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Episode 267: Suzanne Roberts on Big Wins, Rejection Clubs, and 'Bad Tourist'
167 Plays3 years ago
Suzanne Roberts (@suzanneroberts28) is the author of Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (University of Nebraska Press, 2020).
Suzanne talks about:
- Big wins
- Writing in community
- The Wordy Girls
- Rejection clubs
- And how not to sound like a douchebag when talking about travel
Support for the show:
Patreon: patreon.com/cnfpod
Social Media: @CNFPod
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Suzanne Roberts and her writing process
00:00:00
Speaker
I do just as much writing, I think, when I'm not sitting at my desk. That's Suzanne Roberts. That's this week's guest, episode 267 of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, somehow in its ninth year. The show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. That's right. That's what we do here.
00:00:26
Speaker
Yeah, so Suzanne Roberts is a travel writer. She's at Suzanne Roberts 28 Number on Instagram and she was a sheer joy to talk to it was like CNF pod search engine Optimization spewing out of her mouth listening to her talk. She was just checking off so many of the boxes I love to talk about and of course we're writing a nonfiction memo and
00:00:51
Speaker
community, dealing with jealousy, rioting in community, dealing with rejections, etc, etc.
Sponsorship and Support Options
00:00:58
Speaker
But first, support for the Creative Nonfiction podcast is brought to you by West Virginia Wesleyan College's low residency MFA in Creative Writing. Now in its 10th year, this affordable program boasts a low student-to-faculty ratio and a strong sense of community. Recent CNF faculty include Randy Billings-Noble, Jeremy Jones, and CNF pod alum Sarah Einstein.
00:01:21
Speaker
There's also fiction and poetry tracks. Recent faculty there include Ashley Bryant Phillips and Jacinda Townsend, as well as Diane Gilliam and Savannah Sipple. No matter your discipline, if you're looking to up your craft or maybe learn a new one, consider West Virginia Wesleyan right in the heart of Appalachia. Visit nfa.wvwc.edu for more information and dates of enrollment. And promotional support is also
00:01:49
Speaker
brought to you by Hippo Camp 2021. Oh my goodness, it is right around the corner. It's back in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Registration's still open. It's a conference for us CNFers, us creative nonfiction writers. Marion Winnick will be this year's keynote speaker.
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Speaker
I've got a debut CNF author, panel featuring Lily Danziger, Greg Mania, Carol Smith, and Janine Millett. August 13th through the 15th, you dig? Use the promo code CNFPOD21 to get $50 off your registration fee.
00:02:24
Speaker
So Suzanne Roberts, she's a travel writer, memoirist, and poet. I'm pulling some things off the old website, SuzanneRoberts.net. Her books include the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award winning Almost Somewhere, 28 Days on the John Muir Trail, Muir, Muir, Muir, Bison Books, whatever. You know the trail, you know the guy.
00:02:48
Speaker
The award-winning memoir and travel essays, Bad Tourists, Misadventures, and Love and Travel. That's the one we really talk about on this show. University of Nebraska. And a collection of lyrical essays, Animal Bodies, On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties. That's forthcoming. University of Nebraska Press 2022. And four collections of poetry. All great stuff, right? So we talk about early wins, how not to sound like a douchebag,
00:03:17
Speaker
when you talk about traveling. That was cool. So show notes and other ways to support the podcast are at BrendanOmero.com. If you hate ad reads, you know I keep them pretty minimal and I keep them germane and I only take the ones on that I think are of value to you. But that said, if you're tired of those, consider becoming a patron of Patreon. That way I can maybe make the show 100% listener supported.
New Year's Resolution and Career Shift
00:03:40
Speaker
patreon.com slash cnfpod window shop gets you access to audio magazine every tier and then other tiers get you transcripts and other stuff think about it still keeping this pretty lean here in the introductions don't want to waste your time i might consider recording my quote parting shots unquote and save those for the patreon crowd
00:04:03
Speaker
That way, if you really want to dig that shiz, you can check it out and not be force-fed it. That said, I always kept the old parting shots at the end of the show. Not always, but more recently. And anyway, this lean opening is starting to get bloated, so here's a Suzanne Roberts.
00:04:32
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So as we get rock and rollin' here, what are you up to these days? What are you puttin' in the tank? What are you reading, watching? What's going in? Oh my gosh, so many things are going in. So this year I decided to do a
00:04:51
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New Year's resolution that I might actually be able to accomplish, which was to read a book a week. So nice. Yeah. Yeah. So I've read some really great books lately. Um, I loved, um, like I said, I loved a little Lily Dansickers, a negative space. I read, um, blow your house down by Gina friend Jell-O. Um, I read home baked by Alia volts.
00:05:16
Speaker
So I've been reading a lot of memoir and essay collections, and I think that's because that's the genre I'm still working in at the moment. And so every book I read just gives me so much inspiration. What is it you like about the essay collection as a piece of work? Well, you know, I really like that I can read one essay.
00:05:38
Speaker
and then set it down and come back, and I don't feel like I have to remember where I am in the story. So that I like. I like being able to skip around in essay collections. I know a lot of people don't like to do that. I've heard, in fact, with my own essay collection, Bad Tourist, people, readers, some readers are a little bit unhappy that my book isn't in chronological order. But I did that on purpose, and I wanted people to be able to skip around if they'd so
00:06:06
Speaker
So chose and I also just love the essay as a form I've always been attracted to the you know, the personal essay and I'm I'm really happy that it seems like the marketplace is now more open, you know in Current times, you know, you'd hear for so long. Oh, you can't get a book of essays published But I just don't think that's true anymore
00:06:30
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Yeah I really like the essay collection for a lot of the reasons you're saying as well because to me it strikes me as like a you know a music album where you can listen to it beginning to end track one to track ten or whatever or you can just listen to whatever songs you want or you can put it on shuffle and read things out of order or listen to things out of order and that's what I've really come to find where whether it be
00:06:55
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Melissa Falavino's Tomboy Land or anything that Elena Pasarello does or even what you do with Bad Taurus that you can't hop around or read it beginning to end and it doesn't feel like you're too unstuck in time within the covers of the book. You can travel wherever you want within the book. Yeah, I love that metaphor with the music track and I also think too that
00:07:21
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You know, every book and every memoir, maybe not every book, but many books have sort of their slow spots or their spots where you get kind of like, oh, I'm not so, you know, tracking so well on this. You can stop reading an essay and just start reading the next one if you don't like that one. So I like that too. Nice. And so what at what point do you get the writing bug in your life? What do you mean?
00:07:48
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I would just say, at what point do you want to lean in and become a writer? Well, all the time. I mean, you know, I quit my full time teaching job three years ago to do just that, to lean in and be a writer full time.
00:08:05
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As a result, my husband and I are going to be traveling in our van this summer and renting our house out so that we can afford our mortgage. That's what I do. I don't do it every single day. I'm not one of those writers who's super disciplined like Stephen King in his memoir on riding. He sits at his desk 364 days a year or whatever. I don't do that. Last week, the weather here has been beautiful. I've been mountain biking.
00:08:34
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hiking and paddle boarding, but who's to say that when I'm not, I'm not writing then too. I think walking for me is a time of thinking about sentences and thinking about images. And I do just as much writing, I think, when I'm not sitting at my desk. So I think I'm always leaning in.
00:08:53
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And when I really want to finish a project or work on something difficult, I go away. So I'll go away for a month by myself and write. And I haven't done that since COVID. I mean, I went away for a couple of weekends and a week here and there. But when I really want to finish something, I go away for a month.
00:09:13
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Can you point to any particular, you know, writer or a book or collection that is one of those mentor texts that sort of turned the world from black and white into color for you? You know, probably the book that gave me permission to write my own stories was many, many years ago in the 1990s, I read Cowboys Are My Weakness by Pam Houston.
00:09:41
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I didn't think that writing about nature and hiking and my fears and my bad relationships and my dog were subjects sort of worthy of literature.
00:09:53
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You know, I'd grown up reading all the, you know, dead white men. And I thought, well, these are, these stories are not worthy of literature. And then I read Pam Houston. My creative writing professor gave me her book and it was like, it cracked everything open for me. It was, it was the book that told me that women's stories are valid and interesting and important. And that to me was one of the books that was really instrumental in me becoming a writer.
Early Writing Success and Impostor Syndrome
00:10:22
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Can you point to an early win in your writing life that put enough fuel in the tank that made you feel like you're not completely delusional in this pursuit? Well, you know, it's so funny. And I think I want to address this because I think people who listen to your podcast probably all feel, not all, but many feel like imposters.
00:10:44
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you know no matter how many books you publish or awards you win you just always have that that little like oh you know you're really an imposter or you know i'll have a book accepted for publication and then the voice will come in the editor didn't really read it like they're gonna find you out but it's really no good
00:11:03
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And so every win I think helps. And my early, early win was in the fourth grade. I knew I wanted to be a writer from the time I could write. Even actually before I could write, I used to make little books. I'd tell my mom the story and draw the pictures and she'd write the words for me. And my dad was a writer. So that was open to me, right? A lot of children who grow up and don't think writing is a profession. I had the good fortune of living with a writer
00:11:34
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And so I loved writing stories. And in the fourth grade, I entered mystery writing contest. It was like a short story contest. And I loved, at the time, I loved mystery. I loved Ed Brown Poe. I loved, you know, horror. I ended up getting my PhD in Gothic literature. So there is a direct line there. But I won. I won the greatest mystery writer contest. It was the first time a sixth grader hadn't won and a fourth grader won. Nice.
00:12:03
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And I had to read my story to the assembly, to the entire school. And of course, I read it so fast that nobody knew what was happening, right? And that was a huge win for me. That told me that I could tell a story that was worth someone hearing. And that was my big win. It was fourth grade.
00:12:24
Speaker
I love hearing that. It's so formative to get those kind of things early on because it's something at writing at that age and even through middle school and high school. Usually, you're not really censoring yourself. You're not thinking about it. You're just doing it out of sheer love and it's so great to
00:12:45
Speaker
to hear you sort of develop that muscle and a sense of unbridledness at a young age, which clearly has translated into your more professional writing career, I imagine. Yeah. And, you know, if the joy isn't in sitting down and doing it or getting a new essay or writing a book, finishing a book, I mean, that is
00:13:08
Speaker
great accomplishment whether or not it's ever published doesn't matter you did your part and and so I just tell myself that the writing that the figuring out that's perfect metaphor or the perfect image of the perfect sentence that is where I have to find the joy because the world the world says yes sometimes and the world has said yes to me in a lot of different ways and I'm really grateful for that but the world has said no to me too and will continue to do so and I and I know that and I cannot base on
00:13:38
Speaker
my happiness as a writer on those outside forces, nobody can. Or you won't do it. Or it's not worth doing. Exactly. So in the face of the innumerable and often punishing knows in the world, how do you endure in the face of those? Well, I'm trying to think about the specifics that you might mean.
00:14:05
Speaker
Can you tell me more specifically what you might mean? Well, the great subjectivity of it all is naturally going to put more rejection on your plate. And there's always going to be people just telling you, no, this isn't right. And it's going to be your own confidence and your own assuredness and your own, at some point, a sort of delusional self-belief in yourself that they are wrong and you are right. And it's just a matter of getting
00:14:35
Speaker
It's a matter of just endurance and perseverance, and some people can weather that and other people can't. I wonder how you have managed to build that muscle up that when you get that no, you realize that it's just one step closer to yes. Well, I think there are a couple of things. The first thing is that I've read a lot of literature by people who never made it until after they were dead.
00:15:00
Speaker
You know, I have a chapter in my dissertation on Emily Dickinson. She had seven poems published in her lifetime, right? Now she's like considered the mother of American poetry. So I've read, you know, so many writers who were rejected, criticized, and I know that they were just ahead of their time and that they were doing exactly what they should have been doing. And so sort of philosophically, I understand that. But in practice, I have developed a few key
00:15:29
Speaker
fun ways to deal with rejection and one is that for years I put together a rejection club and so what we would do is there'd be like five writers in this rejection club and we would keep track of all of our rejections for a year and actually send them you know the ones that come through submittable or whatever we would forward them to each other and then everybody would say oh what bad taste they have and you know kind of make each other feel good
00:15:57
Speaker
And whoever got the most rejections got free dinner. Dinner paid for at AWP, the annual conference, one night. And more often than not, I won. I would always shoot for 100 rejections in a year. And I mostly got 100 rejections in a year.
00:16:16
Speaker
That's great. My friend Lisa Romeo, she challenges people to shoot for 100 rejections in a year, which isn't to say ship crap. It just means ship stuff. And if you aim for that many submissions,
00:16:33
Speaker
you're bound to get something. It's just the sheer numbers of it all, but how many people maybe submit three to five things a year and hope to get published when it really, what it's gonna take is 50 to 100 to get anthologized, to get to fill in the blank. It truly is a numbers game and you just have to have that kind of endurance and it's great that you put a little friendly competition into seeing who can put the most work out there.
00:16:59
Speaker
Yeah, it's fun. It's fun and it builds community, right? So we all know what we're doing and we're cheering each other on and we also do send our successes too, right? Like how I got 40 rejections, whatever this month, but I got two acceptances and you're right. I think when I've kept track, I think that my
00:17:16
Speaker
acceptance rate is between 10 and 20%, which is good. That's like really good. So if I send out a hundred things, I'll get 10 things published in a year. And so, you know, I tell my students, it's like, okay, you want to publish 10 things this year? You're not even going to come close unless you send a hundred things out.
00:17:34
Speaker
It's so important to hear that because and I've talked about this in kind of in terms of in baseball terms of in terms of a batting average and that baseball is truly a game of failure like if you fail 70% of the time you're a Hall of Famer and everyone and everyone accepts that is true and it's like great I'm batting 300 I you know I'm an all-star but we don't know the batting average for
00:17:56
Speaker
submitting our work to places so we don't know what's success and what's a failure. And when you hear someone like yourself and you're telling your students that if you're batting 100, you're doing pretty damn good. Oh yeah. Yeah. A 30% would be amazing. Oh yeah. Yeah. So yeah, you're right. I mean, you, yeah, your bet, your, your 70% rejection would be amazing. So I love that way of looking at it.
00:18:24
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's just like whatever that Hall of Fame number is, just in baseball, we know it's that. And so in writing, if we can agree that maybe if you're batting 5% to 10%, it's like, okay, you're doing pretty okay for yourself. Whether you're making a ton of money or not, who cares?
00:18:44
Speaker
If you're landing enough pieces, that means you're putting it out there enough. And that's a good batting average. And the more we can tell people out there and tell the listeners that, if you're submitting 100 things and you're getting 5 to 10 published, you're doing all right. You're getting on base. Yeah, that's really good. Tell me a little bit about the wordy girls.
00:19:05
Speaker
I love the Wordy Girls. I'm seeing them tonight, actually. So the Wordy Girls is the name of my writing group. Anyone who's interested in my ideas about how to set up the perfect writing group, I actually wrote about the Wordy Girls in the brevity blog. There are three of us and we get together about once a month and we share work.
00:19:30
Speaker
And we do retreats in the desert. Luckily, two of my friends, I don't have one, but they both have houses in the desert. So we typically spend about a week in the desert in the spring and a week in the desert in the fall, and we write. We just write together. And a few years back, we had this big idea that we were going to teach workshops and do manuscript evaluation and
00:19:54
Speaker
take over the world in the writing world. And we did start, we had a number of workshops and our big idea was to start like a camp for underprivileged girls, like who couldn't maybe afford to go to a writing camp. And we wanted to use the proceeds to create this camp in Lake Tahoe where we live. And just as we were getting going, all of our, well, most of our parents started getting older and
00:20:24
Speaker
ill and dying and, you know, two of us had to take care of our parents full time. So that got kind of put on the back burner. But I am hoping that, you know, post COVID world, we'll be able to to bring it back and bring back some workshops and things like that. And I would love to, at some point, do a camp for, you know, for little girls who want to be writers.
00:20:47
Speaker
Oh, that's cool. I love this idea of writing in community, not just a writing group where it's like you write on your own and then you submit your things and you workshop your pieces or talk about your pieces, but an actual situation where you're just sitting there among people writing as if you're, I don't know, it's like homeroom and it's, you know, and you're just, all right, putting our heads down and we're writing. We'll probably talk about this later, but right now, let's all put our heads down together and do some work.
00:21:15
Speaker
It's wonderful. It's like why people go to yoga, right? You could do your own yoga practice at home alone. But the energy of having everybody in the room, even if you're not looking at anybody else, it helps your practice. And so that helps your practice of writing. I just rented a haunted house in Virginia City, Nevada, which is this like old cowboy town about two weeks ago and invited 15 women to this art center. It's like this huge haunted mansion. And we all wrote in our bedrooms all day long.
00:21:45
Speaker
got together at night and were able to, you know, have a glass of wine and laugh and share food. And we had a little reading and it was especially, you know, we were all vaccinated. So we were able to do this safely. It was just wonderful. It's just, it was just so wonderful. I finished my book there, my next book and set it off. So it's wonderful.
00:22:06
Speaker
And I love what we're really talking about here, and you've said it a couple times already, is this idea of community. And this game can sometimes get very competitive and toxically jealous, fraught with envy, if you will. And I love hearing you talk about community and how uplifting that can be. So in what ways has community
00:22:31
Speaker
been a good shield for you against a lot of those toxic feelings that can sometimes bleed in to the writer?
Community and Shared Success
00:22:38
Speaker
It's been everything, you know, it has been everything. And I tell my students all the time that jealousy doesn't serve you. I feel really lucky. You know, I mean, I felt jealous of certain things, but not writing. Like, I don't know. I mean, I know that's normal. Most people feel some jealousy when they see their
00:22:58
Speaker
friends or colleagues or whatever getting big awards or getting great publishing deals. But for some reason, for some really lucky reason, I don't feel that. I don't feel jealous. I feel really glad. And that could even be self serving, right? Like if my good friend gets the Guggenheim, well, then she can recommend me for a Guggenheim, right? So it's like, we can all help each other. And, you know, everybody's work is their own work. And
00:23:27
Speaker
There are times I read brilliant books and I think, why am I even trying? But then I think, I can't write this other person's book and they can't write my book. And I think just knowing that your true friends are out there doing it too and their wins are your wins.
00:23:48
Speaker
you know, my students wins are my wins. And so I wish that that was true for everybody. And I see that it's not, you know, I mean, um, I see that, you know, that people are get sort of jealous or upset when other people win or publish things. And I don't, I almost don't understand it, especially if they're their friends, if they're their friends, it's like, you should be happy for your friend. And if you're not,
00:24:14
Speaker
maybe you should go to therapy because that, if you are truly friends with someone, you will be happy even if they got something you wanted. So when you're starting to formulate what would eventually become bad tourist, were you just in the mode of writing, you know, just writing various travel essays and then you're like, oh, there's a slowly, there's a snowball building here? No, I wish that's how it went. That would have been a lot faster.
00:24:44
Speaker
Um, no, I, I'm a very slow writer and I'm not a very, I'm a terrible travel writer. So despite what anyone will tell you, those things are both true. Um, it seems like I've had a lot of things coming out lately, but I've been working on them for so many years. So I started writing a memoir that was sort of about men and travel. I think it was called Between Men and Countries, something like that.
00:25:09
Speaker
So I was writing this memoir and my mom kept sneaking into it. So then it was about how I didn't want to become like my mother and the ways in which I
00:25:19
Speaker
interact with men was inherited from her. She was a beauty queen, and so the male gaze was really important to her. So it was a memoir about that, and I was working with an agent at the time who just wanted more of my mom, more of my mom. She's a really interesting character. She shows up a little bit in Bad Tourist, and then I realized that's not where I wanted the book to go.
00:25:43
Speaker
I actually took my mom out of it completely and I broke up with that agent because she and I didn't have the same vision for the book. And as I was working on that memoir, I kept realizing that these little sort of vignettes were popping up that all were about being a bad tourist and about how to be a better tourist and how to be a person of privilege who travels through the world and recognizes her blind spots
00:26:11
Speaker
and doesn't fall into the pitfalls of bad tourism. I kept pulling them out and put them in a folder and I just called the folder Bad Tourist. I'd never thought I would have a book called Bad Tourist. Then I went into that folder one day and I realized there were like 100,000 words in there. I switched gears because that other book wasn't working, plus at that time my mom got sick. Then I started writing a book about
00:26:34
Speaker
taking care of her when she was dying of cancer, which is the book I'm working on right now. I just was like, oh, let me just see if I can organize this. These are these essays. And a lot of them had been sent out. A lot of them had been published as little short pieces. And I organized it. And then I thought, this is kind of an anti-guide book, like what not to do. So I thought, well, wouldn't it be funny if I organized it like a Lonely Planet? So I ended up putting the Lonely Planet sites
00:27:04
Speaker
you know, sleeping and eating, all those, you know, festivals, categories. And I realized the book was already almost in perfect order. So that's when I realized it was a book. I thought, oh my gosh, this is a book because it's already organized in this sort of arc of self-discovery, but also worked with the Lonely Planet Guide. So then I started revising from there. So it took me many, many years to write that trust. The very first essay I wrote in it,
00:27:34
Speaker
it happens in the middle of the book now. And that was actually the beginning of the memoir. And it was the scene of the avalanche where we set off an avalanche and that's when I know I want to leave my first husband. And that took place in 2002. So that just gives you a sense of, this is a book that's been 20 years in the making.
00:27:55
Speaker
Right. Yeah. I love hearing that. And I love that it is something, like you said, that has been 20 years in the making, which really gets to the heart of how patient you have to be sometimes for something to come together.
The Long Journey of 'Bad Tourist'
00:28:10
Speaker
Is that something that's kind of come easy to you as a writer to be patient and to wait out a story? You know, it didn't come easy to me early on, but it does now. And I think it's because I've had so many times where I've thought,
00:28:25
Speaker
This is never going to come together. I don't know what this is really about. And what I've learned is the only way to find out what something is about to write through it. So, you know, I have so many friends who sell their nonfiction books on proposal, which is great. It's a great way to do it. You get an advance. You get to write the book. You know, you get the sort of win from the universe that this is a book that maybe somebody will want to read. I have never ever
00:28:51
Speaker
thought that that would be a good idea for myself because I don't know what the book is about until I write through it. And so if I proposed a book, it would end up being an entirely different book by the end.
00:29:02
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. That's especially true, I think, for a personal essay and memoir. Things that might take a certain, if it's more journalistic, it might make more sense to do that, the more the book proposal, but I totally hear you with something that feels a bit more novelistic, that yeah, it does feel better to wade through the mud of that to try to get
00:29:29
Speaker
through and really flesh out its heart, its beating heart. Yeah, no, you're right about the journalistic. I have a good friend whose book is coming out next year. It's called Trailed, Catherine Miles. And it's about the murders just off the Appalachian Trail. The two young women who were murdered about 20 years ago.
00:29:49
Speaker
Maybe it's 30 years now, a long time ago. And she needed to sell that on proposal in order to get the right interviews for the FBI and all of those things. And so for her, it made perfect sense. She knew what the book was going to be about. It was going to be sort of a deep dive into this unsolved murder. That makes sense. And I don't write those kinds of books, at least right now I don't.
00:30:16
Speaker
For me, I just write it and then see if anybody wants it, which is why I said I'm a terrible travel writer, right? Because I write it and then see if it will sell rather than proposing it and then writing it.
00:30:29
Speaker
What was that moment like when you effectively had to break up with your agent? You know, given that so many that finding an agent that wants to represent your work is so hard in the first place and then you had to actually break ties because you didn't sort of share that the same vision. What was that moment like for you? Well, I just couldn't I couldn't do what she was asking me to do in the book.
00:30:54
Speaker
And I kept trying. And it was okay. I spent a lot of time trying to make it more what she wanted. And the fact that she wanted the book about my mom has given me a lot of confidence in this next book that I'm just starting to draft about taking care of my mom when she's dying. And I know that she was thinking in a very commercial way. And I was thinking in more of like,
00:31:19
Speaker
what is the book telling me it wants to be? And that's not right. That's sometimes opposite to the marketplace. And I don't know that I broke up with her. I just, we just sort of, you know, we sort of walked different paths and in different directions. And in this next book, the mom book, who's to say now that I've written what she was looking for, that I won't contact her and say, hey,
00:31:47
Speaker
You know, there's no hard feelings or no, you know, I didn't like go get another agent. I don't have an agent right now. Um, and, and so it was, it was more just like, this isn't, uh, this is, I can't make this book into what you want it to be for the marketplace. So I'm just going to, you know, do my thing and. You know, I hope you're having a great time in New York or whatever. Right.
00:32:11
Speaker
One of my favorite essays in the piece was Bellagio People and about you being with the family of a boyfriend and just not feeling like you were amongst them.
00:32:27
Speaker
traveling internationally through much of this book and here you are feeling like a tourist and almost like an intruder in a different culture, but in the United States just with someone else's family. It really struck a chord with me. Oh my God, I love that description. I'm going to use that. You know, that essay in some ways feels silly. You know, it's one of the only essays in the second person and it's... Yeah.
00:32:52
Speaker
You know, I really tried to push the humor on it because it was very, very uncomfortable. And I needed an essay that sort of showed, you know, because I have the essay where I, you know, get together with that boyfriend in Mexico and I have, you know, a couple essays about him and I need to show sort of what the other side of the, you know, the romance part, you know, was. And it was so...
00:33:18
Speaker
Indicative I think of the way in which relationships are that like in some ways they are like a real fairy tale and in other ways They're just awful because the person comes with maybe an awful family
00:33:29
Speaker
So I'm so glad you liked that one. And you alluded to at the start of our conversation about how some people were frustrated by the structure or the anti-chronology of bad tourists. So maybe you can just speak a little to that about just letting it play out more thematically instead of temporally linear, if that makes any sense. Yeah, I mean, I think that a reader who doesn't mind working a little bit harder
00:33:58
Speaker
will really enjoy that it's not in chronological order. I mean, when you think about your favorite Netflix series, right? You see the story and then you flash back, right? They flash back into one character's earlier life. And so then all of a sudden you're in the past, right? So it's not in chronology. If it's done well and it's clear when you're in the past and when you're in the
00:34:21
Speaker
present, then it's really satisfying. Of course, it's easier in a series because the actress looks younger or has a different hairdo, or you can tell when you are, in fact, in the past. So I had to work really hard. And one of the things I did which made it easier is I dated, I timestamped every essay so that people could say, oh, this is 2002. This is really early.
00:34:45
Speaker
And for me, I think that this idea of a woman who is finding her own agency, who is learning how to be subject in her life rather than object, and who is realizing that travel not only changes her, but how do her travels affect the world? And in realizing that makes her a more aware person.
00:35:13
Speaker
I don't think self growth happens in a chronological way. So there are times that I learned something really important and then I went back and became sort of the person who did the ignorant thing or the person who really wanted to attract the attention of male suitors or whatever. And so I tried to create an arc
00:35:40
Speaker
that shows self growth in a number of different ways. And that self growth didn't happen in chronological order, per se.
00:35:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's nice to see that it's not a polished or clean process of personal growth. It can be two steps forward, one back. It can be one step forward, five steps back. But overall, there is forward progress. It's just not as clean as maybe a self-help book might iron out for you. Exactly, exactly.
00:36:17
Speaker
And I love this idea that you said of learning to be more subject over object, which really harkens to what you were saying about the male gaze and how you inherited that mindset or that want from your mother. So in a sense, it's probably something you never quite outgrow or let go of because it's so baked into your DNA. But how have you been able to cope from that and maybe get out from that shadow?
00:36:45
Speaker
Yeah, it was such an important part of my upbringing, and I think the upbringing of girls and women now even, and we're doing better as a society, not telling little girls how pretty they are and little boys how smart they are. We tell them both. You're kind, you're generous, you're smart, the things that really are important.
00:37:09
Speaker
you know, especially I grew up in the 70s when that, you know, it was the most important thing was being like cute and quiet and not taking up too much space and making sure people liked me and that boys liked me. And that my mother, I mean, my mother, that was her survival mechanism. Like she grew up super poor in Northern England. And, you know, she relied on
00:37:36
Speaker
the attention and the monetary means of older men in order to escape. She moved here to California in 1967 or 1968, something like that, before I was born. But I watched her and as a little girl, I wanted to be just like her because that's how we are as little girls.
00:38:00
Speaker
And then as I got to be a teenager, we were sort of like best friends. So we had this boundary list relationship. And then as I got older, I really realized I didn't want to be that way. I didn't want to be like her. And it caused a lot of difficulty in our relationship, which I'm writing about now. I had to really come to terms with it. I mean, I went to therapy and I wrote about it and I've written a couple of books that include
00:38:26
Speaker
these these sort of issues and I think too just getting older you know I mean there is something freeing about being older and and it is true and it shouldn't be true that older women start to disappear you know but but you do disappear in in those ways and it does give you freedom and I think that has you know it's just been a natural process through aging in some respects
00:38:55
Speaker
And in this conversation, you've alluded to that you don't identify as a good travel writer.
Unique Approach to Travel Writing
00:39:01
Speaker
And I wonder why that is. Well, I like I said, you know, if someone and people, you know, there are magazines and things that have said, please go write an essay about, you know, a road trip along Highway 50. And I've done it, you know, because it pays pretty well, better than, you know, long form place based narrative nonfiction.
00:39:23
Speaker
the voice should be the voice of the publication, right, in that kind of travel writing and it should be in the second person, right? Like, you know, lace up your shoes and hike down the trail and, you know, jump in your car and whatever you're writing about. And I, you know, I'm resistant to that kind of writing because I really like to just, you know, reflect on things and I like to
00:39:47
Speaker
reveal my own mind and my own process of thinking. So I don't make that a good travel writer in that way, though I will say it's a good exercise to be able to manipulate your own voice to be the voice of a publication rather than your own voice. So I think it's a great assignment. And when I teach travel writing, I mostly teach the kind of travel writing I like to do, the sort of long form narrative. But I make the students do a service piece because I think it's good practice. And I think if
00:40:17
Speaker
They're looking for ways to fund their other kinds of travel writing. That is a way to do it. And sometimes if you're at a party and you invariably run into somebody who's well-traveled, and most often, at least with my interactions, they come across as being pretty douchey. And I wonder, as someone who's put a lot of miles, has a lot of airline miles and a lot of miles on her tires, how can you talk about travel without sounding like that guy?
00:40:47
Speaker
You know, I've been in the room with that guy and that gal. So I know exactly what you mean. And maybe I'm not careful enough not to be that person. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. And maybe I haven't. I know exactly what you mean. And I think that there's, you know, there's a maybe, maybe it just comes down to
00:41:08
Speaker
the person at the dinner party who never asks anybody else any other questions. So maybe if I'm talking about traveling in India, rather than going on and telling story after story about my experience, maybe asking the person, where have you been that has been really inspirational or informative or has changed you? Or where do you want to go?
00:41:35
Speaker
You know, and I think asking questions stops you from being that person because I don't need to brag about where I've gone because I write about it. You know, I don't need to do both.
00:41:47
Speaker
Yeah, and yeah, that's a great point. You can always tell, what's her name? Jimena Vengoechea. She wrote a great book, Listen Like You Mean It, and it came out a couple months ago. And it's a really great book about just empathic listening and really getting to the heart of what people are
00:42:07
Speaker
you know, trying to talk about by asking the right questions. And you definitely get a sense that there are certain people out there that are more drains than energy givers in a conversation dynamic. And it could be that a person who is very proud about
00:42:22
Speaker
how well-traveled they are and if they're not asking the kind of questions, they're not reflecting back any questions, all they're doing is being a vampire in a sense because all they're doing is sharing their stories but not really giving anything back to the conversation. Maybe that's what it's all about is to be like, all right, let's look outward instead of me showing you the trophies of my life.
00:42:47
Speaker
Well, and to do that, I mean, right there, you're just not aware of the extreme privilege you have. The extreme privilege connected to travel. I mean, most of the people in the world cannot travel and the places that we want to go are places where people don't have the means to even visit places in their own country. And so I think that the idea of
00:43:14
Speaker
of realizing that will give you enough humility to maybe not brag at that next dinner party.
00:43:20
Speaker
And I like that you have a degree in biology. I studied biology too and I was set to graduate. I was three weeks shy of graduation. I ended up adding journalism and staying an extra year because that was more in my, I wanted to be a writer versus someone tucked behind a microscope.
Interplay of Biology and Literature in Suzanne's Work
00:43:42
Speaker
So I just wanted to get a sense of why you were in biology and maybe why you pivoted from it.
00:43:47
Speaker
Well, as I mentioned, my dad was a writer. And again, I had a complicated relationship with both parents. My dad was also an alcoholic.
00:43:59
Speaker
And so like all children who grow up with alcoholics just really, you're living in really shaky ground, right? You don't know if you're going to have like happy daddy who wants to take you for ice cream cone, or you're going to have yelling daddy, right? Who's angry because you're disrupting his nap or whatever it is. And so I didn't want to become my father, you know, just like I didn't want to become my mother. And of course I've become both of them. And now that they're both gone, I realize I did want to become them just different versions of them or my version of them.
00:44:29
Speaker
And so when I was set to go off to college, I wanted to choose a major that was like as far away from that as possible, knowing that I still wanted to be a writer, but also thinking, well, I can go be a park ranger and a writer or I want to work outside or, you know, I really am interested in the way that human body works. And I thought maybe I'll be a doctor, a sports medicine doctor. I really like sports. But then of course I realized all the things about me, right? I'm terrible at math and.
00:44:57
Speaker
I don't like the sight of blood and I'm messy. I think I had the record for breaking the most lab beakers in my physics and chemistry classes in the history of the school. It was hundreds of dollars I had to pay back before I could get my transcripts. I was a terrible scientist. Most of the things I do, frankly, I'm not that good at.
00:45:20
Speaker
And, but it doesn't stop me, which I guess is a good thing. Um, and so by the last semester quarter, we were on the quarter system at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. I was like, I gotta go to grad school and be a writer or a teacher. So I started taking creative writing classes and I took a women and lit class. I took a fiction writing class. And, um, and I did end up going back and doing my MA in fiction writing.
00:45:48
Speaker
a year later at Cal Poly and then went on to do my PhD in literature. I love to write about the natural world. I'm super curious. So I like the fact that I have a biology degree and I can still key out plants and animals and make sure that the right plant is in the right place in my books and things like that. So it has served me for sure.
00:46:11
Speaker
Well, absolutely. It gives you a great sense of biodiversity and especially just biology as a whole because there's the biochemical aspect of things where you can dig into, you know, Krebs cycle, anaerobic stuff, organic chemistry, you know, fissure esterification, whatever it is.
00:46:31
Speaker
And, uh, but then there's also the cool animal behavior stuff when I swear some of the stuff I remember most is from my, this upper level ornithology course I took and I didn't get a particularly good grade, but I can hear bird song and I know bird behaviors and I can pitch and get birds to come out of the bushes and kind of impose there for me. And that all came from that, that class that dropped my GPA a bit, but it certainly served me in life a little more.
00:46:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. No, I still walk by insects and I'm like, oh, you know, and I can name the like scientific name and people who I'm hiking with are thinking, where did you get, where'd you pull that out of?
00:47:08
Speaker
Yeah. We had to memorize a bunch of orders and families in the songbird kingdom, so in the passerines. Even when I see starlings, I know they're in the mimide family, which is the mimics among other birds. I don't know why those things stuck with me, but it's
00:47:29
Speaker
Clearly, it meant something to have that kind of connection to the natural world and just the cool freaks of nature that are out there just beyond our window. Yeah. Is the scientific name for Starling Apis Apis? Is that right? Oh, you might be. I'm going to look that up. I don't know where that came. I mean, my brain, you know, I wonder where these things are held. But, you know, things just pop out sometimes that I don't know if they're right or not.
00:47:59
Speaker
Let's see. I think the Starling we're talking about, I think is a European Starling. So let me... Yeah, I know a thing about a European Starling too. The European Starling Latin name. This makes for great, great audio.
00:48:19
Speaker
but that's what the edit button's for. Looks like, oh, Sternis vulgaris, that's going to be species name. Let's see if we can back up. Up, it's a Linnaean classification here. Also riveting, riveting audio. Oh, I'm sorry, it's a common swift. I looked it up. Oh, okay. Apis apis is a common swift, not a starling.
00:48:41
Speaker
different bird, but at least it's a bird. At least I wasn't making it up. Exactly. Yeah, about the same size. Yeah, common swift. Fantastic. Nice. Listen, I want to be mindful of your time, Suzanne. As I bring this conversation to somewhat of a close, I forgot to prime the pump for you on this one. If it catches you a little flat-footed, that's fine. We can pivot to something else. But I've been liking
00:49:09
Speaker
ending these conversations by asking the guests for a recommendation of any kind. And that can be a book or a brand of coffee or a new pair of socks. And I've just been really liking asking people, asking guests for that kind of recommendation for the listeners out there to see what you might suggest or what you might recommend for the listeners out there. What would I recommend? Of course, you know, my go-to would be a book, but that seems too easy.
00:49:35
Speaker
During the pandemic, my husband and I both got new mountain bikes, which we love. And so I am going to recommend, if anybody is really into mountain biking, that they should get a pivot. They're expensive, but they're really good. And, and beware that, you know, I did break my arm really badly on my, on that pivot last year, but it wasn't the bike's fault. It was the user. So can I recommend a mountain bike? Is that a weird thing to recommend?
00:50:03
Speaker
It's not at all. I love the more things that are almost divorced from literature as possible as recommendations. I can also recommend skis. How about that? A summer recommendation and a winter recommendation? Yeah. So moment skis are amazing. They are made in Sparks, Nevada. So very close. And in fact, full disclosure, my friend's son makes them. But they're a really great company.
00:50:31
Speaker
I ski on moments and my husband does too and for a long time my husband could not keep up with me until I got him a pair of moments. So I always say that moments saved our marriage.
00:50:42
Speaker
That's really a kind of a perfect turn of phrase, too. What I love about what you're saying, too, with this recommendation is that they're very physical things. And like you said, you would go on walks, and even when you're not at your desk, sometimes those were the most furtive moments of writing. So doing these physical things is very much a part of being connected to the world, but also being an artist.
00:51:06
Speaker
It is, it is, and I think you have to go outside and do things or you're not gonna have anything to write about.
00:51:12
Speaker
Yeah, I heard Whitney Cummings, the comedian, talk about if art is supposed to imitate life, you have to have a life. So it's like this is the kind of stuff that you're going to have really cool interactions by putting yourself out in contact with people in touch with the world. And by doing so, it's like, OK, the notebook will fill up. And you might be able to imbue some meaning on a certain experience, or maybe not. Either way, it's fun.
00:51:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I, you know, it's interesting. I think that that's something the pandemic taught me, you know, this is the longest I've been without a, you know, international travel for, you know, my whole adult life. And I've actually been able to kind of catch up on my story. So like, I had all these stories I wanted to write. And because of the pandemic, I've been able to sort of catch up on it, because I've been staying home and I'm not refilling
00:52:11
Speaker
my life with stories and things I want to write about. I'm sitting and I'm writing, but now it's time, you know, I've written stories I need to write. It's time for me to go out in the world again. But I think for the future, even if we don't have more pandemics, which knock on wood, I hope we don't, but you know, we might. I think that's something I'm going to incorporate into my life, like a break, like a six month break from adventure every once in a while so that I can catch up with the writing.
00:52:40
Speaker
Yeah, I love that, that seasonal approach to things too. And, you know, we've been kind of talking in and out of sports too. Like it's never, there's never just one, one full season. Like there's a, there are regular season, then there's post season, but then there's off season where, where you let the, the, the crops go fallow. And, but you, you're working on skills to
00:53:02
Speaker
when the season starts up again, you're ready with a new set of skills and some training and some time away from the grind of it all. And I think that's a great way to think about it, to take those times away. It doesn't mean you're not working, it just means you're recharging the batteries in a lot of ways. Mm-hmm, exactly. Nice. Well, Suzanne, where can people get more familiar with your work, find you online, social media, website, all that stuff?
00:53:30
Speaker
I have a website. It's just my name, SuzanneRoberts.net and I'm on Facebook and I'm also on Instagram and it's SuzanneRoberts28 and I do have Twitter but I hardly ever use it because Twitter scares me a little bit. So I check it like once a month. So that's not a really great place to find me. So I would say my website and Instagram if you want to
00:53:57
Speaker
follow along on my van adventures this summer. I'm going to be living out of my van, so I'll be posting pictures on Instagram.
00:54:05
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, you'll be twitching the fibers of my envy with the van travel. Well, I'll try to also keep it real and show all the times that we're being towed. Because it's a 1999 van. It's very old. And all the times that we're broken down and all the times that it's buggy and hot and we don't know air conditioning. So I'll keep it real too, so there won't be too much jealousy.
00:54:30
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Suzanne, thanks so much for hopping on the podcast, and of course, thanks for the work. Oh, thank you so much. Thanks, Suzanne. Oh, boy. Well, thanks to Suzanne Roberts for the time. That was a good chat. I had a fun time talking to her there. Let's check in on her van trip.
00:54:55
Speaker
I have many VW van stickers, so I live vicariously through my stickers. What a life. Check out her book, Bad Tourist, Fun Read, and Anti-Chronology. Kind of like it. Anti-Guidebook. It's good stuff. Check it out. So thanks for listening and seeing efforts. Thanks for the support, as always. Thanks to WVWC. That's West Virginia Wesleyan Colleges, MFA in Creative Writing, as well as Hippo Camp 2021 for the support.
00:55:22
Speaker
and thanks for being along for the ride, CNFers. And I haven't been doing much of an extended riff of late. Part of that is mood. I've been in a titanically lousy mood for several weeks now, and part of that is respect for your time, of course, you know?
00:55:38
Speaker
I can't imagine this is the only podcast you listen to. You probably listen to a dozen, maybe more. And who am I to take time away from you and those other podcasts, even if they might not be as good? Then I think many of you who listen to this show, you get a, you know, you can get a decent interview anywhere, right? Sure, I have a certain style and skill, whatever, but ultimately what makes you loyal to a show is the weirdness of the host and any cosmic congruency you feel with him or her or them.
00:56:07
Speaker
My riffs, for what it's worth, you're not going to find those elsewhere. And when I put them at the end of the show, you can at least elect to listen to it or you can skip it. You're not being force-fed the cod oil of my riffs. You can choose to take that on your own time and dime. But it's there if you like a cherry on top. It's your salad with the dressing on the side. Take it or leave it. And if I don't,
00:56:33
Speaker
do a riff, then what separates this show from myriad other punks out there? I've come to love Mark Maron's opening monologues. I used to not like them that much, but then they really grew on me a few years ago at this point. And where else can you find those opening monologues then on WTF with him? It is unique to him and his show. And so that's part of the weirdness that you tune into.
00:56:58
Speaker
Yeah, see, look what happened. I didn't even mean for a rift to happen. God damn it, CNFers. I know one thing you won't hear anywhere else. If you can't do, interview Satan.
00:57:26
Speaker
you