The interview begins, as few do, with a nude model named Prudence standing in sock-clad feet before a pair of people holding pencils at arm's length. It was Dave Eggers's suggestion — life drawing first, conversation second — and the novelist, who abandoned art school decades ago yet never stopped drawing, seems entirely at home. He demonstrates the trick of using a thumb as a measuring instrument, gauging Prudence's proportions with the quiet patience of someone who has spent years believing that the hand teaches the eye things the mind cannot. That conviction is not merely aesthetic.

Since the pandemic, Eggers has been organising regular life-drawing sessions inside the book-lined offices of McSweeney's, the publishing house and literary journal he founded on the San Francisco waterfront in 1998, and he argues with disarming directness that drawing a person for three hours produces something that resembles affection. "There is so much affection that comes from carefully trying to get them right," he says, and one suspects he means this as a principle that extends well beyond figure drawing. At 56, grey-haired and unhurried, Eggers has authored more than a dozen novels, several works of nonfiction, and a shelf of children's books, while simultaneously launching a constellation of nonprofits designed to pull down the economic walls that keep ordinary people away from literature and the arts. His newest undertaking, Art + Water, places ten established artists alongside twenty emerging ones in a free atelier on the San Francisco waterfront, where mentorship is the currency and studio space costs nothing.

The target of his frustration is specific: a Master of Fine Arts degree in the United States can cost $100,000 a year, a figure he calls "absurd" and which, in his view, has generated an arts industrial complex that leaves almost everyone worse off.