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Episode 137—Bozos on the Same Bus with Bronwen and Brendan
132 Plays6 years ago
"Clarity is a goal I want to be working toward. The more clear a piece of writing is, the more honest it feels," says three-time guest Bronwen Dickey (@BronwenDickey). Bronwen is the author of "Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon" and a kick-ass journalist, writer, and teacher. Little change of pace with this episode as it is just us talking shop for an hour. Keep the conversation going on Twitter @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod. Head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly newsletter. Once a month. No spam. Can't beat it! Thanks to Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction for the support!
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Transcript
Introduction & Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two-year, low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on-campus residencies allow you
00:00:15
Speaker
to hone your craft with accomplishmenters who have pulled surprises and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni. Which has published 140 books and counting, you'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey.
00:00:38
Speaker
visit Goucher.edu forward slash non-fiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA program for non-fiction.
Podcast History & Guest Introduction
00:00:53
Speaker
Ever feel like a garden gnome without a garden? That's why I started this racket back in 2013 and that's why we ref.
00:01:05
Speaker
Ooh, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to badass writers, filmmakers, and producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. Today's guest returns for her third time. It's Bronwyn Dickey, everyone. She is literally my best friend, even though we've never met in person.
00:01:30
Speaker
She was so sweet. She asked me about my baseball book as soon as she came on the phone and indulged me for almost seven minutes. So naturally I cut it off. But!
00:01:40
Speaker
This is more a conversation than an interview. This is what I imagine would be like if Brahma and I sat at a pub here in Eugene, Oregon. Maybe Oakshire. One of my favorite places in town. Shout out, Oakshire. I hope you feel like you're eavesdropping on a couple of pals. As you know, I hate hearing myself talk, so this was a painful edit.
00:02:04
Speaker
After that ringing endorsement, are you subscribed to the show? Be sure to do so wherever you get your podcasts.
Engagement & Community Building
00:02:10
Speaker
Ping me on the Twitters, at Brendan O'Mara and at CNF Pod to keep the conversation going. Just say hi, share the show, whatever.
00:02:20
Speaker
You are the social network, so share the show with a CNF you think will dig it. And if you're feeling like sending an early Valentine, head over to iTunes and leave a rating or review. An honest one. You only have to leave a good one, but I take it all personally. So.
00:02:39
Speaker
Could that possibly be it for the introduction? I feel like I'm forgetting something. Must be forgetting something.
Writing Advice: Avoiding Burnout
00:02:46
Speaker
Oh, yes. I'll keep this short. That 20 minutes a night on the book thing really works, man. Set a timer. Maybe you get through 10 pages or maybe just one. I only did one page one night in 20 minutes. I was just tinkering away with a little hammer and chisel.
00:03:03
Speaker
I'm telling you friend that leaves you hungry for the next day and not sore You don't feel burned out telling you try it out That's it. Give it up for Bronwyn Dickey everybody at Bronwyn Dickey on Twitter for episode 137 One more riff.
Organizational Techniques for Writers
00:03:24
Speaker
Oh, yeah
00:03:31
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Susan was great again in essence because we talked about how she uses like five by seven index cards and in terms of her proportionality for the library book specifically, she would see like my chapter had way too many, like the pile was too big. So that would give her an idea of how to, let's parcel this out a little more so it does have a more uniform feel, not too front loaded or middle loaded or end loaded or something. I love that. I said this recently to somebody, but
00:04:01
Speaker
I am so fascinated by the concrete methods that other writers use to gather and organize information. Not just basic reporting of how you find sources and how you develop relationships with sources and that kind of thing, but even the very nuts and bolts concrete. You and I have talked about that, the notebooks they use and how they file things and how they find information when they have so much of it available to them.
00:04:28
Speaker
All those things I could, like, I wish someone would start an Instagram account of just like photographs of writer's notebooks. Oh, that'd be so cool. You know, or like what their filing systems look like or, you know, what they take in their work bag. I can't remember if I told you this, but it was one of the things that made such an impression
Writers’ Tools & Insights
00:04:51
Speaker
on me. You can find it on YouTube. Lawrence Wright did a talk at a library somewhere and he did
00:04:58
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The whole frame of the talk was just him going through his backpack that he takes when he goes out reporting and how he uses each thing in the backpack. So what kind of digital recorder he uses and why he always carries business cards and how he always makes sure to take a snack and all of these different things that seem mundane. But in revealing how he did the work concretely, he was also telling the story of how, you know, the looming tower was written.
00:05:29
Speaker
And it was just this really generous, wonderful thing to do. And I wish more writers did that. Yeah, that goes to what Austin Kleon writes about in Show Your Work, how the process is its own form of promotion. And that it really lets everyone in on the joke and also lets people realize that
00:05:53
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There's really no trick to it. If you just read the final product, it feels like magic if done right. But yeah, if Wright is opening up his backpack and
Discussion on Writing Habits & Social Media Impact
00:06:05
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be like, this is my giant fish net that I'm using to troll the ocean of information. And I'm getting as much as I can. These are the tools I use.
00:06:16
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I might only use 10% of it all, but I'm getting it all. Right. And just the little things that other people have picked up along the way, like one of the things he said was that he always writes the names of all his sources on a legal pad.
00:06:32
Speaker
And so he'll go through several legal pads by the end of a project, because he's talking to so many hundreds of people. And he could easily just put that in a spreadsheet. It would be a lot easier. He could keyword search it. But he said one of the things that's really effective when he's trying to get someone to talk to him is to flip through the legal pad and let the person physically see all of the other people he's talked to. And it gets him a level of credibility. And it shows people in a physical way how serious he is about the research.
00:07:02
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And so even though it's just kind of like a little psychological trick, it's a thing that he does that has worked out really well. And so, especially with everything becoming more digitized, I'm always interested in these analog ways that people kind of figure out to get the job done or various parts of it.
00:07:23
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Yeah, even my, I have one wall in my office that I just have those big desk calendars that usually lay flat on a desk. I've got six months on the wall and I use little colored, little tiny colored post-it notes and like I will move those around the board and it helps me have this big helicopter view of
00:07:47
Speaker
what's coming up for the podcast, like an interview color and then the deadline for each one. And then it's great to be able to see, like that's an analog way of being able to see out six months and to see, oh, there's actually work getting done here and have that validation like, oh yeah, I am doing something even though it feels like I'm smashing my face up against a wall. Were you that way as a student?
00:08:12
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I had a Stephen R. Covey collegiate daily planner and I loved it. I was a nerd about like seven habits of highly effective people. I loved that stuff and my problem is disorganization. I tend to clutter so getting rid of stuff is just a way of sort of defragging the computer of my mind.
00:08:37
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Right and so I don't even have that many books because I will look at I will look at the books on my shelf If I have too much it kind of clutters my brain and I'm like am I genuinely going to carry this into my future? Am I really going to read this again? Yeah, she's kind of like on the spirit animal of mine and and
00:09:01
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a spirit animal of everyone. See, I was never like that. I was always, I was able to keep things together in a highly disorganized way until I started.
00:09:14
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getting incredibly serious about long, complex writing projects and no longer was that able to fly. So now I'm an organization fanatic and an information gathering fanatic. And I'm so intrigued by the way other people do it because I'm always trying to refine and improve how I do things. I feel like I wish I had always been that way because my God, I would have saved myself so much time.
00:09:41
Speaker
Oh, for sure. I am truly disorganized and that's why I have to have fewer and fewer things around me to fuck up. I drive my wife crazy because she's super organized and she'll see my stuff scattered everywhere, papers everywhere, and she's like, Brendan, I don't care how much stuff you have, but things have to have a place.
00:10:06
Speaker
And I have New Yorkers I haven't read under the coffee table and just papers everywhere, scraps of some trash, some things I have to scan. It is a stone cold mess. And so to be able to have fewer things to disorganize is like a hack against myself to stay as organized as possible.
00:10:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's a deep character flaw, and I'm constantly wrestling with it on a daily basis. I'm always also very interested in the way, especially writers and journalists, are how they maintain discipline over their focus in this completely bonkers distraction environment.
Social Media: A Double-Edged Sword for Writers
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that we find ourselves in now with exactly that thing. When you have the backlog of podcasts and you have the backlog of podcasts to, you know, the interviews to conduct and create, but the rest of us, you know, I have the podcasts I need to listen to and the magazines I need to read. And there's so much social upheaval going on in the world that everyone, everything feels like it's on fire all the time. And I find my, you know, my brain is just, it's very hard to focus on the things that
00:11:29
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that used to be very, very important to me and still are, but it just feels like everything is demanding my attention in this urgent way all the time. And it's harder for me to move forward with things than it used to be. And I always wonder if other people are experiencing that or if I'm just crazy.
00:11:47
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No, I don't think you're crazy at all. I think that takes an extra level of rigor in terms of how are you taking a time audit, if you will, on a daily basis. And I have a little planner that is basically itemized by hour. And on a good day, I will have basically my entire tasks written out almost to the minute.
00:12:13
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If i do that i'm like okay i can how do i get through i've got the stack of books up to my ears. How am i going to read you know this many books i'm not i'm not a really fast reader and i also like to read things well so i can say things back to the gas and get them to elucidate on things and expand on things.
00:12:34
Speaker
So when you break down the time, you'll be like, okay, maybe from eight to nine at night is your reading time. And from 7.30 to eight o'clock, that's your Twitter time. That's when you can go and DM people you need to DM to try to get them on the show, or if people said something nice about the show, engage with them. That is Twitter time for the day.
00:12:58
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And it's only on the desktop, it's not on the phone. And just breaking down the time. And when I have those little chunks of time, it works well. I kind of go back to, say, high school. You had history from 750 to 830. And then you go to the next class.
00:13:15
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And you were focused on that class, you know, relatively speaking, but that was that was the time that was partition for that class. You did eight hours of school or whatever. And then you had three hours of practice. And then you got home, you did your homework, and you found some social time to like, how'd we do it then? And we do it. Yeah, we do it. You know, there were so many we had to, you know,
00:13:36
Speaker
We had to focus on so many different subject areas and be going from here to there in all these different ways that it felt impossible at the time. But now looking back, I'm so nostalgic about the structure of it.
00:13:53
Speaker
Yeah, and that's what it was. The structure of it is really looking back on it, be like, okay, if we could do it then, then there's no reason why we can't necessarily do it now. You know, if you've got a day job that is basically your high school work day, your high school class day, it's like, okay, well that.
00:14:10
Speaker
That sucks. Okay, if you got this day job, whatever it is, it might not be ideal, it might not be in your field, but it's what you use to subsidize the work you like to do. Absolutely, yeah. So in that time, kind of focus on that and then find, I think Chase Jarvis says, if you have your nine to five, but then when you get home, you have to have, what are you doing from five to nine?
00:14:32
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And you can do a lot of good work in a short amount of time if you're really strict about it. That's why the 20 minutes of working on tools of ignorance. Like I'm actually getting a lot of work done in 20 minutes and it kind of gives you an appetite for the next day. Like, oh, I can't, I kind of can't wait to get back to it. Yeah. And I think having that, having some other form of work along
00:14:56
Speaker
side, what you're writing is incredibly important. Sometimes you can't do, you know, if you're working on a long book project or something, obviously that is your job. But I think for me, it's always been so helpful to be able to take a break from that interiority and get out in the world and talk and relate to people and have a reason to wash your hair in the morning. And just, you know, learn how to use different cognitive tools. I always, you know,
00:15:25
Speaker
I always work so much better when I have had that. And you say when I've been teaching, then when I've just had uninterrupted writing time for months or years where I get in a kind of obsessive groove and don't come out of my room for days on end. I think like my brain is in a healthier place when I have that break every day from whatever I'm working on. And it also, I think just,
00:15:55
Speaker
As Stephen King always, you know, he calls it the boys in the basement, like your subconscious doing its work. It's really important to, to give the mind that break just so your subconscious can make the connections just like it does when you sleep. But it's, you know, it's also doing the same thing when you're interacting with people and learning about other fields and, you know, processing different information and, and that kind of thing. I think it's really, really important. It's easy to romanticize.
00:16:21
Speaker
like the sitting in the cabin on the mountaintop with months of writing time in front of you. But a lot of times I've certainly found that when I've had months of writing time ahead of me, it becomes, you know, you turn into Jack Torrance in The Shining instead of like Thoreau at Walden.
00:16:44
Speaker
some of my better work, relatively speaking, of course, has come in the face of day jobs I'm not proud to admit I have. But I don't know if that's just a failed
00:17:00
Speaker
a failed business in terms of my own capacity to support myself on freelance. As hard as that is, I just have never been able to successfully do it. And kudos to those who can and any tips, I'm all ears.
00:17:18
Speaker
But a lot of the work – sometimes I've just done features and stuff on the weekends or somehow on lunch breaks making a 20-minute phone call, a little interview, a little reporting call or something.
00:17:34
Speaker
It sucks. You can do it that way, but sometimes you can't outrun the feeling of failure and that you feel like a loser, that you went to school and you've got a master's and you can't support yourself in this thing that you've trained yourself for for almost 15 years. These things toggle and really wrestle inside my head. I like to get people to talk to that sometimes.
00:18:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think with any type of writing, most of the people who are predisposed to be interested in it and want to learn to do it and commit themselves to it are also intensely self-critical. I mean, I guess there is that crop who really want to just kind of demonstrate their brilliance to the world, and that's their motivation. But for most of us,
00:18:25
Speaker
we're interested in learning, we're interested in teaching, we're interested in gathering information and sharing it with others as kind of an act of generosity. And when you're that type of person, you also end up being pretty self-critical because the more you read, the more, you know, as we were talking about, the music is made by the people, music saved, great, you know, Henry Rollins quote. And the stories are written by the people, stories saved. When you care about it that much, it's so easy to feel that you don't
00:18:55
Speaker
measure up. And now I think especially with social media, you can always see what your colleagues are up to. And just like it might be, you know, how women view themselves next to Instagram fitness celebrities, it's kind of like the writers on Twitter are all viewing themselves next to all the other writers who seem to be
00:19:17
Speaker
just, you know, banging out these incredible features one after another after another. And you just say, why am I not doing that? Like how, you know, how am I not able to do it the way they can? And so we live in an environment which is like very much geared towards making us feel that way. And it's, it's unfortunate. I mean, I certainly, I haven't worked on a big project in almost a year and it's not because I don't want to, but
00:19:46
Speaker
It's just hard to know with so much available and so much information coming at us and so many stories that feel so urgent. It's just hard to know where to dig in and start. And especially as a freelancer too, when you have the option of working with different publications, it's hard to know which stories are right for the, for which places. And, and, you know, it's just tough. I think it's, I think it's something that most people are feeling in some way.
00:20:14
Speaker
but it's like not cool to admit that's how you feel. Kind of like when, when you get trolled online constantly and everyone feels kind of bad when it happens, but no one's supposed to admit that it makes you feel bad because somehow that's like weakness or something. I don't know. But, um, yeah, it's, you know, I think we all feel that way. It's interesting that you would say, you would talk about jobs. You're ashamed or embarrassed that you have because
00:20:44
Speaker
Honestly, it's all a grist for the mill, every single bit of it. If you're an insurance adjuster, you're doing whatever, that's going to give you a lens for a certain world that's going to be helpful in something else you're writing. It all helps. Have you ever read Poe Ballantyne's stuff? No. Oh, he's a great essay writer who wrote a bunch of stuff for
00:21:13
Speaker
I think The Sun was his main publication, but he would write these phenomenal personal essays about the people he met while doing kind of random odd jobs, you know, working in kitchens or construction or all these things he was doing just to get by the way most of us are just getting by. But he would make these small interactions into these incredibly beautiful stories
00:21:40
Speaker
very poignant, very honest, very raw. He has a collection called 501 Minutes to Christ that I would highly recommend you check out the next time you're feeling bad about a certain job you have and look at what he's been able to do with just the personal experiences because there's drama in every part of everyday life. So I wouldn't feel bad about anything you're doing. And again, it seems like everyone else is
00:22:10
Speaker
doing these great things nonstop, but I think everyone feels a little vulnerable and a little bit less than compared to somebody else. We just don't talk about it maybe as much as we should.
00:22:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's a big reason I've pulled away from social media a lot.
Social Media & Writer's Self-Perception
00:22:31
Speaker
Not that I've been a huge contributor to that conversation at all, but it's just the things that come across my feed tend to just like, fuck, what am I doing wrong here? And I get I'm the type of person who gets weighed down by that. And so I'm better off just kind of cocooning myself with the work I'm doing and then trusting that my taste will
00:22:54
Speaker
help elevate and get get it into get it into people's brains and have it be visible in some capacity. But then again, you do need social media to broadcast that stuff. So it is unavoidable, but it's you got to use it as a tool instead of it being the master. Yeah. And for for me, I have a very, as you know, I have a very fraught relationship with it. Yeah, because you do the journalist in me always wants to know what's happening. And I do want to have access to
00:23:23
Speaker
people in different fields who I can, you know, drop them a DM and ask them a question or set up an interview or whatever. But there's also the, the kind of part of me as a writer who gets lonely and then turns to it to be having conversations with people. And then one thing bleeds into another thing and you find yourself just drinking from this fire hose constantly and you look up and three hours has gone by.
00:23:49
Speaker
And what have you really done with that time? And so, yeah, I don't know if you've listened to like the interviews that Ezra Klein has done with Cal Newport. I haven't. I've tried to get Cal on the show before, but yeah, for deep work. I think he's the most idle at this point. Just because so many things he said, you know, for him, he's talking about it vis-a-vis computer programming or student life or whatever. But for me as a journalist, it
00:24:20
Speaker
it really, really resonates in so many ways because he's very plugged into various things that are happening, but he's still chugging along doing important work. He doesn't feel remote is what I'm saying. You said that you hadn't tackled a big project in over a year, so what are you doing to occupy your time?
Teaching, Writing Identity & Balance
00:24:47
Speaker
You know, teaching has as a, you know, last semester I started teaching as an adjunct over at Duke. And that was an amazing just shift for me because I hadn't, you know, I had been working on the book for a really long time and then I was promoting the book for a fairly long time. And then I was doing a couple of freelance projects here and there. But there was this gap in between and I didn't really know what I was going to
00:25:17
Speaker
fill with it. I didn't have, I had been so burned out from the book project that I didn't have that next obsession. And for me, you know, when I dive into projects, a lot of times I'm fine doing assignments that people come to me with because I like the challenge of having the ingredients out there and just trying to make something from it. Like, okay, here's this idea someone brought to me. What can I do to put my own spin on that? That's a really fun challenge for me. But in terms of something that I aggressively go after myself, I have to be
00:25:47
Speaker
obsessed. And I've been either too burnout or distracted to know exactly what that subject is. So to be teaching and to be talking about writing as a craft with students and the mechanics of what makes a piece work has been really exciting and fun for me and a great way to kind of reinvigorate my own enthusiasm about various things.
00:26:16
Speaker
Would you say that you identified more as a writer and then you happened to really get the journalism bug or were you a journalism nut and then graduated to wanting to be an artful writer? That's tough. My friend Barry Yeoman asked me that question not too long ago and I don't know. I think probably writer first, journalist second, but I wish
00:26:44
Speaker
I were a journalist for a writer second, if that makes sense, because I just have so much admiration for great journalists and great writers and people who can basically hit the ground anywhere and find a great story. And that requires such a specific set of skills that I've had to teach myself in fits and starts along the way. I wish I had had those skills kind of
00:27:14
Speaker
baked in somehow early on, because the craft part of writing, I don't want to say it's easier, but if you have the materials in front of you, you can build the house. It might take you a long time if you don't know what you're doing, but you can plane things down, you can get the studs in, you can figure out how to build the house.
00:27:38
Speaker
But if you don't have the materials in front of you, if you haven't gathered the wood and the nails and glue and whatever, the insulation, then it's very hard to build anything with it. So I wish, you know, I don't know if that makes sense, but I wish in a lot of ways that I were more journalist first, writer second. I feel like I would, I would be able to, um, do projects more regularly. I wouldn't doubt so much. I don't know. I don't know.
00:28:06
Speaker
But it's, it's a little, I feel like I'm always kind of behind the eight baller. I'm always playing catch up, trying to figure out how do I find a story that both holds my, you know, subject that holds my attention that I'm really passionate about that I'll aggressively go after. And that is a story that, you know, that I need to be telling because there's so many great writers and there are so many, there are infinite number of beats and I never, you know,
00:28:35
Speaker
There are lots of things that I care about, but I always wonder, oh, you know, but so-and-so has been writing about this for 20 years. How am I going to bring something new to it? Yeah. So that kind of thing, you know, what about you?
00:28:48
Speaker
I would say definitely writer first, journalism, journalist second. I don't have that, I wish I did, but I don't have that civic duty journalism thing. I wanna write about the wrongs and expose power, expose corruption and all that. That doesn't appeal to my taste. I applaud the people who can do it.
00:29:18
Speaker
does appeal to me, but I just have no training in it, because everything I've done, I've had to kind of teach myself how to do. And so, you know, you get to your mid 30s and you realize, oh my God, there's just so much about this, I don't know. And so when people are able to meld those two things well, it's deeply enviable.
00:29:38
Speaker
Yeah, like I had, this is kind of a point of embarrassment for me, but I would say 2014, 2013, right around there, I kind of somehow talked to myself in this interview and got a job as like a news reporter for the Daily Gazette in Schenectady, New York.
00:29:55
Speaker
Oh, wow. And I was like, I'd never done news. I'd always been a sports guy, but I had done some longer features and said, like, I don't have a lot of hard news experience, but I do have, like, a nose for narrative. Like, I can find I'm good at that, at detecting what a good story is.
00:30:14
Speaker
Yeah. And then day on the job, Amsterdam, New York is kind of this rundown old mill town. And that was basically going to be my beat. And I just got overwhelmed with like anxiety and panic attacks, just thinking of the crime. Like I don't know how to cover crime, which is a big insecurity of mine. I hate that I don't know how to do it. I hate that it got me to the point where I didn't eat for three days and quit.
00:30:38
Speaker
And I wish I didn't. I think I could have learned. I think they could have been patient with me if I had been forthcoming, but it was just waiting for disaster to happen and then have to knock on that door and talk to people in the throes of their house just got flooded or their house just burned down. My first hour on the job, I got a press release on my desk and they were like, hey, Brendan,
00:31:01
Speaker
There's a suicide in this prison. Can you find out what happened? And I'm like, they're not going to talk to me. And so I call up the prison and they're like, yeah, we can't, you know, there's nothing we can say right now. And I've never handled this. I covered high school baseball. And so then I'm here, here's the suicide in a prison. Was it even a suicide? Who the hell knows?
00:31:25
Speaker
So, um, I just didn't have the skillset to pursue that. I certainly didn't have the relationships in that prison that, uh, that you takes years to build to possibly get that information. And so I was just, it was, I was thrown in the deep end with sharks and it was, um, yeah, I didn't eat for three days and I just realized like, this just isn't, I am not cut out for it. And I quit. That's too bad, but it, it does, I'm sure it just,
00:31:54
Speaker
highlights so, you know, I goes without saying that, you know, journalism is just so important, but I think there are so many of those reporters at smaller newspapers who don't get the recognition they deserve. And when you think about how incredibly mind blowingly difficult what they do every day is and how much skill it requires and how much
00:32:23
Speaker
kind of calmness under pressure and how many tense social interactions they have to navigate and how much discretion they have to use. I mean, it's just absolutely amazing. And yeah, like you, I feel that kind of crushing inadequacy on the skill level when it comes to reporting too. But think about, look at the Morgan Harrington piece that you did.
00:32:49
Speaker
I mean how did you kind of push through with that? That must have been incredibly difficult.
00:32:54
Speaker
Yeah, it was, but it wasn't in the heat of the moment either. That was something that took place over, really, in a sense, over years because I had written, all right, so she was murdered in 2009. I wrote her parents a letter, and I was collecting news stories on it, and I wrote them a handwritten letter, 2010,
00:33:21
Speaker
didn't hear back from them like basically a year to the day. I wrote another handwritten letter and so now we're 2011 into 2012 and then finally November or late October 2012, I got a call from Jill.
00:33:36
Speaker
So this is like three years after. And I had been collecting information, reading her blogs, and they were very open and forthcoming and sort of on the front of that thing. So that's felt different. It wasn't like swoop in, sensationalize this. It was kind of this very slow burn. And the investigation was still going on, too. So that story was very much grounded in just how the parents were dealing with this grief.
00:34:06
Speaker
And the brother didn't want to talk to me and Morgan's friends who were at the concert, they were AWOL. They weren't doing anything.
00:34:16
Speaker
So that one was a little different and we just had these long conversations on the phone with me in jail mainly and then Dan a couple times. And that was the extent of that but that to me felt a whole lot different and more in my wheelhouse than the more hard, hard news stuff, the breaking news.
00:34:37
Speaker
that kind of thing where I can have a very slow burn type conversation and let time take its place. But if it was like, yeah, we need 10 inches in 30 minutes and this just happened, go. I could do that with a gamer or something in sports, but when it came to news, it was grossly inadequate and grossly under qualified. The people who do it are just amazing and I admire them so much every
00:35:05
Speaker
every day, but it also, I mean, that's why there's, um, that's why being especially a nonfiction writer is so exciting and rewarding too. And the, the, the landscape of what you can do is so diverse. You know, the fact that yes, there are the, the newspaper reporters who get there on the scene and gather the facts immediately. And that's their skillset. And then they're the longer for a magazine type.
00:35:33
Speaker
journalists who, after that has been done, they do the deep dig that takes weeks, months, and years. And there's room for them both. There's room for all kinds of things. So that's when I explain it to my students and I try to pitch them on why this is something they should even care about. That's one of the first things I say. It's such an elastic form. And each person can bring something completely different to it.
00:36:03
Speaker
i was talking to earl swift on the show but he uh... he's very much like an old guard reporter night he was uh... you know several time paltor prize finalist dies written you know brilliant books in his most recent one is about uh... i just speak requiem about the rising sea levels of this little island tangerine chesapeake bay i was talking to him about he's just kind of uh... not pugnacious but he just has like the bulldog mentality of
00:36:31
Speaker
There's hard news to cover and he got off on it. He had that competitive mentality of beating the rival paper. Being that person, my jaw dropped when I was listening to him. I'm like, damn, I wish I had that in me. I never had that muscle.
00:36:52
Speaker
I had the opportunity, like I said, but I quit before I could really cultivate it. And I guess I just didn't give myself the chance to see if I could actually do it. I quit before it got hard. And it was already hard, but I quit before I gave myself a chance to try to succeed instead of just pulled the rip cord. Well, fortunately, you know, any body needs lots and lots and lots of different muscles to be able to function.
00:37:21
Speaker
So that's just one, you know. Right, right. What would you say you're better at today than you were, say, five years ago?
Evolving Writing Philosophy
00:37:31
Speaker
Oh, goodness. Um, in terms of, uh, God, that's very broad in terms of. Oh, we can narrow it down for you. Like maybe in terms of maybe just your pure writing. Clarity. Absolutely. Um, and as I've,
00:37:50
Speaker
kind of gone on and as I've done more and more writing and read more and more great writing, the more I have understood that clarity is the goal. I think when I started out, I thought style or voice was the goal. Yeah, me too. Me too.
00:38:09
Speaker
And, you know, I think a lot of young people, they get really fired up by things that are flashy and different and seem to kind of take you to this place you never even knew existed. You know, when you're reading and you read, I think for a lot of people, you talk about the people who had the really strong voices, you know, like David Foster Wallace or, you know, someone like that who has a very strong, distinctive, different voice and some kind of light turned on for you.
00:38:36
Speaker
And you think, oh, I didn't even know this was possible to do with, say, an essay. DFW is problematic for a lot of reasons, as we now know. Rest in peace. But I always think about Mary Carr's relationship with him and how we kind of revere him in this way. And he kind of gets a, you know, a lot of things are glossed over that maybe shouldn't be. But that's beside the point. I think for a lot of young writers, that distinctive voice type of writing
00:39:05
Speaker
is what gets you excited about it. But the more I have done it, and the more I have read great stuff, and the more I've learned, the more I really feel that clarity is a goal I always want to be working towards. Because it feels, the more clear a piece of writing is, the more honest it feels to me. Now, when I read things that are extremely voicey,
00:39:33
Speaker
There are some writers who have a really distinctive voice who are always going to be amazing and mind-blowing, but the more I read more and more writers try to do that, the more it feels like they're hiding behind something, and it's something I'm always trying to get my students to understand. Clarity, if you can just put it out there and be honest and be clear, that is an act of generosity for the reader.
00:39:59
Speaker
It's a way of putting your arm around the reader and welcoming them in to this information that you're trying to share with them. It's more like teaching that way. And that I feel is real. I always appreciate it when a writer does that for me. Um, and so clarity is something I think I'm much better at now and just kind of cutting away as much as possible that can go getting rid of everything that isn't moving the sentence forward.
00:40:27
Speaker
looking at a piece of writing with the exact same level of just kind of dispassionate attention that you would if you were looking at a car engine that wasn't running. You know, how do we get this thing up and running?
00:40:44
Speaker
It's such a fine balance to write with clarity, to tell most stories are beneficial when they're told straight, but also to have just enough voice and style that it doesn't feel like you're just reading the instruction manual to your Fitbit. Oh, absolutely. How do you get there? You can still be vivid and be clear. You can still entertain and be clear.
00:41:13
Speaker
you can still entice and seduce and be clear. When you look at somebody like, you know, Rachel Kaziganza, her incredible profile of Dylann Roof, you know, everything in that piece is clear, but it is also an absolute gut punch.
00:41:38
Speaker
And that's part of why it is such a gut punch because there's no, there's no dressing it up. There's no, um, there's no extraneous anything. Everything is just, it's, it's like a jewel. You know, it's just absolutely beautiful. Or you look at somebody like, uh, Chris Jones, that amazing piece he did, um, the things that carried him about the military funeral and the process of that.
00:42:07
Speaker
Um, everything in it, every sentence is just, it's just, it's like a tuning fork. And yet it's told in reverse, which a lot of people, you know, there, that's a hard, that's a really hard trick to pull off and not seem gimmicky. And yet he's able to do it because every sentence is so clear. And the more, you know, it's the clarity come and the vividness comes in the level of detail.
00:42:38
Speaker
And as a writer, when I look at that piece, I think, God, you know, to think how much, how much time Chris Jones had to put in to getting every single detail, you know, the brand of cigarettes that the soldier's mother smoked and all that, you know, the exact measurements of the burial plot and, you know, what the person who had to mark out the plot with his feet
00:43:04
Speaker
what he was thinking at the time. I mean, those are all, just the level of detail is incredible, but it's all still very clear. It's not what, you know, uh, Mary Carr would, would call gee god up, you know? And that's, and that's, for me, the lesson is like, how can I make this more clear? How can I make the reader see this? So balancing, you know, all,
00:43:29
Speaker
I guess clearing away the details that don't need to be there so you can shine a very hard light on the ones that do need to be there.
00:43:36
Speaker
Yeah, and there's that. I know this is this is something I wrestle with. I'm so glad you're talking about this because this is something I struggle with, too, and something I'm working very hard at to improve upon to try to remove some of that grandiosity, that David Foster Wallace thing, because what was what's nice about something like that, like you don't even need to see the byline to know it's him if you're reading it. And I always was like, that would be really cool to elicit that, like you don't need
00:44:06
Speaker
You just see a couple frames of a Wes Anderson movie, who I love, and I love all his movies, some more than others, but I love them all, and you just know it's him. And it's like, I want to provide that kind of feeling to a reader or whoever, you know, that those guys are giving me, based on just their sheer voice and auteurism,
00:44:32
Speaker
Um, but then I realized that, you know, that's them. Maybe the nature of my talent is to, is to be more clear, to be straight. And that way, if I do drop in a funny line, it's really gonna pop because it's, it's born out of the story and not because I'm trying to be smart or clever. Yeah. And for, you know, I think for me, that's just the, the process over and over again. It's how it's a long lifetime, you know, of work of thinking at the beginning.
00:45:03
Speaker
And I think so many writers are, you know, a lot of us were nerds. A lot of us were outsiders. We know what it's like to be on the other side of the glass, so to speak. And the getting positive attention for something we've done that is stylish or funny or smart seems really, really appealing. But I guess the more I do it, the more I learn that the arrow goes the other way. You know, the arrow now,
00:45:33
Speaker
The way I write today versus the way I wrote in, you know, 1999 or whatever, the way I write today is like the arrow goes from me outward in that I want to. I want to be generous and do something for the reader. You know, I want so my my primary concern isn't how I can be rewarded for this thing that I've done. It's how I can create something.
00:46:04
Speaker
that is valuable for another person that makes them care about this thing that I've found, this story that I've discovered. And so that's what I'm always thinking about is how do I make somebody out there who doesn't think this is interesting, how do I make them care? Is it going to be, you know,
00:46:23
Speaker
I'm going to learn the details of this person's life so intimately that they're going to feel they know that person. And if they know that person, then they're going to care. Or is it going to be, you know, I'm going to find a story or tell a story in a way that elucidates something larger that they can recognize in their own lives. You know, I guess I'm just always thinking about that person, whoever that person is.
00:46:48
Speaker
Yeah, and looking at my bookshelf right now in terms of clarity, and I'm
Writing with Reader Experience in Mind
00:46:54
Speaker
looking at Gran's Killer of the Flower Moon. I'm looking at Sazzlo's Rising Out of Hatred. Yeah. And he just finds these things. Yes, Rising Out of Hatred was a great example of that. I finished that a couple of weeks ago. Great example of that. It's what the camera focuses on that makes you care. It's not in the camera trick.
00:47:19
Speaker
I guess, and so much of what I used to believe writing was, was I thought it was about the camera trick. And so, and I guess we all just come to different places and what we do and how we think about it. But I want, I am so grateful for the writers who have given me stories that have changed my life and made me care about things I didn't even know existed or people I didn't even know existed. I'm so grateful for that.
00:47:46
Speaker
that all I want to do is to do that for somebody else. And it's so much more gratifying and it's so much easier for me to get out of my own ego and self-recrimination if I can think, okay, my goal here isn't to create a beautiful piece of writing that people will look at and say, oh, what a gorgeous essay or whatever. It's now, how can I provide this service? How can I gather information such that
00:48:16
Speaker
and organize it in a way that entertains or frightens or upsets or moves to action or whatever that elicits a strong feeling in somebody else. And the best of those, I would hope, would just move people.
00:48:33
Speaker
Yeah, and I think the insecurity of trying to be flashy, trying to be distinctive in such a way is like, how do I, with so much out there, with so much writing, with so much talent, how do you stand out? And how do you catch the eye of David Remnick if you're going to submit a PDF query?
00:48:53
Speaker
New Yorker and like how are you going to catch his attention that he might be like oh, that's That that's good like that's all right Let's see if we can let him let him go or let her go and see what see what happens It's it does telling it like it's it's so hard to be straight but not robotic and to write find the story that is
00:49:18
Speaker
It's so good you can't ignore it. It's just so challenging to strike that balance. It's so that you can do things straight and in service of the reader, but also have just enough voice that it's like, oh, this person does have an elevated sense of taste that's going to make this more entertaining than dry. Yeah. And I think it's the same as with a lot of things. Like if you are excited about it, then other people will feel that excitement. Right.
00:49:48
Speaker
then they will also be bored. So it's, you know, it's just that, that act of translation. And I think if you're an enthusiast that helps, but when you think about even things, you know, like, um, humor is always really tough because your timing has to be really good. And there's so much craft involved with really incredible humor writing, but also.
00:50:15
Speaker
Even aside from that, there's a level of vulnerability that the greatest humor writers are able to bring to it. It is that letting the guard down and the being open and vulnerable that is that gift of generosity. So every genre has it, whether it's fiction, nonfiction, whatever.
00:50:38
Speaker
the more you create that intimacy and generosity, I think the easier it is to be clear in a way. But yeah, I think that's for sure what I've learned more than anything else. I guess I know it's kind of weird to say the arrow goes one way or the arrow goes another way, but I definitely think of the arrow as going to the reader now in a way that I didn't when I started out. I try to remind myself that, you know,
00:51:09
Speaker
The vast, vast, vast majority of us, vast majority of us who care and work hard and do the best work we can, you know, the vast majority of us will never get that letter from David Remnick. And that's okay. You know, we each, all we can do is plow our own little acre and contribute what we can. And there are so many writers who've made such a huge difference to me.
00:51:38
Speaker
who have never gotten that letter from David Remnick. You know, it's so sad to think that, you know, even look at Eli Sazlett. I don't know if he's ever written anything for the New Yorker, but that initial piece that people were just absolutely, you know, fascinated by and moved by and
00:52:04
Speaker
that just like went everywhere. That original piece, you know, was a was a piece in the post. And the post does great, great, great work. But that original Derek Black piece in the post, you know, I'm going to be teaching that in my profiles class in the fall, because it's there's so much to be learned by people who do really great stuff for newspapers because they have to be concise in a way that
00:52:34
Speaker
the rest of us don't, but we should. They have to think about the placement of every word. Another writer who is amazing at that is Audra Birch at the New York Times. Her beat is hate crimes for the New York Times, and she was at the Miami Herald for a long time and did investigations and stuff there, but she did
00:53:00
Speaker
um this incredibly beautiful profile of the wife of one of the men um the one of the indian men who was shot in kansas i believe it was um and you know how she moves forward now like how she thinks about her life and what happened you know that she had been an an immigrant and now and so excited about
00:53:27
Speaker
um, American citizenship and living in America and all these things. And then her husband was a victim of a hate crime and he was taken from her. And how does she think about this country now? You know, is it a place that hates her, et cetera? It's just this incredibly beautiful piece. And Audra is able to just make every word ring like a bell. And it's amazing, right? So, um, there's so much to be learned from, from every form.
00:53:57
Speaker
whether it's papers, whether it's magazines, whether it's this kind of exciting digital space that a lot of people were very skeptical of, but has been great for especially long-form writers. Look at the Atavist reads or these, you know, there's always a lot of kind of hand-wringing about wither goist journalism or wither goist long-form nonfiction because the magazine landscape is kind of bleak in terms of printed magazines.
00:54:25
Speaker
people are so hungry for these stories that they're finding new ways to get them out there. And that's something that should I think really excite us all. I mean, look at the great storytelling that's being done in podcasts and various other things. So there's something to be learned from all of that. I think we all just, we all just plow our own little acre.
00:54:45
Speaker
I love
00:55:06
Speaker
the badges of validation that you can say at a dinner party, you know, my agent blah, blah, blah. You realize that it's ego driven and you want to be amongst that. When you hear people say that, you want to just be in that club and then if you don't have that badge, you kind of feel like a loser.
00:55:30
Speaker
But it's always, you see, there's always a different thing, though. There's always, I promise you, and I swear, hand on the American Constitution, whatever you consider most valid, that no matter what badge of validation you get, there is always another one that, you know, it doesn't solve the thing
00:55:54
Speaker
That is lacking. I I always thought when I was in graduate school and everyone I knew was working on a book and I had no idea I didn't even have remotely have an idea for a book. I had never written any when I started graduate school I don't think I had ever written anything that was longer than 10 pages seriously, I never wrote a thesis I never
00:56:16
Speaker
You know, because I just didn't have the confidence that I could come up with that many ideas. I mean, I really loved to write, but I just didn't, I had no confidence in my ability to sustain a long narrative. So I was writing very short things in graduate school and I was in awe of people who had ideas for books and were already working in them. And I remember thinking, Oh my God, if before I die.
00:56:40
Speaker
I can just put something between covers of the book. I don't care if it's the worst piece of garbage that's ever been written. Like if I can just do that, I know I will feel, I will feel legit. I will feel okay. You'll feel whole. Right, right. And I will feel that I can do this thing. And then that, that process comes and goes and that feeling is still there because as they say, you know, happiness is an inside job. Um,
00:57:09
Speaker
And it just, no matter what happens, it just never, it always, you always feel a little bit like a fraud, probably. You know, I think that that imposter syndrome is just so central to, to the work we do in terms of examining and dissecting and second guessing and working things over and over and over again.
00:57:33
Speaker
Um, that I think it's just, I guess some people don't have it to, to an extreme degree, but I mean, when you, when you talk to other writers, like, has there ever been anyone who said, I absolutely don't have any sense of imposter syndrome?
00:57:49
Speaker
Oh God, no. That's what's so nourishing about having these conversations with quite literally, I would say 100% of the people on this show. So people are, nobody feels good about themselves.
Imposter Syndrome Among Writers
00:58:03
Speaker
It's that hedonic treadmill, like you're saying, like you thought like, once I have that book together and you did it, and then you're like, oh. So really- Yeah, I was like, oh, I still feel like a friend. I was like, oh, did I get it right? Like maybe I really fucked it up.
00:58:18
Speaker
And you're always second guessing. And now it's like, you realize that for the rest of the world too, I thought like, oh, then people will never ask me what I'm working on again. Cause I've finished this thing and I'll never have the embarrassing conversation of saying, I don't know. And then the minute it happens, everyone's like, so what's the next one? What's the next thing? Just like, I have no idea. I'm still figuring out how to move around in this world. There's so much that I don't know yet. Um, and I feel that way every day.
00:58:48
Speaker
And we, we all do. I would just, I think someone told me once that, um, one of my professors at Columbia had worked with AJ Liebling at the New Yorker and said, of all the people she ever knew, of all the writers, all the people she's taught, all the writers she knew in New York, et cetera, of all the writers, the only person she ever met who enjoyed writing.
00:59:14
Speaker
and thought he was good at it was AJ labeling. And so he was kind of, you know, not hated, but people would kind of roll their eyes in the offices because they walked down the hall and he would be like happily typing away and like laughing to himself, like the felicitous phrases that he could come up with and whatever.
00:59:32
Speaker
Everyone was just like, oh, Christ. They were all practically wanting to jump off the building with self-doubt. He was just like, oh, isn't this wonderful? Everyone goes through it, except maybe A.G. Liebling, I don't know. Yeah, and he's dead. Thank you. Then you take the other end.
00:59:58
Speaker
Look at Joseph Mitchell, paralyzed for years and years by not being able to do that next thing. Going into his office at the New Yorker and not writing anything.
01:00:14
Speaker
It's so hard to run your own race, right? Like you're looking over your shoulder at these, at people you admire. And it's hard to just, like you say, plow your own acre. And if you just really cultivate that, and that being its own reward, you will, over time, drip by drip, do really good work. And you will be noticed.
01:00:39
Speaker
We fetishize precocity to the extent that if you don't have a Titanic bestseller by the time you're 31 or younger, you're a loser. You suck, you're not good. But by that metric, nobody would ever succeed. And if people waited to, or if people stopped when they didn't have those things, no one would get anything done because all those people
01:01:08
Speaker
you're looking over your shoulder at all those people, they're all looking over their shoulders too. And there just comes a point where you silence it enough.
01:01:17
Speaker
to plow your acre and get that thing done and do it well. When I was talking with Debbie Millman about this, we were talking about the 30 for 30 lists, 30 best under 30, and how it helps 30 people and cripples 30,000. And she was just like, you know what, Brendan? I look at that, and she was more of a late bloomer, too. I mean, she didn't reach a level of visibility where we know who she is until she was probably in her 40s.
01:01:46
Speaker
And she's in her late 50s now, I think. So she's a testament to doing good work over time. And she said, like, I wouldn't want the pressure of being one of those people on that list, because imagine, like, kind of peaking in your 20s. I know. I can't imagine. I mean, it's amazing for people who can do it, but also the pressure to be public and to be kind of like a
01:02:11
Speaker
public intellectual in a way that I always think about the Foer family. What's Thanksgiving like at the Foer household? It's like Jonathan and like Frank and Josh. They're all amazing at whether they're like the X-Men with the different superpowers. It must be incredible, but I also wonder if the pressure ever gets really intense because they all did so much great work when they were
01:02:41
Speaker
really young and they're still doing great work all the time. But I, another thing I was going to say is when you said the word visibility, a lot of people think that's what they want.
Visibility & Anxiety in Writing
01:02:51
Speaker
But I mean, for me, I can tell you it was, I had like a tiny little flicker of it for like a week, I guess, like a teensy, teen micro, a micro flicker of visibility. I think it was more like a year. You were kind of, you were. It was truly, I can, and I say this 100% honestly,
01:03:10
Speaker
I was not prepared for how frightening that is because I never prepared myself for it and already being so self-critical.
01:03:21
Speaker
the level of laying yourself bare in public and having people publicly comment on this thing that you've bled and criticized yourself over for so long. Then people will shred you for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
01:03:41
Speaker
You don't have privacy like you remembered having it, at least for a little while, and you want to give your energy to people. But it's also really frightening. It is deeply frightening. I remember waking up on the day that my book was published, and that was the day that the episode of Fresh Air aired, I think. And I had been so frightened during that
01:04:05
Speaker
during that interview because it was the only the first time I'd ever really done a real a real radio interview like that and had to talk about the subject in that way.
01:04:18
Speaker
And I, my mind went blank, my mouth went dry. I was so frightened and I felt that I had tanked and ruined things so badly. And I remember just waking up that morning and thinking, oh, please, like, please let nobody read this and nobody ever want to talk to me about it. And can I just hide under the covers? And I just don't want to, I can't do it. I had, I had a massive, massive panic attack.
01:04:46
Speaker
Because you, again, as a writer, you're so used to spending time by yourself in this kind of introverted mode, just doing things that nobody will ever see, you know, just writing things that know for your own satisfaction or working on your craft and nobody sees the mistakes and certainly nobody comments on them. And you just spend so much time alone that doing that is terrifying and you think
01:05:13
Speaker
when it's not you, you think that it would be really great, but it really isn't. And so, which is why I may, maybe, write another book sometime in the future. I hope I will, but I don't want to do that until I'm ready for it. And I really love the long-form nonfiction
01:05:38
Speaker
Habitat I mean that that's a great habitat to be in because you get the the at least for me because you get the satisfaction of completion and You can kind of engage with people about the the story a bit, but it doesn't become this all-consuming thing so you know everyone has their own habitat and I feel happiest with with that being my habitat at least for right now and
01:06:06
Speaker
Aside from reading some profiles in books, what are you consuming that is helping inform your work or the work you're hoping to do?
Research Interests & Influential Reads
01:06:19
Speaker
Right now, I think, like a lot of people, I'm very interested in addiction. As society becomes kind of consumed by it and we see more and more overdose deaths
01:06:35
Speaker
and more and more people needing help that they aren't getting. I think it's been a major crisis for a long time, but I'm completely just gobsmacked by the lack of scientific rigor that's brought to a lot of addiction treatment. And why don't we have more of an infrastructure to help something, to help people who are dealing with a problem
01:07:01
Speaker
that is so common. And so that's just kind of this existential question that's been bothering me. And so I've been reading a lot about the science of addiction.
01:07:09
Speaker
Um, which is not, you know, sunshiny, great stuff, but, um, it's definitely helping me understand kind of what's happening to our culture writ large. Um, but you know, on my, on my nightstand, it's just been a stack of great, great nonfiction stuff, such as Eli Sazlow's book on Derek Black, which was just phenomenal. Um, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnovich's book, The Fact of a Body.
01:07:39
Speaker
is one of the greatest kind of hybrid memoirs I have ever read. I don't know if you've read it, but just absolutely astonishing. She worked in legal aid for a while and had to work on a case involving a man in the Deep South who had molested and murdered a little boy. And her having to work on that case
01:08:10
Speaker
um, and talk through like what made him the way he was. And then also things in her own family that had gone on and she kind of leaves it together in this way that is just absolutely breathtaking. Um, so reading that, um, you know, just, there's just so much great stuff out there. There's just so much great stuff out there. I've, you know, lots of,
01:08:34
Speaker
lots of big anthologies of great magazine nonfiction. So like the big Esquire anthology I've been liking a lot. And there's just a lot of great stuff. What about shoot?
01:08:46
Speaker
I love documentary films like Chef's Table, which is kind of like these great little profiles. And I love obsessive people. And so there's nothing better than watching documentaries of obsessive chefs, even if they have problematic private lives. I do applaud that commitment.
01:09:08
Speaker
And it's something I kind of sorely lack, that kind of rigor and focus. So to see it in other people is pretty inspiring to me. You know, podcasts too, just trying to, and I listen the way a quarterback will be like reading a defense and watching tape. I kind of.
01:09:29
Speaker
I'm always thinking, why is this interviewer really good at what they're doing? And I'm like, I time how long they ask questions. So the better people, they're very good at answering questions in under 20 seconds, I've found. And so I try to do that as best I can. Some people like to ask a question, and then they just keep rambling on for two minutes. I'm like, no, that's not how you do it. Oh, you mean the question that's really a comment? Yes, I hate that.
01:09:58
Speaker
Yeah. Drives me insane. Yeah. Yeah. And Debbie Millman's brilliant at it. Like, she'll say something for like, she'll set it up and ask the question and get out of the way instead of asking a question and then commenting on it for a minute, two minutes. So I've noticed that in a... Has he done a great interview with Isaac Chotner recently? I mean, in terms of how he does what he does, because his I have to ask podcast.
01:10:27
Speaker
is always really the one he did for Slate, and now he's doing interviews for The New Yorker. But for a long time, for the past several years, I think, he did the I Have to Ask podcast. And he was able to, in exactly the way you're talking about, ask short questions that were incredibly revealing, or that yielded incredibly revealing answers. And he is extremely good at the short question that yields a great
01:10:56
Speaker
And I would love to know more about his philosophy of how he does that. That's worth looking into. I think maybe the skill is – I plead guilty that I have not heard him speak or interview. But I think when you ask or when people ask a sensitive question, there is a tendency to want to blunt the edge of that question by further commenting on it.
01:11:24
Speaker
Instead of like, you know, if you were talking like you specifically about, you know, you're kind of looking into addiction I'm probably the probing question is like, how have you dealt with addiction in your life? Yeah, and then let it go. Yeah, right. Yeah. And for me, you know, that's it's a hugely important subject because so many members of my family have struggled with addiction and Fortunately, I haven't
01:11:54
Speaker
I now that our world is changing in all these ways, you know, I find myself compulsively looking at my phone in ways I wish in ways I tell myself like I need to not do this and yet I keep doing it. And that's this tiny, tiny, you know, again, this like this moat.
01:12:14
Speaker
of a way of understanding the larger thing. But as I've seen my family struggle, both my parents struggle with addictions for their entire lives, several other family members as well. And I've lost a number of people I care about very much to addiction. And so I want to understand it better now as things that I have kind of seen in my own family and friend circle.
01:12:43
Speaker
It now seems to be happening to the entire country because we haven't found ways to get people the help they need, you know? So yeah, for sure. My personal experience has informed that. But yeah, that's a great example of asking the short question.
01:13:00
Speaker
Yeah. And then letting silence do some work too. Yeah. Right. You know, even like if we let this go silent, not that we're going to, but if we let it go silent for three to five seconds, like that's almost agonizing. And if you let that go, usually the person who had the question asked of them will start to fill it in, but it's hard. It's hard to let that play out. Yeah. And it's also hard on the other end of it. I think it's hard to, um, to let,
01:13:30
Speaker
the interviewer know or to not feel a need to immediately answer, to give yourself some time to think about what you really want to say. I think I always feel the pressure to jump right in and say something interesting instead of saying, let me think about that for a second. It feels socially awkward.
01:13:53
Speaker
Yeah, and you feel like you're flat-footed and if you're just like kind of stumbling around trying to think that it's I'm somehow like boring the other person on the other line. Right, right. Yeah, exactly.
01:14:04
Speaker
Well, Bronwyn, I love having these conversations. I love that this was just really unscripted and that we... I'm always unscripted. It's the only way I know how to be, unfortunately. Good. Well, good. I think there's a ton in this episode that a lot of people are going to maybe feel a little less lonely about based on what we talked about. We're all bozos on the same bus, as they say.
01:14:29
Speaker
You know, we're all in this thing together, so the more we can be a little nicer to ourselves, be a little nicer to each other, I think, the better.
01:14:42
Speaker
All right, how was that? A little different than usual, but you can't always have a pure interview every single time. That was nice. She was the third time back for Bronwyn. She came on, we just talked about things that were bugging us. Well, things were bugging me and she was just super cool. At Bronwyn Dickey on Twitter. Thanks again. Thanks again to Goucher College for their support. MFA program in nonfiction.
01:15:11
Speaker
And thanks for you. Thanks for listening. Be sure to keep the conversation going on Twitter. That's at Brendan O'Mara and at CNF Pod. You can follow the show on Facebook as well. The Creative Nonfiction Podcaster at CNF Pod host. What else?
01:15:28
Speaker
head over to BrendanOmero.com, hey, for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly reading list newsletter, books, articles that I stumbled across in the course of a month, as well as what you might've missed from the world of the podcast. It's a growing list. It's a lot of fun. I think you'll dig it. Newsletter once a month, no spam, can't beat it.
01:15:53
Speaker
I think that's it friends. Hope you have a CNF and great week. Have a lot of fun putting this together and I'm deeply appreciative that you're along for this little journey. Let's do it again in a week. Sound good? Deal? Alright. We out. Oh! And if you can't do... Interview! See ya!