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Episode 219: Matt Hongoltz-Hetling — $30 Stories, Brute-Force Freelancing (And Some Bears)
129 Plays4 years ago
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling is a freelance writer and author of A Libertarian Walks into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears). It is published by Public Affairs.
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Transcript
Podcast Sponsorship and Tools
00:00:02
Speaker
AC and Ever, look who's back. The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Scrivener. Scrivener was created by writers for writers. It brings all the tools you need to craft your first draft together in one handy app. Scrivener won't tell you how to write. It simply provides everything you need to start writing and keep writing. And if you enter the coupon code nonfiction, you have to type it like the nonfiction.
00:00:32
Speaker
At checkout, you'll receive 20% discounts off the regular versions of Scrivener from Echos and Windows. That'll buy you some coffee to fuel that writing sesh or whatever you want to buy with that extra 20%. So whether you plot everything out first or plunge in, write and restructure later, Scrivener works your way.
00:00:55
Speaker
There's a great anecdote in the book about a woman who winds up finding a bear going after her sheep, and she and her llama have some conflict with the bear. That's very fun and interesting.
00:01:19
Speaker
That's Matt Hongoldt's hetling. I'm Brendan O'Mara,
Introduction to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:01:23
Speaker
hey hey. And this is seeing after Creative Nonfiction podcast where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. Matt's new book is A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. The utopian plot to liberate an American town and some bears. It's published by Public Affairs.
00:01:45
Speaker
We'll get to that of course. Well, is this the end? I don't know, but it sure looks like it out there. The smoke and ash rolled in three days ago. It's like Thanos snapped and everyone blew away.
00:02:01
Speaker
Stick your head right into a smoldering fire pit and that's what it's like to be outside right now as the fires rage and the climate deniers say, it's the normal cycle of the earth and man has nothing to do with this. It's like a snow globe out there, only it's ash and not snow and harmful particulates to breathe in. It's uh, unsettling.
00:02:31
Speaker
For now, we're okay where we are in Eugene, but we have our go bags loaded and we're ready to roll out. Let me get the alert from the man. Not sure where we'll go because we're surrounded by fire to the north, the east, the south, and of course, why not the west?
00:02:52
Speaker
What are the essentials? I don't know, maybe the computers, the hard drives, Hank, and a microphone because the podcast stops for no Wildfire Man. You need your CNF in fix and I'll be damned if I miss a week because of some cataclysmic, apocalyptic, climactic endgame. You hear me?
00:03:14
Speaker
Good. Be sure you're subscribed to the podcast wherever you listen to them and consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts. I understand it helps extinguish fires. So does subscribing to my reading list newsletter where I give out reading recommendations, cool articles, and news from the podcast. I love putting it together. This little dispatch of cool shit for you to dig through and hopefully it enriches your writing life. First of the month, no spam, can't beat it.
00:03:43
Speaker
Oh yeah, sure. By all means, follow the show on social media at cnfpod, but I'm going strong with the social media detox and the blood seems to be pumping through my veins a little better. The blood pressure appears to be lower. I mean...
00:04:03
Speaker
I've gotten to a point where I almost forget it's there.
Brendan's Social Media Detox Benefits
00:04:08
Speaker
I mean, I get emails from Twitter and Instagram telling me what I'm missing, which, if I'm being honest, is nothing. I do miss niche and we rate dogs, but I do really need to see, like, do I really need to see another rando pic of some dude's meal or, you know,
00:04:28
Speaker
Oh, here's what came out of the garden. Oh, that's cool. I can't eat those tomatoes. I have some. They're great. But I don't know. Or, you know, maybe some some woman in a goofy ass bike helmet taking a selfie. I don't need to see this anymore. I don't miss it. And frankly, you probably don't need to see me trying to be funny when I'm not or trying to be clever when I'm not begging for attention. And for what?
00:04:58
Speaker
I'd rather be working on putting together a badass podcast for you and maybe finishing my damn book. It's happening, bruh. It's happening. And as soon as I'm done, I'm going to spike my computer like a football. Roger Federer, greatest tennis player of all time, single handed backhand to the stars.
00:05:23
Speaker
During the height of his powers, he hired a coach. Writers, you should do the same, and I'd be honored to help you get where you need to go, whether it's a book, an essay, or query coaching. With me, it grants you detailed critiques of the work, email correspondence, couple Skype calls, transcripts of those calls so you can refer to them as notes.
00:05:47
Speaker
and a person in your corner who's willing to tell you, yep, this is when the shit gets hard. If you're ready to level up, I'd love to help. Email me and we'll start a dialogue.
Matt's Transition to Freelance Journalism
00:06:00
Speaker
And maybe, just maybe, you'll write as good a book as Matt Hongoldt's Hettling wrote. And maybe you'll jumpstart your freelance career from zero to Hongoldt's, just like Matt did.
00:06:14
Speaker
going from $30 stories in rural Maine to writing for the Atavist, among other places. And now this incredible, quirky, awesome book he wrote. It was amazing. It was great, great piece of journalism, great writing, a lot of fun. And I hope you'll dig it. Here's me and Matt getting after it.
00:06:42
Speaker
Tell me a little bit about how you got into this racket. Was writing something that you chose or was it something like a lot of other people writing chose you? I always wanted to write from a very early age.
00:07:00
Speaker
I've been telling the story recently that when I was eight years old, I wrote my first book. It was 32 pages long on second-grader school paper about an elf that befriends some monsters and kills some others. I don't want to brag, but it was pretty good.
00:07:22
Speaker
just kind of always had this kind of like passion for reading and for writing. But I also came from a very kind of like blue collar background and family. So the idea of being able to kind of like plug into the writing profession just never really seen that realistic to me. And so
00:07:46
Speaker
I was never really able to pursue it as a serious career option until I was an adult. And even then it kind of happened very, I don't know, not quite randomly, but I was in a place where I was taking pretty much any job that I could. I was newly married, living in rural Maine, renting an apartment and having a hard time paying the rent. And so every day I was just, you know,
00:08:16
Speaker
whatever job is offered on Craigslist, that's what I'm doing. Yeah, I was kind of like that place in my life. Um, and my wife suggested, uh, you know, knowing what my skillset was that I go and try to write for a local newspaper. Yeah. See if I could get a freelance job to do a one-off article for them. Uh, and I did, and I got paid 30 bucks for it. And that was really kind of like a light bulb.
00:08:45
Speaker
moment for me where I kind of realized that maybe I can do this, started doing a bunch of articles at 30 bucks a pop and that was kind of like my entry way into the industry ever since then been reaching for the next step on the ladder with the ultimate goal of writing books. And so that's why this first book being published is, yeah,
00:09:13
Speaker
I'm walking on cloud nine these days. Yeah. And where did you grow up? I grew up in upstate New York. It was a city called Beacon in the Hudson Valley. It's about halfway between Albany and New York City near Poughkeepsie, and also known as the hometown of folk singer Pete Seeger, whose grandson I went to school with.
00:09:40
Speaker
Nice. Yeah, I spent a lot of time in Saratoga Springs in that area for a time. And in the WA&C public radio bandwidth area, they are big Pete Seeger fans. And during all the
00:09:57
Speaker
fun drives that go on every three months there. They really harp on Pete Seeger's charity concerts before he passed away and everything. But yeah, it was very plugged into that area and really, really loved that stretch of New York.
00:10:13
Speaker
That's awesome to hear. When I was growing up, the town was very much run by conservative World War II veterans who really did not like what he stood for. So, in fact, when you drove into Beacon, it would say, welcome to Beacon, home of Kim Kraft, the 1980 third runner-up for Olympic gymnastics.
00:10:41
Speaker
There's no acknowledgement of Pete's presence within the city. No celebration of the fact that we had this American icon living in our midst. It's kind of like the older he got, the more the town kind of started to find a fondness for him.
00:11:01
Speaker
Right. Right. And did you end up going to undergrad in that area in one of the Sunnis or did you go elsewhere? No, I actually I was kind of a bad student, like outside of English classes where I was very motivated. I tended to have conflict with teachers that I for whatever reason had personality disagreements with. And then that really undercut my academic record.
00:11:31
Speaker
And so I'm probably really fortunate that I graduated high school at all. My SAT scores were very, very good, but my GPA was very, very bad. And I didn't have the sort of mentorship or leadership or direction to really kind of pad out my resume with aspirational activities.
00:12:00
Speaker
And so I went to community college for a year. And then my older brother convinced me to go to a state college in Illinois, University of Illinois at Chicago. And he filled out the application for me because I was so much of an unmotivated loser.
00:12:22
Speaker
And then I actually never completed my undergraduate degree and so I'm something like six credits shy of my bachelor's and it was just not a path that ever really struck me. That's crazy. So how do you end up getting to Maine? My family had taken me on a couple of vacations there, like family vacations.
00:12:50
Speaker
And so I knew I loved the state and the East Coast in general. And my wife, she and I had just gotten married and we knew that the city life, Chicago, as beautiful of a city as it is, we were not in a
00:13:08
Speaker
we weren't really appreciating its upsides as much as we were feeling the brunt of its downsides. So we were really being hit with parking tickets and all the hassles of the city. And so we just really wanted to kind of strike out and make a fresh start. And so we drove into Maine filling up the gas tank with the very last of our cash.
00:13:35
Speaker
So I love this idea of you just starting to dip your toe into this freelance journalism kind of thing, writing these stories for 30 bucks and getting your feet wet. What were the things you were drawn to and what were the nature of those stories that you were able to get a little momentum going for yourself?
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah, well, you know, most of the assignments early on were for those very small weekly rural
Creative Reporting on Mundane Issues
00:14:06
Speaker
newspapers. And so, you know, they dealt mostly with really kind of mundane things. You know, you would go to the local city council or select board meeting. You would report on the new sewer contracts. You know, you would report on the 1.3% tax increase.
00:14:27
Speaker
uh young municipal taxes and that sort of thing you know because I was not necessarily my end goal was always to write uh more creatively right at first I was just delighted to be writing you know to be getting paid for writing at all seemed like just kind of like a miracle to me uh I also really wanted to be able to
00:14:53
Speaker
I write in ways that the kind of strictures of journalism didn't always allow for. I wanted to write interesting sentences and I didn't want to be a slave to the AP style book and all of that. Whenever I had the opportunity to do something that was more of a feature story,
00:15:16
Speaker
I seized it, you know? So like I would try to inject little bits of color into even the most mundane stories. And when I had an opportunity to do like a profile on somebody or something like that, I would always kind of like seize that. There were several stories early on that kind of like represented that phase of my journalism career.
00:15:42
Speaker
Um, and I think the editors generally like were very supportive and when they could afford the resources to give me more than half a day to write an article, they were always very pleased with, with the results. And they knew that that was my passion. And so they tried to throw more of those stories my way.
00:16:04
Speaker
And what were some of those odd jobs you were doing that you would find on Craigslist to help subsidize this new hobby that turned into what you're doing? Yeah, I drove a cab a little bit, but this was in small rural Maine, so it wasn't really full-time work. It was like somebody would land at the little local rural airport.
00:16:26
Speaker
or want to go to the local bar safely so then they would call me and I would leave my house in the cab to go facilitate that. I did merchandising. Those are the people who show up at the grocery store at like five in the morning because Doritos has a new flavor chip that they want to get on the shelf and so like
00:16:50
Speaker
you have to rearrange the Doritos section to accommodate the new flavor, right? So you'll have like a little map that you're working from and in a team. I would be one of the people at like the Sam's Club or Costco type places doing like free samples or promoting some sort of product like chocolate flavored calcium pills.
00:17:18
Speaker
Yeah, and seniors would come up and have like a really in-depth, robust discussion with me about their bone health. But I had like, you know, no training or, yeah, basically all I had available to me were like three talking points, like bullet-pointed talking points. Outside of that, I was like, you know, felt very unqualified to hear their ailments.
00:17:47
Speaker
So, you know, it was all sorts of those just kind of like little scrappy jobs that you do to get by. And happily, you know, after I wrote that $30 article, I was what they called a stringer, where I was kind of like on a loose agreement to do three $30 articles per week, which was a nice component or supplement to my income.
00:18:16
Speaker
And then from there, as soon as a position opened up, I was hired at 10 bucks an hour for a 40 hour a week gig. And that was enough to pay rent at least and kind of stabilize me in the profession.
00:18:31
Speaker
Wow, I know several, not even several, just a few years ago, I'd run into a lot of these cases where I'm working various odd jobs to try to have something more steady. And then it got me farther and farther away from the thing that I really love doing, which is these kind of longer stories, of course, this podcast, which has still been able to keep its momentum going. But in the midst of doing those menial jobs, oftentimes it would feel like
00:19:00
Speaker
like a loser all the time. I'm like, geez, like my heroes, rightly, it's like my heroes, they're not, I don't know, they're not working at this store, they're not landscaping, they're not doing this, whatever, you know, they're doing the thing. And you're someone who, yeah, exactly. And you're someone who had, you know, you're working similarly menial jobs, but you had this like the vision and this focus to keep at it. So
00:19:23
Speaker
How did you have the strength and the resolve and the focus to compartmentalize it and keep your big picture alive in your head?
00:19:38
Speaker
Early on, every transition felt kind of like temporarily satisfying to me. So like, first I wrote a $30 article. Oh, that feels great. And then, oh, now I can do three a week. That feels great. And then I got the $10 an hour job to just sit at a desk and write all day. That feels great. And then I moved up to a regional daily newspaper for probably my first decent salary.
00:20:07
Speaker
And that felt amazing as well. What really kind of like ignited me to keep pushing beyond that
Insights from Mike Finkel
00:20:16
Speaker
was that I had kind of a chance encounter with a journalist slash author named Mike Finkel. I don't know if you've heard of him. He wrote a book called True Story about his own interactions with a serial killer who had adopted Mike Finkel's name while on the run from the law.
00:20:38
Speaker
And then he more recently wrote a book about the North Pond Hermit called Stranger in the Woods. And it was about a guy who basically went off the grid and didn't tell anybody, but wound up living in a little encampment for 28 years without any interaction with any people whatsoever. Like literally like Moss on his, the dollars in his wallet.
00:21:04
Speaker
Uh, and I provided him with a little bit of support on his Hermit story, which was, uh, uh, taking place in my backyard, you know, met metaphorically, he was able to kind of, uh, share his path with me and kind of like, give me the insight into, you know, how to craft a pitch and kind of like how I could start targeting those big markets with those larger.
00:21:32
Speaker
features, you know, and it was always something that like, I kind of felt like you needed connections to do and I didn't really have any connections. And so even though Mike, in a way, was a connection, more than that, he kind of was a role model to emulate. Yeah, he kind of like gave me the knowledge and the skills of kind of like, just how the whole world works of freelance magazine writing.
00:22:02
Speaker
And so I was able to start writing pitches then, and that's when I really started to push and push and push to get to the place where I could do freelance full time.
00:22:13
Speaker
So what was that learning curve like? Did you find that it was very much hinged on the idea and the idea was king? Or how did you overcome not being maybe a name in the industry? What were some of those challenges that you had?
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I want to acknowledge that not everybody does it the way I do it. Some people work really, really hard to get that perfect idea and that perfect project. And then they put all of their mental energy and investment into bringing that perfect project to fruition. And I think that just suits some people better. But for myself,
00:22:59
Speaker
I instead took more of kind of like the buckshot approach where I try any idea that sounded, you know, basically because of my background in the daily newspapers, I was used to the idea of really trying to see the story and things, you know, like for a while I was writing 10 stories a week, you know, and so you really kind of, um,
00:23:25
Speaker
fall into the habit of seeing the story that maybe somebody else isn't going to immediately see. And so I saw a lot of potential stories around me. And so at any given time, I would have maybe something like a dozen different story ideas that I would be sending out to editor after editor in pitch form.
00:23:50
Speaker
And just kind of hoping and praying that one of those editors would see some value in one of those stories. So over the course of years, I must have submitted, oh God, I don't know, 500 submissions, maybe 800 submissions. The vast majority of which
00:24:13
Speaker
uh, you know, we're, we're just empty, uh, never get a response. You know, you've, you've thrown something and it feels like you're going into the black hole, right? Um, but because I would have, you know, dozens of pitches out at any given time, uh, just through kind of like my brute force method, uh, once in a while,
00:24:40
Speaker
an editor would respond, you know, maybe not with a yes, but with a no, you know, and that would be valuable. Like, oh, this isn't quite right for us right now.
00:24:53
Speaker
And so then that's an opportunity to continue the conversation with that editor. The fact that they even spent that much time to reject you personally is an opportunity to say, oh, you know, what sorts of things are you looking for right now? And kind of seizing on to those few and far between opportunities and trying to turn one of them into something
00:25:20
Speaker
that will allow you to get some decent stuff published. Yeah, what you're saying and what's worth underscoring and it's so, so important is that a lot of people, even I would say mid-career freelancers, certainly people starting out, they don't know what a good or bad batting average is for landing pitches.
00:25:47
Speaker
So it's like, I don't know, are you bad if you're landing to one out of five or is it more like one out of 10 or is it one out of 20? Is that a good batting average? I'm finding more and more, the more I talk to people like yourself or Mary Pallone or a lot of the other freelancers on the show, it's like, oh, it's far, far less. If you're batting 10%, you're like a Hall of Famer. Absolutely.
00:26:11
Speaker
It's a game of failure and knowing that it's a game of failure should empower people to be a bit more cavalier. Not just randomly spreading pitches, you gotta target them and make sure you've done your homework in that sense. But knowing that a good batting average might be 100,
00:26:35
Speaker
then it's like 100 out of 1000. That should say, okay, I need to be pitching a lot more. And if I do land that one, that's actually pretty good.
00:26:43
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I never really thought about it in terms of percentage, but I think I was lower than that 5% range.
Challenges of Story Pitching
00:26:53
Speaker
The only reason that I'm better than that now is because I have built up a small stable of editors who I've worked with before at this point.
00:27:07
Speaker
They're very receptive because they've enjoyed working with me or been happy with the quality of the work. But as far as a cold call goes, yeah, good luck. Those editors are getting deluged with pitches, right? And you have to be very, very lucky and
00:27:32
Speaker
have a very, very good pitch in order for them to continue that conversation with you. Yeah, and Seth Godin, the great writer and marketer and leader in the world, he has this thing where, of course, he doesn't believe in writer's block, nor do I. And when people talk to him about that or anything, it's like, if you want to be a writer, then show me your bad writing.
00:28:00
Speaker
And a lot of people can't do that. And I think it's the people who can have the endurance to stick with the bad writing that they do every day and some of that will be good. Or in terms of freelancing, you know, show me all your rejected pitches and I will show you a pretty successful freelancer because they're willing to put out a hundred to get five.
00:28:21
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. That's totally true. And then even when you get a story printed or an agreement, then
00:28:31
Speaker
that creates its own kind of set of pitfalls, right? So out of every 10 projects you land, maybe only one of them is gonna go swimmingly, right? So, you know, maybe that conversation with the editor results in them suggesting a story back to you that you're not that enthused about, but that you're gonna do because you desperately want to please that editor and get your foot in the door with that publication.
00:28:58
Speaker
Right and so yeah another thing that i was always doing was kind of like continuously updating my. You know kind of like my my portfolio like what are my three best. Stories that i've written and published that i can show to people as an example of my work and.
00:29:19
Speaker
Yeah, at first I was working with a pretty piss-poor body of work, and then over time you develop those other pieces that you can show them that kind of like demonstrate, oh yeah, hey, if this guy's firing on all cylinders, he can do something pretty good.
00:29:39
Speaker
And so as you're developing your taste as a narrative nonfiction storyteller, especially early on, what were you reading at the time that was giving you sort of an entree into this world and be like, oh, you know, that's the kind of thing I want to be doing? Yeah, yeah, like, yeah, it was kind of funny because
00:30:02
Speaker
When I first started writing, yeah, I feel like such a, uh, uh, so naive sometimes because I've been very much on the outside looking in. And so there have been like, yeah, I was fully an adult writing for my weekly newspaper without really having a good sense that really masterful writing is done for newspapers, you know?
00:30:33
Speaker
But because that was not the writing that was appearing in the very small markets or at least not that often. And so I got clued in kind of late to the game to sites like Long Form and Long Reads and these places that kind of curate really quality Long Form
00:30:57
Speaker
uh, uh, nonfiction writing, you know, journalism and all that. And when I started reading, Oh God, there's one on you. I don't remember the author name. Um, but it was an article, uh, it was written in like a second person format. So it was like, you know, you this, you that.
00:31:19
Speaker
And it was about a Japanese man who had lived through tidal wave, you know, but lost his family in the process.
00:31:33
Speaker
And so it's kind of like, you know, it's written as if it's addressing him, but it's describing him at the same time. So it was very, very creatively structured. And it was just like kind of like exhilarating to read that and to say, oh, my God, yeah, that that just shows how far you can push journalism and push the envelope and still have it be considered a piece of serious nonfiction writing. There was also a book that I read
00:32:02
Speaker
around that same time period that was kind of like advice from other nonfiction journalists, like narrative nonfiction writing. And it was just basically a series of short essays and each writer kind of like shared a tip or two. And some of those tips were just like catnip to me. Like they just really resonated with me. And, you know, like one, for example, said,
00:32:31
Speaker
it argued against ending a story with a quote because if you're relying on your subject to close the article, you're basically saying that you can't write a better summary sentence than your subject. And isn't that kind of shameful?
00:32:48
Speaker
And you know and it's it's true like sometimes a quote is perfect but more often I you're just closing on a quote is kind of like a clever way of like putting your opinion out there right and trying to like pretend you're unbiased and objective but you close it with their powerful quote that says exactly what you think the reader ought to take away.
00:33:11
Speaker
that is sometimes warranted, but I think more often you can craft a better sentence yourself.
00:33:19
Speaker
And you've mentioned that they're writing fiction or nonfiction. They seem to spare it, but they're actually pretty closely tied. So if you can speak to how actually there's a lot of things you can pull on as a nonfiction writer from fiction and certainly vice versa, if you're diving into fiction, there's a lot of things you can really peel away from the nonfiction world.
00:33:44
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, and I don't think this is going to be a particularly new idea to your audience who include a lot of savvy writers. But to me, there's almost no difference at all between nonfiction and fiction. The only difference is that
00:34:01
Speaker
one of them actually happened right and so if you are a fiction writer you are starting with everything that you can possibly imagine like that's your your it's like an infinity. Bank of ideas and things that material to draw but if you're a nonfiction writer.
00:34:21
Speaker
your bank to draw on of material is everything that's ever happened in the entire universe, which is so close to infinite that it might as well be. I think it's really important to kind of realize that, to know that you can make points by looking to history.
00:34:44
Speaker
You can slow down time. You can speed up time. You can flashback. You want to pay attention to character arcs. You can develop your characters in the same way that you would develop a nonfiction character. It's just that you have to find the actual true material in there that doesn't misrepresent the subject in the process.
00:35:09
Speaker
One like a little trick that I learned from pulp fiction is one of my favorite pulp fiction authors is Donald Westlake who is a kind of a mystery pulp crime thriller writer and he did a series about an anti-hero named Parker under the pseudonym of Richard Stark and
00:35:37
Speaker
those Parker novels, there's like 20 or 30 of them, and each one begins, uh, the opening sentence in each of those novels is, you know, as action A happened, action B happened. Right? And so, you know, it's like as Parker dove behind the, uh, uh, moldering green couch, a bullet slammed into the wall above his head.
00:36:02
Speaker
Right. And that is such a powerful way to open a piece of writing, because by the time the reader gets to sentence two, two things have already happened. Right. So you're already like fully immersed in some sort of action sequence and narrative and you can use that same exact trick in nonfiction. Right. You just have to find that that bit of action to open with.
00:36:32
Speaker
and you'll grip the readers in exactly the same way that a fiction piece can. When you're starting to curate ideas that are really starting to stick in your cross, stick in your head, to piggyback on something you wrote to me, what are some minimum criteria for you that for a nonfiction subject that you know is like, okay, there's more to unpack here. This is a seed that can really grow.
00:36:59
Speaker
Bare minimum things that I look for are not that exclusive of criteria. What I really want is, one, to be able to sum up the story in a single word. And I usually can't do that until a little later in the process anyway. So it's not necessarily a screening criteria, but I like to be able to say that a story is about hope.
00:37:26
Speaker
or anger, or something like that, or corruption, something that will resonate in a universal way. And then the other big thing that I want as a minimum is to be able to see a character change throughout the course of the narrative. And sometimes that is a character growth or a change of heart.
00:37:55
Speaker
Um, sometimes, uh, it's not the character who changes, but it's our perceptions of them. You know, so, so like, yeah, I, I wrote one article about a guy, uh, who had passed recently. Yeah. We did this kind of like weekly feature obituary piece and, uh, the Valley news, a regional, uh, newspaper that I wrote in and this guy worked at a local, like organic co-op, but he was like an old school.
00:38:24
Speaker
uh, blue collar, like cigarette smoking foul mouth guy. And he, he clashed with some of the customers sometimes cause they didn't like him cause he smelled like cigarettes. Uh, and they were, you know, lathering themselves in, in, uh, patchouli oil. Um, but, uh, by the end of the article, you know, your perception of that character has changed. And so his, his faults seem like, you know, kind of like, yo,
00:38:54
Speaker
kind of charming, curmudgeonly traits, you know? So he didn't change, but we changed. To me, the most important thing is to have a character who will change in some way, shape, or form, and ideally to be able to boil everything down to a universal abstraction. And honestly, like, almost every story
00:39:21
Speaker
fits those criteria if you work at it hard enough. And so in the book, too, that you wrote, which I love so much, and it's crazy how the seed of it was.
The Bear Attack Mystery in Grafton
00:39:39
Speaker
You go into Grafton, Maine, just because you were kind of got a tip about, I believe it was just the bears attacking cats.
00:39:47
Speaker
And that was what got you there, and correct me if I'm wrong. So what was the genesis of that little story and then the one that maybe took you to pitch it to the activist? Yeah, yeah. Basically, I was there for an unrelated story about difficulties accessing VA benefits. And
00:40:09
Speaker
Uh, the woman, uh, that I was interviewing, uh, who was disabled and, uh, was having a hard time living in her home because it wasn't fully accessible and the VA was not helping her to resolve those issues. Uh, she had a bunch of cats and, uh, I was just kind of chit chatting with her about the cats. Uh, cause I love cats. I'm an animal lover and she said, Oh yeah, y'all used to let them outside. Uh, but that was before the bears game.
00:40:38
Speaker
And I was like, oh, wow. I've never heard anyone say those words in that sequence before. Forget about VA benefits. Tell me about these bears. And she had this kind of amazing story about how she was outside and a bear kind of emerged from the undergrowth and snatched up a couple of kittens from her backyard, practically right under her nose, and then ate them.
00:41:07
Speaker
this was not an isolated incident. This was like an early indicator of a pattern of behavior that had several bears in the area that had learned to kind of prey on the neighborhood cats. That was like a crazy idea to me because there's not a lot of documentation out there of bears eating cats. And so
00:41:35
Speaker
I pitched the article to the Adivis as kind of like the cat-bear war of Grafton County, you know, because I was really intrigued by the different things that people in the community were valuing in the face of these kind of unusually bold and aggressive bears. And, you know, things kind of evolved into almost kind of like a Wild West feel where you wound up having
00:42:03
Speaker
you know, bears causing all sorts of problems in the town and people responding as if there was no kind of higher authority or government to appeal to and, you know, kind of taking it upon themselves to become vigilantes and to dispense justice on these bears. And that was I eventually learned directly related to this
00:42:33
Speaker
a libertarian social project that had been undertaken in the town in which a national community of libertarians had decided that they wanted to turn Grafton into their own kind of utopia. So they moved to Grafton from all across the country and made an effort to outvote local residents to eliminate all of the taxes that they could and all of the rules and regulations that they could.
00:43:03
Speaker
and kind of turn it into this community that emphasized personal responsibility and personal freedoms at the expense of some civic coordinatedness that no one had realized was keeping the bears at bay.
00:43:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's insane the dominoes that start to fall as a result of you going up there for that original story. It's just like, you must have been just entirely floored in the way that kind of makes reporters and writers just kind of drool. Like, oh my God, what have I gotten myself into? This is just so rich.
00:43:42
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And I was used to there being colorful small-town rural characters because of my career in rural newspapers. But this town had some of the most colorful people who were doing
00:43:58
Speaker
the oddest things, and they just felt so disconnected from the world at large. They each had their own private little worlds going on, and I really started to see it as a community that had unraveled itself, not only from the larger world, but from each other.
00:44:20
Speaker
And so you had all these kind of isolated pockets of people who, because of their limited interactions and social connections, had more room to kind of like create worlds that reflected their own perceptions. And we all know how absurd and crazy our own human perceptions can be. That's one of the many advantages of
00:44:46
Speaker
working cooperatively and in a society is because when somebody gets too far out there, other people kind of reel them in. But in this case, you had
00:44:57
Speaker
some people who were just absolutely terrified of the bears, other people who enjoyed watching the bears in their backyard and were therefore feeding them to attract them. You had other people who were kind of excited by the idea of hunting bears and shooting bears and kind of like defending their homestead in this kind of a defend the family type fantasy that I think a lot of guys enjoy thinking about.
00:45:28
Speaker
Yeah, you had other people who were living in very non-traditional settings where their garbage and bird feeders weren't managed very well and that provided
00:45:39
Speaker
more opportunity for the bears to see the humans as a food source. That eventually culminated in, yeah, blood is shed on both sides. But both the humans and the bears are eventually set at each other in this community, and it was really just crazy to watch it unfold.
00:46:06
Speaker
And these are by their very nature kind of distrustful people and of government, certainly, but I suspect of journalists. So how did you engender a sense and get the access you needed to a lot of the core figures of this book, given that Grafton would rather isolate itself off from the entire world and just kind of live on its own?
00:46:32
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's a good question. And in part, the answer is the same as how do you break into journalism career, right? How do you break into a community's social structures? You try a lot, right? You try a lot of different places.
00:46:50
Speaker
I'm and so there were weeks when i was just cold calling going door to door knocking on doors random doors and saying hey i'm writing about bear experiences in grafton have you had any interesting bear experiences and that's not a very threatening topic because people are excited by and large to tell an anecdote about a bear encounter that they've had.
00:47:16
Speaker
And so, yeah, that led me to, there's a great anecdote in the book about a woman who winds up finding a bear going after her sheep, and she and her llama have some conflict with the bear. That's very fun and interesting. But it also,
00:47:42
Speaker
Yeah, so there was a little bit of that brute force method of like, you know, if I have to knock on 20 doors to get one interview, then that's what I'm going to do. But then I think I was also helped by the fact that I do come from a blue collar background and the fact that I
00:48:04
Speaker
did not tend to dress professionally and was driving a beater of a car and could relate to my subjects, maybe in a way that someone with an Ivy League education and a more upscale upbringing might struggle with. So I think that I was able to, even though that, you know, yeah, I don't know, it was, it was
00:48:33
Speaker
definitely a challenge, but I think that those factors in my background helped me out a little bit.
00:48:51
Speaker
strategically placed tentpole set pieces. The llama, to me, struck me as one. There was the attack on Colburn and then the fire of the church. These seemed like those big, dramatic set pieces that were spaced out
00:49:09
Speaker
very well that gave the book that doesn't, in a way, have a lot of action. It did give a certain amount of kinetics to the structure. So what was the strategy there as you were structuring this book and making sure that those set pieces fit nicely into the story you were telling? Oh, yeah. I mean, organizing it was such a challenge because when I sat down, I had conversations with
00:49:37
Speaker
20 different people over a 20-year period, and very few of the people interacted with each other in their own stories and narratives. So the real challenge was, how do I take all of this great material and weave it together so that it tells a singular
00:50:00
Speaker
story. How do we organize it so that it feels like one story and not like 20 different stories? And so I was almost tempted to break it into 20 different stories and just kind of like tell each one as its own standalone experience. But that was really unsatisfying, ultimately. And so instead, I
00:50:26
Speaker
just try to find some organization. And so I kind of broke the book into three separate sections, chronological sections. And then that helped me gain a little bit of clarity. Once I started kind of like chucking the material into those different sections, I could get kind of like a rough timeline. And then in each of those sections, I looked for the
00:50:52
Speaker
Kind of those ten poles as you call them those big events that i knew we're gonna be very vivid scenes that could communicate a lot of what i wanted to get across i wanted to end each of the three sections with a sort of climax but then i also wanted to hold back a few of.
00:51:12
Speaker
a few of those tent poles so that the climax to the third book would feel like a series of climaxes. It would feel like a climax to the whole endeavor and not just the third act. It took a lot of massaging. I kind of reveal very late in the book this idea of the Free State Project.
00:51:39
Speaker
which is kind of like a scaling up of the free town project, where instead of just say freeing or liberating the town of Grafton, the libertarians want to liberate the entire state of New Hampshire. Even though that was ongoing throughout the entire timeline of the book,
00:51:58
Speaker
I don't acknowledge it until very late in the book because that was when I kind of wanted to show the broader relevance to the state at large. So I focus on kind of like what was happening in the free state project a little bit later in the timeline, for example.
Grafton's Peculiar Society
00:52:18
Speaker
When you were immersed in this town and among all your sources, what struck you as completely wacky and loony? And what were some things that were like, oh, I can kind of buy into that. You're making sense here, but you're way out in left field over here. Well, it was funny because what I found was that bear management in the book is kind of like a metaphor
00:52:46
Speaker
Or, you know, it's like a very concrete example of different approaches to society, right? And so one approach to bear management is what the state advocates that is kind of a community-minded approach where everybody manages their bird feeders and their garbage and kind of like discourages bears from having any interest in humans. The other vision for bear management
00:53:14
Speaker
is that every individual is on their own. You know, that everyone's got the freedom to treat bears on their property however they so choose. And that might mean feeding them either intentionally or unintentionally, and it might mean shooting them, right? And so what I found was that in Grafton, the fact that some people were choosing that second approach that they were
00:53:41
Speaker
kind of altering the bear behavior through their own personal intransigence and interactions with the bear and their refusal to follow state guidelines. That changed the playing field and the culture of the town in a way that even people who would advocate that more sensible first reaction theory of bear management
00:54:07
Speaker
are kind of like unintentionally carried along for the ride. So you want to manage bears properly, but if your neighbor is not managing bears properly, then you're actually in threat of being attacked by a bear. And so when you mow the lawn, you better carry a gun on you, right? Or when you go out. And so some of the far out behaviors that people were exhibiting were actually like,
00:54:37
Speaker
made sense given that the whole landscape had been changed and tweaked in this kind of crazy, weird way. People have these odd behaviors. They chose to live in very non-traditional ways and I don't really have a problem with that. I think every individual was kind of following their heart and doing what seemed right to them in the moment. But yeah, I hope that
00:55:04
Speaker
pretty much everything that I talked to came across as at least somewhat sympathetic to me. And I hope they came across as somewhat sympathetic to the reader, even when they are very kind of outlandish. Yeah. And it's one thing when the, you know, when that personal responsibility or whatever, it feels like it has some degree of civic good. But when like structures are starting to burn down and there's no fire department and people are like, well,
00:55:33
Speaker
You just got lucky that. Or when you're when like you know I'm managing my plot of road better but what if the person excuse is like I'm gonna let the road go to shit so this might be nice but then you're gonna run into a shit ton of potholes it's like well we need some civic stitching here so it's kind of like it's really interesting how that played out in the book too.
00:55:54
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Like the whole community kind of got really beaten up by this. Like every, everything that you could measure about life in Grafton got worse. You know, whether it was recycling rates or neighbor disputes or a number of registered sex offenders, sex offenders living in town. Yeah. Everything kind of got worse. They, you know,
00:56:20
Speaker
looked at through this prism of personal responsibility. I think before you started recording, you mentioned the Sopranos briefly, and I was reminded sometimes of
00:56:35
Speaker
this scene from the Sopranos where Meadow Soprano, the daughter, is arguing with Carmella and she's got, you know, she like wants to do something and Carmella's saying, no, you can't. And Meadow says like, yo, I'm almost 18. I can do what I want, right? And Carmella says, is that your only point? And that really kind of like summed up the dynamic that I felt like I was seeing in Grafton sometimes as
00:57:04
Speaker
People were so preoccupied and obsessed with the idea that they had the right to do things, that it got very confused in their minds when someone tried to tell them that they shouldn't do those things. Like there was literally early on, some of the most eccentric free towners were advocating very openly for the moral correctness of allowing consensual cannibalism.
00:57:34
Speaker
Right? Or, you know, just some of these very legalized bum fights, you know, like these things that are just kind of clearly bad, but they were more interested in asserting their freedoms than in using their freedoms responsibly, I suppose.
00:57:56
Speaker
Yeah, Rosalie at one point says in the book that they don't get the responsibility side of being libertarians. They don't want anybody to impose anything on them, but they want to impose their ideas on everyone else. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, it's like, you know, I want to be free. I want to make my own decisions. And then even though we like to pretend that we don't need
00:58:19
Speaker
approval for our decisions. We like to just say that. At some point, you not only want to make the wacky decision, but you want everyone to tell you that it's a good idea. And then at some point after that, you want to make them do what you're doing.
00:58:37
Speaker
Right? So it is really weird. It's just this kind of like quirk of human nature where as independent minded as we all want to be, we all kind of have this like secret need for affirmation, right? And that affirmation can come in many forms, but ultimately, the more we get, the more we seem to require. Yeah, it's like a hedonic treadmill of validation.
00:59:09
Speaker
So Matt, as we wind down here, I feel like I could talk to you for hours about this kind of stuff, but I know we have to be mindful of your time. Coming back to the earlier part of our conversation about how you got your start and how you just slowly started to level up and keep
00:59:31
Speaker
keep doing and turning that ratchet and getting to where you want it to go. For people who might be kind of stuck out there, maybe they're starting or even mid-career, what might you say if you had them for five minutes and you had them in a corner and they were picking your brain, you'd be like, you know what?
Advice for Aspiring Writers
00:59:47
Speaker
Focus on this. What kind of advice might you have for someone who feels stuck or just, yeah, a bit stuck, I'll say.
00:59:55
Speaker
Yeah, no, I think that they have to make sure that they have set aside time in their week and ideally time in their day to do nothing but send out pitches, right? To pitch editors who they have not worked with before and
01:00:21
Speaker
they have to do it as a goal unto itself. You're not trying to sell a story, you're trying to pitch. It's like somebody runs to lose weight. It's much harder if you're focused on the weight and much easier if you can just kind of enjoy the run for its own sake.
01:00:46
Speaker
Yeah, the practice of it versus the outcome of it. Right, right. Yeah. And if you're going to get all wrapped up in whether or not a particular editor is going to accept a particular pitch, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment. You're putting too many eggs in that basket. I would advise that they
01:01:07
Speaker
they get on that hedonic pitching treadmill and enjoy the ride as they crank out pitch after pitch after pitch. Just challenge yourself to get pitches out there into the universe. You want to have a lot of irons in the fire.
01:01:29
Speaker
And however many you think that you can put out there, challenge yourself to double it, triple it. It's okay if it takes a little time to get there. And I promise you that that is how someone without connections gets opportunities. They put their fingers out there and their fielders out there in as many ways as possible. Well, that's brilliant.
Matt's Online Presence
01:01:55
Speaker
And Matt, where can people find you online and get more familiar with your work?
01:01:58
Speaker
Oh, yeah, thanks for asking. Let's see, if you Google my very difficult to pronounce name, Matt Hongoldtetling, you will come to my website at matthongoldtetling.com. You can also find me on Twitter at HH underscore Matt. I'm also right now organizing a songwriting contest called A Musician Walks into a Bear.
01:02:21
Speaker
where folks are writing fun songs about the book and its themes. So if you go to my webpage, you'll be able to see where you can check out some of those songs.
01:02:34
Speaker
That's amazing. Well, best of luck with it. Like I said, I love the book and I'm so glad we got to have this conversation about it, where you came from and how you got your toe hold in this crazy world. Thank you for the work. Thanks for the book and thanks for making time to come on the show. Awesome. Brendan, you provide a lot of support and inspiration for a lot of aspiring writers and I'm so glad to be a small part of this good work that you do. Thank you.
01:03:12
Speaker
can put it on the board yeah! Notice that mic awareness pulled away from the mic. Thanks to Matt for coming to play ball and thanks to Scribner for the support. Be sure to use that 20% coupon code. It's pretty awesome. Great deal, great program. I'm using it for casualty of words and also the retype of tools of ignorance. I'm loving it. It's powerful stuff, even at its most simple
01:03:42
Speaker
Utilization. In any case, it's great. Check them out. Support them so they support us. And hey, thanks to you, friend. It's always nice when we can have this thing, this thing between us. Don't run away yet. But the fact of the matter is, you probably already did the Spotify analytics. As far as they are, tell me nobody listens as far. So if you can't do interviews,
01:04:26
Speaker
you