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Episode 308: The Year the Mountain of Manure Was Hit By a Flood
205 Plays3 years ago
In a departure from your normally scheduled programming, we bring you a new spin on an old favorite.
This is a reimagining of the conversation with the unbreakable Laura Hillenbrand.
Support: patreon.com/cnfpod
Social: @CNFPod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Format Change
00:00:05
Speaker
Hey CNFers, welcome to CNF-PAW, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass people usually. Speak to badass people about the craft and the art of telling true stories. I say usually because this week I don't have a guest. Boo. Boo.
00:00:27
Speaker
Hey, hey, hey, before you start hurling tomatoes up at the CNF and stage, hear me out. My guest this week wasn't feeling good, so we had to reschedule. You might be like, B.O.
00:00:40
Speaker
Thought you had some of these in the can. Get your house in order. And yes, in an ideal world, I have a few in the can. But you'd be surprised how many of these interviews are done the week of and packaged soon thereafter. Some are even done the day before. You wouldn't know because I'm a pro. I could have scrambled for a guest, but I wanted to try something new. Something I've been putting off and putting off and punting and punting and punting.
00:01:08
Speaker
I don't think this will be a regular thing in the podcast feed, but I do think it'll be a normal thing for the Patreon crew, so consider heading to patreon.com slash cnfpod to support the podcast, Window Shop, and you might get special podcasts like this one you're about to hear. So what's the deal? In an effort to up the production value and to make the show seem a little bit more zippy,
Efficiency in Editing
00:01:34
Speaker
I've always been inspired by the structure of comedians in cars getting coffee with Jerry Seinfeld.
00:01:41
Speaker
not necessarily all of the episodes, but certainly the format of it. And here are these episodes that focus on just one guest, like what we do on the interview show here. They film all day, so hours and hours of footage and hours of conversations, for what, 15 minutes of a final product? What must that edit be like?
00:02:06
Speaker
The simple answer is throw out all the boring parts. The harder answer is to say, at least in the case of C&F Pod, I've got 60 minutes of raw tape. You got 20 minutes. Go. So I love the musical interludes of Comedians and Cars Getting Coffee. I love the motion of it. And not that I can do the motion part.
Laura Hillenbrand Interview Highlights
00:02:28
Speaker
here but what would CNF pods sound like if it was similar to that and of course it would be with rock and punk and grunge because that's just our style here it's a lot of work and I figured why not drag out drag one of the the backlog episodes kicking and screaming because I love to live back there they they're comfy in that backlog
00:02:52
Speaker
But sometimes they've got to grab them by the nape and just be like, hey, buddy, we're coming. We're coming to the lead. There's a thing called ladder sprints where you run in line and the person in the back has then sprint to the front and so forth. So this one from the backlog has got to come on up.
00:03:12
Speaker
Come on up! So I grabbed one of the great ones, an all-timer, a hall of fame CNF pod, that people likely miss because it's so far back and it's overwhelming to look through the back catalog and to give it to comedians and cars getting coffee treatment, so to speak.
00:03:28
Speaker
So, that's what I have here in The Naltimer with Laura Hillenbrand. Oh, does she even need an introduction? She's sold to millions of books. You know her as the author of Seabiscuit and Unbroken. Both books were made into Oscar-nominated movies. How do you even follow that up? Is she the goat? She might be. She might be the Sandy Kofax of narrative nonfiction. Not a ton of output, but that output is what
00:03:54
Speaker
Hall of Famers are made of I mean it's just like Just put her up there. Just put her on Mount Rushmore. Did I did I am I throwing her up on Mount Rushmore?
00:04:06
Speaker
I don't know. The conversation took place in December of 2018, and even then the conversation was two years in the making. So sometimes you got to be patient in this game, am I right? So I took the most blemish-free gold out of this golden interview, and you can listen to the interview in its entirety, number 132 at BrendanOMara.com.
00:04:30
Speaker
or wherever you get your podcasts. I mean, what a joy. What a pleasure. What a national treasure Laura is. Oh, by the way, I'm Brendan O'Mara. And in case you didn't already know, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
00:04:52
Speaker
For the longest time in Washington DC, Laura was essentially on a self-prescribed house arrest. The humidity of Washington really confounded her health issues, suffering as she was and is to some extent still with the ill-named chronic fatigue syndrome. But she knew she had the move. She had to risk it all, even if that meant risking her life. So along with her boyfriend, she got the hell out of Dodge and headed west.
00:05:22
Speaker
had just come to a point where I was willing to die in order to live, you know, I was willing to take that risk for the chance of having a bigger life that for a long time I had concluded was going to be lived in a single room. And I just wanted so much more than that. And it was it was worth trying. And it was hard. And it was scary. And it was very difficult the first week or so I was very terrified.
00:05:49
Speaker
But it got a little easier as it went along and I made it. And now I travel. We go out in an RV and I just recently got back from a trip of traveling around the Southwest, which I've not seen before. I mean, every moment of it is a miracle for me now because I thought I would never experience these things.
00:06:10
Speaker
just looking, you know, driving through Kansas and seeing the waving grass, the golden grass and just raving and raving about that and just feeling so blessed to be able to see it with my own eyes. It's every experience is like that now for me. It's in a really weird way. It's been a good thing that I lost so much for so long because life is so rich now.
00:06:45
Speaker
There really wasn't anything that didn't strike me as beautiful. I mean, even we would pass through sort of a rough town. It was beautiful to me because it was something new. It was a new place. I would look in each front window of a house we'd go by in some small town and imagine the life that was being lived in it.
00:07:07
Speaker
And then there were these huge grand things like going through the Badlands, which I actually never even knew what the Badlands were. And I didn't know I was going there that day. My boyfriend said, I don't want you to look ahead on the map at where we're going. Just ride. And we're riding along in this beautiful South Dakota and I'm loving that. And the left turn and all of a sudden we're in these gigantic striated canyons of a million different colors.
00:07:36
Speaker
You know, there are coyotes running around us and big horned sheep and just, you know, prairie dogs. And I just couldn't believe it. It was all of it, the majesty of it, the grandeur of it, the size of this country, the breadth of experience within it, all the different lives. There is no one in America. There's 300 million different lives in different places.
00:08:05
Speaker
It was quite a thing to see it through the eyes I had at the time coming out of a life of such extraordinary isolation and sensory as well as emotional deprivation.
Passion and Family Influence on Writing
00:08:26
Speaker
So where did that sensibility of wanting to be a writer or even being born a writer come from for you?
00:08:34
Speaker
I don't really know. It just, it just was in me. It's in other members of my family as well. My mother was a writer. She wrote for the Syracuse Herald Journal. She was actually one of the, was then very prestigious. The Mademoiselle Editorship, they had a contest every year.
00:08:57
Speaker
of college women all over the country and they would choose a very small number to serve as guest editors at Madam Whistle magazine which was in that day a real thinking woman's magazine and she was one of the winners of it and I never knew that until writing her obituary this year and it was quite a big deal and then she went on to write for the Washington Post. She became a psychologist later in my lifetime but
00:09:25
Speaker
prior to my time she was a writer and my grandmother was an English teacher. So these things, I think a lot of us are born with certain proclivities that are just kind of there. There are people you meet at six years old that are already incredible athletes. There's something about their wiring that works that way and for me the wiring is toward writing.
00:09:48
Speaker
It doesn't go away. No matter what happens to me in my life, it's always there. And I need, when I experience something interesting, I need to compose it into something in words. It's just part of the way I'm wired.
00:10:05
Speaker
Part of the way she's wired, I think that's true. I think we get into this mess because there's a yearning, a calling of sorts. And when you tell people at a party that you're a writer, you get that charge, that juice, that you're out there living on that edge. And to use what is now a pretty tired term, thanks to Brene Brown and Tom Brady, you're the person in the arena.
00:10:30
Speaker
As you might imagine, interviewing is part of the game, the part of the game that I love the most. I do love doing that. And it's great to hear Laura echo that as I asked her where she feels most engaged doing this kind of work. I love the interviews.
00:10:49
Speaker
I toyed for quite a while with doing this story, a World War II story, and I have just decided not to do it because there are so few people who remember it who are still around. I think the time of doing first-person narrative kind of World War II stories is gone because there's just not enough people. And I love, love, love doing the interviews. I love exploring these people and getting to know them and hearing their stories firsthand.
00:11:17
Speaker
It's such a privilege to be a writer and to be able to meet these people. And I love exploring their memories with them and finding out all of these things I otherwise would not have found. There's a lot of material that's available in archives and things like that, but they often will hit a dead end with them.
00:11:46
Speaker
They know people and they have a lot of different stories and you can really explore them. So I love that part of it.
Interviewing Techniques and Surprises
00:11:57
Speaker
And I try to be that way also when I do interviews with people is be non-judgmental and to be as recessive a presence as possible so that people aren't altering what they say because I'm a certain kind of personality.
00:12:15
Speaker
And just sort of be, look, I'll listen to you whatever you have to say. I'm going to ask you the questions that seem like they have obvious answers because so often you're surprised that the things you assume are true might not be. And that's how I go about it. How influential has listening to audiobooks lent that sort of musicality to your own pros?
00:12:45
Speaker
That's a really good question and I think it has been very important. It was something I did out of necessity because I have vertigo and people often think of that term as meaning they get busy with heights and things like that. That's not what I mean by vertigo. I mean that everything around me appears to be moving all the time and I have a sensation of moving all the time and one of the hardest things for me to do
00:13:14
Speaker
seems to read, which is the cruelest punishment in the world for a writer. But just looking at a page, I couldn't for many years put my head down at all. So if I did try to read, I could only read short passages and with my head box. Also, CFS carries a lot of cognitive
00:13:34
Speaker
problems that make reading difficult. I know a lot of people with this disease who can't read at all, ever, because it has cognitive problems that move words around the page and make focusing very difficult. That is a challenge. I can read much better on a screen than I can in a printed book. I haven't read a printed book in many years because it's too difficult. What I did was,
00:14:00
Speaker
I signed up for the Library of Congress's Talking Book Program, which is for the blind and visually handicapped. And you can get anything. They record everything there, and they have really good readers. I've read hundreds of books that way, and I continue to read the audiobook.
00:14:18
Speaker
And you learn something when you listen to books that way. By a good reader, you start to hear that music of the language and you can sort out good writers from that. Whenever I read, I think about why do I like this passage and why don't I like this passage so that I can figure out how someone's writing well or not writing well. And a lot of it does come down to that
00:14:44
Speaker
the rhythm and the tempo and just the shape of a paragraph or a sentence. And one of the things I started to do when I was writing She Biscuit, I had just rewatched Ken Burns' documentary on the Civil War. And the narration of that, which I believe was done by John Chancellor, is masterful. And I began to, in my head, think my words
00:15:14
Speaker
in my brain, in his voice, how would this sound? And then I began to seek them out loud. And now whenever I write something, I say the whole thing out loud. And I can often catch things I can't catch when I read it, of how a sentence isn't working. It's too long. It's too convoluted. When you have to speak something aloud, you have to do it much more simply and with much more clarity than often writing.
00:15:41
Speaker
will make you do it. You miss that when you write it down. So I just, everything I write now, I speak out loud to myself and often inside my head as John Chancellor, and it works really well. And I actually highly recommend that people, the Civil War series is absolutely fantastic, but it's especially well-narrated and it's written very, very cleanly.
00:16:05
Speaker
and with brief, simple sentences that convey facts very well. It's something I did learn from doing audiobooks, from listening to many, many, many of them. It makes you better writer. I mean, originally, we told stories that way. We didn't have written language. We had spoken language. And I like to write books that
00:16:30
Speaker
that sound more like someone telling a story over a campfire. That's what I imagine. I imagine my audience is kind of gathered around the circle and there's a fire. And how would you tell this if you were speaking that way? And so that's how I do it. And for me, language is musical. It's not about grammatical rules and things like that. It's about a certain
00:16:57
Speaker
music that comes out of it, it's balanced, it's almost mathematical and they have such gorgeous rhythm. They know exactly what they're doing. They write these perfect sentences and perfect paragraphs and so I read them and I'm a better writer for it because it's just influential even without you thinking about it, it's influential.
00:17:19
Speaker
What has to be in place for you? And then you all of a sudden know, like, oh, here we go, there's momentum, there's something here, I'm diving in.
Ideas vs. Compelling Stories
00:17:28
Speaker
Yeah, I've gone through that question a lot, because I've been looking for the right story to tell as the next story. And after Louis Vampirini and the Key Biscuit, it's a pretty tough act to follow. Those were incredible lives. And I want a narrative arc.
00:17:46
Speaker
Um, I get composable all the time from people who say, you really should write about this. And it'll be, it'll be someone's interesting life where they've had a lot of different interesting experiences, but it's not an art. It's not a story. And I want a story.
00:18:05
Speaker
I want a story. She says now that's something I've been trying to unpack with people of late. This notion of idea versus story.
00:18:17
Speaker
You can say you want to write about the rise of all, I don't know, backyard campfires. And believe me, I love me a backyard campfire, but that's just an idea. It's not a story and unto itself. What's the story? Were there childhood friends who bonded over campfires and camping? And maybe someone is dying and they figure this will be the last time they roast marshmallows together. So what the story is really about is friendship and the everlasting bonds that transcend the living.
00:18:48
Speaker
And this is hard. It's hard work, man, to really distill that. Because there are myriad things that seem cool to write about, but man, to find the story in it, that's what separates amateur narrative writers from the pros. And sometimes, while you're doing your research or reporting, things might just sneak up on you that you never knew were there. That was the year the mountain of manure was hit by a flood down in Mexico, and it
00:19:18
Speaker
it crashed into the grandstand and knocked it down, and it washed up the barns. And he's like, well, that's neither here nor there. And he goes on talking about what I asked him, and I'm like, wait a minute, back up. And so we tell him this story about this note. It rained like 11 and a half inches in one night, and this flash flood came, and they had a gigantic mass of manure behind the
00:19:48
Speaker
barns at this track in Mexico and this flash flood hit it and the whole mountain of manure moved and it was 20 feet high or something.
00:20:01
Speaker
And he had knocked down the grandstand and the barn. And the rooms ran through and opened all the doors and shoot the horses out. And the horses all ran into the hills. This is in Tijuana. And for quite a long time afterward, the very impoverished locals in Tijuana were riding around on million dollar race horses that they caught.
00:20:23
Speaker
And so he told me the whole story. And he was like, you know, no, never asked me about that. I haven't thought about that since since way back then. And he was a young guy there at the time. So I called all of my sources who had
00:20:37
Speaker
of time when it was blood and it was not the manure hit the grandstand. They were like, oh yeah, I was there. And so I got several of these old guys to tell me more details about the story. And then I looked up weather records and things like that. And it turned into this whole big thing because this ancient gentleman had paused and just muttered something about this. And I kind of let him talk. And that's the beauty about these interviews is the stuff you don't expect.
00:21:07
Speaker
And you do need to give them space to tell those things. So I think it's best, at least to my ear, to write with clarity and as almost an invisible person in it.
00:21:36
Speaker
It just sort of is for me. It just is the way I tell a story. As an historian, I want to disappear from it. I want to not be a presence in the narrative so that people are getting the story in the manner they would get it if they were standing there watching it happen. I don't want to get in the way, and I don't want to intrude
00:22:03
Speaker
I think it becomes much more immediate for the reader if you just have the facts there and you don't have the writer standing there waving at you saying, look at me, look at me.
00:22:23
Speaker
I do love dealing with the real and what you learn about real people by looking at the lives of real people and what they go through. It has changed my way of viewing the world in a dramatic way. It's alternately really a pleasure and a total agony. And you know, everyone says
Challenges and Joys of Writing
00:22:44
Speaker
that. I'm sure it's like that for you too. Everybody who writes knows that agony of writing it. I can't remember who it was who said it's
00:23:07
Speaker
you're trying to do a very big thing in right, but you're not actually moving. It's all going on inside your head. It's really frustrating. And, you know, there's a lot of times where I get up and I've got to go, I got to leave it, you know, because it's just not going anywhere. But, um, and I, I really enjoy once I have something down and begin to edit it. I think that's when I'm having the most time is when I, I, I feel a sense of safety. Okay. Something's on the page and now I can play with it.
00:23:17
Speaker
It's like being an armless, legless man with a crayon clutch in his teeth.
00:23:38
Speaker
For me, I begin with a formal outline, just like they touch in school. I make an outline of how the story seems like it should be structured. And then I will just go point by point. The first thing, I will try to fill out that part and then move on to the next. And when I get stuck, when I don't have it down yet or I don't have the right way to approach it,
00:24:09
Speaker
around things. And so I don't write them sequentially, generally, although the last thing is usually the last part of the book, those last sentences are so very important. And also the first sentences, I will go over those again and again. But I do tend to kind of circle around those treacherous areas. And, you know, I try to tell myself when I get stuck, and everybody does,
00:24:38
Speaker
that it's there, that it's already in me. I just need to wait for it to come back out. And that's what I do. And I used to go pour water in my bathtub and just sit on the tub with my feet in the tub and just brainstorm and just keep telling myself, it's there, it's there. All you have to do is wait, it's gonna bubble up to the surface. And it does, it never lets me down. At least from my point of view in terms of feeling like, okay, I've got that the way I want it.
00:25:07
Speaker
the best way I can do it. And so that's how I work. It's not that linear a process other than I'm stuck on that outline. I really think the outline is a great way to work because then you have something down on that paper. You have sort of a map ahead of you and you can go ahead from there and it changes, you know, as you go and you realize, I want to take this middle part of the story and put it first as a teaser to the rest of it or something like that.
00:25:37
Speaker
I don't know about you CNF'ers, but when I listen to her, what I hear is love. Something so simple and inspiring. Sure, it's all hard work, but what great work it is. And even when Laura speaks of the agony of writing, it's more like the agony of not being able to solve a puzzle. Like, you know you can crack the code. You just gotta keep hammering your head up against that wall.
00:26:03
Speaker
but you stick through it, you stick with it long enough and coalesces. And I think if we can somehow approach the things we do with the joy that Laura exudes when it comes to this kind of work, we'll be better literary citizens and generally happier artists, less in competition with each other and more in concert with our own vision.
Episode Wrap-Up
00:26:28
Speaker
I do like it. I like the whole process. I'm a very happy cursor in one of my books.
00:26:51
Speaker
Hey, thanks for listening to this new riff on the podcast C&Fers. It's a nice way, I think, to reanimate the backlog and give you something that's a little more peppy, just like comedians in cars getting coffee. My inspiration for this.
00:27:06
Speaker
If you want to listen to the original interview in its entirety, visit BrendaDomeira.com and look for episode 132. While you're there, you can also sign up for the up to 11 CNF and monthly newsletter. Been doing it for like a million years, unlike all these substat clowns. Also the episode, it's, uh, you could...
00:27:27
Speaker
Pick it up wherever you get your podcasts. Just type in Laura Hillenbrand, CNF Pod, Brendan O'Man, whatever. I'm telling you how to look for an episode of the podcast. And if you're listening to The Parting Shot, which there isn't much of a parting shot this week, you know the drill. Anyway, let me know what you think by picking me on social media at CNF Pod on Twitter and at Creative Nonfiction Podcast on Instagram.
00:27:53
Speaker
Consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcast. It's a free way to support the podcast and it echoes for all eternity. Feel free to link up to the show on social, tagging me in the show, of course so I can amplify and give you digital fist bumps. And even consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash CNFpod so you can be the first to hear new episodes of this nature. These things will likely be Patreon exclusives
00:28:20
Speaker
So, think about it. As well as, I'm thinking of doing monthly recaps. Sort of month in review of the show too. So, like kind of greatest nuggets. Two or three nuggets from every pod of that month. That's going to kick over to the Patreon crew. Just to give, give them, give them that juice, that extra, that little extra something something. Again, patreon.com slash cnfpod. Shop around. Give it a shot.
00:28:50
Speaker
We should be coming back at you with a fresh interview next week. So until then, stay wild, CNFers. And if you can't do, interview. See ya.