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Episode 187: Ander Monson — It’s Electric
141 Plays5 years ago
The writer Ander Monson, whose True Story essay "My Monument" came out in December, is here to talk about the essay and his approach to writing essays.
Podcast made possible by Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing.
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Message
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A, C, and Fers. Got a podcast for you, okay? But first, let's discover that story, man. Bay Path University's fully online. And the thing, creative nonfiction writing is making this show possible. And grit, and sweat, and blood.
00:00:17
Speaker
Just mine, not the MFA programs. The faculty has a true passion and love for their work. Shines through with every comment, edit, and reading assignment. The instructors are available to answer all your questions and their years of experience as writers and teachers have made for an unbeatable experience. Head over to baypath.edu slash MFA for more information.
Host's Mood and Riesling Moment
00:00:38
Speaker
You ready? Huh.
00:00:50
Speaker
So tonight, not feeling it. Seeing efforts, I just don't have it. I'm not gonna say what's on my mind this week because it's awful dark and we don't need to be going there. We just don't. I'm just gonna drink some Riesling and I'm just gonna drink a little more Riesling. I've had almost a bottle of Riesling in like 45 minutes.
00:01:13
Speaker
And then I'm going to chase it all down with a glass of shame.
Guest Introduction: Ander Munson
00:01:17
Speaker
I've got Ander Munson here for you. He's a force man. In his essay, my monument was the December issue of True Story. He also has a new collection of essays out titled, I will take the answer. I don't have it yet. I didn't even know he had it coming out. But now I do.
00:01:38
Speaker
I will read it eventually and Andrew will come back on the show and we will talk about it like all pals okay he edits the magazine diagram and teaches at the University of Arizona what you're gonna wanna do head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes newsletter is the jam
00:02:04
Speaker
People are kind of jumping on board. It's pretty cool. It's the thing. It's what we do. It's what we're doing here.
Call to Action: Subscribe and Connect
00:02:12
Speaker
You can also connect on social media at cnfpod across the big three. As you know, not really there that much, but I'm there enough. So if you want to say hi there, I'll say hi back.
00:02:24
Speaker
Subscribe to the show on Apple, podcast, Google, Spotify, and Stitcher, of course. If you're feeling kind, I'd happily take a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts. And this connection that we have
00:02:40
Speaker
It deepens if you share it with your various networks and your CNF and buddies. I hope I've made something worth sharing. So let's take a collective swig of weaseling. Weaseling? Riesling? See? This is what happens. Of Riesling from Sweet Cheeks right here and just down in the Lamet Valley. It's nice.
00:03:02
Speaker
Taiwan on and sit back for this amazing podcast another one that's unedited sorry seeing efforts didn't have time have to throw it together we have we recorded this morning and put it right up it just didn't have time to edit it's okay it's okay we're all gonna be okay here's the under Munson huh I mean there's a couple
Childhood Anecdote: Plagiarized Book Report
00:03:30
Speaker
different
00:03:30
Speaker
origin stories that I like to think about. One of them goes back to when I was nine years old. And I turned in a book report on the Hardy Boys and the Curse of the Crimson Flame for whatever, you know, I guess I would have been fourth grade. And my teacher thought it was just fantastic, thought it was like the best thing. And so she actually ended up
00:03:56
Speaker
passing it on to the newspaper and it got published in my hometown newspaper but the thing that no one knew except for me was I just copied the back of the book I just plagiarized the jacket copy on it and I but you know so I've got like you know I was published at nine in the paper my dad was thrilled everyone's like wow you know I mean you're gonna be a writer or whatever but it was plagiarism that let me there that led me there and
00:04:26
Speaker
And if you look on my website, there's actually, I have a copy of the page of the paper, and there's a picture of me just kind of grinning like a maniac, like I'm obviously getting away with something. And my dad didn't know that it was plagiarized until I was probably 30, maybe even older than that. And so, there's a couple aspects to that story that I think kind of ring true for me.
00:04:55
Speaker
I believe, you know, you get reinforced for a thing, for being good at a thing, even if you didn't actually do the thing. And that kind of tracked me into, I'm like, okay, cool, I can do this, even though I wasn't really doing it. And there was also a little bit of a feeling of getting away with it, that I really was drawn to, and that has informed a lot of my writing career. Like I love, I've written about,
00:05:23
Speaker
kind of like the essay as, as like a hack. I've got an essay called essay as hack, where I'm sort of going into some of the background of I was like a hacker as a teenager. And there's like a little bit of like that kind of like gleeful exploration of a place you're not really supposed to be, that I'm still really drawn to in my writing. And I kind of tap into that. And it probably helps that, you know, I do, I do the writing on the same
00:05:52
Speaker
Machine basically that you know, I used when I was a hacker I mean, you know now it's a map not a PC but like there is that like that sense of like interfacing with like the unknown with technology and kind of getting away with something and in particular the true story I say like the idea of writing like an essay and like a long essay which I've been working on for a long time about like my giant 15-foot Rudolph which is a truly unliterary subject and
00:06:19
Speaker
gave me a lot of pleasure. So I mean, I think you can trace a lot of that back to that kind of early reinforcement of cheating my way to success at nine years old. When there's there's an element to that of even though they weren't your words, but you got a certain reaction, be like, oh, but maybe if I do craft something that is of my own, I this kind of feeling of that that connection and that validation, you know, if you can do it yourself, it's like all the more powerful, right?
00:06:49
Speaker
Yeah, I mean substantially more powerful as it turns out Yeah, yeah, and it's so so if that was the maybe the one kernel of of of the origin story What would be the one you that you can point to where you actually you know did something that was? Solely your own that was maybe equally validating that kept you on kept you on this path so I mean the other
Transition from Sciences to Writing
00:07:14
Speaker
And this is probably like the real story was, you know, I was a physics major when I went to college. And then I was a computer science major. And then I was a psychology major. And, you know, I mean, I was kind of always coming out of the sciences, like in some way. And then I ended up taking a fixing workshop, maybe my sophomore year.
00:07:38
Speaker
And it was the first time that I kind of got out what, at least what I put into a class. Like I was, you know, I was a pretty good student and I'd get bored really easily, which is why I left physics. Cause I, you know, I was good enough at it, but I just got bored. And then same with computer science and same with psychology. And, but like when I was in this workshop, I'm like, Oh, I can make something and sort of put it into this group, you know, a small group of people that, and I get this feedback on,
00:08:08
Speaker
But you could also see it kind of like lighting them up in certain ways. And I really love that. Like that immediate kind of connects into the audience. And the idea also, which I wouldn't have been able to articulate at the time, but I can now, that through the craft of writing and revising a thing, like, you know, you get to build this artificial intelligence, which is like the eye and the essay that is smarter than you, funnier than you.
00:08:34
Speaker
Sadder than you like whatever version of you you want it to be but you get to build that over You know in some cases like 30 drafts, which is probably what it took to do the my monument essay Um, and that was really appealing too. So it's not just the thing that you can do in the moment but this version of yourself that you can build and that can entertain people and also be sad and You know, I mean try to have like a wider emotional range. So that's when I think it really got me that I I could do this and
00:09:04
Speaker
And I enjoyed doing it, and I wasn't bad at it either, but that it had this effect on others that would then feed back into me. And this ends up being what I do for a living, which is teaching and running the same kind of workshop for my students.
00:09:18
Speaker
And would you say that, and you obviously know this better than I, but that, you know, that sort of heightened sense of who you want to be, sort of wearing a kind of mask, that that is very much a part of the hacker community as well, right? So there's kind of some congruence there between this heightened self of the essay writer and the I in that, and then also just, you know, wearing a hacker hat too, right? Yeah, for sure. I mean, like, you know, you have
00:09:45
Speaker
You mostly know people by like your online handle. And mine was pretty regrettable. I went by the Grim Reaper. You know, might as well go big, I guess. And like everyone else had like similarly dorky handles, but the and it kind of creates a persona. And it's something I didn't think about because I didn't start out writing nonfiction. I started writing about fiction. I wrote fiction and poetry where
00:10:13
Speaker
you know, in the poem, there's always a kind of persona, like it's never, the eye is never quite the poet.
Persona in Writing and Hacking
00:10:18
Speaker
But in nonfiction, people kind of assume that the eye is the writer, or is pretty much congruent to the, I mean, to the eye of the author. And that's true. But like the eye of the essay becomes, which is, it's like, it's no less role playing. Because you, it's kind of what I talk about with my students a lot. You know, I mean, like, when you are, you're like a little bit funny in a draft,
00:10:39
Speaker
and that goes over well, or you like how that feels, how it felt to kind of play that way, then you want to, it's like, okay, the next draft is, all right, I mean, see if you can amp that up. You like playing that, play it. If you like being sexy, be sexy. If you like being depressing, be more depressing. So yeah, I mean, it's not that much different. It's like a, but it's like a role playing that is, I mean, that you're amping out every time. You're playing a character version of yourself.
00:11:09
Speaker
in a way that you, and even the more you do it, I think probably the better you get at it too. But it's not, I mean, it's also really nice to have that permission that the version of the self that you play in the page, you can treat as a character. And it doesn't make it less nonfiction. It just makes it a little bit torqued version, the version that you want to be in whatever way that is, that you build through revision.
00:11:34
Speaker
And given your background is studying the sciences and the somewhat formulaic nature of being in physics or comp sci, how would you say that has informed the creative side of you, the person that started fiction but got into non-fiction? Is there any connection and did one help the other? Did the science help your writing?
00:12:03
Speaker
For sure. Although, I mean, I'm I don't really think of the science as being that formulaic. I mean, that's kind of what bored me with it. But a lot of science is no less experimental than, you know, a lot of art in which you're trying to perform experiments. I mean, that's kind of where the term comes from to find out what happens when you do a thing. And that's kind of that was kind of like what really drew me to it originally was in part
00:12:30
Speaker
You know, me and my hacker friends, we had graduated to breaking and entering and burglarizing Michigan bell trucks and so forth. And we get this equipment out of there that we didn't really know what it did, but we wanted to mess around with it. And I think that's a lot of what a lot of the people that I love and I'm interested in the sciences kind of get out of the sciences. So it gets not just formulas and it's not just, I mean, it is like messing around. It's like, well, what happens if we try this?
00:13:00
Speaker
I mean, there's some risks to that, and that's not how a lot of scientists kind of taught, and that's kind of what bored me and kind of sent me away from it. But I think you're right to point out, and this hadn't occurred to me, that there is something, you know, I mean, science is about engaging with like the non-fictional sense of the world. I mean, we're trying to explain things that are there, or that we think might be there. And fiction does that too, and poetry does that too, but I think a little less directly.
00:13:28
Speaker
There's this quote by David Foster Wallace that I like and kind of think about a lot from his, uh, from his introduction to the best American essays, whatever, 2005, I forget 2007, one of those years, shortly before he died. And he talks about, you know, I mean, fiction and nonfiction come from different places and fail into different places. Fiction starts with zero and you have to build it all up. And if it fails, it kind of fails back into zero.
00:13:56
Speaker
Nonfiction starts with infinity. Like you are given everything and you have to delete, delete, delete, just kind of pick the things from the world. And if it fails, it fails into infinite noise. And I do think that that's something that really appealed to me in nonfiction. I mean, I didn't know that nonfiction could be could be fun, could be lyric, could be weird, could be experimental. I just it was just kind of boring essays like, you know, or essays that whatever when I was like 18, I thought were boring.
00:14:25
Speaker
And it was really like discovering like the work of like John DeGata and the next American essay and stuff like that In my last year at grad school that I'm like, oh shit nonfiction does you know can be just as experimental and weird as the fiction poetry that I want to be doing and Then and that really drew me in and I've you know still write fiction and poetry I've got a book of fiction that just came out in the book of nonfiction that just came out. So I
00:14:50
Speaker
I'm still drawn to them, but I do love that thingness of the world. I'm trying to explain in my monument the phenomenon of this 15-foot Rudolph and the phenomenon of Hammock or Schlemmer and the phenomenon of Tucson and what it means to live in a city like this. You are trying to draw these things together, and I think that's probably fair to connect that to some of that background in the sciences.
00:15:18
Speaker
And you mentioned Dagata, but who are some other writers, and maybe particularly essay writers, that appealed to your taste and showed you the weirdness of the essay and that allowed you to dive into it and experiment yourself? I mean, Dagata definitely gave me some permission and like, especially his, both his own work and the work that he was kind of collecting in the next American essay, which really introduced me to a lot of writers that interested me. Albert Goldbath is one of them.
00:15:48
Speaker
really fantastic, interesting writer, Leah Perpera, contemporary writer who I really like. And she just has this intensity to her prose that it gives me that like ASMR feeling, you know, where you kind of like feeling like a gentle kind of like pinpricks of pleasure. Like she's just such a sentence crafter that I very mean bedazzling when you read her work. And I love, love, love her stuff.
00:16:14
Speaker
I'm a writer like Mary Capello, who's got a great book on mood that came out last year that I wrote about for as my advent calendar post for the website essay daily, kind of writing about like that kind of like that feeling of being taken over by someone Mary Rufel is another one. I don't know if she considers herself to be a nonfiction writer, but I, I certainly do. A lot of her essays really and they have that kind of like this beguiling quality that kind of comes back to like
00:16:43
Speaker
The thing that I really love about computers, which is partially computer games and this feeling of playing someone else, and I think a good sentence writer, a good essayist, and a good fiction writer to some extent, is creating, you are playing them, or maybe they're playing you, I'm not sure which one, but you put on a Mary Capello persona when you're reading her work, and I find that really fantastic.
00:17:11
Speaker
It doesn't get you totally out of yourself, but it like helps you run that routine, whatever routine she kind of made. So those are three of them that I mean, I find very meaningful and useful as a writer.
00:17:22
Speaker
And as a reader.
Balancing Writing, Teaching, and Family
00:17:23
Speaker
And with respect to your own writing and writing discipline or practice, what do you have in place so you've got various spurs of what you do, teaching, and then you've got your books and essays? How have you developed a writing practice or a discipline? And what does that look like so you get your own work done that you can hone and craft? Yeah, that's become harder to do. I mean, since my daughter was born
00:17:52
Speaker
Six years ago like I had one practice and that worked fine and then you know I had a daughter and then all of a sudden that blew up my practice so it changed kind of like the way that my attention worked and changed certainly the kind of opportunities I had for writing one thing that is that I've really followed though for a long time is just to trust that When I get like interested in a subject I could feel there's some like electricity there, and I don't really know what it is I
00:18:23
Speaker
And I've been really interested in dolls for a while. And I've been starting to write about chips, as in like potato chips and primarily tortilla chips. I've got an essay about Doritos in my second book of essays, but I've been writing more about that. And I can feel this like vibration that there's something there. So I've learned to trust like the weirdness in a certain way and be like,
00:18:49
Speaker
you know, I mean, I know there's stuff that I could be writing that's probably would be more advantageous to my career or whatever. But I'm really bad at doing that when I do that. And writing what I think I should be writing is not been that helpful for me. So I what I've tried to like in terms of like kind of like daily practice, and I don't really have I don't write every day. I try to but it doesn't always work because like you end up spending
00:19:17
Speaker
a lot of that energy in different ways, like reading other people's work, blurbing, you know, all that kind of stuff, like being a good literary citizen can take a lot of that away. Yeah. But so but I mean, for me, it's like, okay, my reading, my writing practice is better if my reading practice is better. So if I know I want to start writing, I want to read writers who give me that feeling that makes me want to go back to the page and purper is a great example. Like I just kind of can't if
00:19:45
Speaker
if I read her, I kind of can't get through an essay without wanting to write my own, which is great. And you kind of know who the writers are, who kind of like start things for you. And I carve out a little bit of time, usually at the end of the day, my family goes to bed, usually around like, I don't know, 10, 1030, my wife goes to bed. And then I have between then and the time I sort of fade out, maybe midnight or one o'clock to
00:20:13
Speaker
get some reading in and then hopefully go back to the page and kind of think about trying to do something. So that's I'm trying to use that kind of liminal space kind of at the edge of the end of my conscious day to get back into it. And that's that's compositional. I mean, revision doesn't happen then as easily revision takes more kind of like conscious, the sort of conscious brain, middle of the day brain where I could go to a coffee shop and put on my headphones and like listen to something relatively ambient.
00:20:43
Speaker
and kind of then try to start tuning things in.
00:21:05
Speaker
I love this idea
00:21:16
Speaker
Ah, fuck them. This is bullshit. Sometimes that too, though. Yeah, right? That's the battle. It's just like, ah, but that attitude is like, oh, they did that son. Leslie Jamison, Elena Passarello, Elisa Gabbard. They did this. Oh, that means I can too if I just apply my own rigor and habits to it. I love that you get that charge from reading someone to go then make your own thing.
00:21:42
Speaker
I mean, it's a social art. I mean, it isn't for everyone. But for me, I mean, I think if you look at the stuff that I've I get a lot of I get a lot of out of being engaged with a lot of other writers, making spaces for them to contribute to things. You know, I mean, I run a magazine called Diagram, which is one of the oldest online journals. I do this essay daily site because I wanted to start gathering some of the writers I like and kind of have us talk and think about
00:22:10
Speaker
about what it is that the essay is. And then I do this March Exynos tournament, which this year is like March Madness, which is, you know, it's like a March Madness style NCAA basketball style, writing and music tournament every year, where we have like 64 musicians or 64 songs that we pick, and they get assigned to writers, including both like Elisa is, she's writing an essay this year on
00:22:39
Speaker
Is she doing Billy Joel? No, she's doing Phil Collins. And Elena Pastorello is one of our usual contributors. And I love making spaces that I can get these really smart, interesting thinkers into conversation. And in this case, into actual competition with each other. We actually have games. We play the tournament out. And I love that. That social aspect of it really has always driven me as a writer
00:23:07
Speaker
And I get a lot out of that. I mean, not all writers do and that's totally fine to just like, you know, hole up and do your thing, be your individual genius. But I really like to be around other people and see what they're up to.
00:23:17
Speaker
Well yeah, I think to be a, like you were saying, a great literary citizen and also just to engage in this and to, you know, to be that proverbial rising up, have an abundant mindset, it really boils down to community and lifting other people up and showing what's possible. You know, to get out of that toxic jealousy that a lot of us have at one point or another probably fallen victim to. But when you frame it around community and these things that you're building,
00:23:46
Speaker
you know, digitally, and so people can engage remotely, it gives every, it lets everyone in on the joke instead of excluding people. Yeah, exactly. And I think it's really important. I mean, I don't think it's important that everyone needs to be engaged with community all the time. I mean, it can also sort of sap your energy and kind of get you into that jealous mindset as you see everyone else's successes, especially in social media. And everyone sort of falls victim to that. But it's
00:24:12
Speaker
I don't know, I mean, there's this line from, I think it's an Edward Hoagland essay from his Best American anthology, his introduction. I mean, what he's talking about, like, the essay is a public art. Like, you publish something, it goes under the world, you're responding to something else that you saw or you read, and then someone else reads it and kind of bounces back. And so, and this is, you know, I mean, this is kind of pre-internet. He's not like a big internet guy. He's kind of a, you know, was kind of a crank.
00:24:43
Speaker
who stayed off of it, but in the internet, it's even faster. You know what I mean? And my friends who have Google, who have Google Alerts for their name, like I could publish an essay that name checks my friend Nicole Walker, and she's also a really great essayist and someone that I love, and one of my probably most common collaborators. But if I publish something and I mention her, like, you know, she gets a Google Alert, it could be the next day, or like, you know, the next minute after Google finds it and sends it to her. And that's kind of cool. I love that sort of that sense of
00:25:13
Speaker
community that gets built online. And then it really does unlock the possibilities because you see someone do something like, oh, you could do that. All right. Let's try to do that. And that's, you know, I mean, that's how you kind of start to build more interesting writers.
00:25:27
Speaker
And earlier you mentioned, uh, the, you know, a certain electricity that you, that you feel as you're getting into the work or even, you know, reading someone else's work. And, and, uh, what was the electricity that you felt as you started to synthesize what would have essentially become, uh, your essay, my monument. So this was one, I mean, it kind of, it came around, you know, I bought this thing after my daughter was born.
00:25:55
Speaker
And I was like a lot of things that I'm initially skeptical of and kind of mock, which is partially this kind of civic engagement with my neighbors, this Christmas decoration, which I'd never done, but certainly not on this scale of my giant Rudolph. But it was a sense of being in Arizona, being from Michigan, Michigan, where I lived in Michigan was really a front porch culture. You know, you got to know your neighbors.
00:26:23
Speaker
because you would see them, everyone would be on the front porch. But here in Arizona, in Tucson, it's not. I mean, everyone is backyard culture. And then we had the tragedy of where Lofner shot my Congresswoman. And that kind of, I was really trying to write about that for a while and think about that and think about how that created community or revealed community in the town that I live in, where I didn't feel a sense of community, but all of a sudden I did feel
00:26:51
Speaker
a sense of being connected to my neighbors and to be with everyone else who was here as part of that really terrible tragedy. So I had that kind of in the background. And then when I, I didn't know why I got, why I bought, you know, spent all this money on my giant Rudolph. But then when I did, it really kind of awed me this, I mean, it entertained me for starters, but then I put me in this state of like awe. And I really connected with this creature
00:27:20
Speaker
Well, I mean, that's not a creature. It's like, you know, it's a prefabrication from China or whatever, but it like looks like a creature and it feels like a creature and it kind of symbolizes Christmas. And I knew I had to start writing about it because I didn't know what was there, but I didn't know. I didn't know the sort of form it would take. Originally, I had, you know, I usually do like a dry January and this, which I like in some ways, in some ways it
00:27:47
Speaker
It's not an easy challenge because I like drinking also. But then during January, I was like, all right, I've been like writing about this, this Rudolph. And I do find myself with more energy in January, which otherwise goes to, I guess, alcoholic, like obliteration or numbing in some way, which is sort of depressing to think about. But but then I'm like, all right, you know, I have all these ideas for new projects. And so I'm like I'd written like, I don't know, 15000 words about Rudolph.
00:28:14
Speaker
And I've been talking with Chris Shaberg, who is the one of the editors or probably like the main series editor of this project called object lessons that Bloomsbury does these kind of little books about everyday objects. And, you know, and they're really cool. And I like him a lot. And he's been trying to get me to do one for a while. And I'm like, well, what if what if I propose a book for them called Big Fucking Rudolph?
00:28:40
Speaker
And that was so and so I did a proposal and and I'm like, you know, I could totally I mean, this is the books that they do are about maybe twenty thirty thousand words. So it's like almost half of a book I'd written at that point. And he was super interested in it. We went through a couple of rounds of doing proposals with them. I mean, of course, they didn't want me to drop the F bomb.
00:29:02
Speaker
And then they and it became really clear after a while, like what they wanted was me to write more about Christmas. They wanted the object I was writing out to Christmas. And I'm like, I don't want to write about Christmas. I want to write about big fucking Rudolph. I mean, that's the thing that I want to write about. And then eventually I just kind of pulled the project from them and just realized it could be this its own thing, which then I this is like an essay that's in the new book that's coming out on Tuesday call. I will take the answer.
00:29:31
Speaker
Um, and it's, and that book is kind of about Tucson and grief and pop culture and weird shit. And when I was working on that, then I'm like, I also pitched it to true story because I, I like true story. And I've worked with Hattie before over there and it seemed like the kind of project that they might be into. So then, you know, so like, then it became, it's in one version in the book. It's in another version and true story, because we did some really substantial edits and Hattie's a good editor.
00:30:01
Speaker
And they have a number of good editors over there who had some strong suggestions. So then it kind of like it found a couple different forms, which happens a lot to my essays. And that's fine. And the book collects one of them. True Story has the other one. And then there's this other.
00:30:16
Speaker
weirder maybe longer version that might have been an object lessons book but probably never will be and yet this essay is it's broken up into the uh... lots of little chocolates throughout the the entire thing and it's one of the longer two-story essays i've read it might even be their longest and uh... and yet so what was the you know what was the sort of the structural strategy of breaking it up at the way you did throughout the entire essay
00:30:44
Speaker
I, you know, I use sections a lot, um, in essays and I like the idea of chunklets because like, that's really a better term. They're not exactly sections. Some of them are pretty short, but I like the idea of bringing, I mean, it makes a modular, which allows you to like revise and also bring in a lot of other shit. That's not necessarily really inherently connected to the subject that you're trying to write about, which I think is really important. And it like, it's my most common when I read essays for diagram.
00:31:13
Speaker
It's my most common critique that I think is a useful critique is especially if someone's writing something like really autobiographical or about a kind of trauma experience. It can have a real intensity to it, but almost always it can be improved by adding in other stuff that's not related directly to the experience, kind of expands the electron cloud of the essay and the emotional range or the intellectual range of the essay.
00:31:41
Speaker
So I really like the idea of trying to, I knew I wanted to write a hat to have Rudolph. I knew I wanted to write about my neighbors. That kind of led me to write about family, led me to write about the desert. And then I started wanting to bring in Pliny the Elder, and these sort of classical ideas of the Colossus. It was originally called My Colossus or something like that, and I kind of took that down. But I like their being able to throw in these
00:32:10
Speaker
somewhat oddly sized chunks. And then it also creates the opportunity for me to, to then kind of like pull these threads through so like, you know, there's a number of narratives that kind of goes through or arguments that the essay is making. And then you get these like nice moments of where one section will echo another section or like respond to another section or like riff on or try to negate
00:32:36
Speaker
another section. And I like that and also creates like, I don't know, I mean, more different emotional tones or sort of like tones in the essay. So I could be serious in one, I could be funny in another, I could be kind of a dick in one. And then, you know, try to be vulnerable here. So I like that aspect of it too.
00:32:57
Speaker
yeah it was uh... you know it's kaleidoscopic in a lot of ways like you can really turn this and you get different different colors that really pop out and get different patterns showing up in front of your eye you know specifically you know one i think on one night when you like uh... just pull the plug on on the on the root off and it's deflating you know you uh... took took that as a moment to reflect on you know your aging cat and like her you know having to eventually most likely as we all as all pet owners do if
00:33:26
Speaker
is to eventually you have to make that decision to put them to sleep and so like you know there was an element that you know that maybe didn't feel like it was gonna be there when you started writing this essay but it's probably something that just came to mind you know as you're watching this thing deflate and you're kind of like caressing it down till it till yeah I'm holding conscious yeah yeah and it's like that's a really sad moment in the essay
00:33:51
Speaker
And the cat that I was writing about did die. She died in December. Oh, I'm sorry, man. Yeah, we lost a couple dogs in the last two years to just had to put them to sleep. I think I had old dogs, but I feel the pain, man. Yeah, I mean, it's brutal. But it's something that you know as a pet owner, you're basically signing up for. I mean, you're going to outlast most of your animals, hopefully. But at the same time, you have access to that.
00:34:20
Speaker
And I'd been, yeah, she was an old cat. So it was one that I was not, it was only a matter of time, but, and I guess I'd had that on my mind for a while, but that's the thing I love about, I mean, about essay writing or about nonfiction in general is like, you know, you're writing about a thing, but that thing leads you to all these other things that you didn't know you were thinking about or that you were relating to the thing you're trying to write about that show up in the peripheral vision. So there was a lot of discovery in this process.
00:34:49
Speaker
I mean, this essay also took me a lot longer. I mean, I've been basically writing it for five years, which is more than I would normally spend on an essay in part because I was trying to think about it as a book or trying to think about it as every time I put it up, I'm like, oh, yeah, I got to write more about Rudolph. And he would come back. I mean, and actually it kind of comes back to I did have like an actual practice like, you know, in December, I would put up Rudolph and have all the lights going. My family would be in bed and I'd be like,
00:35:19
Speaker
drinking some port, um, or suburban or whatever. And just like in this like beautiful state for a little while, which wasn't always literally a literary state, but, and then I would try to like write about that and try to chronicle that. Um, and the part of the project of the, of the essay then was also trying to, you know, I mean, Rudolph is ongoing. Like I still have him. He's going back up. He was flying this year.
00:35:45
Speaker
And I want him, you know, but I can't write about him forever or I mean, or maybe I can. I wanted to at least be done with like this iteration, this iteration of Rudolph so I could move on to other projects. But who knows? I mean, he's, Hammacher Schlemmer will apparently like will replace him unlimited times forever. So he's like a forever pet, which is also just a stupid and unsustainable thing, but kind of marvelous and American in the same way.
00:36:13
Speaker
And if I were going to do this as a book version of it, I was really interested in trying to dig into the sustainability aspect of that. How does that work financially or just in terms of the environment or whatever? But you get a little bit of that in here, but not that much.
00:36:33
Speaker
One of the very tiny sections that you write is the pleasures of homeownership, and you write it in its very short section, and you end it with just saying, of course, everything eventually becomes a ruin, but our most important job as humans is to resist ruin. I underline that because there's any number of things you can unpack there. As we get older, as we start pushing into middle age,
00:37:00
Speaker
How are we going to stem the tides of our bodies breaking down and every damn calorie? We eat since the stick to our body and we're just getting like yeah I'm breaking down and for you know facing our own ruin I wonder like it is was that something you were kind of thinking about as you were synthesizing that little thing Yeah, for sure. I mean like that's It's something that you know, I didn't really think about much when I was younger well I mean I did in certain ways. It's like my teeth were
00:37:29
Speaker
I had like a really bad habit of just drinking a shitload of coke every day. Like I drink like a six pack a day. And so even when I was this one, I was like 16, I was part of my hacker sort of days and drink a lot of coke and do a lot of hacking. Yeah, I was really popular and cool. And but like it created these really bad dental problems where it would just like erode my like the enamel on my teeth. So like my mouth was kind of breaking down at that time.
00:37:58
Speaker
But now, yeah, me and all my friends, we're like, hey, all of a sudden things in the body are sort of not doing what they used to do, at least not without like really a lot of effort. And then, you know, you thinking about that and thinking about mortality, thinking about my daughter, thinking about her outlasting me, like what of me is in her?
Holiday Traditions and Memory with Ander
00:38:20
Speaker
What of the pleasure of even, I mean, and she fucking loves Rudolph.
00:38:24
Speaker
Like she was like so into the giant Rudolph. And trying to do, I mean, trying to create like a kind of like a holiday experience for her also that'll be memorable every year, at least until, you know, she's too old to really care about the fiction that we tell kids about Santa and all that. So that was also part of like thinking here, like I'm really into doing the advent calendar. I do a big advent, I have like a, I have a card catalog, like, you know, they used to have in libraries.
00:38:54
Speaker
I bought one from Western Michigan University when they were getting rid of all theirs. And so every year I do an advent calendar with the drawers for her. And I just love that. I mean, that sort of ritual, I'm not religious, but I like ritual. And so I like the ritual of opening things like every day and seeing something, which is also why we do the advent calendar most years at SA Daily too. That feeling of engaging in a thing every day, I think is good and sort of meaningful for me.
00:39:24
Speaker
And it does make me feel and it's related probably to mortality, I guess, to or to like the, to like, you know, the slope of everything toward ruin. If you have rituals that you engage in, and you try to do them every day, it's trying to achieve a kind of immortality, you know, as long as you can do it, or kind of infinity, at least for the days of Advent.
00:39:50
Speaker
The rest of the year you can't, I don't get around to doing it. But if you can do that, then I feel like you really can create something that, the implication is you could do it all the time. And you could keep doing it forever until you can't.
00:40:05
Speaker
And towards the end of the essay, too, there's this part where, you know, you're taking down the Rudolph and you're like, you're having this, you're mourning, essentially the, you know, taking it down in that period of time or before you'll put it up again. And it, it got me thinking about the, the way we kind of
00:40:23
Speaker
I've really attached ourselves to these inanimate things. This past weekend, my wife and I traded in our old car. It was a car we've been driving for over 11 years. It carried us. It carried our dogs everywhere. It got us cross country. It just took us everywhere. It was kind of mournful to say goodbye to this thing.
00:40:48
Speaker
It made me just think about how kind of bizarre it is, but also kind of how, you know, sweet it can be that we do attach these very human feelings to inanimate things. Like, is that something you kind of, you know, were thinking about to it? You know, of course, towards the end of this. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, it's all and that's that's actually in a certain way. That's like half of the project of that cool object lesson series is exploring the ways in which objects hold a lot of us. I'm really into collections. I collect a lot of stuff.
00:41:17
Speaker
I hold on to a lot of things. My wife is a vintage dealer. She sells vintage clothes. So we have a lot of old things, old stuff in our house. And you do, I mean, and I feel pretty, I actually am, I feel strongly about my car. My wife didn't really care about her car. I mean, she liked her old Subaru. It was like a 2001 Outback. It's a pretty good era of Subaru before they kind of get big in SUV ish. So she was really kind of sad to get rid of that. But we had to
00:41:46
Speaker
when we wanted something that was a little more reliable when we had our daughter. But I still drive like my 03 Baja, which is like a Subaru that they only made for three years. It's like the kind of sequel to The Brat with the little truck back. And I was pretty into it. I've always kind of liked it because they stopped making it and it just becomes like an odd, like a fetish object. But my daughter fucking loves this thing. Like she's so into the Baja and like talks about it all the time.
00:42:15
Speaker
And you could see, I mean, partially I can see through her, like the ways in which you kind of emotionally become invested in these things. And you spend a lot of time in a car. And I mean, so that's especially emotional for most people. And with Rudolph, you know, he's only up for a month. And that's part of the appeal, is if he was up all year, I think he would be, and Rudolph and also, you know, Christmas decorations in general, like you can kind of, you sort of like lose your energy for them in a certain way.
00:42:45
Speaker
You got to put them away and you got to put them back up and see like you have to limit that or else it's not fun anymore. At least for the time being, I kind of do want to buy like, you know, another like eight of them. I don't have enough room in my house.
00:42:59
Speaker
Yeah, so Andrew, we're kind of up against our time here, which I hope will just be the first conversation of many, because this was a lot of fun getting to unpack this essay. This essay was wonderful. I had a lot of fun reading it. It goes in so many great directions, and I think anyone who's lucky enough to pick it up and read it's going to get a lot of fun out of it. So thank you for the work, for sure.
00:43:23
Speaker
Yeah, thanks. And thanks for the work and reading it and talking about it, too. Of course. And where can people find you online, Andrew, and get more familiar with your work if they aren't already familiar with it? So the primary space is OtherElectricity.com, which Andrew Munson.com also will redirect you to, but I just don't like the idea of having
00:43:44
Speaker
my name be like the website. Like there's something like off about that. Maybe my Midwestern ass just kind of couldn't quite tolerate that, but I also had to buy it before someone squatted it and tried to like sell it back to me. So it's otherelectricities.com has a lot of stuff for most of the books. And then I'm on Twitter at anger monsoon, which is my wrestling name, which is also my Microsoft word auto correct of my actual name. So that's become like my, you know, I'm a kind of like online handle in most places.
00:44:13
Speaker
Fantastic. Yeah, I like Anger Monsoon a little better than the Grim Reaper, so that pulls a full circle, right? Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, Andrew, thank you so much, and we will certainly be in touch. Cool. All right. Thanks a lot for having me. You got it. Talk to you later. Take care. Bye.
00:44:32
Speaker
We did it. We made it CNF-ers. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you're subscribing to the show. Of course, this crazy show is produced by me, Brendan O'Mara. I make the show for you. I hope it made something worth sharing. And if you really dig the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Show notes are at BrendanO'Mara.com.
00:44:52
Speaker
Follow the show on the various social media channels at cnfpodacrossamall. Get that newsletter at my website. Win books, win zines, hang out with your buddy BO. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Are we done here? We must. Because if you can do interviews, see ya!