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Episode 8—Maggie Messitt on Shi#y First Drafts and Making Documentaries on Paper
188 Plays10 years ago
Maggie Messitt is the author of The Rainy Season: Three Lives in the New South Africa. Messitt is a writer, reporter, author, teacher, student, dog owner, and super kayaker and we delve into her writing process, how she handles her notes, and her Bookshelf for the Apocalypse (a new segment to the Hashtag #CNF podcast). There's so much great stuff here (and more I want to revisit in a Part 2). You'll get plenty of wisdom from Messitt here. I hope you enjoy this re-re-birth of the podcast. I have a new microphone so hopefully this means better quality and more consistency as I speak with more practitioners of narrative nonfiction. For more show notes be sure to visit www.brendanomeara.com and subscribe to the podcast. It all starts with you. Thank you so much! Love, Brendan
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome to the hashtag CNF podcast. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara. My guest today is writer, reporter, author, teacher, and super kayaker Maggie Meset. Her new book, The Rainy Season, Three Lives in the New South Africa, published by Iowa Press, is out and you should buy one for yourself and for a friend. We talk a lot about process on this one. Rainy season, obviously.
00:00:35
Speaker
And we end the conversation with what I like to call the bookshelf for the apocalypse. What's that you say? You'll just have to listen. So without further ado, three, two, one, podcast.
Maggie's Journey and Balancing Roles
00:01:04
Speaker
Hi, Brendan.
00:01:05
Speaker
Hey, how's it going, Maggie? Good, how are you? Good, good. I don't know if you listened to the voicemail I just left, but microphone had a hiccup and now it appears to be working, everything's recording. So life has been really crazy for you the last year and a half, two years.
00:01:22
Speaker
obviously you've been you've been at the the phd program you've been putting the final touches on your on on the rainy season that comes out in a couple days officially and working on another book and now you're doing the whole book book tour virtual book tour stuff so like what's this been like the last couple years it's been both a roller coaster and an absolute gift
00:01:49
Speaker
I think that coming back from South Africa was a huge transition for me and so the PhD has really allowed me or given me a reason to sit still for a while and it allowed me to kind of pick up the rainy season again and put those finishing touches on and also read it with some distance, which was really great. But it has been a whirlwind. The PhD is an enormous amount of work.
00:02:18
Speaker
and trying to sort of maintain a relatively steady flow of publication. It's been really life-changing for me, but it's given me a time to sort of reflect on my writing and figure out, you know, this next book, which is a really complicated book for me and very different from the rainy season. And it's given me time to really do some close reading that I think
00:02:47
Speaker
So many of us feel like our lives are so busy that we can't actually sit down and read as much as I've read in the last three years. So I know that that has changed my writing a great deal. So yeah, you know, the last three years have been an absolute whirlwind for me. A really great one. But I still wake up every day really missing South Africa. So there's always that.
Teaching and Creativity
00:03:17
Speaker
how do you balance some of that critical reading with the fact that you're using a lot of that reading fatigue and grading papers and that because it's gotta be a hard balance to strike so that you're still feeding your fuel tank but also trying to give reasonable and critical feedback to people who are looking to become professional riders down the road.
00:03:47
Speaker
Yeah, well, I would say for the last three years I have felt like I've had three full-time jobs while running at the same time. One as an instructor at the university level and one trying to earn a living through freelance writing and editing and the third being a student, which is filled with coursework and reading and writing
00:04:13
Speaker
And unfortunately, when you have three, you don't do as well in all of them as you would really like. But I have sacrificed a lot of sleep in order to do it the best I can. I do think that when I'm teaching creative writing, it really fuels me in all the other parts. When I'm teaching things like composition, where there are required courses and the students aren't necessarily interested in becoming professional writers,
00:04:41
Speaker
is definitely much harder. Although I, you know, depending on the exact course that I'm teaching, I really enjoy teaching juniors. And I'm teaching an amazing course called Writing About Environmental Sustainability that has allowed me to bring in some really great works, creative works that are attacking environmental issues on the page. And it's really opened my eyes up to new possibilities for me in my writing.
00:05:12
Speaker
So the balance is super hard and I think it just means the sacrifice of sleep and it means the days that I'm not teaching and the summer months and winter months when I'm not teaching, I am super productive as much as I can be. So you find that teaching actually fuels your own creativity and creative energy in some ways, is that right?
00:05:40
Speaker
keep keeping creative writing yeah teaching other corporate
Revisiting 'The Rainy Season'
00:05:45
Speaker
now i would say that uh... i was driving a writer laughter self remaining left to pretty much that she had to uh... recognize that when she talked it was not possible to break and that when she recognized that and she just stopped trying she was at peak with that it's when we're constantly trying to do both
00:06:10
Speaker
And we're constantly upset with ourselves that we can't really meet that expectation. And I thought that that was really fair. And I do think that there's an element of that for me when I'm teaching things like composition. But last semester when I taught creative writing, I really was excited to write and was thinking about my own writing and everything that I was teaching and everything that I was reviewing for the students in my class.
00:06:40
Speaker
Yeah, there's a big difference when you're teaching creative writing because it's applicable to what you are doing or what you want to do every day with your own life. Right, and you talked about a moment ago about revisiting the rainy season, which was your Goucher MFA thesis, I believe, right? Yes, it was.
00:07:02
Speaker
and how you were able to revisit it and have that requisite distance. How important was that distance and how hard is it to sometimes be patient enough to allow the distance when you're scurrying, you're writing these things and you wanna get them published because it's in your bones and in your DNA. But getting back to the regular question which was,
00:07:29
Speaker
How important is that distance and how hard is it to be patient enough to allow for that distance? The patience is super important, but it doesn't mean it comes easily. I really struck out about this book for quite some time, particularly because a lot of the feedback asked me to put myself inside the book. But the book was never about me. There was no personal journey or narrative arc that really fit inside the stories that are inside the rainy season.
00:07:58
Speaker
uh... that's an entirely different book is really what people were looking for when they act to put me inside of it and i think that that actually that reaction is a common one because people think well this is the book that is that out by the united states and in order for u.s. readers too possibly want to go there they're going to need me to take them there
00:08:24
Speaker
I think I do take them there. I just think I don't take them there by me standing on the page. Right. Right. So it was all it was the long journey was partly because I insisted on not doing that. And and I'm happy that I stuck to my guns on that. I think the distance allowed me to edit in a different way than I could have edited a few years ago.
00:08:53
Speaker
uh... it book it's very much mackey twenty-something at the writer and uh... i needed to make sure that i would have to think that i allowed that to be the case but i didn't completely edit my twenty-something well and rewrite it to you know thirty six-year-old mackey and so i had to really honor writing at the time
00:09:21
Speaker
The distance allowed me to weave in some newer information that I know about the area that I didn't know at the time. And most importantly, it allowed me to write the afterwards. And I think that, you know, or the epilogue, I think that in a book like this,
00:09:47
Speaker
It's really important when you're following true stories to sort of tie up some loose ends that aren't naturally tied in real life within, you know, a year's time or even six years' time. So I was able last summer to spend some time talking to people there to be able to tie up some loose ends for readers. And it really, I think it was important for me and I think it improved the book.
Themes in 'The Rainy Season'
00:10:15
Speaker
It's funny that you said that some of the people who gave you notes felt like you needed to be in there to make it more relatable to an American audience. But I honestly felt that it was a very American-themed story. And so it felt very... I didn't need an American in the forefront, per se, because so much of what your main characters are dealing with are
00:10:41
Speaker
our modern American dreamy problems of just trying to get a toehold in this world and make something of yourself. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I think that there are so many common themes in this book that are really universal. Issues of poverty and the wide gap between rich and the poor and people just trying to secure opportunity for their families and trying to gain
00:11:11
Speaker
access to resources and just have a healthy, happy life in really simple terms. And I think that these are universal. I don't think you need me to hold your hand throughout even though, you know, I'm there. I'm just not on the page.
00:11:30
Speaker
Yeah, the first-person pronoun doesn't always have to be there for an author's presence to be there. You guide the reader through which to almost all of your readers will be a somewhat foreign land. But as you already said, it's very universal in just the individual's plight to make a life for themselves. And I think you accomplished that very well.
Writing Process and Character Selection
00:11:54
Speaker
Thank you.
00:11:56
Speaker
I really, this book is, means a lot for me, and I think that this book, this book really showed me how to write book length, long form, and I felt very lucky for the opportunity, but it's one of those books that, no matter what, I was going to wait until it found the right home, a publisher that was really gonna support it for what it was, and I'm really thankful for that.
00:12:24
Speaker
So what exactly did the process of writing this book teach you about writing something that was clearly longer than magazine length and novella type length? What did you learn to be able to sustain something over 50,000, 60,000 words or whatever the word count ended up being? Well, I actually think that it started less with the writing of it and more of
00:12:54
Speaker
learning how to report for that length. And, you know, that's something that you learn by doing. And I remember in the early phases being out there every day and recording and thinking I have no idea what these stories are going to be. I've chosen these three people. I have a general idea.
00:13:17
Speaker
of what their stories are going to be, but I have to wait until they unfold. And I know that the main story line or the main narrative arc for each of them will sort of present themselves and then I'll be able to focus on that. But for a while, it was really overwhelming because I would come home at the end of the day and I had notes on everything.
00:13:42
Speaker
And I had a recorder at my hip at all times, and I had a camera with me often. But I was gathering without any idea what I was gathering for, which meant I had to get everything. Because once I narrowed down, I needed to go back and figure out what I had gathered was applicable. And that was super overwhelming, because I felt like, I should be writing. I should be writing.
00:14:11
Speaker
you know at the time i was working with com french uh... with my first semester in my mf a and i remember saying to him i feel really bad i feel like it should be getting a chapter today i don't know what to write and i've got it for one too many times that though that right a chapter for me and i wrote something and it was awful and i had no idea what i was doing uh... in terms of the story yet and so it taught me that i just had to be really patient
00:14:41
Speaker
and I had to allow myself to let the story play out and trust that something was going to come to the surface. That said, I kind of, in that time, created my own writing process when working on something that's so long-term because I did feel the desperate need to write even though I couldn't sit and write chapters.
00:15:08
Speaker
So I started doing these things that I call note drafts, or story drafts, that I would come home at the end of the day and I had notebooks filled with things from whoever I was hanging out with and my types of images. And I would sit down and I would just write. And a lot of them were in first person. And they were just sort of, you know, I've never really been
00:15:37
Speaker
a diary person or a journal person, but they kind of were my journaling of the reporting process and everything that I saw and I experienced. And sometimes after writing those, they'd be anywhere between 20 to 40 pages. I was doing that every day. And it allowed me to sort of have that sweet, fresh detail that maybe even didn't hit my notebook.
00:16:05
Speaker
but there's only so much that you can actually get down. And it allowed me to ask myself, it allowed me to share with myself personal reactions to things and notes. With so much of the book, I was able to excerpt out of those. And I really ended up with hundreds and hundreds of pages. And with that,
00:16:35
Speaker
I then started the book from scratch. And I think that that's sort of my process. That's very similar to the process that I'm going into in my second book. So I work on these note drafts and write an insane number of pages with no real intention for what they're going to become.
00:17:00
Speaker
Once I know the story, I have all of this material to work with and it feels so much easier and it allowed me to then storyboard and you know, think more about construction and craft because I have so much material. It seems like that's your way of thinking through and meditating over the material. A lot of people will sometimes they'll take their notes or they'll wake up and they'll
00:17:30
Speaker
they'll go for a long walk or something. And in some ways your long walk is these note drafts and story drafts. It allows you to get into a, feel a greater sense of connection to all the reporting you're doing so you can make better sense of it when you're actually ready to craft your piece, correct? Yeah, that's absolutely it. Although I still am also the long walker and I usually, when I'm in the sort of
00:17:57
Speaker
depth of the writing process. I had a big baker, a lot of bread and a lot of things that I couldn't consume all on my own, but those are part of the time period when I'm doing just that. I'm thinking, I think the difference between that time period and actually writing these note drafts is how much of those note drafts went straight into the book is crazy. It just, you know, so I would not have had that material if I just
00:18:26
Speaker
if I just sort of had that, those thoughts and those ideas in my head, it was really critical to the writing in the book. Did you ever get to reach a point where you thought that the, was there ever a point where you thought that these note drafts were at any, were taking away from your energy to write the, what would end up being the book, or did you just see it as an investment in your overall process of the work to be?
00:18:57
Speaker
I thought it was an investment, but I also, once I knew what the stories actually were, what I was following for each character, then those note drafts were significantly more focused, obviously, on those things. And so I would say that the second half of my recording, those note drafts were early versions of chapters.
00:19:24
Speaker
So they really played nothing but a positive role in my writing process. So now you were doing all your reporting and you weren't entirely sure what you had and there wasn't a sort of an inherent structure to it. You're following these people and you don't know what's going to happen. So what was
00:19:50
Speaker
What was your mindset and your headspace as you're doing this reporting? Not knowing if you're going to have a concrete story to write about. You could end up doing all this reporting and realize you could have dozens upon dozens and hundreds of pages of notes, but ultimately nothing with narrative drive. Yeah, well, I knew that there was a possibility I could invest months and it was only going to be a
00:20:19
Speaker
you know lovely feature p but ultimately you know we all have tensions in our life and we all have optical and though my job was to be on the lookout for the optical that i was not interested in but that i felt were representative of the country at the time and the community at the time
00:20:46
Speaker
And so I had spent time with a number of people before deciding that these three were the ones I was going to follow. So I had a general idea. I had a reason behind my selection. But that didn't mean that anything interesting was going to happen. And so it was really just about allowing myself to hang out with them enough until I really found something that
00:21:15
Speaker
I felt like was a story that deserved to be on the page. And Toko is such a vibrant character that there were so many different points of tension or conflict that I could have focused on. And so, you know, you often have these characters that could really, she could have really filled an entire book on her own. And, but she really served
00:21:42
Speaker
well for the rest of the story is because Regina's conflict is often very quiet and very internal, but equally important. And so the two of them next to one another allow you to learn so much. And then, you know, with the third, with Demke, I think that you get a really good balance of issues, and issues that sometimes all of them are facing. But I couldn't have predicted what was going to happen.
00:22:12
Speaker
I think that once you see it, though, you know it. I knew right away that Toko was a Shabine queen, which is sort of a backdoor legal hub, and that she was a traditional healer, a sengoma. And I knew that she wanted to change from the Shabine to a legalized tavern. So I knew right away we had something to follow with that.
00:22:41
Speaker
And so, you know, obviously I could focus on that. The same goes for the other two.
Sharing Creative Processes
00:22:46
Speaker
I knew that there was something to follow, but there are secondary storylines that sort of pop up that make their stories so much more complex and layered. And it's those secondary stories that really cross all of their stories, which is really valuable. And it also allowed me, because it's sort of a multi-threaded narrative,
00:23:10
Speaker
it allowed me to let you learn about something in one person's story so that when the next person deals with it in their story, we already sort of see it from another point of view. And what was the reasoning or your selection process, if you will, of choosing your three main characters for this? And maybe how many others had you considered before you finally settled on the three?
00:23:39
Speaker
Well, the first character that I chose was Regina. And that was partly because I had already written short profiles on the women at Mapusha. And initially, when I was going to write this book, I had considered just writing a book about the women of Mapusha. But they weren't representative enough, that group of the community. And so they were a good representation of a sector of the community, but not the whole community.
00:24:09
Speaker
So I had already decided that I was going to include Regina, which meant that I was spending a lot of time looking for two additional people. And I started off by spending just half days or single days with people, sometimes just a few hours, and just talking to them, just sort of porch sitting or hanging out with them wherever they work or standing in government grant lines with them and just talking.
00:24:38
Speaker
letting them tell me their story and asking them some simple questions just to kind of understand who they were and what possible, you know, journeys they were taking right now, points of conflict, things like that. And I slowly narrowed them down. I don't know. I would have to go back and look in my notebooks, but I would say that I at least followed 30 people in the beginning and then
00:25:08
Speaker
started narrowing down from there. And sometimes I would spend a couple days with people if I felt like they were good in terms of representing the community. Ultimately, I chose these three because they gave me a good balance in both sort of character vibrancy and age and situation. And also, you know, I chose Toko second. And I felt like Toko gave me a really good balance because
00:25:37
Speaker
Regina is a devout Catholic and most of her story takes place on the Catholic mission. And so I really, it was important to me to select someone in the community that wasn't somebody that was a member of a Catholic or a Christian church, someone that was more traditional. And so,
00:26:01
Speaker
traditional healer or a sangoma really represented the cultural or traditional side of the community. But she also represented this extremely entrepreneurial component of New South Africa. However, I followed a lot of men really hoping that I would find a man that could sort of counterbalance the stories of Toko and Regina, particularly the
00:26:31
Speaker
male stories inside their story. And I ultimately chose Dunkey because I felt like he was such a positive young man. He wasn't the best student in class, but he was really one of the hardest working. And he had real aspirations. He also had his own sort of personal conflict with men in the community and his feelings about men
00:26:57
Speaker
And so my hope was through following him that you could have a better understanding of the men in the community and sort of see how the men in Regina and Toko's stories become who they are.
00:27:13
Speaker
When you were writing your note drafts and story drafts, have you ever given thought to sharing those as kind of a writer, a reader's companion, almost like on your website or a blog? These are kind of like a companion piece to almost like a DVD extras to what the rainy season ended up being. Have you given that any thought? I have, you know.
00:27:41
Speaker
It's such a big part of my process, and those pages are, you know, at the time, I've gone through so many computers since then, and so, at the time, I used to print them out, and I would write on them, and they're absolutely, sort of, they're terribly messy. Coffee stains all over them, which, of course, if I scan them all, would be really interesting. Oh, yeah, you should take pictures of them. That stuff looks really cool. Yeah. You know, I haven't thought about it.
00:28:11
Speaker
I think that it's such a personal part of my process. It's a place where I was also able to sort of work out my own personal conflict with some of the issues. And it's a place where, you know, I sort of insert a lot of, I sort of jump down the rabbit hole of writing about
00:28:37
Speaker
South African history and the places. And so it would be super interesting for someone to go through it. I don't know. It's a great idea. I haven't really thought about it. I think that I have a really difficult time giving those things up. Maybe someone
Creative Process and Audience Connection
00:28:50
Speaker
could convince me one day.
00:28:51
Speaker
Yeah, I really think in a lot of ways we're in this age of process. Austin Kleon's book, Show Your Work, is sort of the capstone of it, of ULA. It really shows you the capacity of
00:29:09
Speaker
selling your work through showing the work that goes into it and the steps we take to create a piece of art, whatever that is. So I think Instagramming pictures of coffee stain manuscripts that you've printed out and scribbled all over is just, I think it allows people to see the work behind a piece of art, which a lot of people don't understand or just don't realize.
00:29:37
Speaker
just the slog it is to put out a book or a painting or fill in the blank. So I think sometimes showing that is a great way of showing or humanizing the whole process. I know I feel a greater connection to the creator and I want to buy their work because I've seen the work they've put into it.
00:30:02
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you on that. I'm sort of an obsessive when it comes to process. This book that I'm currently working on is, you know, the entire book actually is about process. And so, and I'm, unfortunately for me, it was really difficult for me to decide this, but I'm ultimately in the next book so that you can see the process.
00:30:29
Speaker
It's almost like sort of flipping things inside out and sort of showing you the themes of everything. And so, you know, I feel really strongly that that book in particular is really important to share so much of the process. And I'm constantly thinking about ways to share the process of putting it together, even though those things won't necessarily all be in the book.
00:30:57
Speaker
So I really agree with you. I think that the process is just as fascinating as the final product.
00:31:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think piggybacking on the whole process thing, I think people who can successfully make or sell the story behind the story do really well. A perfect example of that is Richard Linklater's Boyhood. Almost everyone, the only thing they say is, well, this movie took 12 years to make. And that was in itself bigger than the actual movie.
00:31:31
Speaker
So, in a lot of ways, the process and the story behind that story is ultimately what sold it to the public.
Writing Routines and Habits
00:31:38
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, you're right. So, but what is some of your daily process, your morning routine? Well, it differs greatly depending on the stage I'm in, in the writing process. If I am really sort of out of the research process and into
00:31:59
Speaker
actually sitting down and writing chapters or even if I'm working on a piece or a shorter piece. If I'm in a really good place then I'm actually up at 4 a.m. I love to write in the middle of the dark when my phone is not going to be ringing and student emails are not going to come in although being here has
00:32:23
Speaker
to me that student emails still come in at 4am. That surprises me. Yeah. But I wake up and sort of groggily come downstairs, get myself my little cup of espresso, go back upstairs and I sit down at my desk and just write until 7 or 8am and
00:32:46
Speaker
it's when i get my best writing done and um... and it makes me feel like whatever i feel the right my day with perfectly fine especially when in teaching uh... now that it absolutely changed over time when i was younger i wrote in the middle of it i would start at you know ten o'clock at night right till two or three in the morning
00:33:10
Speaker
I have attempted to do that a lot in the last couple years, and I just can't. So I know that that is showing my age. But I really, I need sort of a quiet time and quiet space. That said, you know, when I'm writing on deadline, things like that, my writing process is wherever it is and, you know, figure out a way no matter what the distractions are. But that's my utopia. And when I met, you know, residencies and things like that,
00:33:39
Speaker
I am the first one to arrive, and it's great. You know, pitch black, you can get, you know, maybe two hours of writing in before the sun starts to come up, go get myself a second cup of coffee. And it's also sort of a time that my brain, when I sit down, is just a blank slate. So I'm not thinking about anything else. I'm just waking up and starting whatever it is my task is that day. I'm very visual in my process.
00:34:09
Speaker
So in that time, whether I'm sitting at the computer and writing or I'm sitting in a notebook and writing, I consider that part of the writing time as much as I consider me standing in the middle of my writing room, you know, working on the wall storyboarding or, you know, sort of outlining
00:34:33
Speaker
uh... entire piece or what not i i really that visual part for me it's really important uh... and it's one of the reasons why i have to have it that they needed writing eight that i can over wall but it's it's great to you you can almost nobody i know has his
00:34:56
Speaker
full of schedule as you do, yet you always, because you're a pro, you find the time to do your work and whether that's at four in the morning, five in the morning and you work until you have to change gears.
00:35:11
Speaker
One of my biggest pet peeves is where you see something in somebody like Twitter profile or anything and it says aspiring writer. I hate that term so much. It's like you either are or you aren't and you find the time to do it or you don't. I hate that it just grates at me. Does that ever get on your nerves that
00:35:30
Speaker
You know, people who they really, they say they want to be a writer but they just don't sit down and find one hour a day or a half hour a day or the bus ride or the train ride just to get down a couple hundred words or something just to take the aspiring out of that whole phrase. Yeah, I think, you know, writing is hard. And I think that there are certain times in our life that writing is easier than others. I know that when I'm working on a book
00:36:00
Speaker
I am in my best place. And so that also tells me something about who I am as a writer. But I also recognize that there are times in my life when I haven't been able to write at all. And I think that that's okay. I think that I have also gone through periods where I just couldn't call myself a writer.
00:36:25
Speaker
And I've only slowly been comfortable with the term writer, partly because when you're at a dinner party and you say you're a writer, people just roll their eyes half the time. And they ask, you know, where have I seen you? And for a bulk of my life, there were a lot of people that weren't reading the things, you know, they wouldn't know the places that I was publishing in. And so I think that it's a scary, uncomfortable thing for people to call themselves writers, depending on the type of writing that they're doing.
00:36:55
Speaker
If they're journalists, then maybe they'll call themselves a journalist long before they'll call themselves a writer. So I don't know. I think that I definitely believe there are a lot of people who want to be in the arts, whether that's through writing or any sort of visual art, who for their life will call themselves the firing, and yet maybe they only write a couple days a year.
00:37:22
Speaker
and so that's a hobby but I do think that there are also some people who have one book in them and that's all they've got and that's all they want to do and so you know the real question is does that make you a writer? I think it makes you a writer it just means that you aren't a full-time writer so you know it's complicated for me I think that you know I look at the last year for myself and
00:37:52
Speaker
I, out of the last three years, I've written the least in the last year. I've written a number of shorter pieces in terms of, you know, being published. But for my book, it's been a complicated time for me, both with a book coming out and working on a book that had some very difficult terms. And so I've written significantly less. You know, that's why I say the 4 a.m. is ideal. So my first two years in my Ph.D., I was able to stick to that 4 a.m.
00:38:20
Speaker
The last year, it's been hard for me. I'd probably say that I have been able to actually grasp the, I just need to snag a half hour of writing and feel okay if I can snag that half hour of writing. And I've also had to become comfortable with
00:38:39
Speaker
having a rough time writing something for the first time in my life. And that's partly because what I'm working on right now is personal. And it's so much harder for me to write. Oh my goodness, this might be the last book that I ever include myself in because it is so difficult. So I've had to allow myself to say, if you sit down for two hours and you're only actually able to get something set on the page for a half hour of that, that is still a success.
00:39:07
Speaker
So, you know, I think that we change depending on what we're working on. But yeah, I think there are a lot of aspiring writers out there. Yeah, I guess what I what I feel like the aspiring part is it's someone who's just simply not willing to put in the work.
Embracing Imperfection in Writing
00:39:26
Speaker
They want the they want the quote unquote accolades of having written without actually
00:39:33
Speaker
sitting or standing in place and just hammering out a crappy first draft. It's fine as long as you're doing something. It's that wannabe element of it that I find irritating and kind of needy. That's just personal preference, I guess. It's just one of those deals that just, it rubs me raw. But maybe it's the people who are out there grinding every day that
00:40:03
Speaker
I appreciate the people who are actually out there doing it, whether they're publishing or not. That's fine, but if you want to do it, just get words on the page. It's good to see someone with as busy a schedule as someone like you.
00:40:18
Speaker
And you're still, you're getting up before the sun's up and before the world is throwing stuff at your brain and you're just getting your work done. And that's, I think, inspiring for a lot of people who want to take that aspiring tag off and just be a pro about it, whether they publish or not. I appreciate that. I do want to say, though, that my writing, my early drafts I've recognized are different than a lot of others.
00:40:48
Speaker
really embrace the shitty first draft. And I think that there are too many writers that feel like it's supposed to be perfect on the page when they first sit down and write. And too many people who are trying to sort of carry on this myth, this rhetoric around, you know,
00:41:14
Speaker
great writers get it on the page you know beautifully early on and that it certainly not me and i think that because i'd recognize that that copy because i'm okay with shitty first draft shitty second draft uh... that in my case third fourth and fifth well i think that you know prior to working on that current project i think that
00:41:40
Speaker
that shitty first draft is what's really sort of gotten me through a lot because I was not inhibited by the blank page. I just wrote, right, because there's always more time for drafting. And you can't draft and you can't edit unless you have material to work with. And so when I'm teaching, and it's always a good reminder for me, when I'm teaching creative writing, I am pushing and pushing and pushing my students to embrace the shitty first draft.
00:42:10
Speaker
And I do exercises with them, and I sometimes sort of make them clock in at a certain time, write something, and send me exactly what they wrote in that hour and a half. Because that is the bare-bones shitty first draft. Just get it down, and then we have something to work with, something to talk about, something to storyboard and think about. And I think that too many people don't want to do that.
00:42:40
Speaker
Or, you know, I have certainly been accused of bringing drafts to writing workshops in the Ph.D. program that others, you know, would consider too early. But that's the stage I really want to talk to people about things because I can go home and make things beautiful. I can go home and
00:43:01
Speaker
you know and retract but i really want to have conversation about story and about character that i need to have earlier in the process and i have a point where i'm okay and comfortable with letting you see me at the sort of like it you know terrible page that maybe ten years ago i wouldn't have been a couple it does take a certain measure of of confidence
00:43:28
Speaker
uh... in your own ability to show the vulnerability of those shitty first drafts and second third and fourth and i think that makes it all the more important these days especially if you're in a position of relative influence to show some of that process but i think you can break down a lot of people's block when you show it listen this is
00:43:52
Speaker
This isn't easy. Pick your writer, whoever it is, whether it's some of the old American expats or fill in the blank.
00:44:03
Speaker
they all struggled but a lot of people pick up their pick up their work and they see this just these beautifully structured stories and prose and they think wow jeez that it just came out of them like that and you you alluded to that but no i think hemmingway took about close to 40 stabs at rewriting the ending of a farewell to arms i mean that is a lot of tinkering and he may have just tinkered one word in an hour but it's still
00:44:27
Speaker
was just taking the little rock hammer and chipping away at the granite. A lot of people don't understand or see that kind of work. So I think by showing that kind of process, we can let people be confident to embrace the blank pages, you say.
00:44:49
Speaker
Yeah, and I think, you know, going back to process, because I am obsessed with process and talking to others about process and looking at early drafts of already published work. And, you know, when I taught workshops here, I
00:45:06
Speaker
particularly last semester, I approached a few people that had pieces in, you know, recent publications and said, could you give me some of your early drafts? Like two, maybe. One in the middle, one super, super early that you would never want to show anyone. And I gave those to my students when I was first teaching them how to critique one another's work. And, you know, said this is a really early draft of something and so,
00:45:34
Speaker
They went home and they read it and they came back and we roundtable discussed it. And at the end of that class, I sent them home with the next, with sort of the middle draft and the finished piece. Because I thought it was really important for them to understand that they are not alone in these multiple drafts and that there's so much to be learned from looking at how
00:46:00
Speaker
a writer has changed the piece from draft to draft. And whether or not they agree with those changes doesn't really matter. It's about them being able to see it and discuss it and even be able to articulate, I wouldn't have done it that way, I would have done it this way.
Teaching Writing and Overcoming Perfectionism
00:46:19
Speaker
And that's important because it means that they're really thinking about
00:46:24
Speaker
how story is put together and what makes the character and what important i think that they were uh... narrative non-fiction though yeah i think profit that way it is and exploring profit that more valuable for me then sitting down just straight reading a book yeah that's the the rabbit hole of becoming a writer is when you start reading as a writer i'd like i can
00:46:53
Speaker
Yeah, there's like a line of demarcation in my life. I think I might have been 23 at the time. That's when I had been biology major for four years and then added journalism and stayed an extra year. And it was when I took a literary journalism class with Norm Sims. And he wrote the literary journalist of the 20th century and he's on the Goucher Advisory Board too. And as we were starting to get into
00:47:22
Speaker
just the more heavy dissecting of the work. All of a sudden it's the sheen of just reading as a reader is gone. You start to see the mechanics and the wrinkles behind it. Even if it looks beautiful, you know it's not. That writer probably would still be tinkering with it if it weren't for that they had a publication date.
00:47:47
Speaker
It's just, it is, it's amazing. When you remove that glossy sheen, you start to see that it is a piece of work. It's always imperfect to an extent. But it's great that you're, what my point is, it's great that you're exposing your students to that. And that's gonna unblock a lot of people, that it's not perfect. And it never is, and you can get beyond that
Influences on Maggie's Storytelling
00:48:13
Speaker
beyond that notion that it does have to be a perfect threat out of the gate. Yeah, well that's my hope.
00:48:21
Speaker
So what are some formative books for you that really introduced you to the genre of narrative non-fiction, creative non-fiction, and just those types of books and maybe even documentaries that help sort of refill the tank for you and keep you inspired and keep you creating? Yeah, well, you know, it was a terrible reader growing up. And I'm not really sure why. There's a lot of reasons why.
00:48:52
Speaker
I wasn't very interested in reading when I was maybe in junior high. And I read voraciously for a while before that, as my mother always reminds me. And then I went to high school and I was really uninterested in my English classes. And I was uninterested in what we were reading. But I was super interested in the poetry.
00:49:19
Speaker
I read an enormous amount of poetry in high school, and I started just looking for books that were less books, but I was looking for story that interested me. And that could have been in books. It could have been in documentary. It could have been in film. I was really interested in story, partly because my brother was interested in story.
00:49:48
Speaker
uh... pre-med and secretly switched over into journalism and film studies uh... and my brother growing up with making movies every summer so if you walked in his room we saw storyboarding and uh... you know we spent the summer helping him film scenes and so I sort of had this early idea of hey this is actually putting stories together is really amazing
00:50:16
Speaker
But I was never interested in fiction, and I was never interested in film the way he was. But I was always interested in true stories, almost at an obsessive level. At the time, I would walk into the Barnes & Noble near my parents' house, and there were great sections for autobiography in a way that there isn't today.
00:50:43
Speaker
I remember when they took them away and then soon after that sort of replaced them, replaced it with memoir sections. I think unfortunately, as you know, nonfiction, literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction is just hidden throughout the bookstore. But it was a time where I felt like I could just sit in this aisle of the bookstore and pile up the books
00:51:09
Speaker
I wanted to read, and it was less about wanting to read the books and more about wanting to learn about these people. And I remember the tiny section of the elementary school library that I went to, so I went to a Catholic school, kindergarten through eighth grade, and the library was tiny up in the attic. And I remember there was a tiny section of biography, and
00:51:34
Speaker
I just read them all. So I was really interested in just true stories in general. It wasn't that I wanted to write biography, but it sent me down an exploration of how can I put true stories together? What avenue do I really want to go down to do this? And I explored documentary, but the books that were formative to me at the time weren't necessarily narrative nonfiction.
00:52:03
Speaker
The House on Mango Street was a really important book for me as a writer. And even though it's fiction, you know, I looked at it and thought, well, how do I do that if I want to do it as nonfiction? That's House on Mango Street? Yeah, The House on Mango Street by Sondra Cisneros. Okay. Which is really, you know, I don't know if it's ever been categorized as young adults, because at the time we didn't really do that as much.
00:52:31
Speaker
You know, it was just for me, it was beautiful, it was about talking about people, it was about a neighborhood, and I loved it. And so I sat down and I sort of modeling the masters, I created my own book that, you know, basically were these vignettes of people in my life and in my home and my neighborhood and my community.
00:52:58
Speaker
So I did a lot of that. I looked at people's work that I loved and I tried to sort of model after it. And I would talk to my high school teachers about what I wanted to do. The only way that I could articulate it was I really want to write documentaries on paper. But I want to write it in a beautiful way. And my high school principal handed me a book. I want to say I was a junior.
00:53:26
Speaker
and he said you need to read this because this person down in Florida, this journalist, is doing exactly what you want to do. And that was actually South of Heaven, which was Tom French's, I think that was his first book. Yeah, I think it was. And he, you know, he followed a number of high school students down in Florida for a year. And I read that book like a textbook. And I sort of
00:53:55
Speaker
would dissect it and try to figure out how would he have gotten this information? What sorts of questions would he have asked? What access would he have needed? And I tried to sort of turn it inside out. And that is what I started to do with books that I was obsessed with. And that sort of was one of many books. You know, Jonathan Cozzell was sort of my next obsession. I read everything, and Alex Kablek,
00:54:23
Speaker
And these were people telling true stories in a way that was very immersive. And Ted Conover and John McPhee, people that I still idolize and some of whom I've had great opportunities to meet or work with, which is really wonderful for me as a writer to be able to ask those questions
00:54:51
Speaker
16, 18, 20, one-year-old Maggie was asking. And documentaries, I worked at Visionaries, which is a PBS show when I was in college, and the opportunities that I had there to sort of see documentaries that were talking about social justice issues
00:55:17
Speaker
through the stories of nonprofits really helped me think about putting story together and think about the importance of talking about really big issues, but finding ways for everyday readers or everyday viewers to go inside an issue that they otherwise may not voluntarily select to jump into.
Inspirational Recommendations
00:55:40
Speaker
Have you seen the documentary Giro Dreams of Sushi? No. Have you heard of it?
00:55:48
Speaker
Yes, I have. It's on my Netflix. Must watch. Oh, you gotta watch it. It just inspires the artist within. It's a book about art. It's a documentary about art, really, but it's through this 80-year-old guy who's just obsessed with sushi, dreams of sushi. The music behind it, too, is beautiful. If you have 90 minutes at some point,
00:56:16
Speaker
Definitely watch it. It's just I've probably watched it three or four times and if I need a little jolt of inspiration I watch the first 15 minutes of it and just kind of alright that gets the juices going and and stuff so I Deeply deeply recommend it
00:56:33
Speaker
Well, the next time I can't sleep, that's when I will fall. Oh, yeah. Well, it might even help you sleep, too, because it's very relaxing and it's subtitled, too. So if reading puts you to sleep like it does to me, it might help you sleep.
00:56:49
Speaker
But this kind of, I want to be respectful of your time, but I want to ask you one more question, which I kind of primed you for earlier, was this bookshelf of the apocalypse. If you're allowed to take 10 books with you in your survival pack, what would be those books that you would want to keep with you in the event of cataclysmic global demise?
Books for the Apocalypse
00:57:13
Speaker
Well, I've decided this is a terrible question. Oh, you said you loved it.
00:57:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's still a terrible question though because I cannot actually decide because, you know, there are those books that I love but don't necessarily reread. And there are also books that have great meaning to me that maybe aren't the best books I've ever read, but at the time that I read them, they had such an intense sort of connection or meaning for me that I think that those are the books that I would end up
00:57:48
Speaker
ringing even though they aren't the best. Well something that you have more of a, it reminds you of a time in your life that you have more nostalgia attached to it. Yeah and also for some of them representative of sort of where I was at in my writing life and my sort of maybe they were formative in my writing life.
00:58:15
Speaker
The first one, I've already said, which is the house on Mango Street, by Congressman Harris, which I have taught in, I don't even know how many times I've taught it, I taught it in junior high, I taught it when I was in South Africa, I taught it to, in my creative writing class, in a minimum security prison for men, and I taught it at the college level.
00:58:43
Speaker
It's a really important book for me, and it's one of the books that I read and thought I absolutely want to be a writer. So I would have to include that. And Fatima, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down has also been super formative for me as a thinker and as a writer. This one's kind of cheating because it's
00:59:09
Speaker
three books in one, but three by Annie Dillard, which has, um, Silver, McCanker Creek and an American childhood in the writing life. Um, you look at notes from no man's land, which is an obsession for me in the last year. I just absolutely love it. Um, Rebecca Solman, the far away nearby kind of falls in that same category. Um, open city, Niteja Cole,
00:59:40
Speaker
And which is actually ironically, I think, possibly the only novel on my list. And Ivan Vladislavic's Portrait with Keys, which is a collection of both nonfiction and fiction, although it's sort of categorized as all nonfiction, it's this really interesting hybrid. And
01:00:09
Speaker
i have two others that i think they're kind of unexpected though in addition to that anything but i think the mhm and that i think hopeful for me the two of them uh... but when i really thought about it i would need a dictionary partly because i have always wanted to read the dictionary from start to finish and never have and so
01:00:36
Speaker
living a life of no regrets, I would want to make sure I have the dictionary there with me. And the other is this book that I read in college. One of the programs I was in in college is called Faith, Peace, and Justice, which wasn't a theology class at all or a program at all. It was really more out of the philosophy department. And it's sort of a human rights
01:01:06
Speaker
social justice program. And it was paired with my journalism program, but in the very first class that we had to take, it was sort of the only class that everybody in the program had to take. There was this reader, and I don't know how big it is, or how many pages, but it's huge. It's one of the biggest books I have on my shelf. And it's called What is Justice? And it is, I still pick that book up.
01:01:35
Speaker
You know, out of all of these, I would need something that constantly causes me to question things and think about life. And it is, for me, the one book that everywhere I have lived, I have definitively continued to read and pick up for different reasons.
Podcast Conclusion
01:01:54
Speaker
So that is my one that would throw everyone off.
01:01:58
Speaker
Well, that's a great list, and I'll be sure to, when I go back through this, I'll include all those in the show notes with links to the books, so if people want to check them out at the library or buy them at their local bookseller or Amazon or whoever, they can check out and see what some of the books are that inspired you to pick up the pen.
01:02:18
Speaker
So but like I said, I want to be respectful of your time, you know for anyone for anyone listening to this podcast Hopefully it's more than just you and I They will pick up the rainy season three lives in South Africa in the new South Africa published by Iowa Press Comes out this month. So Maggie. Thank you again for doing this and taking the time out of your morning And this was a blast. I appreciate it Thank you so much. You're welcome. Talk to you later
01:02:46
Speaker
If you like this episode of hashtag CNF, a conversation with readers and writers in the genre of creative non-fiction, I urge you to subscribe to it. Also visit my website, brendanomera.com, and sign up for the weekly email newsletter. It just goes out once a week if I have a blog post.
01:03:07
Speaker
or an episode of said podcast that will go out just once a week. So it usually hits on Tuesdays if I post anything at all. If I don't post, you don't get anything. So no traffic in your inbox. Also there's probably going to be some exciting stuff down the pipe with
01:03:26
Speaker
whatever I'm writing or whatever friends are writing. So in any case, I would deeply appreciate it if you would subscribe to the podcast and maybe throw your email my way. That way we can stay in touch and you can be the first to know when new content is up for your devouring. Thanks again and we will talk to you later.