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Episode 281: Susan Orlean Tackles Ledes, Generating Story Ideas, and 'On Animals'
277 Plays3 years ago
Susan Orlean is the best selling author of The Library Book, Rin Tin Tin, and The Orchid Thief. She's a staff writer for The New Yorker and her latest collection is On Animals.
Show notes and newsletter at brendanomeara.com
Social Media: @CNFPod on Twitter and @creativenonfictionpodcast on Instagram.
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Transcript
Submission Deadline for Audio Magazine
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey, before we dive into this interview, I wanna remind you that the submission deadline for issue three of the audio magazine is November 1st. The theme is heroes. Essays must be no more than 2,000 words. Bear in mind this is an audio essay, so pay attention to how the words roll out of your mouth, man. Email your submissions with heroes in the subject line to Creative Nonfiction Podcast at gmail.com.
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:28
Speaker
Oh, I pay writers too.
00:00:31
Speaker
Each book is a brand new uncharted territory that is like putting together the hardest jigsaw puzzle without having the picture of the finished image. So you don't even know what it is that you're trying to put together.
00:00:59
Speaker
Oh hey, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true
Susan Orlean on Her New Book 'On Animals'
00:01:05
Speaker
stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, how's it going? Some of you might be new to this jam. We're in our ninth year of doing this show, and you might be here for the first time because of the one and only Susan Orlean.
00:01:19
Speaker
She makes her third trip back to the podcast. I believe she was episode 61 121 and now 281 Great to have her back You know her as a staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of such incredible books like the orchid thief Rin Tin Tin and the library book and her latest book is on animals and it's a collection of her writing on you guessed it politicians I
00:01:49
Speaker
I kid, I kid. It's animals. The stories feature the orca from Free Willy, a pair of oxen, a tiger lady, and chickens. My goodness, the chickens.
Podcast Sponsorship by WV Wesleyan College
00:02:00
Speaker
But we'll get to that in a sec. Support for the Creative Nonfiction podcast is brought to you by West Virginia Wesleyan College's low residency MFA in creative writing.
00:02:09
Speaker
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 Brandon Billings-Noble, Jeremy Jones, and CNF POD alum Sarah Einstein. 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.
00:02:31
Speaker
No matter your discipline, if you're looking to up your craft or learn a new one, consider West Virginia Wesleyan right in the heart of Appalachia.
Podcast's New Instagram Account
00:02:40
Speaker
Visit nfa.wvwc.edu for more information and dates of enrollment.
00:02:48
Speaker
So if you may or may not know, I started a new Instagram account for the podcast. It is just at Creative Nonfiction Podcast. So you can feel free to keep the conversation going there.
Importance of Podcast Reviews
00:02:58
Speaker
Despite this Facebook fallout bullshit, the latest in a long string of black eyes.
00:03:06
Speaker
Are you losing patience with social media? Well, you know me. I sure as hell am. So, better yet, head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes to this episode and a million other interviews. And to sign up for my monthly reading list newsletter, it goes up to 11, man. Literally. Rage against the algorithm, bro.
00:03:25
Speaker
And if you have a moment, give the show a kind written review on Apple Podcasts. That way, the way we're seeing effort who might stumble upon the show might say, damn, I'll give that a try. As you know, I'm a categorical nobody. So the reviews make someone say, wow, he must be hot or something or like
Susan Orlean on Curating and Story Ideas
00:03:42
Speaker
Dunkin Donuts. All right. Susan Orlean needs no introduction.
00:03:48
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It's always great when guests come back on the podcast to talk shop and this one is chock full of nuggets from leads to curating a collection to generating story ideas. It's all here and it's all Susan Orlean.
Pandemic Media Consumption Changes
00:04:04
Speaker
So let's hit it CNFers.
00:04:17
Speaker
I would say like a lot of America, the pandemic has been my TV immersion period. And also I've listened to tons of podcasts.
00:04:31
Speaker
I also have been slamming back books like crazy, but I would say what I've been doing a lot is at the end of the day, and I think this is true for lots of people I know, this has been such a stressful time. And at the end of the day, I want to sit and be entertained. So I've loved just watching great television and there's been such wonderful stuff to watch.
Pandemic-Induced Anxieties
00:05:00
Speaker
to the point of just wanting to be entertained and to even unplug a bit. I don't know about you, but of late, and especially the past year, I've just been really burned out and having a hard time trying to mitigate that burnout. Is that something that you've experienced too, is just like constant mind fry and you're just like, oh man, how do I cope with this? Yeah, absolutely. I feel like,
00:05:26
Speaker
This has exposed us to pressures and worries and anxieties that are unprecedented in our lifetime.
00:05:39
Speaker
everything from, am I gonna get sick? To, is the world gonna end? To, am I gonna lose my job? Is my kid ever gonna go back to school? It's really, and then the minor things, is it safe to go to the grocery store? I mean, things that we took for granted that were so mundane, so un...
00:06:07
Speaker
challenging mentally that we are suddenly now having to do a kind of algorithm, like is it worth going to the store or is that possibly, suddenly everything becomes a calculation and it's almost as if we're crossing the street over and over again without a crosswalk.
Revisiting New Yorker Pieces
00:06:33
Speaker
Yeah. When you have a walk sign at a crosswalk, you walk across it, you may be mindful just because every now and again, someone will break.
00:06:46
Speaker
a red light or a car will turn unexpectedly, but generally you just walk across the street. If you're suddenly in a world where there are no crosswalks and the most ordinary activity of crossing a street becomes fraught with anxiety and real danger, it's not just in your mind, it's actually reality that you could be exposed to danger.
00:07:16
Speaker
It's just exhausting. I think we're all exhausted.
00:07:21
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Yeah. And was it in any way recharging for you to revisit so many of these wonderful animal pieces that you've written for the New Yorker? And I believe, is it all exclusively New Yorker pieces or are there other? There are a few others, a few from the Smithsonian. There's something that was originally published on Amazon and
00:07:49
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one piece from the Atlantic and the restaurant from the New Yorker. And to answer your question, it was first of all, it was wonderful to have a very specific concrete project. Yeah. That really helped. It was it really focused me and gave me a task. And the task of putting together a collection is very different from
00:08:18
Speaker
putting together a new book. It's demanding and it requires your concentration, but you aren't creating new materials.
Writing Challenges vs. Editing Collections
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Speaker
So it's not tapping into your need to feel creative. It's much more of an editorial sort of project. I was reading all these pieces, editing them, trying to
00:08:47
Speaker
keep them as close to their original form as possible, but I was reading them and polishing them. So it was a very concrete task that felt demanding, but it didn't require me to feel at my most creative because I wasn't producing new work.
00:09:14
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Yeah, because I remember when we were talking around the time of when Library Book came out, you had that sense of just being really rung out from the whole process. And I think I've even seen on Twitter, too, just how rung out you were from it. And you always have that sort of post book thing where I don't think I can do this again.
00:09:34
Speaker
And so I imagine that going through a collection of this nature was a way to still do book work but not feel quite as, you know, wrung out because you weren't tapping into that creative reservoir that does drain the well over several years of reporting research and writing.
00:09:53
Speaker
Oh, exactly. I also think that one of the huge challenges with writing a book from scratch, so to speak, is you're inventing this new thing. Unless you really write formulaic books, each book is a brand new uncharted territory that is
00:10:19
Speaker
like putting together the hardest jigsaw puzzle without having the picture of the finished image. So you don't even know what it is that you're trying to put together. So it's uniquely exhausting. And of course, obviously uniquely gratifying and wonderful and a wonderful challenge. I don't mean to make it sound like all misery, but it is very
00:10:48
Speaker
difficult and it's a very solitary pursuit. It's something that nobody can
Using Historical Context in Writing
00:10:54
Speaker
really help you with. You've got to figure it out. Doing a collection, I mean, I actually think sometimes that I would have really enjoyed being an editor because I really love taking a piece and thinking, what's the 10% improvement that I can bring to this? These pieces were
00:11:18
Speaker
I was very proud of them when they were published. Inevitably, you find little bits that you wish you had gotten a little smoother in the original publication. And then in addition, there's a whole new aspect of it, which is this piece will now live within the
00:11:43
Speaker
same space as this other piece, are there repetitions in terms of word choice or structure that I want to change up? Because there is a big difference in running a story and then having that story next to another story you've written. I mean, you want to make sure that
00:12:08
Speaker
the book works as a book, so there's a little bit of tweaking in that regard. And then there was some new material that I wrote for On Animals, primarily in the first piece, in the introduction and in the, actually the final piece, I believe I wrote an additional section in the end.
00:12:35
Speaker
Oh, I did. Of course I did. Sorry, I couldn't for a minute. I couldn't remember. But that that was it was so natural and so clear to me what I needed in those two sections that that was a writing task, but it didn't have that same. I mean, the big challenge with writing a book of nonfiction is the structure. When you're writing an introduction to a collection, you're not grappling with
00:13:06
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those questions of structure. It's quite obvious what
Overcoming Intimidation in Historical Writing
00:13:09
Speaker
you need. You're writing an introduction. So the biggest drain on your mental capacity when you're writing a book, to me, is figuring out structure. And so that isn't part of what you have to deal with with a collection. So you're saved from that very epic task when it's a collection.
00:13:35
Speaker
When you're dealing with structure and having written several books, do you find that each one is very much starting anew or do you potentially lean on your previous body of work and be like, oh, structure for Rin Tin Tin work like this or orchid thief work like this, then maybe
00:13:56
Speaker
library book could lean on that or draw inspiration from it? Or do you just say or just burn it down and be like, we got to build a whole new foundation from this material? Well, the answer is a little bit of both. I do think overall you have to start from scratch. Each story truly demands its own structure. I don't think you can use the template of a previous book.
00:14:26
Speaker
very much at all. What you can use is a certain amount of of experience and confidence that grows with each book you write. So while the structure of the orchid thief and the structure of the library book are very different, writing the orchid thief gave me the confidence to feel like you could move in
00:14:54
Speaker
in and out of different time frames and a reader could follow you so that both of those books had a real span of time that I was trying to incorporate. I think had I not written The Orchid Thief and had the experience of thinking, all right, as long as you help the reader know where they are historically,
00:15:23
Speaker
they're willing to move from the present to the past. And you can do that. And that really influenced my ability to write Rintintin and to write the library book. Again, I just, I feel that I have a tendency and I obviously feel that it's important to give historical context to
00:15:52
Speaker
all of the pieces I write and they do all end up touching a lot on history, which is something that, you know, only in retrospect did I begin to realize, oh, I do really love looking at, you know, bringing people through time to the present day, that it's, it doesn't feel complete to simply say, here's a story, it happened.
00:16:18
Speaker
on October 1st and it ended October 3rd, and that's all I'm telling you. That experience of moving the reader around in time is one that really helped me in subsequent books. I mean, when I first did it in the Orca thief, I was worried about it. I thought, well, can you go from the present day in South Florida to the 1700s?
00:16:48
Speaker
Can a reader follow that? Can you move from talking in the present day to just winding it back 200 years? And I did it and I thought, wow, you can do that. You can do that and the reader can follow you as long as you explain to them why you're moving in time.
Originality and Unique Story Presentation
00:17:12
Speaker
But overall, I think that
00:17:16
Speaker
Each of my books is so, so different. The subjects are so different that each one required being invented from the foundation up.
00:17:31
Speaker
What have you found to be the challenge regarding historical material or background material that helps inform your sort of a thread that that main narrative going through so much so where it doesn't form the present but it doesn't bog down the entire narrative? Well, this was one of the biggest breakthroughs I ever had as a writer when I
00:18:00
Speaker
When I was working on the Orchid Thief and I did a bunch of historical research that seemed
00:18:08
Speaker
absolutely critical to the book, both the history of the Seminole tribe, the history of South Florida, the history of orchid hunting. You know, I felt like I couldn't tell you the story of this one incident without you knowing all of this other history. And the problem was I was very accustomed as a journalist to telling you what I saw with my own eyes.
00:18:39
Speaker
This person said this, they looked like that. The place was such and so. And this was all primary experience. I didn't feel, my expertise was implied. I was the expert because I was there and I talked to that person. And so I felt.
00:19:00
Speaker
entitled to tell the story because of that sense of owning the material, so to speak. I saw it with my own eyes so I can tell you what it was like. With researching historically, suddenly I felt intimidated and thought, well, wait a minute. I'm not the expert on South Florida. How can I
00:19:29
Speaker
tell readers what I've learned with that same kind of assertiveness as I'm able to tell them about these events that I witnessed firsthand. I think that it was the first time, now certainly I'd written about history in my magazine pieces, but I'd never quite grappled with it before. And I remember saying to my editor,
00:19:58
Speaker
Who am I to tell people about the history of South Florida? Anybody could go look it up. And that was where I became really kind of frozen because not everybody talked to John LaRoche. I talked to John LaRoche so I can tell you what the conversation was like because I had it.
00:20:19
Speaker
But anybody could go look up the history of South Florida. And my editor said to me, but they won't. By which he meant, you're learning this for your reader. And it doesn't matter whether you learned it by having a first person experience or you learned it by going to the library and doing research. It's all equal.
00:20:47
Speaker
The point is you are learning a story, all parts of the story, some of which was book learning and some of which was on the ground learning, but it all equals the same thing, which is a story you're telling people that they probably wouldn't go learn on their own. I mean, the reality is
00:21:13
Speaker
anybody could have called John LaRoche too, but they won't. That was a breakthrough moment for me where I thought, oh, I get it. My job is I'm going to take you into worlds that you probably wouldn't go into otherwise. Whatever the texture of that,
00:21:43
Speaker
information is doesn't really matter. I mean, look, when I was writing about World War I with Rinton 10, I was certainly intimidated. I thought, I'm no expert and this is something that people already know a fair amount about. So I thought, well, what I need to focus on is
00:22:12
Speaker
some elements of the history of World War I that are relevant to the book that you probably didn't learn. I mean, most of us didn't learn in our history classes that animals were used as widely as they were used in World War I.
00:22:33
Speaker
Yes, I need to tell you that World War I existed and that the battles were horrendous and there was a flu outbreak, some of which you might know. But what you don't know probably is the history of animals in World War I. So I gathered a lot of confidence. I mean, really that comment from my editor broke it open for me. The sort of doubling down on
00:23:02
Speaker
the realization that you're kind of relying on me to tell you a good story. And if it includes material from big, big, big, well-known topics like World War I, that's okay. I'm telling you the aspect of that that I've learned. And it doesn't matter that I learned it from a book as opposed to learning it from an individual.
Crafting Engaging Leads
00:23:28
Speaker
And I think this is incredibly rare, but I think it begs asking is that I remember in the, well, I had heard that in the sort of early mid-90s when John Krakauer was working on Into the Wild, I'm blanking on the New Yorker writer, but there was also a writer working on a similar story on Chris McCandless, Alexander Supertramp, who died in the Alaskan wilderness.
00:23:54
Speaker
and so the two of them were kind of racing each other for the story and granted they had they're putting it through their own world for you in their own lens of telling the story but they're still kind of writing the same story at the same time so there's that weird confluence of two very good writers going at the same story so I wonder with you if you've had an experience like that where you've where you know someone else has been writing something that you know you're also pursuing
00:24:20
Speaker
It's happened to me a few times. I feel like I'm lucky because I often think of stories that are so eccentric that nobody else is doing them. But I've definitely encountered other writers. When I wrote about the World Taxidermy Championships, for instance, there was another reporter there and I was shocked because I thought, God,
00:24:48
Speaker
of all the things I've covered, this is the one where I didn't expect to run into another writer. And I forget who she was writing for, but you know, it made me very uncomfortable. And I mean, it was awkward. I think it was awkward for both of us because there were just the two of us. It's not like being at a presidential press conference where
00:25:12
Speaker
Of course, there are going to be millions of reporters. I'm sure we each thought that we were the only person to be covering this. I think ultimately, the way I got over that was just thinking, look, we're going to each write our own story. They'll be different. They're going to be different. Is there an appetite in the
00:25:37
Speaker
public for two stories about the World Taxidermy Championships? Well, I can't worry about that. I need to just do my story and not, you know, it's sort of up to your publisher if they say, oh, no, you know, well, we're not going to run your story now because they just came out with a great one in Esquire. I mean, that happens and
00:26:03
Speaker
It's a real drag when it does happen. But in this case, I thought the stories themselves are absolutely going to be different. I mean, this was such a kooky event to be covering. And there were a hundred different ways you could write about it. So don't worry about it.
00:26:23
Speaker
something that you said earlier about the 10% improvement of a particular piece and the task of putting together the collection. So many of us, I think when we go back and read a lot of our old work, I think a lot of us will say, like, oh, I can't do that. I find that horrifying to go back because you've developed more as a writer or maybe you've even regressed. Who knows? So what was that like for you to revisit these pieces and then look at it and be like, oh, wow, that was
00:26:52
Speaker
That's really good that holds up or I really wish I had done this differently. All right. Well, that, of course, was my dread when I proposed the idea of doing the collection. It was before I had reread all the stories. So and I don't reread my work. I.
00:27:11
Speaker
Once it's published, I do not read it again. I just don't. Partly because I don't want to see things that I then think, shoot, I wish I'd changed it. I just don't want to have that experience.
00:27:27
Speaker
So I was going back and reading most of these for the first time and I worried. I mean, look, it's like looking at old pictures of yourself or something where you could think, yikes, that was not my finest work. And these span an enormous amount of time. So
00:27:48
Speaker
You kind of hope you've gotten better, you know, so that's your first thought was, well, maybe the current stuff is strong, but maybe the old stuff isn't so good. And then you also have this other fear, which is the inverse, which is maybe I kind of hit my peak.
00:28:07
Speaker
20 years ago and I've been going downhill. I've lost my fastball. Well, exactly. So you kind of approach it or certainly I approached it with like one eye crunched shut and thought, OK, I'm going to read these. And if they're not up to my standards, then.
00:28:28
Speaker
then I can't do this collection. So reading them was, it was kind of great because I read most of them as if I were a reader. I mean, except for the rabbit, the story about rabbit hemorrhagic disease, which I wrote very recently, there was a lot of time elapsed between when I'd written
00:28:52
Speaker
any of these pieces. I mean, certainly a lot of psychic time had passed. So I did read them as if I were reading them for the very first time, which was really helpful in terms of editing. But it also made me read them with a pretty kind of high bar.
00:29:20
Speaker
I read them thinking, is this good enough to keep in eternity in the form of a book? And I'm really happy to say that I didn't cut anything. I didn't read something and say, not up to snuff. So that was a thrill. And it actually really made me feel good to think that over quite a long stretch of time,
00:29:49
Speaker
I've written stories that at least to me reach the same level. And that's a nice feeling considering that this really represents a big, broad swath of time.
00:30:09
Speaker
And one of the joys of reading the book and actually rereading it was, all right, so I went through it cover to cover and read it and then I went through and I took a sticky note and I just put it at the start of every piece. So, because I love your leads and it was a way for me to kind of like shotgun a bunch of leads and just see how, how is Susan getting into this story?
00:30:34
Speaker
And there are lots of different ways you do it. And, you know, there's, you know, just eyeballing a couple that I have just tabbed out right here. You know, there's the first, the it bird where you talk like mouth to beak resuscitation and that.
00:30:50
Speaker
And then there's Showdog where you're like, if I were a bitch, I'd be in love with Biff Truesdale. And then there's one of my favorite leads, and I love these leads from all people, and you do it especially well. And this was with the Mule piece, and I call it like the itemized lead, where it's just so dense with reporting. And there's a nice little hat tip to, I think, to Tim O'Brien here, when you started with the things they carry, are band-aids, bullets, and cardboard cases of meals ready to eat, and on and on and on, and it's just like,
00:31:19
Speaker
Oh, wow. Like I love that itemized very densely reported lead. So I just that was part of the fun of this book for me and going back through
Pitching Unconventional Ideas
00:31:27
Speaker
it. So I just want to maybe talk to you about leads and how important those are for you to set the tone and even to put a bit of style into it. Yeah. Well, I mean, that was part of why a collection appealed to me so much, to be honest, because
00:31:45
Speaker
the chance to strut some leads and endings, you know, made me really happy. And also seeing the variety, that was cool to see them together and think, oh, God, I really kind of entered each of these pieces in a really different way, which I'm very proud of.
00:32:13
Speaker
To me, leads are so important. And in the world in which we're fighting not only other magazine stories, but television and podcasts and everything under the sun for people's attention, the lead has become ever more critical, particularly
00:32:35
Speaker
for the stories that I write because nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, God, I'm so curious about how the army uses mules. They just don't. I mean, people may wake up and think, what's going on with the debt ceiling? And have they figured that out in Congress? Or I really want to know if Lady Gaga is pregnant, but they don't wake up wondering
00:33:04
Speaker
about any of these stories. And that is part of the thrill of doing them, but it's also part of the challenge so that I need to get you to buy in immediately. It puts a huge amount of importance on the lead because of that non-existent, pre-existing need to read the story, if that makes sense.
00:33:33
Speaker
A pre-existing interest is a wonderful luxury if you're writing a story. If you know celebrity profile, you can go on the assumption that you're gonna get a bunch of people reading it because we're all curious about celebrities. News stories, murder stories, there are lots of types of stories where people don't have to be seduced
00:34:01
Speaker
early on because they come to them already interested. As far as a story that I am trying to lead you into a subject that you didn't know you could care about, or you might even actually actively think you don't care about, means that I have got to convince you early on that this is something
00:34:32
Speaker
interesting. That doesn't mean that I give you a synopsis of the story in the first three sentences. In fact, it's kind of the opposite. It's a little bit like the warm-up comic before David Letterman. They're not going to stand up there and give you a kind of synopsis of what David Letterman's show was going to be. They get up there and they try to
00:35:01
Speaker
get you engaged and warm you up and make you feel like, oh, I can't wait for the rest of the show. So that, to me, is what the lead has to do. It obviously needs to be at least nominally about the subject, but its first requirement is to intrigue you and make you think, huh,
00:35:29
Speaker
Where is this going? I'm kind of curious. And sometimes it's just that it's rhythmically interesting or visually arresting. The reader's response is then, what's this about? What's next? Or you drop a few super delicious factoids
00:35:57
Speaker
that make people, that hook people because they wanna know what world this comes from. And by that, I mean something like mouth to beak resuscitation. I just think it's a detail, and actually it's accurate, by the way. She did do mouth to mouth resuscitation on the chicken. But I think that the purpose of that is to make you,
00:36:27
Speaker
I mean, often laugh, but mostly go, what? You know, tell me more and buckle in and go with the rest of the story. So I just think they're incredibly important. And their importance is the buy-in from the reader, which I think that for a very long time, I felt that you had to basically synopsize
00:36:57
Speaker
the story in the lead. I think that's a little bit of the newspaper training, which is tell everybody the who, what, why, when, where, right off the bat, and then go more expositionally into the piece. That's not the way a magazine piece needs to go. And you don't want
00:37:27
Speaker
to mislead people, you don't want to confuse people, but I think you need to do something sexier unless merely telling people the explicit detail of what the story's about is the buy-in. But I spend a lot of time working on the leads. I really do, and I write my stories from beginning to end, so until I get the lead, I can't write the rest, so it's particularly important.
00:37:56
Speaker
Yeah, one of the most delightful opening paragraphs that you have in the entire collection is with the oxen, carbonaro and primavera. I love that opening graph. And just the idea that you're writing this story about these Cuban oxen and everything is just like,
00:38:15
Speaker
I wonder how you go about convincing your editors, be like, hey, you know, I found out about these Cuban oxen and how it's, you know, at this watershed of, I don't know, old technology and new technology and everything. And to get to your point earlier of getting people to care about a couple of Cuban oxen, it's like, how do you get your editors to turn you loose on it?
00:38:43
Speaker
Ah, well, that's of course the secret sauce. And, you know, I will say it's, you know, I feel unbelievably lucky because at first blush, 99% of what I want to write about leaves people puzzled
Identifying Compelling Story Ideas
00:39:05
Speaker
or, or even kind of resistant and
00:39:11
Speaker
It's something that I think over time I've built up enough equity with my editors that I feel that I have a good gut intuitive sense of what could make a good story. I think this is something that writers don't talk enough about, which is coming up with story ideas.
00:39:39
Speaker
I do feel for whatever stroke of fate and alignment of neurons, I feel like I do have a pretty good intuitive sense that a story has appeal, even if it's a subject that's extremely unfamiliar or at least at first blush uninteresting. Secondly,
00:40:08
Speaker
I have to be genuinely passionate about it. My own enthusiasm usually is the selling point that I think it's a super cool story. I think it's a great idea. Editors respond to that. They don't always have the latitude to say, sure, we'll do this crazy story about taxidermy.
00:40:38
Speaker
You have to be, I mean, in every instance, this has been a story where I thought, oh my God, I have to do this. Like, this is a great story. And I don't know why. I can't specifically tell you why, but I just feel in my gut that this is a great story. You know, Tina Brown once said to me that she thought what I did was incredibly risky and really dangerous because these stories
00:41:08
Speaker
rely on execution so much. And they do. They 100% do. I mean, look, somebody who's really good could probably make anything interesting, right? I mean, everything can be interesting. In my opinion, if you have a great writer, if Joan Didion wrote about her grocery list, I would probably think it was amazing. But the pressure on the
00:41:37
Speaker
writing and the thinking is enormous. And, you know, Tina was just, I think when I first started working with her and she was suggesting a lot of celebrity profiles to me, are celebrity profiles easy in a way? Because to go back to what we were saying before, that people have a pre-existing interest in famous people. We all do.
00:42:05
Speaker
So it's a hell of a lot easier to get someone to kind of ride along with you in a story about a celebrity. And you don't have to argue every step of the way why they should read the story. They're reading it because they have an existing interest in celebrity. So these are stories that, you know, pretty uniformly begin with people not thinking that they have any interest in them.
00:42:35
Speaker
So it's harder. I mean, it is a harder kind of writing because not only do I have to tell you the story, I have to explain to you why
00:42:45
Speaker
You should listen to me tell you the story. And I think editors are nervous about assigning those kinds of stories because they are a lot harder. They're much harder and they're harder for people who are good at it. It's just a lot harder to say, you know, to elevate a story about a subject people feel no
00:43:15
Speaker
compelling reason to want to care about. And when you taking the the oxen story, for instance, and you're talking about story ideas and generating story ideas and playing the numbers game of ideas. How does an idea of that nature, you know, come across your radar and you know, what is that? What is the sound? What does it sound like when it that that noise that goes off in your brain? You're like, oh, oh, that one.
00:43:43
Speaker
Yeah, well, it sounds very much like the sound you just made because it's something where almost always it's a quick click. It's an immediate like, oh, I want to know more about that. I mean, every now and again, I've done a story where it was a bit of a slow kind of burn where I thought, hmm, I'm not sure.
00:44:11
Speaker
Slowly, I began thinking, oh, actually. But most of the time, 90% of the time, if not more, it's something where the minute I hear it, I just immediately think, wow, what is that? I mean, often it's...
00:44:31
Speaker
something that I had no idea existed. I mean, in the case of the oxen in Cuba, I had no idea people were still farming with oxen. I didn't even know oxen still existed. So, you know, immediately it was like, what? And then in Cuba, I mean, the the combination was so surprising. And then, you know, as the little I learned about it,
00:44:59
Speaker
the strange fact of it coming back into fashion, which of course is what made the story interesting to me. The idea that this rather ancient practice had suddenly become very much in vogue because of the gas shortage and the end of the Soviet Union.
00:45:24
Speaker
It's this small story about a farmer and his two oxen, and then it's really this very big story about global politics that I thought instantly was just a great piece. And usually that's what it feels like. It's some clique that is both very specific, but I can sense that there's more.
00:45:52
Speaker
You know, and there always has to be more. I mean, and you know, if you've done your job, there is more. I mean, writing about the World Taxidermy Championships is both a kind of slice of life and a kind of sort of Charles Corral to America kind of story, which is just this oddball thing that takes place. But to me, it was about
00:46:20
Speaker
mastery and what it means to people to be really good at something. It doesn't matter whether it's that you're stuffing a dead squirrel or doing trigonometry. There's this human desire to feel that you've done something as perfectly as it can be done.
00:46:51
Speaker
And that fascinated me. You know, I got curious about taxidermy. And, you know, I thought, oh, taxidermy is such a wild subject. But when I saw that there was a championship, that's what made it click, where I thought, oh my God, people compete to have the best taxidermy? That's amazing. And that's what made it a story to me. There was this other theme about
00:47:19
Speaker
the idea of making something immortal, that you take a tiger cub that was stillborn and you mount it as a taxidermy mount and make it look alive or a deer that is dead, obviously, but the point of taxidermy is to reanimate it.
00:47:48
Speaker
kind of a profound, it's the ultimate to bring life back to something that's dead. And it's something that we find both fascinating and disturbing and tempting and dismaying all at once.
00:48:13
Speaker
Well, Susan, I want to be mindful of your time. And as I like to bring these conversations down for a landing, I've been asking people of late what they might recommend for the listeners out there. This is something kind of fun and quirky. It could be a book. It could be a new pair of socks or whatever. So I'd extend that to you. What might you recommend for the people out there who are looking for something cool to try out?
00:48:38
Speaker
Oh my God, what fun. All right, let me think. Let me give this some real thought because I like recommending stuff to people. Actually, I'm like the world's most avid shopper. Gosh, let me think one second. Well, one thing that I got that changed my life, and this is a little work related,
00:49:04
Speaker
I got the magic keyboard for my iPad. And it is a fabulous thing. It's amazing. And I always felt very meh about my iPad. And I think it was because nobody wants to type on the screen. It's horrible. And I had a keyboard that was, eh, so-so. And then they came out with these magic keyboards.
00:49:33
Speaker
I think not that long ago and it is so awesome and so great.
Personal Favorites: Magic Keyboard & Oatmeal
00:49:39
Speaker
And, you know, I've written a bunch of stories actually on my iPad, which is something I never dreamed I could do. So that's my like quasi work related recommendation. And my non-work recommendation I would say is the Trader Joe's
00:50:03
Speaker
Maple and brown sugar, instant oatmeal. Nice. Super delicious. Takes 20 seconds to make it. And if you're like me, feeding yourself your three meals a day.
00:50:18
Speaker
you'll appreciate, you'll thank me for this. Well, I love it. Well, Susan, what a pleasure to get to speak to you again about your work and your latest book here, this collection is just such a joy to read and to revisit a lot of the pieces and just to get to hang out with you one more time in book form, which is always a pleasure. So thanks so much for coming back on the show to Talk Shop and talking your new book, and I wish you the best of luck with it.
00:50:46
Speaker
Oh, thank you so much. My pleasure, absolutely.
00:50:56
Speaker
Great, right? She's one of my faves, all-time faves. Go pick up on animals. It's a masterclass in magazine writing is what it is. Go shotgun those leads and see how she does it. And I steal that shotgun term from the great Glenn Stout and he's saying to rifle through like best American sports writing to look at those leads and
00:51:16
Speaker
Get them into your bones.
Podcast Reviews and Patreon Support
00:51:18
Speaker
And this is great because this is all Susan's work. As I want to say, the best books on writing are well-written books, not necessarily craft books. So anyway, thanks for listening, seeing efforts means the world. Thanks also to West Virginia Wesleyan colleges, MFA and creative writing for the support as well.
00:51:41
Speaker
Now when you're a middling writer and podcaster like me, and I suspect there's a chunklet of you out there too, you know that we live and die by reviews. I always read new ones on the pod, so if you have a few moments, heck, while the water's boiling, go leave a review. You can also head over to brendalamare.com for show notes and sign up for that up to 11 newsletter. I live in cool things from my brain to your inbox.
00:52:05
Speaker
Be been doing it for like a decade I Put in a link to an exclusive happy hour last month. We did a writing group and where we wrote for an hour this month I'm thinking we're just gonna hang and see what's on your mind. It's a good time And also you can keep the conversation going on the nefarious social medias at creative nonfiction podcast and on Twitter at CNF pod
00:52:33
Speaker
And if you stay tuned for a few more moments, you'll get a glimpse of volume four of casualty of words.
00:52:42
Speaker
my writing podcast for people in a hurry. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Check it out. All right, and did you have a good time? This show is partly made possible by the incredible cohort of members at patreon.com. Building up the Patreon coffers grants you access to transcripts and audio magazine and coaching helps pay for podcast hosting, which is several hundred dollars a year that's on top of website hosting. So these things add up.
00:53:13
Speaker
and make sure that the backlog doesn't get deleted, which is something I want to keep there as a reference and a resource for people who might need that inspiration from the incredible amount of people who have been on the show. Probably upwards of 250 different people from 280 interviews. Probably more, probably more. Anyway, patreon.com slash cnfpod, shop around, help support the community.
00:53:38
Speaker
I think that's it. And so instead of a parting shot, which I usually have, just stay tuned for a little of what volume four of Casualty of Words has to offer. And remember, if you can't do interview, see ya.
00:53:57
Speaker
I teased it out a bit in the last episode, but it bears repeating. The idea of advice, or a tendency of us in the creative spheres, maybe even outside the creative sphere, to seek constant advice. I'll repeat the Henry Rollins quote from the last episode.
00:54:14
Speaker
I don't ask advice of people, I just go make a mistake and limp away. This underscores something. We're often too afraid to make the mistake, go to the game tape and move forward. Mistakes are quite possibly the greatest learning tool there is, but we have to have the courage to make them.
00:54:35
Speaker
to look foolish in the moment in order to look like a master later. Here's another quote from Rollins. It's important if you're a creative person or aspire to be that you don't spend too much time aspiring or asking advice. Just get going and address what's roaring inside you.
00:54:58
Speaker
There's nothing wrong with seeking some advice, but it's when we keep asking advice, thinking that the next answer will unlock some door for us, provide us a shortcut, give us a reason to hide because we're in search of the perfect thing. Now, what we need to do is push that urge down and run into the wall over and over again, knowing that we'll be limping away stronger than ever.
00:55:26
Speaker
Hey, thanks for listening. Here's your journal prompt. What's the biggest mistake you made that taught you the best lesson?