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Episode 81—Google as Religious Experience and Trusting Self-Doubt with Rachel Wilkinson
124 Plays7 years ago
"Research is this vehicle that allows you to follow your interests however long you want to follow it," says Rachel Wilkinson. For Episode 80 of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with the world's best artists about creating works of nonfiction, I spoke with Rachel Wilkinson, a writer and research based out of Pittsburgh, PA. Her essay, "Search History," won Best Essay for Creative Nonfiction Magazine's Science and Religion contest for Issue 65. It's Google as religious experience, how the very act of asking questions is very faith-based, and, if we're getting grim and dystopian, how this technology, which is getting increasingly sentient, might supplant us some day. #spitoutthebone (Metallica reference for all y'all.) In our conversation we talk a lot how she crafted this essay and how it hangs on a big idea rather than sheer character drive, David Foster Wallace, The War of Art, the fun of research, embracing failure, and trusting—yes, trusting—self-doubt. Self-doubt is my spirit animal. Hey, are you digging the show? I'd love it if you subscribed to the show, shared it with a fellow CNFer. Leave an honest review on iTunes and I'll give you an editorial consult on the house. Just send me a screenshot of your review and I'll reach out. Thanks for listening!
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Transcript
Introduction to Episode 80
00:00:00
Speaker
For episode 80 of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak with the world's best artist about creating works of nonfiction, I spoke with Rachel Wilkinson, a writer and researcher based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
'Search History' as a Religious Experience
00:00:17
Speaker
Her essay, Search History, won Best Essay for Creative Nonfiction Magazine's Science and Religion Contest for issue 65.
00:00:28
Speaker
It's Google as religion or religious experience. How the very act of asking questions is very faith-based. And if we're getting grim and dystopian, how this technology, which is getting increasingly sentient, might supplant us all someday. Hashtag spit out the bone Metallica reference for y'all.
00:00:53
Speaker
In our conversation we talk a lot about how she crafted this essay and how it hangs on a big idea rather than sheer character drive. Also some David Foster Wallace, The War of Art written by Steven Pressfield, the fun of research, embracing failure, and trusting, yes trusting,
00:01:13
Speaker
self-doubt. Self-doubt, you might say, is my spirit animal. So hey, you diggin' the show? I'd love if you subscribed to the show or shared it with a fellow CNF-er. Leave an honest review on iTunes and I'll give you an editorial consult on the house. Just send me a screenshot of your review and I will reach out. Thanks for listening. Why wait? Here's Rachel Wilkinson.
Winning the Essay Contest
00:01:43
Speaker
Yeah, it was a shock when that email came through. I actually screamed. I was at work and I actually screamed. Because I submitted that piece eight months ago, didn't hear a peep. And you know, usually I just figured that means it's a no. So I'd honestly forgotten about it. And then I interned there
00:02:06
Speaker
years ago, the first year of my MFA and, you know, done a little bit of reading for them. And it's always been a dream of mine to be published in the magazine at all and, you know, much less like intern for them. And so to be published at all and then to win the contest for a significant amount of money, it was it was like all a little bit too much to process. But I was really, really deeply honored and they seemed really happy to be able to give it to me. And so it was this really nice
00:02:34
Speaker
this nice, like, pairing of people feeling great about it. So yes. Yeah. So the title of the essay is Search History. And for people who might not be familiar with it, why don't you, like, kind of give a synopsis of what it is? And then after that, talk a little bit about how you arrived at this as an essay you wanted to explore. It's funny you say that because I remember very distinctly
00:02:59
Speaker
trying to tell people the concept of this essay like at parties, and I would just get these puzzled looks. I'd just be like, you know how you search stuff online, and it's kind of personal and maybe a little spiritual, and that's maybe like certain religious traditions. People would be like, what? Are you talking about Google searches? Like, how do I look up stuff about my cat? And I was just like, well, maybe there's like a spiritual component to that. Yeah.
00:03:27
Speaker
Yeah, I guess the pitch for it now that I've had some distance from writing it is that it was intended to explore search in all its kind of meanings. Search has this very technical computer science term for when you actually type a query into a search engine, which is a relatively new invention in the last 20 years, but then has this long religious history of
00:03:55
Speaker
going out and going on pilgrimages and going and looking at relics to sort of find enlightenment or higher spiritual purpose. So I don't know. My Google searches always felt intensely personal and kind of more in that older tradition. And I wanted to see what would happen if you sort of held those concepts up next to each other and wed them. And that's how the essay was born.
The Personal and Spiritual Act of Searching
00:04:24
Speaker
And what was the machinations and the process like working through this as you're searching for a thread through this whole piece that does explore a lot of those deeper questions or at least the need or the historical need to want to ask questions. And it just happens that we have like search engines now and that's
00:04:49
Speaker
a vehicle for those kind of questions. So how did you work your way through this so it felt cohesive and made sense to you and then ultimately readers? Oh gosh. As a researcher, which is also my sort of professional day job, I am very guilty of sort of over researching, especially when it comes to personal essay. I have a history of being like, well, I'm going to write about whatever concept.
00:05:17
Speaker
search, the apology, an autopsy. And I'm like, well, I guess I have to go out and read about the entire history of this thing in the West and before. And there was definitely some over researching going on. So I think I started with the most kind of technical aspects of it, like how what actually happens when you type a query into Google. And
00:05:42
Speaker
It is highly, highly technical for this that I learned. I have no computer science background for this thing that appears sort of easy and magical to the user. There was years of advanced groundbreaking computer science that went into it and is still going into it. So I think I started with the tech, the stuff you could really get a handle on practically, and so much emerged out of that almost.
00:06:10
Speaker
I interviewed Scott Falman at Carnegie Mellon, who I actually wrote a separate story about because he is the person who invented the emoticon. And he, yeah, which is its own, definitely its own story with spiritual components in it. Because he was very unimpressed with Google. I was kind of like, you should read this and this and this and this and this will bring you closer to the sort of AI spiritual revolution that I envisioned.
00:06:39
Speaker
And then at the same time, I was kind of interrogating my own personal history with asking questions. So I was writing little personal bits about what it was like to be a philosophy major in college with all its like, pretension and downfalls. And I don't know, I just, yeah, I kept coming back to the concept of switching between them, like trying to do a hybrid essay.
00:07:03
Speaker
And I played with that and played with that, I mean, for years. Some sections were written three years after I first started writing it. And I still don't know that it has an ending of what the ending is. So, yeah, it remains, I mean, still, I guess any writer would say this, but it remains a work that's in
Technology's Role in Learning and Mentorship
00:07:25
Speaker
progress that was kind of abandoned rather than finished.
00:07:28
Speaker
And for those who haven't read it yet, there's this part where you open it by saying that some people run or meditate or your brother had a little Zen rock garden. And for you, a way of checking in and maybe its own form of meditation was typing these questions into a search bar and everything from how many beats does a blue whale's heart beat in a minute to just asking why.
00:07:58
Speaker
And these days I think we're also so used to punching things into a search bar as well that we might just circuitously write something that is near what we're trying to ask and then it drops down and be like, oh yeah, there's the question.
00:08:16
Speaker
Immediately, you're kind of struck by, oh, someone else in the world has been asking the same exact thing. So I wonder for you, like when you're typing those kind of questions in and then the exact question you're asking pops up, do you feel like connected in some sense? Or maybe you feel like, oh, someone else's thing. Maybe I'm not as unique as I thought. Oh, gosh. Yeah, I think I write this line. It always has made me feel
00:08:43
Speaker
less alone, especially now that we have a wiki how about everything. I mean, there's like how to talk to people at parties, we have multiple wiki house on that. The Post Gazette in Pittsburgh recently ran this like newspaper article, and it was maybe a little bit, there was like a little derisive edge to it about how
00:09:06
Speaker
millennials are learning all their life skills through the internet and how much of a shame it is that you have millennials googling how to carve a turkey at Thanksgiving. And I was kind of like, well, how else like I understood the point of this tradition of learning
00:09:22
Speaker
maybe from generations before you has maybe been a little lost. But also like, everyone can Google how to carve a turkey and just know and have like multiple sources of information that are not conflicting or like, you know, your dad, your dad's crazy way that may or may not be reliable. So I, so I like I felt both those, those impulses, like, I'm
00:09:45
Speaker
I'm a person typing something into a computer to ask a question, which is a little bit lonely and impersonal. But at the same time, I'm connecting to this source of knowledge that's collective and so vast that it's kind of unimagined by previous generations. So yeah, there's an interesting tension between the fact that it's an impersonal technology in a way and then it's also intensely personal.
00:10:10
Speaker
It makes me wonder too if the – so I was kind of like joking with myself not too long ago when I – I don't know what I was trying to solve, but I'm sort of like right at the edge of –
00:10:26
Speaker
wanting like just in terms of my age I'm at the edge of I just asked the internet anything or try to find someone in the past who's done it before so I'm like right on that edge where there's still sometimes a pull to want to ask my father or someone else how to
00:10:46
Speaker
Install a toilet or something And so like when I came to that realization like when I one time I had to have that kind of talk I don't know if it was a toilet or what but it was Like oh I could just ask YouTube and I can just watch the video so like the internet became like the father I never had in a sense and so I
00:11:09
Speaker
that was like sort of for the question or for the person and the convenience of asking an inquiry like oh yeah that's nice and easy I wonder what it does to the older generation who used to be asked these questions and used to be mentors that and they're losing their toehold of mentorship to the internet like have you thought about that at all yeah for sure and like can their knowledge be captured in a way that will be preserved because obviously the internet will
00:11:37
Speaker
Well, hopefully, outlive us all. So, yeah, and you know, and my friends and my friends who do kind of ethnography, we talk about kind of going out and preserving some of the stuff that will get lost with time. But also, it's kind of like the internet is everybody's dad, because you get not just, you know,
00:12:02
Speaker
your dad's trick to install a toilet, and that's funny you say that because I often joke, I'm like a YouTube homeowner. I'm just like, what do I do? But you get, you know, the kind of like the best vetted crowd sourced, both by people and by the search engine version of how to do everything, which is interesting, because do we want our entire lives to be kind of optimized like that?
The Future of AI and Knowledge
00:12:28
Speaker
But yeah, I often think I now go to a restaurant where I know exactly what everyone has said about it before. And people are worried about these questions like, do you lose the spontaneity of just walking into a restaurant? But also, do you lose the spontaneity of getting food poisoning while you're traveling? So yeah, I don't know that I have a good answer to that. And then I was talking to somebody, too, about
00:12:50
Speaker
kind of the end of the essay, where, can I spoil it? Yeah, yes, exactly. Spoiler alert. Yeah, this isn't Last Jedi or anything. Okay. The end of the essay was this really cool, critical piece I came across in The New Inquiry in its very beginnings, when it was a magazine that was really interested in doing, I guess, kind of the same work I was trying to do, like, how do we pair these
00:13:20
Speaker
big, timeless intellectual ideas with just like, I have a Fitbit. What does that mean? And there was one about crossing the singularity, which is this technical term for kind of when the machines and the artificial intelligence outstrip us in terms of intelligence. And the author likens it to when we sort of really enjoy playing with our dogs, feeding your dogs, our pets.
00:13:46
Speaker
And obviously they have certain knowledge about the world, but it's sort of limited. And you can have all these arguments about how sentient are dogs, because obviously they experience emotion, they remember things, experiences, blah, blah, blah. But could they operate a search engine? Probably not. And the future will be the machines looking at us with the same kind of appreciation that we once felt. So yeah, are we building
00:14:14
Speaker
this thing, it's already bigger and better than us in some ways, though we manage and control it. But not only might we lose the knowledge of one person, but we might lose our way of relating to the world as the most evolved primary way, because the machines might overtake us.
00:14:35
Speaker
But then they might just leave us like in the end of her.
Structuring Essays: Intellectual Evolution
00:14:40
Speaker
It's my fear where I'm like overtake us and that'll be it. Like just take also a spoiler.
00:14:51
Speaker
Get your head around. How are you organizing your notes and your thoughts to work your way through this piece? It doesn't have what you would call that narrative story. There's more of an essay of thoughts and ideas and argument and so forth. It doesn't have that character drive that you see in some essays. It's more driven by the big thought.
00:15:15
Speaker
And how did you go about structuring this so it just felt nice and smooth and fluid the way it reads? Because it is a wonderful essay and I'm sorry if I haven't made that clear. I loved it and it was, I loved the nitty gritty stuff of the technical aspects of how like Google works and then of course the big inquiries that you were getting into. So how did you go about organizing your thoughts and your notes to make this thing read so well?
00:15:45
Speaker
Oh, gosh. And boy, am I glad that it worked. It was not easy. I am a saver of everything. Like I have these large folders on my desktop with just like little bits of research.
00:16:04
Speaker
So I had one of those that was kind of a mess. And yeah, like you're saying, I think I think that's exactly right, that if there's no character progression, if there's an intellectual progression, how do you sort of keep the reader moving forward, which is something I struggled with, definitely, in revision. And I had a mentor
00:16:22
Speaker
who said something that I think about all the time, which is that what drives fiction is kind of plot and that traditional structure of like climax and then denouement. What drives nonfiction is sort of continuing revelation toward the moment of greatest truth. So if you're writing memoir, you start with you as a kid, even though you're kind of writing you as an adult and you sort of bring the story up to
00:16:52
Speaker
the most true current version of what you think of events, whatever that is, you start with the child and kind of bring yourself up to the most adult version of yourself. And so I had to kind of do that with myself intellectually. And of course, it ends in an ambiguous place. But, you know, there's a kid in there in the beginning who really wants, I mean, me as a little or a literal little kid, really wants
00:17:18
Speaker
solid answers. And for sort of this journey to be concluded and wrapped up in a nice bow. And of course, that does not happen. So sort of, I guess the progression of it is learning to live more with this ambiguity, even though we'll see if that ever happens in the full sort of like Zen fullness of life way that I would imagine other people are living. So yeah, that was that was the progression I tried to frame around was that sort of maybe intellectual evolution,
00:17:48
Speaker
And as a kid, you're asking a lot of questions and your parents eventually gave you a tape recorder and just said like, well, talk into this. And so when you opened that present or however it was delivered to you, what was that like and what was your degree of excitement or confusion or anything when you received that? I think I knew at the time
00:18:15
Speaker
they were trying to foist me off onto this thing a little bit onto this machine. I was like, come on. But then once I I sort of remember talking into it, I was pretty entertained by myself. And maybe that's a testament to the fact that the the act of asking the question and kind of getting it out
00:18:38
Speaker
is the more powerful thing than having an instant answer. The anxiety, I guess, is partially relieved just by talking and talking and talking about, not necessarily in any kind of profound conclusion. So I think I was just a really chatty, yeah, chatty or kid that I am an
Childhood Curiosity and Writing
00:18:58
Speaker
adult, that's interesting. Just like really chatty outgoing kid that needed a lot of space to think these things out. And so it did bring
00:19:07
Speaker
some relief. And yeah, it was funny, when I was going home and I told somebody I was doing this, they were like, you should find the tapes. I was like, oh, God, I would be embarrassed to just hear this gibberish. Yeah. That was one of my questions, Obele. What were you actually having tapes would be hilarious and fun and cute, I'm sure. But what were some of the, do you remember exactly what you were asking and speaking to the tapes about?
00:19:37
Speaker
My parents told me actually when they read the piece that they of course remember this and that it brought them relief as parents, but that I would just a lot like the kid described in the comedy routine.
00:19:49
Speaker
I would just say why to everything. Of course, there would be no end. My dad came up with saying Z, like why Z? I was so thrown by this that it would often shut things down for a little while. I imagine there's some of that on there, but it's also a nice little ... I don't know if he intended it this way, although both my parents are researchers, so I'm sure they would appreciate it.
00:20:19
Speaker
It's sort of a little commentary on the nature of questioning. You can say why as much as you want, but there's like an end point and so you make a little joke out of it. So I remember counting and talking about infinity a lot, just like how high can I count? Like numbers go so high, how high can I count until I get tired of this? Just the idea of like an infinite number of numbers was really something that threw me for a loop as a kid.
00:20:48
Speaker
We can count forever. Like you really, yeah, you can count forever. So they would let me count until I exhausted myself. Well, this is something I find really charming about kids. Like I myself do not have kids, so I can like appreciate it and then not have to live with it all the time. So I guess that's important. But yeah, I do love that kids like are just sponges for curiosity and like,
00:21:16
Speaker
like, wow, a dog, like, I want to learn everything about dog, what kind of dog is this? Where did it come from? Like, so I don't know, like, I, I try to sort of connect back to that person who was, like, fascinated by the idea of counting, and try to at least sort of put that in some of my essays, because I think it's easy to not do that as an adult, though, that energy can obviously overwhelm parents.
Researching and Writing: A Joyful Discovery
00:21:44
Speaker
So, you know, you say, you know, your parents are researchers, you're a researcher. What does that mean exactly? You know, so many people, it's like an app, you know, if you play a sport and you weight train, it's like, well, you don't call yourself a lifter, it's just like part of your training. And so a lot of people who write nonfiction, of course, do research, but they wouldn't necessarily call themselves like a researcher. So what does that entail as a vocation?
00:22:10
Speaker
Some of it is, you know, unglamorous and tedious. You know, your listeners will appreciate like spoiler alert, like a lot of writing is very glamorous, unglamorous and tedious. So it's like interviewing people when transcribing tapes and scouring the internet for whatever tiny little fact that is way harder to find than you would think, like, how many McDonald's were there last year in the whole world? Just like, where do you go to find that fact?
00:22:36
Speaker
And but the sort of like more, the part that I connect to in this deep way, is the idea that you can go out and discover stuff. So, you know, kind of what we were talking about earlier, like, oh, you're typing something into Google, what does that what does that mean? Like, how does that work? You would answer that question. I mean, there's no end to the amount of things you can kind of learn about a specific question.
00:23:04
Speaker
And for my parents, this took the form of more like social science. And just like, if you put a kid in this kind of school environment, what's gonna happen? I mean, you can spend years kind of like in the field looking at these questions, answering these questions. There's always more to know. And they always said to me, like, it's called research. Like the meaning like, you search and you search again, you search and you search again, because there's sort of no end to the knowledge you can gain about a specific topic.
00:23:32
Speaker
Yeah, I think of research as this really open ended, beautiful thing. And I when I have kind of subbed in my friends classes, I try, they usually have you come in and talk about research. And I always tell them, like, I think we all think of research as this onerous school thing, like, oh, I got to open a book and figure out when Thomas Jefferson did this, you know, just like, searching for boring factoids, essentially. And I was like, no, research is this vehicle that
00:24:02
Speaker
allows you to follow your interest however long you want to follow it. And it should not be boring. The last thing it should be is boring. And if you're bored, your reader is going to be bored, for sure. So some students, it's like they had never sort of heard that or been given the permission to follow your interest. It's kind of, yeah, an excuse to nerd out. Like nerd out to whatever end you want to.
00:24:26
Speaker
Wow. Given that your parents do this kind of work and predated the internet and you were born into a different era where at least the lead dominoes of research are pretty easy because of the internet. What kind of conversations do you and your parents have if you guys are talking shop in any sense about just the craft of
00:24:55
Speaker
doing the, you know, really rigorous research. Yeah. It's funny because they are, as you said, a different generation. So there are ways in which we have like funny, like, Oh, they don't know how to text kind of moments, but then like, they know how to use Excel better than, better than me and better than any, any like person my age, I know. It puts me to shame. Um, so.
00:25:23
Speaker
Yeah, conversations about rigorous research. They usually give me ideas for how to search for stuff online. Well, back when I was sort of more in nonprofit world, they would say, oh, have you looked at this agency? You know, like these people keep data on this for the last 50 years running. Or have you been to the library and they like, you know, keep all the census records for da, da, da, da. So they gave me this appreciation for like, searching through hard documents.
00:25:53
Speaker
which is another thing I find, Google has maybe obliterated this idea, you just type it into a search engine and the first three results, if they're optimized, Google came up with them, that's what you do. But not like, as a researcher, I will go back through the congressional record to look at how a particular topic evolved in 1986. For a story I was working on, not for me, but in my life as a researcher, I was looking at the history of the gun debate. And you have to go back to
00:26:23
Speaker
Ronald Reagan, 80s, even before that, like 1968, after the Kennedy assassination to get like sort of the genesis of today's gun debate. And the idea that you would really dig that far back and read the minutes where you can see the floor debate evolving, like in real time. And of course, they don't know the significance back then, but we can look back and say like, all right, this is the beginning. Kennedy got shot and now we need gun control. And what are people saying about this?
00:26:52
Speaker
I think it's something they gave me, like the really deep go back in the primary documents is something that's, I guess, less, maybe less appreciated with the advent of just like, you click and you have Google and that's it. Yeah. And so we talk about stuff like that. And then I think I explained to them how culture is happening on Twitter and just like
00:27:19
Speaker
Just like did you see this tweet because I mean it really is I'm fascinated by I do Research on Twitter all the time You know, I think we're in a place where we might like see a war declared on Twitter So anyone who dismisses Twitter is kind of frivolous.
Social Media as Cultural Reflection
00:27:34
Speaker
I'm just like, oh no the entire culture is happening So, what does your Twitter research look like? Well, it's funny there's some people who
00:27:44
Speaker
You know, I'm a big admirer of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Who just left Twitter. Exactly. So we're recording at a time. But like he, you know, I don't know how he has the patience, I guess he just ran out. Will
00:27:59
Speaker
you know, people love to try to pick a part and indict his work. And he himself is like, like just fantastic superior researcher, if you want a person who like goes back to the documents and is like, hey, look at this, look at this. 150 years ago, this is what we're talking about. So people try to, you know, troll him on Twitter. And that's what he'll do. He will tweet out, you know, a primary document from the Civil War, exactly in opposition to whatever someone is arguing and say like, it was right here, they said it. Here's General Lee saying this thing.
00:28:29
Speaker
And like it's such a beautiful marriage of research and Twitter at the same time it You know, I guess up until I hope he comes back It builds it like creates for me this New persona of kind of what a public intellectual is like he's using this This medium that is like little quips essentially so fluidly and with such impact on
00:28:59
Speaker
Culture like activist work is being done on Twitter and at the same time like primary document research is being done on Twitter like history like he's creating current history and using past history kind of at the same time in this medium and that was meant for like little jokes about cats and I'm fascinated by that and so I I read people's Twitter feeds endlessly to kind of get the sense of
00:29:24
Speaker
what their mission is and what kind of, you know, and like, you know, I think when we look back at something like the election, or like, I read that the, I guess the election overtook it, but at the time, the day after the George Zimmerman verdict in 2013, or maybe 2015, was at that time, the day of like greatest social media activity
00:29:49
Speaker
and greatest unfriendings of all time. I think if you want to look back at what that day was like as a historian, you're going to want the tweets and you're going to want Facebook. I myself was not immune. I remember that day just being on debating with someone's friend's cousin that I didn't know.
00:30:12
Speaker
sucked into the thrall of social media about what this event means. So yeah, it's going to be, I think, this vehicle for history in a way that we don't entirely understand yet.
00:30:25
Speaker
Yeah, I just read Louisa Thomas's biography on Louisa Adams, the wife of John Quincy Adams. And like most biography, it stems from personal diaries and letters and so forth. And you brought up a good point that what historians might be looking back on this era about 100 years from now or longer.
00:30:52
Speaker
And what if they have the capacity to access the social media feeds going on now? I'm sure it'll be possible to access. It might be hard, but just like digging through documents.
00:31:06
Speaker
what a wealth of information about what's going on today. We're too in it to know the context and know any significance, but imagine 100 or 200 years from now looking at Facebook and Twitter feeds that happen to be available and what that will glean about the culture at this time. It's pretty amazing. Yeah, but I don't envy those researchers because weeds.
Inspiration from David Foster Wallace
00:31:29
Speaker
Talk about weeds.
00:31:31
Speaker
Yeah, we get off kind of light, just be like, oh, we have six diaries we can look at. But like, everyone's Twitter from 2016, like, oh, boy. What about writing and writing true stories appealed to you when you've kind of got into this, this mess?
00:31:51
Speaker
Yeah, I started out, I think like many nonfiction writers do in another genre. And I was writing fiction and poetry, but they're really bad and thinly veiled attempts at writing nonfiction. Because nonfiction, I feel like has only evolved in the last 20 years. I mean, I mean, even the last five years, I've seen this incredible renaissance of sort of like long form nonfiction online. I didn't really know how to do it or what it was. And
00:32:21
Speaker
I had a very prescient English teacher hand me a copy in, it would have been junior year of high school of David Foster Wallace's, a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again, the essay he wrote about a seven night Caribbean cruise, which like, oh my gosh, getting handed David Foster Wallace
00:32:41
Speaker
as a 16-year-old, was a little bit intimidating. But I read that essay, you know, dictionary in hand the first time, and I could not believe it. Like, I could not believe this was a thing you could write. That you could write about the experience of being on a cruise, which is kind of absurd and funny, and, you know, just writing comedically about that would have been enough. But he takes pains to, also as a former conflicted philosophy major,
00:33:11
Speaker
like sort of render this this essay about what it means to go on a cruise and what it says about us as Americans and patterns of consumption and mass consumption and you get lines like the psychic nature of Americans is and I just couldn't I mean I must have carried that thing around for weeks because like I could not believe like oh this is a thing you can write and that was it like that was the moment I was like
00:33:33
Speaker
Oh my god, this is what I want to do. Um, and my family actually got me like a, a signed copy of that book for my MFA graduation. So sometimes when I'm writing, I like talk to him. But the book is on my desk, but I'm just like, it's one of those books I open up and I'm like, all right, okay, I just need to get back to whatever it is that is the thing itself. Like you can wander, you know, so far a few of the books. But um,
00:34:01
Speaker
So yeah, it was writing true stories, but it was also like the idea of using true stories to explore these bigger things, bigger ideas, which is like still, I mean, like an ever-evolving genre, like kind of how do you use the truth, air quotes, to tell stories as much as how do you use like stories to tell the truth, I don't know.
00:34:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's incredible that what I love hearing you talk about that particular essay and that collection is I love hearing about the stories or the books that turn a writer's world from black and white in the color and show what's possible.
00:34:50
Speaker
as you revisit those types of his work and then probably you tried to find, being the researcher you are, you're probably like, well, who then influenced Wallace to write the way he did? And so I'm sure you went back to find his influences and so forth. What about his particular style and then maybe offshoots of him like really just resonated with you?
00:35:18
Speaker
Well, there's the level at which like he's just an amazing prose stylist and that I can't imitate. And that was not really, I mean, certainly like, you know, great to behold and read. And like this appreciation for for every word counts in a sentence was part of it. But it was more like he just would take
00:35:45
Speaker
these mundane things and elevate them to the level of kind of great discourse in this way where you didn't really know it was happening. The other essay in the book I return to a lot is the one where he's at the Iowa State Fair. Yeah. And there are parts of that essay where he's like, just look at these shirts people are wearing like isn't this ridiculous? They're wearing these like shirts with stupid jokes on them like this is what we're talking about. But then it's like, you know, he's very aware we're in a very particular
00:36:16
Speaker
place in history and moment in time, we're like, okay, we're in the Midwest in America, in Iowa, where people are farming. And like, what does it mean to like, get together and have a fair like, what does that mean? And yeah, it was just that marriage of just like, beautiful narrative storytelling, and lots of humor with we can use that as a vehicle to approach these higher things, like meaning making. And like, I feel like still,
00:36:45
Speaker
I mean, certainly he has a lot of options. And I say this knowing that like, I know there's like this culture of David Foster Wallace fandom. But I really, I really do feel this like pure connection that I think was developed before all that happened. And I'm definitely more attracted to his nonfiction in this fiction. So I like to like separate myself and be like, okay, I'm not like an infinite jest person necessarily. But yeah, there's something about he just really, you know, I wanted
00:37:15
Speaker
And I relate to his biography, of course, in this way, that is maybe a bit of projection. But there's some Mustang philosophy that was really not doing it for me in terms of trying to make meaning out of the world, where I was like, all right, I have this like perfect ontological rendering of this thing that sounds really nice. But like, how does that help me when I met the Iowa State Fair? Like, I don't know. And the only way I think you can do that is with narrative, like the way he he did it, you got to be on the ground.
00:37:44
Speaker
going to be like getting sick on the ferris wheel and like then maybe you can pull in some of this bigger stuff. And I yeah, it was such a, it remains like the model for how to do that. That is interesting to me.
00:38:01
Speaker
I'm sort of like you. I like his nonfiction better than his fiction. And what I've grown to like even more than his nonfiction is just his interviews that he granted.
Engaging Discussions on Language
00:38:12
Speaker
Just being able to just watch a video and hear him talk for 20 minutes or something. I just really liked hearing that. And maybe my favorite thing of all is the e-book Quack This Way, the conversation he has with Brian Garner.
00:38:29
Speaker
I have not read that. Oh, it's wonderful. It's just about language and grammar. It's a quick read, but it's something I turn to over again just to hear these two really brilliant writers and just purveyors of the language just go back and forth about what it means to write clearly.
00:38:48
Speaker
and just words and word play and just clean grammar. And if you're a word nerd, it's like the things to read, because it's like being able to eavesdrop on a cool conversation about language. And if you're into that kind of thing, which I am, it's really fun. It sounds like you dig it, too. So you have this mentor, this English teacher who put that book in your hand.
00:39:15
Speaker
You know, in moments of doubt in this line of work, you know, who have been some of those people who give you that permission to keep going and who kind of put fuel in your tank to enable you to keep persisting in the face of what can be just like an untold rejection and so forth? Well, so I have another book. Nice.
The Creative Process and Overcoming Failure
00:39:41
Speaker
Yeah. So I read The War of Art.
00:39:46
Speaker
Oh my god, who's the author? Steven Pressfield. Steven Pressfield, Legend of Bag of the Bands. That book came to me after my MFA when that is, for anyone who has got a post-MFA period can be very difficult
00:40:04
Speaker
transition because you've been supported in your writing and had this community and then suddenly you got to figure out what the heck you're going to do sort of more on your own. So I was in that heavily and that was when that book came to me. Someone recommended it to me. It might have been a former, one of my former professors actually. And that book has saved me many times because he says, I'm going to suppress it.
00:40:33
Speaker
he says, essentially, there's nothing else, except for love of the work. And he has this great scene where he's just like, you got to be like a marine, those guys just love suffering, they love just like being in the muck. And it's cool that you've got to build a bridge and your boots are failing. And if you don't love that, you're not gonna, you're not gonna survive. And anything that you've put up against yourself,
00:41:01
Speaker
to detract from that love he calls kind of resistance and it manifests in all these different ways, procrastination and being sick and having drama in your life. And all of it is just sort of a distraction from the fact that you know you should be doing writing or whatever art appeals to you. Yeah, I've come back to that book. You know, I had that book inspired me to start sending out work and spending at work. And then I kind of had my first successful publication in the Atlantic. And
00:41:26
Speaker
just hearing the words, the Atlantic to me, you know, I was like, I've read that magazine my entire life. I couldn't believe it. But in the end, I was so happy. But it was like, oh, this piece had a really good 16 hours online. Yeah. And, you know, like, all my friends called me to congratulations, which was really nice. And it had a lot of like, nice Facebook things said about it. But in the end, it was like, less than a day of sort of like, praise.
00:41:53
Speaker
And right after that, I was like, back at my desk in the book. And that's when, you know, one of the lessons of that book hit me where I was like, Oh, my God, like, if you can't love the work and the grind, you are doomed. Like, if you are in it for any kind of other reason, and like, especially any sort of like, external praise or a claim or fame or any of that, which
00:42:16
Speaker
I know people who are going after literary fame, I'm always like, you know, that's not like real fame, right? Like, you're not Beyonce. You sort of top out at a very low level of fame, even if you're literary famous. But even if you're going for that level of fame, it is you are not going to make it. And I've come back to them many times just to sort of like
00:42:38
Speaker
really excite my love for the grind. And there are many times where I'm like procrastinating and doing other things that I know I shouldn't be doing for weeks at a time. And I've been going through one of those periods where I'm like, avoiding looking at that book, because I know it's gonna kick me back into lines. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the work has to be its own reward. Mm hmm. There's really, there's no other way around it.
00:43:04
Speaker
Yeah, of course. You're spot on for sure.
00:43:12
Speaker
along those lines of being in the muck and so forth. I always like getting people's definition of what it means to work. What strong and hard work looks like in this line of work, like that rigor and tenacity. How do you define that? So when you look back on your day like, oh, that was a good day of work,
00:43:40
Speaker
Ah, gosh, that's a good question. Suffering is a really, it's a word that really comes to mind. I don't know, I think you know when you really suffered through a day. Like you really sat there and thought deeply about what am I trying to do? I tried to put that on the page and struggled with it and struggled with it. I think that's probably the best you can do. Because I mean, research is its own kind of productive day.
00:44:09
Speaker
But to me, research is almost kind of a fun distraction from the writing itself, which is maybe why I indulge in it for too long. It obviously informs the writing and it has its purpose, but it's not the real work in a sense, because the real work is sitting and struggling with the material. I think if you've sat and struggled earnestly for any amount of time, that's probably the most productive
00:44:39
Speaker
at least I can be. And I know when it's happened, because it feels a certain way. It feels both like perversely bad and good at the same time. You know, it feels like you've done work in the same way it feels like you've like run some sort of marathon mentally. It's funny, I like feel happy afterwards with being miserable in the moment. I don't know if anyone can relate to that probably.
00:45:07
Speaker
When you were an intern and a reader for Creative Nonfiction, what did you take away
Crafting Stories for Creative Nonfiction Magazine
00:45:13
Speaker
from that? And what did you learn from reading slush? Oh, gosh, so many things. I mean, it's sort of a practical level. I appreciated how much, you know, literary magazines to me were just like these magical factories where beautiful stories came out. And of course, I saw the other side of that, which is a grind
00:45:35
Speaker
that is an office on the level of like, oh, there are 17 crazy spreadsheets that someone has to consolidate and understand. So I saw like that, like, oh, you're this is a small business that, you know, mostly, all right, I'm gonna go through these spreadsheets. But then, not fiction. But I think because of the name, gives people permission reading the slush to just kind of send in their diaries.
00:46:01
Speaker
just like, oh, I was standing at my kitchen table and I was thinking about this time from the 1960s. And here it is, here's this like little story that I just typed out and sent. So I really started to appreciate creative nonfiction and nonfiction as a craft. Because I think people think it's just, you know, like the moth obviously is out there, although I think those stories are more crafted than we sort of give them credit for that you can just sort of like, tap out
00:46:28
Speaker
any story in any structure in any format without regard to elements like character and plot and voice and certainly craft elements and send it off. And so I like, you know, there's so many people writing because they got out of a difficult situation and it was sort of cathartic therapy writing where I was like, this is great for you. I'm so happy for you. This is not publishable. I really want to send them in and be like, congratulations, you left your marriage, but we can't like there's.
00:46:57
Speaker
So I think that's, yeah, to get a crafted piece actually was kind of a rarity. And I came to appreciate like people out there, not only try and tell their stories, but craft their stories. I appreciated them quite a bit. How far were there some stories here? Like, I can't finish reading this and it's done. Or did you give each one its own little micro dignity of at least finishing it?
00:47:26
Speaker
I did try to finish all of them and I think the hardest ones were the ones where they showed promise and I would go to be like, ah, I see the potential and creative nonfiction being like, you know, a literary magazine who can solicit whoever wants
00:47:44
Speaker
they don't want to spend a lot of time editing. And so they would say to me like, this is gonna be great for some other magazine, we don't have the time to kind of work with this person. And I really wanted to like send a nice note that was like, just keep this, which is funny, because I've gotten those notes. And so now I knew exactly what it was like to be on the other side of those, and to take them less personally and take them, you know, as encouragement.
00:48:04
Speaker
But that was that was hard when it was a clear like someone's diary. I would read it and be like, OK, great for this person and be able to send like an easy rejection when it was right on the borderline of like, oh, clearly this person is a writer and they're playing with this still. Yeah, that was when I was like, I really want to reach out and be like, you just maybe couldn't do it. But yeah, I did try to give their own unless it was unless it was just like a really
00:48:34
Speaker
I don't know, sometimes we would get really people's indulgent kind of fantasy pieces where I was like, what is this? I would try to, I like the idea of micro-indignity. I would try to afford them all some kind of micro-indignity. So what's your daily routine look like? Is your sort of warming up to start working on work of this nature? How do you set up your day?
00:48:59
Speaker
Oh, boy, I am not a good model of a writer in the sense that I'm not like Michael Chaben, where I know I'm going to spend this exact six hours doing this thing every day. And I have my like, you know, desk where I go with like, I, I often
00:49:16
Speaker
could improve in this, I work off inspiration a lot more, where I will be either really, really deep into a piece for days and be in this cave where I can't really talk to other people, or I will be researching and doing other things. But it's kind of like I have to make space to sort of descend into the depths by myself.
00:49:38
Speaker
And so I will do these sort of like marathon writing days. And I actually perversely really like writing on a deadline because it gives me the space kind of like shutting everybody else out and be like, I want a deadline. I'm going to do it and really, really do a deep dive.
00:49:55
Speaker
Yeah, because I really I don't know I got I have to commune with some higher thing that's happening. Like I'm not one of those people that can like right on the bus. Yeah. I'm very envious to those people. And like maybe as I continue to evolve, I'll be a little less precious about stuff like that. But yeah, so my process is, I'll be researching a piece forever, I'll be making notes on a piece, it'll be percolating. And then finally, I have to just kind of take the time to
00:50:24
Speaker
shut the door shut everybody else out take a couple days and do it and I'm excited to be home right now actually because I have had like a personal piece that has I've been going through that process forever and I'm sort of itching to actually sit down with it and I know it will be painful but it's been that percolation takes a really long time for me and that you know in search history too it's like I've been talking about that piece of parties for a year I think before I like sat down
00:50:50
Speaker
to actually work on it. And when I did, I was like, Oh, God. Yeah, like in your head, I imagine you're talking about it at parties, you had this like perfect vision of it. So it must have been it just tough to then actually have to sit down and try to manifest that vision in your head. That was another I saw Ta-Nehisi Coates give an interview about Kraft, and he had a line that was like,
00:51:17
Speaker
everything always sounds cooler when you're talking about it with your friends at the bar. Like the true like sort of test is when you get home and you're like, that is not as cool as I thought. But I thought like, okay, if Tom has a kids experiences this, I feel good about it.
00:51:34
Speaker
So you mentioned the supposedly fun thing in War of Art. Are there any other books that you like to revisit and reread to remind yourself how it's done or to inspire you to do the work that you find most engaging?
Literary Inspirations and Writing Strengths
00:51:53
Speaker
Yula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land, to me, is almost a perfect book of essays.
00:52:02
Speaker
And the same thing with like she just weds the personal to the political and the philosophical and just like perfectly just I don't know how because her voice I feel like is even kind of more seamless than his in some ways like you don't even realize you're talking about, you know, the history of race relations in America before it's happening. And
00:52:23
Speaker
Um, I've come back to that book so many times I've taught that book and I don't even really know how to teach it. Cause I'm just like, how did she do this? Um, like, come on students. I'm asking you. I, I don't know how they do it. She was at AWP 20, uh, 2015. She was on a panel with Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, and Leslie Jameson. It was the four of them. And it was like too much.
00:52:52
Speaker
star power in one room for me. And I don't actually, the panel was like, okay, because I think there's actually too much star power in one group. Yeah, it's like the Avengers of star, of panels. Yeah, yeah. But those four writers and like, you know, women writers so close to my heart. Oh, man, do they get it. So their books, too, are ones I come back to all the time. And I do feel like whoever put them together and it was probably like Grey Wolf put them together.
00:53:23
Speaker
they are coming at writing I feel like from the same way the same way where it's political but it's personal but it is concerned with like um art and craft and you know client ranking in citizen and um refers but don't let me be lonely which is another one I come back to just like it's almost prose poetry more than essay I mean I think it's sold as poetry but it is like beautiful non-fiction and gives me an appreciation for like
00:53:53
Speaker
you're looking at your TV, how is that political and historical? And how do you write that in like 200 words, like a little 200 word bit? It's like, yeah, beautiful. So yeah.
00:54:05
Speaker
And clearly, research is a strength of yours and something that you can even become a form of productive procrastination in a sense, you know, over researching. And what else might you identify as a strength of yours and also a weakness? And knowing that, which ones do you tend to lean into? You know, leveling up your weaknesses or leaning more into your strengths?
00:54:34
Speaker
I know that I'm kind of a heady cerebral writer. And a lot of what I worked on in, you know, during my MFA, and this sounds like so cliche therapy kind of stuff, but I really had to work into being more explicit about the personal, because people would be like, all right, it's not a philosophy essay, it would be like, well, isn't it though, like, like, we need, you know, I feel like it's often the opposite, where it's like people are just writing
00:55:02
Speaker
When my professors used to call it the classic kind of mom essay, people were just writing endlessly about their mom, and it's sad, and that's it. I needed more mom essay, more sad mom essay. Even in editing for this piece, there was literally a note I got that was like, we need more you, we need more parents, we need more this. And I was like, well, I gave you guys my search history. It feels really personal to me.
00:55:29
Speaker
But you know, it was not yeah, people wanted people want blood. So to give them a little more blood. And yeah, that's something you love. This is really good at it. Claudia Rankine's really Maggie Nelson is certainly really good at even as she weds, like, really high level criticism to whatever she's writing their moments where she's just like, and here's what my body was doing. And you're like, Oh my god, like, so
00:55:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's a weakness I try to lean into. In fact, for this year, I'm trying to just write personal essays. It's really hard not to be like, oh no, I'm going to go research. I'm right now trying to write an essay about cats because it is so saccharine and personal and stupid to just play around with that. But I'm very tempted to just be like, let's research Egypt and cats.
00:56:24
Speaker
But yeah, I'm trying to like, stay in the personal a little bit more. Because I think I've been so much in research. Gosh, it's hard to like, name your own strengths. I feel like this is a question we should be asking other people. So in the last couple years, is there a particular behavior or habit that you feel like has improved your your work or your life in any way?
Writers' Support and Coping with Challenges
00:56:49
Speaker
I started meeting with what we have been calling an intentions group, which is four writers, and we were all in the same MFA program together, get together once a week on Sunday and say, here's what I'm working on. And in fact, I've told them they need to crack the rib with and hold me more accountable and be like, why do you do your intentions?
00:57:13
Speaker
It's having that, again, post-MFA is a tough time for a lot of people. Having that community for just even that brief moment every week has meant a lot to me, and we do help each other out. Someone will say, I'm having trouble doing this kind of research.
00:57:32
Speaker
I'm having trouble structuring the story this way. And what do you guys think is interesting about it? Or who do you think I should go talk to next? And or like, I'm having trouble with this pitch. And we do like kind of help each other out. And just having that space. You know, I've had a lot of weeks recently where I was like, I'm not I'm like really failing. And there's a space for other people to say like, I get it and kind of I forgive you or I give you permission to kind of forgive yourself. So that has helped. And
00:58:00
Speaker
I need to lean more heavily on that I think. But just having that little bit of community has been really helpful.
00:58:06
Speaker
to me and writers will tell you again and again and again the importance of community but to build it took me some time. Yeah. In those moments when you're feeling like you're failing, what kind of self-talk do you use? In the absence of the group, what kind of self-talk have you used to, I don't know, if you find yourself down like that to bring yourself back up so you can still continue to do what it is you love?
00:58:36
Speaker
I think that's when I have to go back to the marine mindset of like of well, number one, no one's going to die. Like you're not actually the marine like keeping perspective. No one's going to die. Thankfully, I mean, and it's my barometer of success, but I've had enough publishing success at this point that I can say like this is part of the process and I know
00:59:03
Speaker
it will work out. It's a long game almost every time and very hard to see, but I was just like, failure is actually part of the process. And so when I'm failing, I think like, all right, I'm at the part where I'm failing. I'm at the failure portion. We'll see how long this lasts. And yeah, Jean Marie Laskis is my mentor and for whom I'm a researcher. And I asked her once in her long career, what have you learned? And she said she was like,
00:59:33
Speaker
She's like, I must have gotten better as a writer. I don't really remember getting better, but I must have just by the sheer amount of time. And she was like, what I have learned is to like, trust these phases of failure, like trust the self doubt. And it's true that like, even watching her and this has been nice to peel back the curtain on a super successful writer, where she's just like,
00:59:55
Speaker
This is a hell of a thing I chose to make a living. Wow, this is hard. This is a lot. She has those moments too where everyone's like, all right, it's all of us. And just being on deadline and not knowing really what you're even writing is a thing that's common to everybody. And yeah, so I guess the short answer is perspective. It's how I try to deal with failure.
01:00:17
Speaker
Yeah, what a what a gift to be able to be that close to mentor to in that sense to see someone that you admire who's like in the muck and just doesn't sometimes know how it's going to turn out but clearly just by showing up has gotten better and better and better and is playing the long game I think you hit it on the head is like you you really have to
01:00:39
Speaker
see this as something as a lifelong thing where you never master it but you do by writing every single day and reading more and more you do become better over time and it is something you don't just drop in and parachute in and become some brilliant well-read person like you actually just have to keep showing up get in the muck and do the work and yes you will improve over time.
01:01:04
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I think with anything, which I find weirdly comforting. It's like there's some truth to the 10,000 hours thing.
01:01:14
Speaker
Yeah, of course, of course. Well, you know, Rachel, this has been a lovely conversation and I'd love to talk for another hour, but I gotta be mindful of your time and maybe we can do a part two and dig into some other stuff that I've drawn up. But in this case, I think this was a great place to end our first conversation of what I hope will be ready down the road. Thank you so much. Well, thank you so much.
01:01:50
Speaker
right that's another episode in the books
01:02:09
Speaker
So go to her website rachelmwilkinson.com and you will learn all sorts of good stuff about Rachel and her work and also find her Twitter link which maybe you can tweet at her and ask her how to say it. Show notes for episode 81 and all episodes of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast appear at BrendanOmara.com
01:02:33
Speaker
There you can subscribe to my growing monthly newsletter where I send out my reading recommendations for the month. As well as what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. So, get this, my wife was knitting the other day so I knew she couldn't get away and I made her listen to an episode of the podcast. And you know what her reaction was? Suffering is a really
01:03:03
Speaker
It's a word that really comes to mind. I'm Brendan O'Mara, and I'll see you right back here next week for another CNF and episode of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. The last one of 28 and 2017. Can you believe it? Thanks for listening.