August 10th, 2026

We interviewed author John Burt about his beautifully written literary novel, A Moment's Surrender. This is an edited version of the interview.

A Moment's Surrender is set during the late 1960s and 1970s, a period of tremendous cultural and political change. Why did you choose to set the novel in that era, and how does the setting shape the story you wanted to tell?

The upheavals of the 1960s are understated but omnipresent in my book. I set the main action of A Moment's Surrender in 1979-80, during the last gasp of the 1960s era, to make the characters feel under continuous moral pressure about politics, about romantic life, even about poetry, because received traditions in all of those areas seemed to be discredited, and how to proceed was an urgent unresolved question. The characters have to pick their own way without banisters through a world in which every available way seems to be a wrong turn.

Tom Corbin is a poet of a recognizably 1960s kind in his subjects, his style, and his behavior. I meant the reader to be of two minds about him. He is an aggressively political poet, but he also is something of a showman, which, however, does not keep him from meaning what he says. The left Catholicism he learned from Dorothy Day is genuine - but Corbin is still not above using his poetry about the Virgin to attract girls.

Paul Bishop's connection to the Vietnam War is more direct than Corbin's, because, lacking the class protection which shielded Corbin, he was drafted out of his high school teaching job, although never sent into combat. But Bishop is a less politically invested character than his friend.

Rachel Lake's impetuous personality reflects something of the struggle for greater opportunities for women in that era; I also see her as taking inspiration from some of the powerful women poets of that time, from Plath and Sexton most of all.

Susan Corbin is younger than the others, and so a little late to the party. Although as a woman oncologist she is not a pathbreaker, she is nevertheless very aware of her debt to women like Claire Wirthlin, her chief resident, who made her own career possible. She also is aware of being the beneficiary of programs that made college educations available to people whose families could not pay for it.

One of the novel's greatest strengths is its cast of characters, each of whom serves as either a complement or a foil to the others. Which character came to you first, and how did the rest of the ensemble develop from there?

Paul Bishop is the protagonist, but the first character who really came alive for me, the character who showed me what the stakes of the novel would be, was Susan Corbin. I wanted her to be a character whom other characters, especially those who love her, always underestimate, but who is the one who transforms everyone else.

I confess that like Paul I also quickly became too emotionally invested in her ("the awful daring of a moment's surrender"), and felt in writing about her a kind of moral test I knew I would be hard pressed to rise to. I wanted to protect her and to heal her, but also to have her transcend my protection and to emerge as a kind of character none of the others imagined her to be.

Gradually we come to know each character through how they react to Susan. In the face of his many infidelities Tom Corbin loves her despite everything, but he cannot accept the forgiveness she is always willing to offer him, because he cannot believe that any moral turn he might make would not be merely the product of self-deception. Anyone who would forgive him, he thinks, must not understand him.

Paul wishes to redeem his earlier failure of nerve with Rachel by standing by Susan in her trouble, but he realizes that his calling about Susan is complicated by guilt and unresolved desire for Rachel, and by his resentment of Tom and Rachel's earlier betrayal of him. But he is serious about supporting Susan in her grief, caring for her as she faces death from cancer, and caring for her son Jack after her death.

Susan, for her part, closely embraces her identity as the faithful wife of her unfaithful husband. Without that love she does not know who she is. She can't help but know, however, what Paul feels for her, although she knows that she is not available to him.

Rachel treats Susan, her rival, as a Pollyanna who can't tell forgiveness from foreplay, and, aware that Tom would never wholly abandon Susan for herself, Rachel seeks occasion to hurt her as deeply as she can.

Some parts of the novel feel like narrative nonfiction. Are any aspects of the novel inspired by your own experiences or by people you've known?

I really did teach rhetoric and composition at the University of Nevada at Reno, but my brief experience there was very much better than Paul's. At UNR I learned how to teach writing from a Director of Writing who inspired me. I tried to put what I learned from her to work in my own career as a Director of Writing at Brandeis. It was a privilege to work with her, and I am very deeply grateful for her example as a teacher, as a scholar, and as a human being. She has a brief cameo in the novel.

None of the main characters are closely modelled on actual people. But a friend of my roommate when I was teaching in Reno really was randomly murdered while he was on his way to tell his wife he was leaving her. I thought my roommate would write a novel about it, but he died in 2001, leaving the novel unwritten, although he did publish poems about the murder.

Most of the details of Susan's death from melanoma were drawn from the actual death of another roommate during my last year of graduate school. Also, just as Susan was, my father as a child had been sent to a friend's house on the evening his father was expected to die. Like Susan, he rushed into the room where his father lay the next morning without have been told that his father had died, his mother and his friend's mother having each assumed the other had already broken the news to him.

Rachel is one of the novel's most compelling characters. What inspired you to create her, and what role did you hope she would play in the story's larger themes?

Originally I thought of Rachel just as an antagonist for Susan. Susan believes, in Blake's words, that

Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair.

Rachel believes, in the words of the last stanza of the same poem, that

Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite.

Rachel has a darkly mystical idea of poetry, with an intuition, common among romantic poets, that the knowledge poetry embodies might be dangerous to its possessor, an idea that many of the poets of Rachel's generation, particularly the women, paid for with their lives. I gave her a sharp and mostly truthful tongue, so that the reader could not just dismiss her views even when they are sure that she is wrong. (That said, she has several enormous lies on her conscience.)

She is intensely charismatic, but full of self-loathing. She's wildly reckless, but also very vulnerable. I wouldn't say that I modelled her after Emily Dickinson herself, but I did model her mostly after the speaker you sometimes hear in Emily Dickinson's poetry, the speaker of My Life and Stood a Loaded Gun. I think there is a touch of Emily Brontë in her as well.

Rachel and Susan are very nuanced and convincing female characters. As a male author, did you approach writing them differently, or did they come as naturally to you as your male characters?

I've glad, and relieved, that you feel that way about how I portrayed Susan and Rachel. I was very aware of the challenges a male author may face writing about female characters. I don't think I have any special insight into female characters in general, but I did feel a particular kinship with both Susan and Rachel, and I worked hard to develop an intuitive sense of how each of them felt, thought, and spoke. In fact, I was more invested in Susan and Rachel as characters than I was in Paul and Tom, because they were the characters who took larger risks, had a wider emotional range, a keener insight into their own feelings, and a deeper sense of the moral stakes of the story. I tried as hard as I could to make sure that everything they did and said accorded with my sense of the felt life of their characters.

I proceeded at first with caution, mostly just hinting at the characters' voices through free indirect narration. Both Susan and Rachel also had extended passages of dialogue, and I worked hard on giving each of them a characteristic turn of thought and a distinctive sound in conversation.

One of the more intriguing moments in the novel is when Paul, Jack, and Susan discuss The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In particular, this passage stood out to us:

"Whatever St. Paul says, Lewis still has to work out the logic of his own story from within the plot. I think the point is that you just can't save yourself from yourself. Especially when you've done something that gives everyone reason to never trust you again. And when you know you can't trust yourself either."

This conversation seems to suggest broader questions about faith, redemption, and forgiveness. Was it your intention to weave a religious or spiritual thread throughout the novel, or did those themes emerge naturally as the story developed?

I didn't start with the idea of weaving a religious thread throughout the novel, but the theme emerged early on, beginning with Susan's conviction that she must bring herself to see her husband's murderer as a human and with her conviction that the deepest truth about her husband is not what he was at his worst moment but whatever it was that moved him to persevere in the struggle with himself that he kept losing.

The religious theme also grew naturally out of the idea that Bishop, Corbin, and Rachel each have something on their conscience that they can't be at peace about, that there is something wrong with each of them at the deepest levels of their identities.

I've spent my career teaching Hawthorne, and one of the main lessons of his novels is how little we are able to work our own way out of the cruxes we find our way into, because everything we do we do in a tangle of mixed motives, self-deceit, and wishful thinking. If the old Calvinist concept of innate depravity means anything, it describes this intractable chaos in our wills that divides us from ourselves. And if the Pauline concept of grace means anything, it means that sometimes, helped by something higher, we find our way, for a few moments at least, out of the maze of self, even though we can't make it happen by ourselves and maybe can't even make it stick.

All of the characters are at an impasse, and all but Susan have done something they think it is hard to forgive. Corbin is so used to betraying his wife sexually, but also so ashamed of it, that he can neither say for certain whether he is sorry about what he does or whether he is not. Susan is always ready to forgive him, but Corbin believes that that is only because she underestimates the depth of his dishonesty: if she understood him, she would have to hate him.

Rachel, embittered against herself by the lies she had told to both Corbin and Bishop as a graduate student, sees embracing her fallenness as the only alternative for her that has any honesty, and the bitter loneliness to which she sentences herself comes to seem to her like a religious vocation, although a negative one.

Paul Bishop, haunted by the realization that he had, back when they were lovers, left Rachel alone to face the temptation to commit suicide, has chosen to live the smallest life he can, since the smallest life offers the least chance of making another similar failure of nerve.

Read our review of the book and buy the book on Amazon.

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