Comparison of Ballerinas and Writers
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Speaker
Yeah, I gotta say, I feel like nothing like ballerinas to get you ready to take the rejection of a writer. I really...
Creative Non-Fiction Podcast Introduction
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Speaker
Hey hey, it's CNF, the creative non-fiction podcast where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories, how they became who they are, and what they're working on. I'm your host Brendan O'Mara, hey hey, good to be with you CNF-ers.
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Today's guest for episode 202 of the greatest podcast in the world is Ruby McConnell.
Meet Ruby McConnell
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Speaker
She's a native Oregonian and she's fellow Eugenian here in lovely Western Oregon. Though we didn't get to record in person, so that's kind of a bummer, but such is life right now. One day, someday, she's the author of A Woman's Guide to the Wild and most recently Ground Truth, a geological
Ruby McConnell's Books
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Speaker
got sometimes sometimes man a geological survey of a life it's published by over cut pressed pressed what the fuck is going on here but we'll get to that in due time over cut press good lord
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Speaker
I don't know why you'd want to subscribe to the show anymore, but hey, if you want to, make sure you're subscribed to the podcast wherever you
Podcast Subscription and Social Media
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Speaker
get them. Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, Pocket Cast, all over. If you dig the show, consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcast. You might want to leave out the part where I can't get words out of my mouth.
00:01:40
Speaker
Or you could. It's up to you, really. Reviews are great. And of course you can link up to the show on social media. Tag me in the show at cnfpod and at Brendan O'Mara and I'll be sure to jump in the fire with you. Also, I recently posted on the cnfpod Instagram a stack of books, big stack of books, and I'm raffling them all out.
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Speaker
How do you enter? You merely subscribe to my monthly newsletter. It's free. It's once a month. It's reading recommendations, podcast news, sometimes my hot take on creativity.
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Speaker
I get a lot of books. I often get the advanced uncorrected proofs and then I get sent finished hardcovers. And I figure why should I have all the fun?
Importance of Coaching and Self-Persistence
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Speaker
Of course, you should buy and support the authors who come on this show. That's why they come on the show, of course. But winning free books is fun too. So be sure to subscribe to the newsletter at brendanomero.com. And you're entered. It's that simple. First of the month. No spam. Can't beat it.
00:02:47
Speaker
Also, hey, with your work, how can I help you get where you want to go? Everything I'm talking about is having that coach in your corner. It's that accountability. It's about knowing where to put the pain.
Ruby McConnell's Writing Journey
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Speaker
Everybody gets tired in a marathon, right? And a coach will show you where to put the tired, where to file it away so you can finish the race. Likewise, I'll show you where to put the self-doubt, the tire, the grind, when you're so damn tired of your own voice.
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Speaker
Don't I know it? How do you persist in the face of that guy? Email me and we'll start a dialogue. I'd love to help you get there the way a trainer or coach will help you get across that finish line. Brendan at Brendan DeMera.com for email. That's a mouthful.
00:03:39
Speaker
Hey, I had a great time speaking with Ruby. This was a whole lot of fun. We're in the same writing group here in Eugene, but we've actually never met. Why? Well, as a result of this podcast, I have so little time and energy to commit to my own writing. I spent almost all my time celebrating other people's work that I simply don't have much time to do my own. I'm not trying to be a frickin' mar, mar, mara, mara here.
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Speaker
I'm not complaining, it's just the reality and my failure as a human. So since Ruby joined the group, I had nothing to contribute aside from feedback. So I haven't gone in person in ages.
Exploring 'Ground Truth'
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Speaker
Plus it's like a 10 mile bike ride to our host house from where I live. So there's that also. It was funny, Ruby didn't realize that the Brendan and the writing group was the same Brendan and Prudose produces the greatest podcast in the world.
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Speaker
In any case, Ruby wrote an incredible book that is rooted in the Pacific Northwest. It's scientific, it's personal, but not academic or overtly memoiristic. There are those moments in there, of course, but I wouldn't classify this as memoir, neither would Ruby. If you like Elizabeth Rush or Rebecca Solnit,
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Speaker
you're really gonna want to buy two copies of Ground Truth. One for you and one for a friend so you can talk about it. Then that friend needs to buy a copy and pass it to the next person and so it spreads. So let's give Ruby McConnell a CNF and welcome all together now. RIP!
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You know, writers or reporters or budding journalists or whatever it is, they feel like they have to be in someplace very exotic to get a good story. And they don't realize that sometimes the best stories are right in your backyard and there's great backyard journalism to be had.
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or backyard storytelling, as I like to call it. And so this is, in a sense, a good time to be like, oh yeah, you know what? There are some things, great things going on right underfoot that I don't even, you know, I don't have to, you know, fly to the Yukon to find a great story. Like it's right here in my backyard. Yeah. And I think, I think that particularly the American West, people do that. You know, a lot of people feel like in order to feel as though you've gone outside and in Oregon, you have to drive for many hours.
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Speaker
and sort of seek out this greater wilderness. But if you live in a place like Eugene, that greater wilderness is, you know, like for people in a different context, just outside your door, you know, like, oh, you live
Ruby's Connection to Nature
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Speaker
on a farm. Like, no, it's just a big backyard. It's perspective is everything. And a lot of people, I think, you know, Portland has what, like 170 people that move there every week right now or some like huge number of people coming in. I think that they feel like they have to,
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take on this sense of American exceptionalism and these national park places in order to get benefit from wilderness and or to feel as though they've made contact with wild things. I think that they're starting to question that. I think we're going to have to as we become more and more homebound.
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Speaker
Yeah. And so you're, as we kind of alluded to earlier, you're an Oregonian native, grew up mainly near Portland, correct? Yes, Mount Tabor. Nice. And so give us a sense of the landscape that you grew up in and maybe what your parents did that kind of planted a lot of these seeds that would eventually sort of germinate when you reached young adulthood. Sure.
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really sort of micro topography level coming from a geologist, Mount Tabor is in fact a dormant volcano. And it's one of very few dormant, you know, to somewhat active, potentially active volcanoes within a city limits anywhere in the world. And for people who haven't been there, it's a city park. It's a large city park. And I grew up right on the flank of it on a dead end street leading into this park that was quite wild and
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both in terms of shrubbery and overgrowth and being jungly and not very well kept up in the 80s, but also a lot of drugs and crime, you know, as happens in large, forgotten urban places. But at the top of Mount Tabor is, in fact, a volcanic crater where you can see the layers of pumice. It's a scoria cone. So layers of scoria and pumice, and you can actually, you know, see the conduit through which the
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lava came up and then there's a basketball court and amphitheater in there. So it's kind of Portland quirky. And I think that growing up in that kind of Portland quirky place fundamentally and being given freedom in this urban wilderness is the defining thing that happened to me. Folks have no idea how this happened.
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are mystified by it to this day. They are not outdoors people. You know, they like to take a walk and look at birds. Dad was a fisherman. But the one time that I remember going camping with my family, they chose to do so in the middle of the hottest part of summer to a campsite with no shade while I had the chicken pox.
Geology and Writing
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And then the only thing I remember from the trip is
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being finally cooked to come out of the tent and sitting down in like a lawn chair that then like collapsed and ate me like a clam. And I'm like covered in chicken pox and my family is just like laughing. Not in a heartless way, but I think because they could not help themselves. And that's, yeah. So those are the answers to this question.
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And so how do you get the reading or the writing bug early on? I didn't get the writing bug early on. I got the geology outdoors, nature, environmental bug early on. And writing is a consequence of pursuing those things, learning a lot, and then finding that I had something to say.
00:10:04
Speaker
I've always had to write by virtue of being a student and I had exceptional teachers early on and throughout my education. I was very, very lucky in that respect. I was a reader and wrote a lot of science and found that very displeasing and not at all fun. And at some point started having something to say in my mid twenties.
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And what about geology appealed to you? I got to go outside. I was an environmental studies and general science major. My geology classes that I took as part of that had more fieldwork and field courses than anything else. And so I took a lot of them and I ended up doing research on Crater Lake as like an undergraduate assistant to PhD students and one of the professors there and
00:11:03
Speaker
I was almost done with my double degree. And she came to me and said, I have a project on Mount St. Helens that I need to give to someone. And I was thinking that I would give it to you, but I'm not going to give it to you unless you change your major to geology. So I did. Yeah.
00:11:28
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Yeah, and that's – I mean I suspect that like – I don't know like how Watergate got sort of birthed a generation of journalists. I wonder if Mount St. Helens in a sense birthed a generation of geologists just given what happened quite literally in your backyard when you grew up just when you were two years old, the eruption of Mount St. Helens.
00:11:52
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I wonder if that too is just, do you think that is something that has spurred the generation of geologists? Certainly it's definitely integral to I think your development as a geologist and also a writer. Absolutely. And it spurred a different kind of geology that's actually really important to our time. What it did was bring hazards geology and risk assessment geology
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and real-time geology, forecasting geology, monitoring geology to the forefront of people's minds. Previous to that, geology was really a mining and a development thing. Geologists were there to make sure bridges weren't going to fall down, and were there to figure out where the petroleum was and to figure out how to build. But Mount St. Helens did a lot to change
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perception. And it's interesting because this was really happening with Earth Day and with some other deep ecology things that were coming in in the 70s. People were becoming more aware of systems science. So when Mount St. Helens erupted and did so kind of in like a public way that captured people's imaginations and was really close to a major West Coast city, it opened up this new way of thinking about natural
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processes and risk and risk assessment and what we might need to do for long-term things. And that really opened up our thinking in terms of climate change response. I mean, this was the beginning of having entire programs devoted to this kind of geology.
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And what do you think it is about geology that connects you and resonates with you on a deeper level, given that it's such a very slow, methodical science that's very hard in terms of geologic time to get our heads around? Right. It's a science of imagination.
00:14:06
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What I love about it is twofold. And what really captures me is it's a truly integrative science. So for a curious mind, when you study geology, you also study biology and physics and chemistry and math and geography in a way that maybe if you study just biology, you don't get to explore. So there's that integrated nature of it.
00:14:37
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that I think kind of overcomes that issue of rocks are boring and this happened a billion years ago. And I understand rocks are boring and it did happen a billion years ago or it took a billion years to happen. I get it. But sometimes it happens quickly and we get to see it. And the other thing is that in geology, once you've been taught to look
00:15:07
Speaker
to look closely and microscopically and to look long-term and to look at all of those options in between, it stops being static. And so what's exciting to me about geology is the field eye, integrating everything that we might know from the laboratory and these other branches of science and then standing out and watching geologists tell a story of the land out of nothing.
00:15:37
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within minutes is a really exciting thing, and it's a really interesting way to walk through the world. Is there a better place in, let's just say, the continental United States to get the geology bug given the Cascadia subduction zone and the ring to the west, or what we're sitting on, essentially, and the ring of fire to the east? Is this kind of a hotbed for it?
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It's a hotbed for surficial processes, for things that we can see on the surface and for active processes like volcanoes. A lot of people come and take positions. The state universities have great volcanic programs because people come to study these rocks. But I will say I did my graduate work at Northern Arizona University because it's an hour and a half away from the Grand Canyon.
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And the rocks surrounding Flagstaff, Arizona in any direction, it's really like the best exposed stack of rocks in the world. You're just not going to get anything as great as what's out the diversity. You've got meteor crater, you've got the entire volcanic field. You have the whole Colorado plateau. You learn those rocks, you can identify rocks all over the United States.
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And so, okay, so you've got this, you're studying, you get sent to Mount St. Helens to study the volcano and do research up there. About this time, you're starting to probably feel like you have something to say in terms of the written words. So what was that moment or that intersection between the expertise that you were building and also this creative itch to marry
00:17:29
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the communication of being a competent writer with all this wonderful stuff you're learning that's very esoteric? It's a great question. I finished graduate school and I started working as an environmental geologist doing groundwater cleanup and site evaluations.
Environmental Geology in Writing
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The bread and butter of environmental work is a phase one site assessment. One of the things that you do is trace the history of the property
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Back to either 1940 or before its first developed use and you do that sort of for all the surrounding properties in an attempt to understand You know ways in which humans may have contaminated or impacted negatively The piece of land and you do this when you're a brand new geologist like, you know 20 of them in a week every week for years
00:18:25
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huge volumes of research and field work. And, but you start to learn the history of the place and you have to go to the library and you have to, you have to walk the property and you have to go to the local library and look at old aerial photographs and old maps. And all of a sudden, every piece of land that I looked at wasn't just the history of the rocks. I also had all of this human history. And I started to sort of, I understand, understood the world in a different way.
00:18:55
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And I started to see patterns in politics and human choices and landscape and my own life. And that was when the change happened.
00:19:10
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And you hit on an important point about coming to a point where you feel like you had something to say. And that's such a big thing with people who do personal essay or people who want to get into this kind of writing. It's one thing to have the chops to write a fundamentally…
00:19:27
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good sentence or paragraph, but also the best people who might not be fundamentally sound are the ones who do have just life experience, things to say, things that have happened to them or things they've experienced in a unique way. So what were the things you were experiencing at the time that started to fill that reservoir of things that you wanted to say as a writer? I did a lot of travel, huge amounts of travel. I witnessed
00:19:55
Speaker
Working in environmental cleanup is really difficult. At some point, it becomes really overwhelming, and especially hazard analysis. You start to see how fragile things are. I had a life like everybody else, so I had people who came and went in terms of loves that are gained and lost and
00:20:24
Speaker
friends and family members die and conflict and all the, you know, all the things that happen in a life. And I start, you know, you start to age into that place. The other thing that happened too was I diverged in lifestyle from my like mainstream cohort in a way
00:20:51
Speaker
that was quite intentional, and I felt the need to sort of be a voice of caution in terms of the future that I thought we were looking at. I mean, writing for me is, you know, like, it's a purging, it's a consequence. You know, I was a dancer, I was a performer for a long time,
00:21:19
Speaker
There's this sort of famous saying that you don't want to work with dancers who want to dance. You want to work with dancers who have to dance. And I feel like that is true of writing as well. I don't try to write if I don't have something to say. I put it down until I have something to say, and I'm okay with not having something to say in a day.
00:21:44
Speaker
A few years ago, I was talking to a former dancer in a former ballerina and she had since got out of it. She sort of injured out of it. She just got banged up and that was it. But I was talking to her just given the wealth of talent that is out there when you're trying to get to that.
00:22:04
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certain, you know, the major leagues, if you will, of dance. And I was like, well, how do you how do you stand out?
Dance and Writing
00:22:12
Speaker
How do you, you know, break through? And she's just like, well, the dancers that tend to do best are the ones who intrinsically know who they are as a dancer. And I wonder if maybe you can expand on that having some dancing experience and then extrapolate that to being a writer, because it's very congruent in terms of thematics.
00:22:31
Speaker
I agree with her entirely. I feel like dance in my life is probably the best preparation I had for writing in terms of, you know, patience and putting into work and taking correction, you know, and taking, taking revision. And then also understanding that you can, there's lots of dancers that dance kind of technically perfectly. I have, I have,
00:23:01
Speaker
taken many hours of dance with many different kinds of dancers. And sometimes you find a dancer who they want to dance so badly and they work really hard and they show up and they nail it technically. And there is still something that makes them not the dancer that you want to watch.
00:23:26
Speaker
And a dancer can come in behind them and be less technically brilliant and be breaking rules or be the weaker dancer, not have, you know, some necessary thing. And it will still be the dancer that people want to watch. Um, so yeah, I think, you know, people, I feel like a lot of craft talk in writing is about, this is how you're supposed to write. And then I feel like you have to kind of know who you are and know what your limitations are.
00:23:56
Speaker
and your voice and kind of, and say, yes, this is how you do it. And then this is how I do it. And I have to make it readable and people, you want people to be drawn to you and you can only do that with authenticity ultimately. And it's true of the written word and it's true of stage performance. You have to be authentic or people will not respond. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, technique in dance ultimately, which is, which would be grammar.
00:24:24
Speaker
you know, and construction technique and sort of, it's the backbone. It's what supports the art. But if it becomes the art, you lose something. As you transition to being a storyteller and a writer, you know, how did you lean on those dance fundamentals so you didn't get too frustrated or bogged down in those early years of grinding as a writer? You know,
00:24:54
Speaker
Yeah, I gotta say I feel like Nothing like ballerinas to to get you ready to take the rejection of a writer. I really I mean, I feel like The different, you know, I don't have to you know with when I do a reading I don't have to be in full stage makeup and do it at the same time as 30 other perfect people It takes and you know audiences are forgiving I feel like
00:25:23
Speaker
Everything about dance in terms of what you learn about holding your own practice is the thing that lets me be a writer. And I don't get bummed out by rejection. I don't get bummed out by having to write and rewrite. And I never lose sense of the things that I've learned as a dancer to inform my writing.
00:25:53
Speaker
For instance, one of the essays in Ground Truth, I sent a video of a dance that I had choreographed for one of my companies to my editor so as to help him understand why it was constructed in the way that the essay was constructed, because those two things had informed my thinking. I had been thinking about these concepts for so many years that it was
00:26:21
Speaker
The essay was predated with the choreographed piece that I was then relying on because you talk, you know, improvisation, the elements of improvisation are also the elements of writing, repetition, tempo, amplification, stillness or silence. You know, these are things that you use to construct a piece of dance.
Navigating Rejection in Writing
00:26:45
Speaker
Those are things that you use to construct language and have it be effective.
00:26:50
Speaker
So you can use those fundamental skill sets to help every part of the process from the creative construction to just, you know, okay, I am not the dancer for this piece. You know, every rejection gets you one step closer to the editor that says yes. That's all it is.
00:27:10
Speaker
Yeah, and then you forget the nose because all you have is the yes, and you're like, oh, no, this was this is where it was supposed to be all along. And so you're almost thankful for all the rejection once you get that once you're able to hold that acceptance in your hand, you're like, I can't imagine anything better than this right now. I'm so happy I was rejected and endured that rejection. Right, you know, and I just yeah, for some reason, I just really am not bothered by it. I feel like, you know, especially when you're a dancer, your art is your body.
00:27:40
Speaker
And so the rejection and the feedback that you get, it's very easy. You know, you're like, I am the stuff of which this is made. And I think that writers feel that too. I am the stuff of which this is made. So it's easy to, you know, take the criticism and the critique as a critique of yourself or your story rather than as a critique of the way that that story has been expressed onto the page, much like
00:28:09
Speaker
dancers have a tendency to torment themselves with their own image being reflected back at them in the mirror. Writing and particularly personal writing is a reflection of yourself, but it's just an image. It's not actually you and it will change with light and perspective and time and all those things. You can't really cling to that critique because it's a critique of something that
00:28:37
Speaker
while it looks like you is not actually you. What did, and I love this about athletics and physical habits and everything about, and how that extrapolates and overlays itself over the art. What about being a dancer? What discipline did you take from that that you were able to apply to your art? Every day, right? Every day.
00:29:06
Speaker
I still do a ballet bar almost every day. You do it every day and complete things. I was a blogger for a really long time and worked in the very brief and very short form, sort of completing a single thought. And I think that that as a daily practice was
00:29:36
Speaker
hugely important to helping me sort of find my voice and find what I write about and deciding how I write about that. But that absolutely you have to do it kind of every day and stick to it and finish it I think is really important.
00:29:56
Speaker
Yeah, and it's so, I love when I need a sort of a jolt of sort of, I don't know, creative steroids, if you will, something that makes me feel a bit stronger and feel a little bit less alone. I watched this documentary called Giro Dreams of Sushi. Have you ever watched that? I have, yeah. Have you ever seen that? Yeah, it's just like the discipline of what it means to do
00:30:22
Speaker
something over the long haul. You know, just, you know, if you're feeling jealous or competitive or you're feeling down, just like ground yourself in the work. Just like set the routine, do the work, put your head down and don't try to be distracted by everything else. Just be the best you can be.
00:30:40
Speaker
And is that, is that something you, you kind of employ yourself?
Balancing Writing and Life
00:30:44
Speaker
You know, just if you're feeling those external factors sort of starting to seep in and seep into the bloodstream that you, you know, you need to just kind of get back to what it is, get back to the work. I think so. I think, you know, I, I'm very lucky to, to live the kind of life I live where
00:31:05
Speaker
We own our own business and I am able to write full time and I'm able to really structure my day to how I need it to be. And so I think that particularly in nonfiction where you have lots of different tasks or at least the kind of nonfiction I write that comes with
00:31:28
Speaker
Necessary fieldwork and deep research and a lot of travel, you know, and so there's lots of different phases of the writing You do kind of have to have a discipline because you have to organize Those tasks so that they get done in the correct order to feed your brain or at least for me you know, I can't I can't start writing until I've sort of fueled my brain on whatever it is, you know and have a certain amount of the
00:31:56
Speaker
the work done. And so especially in long form, which I'm doing a lot of long form, book length work right now, you know, you have to kind of leapfrog all of your projects and stay super disciplined. Otherwise, I think I would sort of lose the thread of so many projects.
Ruby's Business Ventures
00:32:16
Speaker
And what is your your business and the I assume like the day job of your life?
00:32:24
Speaker
I own a cannabis processing business in the state of Oregon, a recreational cannabis processing business. When did that start up? That started in early 2016. We were in the first 50 licensees in sort of the new era of legalization in Oregon. And we are still sort of hanging tough as the smallest processors in the state of Oregon.
00:32:53
Speaker
Nice. So having a business and a startup and everything is its own, you know, just so time expensive, if you will. So how have you been able to thread your writing around the operations of that and keeping that afloat and keeping that thriving? You know, I love what I do and I lead a very simple
00:33:24
Speaker
life and that is very helpful so I wake up very early in the morning and my husband and I like really work hard at division of labor and sort of rather than work life like separation we talk about work life integration so often we'll work a 10 or 12 or 14 hour day and at the end of it not be sure that we have worked at all
00:33:54
Speaker
Um, you know, I mean, it's really, I have a lot of gratitude. Um, and it took a lot of work to get to this point. Um, and it's not particularly lucrative, but it turns out that, um, you know, there's something to be said for contentment and that's what we go for. So I really, you know, I tend to write in the mornings because that's when I am more fresh, but you know, that usually, I usually start writing around six 30 in the morning.
00:34:22
Speaker
And depending on the day, we'll stop, you know, at 10 o'clock or noon or two o'clock or four o'clock. Um, but I also keep myself on a pretty strict, uh, 40 minute cycle. I don't let myself sit for more than 40 minutes. I get up and do some other things. So that, that transferring, you know, every 40 minutes I get up and take on another task and either that's related to, you know, the house or the garden or moving our other business forward. So we get it done.
00:34:52
Speaker
Great. And what does the shape of that writing look like when you hit 630? Is that journaling, or is that a project you're working on? How are you checking in with yourself as you get that part of yourself warmed up? I do a lot of list making, kind of an obsessive list maker. So it usually takes me the first hour of being awake to get rid of, or not being awake, I've actually usually been up for a very long time at that point.
00:35:22
Speaker
I get up very early in the morning. And so usually by the time I sit down, I spend about the first 40 minutes just sort of making lists, figuring out what has to happen, the balance. There's a lot of business of writing that has to happen that can really bog you down. And so I try to get those things out of the way and at least get a handle on the order that I'm going to tackle that and then
00:35:50
Speaker
Yeah, usually dive into whatever I have
Freelancing as a Business
00:35:54
Speaker
on the calendar. I try to reserve some days just for research and reading. I used to reserve a lot of time for in-person research, but that's shifting now. I try to reserve days for field work so that I know what I have coming up.
00:36:11
Speaker
And I like that you said that alluding to the business of writing component. What does that look like for you? What does that look like for you, I'll say? Well, I don't have an agent and I've never had an agent. So I have to sell my own writing. And I do a lot of freelance work.
00:36:35
Speaker
So I have to pitch and enter, you know, and edit and hustle. And you do have to do a lot of reading in order to figure out, you know, who's appropriate, who's going to want what you're working on. When are they going to want that? All of those things. Networking with other writers, finding events, promoting previous books, promoting upcoming books, promoting other people's books.
00:37:03
Speaker
promoting other people's work. I think it's, you know, all of that. And then, you know, just invoices and, you know, collecting some rejections, planning out what you're gonna do, participating on social media. You have to do all of these things, constantly submitting the business of writing.
00:37:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think a lot of people who fail at freelancing, and I put myself in that category, and you and I had a nice spirited Twitter exchange about how shitty we feel we are as freelancers.
00:37:37
Speaker
which is a good springboard to talk about that. It's just like you don't realize, a lot of writers don't realize that you have to see yourself as a small business operator. And once you kind of put that hat on and think about it in those terms, be like, okay,
00:37:54
Speaker
If I'm going to land X amount of pieces this year, I need to be sending out, you know, a hundred queries to get 10 stories accepted. Or, you know, the batting average might even be lower than that. You just, I think a lot of people don't realize that kind of work that goes into it. So naturally, so, you know, for you, like, how are, how are you navigating that side of your, your writing life? In terms of freelancing, I would say poorly. Yeah.
00:38:23
Speaker
poorly and largely without enthusiasm. I'm not a journalist and I don't have an MFA, so let's start there. I'm a woman, but I write about cannabis, geology, environmental stuff, science,
00:38:52
Speaker
Those are kind of not really woman-dominated fields, even down to the who's writing about it on the final end of it fields.
Creating Unique Writing Paths
00:39:05
Speaker
And the kind of writing that I do is not in a voice that easily translates into mass media. Also, I have had a longstanding disdain for most women's
00:39:22
Speaker
focused things. I say having written three women focused things. Differently, I hope, I think my goal was to do it differently because I have been and so I don't have an attitude or a voice or perspective that's particularly appreciated by kind of mainstream women's outlets, nor am I
00:39:48
Speaker
particularly welcomed with open arms into the male-dominated scientific community, and it puts me in a place where I find it easier to place book-length works.
00:39:59
Speaker
Well, you're carving, you're like, well, there are these predetermined paths that you don't feel like you don't just fit into. So it's like, all right, well, fuck it. I'm just going to carve my own path. Yes. And yeah, like get out your machete and just go through this part of the jungle. And you know, if you're with me, if you come with me, you know, people like me do things like this. Follow me. Yes. And I get that a lot, you know, like some of some of
00:40:25
Speaker
You know, like I really tried, they want when you publish a collection of essays to publish a lot of those essays advance of, you know, like a deal or publication. And I struggled with some of them in places that really, I was surprised to have them not get picked up and got really wonderful, fabulous rejection letters. We love this. We love this. We think it's beautifully written. It's well researched.
00:40:54
Speaker
couldn't it be a little bit cheerier? Like, well, I'm writing about climate change. And I think that if we asked the polar bears if we could take a cheerier tone, they would probably say not so much. So yeah, it's interesting when you know that you're sort of bucking the system. I get a lot of could you be, you know, we try to be more positive about the environment. I'm like, well, I try to be really honest. So here we are.
00:41:25
Speaker
Yeah, there's one moment in essay you write that it...
00:41:31
Speaker
Basically, 10 years to understand that environmentalism cannot be about restoration, that the window for reversal is closed, that now it is a matter of survival. It's a radical attitude in the environmental movement and an unpopular one. Hope, it is thought, is the greatest motivator that everything can be saved. So in a sense, today being Earth Day, of course, you know, it's, yeah, you kind of take a slightly more like grim outlook on it because things are, things are grim.
00:42:01
Speaker
Well, right. And I think that pandemics are indicative of changing global systems. There is no difference between one consequence of our global behavior and another. So sea level rise and pandemics are related to one another intimately.
Global Issues and Environmental Writing
00:42:26
Speaker
You know, hurricanes and sea level rise and pandemics and droughts and locusts and you know, war and water scarcity are all related to one another.
00:42:41
Speaker
Expand on that like how the that that the the web of all that they because they seem disparate when you When you say them one by one But they are interwoven in a way that of court like all you have to do is, you know Just right to some look out your window, right? so in in the same way that we understand that if you take something out of the refrigerator and You know leave it on a wet warm window sill
00:43:11
Speaker
it will grow molds and yeasts and collect dust and will become a new, you know, like it'll, it'll change the equilibrium of whatever the thing is. Let's say like an old tomato, you know, it'll rot and that rotting is, Oh, it's picked up, you know, out of the air molds and yeasts and pollens and all of these things. And those things are multiplying and feeding off of it in this warm, wet environment.
00:43:39
Speaker
And then you have to remember that like the earth is just this molten ball and that all of the life on earth is really just kind of like the mold on the orange or the mold on the outside of the tomato, all of us, all of us. And we are just as sensitive to these outside forces and it's just as delicate of an ecosystem. So you change one thing, like a temperature will then you get.
00:44:07
Speaker
a new bloom of something and that everything is still evolving. And so if you change conditions more rapidly, things evolve more rapidly and that we might not have time to evolve in response to something else's evolution is important to understand.
Geology as a Storytelling Tool
00:44:27
Speaker
And that's what we are living through is that something else has evolved faster than us in response to our shared environment.
00:44:35
Speaker
And with looking at one of your essays here, you wrote that geology is a lot like life. And earlier in our conversation, you said it's a science of imagination. And what is it about geology that I think really, I think
00:44:54
Speaker
burrows down, gets deeper. It's almost a very, when you really scratch the surface, it's a very writerly science because so much is going on beneath the surface, if that makes any sense. Absolutely. And I love the analogy. One of the things that I think is wonderful about having geology as a background is that originally it was a descriptive science.
00:45:21
Speaker
And that was, you know, sort of, it was sort of men with sticks walking through the countryside, making observations. And there is this huge vocabulary that you get when you study geology and you're taught then to look differently and to describe differently and to use, you know, use really specific language for really minute, strange things. And you get kind of fun phrases to play with and it's super rich in that respect. But I think, um,
00:45:52
Speaker
You know, it's the universal. It's the universal. And we have so few truly shared experiences. And so we have so few real form, you know, like we kind of feel globalized and monocultured, but I think we're also feeling really fragmented. And I think that the land is this thing that because it exists on time scales and, you know, it's bigger than us and it's smaller than us and it's
00:46:22
Speaker
and sort of outside of our control, that it's a really great starting place for humans. And to sort of think about connections, geology is, it's a share, it's a touchstone.
Crafting Essays with Narrative Cohesion
00:46:42
Speaker
Yeah, there are so many great moments in the book where you marry your personal story with a lot of the topography and geology and geography of the Pacific Northwest. So for you, as you were constructing these essays, what was the challenge of trying to find the nice
00:47:04
Speaker
the right balance between, here's the information that I'd like you to take away, but also here's the beating heart of it to make you care. Right. Yeah, it was different for every essay. They feel really coherent and connected, even though they are separate and standalone in so many ways.
00:47:26
Speaker
You know, I'm glad to hear you say that because that was, that was one of the primary challenges of constructing the book. You have a certain number of essays and then you decide that it should be a book. I didn't, I didn't start writing them as a book. And then I realized that it was becoming a book. Um, and then, you know, I had, I had great volunteer editors, had many editors willing to look at this, um, writers and professional editors, um, that, you know, I had worked with previously while I was crafting the book proposal.
00:47:56
Speaker
And the connection of the essays was emphasized early on. And I read maybe 150 essay collections just to look at how the essays were connected. Wow.
00:48:14
Speaker
Yeah, that's amazing. What were some of the key ones where you're like, oh, this is a great example of what Elena Pasarello might say, like she sees the essay collection as an essay itself. Yes. So I suspect the best ones that you were reading were kind of in that vein. Yeah, Rebecca Solnit is a master at that form.
00:48:38
Speaker
She's a master at that forum where she'll take, you know, the same, the same analogy will sort of appear in a different form in each essay. You know, the repetition of language throughout the essays, the calling forward and the hints that you get of things that are yet to unfold and the holding on to some of those things. I think, you know, even though it's probably like totally over talked about, I think that Joan Didion is also
00:49:07
Speaker
a master of that form, especially because her essay collections were often pulled from disparate pieces written at very different times, or that were written for different purposes. They weren't necessarily written as a collection. And I will say here that of those 150 some odd collections, almost all of them were written by women. And I did that on purpose too.
00:49:33
Speaker
Yeah. So anything that I have to say is going to be totally skewed towards women. Gretel Ehrlich does a great job connecting. And she's a land-based writer too. But eventually, when I first put the collection together and you have to write the table of contents when you have a proposal, you haven't written all of the essays, or at least I haven't.
00:50:00
Speaker
when I write my book proposal, and I did it by physiographic region, which I found helpful as a geologist. But when I turned it into my editor, my developmental editor at Overcup, he said, how have you done this? I said, by physiographic region, he's like, that's not going to fly.
00:50:27
Speaker
I put it a little bit more chronologically and found it easier to connect them, but was really actually thinking about that as I wrote sort of the last few essays in particular.
00:50:41
Speaker
Yeah, and what's great is the connective tissue of the whole thing, and what makes it feel cohesive, at least it made it feel cohesive for me, is of course the landscape of the Pacific Northwest. That's your through line throughout all these essays, and that's kind of what you're able to hang everything on, whether that's the essentially the innkeepers or the housekeepers along the Columbia River Gorge,
00:51:09
Speaker
and just so many other things, whether it's Mount St. Helens or the Andrews Forest deep in the Cascades, it's like all these things are what is keeping these from just exploding and falling apart all over the floor. Right. And partly because there is an essay for each physiographic region, pretty much. Yeah. And also, I was really clear,
00:51:40
Speaker
I don't consider this a memoir and I wasn't trying to write memoir. I really sort of, my brand of environmental writing follows the Irish tradition of the, the Chaunakee, the Irish storytellers. And you have to have some of yourself in that, you know, in that form. And I made it really clear early on. I was like, you know, we can't edit this towards memoir because the analogy
00:52:10
Speaker
You know, like I write about the salmon and I say that the salmon are not the metaphor for my life. My life is the metaphor for the salmon in this. And I was really clear that that was the direction that it ran in all of the essays, you know, as opposed to writers who use the landscape to help hold up the personal story or illuminate the personal story. My goal was to use the personal story to illuminate the story of the landscape or the natural resource.
00:52:39
Speaker
that I was talking about.
00:52:42
Speaker
When I was reading these, it made me think of Elizabeth Rush's rising, which is, have you read that? Because she had a similar way of writing her essays, too. She was in them, but it wasn't explicitly memoir. It was very research driven and going to all these different regions of sea level rise. And this made me feel like you were going to these various regions of the Pacific Northwest geologic
00:53:12
Speaker
need just geographic or geologic diversity of the region and using those things as you were saying to tell the story of the land, but using you as a vector. My sense is that we can all do this and that's really my goal. My goal is to have people come out of the writing feeling like my stories are tied to the land as well.
00:53:38
Speaker
I think that that's the part of it that makes an environmental writing. It's the part of environmental advocacy.
Oregon's Timber Wars
00:53:47
Speaker
If people feel as though their stories are also tied to the land, then they may assign value differently and they may behave differently. They may become protective.
00:54:01
Speaker
And you write in the book also about how you had an affinity for and a love for the trees and everything, but that also runs counter to so much of the Oregon economy, especially from a few decades ago, is on logging and it's still a significant part of the
00:54:21
Speaker
economy, though dwindling. So what is the conflict that you've experienced in Oregon between the environmentalists, of course, and also Big Timber here? Let me start by saying that Big Timber is growing and has been growing for the last several years. Mills that were shut down in Oregon have opened up. There is a lot of timberland being sold.
00:54:50
Speaker
I think that the perception by Oregonians that we are no longer a logging state is really something that we need to reevaluate because there are more clear cuts in Lane County than there used to be. And that's been true of Tillamook County and a lot of Douglas County. What I've seen in my history of living with the trees in Oregon, I remember really acutely
00:55:19
Speaker
the timber wars of the 1980s. And I remember very vividly the evening news with activists, you locked around their necks to the gates of forest roads and bulldozers and heavy equipment being driven at them and loggers and sheriff's officers.
00:55:47
Speaker
opening the gates and dragging protesters across the ground to let the trucks in. I remember very vividly protesters in Eugene in the nineties, sitting in trees in downtown Eugene and having police officers put tear gas directly into their eyes with Q-tips.
00:56:16
Speaker
to try and get them out of the trees that they were protecting in downtown Eugene and the large crowd that formed in support of those brave people. I remember the Jasper Creek tree sit-ins of the late 90s. I worked for Greenpeace at that time. And I remember when
00:56:42
Speaker
going into the forest lands of places like Bryce Creek, where people really spend a lot of time out here before it was clear cut. And I have been around and going to that place long enough that now those are turning into young forests again. And you can still drive down to Coos Bay and see thousands and thousands and thousands of trees lying on their sides ready to be shipped
Writing and Editing Advice
00:57:08
Speaker
Yeah, very much so. And over the course of writing this collection of essays, and I think a lot of people who listen to the show are essay writers and want to write essay collections, what might you say to someone who wants to take on this kind of a project? What was your experience of stitching these together, and what advice might you have for someone who wants to take on a project of this scope? Be really patient.
00:57:37
Speaker
It takes a really long time, much longer than you ever think to write any book, but also with essays in particular, be patient, be methodical, understand that every essay, you'll probably write 10,000 to 15,000 words to get a two to 4,000 essay.
00:58:01
Speaker
If you're writing essays in a way that people are gonna want to read them and at a length that they'll want to be read, you have to be willing to cut it all. Yeah, how did you develop that muscle? I enjoy cutting my own writing. I do too. Some people are like, they find it brutal. I'm like, I love being able to lop off 2,000 words in one hack. Right. Well, here's the other thing that I do. When I go to edit,
00:58:30
Speaker
I save a new copy, right? I save my copy, I save my versions. So it's the, it's the title version one, version two, and I don't care if I have 20 versions because at some point at some later date, I might be writing something else and I will remember that I had that lovely language and I didn't cut, I didn't delete it. There's a difference between editing and deleting. So save all of your language because you might use it later. It's, you know.
00:58:58
Speaker
Writing is like quilt making. You might need that patch for another project. Keep it. And so I don't have any problem deleting it. I mean, or editing it out because I'm not deleting it. I'm not throwing it away. I'm just not putting it into this particular piece.
00:59:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's not your main to that one particular one, but it's so great. I remember speaking with Mary Heather Noble, like way back in the early run of the show, and she saves everything. She believes in the power of the drawer that just because you've written it, you might have edited or cut it. It might not be the right time for the thing. So just put it away.
00:59:34
Speaker
And it might be 10 years from now, that one thing that maybe you lopped off of a particular essay, maybe it's its own thing. Maybe you've matured into something where you can actually make sense of something you've cut. So you just, it's to your point, you really should be holding on to all these things. Deleting, editing is not deleting and vice versa. Right. Oh, I think that's absolutely, sometimes you do just write a pretty paragraph that is lovely language and is absolutely inappropriate for where it's sitting.
01:00:02
Speaker
but you'll go and cannibalize it later.
Meaning of 'Ground Truth'
01:00:08
Speaker
Yeah. For folks who might not understand what ground truth means in terms of geology, define that term and why is that so important to the title of this collection? Ground truth is a noun in a verb. In geology and lots of science, you often have to
01:00:31
Speaker
make decisions about things and make up stories about things and evaluate things from a distance. So the use of aerial photographs or radar or sonar, you get some information. You look at the aerial photograph that looks like a mountain top because it has a circular top. It turns out when you go take a walk to that place, it's actually a lake. They were both circular from above. You had to make a choice. You got it wrong. So the process of
01:01:01
Speaker
going back and verifying on the ground the assumptions and the story that you've determined based on information obtained from a distance is called ground truthing. You also use it in the military, sort of military plans for what they think they will find, and then there is the ground truth of the actual situation once they get there. So ground truth, these essays
01:01:29
Speaker
that was actually the process that I used. All of the essays feature a landscape or a feature or a natural element that I had some connection to my past and my history. And for each one of these essays, I did in fact go back and ground truth and revisit those places sometimes several times over many years to be able to write about them sort of from a distance and then from the
01:01:58
Speaker
that what I was hoping to find, which was the ground truth of the situation. That's such a perfect approach. And so when you landed on that title, you must have been like, yes, this is like the perfect distillation of what I'm going for. I did. And there have been other books with ground truth and then a different subtitle. And I sort of had to
01:02:24
Speaker
keep advocating that this was the only thing. And then once you find the right publisher for your work and the right editor for your work, they agree with that and they make it happen.
Publication Process and Promotions
01:02:36
Speaker
When it's something really fundamental like that, it's really important to trust your editors. It's really important to trust your editors. They really are helping you. At least mine have been. I've had really wonderful editors.
01:02:52
Speaker
And when I was reading it too, I came across something called Harmonic Tremors. I'm like, that's a good title too. I'm like, I got to talk to her about that. You should use that as a title for something. Well, I had an interactive arts collective that I started that is actually still around. I'm no longer a part of it, but called Harmonic Laboratory in Eugene, Oregon, that took the title from Harmonic Tremors because the first piece that we did was a volcanic
01:03:23
Speaker
Peace. Nice. Well, Ruby, where can people get more familiar with you, find you online and get more familiar with the book? You can find me at Ruby Gone Wild across social media channels and at rubymcconnell.com. You can buy my books every place that you can purchase books, but especially from local bookstores.
01:03:50
Speaker
everywhere including but not limited to some of my favorites which include pals and broadwaybooks.com or I think they are .net and then also you can buy directly from my indie press which is great and they are overcup.com.
01:04:11
Speaker
Awesome. Well, Ruby, this is great that we got to do this and talk shop a bit and talk about the way your approach to these wonderful essays. So I really appreciate you covering out the time on Earth Day here to come on the podcast and talk about your work. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm so appreciative of your time. I really touched. Thanks.
01:04:33
Speaker
We did it. We made it CNF-ers. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you're subscribing to the show. Of course, this crazy show is produced by me, Brendan O'Mara. I make the show for you. I hope it made something worth sharing. And if you really dig the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Show notes are at BrendanO'Mara.com.
01:04:53
Speaker
Follow the show on the various social media channels at cnfpodacrossamall. Get that newsletter at my website. Win books, win zines, hang out with your buddy BO. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Are we done here? We must. Because if you can do interview, see ya!