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168 Plays3 months ago
Author and critic Michael Antman joins Joe and Mark for a wide-ranging discussion about visual arts and writing.
Michael started out as a poet. After switching to fiction, he's had two novels published by indie presses: Cherry Whip and Everything Solid Has A Shadow. He likes to explore themes of self-knowledge in his work, or, more accurately, "the lack of self-knowledge."
The best surrealism combines common elements of the world with the feelings we have inside our dreams. Surrealism is unexpected but never absurd, Michael says. "It makes tremendous psychological sense at a deep level."
At the age of twelve, visiting the Art Institute of Chicago, Michael first encountered the work of René Magritte. "It blew the top of my head off!" he relates.
For more information, please check out the show notes for this episode.
Re-Creative is produced by Donovan Street Press Inc. in association with MonkeyJoy Press.
Contact us at [email protected]
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Transcript
Introduction and Art Focus
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, Mark. Joe, how are you? I think you know the answer to that question. I know you're always good. Yeah. Very steady state that way. Knock wood. Yeah. Yeah. yeah So i've got I've been thinking a lot about art. As you should. Because, you know, this podcast makes me think about art a lot in in in many different ways. And so I was wondering, like in terms of visual arts, we haven't done too much in visual arts yet, but we've had a few. Actually, it was interesting. Some of our really early guests wanted to talk about visual arts, paintings mostly. ye And then we've, yeah, we've gone everywhere else since then. So I was going to ask you, do you have a favorite gallery that you like?
00:00:48
Speaker
Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. Okay. Well, can you tell me everyone what that is? Well, it's related to a question that you asked before, which is, did I like surrealism over, you know, and then I mentioned Salvador Dali. And my favorite painting in all the world is Salvador Dali's Santiago El Grande, which just happens to be down the road in the Lord Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Oh, okay. That's great. Yeah. And they have other great paintings as well. And they actually have the original there?
Favorite Paintings and Galleries
00:01:25
Speaker
Yes, they do. Yeah. Wow. The story goes he was going to give it to a church, I think, in in Spain. And then they said no for some reason. And it was, you know, it's this huge, enormous painting and he painted it from a perspective that it was supposed to be above the altar so that when you're looking at it above the altar, it showed up a certain way. And then he wind up not displaying it there. And now it's on the main floor just inside the entrance of the Lord Beaverbrook Art Gallery. in exactly not the right place for the way that he painted it. So to see it properly, you actually have to lie down in the floor. right back That's like, yeah, look at it. Yeah. That's like, if you want to go see, uh, uh, Michelangelo's David, David, you've got to like imagine it's a hundred feet ah higher than you yeah like get a sense of what it was supposed to look like.
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah. But, you know, almost every time I go to Fredericton, I pop into that art gallery to see it. And the last time I went, they were having some kind of event, so I couldn't see my favorite painting. Oh, that sucks. Yeah. Very, you know, well, but it was okay because I got to, you know, look around the rest of the, gallery and say, although there are other great stuff. So as usual, turning the question back to you, what is your favorite? It's probably the Tate Gallery in London, the the other London, London, UK, because I've had some of the most amazing experiences in terms of interacting with art. But I think really, it's got to be the Westland Gallery, which is just down the road for me in Wortley Village in Old South. And they they have like this, they have this yearly thing where artists bring in one by one foot paintings. And so they'll have like every artist in the region, like all of southwestern Ontario, bring in one or two, or maybe three paintings, but they're all a square foot.
00:03:17
Speaker
and That's the kind of stuff they do and I i pop in every pretty much every other week. so You got to support the local regional galleries. Yeah, exactly.
Introducing Michael Antman
00:03:27
Speaker
and i thought I thought our guests, Michael Antman, might have an answer to this question. Welcome to the podcast. Recreative. Thank you for having me. ah You mentioned that your favorite gallery mark was the Tate Gallery in London. I have a funny story about the Tate. I went to the Tate Modern, which is an amazing piece of architecture, but I didn't like the museum at all because there were there was virtually no art in it. It was just a lot of
00:03:53
Speaker
ah empty space and the art that was there was very, very gimmicky. A lot of conceptual art, which I didn't like. So I left after a couple of hours. I gave it ah a good shot and I got into a taxi waiting right outside and I said, can you take me to the Tate Gallery? And he said, sir, you are at the Tate Gallery. He said, I could turn on the engine and drive around the block and charge you seven pounds and you'd still be at the Tate Gallery. I said, no, the real Tate Gallery. And he said, oh, I got you. So he took me all the way across London to the real Tate Gallery, which also was one of my favorites. I'd say it's in my top five. When I was younger,
00:04:34
Speaker
Being an art fanatic, I remember making a sort of a bucket list life vow to visit every great art museum in the world. And at this point in my life, I probably hit about 50% of all the great art museums in the world. And I consider that a great life goal. There's some I'll probably never get to, like the Hermitage in Moscow. But I've always loved it. My father was a a painter, an amateur painter. He painted on the weekends. And he was pretty good
Michael's Artistic Journey
00:05:03
Speaker
for an amateur painting. He had a few exhibitions, but I think I always had an innate interest in art, although it wasn't truly awakened until I was a little bit older, which is one of the stories I want to tell you about.
00:05:16
Speaker
Well, that's great. That's what a wonderful place to start. So this is usually what we ask you to introduce yourself to our listeners because Joe and I are too lazy to do the bio. No, that's not true. No, we do this because this way you get to pick what you want to talk about really in terms of your career. yeah But it's also kind of true. kind of tri yeah i'm I'm happy to introduce myself because I happen to be one of the world's leading experts on Michael Antman. I'm not an expert on very much else, but I do know my own life. I grew up in Chicago. Although my family was, I would say, lower, lower, lower middle class, they always took advantage of all the free cultural attractions Chicago had to offer. And they took us to the Grand Park concerts, which was the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. And those were free. And they took us to the Art Institute and the Museum of Science and Industry and and many other free cultural attractions. So it was a great upbringing in that sense. And I developed an interest in art because, as I mentioned, my father was a painter, an impressionist painter.
00:06:16
Speaker
But I wanted to be a writer. I started out wanting to be a ah a columnist like, I don't know if you two are remember the name Mike Reichel, but he was a very ah famous Chicago a political columnist who wrote a ah very ah notorious book about our mayor daily called Boss. But then I gradually changed as I developed, for lack of a better term, and I don't mean to sound pretentious about it, but I developed kind of a poetic way of looking at the world, a poetic sensibility, and I decided I wanted to become a poet. So fast forward and I wrote many poems which to this day I still think are very good but got almost universally rejected. I had extreme difficulty in getting my poems published. I ended up getting about 20 published in various journals but I realized to be a successful poet you had to be a careerist and really make a career out of it and and I didn't really understand that. I didn't really have a mentor.
00:07:08
Speaker
Over the years I switched to fiction and I i published two novels with ah small boutique presses. One was called ENC Press, which Mark is very familiar with, and the other ah is a press called Amika Press. They're they're both very legitimate boutique presses, not big, but I was still very proud of both of the
Themes in Michael's Writing
00:07:28
Speaker
novels I published. One was called Cherry Whip, about a Japanese jazz musician, very naive but a genius, who comes to America and he immediately runs into one disaster after another. It's a little bit patterned after Kingsley Amos' novel, ah Lucky Jim. it's It's a comic novel, but it also has elements of tragedy. And I look at it now, and even though I didn't sell a lot of copies, I'm proud of it and I feel good about it. And I published a second novel called Everything Solid Has a Shadow.
00:07:58
Speaker
which was based on an extremely eerie experience I had and which I used the novel as an attempt to explain and never fully understood or was able to explain what had happened to me but I think the novel was a kind of um catharsis and also it shaped my experience in a way that I thought would be ah ah palatable to to readers, both of the novels have in common my my theme, which is also present in the memoir I wrote, which was called Searching for the Seagull Motel. And the theme in all three of my books is self-knowledge, or more accurately, the lack of self-knowledge. Because if I look at my life, I i had a you know reasonably successful life, but I always suffered from a lack of self-knowledge.
00:08:47
Speaker
And I didn't really understand myself and it wasn't until recent years, I wouldn't say too late, but very late, that I truly understood myself and my motivations. So that became the theme for all of my writing was self-knowledge. And I'm convinced that virtually all people with very few exceptions lack self-knowledge and they lack it to such a degree that they don't even know that they lack self-knowledge. It just doesn't even occur to them that that's an issue. And because I discovered myself extremely late, I still, to this day, at my advanced age, still discover new things about myself all the time that explain some of the stupid, irrational, and embarrassing things I did when I was younger. Yeah, why did I do that? I go, oh, that's why I did that. That's why I acted that way. And in some cases,
00:09:37
Speaker
In retrospect, I realized that I acted in a smart way, but I just didn't understand why I was doing it or that it was smart. I just had an instinct or a gut and I followed it. In other cases, I did things stupidly and it wasn't helpful because I didn't really understand the the impact of my childhood and and the the impact it had on my psychology. So I'm absolutely fascinated by psychology and human behavior and motivations. In addition to my three books, the memoir, by the way, was never published. I found a big New York literary agent who was thrilled with it. She said, this is going to sell. It's going to be a bestseller. I was so excited. When she called me, I was in a Starbucks and I literally bought
00:10:22
Speaker
drinks for everybody in the starbucks speaker because i was so excited i said i'd always wanted to say drinks on the house and i did and everybody everybody took me up on it and bought it's very expensive frappes and and cappuccinos but she was wasn't able to sell it so that book remains unpublished in addition to three books and the poetry that i wrote when i was younger i'm also was a book critic for many many years published well you know well over a hundred uh... book reviews and and pieces of literary criticism and uh... more recently have been a theater critic which which I've absolutely loved and I've done that for a couple of years and I've gone back to writing some poetry and I've also written many, many essays and I continue to write essays and I would say that all the writing
00:11:08
Speaker
gives me tremendous satisfaction. I've outgrown my my younger sense of frustration that I wasn't selling a lot of copies or getting a lot of readers. I wouldn't say that I do it now just for my own satisfaction, although there is a great deal of satisfaction in writing something I think is good. But if I have even one person say, wow, I really loved what you wrote or that really resonated with me, it makes it all worthwhile. yeah So I continue to be a writer at this point in my life and I'm working on a new major novel. i that I can't really talk about, but it's ah it's a huge undertaking and I'm very excited about it. And I write a lot of smaller things as
Michael's Artistic Pursuits
00:11:45
Speaker
well. I'm also, in addition to all that, an amateur photographer. I posted over 4,000 photos and on Instagram. I don't pretend to be ah professional or at the same level I am as a writer, but it's a great hobby. and
00:11:59
Speaker
It also helps me satisfy my interest in the visual arts. Since I never had any talent as a painter like my father did, photography is sort of a way of of looking at the world visually. If I may say, I love Cherry Whip. Thank you. know we're we're well We're alma mater of ENC Press, both of us. so And I think your book came out before mine did. I think it was the year before. And I was just like, wow, wow, that's just a beautiful. It's funny, too, like there's really lots of laugh out loud moments in the book, but it's just like the poetic side of it. um I really resonate with what you're saying is like, OK, yeah, this guy clearly wrote some poetry before he wrote this book.
00:12:42
Speaker
Yes, there are some observations that are poetic at you know, that's how I would describe them. Exactly. Yeah. Now you said that book is out of print. It's out of print. Yeah, it just went out of print about three months ago. And I have to give a lot of credit to the publisher because she kept it in Olga Gardner Galvin. because she kept it in print for, let's see, I published it in 2004, so almost 20 years, and that's pretty good for a small boutique publisher to keep a book in print that long. I got all excited about six or seven years after it was published because a movie producer optioned the rights to it for a movie, and I of course had
00:13:23
Speaker
stars in my eyes and was all excited. Then the producer came up to me and said, hey, in order to buy the, not the rights, but the option for the rights is going to cost me $500. And I said, okay. And he said, well, I don't have $500. Can you lend it to me? That was my first clue that he was not a serious producer. So I lent him 500 bucks and He never, he never, not only didn't produce the movie, he never even made any effort to raise any money to produce the movie, but to his eternal credit, he eventually paid me back the 500 bucks. I guess that's something. Oh, that's good. That's a good story. Yeah. So do you now have the rights to the book and do you plan to republish it or? Well, I don't know. I'm not sure.
00:14:11
Speaker
I'd rather focus on the future. I retired a couple of years ago. I spent 44 years and in marketing. i was the In the last 13 years, I was the chief marketing officer for a big company, a Fortune 100 company. And that was very demanding and stressful, although I loved my job for the most part. But you know I was immersed in marketing. And I didn't do, although I did write all three of my books during that time period when I was in marketing, I'm not claiming I didn't have time for it. or energy for it. I did. I just have more time and more energy now. And I choose to devote that energy to new projects instead of reliving old ones. So it's unlikely I would republish Cherry Whip unless my next novel ends up being pretty successful and people say, hey, I'd love to read Cherry Whip. And then I might consider it. I would have to hire a professional typist.
00:15:02
Speaker
to re type the whole book because the digital files of long since disappeared but you know if dickens could write in longhand and do thirty revisions i think i can read type book one one time now i have to ask the obvious question. Did your marketing experience help you sell books. Not really i thought it would. I thought it would, but it really didn't. And book marketing is a beast unto itself. My area of specialization was primarily business to business marketing, financial services, high tech, healthcare. care And the degree to which it was applicable to book marketing was about 0.5%, one half of 1%. So I did a tremendous amount of marketing. And when I look back at it, I'm very happy with the ads that I ran and the PR that I did.
00:15:51
Speaker
And when I was marketing Everything Solid Has a Shadow, the PR firm that I used at my company, they made a lot of money off of us. So they offered to do the public relations for me to market the book, to help me get reviews. And I thought, you know, they were they're one of the top PR firms in the country. They couldn't possibly do anything but a bang up job. And they did it, of course, because they wanted and valued my business. They were afraid I was going to fire them. at any point didn't ever occur to me they were the ones who offered to do it i said sure resulted in absolutely nothing and i don't blame them uh... i think i came to understand and they came to understand that book marketing is a vastly different creature it's just a totally different animal from other types of marketing and it's very very difficult if i could
00:16:40
Speaker
give one lesson to anybody listening to your podcast who's trying to market a novel, it's this. I would look at it the way you build a fire. I always assumed that the way to market a book was to do some initial feelers, reach out to friends, get that them to post Amazon and Goodreads reviews, then do some PR, try to get some professional reviews, go to Kirkus, get one of those Kirkus reviews you pay for. And then you know over a course of a a year or so, just do everything you can think of. And that was totally wrong. That's the equivalent of trying to build a fire by putting some newspaper at the bottom of the grate, lighting it, waiting until it burns out, then adding some kindling, lighting that, waiting until it burns out, et cetera. The way to do book marketing is to do everything all at once in a concentrated burst, maybe a month or two before publication and a month or two after publication.
00:17:34
Speaker
You pile the newspaper, the kindling, the tinder and the logs in the grate all before you do anything and then you light the match. And if I had only known that, instead of stretching it out, I would have been much more intensive in the first few months. Would it have made an enormous difference?
Influence of Dreams and Art
00:17:51
Speaker
Not necessarily because everything solid has a shadow is about psychology it's about one man's struggle to come to terms with his past through some very eerie dreams that are forcing their way inside his head and he doesn't understand them why he's having the dreams he's a very superficial guy he's buried a lot of traumatic things in his past he has no interest or willingness to come to terms with them uh... he has a pretty girlfriend and a great job and successful career and he thinks everything's fine but he's falling apart
00:18:21
Speaker
And the reason he's falling apart is because he's suppressing something that happened to him and as a child. Not what you're assuming happened and it has nothing to do with sexual abuse or anything like that. He was falsely accused of accidentally causing the death of a small child in his care and when it wasn't really his fault. And he's held the guilt and the trauma with him. and buried it, as most of us bury traumas. And the dream is kind of like a crowbar forced it out of him. And he is forced over the course of the novel to come to terms with why a woman he thinks he barely knows keeps on walking into his head while he sleeps. More than just a dream. This is based on something that actually happened to me that I still haven't come to terms with. It was incredibly
00:19:06
Speaker
ah puzzling and and strange and I still don't understand it. That's so interesting because I would say almost all of my novels started as a dream. Oh, really? How interesting. The only one that didn't was the fatness, but almost all of my books started as a dream that I had. And in the case of the Amadeus net, it was a dream that I just kept having and kept having and kept having. It's like, okay, clearly I have to write about this to get this out of my head. That is so interesting. Yeah. Because dreams are unexplored country. I feel like they're very overlooked in literature.
00:19:44
Speaker
Uh, there are one third of our lives, literally one third of that more. In my case, since I'm retired, it's more than one third. Oh, you and your afternoon naps. I love that. Yeah, I love it. But people tend to, um, scoff at dreams. either because they they think they're irrelevant they're just nonsense or literary types who say you know dream sequences are boring who cares but it's not about the dream sequence per se and it's not about the dream per se it's about the buried
00:20:15
Speaker
Things that the dreams force you to confront and the point I was going to make is that I think one of the reasons it's hard to sell a novel like everything solid has a shadow is that most people want to live outside of themselves and you know read about adventures and I'm not scoffing at that because I love my novels and mystery novels. that's all that stuff is great but it's very rare to find people that really wanted spelunk inside their own brain and kind of ignore their explore their own inner psychology into engage in the process of gaining self-knowledge it's not a common thing literary novels in general are difficult to sell a literary novel that's inwardly focused about human psychology is even harder to sell so that combined with my lack of
00:21:03
Speaker
knowledge or insight into how to market a literary novel meant you know that it was a tough road. But your books sound fascinating. i say I'm sensing a real great segue here because if you're talking about like the unconscious and taking the unconscious seriously, that is kind of what the surrealists are all about, right? Like. Precisely. Salvador Dali. Yeah. And I think you want to talk about Magritte and you want to talk about 2001 A Space Odyssey. Correct. And I think these both share that idea. Yeah. When I was 12 years old, I had a kind of experience that ah for lack of a better better terminology blew the top of my head off. I went with a friend of mine named Alan to the Art Institute to see an an exhibition by Renee Magritte.
00:21:52
Speaker
I'd never heard of him, had no idea idea who he was. I was 12 years old, very innocent. I didn't know much about painting, even though my father used to take me to the Art Institute and I would see his own painting. But suddenly I was confronted with visions of the world. that were completely, for me, unprecedented and and flabbergasting. The one that in particular stands out was a British gentleman, and ah I guess it's called a derby, the style of hat, leaning over a bridge, looking at the water, and next to him is a lion that's on fire.
00:22:26
Speaker
And I remember being just so blown away by it because what Magritte does is take the common elements of our world and combine them in ways, well, in the ways that we and ah we experience dreams, completely unexpected. and inexplicable and yet strangely right. To me, that's the key to good surrealism, whether it's René Magritte or it's David Lynch. Good surrealism is unexpected, but it's never absurd.
00:23:01
Speaker
It's strange and it's inexplicable, but it makes a kind of sense at a deep level that we may not even be able to understand or explicate. The reason David Lynch is a great filmmaker and many imitators are not is because all of his work, which also comes from dreams, by the way. he's He talks about that very openly. i've heard him All his work makes tremendous psychological sense at a deep level so that even if you can't explain it or articulate it, you know it at some deep level. And that was what I felt seeing Magritte for the first time. It awakened to something in me that I couldn't explain. I couldn't explain it to my friend, Alan.
00:23:40
Speaker
I couldn't explain it to my friends, but I started making an effort to see the world from unusual angles and in unexpected ways. And I really think that's what started my interest in progressing beyond wanting to be a political columnist, to wanting to be some some sort of artist ah to see the world in different ways. And a few years after that, so that was when I was 12, When I was 15, I went with some buddies to see 2001 A Space Odyssey. Back then, before the internet, there was no buzz about it, no news. You didn't read anything but online about people quibbling about the casting choices or, you know, is it going to be true to the novel, although the novel appeared at the same time. But we knew nothing about it was my point.
00:24:30
Speaker
And again, I walked out of the theater you know with my head blown off. i I walked around in a daze to such a degree that I remember a friend of mine saying, are you all right? yeah And I really wasn't. I mean, it just flabbergasted at me. And again, here was something that opened up a world to me that not only I didn't know, But a world that I didn't even couldn't even conceive could exist. And here it was in front of me through the genius of Stanley Kubrick, one of our greatest film directors, along with David Lynch, for that matter. And 2001, A Space Odyssey is not precisely in the same category of of ah the exploring human psychology.
00:25:11
Speaker
because Kubrick was not that interested, humans, to be honest. oh but but But nonetheless, it it did hit me at a very deep psychological level. And I became obsessed with it, along with my friend Barry. And we ran out and bought, of course, we bought the novel. And we bought a ah paperback called The Making of 2001. And that itself was revelatory, reading The Making of 2001, because it helped me understand, as a naive 15-year-old, that great art And in particular, great art that seems completely dreamlike and and eerie is nonetheless the result of craftsmanship, yeah hard work, tremendous amount of
00:25:49
Speaker
of thinking through what works and what doesn't work. and And craft, just craft. Can you explain, because I'm not sure that everyone will know that the movie was a co-creation. So Arthur C. Clarke, very famous science fiction writer of his era, was working with Stanley Kubrick at the same, working on the story kind of at the same time. Correct. Kubrick is working on the movie. He's working on the book. They're working back and forth. They're spending lots of time together. Can you explain more about what that was like? Do you know anything about that? Yeah, I remember reading the book. not And I don't remember exactly how long after the movie I read the book. And I read, I remember reading the book in quest of answers, quote unquote, to the enigmas and anomalies. ah By the way,
00:26:38
Speaker
That movie taught me the word anomaly because remember they talked about finding the lunar anomaly. There's an anomaly on the moon. Yeah. Yeah. There's an anomaly in the moon. There's another one now on this, on, it's a Titan, Satan, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's Titan. Yeah. So I, um, I read this, uh, read the Arthur C. Clarke novel in, in search of answers to the enigmas that the movie presented. And it taught me two things. One. Yeah, there were some very interesting, illuminating answers to things I didn't understand. But two to some degree, it didn't matter because the it didn't in any way, you know, vitiate the impact of seeing the movie and knowing what the sentinel was and why it was planted there and what its purpose was. Yes, it was extremely interesting. And by the way, I had been reading science fiction ever since I was a little boy. I always loved it, especially science fiction short stories. And the stranger, the better.
00:27:31
Speaker
I loved Clifford D. Simak. I don't know if you're familiar with him. He specialized in writing about aliens that were very alien, so to speak. So completely different from from what we could imagine. And he himself was a kind of a surrealist. And, yeah you know, one of the things I learned was that finding out the answers is helpful and I don't have an issue with it. I don't have a problem with spoilers either for that matter. But it doesn't in any way, to me, diminish the experience of the strangeness itself. And and and I need to emphasize that not random strangeness
00:28:09
Speaker
not absurdity. I've always hated absurdist literature, by the way. I can't stand it. Strangeness that makes an inexplicable kind of sense in the same way that our dreams do. ah We wake up and we have a mood and a feeling. and We know we've been changed in some way, even if we can't articulate it. But now, okay, so why have you chosen Magritte in 2001, A Space Odyssey, saying that A Space Odyssey is not surrealistic? Right, well it is to to a degree. The end it is a
Childhood and Transcendence in Art
00:28:37
Speaker
bit. But so is that that to the connection or do is there a deeper connection for you?
00:28:41
Speaker
No, the connection between the two, the reason I raised both of them as the subject matter I wanted to discuss was that both those were the two formative experiences from an artistic standpoint of my childhood, the two things that took the time off that made me go, wow. and There's more to the world. There's more to the universe. There's more out there. I spent my childhood, as I mentioned, reading science fiction and reading comic books, watching television, and playing sports from sunup to sundown. That was my entire childhood. And all of those were very pleasant things. They were a great escape from home and from school, neither of which I liked. And they were all wonderful, but they didn't
00:29:22
Speaker
transcend anything. These two experiences were the two things that helped me to transcend and to recognize more importantly to recognize that it's possible to transcend your own existence and by writing something good help other people transcend their existences and to me that's what art is all about is taking your consciousness and communicating it or transporting it or conveying it to somebody else's consciousness and helping them feel transformed. Magritte did that to me, and I'd love to do that to somebody else. Now you alluded to another, and I'm leery of getting into you know painful or dangerous territory here. No, that's fine. You alluded to another experience that um that your second novel was was basically based on, and so Magritte in 2001,
00:30:12
Speaker
We're not that experience that was a different experience is a different one yeah and and and that's fine to ask about it it wasn't not. In any way traumatic it was just deeply ah what's the word that's stronger than puzzling whatever that word is that's what it was what happened was I it was when I worked for i was a principal in ah in a marketing agency and. ah One of the women who was working on my team, she was a PR specialist, her name was Tracy, and she and I were work spouses, I'm sure you've heard that term, we worked very closely together. She was happily married, I was married, there was nothing untoward about it, we just worked very closely together, we we knew each other very well, and we were reasonably you know affectionate and friendly, although I was her boss and sometimes I got mad at her and she got mad at me, but there was nothing particularly remarkable about the
00:31:03
Speaker
relationship. So one night, just out of the blue, in the middle of nothing in particular, I had a dream. And it wasn't exactly what you would call a dream. My brain was completely black. What I saw in the dream was just complete blackness. And I saw a tiny figure smaller than half of a grain of rice at the back of my head. And it walked forward in my head, and as it got closer and closer to the front of my head, which is to say my eyes, I recognized it as Tracy, my coworker. And she leaned into my eyes. Now, she's inside my head, so she's leaning into the back of my eyes. yeah But I can see her clearly, and she says, so Michael, I have a very serious illness.
00:31:45
Speaker
And that's all she said, that was the end of the dream. So I didn't give it much thought. It was a very odd dream because there was nothing surrounding it. There were no rooms or houses or people or parks or cars, just her. So the next day when I saw her in the office, I said, Tracy, I had the weirdest dream about you last night. Now she, because she was a woman, she rolled her eyes because when a man says that, it usually means he's gonna say yeah it was something sexual. And I said, no, no, nothing like that. All you did was lean into my, head or walk into my head and say, Michael, I have a ah very serious illness. So the moment I said this to Tracy, she went completely white all over like a sheet of typing paper. And I said, what's the matter? And she says, Michael, yesterday I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. And she said, what time did you have the dream? And I said, I'm not sure.
00:32:38
Speaker
But it was, uh, I woke up shortly after the dream and it was about 2 AM m and she said, I was up all night with my husband, his name is Leonard. And we were talking about whether or not I should tell you about this illness. Cause you know, I don't know if I should tell my boss that I have a degenerative neurological disease. We finally decided not to tell you, and this would have been about 2 AM. And I said, you told me, you told me anyway. And. She was very freaked out that somehow she had walked into my brain and communicated this to me without meaning to or intending to. And our relationship after that became very, very strange, almost strained in a way because she sort of felt like I had invaded her privacy yeah or or stepped into her brain, even though the irony being she had stepped into my brain. She didn't have a dream about me, I had a dream about her.
00:33:30
Speaker
But it became a little bit odd. And I didn't understand how I could have known that she was seriously ill because she betrayed no signs of illness. She wasn't showing any of the signs of multiple sclerosis in a visual sense. I would have had no way of knowing whatsoever. But somehow I knew. And I'm i largely convinced that human beings have vestigial senses in the same way that you can see a fox. with its fur bristling when it senses danger nearby. yeah I use the analogy in my novel of, if you've ever played this game as a kid, where someone takes a very sharp knife and holds it to the bridge of your nose without touching anything, but just a millimeter away and the hairs, the minuscule hairs start bristling. There's no question that we that ah you ignore your own instincts at your parents. Absolutely. Because we have been,
00:34:24
Speaker
Evolving for hundreds of thousands of years and we have these highly evolved instincts, which we don't understand. But they are there and that's so I totally believe that you might've even smelled this. I mean, but that's ah something that has never occurred to me that you might've smelled she had cause dogs can do that for sure. They can identify when someone's ill way before and any of our modern screening technologies can. So that's it's possible. Good point.
00:34:55
Speaker
Yeah, so you don't think there's anything supernatural about this. This is something supernatural. It might be supernatural. That we don't know. That's what I think is I think a lot of these things seem supernatural and there might even be a non-rational scientific explanation for these things that someday we'll get to. I agree. Yeah. The other analogy I used in the novel is this doesn't happen to everybody, but for many people, including me, if I'm standing on a ledge or a balcony or cliff overlooking a very high place and I suddenly imagine myself jumping, I get an aching sensation in my groin. And what is this? It's a vestigial sense. It's a, it's a warning. So I don't know. there's Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So here's where I want to connect it to absurdism.
00:35:48
Speaker
So Sartre called that lapel de vid, the call of the void. Yeah, he called that the call of the void. And that is what's at the heart of absurdism. It's not just nonsense for nonsense sake. It is wrestling with this nonsensical notion that I can just jump off this cliff anytime I want to. Yes. that is That is how I see absurdism is that idea that you you've always got this option. It's always an option. You can always jump off the cliff. Yes. It's always there. We don't. We we generally don't. But we don't and a lot of our lives are wrestling with why we don't.
00:36:31
Speaker
That's so interesting. And Sartre is one of my favorites. Anosia is one of the most thought-provoking novels I've ever read. And he I never really thought of Sartre as an absurdist. I thought of him as an existentialist. He's an existentialist. But but i see I see like ah a Camus as an absurdist. And they're so close closely aligned, I think, in terms of their existentialism that I kind of always attribute a little bit of absurdism to Sartre when I probably shouldn't. Very, very interesting. And I'm still dwelling also on your earlier comment about the possibility that I might have smelled something, which is something that never, ever in all these years of puzzling over this occurred to me. Now, I have two other things I should briefly mention. Now, before you before you get to that, though, I wanted to just ask about her. how
00:37:17
Speaker
Well, that's one of the two things I wanted to mention. um Oh, see, I smelled that. Yeah. There are two different, roughly two different types of multiple sclerosis. The type that is called recurring or emitting and comes and goes. And there's another type that's like a ah straight roller coaster ride downwards. And unfortunately that's the type she had. She was a lovely, lovely person and it was very, very tragic. ah She passed away a few years ago and her symptoms were just god-awful. But I want to mention that I had another dream about her. This was about 18 months to two years ago and in this dream she had a present for me
00:38:00
Speaker
And she said, can I open it? And I said, sure. And ah she opened the box and all these streamers and pieces of glitter and pieces of little candy and little toys came floating out of the box and and and flying into the air. And in the mix was an invitation. She said, I want to invite you to my party. And I said, I'll be there. That was the dream. I later found out from my former colleague that had stayed in touch with her. that at the time I had this second dream this was of course years later after the first dream she had passed away and the dream again was all black nothing except her and she was clearly communicating to me that she was saying goodbye and the party was her deathbed and her passing away ah this occurred after the novel was written
00:38:51
Speaker
I you know i didn't i didn't incorporated the novel is not really just to be clear not about her i took this incident is a nugget for a much broader story that's really kind of a love story and a romance and i turned the illness into something much more severe if you can imagine. called ALS or endotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease. And it's a love story and a romance, but it's about an emotional emotionally constipated man. That's the thing that it had in common with reality because you could argue that's why I had these dreams because I wasn't in touch with my feelings on a day-to-day basis. The second thing I want to mention is that when I yeah
00:39:33
Speaker
was writing the novel, I wanted to make sure I got the details right about ALS. And I happened to know that a high school classmate of mine who was also on the high school tennis team with me. was a neurologist in Spokane, Washington, and an expert on ALS. He treated many ALS patients. So I interviewed him you know while I was writing the novel to get all the details right about the course of the illness. And he was very helpful. I put him in my acknowledgments. A few years ago, around the same time I had that second dream about Tracy, he himself was diagnosed with ALS.
Existential and Therapeutic Themes
00:40:05
Speaker
Oh my. is now
00:40:07
Speaker
And I'll coping with it. And the irony was just crushing to me because he was such a good guy. And, uh, to have lost a couple of friends to these horrible neurological illnesses is, you know, it was very difficult for me. yeah And, uh, that's, that's, yeah, that's, that's an awful way to lose people. And it's surprisingly common. and Yeah. It seems to crop up, uh, all the time. Uh, but, but the novel. deliberately because I don't like writing books that are without hope. The novel itself, although it can't possibly be hopeful in a sense because the woman has ALS, it has
00:40:50
Speaker
a very hopeful and beautiful development or twist in it that is medically extremely rare but definitely possible. And I think that twist at the end is what really makes the novel and and kind of rescues both the male protagonist, the one who has the dream, as well as as the the woman he has the dream about. The the book is itself is much more complicated be be but because before he can come to terms with his own constipated psychology and his own ah understanding of why this woman is appearing in his dreams. He first has to work his way through
00:41:27
Speaker
his current girlfriend and then another girlfriend. The other one was the little girl that he was with when they accidentally let the the little girl's baby sister die. He has to work his way through these other relationships before he can even reach a point of coming to understand himself or what this third woman means to him. And this process of of working his way through these other relationships was indirectly patterned on another Stanley Kubrick. movie to come full circle, which is Eyes Wide Shut, where Tom Cruise kind of works his way through a psychodrama featuring women. yeah So you can just not answer this question, but have have you done therapy? Have you been in therapy? I should tell you that I will answer any question. okay
00:42:15
Speaker
um well no matter what what topic but I've been in therapy now for the last three years and I'm like, yeah, these are some of the things that you figure out when you have someone you can bounce these ideas off of in a you know place where you're not going to be judged. Absolutely. yeah the the The answer to your question is I worship psychiatry. I've actually been to three, one psychologist who was okay, but to two psychiatrists that were just brilliant men, brilliant. And they took conundrums and puzzlements that had been plaguing me my entire life.
00:42:53
Speaker
And like a hot knife through butter, they immediately cut to the essence of what was bothering me. Both of these men were amazing. And both happened to be gay. and And I kind of suspect that they might, I'm not gay myself, but I admire gay men because I feel that for some reason they have more psychological insight into people than straight men. I can speculate as to why, I don't really know the reason why. But both of these men had that in common. I wrote a fictionalized version of the second psychiatrist in Everything Solid Has a Shadow. He was incredibly eccentric. Eccentric isn't a strong enough word for it. He lived in a- Wait, the real guy or the fictional character? Both. I had to scale the fictional character back a little bit because no one could possibly believe how eccentric he was. No one's going to believe it?
00:43:46
Speaker
you walk You walked into his place and you needed a gas mask because he had so many cats and that the place just was had an overwhelming fog of of cat stink. And he smoked cigars obsessively like like Sigmund Freud did, one right after the other. And his place was, he was a the If I had called a colleague or an attorney who was, you know, vetting one of the pieces I was working on and they didn't return my phone call, what happens to most people when they don't get a phone call return? They get irritated, right? You know, I got to get this job done, but he won't get back to me. It's annoying. Not me.
00:44:45
Speaker
When someone didn't get back to me, I would become homocidally enraged. And I would have fantasies about like brain now strangling this person slowly. Now, just for the record, I'm not a murderer. I'm not a murderer. I never did kill anybody, but I would have fantasies about it. And and in my 20s, when I was dating, if I was ghosted by a girl or a girl didn't call me back after the first date or the second date, I would also become in In those cases it was ah it was a different feeling I become incredibly depressed and bitter and it was unnatural even at that age I knew that my reaction was extreme and unnatural I would walk around in a funk for months if someone cancelled a lunch date and then never called me back and and remade it.
00:45:34
Speaker
And I knew something was wrong, but I had no idea what it was. And I would go to other people saying, doesn't that get you enraged? And they would go, well, I guess. It's not that bad. So I talked to this psychiatrist, and I was explaining to him. And he he immediately identified the reason for these feelings. When I was a child, my mother had a habit of suddenly and abruptly stopping speaking to people. She didn't talk to my father for seven or eight years straight. And for seven or eight years living at home, it was always, Michael, will you tell your father I need the car this weekend? And my father would say, Michael, tell your mother she can't have the car. And they would conduct fights through me and through my my two siblings as well. And my mother also would frequently not speak to me. All of a sudden I did something wrong or
00:46:28
Speaker
either really wrong or or imaginarily wrong and she would stop speaking to me. And she was a borderline personality. In addition to not speaking to me, she would often go into these terrible funks. And I remember distinctly as a child that when she would wake up in the morning, I would examine her face like this. I would look into her eyes just to determine what kind of mood she was going to be in that day. and whether she was going to be yelling at me all day acting irrational, or whether she was going to be you know kind and loving. And the psychiatrist says, you mean you never made this connection? This is why when people don't respond to you, you get so upset. And I said, no, I honestly had never occurred to me. ah i mean I'm a typical novelist in the sense that i'm I do think I'm very insightful about other people. Exactly. yeah yeah But you did not react with the same rage to her.
00:47:21
Speaker
No. Why? Because she was the one that was raising me and providing food and clothing and and shelter. So I didn't have the you can't have freedom to be to be become enraged. And I didn't know this. I didn't consciously say I'm angry at my mother, but I can't say anything because yeah you know When you're a child, you don't think these things through. I just was ah ah afraid and intimidated to say anything to her like, you know, Mom, can you please speak to me? Mom, can you please tell me what's in your mind? No, children don't think that way. They're like goldfish in a bowl. that They don't think about the water. They're just existing.
00:47:54
Speaker
Now I have to ask as well, so your psychiatrist, who was brilliant, but there seems to be an element of physician healed thyself. So he clearly had issues with the wording of what- Same problem that all of us have. It's like they can incite throughout other people, but not themselves. Couldn't agree more. Although what he would say was, and I remember him distinctly saying this, is that I revel in the freedom to do and be exactly what I want to do and be, and I don't care what anybody thinks. And I think this was an outgrowth of him being gay. And he decided if he wanted to have 13 cats in his apartment and smoke cigars obsessively and wear spangled suspenders and have 12 fountain pens in his pocket and all of his other weird eccentricities, he was like, if you don't like it, tough shit.
00:48:41
Speaker
I do think that I have great insight into other people. I look at them closely and I know it motivates them. I just had a blind spot when it comes to myself. It's no different from the way we can't, unless we're using a mirror, we can't see our own nose. you know ah We can't see our own face. We have to look in a mirror. And the psychiatrist is that mirror. They're the one. Okay, so a few questions around that. Sure. what Why must we know ourselves? So Socrates obviously said that it appears on the surface to be a laudable thing, but do we really need to, because there are an awful lot of people, like you said, who go through life but without a clue about, you know, why they're, and I know this is presented as a bad thing because then they don't understand their motivations and they can't, you know, maybe successfully negotiate the world, but is it really a bad thing? Maybe it's a good thing in some instances.
00:49:30
Speaker
I would say very rarely, I've known a few and very few genuinely non-neurotic, happy people who clearly didn't spend a lot of time dwelling on themselves and who they were and where they came from. I have known far more people that were alcoholics, drug addicts, gambling addicts, sex addicts, deeply unhappy people, people who were drifting. I have two friends in particular I want to point out, both of whom deliberately deliver former friends who deliberately destroyed their lives. In one case he explained it to me as, I want people to feel sorry for me because when they do then it'll be like my mother taking care of me when I was a little boy and then I feel warm and taken care of. And that was a form of self-knowledge, at least he acknowledged why he was destroying his life.
00:50:18
Speaker
But it took him many years to acknowledge this, many, many years of terrible bankruptcies, divorces, being fired, etc. And I had another friend whose life was just unbelievably tragic and she had a need to define herself as a loser. and as a sad person and a person who is not made for this world and destined for another world, which is a form of suicidal talk. So I absolutely do believe that these people could have and would have benefited from going to a psychiatrist, gaining self-knowledge, better understanding what motivated them, and they could have been happier. and And I also used to work in a mental hospital. Let me emphasize, worked in a mental hospital.
00:50:59
Speaker
okay I wasn't a resident. like i work with I worked as a, ah as they were looking for a male over six feet tall who is a very fast typist. And I'm a 6'3 and I used to be able to type about 110 words a minute because they wanted someone to be an intake clerk who could type up all the intake forms right next door to the violent ward. So they the nurses and the female psychologists wanted a big guy. Now, when I showed up for work, they were shocked to discover that when I was a freshman in college, I was 6'3 and 155 pounds. So I was kind of not as imposing as they were hoping. yeah yeah yeah But nonetheless, I saw and got to meet many, many of the mental patients, and I also had
00:51:45
Speaker
a relative who is mentally disturbed. A lot of it is organic. They can't help it. But I do think that if they had done the hard work, the spelunking, I call it, of really digging into themselves and who they were and why they were the way they were, their lives could have at least been marginally better. To me, everything's going to continue on. It doesn't mean that by going to a psychiatrist or developing self-knowledge, you can just flip a switch and suddenly become whole and healthy, but you can become at least somewhat happier, somewhat healthier. And I'm going to now turn this back to René Magritte, because when he was, the story goes, and I'm not 100% sure if it's apocryphal or not,
00:52:25
Speaker
But the story goes that when he was a little boy, he was walking along ah the banks of a canal. I believe this was in Brussels or somewhere in Belgium. His mother had committed suicide and the police had just fished her out of the canal and he happened. upon the scene of his mother being fished out of the canal. yikes She was wearing a nitrous of some sort or a robe or something and it was soaked through of course and pulled over her head and she was naked. So he saw the naked bottom half of her body
00:52:56
Speaker
and the top half was covered in this cloth. And you can see that kind of image in his paintings, very much like that, where he had constantly returned to the themes of faces being covered, you know, like with an apple, for example, yeah or or sometimes ah very literally with a cloth. And I have to think that René Magritte himself, I have no idea whether he went to a so ever went to a psychiatrist, but the painting was his work. It was his way of digging into his psyche and examining and understanding the trauma he had, which obviously was far greater than my trauma of my mother not speaking to me.
00:53:39
Speaker
but he worked it out through his painting and through his art. And and now i've this has never even occurred to me. I wonder if one of the reasons that he resonated so strongly with me when I was 12 years old is because I saw something in his paintings that resonated with my own childhood and my own experience. And I would contest that his trauma was worse than yours because his was ah yeah was very powerful, yeah, very and intense, but you know and And I get the actual incident was brief and I suppose the repercussions later on, but you had to deal with yeah this person of this borderline personality probably for years, which I can only imagine would have been extremely difficult.
00:54:22
Speaker
Well, the interesting thing is, and this gets back to you I charged myself with being emotionally constipated, and I don't think there's anything unfair with calling myself that. It became that way for a reason. I didn't deal with it at all when I was growing up with my mother. And the fact that I didn't understand why I was so enraged by people not returning my phone calls is proof. that I didn't engage with it. It wasn't until I left my family home in my twenties that it started to have an impact on me. I had suppressed it. I had suppressed it by playing sports obsessively, by reading science fiction obsessively, watching TV. I had lots of friends. I had a pretty happy childhood.
00:55:03
Speaker
But then, overall, you know despite my mother, but then in my 20s, because I had suppressed it, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I did not have a difficult adolescence. I didn't have a rebellious adolescence. adolesence I wasn't miserable in middle school like most kids are. I just floated on the cloud. But as any psychiatrist will tell you, you can only suppress things. You can't eliminate them, and eventually they'll come up in some form. and all of a sudden, when I hit about age 22, it just hit me like a brick wall falling on me in my 20s.
00:55:36
Speaker
were extraordinarily difficult. They were sort of a combination between adolescent angst, which I had suppressed and delayed, along with quarter-life angst, like, what am I going to do with my life? And I was just miserable from age 22 to 28 as a result. And it was- Even when you were away from her at that point. Yeah. Yeah, because it wasn't about her, it was about the impact she had on my psychology. Yeah, because not about her per se you've ah most of your life you've learned specific things. You've learned that the way that other people love you or don't love you is very conditional and not something you actually have any control over, right? So correct that is very difficult lesson to learn as a child and an adolescent. And then to go into your twenties, which is a really turbulent time for most people, it's hard to to have that in your background.
00:56:36
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and I would say that I didn't fully work through all all those issues uh... until you know my fifties which seems extraordinarily late but it's it's the truth it's a reality yeah now to be fair to myself because i have been hard on myself yeah you've been very hard on yourself i didn't take out these issues on other people for the most part i always had good relationships uh... with my girlfriends i've looked fondly but on all the girlfriends i had i had good friends i
00:57:07
Speaker
I had a steady jobs, I had a good career, and I i was very self-controlled, and all of this was a good thing. I'm not not saying there was anything wrong with that, but self-control and suppression comes at a price, and eventually it comes out one way or another. I remember reading a a memoir. I used to review books for many, many years, and I wrote a column about the art of the memoir. And I read one memoir in which a guy recounts stripping off all of his clothes and running naked down the street and screaming and trying to get hit by cars. And I remember in my review of the memoir saying that that was the most inconceivable thing to me because I never did anything that was uncontrolled.
00:57:57
Speaker
And I couldn't imagine no matter how agitated or upset I was ever doing anything like that, which is a good thing because I wouldn't have wanted to be arrested or gotten hit by a car or or humiliated myself. But it did come out in a different way. I became excessively controlled and deeply frustrated in an internal sense that only I knew of. All my friends thought I had everything together. ah they They had no idea about any of this. because a full but You them. Can you elaborate then? on so what What was bad about that? It was mostly not bad. i mean It allowed me to have a very ah reasonably successful career in marketing. and I did have good relationships. I had marriage issues, which I won't get into, but you know for the most part, I did have good relationships and and good friends. so I would say at 75 percent, it was positive.
00:58:49
Speaker
But at the same time, it was also true that I had trouble absorbing, understanding, and responding to hurts and slights. And ah that caused me to have a lot of unnecessary you know hurt feelings. And it probably also caused me not to relate as openly as I should have to other people. Did you have problems on the other on the other extreme? ah Experiencing joy. No, thank you. Thank God. That was not an issue. I always had a tremendous ability to experience pleasure. That's great. ah And pleasure. Well, I don't just enjoy not pleasure. But anyway, you're right. Those are two different things. yeah Those are two different things. There's happiness. There's pleasure. There's happiness. There's joy. There's joy. There's all three of those things. My emotional control did not prevent me from any of those three things. And I feel very fortunate about that. And I think the reason was that
00:59:49
Speaker
I did at least have the artist's openness to the world. And I took tremendous pleasure in the smallest of things, discovering a new food. ah My very first day in a dorm at college, I was so excited I was jumping up and down like a five-year-old because of all this food. And my friends were like, this is this food is shit. And I was like, no, it's wonderful. Because my family didn't ah believe in cooking. but little things and ah visually I took tremendous pleasure in just, you know, very common sights that other people would overlook. That's what my photography is about. If you if you look at my Instagram photography, it's about scenes.
01:00:33
Speaker
I don't want to sound pretentious about it. I don't necessarily mean seeing beauty in in the little things because that sounds kind of lottie down, lofty. I don't mean that. I mean more like enjoying ah the little things that I see and and taking note of them. And in my novels as well, I try not to expend an excessive amount of time focusing on small details. They always have to have some kind of meaning to the story. The story is what propels it, and the characters propel the story. But in the course of that, I do populate my novels with these little moments that I find you know precious and and beautiful in one way or another. And that to me, that's an important part of constructing a novel, is is finding these moments.
01:01:18
Speaker
Thank God I do have that capacity. Yeah, I'm really glad to hear that. And actually, I'm not surprised because no one could write as beautifully as you do if they didn't experience joy. Well, thank you. That's a a very surprise very kind compliment. Now, to what extent have you learned about yourself at this point? Is there much left to uncover? i'm at eighty seven percent right now congratulations thank you uh... i don't know if i'll ever reach a hundred percent but you know i i'm pretty close i would say when i was in my twenties i was at thirteen percent or something like that i just drifted along i existed i knew i had appetites i wanted good food and and pretty girls and i wanted to travel and and i wanted people to like me and it was all and i'm not saying that i was an entirely superficial person
01:02:07
Speaker
because I loved great art.
Michael's Reflections and Closing
01:02:09
Speaker
I read novels and I love painting as you know and great art and great music both popular and classical and the movies and the theater. I was actually very obsessive about I had an early form of FOMO fear of missing out. I wanted to see every movie and go to every play and try every new restaurant so I did want to experience things. I'm not suggesting otherwise, but i did I was kind of floating along the surface in a psychological sense in terms of really engaging.
01:02:41
Speaker
and ah you know it's ah It's a little difficult thing to describe, but I found myself becoming a somewhat standoffish person, I guess is the best way to describe it. I often had the experience of being with a woman, even if she was younger than me, and and having the sense that she was more mature than I was. And I've always preferred women to men anyway, but I always had the sense that they were more mature. And I think that had to do not with my life experience, and not with my career. I was you know reasonably successful, not with my writing, but just that I didn't have that same ability to psychologically delve into myself and others the way that they did.
01:03:22
Speaker
your lack of success, uh, as you put it in, uh, in writing, did that bother you or had you acquired sufficient self-knowledge by that point to deal with that? Yeah, I would say that in my twenties I, I was filled with rage. I even wrote a, uh, an essay about it called poetry, patience and rage to discuss the whole issue of, you know, getting rejection slips and how you react to it. And I reacted very, very poorly. I would crumble up the rejections, fling them against the wall. I had extremely high self-esteem, and I thought my writing was great, and I couldn't understand why others didn't immediately say, not only are we going to publish this poem, but we wanted to devote a special issue to you. Can you send us a couple more poems? I had very unrealistic expectations. I dealt with it very poorly. If other people critiqued my writing or criticized it or didn't like it, I didn't lash out at them, because that just wasn't my style. I was too controlled. But I went inwardly inward and became very depressed.
01:04:19
Speaker
and frustrated that people didn't see my great genius. you know I was deluded, I think is the best term for it. Even though I was a good writer, and I still to this day think the writing I produced in my 20s was good, I was still deluded because I didn't understand how much hard work and careerism went into becoming a successful writer. I was skating along the surface again, thinking, oh, I just have to throw myself out there into the void and someone will recognize I'm great and publish it. So and very bad, I gave up writing for a number of years. When I went back to it, I did make a tremendous discovery that helped me a lot, which is that when you write a book,
01:04:57
Speaker
And if you're able to find an agent, and I was fortunate enough to find some agents, the rejections become vastly less painful because the publishers are so much more professional than the editors of literary magazines. Literary magazine editors, I didn't realize. They're just a bunch of kids. They're college kids and they don't know very much. ah Sure, a lot of my stuff might have been rejected for good reason. A lot of it may have been rejected arbitrarily or they just didn't read any of it because they had too many submissions and they just automatically send out rejections. But a lot of it might have been rejected because these people knew very little about literature, or what it was they were reading. But publishers, they know their stuff. They're professionals. They get paid to find good books. So even when my memoir
01:05:42
Speaker
which made the rounds of all the major publishers even when it was rejected it was always accompanied by a thoughtful letter and the letter said you know here's why we we don't want to take this on and that made me feel good because i realized that it wasn't the rejections that bothered me it was the not being listened to. that bothered me, not being taken seriously, not being responded to. And so when these publishers responded to me and gave me reasonable explanations, I was mollified. I was like, okay, that's reasonable. I'll move on to the next. and And what helped even more is that there was a common thread in nearly early all the rejections of my memoir. They all used the same code word, which was, it's too quiet.
01:06:25
Speaker
and it beautifully written, but too quiet. And my my agent, who is a very savvy ah woman who has represented a lot of great authors, she says, that's a code word that means there's not enough sensationalism in it. There's not enough sex and violence and misery and suffering. It was a comic memoir. yeah And I said, okay, I understand that it's reasonable. So yes, at this point in my life, if something gets rejected, I've totally come to terms with it. because I only submit books. I don't bother with literary magazines. I have not, as a matter of policy, submitted to a literary magazine in a good 30 years, because I know it'll just piss me off. So I focus only on the books Books and reviewing. I do a lot of reviewing too.
01:07:09
Speaker
Now this has been a fascinating conversation and I think we could talk for another hour or two, but then I would never have time to edit it. I want to thank you both so much for being ah being great hosts and asking me great questions and and thinking of me in the first place. Thank you thank you for coming. yeah Absolutely. Thank you. yeah Really great having you on the podcast Recreative.
01:08:02
Speaker
Recreative is produced by Mark Raynor and Joe Mahoney. Technical production of music by Joe Mahoney. Web design by Mark Raynor. Show notes in all episodes are available at recreative dot.ca. That's re hyphened-creative dot.ca. Drop us a line at joemahoney.donovanstreetpress.com. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.