I first met Brian Platzer in 2007 when we were wide-eyed graduate students at the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. I say “wide-eyed” but in truth, that was just me: a medical student delighted to be on hiatus from her clinical rotations, I was dazzled by the hyperarticulate charms of the MFA world, thrilled to be consorting with clever writer-types (e.g. Brian) who knew how to argue a point stylishly or declaim verse from the sticky red booths of the Club Charles. Brian was funny, both savvy and self-deprecating. He seemed to know what he was doing when I did not (perhaps still true?). That sly humor of his concealed a terrifying awareness—of himself, of others—that he wielded with compassion, all while letting no one off the hook. These attributes are, I think, also hallmarks of his fiction. Brutal, generous, devastatingly funny—that’s Brian Platzer for you.
The Optimists is Brian’s third novel—and his best to date. In it, Mr. Rod Keating, a teacher recently incapacitated by a stroke, tells the story of Clara, one of his brightest students. In the process of telling Clara’s story, Mr. Keating offers something far more expansive. It’s a book about how we search for love and purpose, even while reckoning with loss.
Brian would probably interject here to say this all sounds too grand, so let me just let him tell you about his new novel instead. He’ll do it better. It was a joy to speak to my old friend via text and email.
Joanna Pearson
Thank you, Brian, for this lovely, funny, heartwarming novel. Can you talk to me about how you landed on The Optimists as your title? It’s perfect for this novel—and yet unlike many perfect titles, I don’t think it’s a phrase that appears anywhere in the book (you can correct me if I’m wrong). How far into writing did you know that this would be the title?
Brian Platzer
I’m so pleased you enjoyed reading! You’re absolutely right that the phrase “The Optimists” does not appear in the book. I had a full draft done before I had a title of any kind, and just as I’d gotten comfortable with the idea of sending it to first readers untitled, I came across a poster in the faculty lounge where I teach with the quotation, “Teaching is the greatest act of optimism.”
There’s something funny about that phrase to me in that it seems to imply that the actual goals we teachers are trying to accomplish are so impossibly difficult that we’d have to be optimists to attempt to accomplish them. Like no one would say “Dentistry is the greatest act of optimism” or “Plumbing is the greatest act of optimism.” People assume that dentists will fix teeth and plumbers will make the water run. “Teaching is the greatest act of optimism” implies that a realist wouldn’t even attempt it. But then I realized that my narrator, Rod Keating, a retired teacher, isn’t a realist at all! For him, teaching is an act of optimism. He and his colleagues are optimists. He believes his tests matter, his students matter, and most of all, teachers and students must and will matter to one another. Like all great teachers, he believes he can accomplish incredible things.
Joanna Pearson
Well then tell me more about Mr. Keating, your narrator. He is physically incapacitated by a stroke, and so the process by which he composes this story is laborious and, fittingly, often told in short bursts. You’ve written about your own experiences with chronic illness. I’m curious to hear from you about the challenges of writing novels while living with a chronic medical condition, as well as the challenges—and opportunities?—that come with choosing a narrator reckoning with such an abrupt physical change himself.
Brian Platzer
Mr. Keating’s disabilities are far worse than mine. He is unable to read, speak, or communicate except with a device that uses eye-tracking technology to allow him to record his thoughts onto a screen. With medication, I am physically healthy and have mental clarity from around 7am to 1pm, meaning that on the weekdays I don’t teach, I am able to write for a few hours in the mornings. Though I treasure those mornings, as I understand their scarcity and value, Mr. Keating’s post-stroke writing is so painstaking that every story, joke, and word he chooses is the result of his profound effort. I wanted the reader to feel the intensity of how important it is to him to tell this story with his last bursts of energy in the waning moments in his life.
Additionally, I am fascinated by the emotional journey of the storyteller. His older, incapacitated self is envious of his younger, healthy self, which is something I also feel every day, and he, like I, can’t quite avoid expressing his frustration. Mr. Keating is narrating the life story of his most extraordinary students, but in doing so, he is making an argument for the importance of his own life. The narrative occasionally gets away from him when he is drawn away from the story he is trying to tell by the memories, pains, and necessities of his own life. All of a sudden he’ll distract from his or his student’s story by telling the reader a joke he thought of while in bed the night before.
Joanna Pearson
Yes, please, talk to me about jokes! Mr. Keating punctuates the longer chapters with some of his favorites, and this effect works beautifully. How did you land on this as a device? What do jokes offer Mr. Keating (and/or the rest of us)?
Brian Platzer
One fear in writing a novel whose narrator is incapacitated is that readers might assume it will require heavy emotional labor. I wanted this novel to be first and foremost an entertainment, and what better way to signal to the reader that this isn’t going to be a slog than for the narrator to present himself as a comedian and entertainer? And then I wrote myself into the realization that most of us teachers are, in some way, stand-up comedians, trying to play the room, get laughs, and maintain the focus of our audience. As Mr. Keating began to see teaching—questions and answers—as set ups and punchlines, I began to find additional places for the ridiculous jokes that have been swirling around in my brain for decades. Some—the knock-knock jokes and yo’ momma jokes, for example—are dopey classics, while others are particular to the real Mr. Keating on whom I modeled the fictional one.
Joanna Pearson
To give your readers a sense of what we’re talking about, here’s a joke and Mr. Keating’s explanation of it that got cut out for a different joke in the final manuscript: A man and a woman are sitting together at a bar. “How many beers does it take to make you dizzy?” the man says. “Three or four,” the woman says, “but don’t call me Dizzy.”
Brian Platzer
Dissecting jokes has long been a great pastime of mine, and this one relies on the double meaning of “make you.” The man is attempting general repartee about whether or not the woman is able to hold her liquor. But the woman is a sexually inclined person who hears the phrase “make you” and assumes the man wants to go to bed with her. She’s revved up to do so, but at the same time she’s also taken aback that he thinks her name, or perhaps her nickname, is “Dizzy.” Equally important to the joke—and what makes it better than Airplane’s more often cited “I am serious and don’t call me Shirley”—is that it’s clear in the man’s initial question that he is flirting, so the joke succeeds in surprising the listener and in sharing the good news that both characters in the joke will most likely get what they want.
Joanna Pearson
Is that funny? I’m not sure that’s funny.
Brian Platzer
It’s not funny, which is why I cut it. I liked his explanation of the joke more than the joke itself, but the whole thing kind of spiraled out of control on me.
Joanna Pearson
I loved Mr. Keating’s line, “I’ve always been needy, just as I’ve always been ashamed of my neediness.” This feels true for many of us (perhaps especially for writers?). To play contrarian, I’ll point out that Mr. Keating is also tremendously generous. Can you talk about this interplay between neediness and generosity?
Brian Platzer
Do you see neediness as in opposition to generosity?
Joanna Pearson
I guess I might. You don’t?
Brian Platzer
I don’t think so. I find that some of the most generous people are the neediest. Performers, entertainers, teachers: those who give the most love are usually the ones who want the most love in response. And I don’t see this as hypocritical. It’d make sense that the best present-givers love receiving presents. Those of us who understand how desperate we, ourselves, are to be loved are, I’d hope, the same people who are most eager to demonstrate love. We want others to feel good because we understand the intensity of that same desire in ourselves.
Joanna Pearson
Your acknowledgment includes one of the most beautiful statements I’ve read on teaching: “In his classroom, you felt it: the quiet conviction that teaching, in its highest form, could change everything.” I’d love to hear a little bit—if you don’t mind—about your relationship to the real Mr. Rod Keating.
Brian Platzer
Rod Keating, the narrator of my novel, was a real man who really was my seventh and eighth grade English teacher and then my mentor and friend when I began teaching. He became a reverend to officiate my wedding, a week after which he had a massive stroke, and for the rest of his life he never spoke, read, or wrote again. He’d been a brilliant man. He’d spoken, read, and written in multiple languages fluently; read at least a book per week; and had lived a fascinating life that was primarily dedicated to his students.
As I spent time with him, his nodding in his wheelchair and my reading to him and telling him about our former students, I became obsessed with what was really going on in his brain. What he was really thinking about. I longed for the existence of some way for him to communicate. So I started writing this novel with that invention in mind. I invented a fictional way for him to write.
I, myself, have been teaching eighth grade now for nearly two decades and have long wanted to animate the lives of my students and colleagues. Getting to live in Mr. Keating’s mind for the years it took to write was an added privilege.
One side effect of the medications I take for my neurological disorder is that I have multiple vivid nightmares every night. They’re terrifying and awful, and my wife needs to wake me from them as I grind my teeth and struggle. Of the couple dozen nightmares I have each week, half are one-offs, worlds I enter a single time. The others occur in a few distinct worlds. In one, I can’t get the copy machines to function as I’m late to teach a class. In another, I try to save my children’s lives from an invader. And in a third, Mr. Keating is there at school, teaching and talking like normal. When I run up to him and ask him what he’s doing back alive, able to speak and teach, he gives me a wry smile as though I’d been silly to think anything could keep him out of the classroom. I’ve had this dream at least once a week for over a decade.
Joanna Pearson
Above, I called this novel “heartwarming,” and I genuinely believe it is, in the best possible way, while somehow avoiding the pitfall of sentimentality. It’s an incredibly smart novel that moves briskly and wears its intelligence lightly. I suspect this has something to do with how you use humor paired with your impeccable tonal control—or not? You tell me. How’d you do it?
Brian Peltzer
Heartwarming vs. sentimental. That’s more difficult to me than neediness vs. generosity. Heartwarming means making the reader feel good, and I think that having a narrator tell a story about his love for his student, wife, and friend will do that. The jokes help, as do his eccentricities. Does sentimental imply exaggeration or self-indulgence?
Joanna Pearson
I think that’s right.
Brian Peltzer
Then I hoped to avoid sentimentality by making sure Mr. Keating acknowledged his own self-indulgence. Also, I wanted to make sure that the book did not know more about its characters than the characters knew, themselves. These are smart people who understand the luck they’ve had in their successes and the pain they’ve experienced in their suffering. Mr. Keating is aware that he can be performative. He apologizes for his performances as he performs. He is both confident and insecure. I hope the reader never feels manipulated.
Joanna Pearson
So I know your second novel came out in March 2020, right as we were all going into lockdown. How is it to anticipate this book coming out after that experience?
Brian Platzer
Novel-writing is a crazy business. As an admirer/humungous fan of your work, I know you know how unsettling it is to disappear for five years, write something, hope it will get published, fear it won’t, then actually get it out in the world. It can be really exciting, but it’s inevitably disappointing, too, as you’ll never have as many readers as you’d hoped. Publishing on the day the world shut down was pretty bad timing for coverage, events, and general attention to the novel, but it was probably more a difference in degree than in kind. Some people read it, and that’s exciting! And I hope many more will read this one, which would be exciting!
I don’t know. How is it to anticipate this book coming out after that experience? It’s terrifying! I am confident that The Optimists is the best book I’ve ever written or I’m ever going to write, and I’m absolutely terrified that no one will read it!
Joanna Pearson
They’ll read it!
Fiction
The Optimists
By Brian Platzer
Little Brown and Company
Published February 24, 2026
