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Episode 233: Lee Gutkind on Magical Moments, the Rope Test, and 'My Last Eight Thousand Days'
153 Plays4 years ago
Lee Gutkind, author of several books and, most recently, the memoir My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Male in His Seventies (University of Georgia Press), returns to the show to talk about voice, starting his day, the eternal "rope test," magical moments, and the optimistic days ahead.
Promotional support is provided by The Writers' Co-op Podcast.
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Show notes to this and other shows at brendanomeara.com.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Writer's Co-op
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey, if you enjoy this podcast, you may also enjoy The Writer's Co-op, hosted by Wudan Yan and Jenny Gridders. The Writer's Co-op focuses on the business side of running a freelance writing career and concurrently building a life you want.
Freelance Writing Business Insights
00:00:18
Speaker
Wudan and Jenny are candid about talking about freelance pay, contracts, saying no to work, and more. This season, they're interviewing freelance writers on how they make it work.
00:00:30
Speaker
Guests so far have included Maya Kozov, Aurora Almondroll, Daniela Zaltzman, and Matt Vellano. Hey!
00:00:41
Speaker
Listen wherever you podcast, man. You dig? Good. I look at that voice and as I look at it on the keyboard and read it, I also hear it in my mind and I know pretty well almost immediately if this sounds like me. Does it sound like me?
00:01:08
Speaker
Let's just say this scene at first, and made a podcast you can't refuse.
Lee Guttkind's New Memoir Discussion
00:01:13
Speaker
Which is to say, the godfather of creative non-fiction Lee Guttkind returns to the show to talk about his new memoir. My Last 8,000 Days an American Male in his 70s is published by the beautiful people of the University of Georgia Press.
00:01:32
Speaker
of the several memoirs I read in 2020, Lee's is in the top four, along with Tim O'Brien's dad's maybe book, Rose Anderson's The Heart and Other Monsters, and Paula Sickie's Lata.
00:01:47
Speaker
Great, great stuff coming your way.
Engagement on Social Media
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Just search for it. It'll pop up and Keep the conversation going on social media at CNF pod across the big three though Instagram and Twitter seem to be the best places Facebook no matter what I do no matter what I post or put there It's everything's practically invisible. So Thanks for nothing suck
00:02:32
Speaker
Written reviews of the show give CNF pods some extra juice and validation. So if you have a moment, either leave one on Apple podcasts or email me one and I'll read it on the air and give you props and maybe use it for the show's packaging.
CNF Pod Audio Magazine
00:02:49
Speaker
When I go courting sponsors in the speed dating world of finding people to underrate the show so I can make a few bucks.
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Speaker
If you haven't listened to issue one of the audio magazine isolation, check it out. It's in the podcast feed. It is free for all. This one is submissions are open for the next issue on the theme summer.
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Speaker
email your submission of no more than 2000 words, roughly a 15 minute read, but don't worry about reading it on air as your submission. If I accept it, we will worry about the recording later. Creative nonfiction podcast at gmail.com. It's a, it's quite a bit to type, but should have done cnfbot at gmail.com and made it easier on you. My bad.
Support through Patreon
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So that issue, the issue on summer and subsequent ones, will be exclusive to Patreon members. Get used to me yapping about this. So if you want to support the magazine and support the work that goes into it,
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Just know that every dollar you spend goes towards making that product and possibly paying writers and building the community. If that appeals to you, visit patreon.com slash cnfpod. Some great perks and exclusive content, tier one of four. It's just four bucks a month.
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And it gets you transcripts from the date of your enrollment onward. Access to all the audio magazines. Issue, well, in 2021, looking to do two. 2022, looking to do at least three and then 20, 24, 23. I don't know. The year after that one, looking to, looking to take this thing quarterly. You know, if it merits it, if that's something you want to support, head over to there and become a member. Some good stuff.
00:04:44
Speaker
And with respect to this episode, you'll want to stay tuned for my parting shot, wisdom in weird places and a revival of an old gag. Oh, OGC and efforts might recognize it when it comes around. So you're going to want to, you're going to want to stick around for that sucker. I used to do it all the time. You'll just have to wait. Okay.
Guttkind's Writing Process and Voice
00:05:08
Speaker
Lee is here. I remember the first time, first time we talked about three and a half years ago, episode 60, I was kind of freaking out. I mean, that's kind of my MO, I freak out a lot. And this time, it was like we're all pals. I was in, I was in the pocket, man. The
00:05:27
Speaker
Offensive line was collapsing around me forming that nice little horseshoe clearing out passing lanes And we were just we were going downfield first in 10 second in 10 Second in one we're just we're just moving the chains This was a good move in the chains episode if you ask me so And he came to play ball, which is great. So make way for the godfather rip
00:06:02
Speaker
She said, you know, today's wish, a substat, so a newsletter that features different writers talking about how they structure their writing day, not aspirational stuff, but what they actually do in real life, rewriting, sleep, caffeine, family, exercise.
00:06:21
Speaker
Social media, email, reading time, et cetera. And I think that might be kind of a fun jumping off point for you. I know, of course, you wake up really early and you walk down to that Starbucks to get your venti. But from that point on, how are you structuring your writing day? It's less, excuse me, it is less structured than it used to be. When you start out for years and years and years, the structure is so incredibly important.
00:06:48
Speaker
You got to get the writing in no matter how long that takes. After a while, after a long while, at least for me.
00:06:56
Speaker
I've been able to be much more flexible with my work time. And I think that's because I think I've found my voice after years of searching for it. And I have a little bit more confidence in what it is I'm doing or what I need to say. And so, yes, I'm still stumbling up to Starbucks and getting my Venti and bringing it home.
00:07:26
Speaker
And sometimes I start to write right away and sometimes I need to kind of take a breath, take a breath and find out a little bit about what's happening in the world. I might go to the New York Times website or the Wall Street Journal and just kind of look around for a little bit. I might look at my emails to see if there's anything really important I should start to think about and deal with. Maybe that might take, the whole thing might take an hour or so. And when I can
00:07:56
Speaker
when let us say when I can move any concerns beyond me and I can take a deep breath and dive into my work, knowing that, hoping that nothing will interrupt me or weigh on my mind.
00:08:12
Speaker
And then I move into the work and sometimes it seems enough to give it two and a half or three hours before I stop. And sometimes when things are really going well, I push it a little further. But I have noticed that two and a half hours of straight writing causes me to have to take a break.
00:08:35
Speaker
take a walk or go back to the times for a little bit and just just kind of take a break and a big breath for a while and and conjure about what it is i have just done and what i now need to do before i'm ready to end the day end the day as a writer that is
00:08:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's very much like surfacing from scuba diving or anything where you've been so submerged into something where there aren't a ton of, say, inputs down there. You've got your thing. You've got your gear on. But eventually, it's like, OK, my tank is running low. I've got to come up for air and then kind of survey the land, if you will, from which I'm rising out of this ocean.
00:09:22
Speaker
No, that's very true. And as I said, it has changed for me. The less sure of yourself you are, which is not to say I'm sure of myself. And I don't necessarily mean that. The less sure of your voice and what it is you need to say, I'm much clearer about that than I used to be. And early on, it's the struggle to figure out how to squeeze things out and make it sound really good.
00:09:51
Speaker
and then go back and do it again and do it again and do it again. And I have a little bit more confidence now that I can move ahead and get my thousand words or whatever it is I think I want and take a breath as I say that then maybe I'll go back and take a look at that again or maybe I'll plow
Balancing Writing and Life
00:10:11
Speaker
forward for a little bit longer. But I also have a sense and it's really nice to have this sense when it is time for the day
00:10:19
Speaker
to stop and when it's time for you to take up other responsibilities in your life and let what you have written that day and maybe some of the days before just kind of percolate in your head and stew there for a while so that you're ready to explode or ready to get back into the work when you next take a look at your keyboard.
00:10:47
Speaker
And I love that you brought up voice and that even having done this for so many long and written so many books, that voice is still something that you're, you know, still grappling with and wrestling with and it's something that you're even at this point, you're still
00:11:03
Speaker
figuring out and it's kind of this fluid thing. Regarding voice, what is it about now that you're starting to feel a bit more confident when you're sitting down that it is this one voice, a very leanness on the page, if you will? I'm not sure this is a great answer, but I look at that voice and as I look at it on the keyboard and read it, I also hear it in my mind.
00:11:31
Speaker
And I know pretty well almost immediately if this sounds like me. Does it sound like me? Or does it sound like there is some sort of unnecessary or different affectation to what it is I have put down? Now, the content is something different. You have to look at the content much more carefully, but the way in which you produce
00:11:59
Speaker
the work that is to say how you put it down on paper or in this case on a display. I hear it and I know I know pretty well what sounds like me and what doesn't sound like me and if it doesn't sound like me I'm not necessarily saying delete get rid of it but then I
00:12:18
Speaker
I start thinking about why it doesn't sound like me. What is that telling me about this kind of different sound? And it often connects with the content at that point.
00:12:33
Speaker
Yeah, and when you're writing and maybe, of course, you know, reading other things or reading other books or rereading other books from authors you admire, how do you maybe put up some sort of a firewall between that voice that you admire and then your own so it doesn't sound like, so you're inspired by them, but not imitating them to the point of corrupting your own voice?
00:12:58
Speaker
Well, first of all, you have to think very, very carefully about what you want to read. Because if you think either the content or the voice is going to be a little bit too close, it is best, at least for me, not to go there. And so, again, I think really carefully about what I want to read and when I want to read it.
00:13:24
Speaker
And I try to make sure that there's some space between what it is I read and when I go back to writing. I really admire how people sound and how they say things using the written word. And I think about it a lot in retrospect. I'm really careful not to try real hard not to sound like the person I'm reading.
00:13:55
Speaker
But I look much, also I look really carefully as I read other things at how writers structure what they do. And the structure is often a learning experience. And if not a learning, like, oh, look what she did in that essay. Look how she put it all together. That's really interesting to think about.
00:14:19
Speaker
And I don't necessarily say, oh, I'm going to try to do it this way. What I like to say is think about what this writer did and think about what you can do that may well be as interesting or as daring or as off the cuff as she has been. And I
00:14:40
Speaker
I really appreciate that. It's like I tell my students often that writers need to kind of look at their work with the eye sometimes of an engineer or an architect to take a look at the blueprint of what the writer has done.
00:15:02
Speaker
and maybe use some of that or learn from that the different ways in which you can structure a story and how different that structure can make the story be.
00:15:15
Speaker
you know, just kind of piggybacking on on voice a little more, you know, you've written this, this wonderful memoir, and you've written personal things in the past with like, trucking with Sam. You've also written a lot of more repartorial stuff, you know, umpires, transplant, organ transplants, and, you know, robots, among, you know, myriad other things. How would you say, make your voice
00:15:38
Speaker
is different between when you're more repartorial versus more personal? No, it's a question of distance. When you're hanging out with a bunch of organ transplant surgeons or baseball umpires or child psychiatrists, you're standing back like you're some sort of a camera.
00:16:04
Speaker
and you're watching at different angles from close-ups to long to medium and long shots, but you are always behind the camera and not necessarily in the shot, whereas when you're writing about yourself and you are writing a memoir, it is much different. You are front and center in the camera's eye, and even though
00:16:33
Speaker
You are also behind the camera as a writer. You are looking at yourself as the protagonist, as the person about whom the book or the essay or the chapter is all about.
00:16:48
Speaker
And I love that, that your, your new book really underscores that, you know, people, let's say in their fourth quarter of life, fourth quarter of the game, if you will, you know, shouldn't be, you know, avatars of, you know, grief and loneliness, but, you know, very much alive and ambitious.
Themes of Aging in Guttkind's Memoir
00:17:08
Speaker
So I really, that must have been really at the forefront of your mind that this isn't just something that's looking back. Like, I still have very much, like, lots of stuff to give and I need to,
00:17:18
Speaker
be that example for people? Well, what shouldn't be and what is is kind of different. Yes, one shouldn't be fearing the last quarter of their lives or thinking that the last quarter is going to be kind of a quieter quarter
00:17:38
Speaker
than the first three. My book represents a transition from a time around about the time I turned 70 when I felt confused and lost and not too confident about my voice or about my ideas or about what was gonna happen next in my life. I felt very insecure. I'm a pretty upfront, independent, sometimes considered arrogant fellow
00:18:07
Speaker
But there was no arrogance in what was happening to me when I turned 70. My two best friends died that year. My mom died five days before my own 70th birthday. I had a long relationship that had just fallen apart. I had a book contract that I gave my heart and soul to that fell apart.
00:18:32
Speaker
All these things happened to me around the year of 70. I let us say I lost my moxie and didn't quite know what to do. But I did know that this 70, this big 70, needed to be a transitional point. I needed to make a change, to reevaluate and dig deeply into the camera of my own life
00:19:02
Speaker
and look at what had happened to me until I could figure out how I could come out the other side of it with renewed vigor and confidence in the future. I guess, in many respects, I wanted to figure out
00:19:18
Speaker
how I could continue to be what seemed to be, at least in public, that independent, hard-working, maybe even sometimes arrogant guy who felt very, very sure of himself and needed to move on. Some of that happened. I reevaluated. When I went back and tried to think of my life, speaking of voice, I needed to
00:19:42
Speaker
Talk to myself as I was writing the process was incredibly interesting at least for me because as a reporter I
00:19:53
Speaker
as an immersion observer, yes, you ask questions, but you really wait and watch to see what happens. And then sooner or later, you dig deep into the person or people you're writing about and ask some questions that allow them to kind of bear their innermost thoughts and maybe their soul. But in this particular case,
00:20:19
Speaker
I realized that I had to do that on my own. I was the camera on the outside looking in and I was looking in on myself and I took a deep dive into and immersed myself into myself as deeply as I could.
00:20:36
Speaker
And I wanted my voice to sound like, just like I'm talking to you, Brendan. There's nothing in the world that you can ask me that I will not tell you the truth about. And that's really as sincere as I could make it. And that's how I felt I wanted to deal with this coming of old age books.
00:20:58
Speaker
there would be nothing that I would ever leave out, that I would dig as deep as I possibly could. Even though it could well be humiliating and embarrassing, I was going to do it right. And I was going to talk in this voice to my readers, whether they be 17 or 70 or 80 or 90, to tell them what it's like to kind of try to make a big
00:21:23
Speaker
Personal change a transition when you're so old and so used to what you have done for so long and in that reevaluation process and i imagine just this this book was every bit as important to you to write as it was for you to put it in the hands of somebody else.
00:21:42
Speaker
So how did this book evolve from something that you needed to write to ultimately being something that you were comfortable handing to the reader and being in service of the reader once you had processed and reevaluated, as you said, this very big watershed moment in your life? To me, it was almost like going to
00:22:08
Speaker
regularly see a therapist. And when you see a therapist, if things are working out well, you'll sit in that person's office for 35 or 40 or 45 minutes and you'll talk to the therapist and the therapist will encourage you to tell as many stories and many incidents that you feel have affected your behavior in your life.
00:22:34
Speaker
And then so you do that and you walk out and you go get a cup of coffee and you think about until the next time, the next week when you sit back in that chair and so often you will go back to the same story and you'll tell that story again.
00:22:53
Speaker
But the more you have thought about it and the more you tell it, what is so interesting is that the story changes in many different ways because by telling one story, that's one level. And then you go back and you reevaluate and you think a little bit more and you remember a few things or you realize that some of the things you said in visit number one was incorrect.
00:23:23
Speaker
And that's the way in which I worked on this book, off and on for 10 years. I would write a story, many stories, and include a lot of reflection about what those stories meant.
00:23:38
Speaker
And then I would go back and do it again. And the more often that I went back and wrote it again, the more my eyes, the more insight I gained from repeating constantly, going back and writing that same story and the more things that I remembered.
00:23:59
Speaker
And I dug as deeply as I possibly could, just as I would if I were committing two or three or four years to a therapist. I dug as deeply as I possibly could until I thought, well, there's either no more I can tell, or on the other hand, there's no more I'm willing to tell. And so it was a long process to keep doing that, to keep revisiting these ideas and stories that I had.
00:24:29
Speaker
And so that's one part of your question. And the other part of your question, I think, may well have something to do with getting it ready for your audience. And so if I go back in time, again for 10 years, I started this memoir and went
00:24:53
Speaker
went some distance. I decided that I didn't want anyone who knew me very well or in any way was connected to my publishing world and to my magazine to read this. I wanted someone to read this book as if they had just bought it at a nearby bookstore and was opening it up for the first time. And so I went to people, literally strangers, people I didn't know
00:25:22
Speaker
And to be honest, I hired them to take a look. And the first editor said to me that the memoir wasn't working, and he suggested that I turn this into a series of personal essays. And I listened to him, and I did, and sent it back to another editor who said that the essay form wasn't working and it needed to be a memoir. And so I did it again.
00:25:51
Speaker
all the while rewriting these stories as I fit these different structures. And one editor said to me, so this is starting to work as a memoir, but your voice, back to the voice, you don't sound like a likable fellow. You sound a little bit angry, a little bit snippy, and maybe you are in real life, maybe not, but readers don't want to read an angry book. They want to read a book that they can connect to and relate with.
00:26:21
Speaker
And so I did it again. So that process was really interesting that every time I sent it to another person who did not know me, they may have known about my work, but they didn't know about who I was very personally. And I kept getting more and more reactions in that way until I was able to put all of these reactions together along with my steadfast revising of the stories I was telling
00:26:51
Speaker
into again a memoir that I think has a strong narrative arc that took my readers where I wanted them to go.
00:27:00
Speaker
The book struck me as such a great letter from a person in a specific place in a specific time. And ultimately it turned into such a really hopeful book of the days that lie ahead and where your ambition lies. And it was very energizing to read that.
00:27:23
Speaker
over the course of the book to just see the Lee on the page there come to grips with that and see that there are still great days ahead, even though, you know, you're kind of bludgeoned with a lot of very personal things right around your 70th birthday. If I hadn't done that, I'm sitting here today. Yes, we're under the very dark shadow of COVID.
00:27:51
Speaker
But if I hadn't done that, I don't think I would, but I'm feeling okay. I'm feeling healthy, I'm feeling happy, I'm feeling satisfied. And if I hadn't done that, I'm satisfied with my life and I'm satisfied with my friends and I'm satisfied with the book that we're talking about now. And I'm not sure if I hadn't done what you just described, I would not be feeling as hopeful and optimistic as I am of
00:28:19
Speaker
of whatever is left of the 8,000 days I have in my future.
00:28:23
Speaker
I think too, and you do a really wonderful job about this because I think the book really toes this line of coping with invisibility as well. Like early in life too when you were an overweight kid, kind of marginalized by a lot of the kids you went to school with in your neighborhood in Pittsburgh. And then even as we age and certainly get into the AARP subscription age that
00:28:51
Speaker
that there is a fading and invisibility that is kind of hard to cope with, especially when in your head you feel younger than you are and yet you're sort of, you know, marginalized. And it's kind of on both ends of that spectrum. Is that something that you wrestled with personally and then, you know, you were able to really render in the book? As you get older, you can kind of lose yourself. As I said, when I turned 70 and all those things happened to me, I lost with all those people in my life
00:29:21
Speaker
who were dying and understand, I know you understand this Brendan, but writers live lonely lives anyway. I do my Starbucks thing and I face my keyboard for hours and I'm all alone all the time and I try or so often and I try to not answer emails for a while and not take phone calls.
Loneliness in Writing
00:29:45
Speaker
We all need to isolate ourselves so that we can be at peace with our work. And so I did that, and I was used to that, but I always had this support system of those three or four people I described to you. And then suddenly, in a flash, they were all gone.
00:30:03
Speaker
And you realize that you need some sort of even though you were a loner born in bread as a writer you realize that you need some sort of support system to keep you going to reach out to other people and touch them from time to time.
00:30:19
Speaker
And I was pretty well lost. And the other thing that happens when you get older, Brendan, your face is wrinkled, your hair is gray. And the more aged you've seen, the less people kind of take an interest in you. And you walk up the street,
00:30:49
Speaker
wherever you go, and it seems like people, younger people, and not kids, but maybe middle-aged people, maybe people look through you. They don't see older people anymore. And so these things, you're getting old, and maybe you're losing some of your support system, and maybe you're not as healthy as you used to be.
00:31:15
Speaker
And then when you're in public, you're hardly noticed, sometimes only noticed when you're perceived as some sort of a nuisance. And so those things come together for people who are aging. And I thought that it was really important to fight that, to fight
00:31:36
Speaker
to fight the idea that I was invisible as an old person, and I tried real hard to continue to make a statement as a human being, the way I walked, the way I talked, the work I did, and to resist when other people asked me demeaning questions like,
00:32:01
Speaker
When did you retire or if not, when are you going to retire? Things of that nature or people would say to me often when I would go into another starbucks they would say Say, how are you today young man? Well, i'm not a young man. I am who I am and it just kind of It kind of makes you feel like um, like like you don't count anymore
00:32:28
Speaker
And so now none of these things really killed me. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that these this is what can happen and often does happen to people who become elderly especially in the United States.
00:32:46
Speaker
And there's a moment, too, later in the book, where you cite what happens to a lot of people. And this happens to your mother. It's happening to mine. It's been happening there for several years, where you just kind of age in place, right? And you write about that here, about aging in place. Right. Yes, that does certainly happen to my mother. And I decided I was not going to age in place, for one thing. Yeah.
00:33:16
Speaker
But it was really interesting. And again, people who are in their 60s, maybe even in their 50s, they begin to, they sometimes have to take care of their parents or their parents are not, or in different living facilities of one sort or another. But when you're 60 and your mom is 80,
00:33:40
Speaker
You're both in the same boat. It's really weird to think that you're not that far away from the person that you're taking care of now. And it's quite a challenge to be able to swallow that.
00:33:58
Speaker
I'm talking here about this book that I have written again about what happened to me when I was aging but but I would like to say that as honest and sincere and deep I was in with my own life I'm hoping that when people read my book they will laugh and chuckle along the way because the voice I tried to capture was a voice
00:34:28
Speaker
that was both sincere and honest, but also light enough so that I could look at my world, let us say, not lighthearted perspective, but from a perspective that didn't cast a pall on the book I was trying to write. You don't want to write a book that is depressing.
00:34:53
Speaker
You want to write an honest book and you want that book to be about you. You don't want to write a book, a memoir especially, that blames other people for the things that happen to you. You want to just focus in on yourself and try to present yourself in as honest and in many ways true, honest and true way that you really feel.
00:35:19
Speaker
And so I'm hoping that people read this book. They're going to think it's pretty funny, even though I'm dealing with really serious subjects. Of course. Yeah, of course. And too early on, there's a great moment where you write that when you're, you know, but when I'm home alone, especially when I'm preparing to go out and play the
00:35:44
Speaker
the the public me the the pressure mounts and and then you you go on to say that i'm pretty damn insecure and the insecurity is or was getting worse and more troublesome and uh and you know you can go on of course but i wonder like for for you as an in as an insecure person what did it mean to be able to commit to this in writing and show that vulnerability on the page it simply had to be done in order to write a book that was
Managing Personal and Public Personas
00:36:11
Speaker
true and reflected the essence of the real me. And yeah, I do have a section in my book that talked about the privately, the personally, and the publicly. We're all like that. Brendan, you're a great interviewer, and I talked to you before this interview, and we had a nice conversation.
00:36:34
Speaker
And that's who you are out in the world. And I have this nice idea of who you really are when you're back at home all by yourself or with your family. You're a different person. As a writer who has been in public for such a long time and as a professor who has taught thousands of students, you have to be on your game. You have to be whomever you want
00:37:04
Speaker
the world to perceive, you have to work hard to get there. And I have always, because there was a certain amount of insecurity in me, I have always kind of have to prepare myself for going out in public and being who I wanted people to think I was. And I had to work really hard to do that. And I still work really hard to do that quite often.
00:37:32
Speaker
But then you go back, you sink back into your house and into your office and you're often someone else. We all have these double or triple personas that we show in different ways to different people.
00:37:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, you know, just as a New England guy and a Patriots fan, you know, Tom Brady was always the 199th pick in that 2000 draft. And no matter how good he got, he was always that draft pick and always kind of carried
00:38:08
Speaker
You know, that in his, in his knapsack. So it was always needed to prepare just a little more. And you even write that, you know, I prepare my ass off in secret so that it looks spontaneous and natural, the ready for anything me. And, uh, I really love that. And I, I wonder what, you know, what does your preparation look like when you're going to the game tape and the game film to, you know, to put on the best ready for anything Lee.
00:38:34
Speaker
Well, I describe it in my book. I worked really hard to prepare myself to be in public, and you have to figure out who you are. Today, in my case, I have to be a lot of different people. I am
00:38:50
Speaker
the editor of a rather significant literary journal. And when I deal with my staff, I am kind of, I have to play the leader and I have to make decisions rather quickly. When I am a professor, a teacher, I think really carefully about the ways in which I need to communicate with my students. I gotta be very stern and
00:39:17
Speaker
let them know when they are doing things that could be done better. But I have to do that in a way that makes them feel positive and good, rather than makes them feel pretty bad. I don't want them to go home and cry. I'd rather have them cry in class, in fact. Depending upon who you are in any given day, but what I want,
00:39:47
Speaker
What I wanted at the time, as I was writing this, is for the public me to seem to be confident and strong and articulate and thoughtful, and it gets a little bit more challenging to do that
00:40:07
Speaker
without preparation as you get a little bit older as some of the words that you used to use on a regular basis sometimes escape you for 60 seconds as you walk up the street or go to a conference and you see faces that you know you have seen for the past 30 years and somehow you can't you recognize that face but you cannot for the life of me figure out who those folks are
00:40:34
Speaker
It's almost like you're living sometimes, have always lived in the COVID world where you go into a big conference and you see a lot of people and they've all got masks on and you have to kind of figure out who the hell they are.
00:40:50
Speaker
I think we all, to a certain extent, do prepare ourselves differently for the public, in my particular case, because I started out as a lowly, hardly high school graduate and became a distinguished professor over the years. In my particular case, I've had to work harder to remember who I was and who I wanted people to perceive, or what I wanted people to perceive of me now.
00:41:20
Speaker
What I love throughout the book too, as a, as a grace note, it's very literal early on. And then of course
Persistence in Writing and Life
00:41:26
Speaker
it evolves. And it's this idea of the rope test when you were in the, you know, in basic training for being in the coast guard, I believe. And so, so maybe you can talk to us a little bit about, you know, the rope test as it was when you were in training. And then of course, how this idea has, you know, morphed over the years and how you approach, you know, the day to day rope tests in, in your own work.
00:41:49
Speaker
Well, then we have to begin with Lee Goodkin, 18 years of age, unable to be accepted to any college, any university, no matter how hard he tried because he graduated in the bottom fifth of his class and not a particularly happy fellow and not, I weighed 225 pounds when I graduated high school.
00:42:14
Speaker
It was really easy to pick on the fat kid. I had nowhere else to go. The Air Force, the Marines, the Navy wouldn't take me, so I ended up being in the Coast Guard. I was in the Coast Guard with 60 other people from all over the country.
00:42:34
Speaker
pretty much stuck in a small section of Pittsburgh, went to the same schools as all these other kids in my neighborhood. And suddenly, there I was with kids from Alabama and Georgia and California. It was really quite interesting. It was like going around the world. It was just so interesting to be with so many different people.
00:43:02
Speaker
And as we went through the basic physical training, I began to lose weight. Six months later, when I got out of boot camp, I had lost 60 pounds. But during that time, after 13 or 14 weeks, we had the opportunity to go home for a few days if, in fact, we could climb a 50-foot rope.
00:43:26
Speaker
And I was very confident. I'd lost weight. I could do as many push-ups as you wanted me to do. I thought that I had finally achieved something really significant. And so we all kind of gathered in an aircraft hangar and the ropes were hanging 50 feet down.
00:43:42
Speaker
There were a few knots in the rope, but not a lot because as you know, we coast guardsmen, at least back then, we were considered the shallow water sailors, but we also had to make sure that we had the power and the strength to board enemy vessels. And so the big test was, can we climb the rope? And I jumped on that rope after the whistle was blown and I climbed
00:44:07
Speaker
quickly. I felt so strong and so good and so confident and about three quarters of the way up. I've lost all of my strength and all of my will to move forward. And while all of my other people, all 59 people in that company climbed that rope, I slowly, embarrassingly slid down that rope and landed on the ground.
00:44:34
Speaker
And it was one of the most humiliating moments, at least in my young life. And that made me think, that kind of changed my perspective about everything. All those other guys could climb the rope, some heavier than me. And I had lost all this weight and I felt really good and I couldn't get up that damn rope. For the next three or four or five weeks, I was stuck on our base.
00:44:58
Speaker
And I worked my rear end off to get myself in really terrific shape and to focus as deeply as I could on that rope and how I was going to get myself up to the rope, to the top of that rope, and achieve what I knew I could achieve and what all these other guys did much more easily than me.
00:45:20
Speaker
And when I had the next opportunity, I absolutely, positively skittered up that rope. And I got to the top, I went back down again, and I skittered all the way up the second time. And it was a really triumphant moment, a magic moment in my life. And I learned at that point that sometimes you had to try
00:45:43
Speaker
You had to never give up and you had to try as hard as you possibly could and to focus on this idea first of the rope and later on, Brendan, about writing essays and writing book. You had to focus and commit and stay as centered as you possibly could on whatever your objective was. And so whenever I felt a challenge after that, all the way through life,
00:46:10
Speaker
Even when I turned 70, I thought about this rope and the test that I took and how I achieved that goal. It's been a metaphor for me for my whole life that no matter how hard and challenging and difficult something could be, I at 18 years old climbed that rope and made it to the top, even though it required for me much more effort than it did from lots of other people.
00:46:40
Speaker
Yeah, and I love that you said a magical moment. That's something I wrote down as it reflects some reading Nick Adams stories and just what it's like to be really in the pocket of writing and when you're just grinding, when you're in the rope test of writing something that you know is good and you're starting to get things to sing.
00:47:04
Speaker
And then there's also that moment too where you're speaking with one of your buddies, his last name is Laird or maybe that was his first name, Laird. And he referred to you as a college guy and as someone who couldn't get into school and that was something that was deeply affecting for you as a young person to hear that, to be thought of as academic or scholarly or literary. That must've been a pretty magical moment too when you're a 19 year old kid.
00:47:34
Speaker
It was indeed. And I felt so bad about myself all the way through high school. And then I'm with all these guys, and they're all so different than me. And I tried to be who I was when Laird just wasn't a guy in my company. He had a couple of years, I think, at Princeton before he decided to go into the military. And when he said,
00:48:02
Speaker
We were talking about some of the people in our company and not talking a lot about what they may know about the world. And then Laird said to me, well, listen, good kid, you're a college guy. You should know all this stuff. And I thought that was really quite amazing, this kid then 19 who knew nothing, who absolutely knew nothing could have been perceived in that way.
00:48:28
Speaker
We all have these magic moments in our lives. We could probably sit down and think about the 10 things that we remember that either changed our lives or that changed our lives, maybe not all for the better, but that really made a difference in our lives.
00:48:47
Speaker
The teacher you had when you were going to night school when you had you had written something and he said that this is well written you ought to think about being a writer i mean that's a that's one of those tentpole moments in in a writer's in a young writer's life were like oh.
00:49:02
Speaker
I've got some chops and maybe if I put in a similar degree of rigor that maybe I can make it go for this and you can be alongside a lot of your heroes on those bookshelves. So that must have been incredible too, to just hear that validation. It was. It's one thing to look for validation. I think I'll write this or I think I'll do this and hopefully someone will say, I just wrote it because it was an assignment.
00:49:29
Speaker
and it never occurred to me that it would go any further than just an assignment. And when he said that, I thought, that just kind of rang my bell. There I was. I was reading a lot of books and I cared about what I was reading and I thought a lot about the authors I was reading, but suddenly he kind of allowed me to turn my corner. I had no idea what I was doing in freshman English or what I was doing at the university at that time. I just
00:49:58
Speaker
was able to get in after the military. And then this guy said to me, you've got to be a writer. And I thought, why not? Gee whiz. It's something that I really love to do.
00:50:12
Speaker
And at that point on, from that point, it was maybe not a straight line, but it was the bottom of the rope. And I decided that I was going to continue to climb that rope as high as I could as a writer.
00:50:31
Speaker
And I love to in the moment when you're getting all juiced up for the for the story that falls through the the menachim story and of course he's exposed as you know as a fraud in this thing that you thought was going to be like the the apex book of your career it falls through
00:50:51
Speaker
And you write at a point that things weren't coming out, but it wasn't because you were blocked. It was because you felt beaten. So going back to falling off the rope, you fell off a rope there and out of your control.
Overcoming Setbacks
00:51:07
Speaker
How did you pick yourself up after feeling so beaten when you had what you thought was the perfect story in the palm of your hand? Yeah, I had the perfect story. And I had, if you recall in the book,
00:51:20
Speaker
It was the first I had published by that time. I don't know, 10 books, something like that. But it was the first time I had ever had what we call in the publishing business an auction. So many editors were interested in this book.
00:51:33
Speaker
And the bidding went on for eight days. I was incredibly excited. And I thought, this is it. All of my books have been well reviewed more or less. And some have sold some respectable amount of copies. My life as a writer has been okay, but this is it. This is what I had been waiting for. It was a perfect subject. The subject was,
00:51:59
Speaker
the story of a heroic rabbi whose name was Menachem Ullis, who was known far and wide, known in the New York Times, Washington Post, Jerusalem Post, CBS, NBC. He was really famous.
00:52:15
Speaker
as the Torah hunter. And this guy would go around the world seeking Torahs that were desecrated by the Nazis during the Second World War and stolen and hidden away by the Russians after the war. And he would get those Torahs. He was a rabbi who was a sofer, so sofers write and make
00:52:38
Speaker
make Torres kosher, repair. It was just, and he promised me, after I did some things for him, we became close and he promised me that I could have his story.
00:52:52
Speaker
I wrote this book proposal and as I said, it was auctioned off. I was so excited. I thought this was not only a story that would make me some money and it was a story that would maybe bring me back to
00:53:11
Speaker
my Hebraic roots, this rabbi who was such a good, honest, hard-working man. It was a story about a hero who sacrificed himself. He got no money for any of this, allegedly, and I thought it was just the perfect story, and so did those many publishers who
00:53:30
Speaker
who bid on the story. I'm not going to tell you exactly what happened in the book, but it turned out to be after a couple of years of devoting a lot of time and energy and passion and belief, it turned out to be a scam. He did not do exactly what he was a fraud, and I was devastated. You asked me how I got through it.
00:53:56
Speaker
Well, first there was wine, and then there was vodka, and then there was spending tons of time alone by myself at home trying to figure out how to get through it. I watched tons of Law & Order. I'm a Law & Order addict anyway, but I watched a lot of TV and just tried to kind of figure out
00:54:22
Speaker
how I was going to get past this. I really spent months and years trying to recast the book in all kinds of different ways because I thought that the fact that he fooled everyone, he fooled the New York Times, he fooled everyone, I thought that it was a better story now than it was before when the rabbi was a hero. But I was one of the few people who thought that.
00:54:48
Speaker
And it took me a long time to get over it. And it's funny that you asked me this today because earlier this day I had a long talk with a friend exactly about whether I ever did get over this incredible disappointment. For a writer, of course, we have our children, we have our kids and our loved ones, but we're never happy unless we have a book.
00:55:17
Speaker
And if you're a nonfiction writer, you're searching for a subject to write a book about. If you're a poet or you are a fiction writer, you are constantly writing something that someday might turn into a book. I was suddenly, I'd given so much of myself to this book, and I was suddenly without a book and so devastated that I didn't even want to start to think about any other book for a long time.
00:55:45
Speaker
And speaking to the resilience that you needed to bounce back from that, I love the Humphrey Trevelyan quote that you cite. I believe he's writing about goth. An artist must never grow complacent, never be content with life, and always demand the impossible not to impede efforts or ambitions or dreams. And that to me just speaks of just the boxer getting up off the mat and saying, all right, got to get my punches back in.
00:56:14
Speaker
You're a writer. It's like I got to get my book back Yeah, and and and gee, that's a nice that that's it's a nice way you put that friend and We writers are on the map all the time the public world is not nice. It's not a nice world you know, I mean sometimes we have success and sometimes we don't and
00:56:35
Speaker
But so often we deserve success and don't get it. It's a doggy dog kind of world. And it's not that publishers aren't nice and that editors can't be good. But it's a tough business. And we are, as writers, rejected many, many more times than we are accepted. And it's hard to get off the mat every single time, especially when you give all you have, you give everything.
00:57:03
Speaker
to whatever it is you're writing and you work on it as hard as you possibly can until you think you know it's right and you have confidence and faith in it.
00:57:13
Speaker
and an incredible amount of hope, and then you send it off to whomever you want to send it off to. They sometimes treat it with not a lot of respect or understanding, perhaps because that's the way the business is and perhaps because they're inundated with thousands of other stories, but it's just your story that you're thinking about all the time and it hurts so much when you get it back. And you do feel like in many respects that you've taken a punch
00:57:43
Speaker
and you are on the ground for a little bit until you start writing another story or figure out how to rewrite this one and so you're getting up off that mat all the time and going at it again and it's tiring and it makes you weary and the challenge is to keep up your spirit and your confidence for as long as you can.
00:58:04
Speaker
And there's a, there's another great moment in the book too, where I really related to this from a project I did several years ago. And when I ran into my, my source again, a few years after that, and like you wrote and then you put friends in quote, and you say, I put this in quotes because the reality is when you jump in and out of people's lives, those friendships last only as long as the research and writing. And then even if you try hard to keep in touch, they invariably fade away.
00:58:34
Speaker
That hit me really hard because I just – I was immersed with this one particular guy for a year. And then when I saw him years later, it just – and keeping in touch, it just kind of dissolved. And you always have to have some sort of wall between the source and the writer, but you do develop these friendships. And then when it invariably – or yeah, when it dissolves, it's –
00:58:58
Speaker
it kind of leaves this emptiness and that it just that passage you wrote it really it really struck me and I I just wonder like you know your experience with that too because it sounds like you've had a few of those I had I worked really hard to when I do my immersion work
00:59:14
Speaker
I really work really hard to connect with the people about whom I'm writing. Yes, at a safe distance, but, and you become a part, if you're really, if you're like a method actor in some respects, and you become a part of whatever it is, whatever world you're writing about.
00:59:31
Speaker
And you may not be an integral part. I never did any significant surgery as I hung out for four or five years with organ transplant surgeons. But you become a part of their lives and their world.
00:59:46
Speaker
And you know, after a while, that they're in jokes. You know who their families are, their wives, their children. You know the challenges they have to face to get published or to save lives, whatever it is. And you're very much a part of that milieu. And then you finish the book.
01:00:08
Speaker
and you send them a copy and they may well send stuff back, nice words back to you. But when the book is over, when that book is done, they're going to go on with the same life they were leaving about which you wrote. But you're not, Brendan, you are not. You're going and you're looking, maybe have probably already found another world to immerse yourself in.
01:00:35
Speaker
and new friends to make and new connections and ideas to learn.
01:00:40
Speaker
And you leave that world way behind, the world of your other book way behind. And you have to really start all over again, living in a different milieu, which in fact is going back to what I was talking about before, why a small support system is so incredibly important. Because many of us in our lives, we make work friends. But writers, unless you're teaching at a university,
01:01:06
Speaker
Writers don't make work friends. Immersion people make their work friends is the book that they're writing and then you fade away and it's all gone and the book is still there and people are still reading it and you're still talking about it but the real people who appear in the book have faded away and it's lonely especially when, as you just said, you run into those folks and
01:01:33
Speaker
And all you can do is say something that you learned five years ago. So yeah, it's such fun and so wonderful to be able to immerse yourself to become part of someone else's world and to become an intimate part of the world. And it's really satisfying and challenging to be able to do that when you can do it right.
01:02:02
Speaker
But the better the experience is, the more emptiness that comes when that experience is over. For sure. Well, Lee, I want to be mindful of your time. This was a wonderful conversation. It's such a great time to catch up, and what a great excuse to do it with this wonderful memoir you've written.
01:02:22
Speaker
And I just, as always, I look forward to whatever's got your name attached to it coming down the pipe. And this memoir was no exception to that. And I can't wait for what you come up with next. So just thanks so much for the work and thanks for carving out time to come on the show. Let's maybe do this again a little more frequently than every four years. Well, as I said to you when we first started talking, I really admire the work you have done with this podcast. And it's really been important for the genre.
01:02:49
Speaker
to kind of introduce new writers and establish writers and editors and to spread the word because creative nonfiction is not only the
Contribution to Creative Nonfiction
01:03:03
Speaker
fastest growing genre in the academy and in the publishing world, it's going to be the genre that does overtake all others. You're making that, you're helping to make that happen.
01:03:26
Speaker
Isn't that great? I love that guy. Books are great. Read several of them. Latest one, my last 8,000 days published by the University of Georgia Press. Thanks also to the Writers Co-op Podcast for promotional support. I've spoken with Wudan Yan in the past on this show earlier this year. And Jenny Gridders will be on in February 2021. They're doing generous work with that podcast. Tell them I sent you.
01:03:55
Speaker
I'll validate your parking. This show was produced, edited, and everything by me, Brendan O'Mara, as part of Exit 3 Media. Got a story to tell? Take Exit 3.
01:04:08
Speaker
and also head over to brenthedomare.com for show notes to this episode and all the other ones so you can check out some cool links and the like and also subscribe to the free monthly newsletter where I give out book recommendations, enter you in book raffles, link up to cool articles,
01:04:27
Speaker
share podcast news and you get a secret decoder ring that gets you access to the monthly Zoom happy hour where we just talk about your work. It's fun. The last two were really fun and I think it's going to gain a little bit of steam for the newsletter community. It's a big ask, but once a month, no spam. Can't beat it.
01:04:53
Speaker
So here's that little riff on finding inspiration in the weirdest places. The lid to my barbecue sauce said, make do with what you got. That has echoes of if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with, whoever sung that song, I can't remember. But I took it in different directions.
01:05:16
Speaker
Listen, we all have a certain amount of innate ability. Some of you have more. Some people like me have a fuck ton less. But at some point on your journey, you have to access who you are. Find out who you are. Come to grips with who you are. We don't need another Mary Carr or John Jeremiah Sullivan, George Saunders, or Elizabeth Gilbert. We need you.
01:05:45
Speaker
This isn't to say there's no room for improvement in that you should just coast where you are. But there's no sense in trying to be a fire baller if all you have is 75 mile an hour cheese. Gotta paint the corners, gotta paint the black if you're gonna bring that shit.
01:06:01
Speaker
For better or worse, I've kind of found a good groove of punk rock pros that's palm muted and a bit pockmarked from smallpox. In NASCAR, there are these races with restrictor plates. They keep the engines from hitting a certain speed on the super speedways.
01:06:20
Speaker
it's reductive but you catch the drift and I know with my my work sometimes I want to take off the the plate and let it rip and show the pyrotechnics of my vast skill of writing and bringing color to the page but as I've come to learn after writing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of words
01:06:42
Speaker
It's not natural for me. It's posing. It's trying to be somebody else. It's like I'm lip syncing someone else's song. It gets me into trouble. Make do with what you got. What's the moral of the story? Listen to your barbecue sauce.
01:07:04
Speaker
Like I said before, early in the show, get used to me yapping about being a Patreon member. I'd hate for you and the other writers submitting work to miss out on an audience. This isn't about me, it's about building a bigger community to publish true audio stories. This is a publishing machine. You'll still always get the interviews for free, but now it's kind of like a printing press in a way.
01:07:33
Speaker
You don't just get exclusive access to that magazine, even at the tier one level of $4 a month. You get a whole lot more. You'll want to support writers and CNF-ers like yourself. It might be you one day in the magazine, and you'll want that support too, I imagine. Patreon.com slash CNF pod.
01:07:57
Speaker
Okay, so at long last, I think I got my wife to listen to the podcast.
01:08:04
Speaker
233 interviews, she hasn't listened to one. She was reluctant, but I asked her how she did it. Well, first there was wine, and then there was vodka, and then there was spending tons of time alone by myself at home trying to figure out how to get through it. We'll see you next week. Stay cool, CNFers. Stay cool forever. See ya!