Dave Eggers: ‘Once you have a machine think and write for you, you’re cooked as a species’ | Dave Eggers

At Dave Eggers’s suggestion, we’re starting the interview by life drawing together. The novelist dropped out of art school but has been drawing for decades, and his new book is set in the art world. Prudence, our model, stands before us with her palms open, nude but for a pair of black knee-high socks. This, unsurprisingly, is an interview first for me. Eggers shows me how to hold my pencil at arm’s length and use my thumb to measure Prudence’s proportions. Since the pandemic, he’s been organising regular life‑drawing sessions in the book-lined offices of McSweeney’s, the publishing house and literary journal he founded in San Francisco in 1998. He loves the element of chance in figure drawing – you never know which sketch will work out – and believes it helps cultivate empathy.

How so, asks Prudence, helpfully interviewing him for me, because I’ve been thrown off my game. “I feel like in three hours of drawing a human, you learn so much about them and there is so much affection that comes from carefully trying to get them right,” he says.

Eggers is 56 and emanates rock-dad vibes, with his grey curly hair, black graphic T-shirt and jeans, brown lace-up boots. He has written more than a dozen novels, half a dozen nonfiction books, as well as children’s books and art books, and has launched a huge number of non­profits over the years, many of them aimed at reducing the barriers to literature and the arts. Asked how he manages all of this, Eggers is modest: he says, for example, that he likes to hand over leadership as soon as he can. His most recent venture is Art + Water, an arts centre on the San Francisco waterfront modelled on a traditional artists’ atelier, in which, in exchange for free studio space, 10 established artists will provide mentorship and instruction to 20 local emerging artists. The programme will be free to attend. In the US, a master of fine arts (MFA) degree can easily cost $100,000 a year, an “absurd” price, says Eggers, that produces an “arts industrial complex that makes everyone miserable”. “There’s nothing that makes me more crazy than an economic barrier to a creative writing class or a drawing class,” he says.

After we finish drawing, we pass through the Narnia-style wardrobe that separates the McSweeney’s offices from the International Library of Youth Writing at the front of the building. The library showcases books written by children who attended the international network of writing centres that Eggers helped found almost 25 years ago. The original centre, 826 Valencia, is across the road, inside a pirate-supply shop, because local planning laws dictated that the building be used as a commercial space, and Eggers believes children need more whimsy in their lives.

We settle on a pair of grand, mismatched armchairs. Local school kids can come to the library to read or to write, with a pen or a typewriter, or make their own zines. There are…