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Episode 54—Andre Dubus III on his Accidental Memoir, the Love of Revision, and Getting the F*ck Off Social Media
137 Plays8 years ago
Andre Dubus III, author the memoir Townie and the novels House of Sand and Fog and Dirty Love, stopped by the podcast to talk about memoir, the essay, and writing in general. "The truth is, if you want to write or create anything worth a damn, you better embrace failure or you're not going to get to the good stuff. You gotta learn to love how hard it is," he says. This episode is so packed with great, actionable, and inspiring material from a "made" writer, meaning he built himself into the writer he wanted to be. If you think you don't have time to write, just wait until you hear him talk about how he found the time to write his breakout novel House of Sand and Fog. Talk about rigor. Please review the podcast and pass it along to a friend! Thanks for listening!
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Transcript
Introduction and Humor
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the ha- oh my god. Welcome to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. I'm your host Brendan O'Mara. Before I drop the Andre Dubuze III bomb onto your tympanic membranes, that's your eardrums. Love to see my useless biology degree at work, by the way.
Andre Dubus III’s Writing Philosophy
00:00:23
Speaker
Andre knows his stuff and he's super grounded and takes the responsibility of a writer who has quote-unquote made it very seriously. He knows that sometimes that little bit of encouragement from someone in his position could fuel a budding writer for years. He knows it happened to him at one point.
00:00:45
Speaker
He talks about his amazing memoir, Townie, which came out in 2011, the joy in writing, how he wrote his breakout novel, The House of Sandin Fogg, his love of the essay, dealing with rejection, the power of revision, and how he's written five to six days a week for 35 years. Man, there's just so much jammed in here. We need to go. We need to go now.
00:01:11
Speaker
But first, let's do some housekeeping.
Podcast Engagement Encouragement
00:01:13
Speaker
Please subscribe if you haven't already, and if you've gotten any value from the podcast, please share it and leave a review on iTunes. I've been leaving reviews for podcasts like Jessica Leahy's Am Writing podcast and Writing Class Radio, and it literally takes 60 seconds. Five stars, little comment, done.
00:01:34
Speaker
and you've helped so, so much. You have no idea. So enough of that, let's lay down the riff and get on to it. Episode 54 with Andre D'Abuse III.
Memoir Writing Insights
00:01:50
Speaker
Let's start by talking about the Riverteeth memoir contest that you judged recently. I imagine that you got a lot of that stuff in your lap. What was a big takeaway from a lot of the stuff that came to your desk when you were judging that? What did you see? What was the pulse of memoir that you got to read through judging that contest?
00:02:19
Speaker
Well, that's a great question. You know, I've done that, I think a couple of times, and well, sure, first let me back up, give you more context. Sure. You know, before I wrote my own accidental memoir, Townie, I had not actually read a lot of memoirs. I did read Thank You, Doc. I did read This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolf.
00:02:39
Speaker
and years ago, and that was sort of an artistic model for me. What I'm getting at is, a lot of people are writing really well about their lives. You know, there's a lot, now look, I got some of the finalists and some of the finalists. The takeaway is, it's hard to write a memoir. Look, all writing is hard in all ways at all times, which is what I think writers love about it.
00:03:09
Speaker
I found that once again that the task seems to be to write honestly and fairly, but also you walk in that fine line between self-aggrandizement and self-pity. And it's got to be an honest book. And that's hard to do. I'm not being articulate here.
00:03:36
Speaker
I have found that once again, the best books seem to be the ones where the writer had command of his or her material emotionally. In other words, there'd been enough distance between the thing being written about and the thing that had happened.
From Fiction to Nonfiction: Writing 'Townie'
00:03:53
Speaker
And those that seem to be too close to the events they're writing about tended to fall into the self-aggrandizement and or self-pity traps, which are understandable. I'm not saying I'm about it, but I'm saying it.
00:04:05
Speaker
But that's one of my central observations. Right, and that's something you were certainly able to accomplish with Townie because you did have 30 years removed from so much of the narrative of that book. And maybe speak to that a little more, just that importance of distance so you can process it with a clearer set of glasses.
00:04:35
Speaker
And I really like what you just said, a clear set of glasses that comes at a time. Yeah. You know, I teach undergraduates at UMass and I talk to a lot of college students around the country all year long. And I'm always amazed when I made a 20, 21 year old human being who's writing a memoir or, you know, a bunch of personal essays. You know, it's not their fault. They're only, you know, 18 months, three years, five years and move from what they're writing about. And I tell them, you know, I had to get 30, 40 years down the road.
00:05:04
Speaker
So much of what is in county, I try to write as fiction three separate times over about 28 years of my writing life. Probably for a total of maybe eight or nine writing years, I try to write so much of what's in there as a novel.
00:05:21
Speaker
And it finally came as nonfiction, and it came from an essay I was writing about my sons in baseball. And the question fueling the essay was, how come I didn't play baseball? I love baseball now, but I got into it when my kids got into it. I'm 40 years old. How did this happen? So that's what began, but you're right.
Family and Editorial Influence in 'Townie'
00:05:43
Speaker
It took 30 something years before I could actually go back to those wounds of my childhood and really write about them honestly and fairly and clearly. And what was that experience like watching your sons play ball? And what were the thoughts going through your head as you were watching them play and then as you were looking to process that to write about it as an essay? Well too much of it was. Are you a dad yet? No.
00:06:11
Speaker
I highly recommend it if it's in the cards for you guys. There's nothing better. There's just nothing better. And there's a primary feeling, one of joy. It's just so joyous to watch these creatures that came out of you and your partner and having their lives of their own. So the feelings were...
00:06:28
Speaker
It was interesting, mainly fatherly, a sense of wanting them to have a safe and, you know, positive experience with youth sports and all that. But there's also a little boy in me, you know, I do believe this is not an original thought, of course, that, you know, we're all like the skins of an onion. I'm 57 years old, but, you know, my 14 year old self is talking to you right now. Your 20 year old self is talking to me. We're all, seems to me that all parts of us are here at all times and we can't get away from it, which is kind of beautiful.
00:06:58
Speaker
And so yeah, there's a part of the little boy of me who, you know, I moved two or three times a year for cheaper rent. We're always the new kid in schools and we got picked on, you know, you know, I avoided sports cause I didn't know anything about him. I got teased and so it brought back the, the rejected exile of little boy I'd been. But the irony is it turns out it was a pretty athletic kid, but I became a solo athlete as a, you know, weightlifter runner boxer kind of guy. But,
00:07:28
Speaker
All of that was there. There was the little boy in me wishing I played, but mainly the father in me, proud and happy to see my boys taking part, you know, and using their bodies and not being afraid of what people said to them. And you wrote this great essay, The Descent, and the latest issue of River Teeth.
The Discovery in Memoir Writing
00:07:53
Speaker
And I wonder how can a writer make that descent into the dream world as you write about in non-fiction like someone can in fiction? I'm so glad you asked. So look, as you probably know, the opposite of the word to remember is not forget, it's dismember. It's chop, chop, chop. And so when we're remembering,
00:08:18
Speaker
we're literally putting the pieces back together again. I mean, look at what a therapist does. I've read, I've been there. What do they do? They say, okay, where were you sitting? Well, I was in the kitchen. Well, was he still in his winter coat? Yeah. And was it still snowing out? Yeah, it was really coming down. The questions are all leading you to put the images together. Just tell the story again.
00:08:42
Speaker
And I think that's what we do in memoir. Now, I do believe that people make, and by the way, this is also another central thing I took away from grading, not grading, judging the River Teeth contest, memoir contest, is that too often you feel that the writer knows too much about what he or she is hoping and trying to say with their memoir. And my view is, well, just because you were there doesn't mean you know what the hell happened.
00:09:09
Speaker
You know, we all know that when we were 16 years old, our dad left our mother and, you know, he did some time. You know, we all know what that, you know, I'm making this up, but just because we know what happens, what the hell happened? Right? So it seems to me that if journalism is about information, art, the kind that we do is about experience. You know, journalism is about recording. What we do is about capturing. You know, journalism is about the facts. Ours is about the truth. And so I think that
00:09:39
Speaker
You know, a guy who mainly writes fiction, but I will write personal essays now and then, and I've written that memoir. I feel the same fuel at work, which is curiosity. And I think that is the main challenge, is you must be curious about what happened to you. Just because you were there doesn't mean you know what the hell happened. And I would submit to you, that's really why you're writing this memoir. Because you have to go back, because what the fuck happened? Right. Right. Yeah, so you have to kind of be... You have to go back into the wreck, which is actually from a great Andrea Richball, right?
00:10:09
Speaker
You have to go back into the wreck.
00:10:12
Speaker
Yeah, and you're an incredible repository of quotes from great writers. I'm always impressed. You seem to be able to recall them just at the snap of a finger. Is that something you record and you play over in your head and how do you, you've got those right in your holster, it seems. It's funny, people say I have a weird savant quality about it. It's true, it says, I have a weird memory, like Brendan, buddy.
00:10:41
Speaker
I could watch a movie tonight, my Labor Day, new movie for me. I won't remember anything. But I do retain lyrics and quotes and lines. It's just the nature of my memory. I retain words that I love that are helpful to me. And they just, I don't memorize them.
Memory and Writing
00:11:01
Speaker
I have tried to memorize a poem or two.
00:11:05
Speaker
So funny, my wife says, oh, honey, you have no wisdom of your own. It's just like a rolodex of other people's wisdoms. I say, well, I call that attribution. So one of the great things in the acknowledgments that you wrote in Towney is I think you were crediting your editor or thanking your editor about helping to find the true book within the one you'd first written.
00:11:31
Speaker
What was that process like, trying to keep going deeper and deeper to find that true book? Well, let me, I'm glad you asked about that because, you know, I feel so fortunate to have her as an editor. Actually, today, after we get off, after I get off with you, I'm sending my new novel to her like today. Oh, congratulations. That's awesome. Well, thank you, man. She's a toughie and she's very smart and she's very rigorous. A really good editor will help you do that.
00:12:00
Speaker
And you know, he or she is not looking to help you write a more commercial book. They are actually looking at what it is you've wrought and helping you write it even more fully in a truer way. So here's the thing. When I first, the first drafts, I left out.
00:12:21
Speaker
All my family, I left them out. I didn't want to shine a light on their privacy. I didn't know where the line was. And she said the funniest thing. So I sent her all this violent stuff, which I was happy to write about because I've been trying to write about street violence for years. I didn't know how to do it without sounding dangerous and strange. And I found, and again, the truth, right? How did I find my way into the violence through the scared little boy who didn't know anything about sports who moved?
00:12:50
Speaker
with a single mother and siblings to tough towns. And that was the way in. Um, and the more honest way in the more vulnerable way in. And so the first drafts, you know, I had all the street violence just, well, didn't you live with people? Well, isn't that part of your story too? I said, yeah, but I don't, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to violate their privacy. So,
00:13:16
Speaker
A little while later, I saw the writer Richard Russo. He's
Deepening 'Townie' with Honesty
00:13:21
Speaker
a good buddy and we were at this literary thing. And this is before he'd written his own memoir elsewhere. And I told him, I said, I know my editor is right. I just don't know where the line is between me and my family's experience. And he said the most helpful thing I've heard about this. He said, well, if it were me, I'd ask myself, am I trying to hurt anyone with this book? Am I trying to settle any scores? And if the answer is yes, I wouldn't write it.
00:13:46
Speaker
Uh, or I write it, but I wouldn't publish it. The answer is no, I just go ahead and write it. And the truth is, as soon as you said that, Brendan, I could feel that I was no longer, again, I was turning 50 at the time. I could feel I was no longer angry at my father or my mother. I didn't even feel sorry for the boy I'd been or the childhood I'd had. They're a lot worse everywhere at all times.
00:14:05
Speaker
I just felt artistically compelled to try to capture what it was like to be in this dead mill town in the early 70s, Vietnam limping to a finish. We're all doing drugs and alcohol. We've got hair to our waist and there are no men around and there's all this dysfunction and violence. It was the world that shaped me. I finally just felt I found a way in.
00:14:30
Speaker
And then my strategy was, okay, I'm going to let my, I'm going to shine a light on my family, but only when their experience intersects my own. So for example, my brother was sexually abused, you know, daily by this grown woman for six years from 13 to 19. She was just, he was like a cat boy. And, um, you know, so if I'm walking by my 14 year old brother's bedroom at four o'clock on a Thursday afternoon and I hear the moaning of, you know, a grown woman having sex on the other side,
00:14:58
Speaker
I'm not going to go on the other side of that door, because that's his memoir. That's his story to tell. But you know what? In the hallway, the moans are part of mine. And that became my strategy. And then it got better. It became a much more honest and symphonically rich story to tell. And it was my editor who was tough on it. She wouldn't let up, said, no, this is... And here's the thing, man. I talk about this almost too much.
00:15:28
Speaker
The essential thing about writing I find most joyous is that it's an active discovery. It's not an active exposition, which as you know, means to show, you know, showing all the smart things you've learned. Who cares about the writer? It's not an active exposition. It's an active discovery. I love that line from the late great short story writer, Grace Paley. We write what we don't know. We know.
00:15:50
Speaker
The truth is, all those years, for years, I thought I'd become a far more effective street fighter than I should have been, because I'm not a tough guy, I'm not a big guy. I mean, I'm physically strong, I'm in shape. There are tougher guys within a one-mile radius of wherever I am at all times. I was so insanely, toxically full of self-hatred, I would rather die a violent death than see a coward in the mirror anymore. And that made me very dangerous for about a decade.
00:16:19
Speaker
But all those years, Brendan, I thought, until I wrote Townie, this accidental memoir that rose from an essay, I got dangerous because I learned how to channel, I learned how to box, and I learned how to fight, and I learned how to do all that, and it was the rage of the bullied boy. No, wrong. What writing Townie taught me
00:16:43
Speaker
And again, and this is what I try to teach in memoir writing classes and when I talk about creative writing nonfiction to writing students, is you must be as authentically curious about your own experience as you are as if you're writing a novel. And what I learned going back, putting the pieces back together, my own story, once I step back into the wreck from Adrian Richbaum,
00:17:06
Speaker
What did I discover? Oh yeah. Well, and once I let in with the editor's note, I let in that my brother was being sexually abused on a daily basis for six years. He tried to kill himself like 10 times before his late twenties. I left that out. I left out that my mother was so depressed. She was, you know, she worked 14 hours a day. She'd come home. She lined the floor in a work hose, fall asleep. She felt like an older sister. She had no friends. Her family was 2000 miles away.
00:17:33
Speaker
Nobody, she was isolated. I left that out. I left out that my sister was raped and was selling drugs. I left out my other sister who was so depressed and isolated. She put a padlock on her bedroom door because the house was full of degenerates. And when we came home from school, drug dealers, my sister knew I left that out. I left it all out. And then I put it back in and then I kept digging and found more.
Curiosity and Personal Discovery in Writing
00:17:56
Speaker
And here's the thing. That's what I was putting into my fists. All of that, all of that.
00:18:03
Speaker
You know, and so it's, it's what I love about, you know, I'm working on a collection of essays right now that I hope to deliver to my publisher before the year's over. I've got, you know, I've published like 30 of them already over the years and uh, I love it about the essay. You know, it just, you know, as you know, it comes from Montana, it comes from the French essay to attempt it to try. I, you know, I, I, I love that form that, you know, in the same way that
00:18:31
Speaker
Poetry captures things that need poetry to capture them, you know, the way the light hits the side of your mother's face on that porch, you know, you don't need a novel. You just need, I just need a moment. I need this poem. The essay does the same, you know, what was it like? What was it like to be in that afternoon when bah, bah, bah, you know, it's a beautiful thing.
00:18:51
Speaker
And, you know, you had said that you had experimented a lot with trying to take a lot of what became Townie and write a lot of false starts in fiction, and then it finally coalesced in the nonfiction account. So why do you think there were so many false starts in fiction in the end, and then it ultimately became a nonfiction account? I think there are at least two or three different kinds of writers, if not
00:19:19
Speaker
a lot more than that. But there are those who tend to be more auditory. I think Faulkner had to hear those sentences in his head. You could say him anyway was more painterly and very imagistic. In fact, he would study landscapes at the Louvre to learn how to write landscapes. John Irving said there are at least two kinds of novelists, kinds of novelists. There are those who are
00:19:42
Speaker
Sort of tragic and somber and tone and those who are more comic and he put himself and you know Charles Dickens in the more comic vein as would be marked way, etc So then what am I saying? And then there are those this is my little theory. There are those writers who can who can write Derivatively from their life experience and make beautiful fiction out of it Linkopodi could have a bad cocktail party, Manhattan and write a beautiful short story about a bad cocktail party, Manhattan
00:20:10
Speaker
My own father, the great short story master, Andre Debuts, so much of his writing was derivative. I mean, I could, I could point out, oh, well that's his ex-wife from his second marriage. Oh, that's me. Oh, that's, you know, my sister. You know, Tim O'Brien writes beautifully from experiences he's had directly. Uh, but then there are those of us who seem to do a lot better when we go far field. And I finally learned after many years of trying and failing that I tend to do better as a fiction writer when I, when I really,
00:20:39
Speaker
step into the private skin of someone I'll never be like a, like a female stripper in a Florida club or like a Saudi Arabian or like an Iranian or like a little girl. I do better when I'm not writing close to home, at least in terms of factual experience. That's my answer is, is I do a lot better when it's not remotely tied to anything I've experienced. But here's the thing, man,
00:21:05
Speaker
But then, I love what Dr. O said. You know, Sarah Orange Hewitt, as you know, is the one who said, you know, write what you know. Dr. O said, yeah, but how do you know what you know? And so, the doctor said, yeah, but how do you know what you know? You know, my first published story was from the point of view of an inmate out on a date with a woman for the first time in seven years, because he was in the joint for seven years.
Encouragement and Persistence in Writing
00:21:29
Speaker
And I got letters from inmates, you know, it was in Playboy magazine, so that's how they read it. I got letters from, like, a handful asking where I'd done time or where I was doing time, and it made me feel so good because it was my first story, and I thought, why? Maybe I wrote that pretty well if I think I was an inmate. The truth is, I'd never, at that point, had never stepped foot inside of a state prison, but I have sense, but not then.
00:21:52
Speaker
But the truth is, I knew what it was like to be a new kid in a schoolyard, getting ready to get beat up just because I was new. It wasn't a huge emotional stretch to imagine what it's like to be raped or stabbed in the prison yard. And so we still end up, what I'm getting at is, you don't have to write about your direct life experience, you still end up singing your song. You're gonna do it emotionally anyway, but in my case, it tends to come out a lot better when it's, you know, from the points of view of characters and situations I've never been in.
00:22:21
Speaker
What did it do for you when there's a great little scene in town and you get a knock on the door and your father had called a phone booth from outside and he got wind of the story you had written and he's just like, you're a writer, man. What did that mean to you when you heard him say those words? Well, it was layered as hell, I'll tell you. And I hope I got some of these layers into that book.
00:22:52
Speaker
Um, on one level it was, I, I acknowledged that I was beginning to read his work. So I was beginning to discover how good he actually was at this thing. And, uh, so I took it as encouragement from a, from a master to this puppy apprentice that maybe I was on the right road. You know, you know, as you know, when we're in our late teens, early twenties, we're all desperate for some sign from some older, helpful person. Am I on the right path? Is this what I should be doing?
00:23:22
Speaker
And you know, by the way, I take that responsibility immensely seriously with young people. And so there was that part of it, but there's also the part of having not really grown up around him, you know, he left when I was 10, you know, there was that part, there was just that father-son part where as the son, I was just desperate to get any sort of appraising attention from it all. Not praising, not praise, but an appraisal, you know, I wanted to be measured by him in some way.
00:23:50
Speaker
And I know it's a term we throw around now, but it's actually, I think, very accurate. I just wanted to be seen by my old man. And that moment, all those came together in that one comment, you were a writer, man. And that just, I was high on that feeling for quite a while. It gave me courage to keep doing it for a while.
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah, our artists on any level, no matter what your discipline, something like that, a little bit of validation, just put so much fuel in the tank to just say, keep going. One comment can help you for years. Yeah. Especially once you start to get all the damn rejections, and I got a shitload. A shitload. You know, people understandably think, well, it must have been easier if in with the same name, doors must have opened. I think they closed.
00:24:43
Speaker
My first book had seven stories in it, three of which have been published in magazines and quarterlies. For those three exceptions, I had 117 rejections. The book went to 39 publishers over five and a half years or whatever. I think people understandably thought
00:25:02
Speaker
You know, you're like, I love Hemingway. You know, if someone handed me a copy of a story by Ernest Hemingway III or Jr., I wouldn't even want to read it. Screw you. I got my own
Revision and Reader Engagement
00:25:10
Speaker
Hemingway. Why don't you go sell cars or something? And I think I got a lot of that, which is understandable. Oh, man. Although I hurt my feelings for about 20 years, but that's okay. We all get a hand we're supposed to play.
00:25:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, I've read, and I think it was in, it was either in Towney or the Descend. It was, you say you value deep revision in that process. And I wonder, like, how do you process that and work through ugly middles and get to the point where you are confident in a piece?
00:25:45
Speaker
Well, you know, honestly, Brendan, boy, I never get to the point where I'm confident. I get to the point where, and I feel, you know, I'm getting ready right after we talk to press send and send this new novel to my publisher in New York. And the feeling is, oh, well, the feeling always is, well, a better writer would have written a better book, but this is the best I can do. I have written it and rewritten it and rewritten it.
00:26:12
Speaker
And I have, you know, there's a great line from Raymond Carvey said, you know, the kind of care I like is when the writer takes out all the commas and puts them right back where they were again. Yeah. You know, so to answer your question, what I think one of my favorite parts of the whole creative writing process, whether it's nonfiction or fiction is revision.
00:26:32
Speaker
And as we all know, it means to see again. Well, not just, gee, do I need to rewrite the sentence. Certainly line editing is important, but also, I don't know. Do I need all 85 pages of this boy's memory of that year? And the truth is, usually no. And too many writers, understandably, again,
00:26:54
Speaker
are loaves to cut it because that was 14 months of my life. It took me 14 months to write those 85 pages. Yeah, you know what though, but the reader only needs three of them. One of my favorite lines, and it's also, it's a really harsh line is from Blaise Pascal who said, look, anything written to please the author is worthless. You know, it's so harsh.
00:27:15
Speaker
But I do believe you must embrace that line, especially when you're revising. Just because it took you two years to write these hundred pages doesn't mean we need them in the narrative.
00:27:26
Speaker
But it's not wasted time, right? What you learn in those hundred pages are now going to fill what you leave out in that whole thing that Hemingway was a master at with the iceberg and one-eighth is showing, seven-eighths is beneath the surface.
Tenacity and Process in Writing
00:27:39
Speaker
Well, about seven-eighths beneath the surface is what the writer knows but is left out. It takes great discipline and frankly, an immense act of generosity, a word I don't think we use enough in creative writing discussions.
00:27:51
Speaker
for the reader, not only generosity for the reader, which is counterintuitive, right? Because you're giving the reader less. But it's an act of generosity to give the reader less, because you're actually trusting him or her to bring their life experience to the reading. And they can feel what is not there, they will sense and feel and know from their own lives. And that's part of the art.
00:28:17
Speaker
And how would you describe the tenacity it takes to survive and thrive as a writer? Well, look, man, it's different for everybody, right? You know, one of my favorite lines about this is from
00:28:34
Speaker
are a wonderful American novelist who still hasn't read nearly enough. Thomas Williams won the National Book Award for his novel, The Hair of Harold Roo in 1975, a beautiful book about writing, The Writing Life, by the way. Have you read it? I have not. Check it out. The hair of Harold Roo, R-O-U-X. Actually, I believe
00:28:56
Speaker
USA, it'll come to me, the publisher of Bloomsbury Books did, I think, a reissue of it, and I wrote the new afterword. Anyway, it's a beautiful book. Late in his life, Mr. Williams was asked, why do you write? He said, oh, that's easy. I write so I don't die before I'm dead. Isn't that great? I think the most real writers, I'm not talking about real as in having had any publishing success.
00:29:20
Speaker
You know, you're a writer if, you know, people say, well, I don't know if I'm a writer. I said, well, can you go a year without writing and feel just fine? Yes. Well, you're not a writer. Good. Go, go, go do something else. Now you're free to go do something else. Um, but as you know, if the answer is no, I, if I go three days without writing, I feel fucked up and you know, depressed and a little cranky. Well, you're probably a writer, but when you talk about tenacity, um, I do think that something has come in to the culture that,
00:29:47
Speaker
I think is kind of ominous. Now, I'm a bit of a broken record on this, forgive me. I hate the digital world. I don't hate the podcast. I don't hate Google. I don't hate the internet. I hate the handheld device. I detest the iPhone. I detest that human beings are walking around staring at gadgets in their hands instead of looking at each other's eyes.
Digital World’s Impact on Writing
00:30:10
Speaker
Checking out the sunset on the side of that dumpster in that Brooklyn alley that you know Your cab just drove by but guess what you missed it because you're looking at social media social media Facebook, I'm not putting them down. I'm sure there's value to them. I've had nothing to do with any of it It's not cuz I'm a snob I don't it seems like a time killer when you could be reading a book or talking to a loved one. I've never texted I'm never gonna text. Here's my point. I
00:30:35
Speaker
When you talk, one thing that I've seen polluting the writer's life, especially young writers, the first 10 or so years of doing it is, you know, Facebook has made everyone the curator of the museum of me. Everybody seems to be taking selfies and posting them and taking little movies of themselves. What's happened is, and of course this is not an original thought, but I don't think it's helpful for the writer.
00:30:57
Speaker
It's made us even more self-involved and narcissistic than people tend to be. It's made us more neurotic. And I'll tell you, that is the opposite energy the writer needs. What is that great line? I'm going to butcher it from Planet Real Connor, but something like, no art is sunk in the self. The one about the self needs to be self-forgetful in order to see the thing being seen and the thing being made.
00:31:23
Speaker
So if you want tenacity, get the fuck off social media, you know, because what this is going to do is it's made people less patient about their own failures. It's made people, um, cravings and gratification more.
00:31:40
Speaker
And, you know, I'm sorry, I think the muscles it builds are the, well, that's a bad metaphor. I think it atrophies any muscle you need to be tenacious, because it's making us less patient and more self-involved. A great book can take 10 years to write, maybe longer. And you must find a way to do that without caring about the world ever noticing whether you write or not, or if you're gifted or not.
00:32:06
Speaker
is a great line I love from an A.D. and Gortimer novel, a son story where one character has an insight as to what sincerity is. And she's talking to her friend and we're in the character's point of view and she thinks, oh, sincerity is never having an idea of oneself. I think that's beautiful. And the truth is if you want to be tenacious, stop thinking
00:32:29
Speaker
get the word career out of your head, get the word book out of your head, get the word publisher out of your head. Now don't get me wrong. I wish that on all hardworking writers that they have some kind of worldly success, but I think that too often it's in the forefront of a writer's psyche these days. And that's just a recipe for hamstringing your tenacity.
00:32:48
Speaker
It's too much of a – it's hard to do this, especially in this country of being ambitious and outcome-driven versus being process-driven, which I think is kind of what you're getting at, too. Well, you just said it much more economically than I did, Brendan. That was good. Yeah, what you said.
00:33:08
Speaker
And you said something wonderful about being patient with failure. And something I like talking about with people is the value of the drawer.
Patience in Writing Process
00:33:19
Speaker
Sometimes something needs to go sit in the drawer for a while, however long that might be. And I wonder maybe what your experience is with letting something that you've maybe rushed to write but then it didn't feel right so you just put it away and then it came back better than ever.
00:33:36
Speaker
I would say that's, I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say this. I think 95% of whatever I put out in the world writing wise are the phoenixes that rose from the ashes of what failed. You know, I have been writing five, six days a week without fail since I was 22. That's 35 years. I've only published six books. Where the hell have I been? Well, I've probably written six others too, but no one's seen them.
00:34:03
Speaker
because i had to write them is a great line to kill go with the writer must has to clear throat before she sings you know so much of this is is a cooperating with what we find and you know if i say nothing and i especially felt this writing uh... my memoir and when i write personal essays it always goes deeper and better the writing does and always comes out to be something i'm
Embracing Difficulty in Writing
00:34:30
Speaker
more proud of than ashamed of. Not when I set out trying to say something about something I experienced, et cetera, or something I know or learned. Who cares? No, it's when I've set out to find something. That is when something really special happens. And, and so so many early drafts back to your comment about the value of the drawer, they go in the drawer.
00:34:53
Speaker
because I was too willful. I was controlling it too much. I was trying to say something and it was just a one note treatment of something that I'd let go and really wait for the, for the, the honest and authentically curious way in. Um, yeah, I can't, I think you're totally correct. And also there's another thing about Americans. We're very impatient with failure. You know, we, we, we, we don't tolerate it in ourselves or others.
00:35:17
Speaker
You know, I think we still do break our culture down into winners and losers. And look what we did. We elevated a man to the highest office in the land who literally breaks people down into winners and losers. And who are the winners? Rich white males. And the rest of us are losers. And he actually uses those terms, winners and losers, which is toxic. But the truth is, if you want to write or create anything worth a damn, you better embrace failure or you're not going to get to their good stuff.
00:35:46
Speaker
Yeah, and I think I always, I sometimes default to, like most men do anyway, to a sport metaphor. In baseball, you're a Hall of Famer, not if you bat 300, but if you fail 70% of the time. Yeah. In horse racing.
00:36:06
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And in horse racing, a Hall of Fame horse trainer, he's, if he's winning at 18% of the time, so failing 82% of the time, like he'll be a Hall of Fame horse trainer. So it's like, yeah, it's a, when you flip it on the other, you can, you can embrace failure as, as a means to success, but it's hard to get there sometimes, you know, just have the highlight reel to compare ourselves to. Yeah. And I think that, um,
00:36:37
Speaker
So then what is the task before us? I think the task before each of us, people who do this creative writing thing, you got to learn to love how hard
Daily Writing Routine and Discipline
00:36:46
Speaker
it is. You know, for years, you know, if you read Townie, you know, that I worked really hard on trying to build a big strong body. And you know, I never had the genetics to get big, but I've always been pretty in shape. Well, now since I started working out in 1974, I haven't quit.
00:37:01
Speaker
So I'm a lot stronger than I look. What's my point? I was a student of the bench press cause I know all I wanted to do was bench press three to 500 pounds. I got close to 300, but I never got beyond it. And I never, you know, I never got heavier than about 165 pounds of body weight. My point is I read this one article. I was really good body builder. He said, he said, he said, when I, when I started to get really good at, at, at bench pressing is when I began to fall in love with how scared I was lowering a heavy weight to my chest.
00:37:29
Speaker
He said, I began to fall in love with the fear and I began to fall in love with that feeling of the pectoral muscles stretching almost to the breaking point as I lowered that heavy bar. He said, once I began to look forward to the fear and the physical pain, I got really better at bench pressing. And so I do think that, well, okay, so here's another great line I love from some ancient Chinese wise person.
00:37:57
Speaker
If the mad dog comes at you, whistle for him. Right? You know, I, you know, I, Dennis Laham's an old friend and I saw him once in a, give a talk and actually to my students at UMass and he said, you know, when I look back and I think about all the buddies I had who started writing when I did and how they didn't keep it up, he said, I asked myself, well, how come I, how have I kept it up? And he said, Oh, I know fear management. Every day I manage my fear. And you know,
00:38:27
Speaker
These are important thoughts because most of us have jobs that we're not afraid of. We have stress. Everyone's got stress. But it's a gift to have a job that still scares you after decades of doing it, as it scares me stepping into the unknown. But I've learned to love that fear. Have you read The Writing Life by Andy Dillard?
00:38:52
Speaker
It's on my shelf. I have not read it yet. Yeah, go read it this summer. You'll read it in two hours. It's a lovely, slim volume. So smart. In one passage, she's describing Giacometti. Well, I talk about this in that essay you read, The Descent. And I love how she talks about if Giacometti had not acknowledged his bewilderment, he would not have persisted.
00:39:16
Speaker
And once again, I don't think it's something in American culture, any way the culture I know best, that, you know, we're not, we don't tell kids to go get lost and sadly tell them to go get lost, but we don't, we don't prize being lost. We don't prize bewilderment. You know, he's supposed to figure shit out. Well, no, don't. You know, Flannery O'Connor, there's a certain grain of stupidity the writer can hardly do without.
00:39:42
Speaker
And that is the quality of having to stare. I think once the writer begins to embrace bewilderment and the fear that goes along with it,
00:39:50
Speaker
Joyously, that's when real growth happens. And that's when that tenacity that you talked about happens. And that's when the patience that is required to create something beautiful, I think kicks in. And then what becomes far more important is the daily writing. And you're not so much thinking about being an author as you are a writer. And then over the years I've seen those who can do all that end up being authors.
00:40:14
Speaker
And how have you, you know, you said you've been writing five to six days a week since you were 22, so you know, 35 years of that. How did you bake that into your day and what's your routine like to ensure that you're getting those mountains of words written?
00:40:35
Speaker
Yeah, well, there's the rub right there, brother. Sometimes it's not a mountain of words. Sometimes it's five, 14. But it's words. I have this metaphor, which is probably creepy, but I think that whether you're male or female writer, that you're pregnant with that story or essay or memoir, novel, what have you, you are pregnant with it the way a real woman is pregnant with a real child in her real womb. And your job is just to get daily nutrients to it.
00:41:05
Speaker
No matter how you feel about it, you gotta feed the baby. Well, how do you do that? You show up and you get in a session. Now, the novel that put me on the map, House of Sand and Fog, I wrote in a park car in a graveyard, not far from my house, because we had three little kids in a tiny apartment. I wasn't going to tell them to be quiet so daddy could write. So I wrote my car.
00:41:27
Speaker
During those years I was working, uh, teaching at four or five campuses and as an adjunct writing professor in Boston, I was also remodeling houses as a carpenter where I made more income. I was a sole provider financially and I had no time. I had such good excuses to never get any writing done. I was also getting four or five hours sleep a night, but still I would pull up in that graveyard and you know, five in the morning, you know, engine running coffee in my hand, no sleep. And I would write a paragraph.
00:41:55
Speaker
You know, I write for like 17 minutes. I go to the job, whether it's carpentry, teaching a book on the way back, I go to graveyard again, I write another 17, 18 minutes. And I did that for three years. And after three years, I had 22 notebooks filled at beginning, middle and end. So at the height of my young, struggling family life, I was able to write, you know, an entire novel. And I think anyone can do it. You don't need,
00:42:23
Speaker
all day. Now, that said, I'm glad those years have come and gone. They were joyous in an exhausting way. But now I've got a great schedule. You know, I only teach twice a week, even on those days I write because I teach in the afternoon. So I get down in my cave. I have a soundproof room in my basement. I bring my coffee. I shut the door. It's a cave. It's five feet wide, 11 feet long, six foot ceiling. I cover one window with a blanket.
00:42:51
Speaker
I work at a wooden desk facing a blank wall. I write long hand pencil and notebooks. But I begin by reading poetry, which I've been doing for many, many, many years. I'm a huge consumer of poetry. And I read two to three, four poems just to get me into a state. And frankly, it's inspiring. And then I start writing.
00:43:14
Speaker
And when I'm composing from scratch, I will write for no more than two, two and a half hours. I'm shot after that. I'm done. There's no, there's no concentration left. I'll go work out, clear my head and then go, you know, juggle all the things that need doing, you know, to pay the bills, to be a husband, a father, a friend, a son, the brother, et cetera. And, um, in the morning, next morning I go back and I do it again.
00:43:38
Speaker
But I type the previous day's handwriting into the computer, push it aside, and continue to write longhand. You don't need to write all day. It's a rare writer who can.
00:43:54
Speaker
You know, Larry McMurtry, one of our most prolific novelists, 90 minutes a day. But every day, 90 minutes. Graham Greene, who wrote what, 40 plus novels, two hours every morning on the French Riviera. I don't know how he got any writing done on the French Riviera, but he did. Two hours every morning.
Influences and Literary Admiration
00:44:10
Speaker
So what are some book or books that you reread over and over again to get into, X-ray read it, to get into the bones of it?
00:44:20
Speaker
One of my favorite contemporary novels is Ironweed by William Kennedy. Have you read that one? No. It's a beautiful one. It's more than a multiple surprise. I think in 1985 or 1986. It's just stunningly put together. Another one. And, you know, he was a young writer. And have you read the stories of Breeze DJ Pancake? No. Whoa, man. You're giving me a reading list.
00:44:43
Speaker
Yeah, man. Pancake. There was a reissue, I think Back Bay Books did, and I actually wrote the new Afterward for that one. He, somebody gave me, a good writer friend gave me a copy of his story, Trilobites. Pancake died, killed himself when he was 26 to 27 years old. He left behind these short stories. His mother sent him around, a lot like the John Kennedy O'Toole story, and they got published. And then guess what? They were finally supposed to prize for fiction.
00:45:13
Speaker
he was a beautiful gifted writer. He wrote so deeply and honestly about what he knew, which was the coal mining haulers he grew up in West Virginia. And so I reread that book a few times just for the, just for the honest voice and vision and read a story trilobites. Another one, I have a big doctoral fan. I reread a lot of his stuff lately. I've read the March a couple of times.
00:45:42
Speaker
But the one that I go back to, you know how I go back to a lot, is Hemingway's short stories. And I reread them many times, and it's, again, the economy and the containment and the restraint. It was really something. And I think I read The Sun Also Rises six times. And who else? Yeah, there's so much great writing right now. I have to say, probably my favorite living American writer right now is Elizabeth Stroud.
00:46:09
Speaker
I can't get over the quality of her prose. If you have not read My Name is Lucy Barton, talk about restraint and trusting the reader to get the blank spaces. That is one of the most psychically naked books I've ever read. It's stunning.
Gratitude over Jealousy
00:46:25
Speaker
And of course there are more that I'm not thinking of.
00:46:29
Speaker
There's such great writing out there. And by the way, I don't understand writers who get discouraged when they read great writing or competitive or envious. I feel nothing but gratitude. I just feel grateful somebody pulled it off. Oh my God, now I want to try to.
00:46:44
Speaker
That's incredible. I wanted to ask you about, sometimes there's an inherent jealousy among artists, and I think you said the one thing that is the force field against that feeling is not to be competitive or jealous, but to approach it with that sense of gratitude and wonder and positivity, right? Yeah, I mean, I don't. I mean, look, I've had fallen human moments where I've seen
00:47:11
Speaker
a writer elevated who I didn't think deserved the elevation say. So I've had those bitter moments of, oh man, that guy, he's not even that good. Are you kidding me? But George Garrett has a great line. He said all that crap that writers are guilty of sometimes of envy or
00:47:35
Speaker
jealousy or greed. He said, try to contend with all of that in the head, but don't let it get into the heart. I think that's profoundly wise advice. But the truth is, it's a rare moment for me.
00:47:48
Speaker
to feel those things. I've got other human flaws, but the truth is, it's hard to write a book, really hard, and I trust that everyone's doing the best they know how, and when someone really pulls it off artistically, I just feel joy. Again, one of the great successes in publishing the last few years have been is Anthony Doris, All the Light We Cannot See. Have you read that?
00:48:13
Speaker
It's on the shelf. Okay, Brendan, that is a friggin masterpiece. Eleven years to write, too. Eleven years. It deserves every accolade and success it's getting and more. I felt nothing but joy seeing that because it was one of the books that just made me glad to be alive and have eyesight and a reading habit. You know? Yeah.
00:48:37
Speaker
And lastly, before I let you get out of here, Andre, you know, you had written in Townie that writing had given me me.
Authenticity and Identity in Writing
00:48:46
Speaker
And I wonder if you could just maybe like speak to that and what that means for someone who might be, you know, we kind of alluded to being outcome driven and all that stuff. And I think that sentence there kind of grounds writing of what it
00:49:02
Speaker
what it should and could be for a lot of people if they just kind of got the book out of their head and just did the work yeah thank you brendan for that question because it's a profoundly important one uh... block i think someone is profoundly fortunate if they find early in their lives your in in his or her life as i did mine
00:49:24
Speaker
that same that makes him or her themselves. For me, uh, when I discovered writing at age 22, creative writing, I felt like me for the first time said, okay, here I, oh, here I am. You know, I give a lot of convincing speeches and I find I keep saying the same thing, which is, look, I don't, I don't wish success on you guys. I don't want you to go out there and be a winner.
00:49:45
Speaker
I want you to go out there and be joyous and grow. Because that's the only way you're going to be joyous, is to grow. And how are you going to grow? To do that same or those things that when you do them, you're more you than when you do not. Joseph Campbell wrote about that beautifully. We talk about falling the bliss and all that. I mean, the power and the myth. Look, what is, we live in this culture that prizes, that celebrates, you know, famous writers and actors and directors and
00:50:12
Speaker
They give you a lot of attention and love once you've had success, but it's not a culture that helps you grow as a writer until you've had it. In fact, they belittle it. You know, families love their kids, but I can't tell you how many, I work with a 90-year-old woman and she couldn't start writing until her parents died because they didn't want her to suffer in the writing life. Here's my point.
00:50:40
Speaker
Too often, what is keeping people from doing it and rushing it, wanting that success, is they're trying to please others. Too often, I think, we make daily choices because we're imagining that family gathering in the future three years from now, where I get to say, well, I'm doing this and I've done that. To some ant, you hardly even know. And the truth is, our lives are short. We live 100 years. It ain't long enough. And you're only given one.
00:51:05
Speaker
So if you are fortunate enough to have found, say, creative writing, and you know that you're not going to be you if you don't get in those daily words, then that's all you need to know. You need to do that. Or you're going to die before you're dead. And by the way, let's just talk about that desire to give to
Cultural Contribution through Writing
00:51:22
Speaker
the culture. Gene Reese has a beautiful image. We can end with this. Gene Reese.
00:51:26
Speaker
She said, you know, and look, I'm not purporting the desire to publish. I think it's a beautiful desire. It means you want to be part of the conversation. But Jean Reese said it so much more beautifully in this image. She said, look, she said, if if if culture is a big ocean and then there are great rivers that flow into it like Mozart and Shakespeare and Claude Monet, she said, but they're also my five novels, which are it's a trickle of a stream, but they go into the same ocean.
00:51:56
Speaker
And I think that's really such a beautiful image, because it's really what's behind the secondary pleasure of writing, which is wanting to have people read it. We just want to be part of the cultural conversation. And that's a beautiful impulse. But it ain't ever going to happen if you've got one eye in the mirror to see how you're doing. You must embrace the fact you will not be on the planet forever. May everybody live 140 years. And you must get in the words, just show up.
Conclusion and Audience Engagement
00:52:24
Speaker
Well, thank you so much Andre for carving out time your morning here to talk shop. My pleasure. Yeah, so hey, safe travels and we'll be in touch down the road. Thank you so much again. Alright man, I really enjoyed your questions and let's have a beer sometime, you're back east. Fantastic, we'll do it. Alright, take care.
00:52:48
Speaker
Good luck finding Andre on social media. He ain't there. He's writing and getting the work done. You could all learn from that, right? So thanks, big thanks to Andre for coming on the podcast and talking so candidly and openly about his work and the generosity it takes to be a part of the writing community. It's quite inspiring listening to him talk.
00:53:15
Speaker
So lastly, I wonder how confident he is that I can get my wife to actually subscribe to my own podcast. Well, you know, honestly, Brendan, boy, I never get to the point where I'm confident. That's kind of what I thought, right?
00:53:36
Speaker
Anyway, thanks very much for listening. Tune in next week for another episode of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Thanks again.