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Episode 89—Sarah Minor Isn't Your Typical Writer
142 Plays7 years ago
"I have to remind myself that I have to be a little nuts to do this. I think all writers have to be a little crazy," says Sarah Minor.
This week I bring you Episode 89 with Sarah Minor, @sarahceniaminor on Twitter and @sarahcenia on Instagram). She is a professor and a writer and her essay "Threaded Forms: Decentered Approaches to Nonfiction," looks to knitters, stitchers, and quilting bees to discover new and subversive models for writing memoir. In this episode we talk about: Visual Essays How boredom dictates her direction Losing voice and finding it And the ever-present battle of dealing with social media Let's do this.
Okay, if you go over to brendanomeara.com you'll be able to sign up for my monthly reading list newsletter that has book recommendations and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month. No spam. Can't beat it. You can say hi to me on Twitter and Instagram @BrendanOMeara. @CNFPod is the podcast Twitter page and @CNFPodcast is the Facebook page. You'll find me hawking over those territories all the time.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Promotion
00:00:00
Speaker
Yo, wanna help the podcast? Leave an honest review on iTunes, send me proof, and I'll coach up a piece of your writing for up to 2,000 words, or I'll give you a fancy transcript of any single episode of the podcast. That was easy, let's go.
00:00:22
Speaker
It's that time again. What's up CNF-ers? My CNF buddies. This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, and I'm your Radio Handsome Host, Brendan O'Mara.
00:00:33
Speaker
This is the show where I bring you talented creators of non-fiction, leaders in narrative journalism, essay, memoir, radio, and documentary film, and tease out origins, habits, routines, influences, books, mentors, so that you can pick some of their tools of mastery, add it to your cart, and check out Free of Charge. That sounds fun, doesn't it?
Sarah Miner's Artistic and Writing Journey
00:01:16
Speaker
Minor, M-I-N-O-R, she is a professor and a writer, and her essay, Threaded Forms, Decentered Approaches to Nonfiction, looks to knitters, stitchers, and quilting bees to discover new and subversive models for writing memoir.
00:01:19
Speaker
This week I bring you episode 89 with Sarah Miner.
00:01:47
Speaker
let's do this
00:01:57
Speaker
the
00:02:18
Speaker
So I probably feel like it's all very accidental, but my mother recently showed me this little card you would have gotten in first grade that they would have stuck on a bulletin board outside of a classroom. And it said it would say, Sam Miner wants to be. And then on the little line afterwards, I squeezed in an artist, a seamstress, and a writer. And so she was like, you knew. But apparently, after that, I forgot for a long time whatever I had known.
00:02:49
Speaker
you know, in college, I did art history and visual art, and I didn't really even take a creative writing class until my senior year. And that's probably a little bit where I come from, is that I have this background in looking at and thinking about art, and then I make writing now. And so sort of, I would say that I would have a hard time not doing that, not making texts in shapes, but it does seem maybe it was rooted in something when I was a child.
00:03:18
Speaker
But was that something you shared with your mother or grandmother? So my mother is not crafty. She's a reader, and she's a medieval scholar, but she's not a maker of things. But yes, my grandmother, when I was young, she and I would embroider. And she had one of those bodies. I didn't know what it was when I was a child, but a body made exactly like her body so that she wanted to make a dress for herself. She would just build it on that form.
00:03:48
Speaker
And she made my mother's clothes when she was little. And when my grandmother went to college, it was sort of early. And she could still major in home ec. And so that was her major in college was home economics and sewing primarily. What do you think it is about those crafts and the textiles that appeals to you so much?
The Craft of Narrative Textiles
00:04:12
Speaker
On a very basic level, it is the materials. There's something about engaging with
00:04:18
Speaker
particular materials like fabric or texture that communicates something, I think says something that is harder to communicate in text alone. And I think conceptually, some of the research I've been doing into the history of textile art, the history of fabrics, is all about how those objects aren't inherently narrative, so not only
00:04:45
Speaker
containing an archetypal symbol that would suggest a story or remind the viewer of a story, but that they actually had narrative arcs and plots and characters. There's now a little field of research into quilt poetics, which is the language of quilts and how certain quilts have jokes in them based on the way they've altered a pattern or humor based on how they have paired unusual colors.
00:05:15
Speaker
It's all based in the idea that quote patterns are a type of language and when you speak it, you can notice the variations and that they are actually communicative and narrative and that really compels me. I like thinking about that and I like thinking about how texts could do something, could communicate subtly in their forms as well as their language, obviously.
00:05:35
Speaker
When you approach a say a piece of of writing and it's something a kind of allude to in your threaded forms essay that are you thinking you've got this This this idea or particular scene and you're like, oh this might be this might work better as a quilt and a piecing thing or or a knitted type of
Writing Process and Influences
00:06:00
Speaker
thing where you're not sure where it begins and ends and things that you deconstruct and speak about far more eloquently but it's, do you go in thinking structure or do you let the whatever is your inspiration dictate the structure? Yes, that's a good question. I think I would say I have rarely
00:06:25
Speaker
with a structure, so I wouldn't say. Like I have a piece I'm working on right now in the shape of a log cabin quilt and I wouldn't have found that first and then started writing, but it's more perhaps it's more like I would start writing about something that was compelling me or an argument I had and then I would get really stuck usually. I think this happens to everyone of course and there are lots of ways to fight through that or work your way through that, but for me
00:06:52
Speaker
A really good way to move past that point is to really mess up the form, to put it in something else, and then the text sort of finds its way by the form guiding it in that direction. And so maybe it does seem like it's really about my process. The form is a way to keep going with the text.
00:07:10
Speaker
If they know like John McPhee labors over structure, you know, he'll get his material and then he's like always thinking like how to, how to make this, you know, he might spend, I'm just throwing a fairly arbitrary number, but it might be like 90% of his time is just before he even starts writing, just thinking about the shape of the piece and how he wants it to look.
00:07:33
Speaker
Do you feel like once you have your material, you spend like a long or a long period of time just thinking like, okay, how let's think and take our time with the shape of this thing and then that will create its own momentum and then you can just take off from there? It's interesting to think about John McPhee. I think I'm also so curious about hearing about other writer's processes, of course, but like I'm thinking about Joanne Beard. Have you read the set?
00:08:02
Speaker
When she writes, she only writes one sentence at a time. And once she puts down one sentence, she won't go back and put down the second sentence unless she's really, really sure that's the next one. And then she writes in one direction that way and won't go back. I think of her as one of the more tortured writers in terms of process. And her sentences are very determined and they do seem like they always go one after another.
00:08:30
Speaker
But for me, I think probably my process is something of the opposite where, you know, I have some pieces that are living in the ether that won't progress because I haven't found a form for them to go in and that means that I'm bored with them. Probably I find them boring because they aren't, they're not allowing themselves to go into something shapely. And then once I do, once they find a shape, it's more of a back and forth process.
00:08:58
Speaker
I think of myself as someone who takes forever to finish something, though I know it's probably similar for most folks. Part of it for me is that I'll edit the shape as I edit the text and both have to come together to make something whole. That's why I'm often writing in a design program, which if you've ever tried it is maddening. Wow, yeah. What program are you using when you do that?
00:09:24
Speaker
I was writing an InDesign for a while, which seems more intuitive, and now I've been writing an Illustrator. Are you able to take the pencil tool and draw a shape and then you can fit words within that? Is that how you go about it? Yeah, it's usually the tool that makes it borders for a section of text.
00:09:55
Speaker
I'll edit those borders as I write. And sometimes I'll take the text out and put it in a Word document and work with it for a while and then put it back in the shape. So yes, tedious a lot of the time.
00:10:10
Speaker
So take me back to that moment when you're in college and you take this creative writing course, something that you didn't think that writing might be kind of an option, but something probably happened to you in that course that switch might have gone on.
00:10:32
Speaker
No, what was that experience like when you were there and how did that open up the doors of writing as a possible vocation for teaching and also a form of expression for you?
Education and Narrative Forms
00:10:45
Speaker
Yeah, so I took that course from Kayda Schwane, who's a poet who was at the Iowa Writers Workshop and now she actually has two books of nonfiction, I believe. But the way she taught the essay was, I think, coming from
00:11:00
Speaker
maybe a poetry background so the essay was something very fluid that could be shaped that especially could use the imagination as a way to drive an idea or a scene or something towards the end of it and that felt a lot of the ways you talked about the essay were ways I was familiar with talking about art and it just made a lot of sense for me and I had been a big reader and I liked books a lot and
00:11:28
Speaker
love to read and so it did, yeah, things kind of coalesced at that point. What were you reading up until that point? Um, yeah, I was, uh, I had just been, I'd taken a semester abroad right before I took Kata's class. And so I was reading books, um, about the places I was visiting. And so I had read, uh, like, Iron Daddy Roy's The God of Small Things and this book called Christmas in China. And so it was a lot about,
00:11:57
Speaker
writing that was about the context someone had found themselves in, or writing that was about the self, but the self-engaged with the world. And so that, I think, got me interested in the essay, which is personal, of course, but I think always in conversation with something larger. So Kato taught us from the John DeGata, The Next American Essay, which I think it's an anthology, but it's making the argument that an essay
00:12:25
Speaker
you know, has existed in many, many different forms for a long time. It includes The Body by Jenny Boulley, which is just footnotes with the main text redacted. So White Space is definitely a play even in those examples. But for me, I always think about Albert Goldbath, who's a poet by training but has a book of essays. And he has this essay called The Flea, and it's in that collection too. Do you know it? I don't know. Yeah, tell me about it.
00:12:53
Speaker
It's a personal essay, but it pulls together everything from Dutch painting to the plague to our invention of the microscope and how all of these are related to sex and for him personally and historically. And so it's really winding together some huge frames and lenses down to a personal experience. And I really liked that.
00:13:23
Speaker
that seemed very artful to me, the pulling together of so many different topics. There's imagined space in there, there's personal scene, there's a lot of research that's pulled in but is made very beautiful. A lot of gymnastics going on there in terms of the effort.
00:13:43
Speaker
What stories really trigger your taste? There's a click that goes on in your head, and you're like, oh, that's something that Sarah Miner wants to write about. What are those things that really stick in your craw? And you're like, all right, this is something I need to lean into for a while. Well, now that I'm working on a project, I'm always on the lookout for an intersection of text and textile. So if I were to come across that, that would be very interesting for me.
00:14:14
Speaker
But often, you know, I think it's something, a topic that I write about is often something I've been angry about for some time and which usually means that it's something I've thought about. I think that emotion makes you think something through in depth. And then usually when I'm writing, it's because I have a question about that or because I feel like I'm able to just contextualize that question clearly. Not that I really have an answer, but
00:14:44
Speaker
that writing about that will be a question that I clarify and situate in a context. And if I can do that by
Media Critique and Narrative Ethics
00:14:52
Speaker
the end, that's a success, I think. If anger is an inspiration, then what are some things that make you angry? Well, yeah, so right now, I think I'm writing a little bit about rape narratives, which, yeah, if you're, I don't know if you're a Netflixer or
00:15:11
Speaker
movie watcher, but they're very prevalent in a lot of the movies and just the stories we look at and share in our culture right now. They're a way often to drive a plot or to catalyze a character, to give them motivation to do something, usually to take revenge or take action of some kind.
00:15:36
Speaker
that has, I don't know if it's angered me, but it is frustrating just to see it happen. It feels very tired, but it's also interesting to us, right? Because it's violent and also usually sexy in some way. And so that's something I'm thinking about and writing about.
00:15:52
Speaker
What are, what are some of the, the shows or movies you've seen that might be leaning on that too much as a, as a crutch for a revenge and, and violence and it, yeah, I think I agree with you that it is kind of a, maybe at this point, a cheap trick to, to motivate a character, but what are some of the things you're watching that is like spurring this on?
00:16:19
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. People have talked about this one a lot, but Game of Thrones, of course, has, you know, it's maybe one large rape narrative, the whole series and then embedded in it are several other small ones. And the makers of the TV show have added additional ones, I think, to, you know, to skip plot holes or or push the story along. And so, of course, this doesn't ever mean catalyzing a female character. Usually it does. It means that they're sort of
00:16:49
Speaker
they're the person that's being saved or who is turning someone else to action. There's so many, I think it would be harder to find, it would be harder to find a television series with that is violent and sexual that doesn't have a rape narrative in it that's specifically used to catalyze the plot and not to develop a female character. But I'm thinking about Wind River, did you see that many? Came out last year about
00:17:21
Speaker
I guess he's a reindeer in the forest who finds a body of the body of a girl who's kind of frozen in the snow but also dead. And it is about, I think it's a movie that wants to be about Native women and how they're not seen or able to speak a lot of the time and are being kind of subsumed by colonial strategies still. But Native women don't speak in the movie ever.
00:17:52
Speaker
You know, there's not one who has lines. It's mostly about those who are avenging and solving this problem who are, you know, often white. So that's, I think, like a prime really good example.
00:18:06
Speaker
And your approach, are you using it to use your, your quilting metaphors or any, are you using a piecing technique or the knitting technique or stitching? Like maybe you can talk a little bit about those sort of structural devices that you write about in your essay and then maybe how you're applying some of those tactics to your own essays these days.
00:18:31
Speaker
Yeah, and I think I'm still thinking through this, but in the Lit Head piece, one of the arguments I'm working on is that a lot of the narratives that haven't been able to be shared, a lot of the stories that are lost are ones that can't be told in a linear manner for several reasons. And right now, and especially recently, I've been thinking about how fragmented forms, something like a braided essay or a collage,
00:19:00
Speaker
comes from is rooted in post-colonial literature and queer communities that were often writing back to a power structure. And the form they used to write in was actually fractured as a way of saying, we're not going to write in your style. We're not going to use the rules of narrative that have been applied so far. We're going to actually say something through form and the content. And so it's actually sort of an old way of approaching things, especially if we think about post-colonial writers.
00:19:31
Speaker
And I think I'm interested in, I'm especially interested in my role as a white cis woman in America. I was curious about that subject, but I am seeing it resonate in a lot of different ways that you might not expect today. Like there's this beautiful metaphor for that I have learned from doing some advocacy work, which is that when we try to think about the way of victim of assault or a trauma victim,
00:19:58
Speaker
tries to recreate their story and how hard it is for them to do that often. They use the metaphor of a wall of sticky notes. Each sticky note has something that happened during the event. For a trauma survivor, it's often like trying to piece that story together via sticky notes. That's why it comes out so disjointed sometimes because of the chemicals that are released in your brain as you experience trauma and you have a difficult time storing memories and then putting them back together.
00:20:25
Speaker
That reminds me of piecing, of course, putting sections together and making a larger picture that's maybe non-linear.
Balancing Teaching and Writing
00:20:34
Speaker
What kind of practice do you put in place so you can feel maybe accomplished at the end of the day, so you're getting your work done and so forth, so you can kind of feel rewarded? Being a teacher is an interesting role because I think a lot of creative energy does go into your classroom.
00:20:54
Speaker
her students and so it's often hard for me to go home and write after I teach but when I do I really like to write in the evening. I think a lot of folks have trained themselves to ask their brain to work in the very early hours and that's how they sneak their writing time or they steal their writing time from the world from the rest of their world but for me it is the late hours and so if I find myself there trying to make something and I can't or I'm stuck in some way I
00:21:24
Speaker
learned or I know that it means that I haven't been reading enough. And reading really is this a process that I go back to whenever I can't make or go forward. Sometimes the way I talk about it is that I feel like I've lost my voice when I'm at the computer and nothing's coming out or everything that comes out feels forced or bad. I feel like I've lost my voice. And so often for me, it's getting quiet enough.
00:21:52
Speaker
waiting for the other voices to go away long enough that I can speak from a place that feels genuine. Do you feel writing at the end of the day can make it hard for you to find your voice because you've been bombarded with input all day long? Definitely, yes. Yeah, and sometimes I'll cheat and just read for half an hour before I start. We'll take a half an hour from the time I've set aside just in order to get going and to make something that feels more worthwhile.
00:22:22
Speaker
Certainly, I think what you're saying too makes me think about why so many people feel like the first hours are the best. They say you're closer to dreams at that time, perhaps to your subconscious self. And so, yes, that makes sense too. Yeah, and what do you like to read before you start writing? Pretty much anything. But I do have books I go back to
00:22:51
Speaker
I really love Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, and I'm leaning over to look at the stack of books on my desk right now. I really like doing Beards, The Boys of My Youth, and lately I've been reading Isha Sabatini Sloan's Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, which is a collection of essays that's doing a lot of this pulling different subjects together.
00:23:15
Speaker
Do you ever struggle with, say you're reading something of this nature that's very polished and then you go to your own work that maybe you run into a mimicry problem or you're sounding too much like say Maggie Nelson and not like yourself in your search for your voice at this time of day? Or is that something you can easily shake off after a page or something?
00:23:41
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's such a great question, especially because when I'm teaching my students, I often ask them to mimic the writers you're reading, you know, take on that voice, speak from that approach to writing. And for me, I think the books that I'm listing, though they're very polished and have a good sense of the line and of their projects, really what I'm always looking to go back to when I read is a book that is very sure of its own voice, that is not concerned with
00:24:10
Speaker
you know, mimicking another, it has its own distinct style and approach. And so perhaps when I'm going back to that, I'm just reminding myself that that's the way to do it. That's the approach to take.
00:24:22
Speaker
Right, right. Like what are some of your, I guess maybe your ambitions in your long term goals and with that in mind, like how do you cultivate a sense of patience to play the long game with your writing? The long game, yeah, that's a good question. Well, what are my ambitions?
00:24:47
Speaker
Yeah, I'd like to have some collections of essays get published in the world that are experimental and take up strange visual spaces, which is, I think, kind of a niche. It's not something every publisher has the capabilities to put out there. It takes a lot of work, I think, to reformat these things for pages and especially to edit them. And I'm working on my writing process as much as my design process.
00:25:15
Speaker
It does take some time for me to hone the craft of these things. But long game, I think, you know, I think I have to, I have to remind myself that I have to be a little nuts to do this. I think all writers probably have to be a little crazy to convince to keep going. But, you know, right now I'm proposing, I'm working with a library to propose to install a bunch of visual essays in their spaces that can be interactive for patrons and read that way and encountered that way. And so.
00:25:45
Speaker
I haven't built those things yet. I'm proposing them in order to build them. And so for me, a long game looks like, yes, in terms of pages, a collection of book length projects, but also this idea of putting text in space in different ways and asking people to think about what reading looks like, what different kinds of reading looks like.
00:26:11
Speaker
Do you ever find yourself struggling with looking over your shoulder and comparing yourself to other writers, younger or even a little older and you like kind of wonder like, Oh, like how are they able to do what they're doing at such and such an age? And when I was at that point, like I was this little seed and somehow they feel anointed, like, do you ever find yourself with that kind of that jealousy struggle sometimes?
Creative Resets and Inspirations
00:26:40
Speaker
Or have you been able to avoid that altogether? Oh, yeah, I think that's definitely most of those thoughts are unavoidable, especially when you're in, you know, a writing world where a lot of those things are pretty visible. And, you know, the conversations I have with a bunch of my writing community and my friends are about I think the role of literary Twitter and how it can really send people down those spirals. And that engaging deeply with the conversations on Twitter can make you
00:27:09
Speaker
I think it does keep you very informed. It lets you know about new works that are coming out, important conversations that are being had. But for most people, I know it makes them, it really freezes them up or makes them afraid to write because they're thinking about the context in which their writing will be received before making the writing itself. And so, like for instance, I've really tried to disengage from those platforms, though, of course, not all the way.
00:27:37
Speaker
But I think, you know, I just started this new job in Cleveland this year, and I'm pretty young to be an assistant professor. And a lot of the ways I have kept going is by really just thinking about where I'm at right now and trying not to think about what the result will be, because that, you know, that would freeze me up also. It would make me unable to really make my work, to write in my voice, as I've been trying to say, I think.
00:28:06
Speaker
Yeah, because I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who's an illustrator and painter yesterday. And she's just in this weird place where she has like this almost deep anxiety about being able to she's kind of burned out, but she doesn't feel like she deserves to step away from it because she's, you know, gonna lose her edge, but she's running the car into the ground. And then it's just this
00:28:32
Speaker
It's this thing where she's kind of growing resentful of the work itself. And part of it has a lot to do with looking at everyone's highlight reels on Instagram or Twitter and compared to the muddy shit that you're stuck in. And then it just kind of heightens the level of anxiety that you're not doing enough and you're not accomplished enough.
00:28:54
Speaker
And you said that with literary Twitter and everything, it's kind of the same way. You're seeing everyone's A-game, but you're not seeing the tomorrow baseball term, like the 500 swings going on in your basement. Exactly, yes. So I have a mentor, Eric LeMay, who is an essayist and does some really cool digital essay work too.
00:29:23
Speaker
His approach to teaching, I think, is to know that all students and really all writers, I think, at every level of the profession are in some way limited. The possibilities for what they're going to do are limited by all the pressures of the outside world, be it Twitter or the critiques they're getting or the other things they're reading that are making them question the work they're making. And he famously says that
00:29:50
Speaker
writers require leisure to do their work. So not that it's taking a break ever, not that it's going on a vacation from your work, but you actually need it as part of your process to digest what you're doing and think back. And for me, I think leisure from Twitter a lot of the time, like vacationing from those outside energies that would limit me in other ways. And my friend, Misty Morrison, who's a painter,
00:30:18
Speaker
always tells her students that when they're stuck with what they're doing, when they're, you know, they're tired of it, they don't want to make it anymore. They should go to the hobbies that are their secret hobbies. So what they really make on the side, like if you're a journalist who writes poems, or if you're an essayist who's secretly doing watercolors, do that for a while. And that's, you know, the making energies are still moving, but you are giving yourself leisure time from whatever you feel stuck with.
00:30:46
Speaker
What are some things that you like to do that's part of your process away from the computer that helps inform your writing? Yeah, that's a good question. I think I really used to think and tell myself that all of my writing began with heavy research. That's kind of the field I came from. The way I learned to first put things on paper was in art history.
00:31:10
Speaker
I still, you know, whenever I'm writing an essay, I still come back from the library where I'm teaching at the school where I'm teaching with a huge stack of books, like crusty old books on subjects with beautiful old dated approaches to them or really smart arguments. And so sometimes for me, it's like having my own thought, my own, usually frustration, and then sitting with ways that other people have thought about that and either writing back to that or writing against some of those things.
00:31:41
Speaker
that helps a lot with my process. I think you are you asking too about like, like I do embroidery on the side or I will mess around with quilting that I sometimes put in my work when writing is bothering me.
00:31:56
Speaker
And you mentioned earlier too about mitigating or limiting social media and so forth because it's great in a sense because it can connect us but at the same time can be incredibly toxic depending which sort of rivers you paddle down.
00:32:20
Speaker
How do you balance those aspects of the sort of the need and the utility of your Twitters and Facebooks and Instagram versus unplugging and being able to just step aside and do the work and do deep work as Cal Newport might say, who's a best-selling author.
00:32:42
Speaker
gets a ton of work done, ton of books, ton of research, ton of teaching with no social media platform at all. So how do you strike a balance? That's a good question. Yeah, I think it's probably different for everyone, but I'm certainly not saying I'm totally disengaged, no way. But for me, it's being willing to be a little less informed sometimes or playing catch-up when I go back to it, being informed in retrospect about things
00:33:13
Speaker
You know, I am so much more deeply embedded in the writing world with writers. Most of my close friends are writers, people I talk to daily are writers. And so I find that it's more productive for me to work out a lot of the ideas that are current or problems that I'm thinking through.
00:33:37
Speaker
by hashing them out with those real people, you know, over long conversations and then kind of going back to whatever's going on in a much more, I think, snacky way on social media feeds. And I feel like I really, you know, it helps my writing and my sense of my voice to also have real deep conversations and arguments and hash things out with those folks and then know that they're also going on on those platforms online.
00:34:06
Speaker
Yeah, are these in-person conversations or digital? Yeah, I guess they're mostly in-person. Yeah, my partner's a writer and then two of my very best friends are writers as well. Sometimes it's arguments that we're in, these days-long arguments about something and we'll both come to a better understanding of our own thoughts and probably change our minds as well.
00:34:32
Speaker
Yeah, with your work, you know, what do you feel like you struggle with the most? I think it's probably what I've struggled with since I was young and what I probably always will struggle with, which is ending, deciding when something is finished or when I've said it clearly enough. I think I could, you know, there's an essay I've been writing for a year and a half now, like,
00:35:01
Speaker
really grinding on. I don't think it's finished. But I think sometimes finished can mean you worked it to a certain point and that you don't want to overwork it. And that's something I'm trying to learn for myself. Is it because you have perfectionist tendencies that you just want to keep shaping it and shaping it? Probably. I don't know.
00:35:29
Speaker
you're not as detail oriented as you would think a person who writes in a design program would be. But it's that, but it's also that I'm probably trying to do a gold bar type thing where I'm pulling in, you know, research my own voice scenes, memories, all these different materials, and also asking them to live in this strange form. And so there are just so many elements fighting against each other a lot of the time. And
00:35:57
Speaker
A lot of my work is to make them feel seamless and that, um, you know, when does that end? I think I want, I wonder that if they're so different from the start and you want them to remain distinct. I don't know when that ends. What are some of the conversations you've had with your friends about finishing things and knowing when things are over? Yeah, I don't know. I think it's something I talk a lot about with my students too. And that is, um,
00:36:27
Speaker
in nonfiction, especially when you're writing something that's more essayistic, or there's a personal narrative to it, of course, that moves through time and relies on action and dialogue, but there's also outside elements that are in conversation with that. What is an ending? What does it look like? How do you manufacture the feeling of conclusion when all those materials are at work? And I think that sometimes I've seen it done in a scene that
00:36:53
Speaker
that pulls, you know, it's a final action. It's sort of like a fireworks moment, you know, it's over because there's a big bang. Or it feels or it can feel more like the end of a research paper where you actually come to some concrete conclusion in an essayist voice that's outside of scene. And that what that's what feels conclusive. But it seems like it's different for each piece that a person writes. And so
00:37:19
Speaker
With my students, I used to joke that in nonfiction, not everyone dies at the end or gets married at the end. You could say that they did, but it's usually, there's something else that you have to pull together in terms of giving the reader, yeah, something finalized, something they feel like they've finished by the time they leave. So it's different for every piece of scenes.
00:37:42
Speaker
Yeah and it could be too that depending on the piece it almost feels like it never ends because there's a point in the essay that you write that some of the best things that you've ever read are things where as soon as you've reached the final full stop you want to go right back to the beginning of the essay and like start it over. So it's like in a sense like some are just they just keep going and going and that's okay and that's actually a testament to the writer to be able to
00:38:08
Speaker
It just makes you want to swing back to the beginning and just start over again. Right, right, yes. Yeah, I think about that a lot. And I think that comes back to what we've been talking about with narrative where if we think of a story or an essay or an article or something that moves from a beginning to an end, that's actually one way of thinking about how a life is learned or how a thought is experienced or something
Interview Methods and Media Inspirations
00:38:32
Speaker
like that. And if you – if an ending is more fuzzy or
00:38:36
Speaker
If, as you're saying, it doesn't end, it's just that we've paused in a longer moment, then maybe the form or the ending would look different.
00:38:47
Speaker
Nice. So let's get a little technical with some things. A tactical, if you will. When you're getting into an essay that has some research component to it, how are you recording interviews or organizing your notes? How are you building your palette so you can start to get the work done?
00:39:15
Speaker
I have written essays where I've done long interviews and I've usually recorded those on an audio device so that I have them later and ask for permission obviously before I begin. I correspond with people by email and then I have their written responses. I find that writers, especially writers, sometimes prefer to be
00:39:39
Speaker
to be asked about their very their work and their very deep secrets or something over over email. And so that that's been useful for me in the past. You know, a lot of my work is not not journalistic in that manner, though. So even though I would have done use a process that I know is fair and moral as a way to gather information, those interviews would then be woven into a piece where
00:40:09
Speaker
You know, they would be, their attributions would be in a, in a footnote or in a side column or worked in a different manner than they would in an article. Yeah. And when you have those recordings, do you transcribe your own recordings or do you have someone else do it or a service? Yes, I would transcribe mine. Do you hate it? Like I hate it.
00:40:34
Speaker
It takes so much time, right? It's incredible how much time it takes. Yeah. It's a big reason why the podcast right now doesn't really have a lot of transcripts because to me, it's a three to one thing. If it's an hour long, it's going to take me at least three hours. Oh my gosh. That seems fast actually to me that it would take
00:40:54
Speaker
because you can't type at the rate of a voice. No, no. And I hear having a foot pedal helps because you can keep your hands free and pause the recording and record with your feet. Oh, wow.
00:41:09
Speaker
Just need more limbs for this. Yeah, you have to be like a drummer. Yeah. But yeah, it's a grind. If that three to one ratio seems fast, that's only fast because of newspaper stuff I've done and I've been on newspapers. So you got to be going pretty quick, especially if you have recordings on Deadline.
00:41:34
Speaker
And do you, do you choose to, to outline, do you use, um, or do you kind of just have it in your head and try to manifest it on the page after? Um, I would, I used to outline, you know, especially if I would write, like sometimes I'll write some critical article or I probably, I think I did make an outline for the piece on text and textiles that we're chatting about, but for creative work, I think, no, never, because I'm really always interested in where
00:42:03
Speaker
I'm going and if I know where I'm going to end, then I get bored pretty quickly with the writing because it does feel like a process of discovery for me.
00:42:13
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, so in a way, it's like you got to leave open the possibility for spontaneity in a way. And when you sit down to write in the evenings, how long do you typically go before you kind of get tired? Do you just go for, can you go for hours or do you write in little spurts? Historically, what I would like best to do is to sit down and write for like four or five hours. I think for me,
00:42:44
Speaker
I would, that's what I would like to do. That doesn't work out very often because I love to really be immersed in a project. And I think sometimes it's hard to find your way out or find a way to draw everything together unless you are really deep in the consciousness of that project. And so it has been hard for me, especially as I've, as I've been teaching more, as I've been traveling to sneak in those little bits of time and feel like I'm still progressing forward at a rate that feels good. Um, and so.
00:43:14
Speaker
I think for me, the fact that I am no longer writing in long chunks of time is actually changing the shape of my writing. It's meaning that I have smaller sections that I write at a time and don't really worry about the trajectory, which is probably also why I'm avoiding outlines. What part in the process would you say you feel most engaged and most alive in? I really love when I have a
00:43:44
Speaker
very messy draft with writing. I would be ashamed to show anyone and then I go back to it and I think I see you would call it editing or rewriting. For me, that's really what writing is, is the rewriting and rewriting and rewriting of a piece and honing it down. And so that's when I feel like I have steam to go forward. It's much harder for me when I am starting at the beginning with not a lot of material on the pages yet.
00:44:11
Speaker
And I think it's not for me, like I couldn't just sit down and bang out a bunch of things and then shape from there. I think I have to be pretty intentional with what I put down in order for it to have the direction. And so that's maybe why the first part is so feels tedious for me sometimes. Yes.
00:44:29
Speaker
And what, uh, what books do you find yourself rereading over and over again to kind of teach you, like, or remind you they're like, Oh, you know, that's how it's done. And when I'm on my game, I can do that too. Yeah. Um, and we talked a little bit about those, like, um, the Argonauts is one to go back to a lot lately. I've been looking at, um, Alanis Killianis is you animal machine.
00:44:57
Speaker
And it's Eleni Siciliana. So I should say Greek name. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing it correctly. And how do you try to avoid the feelings of self-doubt? And maybe what kind of self-talk do you use when you're a bit down or in a creative funk to kind of pull yourself up out of that kind of rotten mud?
00:45:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think I just really try to be present with the place that I am currently, and not and try to avoid thinking about, you know, things I wanted to achieve by this point, but feel like I haven't or feel like I'm behind on, you know, I have a creative dissertation due a year from now. And it feels like the timeline is coming up pretty quickly. And so thinking about that timeline, right, is not gonna, I'm not gonna do work by thinking about that timeline, but by
00:45:50
Speaker
I forget about it for a while, I might actually get something done. And so it really is for me about focusing on the present moment, what I'm doing now, what interests me right now, not what I should be researching for the next piece, or not the deadline that's coming.
00:46:06
Speaker
And you said you look at some other visual forms of things for inspiration. Are there any documentary films or podcasts or radio that you also listen to and consume as a way of like, oh, if I do it as well as they're doing that podcast, I can make my visual essays better? Mm-hmm.
00:46:30
Speaker
Yeah, I love documentaries. I recently watched. Have you seen the documentary Tickled? No, but I'm going to now. Yeah, it's pretty dark. But it's it was I think, watching documentaries, watching documentarians put their things together makes me think a lot about the essay and about nonfiction and the approaches you can take while doing I think they that documentary, they really broke the fourth wall or it's probably more like the fifth wall by
00:46:59
Speaker
bringing in their subject, the subject of their documentary, who showed up at the Sundance showing of the film. And they include these interviews with him and his being present. And so, yeah, that was like a very interesting, I think an interesting moment for nonfiction and reporting and documentary that that happened. And it's about competitive, what started out as competitive tickling.
00:47:27
Speaker
men who are hired to see how long they could be tickled and withstand it, but then that became quickly pornographic and they were, you know, sort of, um, held hostage for the videos they had made by the maker. I don't want to spoil it for you, but yeah, it's a dark, dark film, but very interesting. Well made, I think. And they do, yeah, there's a lot that you get to see about the process. That's cool. Um, and then also I,
00:47:58
Speaker
I listened to, I really love the New Yorker fiction podcast where they have folks come on and read and I've actually my partner and I have taken some very long road trips over the past two years and some of my work has started while I've been frantically scribbling in the passenger seat, you know, right after one of those or even during them when I feel like I've
00:48:21
Speaker
You know, done that thing where I hear someone really writing from a voice that is theirs and not thinking about the pressures that are would be reshaping that are questioning that or. Yeah, I really love listening to work aloud. It's like reading, but sometimes better. Yeah, yeah. Are there any points of grammar or craft that
00:48:43
Speaker
you that you know that that you can that you coach people on that's like a real that may be a real simple tweak that you see that a lot of people might be making a mistake on but it's something that you know when done and when done when done well it's just it's something that can really make somebody's writing pop yeah I'm not sure about something at the line level that you're talking about as much I often coach my students into repetition so if they
00:49:13
Speaker
If it feels like they haven't found a voice, if it feels like they don't know what direction they're going in with the piece they're writing, we'll ask them to repeat some way they're structuring a sentence. So very basically down to the way the sentence is built. And if they do that a few times, it both makes them think about what they have written, how they're putting thoughts together, what their voice is and how it is developed by that sentence. But also it
00:49:43
Speaker
If they leave it, it looks like they're doing something intentional, right? And then they're like, oh, right. I should have an, I have intentions. I, I should communicate to my audience that, you know, I, I'm taking us somewhere. I know what I'm doing. And that sometimes means writing through it and finding the intention and being able to go back and, and signal what it is. So.
00:50:05
Speaker
And when you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do to maybe get back on track? With writing.
00:50:16
Speaker
Yeah, or it can be even outside of writing. I think a lot of us are bombarded with a lot of stuff and anything that can help sort of defrag our own mental computers can really help us get to a better creative headspace. So I wonder, yeah, you can take that any way you'd like, but whatever way you're comfortable answering.
00:50:40
Speaker
Yeah, so my friends would tell you that I'm notoriously hard to reach by telephone. And that's because I often leave my phone away from myself, you know, in a room, very literally under a pillow with the sound off.
Productivity Techniques and Conclusion
00:50:54
Speaker
Because you know, it's very tempting if you if you've encountered something difficult, if you're stressed out, if you don't want to do your work, it's easy to just sit down with your phone and look up an hour later and think where have I been. And I
00:51:08
Speaker
those moments usually make me feel very lost or something's wrong here. I'm not using a process that's actually getting me anywhere. I'm just sort of checking out. I think checking out can be great. Really useful sometimes. I still do lose hours to the internet and my phone, but I think I do often put it away. That's also a way of me disengaging from social media for a day or a few days is
00:51:39
Speaker
Just literally having it out of reach, out of sight.
00:51:42
Speaker
And that helps you check in. Yeah, because then if you get into that hole of that downward spiral of that and then you look up and it's an hour later and you just feel like shit, you're like guilty. Like I just blew all that time and I should have been doing this and how I feel like garbage. And then you're just in a horrible space to keep going forward and then you just give up and move on to the next day maybe. Yeah.
00:52:11
Speaker
And I think that cycle, you know, I've gone through that cycle many times, especially probably before this year when I really started putting things away. But I think for me, if I if I look up from my phone, because it does happen, if I look up from my phone and I'm like, oh, an hour, two hours has gone by something like that. My phone's dying. That's why I'm looking up from it. I think, OK, what what am I actually avoiding right now?
00:52:38
Speaker
because it's usually not work that's coming up. It's something that I've experienced that day that I'm trying not to think about or that my brain is sort of like, I can't deal with this right now. And so that for me is the signal to be like, hey, you're supposed to be, there's something you actually need to process that you're not. And so put this away and figure out what that is.
00:53:00
Speaker
Oh, very nice. Sarah, why don't you tell us where we can find out more about you and your work, like your website and when you're allowing yourself to be on the digital platforms where people can find you online. Sure. I have a website that's sarahseniaminer.com. I have a Twitter that is very irregularly updated.
00:53:29
Speaker
Yeah, like I'll be at some panels at AWP this year and be giving a reading and flag stuff this year. And I'm at the Cleveland Institute of Art where we're doing some really cool stuff with creative writing and visual art these days. So.
00:53:45
Speaker
Very nice. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for carving some time out of your morning. This is a lot of fun getting to know you a little more and get familiar with your work and your process and everything. So this is a lot of fun. Your essay in the magazine was brilliant. And so just from one writer to another, just keep doing what you're doing and thanks for your work.
00:54:05
Speaker
Yeah, thank you so much for the invitation, Brendan, and you too. Keep doing your work. Thanks. All right, take care. Alas, we've come to the end. Thanks again to Sarah Miner. Be sure to give her follows on Instagram, at Sarah Senior, and Twitter, at Sarah Senior Miner. Thanks again to Sarah. That was good. I had fun. It was fun, right? You like me. Whatever.
00:54:32
Speaker
Okay, if you go over to BrendanOmera.com, you'll be able to sign up for my monthly reading list newsletter that has book recommendations and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Also some documentary film and many other cool non-fictiony stuff I stumble across. It's once a month, no spam, and you can't beat it. You can say hi to me on Twitter and Instagram at BrendanOmera. At CNF Pod is the podcast Twitter page.
00:55:02
Speaker
and at cnf podcast is the facebook page wow that's annoying you'll find me hawking over all those territories all the time so you have innumerable ways to say hello i am done have the cnf and great week friends