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Episode 403: Elizabeth Rush Moves Toward Exactitude
646 Plays8 months ago
Elizabeth Rush is the author of The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth (Milkweed).
Liz talks about writing toward exactitude, lyricing her way through sticking points, being a character in her own work, and voice.
For a couple weeks, visit combeyond.bu.edu, use the promo code NARRATIVE25 at checkout and get 25% your tuition for the two-day Power of Narrative Conference. And, no, I don’t get any dough.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Social: @creativenonfiction podcast on IG and Threads
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction and Conference Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Well, shoot. Excited about this CNF as promotional support for the Creative Nonfiction Podcast is provided by the Power of Narrative Conference out of Boston, Massachusetts. It's a craft conference focusing on a genre near and dear to my heart. Narrative journalism taking place March 22nd and 23rd at Boston University. I attended a few years ago and it's a great time. You got like one week, dude, one week.
00:00:29
Speaker
Three to 400 journalists from around the world will descend on Boston University, and you can be one of them. Sure can. Visit combeyond.bu.edu. Navigate to the Power of Narrative Conference page. And when you register, use the code narrative25, and you'll save 25%.
00:00:50
Speaker
This year's keynote speakers include former New York Times editor Dean Baquet NPR White House correspondent Ozma Khalid The Washington Post's John Woodrow Cox Former WAPO editor Marty Baron and the team behind the Boston Globes Murder in Boston The untold story of the Charles and Carol Stewart shooting
00:01:13
Speaker
Not only that, but there's going to be 15 breakout sessions and crafting climate change stories or writing braided narratives and the power of empathy in reporting. Learn more
Introduction to Elizabeth Rush and Her Work
00:01:27
Speaker
at combeyond.bu.edu and use narrative25 at checkout. Again, narrative25 to save 25% at combeyond.bu.edu. Repairing, restoring, reconnecting through true storytelling. I dig that.
00:01:43
Speaker
Say it once and get the fuck out of there. Oh hey, Seeing Efforts, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to primarily badass writers about the art of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Hey, I'm not thrilled I'm the host of the show either. We can't all be Max Linsky or some shit. Okay, but listen though, Elizabeth Rush is back for her third rodeo.
00:02:12
Speaker
This was recorded back in November, so we're nothing if not punctual here, and her book is probably closer to paperback than hardback, but whatever, okay? Man, the name of her book is The Quickening, Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth. It was published by Milkweed. Her first book, Rising Dispatches from the New American Shore, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She didn't win, but
00:02:40
Speaker
I'll come out and say being a finalist is as good as winning. Take it from someone who's never won anything. Show notes to this episode of More at BrendanOmero.com, where you can sign up for my monthly rage. You can see algorithm newsletter. It's a toe-tap and good read. Very biased. First of the month, no spam, as far as I can tell. I can't beat it.
00:03:00
Speaker
For now, keep the conversation going on. Instagram and threads at Creative Nonfiction
Rush's Exploration of Climate Change and Motherhood
00:03:05
Speaker
Podcast. And consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash cnfbod. I get it. Money's tight, dude. And the joy you get from, say, I don't know, just having like a four dollar coffee often is far more gratifying than like four bucks a month on your favorite podcast. But
00:03:23
Speaker
If you can, check it out. I just put out a call for office hours to talk about whatever you want to talk about. It happens to be for the $4 and up crowd. And it's a little thing. I do, maybe like quarterly, kind of do that. You want to hash something out? You can hash it out on me. Elizabeth can be found at elizabethrush.net. Not com, not org, not govnet.
00:03:50
Speaker
Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Orion, Guernica, and she teaches creative nonfiction, the subject, not the podcast, at Brown University. I once drove to an open major league tryout at Brown University in 1998, but I got lost in Providence, Rhode Island, and I
00:04:10
Speaker
was super depressed anyway, didn't really want to go, and I missed the tryout and drove home. My dad was not happy. In this conversation, Liz talks about how she tries to sometimes lyric her way out of problems. The voice, the slippery nature of voice.
00:04:28
Speaker
and being a character in her own work and giving her sources a chance to not be on, which is kind of a good concept, especially when you're talking to maybe people who aren't used to being covered, like the scientists she was shadowing while on a giant boat circumventing
00:04:52
Speaker
Antarctica in visiting the Thwaites Glacier. Amazing stuff.
Writing Advice and Personal Reflection
00:04:58
Speaker
Anyway, enjoy CNF-ers. Stay tuned to the end of the show for a parting shot about cutting a book's worth of words from a book and still being able to call it a book risk. I was reading
00:05:22
Speaker
this on Brain Picking, sort of the marginalion, about this great little post about Kurt Vonnegut in writing and style. And there are a few bullet points, several bullet points that Vonnegut talks about. And I think this might be kind of fun to spit out these bullet points and have you kind of riff on them, because there are a lot of things that are just congruent thematically with this little post and what I like to talk about on the show. And I think this might be kind of cool to get your insights into some of this thing with kind of writing and style.
00:05:51
Speaker
And his first point is find the subject you care about. And I think this might be a good place to even just pull in the quickening for this and how that came to pass, why it was a subject you cared about in terms of its backdrop, but there's also the greater subtext of motherhood that is congruent also with the book. So maybe just riff on finding a subject you care about and the importance of that, really.
00:06:21
Speaker
So I teach writing also and something I always tell my students is exactly that. Like you want to be writing in a space where you have a lot of curiosity and interest because at the end of the day, like writing's not going to make you rich.
00:06:42
Speaker
It's not gonna make you famous. What it can give you is like a considered life and time and space to like really probe, you know, your interests deeply and figure out what makes them fire and why. And that's like the reward. It's not all the other things that we tend to think about as being like actual rewards. So definitely start with something that you care about. For me,
00:07:13
Speaker
My most recent book is really about Antarctica, climate change, and motherhood. The starting point for me was I had spent half a decade in coastal communities in the United States that were being transformed by higher tides and stronger storms.
00:07:35
Speaker
There was like a certain amount of uncertainty that I had to learn to live with. Like, are you going to get three feet of sea level rise by the end of the century or six? No one really knows. And you have to be comfortable with that uncertainty. But then I read an article about this glacier in West Antarctica that is the size of Florida.
00:07:58
Speaker
that no human beings had ever been to the place where it discharges ice into the sea. So we really don't know much about how it's behaving, how it will behave, but it contains enough ice to raise global sea levels two feet. And it's a kind of cork to the West Antarctic ice sheet, which if we lose that will raise global sea levels 10 feet or more. And apparently like when I read about it,
00:08:26
Speaker
We know so little about this place that they don't even include it in a lot of, at the time they didn't include it in a lot of sea level rise models because there was just no way to accurately do that. And so I was fascinated by the idea that there's a place on the planet that is already profoundly transforming us.
00:08:48
Speaker
but that we don't even know well enough to understand what it's up to and what it might do in the future. That was just fascinating to me. So I applied for a grant to go there and through the National Science Foundation and I got it. And then I found out that in order to be part of this scientific mission, I had to
00:09:11
Speaker
pass a series of like physical tests. And one of them was I had to like prove that I wasn't pregnant because pregnant people aren't allowed to deploy to the ice on these government run icebreakers. And I wanted to get pregnant around that time, but in order to go on the mission, I had to postpone those plans, like one full year. And I was 35. I was, you know, postponing plans to get pregnant one full year meant that were I to get pregnant when I came back,
00:09:41
Speaker
I would be a geriatric pregnancy technically. And it just seemed to me like, oh, these two things that I'm really interested in, one that's like grounded in creation and the other that's grounded in disintegration are really intimately tied to one another in my life in ways that I like didn't fully understand. And so that book, the book is kind of written from the place of trying to hold these two desires alongside one another to see what they do to one another.
00:10:10
Speaker
Lots to unpack, but we'll keep going down this Vonnegutian list, and we'll circle back to some of those topics for sure. So step two is do not ramble, though. Like, can I just ramble? I hope not. No, no, no. No, it's all he has to say on that is like, I won't ramble on about that. But it does get to concision and being probably ruthless with your language once you're rewriting. Am I allowed to swear on your show?
00:10:40
Speaker
Hell yeah. OK. So at some point in the semester with my students, I give them my top 10 tips for revision. And tip number one is read your work out loud. Always read your work out loud. Edit in real time. Your ear is a better editor than your eye. And I think tip number three or four is say it once and get the fuck out of there.
00:11:09
Speaker
which I think could be translated to do not ramble. No one wants to hear you say the same thing seven times sideways, so I won't ramble on about it either, but don't repeat yourself. Strangely enough, the few times that I'm interviewed or people ask me questions, that's something I have to get very much better about. I have a tendency to be far too long-winded and often repeat myself two or three times, and it's like,
00:11:38
Speaker
Dude, even just speaking, it's like, get out of your own way. Brevity is your friend, whether it be speaking or in writing, right? I mean, I think it's way harder to do in speaking. I'm sort of gotten embarrassed when I listen to myself talk because I do think I'm pretty... I think of it as exactitude on the page. I edit towards exactitude.
00:12:03
Speaker
when I speak I don't get the privilege of working something over like 17 times before I make it public. So some of that exactitude disappears. Sort of painful to to encounter for recording.
00:12:18
Speaker
Well, I think people like us who do journalism and we know what it's like to talk to someone who is very hard to talk to or is a tough nut to crack and just doesn't talk. So there might be some, I know I'm pretty self-conscious about that. Like if someone has the courtesy to ask me questions, I want to at least give them more than they bargained for. So it's like, you can cut down whatever the hell I'm saying, but at least I'm going to show up and give you something instead of being like,
00:12:47
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with that. Next question, or I don't know. Didn't really think about it. It's like, oh, well, yeah, here you go. Here's a bunch. I'm just going to vomit. Take what you want. I mean, that's the kind of drafter I am, too. I'm a vomit drafter. And I have senior thesis students right now, and they're kind of in that painful place of like, I made a bunch of stuff, but it's not good yet. And I was like, yeah.
00:13:16
Speaker
It stinks to have to sit in that place for a while, but you just keep producing stuff, and then we'll get into revision, and then we'll get into revising the revision, and then we'll get into revising the revision of the revision, and then you'll start to feel better about things. And that kind of reminds me, just the cadence of what you just said from our first conversation. It's one sound bite I pulled out for a presentation
Writing Voice and Style Development
00:13:39
Speaker
I did at a Hippo camp of Creative Nonfiction Conference a couple of years ago.
00:13:43
Speaker
and you're like, I'm just a mule. I'm just slowly plodding up that hill as you're going through your draft. I just always love that image of how slow and methodical it can be. It's just like, I'm just a mule. I remember saying that to you, and I actually have said that since in many other conversations. Yeah, you just got to walk slowly up an absolutely gigantic mountain.
00:14:13
Speaker
and show up for the work of it. It's not particularly glamorous. And the next one is keep it simple. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That makes me think, you know, George Orwell has it somewhere in politics in the English language where, no, no, it's drunken white. I don't know, it's one of the two.
00:14:42
Speaker
Or it's Lee Guckin, God, who knows? But- If I'm being honest here, I didn't exactly Google to see who said that exactly, but it's a common sentiment among the literati to favor clarity over verbosity. And another way of saying that is, don't get writerly on me, which is something that's always in my ear, a little bug.
00:15:11
Speaker
in my ear and maybe we need to stop teaching examples that are quote writerly because we end up mimicking it and then we suck and then we're told this isn't the way you do it you should do it do it this way and this way is often better but it's just like the the foundation on which you're building all your insecurities is over here and then fuck
00:15:41
Speaker
Don't use a $5 word when a $1 word will suffice. When I was a younger writer, I'm still sort of young, but not super young. When I was a younger writer, I think I confused fancy words with style. Like if I put in enough fancy words, my writing would have style and
00:16:05
Speaker
I think that style is actually kind of the opposite. It's like what, what, and voice, like who am I without the fancy words? What happens if I try to say this in plain language and I'm laughing at myself because I think sometimes the kind of writer that I am, I will like,
00:16:30
Speaker
I think of it as lyric my way out of a problem. Like, I won't know exactly what I'm trying to say, so I will make the language beautiful and transfixing, and I will hide behind that affect, that patina that I've put on the language, because I know that I can do it. I'm trained as a poet first. I know how to...
00:17:00
Speaker
draft, I know how to like through revision, make a sentence that sings, but does it say anything? Sometimes I get an, I sometimes I make it sing so I precisely don't have to solve the problem of what it wants to say. And that's when you like need a good editor to be like, Hey, come back to this. What do you actually mean? At least that's true in nonfiction. So keep it simple.
00:17:29
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm going to skip four. I'm going to come back to four, but on five, because this is pretty germane, it sounds like yourself. And it gets to style, and yeah, sometimes we conflate style with these pyrotechnics, but oftentimes, at least in my opinion, style is about or reveals itself in what you pay attention to also.
00:17:52
Speaker
Absolutely. Absolutely. That's a really good point. There's like, um, I have a really talented student right now in one of my workshops who I worked with on and off for a couple of years. And he has lately been sort of concerned with voice. Like everyone's like, find your voice. What's your voice? And
00:18:19
Speaker
I said to him, you know, I'm not sure if this will be helpful for you to hear, but I don't think I found my voice until I was like 30. And finding my voice had as much to do with finding the forms that I was interested in working in and also finding the subjects that like most bring me and my writing mind alive and
00:18:47
Speaker
finding the linguistic register. But I think that third part, that thing that we think of as being defining of the writer, for me, didn't click into place until form and content had clicked into place. So I didn't really start writing.
00:19:08
Speaker
in a way that was deeply grounded in nature until and like consistently at sort of the nexus of like human built society and the more than human world until I was like 30. I really wasn't having listening as central to my writing practice until then either or
00:19:34
Speaker
really bringing the voices of my interviewees into my work until then. So, you know, I was
00:19:44
Speaker
five years out of an MFA program at that point and a decade out of my undergrad work before I think I found my style or my voice. But that whole decade I was still writing and still doing work, you know, for other people, for myself and all that was like part of the process.
00:20:06
Speaker
Voice is
Writing Clarity and Reader Engagement
00:20:07
Speaker
really slippery, and it's hard to get your head around. A lot of people struggle with it, like your students. And it doesn't matter how old you are. A lot of people really struggle with this. They have to emerge fully formed right away, and this is who I am. Bang!
00:20:25
Speaker
whereas it really is just this very slow Polaroid picture developing thing. It doesn't just happen overnight. It really emerges and develops over time. And suddenly, after years of doing it, it's like, oh, well, there it is. But it didn't just emerge. And I think people really want it to just emerge.
00:20:49
Speaker
Totally, they wanna be like, I wrote a poem and this poem has my voice. Boom, boom, just like that, yeah. Yeah, I love your metaphor. It's like a very dilated development of a Polaroid picture. And then we come to say what you mean to say. I like that one. I mean, you're just making me think about, it's making me think about,
00:21:18
Speaker
Uh, things that I'm sitting in my office at work and things that I stay in this office a lot and that I have to remind myself of regularly. Let's put it this way. Like I will often be having a conversation with someone about their work or a conversation with myself about my work. And if there's a section that's unclear, I will ask like, what are you trying to say here? And.
00:21:47
Speaker
usually the person will just spit it out and I write it down exactly as they said it and I hand it to them. And I'm like, there, go put that in the piece. And sometimes I'll like do that exercise with myself as I'm editing something. If I know I've gotten like, I've lyrics my way out of a problem or I've gotten
00:22:06
Speaker
cloudy in my thinking or I have a note that's like, this is confusing. I will sometimes make like an audio recording in my voice memos of my phone where I just try to explain what I'm actually trying to do or what I mean. And then I'll transcribe that recording and usually use some of that exact language in the revision. And this one, this one's good. This is actually a really good name for a podcast title. Pity the readers.
00:22:36
Speaker
Yeah, right. Eventually, it's got a land on a lands in someone's hands. It lands in the lands on their ears. It's an audio book. You know, eventually what we're doing is trying to communicate something to to a reader. And that's we need to we always need to be mindful of that. Maybe not too early in the process, but eventually we do need to pity the reader. Totally. I think even more so nowadays, like think about
00:23:06
Speaker
just how profoundly our attentions are like split and fractured and there's shit vying for them all the time. Like you have to understand that your reader exists in a world where like attention unfortunately is money.
00:23:29
Speaker
How are you going to break through and draw their attention towards this thing that's really curious and interesting to you? But you have to meet them in some middle ground and not just think that your interest is going to carry them through your text. You really have to think about what can spark their interest. Sometimes I'm very much a character in my own work.
00:23:57
Speaker
And that's not because I think I'm like profoundly interesting. The eye that's a character in my work is really there for the reader, is there for like sense that the reader gets to know someone like a real human being with an incredible amount of like intimacy and that you get a little bit of a voyeuristic glimpse into their life and that they're gonna,
00:24:25
Speaker
also only include details that are relevant to the subject matter that they're exploring. So I'm not telling someone like everything on my shopping list, right? I'm editing most of that stuff out and trying to be like a good judge of the kinds of intense personal details that can fire up that voyeuristic side of a reader while also helping them like better understand the subject at hand.
00:24:53
Speaker
And lastly, and you alluded to it before and kind of alluded to it just now, is have the guts to cut. And yeah, that is so true. Even if it's good stuff, you have to cut. You know, it's just to reduce, reduce, reduce the sauce. Totally. I think of like the person who turned me into a writer was a woman named Katie Ford. She's a poet and she was my senior thesis advisor at Reed College.
00:25:22
Speaker
And I remember I worked on these poems all summer long in our first thesis meeting. I had sent her 10 poems. And she handed them back to me. And I think she would be slightly mortified to hear she said this to me. But I've told it to her face. So she's like, oh, yeah, I did say that.
00:25:44
Speaker
She handed me back the poems and literally said to me, this isn't poetry. And I was like, oh, well, I mean, I think it's my poetry. I've been like trying really hard to make something. And what she did over the subsequent months was she we met once a week and she sat down next to me and she had this kind of like thick black felt tip pen and she would just go through my poems and cut out like
00:26:14
Speaker
50, 60% of the language in them. And what she would leave in her wake was so much stronger than what I had passed to her. And she did that exercise with me again and again and again and again until I kind of learned how to do it myself. To me, that was just like
00:26:37
Speaker
literally the turning point in becoming a writer was learning that I could make something stronger by leaving it out. What are the looks on your students faces when you similarly got the shit out of whatever it is they turn in?
00:26:53
Speaker
I like to, I don't use her black felt tip marker. And I don't cross things out. I've used a trick from William Zinser. I put brackets around stuff. And I have like a proofreading paper that I hand out very early in the semester with all my like marginalia notes.
00:27:15
Speaker
And the note next to the brackets, anything that's inside brackets, is an area that I would consider cutting. The rule of thumb that I tend to do, because I don't work with poetry, I work with creative nonfiction essays, is I will bracket the first two pages of a text, but then I want the student to take over and do some of that work themselves.
00:27:45
Speaker
Oh, what is the look on their faces? I mean, sometimes there's like a little bit of devastation. Like they look at me like, Oh, I did it wrong. And then I read to them just like out loud, the first paragraph with the stuff that I bracketed omitted. And there's like another look on their face, which is like,
00:28:13
Speaker
Holy shit, that sounds good. And so I think they then get excited about it. And they realize that it's just part of the process. And you can't be precious and hold on to things. And you didn't do anything wrong. It's in fact exactly correct. You just
Themes in 'The Quickening'
00:28:36
Speaker
have to now take the next step, which is moving towards exactitude.
00:28:42
Speaker
Yeah. And moving towards exactitude, you know, let's say with the quickening, so you apply for this grant and you get this, uh, this access, this trip to go to the doomsday glacier, uh, the Twates Glacier. And am I saying that right, Twates?
00:28:58
Speaker
Like it's a little bit more like the whites. Okay. So, so you get the, you get that access and it's at a, it's at a time where you're considering becoming a mom. And at what point over the course of say that project, did you realize that those subjects were, were going to merge and intersect?
00:29:22
Speaker
I think what happened was that because I really had to put off pregnancy to go on the trip, they were already intersecting in my life. Early on it felt like maybe that intersection was arbitrary or I was like inventing its importance.
00:29:45
Speaker
But the more research I did, the more profoundly I understood sort of like the heteromascular narratives that have been sprayed all over the Antarctic continent. The more committed I became to not keeping these subjects separate from one another. And then the challenge was not to project my,
00:30:13
Speaker
preconceived notions of how they influenced one another onto the ice, but to kind of remain open to and receptive to the reality that I might like learn something by carrying them together in the same bag for, or like vessel for a long time. I had to, I think there are multiple times where I had to kind of check myself and be like, oh, you like came up with,
00:30:42
Speaker
this idea before you ever even saw the glacier. Did that actually hold up when you got there? If not, what happened? And if what happened was unclear, how can you talk about what was confusing? And at what point does the title hit you and it's double meaning? Oh, late, really late for the longest time. This book was called The Mother of All Things. And
00:31:12
Speaker
I never loved it, in part because it felt a little too ambitious. I was like, mother of all things. Like, there was some part of me that was like, I don't want to like, I don't want to say anything as the mother of all things. Like, I just don't think I have the authority to do that. And it was, you know,
00:31:40
Speaker
I was doing this thing where I was turning Antarctica into a mother from afar without really, I feel like that was a kind of thinking that I had in my head before I even went on the trip. Yeah, I mean, I want to say it was like six months before publication that the quickening occurred to me as the title. And I was a little bit like,
00:32:08
Speaker
Right, quickening means two things. It's sort of like to quicken as in to accelerate the way that the glaciers are accelerating because they're moving with more speed than human beings have ever before recorded because we're forcing change into them. And it's also kind of to spring to life. The moment when you first feel your baby move is the quickening of a pregnancy. And before we had ultrasounds, that's like how you knew you were pregnant.
00:32:38
Speaker
quite late in the game. But that's how you could kind of confirm that the baby was alive. And I think those two definitions, especially the quickening, I think Antarctica's glaciers are quickening in that second sense of the word right now. They're springing to life and showing us their animacy. How would I put it? My first book, Rising, also has a kind of double entendre
00:33:05
Speaker
title as in rising sea levels, but also like rising into awareness and rising into power. And I guess that's just a thing I like to do. There was a brief moment where I was like, oh, is this too similar in how it works to the title of rising? But I like how concise it is. And I like how
00:33:27
Speaker
It asks us to think about sort of like the possibilities and embedded in the language that we use. So this book has something of a kind of a three prongish structure. It's like, you know, you the in Antarctica on the boat.
00:33:44
Speaker
And then there's your meditations, usually back on the mainland about motherhood, conceiving and thinking about that. And then there are these a kind of like oral history type breakaways or breakout sessions that are kind of thematically driven too, based on what you've been writing about. So how did you arrive at that particular structure for this book?
00:34:09
Speaker
Oh, I like this question. So when I went, when I signed up to go on the mission, I knew that women's stories had been left out of Antarctic storytelling and that the stories of
00:34:30
Speaker
laborers on the vessels or in the research bases had also largely been left out of Antarctic storytelling. And those people are often people of color, not always, but there's, you know, the Antarctic canon is very white, but there are people of color who go to the ice predominantly in support roles. So I knew going into the mission that I like wanted to
00:35:01
Speaker
highlight these other stories, these other experiences of the ice. And interviewing has always been really central to my writing practice. So from day one, even before the cruise set sail, I was calling my shipmates and regularly interviewing them about what they were doing to prepare and, and, uh,
00:35:26
Speaker
everything from science related stuff, to work related stuff, to personal related stuff. While I was on the boat, I did 213 interviews. I transcribed them all by hand on board. So there was no transcription software because we had no internet. And I knew that like, it was such a heavy lift. I
00:35:54
Speaker
I would tend to do like, let's say three interviews a day. And those would be like 20 to 30 minutes long, sometimes a little bit longer. And then I would have to spend, you know, two to three times that amount of time transcribing them. So I spent an ungodly amount of time in Antarctica, like in the lowest deck on the boat transcribing interviews. And
00:36:21
Speaker
I knew but I was like making the archive. I knew I was making the thing that was going to make the book. I just didn't know how I was going to use them yet or how the voices were going to come in. And I was really inspired by Ilya Kaminsky's Deaf Republic. He's a poet who I love who wrote this really amazing book during the Trump presidency about
00:36:49
Speaker
It's an imaginary community living under a dictatorship that invents their own sign language to resist the dictatorship. And the oppressive regime ultimately ends up killing a young deaf boy in this community. And you follow the people around him leading up to his death and then after his death.
00:37:18
Speaker
And like there are very specific characters in the book. And he opens with a kind of cast of characters where you get to know each of the different people who are gonna be at play in this like lyric narrative poem. You get little descriptions of them. And what that did for me was like it somehow as I was reading,
00:37:47
Speaker
made me see the individual characters not as an invention of Ilya Kaminsky, but as like people in their own right. They felt sort of fully formed. And I basically stole that idea from him. I was like, okay, I'm going to do a cast of characters at the start. And then I decided to use the transcriptions to create these sections of text that look sort of like a screenplay.
00:38:17
Speaker
where the different individual speakers kind of talk directly to the reader. That's how it came about.
00:38:24
Speaker
I love hearing you say, as you are transcribing things, of making the archive from which this book will eventually derive from. I really like that idea of you're making this master library through which that you're gonna synthesize this book, but it's like you have to create the archive yourself. It's kind of a wild image of conjuring so then you can cast a spell.
00:38:54
Speaker
Totally, totally. And it's like, okay, if these voices are missing, I got to figure out how to capture them as it's happening because otherwise they'll get disappeared. They
Balancing Creativity with Life Choices
00:39:09
Speaker
won't appear in the official record. So I felt like that was where the labor began. That was really exciting to me. It was a really exciting time to be on that boat.
00:39:20
Speaker
There's a moment early in the book where you write, this is one of those sections where you're just thinking about being a mom and so forth, and you ask, what if by having a child I destroy the possibility of ever truly being alone?
00:39:35
Speaker
And I wanted to get a sense of what your relationship is to solo time, even loneliness, and maybe how that has changed now since you, you know, since you have since given birth to your son and are now six months pregnant with another. Oh, you know, it's complicated. I have always like I am at the end of the day an introvert and I do recharge.
00:40:05
Speaker
you know, by being alone and often for me by being alone for like long periods of time. And ideally some of that time is like spent outside moving my body. And I very recently, so I've been on book tour all fall, which meant that I have like left my husband and my son behind.
00:40:31
Speaker
But all of that travel is always done, you know, with work, and a lot of super shockingly, like, we ask writers to do so many different things that
00:40:47
Speaker
require so many different skill sets. We want you to be great at spending years by yourself in front of a computer in a room. And we want you to be able to go on the road and put on a road show and talk to a bunch of people and be really engaging and entertaining, like you're supposed to be an entertainer at some level. So I spent the whole fall basically leaving home once a week
00:41:16
Speaker
to go do some kind of public facing event. And two weekends ago, my husband and I were scheduled to go visit with his family in New Jersey. And I looked at him very last minute and said, would it be okay if I don't come? And I was like, if I could stay home, it would be a great gift that you are giving me. And so my husband and son went to New Jersey and I stayed home for three days.
00:41:47
Speaker
I swear to God, it was like the first time I've heard myself think in three years. And I was like, oh, I have thoughts. Oh, oh, that's lovely. Like I'm going to stand in the shower and look at the curtain rings and like think about this thing that's totally unrelated. And I went for some hikes and I did some yoga, but there was just time and space to literally encounter myself thinking again.
00:42:17
Speaker
Um, and I have definitely been feeling a little bit like my well is feeling a little dry. Um, I have a new book that I'm excited to start working on, but I've been pretty resistant to like jumping full in just cause I want a little bit of, I just need to kind of like re-encounter myself as a writer. And to do that, I actually need space and time alone. So.
00:42:45
Speaker
You know, crazy time. There's another baby coming, but we also have sabbatical coming up and we'll spend our sabbatical in Columbia where my husband is from. And we have.
00:42:59
Speaker
the incredible privilege to have help with childcare in Columbia. So I'm hoping that I can get a little bit more of that time alone as needed in the next year, even though I will also have a newborn. We'll see.
00:43:17
Speaker
And part of the book too is you thinking about the environmental impact on bringing new humans into the world and even if bringing it then taking the step bringing them into the world and then what kind of world are they inheriting and that's something you Meditate on quite a bit through the book and there's you know there's a moment to where you bring up the the PR campaign of British petroleum and how
00:43:46
Speaker
they put in something like a hundred million dollars to really essentially guilt the individual into taking on the burden of cleaning up the planet.
00:43:55
Speaker
It's something big corporations do and it's capitalistically driven to then outsource that guilt onto the individual. And I just wanted to get you to just expand on that because we see it not just in climate-related things, but there's just any number of things that big companies love to outsource the thing to the individual when it's really big systems that need the most change.
00:44:22
Speaker
Totally. I mean, I read an article by me and Christ who has since become a friend actually, which is just lovely. I love how that happens when you're a writer. You sometimes read an article that changes your entire universe and then the powers that be kind of throw you into the same spaces again and again in a friendship forms, which is really awesome. She wrote this article that just said exactly kind of what you're talking about where
00:44:50
Speaker
She charted how British Petroleum purposely popularized the carbon footprint and in particular carbon footprint calculators as a way to tabulate the impact your individual life has on the planet. And then sometimes they make suggestions for like what you can do to be a better citizen, like one less flight or go vegan and
00:45:18
Speaker
I had long been sort of skeptical of those calculators because they often put kids like choosing to have a child often appears in these calculators and then, you know, they not surprisingly will spit out a number like, you know, that's 20 times more impactful than, than buying a car. Uh, and I just fundamentally disagree with the idea that choosing to have a kid and buying a car are the same kind of choice. Like.
00:45:46
Speaker
a kid is not a consumer product that you pull off the shelf and like self scan at the target, you know, so that sense of sort of offloading guilt and shame onto the individual is something they were really interested in fostering to
00:46:10
Speaker
lead us to places of moral quandary and indecision in the supermarket aisles and all of that gets in the way of organizing in a more methodical way to end the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, to advocate for the transition to renewable energy sources, all of that. So they've been really successful and
00:46:37
Speaker
And yet I think we're slowly kind of waking up to the fact that true climate action is sort of collective action and means fundamentally shifting the systems through which our energy is supplied. At some level, when I found out this stuff, I was like, get out of my uterus. You're not allowed to make decisions around whether or not I get to be a mother.
00:47:02
Speaker
BP doesn't get to influence that. And so it was very clarifying information for me. When you were on the boat and shadowing the researchers and the crew, how did you navigate?
00:47:18
Speaker
not being intrusive but also trying to be there to absorb whatever information that you wanted to fill up a notebook with so that you could write something and and know that like oh shit like here liz is over there she all right watch what you say guys or like shit like i just want to have my head down in my work here and that here she comes she's probably gonna start asking a shit ah
00:47:45
Speaker
Oh, yeah. So it took me like something that I didn't realize until I had been on the boat for like a week or two was that I was not so I was the writer in residence on board and I had to apply for that position through the NSF and get a specific grant for it. Then there were two journalists on board who were brought in sort of
00:48:15
Speaker
independent of the NSF's grant process because the National Science Foundation wanted publicity for this mission. And it took me like a couple weeks to figure out that none of the crew or scientists had been asked
00:48:36
Speaker
if they were okay with this kind of attention on their work. It's not the norm. And as I learned that, I could see that like some scientists were taxed by feeling like they constantly had to be on. And so I started to like work with people to try to set ground rules, like what you stay in the mess hall stays in the mess hall.
00:49:06
Speaker
no interviewing in our cabins. More so than any other time in my life was really rigorous about any time I turned on my recording device, I would say like, I'm recording now, can I have your consent? Just so they knew that like now they were on, if that makes sense. Cause it felt to me and I totally got it really important that they have space to not be on. And then I also said,
00:49:36
Speaker
We're gonna do all these interviews if you choose to be part of them. You don't have to choose to be part of them. And at the end, I'm gonna write a book and I promise that I will send you like a illuminated manuscript deep into the drafting process where I highlight everything that you say and you get to review it and potentially change it if you're not happy with something you said.
00:50:03
Speaker
So I want to kind of let you know that you're not going to lose agency over your words at this moment of this interchange. Cause that happens a lot with this kind of reporting where you say something and then like, you know, six months later it appears in an article and you're like, Oh yeah, okay.
00:50:22
Speaker
Um, and like, I don't like the way I sound off the top of my head, so I can't expect everyone else to just get behind that. I tried to be really forthcoming in this way. And I also tried to help out. Like I tried to say like, you're going to do interviews for me. Can I help you label sample bags or dig for ancient penguin bones or.
00:50:49
Speaker
you know, make this like a two-way street as opposed to just me take, take, taking from you. And I think all of that really worked to my, worked to the overall advantage of making the book. And I
Resilience and Accountability in Research
00:51:04
Speaker
did, I mean, I made good on all my promises about, it was January before the manuscript was used. So January of 2022,
00:51:17
Speaker
about 10, 12 months before the final manuscript was due, I started sending out those illuminated texts to the different interviewees. And it was really wonderful. I was so pleased. Most people didn't push back much at all. And the thing that
00:51:37
Speaker
And I mean that not like in a, I don't know, most people just, I was getting the science right. I was getting the story right. There wasn't a lot of like, you misunderstood this concept or whatever. And that's great. You know, the thing that most people wanted to change was how they talked about their mothers. Cause I asked everyone to tell me the story of their births. You know, those were changes that I could make no skin off my back.
00:52:02
Speaker
and get the manuscript to a place that the person speaking is happy with and wants to share it with their parents or wants to share it with partners and family. So it all worked out, but it was, let's put it this way, like thoughtful from day one and years in the making and a lot of extra labor went into it.
00:52:25
Speaker
And speaking of you trying to be of use there, there's the moment too where you drop one of the cores and take us to that moment of when that happens. Oh, gosh. Funnily, I have heard from a lot of readers that they love this part of the book.
00:52:50
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I did. I was helping. I was like a field aide in the data collection process. And it was the day after we arrived at the weights, a ton of material had come on board in the nighttime.
00:53:11
Speaker
And I just volunteered to help process the data, which meant like scooping mud out of a big metal tube and putting it in plastic bags and cleaning the utensils and doing that kind of thing like on repeat for 15, 16 hours straight. And very late in that day, I made a grave error where I didn't
00:53:38
Speaker
hold the supporter cork in the bottom of a megacore is what it's called. And so, you know, 30 inches of glacial sediment dragged up from the ocean floor from right in front of the weights, just like splatted out onto the lab floor and like trickled away. And I can still
00:54:09
Speaker
see that mud and feel the like, I literally like started sweating profusely and my mouth got dry. And I was like, oh my God, I messed up big time. It was the most ashamed I've been as an adult. Like it was awful. And then I went to each of the individual researchers on that team and had to apologize to them.
00:54:38
Speaker
and say I lost this really important data. And what was fascinating was also sort of the aftermath of that because someone said to me, uh, you know, this is Antarctic science mistakes happen all the time. You know, you lost 10% of the data, but if you moan about it, you're going to lose 20, meaning like every minute, every hour counts.
00:55:02
Speaker
So we just have to like keep going. And that was fascinating to me. It was like I had to be really accountable for my actions. And then I just had to keep working. And I think there's something really important that we can learn about sort of like the fight for climate justice. It's like we're all making this stuff up as we go along and errors will be made.
00:55:28
Speaker
It's how you deal with them that matters. And there's a moment in the book also where the glacier calves a big section into the ocean, which is a really dramatic moment. And I imagine beautiful to witness, but it's got to be on some level. It's something you don't want to see, but you also want to see. Maybe you can kind of take us to that dichotomy there in that sense.
00:55:58
Speaker
Before I ever went on the mission, I, in part to write a grant proposal to write about glaciers, I watched a really important clip, a video clip from a documentary called Chasing Ice.
00:56:17
Speaker
which shows the Jakobsoven Glacier in Greenland stepping, retreating really rapidly over the course of like two minutes. It just kind of crumbles and falls apart, a big chunk of it. And I watched that glacier fall apart multiple times because it's like that video is
00:56:42
Speaker
the only visual record human beings have as of that moment in time of like a glacier moving really quickly. And Jakobsoven is like one of the fastest retreating glaciers in the world. And it's really violent. Like the clip itself, you see like gigantic chunks of ice, like the size of skyscrapers falling off the front of this glacial like tongue. And
00:57:12
Speaker
So in my mind, if we saw the weights fall apart, it was gonna look like that. And we were there. And in fact, the weights, a huge chunk of the weights, 25 times bigger than the chunk that fell apart at Jakobsoven in that clip, fell apart all around us. And it was of such a scale, like it was so big. It kind of just like,
00:57:42
Speaker
broke off into pieces that then drifted away from the ice front. And so I had never anticipated that a collapse could be bigger than what had been previously recorded and that it would be so big that I actually couldn't really see it, if that makes sense. So indeed, we did witness this calving event
00:58:07
Speaker
but it never like resonated in my body as really violent because my body was sort of like the wrong barometer. It couldn't totally grasp what was happening, which was also really unsettling.
00:58:25
Speaker
Very nice. Well, Elizabeth, I want to be mindful of your time, and it was great to kind of talk about the writing of the book and some of its internal musculature, and it's such a great book, and it's so great to see you go from rising to this one, and I can only imagine what the third one will bring.
00:58:48
Speaker
So as I bring these conversations down for a landing, I think this is different from the last time you were on. I like asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. And that can just be anything you want, anything you're excited about. And so I'll just pose that to you, Elizabeth. What would you recommend? I totally have an answer to this. I recently read a book that I loved called Kick the Latch by Catherine Scanlon.
00:59:16
Speaker
Um, it's technically a fiction, but it is based on years of interviewing a horse trainer at sort of like B grade racetracks in the United States. It's a female horse trainer and it's got to be like a series of like 50 very short vignettes, uh, that are all recounted entirely in her voice.
00:59:43
Speaker
or at least the recounting comes from these interviews and it's like a very vocal piece where you feel like you're kind of getting inside the contours of this very, very particular human being. I adored it. You should have her on if you haven't. She's, I'm just like fan number one. I think I recommended it 18 times this month. Oh, fantastic. Yeah. I'll have to look into that for sure.
01:00:13
Speaker
Ah, Liz. Makes me feel good. She's a joy to listen to. I love talking to her. Thank you, CNN for listening. And thanks to the Power of Narrative Conference for the promotional support. This is your last chance in 2024 to get your 25% off discount by going to combeyond.bu.edu and using narrative 25 for some extra book money.
01:00:37
Speaker
or burrito money or let's be honest if you're me beer money okay so by the time you hear this i've got one looking month to my big deadline i've largely been mum about this whole process because i just don't have much to say that won't sound profoundly boring i also recognize my great privilege through this process so i don't want to complain too much though humble listener you're probably like all i've heard you do is complain this last year
01:01:07
Speaker
I haven't had to find a day job during the writing, so I recognize how lucky I am. After, oh well, most likely, I'm thinking after this process is done, I probably have to bartend. It seems like a good calling for me. I'm good at conversation. Well, I'm good at allowing conversation to happen to me. I'm not a good conversationalist.
01:01:35
Speaker
But I bring the conversational list out of people who are across from me. Anyway, you make more money bartending than being a writer, that's for sure. Got my first round of edits through just like the first hundred-ish pages of the book, because we got a fucking hustle.
01:01:53
Speaker
through the first 13 chapters or so, and they are generous. And by generous, it does not mean nice. I can hear how annoyed I make my editor. Like, maybe I'm projecting. I always project. It's a character flaw. Deal with it. I have to cut a minimum of 57,000 words. That's correct. 50.
01:02:20
Speaker
7,000 words. That's a novella or even a short book. Aren't novella short books? Anyway, it's a lot of words. My original message
Reflections on the Writing Process
01:02:31
Speaker
was about 555 pages, 167,000 words. My contract says no more than 95,000, but yeah, there's a little wiggle room. So we're trying to get down 110,000.
01:02:42
Speaker
at least I have to get that 110,000. I took out an 800 word chunk this morning and it was like that satisfying feeling when you kind of like peel off a scab. I know that's gross and it kind of hurts but also feels relieving and oddly good. It's okay.
01:03:01
Speaker
Like, four of you listened this far. I'm sorry, Kelsey, for that image. My compost file for this book so far is 4,367 words of cut stuff. Some of it yummy.
01:03:16
Speaker
I'm close to a hundred pages through the cutting. Hopefully I'll be close to that 57, maybe even 60,000 word limit. And then word cut limit. I'll have to go through one more time and then maybe do the thing where you find like one word in every sentence, like one instance of passive voice where you could take like three words and make it one. And that's pretty cool. It's like a magic trick.
01:03:42
Speaker
One pesky adverb. And then maybe I can find an extra 10,000 words without losing anything. This manuscript needs abs, man. And you do that by cutting the fat. I want a 5% body fat manuscript, man.
01:04:00
Speaker
But what sucks is that your rough draft, however bloated, it's still like following your taste. Like that's your instinct. And I know in my book proposal, I was asked to kind of like zhuzh up the writing. And when I struck that same tone, say, in this manuscript, you know, I'm told on the other hand to stop being so zhuzhy. It's a tight wire act.
01:04:22
Speaker
You listen to some writers who are like you got to try to be in your face Don't be so boring have some style right enter like enter this enter and Then you get a comment when you do that when you mimic that and the comment just says um no
01:04:41
Speaker
And I get it. It's hard to write and serve so many different tastes. And how do you stay true to your taste when you get conflicting feedback from multiple sources that are like, stop doing this and you do this and it's like, no, stop doing that. And it's really confusing. I'm more of a get out of the way kind of guy and let the story shine, but it's hard not to set off a few bottle rockets. It helps to have someone take away the bottle rockets and say, it's OK, B.O. You don't need these.
01:05:12
Speaker
It's also hard not to take things personally. Your instincts took you this far. And then you're told your instincts kind of suck and you're 43 years old and you've been writing for 20 years and you've written four books, one published, one on the way, one hopes, and still you suck ass.
01:05:30
Speaker
So I guess it's always mitigating the ass-sucking. There's an image. But you kind of get it, right? And it could be that even Margaret Atwood's rough drafts or Isabel Wilkerson's rough drafts or Bryn Jonathan Butler's rough drafts or Elizabeth Rush's rough drafts all suck, like objectively suck, and it's ultimately on us to be a pro. Realize that whoever you've paid is looking to make your book as good as possible. They too are a pro.
01:06:00
Speaker
Some people are naturally better than others. Some people are starting with better field position than others. All we can hope is not to get too bogged down, not take things personally and get better one book or one essay at a time. And you know, I love to mix metaphors. So how many experiments in a test kitchen does it take to nail a recipe? Dozens? We're talking from like accomplished chefs too.
01:06:28
Speaker
Like, are you a shitty chef because recipe three is not quite right?
01:06:34
Speaker
no as you become more seasoned haha as a chef you see see that I'd probably get a I'd get a comment right there and anyway you start from a better foundation of experience so that maybe it takes fewer experiments to dial in that flavor so maybe instead of 30 repetitions on a certain recipe it depends how ambitious you're trying to get maybe it takes 15
01:07:01
Speaker
Because you're like, okay, I understand. I have a fundamental vocabulary that is better than it was the last book. That's writing, man. So stay wild, CNFers. And if you can't do, interview. See ya.
01:07:38
Speaker
you