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Episode 466: Katie Goh on Issues of Identity and the Trappings of Mythology
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"Mythology can be really a dangerous thing, because mythology feels like it can't be changed, or it's always been something," says Katie Goh, author of Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange (Tin House Books).
Katie Goh is a writer and editor based out of Edinburgh, Scotland. She’s also the author of the slim book “The End: Surviving the World through Imagined Disasters” about disaster movies. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Extra Teeth, and VICE. You can learn more about her at katiegoh.co.uk or follow her on IG @katie_goh.
In this conversation we tackle:
- The love of being edited
- Having to selfish to be a writer
- Finding obsessions
- Issues of identity
- Style and voice
- And the trappings of mythology
Podcast Specific Substack at creativenonfictionpodcast.substrack.com.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Book Release and Events Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, CNFers, we are fewer than two weeks away from the publication of The Front Runner. No, you're having a stomach ulcer. So sure, go ahead. Secure yourself a pre-order while supplies last. Call now.
00:00:14
Speaker
What number? i don't know. But seriously, go to your bookseller of choice and maybe pre-order it. Order from the independents, not the big A, if you can help it Oh, and I will be at Run Hub in Eugene Wednesday, May 21st, 6 p.m., pub day 5K.
00:00:31
Speaker
Day after pub day, but day after pub day 5K doesn't roll off the tongue. Three to five mile run from 6 to 7, then at 7 p.m., that's where I'll be. No, I'll trot a bit.
00:00:45
Speaker
Anyway, Coal Fire Brewing, 7 p.m. for a book event. Not sure of the shape of that book event. Hope I'm not reading. No one likes that. Thursday, May 29th, I'll be at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton, 7 p.m., in conversation with my good pal Ruby McConnell.
00:01:04
Speaker
See you there. Also, from May 28th to June 1st, the Archer City Writing Workshop at the Larry McMurtry Literary Center... They're hosting this workshop called Feature Writing the Reconstructed Narrative, led by Kim H. Cross, Hamptonsides, and Glenn Stout.
00:01:20
Speaker
Visit lmcmurtrylitcenter.org slash events to learn more. Gotta put that slash in there. You'll enter the retreat, one writer, and leave a new one, a better one.
00:01:33
Speaker
And no, I don't get kickbacks or commissions, so get your cynical head out of your ass. I'm not always about the money, man. I'm not. How could I be? I would write like poetry from the perspective Gandalf.
00:01:54
Speaker
Well, well, well, CNFers, happy CNF Friday, or as I like to call it in these parts,
Introducing Katie Goh and Her Work
00:01:59
Speaker
Leg Day. It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. I'm Brendan O'Meara. That's right, throw is right.
00:02:07
Speaker
For episode 466, we've got Katie Goh, author of Foreign Fruit, A Personal History of the Orange. It's published by Tin House.
00:02:18
Speaker
This is a book that blends memoir and biography. The biography of a fruit, that is. I didn't tell Katie this while we were on mic, or off mic for that matter, but John McPhee's slim book, Oranges,
00:02:32
Speaker
was one of the seminal books that made me want to write narrative nonfiction. That and McPhee's Survival of the Bark Canoe. But Katie, who is of Southeast Asian and Northern Irish descent, the book tackles issues of identity, colonialism, capitalism, xenophobia and racism, still life art and mythology. It's dense. It's expansive.
00:02:52
Speaker
It's a really fine book.
00:02:55
Speaker
Show notes of this episode more at brendanamara.com. Hey, there. You can sign up for my monthly Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. And the monthly pod stack can be found creativenonfictionpodcast.substack.com.
00:03:07
Speaker
It's worth your time. That's something I'm very aware of. I know. What a guy. There's also the Patreon crew where you can elect to join for free or chip in a few bucks if you want some one-on-one time to talk things through.
00:03:21
Speaker
i post little videos over there, and it's a fun way to get a little... extra something. As if you need more from your boy. Got a nice shout out from Lit Hub about the front runner being one of 10 nonfiction titles to read in May.
00:03:36
Speaker
Shout out to Tracy Slater for bringing that to my attention. And the first bookstagrammer at the Sports Librarian posted a really nice review of the Front Runner.
00:03:49
Speaker
So we'll see what the fuck comes of this. Katie Goh is a writer and editor based out of Edinburgh, gu Scotland, however you pronounce it. I don't know. It's an audio medium.
00:04:02
Speaker
I should know these things. She's the author of the slim book, The End, Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters, about disaster movies. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Extra Teeth, and Vice.
00:04:14
Speaker
You can learn more about her at katiego.co.uk or follow her on Instagram at katie-go.co.uk. g o h In this conversation, we tackle the love of being edited, having to be selfish
The Making of Foreign Fruit
00:04:32
Speaker
to write books, finding obsessions, issues of identity, style and voice, and the trappings of mythology. Really rich stuff.
00:04:40
Speaker
Parting shot on a different kind of blank page panic. You'll want to stay tuned. And we're starting off with Katie talking about the experience of recording her audiobook, Riff.
00:04:51
Speaker
Riff.
00:04:59
Speaker
Well, three days without writing, feel fucked up and, you know, depressed. I like to write books that sound more like someone telling a story over a campfire. Then you got to keep moving on because tick-tick, you know, tick-tock. This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:05:20
Speaker
Yeah, it was quite intimidating, i have to say. I've never done it before, and I don't know if you can tell this, but I'm not a professional reader or audio person, but I did do do a radio show.
00:05:32
Speaker
So I had some experience with like, you know, recording and it being in the studio. But I also, when I was a kid, I had a bit of a like speech impediment and I find reading aloud really stressful and it kind of triggered that like impediment that I had.
00:05:46
Speaker
So I went in really, unsure of what the experience would be like but yeah everyone was so nice in the studio and they really like put me at ease and I just took my time with it we actually had to add on an extra like half day because I was reading so slowly which might be surprising because I think I speak quite quickly actually like naturally like most Irish people do yeah you have to really slow down when you're reading and actually like having to say every single word perfectly and also kind of like the way that you are reading, you kind of like have to really like embrace the word in a different way. it was quite, felt quite vulnerable where I was like, oh, have to read every single word of this book. Because normally when you're reading, your eyes almost like glaze over sentences and things, but to actually slow down and be like, I chose these words and this sentence structure.
00:06:33
Speaker
But it was it was really fun. i mean, I might never do it again. So it was real once in a lifetime experience. And yeah, i recommend it if people ever get the opportunity to do something like that. Well, yeah, and often in in rewriting and drafting pieces, it's it's good practice to read things aloud.
00:06:52
Speaker
you you know, you hear things and it might make you want to, okay, that I'm stumbling a little here. It might indicate that I need to change something. And now like, so when you're tracking your audio book, here you are with the final product.
00:07:07
Speaker
and Did you have to resist the urge to be like, I kind of want to, don't kind of want to change this now. Yeah. I think the thing I was most stressed about was finding mistakes. Um, and I i will say i find two minor ones, but I think that's pretty good is like reading an entire book goes with picking up mistakes and they're like little typo things, um, which can get corrected. So I, it was fine, but.
00:07:29
Speaker
Yeah, i whenever I'm editing, I read it aloud. So yeah, I'm really used to like reading and being like, oh, that sounds really weird. Or like stumbling over it a bit and being like, I need to go back tinker. It's not quite right.
00:07:42
Speaker
But yeah, it was really hard to be like, oh, I can't actually change anything. It's too late. um And, but also in a way it felt like full circle for this whole process of writing a book. Like I started working on for and for it, I think.
00:07:57
Speaker
three and a bit years ago like it's been like a bit of journey so I wrote book proposal first and put all all that together and then to get to the point where I'm actually reading it aloud probably for the final time I mean I don't think I'll ever read this book again except you know little bits of events and things like that but it felt kind of like well it feels like the right thing to do to read it one last time and kind of be like okay ready for it to go out into the world and be its own thing now And I love hearing you say that you you wrote a proposal for this. And I've written a few myself, and that's its own that's its own can of worms, working in ah in a book proposal and having to do that.
00:08:39
Speaker
ah So what was the experience for you as you were formulating that to to get to attract the attention of ah who would eventually buy the book? This is my first book, so I went into this not knowing how any of this worked. So it was a huge learning curve for me, but the book actually began because I wrote an essay for ah magazine. i'm i live in Scotland and it's a Scottish magazine called Extra Teeth.
00:09:06
Speaker
And um yeah, I wrote this essay for them that is kind of the introduction of the book, like where it opens, like me having this experience of eating like these oranges after this horrible night of sort of like violence takes place in Atlanta and sort of seeing that news and reacting to it by just sort of eating a lot of fruit. And with that essay, I was like, you know, I wanted to write an essay about that sort of time during COVID and lockdown when there was lots of,
00:09:36
Speaker
sort of anti-Asian violence and rhetoric in the media and in the air and I wanted to sort of write about that and these aspects of my identity as someone of East Southeast Asian heritage but I was like I didn't really know how to do that in a way that felt authentic to this sort of moment so I sort of started from that moment of me eating those oranges and the essay was sort of exploring like fruit and eating and how you can use objects as like real things, but also as metaphors and the ciphers to talk about other bigger issues or things like identity.
00:10:10
Speaker
So it began as this essay. And then I wrote this very short book called The End, and it's a little book of nonfiction. It's like a small book of essays. for an independent publisher in Scotland called 404 Inc. You're wonderful.
00:10:25
Speaker
And that was all about disaster movies and disaster books and sort of why, like, I don't
Influences and Inspirations in Writing
00:10:31
Speaker
know if you can remember this, but at the start of the pandemic when everyone was like, watching contagion and like going back to and bird box too like yeah that it ah that was a big i remember right it during lockdown like that was you know one of those terrifying moments when you see how fragile civilization is and like everything that we build our structures on is actually pretty fragile Yeah, and also I was like, why is everyone watching these movies during what felt like the end of the world, like an awful pandemic? like Why would you want to watch a movie about a pandemic? And like why did I want to watch a movie about a pandemic? And I wrote that like small book kind of exploring the idea of like why we are really attracted to disaster throughout time like in our stories and things.
00:11:18
Speaker
So I'd written that short book and my agent, Matt Turner at RCW, he had read it and he got in touch, I think because he thought I might write like some sort of post-apocalyptic novel or something. But I was like, I've got this essay about oranges and sad feelings instead. um And he was like, yeah, like there might be something here. yeah.
00:11:41
Speaker
That was the idea of like, okay, I want to expand this out and actually like look at the history of the orange, sort of do proper research into, you know, how oranges have moved from Western China to like down the Silk Roads to Europe, to America, across the world. Like that history angle wasn't really in the essay. And I love sort of finding like an obsession where I can do like a year of research and go and like read books.
00:12:08
Speaker
hundreds of books about uh oranges and citrus so that's kind of how the idea came about and then the proposal was strange because i've just never had to do something like that before i'm very used to like pitching articles as a journalist but those are like 100 words and you know an article is really short whereas this was think my proposal ended up being like 20 000 words which i think is on the long side of proposals and Yeah, it took actually almost a year to put that together to really know how we were going to structure it, how I wanted to like, yeah, follow the orange across ah like the world sort of geographically, but also chronologically and how I wanted to sort of tackle these sort of issues of identity in a way that felt more authentic to me than some of the other writing I had done before.
00:12:59
Speaker
How did the the book itself change from what you proposed in the proposal? It stayed pretty much the same structurally. I think maybe a couple of chapters just like moved around.
00:13:14
Speaker
I think with the proposal, i was kind of like, was quite ambitious where I was like, look, you know, I hadn't done a lot of the travel that was in the book. Like I hadn't gone to California, for example, to Riverside or LA, which is a chapter in the book. And i was like, well,
00:13:29
Speaker
maybe I'll get to go. I haven't been yet. So it's quite hard for me to know what emotional beats are going to sort of be hit on in that part of the book because I haven't actually done it yet. So it was quite strange to sort of have to propose almost like the emotional arc of a book that you have not got on yet.
00:13:45
Speaker
So I think the book changed in that aspect of like the structure kind of stayed the same, the journey of the orange sort of stayed the same. But I think my emotional reaction to being in certain places like Vienna or being in California those were the things that changed the most because I actually got to experience them after my book was acquired by Tin House so yeah I think those are the parts that changed the most but it pretty much all stayed the same other than that I think actually the book ended up being a bit more like creative if that makes sense like I think because as a journalist I'm very like
00:14:23
Speaker
well trained in suppose like whenever you have to review, I do a lot of reviews of films or books or gigs and things and you're trying to capture something that you experienced whereas in this book there's a lot of history that I was not alive for.
00:14:40
Speaker
um i was not alive in the times of the Silk Roads or in like ancient Chinese markets. So I had to use fact to kind of get those sort of details right. But also there were some of it where I was like, you know, imagining people in this market, imagining like petals falling off trees. And i was like, well, I don't know if that happened, but it probably did. So it's a mixture of using fact and then also ah bit of imagination, which was something that I wasn't expecting.
00:15:07
Speaker
I would do so much in the book. Yeah, well, that's certainly like a ah a plausible scene to scene to build. Yeah, because like i a lot of times the when you come from a journalism background, there's just this rush to just want to dump the information on the reader, and then you have to kind of rewire your brain to tease out certain things and to paint scenes and make things a bit more evocative with the facts and with the research and reporting. So it's it's ah
00:15:39
Speaker
It's a really, it's a, it's a cool muscle to, to develop, but but it does take quite a bit of rigor to try to put a fiction hat on to the facts that you gather.
00:15:51
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. I think that was the thing that felt. the strangers and also the like dialogue of things that was quite weird like i have experience of doing like interviews and profiles so like using people's like what they say and putting context around it but it was quite strange to do like back and forth dialogue and have myself as a character as well in scenes and i was like this felt really like she said this i said this she said this and it was like if that felt quite um funny to me as someone who has like no experience of writing fiction at all.
00:16:23
Speaker
I think I pulled from yeah like a lot of um like novels and things to try to like understand how do you actually like set a scene and also how do you like use dialogue in a way that's not just I don't know like a bit flat on the page but how do you make it sort of um feel like it's moving towards something.
00:16:41
Speaker
Kind of piggybacking off of you know you like ah you know tracking the audio part, like I had him had my notes too and I love peeling back this and this element of of writing and and the idea of just voice and and style and you know how you cultivate a voice as as a writer and how you think about it. So how do you think about voice and style and how did you land on something that feels you know unique and you know in your own skin?
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's something that I feel like I'm definitely still developing. And yeah, and also this is the first time I've written something of this length. So it was kind of interesting to see how my style sort of, because I wrote it pretty much like first chapter, second chapter, you know, that sort of chronological way to sort of see how it changed. And the epilogue of the book is kind of like this breakaway from my narrative where it kind of becomes almost like a little like,
00:17:37
Speaker
fictional short story kind of thing where it's kind of imagining this valley and there's no people in that part of the book and there's no really it's kind of like god perspective i guess or like very objective for me and i felt like like that kind of style something that i would never have done before i wrote this book like kind of you know that was the last thing that i wrote um the epilogue and i would never have had the courage to do that at the beginning because i've been i feel like i'm very like well-trained to be like oh I always need to sort of make people like relate it to me or I need to explain things and I'll sometimes over explain things as as a journalist my job is to take something really complex and make it really accessible and I still think that that's a really great skill and like I do that I think in a lot of the history parts of the book because as I you know
00:18:28
Speaker
I'm very clear about in the book, I am not a scientist and I am a not historian either. And I have an academic background, but you know, in like English literature, but I wanted to make the history as like enjoyable and like as much pleasure for reading it as sort of the other aspects of the book. So yeah, I think that the style is like, it's kind of trying to take those sort of fact and make something like quite compelling.
00:18:57
Speaker
from it or just try to like draw people in and like how do you like take people to somewhere that I've never been, they have never been, no one alive has ever been to like you know especially when you're talking about ancient history but how can we talk about like smell or sound or c sight and this sort of texture of a place and try to conjure that up even though I am sort of having to like do lot of imagining there, like using the history and the facts to be like, well, if they're like cooking these things and these are the sort of, you know, socioeconomic issues of the time, these are probably sort of the sites and, oh, there was like magnolia trees have been found in this place. So there was probably petals falling at some point. And there were these sort of buildings here.
00:19:42
Speaker
How can I like use that sort of piece together like a scene and bring people there. So yeah, I don't, I don't know if I hide to describe my voice, but I think it is. Yeah. A mixture of all those different things together.
00:19:54
Speaker
Yeah, I know just ah over the course of you know the development, the constant evolution of ah an individual writer, there are people we love to, like, we really lock into and really want to mimic and you know ah until until something of ourself starts to develop out of all those influences.
00:20:13
Speaker
So who were some influences that you really locked into that you know you you aspire to and just inspired you to do the kind of writing you do? Yeah, I always feel like with these quiet there's questions, I like, i have some of my favorite writers, but i and I'm really inspired by them, but I'm always like, oh God, people are gonna like, I hope people don't think I'm like doing some sort of like weird imitation of like, like I love Hilary Mantel, for example, I think she's like, yeah she changed like how I thought about fiction. and um but I'm like, please like, don't, don't try to think of me and like Hilary Mantel on like the same bookshelf almost like that seems crazy to me. But I think the Wolf Hall trilogy, like I read that when I was and like a late teenager, I think.
00:20:57
Speaker
And like, I don't know how popular Wolf Hall is in the States, but like in the UK, it was very popular. I think. Yeah. Yeah. think of like TV show and stuff. Yeah, it comes it comes up fairly frequently on this show. And I've asked people for recommendations. And it it has it definitely inspires a lot of people. And I worked in a bookstore for a time. And I'm always frequenting bookstores. And it's, yeah, you see the book all over the place. So yeah, it does have an imprint over here for sure.
00:21:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think like how is she wrote about history, I found really inspiring, like how much of it was about character and about emotion and the history aspect like you could tell that she has done so much research but it feels so effortless that like that I think that is really the sign of like someone who's like done their homework is that they've conjured this world that is so it feels so real that you can't even like like you can't even pick out parts where you're like oh she's obviously put that fact in because it's you know like she needs to do that or you know put this like tutor thing in here like it just feels like a world that she's conjured and
00:21:58
Speaker
I love her writing, but I think the Wolf Hall trilogy is like one of the best series ever written. So I think in terms of like the history aspect, Hilary Mantel, and I also got really inspired by james Joyce.
00:22:10
Speaker
ah When I was in uni, I did a James Joyce course and i was really taken with like his use of language and how modern it felt. And that kind of, talking about like Ulysses in particular, because we spent, we spent like three months just reading that one book because it's so long and there's like so much that you could pull out of it.
00:22:30
Speaker
And I think that high he, cause whenever he was writing Ulysses, he wasn't actually in Dublin as far as so if I'm remembering correctly from being student, he wasn't in Dublin. He was writing it from afar, like when he was overseas, but kind of imagining this Dublin of his youth or of a different time in his life.
00:22:49
Speaker
And I was like, I think that is just such a incredible ability to have such a detailed book about Dublin and like for a book to capture something so special and to capture a place so well but it's not for him not to have even been there I think is like yeah just like it just shows how skilled he he was as a writer and I think his use of language as well and how he sort of uses there's like something very physical about his sentences like you read them really quickly and then they're really
00:23:21
Speaker
short and you feel like this push and pull almost like they feel quite like muscular or something and I think there's like a couple of cases in the book where there's like quite long run on sentences which was a pain whenever I was recording the audiobook trying to like remember to breathe and like figure out how to like breathe through them but I think like, when do you like let go and just let yourself take the reader away? And like, when do you use that? When do you pull that back?
00:23:47
Speaker
I think that kind of style was really inspired by Joyce and Ulysses in particular. Yeah, I think more recently, Annie Erno, the French author, has been a real inspiration.
00:23:59
Speaker
She uses a lot of her, I mean, she completely uses her life in her writing. And it's like this hybrid of fiction, nonfiction, like people aren't really sure what it is. And she's kind of like,
00:24:10
Speaker
I don't know either, it's just my life. And she writes so beautifully about memory and she's got a book called The Years, which tells the history of her lifetime.
00:24:21
Speaker
um i think beginning like the 1940s, 50s maybe in France and kind of coming right up to almost like the present day.
00:24:31
Speaker
And she has this like collective we and she talks about her life in this sort of like plural, almost like chorus kind of fashion it's epic and it's personal and it's intimate and it's you know tiny moments in someone's life but also huge grand moments and huge like political moments and how the personal and the political are one and the same really and they're like giving the same um respect in her book and the same amount of space and I think that how rewrites a lot of her life and sort of focuses on different moments in her life and uses memory.
00:25:06
Speaker
i find that really inspiring and I'm kind of awed by her ability to do that. Now, a lot of us get into writing because we we love books and love reading. And then it's another another stretch and another step to actually want to you know become a writer.
00:25:21
Speaker
So what was it ah you know about you along your along your path that made you that made you want to pick up the pen and do this kind of work?
Personal Reflections and Family in Writing
00:25:31
Speaker
I think I was like a reader before a writer, like everyone normally is. like I loved reading as a kid. And like my parents were great and they you know, brought me to the library and they bought me books and they read to us and, you know, like fell love just really good stories first. And I actually remember in our town's library,
00:25:52
Speaker
I remember going in and I kind of i had outgrown the children's section, but I wasn't quite maybe ready for the adult section. But I went over to the librarian and I was like, I want to take out this book. I can't remember what it was, but it was definitely like from the grown up section.
00:26:07
Speaker
And she told me like, you can't take that out because you're too young. Like, you know, kind of was like, like a little like censorship in the town library. or she's like, you can't, um, you know, you should be in the children or like the young adult section. And I was ah completely outraged by that. So I think I kind of rebelled and was like, I'm going to like read Wolf Hall or I'm going to read like these books that I'm definitely like too young to understand.
00:26:31
Speaker
But I think I was just like in love with reading for a long time. And then when I was a teenager, I wrote a lot of poetry, actually, a really, really bad poetry. um But I would like because I had no life experience really as a child. So I would take characters from books and write poetry from their perspective kind of like really weird fan fiction yeah so i would write like poetry from the perspective of like gandalf or like sylvia plath characters like ah like the character of the bell jar and be like it would be so emo and dramatic and i'd be like oh my god you know and turn it into poetry so
00:27:12
Speaker
Yeah, I think I was definitely more of like an art kid when I was younger, though. I think when I was a teenager, i really thought I would like go to art school and pursue that. And I did i ended up studying English.
00:27:24
Speaker
But in terms of like, I guess, writing more seriously, other than like my weird poetry fan fiction, um it was when I was doing ah master's at Edinburgh University. and And I started doing reviews of books and things for a magazine here called The Skinny.
00:27:41
Speaker
and writing articles and interviewing authors. And i was like, oh, this is really fun. This is like, you get paid for this. This is like way better than being an academic. So, um, I finished that master's and I'd been weighing up pursuing a PhD or not. I kind of was like, I kind of fell out of love of academia during my masters and find sort of journalism and did lot of film criticism, book reviewing interviews and things.
00:28:05
Speaker
and sort of built a career as a freelance writer amongst like many other jobs. And yeah, I think that that kind of led me to write that book, The End, because that was sort of piece of like cultural criticism And I think for and for it is kind of like the biggest jump I've done since then. Like i used to write a lot of opinion pieces and personal things.
00:28:28
Speaker
And I write about that in a book and kind of how I find that experience of writing about really personal things quite exposing. And um yeah, it was, I was kind of like, um,
00:28:42
Speaker
like I would write a lot about like as a mixed race person this is this or as a person of East Asian heritage you should go and see Chinese rich Asians or things like that like having to like use a lot of my identity sort of markers I guess is like reasons why someone should listen to me and after a few years of writing these sorts of articles i was like okay they're good in terms of like it means that I'm writing and getting paid for it but it's kind of like taking a lot out of me and I'm kind of giving up a lot of myself to the page and you know I don't know if it's really worth it so i kind of made it ah conscious decision to like not do that kind of writing anymore and actually that's why I wrote that essay and then sort of foreign fruit came from that so it feels like after writing foreign fruit like I think the next book that I write if I'm lucky enough to write another book I think it'll be
00:29:41
Speaker
quite a different direction. But I think I've always been interested in like personal writing. um But I think that this book feels kind of like the culmination of like a lot of things I've been thinking about sort of throughout my like 20s and, you know, early thirty s Well, think what i love in particular about this kind of personal writing that you do with Foreign Fruit is that, and I think a lot of journalists are are are good at this too, is it's ah more reported essays where you are like a presence, but it's not navel-gazy. You're really like a guide for for us through this. And
00:30:20
Speaker
as you even braid in your family story at various points, it never feels like yeah self-indulgence. it It just has a a natural way of fitting in and locking in like a puzzle pieces to you know the you know the the cultural histories you explore as well as basically a biography of a fruit in in a sense. So I think that i I lock into that particular kind of personal writing. I think you do that you know exceptionally well here with this one.
00:30:49
Speaker
Oh, that's really kind of you. Thank you. Yeah, I think that with this, I was ah yeah quite like cautious about how much to do with the personal writing, like how much to write about like my family, for example, and like turn them into actual characters. It's a very unnatural thing to do. And I'm really lucky that I showed my aunts and my dad, who are in the book the most, the passages that they're in,
00:31:15
Speaker
And I was like, oh, I really hope that they don't think like I'm like spying on them and like, you know, turning them into like characters or they're going to be really offended by how I've like characterized them. But they were really sweet. They were like, look, we understand that it's like your perspective of us and it's not like an objective perspective.
00:31:35
Speaker
opinion or like an objective view, like this is all through your eyes and all through like, yeah, your perspective. So yeah, we're fine with it, which is great.
00:31:46
Speaker
That's amazing. That degree of like emotional intelligence and maturity from, People being written, family being written about, because often they get very defensive. But the fact that they even had that wherewithal to be like, oh, yeah, this is your subjectivity.
00:32:00
Speaker
As long as you're doing no harm, it's just like, yeah, this is your perspective. And I'm sure you had conversations with them about it. But that is just hearing you say that is actually if I had hair, it would be blowing back because.
00:32:11
Speaker
So often families just like they get real the hackles go up when they realize they were on the record all that time and they didn't realize it. ah Yeah, I mean, I was like it came along.
00:32:21
Speaker
Yeah, I will say that I think they I've written about them in like a very like positive way. Maybe they'd have different opinions if it was like my aunt was so horrible to me as a child and traumatized me but i feel like they were like yeah it's fine because you know quite nice isn't it and i think that they i think they also have a lot of appreciation for like me being so interested in like that part of our family as well like you know i didn't grow up in malaysia and a lot of this book is about
00:32:52
Speaker
like our Malaysian Chinese family and our heritage. And I think that they are kind of like, it's a really positive thing that you've done this or you're interested in this as well. Like, why would we not like it? Which is lovely.
00:33:04
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I was struck by really the the courage of your father to to stay in Northern Ireland, you know, when it was maybe expected of him to return to Malaysia. you know, you went abroad to study and then it's kind of like, oh, yeah, you come back. But I i just that that degree of of courage to kind of buck the family expectations. I always admire that in people. And that's I walked away admiring, you know, your father for you just for following that path and which leads to, you know, him meeting your mom and you growing up in, in Ireland, Northern Ireland.
00:33:38
Speaker
Yeah. And that's the reason we're here right now. yeah um But yeah, I think that was the thing as well as the book where i think for a long time i was like, Oh, you know, really thinking like about my own identity and my own feelings around that, which I think is like fine and natural. Like we were all like quite self-obsessed creatures.
00:33:57
Speaker
um And I actually think like, Yeah, like talking about this book with him and expressing like in the book, there's a part where I'm like speaking to him and a bit like, oh, I don't know if I should do this. Like, I don't want it to like make anyone or family sad or I don't really know like how to do this in the right way.
00:34:16
Speaker
And he was like, look, like, it is really hard to live between two places. Like I feel that and I feel like I've got, I feel pulled in two directions as well and having like a really honest conversation with him about that. And yeah, I'm really happy that the book kind of gave me that opportunity to connect with him and be like, yeah, like I, and it's not to like be like, oh, that I feel like bad for feeling bad about my own issues. It's more just like, you know, other people have gone through this and my family and like,
00:34:45
Speaker
probably my grandmother moving from China to Malaysia had a similar feeling of being pulled between two places and other members of our family because they've like come from a different place as well to Malaysia and then my dad going from Malaysia to Ireland like yeah we are all sort of pulled in different directions if we move away from home and yeah i think it was really wonderful to kind of have that connection with him and be like, oh, these feelings that I have, are i not really belonging to this place?
00:35:16
Speaker
um Or uncertainty of like, oh, because I have mixed heritage, i don't really fit in here or there. It's like, well, other people who I know and love also have those feelings too. Yeah.
00:35:26
Speaker
When, uh, being of mixed heritage, you know, at at what point did you realize that, let's say just, you know, the orange is in and of itself something that grows because it is hybridized or grafted and becomes this thing that is, um mixed unto itself.
00:35:44
Speaker
At what point did you kind of, that did that light bulb go off for you? Like, Oh, this is something that can really tether to my own story. Yeah, I think it was when i was writing that essay and i think i I had known like that the orange was a hybrid or like citrus is loads of different hybrids.
00:36:01
Speaker
Cause I think actually I was really, i think I found out like the lemon was a hybrid and I was like, oh, it's really interesting. But I think when I was writing the essay, i was like, oh, like maybe I could like write a bit about like oranges or I can like, you know,
00:36:13
Speaker
that could be a really interesting like metaphor for talking about something quick little Google. And I was like, Oh, it's like a mixed, it's a mixed fruit. And I was like, Oh, like I've mixed. And I think from there it was like, Oh, this is a really nice way of exploring those bigger questions. And I think actually like the orange is almost like,
00:36:34
Speaker
like a Trojan horse or something. Or like, it's kind of like this very narrow opening, like one object or one like sort of topic that then kind of branches out. And it's like, well, if you're speaking about this fruit, you can speak about like a mixed identity, hybridity, grafting, like you say, this idea of like family trees or hi families come together over time.
00:36:56
Speaker
You can talk about globalization because of how the orange has been moved across the world. Cultivation is the orange even. like a wild fruit or a natural fruit it because it's been cultivated so much by scientists. Could you even say that the orange that we eat now has any relation to the first wild orange?
00:37:15
Speaker
i thought that was really interesting idea of like, oh, how do we, how do we get changed over time? how are we like cultivated as people? And also things like capitalism and like commercialization of something natural, you know, like the orange kind of became an industry in Southern California.
00:37:32
Speaker
sort of ideas around the empire because the orange was eaten by European sailors who wanted to go and like discover in quotes, other aspects, like other parts of the world.
00:37:44
Speaker
Would they have been able to do that without citrus because that prevented them from getting scurvy. So you could see the orange is a sort of like tool for empire as well. So the more I sort of started like reading into the orange, I was like, well, these are all the things that I kind of want to explore as a writer, like these really big,
00:38:01
Speaker
juicy topics that are almost too big to kind of write about directly whereas the orange was a really nice way for me to like fold them all in but also still have that personal lens and also have like being able to follow one object or one fruit is much easier for a reader rather than like an old wieldy book that's just about everything, everywhere all at once.
00:38:26
Speaker
yeah Yeah. what ah What struck me about the book as well, and it kind of rung to me like this little bell every time I heard it, was this idea of mythology.
Themes of Identity and History
00:38:37
Speaker
And you know early in the book, you write, and go memory slips into mythology.
00:38:41
Speaker
And then yeah by the California section, you're like like Eve's apple and Persephone's pomegranate, California's oranges are as much myth as they are fruit. And there are other grace notes of myth throughout the whole thing.
00:38:53
Speaker
So I just wanted to get your sense of you know mythology as ah as a theme in this book as it pertains to the orange, but also kind of the danger of mythology too.
00:39:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think with the California aspect, it's like, you like close your eyes, think of California. It's like, you know, orange and lemon trees, sunshine, waves, palm trees.
00:39:16
Speaker
It's like this image that media has sort of created for us that whenever we think of something, we think of these like almost like stereotypes, I guess, is like mythology is wrapped up in that as well. But I think you're still right. Like mythology can be really a dangerous thing ah because the mythology is kind of like, it feels like it can't be changed or like it's always been something.
00:39:38
Speaker
So I'm thinking like in where I live in the UK, there's like this mythology of the British empire was a really like glorious thing or a really great thing, or it was just a thing that kind of, you can't really question it. And I think for when I was growing up, you know, no one really talked about the British empire.
00:39:59
Speaker
as anything other than like, oh, you know, like this, this thing happened or it just was like this inevitable thing that just had to happen. And now we're here. That's, that's, you know, the history of the world.
00:40:10
Speaker
As I got a bit older, I was like, oh, hang on a minute. Like, why did that even happen? And, you know, i think there's been a, really big movement that was being led by like the Black Lives Matter movement, looking at sort of colonialism and like the legacy of the British Empire and even things like statues that we have in our cities, names of the streets in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Streets are named after people who owned plantations in the Caribbean.
00:40:41
Speaker
and we don't really question these things and it's like the myth is all around us we like live in it and it feels like because it feels like it's everywhere and it's almost like you can't grasp it or something like it's just like in the air and you can't question it and obviously now people are questioning it more and more And that myth is kind of being shattered a little bit, or it's at least being, it's like saying, okay, you have this myth, but there's also other myths or there's other stories here that you can look at. Like, what about the stories of the people who were colonized or the people who were like left behind also in Britain who were living in poverty at this time, like these different stories. And I think the myth idea is like,
00:41:27
Speaker
it's almost like the final boss of like the stories or the history you know history written by the victors like the myth is like created by the victors of history and it's this very dangerous thing that if we sort of just say oh well you know that just had to happen or it was inevitable or that's just a story or like you know these sorts of things with like beginnings middles and endings then it doesn't really leave space for us to question them.
00:41:54
Speaker
And I think that we're seeing more and more people wanting to question these big grand myths and these big narratives that we have in our nations. Oh, for sure. Yeah, we're seeing that almost on a daily basis here in the States of people are rightfully questioning like the founding fathers and the westward expansion and the displacing of indigenous peoples ah to speak nothing of the the heinous enslavement of African-Americans and the Africans who were shipped over here against their will and there's a very large contingent that would just rather sweep that under the rug and erase it from the history book so we don't even have to cast an eye at it speak nothing of the reparations owed to these people the more we burrow into the mythology of these godlike figures who wrote these treatises that founded you know the this country it's uh the more danger ah we do to subsequent generations
00:42:52
Speaker
And it's I just in your California section, just that the massacre of the some the Chinese immigrants and that that you write about so brilliantly. And I had never heard of that. You see it kind of pepper throughout history. And I just found that.
00:43:08
Speaker
It's just so sobering, but so important. And I'm so glad you you wrote about that to you know for a reader like me who had never even heard of that. you know it's like It's a history that was definitely forgotten. I was like, oh, awesome. like I'm glad Katie brought this to the fore in the way you did.
00:43:25
Speaker
Yeah, and like that, yeah, that's only like one of how many hundreds of similar incidents throughout the like founding of the United States. And I think that, I think, oh yeah, i was really curious about like memory as well when it comes to that, because that l LA massacre of like it's Chinese immigrants, you know, that happened in the 19th century so long ago.
00:43:50
Speaker
they Only now is there going to be a memorial to that. And that's something that people have really had to push and fight for, like the Asian American community yeah in Los Angeles. And you're like, over 100 years, and it's taken it's taken that long to even remember what happened here.
00:44:07
Speaker
And like I went to visit the site of that massacre. And like there's a huge freeway that runs like basically through where Chinatown used to be in l LA. Yeah. And when I went to visit it, there was like nothing there to, you know, mark that something had happened and this tragedy had happened.
00:44:24
Speaker
There is like a really amazing museum nearby and there's going to be ah really, I think it's going to be like these sculpted trees, which sound really beautiful. In a few years, they'll be built. But when I was there, there was just nothing. And it was like, wow, like how many places do we walk through where something awful has taken place and there's just nothing to remember it.
00:44:45
Speaker
And I kind of, yeah, it's like, how can we question these myths when we don't even like know the full stories? And I think that that's why the work of people who do that research and try to bring these stories to the forefront of our minds is so important. And it's always important to always be, you know, questioning things and like, why did that story get erased? Like what happened? Or like, why did that Chinatown get erased?
00:45:09
Speaker
What was going on at that time? What were they trying to hide or, you know, they didn't see that community is valid enough to protect that sort of like heritage site. And I think that whenever you start to look at history like that, it kind of makes you really cautious of like what's going on our present day moment because the same things are happening where,
00:45:30
Speaker
Certain communities are being eroded or being attacked or we're not remembering certain things. Yeah, when you start to like look at the past and start questioning things or question what version of history you've been told, it makes you a bit more, i think, like acutely aware of what's going on right now.
00:45:48
Speaker
And you're like, I can sort of see the parallels of what's happening. And yeah I think that's why like history is such an important thing to teach people and to teach children, especially. um i I really like hope that like a younger generation when they're being taught history, it is a bit more of the whole story rather than just like that myth that I was brought up with.
00:46:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, where and even when the way I was schooled, you know you're brought up with a certain myth that Christopher Columbus is this you know brave hero that discovered America, and and the the pilgrims came here, and they were just worked in harmony with the indigenous tribes and the native tribes.
00:46:30
Speaker
and ah But then you learn, you you know you read more treatises and just popular history books, and you realize the degree to which these cultures were just obliterated for westward expansion manifest destiny and you realize just how ugly it is and to turn a blind eye to it is it does such a disservice to so many people yeah it's unsettling to see people not being willing to face that fear out of some shame and that does a greater disservice to just everybody in the culture at large yeah definitely and yeah it's just like
00:47:07
Speaker
Yeah, like we just need to, I don't know, stay like, stay aware of what's going on. And also like, vi and yeah what like, like, you know, there's been like loads of cases of, you know, LGBTQ plus books or black books, brown books, indigenous stories, like these things being banned from libraries, from curriculums.
00:47:26
Speaker
And yeah, we're losing so much history if we're not taking everything into account, all these stories. And it's, yeah, really scary because whenever, you know, politicians, media, you know, public figures start erase aspects of our past, then that is kind of becoming our past, you know, unless there's like a pushback against that.
00:47:50
Speaker
yeah Yeah, and there's a moment too where you when you're interrogating the utility of writing about that that massacre in the LA Chinatown where you write, um to exercise the past is to make choices.
00:48:03
Speaker
How many of the violent details should I include? How much should be glossed over and sanitized? Am I preserving violence by recreating it on the page? Is this an archive or entertainment? you know What is the purpose of this remembrance?
00:48:14
Speaker
Is it to say, look at what they did to us or does it to say, look at what we did to them? And I love that little passage as, ah you know, you're you're by interrogating the utility of it. Like, is it exploiting by recreating it or is there some greater service to it?
00:48:31
Speaker
And I just ah I just wanted to get your sense of, you know, how you when you're constructing a scene of that matter, of that nature, like how you are interrogating it and working your way through it.
00:48:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think this is the thing because the I think that the massacre section of the book, it's like probably the most detailed in terms of violence. Like it's really, i think i I tried to write it in a way that was very like factual where it was like, you know, describing what happened in that massacre with factual detail that I, you know, used other researchers work and like articles at the time to try to put the scene together.
00:49:09
Speaker
And I try to do it in quite an objective way or as objective as like you can as a as a person. And then there's like a moment where it kind of breaks and it's like me questioning like what like that passage that you read out because I wasn't really sure whether I should go into that much detail or not because it was like,
00:49:27
Speaker
what is the point of and am I just sort of like shocking people for the sake of it am I making them upset for the sake of it am I going to anger people for the sake of it like what's the reason for this and I think that yeah I think that's a good question to always been asking yourself um and I don't really know whether I have like an answer to any of those questions that I asked myself in the book like I think at the end of that passage I sort of think say you know I think remembering is better than forgetting and that's kind of where I come to in terms of a ah conclusion and I still sort of feel that way of like I still don't know because ah book is a piece of entertainment and I did construct that narrative to be to some extent entertaining or something someone could read on a narrative that was put together for someone to read
00:50:17
Speaker
So was that the right thing to do? I don't know. But I also think it might enable people to reflect on that moment of history for someone like you who didn't know about it to learn about that or to think what an awful thing those people went through and to kind of try to put that experience and that violence on the page to preserve it, to try to remember it.
00:50:39
Speaker
I still think it's better than kind of letting it fade away history. history or yeah to to to choose to like turn away from it and i thought it was quite important for me to like sort of face it front on and i think that with the book there was like some passages that were in the manuscript to begin with where i was talking about experiences of racism that i had like faced and i chose to take a lot of those out of the book because of that question of like like you know is this
00:51:11
Speaker
an archive, is this entertainment, like what is the purpose of this? And I think for those bits that were personal to me, I made the decision of like, okay, I don't think I need this here, or I wanna keep something for myself, or that feels a bit more like trying to get the reader's sympathy on my side or something.
00:51:29
Speaker
Whereas hopefully if I just say I've experienced some like moments of like, yeah, abuse or like racism, hopefully that's enough that you could just be like, oh yeah, let's that sucks. That's like, you know, you can like, you still be on my side without me having to explain in detail every single thing that ever happened.
00:51:47
Speaker
So I think that when I taken those parts out, I still felt like, and I was looking at the massacre section. I was like, okay, I think this is actually really important to be here for it to be in this like explicit detail as well. And for people not to be able to like look away from it. And for me as the author to really like focus in on it as well. Like I couldn't look away from it either.
00:52:09
Speaker
And it's quite like a relentless passage to read. It's like quite intense, but it felt like it was important for it to be that intense as well. Yeah, and I suspect that was ah that was difficult to research and to write and recreate. um ah But what were some maybe other other aspects of the book that were just particularly challenging for you to to approach and to write about?
00:52:34
Speaker
third chapter where I talk about still life a lot, but around that I'm also talking about during lockdown when I was incredibly depressed. um I don't know why I'm laughing. I think that's just like what we do.
00:52:46
Speaker
um or to be Like, oh, you know, I was like really depressed, but haha, it's okay. But um it was during lockdown and you know, i was like seeing all of this like violence on my screen and my little phone screen, know you know, like Also, it felt like the end of the world. I was back home at my parents' house. I was really lucky to have a roof over my head, but it still felt like, you know, is this the end of kind of like my life as an adult? Kind of, you know, i had a good run. Now I was like 26 back at home, unemployed, kind of just like getting by.
00:53:18
Speaker
um because i was lucky enough to be at my parents and i i think that was quite difficult to return to because it had been like quite a few years since that time and i think most of us have kind of tried to like repress that like those years of covid and be like yes everything's fine now we've like definitely processed that trauma we all went through collectively as like yeah a society um let's just move on and i think that like a lot of people are still absolutely traumatized by that and a lot of people so have long covid health issues things like that and i think that I kind of felt like it was important for me to like reflect on that time and like that is like the longest I've ever spent back home in like Northern Ireland since I was like 18 when I left and it felt like like that during that time I spent a lot of time in the garden and felt kind of like it was like the first time I felt really like connected to like the earth or the place that I had come from and it was really important
00:54:16
Speaker
I think for me to just like put that into the book and it was quite difficult to just like think about that time again but it felt like yeah like the right thing to to do and then I guess just like having to research all of the history was very challenging just a lot of hours in the library but it was kind of like joyful as well like you know I'd be reading like six books about the Silk Roads and there'd be like one mention of the orange and I'd be like yes I find that one mention of the orange amazing oh my god It's the best when you're panning for gold like that. You're like, find something, come on. And then then you find it, you're like like you say, like pumping your fist. You're like, i found it, hell yeah. no
00:54:55
Speaker
Yeah, and I think like the book, as much as there are like these hard moments in it, like it really was so joyful. It was a really joyful experience to research and to write as much as I like complained about it at the time, obviously as a writer, you have to complain about writing when you're in it. But there was so much joy in it. Like it felt like,
00:55:14
Speaker
in some ways total freedom to a have these many words and like pages to fill because I've never been given that chance before and being able to but yeah like write about still life art write about like these like very random little like pockets of history that there's like no reason why someone would have commissioned an article about these sorts of things but I was kind of given the freedom to move around and explore a lot and I feel like it's completely changed me as a writer but also as a person having that kind of way of expressing myself so it was yeah I really like joyful thing as much as it was incredibly challenging at times as well
00:55:55
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I love hearing you you allude to the the things that we complain about as as writers. And that's just the natural extension of this line of work. ah So just like for you, like how does it how does the the grind of it and the the mundanity of it manifest for you to and maybe it practices in place you have to get the work done in the face of the drudgery of it at times?
Writing Process and Career Insights
00:56:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think for me, I spend a lot of time, like, I think like 50% of it is like the thinking and the research. And I like try to like, I spend as much time like reading these books about like still life and like really like looking at paintings and trying to like embedding myself and like thinking about this.
00:56:41
Speaker
And then actually the writing is like, yeah, like touch wood is like quite quick. Like I ah feel I'm very lucky in that sense. But then the, you know, like the other 40% of the writing is actually the editing. Like I love editing. I love editing myself and like other people. I work as an editor. i love being edited um by other people as well. Like it's such a gift as a writer to have a good editor. Like it just completely changes your practice and it makes you so much better. And when people complain about being edited, I'm like, this is the greatest gift you could ask for. um Like, you know, you don't like you don't know how good you've got it having someone go through and you know,
00:57:18
Speaker
picking out your mistakes before a reader does. ah So yeah, I spend a lot of time sort of like, i feel like I get like the raw material of like the first draft on. And then it's all about like going back cutting, like, does this are the sentences flowing right? Is this like image quite right? Do we need to move things around?
00:57:37
Speaker
So I think the editing for me feels a bit like the but really hard work of like, you know, and really like meticulous work of picking apart adjectives that are being used or like moving little things around. And yeah, I'm like a real like fiddler for like always wanting to move things all the time, even whenever things are meant to be finished. And then I go back and like, you know what? well Have you thought about, is this word quite right? Can we find another word for this? But i yeah, whenever I was writing for and for it, I was,
00:58:06
Speaker
doing other freelance writing and editing at the same time. And I think it's always very important to like, you know, burst the bubble of like the author myth and be say that, you know, I had to do lots of other work at the same time as writing this book because otherwise I couldn't pay my rent or my bills. So I was lucky to be able to have like three days a week that I was able to work on foreign fruit alongside my other work.
00:58:29
Speaker
But right now I've got full-time job. So whenever I come to write book two, I think I'm going to have to take a lot slower actually and be more careful with my time because you know very few authors actually make their entire living from their books so that's kind of the reality of that Yeah, I love hearing you talk about that. i love hearing other writers talk about that because there is this, you know, to use that term myth again, like the that ah as as authors, here we are just writing this book. If we're lucky, maybe we do get to do that. But it's it's a lottery ticket if you get that opportunity ah to do it long term, a or even just short term with one book.
00:59:11
Speaker
But yeah, the to to be able to come compartmentalize you know some day job stuff, contract stuff that helps subsidize the more creative work you want to do and then making the time to do it, it's a skill into itself. And I i feel like...
00:59:26
Speaker
and i think there can be some, unfortunately, some shame attached to it because we have that myth in our head that the successful writer author is just doing this, the creative stuff, and that is what's paying the bills. But often it's like all this other shit we don't tweet about that's paying the bills, and then when the book comes it's like, hey, look at this, and it it creates this veneer of this is what I've been doing all this time, whereas it's kind of inversed.
00:59:55
Speaker
Yeah, and it's like the people who are able to have that freedom to just sit around write because their parents are rich or bought their house or they have a rich partner a lot of the time. And people don't talk about that. You find that out and you're like, oh, that makes a lot of sense, actually, why you can just sort of like...
01:00:11
Speaker
walk around to coffee shops and ride all day and wander home. And like, you know, I think that like the economic realities of being a writer. Yeah, it's still, even though I think people have got better about speaking about it, it still is a bit of a like shame thing attached to it Big time.
01:00:27
Speaker
Yeah, it's like also, you know I didn't have caring responsibilities when I was writing for it. It would maybe be a very different book if I had care for i loved one or a child. you know And like that's a really difficult thing for parents to do and to balance.
01:00:43
Speaker
caring for someone else and being able to be like a selfish author because you have to be selfish to write book because that's just the nature of it you have to be able to like lock yourself away for four or five hours to write I can't do that if I have a kid or someone to care for so I think that they're yeah like the realities of being a writer it's much more um I think it's just good to a sort of be honest about it and like burst the bubble and sort of recognize that for a lot of people, it's just not a reality because the, the amount that you're paid does not equal what you need to get childcare and things like that. So, yeah.
01:01:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's really, i i like I said before, like I love hearing you, you know, just because you're in front of me right now. I love hearing you talk about that. And I try to be as transparent as possible with me. Like, I don't have kids, three very needy dogs, but don't have any children.
01:01:37
Speaker
ah You know, my wife is the breadwinner and brings in health insurance and everything. So it it gives me more latitude and freedom to do to do what I do. So i'm I'm always, I'm just always trying to beat that drum.
01:01:51
Speaker
just to let people know the privilege I benefit from. And by extension, you went, okay, now you may be able to interrogate other people's conditions, whether they're not being as forthright about it. be like, okay, you know, the the odds are they've got some sort of ah something that is liberating them that might otherwise be saddling me on the other side, you know,
01:02:14
Speaker
Yeah. it's like, there's a, I feel like, yeah, we could go on like a very long conversation about this, but it is just like, yeah I just feel so sad for how many great authors or but like potential authors aren't able to do it. You know, like there's so many great people who were just like missing because they weren't able to write because they had to care for people. They have to work, they have to do this, that, and they don't have the time to sort of sit down and write or to be able to like pursue getting an agent in or getting a publishing deal.
01:02:42
Speaker
And I mean, I'm really curious to see if like if there's any way of changing that in the future. like Over in Ireland, they're trialing this like universal basic income for artists.
01:02:54
Speaker
There's a pilot scheme going on that the government has put forward. And i have a friend who's on that scheme and it's completely changing her practice, like how she's able to do her art and make and create and explore. And I just think like What would it be like if, you know, not just artists, but everyone had some sort of like, there was just a bottom line that sort of kept people safe and fed and sheltered. Like what would our art look like? I think it would be way more interesting than what it is not.
01:03:22
Speaker
Oh yeah. Yeah, 100%. It's just like you remove ah stressor, I guess you can call it ah some of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like if you can just like make sure that you know people have like consistent housing and like they're they're not on suffering from food insecurity.
01:03:42
Speaker
It's just like, okay, now there's so much more bandwidth free to create or just to in even just to not put any more extra pressure on themselves, maybe just to feel free in their own head instead of having to be under this constant cloud of worry.
01:03:58
Speaker
i mean, it's it's a beautiful sentiment. I'd love to hear more of that program from you. Yeah. in the In the future, I'd love to know more. Yeah, I would, yeah, I'm really curious to see how it goes and if it's kind of taken up as, you know, moves beyond a pilot or other countries that are doing similar things um or at least, you know, funding people to pursue art kind of for art's sake outside of just like, you know, it makes money. It's like that's, there's like the economic argument for art, which is great and everything, but what about just like,
01:04:32
Speaker
people being able to make the art they want to make, you know, maybe it's bit like hippy dippy, but I think that it has a very positive impact on like, you know, welfare and our society. Oh, 100%.
01:04:44
Speaker
Well, Katie, I want to be mindful of your time.
Recommendations and Investigative Writing
01:04:46
Speaker
And ah as I bring these conversations down for a landing, I always love asking the guests to you in this case, for a recommendation of some kind, just like something that you are that is bringing you joy that you want to share with the listeners. So i would just extend that to you.
01:04:59
Speaker
Oh, what a lovely way to finish. That's a really nice question. and What's been bringing me joy? Even though it is spring, kind of moving into summer here, i have been playing a lot of video games and ah spending a lot of time inside. And there's a game that I haven't been able to play yet, I've watched a lot of Twitch streams called The Blueprints.
01:05:19
Speaker
And I'm really hoping by the time that this podcast comes out, I've got it. um I've got my copy of the game. But it's like this game where you... like walk into this house and there's kind of like these days that you play and you move, you have so many steps. So that you have like 50 steps, you can walk into rooms 50 times and you have to kind of solve this like mystery. It's like a puzzle of like,
01:05:45
Speaker
what's going on in this house like how did you like this all kind of come to be like how do you kind of get to this room at the very end of the house that you have to move towards you kind of have this like blueprint map which is kind of where the name kind of is like a you know little playing words um that you have to get towards but and there's like things that you can get that give you more footsteps or yeah, like things to aid you to get you over there. But then if you run out of steps, your day ends and you start the day again and everything resets. It's like a rogue-like game where you have to start from the very beginning. And I love those kinds of games because I get absolutely obsessed with them where if you go back to like the very start and you're like, okay, I've like figured out that if you go from the kitchen to the ballroom, then you get this thing that means that you can go back into the kitchen and then So it's kind of like, um I was like Cluedo or something. It's like, i yeah, it's really fun. And
01:06:33
Speaker
I've been watching some people play it on Twitch and I'm really hoping to get ah copy of it very soon. So the blue prince is what it's called. Nice. And what's the gaming system it's on?
01:06:44
Speaker
is it It is on, i think it might be PlayStation as well as Windows. um Yeah, this is my problem is I have a MacBook and you can't play on the Mac. So i have to wait until I can use my partner's laptop to play it on.
01:06:59
Speaker
This is why I haven't been playing it yet. But um I know it's going be great and it's going to bring me a lot of joy, especially because I know a lot of the secrets of the house already from watching all of these other people play it.
01:07:10
Speaker
Oh, that's great. Yeah, there's a couple gamers online that I, i I'm just like a Zelda junkie, and um and so I like watching a couple and guys on ah yeah on YouTube and just how they play. I'm like, ah, this kind of,
01:07:26
Speaker
It's kind of entertaining. as's you kind of You almost have to remind yourself, at least I do, it's like stop vicariously watching them do it. You play it. like you You figure some things out. You have fun. like don't Don't attach your your experience to to them. Do it for entertainment or maybe some tips or to do things a little bit better. But like don't don't forget. Don't lose yourself in someone else's experience. Go and do it yourself. Yeah. I find it so soothing. There's something really soothing about watching people play games. like it's like I would just have it on the background and I'll be doing other stuff you know as well. I'll be doing like my knitting or whatever. And it's just like me on a Saturday night watching someone else play a game while I'm like knitting and it's like, well, this is it.
01:08:08
Speaker
This is my life. It's pretty good. Well, that's wonderful. Well, Katie, I'm so glad we got to have this conversation. And i yeah, love i loved Foreign Fruit and it's just such a a great journey that you take us on like throughout the book. So I just thought thank you so much for the work and for coming on the show to talk about it.
01:08:26
Speaker
Thank you so much, Brandon. This has been like a real pleasure. thank
01:08:34
Speaker
Yes. Awesome. A bunch of years ago, Meredith May meant it as a compliment, I think. She said I'm like Wayne from Wayne's World.
01:08:47
Speaker
Yes.
01:08:50
Speaker
Thank you, CNFers. Thanks to Katie reporting live from Scotland. The name of the book again is Foreign Fruit, A Personal History of the Orange. It's published by Tin House up the road in Portland.
01:09:02
Speaker
Don't forget about upcoming frontrunner book events starting May 21st. And you can always follow the Instagram page. We'll be for news and updates at Creative Nonfiction Podcast or at Brendan O'Meara or at Brendan O'Meara dot bluesky dot social or whatever the fuck.
01:09:19
Speaker
For lots of writers, the blank page of writing is the intimidating part. That blinking cursor. That giant sea of white. The possibilities are boundless.
01:09:31
Speaker
That's part of the overwhelm. It could be anything. Thanks to newspaper writing, the blank page doesn't intimidate me or stump me. It's like you learn early on that ah and good enough is good enough when you're on deadline.
01:09:48
Speaker
You never want to say that with book stuff, but never mind. What gets me is the blank notebook page in the blank Rolodex. Much of my attention of late has been ginning up sources for the next biography, and I haven't spoken to anyone yet.
01:10:03
Speaker
I have names, I have some numbers, I've left a number of voicemails, and I've got nothing back. The idea is solid. The arc, in theory, also solid. My agent likes the idea, the arc.
01:10:16
Speaker
But I need sources. I need conversations. and I feel like I need about a dozen people on record. just to be like okay, there's there it is. There is a little groundswell of of shit.
01:10:30
Speaker
And until I get that, I have no book. And with no book, I'm awash in panic. This is how I felt at the start of Prefontaine. The feeling is very familiar. ah Trying to find names and numbers and emails, it's not too hard.
01:10:44
Speaker
Placing the call, of course, that gives me panic. But whatever, you do it because that's the job. And then you have to sell yourself for 15 or 20 seconds over and over again. and you get kind of good at it after a while. And in the did then you're just working up nightmare scenarios in your head about how they're going to tell you to go fuck off and that I'm a monster and an enemy of the people.
01:11:05
Speaker
i mean, this never happens. Maybe they think it, but you know most people are pretty civil. Or sometimes they do that, but it's very rare. And that's the plight of the journalist when it comes to writing nonfiction. By and large, we're not drawing from the well of personal experience. We're reliant on the information and stories we get from people willing to go on the record or offer background information.
01:11:25
Speaker
Without that, you have nothing. You can't sell shit without that. Especially for a contemporary sports figure, which is what my next project is about. You got nothing unless those people are talking to you.
01:11:39
Speaker
And it's figures, actually, but that's neither here nor there. And hopefully I'll have an announcement before 2026 arrives. but I've been filling up my new compendium with names and numbers, cataloging my travails of the day-to-day as I dip into it.
01:11:57
Speaker
If I leave five voicemails in a day, i consider that decent. Eventually, someone will call you back. It's the first five sources who become really the most important. They become validation to an ever-increasing roster of sources.
01:12:13
Speaker
They're the ones who take the risk before there's a contract, before there's even a book proposal, when it's just this little nascent newborn idea that is just kicking and screaming and wanting attention and nourishment.
01:12:26
Speaker
yeah Those are the people... who really are they the the but unsung heroes of a work of nonfiction, before things are certain.
01:12:37
Speaker
From there, the snowball will start to gain mass and momentum as it tumbles down the hill, but shit. Until you get people willing to help fill up a notebook and a recorder, you're dead in the water.
01:12:50
Speaker
You got nothing, man. That's the blank page panic that keeps me up at night. Hello, 3 God damn it. Stay wild, CNFers.
01:13:02
Speaker
And if you can't do interviews, see