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Episode 71—Working Backward with Elizabeth Rush
133 Plays7 years ago
Elizabeth Rush told me, “I’m just a mule. I just show up every day and climb very, very slowly up that mountain.” What’s up, CNFers?! Hope you’re having a CNFin’ good week. It’s the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with the world’s best artists about creating works of nonfiction: leaders from narrative journalism, memoir, essay, radio, and documentary film and try to tease out their stories, habits, and routines so that you can apply their tools of mastery in your own work. This week I welcome Elizabeth Rush to the CNFHQ. Elizabeth’s latest essay “Something Like Vertigo” appeared in Issue 64 of Creative Nonfiction and I wanted to talk to her about it. In this episode you’ll hear about: Her working in pie shops The importance of planning and deconstructing the end goal by working backward Pitching Poetry Her “aha!” moment And how telling true stories got her out of her own head And of course before we get to that I want to say thanks. Thanks for listening. Thanks for leaving reviews. Sometimes when I listen to other podcasts I get the impression that the hosts feel like it’s we the listener who is lucky to hear them. I want to flip that around and say what a privilege it is to make this podcast for you. It’s my great pleasure to bring this to you every week. But for now, if you get any value from this, anything at all, please share it with a friend and leave a nice review on iTunes. They keep adding up and they mean greater visibility and greater reach. Let’s keep building them up and get to triple digits. It starts with you and it takes under a minute to leave a short one, a little longer if you put some elbow grease into it. Entirely up to you, friends. Want show notes? Visit brendanomeara.com.
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Transcript
Editorial Challenges and Expectations
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, what's up CNF-ers? Hope you're having a CNF and good week. I got edits back from a long piece I'm writing and the editor wrote back and said this was a lot of work and I can't do something like this again. Just don't have the time or the energy. So...
00:00:20
Speaker
In fairness, the editor did this as a favor so that these can be eligible for an award I'm gunning for. If you can't get paid for a 67-word feature, you might as well go for trophies. Am I right? But it never feels good to hear what you thought was a nice, well-structured, well-crafted draft. Turned out to be the shit you scrape off your boot.
Introduction to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:44
Speaker
Anyway, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with the world's best artists about creating works of nonfiction, leaders from narrative journalism, memoir, essay, radio, and documentary film, and try to tease out their stories, habits, and routines so that you can apply their tools of mastery to your own work. I'm Brendan O'Mara.
00:01:11
Speaker
This week,
Introducing Elizabeth Rush
00:01:13
Speaker
I welcome Elizabeth Rush to see an FHQ. Elizabeth's latest essay, Something Like Vertigo, appeared in issue 64 of Creative Nonfiction, and I wanted to talk to her about it.
00:01:26
Speaker
In this episode, you'll hear her talk about working in pie shops, the importance of planning and deconstructing the end goal, and then working backwards, pitching, poetry, her aha moment, and how telling true stories got her out of her own head. And of course, before we get to that, I want to say thanks. Thanks for listening, and thanks for leaving reviews.
00:01:50
Speaker
Sometimes when I listen to other podcasts, I get the impression that the hosts feel like it's we, the listeners, who are lucky to hear them. I want to flip that around and say what a privilege it is to make this podcast for you. It's my pleasure, my great pleasure, to bring this to you every week. But for now, if you get any value out of this, anything at all, please share it with a friend and leave a nice review on iTunes. They keep adding up.
00:02:18
Speaker
And they mean greater visibility and greater reach. And let's keep building them and get up to triple digits. Why not? It starts with U and it takes under a minute to leave a short one a little longer if you put some elbow grace into it.
00:02:30
Speaker
so it's entirely up to you and in any case elizabeth rush this was uh... wonderful and fun episode she has a ton of smart smart things that might just change the way you look at your freelancing and really kickstart some things it definitely made me think has made me made me better than i was when i before i talked to her so i hope you get at least uh...
00:02:57
Speaker
get at least a fraction of what I got out of it and I know you'll improve immensely. So here she is,
Becoming a Writer in Creative Nonfiction
00:03:02
Speaker
Elizabeth Rush. So if you're at a cocktail party, what are you drinking? Wow, that's a great question. And the answer is, it totally depends on my mood. Let's say they had a beer from Oregon by some amazing
00:03:25
Speaker
Miracle, I would definitely choose like a mirror pond pale ale over anything else Second might be a glass of Rioja because I have spent some time in Rioja So I think I drink where I'm from essentially I drink drinks from where I've been Geographic drinker. Yeah a geographic drinker. That's me But if it's Friday and it's been a long week, I would be potentially having a Manhattan
00:03:52
Speaker
Oh, very nice. So all right. So we're, so we're at this party. I'm like, Oh, Hey, Elizabeth, I noticed you drinking this Manhattan. What do you do? How do you, when someone asks you what you do in that small talky kind of way, what do you tell them? Oh, I tell them I'm a writer and they're usually like, Oh, that's interesting. What kind of writer?
00:04:14
Speaker
And I'll tell them that I write creative nonfiction and the and the expression usually like shifts at that point. They're like, I don't know exactly what that is. And my husband, who's Colombian for a while, used to introduce me as a non creative fiction writer, which everyone would laugh and I'd be like, no, no, it's creative nonfiction. And that still didn't necessarily clarify thing matters for folks. So then, you know, I'll usually say,
00:04:44
Speaker
you know, the New Yorker, that a lot of what's in the New Yorker is creative nonfiction. And then I'll often sort of narrow it down and say, you know, I'm working on a collection of lyric essays about coming to terms with sea level rise. Yeah. So, so that's the, so you primarily, I, even though you, you teach in your website, you see a photographer, educator. So you identify mostly as a writer, correct?
00:05:13
Speaker
I identify mostly as a writer, though I would also say that in recent years, even though I do photography and photography, my photography is certainly going to be in this book, this collection of essays, I think that writing is my main focus. Though in recent years, I've been teaching for about five years and I have come to really enjoy teaching as well. And I think it's a really nice balance.
00:05:38
Speaker
for me as a writer, but writing is number one.
00:05:56
Speaker
He doesn't do any writing while he's teaching, and so he considers it a form of crop rotation. So like it kind of, and during his non-teaching months is when he gets his, what looks on paper to be like a prolific list of books and articles, but it's just,
00:06:15
Speaker
But he doesn't do it year-round, so it's kind of like, oh, this is a way to rejuvenate the spirit and the creative spirit to be able to do the work you love while also sort of contributing to something larger. Yeah, I didn't know that he didn't write while teaching, and I'm shocked because I just finished Annals of the Former World, and it's like a thousand stinking pages long on geology. So I really don't know how he wrote that just in the summers.
00:06:44
Speaker
I do write
Balancing Teaching and Writing
00:06:45
Speaker
while I teach and I tend to just be like really rigid about sectioning and administering my time. So I tend to ask my administrators to get me to teach in the afternoons and I try to keep mornings, let's say from like seven to noon sacred. So I'm usually at my desk writing
00:07:12
Speaker
five days
00:07:28
Speaker
I know from personal experience, if I had a bad effort at the plate, a lot of times I would carry that over into my, into my fielding and sometimes that would make for bad fielding. So I was sort of ineffective at compartmentalizing that. So I wonder how you do that with your teaching and your writing. Well, I don't, I think that I'm, this is, I don't want to sound like I'm patting myself on the back. I think I'm a really good time manager and
00:07:55
Speaker
But that doesn't mean that like emotionally the two don't bleed into one another. So like in a very practical sense, I keep a very meticulous, not, I wouldn't say meticulous. I keep, I have a planner that is like my Bible and I'm actually looking at it right now cause I get to cross off 2 PM like interview. Um,
00:08:19
Speaker
from Wednesday. But I literally take each day of the week and I divide it down the middle and I write in my sort of like external commitments in the right hand column and in the left hand column, I write in like I mark down writing time. So it'll often be like
00:08:43
Speaker
7 to noon in the left hand column, like right. And then in the right hand column, you know, read five student essays, teach from three to six, have this phone call with creative nonfiction, a podcast. So I feel like visually in this weird way, I like, I put them both on the same page and I understand that they both have to coexist in the same day, but I try to keep them separate in that way. And then,
00:09:12
Speaker
This is like really, I don't know. I think it's really, this is an in-depth dive into my personal planner, but I also have on the opposite page of the planner, like big writing goals for the week. So this week I'm pitching a feature to Harper's. So that goes on the, on the right hand page. Um, next week I have to finish the next two weeks after that, I have to finish revising.
00:09:40
Speaker
you know, part two of my book. So I have sort of like this macro level thinking where I think about my writing goals every week. And then I have this like meticulous, almost hourly divvying up of my time. That being said, like,
00:09:58
Speaker
When I have a great class, that makes me really excited for my writing in the morning. And when I have a class that didn't go exactly as I wanted it to, that can certainly bleed over into my mental space in the morning when I come to my own work.
00:10:18
Speaker
I love your approach to it, and I love geeking out on these little things that help people organize their lives. A lot of times people think that structure sometimes will impart its will on creativity in a negative way, but it's really quite the opposite, that when you impose these kind of constraints, it actually kind of frees you up to do the work better.
00:10:42
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. So like, how do you approach this? Are you doing this in the morning making your list or is this kind of like on Sunday night? You're like, all right, here, I'm mapping out the week and then then you go. Um, well, I would say that I like, I definitely check in Sunday nights to be like, okay, what's coming up this week? But I also, it's sort of like ongoing. So if I, let me look forward, like,
00:11:09
Speaker
So a writer friend of mine just wrote me and was like, I haven't seen you in a while. Do you want to have a drink next Thursday? So that immediately goes in, like everything goes in as soon as I make the plan. So I don't feel like I'm mapping out stuff like the week before. It's just like, as soon as I commit to something, it goes in the planner. And also at the beginning of every semester, I go in and write in each class in my office hours.
00:11:37
Speaker
for the whole semester. So that happens in like August and usually takes an hour. And then the rest is sort of ongoing. And like the writing goals, I guess, are ongoing. But I certainly, you know, if I have a deadline, I put it in as soon as I know it. And in a way that I think I'm, I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I feel like I'm often ahead of my deadlines.
00:12:04
Speaker
I don't like working under pressure. I don't like the feeling of like, oh, this essay isn't where I want it to be, and it has to be done tomorrow. It usually just makes my brain completely short out. Yeah. I think that goes a long way to forging good relationships with editors, too, if you can over-deliver. Even if they don't, even if they never say, oh, thanks for turning this in early. You know deep down that they're like, oh, thanks. I'm glad I got this in three days ahead of time. This is going to be a big help.
00:12:34
Speaker
Yeah, then they get more time with it. It's like I think editors are super important to the process and I don't want to leave them in a bind. Like I want them to put their best mind to work editing the stuff that I submit also, so.
Pitching Stories to Harper's Magazine
00:12:49
Speaker
So with this upcoming Harper's pitch that you have going on, I kind of want to just unpack the process of this a little bit too, because this is important and just fascinating to me as well. So you want to pitch the story. How much work have you already done on the story before you plan on pitching at the Harpers next week? Great. Another great question. So the story is on
00:13:19
Speaker
retreat, which is a kind of climate change adaptation strategy, which means essentially removing homes and relocating residents that live in areas that are prone to flooding. And so the piece is about looking at retreat and how the conversations around retreat are shaping up on the ground in Houston after Harvey. So on the one hand,
00:13:48
Speaker
To be perfectly honest, like I have written a lot about retreat over the past five years. So I'm really steeped in the discourse and that's a conversation that I follow pretty closely. So I feel like on the one hand, like, I don't know, I've spent five years researching retreat. And that's part of certainly what will go into the pitch. But on the other hand, you know, being really specific about
00:14:15
Speaker
who's thinking about retreat and being bought out in Harvey, in Houston after Harvey. I would say that I've reached out to folks, talked to a couple of people on the phone, read tens, hundreds of articles on it. So I've been following the conversation really closely, let's say, since in the past month. And then this week I started just to make
00:14:43
Speaker
sort of like inquisitive phone calls, because when I pitch something to Harpers, it's a feature. I want to make sure that I have identified someone who could like be one of the main characters of the piece and that I can essentially make an argument for why it's not just reflection on this policy that could be written in Washington or Idaho, but really demands being there.
00:15:12
Speaker
I wanna write about the human decision-making process. How do you choose to leave a home that you've loved? And that requires at least putting in a few phone calls and getting potential sources, whether or not I use them in the end is sort of beside the point, but I need to paint little mini portraits of folks that could become characters in the piece in the pitch. So yeah, it takes some work.
00:15:40
Speaker
Yeah, and so what does your process look like revolving around writing the query? How long do you typically make them and what are you putting in as opposed to what you're leaving out just so you're baiting an editor just enough that they want to see more, which is obviously the point of a query.
00:16:03
Speaker
Let me let me look at this thing. I literally just I'm I'm ahead of schedule. I sent it today. Of course. That makes sense. Yeah. And and I guess like I'm I'm mentioning this because I think it's sort of funny. It's like a lot of my students.
00:16:20
Speaker
think that writers are like geniuses and struck by the hand of God who infuses what they do with a kind of like miraculous quality. And I tell them like, I'm just a mule. Like I just show up every day and climb very, very slowly up that mountain. Like I'm not particularly gifted. I just spend a lot of time.
00:16:45
Speaker
That's so perfectly articulated because a lot of a big reason why I even started this podcast was to kind of demystify that process, the fact that some people feel anointed and really ground it down into, no, it's work. And a lot of people didn't just go from
00:17:04
Speaker
zero to a hundred. They were being mules and they slowly wound their way up to the mountain top. And so it is a grind and you have to cultivate a certain sense of patience and believe in yourself and almost have a delusion about yourself that you're going to make it to the top. True. So that's great to hear you say that. That's brilliant. So I'm looking at this pitch and it's 915 words.
00:17:34
Speaker
which I would say is a little bit long for me. I often try to keep them to one page, but I'm working with an editor who I've worked with. I would be working with an editor that I've worked with in the past at Harper's. And because of like the nature of that magazine, I think that they want a lot of, they want more, a little bit more a demonstration of your knowledge going into the project above and beyond what some other publications might want.
00:18:03
Speaker
So I definitely open with a quick sort of character study of this woman who, you know, I describe as a petite bleach blonde Texan who cheered for the Baylor Bears. Meaning she's not necessarily the kind of person that you would necessarily think wanted to participate in what's considered one of the most progressive climate change adaptation strategies out there.
00:18:30
Speaker
So I start with her and the way that she tried to prepare for Harvey and she ends up fleeing the storm in a rowboat with her family. And then I immediately sort of switched to this question of, so she wants to leave now. Other people in her neighborhood want to leave now. They've all flooded three times in the past two years. You know, it's a recurrent issue and it's one that's costing the federal government a ton of money.
00:18:59
Speaker
So I go from that like immediate tiny particular portrait of this woman to a macro level vision of what does it mean to keep demanding that people rebuild in the floodplain? What are the financial costs to American taxpayers? And then I zoom back in and say, here's why that community is interested in leaving.
00:19:23
Speaker
And then I start to talk about sort of managed retreat as an adaptation strategy and where it's worked and where it hasn't. Anyways, I'm giving you like a play by play, but I would say it's almost like cinematic. Like you zoom in onto someone and you do like a mini tiny teeny tiny scene. And then you have to like zoom out and give the macro level larger contextual argument for why they're acting in the way they have. And then you zoom back in and then you kind of zoom back out and you
00:19:53
Speaker
It's almost like you're periscoping. Periscoping? What's telescoping between two viewpoints? So how long did it take you to figure out this way of querying? Like what were your some stumbles and successes that have led you to how you're able to successfully cultivate a successful pitch? I was teaching
00:20:21
Speaker
graduate class at the CUNY Graduate Center for Journalism in New York City a couple years ago. And my students were really interested in pitching. And I realized that I had some successful pitches and that I hadn't really taken the step back and thought of it from an editor's perspective. And I had a friend who was with Reuters at the time.
00:20:49
Speaker
And I said to him like, what do you look for in a pitch? And he immediately sent me, you know, three examples of pitches that he loves. And he essentially said something similar to what I said to you right now, which is like, there need to be characters. It needs to feel like you're almost in a movie. And then you also need to zoom out and make like the larger contextual argument for why that movie is an important movie to watch, essentially. And
00:21:18
Speaker
But he was like, it should demonstrate, you know, the writer's ability with using or massaging and playing with and inhabiting written language in a way that's compelling. So it's not just an argument and stumbles. I would say that pitches in a way used to take me a lot longer and
00:21:45
Speaker
I would write these pitches that were like two and a half pages long. Like it was almost like I wrote half the article for the pitch and they were just too long period. So I started to learn to edit them and make them shorter. And also that at the same time, I think that all the research that went into some of my early pitches,
00:22:11
Speaker
well, very time consuming was kind of important because I hadn't developed working relationships with any, you know, major magazines and, and so I feel like I kind of overdid it a little bit, which like sometimes was great and they were excited about it. But oftentimes it was like, uh, sometimes it was a flat out rejection or a, this needs to be half as long before we even look at it. And,
Handling Rejection from Publications
00:22:40
Speaker
That being said, also, I have to laugh. I mean, last week I had an editor for The Atlantic reach out to me and say like, oh, we want to hear some ideas about this kind of article. Just a couple sentences. And so I sent them a couple of sentences and they were like, oh, that's domestic. We want international. And my thought process is like, oh, I've been doing domestic stuff for the book that I'm writing for like four or five years. Well, let me think about how I could
00:23:10
Speaker
what I might write about in a sort of more broad international context. And I came up with like two very vague ideas. And I think I could have spent more time researching them and sent them something more substantial. But I sent back another two sentences that were admittedly probably a little bit more vague than the first thing I pitched. And they came back and they were like, no, we don't want that. I was like, okay.
00:23:37
Speaker
I mean, it felt like a little bit of a missed opportunity, but also figuring out how to spend your time. And I feel like so much of my focus is on this book and I want to get articles out in advance of its publication that speak to what the book is about, but it also felt a bit like a waste of time for me to really change my area of focus just to get something in the Atlantic.
00:24:06
Speaker
But I don't know. I mean, maybe that was a misstep. Hard to say. So, all right, say you've done this work and then Harper's is like, ah, you know, we like your work with it. For some reason, this one just isn't working out for us. You know, we're going to thank you, but we're going to pass. What's your next step in the playbook? Do you have plan Bs and Cs lined up? So if they say no, you're ready to just keep going right down your list.
00:24:33
Speaker
Yeah, I would say I do at this point and I would probably consult with the publicist at Milkweed just to be like, here's what I'm thinking since Harper's didn't come through. What do you guys think? In terms of trying to be really strategic about where this article on retreat in Houston might appear because likely it'll kind of coincide with the book publication. That's the ideal, right? But
00:25:02
Speaker
And where I feel like in the past, though, my, my goals were a little bit different. So I, in the past, I would have gone to Le Monde d'Iblematique next because I've worked with them a lot and they, um, are very generous in covering and reimbursing travel.
00:25:23
Speaker
And I feel like for the past five years, what I've been trying to do in part to write this book is get small one-off trips to different coastal communities paid for by various publications to write a magazine article for them. Um, that's pretty, that's pretty sort of traditional nonfiction slash journalism. And then.
00:25:47
Speaker
I come back to my little writing hole and I think about how I can turn that experience into more of a lyric essay that would make its way into the book. So I feel like I've been financing the travel that the book has required by writing more journalistic pieces about sea level rise and adaptation. So that would be my hierarchy of who I go to next in the list is who's going to pay to send me somewhere.
00:26:16
Speaker
But right now I feel like I'm in a slightly different position where I want to think about what's the best outlet in advance of the book publication. And that's a conversation. That's like a question I'm not as familiar with. So I probably, I probably consult my agent and the publicist to get a better sense of what to do next.
00:26:37
Speaker
Yes, you write a lot about climate science and climate change and also in a very artistic way. So you're kind of like uniting two sides of the brain. When you were younger and coming and just as a kid in high school and so forth, what did you gravitate towards more? Were you more of a science kid or an artsy kid? I was a mixture of the two, I would say. I was really
00:27:06
Speaker
into science and I won my first grade science fair. I still remember it. My parents were like, you're not necessarily going to win. I was like, I don't know. I think I might. And then I did. And I got a $10 gift certificate to the science museum and I bought a really cool rock for my rock collection. So science is definitely big for me.
00:27:33
Speaker
That being said, like I also started writing poetry when I was like 10 years old and admittedly it was absolutely terrible and continued to be terrible for a very long time. But I think I've always had a little bit of both. Somewhere in high school, I started to lean more towards the humanities. But it makes sense to me, I think that I have a mind that can make, that doesn't struggle to understand some of this
00:28:01
Speaker
some of the hard science underlying climate change. So it makes sense to me that that's part of, that this is where I ended up.
00:28:11
Speaker
And what did your parents make of that dichotomy that you had between science and art and then started to gravitate towards more of the humanities, as you say? What were they saying to you at that time as you're looking to perhaps pursue something like journalism or writing as a vocation? I think to their credit, they were incredibly hands-off with me.
00:28:41
Speaker
as a rule, a pretty fiercely independent person, and I think they sensed that if they got involved, I would just push back against that. And they've always been really supportive, whatever it was. So they would get excited about the science fair projects when I wanted to work on them, and they'd get excited about my poetry when I wanted to start working on poetry and publish poetry.
00:29:10
Speaker
They've always been really supportive. I will say the, I graduated from college with a degree in English and I wrote a creative thesis for my senior thesis project. And then I went to go live in Vietnam and my mom was at the time working at this university, Southern New Hampshire University.
00:29:36
Speaker
And she told me, you know, we have a low residency MFA program. Why don't you, why don't you do that? And I sort of like, I sort of was like, I don't know. I don't know if I want an MFA. Like would I get one from SNHU? I could apply to a bunch of different programs. She was like, it's free. You should just look into it. And I did it. And I think, and I think she was concerned about my ability to make money in the future.
00:30:04
Speaker
And I did it and that MFA, that degree is why I can teach now. And that's a huge source of where my income comes from. So though she never said I'm concerned, I think that was the one moment where she sort of interjected and was like, you might want to think about this just to be able to put food on the table.
00:30:25
Speaker
And what about writing and writing true stories in particular appeal to you when you first started picking up the pen to do this kind of work? What drew you to it? Well, speaking about money, it's sort of a funny story, but I wrote that undergraduate thesis at Reed College, and it was a collection of poems.
00:30:54
Speaker
the first like 22 years of my life was just interested in poetry. And I think poetry as a genre can, if you want it to be very concerned with sort of unmediated representation of the world of which the poet is a part. And that's, I was always sort of a lyric poet in that sense. And then I moved to Vietnam and
00:31:23
Speaker
I started working as, we called it a position called the Director of Information, which was like a sort of funny joke and nod to the communist government of North Vietnam. But I started working as the Director of Information for an art foundation that supported controversial North Vietnamese artists. And my job was to like interview these artists and
00:31:49
Speaker
write down their stories in a way that would make their life experience understandable, parsable to an international and often Western audience so that that audience might want to go out and buy one of these paintings by these worth Vietnamese artists.
00:32:09
Speaker
And that was just sort of like an aha moment. I was like, oh, I'm writing, really enjoying it. I like getting to learn in a very specific way about experiences that aren't necessarily my own. And unlike poetry, it's like paying me more than like 0.0007 cents per word. And then I started doing some work for various international newspapers.
00:32:38
Speaker
And it was, I think in that way, like a very pragmatic transition where I felt like I could still use all the skills that I had developed as a poet, but put them in service of stories that were by definition nonfiction and also coincidentally, you know, more able to help me pay my bills. But I also think that for a long time, one of like the,
00:33:09
Speaker
significant limiting factors for me as a young writer was that I didn't have a ton of life experience. And like, how many poems can you write about your boyfriend breaking up with you? They're all bad. So in this way, I feel like nonfiction, creative nonfiction helped me get over that really significant hurdle. And I haven't really looked back. It definitely helped me be a lot less self-interested.
00:33:37
Speaker
What were some of your earliest goals as a writer? And as
Financial and Career Planning for Writers
00:33:42
Speaker
someone, clearly we had a long conversation about your daily planner. It looks like you like to plan. So when you took this up as a vocation, what were some of those short and longer term goals? Did you give yourself a deadline of which, if this doesn't sort of quote unquote take off, am I gonna pivot and move elsewhere? What did that look like and how did you think through that?
00:34:04
Speaker
Great. Another great question. I, so I moved to Vietnam. I lived in Vietnam and was doing this work for this art foundation and I was making enough money to live well in Vietnam. But you know, when I think back, I think I made like $15,000 a year. Like I made very little money doing it, but I could live on that. And I think like early on, my goal was just,
00:34:32
Speaker
My goal was to publish and to publish decently. And that was sort of like the thing that obsessed me probably for like the first four years out of college. And then I moved to New York City and I was still making a living off my writing. I got hired to ghost write someone's memoir.
00:34:57
Speaker
So that took, you know, I got $10,000 to do that. That felt like so much money at the time. And it took a lot of my, it took a lot of my time. But in order to make ends meet, I was also
00:35:11
Speaker
working at a pie shop. How Brooklyn is that? I sold, I was like the counter person at a specialty pie store. I'm a pie maker. So I actually could be really enthusiastic about that. But there was a moment probably like two years into living in New York. And I had often like waited tables in the past. And there were just there were days where I was like, my body hurts from
00:35:40
Speaker
uh, making cappuccinos, like my hands would really hurt. And, and I'm making, like, I probably got up to like $22,000 a year, which again, in New York City, isn't that much money. And I remember thinking, you know, I do want a family at some point, and I don't know how I would support them on
00:36:06
Speaker
anything that looks like what I've got going right now. I was probably I was probably 26, 27. And I said to myself, like, so what's your goal? Where? What do you think you might need? And I was like, I don't know, $50,000 a year. And
00:36:28
Speaker
So I did some calculations and I was like, let's say, I mean, this is definitely the brain, the way my brain works. Like let's say childbearing age starts to like taper down around 35. So you want to be at $50,000 by the time that you're 35. Um, and I figured like, that means you need to make $5,000 more a year every year, something like that. Maybe it was like 33 and
00:36:57
Speaker
And the first thing that I thought of was like, OK, well, I have this MFA all adjunct. Why don't I see if I like teaching? And I guess this is I mean, this isn't about publication. It's also just about making ends meet as a writer. And so I feel like I started to I felt like I had a.
00:37:19
Speaker
network where I was getting my work out, it was getting published, but it's still, and I think this is a real issue for a lot of writers, it like still wasn't totally providing a living. Or it was providing a living that was okay for someone who was 22 years old, but it was starting to seem like not enough when I started to think about being in my 30s. And I think that's really when I started to
00:37:44
Speaker
I started adjuncting and then I got a cool fellowship with the Andrew Mellon Foundation to teach up at a college in Maine. And now I'm a visiting lecturer at Brown. So I feel like I slowly worked my way to that. I'm there. I'm 33 and I'm making $50,000 a year. So success.
00:38:07
Speaker
That's amazing. What's really good and what's really smart about how you did it was you basically you found your target and then you worked backwards to deconstruct it in a manageable way. You know, you didn't just kind of like go forward in this nebulous thing, taking aim at a dartboard you couldn't see. You built the dartboard. And so like my husband makes fun of me. He'll look at me and be like, let's work backwards. And I'm like, oh, shut up.
00:38:35
Speaker
That's the best way to do it. That's the best way. I agree. I agree. I'm the planning master. That's great. So for instance, even if you wanted to, I'm sure as almost everyone who does the kind of work we do, if you haven't already been published in the New Yorker, say, everyone wants to write for the New Yorker at some point, it's like horse trainers that say they don't want to win the Kentucky Derby. Right. They're lying. Every trainer wants to win the Kentucky Derby.
00:39:03
Speaker
Every journalist and every writer of creative nonfiction wants to be in the New Yorker somehow. You've gotten inroads with Harper's. You've had work published with them, right? Yeah. I mean that to me when you said like what was your goal, I remember really wanting to be in Harper's.
00:39:21
Speaker
And I remember thinking, I want to be in harbors by the time I'm 30. And. Work backwards. Work backwards. And it didn't happen at 30, but it happened at 33 and it is framed on my wall in my office. I'm really proud of it. That's amazing. Like, so how did you deconstruct that? The way from that, I mean, there are, there are steps there that you can, you can work with there. What was the recipe that you drew up for yourself to try to get to that end point? That's a good question.
00:39:52
Speaker
Huh, I mean, I will say, gotta think about how did I strategically try to get to Harper's? Well, it involved, it's not as clear a story as like the getting to being sort of a financially solvent writer, but I, I mean, part of the reason why I moved to New York was I was like, okay, I have a lot of publications
00:40:19
Speaker
in bizarrely enough, like a lot of European magazines and newspapers. And I know that writing is about your writing, but it's also about networking. And I'm going to like polish up my boots and go move to New York City. And with the idea that like, and I think this is with the idea that I had enough like tear sheets
00:40:44
Speaker
to make an impression. I wasn't just arriving there with nothing to my name and that I was gonna start to try to get to know folks and get published. And in truth, I think Carpers was a lot of networking. So it turned out that the College of Staten Island, that was my first teaching job, I took the time to get to know the other
00:41:12
Speaker
professors in the English department. And it turned out this guy, Fred Kaufman, whom I've read and long respected, who's a Harper's writer, taught in my department. So then I emailed him and was like, oh, let me take you out for coffee. I'd love to talk about your piece, the food bubble in Harper's. So we went out for coffee and we hit it off. And I said, you know, why don't you give me a walking tour of the financial district?
00:41:41
Speaker
uh, as it relates to commodity index funding and I'll publish it on the Limon diplomatique diplomatic channels blog that can help promote your next book. So then we did that. So it was sort of like, I. And then at the end of that, I was like, do you have an editor at Harper's you recommend I reach out to, he gave me Chris Cox's.
00:42:06
Speaker
information and I pitched him something. And that was one of those pitches that I spent forever on. And it was like two and a half pages long. And it made it to an editorial meeting and then got killed. And I was totally bummed because I was like, oh, I'm so close. So, you know, I sort of like licked my wounds that hurt. I mean, that hurt a little bit. I really wanted that. And then I kept, you know, I kept writing.
00:42:34
Speaker
And I got to know another Harper's writer, Matt Power, who passed away not that long ago. And he and I would sort of like bat around story ideas. And then I pitched them a second time. It made it to an editorial meeting a second time. It got killed a second time. And then, gosh, I had been writing a lot about flood insurance and retreat.
00:43:03
Speaker
starting to sort of piece together the essays in my book. And this academic, Rebecca Elliott, who had studied with the woman who wrote, oh, ah, Strangers in Their Own Land, that book that was a pretty big hit right after Trump got elected that was about talking to sort of an on the ground investigation of politics
00:43:32
Speaker
and environmentalism in Louisiana. And anyways, so I had interviewed her student who was working on a dissertation about flood insurance reform, Rebecca Elliott. Rebecca Elliott, it turns out, has a good friend who's an editor at Harper's and he contacted her and said, you know, we kind of were looking for something on flood insurance. And she wrote me and was like,
00:44:00
Speaker
Do you want to pitch this together? I think she felt like she could use the help of someone who was a creative nonfiction writer to help her make the research that she had been devoting so much time to sort of accessible to a broader public. And I said, yeah, let's totally work on it together. We put together a pitch. We sent it to Matthew. It went to the editorial meeting and it was accepted.
00:44:28
Speaker
I suspect that perhaps some of those people also remembered that I had had pitches with them before and it had made it far and Fred Calvin had recommended I get in touch and Matt Power had recommended I get in touch. So it was a long circuitous route.
00:44:45
Speaker
yeah how much time how much time pass between from when your first pitch got killed at the editorial meeting until you finally landed this one just to give it people an idea of how patient you had to be like three years
00:45:03
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking it was probably at least two, if not longer. So yeah, that's persistence and resilience in the face of indomitable rejection, which is what you have to deal with. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true.
00:45:21
Speaker
and i have loved the nature of your hustle in this instance where all right you've noticed that you had uh... a colleague who wrote for harper's and you not only asked to take him out the coffee you read his story and so and then you talked about that and then you slowly you know you didn't just say hey right for harper's who's your editor over there i'd love to pitch a story like you you know you sort of
00:45:45
Speaker
And then he wound my way into his heart. Yes, you definitely won him over. But you did it in a way that wasn't sleazy and like overly and overtly ambitious. You did it the right way. And like, how did you learn to do that as opposed to be like, oh, hey, you know, like you don't really know me that well. And I'd like your content. I'd like your Rolodex, you know.
00:46:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think that like first it does come from a place of like genuine curiosity and and also, you know, I think that a lot of magazines say in their submission lines, you know, get to know our work, get to know us before you send us something. And the case with Harper's, I'd been reading Harper's since I was like a teenager. So
00:46:42
Speaker
When I realized that Fred Calvin was in my department, I had read his article. Like I did know what it was. Not that, you know, not that that's going to be possible in every instance, but I think it's worth asking, you know, what are the publications that you really like and respect and that you come back to, um, and that you have, that have a place sort of in your life and in your mind. Cause I think that makes this process like a lot easier.
00:47:12
Speaker
And then also I would just say my mom is like the number one networker in the universe. And she probably taught me by subtle example my entire life because she's also, I mean, she, people take to her sort of immediately and fully. And I think she knows that it can all be helpful in the end, but that's not the immediate proposition.
00:47:34
Speaker
Right. All right. So when you're starting to get your teeth into a story, what sound does your brain make when something just clicks? You know, like, oh, that is something I am going to do like a ton of pre-reporting on for my query. And that's something that I'm just going to lean with all my resources into. Like, what does that look like for you and what has to be in place? Oh, that's a...
00:48:04
Speaker
That's an interesting question. And I don't know that I have an answer in part because I think my general enthusiasm means that sometimes I don't know exactly the difference and I spend time on stuff that I shouldn't necessarily. So let me think. It's hard to say because I've also been in like the mindset of this book.
00:48:33
Speaker
So for me, the book is about coastal communities coming to terms with sea level rise. And as I have been working on it, I realized that it's about wetland communities. They have to be situated on top of former wetlands or alongside current wetlands, that that's really what's going to put them at risk. And then
00:48:59
Speaker
Also, because in another way, it's a book about the non-human communities that live in wetlands and how are they going to survive the transition to a warmer world with higher seas. And so, you know, like I said, I follow a lot of conversations on flooding and flood insurance, and I follow conversations on retreat as an adaptation strategy, and I follow conversations on
00:49:28
Speaker
climate change and environmental justice. And I realize there's a lot of things that come into my orbit that are exciting to me for one of those reasons. But right now, for me to pursue something, it has to be about a wetland community dealing with coastal flooding. And also it has to have some kind of justice element in it. It can either be like,
00:49:58
Speaker
justice for non-human communities or justice for low-income communities, but I'm not necessarily interested in the wealthiest parts of Miami that are just raising everything up on stilts. Because I think that there's sort of a tie between the vulnerability of low-income coastal communities and the vulnerability of species that are endemic to tidal wetlands.
00:50:25
Speaker
Right now, if it doesn't check all, like those boxes for me, I just, as interesting as it may be, I can't spend time on it.
00:50:35
Speaker
Yeah, does that answer that question? Definitely.
Crafting Essays with Personal and Universal Themes
00:50:38
Speaker
Definitely. And in tune with a lot of this writing you're doing with these retreats in the Sea Rising is the essay you have for Creative Nonfiction, which kind of ties in this personal story, your dad coming down with this sort of inexplicable vertigo. And I wonder, how did you
00:50:57
Speaker
come to that essay and how you planned on tying in the personal story with these with these really chilling images of sea rise of like Fenway Park underwater and all this you know that really hit that really hits at home of like that's what let's say a four-foot change in ocean level will do will totally bury an entire coastal city so or submerge it so like hey yeah how did you come to that essay and come to those touchstones in it so
00:51:28
Speaker
I would say that I had been writing about sea level rise and retreat at that point for probably like three years in this more straightforward nonfiction way. And I think I felt frustrated by the limitations of talking about adaptation to climate change in a way that was like strictly financial or policy based, because I think that it just wasn't
00:51:58
Speaker
grasping for me some things that I was seeing on the ground, which were that human beings were, when they had to, capable of sort of giving up places that had defined them, giving up communities that had meant everything to them, and deciding on sort of making a new way forward now that the ocean was like in their back door.
00:52:28
Speaker
And, and I didn't know exactly how to write about that. Um, but I was definitely reading and have turned back to often, uh, this book by John DeGada called about a mountain that sort of runs two stories parallel alongside one another. One is about sort of the ongoing at the time, ongoing discussions about whether or not to store nuclear waste in Yucca mountain, which is this outside
00:52:58
Speaker
of, say, Yucca Mountain? Anyway, sorry, outside of, outside of Las Vegas. And then the other story that he runs alongside that is a story about a young boy named Levi, who commits suicide from the tallest building in Las Vegas. And I think on this surface,
00:53:24
Speaker
they really have like not a lot to do with one another. But when he starts to run them in parallel, this weird thing happens where it becomes a meditation on sort of some of the most unknowable things in the world and the facts that we construct around them to help make sense of the fact that they're very unknowable for us. So what's like the lifespan of nuclear waste
00:53:54
Speaker
It's really unclear, like scientists say 10,000 years, but that's just sort of a random number to be a placeholder for the fact that we don't know. And why do folks commit suicide? It's one of those questions that I think is very haunting and ultimately one that we just will never have access to. And I think that when he puts those two stories alongside one another, both becomes energized in a way
00:54:23
Speaker
that helps them break out of sort of the traditional discourse that defines them. So he just like, for me, really reenergized the conversation around nuclear energy by considering it alongside this, the suicide of this teenager. And I realized that I think I needed to do something like that with sea level rise. And my father came down with Vertigo and he's just been like a,
00:54:53
Speaker
defining real touchstone were very close. And that was so disorienting for me to see him who's very like handy and very capable in the world suddenly lose some of the things that I think of as his defining features. And so the essay I think sort of became about what what it was like to watch
00:55:19
Speaker
you know, let's say one of the points that I navigate by sort of start to disappear. And then that's because he's doing that same thing that the rules that he usually uses to navigate the world have changed. And he has to figure out a way forward in this kind of new body with these new set of laws governing it. And I think that helped. I think it helped make sea level rise into something that's not just like a scientific discussion or a policy discussion.
00:55:48
Speaker
And as you were working your way through that essay, what did you struggle with? And when you ultimately ran into those roadblocks sort of in the middle of it, when the honeymoon period of starting it ends, and then you have to like, you're in that dark forest part, what did you struggle with there? And like, how do you find yourself pushing through the ugly middles of drafts?
00:56:15
Speaker
Hmm. And maybe this one was easier than things you've written in the past, but like, how do you, um, how do you like just navigate the, the middles, which can be really hard to get through when you're too far away from home, but you're not quite at the destination yet? Well, I would say something that I do is sometimes I'll print out the essay and
00:56:45
Speaker
Um, and cut each paragraph, like cut the paper at the end of each paragraph as I've written it and lay out all the paragraphs on the floor and then like move them around. Cause I think that I can get really wedded to the way the narrative has arrived in, in some of the earlier drafts, but that that might not be the form that's most fitting for the piece. So.
00:57:15
Speaker
that helps me sort of like take a step back. And I try to, I guess like I sometimes try to think about it like formally. And what else? Ugly middles. Mmm.
00:57:34
Speaker
I, well, for the long, for the past two years, I've been part of a writing group and I'm like a huge believer in having other people read your writing, even when it's like sort of at that like embarrassingly bad stage. Cause that can help. You know, I want to hear, I had this writing group at Bates college where I was teaching and we met every Tuesday and we submitted stuff every other week.
00:58:00
Speaker
And I wanted to even just like hear what was exciting to them, what felt off-putting, where they wanted to see the essay go. Not that I always paid attention to that, but it was just really helpful to have that feedback and helpful to have a goal to work towards. It's like, oh yeah, I have to send them something new, so better keep on that.
00:58:23
Speaker
What other ugly middle stuff? I mean, for me, I'm like one of those drafters. I call it like a vomit drafter. My first draft is like the ugly middle. My first draft is disgusting. The whole draft is the ugly middle. Yeah. It's just like, oh. And for me, honestly, like the hardest part, I guess it's like the beginning of the ugly middles. It's like I get a draft out and then I have to sit back down with it. And I'm just like, wow, that's
00:58:53
Speaker
That's like almost unsavable. Like that's just, that's terrible. Oh, I have a good, another good tip, at least for me. When it, when I'm in that place with a piece of writing, I will often wake up a little bit earlier and sit down with it. Let's say at like 6.30 AM. And I feel like that's a time before my rational brain totally kicks in and can hate it.
00:59:22
Speaker
And it's a time where like there's a lot more possibility and I'm sort of like still in that state between dreaming and being fully awake. And I think sometimes that the big breakthroughs and the changes
00:59:35
Speaker
They need to happen, happen for me at like 6 o'clock or 6.30 in the morning. So if I'm stuck with something, I wake up earlier. That's so great. I forget who has the quote, but Andre Dubius when I had him on, he attributed it to someone and it was someone who writes first thing in the morning and it was because she liked to go from the dream world to the dream world. Yeah. And that's exactly what you're saying, yeah.
01:00:05
Speaker
Exactly. And what part of the process appeals to you more like that rewriting editing part or the vomit draft? Definitely not the vomit draft. Well, like the name says it all. You're right. There's a part there's a part that's like, no, I love I mean, I love where I am with rising my book right now, which is I've been working on it like as a collection of sort of lyric
01:00:32
Speaker
essays, let's say for two and a half years, and I'm getting, I just got part one back from my editor at Milkweed, and I think she's a genius. And at the same time, well, yeah, and at the same time, she has some really good, difficult questions for me to address in the margins that
01:01:01
Speaker
You know, I think after steeping myself in the subject matter, I'm prepared to address them in a way that I definitely wasn't when I maybe initially wrote the essay or the chapter. And it's just really exciting to get to that place with a subject or a body of work where you're like, oh, there are some really big, sort of slightly difficult questions. And I might possibly have an answer to those.
01:01:28
Speaker
I don't know that I've ever exactly been here before and it's feeling really amazing. I mean, I also, and I also really enjoyed this summer, which was like getting the final, getting the draft ready to send to her so that she could start working on it in a line by line way. It was, you know, I, I wake up and if something feels kind of close to done, I'll often find a nice spot outside and read it out loud and make marks on the page.
01:01:58
Speaker
And that to me starts to also feel a little bit like poetry where I get to inhabit the essay and the sound that the words are making and think about it really at the language level. I love that stuff. I like that a lot more than the like researching the history of the National Flood Insurance Program.
01:02:20
Speaker
Well, speaking of reading, what were some influential books or essays that really influenced you and extend that to even particular writers that you turned to? And when you see their byline, you're like, oh, yes, I'm in for a ride today. I can't wait. Well, I definitely bet that John DeGada book has been really hugely important to me. And right now, I'm just sort of in love with it.
01:02:50
Speaker
half of everything that Grey Wolf does. So I've been really enjoying Maggie Nelson and Eula Bess and Claudia Rakhine. There's something, and I think that they all have like, along with John DeGata, they're all sort of attuned to the poetic and attuned to language and the way that it works in a way that I think is really exciting and
01:03:18
Speaker
is like maybe defining a little bit essay writing currently. For contemporary takes on environmental issues, I also turn to milkweed often. And I think similarly, you have a lot of sort of very poetic writers there. And I would say in this weird way that, hmm, I don't know, I think that I also,
01:03:46
Speaker
I read a lot of poets and I often, let's say that right now, let's say I'm revising something on New Orleans. I might open up Katie Ford's book Colosseum that was written after Katrina, just to like get steeped in the language that this poet chose to describe a particular place that I'm interested in.
01:04:13
Speaker
And I feel like, yeah, I feel like I turn to writers to help me solve problems that I'm having, which is like maybe a different, it's a slightly different question. If I want to figure out, you know, how to write about white privilege and race in a way that's sort of like humble and specific, I might open up Eula Bess. I love Eula Bess. I mean, I'm really jazzed when I see something that she's written for sure.
01:04:41
Speaker
I might turn to CD right if I want sort of like slightly more like metaphysical meditations on the role of the writer and like a very particular like razor sharp scalpel attention to language. I really liked Rebecca Solnit. I know that that's probably a pretty common answer, but she does a real nice like meld of environmental with a personal for me.
01:05:11
Speaker
Yeah, if there are for some people who might be just put off by the very idea of poetry. Because there are out there like, who would you recommend as if you had one or two poets that you would recommend as like, that's, that's a good introductory poet to maybe get you into more esoteric poetry.
01:05:34
Speaker
I love Robert Haas, like beyond the ends of the world. And he's, I mean, I think you can see in a lot of the writing that I really like, it's definitely concerned with humans and their interaction in the physical environment. I don't know if I would call it like nature because I think nature is kind of a construction.
01:05:55
Speaker
that were part of nature, not interacting with nature. But he's this really killer California poet who I think is very approachable. And at the same time, the payoffs are really huge. He has a gorgeous poem, Meditation at Lagunitas, that I was obsessed with for years. And if you drink Lagunitas beer, that's just another reason to read the poem.
01:06:22
Speaker
committed to keeping the pub in public radio. Yeah. Who else? My husband and I, we rode bicycles across Chile for our honeymoon and we visited each of Pablo Neruda's houses and
01:06:44
Speaker
and read Neruda out loud at each of those homes. And Pablo Neruda is great. I mean, I think he's really approachable. But similarly, like a very elemental poet. It was really cool to go to, he has a house on the Chilean coast called Isla Negra. And there's a poem that's called like the Ode to the Sea that in it he talks about
01:07:11
Speaker
the sea being like seven green tigers and seven green dogs. And we showed up at Isla Negra and the waves crashing onto the rocks were like seven green tigers. They were just like humongous, roiling, powerful things, unlike anything I had ever seen. It was really fun to be like, oh, this is totally the place that that poem is about.
01:07:40
Speaker
I think he's really approachable. And also, I mean, I don't know, I, similar to how I drink, like read poets of places that you are fond of. I think that that's, you know, that can create that relationship with poetry as much as just the language on the page. It'll bring you back to something that you cherish, can.
01:08:05
Speaker
Yeah, as a dog person, if I could say dogs are a geographic place for me. Mary Oliver's dog songs just tears me up every time. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
01:08:20
Speaker
Yeah, and so what are, all right, so you mentioned the poets, a bunch of writers and some of their work. What are some other artistic media you like to consume, whether that's like documentaries or feature films or podcasts that help inform your writing, things that you're tuning your ear and your eye to, to maybe, it'll be tangentially related to writing, but not exactly, you know, actual reading and writing?
01:08:45
Speaker
Well, one thing that I'm struck by revising the book is that I clearly like there's a lot of references to artworks throughout it. So I was sort of surprised to realize that because it's not something that I necessarily encounter in other writers. So I would just say like I definitely consume. Hold on, I'm going to shut my window.
01:09:15
Speaker
I definitely consume contemporary painting, photography, sculpture, public sculpture, all that stuff. But the other answer is like I ride my bike a lot. I don't know if that's an answer. Something I consume, but I consume the landscapes that whiz by me while I ride my bike. Yeah.
01:09:42
Speaker
Yeah, and it strikes me that you're a real visual consumer of art and so forth. So being on your bike and being able to consume a lot of landscape and feel that air on your face and everything is a great way to help stimulate your brain in a way that you can translate that to the page. Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that that kind of goes to
01:10:08
Speaker
I would say like landscape art. Like I'm definitely, I've like made the pilgrimage to spiral jetty. I'm interested in works of art that like situate themselves in physical places in a way that's meaningful. I seek those out.
01:10:24
Speaker
With respect to, say, social media and running your own race and different career tracks and everything, how do you navigate that world? So
Social Media's Impact on Writing
01:10:35
Speaker
you don't get bogged down by other people's highlight reels and not get jealous of other people, because that's a reality. And I know that's something I've felt routinely. And I wonder how you, if those sort of toxic feelings creep into your blood, how you cope with that.
01:10:54
Speaker
I don't have a Facebook page, though. Nice. I probably, like, I don't know. Maybe I should. I think that I realized that that was I did. I used to. And it seemed to be like a waste of my time in that it took a lot of time and it wasn't seeing like a lot of positive things necessarily coming from it.
01:11:16
Speaker
I do have Twitter. I have like 300 followers on Twitter. I basically just tweet about wetlands and flooding. I have no illusions that I'm better at this than I am. I know I'm pretty bad at Twitter, but I use it in part because it keeps me up to date on conversations that I think are important. I don't know.
01:11:46
Speaker
I feel like I just don't measure my success by social media at all.
01:11:55
Speaker
And I just laugh at myself because I'm really not very good at it. Though I suspect that maybe I should attempt to become better at it, though I'm not entirely sure how. Whenever I put a hashtag on something, I'm like, hashtag climate change? Does that work? I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Everyone hashtags climate change? I don't know. But I have a really good friend who has 20,000 followers.
01:12:24
Speaker
is, you know, a pretty well-known journalist and I sometimes wonder how he does it, but I also feel like I know that what he's doing and what I'm doing seem to me to be kind of fundamentally different things. Though, like I just wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post.
01:12:48
Speaker
and it got 850 comments in a day and I was like, how did that happen? So I don't know, it's like all sort of a mystery to me. I think that's my answer. But I try not to measure my self-worth by social media but rather like when I got something in Harper's, I framed it and put it on my wall and that's pretty exciting.
01:13:12
Speaker
Yeah, I've been really struggling with just the whole idea of social media and all that. Cal Newport's book, Deep Work, is outstanding. And that guy is a best-selling author. He's a tenured prof.
01:13:27
Speaker
Somewhere I can't remember where but like he gets a lot of work done and he does not have a social media presence at all And that's kind of his jam that he doesn't have doesn't have that yeah, and I wish I could do that I just if I could if if I could make work that was so good that I didn't need it then I
01:13:49
Speaker
I don't know. I just don't know. It's like how do you get your how do you get your your work noticed without these bull horns? But there's just so much noise that like it's just I don't know. I guess I mean, I just don't think the blow horns are like helping. Yeah, my work like yeah, I don't know. I tweet my I think that I think that getting work out in an online publication can be really important. Like there was definitely a moment where I was like, oh,
01:14:18
Speaker
I as a person favor print media, that's not true of all reading publics. So I don't want to limit who I'm reading, who I'm reaching by limiting where I publish stuff to print media. I think that that's limiting. But when it gets published in something like online,
01:14:41
Speaker
That's exciting and they can be really good at distributing that online. That's what they do. But I don't need to know how to do that. I feel a little bit. Yeah. Because I tweeted and it goes to my 300 tweet followers. I don't think that that's really helping.
01:14:57
Speaker
Yeah, and if you even want to reach all of them, you're going to have to pay for a promoted ad to even get to most of your followers. So it's like, this is just all crap. They're just one little line of code away from changing the game on you. So it's why invest all your time in it when they could just change the rules on you overnight. Yeah. And I feel like in recent months,
01:15:25
Speaker
especially since Harvey and Irma and Maria, I have been more active on Twitter because I really want to know what the public conversation is shaping up to be like in the 2017 hurricane season. But I also feel it like encroaching into my work, my mental space in a way that I'm not super duper happy with. So I feel like at that point, I make up myself a little rule where I'm like,
01:15:55
Speaker
Okay, you know, fine. I notice, Liz, that you're on Twitter a lot, but don't let it get in the way of the writing work that you really want to do. So then I make a rule like you're not allowed to go on Twitter before noon. And if I find myself breaking that rule, then I literally unplug my router. Like, yeah, I don't know. It's like this stuff can really
01:16:26
Speaker
take over your time. And I don't think that I'm like better than anyone else at being distracted. So I just like unplugged my router.
01:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's perfect. And so with with respect to like continual and gradual continual improvement with writing and even as a reader, what are little things that you do routinely to kind of sharpen the sun and get yourself just a little bit better than you were yesterday? I think teaching really helps because I it keeps me reading new writers. It keeps me
01:17:08
Speaker
You know, I go back to craft books. I just was teaching a section from Telet Slant, um, which is a book on creative nonfiction. Gosh, who wrote that book? I'm going to forget her name. Um, I think it's someone and Dorian locks locks. No, I'm that's not right. It's anyways, it's this like neat book on creative nonfiction and.
01:17:36
Speaker
It reminds me in the basic sense, some of the things that I ask my students to do, I'm like, oh yeah, I should be doing that too. We look at Raymond Carver in dialogue and I tell them that when people speak to one another, they don't always say what they mean. And then that makes me go back to a scene and be like, right, I could edit this in such a way that it would have more attention if
01:18:03
Speaker
Uh, so-and-so said one thing, but they meant something else. So I think that teaching really helps me stay sharp. I also go to, I go to a lot of readings. Um, I like to go listen to other writers read their work. I am part of a, or was part of a writing group. I hope to start up again in January. What else?
01:18:28
Speaker
I also just like to go to lectures about things that I'm generally interested in that have nothing to do with writing to remind me that like the world doesn't rise and fall out of the writing world. Do you, you know, you write a lot about, you know, wetlands and the rising seas and so forth, and that's what your next book's about, which I desperately want to, we'll have you back on when that book comes out and we can really dive into that. That'll be a lot of fun.
01:18:56
Speaker
after I get a chance to read it. But like say, what other things interest you besides climate change and science writing? Like fill in the blank, like what is something else you would like to tackle? Oh gosh, you know I was at this poetry reading last night and it was, I loved just like swimming in their language and you know sometimes sitting in those readings little things come up
01:19:25
Speaker
ideas for something that I want to write about. And the thing that came up for me last night was that I literally don't know how to not write about climate change anymore. That's sort of daunting. And I think in this weird way, this book has working on this book has sort of like rewritten my own consciousness in a way that I haven't had time to step away from the project and grapple with yet, but I expect
01:19:54
Speaker
Once everything's in by the middle of December, I'm going to be in that space and I don't know what's going to happen. Part of me suspects that I might not be able to walk away from this subject. And that's, I don't know, that's scary. I've never felt that way before.
01:20:16
Speaker
Yeah, because like it's in a way, and I hate to use this term, but it's kind of like your brand at this point. Yeah. You know, like if you wanted to write a story about the the Red Sox, you know, it's just like someone would be like, well.
01:20:30
Speaker
What a thought, even if you've been a lifelong fan or whatever, you've been writing about climate change for 15 years. What makes you the person who can write a story about the Red Sox? I don't know. Right. No, I will say, I spent part of the summer putting in a 54-page grant application to the NSF to go to Antarctica next year. The idea being that
01:20:58
Speaker
Antarctica is like the only continent on the earth that doesn't have a history of an indigenous presence and that the people who go there, the scientists who go there to study glacial melt and ice sheet collapse are really the front line of bearing witness to one of the most dramatic
01:21:26
Speaker
geologic changes, perhaps the most like dramatic geologic change that human beings have ever witnessed. And I'm really interested in how bearing witness to these phenomenon are like rewriting the spiritual and the personal mental maps of the scientists. So I want to go down there and interview them
01:21:55
Speaker
over an extended period of time and then turn those interviews into essays. So that's potentially the next book and it's definitely climate change. Knock on wood that the National Science Foundation thinks that that sounds like a good use of their resources. But that wouldn't be for a year and I'll have this weird year between the end of this book and that. And I don't know, I imagine it might be a couple of personal essays about
01:22:25
Speaker
how writing about climate change really just changes your life. This has been a lot of fun getting to know you and talk to you about your work. Thank you so much for carving out this time of your afternoon. We'll have to do this again when the book comes out. Fabulous. Thank you. It's been a ton of fun. I really appreciate your reaching out and taking the time to interview me.
01:22:50
Speaker
Well, you're welcome. Thank you. The pleasure was all mine. Thank you very much. Yeah, you're welcome. Go and have a Manhattan. Okay. Have a good afternoon. You have one too. I think I might. All right. Thanks, Elizabeth.
01:23:03
Speaker
That's it, CNFers. Big thanks to you and to Elizabeth for her time and insights. I had a blast and I hope you did too. Hey, reach out to me on Twitter, at Brendan O'Mara, or email me. It's easy to find. You can also sign up for my monthly newsletter. Yeah, that's right. It gives you my monthly reading recommendations, usually one newspaper blackout poem, and what you may have missed that month on the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
01:23:33
Speaker
Four bucks, once a month, no spam. Can't beat it. As many of you know, I lobby to get my wife to subscribe to the podcast, and every week she says, meh. So this week I tried a new tactic. I grabbed her iPhone and thought about subscribing for her. It didn't go over well. I mean, maybe that was a misstep. Hard to say. Keep on CNF'ing and the free world, friends. Till next time.