Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 378: Steven Moore
1.3k Plays1 year ago
Steven Moore is the author of The Distance from Slaughter County: Lessons from Flyover Country (UNC Press).
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Substack: Rage Against the Algorithm
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Sponsor: Liquid IV, code cnf
Recommended
Transcript
Sponsor Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
ACN efforts, this episode is sponsored by Liquid I.V. And I gotta say, this is a delicious way to rehydrate and fuel those endurance activities, or if you just want to zhuzh up your water. As some of you know, I kind of was training for the Unsanctioned Mackenzie Marathon. It's postponed, I will say that.
00:00:19
Speaker
But liquid ivy was there for me in that bottle until he and fitness just not coming along. I can't blame the hydration of liquid ivy. I blame myself. It's some tasty stuff.
00:00:34
Speaker
I love the lemon lime. Non-GMO. Free from gluten, dairy and soy. So you know you're burly. Vegan digs it. That might be the problem. Maybe guys like me are just not supposed to run marathons. We're just like too beefy. I'm just like a beefy guy. Get 20% off when you go to liquidiv.com and use promo code CNF at checkout. That's 20% off anything.
00:00:58
Speaker
You order when you shop better hydration today using the promo code CNF at liquidiv.com.
Guest Introduction: Stephen Moore
00:01:06
Speaker
I feel like I don't really understand an essay until I read it a few times. Oh hey CNFers, it's
00:01:24
Speaker
CNF bought that creative non-fiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Meara. Yes. Look who's back.
Stephen Moore's Book Overview
00:01:34
Speaker
Stephen Moore, a writer based out of Corvallis, Oregon, just up the five from me down here in the Emerald City. Stephen's new book is The Distance from Slaughter County Lessons from Flyover Country. It is published by the University of North Carolina Press. It's a great, punchy essay collection about the Midwest, what it stands for.
00:01:58
Speaker
and how Steven views his time growing up in Iowa from the inside and now the outside having lived in Oregon for close to 10 years and the West Coast even longer. Essays range from how coastal reporters cover Iowa, Shania Twain, Garth Brooks, the sitcom Home Improvement, Blockbuster Video, and Ida Tarbell in Standard Oil. Yeah, all that's in there in like 150 pages.
00:02:27
Speaker
I'm bang for your word buck.
Promoting Newsletter and Patreon
00:02:30
Speaker
Make sure you're heading over to BrendanMara.com for show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. Just click the lightning bolt on my website if you happen to be over there. Or visit RageAgainstTheAlgorithm.substack.com. First of the month, no spam. Still can't beat it. It goes up to 11, by the way.
00:02:50
Speaker
If you dig the show, consider sharing it with your networks. Whatever the shape of those networks look like these days. So we can grow the pie and get the CNFing thing into the brains of other CNFers who need the juice. You can also leave a kind review on Apple Podcast, so the wayward CNFer might be like, well shit, I'll give that a shot. I don't know who that guy is, but I'll give that show a shot, cause I know who that guy is. You follow me. There's also patreon.com slash CNF pod.
00:03:17
Speaker
We got two more $4 a month patrons. Yes. LaVaughn Ellis and Natasha Varner. Thank you very, very much. That is awesome.
Personalizing Patreon Offerings
00:03:26
Speaker
And I came on my birthday, so I was like, yes. You could drop a few bucks in the hat if you glean some value. The show is free, but as you know, it sure as hell ain't cheap. I've been doing these one on one calls of late and I've long wanted to provide more value for patrons. And I'm like, what can I give you? Like, what can I make?
00:03:46
Speaker
And there's only 25 patrons, which is great given the size of the show, but there's only 25. And until that number gets unruly, let's say, I don't know. Thank you, Lachlan, for that. North of 100. It's very unlikely as that is. Maybe the best thing I can offer is my time. The upper tiers will get perhaps quarterly phone calls with transcripts and audio for your records so you can revisit it.
00:04:12
Speaker
lower tiers might just get a shorter call or a same call, but no transcripts in audio. You know, without the extra bells and whistles. Frankly, given the scope of the show, I don't see the Patreon or the Patreon count far exceeding my ability to deliver Sage Council in this morass we're all in. Shout out to Athletic Brewing, of course, my favorite non-alcoholic beer out there. Not a paid plug.
Athletic Brewing Promotion
00:04:38
Speaker
I'm just a brand ambassador and I want to celebrate this amazing product.
00:04:41
Speaker
If you head to athleticbrewing.com, use the promo code BRENDANO20 to check out somebody, please use it. You get a nice little discount on your first.
00:04:51
Speaker
Order, speaking of promo codes and affiliate type ad reads, often we don't get money for reading the ad. We get money when you buy the stuff. So yeah, well I don't get any money for this one. Not an official sponsor of the podcast. I just get points for t-shirts and beer. Give it a shot.
00:05:13
Speaker
A little more about Steven, he also is the author of The Longer We Were There, a memoir of a part-time soldier, which won the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction. His work has appeared in The Kenyan Review, Georgia Review, and more. So, let's just get into it.
Engaging with Author's Mind
00:05:31
Speaker
Now we talk a lot about just the essay and voice, and my goodness, this is good to have Steven back.
00:05:51
Speaker
The mark of a really good essay collection is just like I think a lot. I'm not the person who's coined this term, but it's just like, oh, you want to like have fun hanging or you enjoyed hanging out with that person's mind. And it was like, oh, so that's what I kind of that's what I enjoyed about your book so much. I'm like, oh, I'm having fun where Steven is taking me through through this book.
00:06:14
Speaker
I really appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, I agree. I feel like that's one of the one of the ways that I know that I'm in like a book that I want to be in is just like enjoying the way that they think and being surprised by the way that someone thinks and just enjoying the like where they're where they're leading me because it's never a place that I would have been able to predict. But that's that's what makes it kind of like exciting and invigorating to me. So that's super cool to
Rereading Essays for Depth
00:06:43
Speaker
hear.
00:06:43
Speaker
And that gets to a level of next level, let's say, reading like a writer. And at what point did that switch turn on for you where you were starting to not just read for entertainment, but you had a next step literacy of reading like a writer, reading like you're going to maybe analyze something and try to convey something on a deeper level to a reader.
00:07:07
Speaker
A lot of the momentum that I get in writing is when I read something and feel the urge to respond to it. Where either because I disagree with it or because I just want to keep going with their line of thought.
00:07:24
Speaker
And it's not, it's like by no means like every book, but especially when I'm reading a lot of books and I'll see patterns among them and I'll want to put them in conversation with each other or I'll want to just like be part of the conversation that they have initiated.
00:07:42
Speaker
it's that like instinct like i'm just excited about what they're talking about i have more to say about it maybe i have like a disagreement but i want to take this writer's ideas and just participate and put them in to conversation with either with me or with another book that i read i think these two these two writers are talking to each other even if they're not doing it directly and i just want to like step in and like let
00:08:07
Speaker
the essay be a form for making that conversation possible and That's just like one of the things like one of the kind of sources of energy that I get from writing is being able to like just be excited about the work that other people have done and just like I want to keep going with it like the Dialogue that they've started. I want to I want it to keep going and I wanted to participate and
00:08:31
Speaker
How often do you find that you need to reread an essay for it to really, really sink in? I feel like every time. I feel like I don't really understand an essay until I've read it a few times. I mean, there's always the joy of the first pass, the first reading of it.
00:08:57
Speaker
But anytime I really, really am interested, like it's always like rereading and rereading and rereading. Yeah, all the time. I mean,
Influences on Writing Style
00:09:07
Speaker
I was just pulling out Zadie Smith's Feel Free because it occurred to me that I read that book for the first time.
00:09:14
Speaker
right as I was starting to work on the distance from Slaughter County and it was just like her cadence and her kind of balance of like humor and seriousness and like in some moments she's really like academic and like scholarly in her thinking and some moments she's very
00:09:32
Speaker
like almost like flip and personal and there's just like a great like variation of of how she composes her work and I think that like some of her like cadence and some of her just style like interested me a lot and got me moving in a lot of ways and I would just read I had been rereading like those essays for
00:09:55
Speaker
you know, the last couple of years, just like pulling the Joni Mitchell essay off the shelf or pulling the Key and Peele essay off the shelf or the Jay-Z essay or the one on Joy. And just like going back and like always being surprised like, oh yeah, it's like this Joni Mitchell piece also like spends a lot of time on Kierkegaard and like the story of Abraham and like always being surprised at the way that she does something. But it always takes like rereading it to really like
00:10:22
Speaker
understand and like like digest it for me. What sucks about let's say like reading and trying to connect dots across various influences versus say like listening to music or watching movies it's like you watch a movie it's like okay that's two hours that's cool like you can kind of get in get in and out and you can rewatch it again and it's like okay four hours all right I'm getting
00:10:49
Speaker
But reading is, at least for me especially, is very time intensive. I'm not a terribly fast reader. I know some people that can just fly through books with comprehension. I am not like that. I cannot do it. I envy them greatly.
00:11:04
Speaker
And so to be able to connect dots across various writers and see those influences in the family tree of a writer, it's great if you can get to that point, but my god, it takes a frustratingly amount of so much time compared to, say, music or painting or movies.
00:11:24
Speaker
Yeah, and like I think I've started gravitating toward like really short books lately, in part because I know that when I respond really positively to a book, my first instinct is going to be like, I want to read that again.
00:11:36
Speaker
But if it's a gigantic like tone of a book, there's no way that's going to be possible. But like these, you know, these like 100 page books or 150 page books, I've been like super excited about lately. Because like if they pull it off, like the first thing I want to do is read again. And like that makes it not just consume another like three months of my time. Like you can do it. You have space for it. And I think that's like a cool, like just a cool way to be able to engage with a book.
00:12:05
Speaker
Yeah, what I like to do, you said a moment ago too, is when you're kind of like looking for a certain degree of inspiration, I pull that one essay down from the shelf from this book and I'm like, all right, I want to unpack that one a little more. Or I know...
00:12:21
Speaker
What I'm writing, I want to kind of like approach that star in some sense. And it's like pulling down an album. You know, if you're a musician, you're like, you know, I need to listen to this record. Maybe it's going to that's going to get into my steep, get into my bones. I want to steep in that sound is going to help me write riffs better.
00:12:38
Speaker
And I love that about books being kind of like that too, books as mentors, books as inspiration, not to plagiarize, but to really inform and inspire. I kind of like that. You just go to your shelf, I need to pull this sucker down.
00:12:54
Speaker
And there ends up being like, yeah, I absolutely agree. And I feel like for me, there's kind of like this automatic sort of like juxtaposition that happens. Cause like when I was working on this project, there was like one stack of books that I was reading for content. Like they were research like sources, like outside sources, like whether it was one of like Ida Tarbell's books or like a book about the Midwest or whatever the case was, there was like one stack of books that I was reading.
00:13:22
Speaker
because I wanted to be specifically in conversation with the kind of work that they were doing and the topic that they were talking about. And then there was another stack that I was just really excited about stylistically. And none of the content shows up in the book. I'm not really responding to those writers in a content kind of way, but I was really excited about
00:13:47
Speaker
the way they were making essays or the way they were making prose and I just like wanted to be close to their work and being able to pull it off the shelf, spend half an hour with it and then try to do it. Like try to like do my best like impression of it and then whatever whatever like
00:14:07
Speaker
failed attempt I make to do that ends up being like the closest I could do but you end up having this kind of like juxtaposition between like the stuff that's really really inspiring from like a stylistic kind of way and then the people that I want to be in conversation with just because of like the idea and having that like
00:14:26
Speaker
that kind of distance and that kind of tension was kind of fun to play with because there ends up being, yeah, just like a sort of a tension. Like when I was writing about Ida Tarbo, like the book stylistically that I was really into was the novel, Fleishman is in Trouble. I don't know if you're familiar with it. Heard of it, yeah. Absolutely wonderful novel. And there was just this like really interesting confidence in the like prose style that
00:14:55
Speaker
The novel has this amazing understanding of her character's psychology. There's a certain rhythm to it. It moves really, really well. The book has nothing to do with the topic that I was writing about, but I just wanted to try to take that kind of prose style and apply it to this woman who was born in like 1857 in like Western Pennsylvania and try to like write her life in this style and just kind of see what happens.
00:15:22
Speaker
And I feel like a lot of the essays ended up with this kind of collision between the topic that I was interested in and just some kind of essayistic form that I wanted to try to approach it with. For you, when you're setting out to write an essay, what is the seed that starts for you?
00:15:42
Speaker
A lot of them in this project just had to do with place. That ended up being the piece of it that if I couldn't get a topic, if I couldn't understand a topic really effectively through the lens of the Midwest or of Iowa or Oregon, if I couldn't think of it through that lens, it didn't really work.
00:16:06
Speaker
And so a lot of the time I would just be sort of, I would think of an idea that I'd be kind of interested in and that would be the sort of the test for whether I could like keep it in this project because it was really place-based essay collection about like growing up in Iowa and then you know moving out to the west coast. I've been living in Oregon for about almost 10 years now and being able to try to think through like
00:16:32
Speaker
a sort of like dislocation and like in a way like a certain kind of estrangement in place like being able to think through that lens toward an idea so like when I start writing about like
00:16:48
Speaker
home improvement as a sitcom. Like you could write about any kind of television show, but like home improvement was interesting to me because it was set in the Midwest in a way. And like, it's a topic that I can think through in terms of like its setting and its location and how that location
00:17:06
Speaker
affects its characters and that kind of that kind of sensibility and being able to do that for each piece and still have it be a kind of like surprising approach like that was sort of what was really driving me like I have to be able to do that for each piece but I also want each piece to do it in a different way.
Media Portrayal of Midwest
00:17:27
Speaker
So it's kind of a chicken and egg question. What came first, the idea of this essay collection of distance from Slaughter County as an idea? Or had you written a few essays and this notion of place, be it Blockbuster Oregon, California, Iowa, Home Improvement?
00:17:48
Speaker
Did those those things start you did you just write those and you're like, oh my god this this theme sort of unconsciously sort of bubbled up and then you a collection started to form as a result of what you were working on and
00:18:02
Speaker
I had like the idea of the theme, like really from the beginning, one of the first like really big essays in the book, it's called The Problem with Landing. And it was really where I started writing the book. It was, I had been reading a lot about the Midwest. This was kind of in 2018. There had been a lot of like, sort of discourse about the Midwest and about Iowa in particular, after the 2016 election, there had been like a
00:18:31
Speaker
a wave of journalism that had sort of descended on Iowa after the election trying to understand how people had voted. There had been a kind of like counter discourse to that of people just like picking apart.
00:18:46
Speaker
what these journalists were doing, going into diners and asking these random people about how they voted. There was just a lot of thinking about what the Midwest represented. Iowa was getting a lot of attention in particular because it had voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then had
00:19:07
Speaker
um flipped to trump in 2016 so it was getting a lot of attention there were a lot of people who were writing in a lot of different kinds of media about what it like what it represented there were a lot of books coming out from writers in the midwest who were
00:19:22
Speaker
kind of representing themselves and making an argument for themselves rather than from like coastal journalists and it just kind of got me thinking about like women to me to no longer live there to be living in Oregon and to be trying to have some kind of like thoughtful relationship to place where a lot of the things that I was reading didn't quite
00:19:49
Speaker
didn't quite ring true for me or they didn't feel like exactly like they applied to the way that I was thinking about Iowa or what it meant to me from there. And so I started working on this essay about flyover country and what it meant for that.
00:20:05
Speaker
phrase to be thrown around all the time and it really started to feel like this is more than an essay. It's a larger idea and it'll be the project to try to combat that idea in some like different and hopefully like unexpected ways and being able to try to like find the like the tensions and the contradictions and explore them and sit with them and like
00:20:30
Speaker
being able to approach to some of the discomforts of place and kind of dwell there in a way that hopefully feels like productive and constructive and new. But it definitely started at the beginning. It definitely was part of the onset of the project and just finding from there, like finding different ways that I could come at that theme that didn't feel like predictable or didn't feel tired. But yeah, it was from the beginning.
00:21:00
Speaker
At what point did you feel like you might have been something of a black sheep from Washington, Iowa, and you were a bit more liberally slanted growing up in a pretty conservative family, and you write pretty candidly about that in the book, and I wonder at what point did that strike you like, you know, I might need to, eh, it's probably in my best interest if I find some other place to live.
00:21:26
Speaker
I don't know. Sometimes I think I'm just a very easily persuadable person. Whoever I'm in the immediate presence of, whatever idea that they have and are confident about, it's just like, yeah, I absolutely completely agree with what you're saying. And then I go talk to somebody else and they have the exact opposite opinion. But yeah, absolutely agree with what you're saying.
00:21:49
Speaker
And I don't think it was that I felt like I had a different perspective necessarily, but like once, you know, I grew up in like, you know, pretty rural Southeast Iowa, pretty small town. And then I went to, you know, the University of Iowa for college and it was just a really exciting, like Iowa City is a great, interesting, exciting place. It's a very literary town. There was a lot of like,
00:22:14
Speaker
There's just a lot there to pay attention to and learn from. And it just started complicating my sense of like, even of what it meant to live in Iowa, to try to reconcile the fact that my small town in farmland of Iowa, that's Iowa, but so is Iowa City. So is everything about Iowa City.
00:22:37
Speaker
and being able to try to think of that space as the same in a way that they're both part of the same larger culture and they're both connected, they're part of the same community in a lot of ways.
00:22:50
Speaker
I think that's what interested me, less than my own personal political proclivities, just the contradictions and tensions that live alongside each other all the time in a way that's just completely normal and completely ordinary to a sense.
00:23:09
Speaker
in my several drives across the country is like I'm very impressed with Iowa's windmills. As far as the eye can see once you get into eastern Iowa, I was very impressed.
00:23:23
Speaker
Oh, they're everywhere. I mean, even even when you're just driving around, I mean, there's there's there are so many being built that you can't you can't be on the interstate without seeing the blades being hauled by these, you know, gigantic, you know, semis that are just hauling them all the time. Yeah, it's and I mean, even that has been like, it was controversial, is one of those things where people had to like kind of
00:23:50
Speaker
look at what the values were of their community and decide how they wanted to use space and how they wanted to think of their landscape. They're not necessarily pretty to look at. It was one of those changes that Iowa certainly had to work at and reckon with and it's still controversial.
00:24:14
Speaker
Yeah on the let's see on the let's see eastbound side there is a lot a lot of really good rest areas I'm like a rest area connoisseur because we've driven cross-country many friggin times and there's one that's I it's got to be near Iowa City because it's a it's a very literary rest stop because there's like quotes from Kurt Vonnegut on certain things and among other writers and these little like there'll be a picnic table and a little sort of
00:24:41
Speaker
A little cover and then on that cover is cut out of the metal is some quote from some famous writer. I'm like, this is pretty cool. Then like on the other side, too, there'll be like on the westbound side, there was a giant windmill blade just say it mounted there like a statue. And you look up and like, holy shit, these things are like I'm like 125 feet long or something.
00:25:03
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, it's amazing. It's one of those like perception, just like distortions when you're up close to them. It's unbelievable how big they are. And then once they go over the air, they just seem like tiny, but yeah, I believe it. There are some amazing, amazing rest stops on IED, especially between Iowa city and the river. Yeah.
00:25:20
Speaker
I want to talk to you about voice, too, and that's paramount importance to essay. You know when you're reading Hanifa Durakeeb, Elena Pasarello, our mutual friend, among Chuck Closterman, so many others that you're like, okay, that's part of the appeal of essays. Why would I want to read something bland? I want to read something that does have some sort of
00:25:44
Speaker
dynamism on the page. And so for you, how did you forge your voice through your taste and practice?
00:25:56
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I spent a lot of time stealing from other people or borrowing from other people. Yeah, just like kind of having close that stack of writers whose voices are just really, really engaging and exciting to me. I mean, I had
00:26:17
Speaker
Amy Fusselman's book, Close at Hand, like the entire time I was working on this. I mean, she has a bunch, but Ideophone in particular, I had JD Daniels, the correspondence, really close at hand all the time. Like his, his humor is so interesting to me, the way he can like turn on a dime in the middle of a sentence and do something different. It's just really interesting to me. I mean, like paragraph by paragraph within
00:26:43
Speaker
my book, I feel like I could probably tell you what I was reading at the time, just like trying to imitate. And that's always like one of the, it might be like a crutch in some way that I really have to be like trying to like respond to someone else's voice or like trying to imitate a voice that I'm really interested in. But yeah, I had had a whole stack of writers that I was excited about. And I spent a lot of the time working on the book, like
00:27:13
Speaker
reading it out loud. That's one of the tests that I have for whether things are going well. When you start to read work aloud, you can tell when you get bored with it because you'll start mumbling. You'll start skipping over stuff. If it's something that
00:27:32
Speaker
I don't even have it in me to say out loud, to read an essay from start to finish. You can kind of tell where you get a little tired. And that's the point where it's like, all right, well, I got to stop here and go back and do some work because I've lost my own interest in what I was saying.
00:27:53
Speaker
And that was kind of one of the tests that I gave for the essays. I wanted to be able to read all of them from start to finish without getting bored, without losing interest. And I think reading aloud can be one of the ways to make sure that the essays do have a fair amount of personality.
00:28:14
Speaker
But it can also be kind of a challenge too because on the other hand, you can read something in a way that makes it sound a lot more interesting than it is that you can kind of perform the essay aloud and give it some personality that doesn't necessarily happen on the page. And so I think you have to kind of keep, you have to keep like both of those things in mind that it does help you
00:28:41
Speaker
identify where the essay might be starting to slow down, but it can also be a little deceptive. It can seem more exciting than it is because you're reading it in a certain kind of way that maybe that joke doesn't really land for someone who's just reading it or maybe the tone doesn't come off the way you think it does if you're reading it loud. But that was one of the things that I spent kind of a fair amount of time with is just making sure that
00:29:10
Speaker
the cadence held up and that I'd be able to just read the book with a spoken voice and it would work. It would still make sense.
00:29:21
Speaker
Yeah, and the other danger, too, with reading stuff concurrently with what you're writing and maybe taking a very long time to write a book, and I spoke with Lily Danziger about this, too, because her memoir, Negative Space, took her close to 10 years.
00:29:42
Speaker
and this baseball memory I had written a while ago and it took me a long time and it's like you can tell like draft to draft like who you might have been reading and like in that stuff some of the ways I just kind of call voice creep is like oh there's footnotes there yeah you got into the David Foster Wallace phase let's get that out of there
00:30:04
Speaker
And it's like one of those things where it's almost like you have to write as fast as you can That way you don't get too many influences just trying to like trespass on what you're doing Yeah, I think it's like I think it's a revision thing. I feel like I
00:30:18
Speaker
there is, if I'm trying to like, if that creep starts to happen in a way that feels really forced or just like uncomfortable or just like ineffective, like the revision process hopefully like smooths it out. But I do, I like the sort of like permission of trying as hard as you can on that first draft and then kind of revising back into
00:30:45
Speaker
something that's a little bit more your own but like also yeah like what you're saying there's definitely people who I can't read at all within like 24 hours of trying to produce my own work because their way of doing it is just something I'm absolutely not capable of and if I even if I try even a little bit it just it ruins the thing that I'm trying to make I can't I can't even be within like
00:31:13
Speaker
the same room of a David Foster Wallace book. That's just not how I think. I really admire what he does, but it's just not the way that I'm able to compose. It just destroys my own prose, for sure.
00:31:27
Speaker
It's like a hand grenade of an essay. It's just like, ah, damn it. This guy is going to blow up everything if I even read that sled stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I just can't. I can't do it. But I admire a lot of his work. I love like I I can't get enough of his tennis essays. I think there's like four tennis essays and those I adore and I do. Those are essays I reread quite a bit because I love those.
00:31:52
Speaker
Everything else I can sort of take or leave more or less, but it's the tennis ones. They kill me. And it's that same kind of interest where it's the sort of person who can't necessarily explain how their own genius works, but the genius is there. And you can't just ask them a question directly about how it works because they're
00:32:18
Speaker
Capability isn't in articulating how amazing they are. Their ability is just like doing the amazing thing. And that leaves work. Like in the essay, it leaves work for Wallace to like try to help us understand and try to be able to like approach like what makes it so successful. And I love that like gap of the essayist being able to try to step in and like help the layperson like appreciate something that they might not understand.
00:32:48
Speaker
I don't have like any special interest in tennis, but I absolutely agree with you that those kinds of pieces are really like, are really gripping just because of he's like helping you kind of get there as a reader.
00:33:02
Speaker
Yeah, and it gets to a point of it's like being like that guy at the end of the bench who who can kind of see the matrix of the sport. They just don't have the ability to be transcendent. And they're like, oh, you know, like I can't like him. He was a pretty competitive tennis player, but he wasn't great.
00:33:22
Speaker
But he can write about Roger Federer. He can see what he's doing. He's like, oh, my God, like that is that is otherworldly. That is that is Everest, you know, and all the all those people. And he can speak to it even though he could never pull it off himself. So it's like it's like I just understand it just enough to know that, like, oh, wow, I can see what that guy's doing or what she's doing. And like that is
00:33:46
Speaker
You guys need to understand what this person is doing right now. I don't think you get it. I don't think you understand I'm gonna help you understand, but I don't think you get it. You need to get it now. I Love that task like for writers like I love that task for like being able to try to like
00:34:04
Speaker
like help scaffold like a reader's appreciation for something and just like try to like get there together and like do the work of understanding together like because even like regardless of like your technical proficiency of something if you're just like in witness to something that's really profound like it is this like kind of tendency to like wow
00:34:27
Speaker
how though like how is that possible and just being able to do that like kind of like boots on the groundwork of figuring out like the act of appreciation. I think that's so wonderful and I feel like it's just a really like perennial way for essays to like participate in like in pop culture or in sports whatever the case is. Well it's good to have like that
00:34:51
Speaker
like that space where you have enough of a connection to like the event you have enough familiarity with it that you can be kind of like our guide without being so immersed that it becomes like kind of hard to connect with like you have that like step in where you you have the the access maybe you have the language
00:35:18
Speaker
and you can kind of like be our like our museum guide through the story without it being you're so overcome with like background and story and like that it becomes like hard to enter into like if you're the reader who's a novice to that culture and a novice to that community
00:35:38
Speaker
It takes a voice that can be welcoming to people regardless of what they already know about it.
Taking Risks in Writing Voice
00:35:50
Speaker
That's the thing that's so tricky, but also kind of an exciting thing to try to do.
00:35:57
Speaker
I heard the chef David Chang the other day on a podcast, and he was talking about how in the restaurant game it's like 99% failure. I'm sure it's not quite that high, but it's pretty damn high. And he's like, so you're going to fail, so why not take big swings? Why be conservative in this? And I kind of think the same thing about writing and voice. It's like there's a lot of very competent
00:36:23
Speaker
Writers out there, you know, just writing right along. All right, this is easy enough to read whatever information in information out very forgettable But but with with essays and stuff and I know stuff that you've written and we've mentioned Hanif and Elena Why not take big swings because so many so many voices are very vanilla out there And so I wonder for you like how do you balance or what's the calculus between? Trying not to be vanilla but also, you know taking big enough swings that you make an impression that lasts
00:36:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I totally agree. I feel like, and I don't mean this in like any shade to anybody in particular, but like the thing that I most, if I'm going to put a book down, like I'm 30 pages in and it just feels like I'm not, this isn't going to be one that I finish off. Like the thing that's happening that I recognize in the book is like
00:37:16
Speaker
the writing is sort of like grotesquely competent and it's just like it's it's just good enough at doing the thing that it's doing but isn't really interested in itself like in the language of itself and like trying to cultivate like that language in like a really intentional way it's just like it's just fine and
00:37:44
Speaker
that kind of like reading experience is the thing that like most like elicits me to just stop reading and it's the thing I'm like most afraid of like happening to a reader is them just becoming
00:38:01
Speaker
kind of disinterested in the way that I'm writing and it's I think it's why I spend a lot of time like trying to find writers whose whose like style and manner and form are really really engaging and like Elena and Yifar are just like both really amazing examples of like people who are paying really acute attention
00:38:27
Speaker
to what they're doing and the way that they're doing it like word by word just are really really interested in that and I mean I also completely agree with what you're saying about like like why not swing as hard as you can what are you gonna what are you gonna do like what's the worst case scenario like I've been thinking about this like
00:38:48
Speaker
anecdote that happened to me back when I was in the National Guard and I was like we were doing this like training exercise where I was driving a Humvee for my lieutenant and we were supposed to be going up this hill and I was kind of trying to climb this hill in this truck and he just like was yelling at me like to drive faster
00:39:09
Speaker
And he just says something like, just like, floor it. Like, you're not going to break it. Like, the thing that you're doing is what this thing was meant to do. Just like, floor it. You're not going to break it. And that was just like a really, I just remember thinking like, all right, like, yeah, you can just go harder. And you're not going to break anything, probably. And I feel like that's the thing I'm trying to just be more
00:39:38
Speaker
more deliberate about whatever my instinct is to what I'm writing prose is, what if you turn the knob a little bit
00:39:52
Speaker
a little bit up and then a little bit up from there. I'm not going to break anything. I'm not going to break the essay probably. What will happen is the essay needs that. It needs to be weirder. It needs to be stranger. It needs to go after it in a way that's just a little bit more confident or aggressive or whatever the case is.
00:40:14
Speaker
I think for me, it's an exciting thing to try to put at the forefront because my instinct is probably usually the opposite, usually fairly restrained, fairly spare kind of prose. I think I default to a fairly spare way of writing and I think that's why I get really excited when I find writers who are doing
00:40:41
Speaker
The absolute other thing where they are just like trying as hard as they can to do everything they can with language in a way that is doing justice to their topic and just like Like do everything that you can like you're not gonna break it Just go and just do as much as you can and I think that's an exciting like instinct
00:41:02
Speaker
And I think it's something that I can learn a lot from because it's never really my impulse, my default setting to do that. My default is just to be kind of polite and direct and sometimes even plain. So trying to put some more reverb on it is always like, it just makes the work exciting.
00:41:31
Speaker
I love that, put some reverb on it. Well, there's also like the Pacino take. I think he famously, like Dern takes, I mean, he would go full out Pacino, like way out there. And usually, you know, the take would be like some reduced version of that extreme take, but it's like, it's taken that giant swing and then kind of editing back from that.
00:41:55
Speaker
you know, when you read someone like a, or just keep using Haneef or Elena or even Closterman, it's just like you can tell they're taking big swings and then they add it back, but then it's still when you're, it's still what they land on is still like very distinct and it does have that reverb you're talking about.
00:42:15
Speaker
yeah i mean i remember reading like when i was reading go ahead in the rain there was i feel like it's toward the end it's in the letters um section of the book i forget even who the letter was to but the way that it ends i was just oh my god like oh my god i can't i just couldn't believe like that he had gotten to the place that he got to
00:42:36
Speaker
and just like I had to go back and start reading like pages like prior like how where did this start how did how did he start creating this effect where did it come from and like in a way it came from like the first page of the book like gradually like building this like sort of like
00:42:55
Speaker
characterizing these people, characterizing the time they came from, characterizing himself as a listener, and just being able to see that kind of build. And it happens in a moment, a lot of times, where it'll feel like a sentence doing work, but it's the book doing work. It's like the whole essay doing work. But it really comes to a point
00:43:19
Speaker
And especially with Hanif's work, you just set it down. That's just, it's stunning. It's really stunning. But trying to figure out, how do you do it? How do you make this happen? I feel like that's a lot of the joy of being a reader and then trying to be a reader for the purpose of, how can I even try to do this kind of work?
00:43:44
Speaker
Yeah, yesterday I was just kind of in a mood, and I definitely needed some inspiration, and I kind of default to going
Book Recommendation: 'Springer Mountain'
00:43:55
Speaker
to this great, I used to be brain pickings, but now she's the marginalion, Maria Popova's site, and I always look for the Bill Watterson commencement address, and Bill Watterson wrote Calvin and Hobbes.
00:44:08
Speaker
And I always like going to his, her analysis of it, but she transcribes a whole bunch of a Kenyan college commencement address. And at one point, he says, to endure five years of rejection to get a job requires either a faith in oneself that borders on delusion or a love of the work. I love the work. And I love that so much, just the speaking of the delusion and also just leaning into loving the work.
00:44:37
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it feels like both all the time. It feels like this doesn't make any sense to be doing, to like be spending my time with, but I'm not, I would never stop. You know what I mean? Like I'm not going to stop doing it. I just, it's too, there's too much love for it. And, but at the same time, like you always know, like this is, this is ridiculous. It's silly, but it's both.
00:45:01
Speaker
Very nice. Well, as our hour is winding down here, Stephen, as I like to bring these conversations down for a landing, I always love asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind, like anything you're excited about that you'd want to share with the listeners. So I'd extend that to you. What might you recommend for them out there?
00:45:16
Speaker
Well, I was talking earlier about how I really have been enjoying short books lately. One of the last, just really, really great short books that I read is called Springer Mountain. It's by Wyatt Williams and it's a book about food. I think the subtitle is Meditations on Killing and Eating.
00:45:36
Speaker
it's about food, it's about everything else though too. And like I remember seeing in one of your notes on some stack that you're interested in like a John McPhee-esque project, but one of Wyatt's like other pieces, he wrote an essay that was in Best American Food Writing called After Oranges, where he chases down, like he just tries to kind of like imitate what oranges does. He goes and like
00:46:02
Speaker
retraces some of John McPhee's footsteps and kind of writes sort of like a coda in a way to McPhee's book, Oranges, and like from the background of like
00:46:15
Speaker
the food industry and everything else. His book, Springer Mountain, has that energy to it. It has that McPhee-esque interest in the mundane and ordinary, that really rigorous journalistic interest in uncovering how the everyday informs us and how we might take an ethical approach to it.
00:46:42
Speaker
But it also just has a kind of wildness that's so exciting to me. And he lifts off the project and closes it down in 105 pages. It's one of those books that
00:46:55
Speaker
When I come across it, I just immediately have to start telling everybody about it. I don't have my copy anymore because I've already lent it out. It's one of those where it's just like, I have to tell everybody about it because I think it's so well done. It's called Springer Mountain. It's really good. Fantastic. Well, a distance from Slaughter County is awesome too. I really recommend it.
00:47:15
Speaker
A lot of fun. It's a short, punchy book, a bunch of wonderful essays. And I really had fun with it. So I just got to, you know, it's just a great job, man. And thanks for coming back on the show to talk about it and just writing essays. Absolutely. It's great talking to you. I always appreciate it. I appreciate your time and what you do for creative nonfiction. It's amazing. So thank you so much.
00:47:47
Speaker
Nice. Thanks for coming back on the show, Steven. Great having you back. Great time. One of these days I'll get off my ass and treat that dude to a frothy IPA. Don't forget to rage against the algorithm with me over at Substack. I've pulled way back on Instagram and way back on Twitter. It might be deletion time for Twitter. Cue a parting shot. And many people are jumping ship to blue sky or blue ski.
00:48:18
Speaker
I don't know how you pronounce it. Just for consistency, I'll say blue sky. I don't know how to pronounce it, but we're going with blue sky. We can all agree.
Critique of Social Media
00:48:29
Speaker
Twitter is something of a sinking ship. Has been. We hang on because we've been there since 2009. We weathered all the rule changers and yet we still keep going back to the same shitty restaurant expecting better service and decent food. It's not gonna happen.
00:48:48
Speaker
So the reaction has been this, Instagram threads in blue sky. Now, nobody's taking a moment to stop and think, why not quit Twitter and just be done with it? Instead of, what will I replace Twitter with, how will I connect? We should see this maybe as a means to purge our systems of this chronic over-connectivity.
00:49:14
Speaker
You might say I'm a hypocrite since I'm on Instagram still and I like, I enjoy, I like sub-stack and sub-stack notes, which is nothing more than Twitter and the whole ecosystem there is kind of, it's got social network, you can almost feel like the virus of social networks there. That's the best way I can think about it.
00:49:38
Speaker
But you can call me a hypocrite. You wouldn't necessarily be wrong. Maybe don't rush to the next new social media because they have all unilaterally proven one thing. Maybe they accept me like Vero. I don't know what Mastodon's about. There was that mass exodus, remember? It doesn't matter. They get corrupted by their need to glue us to their platform for data, ad sales. Not a single one of the popular social medias
00:50:07
Speaker
The social mediums has proven to be this internet utopia. They start that way, but they all end the same.
00:50:20
Speaker
As many of you know, I like to rage against the algorithm, and I'm really squeezing my brain to remember those days in the mid-2000s and earlier. Social media was going to conferences, meeting people in person, writing groups, reading groups, readings. As much as I loathe readings, and that might be a good essay one day, how to fix the author reading. I don't like them. Anyway, face-to-face meetup. Those bonds, you know, if you had to,
00:50:48
Speaker
Quantify it. Put a metric on it. Put a follower account on it. I'd say one face-to-face is a hundred Twitter followers. Even in the glory days of Twitter.
Value of In-Person Connections
00:51:00
Speaker
Maybe it takes more time. Maybe it takes more money. Maybe for us introverts, it certainly takes more energy. But maybe this is the time to scramble away from the algorithm and into the coffee shop with two writers and share in something that isn't gamified, that feels better than seeing that stupid red heart light up. You know, instead of like hitting like, you're like,
00:51:24
Speaker
You know what, this rounds on me. For most of us, and I understand some people are fractured by, you know, be it geography or physical abilities or maybe being in person is truly panic inducing. I won't deny that and I respect and honor those folks for whom in-person connection just isn't feasible, doesn't work for whatever reason.
00:51:45
Speaker
But for most of us, there's a better answer to jumping from one sinking ship to one that will, no doubt, eventually sink, instead of maybe rediscovering the solid ground that civilization was built on. So stay wild, C&Fers, and if you can't do interviews, see ya!
00:52:19
Speaker
you