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Episode 344: Rachel Dickinson
312 Plays2 years ago
Rachel Dickinson is the author The Loneliest Places: Loss, Grief, and the Long Journey Home (Three Hills Press).
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Promotions
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey CNFers, shout out to Athletic Brewing. Give that dry January time of years fast approaching and you might want to give it a go. Delicious stuff. I'm a brand ambassador. And get no money.
00:00:14
Speaker
And they are not an official sponsor of the show, so I would just love for you to give it a try. So visit athleticbrewing.com and use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout for a discount. All I get are like points towards merch and free beer, but I don't get any money. I just want to spread the love.
00:00:33
Speaker
Also, I haven't done this for a while, but I'm happy to bring it back into the rotation since I have a teensy bit more time on my hands. If you leave a review over at Apple Podcasts, I will give you a complimentary edit of a piece of your writing of up to 2,000 words.
00:00:53
Speaker
Once your review posts, usually within 24 hours, send me a screenshot of your review, and I will cross-jug it, to creativenonfictionpodcastatgmail.com, and then I will reach back out to you and we'll get started. Who knows, if you like the experience, you might even wanna do something more ambitious with me. All right, we can hope. Where's Mr. Food when I need him? And so I tried to find Mr. Food.
Rachel Dickinson on 'The Loneliest Places'
00:01:25
Speaker
Oh hey CNFers, it's CNF Pod, the creative nonfiction podcast, the show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, how's it going? Rachel Dickinson is here to talk about her new book, The Loneliest Places. Loss, grief, and the long journey home. It is published by Three Hills Press.
00:01:49
Speaker
No way to sugarcoat what this book deals with, alright? Rachel's son Jack died by suicide in 2012. He was 17. And this book stays within the boundaries of Rachel's experience. Her headspace. Her grief. Yes, her three daughters and her husband were deeply affected by this tragedy, but you won't hear much from them in this book. Not really until the end of the book.
00:02:15
Speaker
where Rachel interrogates her selfishness, in her own words, and withdrawal from the family, and in some cases, abandonment, where she just set off around the world.
00:02:31
Speaker
It would be easy to judge Rachel in this book. Even her editor wondered how, quote, likable, unquote, she was as a character. And if anything, she'd tell you just how honest Rachel was about her processing of this unthinkable experience and a willingness to put down that degree of candor on the page, independent of what anyone might think of her.
00:02:55
Speaker
this is something I've never done before but I think we should bring it up given the subject matter of the book and I've heard other podcasts do this if you or someone you know is dealing with suicidal thoughts or may harm themselves
00:03:11
Speaker
Call or text 988 and this will be the suicide and crisis lifeline. This will route people to the national suicide prevention lifeline where they can speak with a counselor, a trained counselor for support and help them through a dark moment. Okay. Little housekeeping here.
00:03:36
Speaker
show notes to this episode and a billion at last count others are at BrendanOmero.com. Hey there you can also sign up to the up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter and what better time to rage against the algorithm than right now what with the shit show happening at Twitter this is where it's at CNFers I'm not one to hang out on social media in fact I've logged out of my Twitter accounts because
00:04:01
Speaker
just because. Tired of it. But I am one to put a lot of effort into my kick-ass newsletter that entertains, I like to think, gives you value, I like to think, and invites you to a monthly 40-minute happy hour. Because who can afford all that Zoom nonsense? 40 minutes to days.
00:04:22
Speaker
that's our happy hour and also we're sticking it to the algorithm right up the algorithms keister if that's your thing sign up first of the month no spam as far as i can tell can't beat it
00:04:35
Speaker
Also, consider heading over to patreon.com slash cnf pod. Going over there helps keep the lights on cnf pod HQ show is free but it sure as hell ain't cheap. I got to thinking that maybe I'd move the cnf and happy hour to patreon but I'm thinking that maybe for certain tiers I'll have a virtual writing group where you guessed it will sit right in community whatever we're working on. I have to figure out some logistical things about that but we'll see.
Writing Process and Influences
00:05:03
Speaker
We'll see cnfers.
00:05:05
Speaker
All right, it is time. It is time to speak with Rachel Dickinson about writing, the late Philip Girard, structure, painting, grief being marked, and a recommendation we should all heed. So here we go, riff.
00:05:33
Speaker
do you have any mentor texts of that nature where you do kind of like pull them off the shelf and be like I need a little jolt what and this is where I'm where I'm turning to yeah I I actually go to the Tracy Kidder dick talk book
00:05:52
Speaker
For those who want to know, it is good prose, the art of nonfiction, stories and advice from a lifetime of writing and editing. Periodically and just kind of, I don't know, it invokes Goucher for me, which I really love. But one of my favorite books on writing is actually Stephen King's book. Oh, it's a great one. Yeah.
00:06:17
Speaker
I love that. I love that book. For me, it's inspirational because he talks about not being able to write. And that's what hits me periodically and not being able to write and then thinking, how do you get through this process?
00:06:38
Speaker
I instead of me trying to write, I learned how to paint. So thinking, oh, well, at least I'm using the same part of my brain, which it turns out is false, but at least I'm doing something with my time. Yeah, that's a wonderful way to crack yourself out of creative blocks is just to try an entirely different
00:06:58
Speaker
I try to test a different muscular chair in a sense and it can really kickstart something like I like to doodle and draw and make zines and everything just for my own little for my own entertainment and it definitely it's a nice little pivot to take a little it's like a pressure release valve for you know getting to the writing which is sort of a you know our stock and trade.
00:07:21
Speaker
Yes, yes, exactly. But then I found myself spending, I became very disciplined at the painting. I would get up and that's the first thing I would do and I would paint all morning or dedicate myself to some aspect of painting all morning.
00:07:37
Speaker
Whereas I used to do that with writing and I thought, wait a minute, you know, now how am I going to do both of these things? So I felt like maybe when I started writing again, the writing would suffer because I had spent so much time developing the discipline of painting. How do I get back the discipline of writing? And what kind of painting do you do?
00:08:01
Speaker
I started with watercolors and then realized that the way I taught myself and the way I taught myself was to look at Edward Hopper paintings, particularly his watercolors of houses or buildings. And I copied every single one. And I have a friend who's a very accomplished painter and he would look at these and say,
00:08:26
Speaker
Wow, that's really great. You did a great job, but you have to remember Hopper was not very good with perspective. So I was teaching myself shoddy perspective by copying Hopper, but I absolutely loved it. But then I realized what I really liked was color, and I couldn't get the depth of color I wanted with watercolor. So I eventually ended up using oils, which is what I do now.
00:08:53
Speaker
Very nice. I love that when you were starting to paint that you would, you know, literally, you know, copy other images, you know, Hopper in particular here. I think there's a lot of that gets to the heart of how you develop a voice, be it as a visual artist or as a writer.
00:09:13
Speaker
that you do imitate people who inspire you and over the course of doing that you start to over time kind of hone something that is uniquely you. So maybe you can speak to that and how you developed your voice maybe by imitating other writers that you deeply admired as you were coming up.
00:09:31
Speaker
I completely agree with you that for me, Imitation really was my best teacher in some ways. I didn't start writing actually, really writing until about the year 2000. And I started by writing a newspaper column for our little teeny tiny Gannett newspaper. I remember walking into the editor's office and
00:09:55
Speaker
saying, I want to write a column about my village. And after he got done laughing at me, he said, well, what would you write about? And I said, I pulled out an index card, and I said, well, corn, of course, walking, people I meet. And I said, whatever I want to. And he
00:10:14
Speaker
He said, OK, you can write three pieces and then we'll go from there. And I ended up having a five year run with this paper and they started advertising me above the fold on Mondays because people were buying the paper because I was writing a column in it.
00:10:31
Speaker
And I said to the editor, aren't you really, do you think it's because of me or is that the day you run all of the circulars and the coupons? I said, I feel like it might be the coupons. But so I taught myself how to write an essay by doing these little 500-word pieces. But I wasn't really reading essay. Instead, I was reading
00:10:57
Speaker
I love Susan Orlean and I was reading anything that she ever wrote and just really trying to absorb what she was doing. Her sentences and her word choices are so wonderful and evocative, but she can do one thing that I
00:11:19
Speaker
definitely can't do. And that's dialogue. So and she just like, she's kind of a messy writer, too. I remember trying to deconstruct the orchid thief like, okay, this will break the code. This is how I will learn how to do structure by looking at Susan Orleans orchid thief.
00:11:40
Speaker
Well, I wrote all over my copy, and I could make no rhyme nor reason to why things happened when they did. And I just kind of threw the book in the air at one point and said, I just will love this for this, but I'm not going to learn structure from Susan Orlean. I have to turn to something else. So I am a person who constantly looks for
00:12:04
Speaker
Um, imitation for someone to imitate someone who I think is really good at something and structure is my problem. So. The 1, 1 person I turned to for structure is, um.
00:12:21
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actually Candace Millard, I think she's an amazing writer. She has a background in National Geographic stories and she was an editor there and she's written four books and to me they are all gems and they are all
00:12:41
Speaker
They all have at least three characters and that she follows through the entire narrative. And they are pieces of beautiful history or history written beautifully, I should say. And she approaches each topic like the one I love best is Destiny of the Republic, where she writes about James Garfield, the 20th president who dies four months into office.
00:13:11
Speaker
destiny of the republic it's a tale well here's a subtitle a tale of madness medicine and the murder of a president james abram garfield was one of the most extraordinary man ever elected president born into abject poverty he rose to become a wonderkin scholar a civil war hero a renowned congressman and a reluctant presidential candidate who took on the nation's corrupt political establishment but four months after garfield's inauguration in eighteen eighty one
00:13:41
Speaker
He was shot in the back by a deranged office seeker named Charles Guiteau. And so she develops this whole argument about how James Garfield would have been probably one of our most extraordinary presidents.
00:13:58
Speaker
had he not died and then she also writes about the person who shot Garfield and then she writes about the medical establishment at the time and Garfield's physicians who did not believe in germ theory and just like
00:14:14
Speaker
Garfield lived for a couple of months after he was shot and he was in extreme agony and they would just kind of go into his stomach looking for this bullet with their bare hands that they had never washed. So it's like you learn so many fascinating things and then she brings Alexander Graham Bell in there who tries to develop a device really quickly that can locate a bullet in someone's body. So in this one
00:14:44
Speaker
volume of history that is beautifully documented, she does this perfect braided narrative. So I feel like, OK, that's someone I can learn from. Oh, that's that's great, because I love I love finding those kind of models and even talking about structure in a recent conversation I had with JB McKinnon, who's a freelance writer based out of Canada. And he had a piece in the activist magazine last month.
00:15:11
Speaker
And his his thing was like writing these days or at least the writing culture sometimes puts too much of a premium on quote unquote like beautiful writing over over beautiful structure.
00:15:27
Speaker
and you know a structure can be you know you don't necessarily want to see all the scaffolding but if you look hard enough you can see the choices made and didn't see like the the nice lines on the car that are just like really seductive to look at
00:15:42
Speaker
And and that should be the goal over like these little these little zesty flourishes of language where it's like a lot of the energy and what makes it for a good what I like to call like a downhill read is Structure that is conducive to a really quick read of absorption. You're like, oh my god I can't believe I just read 30 pages and I don't I just feel like I didn't blink and
00:16:05
Speaker
Yes, this. I completely agree with that. And in fact, I'm so aware of when I'm reading something where I just feel like, oh my God, your words are so goddamn precious enough already.
00:16:22
Speaker
Exactly. I can't remember if I was just journaling about this or I spoke about it with somebody or it was just chasing my own tail. I don't know. But it was like I was saying either to myself or this person that you can't write your way out of a bad reporting hole or of a deep reporting hole.
00:16:41
Speaker
Like you need to have like such a titanic amount of research and reporting and interviewing done and then the writing is it's just well lubricated at that point and it tends to be a lot easier but if you haven't done a lot of that up front legwork and research you can't just like with precious words and purple prose like
00:17:04
Speaker
artistically write your way out of that hole. In nonfiction, that's what we need to do. We need the research and that'll make the writing pop in the end.
00:17:14
Speaker
I totally agree and I am a person who tends to. Well, you can never over research, but I research the hell out of something and as I'm researching, I am so old school. I have index cards and I'm writing things on index cards and throwing them in a box.
00:17:34
Speaker
And I'm also writing down all of the sources, everything on index cards. And then at some point I start going through the box and sorting things out. And then because I guess I'm a visual person also, like give me a timeline. I never met a timeline I didn't like, you know?
00:17:53
Speaker
So I can pin those index cards up on some timeline that timeline of, you know, several events that should be coming together or where do they come together.
Research and Structure in Writing
00:18:04
Speaker
So seeing seeing this whole thing just.
00:18:09
Speaker
like the Luddite would do, that is me, you know, I'm just there, give me the cards, let me do the research, and then I can find story. And I, yeah, there's no way I could write myself out of a writing hole if I hadn't done all of that research. You still fall in a hole, but at least you have the research, you know, to grab at as you're trying to climb out of the hole.
00:18:33
Speaker
For sure. The timeline exercise is so valuable. If you have something, be it on a cork board or on a wall and you've got all those years laid out or be it in a spreadsheet or whatever, however you want to lay that out, it's like you start slotting in these blocks and then suddenly there might be something that is very specific to say your own personal history.
00:18:57
Speaker
And then you realize that in, I don't know, the year 1981, you're like, oh, like, and it's a certain month. You're like, oh, that's when Reagan was sworn in. And then all of a sudden you start to have like cultural context that is overlaid over your personal context. And all these things start to slot in and you start to really create this mosaic. And it kind of doesn't happen until you lay out that timeline.
00:19:22
Speaker
When I, my thesis at Goucher was about the Reno gang and they were the world's first train robbers or robbers of a moving train, I should say. And when I went to Goucher, I knew that whatever I was going to work on there, I wanted to turn into a book. So I chose something that had a lot of meat to it and that no one had written about.
00:19:47
Speaker
very weirdly, but it involved these robbers, it involved a town, it involved the Pinkertons, it involved how there was one other moving part. But so I ended up making these four timelines and one for each moving part that I had to try to sync up. And that was so instructive, like, oh, history of railroads, of course. So there I am, like, oh, okay, so
00:20:16
Speaker
Oh, they didn't have this at that point when these people were trying to do that. You cannot see that unless you have this like photographic brain. You can't figure that stuff out without just doing the work to make things mesh.
00:20:34
Speaker
I remember back in undergrad, I had a class with Maddie Blaze, who actually sometimes... Oh, she's awesome. She's the best. I loved her book about basketball. It was just fantastic. Yeah, and These Girls Hope is a Muscle. It's such a wonderful book, and her memoir of the house on Martha's Vineyard is awesome. That came out a few years ago. I don't know what she's working on right now.
00:20:57
Speaker
need to knock on that door. But yeah, I had a Diaries, Memoirs, and Journals class with her at UMass Amherst. And she had us do the timeline thing.
Incorporating Personal Memory into Writing
00:21:10
Speaker
And just so we could start to see
00:21:13
Speaker
Uh, a little, we'll be able to slot, you know, various personal vignettes. And it's just like the minute you do one, you don't think you can remember anything. And then you do one and you're like, something else kind of comes into focus, like a Polaroid picture. And then all of a sudden, like you're starting to really fill it out. And it's such a great exercise because you don't know what you're going to remember until you start to kind of write it down and they kind of kickstart another memory.
00:21:36
Speaker
That's how I feel when I write essays. And I really came to writing essays fairly late, but I find it, in a way, they start as these writing exercises almost. And these are personal essays. And as I start writing, I am amazed at the stuff I managed to pull out of my head.
00:22:02
Speaker
And I try to fact check it as well because, you know, my memories are very weird thing. And in my latest book, I'm writing about my memories, but it also involves reaching back into time. And at one point, a sister's involved or my parents are involved. And I think, now, did this really happen? How do I even fact check this? I can fact check
00:22:28
Speaker
the weather, but how can I fact check my memory if most of the principal players are dead? It's such a tricky exercise. And then you can kind of play with the fluidity of your memory and play it off someone else's. Like, this is how I remember it, this is how someone else does. And then triangulate the scene as best you can. And I think that's what a lot of people who might have a more journalistic bent will do in memoir. And then other people might just be like, I'm just going to take the one that sounds better.
00:22:58
Speaker
And that's the other, that's a choice and that's also sometimes where people get into trouble with memoir.
00:23:07
Speaker
Yes, yes. I do know that my sister is also a writer and she does show up in my book, my latest book. And I thought, hmm, should I fact check this with her? And I decided not to. Because I knew she'd have a different memory. And I thought,
00:23:30
Speaker
Damn it, I'm allowed to have my memory of this. And I don't want to have to fact check it with her. And because people, my sister wrote a couple of memoirs, and people would come up to me and say, oh, wow, did that really happen that way? And my pat answers always, people are allowed to write their own story. It's like this is her version of her story. It's not my story to tell.
00:23:59
Speaker
Yeah, I gave myself an hour. Always. Right. Yeah. And I've been trying to kind of craft this essay about my mom and Rachel Ray, our relationship through like food and specifically Rachel Ray. And my mom's going like down the dementia road.
00:24:17
Speaker
right now and so like you know she's so I was trying like I was not a few weeks ago when I was back east I was you know talking to her about the the right time like do you remember like you know being into Rachel Ray and we would do these you know we would talk about her it's like oh yeah yeah yeah
00:24:34
Speaker
And I had a memory of her doing ... She was trying to call bullshit on Rachael Ray, being able to cook these meals in 30 minutes or less. And so my memory of the meal that she tried to cook was beef stroganoff. And I'm like, do you remember making beef stroganoff to try to do it in 30 minutes? I remember you hustling, hustling, hustling.
00:24:56
Speaker
kitchen, you're making all these noises and you work as fast as you could. And she's an amazing cook, but she did it in like 40 minutes or something. But her memory of the meal was definitely not beef stroganoff, it was something else. And it's just like, God damn it, I remembered it like that. She remembers it like this. But does the meal or does the food even matter?
00:25:20
Speaker
Like it's really not about the actual meal, but I'm like, I would be really good if I could get the actual meal, because then I can maybe find the recipe in a cookbook and then I can really unpack the scene a little bit better. But you just don't know in those instances and you play one memory off the other or or just make up the meal together.
00:25:39
Speaker
Exactly. That's the fun part is actually when you get to write and say, here's how I remember it and you like really flesh out your memory and then checking with your mom and she said, no, it's beef bourguignon or whatever. So it's like you've got these competing memories and these competing foods and you get to play with two recipes at that point. I love that. I think that sounds like it's going to be amazing.
00:26:07
Speaker
Yeah, my sister has all the old Rachael Ray cookbooks, too, and I was going through them, and I'm like, is there a beef stroganoff recipe in here? And I could not find one. I'm like, damn it. I was going through, trying to do all the reporter, real sort of Woodward Bernstein kind of research here, but I'm like, what?
00:26:30
Speaker
I fell down that same rabbit hole, only it was with, it was about food and my mother, but it was about looking for something. She got a cookbook in the mail from Mr. Food. And I honestly, I don't even remember who Mr. Food was, but here's his cookbook. And she made fried spaghetti squares.
00:26:55
Speaker
I have a certain memory. I tried to recreate this fried spaghetti squares. No one has ever heard of it. I can't find a recipe. So I'm just using my brain. Like, well, if you put this with that, then this will happen. And I think, where's Mr. Food when I need him? And so I tried to find Mr. Food to see.
00:27:18
Speaker
if I could find this recipe. So yeah, I've been down that recipe trail and it is sad. It's a very sad trail. You know, as I look at my computer screen on my monitor here is something I want to pick your brain about because I think distraction and stuff is a lot as creative people we really wrestle with as we try to get work done, especially in an age of social media where every things are trying to really pick at our brains.
00:27:47
Speaker
and I counted all the tabs that I have open and I have 39 tabs which for some people might actually be not that much but it is a lot and I'm looking I'm like oh my god and some of these tabs I have been open for weeks like I want an age like a software that tells you how old some of these tabs are
00:28:09
Speaker
Hey, I have the same problem. In fact, I have a tab open for a Toshiba. I used to have a Toshiba something a really long time ago. I don't know why. I still have a tab open for Toshiba.
00:28:27
Speaker
I don't know, accessories or whatever. I just keep the tab there to try to say, well, this is part of my personal history. Let's see if we can work with this at some point. So I have you beat on the tabs, I have to say, but I'm not even going to divulge the number. It's frightening.
00:28:48
Speaker
Yeah. And then sometimes it'll be like, you know, this is your final free article. And I'm like, oh, shoot, I can't, I can't close this tab. That's exactly right. Yeah. Do I want to? Yeah. I want to definitely read that last Atlantic article before having to push the button subscribe once again. Yeah.
00:29:09
Speaker
So yeah, to that end, how have you gotten work done in the face of being bombarded with any number of distractions and getting to what Cal Newport would call like deep work?
00:29:21
Speaker
I do a couple of things. I go to Iceland every year for a month, and I started doing that about five years ago. And that is my place where I do my deep thinking and, you know, express my ennui and however
00:29:43
Speaker
whatever form that's going to take. And I have this cabin that I go to. It's part of a little artist colony. And from this cabin, I can see a volcano, a volcano that could be active at any moment. And I remember the first year I went, I just wished for that volcano to explode because it would solve all of my problems. Suddenly, I would have something to write about that was
00:30:11
Speaker
so amazing and magnificent. It would just overwhelm everything else that was in my brain. So I try to get away from home in order to do my deep thinking, or is it deep distraction? I have to think about that.
00:30:27
Speaker
Speaking of research earlier, and how exciting and charged that is, and given that you went to Goucher, as I did, and as Christina Gaddy did, who was on the pod again last week, and it makes me think of Philip Girard. And I never studied under him, though I considered him a friend over the years in his wonderful book, The Art of Creative Research, another book I don't get rid of.
00:30:53
Speaker
And I wanted to maybe just get a sense of what you remember about him, if you studied under him or not, but just the kind of personality he was and what he brought to the community.
00:31:08
Speaker
Well, Christina and I were in the same class with Philip Gerard. We were two out of three students in that class. And we were, yeah, the two top students out of three. It's not hard to do that, actually. There are only three. But I loved him because I was writing about the train robbers. And he was so excited about that topic. And he
00:31:35
Speaker
He really, and I think Christina said the same thing, he really talked about being cinematic with your writing, setting scenes where you could smell, you know, the gun, the cordite from the guns and you could, you know,
00:31:52
Speaker
see the shine of the barrel and you could hear the sounds and you could see the wood splintering from the railroad cars. He talked through a scene like that with me and I'll never forget it and I thought, okay,
00:32:08
Speaker
you know the same principles apply principles of physics apply today as did then so you can extrapolate you know i don't have to be there and have someone have described what it sounded like i can actually create that sound with words um using what i know and so he gave me a freedom a total freedom to do something although he
00:32:35
Speaker
He was not one for the bullshit. In the bullshit meter, it's like, no, you don't do that, but you are allowed to think like a screenwriter, which I just loved. And he was a great community member. He came to the study halls. He was hilarious. He always brought his guitar. And I loved the pieces he wrote about North Carolina history.
00:33:05
Speaker
during its, I don't know, it had some kind of centennial or something, but he wrote a piece every month that was just outstanding. He's a hell of a writer, and I was really gutted when I heard he died. I could not believe it. I couldn't believe he's still not around.
00:33:25
Speaker
Yeah and yeah to that point of the research too and like trying to create those scenes you know as you go deep into say newspaper archives or something I was talking to Glenn Stout about this too it's just like you you get all these sources and one might say like the ghetto they got away in a getaway car okay great so they're in a car
00:33:44
Speaker
next one might be like oh it was a Buick and then another story might say it was like a maroon Buick and then all of a sudden you're like layering on these details and it's building that scene and making it more movie-like but it all comes down to being like alive and engaged with the archival stuff and you know
00:34:01
Speaker
I love archival research. I think I'm at my happiest when I'm sitting in a dusty archive, although they're not supposed to be dusty. In my mind, they always are.
00:34:16
Speaker
sitting in an archive with a folder open like reading through diary entries or letters or journals and oh my god i'm just in my place and i i just can't imagine not wanting to do that all the time you know i must be the biggest history nerd or
00:34:41
Speaker
I don't know. I don't know why I love it so much. So when I was doing the Reno gang, I went out to Indiana where this train robbery took place. And I went to the local historical society.
00:34:56
Speaker
and ended up in what was a dusty archive, but I found the kind of the key to make all archival research just even more wonderful. I found the one person who was a bigger nerd than I was. Pro tip, find a librarian and become their best friend.
00:35:20
Speaker
Or at least let them know how much you like them. Maybe send them gifts. Maybe an edible arrangement of some sort. They are your best friends. Okay.
00:35:37
Speaker
And she could show me where to go in the archives to find the perfect stuff. And she would feed me information long after I had gone home saying, oh, you know, I found this, I found that, and she'd be sending me copies of stuff. And it was wonderful. But I felt the same way about going through 10 years of a town's newspaper.
00:36:03
Speaker
in Southern Indiana. And what I did find out is a course, I mean, these newspaper guys, and they were guys, they were such hacks. And they were so wonderful at the same time, you know, they would paint a picture that bore no resemblance to reality at all. And I was knowing that as I was reading it, because I had these other resources, I was kind of folding in, including even going to like,
00:36:33
Speaker
the weather in the 19th century on that particular day and realized, what are they talking about? They're talking about the rain and just making this really dramatic scene and the skies were blue that day and there was no wind is what you really find out. I had been using newspaper accounts with abandon and then realized, well,
00:37:00
Speaker
These are people who are really engaged in storytelling and their kind of storytelling does not adhere maybe to the same kind of storytelling that we learned about at Goucher.
00:37:16
Speaker
These people are just they're writing a good story and they're putting pigs in the street and whether they were in the street or not, you know, you'll never know. So I learned to kind of pick and choose and kind of triangulate some of the information because I never knew what I could say was real or not. And I learned to use all the words like it was probably or it was likely or, you know,
00:37:46
Speaker
someone reported that so that there was this little tiny out every time I put in some kind of historical fact. Yeah. Yeah. And now I think the segues into your latest book, because in talking about Goucher, I think the unspeakable experience that you endured to give context to people who are listening who don't know the book, it's like your son dies by suicide in 2012 in February.
00:38:15
Speaker
You know, shortly thereafter, you're trying to figure out how to metabolize it. And, you know, you go to Gautre thinking you're going to write about it. It was only a couple of years removed. And someone would probably say, like, you're a little too close to this. Yeah, my mentor, he's like, oh, no, no, no, you will not be writing about this.
00:38:37
Speaker
But then it's definitely something that as a writer, as an artist, it's something that is going to be always pecking at your brain to metabolize in whatever as a writer. So at what point did you feel like you were ready to tackle it if you are ever ready to tackle such a thing?
Grief and Editorial Challenges
00:39:01
Speaker
Well, this latest book is called The Loneliest Places, Lost Grief, and the Long Journey Home.
00:39:10
Speaker
I meant every word of that title when I wrote it. I started writing, I started trying to write about it kind of right away and realized I couldn't do it. I just had these really angry screeds, you know, toward my son or about my son. And I was such a wreck, as you can imagine, that I
00:39:37
Speaker
Basically, either I was not home, I ran away from home, or I was sitting in a green chair wrapped in a red quilt watching thousands of hours of.
00:39:48
Speaker
British police procedurals. I really loved the main characters in those because they're always flawed detectives. And they were working on their problems like I was working on my problems while trying to solve a mystery at the same time. So these were my people.
00:40:09
Speaker
And then when I went to goucher, I thought, okay, now I get to someone's going to help me figure out how to write about this and now it couldn't be touched. So this is when I fell into the train robbery.
00:40:25
Speaker
book and I fell hard and I worked hard on that for a couple of years and it was published and I loved it because it allowed me to go into the minutia of something that wasn't me. I got to read about railroad gauge sizes and even write about it and then of course take it out because who the hell is interested in that besides me.
00:40:52
Speaker
So, but it allowed me to do this deep research and it had nothing to do with my family. And after that book was finished, I did start trying to write some essays about it.
00:41:07
Speaker
You know, so it was a long process. That was in 2017 or 2016 when I started writing these essays. And I had a friend who was an editor at Cornell Press and he had been trying to get me to write something for them that I didn't want to write. And so he asked me what I was working on. I said, well, I'm doing this. I'm writing these essays. I have no idea where they're going to go or what I'm going to do.
00:41:36
Speaker
And he told me to show, he wanted to see them. So I sent them and I probably had 10 or 12 done. And he said, keep going.
00:41:48
Speaker
I'm going to put this through the process and I think we can get you a contract and you can keep going with this. So then it became real. Then I had to really sit and think about what I was going to write about and how do you tell the story of this boy who was 17 and who I felt like I didn't know that well ultimately.
00:42:14
Speaker
And I realized at some point pretty early on that this was not the story of Jack. This was my story of trying to put the pieces of myself and my family back together. But it also wasn't my family's story. They have their own story to tell. So I didn't write much about my daughters or my husband. And at one point the editor said to me, well,
00:42:44
Speaker
you know, I'm not hearing really anything about your family and I and I said it's it really isn't their story and he said well he also said you are coming across as kind of an unlikable character and that gave me pause and I said well you know this is how I this is how I was feeling at the time maybe it's how I'm feeling now I don't know I said I never thought of myself as being unlikable maybe
00:43:14
Speaker
unrelatable character might be a better way to say it. But I also realized this, I was kind of interrogating how I was feeling during those moments. I really had to look back at my own family history from the time I was a child. And so, you know, you go into your childhood and you just start stirring up all of this stuff.
00:43:42
Speaker
like Mr. Food, or working in a cow barn. We had cows, dairy cows, or living on the edge of poverty in many ways. And thinking about also the way children were raised in the late 50s, early 60s, mid 60s,
00:44:07
Speaker
we were allowed to play on the top of a 30-foot waterfall. And we were little. We were like five and six, seven years old, and all the kids played on top of these waterfalls. And I thought, where were the parents? Who lets their kid do this? And then I realized this is the time. Times were really different. My mother was
00:44:32
Speaker
Inside, reading Nabokov, probably, or Chekhov, and smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee. That was what she was interested in. And more power to her. But it took a lot to figure out what goes on in a family. What do you know about family, really, when you're in the middle of it?
00:44:56
Speaker
Well, and given the story that is so, you know, it's obviously a grief story, grief memoir through essays, and there's writing it and then there's writing it to be published.
00:45:11
Speaker
And so, like, for you, just, you know, what was the process by which you're like, yeah, I'd like this to be, you know, public knowledge in the end instead of, you know, maybe privately metabolizing it. There's always that calculus, that math you're doing, you know, as a writer, like, should I publish this or should I not? I guess I have always felt like whatever I wrote
00:45:36
Speaker
could be published. I never thought anything was off the table in terms of anything I was writing. Part of my writing is about making money. This is how I earn some of my money.
00:45:53
Speaker
And so that goes into the equation. So I felt like there wasn't much I had to change in terms of public or private when I was handing these essays to the editor. The biggest challenge came in having to figure out
00:46:17
Speaker
the stupid structure. Once again, it comes down to structure. How do you tell this story? Do you tell it chronologically? No, because, you know, who wants to read a chronology? Well, I don't want to read a chronology. So I wanted it to be something other than that. But it took quite a while to come up with how to tell this story in essays.
00:46:43
Speaker
And a moment ago, you used the word interrogating. And towards the end of the book, probably the last 20%, maybe the last 10%, you interrogate what you said is your selfishness during the time of your grieving.
00:47:05
Speaker
And you know I over reading the book I kind of felt that absence of your husband Tim and your three daughters as well and and then you start to talk about the selfishness at the end and was that a reaction to the conversation you were having with your editor or is that something you felt like you just needed to dollop there to recognize that you know this was your story and this was you know your way of processing.
00:47:30
Speaker
I think it was a combination. I was taken aback when the editor said that to me, but I also knew it to be true. And I always knew that writing these personal essays were always going to be about me and my relationship to the world. And weirdly, it did not involve my family.
00:47:54
Speaker
you know, he points that out. That's kind of a strange thing. You are married and you do have these other children. So at the end of the book, I do address the selfishness and I ask each of the girls and my husband to write me a letter about
00:48:14
Speaker
basically how they'd been doing since Jack's death. And it threw the girls into a total meltdown, breakdown, tizzy, because they all felt the same way about particularly the first two years after Jack died. And that was that I was not present at all for them. And so they had
00:48:41
Speaker
their father, my husband Tim, write me a letter.
00:48:46
Speaker
about their response, and he agreed with them. And they said, it was like we were living in a single parent household. Even when you were sitting in the green chair, you were not there. And I was so completely taken aback by this letter. I remember my cheeks getting really warm and feeling really embarrassed and upset at the same time.
00:49:12
Speaker
And I then started thinking, what do I remember back about those two years? And it was nothing other than the color of the chair and the quills and what was on the television. And I didn't remember how we ate.
00:49:29
Speaker
you know, how anything happened. I just couldn't remember. I took some trips. I remember those. But they were to places where Jack had never been. He was not part of the landscape. When I was at home, Jack was always there somewhere. And it was just me trying to keep him
00:49:52
Speaker
I didn't want him to be present. And so I think I was just keeping myself just wrapped up in saran wrap almost, just didn't want to open my eyes and catch a glimpse of him. And that kept me in a cocoon. So I wasn't there for those girls. And for that, I will always feel bad.
00:50:18
Speaker
They, they forgave me. You know, they also realized that this
00:50:25
Speaker
was also a, this was how I was raised as well. When something, when my parents got divorced, my mother spent two years going to work every day. I remember she earned $6,000 a year as a typist at Cornell and that she had to buy a car and the car cost $6,000. I mean, it was just astounding to me like this is the economic calculus here.
00:50:54
Speaker
But she would come home and just go right into her room and lie down, clutching her purse to her body, not take her coat off. And we were just on our own for a couple of years. And we just knew she was too sad to do anything. So I did the same thing to my own kids, only I didn't really... I was less communicative than she was even.
00:51:24
Speaker
Yeah, I imagine like I'm just trying to picture you like you know you're handed you know an envelope or that piece of paper with that letter and like you know the rule maybe even the the fear of reading it and sort of a
00:51:40
Speaker
the reckoning that you're going to have to read and learn things that are going to be deeply uncomfortable and will saddle you with like a tremendous amount of guilt like was it was there like a reluctance or like oh my god like do I really want to read this thing do I really want to know
00:51:55
Speaker
Yes, yes that always there and it it definitely felt like come up and like this was it this was I was going to get it in the neck and even though I have a very strong relationship to all these members of my family now and we are
00:52:19
Speaker
We're in contact every day. You know, I have one daughter who lives in Serbia. She FaceTimes me every morning. I mean, we are just a very close family that way. And part of it was after we all blew up, I think we took all the little splinters that were left and kind of glued them back together. And that became our family. We are, you know, the post Jack family. So I was frightened to read that letter. And when I read it,
00:52:49
Speaker
I got it, but also it was shocking to me because I didn't realize I had done that until it was pointed out to me. And a lot of how you have used this term a bunch already metabolized the grief of the moment in the years following Jack's death was literally getting as far away as possible, be it the Falkland Islands, be it Iceland.
Nature, Travel, and Healing
00:53:18
Speaker
be it wherever, and being out in nature, and birding, and just finding artistic outlets. At what point, I guess, did you know that that was going to be your path through it, was to seek out nature and to seek out faraway places?
00:53:41
Speaker
The second I stepped on the plane in Syracuse, New York to eventually land in the Falkland Islands, I knew that this was the thing that was going to work because I got on that plane. It was five weeks after Jack's death. And I think people were horrified that I was even going because I hadn't been able to function at all at home. It was like, how will she even XYZ fill in the blank?
00:54:10
Speaker
And I got on that plane and I felt such a lightness because I realized that no one would know my story where I was going. No one on the plane knew my story. I could be whoever I wanted to be. I could be happy, Rachel. I didn't have to be
00:54:26
Speaker
pathetic crying Rachel all the time. So I found a kind of freedom in this travel that I just didn't expect. And so I kept kind of yearning for that freedom once again.
00:54:46
Speaker
you know kind of periodically just the need to get away to get away from the ghosts that were here and as I said earlier I traveled to places where Jack had never been there was no chance he would be a ghost in one of these places he would not be lurking around a corner I wouldn't hear his whistle I wouldn't hear the music he loved or played I would be
00:55:12
Speaker
literally by myself in these places. And something I've always done and loved is notice the landscape around me is just the way
00:55:25
Speaker
it's just the way I do things. I look outside and I see a lot more or different things that other people see. They focus on people perhaps and I'm focusing on how that particular tree is growing and isn't it interesting that you wonder what form that knot at that one place or why is it, do all elm trees look this way? So I just start wondering about
00:55:53
Speaker
how things occur in nature and what they look like. And it makes me feel good. This is what it is. Or it lets me feel everything at the same time, good and bad, sad, lonely, happy. I feel everything when I'm out in nature and not just feeling sad and lonely when I'm sitting in my green chair.
00:56:16
Speaker
And a moment ago, you know, something you said struck me that you, you know, you kind of labeled yourself as like the, you know, the pathetic crying woman and or, and pathetic being that's a really strong, strong word. And, and a word I, it just just for me, I, I hate to hear you use that word. Did you, did you really feel, you know, pathetic at that time?
00:56:42
Speaker
No, actually I didn't. I don't know why I said that word because it is the one I would use often. Instead, I felt like I was so closed off from everyone and everything, but I also was prone to cry at the drop of a hat. So perhaps in other people's eyes, I would appear to be pathetic. I don't think I ever felt pathetic, but I think I was viewed as pathetic.
00:57:13
Speaker
And in the book too, you just get a sense of how Jack's death kind of, in a scarlet letter kind of way, kind of like marked you. And as that mother and that family that that happened to.
00:57:30
Speaker
So what was, you know, you just having that that weighted vest on you, like what was you just that like for you to experience like knowing that when people are looking at you like you can't help but see them see you as marked or labeled? Yeah, I yes, always feeling like you were the other. They were really othering you and they were putting you in this box that said, oh, you're the mother of the boy who killed himself.
00:58:01
Speaker
it felt terrible. I avoided all local places. I would drive
00:58:08
Speaker
if I remember going to a store, this is also the problem, but I would drive far out of town in order to conduct any kind of business, be it grocery shopping or going to a bank. I could not bear to see the face of someone I knew or who was a parent of one of Jack's friends. I remember being in Target a year after Jack died and there was the mother
00:58:37
Speaker
of one of Jack's friends and the boy himself, the friend, and they saw me and they both ducked into an aisle. And I was so grateful. I was so grateful to them. It's like we all knew we cannot see each other. This would be a bad thing. So what happens when you run into people who, where you see the thought bubble of what, you know, oh, there's the mother, is you find that they say things that are
00:59:05
Speaker
totally inappropriate because they don't know what to say and you find yourself trying to comfort them and say it's okay while you're also crying. So it becomes this incredibly awkward transaction and no one wants to go through that.
00:59:25
Speaker
which gets to the why it makes all the more sense why it it it was it that it made sense for you to want to go far away where nobody knew who you were and you could engage with them and they wouldn't know the story at all and just that you can almost feel the the way and you get it get it from reading the book you feel the lightness of not having to confront that with every single person that you're seeing be it in the Falkland Islands or in Iceland or wherever
00:59:56
Speaker
That's absolutely true. I do remember being in the Falklands and I was there to cover the 30th anniversary of the 1982 war with the Argentines. And I forget who I was, I was writing a piece, it might have been for Men's Journal, you know, which is weird, but I did a lot of travel stuff for them. And it was, I was being shown around all these battlegrounds and
01:00:23
Speaker
Various places by people who had actually been alive and experienced, you know what it was like to be occupied by the Argentines for a couple of months and.
01:00:38
Speaker
I realized I would look at their faces and that these were people who were like being re-traumatized by this anniversary and by me asking all these various questions about how you felt and what you did. And at one point I realized I was also looking at myself. It was like looking in the mirror.
Emotional Encounters in Healing
01:00:58
Speaker
of when people would ask me questions or people who knew what I had gone through and it was that gave me a jolt and the other jolt I got in the Falkland Islands was it was the first time that someone had asked me how many children I had and I burst into tears because I didn't know how you answer that do I have three and do I have four I don't know you know what do you say when one of them
01:01:28
Speaker
is dead. So that was something I had to work out over time. And I think I still to this day, I just kind of judge the situation. And the easy answer is three daughters. That's it. The easy answer.
01:01:45
Speaker
Well, Rachel, as we bring the conversation down for a landing, it's something I always love to ask guests for. Towards the end is just a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. It can be something professional or just something fun or something that's just really exciting you these days. As we wind down here, I'd extend that to you. What recommendation might you have for the listeners out there?
01:02:10
Speaker
Mine is earlier we talked about Kansas Millard and her books that I love. So that would be a reader recommendation is if you haven't ever read her, pick it up. Pick up one of her four books. Another thing I would say is go outside. You know, it's really a simple thing, but we often don't go outside and really appreciate what's around us. Go outside, take a walk, look up,
01:02:38
Speaker
Notice there are birds, look down, notice there are rocks. It's an incredible way to just open your world up and to make it more full. So enjoy nature. And I'd add to that too, like go outside, get into nature and do so even if the weather is quote unquote bad.
01:03:03
Speaker
You're right. And I am terrified of falling on the sidewalk. And so I go out into the backyard where if you fall, you know, you have a chance of not cracking your head open. So yeah, go outside regardless. And if you live in a snowy climate, go outside and go by a pine tree and just pull a branch down and watch all the snow come off. I mean, there's like lots of stuff to do. Pretend you're a 10 year old.
01:03:32
Speaker
Yeah, I like that. Very nice. Well, Rachel, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about writing and talking about the rawness that is your latest book. And just say, yeah, thank you for doing the work and carving out the time and having such a wonderful conversation. It was a pleasure. And I'm glad we got to do this. Thank you, Brendan. I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I'll get in touch when I write my next book.
01:04:03
Speaker
Thanks to Rachel for coming on the show. Thanks to UC and efforts for listening and making it this far. Again, if you're someone you know, could use a little help or feeling suicidal, dial or text 988 and a trained counselor will be there to listen and provide support. By the time this podcast publishes, it'll be Black Friday. In honor of Black Friday, this podcast will be offered free of charge.
01:04:30
Speaker
I know, I know, what a guy. But if you insist on paying, head over to patreon.com slash CNF bot, shop around, see if there's a tier where you'd like to throw in a few bucks into the tip jar. The other day I was interviewed by a University of Oregon student for the Daily Emerald, their school paper, about the shuttering of the opinion page at my former newspaper.
01:04:57
Speaker
She seemed a little nervous, and I get that. Hell, I still get nervous when I talk to people. She used a recorder, which most of us use. I use one. But she wasn't taking any notes at all. I tend to use notes in this context as a way to maybe put a pin in a question if someone says something like, ooh, I want to circle back to that.
01:05:15
Speaker
I don't have the capacity to mentally put a pin in something because I'll forget. So I write it down. And there are other things worth writing down. As a result, sometimes in the conversation and the interviews, you kind of lost your train of thought quite a bit. But this is why we practice.
01:05:32
Speaker
I wish you could say there was a path to journalistic riches. I was just thinking of the road ahead of this young reporter. What would that look like, a satisfying career? One where you can envision an emergency fund or not have to marry rich to afford a house or even a family. There will always be a need for journalism.
01:05:55
Speaker
I just wish it was valued in the same way that we value a good accountant or a real estate attorney. When I started at this last newspaper, I was making $18.50 an hour, which did not change at 34 hours a week. Then I was told I had to work 30 hours a week. Then they cut my workload so much that I was down to 15 to 20 hours a week. Never any raise over more than three years, not even for cost of living, which is astronomical in Eugene, Oregon.
01:06:25
Speaker
Relatively speaking, I married Rich. She hates her job, feels trapped, and wishes she could leave, but hey, Brendan gets to have a podcast. So we find gigs that we don't tweet about, if we tweet at all. Logging off of Twitter has been one of the great joys of 2022 for me. Done giving them free words. Done. Especially with the reinstatement of you know who. Done.
01:06:52
Speaker
Let's just say 2022 is a pretty shitty year overall, this year three of the pandemic, but I cite slogging off of Twitter as one of the great highlights. I don't know what to offer anybody anymore. Not that anyone asked me for an opinion or advice, nor should they. I don't really have much to offer in that realm. I'm a bit of a rambler. Thank goodness I'm reading a script, even though I didn't write that line, that one. That one's ad-libbed, totally ad-libbed. All this is ad-libbed. This next sentence is not ad-libbed.
01:07:21
Speaker
I'd probably just say you need to interrogate your own experience. Wrap yourself in bubble wrap and fumble your way forward. There's a trailhead. Here's a machete. Go find your way to the top. And maybe don't forget to go park yourself at a good overlook. Smell the roses, man. Okay. That's it. Stay wild, CNFers. And if you can't do, interview. See ya.
01:08:05
Speaker
you