Sarah Vowell

Then Meditation

For Sarah Vowell, the Past and Present Are Always in the Picture

Ask Sarah Vowell a simple question -- like, say, "What turned you into the kind of person who would immerse yourself in the writings of 17th-century New England Puritans and write a book about them?" -- and within five minutes she's telling you about the time she became a human paintbrush in a piece of performance art.

This was in the mid-'90s, before public radio's "This American Life" turned Vowell into a radio personality, before books like "Assassination Vacation" turned her into a best-selling writer and before Pixar Studios turned her into the voice of Violet in "The Incredibles." Back then, she was just a grad student at the Art Institute of Chicago, doing a thesis on a 1960s phenomenon called Fluxus.

"They were this kind of collective of random artists," Vowell explains. Among their activities were short performance pieces based on what they called "event scores," little cards with simple instructions on them.

This explains how she found herself rolling out a 20-foot sheet of butcher paper in the aisle of a Chicago auditorium and crawling slowly down it on her hands and knees, trying to paint a straight line with her hair.

And what, you might ask, is the line that connects the Fluxus-admiring Sarah Vowell who dunked her 20-something head in paint with the Sarah Vowell, now 38, whose fascination with the Puritans inspired her to produce "The Wordy Shipmates," her fifth book, just published by Riverhead? (She'll be talking about it tomorrow night at Washington's Avalon Theatre, at an event organized by Politics and Prose.)

Well, she liked the fact that, under the Fluxus umbrella, "all of these really singular eccentrics could do their own art and do their own thing" but come together in group efforts as well. And she sees the theologically quarrelsome yet fiercely communitarian settlers of New England in the same light.

"It's my ideal of America," Vowell says. "I don't like a coherent group, I like an unruly group."

Or perhaps no group at all.

Never mind her public persona or the clutch of loyal friends she's assembled. Vowell is the kind of person who'd just as soon be holing up with a book of Puritan sermons or the diary of a dimly remembered president.

"I just like being in my apartment by myself for months at a time and figuring stuff out, in a way that's just me figuring it out," she says. "On my own."

She has been plunked down this day, not entirely happily, in one of her publisher's conference rooms, the kind where it's hard to tell if the muted wall color is gray or brown. ("It's 'greige,' as they would say on Apartment Therapy," Vowell deadpans.) In the course of a two-hour interview, she lets out a good number of short laughs, but you're more likely to see a corner of her mouth twitch faintly upward when she gets off a good line.

"Assassination Vacation," Vowell's previous book, is the kind of hip historical travelogue its title implies. Researching it, she got to sally forth to examine -- among other wondrous American locales -- "the Vatican of the Lincoln assassination subculture," a funky old house-turned-museum in Clinton, Md., where fugitive John Wilkes Booth dropped in for guns and whiskey. At Ohio's James A. Garfield National Historic Site, she got to ponder the chair in which the obscure, book-loving Garfield used to curl up "with all the decorum of a teenager plopped on top of a beanbag."

"The Wordy Shipmates" relies more on documents than on tourist attractions -- making it, in the words of one Vowell friend, "not so much road trip as head trip." Still, she did spend some time on the road. What sites might she want to show an interviewer if they could flee this greige purgatory?

"The Massachusetts Bay Colony tour isn't quite as action-packed as even the President Garfield tour," she says. But perhaps we could start in "this alley in downtown Boston behind the Winthrop Building," the city's first steel-framed skyscraper, which sits atop the site of John Winthrop's house.

If you're having trouble placing Mr. Winthrop, he's the leader of the band of Puritan colonists who did not gain eternal renown by landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620 and chowing down thankfully with the Indians. Winthrop's people showed up a decade later, founded Boston and were far more important than the Pilgrims in shaping what became these United States -- though Winthrop himself is now best known for the sound bite about "a city upon a hill" that Ronald Reagan cribbed from him and quoted endlessly out of context.

Vowell loves Winthrop for writing what she calls "one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language": "We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body."

After Sept. 11, 2001, she writes, "when we were mourning together, when we were suffering together," she finally understood what the old Puritan meant.

This is Vowell at her most serious, and there's plenty of seriousness in "The Wordy Shipmates." Still, she rarely lets more than a paragraph or two go by without livening things up.

Take this typical then-meets-now analogy: "The Old Testament Israelites are to the Puritans what the blues was to the Rolling Stones -- a source of inspiration, a renewable resource of riffs." Or take the one she employs while describing the first full-scale massacre of Colonial New England's Indian wars, in which the Puritans ended up burning hundreds of Pequot men, women and children alive.

"The buildup to the Pequot War," she writes, "reminds me of what skateboarders call the frustration that makes them occasionally break their own skateboards in half -- 'focusing your board.' The Pequot War is just that -- a destructive tantrum brought on by an accumulation of aggravation."

Not an analogy you'll likely find in your high school history text.

Vowell "has never seen any reason why an interest in history should preclude an interest in popular culture," notes her friend Nick Hornby, the English novelist. "In a way, she makes you wonder about the rest of them, the historians who would never dream of making a pop-culture analogy." Part of the answer, Hornby thinks, is that "there's so much intellectual insecurity in high-culture pursuits," while Vowell is not only "very smart" but "confident in her smartness."

"I just try not to be generic" is Vowell's own explanation. In her former life as a music critic, she established a "personal moratorium on what I call inter-rock analogies." It was boring to compare Soundgarden with Nirvana. She wanted to compare them to "I don't know what, a pastry, or something that was just more interesting."

Vowell has almost as many former lives as current ones. But they somehow blend together, rather than clash. This makes her far more interesting than she'd be if she'd either stayed in her native Oklahoma or been born in Manhattan, where she lives now.

She grew up working class (her father is a gunsmith) in a tiny town near Muskogee, where she spent her early years as a devout Pentecostal Christian. By the time she got through ninth grade, the family had moved to Montana and she had lost her faith. "The thing that really did it was starting Greek mythology," she says. "The more I thought about it and all the creation myths and all that, it seemed like, you know, wait a minute."

Still, she remains haunted by the Sermon on the Mount and "the radical nature of true Christianity." One of the reasons she chose to write about a group of intense 17th-century believers, she thinks, is that "I feel like I'm a Christian the way my atheist Jewish friends are Jewish -- it's a cultural thing."

High school brought beat poetry and rock-and-roll. Vowell bonded with the art kids, the ones, as she has written, "who changed my life, who saved my soul." Then came college at Montana State, followed by Washington internships at the Smithsonian and the National Gallery. The city wasn't a fit.

"Everyone my age wanted to go to law school," she says. "I just wanted to go to PJ Harvey concerts."

She started writing about music and art, but the idea of writing as a career scared her. Art school was a hedging of bets. While there, she wrote "Radio On," an intensely personal diary of a year's worth of radio listening. With the book in galleys, she did an interview with Hornby and boldly gave him a copy.

Hornby recalls that he probably patronized Vowell at first ("I thought she was 16"). Then he started reading and thought: "Oh. Okay. Possible genius."

That first book was also Vowell's link to radio journalist Ira Glass, who was launching "This American Life" as she was reporting "Radio On." She sat in on the production of an early show and the two became friends. One day over dinner she told him a story about encountering a Fastbacks fan so obsessive that he made pie charts detailing the relative contributions of the group's many drummers.

"Ira was like, 'Oh, let's get you a tape recorder,' " Vowell says. Pretty soon she was on the air.

"She sounded unlike anyone else on the radio," Glass says, "which is what you want. The radio is filled with people who sound like each other." Asked to describe Vowell's voice, he calls it "high-pitched," adding that it's "something in between a really precocious seventh-grade girl and Sarah Palin."

Whatever. Let the record show that it was Vowell's radio chops that earned her a call from "Incredibles" director Brad Bird and led to undying fame as the voice of computer-animated teen superhero Violet Parr.

Vowell went from doing music pieces on "This American Life" to more personal stories, such as the one about her dad and the lovingly constructed homemade cannon from which he wants his ashes fired. Eventually, she proposed a piece that merged personal and national history: She and her twin sister, who are part Cherokee, would get in a car and trace the path their ancestors walked when forced west on the Trail of Tears.

The tale is both horrifying and complex -- a minority of Cherokees, for example, betrayed the majority by signing an illegal treaty authorizing Andrew Jackson's brutal removal -- and Vowell is proud that she was able to tell it clearly. What she really loved, however, was combining scholarly digging with an evocative road trip.

"That just changed my life," she says. "Ever since then, that's just what I've wanted to do."

And she has.

In Union Square, not far from Vowell's apartment, stands a statue of Lafayette. The aristocratic French teen who fell head over heels for revolutionary America is a personal Vowell favorite. Listen to her riff on him and you may begin to grasp the strange, insightful muddying of past and present that she has turned into her intellectual home turf.

"You know that Allen Ginsberg poem 'A Supermarket in California'?" she begins. "There's a throwaway kind of line about 'the lost America of love,' and to me, the Marquis de Lafayette is just all about love." She elaborates, telling his story in some detail, mentioning his idealism, his being "such a continual friend to this nation when we really didn't have any," his desire to be buried under dirt from Bunker Hill.

And what, exactly, does this have to do with a life in the 21st century?

"I just find it makes me happier," Sarah Vowell says, "that when I go to the grocery store, I can think about the Marquis de Lafayette."