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Episode 27—Author Paul Lisicky on Writing in Unlikely Times, Simultaneous Projects, and Preserving Play
133 Plays8 years ago
Paul Lisicky stops by the podcast to talk about his memoir "The Narrow Door."
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Transcript
Introduction to CNF Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Attention, attention everyone. This is the hashtag CNF podcast. A conversation with readers, writers, authors, filmmakers, and the genre of creative non-fiction episode number 27. I insist, I insist that you sit down.
00:00:27
Speaker
Hey, it's my podcast. I can do whatever I want. So, excuse me. So
Featuring Paul Lisicki and 'The Narrow Door'
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Speaker
episode 27, huh? We're getting up there, almost hitting the big 3-0. But before we get there, this episode deals and speaks with
00:00:46
Speaker
None other than Paul the Sickie, author of the wonderful memoir The Narrow Door, published by Grey Wolf Press. I think you should go out and buy it. And when you do, just buy another one. You'll probably get free shipping or something. And then give that book to a friend.
00:01:05
Speaker
is a nice wide-ranging conversation as they all are about the craft of writing nonfiction and this one's a good one just like all the others so thanks for listening and if you get a chance subscribe share it with a friend and
00:01:23
Speaker
Give it a rating or subscribe to my email newsletter over at BrendanOmera.com. All of that helps. Helps keep this train going. And so that is about it. Enjoy this conversation with Paul Lisicki. Thank you. My
Evaluating the Slush Pile with Students
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Speaker
class and I go through the slush submissions and
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and try to pick out work that is memorable, that shines, that seems exciting and fresh to us.
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That's got to be enlightening in some way for your students, too, to see the whole spectrum of work that gets submitted to a literary journal, like the good and the bad. And that can certainly be, it's always good to be reading, you always want to read the best, but it also kind of helps to read what still needs work. Yeah, right. I think they learn a lot about openings and importance of having a really crystal, singular,
00:02:31
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to put a piece aside if it's not present and fresh from sentence one. So that's at the very least, they're learning that and they just get an intuitive sense of what their own work is. I don't like this term so much, up against when they're sending it out.
Paul's Connection with 'The Narrow Door' and Proximity Magazine
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Speaker
So what's kind of cool, how I came to be familiarized with The Narrow Door and your work in that sense was I submitted some work to Proximity for their essay contest and the narrative journalism contest. And so I had had Bronwyn on the show a few weeks ago, well, actually months ago now at this point. And then I saw you and I saw you have written this memoir. I'm like, oh, this is great.
00:03:21
Speaker
Find out the publisher, which is Grey Horse, Grey Wolf Press, and reached out and was able to read it and then subsequently reach out to you. So that was kind of neat to see that you're in some way affiliated with a lot of the people I know with Proximity, like Maggie and Tracy McNamara, who's I think since moved on from Proximity.
00:03:47
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I wonder, how did you come to know them and be affiliated with them in some capacity? Well, I think I heard, I probably know Maggie. Maggie must have read The Narrow Door than I heard from her, I think, back in March about, and she asked me if I'd be interested in judging the contest.
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Yeah, that's how it all started. Cool. And so what has the publicity and the promotion of your book been like the last few months since it's come out? It was
Promoting a Book: Challenges and Rewards
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an intense burst from about mid-January to, I'd say, mid-May. And I must have done 30 readings in that time.
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And I mean, the great part is that I got to I got to travel to wonderful cities. I got to see many old friends. It was grueling. But I mean, I think the grueling part is was standing online and, you know, at the airports. And, you know, it's it's tough and it's it's a challenge to be in front of people.
00:05:14
Speaker
you know, all those nights, but it felt it felt very energizing. It gave me lots of adrenaline. It quieted down it and seemed it's been much more reasonable sense. I mean, I have, I think for book festivals this fall, and, and some college readings, and what else? Yeah, yeah, it's, it's
00:05:39
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it seems pretty sane. I mean, there's usually no more than than one or two things a week. So and I get to go to California in two weeks for for five days to teach a workshop that Pam Houston's writing by writers conference and
00:05:57
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And we get to go to Miami next month for the book fair. So yeah, it's good stuff. Nice. What do you like most about doing the readings and putting you and your work out there as a real sort of putting a public face to your work? What do you like most about that? Well, I think there's something about standing in front of a crowd and feeling
00:06:22
Speaker
and sort of disappearing into the work that is a pleasure to me. It's the place where I get to be a performer. My earliest work as an artist was as a musician. So there's something really familiar to me about standing in front of a crowd and not quite being myself, but being this,
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you know, receptor for, for sound, if that makes sense. And, and, and, you know, being attuned to the audience being attuned to its reactions and, and feeling that a kind of energy passed back and forth. So I like that. And Q and A's are fun too. I mean, you have to be under toes and sometimes you're not exactly able
00:07:21
Speaker
to give the best answer on your feet, but I like the sense of alertness around all that. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, the Q&As are always nice in that it's great to be able to engage with readers face-to-face like that and give them that extra level of texture and meaning.
00:07:43
Speaker
to the work, to help them interpret what they've read or sometimes refute what they've interpreted even though when you put out a piece of work like that, it in essence becomes theirs and it's almost no longer yours. But sometimes it is nice to engage in that people have shown a certain sense of interest that you've engaged them on some level that they actually want to inquire more about you and your work, which is kind of nice.
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Right.
The Reader's Interpretation of Published Works
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That's, that's really beautifully put. And I think that's where the real pleasure lies, just standing in the midst of all that, all that exchange. And yeah, and you're absolutely right. You realize as you're reading the work aloud, and in many cases, readers already know the work, maybe sometimes even better than I know the work. And at that point, it's theirs, you know, you're, you're just, you know, helping it along.
00:08:38
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So you said you were a musician at one point or maybe you still practice. What instrument do you play and what was that experience like, sort of honing your artistic craft through music? Right.
From Music to Writing: Paul's Creative Shift
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I guess I still am a pianist and a guitarist.
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I started picking out music on our family piano when I was about five years old.
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our piano was in sort of the center of the house and it was impossible to move through the house without sort of contending it. So I would sit at the bench and start picking out notes and I took piano lessons fairly early on. I started writing music as a teenager, both choral music and I wanted to be a singer-songwriter and was quite serious about it.
00:09:41
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And I was positive that was going to be my life. And then at a certain point, when I was an undergraduate late in my undergraduate years, I took a writing workshop and something shifted. Not immediately, but I came to writing
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at a time when I think I was up against what I saw to be the limitations of the particular field of music I was writing in. And the world of writing seemed to offer many more kinds of possibilities. I could combine in a piece, you know, high and low. I could, yeah, it just felt like it was a bit,
00:10:37
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It was broader in its implications, even though, as I say these things, I'm saying to myself, what? What prompted you to take the workshop? I wasn't able, I stopped, I was writing music and for some reason I couldn't, I was sort of stalled.
00:11:03
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It was essentially out of play. I wasn't taking it with any grand design. I was lucky enough to work with a creative writing teacher who brought really interesting, challenging work to us.
00:11:26
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dumb the content of an introductory workshop down. I remember coming in, this is the first place I read Thomas Pynchon and Jane Bowles and John Hawks. And I became a huge Jane Bowles fan in the course of that class and started writing what I think of now as Jane Bowles imitations. And
00:11:54
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I remember putting the story up in class and it going, you know, it sort of, I remember it being received rather well. But that teacher followed me down the hall after class. And she said, you know, you did. And I remember thinking that her
00:12:15
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her interest was sort of unfounded, and I was confused by it. I thought, oh, maybe she just wants to be seen as valuable and useful as all teachers want to be seen. But that gesture meant so much to me, maybe not right on the spot, but years down the road. It was one of many affirmations that I got from others that helped me
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just turn my own lens in a different direction.
Affirmation in Writing: Fuel for the Journey
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Greg Hamlin, who was a journalist who was on the podcast of last year sometime, he was anthologized in Best American Sports Writing and in that same year had a notable selection for Best American Sports Writing. He just had an amazing run and he referred to how important it was because it put gas in his tank
00:13:13
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He articulated well the insecurity and the need for some affirmation to keep going. When he was able to get anthologists, it validated the work and a lot of the struggle. When you talk about this teacher giving you that affirmation,
00:13:38
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that must have, at that point, like you see, you didn't realize it quite at the time, but I imagine you reflected back on that in those down moments, that probably put gas in your tank, and be like, okay, I'm feeling down now, but she saw something in me then when I never saw anything at all.
00:13:55
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Yeah, and in memory that just becomes an iconic moment. Yeah. An emblem of support. And I think you start to build those little emblems and hopefully you have access to them in your memory during those long, long, long times of quiet when you're simply working and not getting much in the way of feedback or support.
00:14:23
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And those times, I think, are inevitable. Yeah, of course. And how do you deal with those long times of quiet and sometimes that solitude and that need for reflection to sort of be alone with the work? But how do you deal with that when you approach those walls and hurdles of self-doubt? And when you've been working with a piece for so long that it becomes
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So boring and you hate it. But you try to rationalize that you hate it because you've just spent hundreds of hours with it. So how do you overcome that and deal with that? Yeah, there comes a point when you've worked so long on a piece, especially a long piece, that it becomes really hard to see it. Yeah.
00:15:11
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I usually work on something else at the same time. For me, I mean, I work on some really short pieces that I can finish rather quickly. So yeah, I always like to have them going. So I at least get the satisfaction of some sense of completion. And it's usually the case that those kinds of pieces are, you know, fairly
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know, people ask me for work and I can send them that work. So there's like a more frequent kind of affirmation than, you know, the kind of response you get from your editor when you've turned in a long narrative, a long manuscript. So yeah, I think it's probably important. This seems like an impossible task. But for me, it's important to work on more than one thing at once.
00:16:06
Speaker
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. In that sense, you're getting some freshness, but also a sense of completion along the way of some longer project, these little gold coins along the path that make you feel like you're accomplishing something. Yeah, and I think if you're putting too much focus and too much light and energy on one thing, you can probably kill it. You can start to will it.
00:16:35
Speaker
if it matters too much, you know, I think if you disperse that energy, you probably come insane a relationship to what you're trying to make. And yeah, it's one way to preserve play. It's so, so important. It's so easy to forget the importance of play or so easy to forget to nurture it when
00:17:03
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You know, you're trying to do something serious. So what, uh, how do you, uh, foster and sort of coach along that, that sense of play when you're, when you're working? What
Permission to Write Anytime and Flexibility
00:17:14
Speaker
are some of those outlets and, uh, how do you, how do you nurture that so you don't like smother the important stuff with a pillow? Like you just, you're able to, uh, yeah, to nurture it. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, well, I try to work in such a way that I don't these days have a set schedule.
00:17:32
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I like to write as frequently as possible, but it's not like the old days when I said, you know, I'd sit at my desk at home at nine o'clock and write, you know, say for three hours, whether it was good or not. It seemed to be important at an earlier time in my writing to fix myself to that kind of schedule. And these days, I'll often write
00:18:00
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when I'm not even trying to, if that makes sense. I might be standing online at a coffee place or somewhere at school, and I'll just peck something into my phone. And that's often a place where some, for me, some...
00:18:25
Speaker
the origins of the best work, or there's a better way to put that. Some of the things that I'm most interested in start out that way. It also involves giving myself permission to write in any circumstance. So that goes from writing in public to, well, last week, last Wednesday, I actually wrote for two hours before I taught. And I think that's the first time in my entire
00:18:55
Speaker
writing life that I was able to write before I taught. Giving oneself permission to work at unlikely times I think is important. During and after you had taken that workshop, at what point in your life did you allow yourself to give yourself permission to pursue that as a vocation?
00:19:24
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Um, it probably took several years and, um, I mean, I think the permission was sort of fostered by getting certain awards and getting into certain colonies and getting into a certain grad school. And then there comes a point where you think, Oh, I guess, I guess I'm supposed to be doing this. Um,
00:19:48
Speaker
I'd like to think of myself as a self-attuned person, like someone who is not dependent on outside approval or outside validation in regard to my work. But I think early on, I didn't need all that. You kind of grow up over the years and I think
00:20:20
Speaker
It's great to be published by X Magazine or to win that award at a later point, but I think it meant more earlier on. It goes to needing some degree of validation, that gas in the tank thing to make sure that all these thoughts you have aren't completely delusional. Right, right.
00:20:47
Speaker
writing is not the most, when I was young, my parents had, they wanted to make sure my brothers and I were taken care of and knew what we were doing. And they were really practical people as much as they were people who were supportive of our interest in the arts.
00:21:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's a different thing when these urges, these instincts of intuitions happen when you're young and you're still at home and you haven't really cultivated an adult identity yet. You haven't been out in the world yet. Yeah. So what did your parents do for work? My mom was a stay-at-home mom.
00:21:45
Speaker
But she was a musician and came from a family of musicians and that. So like, ironically, she was the one who was probably much more concerned about her sons having some sort of professional affiliation. Yeah, yeah. Really important for you know, because she had seen how her brother
00:22:09
Speaker
an actor had struggled before he, you know, went back to college. My dad was an engineer, and was the first person of his the first member of his siblings to go off to college. And yeah, he was a very ambitious guy. Yeah, lots of lots of energy. And
00:22:38
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um, self belief. And yeah. Do you think that's where a lot of see what you said late early on that a lot of when you were starting to write that you didn't necessarily need a whole lot of
00:22:55
Speaker
validation and affirmation early and you say your father had a lot of self-belief, do you think that's where your self-belief came from, that fearlessness that you were able to pursue, whatever it is that you felt like you wanted to pursue at a given time?
00:23:14
Speaker
you know, that there was a certain kind of like reckless romanticism about my father. And I think I'm, I'm positive he thought we could do whatever we wanted to do just as long as we excelled in it and you know, invested all, you know, all of our energy in a project. So yeah, I guess so. Sure. Yeah.
00:23:38
Speaker
Yeah, is that something about your personality that when you hook onto something, you tend to lean into it with all of your energy? I think it's a part of my personality. I think there's also a part of my personality that is really distractable. And maybe I hook into something with all of my energy as a way to
00:24:07
Speaker
sort of resist that distractible impulse. It's like both of those things are there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can't imagine sitting down in front of the laptop with, you know, confidence and belief, you know, at 100% level. I mean, I don't think any works that way. And it's probably that it's probably the case that our doubts and uncertainties are, are necessary to
00:24:35
Speaker
getting back to it day after day. Yeah, yeah, they kind of have to agitate the leaves at the bottom of the pond, you know, kind of turn it over. Yeah, I like that metaphor. So you've written a lot of fiction. So how did you come to want to write nonfiction with The Narrow Door? Yeah, my second book, Famous Builder, is actually
00:25:03
Speaker
a collection of autobiographical essays. And I initially wrote that because I felt this urge, this desire to do something different from my first book, which was a novel. I didn't want to write the same trajectory and scenario situations.
00:25:29
Speaker
I thought, what would it be like to be an amateur all over again? So that impulse, that desire, fed that book. And then the next, The Burning House is a novel. Unbuilt Projects is this weird coalition of lyric essays and short
00:25:58
Speaker
parables and fables and myths. So it's kind of like standing into different territories. When my friend Denise had died, and this was back in 2009, I had just finished Unbuilt Projects and didn't at all feel any urge to get going on a new book. But
Processing Grief through 'The Narrow Door'
00:26:24
Speaker
I did feel a sense of emergency
00:26:28
Speaker
around her loss. My mom had died six months before she died. So those two, those two losses kind of coalesced for me, though I couldn't quite see it. I was I was okay on the surface. And, you know, was was teaching as a visiting professor somewhere and paying my bills and getting out of bed and able to have to hold conversations with friends. But I think
00:26:57
Speaker
on a deep down seismic level, I was in trouble. And so that book just started out as a way to sort of sit with my friend a while and to think back on the iconic moments of our friendship and to get, I hoped, a clearer sense of who we were for each other and why this loss felt so huge. So
00:27:25
Speaker
Yeah, in part it was just about a desire to be with her over the history of our time together, but also to think about attachment and boundaries and where we begin and end and what it means to manage or negotiate a goodbye. So I was sort of writing it first and foremost for myself.
00:27:55
Speaker
At a certain point I figured out, you know, this is probably a book, but I wasn't too caught up in that. Um, it felt like the book was a kind of light. Um, when I, when it didn't feel like there was that much light in my everydayness. So it was just, it was something I felt lucky to return to. It was my, it was my ongoingness.
00:28:22
Speaker
when everything else kind of felt like a duty to me. So yeah, even though I imagine that writing this book about Denise and your friendship with her was challenging emotionally because you guys were friends for close to 30 years. No, it's crazy.
00:28:48
Speaker
So was this a way to also just spend a little more time with her and just revisit a lot of the good and bad times that you had over the course of your friendship? Yeah, definitely. Because we'd moved through many different chambers in our friendship. There were times when we were really close. There were times early on when she was
00:29:15
Speaker
as much a mentor to me as she was a friend. And then there were times when we were a little bit more distant and we didn't talk to one another. And then there was a long falling out maybe 20 years into the friendship in which we didn't talk at all for 16 months and pretty we pretty much had it with one another. And
00:29:46
Speaker
there was something about the getting back together after that time of silence that I wanted to think about. You know, it felt like that silence was a kind of test and it was a relief, you know, it was a relief to
00:30:09
Speaker
be to get in touch again after I think we'd sort of convinced ourselves that you know, we'd sort of the friendship had run its course and you know, it was not easy to live with a sense of letting someone else down or being let down or so.
00:30:35
Speaker
Yeah. How do you think that that 16 month window changed you and her? Like, what do you think changed in that window that allowed you to then graduate to a different chapter of your friendship? Well, I actually didn't think about her all that much. So I don't think the I don't think any quote unquote education happened until we were
00:31:03
Speaker
you know, back together as friends again. And I think what had happened once we were back together was that the stuff of writerly competition didn't matter any longer. You know, we sort of like recalibrated. And I think what had happened was that, you know, stuff about power and status had unwittingly become too present. And
00:31:33
Speaker
We sort of developed another kind of friendship in the last years of our time together, where that stuff, it wasn't completely off the table, but it was really, really far to the side.
00:31:51
Speaker
At what point in your friendship, and I think it was pretty early on, if I'm recalling correctly, in the book, because she had some fairly prominent success as a novelist. So where did the writerly competition start to breach the surface, if you will? And it might not have even been spoken about. It might have just been some undercurrent. Most often, it was not spoken about.
00:32:21
Speaker
I mean, it was like communicated and, you know, gestures and silences. And I think things started to shift a bit once I started to get some fellowships and publications that Denise had actually wanted for herself. I think she had taught me to value, say, getting into that conference or getting into that school.
00:32:53
Speaker
And then I ended up applying to those institutions and ended up getting in. And, um, I think that was uncomfortable for her. Comparing oneself to other writers on, on their own trajectories is often the most toxic thing anybody can do. Yeah, it's, it's almost impossible to do it. Yeah. I mean,
Overcoming Writerly Competition and Toxic Comparisons
00:33:15
Speaker
it's impossible, not even when you're, you'd like to think of yourself as
00:33:21
Speaker
enlightened or evolved. That stuff still happens. Someone gets on a list or someone is a finalist for something, a prize that you're not a finalist for. But if you let that toxic feeling overwhelm you, then you're in trouble.
00:33:45
Speaker
It's like you almost have to trick yourself and to just get to this place where it's best to always be encouraging of one another.
00:34:01
Speaker
you know, raw emotions are gonna wanna trend towards maybe a little jealousy and competition and like, why didn't I get into this? Why didn't my stuff get picked for that? And then you start to devalue yourself. But eventually you just have to realize the subjective nature of the whole thing. And then just find a love of the work itself and be grounded in the work. And if you can do that,
00:34:27
Speaker
the other stuff will take care of itself. And then if you encourage others and just try to be just a little bit of, I don't know, some degree of positivity in a community of artists and writers, I think you'll just be far more satisfied. Yeah. I mean, I think it's best to save that competitive urge for oneself. I feel like I'm
00:34:54
Speaker
know, I don't want to be boring. I don't want to repeat myself. And so I feel like my competition is sort of turned inward now. Yeah. I reached something unexpected. Um, I wish I could say, I mean, I think that that could just happen over time. Because, um,
00:35:18
Speaker
Maybe you get at a certain point that the external rewards don't change your life. Maybe they do a little bit, but it's not where the real pleasure of this endeavor is. I think the real pleasure is in challenging oneself to, you know,
Making Memoirs Resonate with Readers
00:35:40
Speaker
to make something unique, to make something unique, to make something meaningful for other people and to do that the best you can and to look at your own tools, to look at your own weaknesses and to turn them into strengths. And yeah, to make something that sounds like no one else really. Yeah.
00:36:05
Speaker
And when anyone takes on a project of memoir, you kind of hit the nail on the head by saying, making work that's meaningful to other people. And I think that really has to be the ultimate goal of a memoir. Even though it's your story, you have to have a reader in mind. It has to mean more than what you're just saying. And ultimately, if you've done it right,
00:36:31
Speaker
as I think you have for sure, people can then overlay their own, the reader sort of becomes you, and then their friend becomes Denise, or Denise becomes their friend. And I think. Yeah, or you're bringing the history of your own friendships to the page, and the ego of the writer has dissolved. Yeah. And that's, yeah, I think that's a testament to like, a truly well done memoirs. They just overlay their own story on top of yours, and then it becomes theirs.
00:37:01
Speaker
And, um, I wonder how, how, um, present was that having the story be meaningful to others? Like, uh, how present was that for you as you were writing the book? Oh, that's a good question. Um, maybe on an intuitive level. Uh, but I wasn't overtly concerned with that reader. I mean, consciously concerned with that reader. I mean, maybe
00:37:30
Speaker
I don't know how I can't even conceive of writing a memoir without thinking of an audience. So it's just sort of assimilated in my, in my thinking. Yeah, if you asked me to write about me, if the lens was just on me, I would freeze up. So I always think of
00:37:57
Speaker
I always imagine using my autobiographical stuff as a window into some kind of inquiry, into some kind of conversation. And in that way, it doesn't feel confessional. It doesn't feel like it's exactly about me. I'm just using the sounds and images and memories
00:38:26
Speaker
of my own experience as a way into a conversation.
00:38:36
Speaker
Yeah, I think even thinking of an audience probably in the first draft or the first incarnations would probably be a bit strangling and stifling. But as you go through the rewrites, then you can have a greater sense of respect for other people and be like, OK, that first draft is for me. But the next one, this is going to be the one that I'm going to buff all the nastiness out of this. And this one's going to be for you guys. Yeah.
00:39:03
Speaker
Yeah, that just happens in terms of fine tuning craft. If your descriptions are fine tuned and they feel invested with your own psychic energy, then that's going to be meaningful to a reader.
00:39:23
Speaker
it's not gonna be meaningful to a reader if you're just using that kind of shorthand, emotional shorthand or relying on cliches or generalizations. I mean, it's just gonna be opaque, right?
00:39:37
Speaker
Yeah,
Non-linear Structure and Inspirations
00:39:38
Speaker
and in reading the book, I liked how you fragmented time throughout the whole thing. In a way, it created this sort of like a Rubik's Cube with all the tiles that are all kind of scattered all over, but it's still cohesive. And I wonder how you went about strategizing that structure and also the way you chose to plot Denise throughout the book. So she is this,
00:40:07
Speaker
She she's with us from cover to cover, even though she even though you're jump around in time a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And and certainly step away from her and sort of think about her character through other lenses. You know, I did not overtly strategize. I with this book, I decided to
00:40:35
Speaker
I decided to pay attention to patterns, to sort of cultivate repetitions, to be aware of associations from section to section. And I wanted to see where that listening would take me. Earlier in 2010, when I was writing the book, Nick Flynn had released a book called The Ticking is the Bomb. And so much of that,
00:41:06
Speaker
is about getting lost. It's a book that wants to wander. The speaker wants to learn something in wandering and in getting lost. So I sort of took direction from that book and I wanted to see where I could go if I allowed
00:41:30
Speaker
if I allowed myself to range in terms of thinking and subject. So the structure you have is pretty close to the initial structure I developed over the course of a year. Some material was added later on, but by and large, that's the route I took. And
00:41:59
Speaker
You know, it was scary because I thought, my God, I want to make a mess and I don't want this. I don't want this to seem chaotic and, and lacks. So I think that fear really, um, encouraged me to, to pay attention to patterns. I thought, okay, if there isn't
00:42:24
Speaker
going to be a linear through way through this. The reader has to sense some kind of, some sense of glue holding this all together. And yeah, so I ended up writing a different kind of structure than I'd ever written before. My previous books are all fragmentary, although they might not look like it. My first novel, Lawn Boy,
00:42:52
Speaker
is essentially a collection of individual scenes. And I kind of wrote that book all over the place. I mean, not in any kind of chronological order. And when I had enough material, I literally cut and paste that book together. It was printed out. I made this big art project on the floor. This is the first book that I wrote that
00:43:22
Speaker
I don't know how to say this well, but I wrote it consecutively. So the scene with the volcano in the first chapter is, that's the way, that's where I wrote it. It came right after that opening sequence around the dinner table.
00:43:42
Speaker
Yeah, and the way it comes across, too, it's how, as you go through your day or through a month or a year, little memories pop up. Right. In France, that's kind of how it felt to me.
00:44:02
Speaker
this popped up and you can't predict when a certain memory is going to crop up and it just does. And that's how I sort of chose to interpret how she would just bubble up or a certain vignette would bubble up. And I think that's what grief feels like too. That's what memory feels like. It doesn't move so neatly or it doesn't move, you know, from A to B to C to D to E. It's
00:44:30
Speaker
It's much more wily than that. What surprised you most about the process of writing this book?
Real-time Breakup's Influence on the Narrative
00:44:40
Speaker
What cropped up, maybe what caught you off guard as you were writing this book?
00:44:49
Speaker
my relationship with my ex to come to a crisis point in the writing of the book. There's a line, maybe two thirds of the book in which the speaker says to the ex, I don't want this in my book. And that means, you know, that's meant to mean in multiple directions, like, I don't want this to, I don't want this to ruin my book. This is the one thing
00:45:16
Speaker
the one bit of light that I have right now and you know obviously it was devastating on other levels but I thought the book was going to be entirely about Denise and I didn't expect there to be a subordinate narrative about a breakup so that was the big surprise and you know the breakup was happening in the real time of the writing of the book.
00:45:44
Speaker
Wow. So did the book end up being in its own way, a little bit of a refuge from a lot of the external stuff you were dealing with at the time too? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it was a refuge, but it was also really painful also. Maybe it helped, uh, maybe hasten a kind of kinder detachment. That makes sense. Like it, or a kind of distance in a way that made, um,
00:46:14
Speaker
the unbearable, a little more, not, I won't say bearable, but I could, it felt like I could walk alongside it or stand with it. I felt like I could hold that darkness. Yeah. It's like you could just, you could transform the real people, then like distance yourself and make them characters in, in a book and that you're creating that kind of distance, I guess. Yeah, but it's, it still doesn't, you know,
00:46:44
Speaker
it doesn't absolve or resolve or cure or heal or make that pain any less difficult. Yeah. And in all the readings that you've done, what has surprised you most about what readers have taken away from the story or what questions do they come to you with most frequently?
00:47:10
Speaker
People often ask about the structure. They ask about the design of the book, even ahead of the content. It's interesting that that compels them so much, or as many readers who have brought it up. That usually comes up again and again.
00:47:38
Speaker
And how much attention in your process do you give to openings and closings of essays, of short stories, and even books? Yeah, I love talking about openings as a teacher. There's something really thrilling about what a good opening signals in terms of atmosphere and voice and
00:48:05
Speaker
you know, and foreshadowing and all that stuff. Yeah, I think they're incredibly important. And I'm just thinking about my own closings. I often write too far past where the natural closing is. So there were actually there was actually another long scene in the narrow door following
00:48:35
Speaker
the ending is written, that would have taken the book in a different direction. And luckily I was able, the book was read by a friend of mine who knows my work over time and said, like, you know, I don't, I don't think this doesn't work for me. And I could see that the book had already come to a kind of resting place.
00:49:03
Speaker
before that. I see that in a lot of my drafts that I'm like, I try too hard to make an impression at the end and inevitably I have to cut back. I've already arrived and didn't know it.
00:49:23
Speaker
Yeah, openings are hard. Yeah, I know. I read something or heard an interview where John McPhee, he'll sit in a chair sometimes just agonizing for eight hours about just the lead alone of a long magazine story or one of his 30 books.
00:49:43
Speaker
because he feels that the lead is the lighthouse. It's the light that cuts through and guides you right through the entire thing. So he labors over it. Ideally, I love the idea of finding the right opening and that opening feeling like a cornerstone or a foundation and giving you the stuff to build this big tower.
00:50:12
Speaker
Yeah, but I think about my book The Burning House and I think that that book it took five or six years to find that opening and there were so many different openings that were trying too hard and finally the opening that I used was not even Initially written to be part of the book. It was a
00:50:37
Speaker
It came from a little prose piece that was meant to stand on its own. And I looked at it one day and I thought, oh, there you are. Always been around. The opening of the narrow door was always the opening. It was a matter of question.
00:50:54
Speaker
Yeah, I think Mary Carr, when she was writing The Liars Club, she spent something like nine months working on that first chapter, because that was where she solidified her voice for the whole thing. But it took her a long time to get to that place where that chapter sounded exactly like she wanted it to sound, and then that carried her throughout the rest of the book. I'm sure, I don't know how long, but it could have been like the rest of the book took nine months, but that first chapter also took nine months, just to set this cornerstone.
00:51:24
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, I think it's often been the case that I've, I've written a way into the book as a book in progress and sit and kept the opening for for last. Just because I sort of hate the idea of dogging or willing something into being. Yeah. Yeah, most of
00:51:51
Speaker
The writing I've put aside over the years has been sort of dogged into being sort of, I push into the dirt with the top of my head and you can feel the stench of the work and it doesn't, it's not good. There's the poll quote, the stench of the work.
00:52:14
Speaker
So you've been a teacher for a while and I always like talking to teachers who also write a lot as well and how one feeds the other or how one pirates from the other. And I wonder how teaching has informed your writing and maybe vice versa as well. Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, I think
Teaching as Engagement and Collaboration
00:52:36
Speaker
I've found a way to use my teaching life as a way to educate my work.
00:52:44
Speaker
I use teaching as a way to stay awake. And I teach a lot of writers whom I don't know very well, who might be newer writers. So I can get to know that work, you know, clearly and just to think about its architecture and voice to think about how it might be different from
00:53:12
Speaker
what most of the people in the class are doing, we think about how it might differ from, you know, certain, certain iconic examples. I don't just teach new work. I mean, I like to teach, say Flannery O'Connor up against a more recent writer. But yeah, it's just, it's important for me to go into the classroom
00:53:37
Speaker
not so much as an authority, even though I know more than my students do, just because I've been at it longer, but as a participant. So a lot of what I do is ask questions and invite conversations around the table. And we sit around that table and think together and have a collaborative, one hopes precise discussion about what we see in front of us.
00:54:06
Speaker
So it's impossible not to take those conversations to your own work if you're kind of thinking they're on the spot. What advice do students come to you often? Or what questions do they, because most of them probably, they want to turn writing into some sort of vocation. Some, not all, but some certainly want to do what you're doing, which is writing
00:54:35
Speaker
writing books, short stories, essays. So I wonder what they might come to you and ask for advice, or what is a common question you have heard over the years? Well, I often get, what should I do? How should I use this time as an MFA student well? And one thing I tell them is to cultivate fandom.
00:55:05
Speaker
I think it's important to develop a kind of literary fandom that's similar to the fandom that we have around musical figures, and that they should, over the course of this time, be tactivated or find two or three writers who mean everything. And to read all of that work
00:55:34
Speaker
to read it aloud, to type out sections in the page, to read all the writers interviews, to read everything else that has been written about that figure. Because I think if you develop that kind of relationship, you have a, you develop a kind of permission for your own work. You know, I can break this rule here because X broke that rule in the story. So yeah, I think those,
00:56:04
Speaker
You know, those relationships are artistic rudders. So over and over and over again, I'm trying to cultivate my students reading. So who might have been a writer or two or three that was like that for you, that you hooked onto them and you read their whole canon to find the rules to break and the rules to follow?
00:56:34
Speaker
Right. Oh, Flannery O'Connor from the get-go. Even before I started writing, I loved the mixture of kind of absurd comedy alongside, you know, its grave questions about faith, et cetera. You know, primal questions that seemed really intransinct to me and the total complexity of that work.
00:57:04
Speaker
I love the fact that a good man is hard to find opens like some kind of dark, dark sitcom, and then just goes really dark in this sort of fearless in its, you know, in its trajectory. Joy Williams's work is also important to me. And I've loved that work since I was 23 years old. For some, it's for some of what
00:57:33
Speaker
O'Connor does. I love Joy Williams's sense of atmosphere. Again, the absurdity, her interest and love for animals. And I love the way the stories want to sort of hold human darkness and human incomprehensibility. And I think that work is often seen as
00:58:03
Speaker
you know, nihilistic and I think it's up to something else. It's a little more complex. I wonder what books do you turn to reread like over and over again? Well, they're often the books that I teach. I mean, I do go to Joy Williams over and over again.
00:58:31
Speaker
And, you know, Flannery O'Connor, not as much. More recent books, like books by Nick Flynn, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankin. But I would love to visit Madame Bovary again. I'd love, you know, I'd love to visit Cheever. I'd love to visit Elizabeth Bishop. I just, I was a huge
00:59:01
Speaker
Bishop fan about 15 years ago, and then I sort of, and I knew everything, and then I sort of moved on, but I'm supposed to give a reading next week of her poem, The Armadillo. And so I've come back to that work and found new things, new things to appreciate and love in it. So there are just a few.
00:59:26
Speaker
What are some of the books or books that you gift the most to friends, other writers, family members? Yeah, I think it depends on the person because one doesn't ever want to force a book, especially a book that you love on someone who might not appreciate it. It can be like forcing a religion on someone, forcing AA on someone. It doesn't really work that way.
00:59:55
Speaker
So yeah, there can be something painful about recommending something that you're convinced that someone is going to love. I'm just thinking about last week. I was convinced that a friend of mine would love this musician. And I sat down with her and watched a video.
01:00:16
Speaker
And she put her hand up to her mouth and felt this psychic horror that I knew that was she just she found it really revolting and upsetting. So much for my intuition about her, you know, cultivating fandom once you know, once she got to know this musician. So, um, a book
01:00:43
Speaker
But all that said, I've given Joy Williams to people, but she's tough because that work is pretty dark and not everyone's in sync with it. I like her most recent book, 99 Stories of God. I think that's a good entry point. The stories are short.
01:01:04
Speaker
And you can kind of dip in and out of it. It doesn't have to be read consecutively. The stories have a real casual surface, even though they're up to complicated things. So that's one. And how would you describe your, if you're in the throes of a writing project, or maybe even if you're not, how would you describe your morning routine or that first 60 to 90 minutes of your day as your priming a pump to get going?
01:01:33
Speaker
Well, it's interesting.
Fluid Routine for Creativity
01:01:34
Speaker
I usually get up fairly early. I like the idea of getting up earlier than anyone else nearby and just having that quiet time to myself. But I often don't start with writing. You know, I sort of tried to sneak into it, if that makes sense. So it doesn't feel like, you know, a job.
01:01:59
Speaker
So there's a lot of putting off and delay and, you know, going on Twitter, finding things to post on Twitter. Yeah. I'm just puttering around the house and then sort of sidling up to it, you know, from a sideways position. But, you know, that can often happen hours into the day for me.
01:02:29
Speaker
Right. So it's not very rigid. It's not. Yeah, I think I try to do everything possible to avoid rigidity. It worked for me at an earlier point. But, you know, as I said, I was I was living at home and I wanted to look I wanted to look serious to my parents. I didn't want to look like a goof. And I sort of, you know, taught myself to perform seriousness in that situation. But
01:02:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's sort of against rigidity. But there might be certainly, I don't want to seem like I'm so casual about this because there might be plenty of times when I'm working for multiple hours a day. If I'm close to finishing something, I might be working from noon to noon or morning till night.
01:03:27
Speaker
if I don't have other obligations. If I have other obligations, I might come back to it at night. They're just different levels of time and engagement. For me, it's important to respect those different kinds of engagement.
01:03:46
Speaker
Yeah, I was having a conversation a couple months ago with a former ballerina. And I'm always attracted to people who have almost a monastic devotion and a singular vision and dancers and certain musicians and bodybuilders, all this. It's like, I love that. I kind of love the people who are obsessive. And she had since moved on from it. But I asked her, with so many talented people,
01:04:15
Speaker
Um, how does one stand out? How do you make it? And, um, she's like, Oh, the one thing I noticed was it was people who, who knew who they were. And, um,
01:04:29
Speaker
And so what you were just saying about your routine, like you used to have a more very rigid structured schedule to stick to, now it's a little more fluid. You sort of, you have a different approach. And I think that just comes with knowing who you are at this point in your life. We're really trying to, yeah, I don't, you know.
01:04:52
Speaker
claim to them to know who I am, I hope. But you know it's kind of working for you at this juncture. You know what's working for me and try to respect that. Make room for that. I wonder if Nelson's rule might not work for you or you.
01:05:09
Speaker
Yeah, which I think is always kind of fun to hear how people go about the work. And maybe other people can kind of cherry pick one thing that Paul the sicky has done and then another thing that Glenn South's done. I think that can help people. People like Seth Godin, who's just a genius marketer and everything he does, a generous person and soul.
01:05:32
Speaker
He won't tell anyone his morning routine because he feels like it's a way of... It's his magic. It's not only that, but he feels like it's a way for other people to hide. He's like, what does it matter what I do? Go find your own thing. He's like, do your thing. Yeah, exactly.
01:05:47
Speaker
And so I can see that. I can see that rationale too. It's like Stephen King's pencil. He's like, just because you use the same pencil, he's the one doing the work. It doesn't matter what pencil he's using. It's not going to make you any better. So that's his rationale for saying, I don't know how you can't have a morning routine, but I'm not going to tell you mine. Go find your own. Go find your own. Yes. Yeah.
01:06:09
Speaker
And I wonder also what may be the best advice you may have received from your mother or your father or a trusted mentor, something that's really clung to you over the years? I think it might come from my ex who told me that one of my real gifts was in writing short pieces and
01:06:37
Speaker
I don't think I've been putting that much energy into that work because it seemed harder to sell collections of shorter pieces. And I essentially was telling me to put your energy into work that's uniquely yours and forget about, you know, forget about what's
01:07:04
Speaker
marketable or publishable in external terms, but allow yourself to grow there and if you do that, good things will come from that.
Advice on Writing Short, Unique Pieces
01:07:20
Speaker
It kind of goes back to what we were alluding to earlier about sort of knowing yourself as an artist. Maybe that is the nature of your talent is trending more towards the shorter fiction or the shorter non-fiction. Yeah, some people are marathon runners and some people are meant to run sprints. I think the books that sort of look like marathon books are actually
01:07:47
Speaker
compilations of sprints, you know? So, I think it's more, it's also about just like trying to make use of your own psychic materials and your own urgency and what, you know, how are you in trouble? And how can you, how can you, you know, make meaning of those struggles? So, yeah, just about
01:08:18
Speaker
paying attention to what's inside us at any given moment, to stay awake to your own stuff and how to bring that to your work, how to keep that cord between the psyche and the project of your writing, how to keep that there at all times.
01:08:42
Speaker
Well, let's see. One more question for you. Where can people find you online? Pretty easy to find online on the major Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.
01:08:58
Speaker
And I also have a website that's pretty accessible. That's just myname.com and or .net. So, yeah. And on Twitter, would you be at Paul the sicky? Yes, Paul underscore the sicky. Fantastic. Yeah, if you just Google my name with Twitter, it means the handle will come up.
01:09:22
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, the book is The Narrow Door by Gray Wolf Press. Wonderful memoir. I encourage everyone to go out and buy it and buy one for their friends. And go out and see Paul if you see him at a reading and ask him all sorts of questions. But in any case, Paul, thank you so much for carving some time out of your morning. I love the book. Oh, that's pretty good. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. And yeah, we'll certainly keep in touch on the socials and email and maybe when your next book comes out, we can have you back for a round too.
01:10:15
Speaker
Excellent. Thanks so much. You got it. Take care.