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Episode 284: Kim H. Cross on Scenes, Structure, and The Stahl House
268 Plays3 years ago
Kim H. Cross (@kimhcross) is the author of The Stahl House: Case Study House #22: The Making of a Modernist Icon (Chronicle Chroma).
She is a best selling author and her work has been featured in The Years' Best Sports Writing and Best American Sports Writing, among many other places.
Sponsor: West Virginia Wesleyan College's MFA in Creative Writing
Patreon: patreon.com/cnfpod
Social Media: @CNFPod (twitter) and @creativenonfictionpodcast (IG)
Up to 11 Newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Submission Deadline and Instructions
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, you know, before we dive into the interview, I want to remind you that there's a submission deadline right around the frickin' corner for issue 3 of the audio magazine. November 1st, I'd hate to be one of those guys who doesn't get enough submissions, you're like, guess what? Gotta extend the deadline, cause it's looking like that. Themes Heroes, you're gonna see a bunch of them trick or treating. Not like the kids, those and they're not heroes, but they're gonna be dressed like them.
00:00:27
Speaker
Take it whatever direction you want to go in. Essay you're supposed to be no more than 2,000 words? Bear in mind, it's an audio essay, so pay attention to how the words tumble out of your mouth. Email your submissions with heroes in the subject line to creativenonfictionpodcastatgmail.com. I pay writers too. You know that. I've been calling it that fat burrito money because you'll be able to get like two Chipotle burritos. Dig it.
00:00:52
Speaker
And I was like, Oh, twist my arm. You know, I love jumping off shit. It's like, it's my jam. So I was like, you found the right writer.
00:01:05
Speaker
Well, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. My voice cracked. I hate when that happens.
Introduction of Kim H. Cross
00:01:15
Speaker
I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going? Kim H. Cross is a freelance features writer, teacher, editor, mountain bike head coach.
00:01:25
Speaker
It's just a damn pleasure to be around, man. She's been featured in Best American Sports Writing, the year's best sports writing, the expansion team model. For her wildly popular and dissected piece, What Happens When Two Strangers Trust the Rides of Their Lives to the Magic of the Universe, or Noel and Leon, Eva Holland has dissected it, Chip Scanlon has dissected it, Matt Tullis has dissected it,
00:01:55
Speaker
Kim and I gab a little bit about it since we talk about structure, and that piece is a masterclass in structured gymnastics. It's like the balance beam of structure. She sticks to landing, man. Hence the dissection.
Kim's New Book and Hectic Schedule
00:02:11
Speaker
But what finally brought Kim into C&F Pod HQ was her new book, The Stahl House, Case Study Number 22 in the Making of a Modernist Icon. It's actually out.
00:02:23
Speaker
Early next week, November 2nd, I believe is the official publication date finally been pushed back. A lot of people's publication dates have been pushed back for reasons that are beyond my comprehension. Kim, like I said, she had a lot of false starts in the publication.
00:02:38
Speaker
book so it would appear that it's good to go. I don't know. It's a beautiful book regardless. Even if I did only read it on my internet pad, it was published by Chronicle Chroma. Really beautiful photography in there. I imagine the hardcover of this book is really a gorgeous thing to behold. Well that's a nice little intro so far. Let's do an ad read. Support for the creative non-fiction podcast brought to you by
00:03:07
Speaker
West Virginia Wesleyan College's low residency MFA in creative writing. Now in its 10th year, this affordable program boasts a low student to faculty ratio and a strong sense of community. Recent CNF faculty include random millings noble Jeremy Jones and Sarah Einstein. There's also fiction and poetry tracks with recent faculty there. Ashley Bryant Phillips, Jacinda Townsend, as well as Diane Gilliam and Savannah Sipple. So no matter your discipline,
00:03:34
Speaker
If you're looking to up your craft or maybe learn a new one, consider West Virginia Wesleyan right in the heart of Appalachia. Visit mfa.wvwc.edu for more information in dates of enrollment. I should also say, and I'll start plugging it now, on Saturday, November 13th, 4 p.m. Pacific, 7 p.m. Eastern, I will be doing a CNF pod live
00:04:05
Speaker
Zoom Live, but it's gonna be live for a non-fiction conference of sorts, virtual conference for Goucher College, my MFA alum, alma mater. So I will be interviewing Ricky Turner, who has a new book coming out. I've never met Ricky, I haven't read the book yet. But from the 12th to the 14th is a pretty cool virtual conference. I think it's like 20 bucks.
00:04:32
Speaker
Don't have the link or anything? I'll put it in the show notes. How does that sound? Good.
00:04:39
Speaker
Kim's one of the good guys. Her work has been featured on Neiman Lab, ESPNW, SB Nation Long Form Southwest Magazine, RIP. I believe that closed down. It's one of the better airline magazines that bit the dust. I think it bit the dust. Someone fact check me. Hank. Hank. Yeah, he's a dog.
00:05:03
Speaker
Bicycle magazine, among others. She's the New York Times best-selling author of what stands in a storm, a true story of love and resilience and the worst super storm in history. I feel lucky to call Kim a friend, though we've never met in person. She does live right next door in Idaho, but it's still a long ways away. Shooting across Oregon on Route 20 in the high desert, take a while to get there, but maybe we'll fist bump one of these days.
00:05:32
Speaker
So the Stahl House is the biography of a house and you'll hear names like Buck and Carlotta Stahl, blue collar people with white collar dreams, and architect Pierre Koenig and photographer Julia Schulman, they feature heavily in the development of this house and the story of the house.
00:05:53
Speaker
And the Stahl House is one of the most iconic houses in the world, built at the nexus of several factors that were illustrative of America and Los Angeles at large at the time, post-World War II United States. So Kim, along with her co-authors Bruce and Sherry Stahl, well, Bruce Stahl and his sister Sherry Stahl Gronwald, they spent a warm story about a home.
00:06:18
Speaker
Kim is at KimHCross on Twitter and Instagram. She has a nice newsletter, don't we all now, called Kim's Wins, which the title alone just cracks me up. Not the newsletter, the Kim's Wins is very cute and funny. I like it.
00:06:33
Speaker
Speaking of newsletters, head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for my up to 11 monthly newsletter. Been doing it for about 10 years now. Cool links to stuff I think you'll find groovy, man. Exclusive happy hour, book raffles, and more. First of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it.
00:06:53
Speaker
You're gonna love how Kim goes about the work, hearing her 10-year vision plan. We talk a lot about structure. We talk about that book, of course. Lots of stuff. Good things here. And if you're not excited to do some reporting and research and writing when this is all said and done, then go grab your goodie bag and just head on home, okay? So here's Kim. Riff.
00:07:26
Speaker
Oh my gosh, it's been a really crazy fall. I have four or five jobs. This is the first time I've been able to come up for air since August. One of my jobs, and this one is completely volunteer, is I'm the head coach for a high school and middle school mountain bike team. Nice. I wanted to ask you about that, so I'm glad you're talking about it. Yeah.
00:07:51
Speaker
And we have, you know, it's a really interesting sport because it's a team sport. But to do it, we have to have adult coaches who are very trained, have wilderness first aid certification and other training, and are able to ride with the kids three times a week. And that's a big ask. You know, we have a ratio of like six students to per instructor.
00:08:16
Speaker
And in order to guide mountain biking safely, you have to have a lot of coaches. And so that's one of the big challenges of it. But it's really also fun because we're not standing on the sidelines. We're actually going on rides with these kids. And it, you know, it keeps us in shape and it makes me ride my bike, which is which is really fun.
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, I had never known that there was actual mountain bike teams in the way that I guess you would have, you know, your classic cross country or whatever your fall sports, like individual slash team sport. I had no idea that existed.
00:08:52
Speaker
You know, most people don't. And it's been around for, I can't remember how many years, but in Idaho, I think it's been seven years now. And we're not, you know, by far the newest league. But there's an organization called NICA. It's the National Interscholastic Cycling Association. And they're trying to get a league in every state. And it's the reason we live in Idaho. Like, my husband launched the Alabama League.
00:09:13
Speaker
And it did so well that the national organization asked him to come out and help launch Idaho. And the guy who launched Idaho was kind of a starter who wanted to turn it over to someone to run. So he immediately started recruiting my husband and that's why we live here. And we have like a thousand kids in Idaho, more than a thousand racing mountain bikes, which is really cool.
00:09:33
Speaker
You know, it's, it's a, it's a great sport because it's, it's, you know, boys and girls on a team. No one gets cut from the team. No one warms the bench and you don't even have to race in order to be part of the team. So it's really kind of a cool lifelong sport where we get to, you know, get these kids learning more than just riding a bike, but you know, through bikes.
00:09:54
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, that's when I was reading one of the essay you wrote in 2013 for ESPNW about the triathlon, the tri-cross event you did. You wrote there about some of the, most of the lessons or many of the lessons that you've
00:10:14
Speaker
learned over the years are a result of sports actually have the quote here it's like how to suffer what to practice what to sacrifice when to compromise why teamwork matters that falling is an art and that sometimes what you learn from losing can be even sweeter than winning so it's kind of embedded in that what you're talking about right now totally it so what I
00:10:38
Speaker
as sort of a lifelong athlete myself, I can definitely attest to that. But what are some of those lessons from sport that you've overlaid onto your writing career?
00:10:52
Speaker
Oh, that's a great question. I love this question. You know, it's funny because I think I realized sort of late into my writing career that I approach writing kind of the same way I approach sports. And a lot of the sports that I did were skill sports. So you have to practice something over and over and over and you have to really put in the time. And then I switched to endurance sports where you really have to learn how to be uncomfortable for long periods of time and also kind of build the base that then you can use when you
00:11:21
Speaker
Want to increase the intensity so you know one thing i try to apply to my writing life and sometimes with more success than others depending on how much time i have is that you need to practice it before you go out and do it in.
00:11:36
Speaker
like for real in a game or in competition. And so free writing is a big part of my writing practice. When I have balance in my life, I try to start my day with a little bit of free writing and I try to build in time to do stuff that allows me to practice and experiment.
00:11:55
Speaker
in a way or in a venue that doesn't have the pressure of publication. I don't know if you want to go down this trail, but some years ago, I taught and co-instructed a writing workshop in Archer City, Texas. The idea was that we would create a safe space to experiment
00:12:15
Speaker
um, without the, you know, fear of failure and without the pressure of publication. So we would be, um, going out and practicing the craft and sharing it and workshopping it, but it wasn't necessarily, you know, ever going to be published. Uh, you know, sometimes it did get published, but that wasn't the point. The point was like, if you're a basketball player, you're going to shoot like a million free throws, right? And a lot of writers, I mean, working writers
00:12:42
Speaker
You know, you have to really deliberately carve out the time to practice because it's so easy only to write on demand when you're on deadline and you have an assignment. And so I think that some of my best growing as a writer has been done kind of privately in a notebook.
00:12:58
Speaker
really believe in keeping a paper notebook and writing by hand because I think it taps a different part of my brain and it allows me to only write forward. You can't self-edit and get in the way of the writing process as much as you can when you're sitting at a computer and you can constantly hit the backspace key.
00:13:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's so important to see the footprints of a sentence, even if you're going to scratch out words or everything. That's what's so great about longhand is that it leaves evidence of the mistakes behind. So you're like, oh, okay, I can see what happened here, what I crossed out, what wasn't working. But with a computer, it's like those things get deleted forever and you never
00:13:42
Speaker
see the progress necessarily because it gets deleted. But that's what's so great about me, I'm just a pencil guy. So like pencil on paper, I do a lot of that. So that's such a great exercise.
00:13:55
Speaker
Oh, that's awesome. When do you do your writing? Do you have like a time of day? Is it built into your daily life or how do you use that? Yeah, in the morning, early morning, I just, right now, I've kept the journal since I was 16. So I've had an almost daily journal for, oh, what is that now, 25 years.
00:14:18
Speaker
And so right now my journals are always changing the form, and right now I just use a bunch of field notes notebooks. Let me just do one or two pages in a little field notes notebook in the morning, and it's just little riffs. It's nothing technical or anything. It's just like you said, kind of free writing. And then at night in my bullet journal, which is kind of like my daily planner slash calendar slash
00:14:42
Speaker
external hard drive for what's going on in my brain. I do a daily download right before bed that's usually just three or four sentences about what happened in the day and I just draw a box around it. So that's kind of like my analog writing, journaling practice for the most part right now. Oh, that's fantastic. I love that you bookend the day with that.
00:15:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's great to get away from screens and do something that is truly easy on the eye, but it's also like a signifier that, okay, we're really powering down and it's bedtime and there's no more electricity getting beamed into my head.
00:15:25
Speaker
Oh, I love that. I love that. That's a great evening ritual. I think I need to take that up again and lock my phone in another room. Yeah. Yeah. And I love the point you're making too about getting away from the pressure of publication, but writing is as practice. And there are any number of ways that that can manifest itself.
00:15:48
Speaker
You could write poetry or even mess around with screenplays just just in a way of trying on different shoes But it's all kind of exactly yeah, it's just I love love hearing that and we don't practice enough I guess we just kind of go through the motions whether it be emails or even stories that might be on deadlines just like all right I know I know how to write out some basic skills. I'm just gonna kind of
00:16:10
Speaker
do what I can as fast as I can, but we don't take the time to set up the tee in the basement and take a bunch of swings and maybe mess around with the different path to the ball or a different way of moving. Everything just seems like it is weighed down with that pressure to publish.
00:16:29
Speaker
Exactly. And if you were an athlete and you only did your sport in competition, how bad would you be? And I love the idea that, you know, of doing almost drills. And I think, you know, I didn't realize it, I think, until recently that I'd been doing this for years, because when I would go on a trip, I would practice writing scenes.
00:16:47
Speaker
and dialogue and capturing all of that kind of in real time. And I would have kind of an everyday carry notebook that I would use to capture dialogue, especially, and just little details that you might forget. And then at the end of the day, I would sit down and practice writing a scene. And some of those things have found their way into essays that I wrote, you know, seven years after I initially took the notes and did the scene. And I didn't know at the time it would ever, you know, become something else. But it's just kind of funny how like you
00:17:17
Speaker
develop this raw material. And the other thing I've been thinking about a lot really in the mindset of coaching since I've been, this is my first year as head coach, is that, you know, the same tools that you can use in sports to, you know, develop the neural pathways that you need to, you know,
00:17:37
Speaker
to train in order to do emotion that's complex. I think you can do that with writing as well. It's just you have to do the thing.
Sports Principles Applied to Writing
00:17:47
Speaker
And by going and writing every day, you're training your brain to be ready to write at that time every day. And I think there's something to be said for that that makes it easier when it's time to sit down and
00:17:58
Speaker
you know, do it on Simon or under pressure, is that, you know, it's almost like the muscle is fit and it's ready. It's used to being used. And so it's like, oh, here we go again. And it's the same thing that I'm trying to teach my athletes about, you know, having rituals that they do in practice and doing those same things in practice as they do before a competition so that, you know, your brain is just kind of primed to go.
00:18:23
Speaker
getting into, you know, getting to that next level and athletic performance too often takes a great degree of deep study. And this is more true with team sports, but I suspect it is with individual sports, especially, you know, golf comes to mind to where you might go to the film.
00:18:39
Speaker
and you're gonna study what the other team is doing or what you guys are doing and how everything all those pieces are moving together and that's also something that is can be done in the creative fields and specially movies but what we're talking literal film.
00:18:54
Speaker
But going to the film as a writer, it's like taking that piece of writing that really clicks with you and then just trying to really deconstruct it. What's going on here? Keep asking those questions of it and replay it. Go rewind. Go forward and see what the heck is going on in the piece. So I don't know. So how have you cultivated that film study of a piece of writing so you get to be a better writer as a result of that deep study?
00:19:24
Speaker
I love this analogy because I've never actually done a sport where I had to study another team's film, but I love this analogy because I can relate to it in the writing life in that I will look at a piece that I love and then I'll try to dissect it.
00:19:42
Speaker
and figure out why it's working. What are the pieces of it? What's the anatomy of the piece? What's the architecture? What techniques are they using? How are they shifting verb tenses in order to have a certain effect? What is the point of view?
00:19:57
Speaker
what deliberate decisions are kind of going into this piece that are making it work. So I like to dissect a piece almost like it's a frog. And I am trying to learn how to teach this in my classes as I teach creative writing. I'm trying to learn how to give this skill to other students who might not approach it that way, because I think it's one of the most valuable things that you can have in your arsenal to keep growing as a writer through the years.
00:20:24
Speaker
Sometimes you don't have that great editor or that great instructor available to you all of the time, but you can always turn to a text and keep learning from it. In your experience with your students, what has been maybe their biggest hang up or something that they really struggle with as you start to give them, I don't know, what is it, the red pill and the matrix to turn them from just readers into writer readers?
00:20:54
Speaker
You know, it's funny because I think you just can never take for granted anything. You can't assume that anyone knows anything. So I've always been worried that by trying to simplify things to basic a level that I was going to be patronizing or condescending. But I've learned that no actually starting with the fundamentals, like in a sport, is a great idea. So one of the most challenging things has been at the beginning of a semester
00:21:23
Speaker
Particularly when I've been teaching a class in a creative writing department instead of a journalism department, it's getting the students on board with the idea that interviewing isn't necessary journalism, it's a tool. Interviewing is like a knife. You can use a knife to be a surgeon, you could be a chef, you could be a fax murderer. A knife is a tool. Interviewing is a tool. It's not necessarily journalism, it's part of the writing process. Then the other thing is just breaking it down to scene, summary, and exposition.
00:21:53
Speaker
And that, I was really, really shocked that a lot of people don't know even what a scene is. And if given a story, they can't, they struggle to identify a scene and differentiated from summary and a section where you might be explaining something.
00:22:08
Speaker
And so actually, early in the semester, I have them take a story and three highlighters, and I have them highlight scene and summary and exposition, and then step back and look at those patterns of the colors to see the structure. Being able to take a highlighter and look through different lenses at your own text is such a valuable tool. Another thing that I do with them is to
00:22:33
Speaker
highlight things that are high on the ladder of abstraction and low on the ladder of abstraction. And to make sure that they're mostly low, because I think that's the, you know, when you're low, you're concrete, and that's when you create the movie that plays out in your reader's mind. And if you can sprinkle in highs now and then, you can elevate that. But I think it's really fun to try to stay, you know, almost completely low on the ladder of abstraction for, you know,
00:23:02
Speaker
an entire section to see how long you can do it. Now in reading your work and reading analysis of your work and how you talk about your work, you are clearly a very structure nerd. Totally. So how did that muscle start to refine itself and how did you get into structure as such a key part of what you bring to the craft?
00:23:28
Speaker
You know, I don't know. The first thing that comes to mind is John McPhee. You know, reading him talk about structure gets me really excited. And I don't know. I just think that from a macro sense it
00:23:43
Speaker
or from a zoom out sense, you can kind of just see the bones of a piece and then it makes the writing easier. Like if I know if I go into a piece and I have an idea of the structure of it, it makes the actual laying down of sentence after sentence so much easier because I know where I'm going.
00:23:59
Speaker
And I've likened it to kind of, you know, the process of building a house. You know, you could just start building a wall, you could build a house wall by wall, and you could like build the wall and then, you know, put the drywall up and then, you know, start painting it, but that would be just silly, right? The actual process of building a house is more like, okay, you have kind of a blueprint, that's your plan.
00:24:23
Speaker
But then as you start framing the walls, you do a walkthrough and you're like, you know what, this wall is kind of wonky or this is a little, this is in the wrong place or we need to move this window or something. And, you know, it's a better time to move that wall when you haven't put the drywall up. And then once you're, you know,
00:24:41
Speaker
once you're sure that all of the rooms are where they should be, and I do think like a story, like a house, if you walked into a stranger's house, you should be able to find the kitchen, you should be able to find the bathroom, it shouldn't be like in some weird place, right? And so the same thing with the story is, you know, a reader should kind of find their way through a story and never feel lost. And so if there's one point where they suddenly feel really disoriented and confused, then you know, the wall's in the wrong place.
00:25:06
Speaker
So it's easier to move those things around early, and it's easier to move them, I think, if you know they exist in the first place, and if you go in kind of with that blueprint. So then when it comes time to do all of the, you know, the subsequent steps, it's, I don't know, you know, the big pieces are where they should be, and then you kind of get more granular and more refined, and it's actually fun.
00:25:27
Speaker
Yeah, I like that idea of, you know, there's an intuitive sense when you go into a house, you know where certain things are. It's not, but if you are overly explicit about the structure of the house, you'd be handing people a pamphlet of the blueprint. And that's like the exact opposite of what you want to do in a piece of writing. You want it to just kind of feel implicit to the piece, almost unnoticed. But if you burrow a little deeper, like, oh, I can start to see the scaffolding here that was
00:25:54
Speaker
subsequently stripped away by the writer so I could enjoy this as a reader. Exactly. I think you don't need a sign that's like the bathroom's over here. You don't need a neon flashing light that's like kitchen, kitchen, kitchen. You should feel comfortable in it like you can find your way. I think structure, when it's done really well, it's invisible and seamless to the reader. I've done some little experiments with structure where it was just for me.
00:26:22
Speaker
It was either for the purpose of the story, but if I do any kind of crazy things, my role is that it can't get in the way of the reader. It can't get in the way of the story. And if it comes at the cost of the reader, then I have to throw it out.
00:26:40
Speaker
Yeah, and you did that as the palindromic structure of the piece of Leon and Noel for Bicycle Magazine, and was that one of those deals where you're like, I'm going to do some structural pyrotechnics that are sort of, they're noticeable upon subsequent reads, but ultimately I'm sort of the only one who notices off the bat.
00:27:04
Speaker
Exactly. That was kind of my goal for that piece. And that, you know, I wouldn't normally recommend like wonky structure, except that that particular material begged for it. It was probably the only story in the history of the universe where it made sense to try to structure as the palindrome just because of the nature of the story. But I actually, you know, when I learn about the story, so for readers who aren't familiar with the piece, I'll explain it.
00:27:32
Speaker
You know, when I found out about the story, I thought this couldn't possibly be true because it was so weird and wonderful. And basically, two men, two strangers, an American and a Brit, independent of one another, decided to ride their bicycles solo across Eurasia, one road east to west, the other road west to east. And by total chance,
00:27:55
Speaker
smack dab in the middle, like at almost the exact midpoint, they meet in the middle of an empty desert. And one of them desperately needs help. And the other one just happens to be able to help him. And they sort of, you know, realize that they're doing the same journey in reverse. Their personalities are very much opposite. They're almost like matter and anti matter. And
00:28:16
Speaker
when they meet, they realize that their names are the same name in opposite directions. So one is Noll, N-O-E-L, and the other is Leon, L-E-O-N. And they just kind of chuckle and they're like, well, isn't that funny? And they go on their way. And only in recounting the story later to people do they realize
00:28:35
Speaker
that it really is kind of something. So because their names were a palindrome and their journeys were, you know, parallel journeys in opposite directions, I just thought, you know, I want to try to write this as a palindrome. And so I structured it so that the opening scene and the ending scene are both the meeting in the middle of the story.
00:28:56
Speaker
And then the sections alternate from, in point of view, it's a braided narrative. So it's Leon, Noel, Leon, Noel, Leon, Noel, Leon, and then it ends with a meeting. So there's this point in the story where you have to actually skip the meeting because in chronology, that's where the meeting should occur. But it was a big struggle because I tried to figure out how to do that to flash forward and then come back to the meeting.
00:29:20
Speaker
And that was the big riddle of the piece that I had to solve. And I was so worried about it being kind of my little precious conceit that I submitted two versions of the story to my editor. So Matt Allen was the first editor on the piece and I was like, Matt, I just
00:29:39
Speaker
Here's the palindrome version. Here's a normal chronology. You tell me if it's working or not, because if it's not, I don't have to throw it away. To his credit, he came back and said, I want you to do the palindrome, but I need to give you more words because you need more words to establish the pattern.
00:29:54
Speaker
And then Leah Flickinger was the second editor on the piece and she totally got it and was in support of it. But again, my rule was that it should be invisible to anyone except for me and my editors and my writer friends with whom I can geek out about it now.
00:30:10
Speaker
That's amazing. And something that you recently said just made me want to ask this too. You said the material begged for that kind of structure. And I wonder for you, when you're approaching a piece, at what point does the structure start to reveal itself to you over the course of your reporting?
00:30:35
Speaker
Oh, that's a good question. I feel like it's kind of different for every piece. I really am a lot happier when I know the beginning and the end, when I go into a piece. And that's pretty common. I'm just writing a good dog essay right now of her gardening gun about my dog. And I know that the beginning is the origin story, like how she came into our life.
00:31:01
Speaker
And then I know how it's going to end. And then the middle, I mean, it just kind of like, well, our normal chronology really serves this the best. But in other pieces, I really love, like, in Medius Ray, because I like to start in the middle of the action at the, like, moment of truth when, you know,
00:31:19
Speaker
and then end the first section or chapter with kind of a cliffhanger because it generates so much narrative momentum and tension that it just slingshots the reader through the story. And they have to keep reading because they know what's at stake right away. And then you can afford to kind of rewind and go through moments that give context to the big kind of crux of the story.
00:31:43
Speaker
And then they kind of know where they're heading. So it's a very self-orienting and fun structure. But every story kind of reveals itself to you in different ways. And I guess as I'm going through, like there's this one I'm thinking about, and I was talking about it with Leah, my editor, and going, well,
00:32:03
Speaker
I could, you know, there's several moments of tension and I could do like the big moment of tension or the surprise moment of tension before that. When, you know, we knew what the moment of truth is going to be, but actually there's a surprise thing that goes wrong before that. And that's even kind of more, creates even more tension because you're like, oh, I wasn't expecting that. So I don't know.
00:32:27
Speaker
And sometimes I think you don't know if it works until you get it down on paper. And that's that's what's fun. And that's what's fun about revision is that, you know, we're not going out there and doing like a live show in front of anyone where we're like, well, that was that was the wrong way to do it. You can do it and totally mess it up and then be like, nope, nope, got to do it another way. And that's and that's OK.
00:32:50
Speaker
And you learn from those times, I think, when you do it the wrong way because you learn, oh, okay, well, this doesn't work because of this reason. And so whatever reason it is that it doesn't work is the consideration that you have the next time you enter a piece and try to wrestle it.
00:33:08
Speaker
Yeah, I know I know McPhee sometimes he had in draft number four he talks about there are certain structures that he kind of reports to like he's like I'd like to tackle this kind of double profile or three-person profile over you know a B C and D thread over a or whatever Ellie you know what I'm talking about cuz I'm sure you've seen
John McPhee and Structured Writing
00:33:32
Speaker
the essays and
00:33:32
Speaker
But it's one of those things where it's like, all right, he had a preconceived, almost like a prefab house, and he's like, all right, I just gotta go find the parts to that house and then build that house. Whereas I think some other people, that could limit you in a bad way, or maybe you can be reporting, you're not reporting for the right structure.
00:33:58
Speaker
So it's such a weird tightrope to really balance.
00:34:05
Speaker
I agree. That's sort of the experts only, don't try this at home. That's the evil, clean, evil way to go about, I think, storytelling is that you have to be John McPhee or someone like him to pull that off. It's not what I would recommend to any writer short of John McPhee and his level, just because it could go wrong in a lot of ways where you're kind of going out with the structure in mind and then having to find the story to fit it.
00:34:32
Speaker
And I mean, that is one way of doing it. And he makes it work and he makes it work beautifully. But I just think that for most writers, it would be it would be kind of a recipe for trouble. Yeah, I wonder in the collection of raw material, and this is always the challenge for people doing nonfiction. It's not just reporting and gathering information, but it's reporting for story. So how do you go about reporting for story or reporting for narrative?
00:34:57
Speaker
So I think that, especially interviewing, it's very different. But before I even get to interviewing, let me start here. So, you know, it's funny, I was vetting the story by an editor came to me and said, Hey, I want you to just story about this, this thing that happened in Afghanistan, and with people who are all over the world, and can you make it happen? I was going, Oh, my gosh, it sounds like such a such a complicated nightmare. No, I don't have time for this, but I'll do it just because
00:35:28
Speaker
Well, I went to someone and immediately began ticking off like, here's what I need to do a narrative. And I was like, okay, so I need a central character. I know there's a lot of people involved in this thing, but I need a central character. I need her to speak English or I need to have a translator. I need to be able, like she needs to live in a place where I can actually Skype with her or Zoom or get her on the phone. Because as I found with Leon, you can't really do that with China.
00:35:46
Speaker
you know, just because I wonder.
00:35:56
Speaker
I need written, you know, recorded dialogue is one of the most important things I go looking for, because dialogue is really key, and it's the hardest thing to get right. And if it's recorded or transcribed in some way, then you know that it's pretty, you know, you know that it's legit. Whereas if it's recollected, you know, it's
00:36:20
Speaker
it's less likely to be actual dialogue. It'll be perhaps pretty close, but people's memories are fallible. So one of the things that I learned from what stands in a storm was the importance of timestamped material, timestamped dialogue. So for that book, I was basically recreating the biggest super storm to hit anywhere, big tornado outbreak, three days, 349 tornadoes over 21 states.
00:36:49
Speaker
And it was so complicated, but I started with a timeline. So one of my characters was James Spann, a meteorologist who, when there's a tornado outbreak, he goes on the air and does wall-to-wall coverage. So no commercials, no interruptions. And so his
00:37:08
Speaker
footage of that day, his coverage was uploaded on YouTube, and I transcribed all of it. And I time stamped every time he said something, I time stamped it. And then I had like little screenshots of moments when, for example, he was standing in front of a screen where he has an inset of
00:37:26
Speaker
a tornado happening in one town and he has audio of a tornado have a different tornado happening in a different town and he's trying to warn people in both places at the same time and so I had little screenshots and then if he said oh my god look at this you know the radar is really a mess and I was able to go and get a radar screenshot of that time so I
00:37:45
Speaker
have this timeline with timestamps. And then over that, I overlaid sources of dialogue and scenes that were timestamps. So one of the biggest challenges of reporting on a natural disaster or any kind of big traumatic thing is that people's memory gets pretty fogged by the trauma. So they're likely to remember the emotions accurately, but the accuracy of their facts gets
00:38:13
Speaker
you know, pretty compromised by the trauma. And so I found radio transmissions between first responders that I didn't realize until I had them are timestamped. And so when I interviewed one responder, he couldn't remember when he got to this particular house, he said, you know, it could have been 11 o'clock p.m. It could have been 3 a.m. I have no idea. But I had a radio transmission that said,
00:38:40
Speaker
10 22 p.m. or whatever and then like hey we've got seven guys going to the house and then I knew from that that we had seven people coming to the scene at this particular time and that you know you could assume they were there sometime after that
00:38:55
Speaker
And then I had texts, messages that were conversations between a sister who survived and a sister who didn't. And because they were time stamped, I was able to, you know, layer those over. I knew, for example, that one of the characters was watching James Spann on TV. And when she said, Oh, my God, look at that thing.
00:39:15
Speaker
I knew exactly what she was looking at on the TV and I knew exactly what James Spann was looking at on his radar screen. So it's kind of this layering of primary sources. And nowadays with social media, we have kind of an embarrassment of riches almost too much so that you have to be meticulous about being able to sort through all the tedious stuff to get a few nuggets. You have to mine for a long time to get like one good, good piece of information. But when you do, it's really worth it. And then the other thing that I really use
00:39:45
Speaker
in reporting for scene is I use Google Earth a lot. It's an amazing tool. I have no idea how it's free, but I use that for Noel and Leon and also for the tornadoes. So for the tornado story, the National Weather Service has pages where they have
00:40:06
Speaker
I guess KML and KMZ files that are somehow GPS coordinates that you can download and put in your Google Earth kind of system. And I could see the width of the tornado. I could see the track. I could see how long it was. I could click on this information and see pictures taken from the survey that they do to determine what category of tornado it is.
00:40:33
Speaker
I had the number of people injured, the number of people who were killed in each tornado. I mean, it was really, really pretty amazing. And then to be able to go into Google Earth and see, zoom in on a house, you can also use the history tool to scroll back in time. And you can go to the day before the tornado and the day after the tornado, and you can see all the trees that were there before. And then you can see that everything's flattened afterwards. You can see in some cases, you know, particular houses that were crushed.
00:41:03
Speaker
And oh my gosh, it's just mind-blowing to me that we can do that, that we have these satellites flying overhead that can capture this in such detail that I was able to go with a Noel and Leon story. I was able to zoom in on the tea house in the middle of the Kazakhstan desert where they met.
00:41:22
Speaker
And Noel had a GPS unit that didn't tell him where to go, but it left breadcrumbs. So I knew exactly how many miles he rode each day, exactly how much elevation, and I could actually see his path. And you can see his path, like beer off the dirt road to go to the tea house and then to veer back onto the road. I mean, it's amazing. So I would say,
00:41:45
Speaker
You know, getting those primary sources down before you even start the interview process is really helpful because then you can use those things to enhance or help the memory of your sources who
00:42:00
Speaker
might not remember or it might not occur to them to share with you things. You'll ask questions differently going in armed with all of those details and that knowledge. Then you can start saying, okay, put me in the house. I couldn't find, for example, a picture of the house where three students died in one of the tornadoes that hit Tuscaloosa. So going back to the book, sorry, I'm jumping around a lot.
00:42:29
Speaker
I was not able to find a picture of the inside of the house. So then I had to kind of put on a fiction writer's hat, which I had never done and was kind of scary. And I was like, okay, if I was writing a scene, what would I need?
00:42:45
Speaker
to see in the scene and I was like, okay, I would visualize myself walking into the house and that's what would guide my interview. Okay, walk me through this house. When you open the door, what's the first thing you see? Can you draw me a map of the floor plan? Where was the place they were hiding under the stairs? Okay, how were they seeing the TV? What could they see from that spot? And if you turn your head to the right, what do you see? If you turn your head to the left, what do you see? What does it smell like? What does it sound like? And so you have to kind of imagine
00:43:15
Speaker
what you would need to put in the scene if you were just making it up. And then it's almost like you have to assume and then fact check your assumptions with the people who were there. Does that make sense?
00:43:26
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, yeah. It puts you in the right headspace. Well, it's kind of like one of your students who they when they almost didn't know what a scene was. It's like, well, you know, visualize it and paint the picture. And then in your case here, you're painting that picture and you're like, OK, now, you know, verify for me what these things are. This is what I want to see. Now help me actually see it in a verifiably true way.
00:43:52
Speaker
right, right. And then pictures and anything that you have that you can show to the source, they might be like, oh, I forgot about that painting. Let me tell you about that painting. Or you can ask them about things that it wouldn't even occur to them to tell you, but you have to prep them for that.
00:44:13
Speaker
I'm going to be asking really, really specific things. So bear with me. This is what it's for. But it's really fun. I think it's one of my favorite parts of this work that we do. Is that where you would say you probably feel most alive and engaged in the whole process?
00:44:29
Speaker
I just love the whole dang thing. I just love all of it. Even the tedious bullshit. I have right now downstairs, I have 12,000 pages of court transcripts to go through. I've found a way to ... I have some volunteers who are willing to read it, but I'm like, I want to read every page because I didn't want to miss everything. I love all of it.
00:44:56
Speaker
There are moments when I love the writing more than others. It's the hardest part, for sure. But I even love that part, you know? I know it's almost kind of like, taboo to say that. But I even love it when it's hard. So, yeah, it's all just, this is all I could ever imagine doing. That's amazing. Well, tell me a little bit about your 10 year vision plan.
00:45:25
Speaker
Ah, you write about the 10 year vision plan. Well, I want to be, you know, I want to be writing books and long form narratives. You know, my sweet spot is, you know, meticulously reported narratives that I want to read more and more like fiction, but be fact checkable by a National Geographic trained fact checker.
Challenges of Freelance Writing
00:45:48
Speaker
And I just, you know, the piece that
00:45:51
Speaker
is missing right now is just kind of the business model for making it stable. Like I've been really lucky to be completely freelance, completely making a living, making words for seven years now. I don't know. Let's see, 2003 is I think when I quit my job.
00:46:08
Speaker
There have been years when it felt fine, but then I had a couple really major setbacks that were really unexpected that have made it a lot scarier and harder to come back from. I think in the next 10 years, I just want to be in a place where I have overlapping book contracts. I think that's really the key, is that a book contract
00:46:33
Speaker
the quote advance as I learned with my first book doesn't get paid all in advance, it might be paid out in quarters over four years or over three years. And so I think if I can do a book every two to three years, and they have overlapping, you know, advance payments like that, and then, you know, pepper in some 4000 to 6000 word freelance narratives, and maybe some little things to just, you know, have a sense of finishing stuff I like that's
00:47:01
Speaker
That's what I want and to keep teaching. Teach just enough that it's invigorating. You spend so much time in your head as a writer that I love teaching because it makes me come out of my head and engage with people.
00:47:17
Speaker
helping other people is just really fun and exciting. And it refuels the tank that I then draw from when I'm writing. So I guess that's what it would look like. And I would really, really love to have my own writing retreat. Right now, I rely on the kindness of others because as a working mom with a 13-year-old kid and a husband who also works from the house and when he's not taking conference calls, he's
00:47:44
Speaker
operating power tools. It's really hard to write. And so my best tool for getting, you know, the kind of writing done that needs to be done for long, long form is to go to a borrowed cabin or a house somewhere and hold up for 10 to 14 days and eat, sleep and ride and ride my bike and just kind of
00:48:07
Speaker
be, you know, immerse myself in the process without interruption. So I guess my big dream would be, you know, to have my own place. However, I mean, it could be a cabin off the grid, where I have like a wood burning fireplace, that'd be fine. But it just, you know, I feel almost like I'm having to mooch off of friends who have, you know, second homes or places that they kindly let me go to, to do my work.
00:48:35
Speaker
Nice. And you also wrote in the same newsletter that, you know, chasing hard news isn't really your jam. Totally agree. I'm not a breaking news person, a narrative guy through and through. You'll say, like, you're drawn to timeless stories that lack a news hook that's hard to pitch. Also, I don't enjoy pitching. So how do you navigate that, given that the crux of doing these kind of things does rely on the almighty pitch?
00:49:04
Speaker
Yeah, well, you know, one, I over report the heck out of everything, like to a fault, probably. You know, I'll do months of reporting sometimes at great expense, before I even pitch a story because I want to know I have the access and I don't want to know what the story is. But sometimes you do so much that you have a hard time distilling it into
00:49:29
Speaker
you know, the right angle or the right thread for a particular publication. And I always know when I don't have it because my litmus test is the one breath pitch. Like I need to be able to say what the story's about and one breath. If I have to breathe several times, it's too much.
00:49:46
Speaker
You know, to be honest, I think I have a bad habit of just staying in my safe zone. And I have a few editors that I love working with who know me really well, who get me, and they either send me stories that they know are my kind of stories,
00:50:04
Speaker
Or I chicken out on pitching bigger publications because I know that I know this editor is going to get it. I know she gets me, and I don't have to sell as hard. It's really hard, I think, when you go to a new publication, a new editor you haven't worked with, and you have to
00:50:26
Speaker
first you have to sell yourself and that's really hard I think for most writers to be like here's why here's why I'm the best one to do this it's really hard and then to presume to know what it is that they're looking for in a story if you haven't had a conversation so I think maybe one of the best tools that I can recommend for doing it better than I do is
00:50:48
Speaker
to try to have like a meet and greet, a low pressure conversation with an editor where you get to know what like they're looking for, what makes them tick, what makes a good story for their publication. And then you can look at your story and this massive reporting through the lens of that editor's needs. And I think that makes a little bit easier, but I don't know. I think pitching is one of the hardest things to do. What's your one breath pitch for your new book about the Stahl House?
Biography of the Stahl House
00:51:18
Speaker
It is a biography of a house would be kind of a simple explanation. But really, it's, it's a story of a blue collar family with a white collar dream. And yeah, and the main character in the book is a house.
00:51:33
Speaker
Right. And what becomes the challenge of telling the story of a house when, you know, you could have gone into, you could have made this an architectural biography, which part of it is, but ultimately it's about the people who inhabit it. So how did you navigate, you know, that in the telling the biography of this house?
00:51:55
Speaker
Well, you know, I kind of looked at the arc of the house, and it sort of begins as a dream. So the book is called The Stull House, Case Study House 22, The Making of a Monodist Icon. And it's about one of the most famous houses really in the world. This house has been photographed more than Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water. And it's been in at least a dozen movies and TV shows. It's been in every fashion magazine imaginable.
00:52:25
Speaker
And it is, I mean, it's even been on The Simpsons. It's like this pop culture thing. But, you know, it really began in 1954 as a crazy dream of these newlyweds, Buck and Carlotta Stahl, who were living in a little apartment in the Hollywood Hills. And when they looked out of their window, they could see a ridge in the foreground, and they just could see a little point on this ridge that looked like an island in the sky. And they just started joking that this was our lot. Like, we're going to live there one day.
00:52:55
Speaker
And it was kind of just a pipe dream. And at that time, there were very few houses built in the Hollywood Hills. So it was just one of many lots graded for development. And one day they just went up there on a whim and said, let's go see our lot. And by coincidence, the owner of the lot happened to pull in. He lived in another town and just happened to be there for the day. And the lot was for sale. They bought it for $100 in a handshake.
00:53:21
Speaker
And then they dreamed up the house that they could put there that wouldn't obscure any of the view they had in this lot, a 270 degree view of Los Angeles and the ocean below beyond it. And they didn't want they didn't want any walls. And so they actually buck who was a commercial artist and then later went into sales in the aerospace industry.
00:53:45
Speaker
He built a model of the lot. He used crushed beer cans and clay and built a replica of the lot, and then he built a model of the house that he thought would give him a view from every room.
00:54:00
Speaker
And then he started shopping with this model for architects, and everyone turned him down and said, that's not buildable, or the lot's too small, or the lot's buildable because it was on a cliff. And so basically, the whole first act of the house is that it's this impossible idea. It's impossible to build. And when he finds the right architect in Pierre Koenig, a young architect who knew how to build with steel, which was the only way to have all glass walls,
00:54:27
Speaker
He, it starts to become possible, but then they have one hurdle after another to actually get it built and passed, you know, approved by City Hall, which the City Hall had never seen anything like it. And it was just, you know, the people were, it was breaking rules that hadn't even been written. So, you know, again, the Act One is kind of about this impossible thing. Well, then it gets built, and then it kind of turns into this architectural marvel. And also, it was, you know, home.
00:54:54
Speaker
And that's the chapter that I think not a lot of people who think they know everything about this house know is that, you know, it was the house of this family that was neither rich nor famous. They somehow raised three kids in this two bedroom, like, you know, 2300 square foot house that also had a pool immediately outside the children's bedroom. So the children had to get on and like get up and put
00:55:17
Speaker
life vests over their pajamas to come out. So then it was just kind of a home. And then at some point, a museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, does this major exhibition on the case study house program, which didn't even go into but it's what this house came out of in the post World War II era.
00:55:37
Speaker
And so that kind of gets the house on the, I think, on the radar of Hollywood. And then it enters this era of fame, where it starts appearing in movies and magazines, and then the house starts making money for the family that worked so hard to build it and make it possible. So it's almost like the arc of the house has these different phases. And it
00:56:01
Speaker
I don't know. The people who made it and the people who lived there were kind of the supporting characters, but it all kind of revolves around this house. So I don't know if that makes sense. I did read Tracy Kidder's house for inspiration, but that turns out to be a very different kind of book about the making of a house. Right. So what did it mean to be a case study house?
00:56:22
Speaker
So, the Case Study House Program is, and granted, I knew nothing about this when I started this book. Case Study House Program was one of the greatest experiments in American architecture. So, as World War II was drawing to a close, there was an editor named John Intensa who ran a magazine called Arts and Architecture. And he was not an architect, but he was a smart guy. And he had this realization that we would be sending home at the end of the war, six to seven million
00:56:49
Speaker
American GIs and they would have no place to live because all of the home building materials and resources and labor had been diverted to the war effort all of these years and virtually no houses had been built. So all of a sudden all these people were going to come home, we were going to have a housing crisis and in the housing crisis he envisioned that a lot of bad designed houses were going to be built.
00:57:10
Speaker
And he didn't want that to happen because he was, you know, he was a modernist. And so he came up with the idea that we could tap the nation's best young modernist architects to reimagine the American lifestyle and redesign the American home and just the middle class American home. He thought that he could give them, you know, match an architect with a client
00:57:32
Speaker
And the architect could design for the client a house that would serve as a prototype that could then be replicated nationwide using the processes of mass production and the materials developed for the war, which then needed a domestic market.
00:57:47
Speaker
So it was really, really a cool idea. And he commissioned a whole bunch of houses. And it was this win-win-win situation where the architect got to experiment with new materials, which were donated or sold at cost by suppliers in exchange for getting featured in the magazine. So they got free advertising. And then the clients got a little bit of a break on price because those supplies were donated or sold at cost.
00:58:15
Speaker
And so the magazine would publish the drawings that the architects produced before the house was built. It would publish then later issue photographs of the house going up, the construction. And then when it was done, it would photograph the results and it would keep the house open to the public for tours for some weeks before the family could move in.
00:58:36
Speaker
And it really was a great idea that, you know, now when I look at modern shelter magazines, and they have idea houses, it really kind of, I guess started here, the program didn't actually achieve the goals of producing these, you know, mass produced, good designed houses, because the lending community wasn't what was conservative, like banks basically wouldn't
00:59:01
Speaker
didn't want to give mortgages on modern houses. They wanted traditional houses that they knew would sell. And then also the construction industry was used to doing things the way they did, which is getting materials on site, cutting wood, and they were not set up to suddenly start building with steel, which requires a whole different set of tools and skill sets and procedures and processes. And so the experiment kind of failed, but now these houses are kind of architectural gems.
00:59:30
Speaker
And looking back, John and Tenza was really ahead of his time. It was a brilliant idea that didn't work out, and yet we learned a lot about design from it. You also write that the Stahl House is a portal. So in what way was it or is it a portal?
00:59:51
Speaker
You step in this house and it takes you back to an era when the world was different. It's really amazing. The house hasn't changed very well. I mean, it's changed very little. They added a Jacuzzi, but they've taken most of the houses as it was built. And when you go there, you feel
01:00:17
Speaker
I don't know the optimism and the freedom of that post war era when you felt like you know anything was possible and it was very hopeful era and the modernists believed that they could change the world by changing the way people lived and you just kind of feel that in this house and I'm no architecture expert but
01:00:36
Speaker
The fact that something that's inanimate, this designed place, could move you emotionally and take you back to this time and place is pretty remarkable. So if you ever get a chance to go take a tour, you should. It's really something.
01:00:54
Speaker
Now in this book, too, there isn't a whole lot of what I would say like classic sort of tension or conflict in the book. There is a kernel of it, but I think it was more or less saved for the end notes, which we'll get into in a moment. But for a book of this nature where there isn't that like, what happens next? What happens next? What happens next?
01:01:17
Speaker
keep to use a bad how do you keep shoveling coal into that furnace when there wasn't you know that classic narrative propulsion that was something we're used to with a real page turner if that makes any sense
01:01:31
Speaker
Well, I do think it's there on a chapter level. In each chapter, there is a little thread of tension. In the beginning, it's the dream, but we could never afford it. And then how do they make it possible? Later, it's how are we going to get it approved? The architect was just battling with City Hall, and they were having problems getting it approved, and they had to redesign some things.
01:01:56
Speaker
in order to actually make it happen. And then later when it was getting ready to be photographed, there's a lot of tension because on the day it was supposed to be photographed, it wasn't done. The floors were bare concrete, there was plaster dust everywhere, the landscaping wasn't done, and the photographer's like going, I need to get in here and shoot because the deadline's next week, and the architect is stressing out because the house isn't done. So there is tension, but it's more on a,
01:02:26
Speaker
you know, the arc of the house maybe doesn't have the tension of a typical novel, but each chapter has its own little thing of tension. And then there's a chapter on all of the threats of the house, like the fire that came within a quarter of a mile from destroying the house. So I do think it's there. It's just on a chapter by chapter level, if that makes sense.
01:02:45
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And there's also the tension between the very sort of bullheaded photographer, but also with the architect. And then there's also this idea that Buck had this model of the house, but Koenig was just like, no, he didn't. I didn't see that. This house is my idea. So it was almost like a conflict of egos in a lot of ways too.
01:03:08
Speaker
Exactly. And I think that's where the real tension for me came in, because I wanted everyone's side of the story to be heard. And there's some things that we will never know for sure. I looked really hard, because these people are not around to speak for themselves, so I had to go off of interview transcripts that they did when they were alive.
01:03:30
Speaker
And so, you know, I searched for an interview transcript where Koenig said, I saw Buck's model and I couldn't find that. But I did hear him talking about the elements of Buck's model that he then had to change. And so I had to be very careful handling that in a way that didn't, you know, offend the people and the historians who are like, well, you know, we don't, I mean, there's a lot of people who will believe that, you know,
01:03:56
Speaker
didn't see the model and there are a lot of people who are going to believe that, of course he did. And so I tried to kind of leave that up to the reader to decide what they believe and give them, you know, the facts that I was able to find. So that's where, I don't know, that's where a lot of tension for me came from. Yeah. And you also, you do something cool with the end notes where you make into, you know, narrative end notes. So what was the, you know, the purpose behind that instead of just annotating things in the back?
01:04:26
Speaker
Well, I knew you had read those, and I'm so delighted that you read my notes, my endnotes. You know, one thing was that there were so many little stories, little side stories that either didn't pass fact checking, but were really fun, like things to consider. And there were things that just didn't fit in the chapter, but they were part of the mystique and the story of the house. And I just thought like, I wanted
01:04:52
Speaker
I didn't want to write however many pages of endnotes there. I didn't want to write stuff that was just going to be tacked on like a dead weight, like an albatross. And I also didn't just, I just didn't want to write endnotes. I think I looked at all of the different formats and studied different books and I was like, I'm going to claw my eyes out if I have to do this.
01:05:12
Speaker
and no one's going to read them. I wanted them to be useful for a future researcher or an architecture student, but I also wanted them to be like part of the book that you'd actually want to read. So some of my favorite little tidbits are actually in the endnotes. And I have to say like one of my favorite parts of the book got cut because out of respect for Carlotta, it was just a little bit risque, but
01:05:36
Speaker
it was one of my favorite parts. And I'll share it with you because it's funny. But basically, there's a moment where I realized that this house has inspired art, but also it might have, I don't know, there's this full circle moment of possibly art inspiring architecture and then inspiring art. And so I think it started when I found this
01:06:00
Speaker
this mu mu shoot mu mu is a, I guess, part of Prada, the designer, there was a photograph of models falling into the pool. And then there was a photograph of like, someone diving into the pool and the splash is coming up out of the pool, all you see is the splash. And then the stall house in the background is blacked out. And I was like, why would you black out the stall house? That's weird.
01:06:21
Speaker
And so I went and interviewed the photographer and he said, Oh, well, it was it was inspired by a painting by David Hockney. And the painting is called A Bigger Splash. And it's very famous. And David Hockney is a British artist who is now in his 70s, or 80s, maybe I don't know he's, but he's still painting.
01:06:38
Speaker
And I was like, well, that's really interesting. I think it was kind of a 1960s era painting. And then I found a quote from attributed to David Hockney and in it he said, I moved to Los Angeles from England for two reasons. And one of them was Julius Shulman's photograph of Case Study House 21. And then in the stories where this quote was used, he
01:06:59
Speaker
they went on to talk about the importance of swimming pools on his work. Well, I got to thinking, wait a minute, Case Study House 21 doesn't have a swimming pool. 21 was also designed by Pierre Koenig and also photographed by Julius Schulman and is very close to 22, but 22 has a pool and 21 does not. So what if he really meant 22? Then it would be this really crazy circle of like,
01:07:22
Speaker
you know, Julie Shulman's photograph of this house inspired Hockney to come here. He paints this painting, which then inspires a photo shoot that takes place at the Stahl house. Like, wouldn't that be really neat? And I mean, of course, this matters to no one but me. But I went to great lengths to fact check this. And I couldn't figure out, like, where the source of the quote came from. It was attributed to a woman named Diane Hanson. And it was used in two different kind of art magazine articles about David Hockney.
01:07:52
Speaker
So I'm looking through, you know, is she an art historian? Is she an architect? Is she, you know, who is this woman? Well, I come to find out that Diane Hanson is the sexy book editor for Tashin, which is a publisher who does a lot of beautiful books about modernist architecture and also newts.
01:08:12
Speaker
know, they do a lot of, you know, like, the sexy book line does like the big book of breasts and the big book of butts and, you know, you get the idea, right? And so I was like, well, maybe she has a transcript. So I
01:08:28
Speaker
email Diane Hanson and she gets right back to me and she's really lovely. And she's like, no, that actually there, there was no interview. It was a comment he made at a dinner party in which he was talking about why he came to LA. And he said the other reason and she's like, and this is the more like more germane to the conversation. You can't leave this part out is that you know, reason number one might have been for him coming to the United States might have been
01:08:52
Speaker
Julie Schulman's photograph of one of the case study houses. But the other reason was this Homer erotic nude photo magazine called Physique Pictorial.
01:09:03
Speaker
wow, this is really a big non sequitur for this book. So I was like, okay, well, do you think do you think he meant 22? She's like he very well might have like we're all drinking and 2122 same photographer, same architect, like that would make sense. And so I tried to go through David Hockney's people. And I couldn't they basically just, you know, shut me down because he's painting in France and he's painting in Normandy and he doesn't want to be
01:09:29
Speaker
interrupted. At some point, I know that he doesn't like emails, so I got on a 1930s royal typewriter and typed him out a note and put it in a handwritten envelope and sent him $20. It was just basically like, did you really mean $22? Here's the picture, here's the quote, checkbox, here's a postcard, send it back. I don't think
01:09:53
Speaker
it got to him. But it was really, really fun trying to nail it down. And at some point, I think Kelly Lynch, who's the actress, she's big into mid-century modern preservation of architecture. And I got on the phone with her and she told me this wonderful story about a cocktail, like, no, no, no, a party for Julia Schulman.
01:10:17
Speaker
it was like his 90-something birthday party and she threw it and there was a champagne glass with a burlesque dancer dancing in bubbles in the champagne glass and at some point she throws her bra off and it lands on Julius' head.
01:10:32
Speaker
And at the end of the night, Julia Schulman says that that was the best night of my life. So I found the burlesque dancer, her name is Catherine Delish, and I fact checked it with her. But ultimately, all of this got cut because Carlotta Stahl was very adamant that, you know, as as much photography went on in her house and filming, there was going to be no nudity and no like, you know, you know, no sex movies there. And so, you know, her kids were like, you know, I don't think we can put this in like my mom would be really upset. So
01:11:00
Speaker
So you have to cut it out. But anyway, it was kind of fun, fun rabbit trail. So that's the kind of stuff that you'll find in the footnotes. And that's why I made them into, or the endnotes, that's why I made them into narrative endnotes. So that you would actually want to read them. And if you did, you would kind of walk away like chuckling and glad you did.
01:11:19
Speaker
So I hope you, did you enjoy them? I hope. Oh yeah, of course. I had come to it late in the night when I had finished the book proper at night and there was only, you know, there was like five or so pages of those narrative end notes. I'm like, oh, I'm going to save these for the next day because I want to come at these fresh. And it was, yeah, it was great. It delivered for sure.
01:11:42
Speaker
never seen it done. It was like, oh, why not, you know? Absolutely. But really, I couldn't, I couldn't decide on a real format. And I think it would have just like, killed my soul to do it the normal way. Oh, yeah, for sure. Now, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the photograph that the famous photograph that's on the cover of the book that Julia Schulman took one shot Schulman and how, you know, how famous and iconic that photograph is, because that's very much
01:12:09
Speaker
enmeshed in the narrative of the house. It is. It is such an amazing photograph. So it was one of Time magazine's 100 most iconic photographs of all time. There was a book that came out and, you know, you recognize a lot of the pictures, like the picture of the guys having lunch on the skyscraper, you know, is on the cover. But it was this photograph that is probably the most
01:12:39
Speaker
published and famous photographs of anything Julie Shulman took. I mean, it isn't probably, it is. It is his most famous photograph. But even outside of Shulman's context, it really sums up a moment in time and the whole optimism of the post-World War II era.
01:12:58
Speaker
it just signifies everything that California and particularly Hollywood was at that time. And when you look at it, you're like, that's the dream. That's the California dream, is living in a place like this. And it's a nighttime photograph of the corner of a house. And the house is cantilevered over a cliff. And it's in the Hollywood Hills. So the city of Los Angeles just spreads out like this glittering carpet from there to the horizon.
01:13:28
Speaker
And what's really cool is in this nighttime photograph, because the streets are lit up at night, you can see how the angles of the house, the lines of the roof, the lines of the floor, actually are extend and match perfectly up with the lines of the gridded streets below.
01:13:47
Speaker
And that was not by accident. So Pierre Koenig really wanted the house to be an extension of the city and the city to be an extension of the house. So they are really kind of, you know, enmeshed together and you really see it in this photograph. And then in the suspended corner of the house, which is brightly lit and in sharp contrast to the dark outside, you see these two young women in white dresses sitting with their ankles crossed, you know, and back straight just, you know, talking to one another.
01:14:17
Speaker
What's so interesting about this photo is that it contains no one who actually had anything to do with the house. The girls were girlfriends of two architecture students that Pierre Koenig recruited to come help with the photo shoot because Julius Schulman liked to put people in his photographs.
01:14:36
Speaker
I mean, he's largely considered to be someone who changed the course of lifestyle photography by putting people and greenery in his photos. And so he told Pierre like, hey, tell your architecture students to bring their girlfriends, tell them to wear something nice they might be in a photo. And so they were actually just sitting there in the corner of the living room.
01:14:58
Speaker
when Schulman was setting up an indoor shot, and he stepped outside for some reason. And when he stepped outside, he saw, he saw them there and thought that, oh, we're completely resetting up the shot. And so he changed the lights, he had the girls, you know, sit there in the dark. And there's this famous, you know, I think it was something like a seven minute exposure where it was very tricky, because back then, no digital photography, of course,
01:15:21
Speaker
And he had them, I think, sit in the dark for seven minutes, perfectly still, while he turned off all the lights and he opened the shutter and let the ambient light from the city kind of burn itself into the negative. And then he had replaced the lights in the, in basically in all of the lights that you see in the picture and the interior lights with flash bulbs. And when the flash bulbs went off for just a split second, it lit the shot and the interior.
01:15:47
Speaker
And so it's a really tricky exposure and to think that he just nailed it with one shot at a time when you couldn't like chimp and look at your pictures is pretty amazing. So that story is in the book and I actually have a sidebar where he tells it in his own words. And it's pretty cool to see like how it was created and all of the things that had to come together. But
01:16:12
Speaker
What I think is most important about this shot is that without this photograph, I don't think the house would be as famous as it is today. I don't know that the case study house program would be quite as renowned as it is because the photograph really showed, you know, it doesn't even show the whole house, but it really captured the essence of what this was all about and the essence of the time in which it took place.
01:16:38
Speaker
So, I don't know. I think Time Magazine had a good reason to put it in that book. What did it mean for you to be able to jump off the roof of the house and into that pool?
01:16:51
Speaker
So, it's funny because, you know, one of the little known stories, I think, behind the house is that Bruce and Sherry, who are my co-authors, who grew up in the house, their dad was Buck Stahl and their mom was Carlotta. When they were little kids, like six or seven, their dad propped a ladder up against the roof and climbed up there with them and they all jumped off the roof into the pool.
01:17:16
Speaker
And the roof has these long overhanging eaves. And so you just had to kind of aim for the deep end. And it's a pretty deep pool. And then Bruce actually went on. They both went on to be competitive swimmers in high school. And Bruce went on to break a world record in the 50 meter
01:17:32
Speaker
free. And so this pool really shaped their lives. So they came to me and basically asked me to write their book. And they said, but if you really want to know what it was like to grow up in this house, you have to jump off the roof. So we have to bring you out to LA and you're going to have to jump off the roof. And I was like, oh, twist my arm. I love jumping off shit. It's like,
01:17:55
Speaker
It's my jam." So I was like, you found the right writer. But it was really cool. And the photo that ended up being, you know, they're like, we need an author shot in the book. And I hate author portraits, for the most part. Like, I have some that a photographer took that are very nice, but I just don't feel like myself. But this photograph was basically the first time I jumped off the roof. Bruce is like, here, give me your iPhone. And he's a pretty good photographer with an iPhone. And he
01:18:25
Speaker
you know, did one of those bursts where he shot me jumping all the way into the pool. And it's hilarious because I look like a ninja and my mouth is open, my hair's flying into my mouth, my eyes are bugging out. It's really like not attractive. But it's so me. And so when it came time to, you know, pick an author photo, I was like, I'm sorry, guys, this this is this is I don't have anything that's better than this.
01:18:51
Speaker
They're like, we love it. And so when Vanity Fair did their excerpt, it's not in the actual magazine, but it's online. And I was like, oh, my God. You look like Spider-Man. Totally. You got the arms going back, the knees drawn up to your chest. You look like a comic book hero.
01:19:11
Speaker
Yeah, and that pretty much, that's the authentic me. I'm not a fancy clothes-wearing. It's really hard for me to learn to walk in heels. It just felt kind of perfect. But it was fun. The thing that I've promised my son is that we're going to go to LA in a couple of weeks for the lunch party, and he's going to get to jump off the roof. He's so excited.
01:19:40
Speaker
That's amazing. Well, Kim, I want to be mindful of your time. You're someone I could talk to for five hours. Oh, likewise. You're someone I would talk to. We'll have to turn the faucet off on this one for now. But we'll have to do this more frequently, for sure. But I'm so happy that we got to do this for the first time on the mics. Where can people get more familiar with you and your work if they're not already familiar with it?
01:20:09
Speaker
Well, Google. And I have a website that's kimhcross.com. You have to put the H in. And I'm on the socials, but I'm not very good at them. So like you can find me on Twitter, but I really suck at Twitter. So just don't judge.
01:20:32
Speaker
What a cool person.
Support and New Podcast Plans
01:20:33
Speaker
What a great person to hang with. Kim has introduced me to two agents in the last six months or so to try to get my foot in the door to publish the Tools of Ignorance, my humble little baseball book.
01:20:45
Speaker
And though both agents have said no, one definitely said no and one is doing the agent thing where they kind of ghost you. It's just part of the game. Whatever. The fact that Kim went out of her way to put me in touch with people and move me up the slush, that should tell you everything you need to know about the kind of person Kim is.
01:21:04
Speaker
While I'm feeling all gooey inside, thanks to West Virginia Wesleyan College's MFA in Creative Writing for the Sport, Casualty of Words, the writing podcast for people in a hurry, dig it. And also, who would I be? What kind of a monster would I be if I wasn't thanking you? The listener. Means the world, CNFers.
01:21:25
Speaker
Hey, when you're a middling writer and podcaster like me, and I suspect there's a chunk of you out there, too, that you get it, you know that we live and die by reviews. I always read new ones on the podcast, so if you have a few moments, heck, while the water is boiling for your tea or your coffee, just go over to Apple Podcasts and just peck out a little review. It takes less than five minutes.
01:21:49
Speaker
You can also keep the conversation going Instagram at creative nonfiction podcast and Twitter at CNF pod at Brendan O'Mara I know Have a good time. The show is partly made possible by the incredible cohort of members at patreon building up the patreon coffers grants you access to transcripts and audio magazine and coaching helps pay for the podcast hosting which is
01:22:13
Speaker
Not cheap. Also keeps the backlog alive so you can go way back and you can see some of the great, great interviews that took place in the first hundred, the second hundred, and now we're in the third hundred. We're almost coming up to 300 and they stay up there for you to listen to because of the hosting. Show is free but it ain't cheap, you know I'm saying. So visit patreon.com slash cnfpot, shop around, help support the community.
01:22:43
Speaker
Speaking of podcasts, I'm getting my ducks in a row for a new one. I know, I know. Brendan, focus! But this one has more of a purpose. It's going to coincide with the publication, or prior publication, whenever that might happen, of the memoir, Tools of Ignorance. The podcast will be this. Okay, get ready. The Tools of Ignorance. Conversations from behind the plate, or behind home plate.
01:23:06
Speaker
whereby I get the dirt from the game's best catchers, past and present, about the art and craft of playing catcher, the conversations on the mound with umpires, managers, hitters, game prep, series prep, dealing with starting pitchers and bullpen pitchers,
01:23:22
Speaker
Hat tip to my pal Kevin Wilson the batting instructor for opening my eyes to some of these things that an insider would find interesting so the esoteric stuff But I think it'll all be of interest to the insiders and fans who I hope will also dig a pretty cool memoir about About a baseball about father and son about a family broken by divorce. It's a divorce memoir disguised as a baseball book if you ask me But that's up to the reader
01:23:50
Speaker
It'll be broken
Reflections on Podcast Growth
01:23:51
Speaker
up into nine episode seasons, nine for, you know, innings. I'm reaching out to Johnny Bench right now, Jason Veritech, Pudge Rodriguez, Jorge Posada, and get this, my sister and father for season one. They were catchers.
01:24:06
Speaker
This will help, I hope, build some roots in the baseball world that should help drive interest in the book. One would hope. So I plan on keeping that podcast like 25 minutes or so. I'm going to try to bank a lot of interviews and produce a bunch and get ahead. Not like the scramble that is never taking a break with CNF pod. Such is life.
01:24:32
Speaker
I don't see how that baseball one won't be popular, but I can also see that it might not, despite having really famous people on the show, because I'm not famous, which is not that I want fame. I just want a little bit, just a little bit, a little juice. And being not famous is the problem that keeps this podcast from reaching its full potential, in my opinion.
01:24:57
Speaker
It's like if Cheryl Strait had started a podcast before Wild and before people knew she was sugar, she'd probably have a middling podcast much like this one. But by middling, I just mean audience size.
01:25:12
Speaker
I think the quality is high, but if you're not famous enough, it doesn't get in front of enough people, no matter. But because she got memoir famous, she would elevate the status of everyone who visits her show. And so guests would engage and the flywheel would spin and so forth.
01:25:30
Speaker
But the status ballet is tough when you're not famous, even when you have famous guests on your show. They don't tend to engage because it doesn't really help their status, it might even hurt their status to be associated with a jabroni like me.
01:25:45
Speaker
I see it all the time. It definitely hurts, not gonna lie. I'm just like, ugh, I see what you're doing there, and I don't like that, and it hurts. But I know we're doing good work here. Deep down, I know we are. So I keep showing up for you as best I can, because I know this show is hitting the bullseye for a lot of you, and it means the world to me that it means something to you, and that's why I keep showing up. So I hope that's enough.
01:26:12
Speaker
I still hope you get some value from the show as it keeps developing and so forth. You know how when you listen to some other interviews, you know a Mark Maron interview. You know that's a WTF interview. I can't even pinpoint what a CNF pod interview is. Is it breaking down?
01:26:34
Speaker
books, analyzing books, is it the writer's life? It tends to be more like that. I have a hard time pinpointing, I guess the overarching voice of the show. You think I'd have an idea after nearly 300 of these, but I don't. I truly don't.
01:26:54
Speaker
So that's the journey of it, I suppose. Maybe you can tell me. Maybe you have a better idea than I do. So anyway, I hope this show is still a toe tappin' good time. So throw toe tappin'. Nah, toe tappin'. So throw up those horns, CNF-ers. Stay wild. And if you can't do interviews, see ya.
01:27:41
Speaker
you