It is one of the strongest pieces of fiction I’ve written. If you read it on your own, it can be disturbing. To have it read to you by an author on a podium, first thing in the morning, during a conference on fairy tales, must on reflection have been, for the listeners, a rather extreme experience, like taking a gulp of something they thought was coffee, and finding that someone had laced it with wasabi, or with blood.

At the end of a story that was, after all, just “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” an audience of several dozen people looked pale and troubled, like people coming off a roller coaster or like sailors recently returned to land.

“As I said, these stories have power,” I told them as I finished. This time they seemed far more inclined to believe me.

VI

ALL TOO OFTEN I write to find out what I think about a subject, not because I already know.

My next novel will be, for me, a way of trying to pin down myths—modern myths, and the old myths, together, on the huge and puzzling canvas that is the North American continent.

It has a working title of American Gods (which is not what the book will be called, but what it is about).

It’s about the gods that people brought with them as they came here from distant lands; it’s about the new gods, of car crash and telephone and People magazine, of Internet and airplane, of freeway and mortuary; it’s about the forgotten gods, who were here before Man, the gods of Buffalo and Passenger Pigeon, gods that sleep, forgotten.

All the myths I care about, or have cared about, will be in there, but there in order to try and make sense of the myths that make America.

I have lived here for six years, and I still do not understand it: a strange collection of homegrown myths and beliefs, the ways that America explains itself to itself.

Maybe I’ll make an awful mess of it all, but I can’t say that worries me as badly as I think it ought to. I look forward to putting my thoughts into some kind of order. I look forward to learning what I think.

VII

ASK ME WITH a gun to my head if I believe in them, all the gods and myths that I write about, and I’d have to say no. Not literally. Not in the daylight, nor in well-lighted places, with people about. But I believe in the things they can tell us. I believe in the stories we can tell with them.

I believe in the reflections that they show us, when they are told.

And, forget it or ignore it at your peril, it remains true: these stories have power.

This was first published in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art #31, winter 1999, although I actually wrote it as a speech in 1998, which I delivered at the Chicago Humanities Festival.