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Episode 384: Nicholas Dighiera
1.3k Plays1 year ago
Nicholas Dighiera is a writer whose work has appeared in Short Reads, River Teeth, Catamaran, and Under the Gum Tree, among many others.
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
Social: @CNFPod and @creativenonfictionpodcast
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guests
00:00:00
Speaker
ACNFers, this episode is brought to you by the word Obstreperous Obstreperous Noisy clamorous or boisterous when the 3 a.m. Voice comes to tell you what a lousy person you are it sounds Obstreperous
00:00:26
Speaker
AC and effort at CNF Pod, the creative non-fiction podcast show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Wonderful. What can I say? Nicolas de Guillera is here and he's a heavy dude. Not in the sense that his BMI is dangerously obese. I don't think it is. Okay. Can I pause and say BMI is bullshit?
00:00:51
Speaker
I may be built like Spongebob, but I'm not obese. But BMI has fat-shamed me into body dysmorphia, and I don't know who to blame. Nick had a great piece of flash. Flash. Nonfiction, uh, for shortreads.org. Titled Happy Birthday.
00:01:10
Speaker
It is one
Nicolas's Writing Philosophy and Personal Insights
00:01:11
Speaker
sentence long. It is 857 words long. There are many commas. You will not lose your breath. Nick is not afraid to run toward the pain, and you feel the pain. His mission is to make you feel less alone. He laughs at the idea of calling whatever it is he does a career, so don't use that word.
00:01:33
Speaker
Great chat about MFA programs, the one sentence essay, telling the truth, and running towards the hurt. You can learn more about Nick at www.nicolasdigierda.com. Digierda. D-I-G-H-I-E-R-A.
00:01:53
Speaker
As far as I can tell, he is not on social media. For that, I am jealous. And I am jealous of his beard. He has an epic beard. If you head over to BrendanOmero.com, you can read show notes to this episode and many others, and sign up for my Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter.
00:02:12
Speaker
A curated list, so basic. An essay, not so basic. Books, stuff to make you happy. It goes up to 11, literally. The list is 11 items long. First of the month, no spam, can't beat it.
00:02:28
Speaker
Oh, and I started something cool for the Patreon crew, patreon.com slash cnfpod if you want to throw a few bucks into the hat. As you know, the show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. Any tier, I started like a thread, a simple one for starters. What are you working on? Encouraging the Patreon crew to talk amongst themselves.
00:02:48
Speaker
I jump in just to keep the momentum going, but I don't feel like I need to be there there to acknowledge, but I hope that the Patreon crew will talk amongst themselves, like make it a hub for people to meet. They normally wouldn't meet and to maybe glean some insights from people they would not ordinarily glean insights from.
00:03:10
Speaker
There's no way to tag someone, but maybe you can write. I think you could just reply right below someone's comment and you can have conversation. Just thinking of other means to get your money's worth and feel less alone. I suppose.
00:03:26
Speaker
There's a, I could create like a private Facebook group for it. But I doubt, I mean, I'm only on Facebook to find people I need to talk to. Like for book research and stuff,
Community Building and Personal Endorsements
00:03:39
Speaker
like I'm not on there to socialize. Yeah, that.
00:03:45
Speaker
So I just, what I might be doing with the Patreon thing too, I might do a little video and it'll just be like, that'll be like the prompt to start the thread and it'll just be things that you can kind of chew on and be like, oh cool. And there's 27 Patreon folks of varying tiers. That's a nice little cohort. I mean, of course we'd love to see that be 2,700. Wouldn't that be cool? Then I could retire.
00:04:14
Speaker
Shout out to Athletic Brewing, the best damn non-alcoholic beer out there. Not a paid plug, I want to be clear about that. But I am a brand ambassador, I want to be clear about that. And I want to celebrate this amazing product. If you head over to, I almost said brendanohmeri.com, hey, athleticbrewing.com, and use the promo code brendan020 at checkout. You got a nice little discount on your first order. I don't get any money.
00:04:38
Speaker
and they're not an official sponsor of the podcast. I just get points towards t-shirts and beer, and I have enough points to get myself a case of beer. I just have to pay for shipping. It's just from other perks of being an ambassador. Not a single person has purchased anything with my referral links and my discount.
00:04:59
Speaker
I would love to see that change because I think it's a great option for you to have in your refrigerator. Here's a really nice chat with a writer I've come to really admire, Ruth.
00:05:21
Speaker
I really enjoyed getting acquainted with your work.
Challenges and Craft in Writing
00:05:28
Speaker
Yeah, that other piece that you read, Captain America, I was supposed to do a reading for AWP in 2019 in Portland.
00:05:41
Speaker
and it had to be a particular size or whatever, and it went really well, and I submitted it to Riverteeth after. When the creative nonfiction people signed Riverteeth on as a, I don't know, supplier of work to them, they said, well, you know, what do you got? And they sent them my piece first, and that's how the people at Shortreads found me, was I guess they've moved from
00:06:09
Speaker
the creative nonfiction, whatever email that was to short reads. So they reached out and they're like, oh, do you have anything? And I had this piece that I had written. I tried to get in Taco Bell quarterly. Are you familiar?
00:06:28
Speaker
Okay, so there's this guy, I think his name is MM Kerrigan, and he made this magazine called Taco Bell Quarterly. It is not associated with Taco Bell. It does not come out quarterly. And all of the stories have to be associated with Taco Bell.
00:06:44
Speaker
Which is, I tend to write more serious, to me, serious things. And I was like, I got to try to get it. They're calling for more work. I'll try to write some piece. So I happened to be in Fruita waiting for my kid to get out of school and I busted out that piece and they didn't, they didn't accept it at Taco Bell Quarterly. And so I, uh, I think I worked it maybe for a magazine called Complete Sentence, but I think it was originally always one sentence and then
00:07:13
Speaker
I sent it off as soon as they reached out and asked for work at short reads. When I was talking with Hattie and Steven for an episode of the show a few weeks ago, we were just talking about Flash essay as a form and everything. Hattie was bringing up various things. Sometimes there might be maybe an essay can be one sentence. I'm like, all right, that's curious. I haven't seen that yet. I think this one must have been in the chamber.
00:07:38
Speaker
And so it's one of those things where it could be – it's like Birdman in a way. The way Birdman was filmed, that one-or, that one-take thing, it's like, okay, that's part of its style, its essence, and what you end up talking about. And so it can be a dangerous tool to deploy if it's not done well.
00:08:01
Speaker
So when you were approaching something like a long one sentence essay that can call attention to itself, what were some of the dangers that you were reckoning with as you were looking to use that as a stylistic choice for this essay? Oh, I wouldn't. Yeah, I wouldn't say that I made that choice intentionally before I set out. I wrote this piece called Kong a couple of years ago and it came out in the sun and I got invited to go do this
00:08:31
Speaker
writing, meeting with some people online. This was heavier COVID times. And I just remember they were so excited to ask me like, well, what was your intention with this piece? I mean, if you want to call it intention, I had two. One was to sit down and write, you know, as opposed to do anything else. And then the other was I needed to somehow write about Taco Bell.
00:08:54
Speaker
And that's it. My whole goal is to tell the truth. I guess so that's an intention. If I'm going to write, then I want to tell the truth. I didn't set up to write one sentence. I do often write very long sentences. I don't know if they work or not from a technical or grammatical standpoint, but I guess like any art,
00:09:17
Speaker
If the reader deems that it's working, then whether or not it meets a strictly technical definition of work is irrelevant to me.
00:09:26
Speaker
Yeah, because as I was reading it and it became apparent to me that it was going to be a one-er, I was like, all right, it's like my attention has been called to it. So it's just like, OK, let's see how it unfolds from here, because that can be sometimes when you call too much attention to the style or the vehicle of the thing, maybe the message can get lost, which wasn't the case for me. I just I found it a riveting essay that just had this unique one-er component.
00:09:54
Speaker
So I guess maybe as you were rewriting it, what were the gears churning like in your head as you're rewriting it? You're like, okay, this is gonna be a one sentence thing and I kind of like the sound of this right now. I don't even think about it in those terms. It's not...
00:10:14
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think about this. I had another essay that Riverteeth published and a very good friend of mine and mentor, he read it and he said, I've been sitting here retyping a 502 word sentence that you wrote and I don't know how you did it.
00:10:32
Speaker
I don't remember doing it. I didn't know that it was that long. So my editing process. So the writing process is to try to get to the place that hurts. And then once I'm there, it's just like this fury of trying to witness it. Like I don't know that the words are right. I don't know what the right words are. I just know that I'm in the pocket. So I just need to write as much as possible before the pocket passes.
00:10:59
Speaker
And so on the revision, my goal is to clean it up to the degree that it makes sense. I am never engaged with the novelty of the vehicle. I'm more listening to the tune, like the syllabic measure, and how clean and easy to understand the material is.
00:11:28
Speaker
I don't want to confuse anybody. I want it to just be clean and compressed. Probably out of all of those, I'm the worst at compression.
00:11:42
Speaker
I love that image of being in the pocket and I often just being just the thick of skull that I often I lean on sport metaphor a lot and so like I love the term in the pocket I use that term for interviewing people something even writing it just being in a you know the
00:12:06
Speaker
the quarterback pocket and it's all around you and it's surrounding you and then you do have this moment where if you hold on to the ball too long that shit's gonna collapse and you gotta get rid of the ball or you gotta be really prepared that way you can you can see the field better read the defense better
00:12:21
Speaker
read your opponent better. Not that an interview is adversarial or one versus the other, but it's when a person goes one way, you're like, oh, I can see where we can take this. So I love that image of the pocket and being in it and not wanting to vanquish the opportunity of being in that nice spot. Oh, yeah. From an artistic standpoint, for me,
00:12:48
Speaker
It's been a lot of years to realize how to get to the place and how to stay in the place as long as possible because, uh, the feedback, well, there's two, two fold. The feedback that I get from myself is that I am the most satisfied with my writing when I can tell the truth from that place. It feels like real beauty, like the kind that is all of the emotions all at once.
00:13:14
Speaker
It's really good. I'm sure that you've been there before where you were writing and all of a sudden you just like fell into this river and it was like everything that's coming out of you right now is only good.
00:13:28
Speaker
sometimes not
Truth and Beauty in Writing
00:13:30
Speaker
that you think of yourself in highfalutin terms but sometimes you're going along and sometimes you give yourself goosebumps where you're like it just you're so in it and it feels so visceral you're like oh wow that it elicited something in me that was a hormonal in a way
00:13:47
Speaker
Yeah, like, I remember Stephen King talking about, I mean, it was in a book where he was writing about himself, which is amazing as a fictional character, but how the story seemed to come from his belly button. I think as John Gardner writes about it, like this white hot heat. A lot of people, I think it's in Wonder Boy's, the Katie Holmes character talks about how the Michael Douglas character, like all the words were just up and
00:14:14
Speaker
fiction heaven waiting for him to pick them and put them in exactly the right order. It feels like you have some sort of antenna and you're on shortwave and you're just like writing is just dialing and you hope to get like you know pick up Mongolian throat singing from Ulaanbaatar
00:14:33
Speaker
And you're just praying that it comes, that something that genuinely beautiful comes in. And when it's in, you're just like, your whole goal is to not fuck it up. It's like, you don't know how long you're going to be there. And just to, and to hear it while it's not to try to think about where it's going to go afterward and what you could do with it or anything, but just, just, just to hear it, to be witness of it.
00:15:00
Speaker
Have you found any way in your practice, in your writing practice, the way you show up, how frequently you show up, that you can increase the frequency by which you may be able to tap into those heavenly words out there in the ether? I revisit events a lot, but I honestly think that revisiting those events a lot, those events are traumatic and there is trauma there, but I think it's an easy place to begin to understand
00:15:29
Speaker
beauty because there's so much trauma and the trauma feels so much. There's so much that comes with it. It's like I bought it, you know, I didn't buy a coffee today, but I bought a coffee today has little to no feels to it, right? But like my brother got run over by a car when I was 15 years old has an ocean liner of feels. So it's first learning how to
00:15:55
Speaker
Learning how to feel, I guess. I don't want to sound pretentious. I don't know what I'm doing, man. None of us do, Nick. I sit down and I try really hard to break my own heart every time I write. I don't know why. It's like somehow if I write it all down, then it'll go away. But that's not true either because it doesn't go away.
00:16:20
Speaker
All I know how to do is do what works for me, which is sit down and try to write something that actually matters to me, to tell the truth. Not stylize it or not make it. Obviously, all nonfiction, not going to say that. Most nonfiction is just fiction anyway, because it's my version of the story and everybody is a completely different witness to both their story and anyone else's. So I'm writing a form of fiction as witness by myself.
00:16:50
Speaker
and felt by myself. So I guess if I've learned anything over the last decade or so of writing, it is that the more that I do it, doesn't mean that I'm getting better at it. And by do it, I mean writing, but also
00:17:12
Speaker
It's like playing the instrument. The more that I practice, not every day of practicing produces quality material, but the more that I practice, the more prepared I am to play the song when it comes.
00:17:25
Speaker
Right. I remember taking guitar lessons very, very briefly before I gave it up because I don't have any grit. But I remembered after one session, be it playing by myself or after just planking along with the teacher, that day's lesson was total garbage. It was so bad.
00:17:51
Speaker
But the next day when I started it was like in my sleep that muscle memory was doing its thing and my neurons were starting to thread together. And so that next day it was like it was a little bit better. And I think that's true with writing too because sometimes when we're in that be it if we're in the pocket or somewhere outside getting crushed.
00:18:13
Speaker
it's we weather that the the buzzing of the fretboard and the the out of tune stringing but maybe but by the time we get to the next one those neural networks are have fired and we're a little bit better the next day and it's kind of it's kind of my long-winded way of just echoing exactly what you said yeah it's also um
00:18:37
Speaker
I find it's like learning to appreciate being a witness. I feel like you can practice writing all day long, but if you can't see anything, if you can't feel how the world looks in a way that is unique to you, it's unique to everyone. Everyone looks at something completely differently. So in your real life, if you're not practicing,
00:19:01
Speaker
trying to feel all the feels and not that, you know, everybody does a bad God, I don't want to sound pretentious. I don't know what I'm doing. You know, I think there's an element of what you're saying, which is
00:19:18
Speaker
You've developed a way to run towards the pain where a lot of writers sometimes don't, because they're afraid to. And how have you cultivated a sense of, well, that's where I need to go, that place of hurt that you mentioned a moment ago.
00:19:37
Speaker
Not a lot of people can get there, and I wonder how you've, not that you're comfortable with it, because I don't think anyone gets comfortable with it, but you found a way to run towards it and really convey it well, at least from what I've read. Yeah, so that's two parts, right? The running towards it is the thing, and then the second part is the practice.
00:19:58
Speaker
at the instrument. And if you practice long enough, you can play your instrument well, which helps better serve the first thing, not saying I've practiced long enough or that I do the first thing well. I don't know. I don't know that it just feels like telling the truth is important. And maybe it's because I think
00:20:21
Speaker
It's so hard to tell the truth in real life or you don't always know the truth. You don't have time to develop the truth because when you're communicating with someone else, there's like you and the other person and that's two people. And then there's the third person that you make, which is the person between you. It's like the idea of the conversation or the relationship or the interaction.
00:20:51
Speaker
And it's separate of the both of you and it doesn't genuinely most of the time achieve what either individual wants because it has its own agenda. But the paper has no agenda. The paper is not going to shame you for writing what really happened to you or what you did.
00:21:11
Speaker
The paper will never interrupt you or tell you to stop. The paper will accept every horrible thing that you've ever done, will always be there for you. I used to, he's the joke with this friend of mine who I have to go to his funeral this week, which is going to be something. But we had a joke between him, he and I and another friend about how alcohol always, or alcohol never says no, you know, like it.
00:21:38
Speaker
Everybody in your life will tell you no, but alcohol never says no. Um, which is the truth and also extremely terrible. But the paper, the paper is like that. If I try to have a conversation about some of the things that I write about in real life, my voice will continue to increase and register until it's so tight in my throat that I can't talk anymore. Um, and I have things that I want to say.
00:22:06
Speaker
but I can't say, and there's usually another person, and then the other person has things they interject with or whatever, and so, but like the paper, I can, my throat can fail to work, and I can continue with my fingers and my mind, and I can explore a space that cannot be explored.
00:22:30
Speaker
through normal human communication. And so maybe for me, part of what you're talking about and the reason I've gotten good at it is because I have things that I need to say, not that my things are any more or less important than anyone else's. My experience is equal as everyone else's. But as I'm trying to say those things, it doesn't really work well in real life. So I found an alternative reality where I can say whatever
00:23:00
Speaker
I feel I need. How did you develop the, let's say, the compulsion to want to share it and write it? That's a uniquely different thing for writers, right? And you could just tell a therapist or keep it to ourselves, but some of us turn to writing essays to metabolize it. And maybe for you, how did you develop
00:23:29
Speaker
that as I said a moment ago, the compulsion to do it. Early on, like just post high school, I kind of fell into like deep reading, kind of going from, I used to read a lot of pulp fiction novels from like the thirties, like Doc's average in the shadow and stuff like that. And then I moved into kind of heavier stuff and I realized there was a difference, but I didn't understand the difference.
00:23:56
Speaker
And it took, you know, 10 years or so and then I have reading off and on and I started falling into, you know, Pulitzer Prize winning or
Impact of Writing on Readers and Authors
00:24:04
Speaker
Pulitzer Prize winning books and Nobel Prize winning authors and short stories. And it was really when I got into Raymond Carver, I thought these stories make me feel less alone in the world. I've always, not always, but as I have grown, I have developed more a sense of aloneness.
00:24:24
Speaker
even amongst others. And particularly really great short stories made me feel less alone. And I think the very beginning attempts to write came from a position of wanting to put that energy back into the well that I was taking out of. Like if I could make one person feel less alone for five minutes, then
00:24:53
Speaker
I know what that's like and it's worth everything. And that mentor I was talking about earlier, he said I have this gift where I will tell the paper absolutely anything and then I will be able to go back and edit it and not recognize what I told the paper.
00:25:13
Speaker
And then I will go out and submit it to the world and forget what I told the paper. There is a complete disconnect from what I told the paper to when it gets published somewhere. And then it gets published somewhere. And then people will reach out, and they'll say, oh, that was really great, or oh, this or that. I've lost friends over things that have been in things that I've published. And I'll have forgotten what I said.
00:25:41
Speaker
So it's not ideal, or it can be not ideal when it involves other people. What are some of the things that you return to and read and reread for that sense of un-loneliness, to feel less alone, and maybe even the things that turn the world from black and white into color for you that made you want to contribute to the well? Oh, man.
00:26:12
Speaker
Hold on. Well, in the terms of like nonfiction, have you ever read Poe Ballantyne's essays? Poe Ballantyne? I have not. Oh, man. There's a book called 501 Minutes to Christ, and there's another one called Things I Like About America. I highly recommend that you
00:26:34
Speaker
You wrap your eyes on those, they are so beautifully heartbreaking. God, they're unbelievably good. He's kind of a wanderer and he just takes like the bus all around America and he lives this really like, or he used to, he doesn't anymore. But man, he just has so much to say about being alone and these great,
00:27:05
Speaker
Oh man, there's such good stories. There's one about mess that breaks my heart every time. It's really good. Sorry, I was able to find my list here. Just stories and like short stories, not whole collections, but short stories. I think my favorite is Fireworks by Richard Ford, because the end of that story is unbelievable.
00:27:30
Speaker
And I really like, like if you've ever read, uh, prophet of Jupiter by Tony early. That's so good. Um, okay. I just read one the other day. Uh, a history of everything, including you by Jenny Hollowell. It's so short and it fits everything in it, uh, which I think is brilliant.
00:27:58
Speaker
Yeah, I love tight economical writing passages, short novels, short short stories. It's a heavy fast ball and I love that kind of stuff. Yeah, I wish I could get that same kind of hit from poetry. There's one out there called, I think it's called reverse suicide.
00:28:26
Speaker
Can't remember the guy's last name. Maybe it's Rasmussen. I can't remember it right now, but that one got to go back to that one like once or twice a year. It's just so it's so good. But I'm always looking. I'm always looking for like I only read probably one or two stories a year that are that are that good. There's one in The New Yorker by Lauren Groff, I think last year. Can't remember the name of that one. Oh, Annunciation.
00:28:54
Speaker
And then Stay Down and Take It by Ben Marcus was in the New Yorker, I think in 2018 or 2019. That story, I am a sucker for a love story. And that one is all the love.
00:29:08
Speaker
What could you point to as you were getting your writing career kind of going? We all need early wins, early victories that put a little fuel in our tank to make us to feed the delusion, to keep going. And what could you point to as an early win for you that set you on this course? I don't have a writing career. Yeah.
00:29:37
Speaker
Yeah, I get maybe a few things published. Yeah, I wouldn't even see every year. I only write some years, I get five essays out, some years I get one. Little things like this, I can turn out really quickly, but it's whether or not they're good enough to publish. So I wouldn't necessarily say that I have a writing career. Why do I keep trying? Yeah, why do you keep trying?
00:30:06
Speaker
Because I believe I can do it. Yep. Yeah. And not every time and not that everything will be good, but I believe I can do it. Yeah. The, the only person now that I write to like impress is that one mentor guy, like.
00:30:34
Speaker
These stories go out in the world and you hear so many rejections. I have an incredible spreadsheet that I keep all my metrics in. I think I'm like 667 submissions in, I don't know, less than 10 years. My acceptance rate's like three and a half percent, which is very, very small.
00:30:56
Speaker
And probably normal like people need to know that kind of batting average. I think anywhere if you're in that ballpark I would say that's probably normal not that I keep 100 percent and I'm more and sometimes more in the journalism kind of world where it's probably more like 10 percent if you're good. I'm way under 10 percent. You know I'm in the minor leagues but it's one of those things where
00:31:20
Speaker
Yeah. It's like talking about those percentages to get to your point about making people feel less alone. People need to know that the rejection rate is cataclysmically high and it's okay. And it's normal. Yeah. Um, when magazines are like, uh, Hey man, you should be really excited. You got in cause we have less than a 1% acceptance rate. You're like, you're like, yeah, that's, that's incredible. But yeah, you get that beat down enough. It's like, uh, it starts to become funny.
00:31:50
Speaker
Like I got a rejection letter once that the guy was like, hey, we're not going to take this. So normally I have them in my mind. I have them tiered out. Tier one is form rejection, like no flavor. Tier two is a form rejection with encouragement, where they say, hey, yeah, we're not going to take it, but please send us more work. And tier three is like, there's a note for you. Hey, we really liked this character in this scene or whatever.
00:32:15
Speaker
And I got, I don't know, tier zero where this guy said, hey, we're not going to accept this essay. And also, as long as I am editor of this magazine, we will not accept any essays from this collection. And I was like, that is brutal. Thanks, buddy. But it starts to become funny. And then you realize that no one cares. No one cares about what you do. You sit down at the computer and you bang your heart out and you try to tell the truth. And no one really cares.
00:32:44
Speaker
But if I send that essay to a guy in Lincoln City, Oregon, he will send back a response and he will tell me that I did it again or that I'm beautiful for a minute. And that really matters to me. And so it's weird when it goes out into the world and like, I don't know, I had some piece, I have a project, I don't know if I wanna mention it, but a piece of it got,
00:33:12
Speaker
I don't know, went on Facebook and then there was like 5,000 people that read it or more and everybody said nice things and that was too much to bear because I don't write it for all that. I kind of just wrote that one for me and then it was really great that the other guy, the mentor dude read it. Beyond all that, it's like, I don't know why I keep doing this. I got asked that the other day. Does it make my life better?
00:33:41
Speaker
Does it make me feel better? And I think happiness is pretty fleeting, doesn't make me happy. But it feels like satisfying, like I can be okay for a little bit. Yeah, would you say that writing in a way and running towards the pain and writing through the hurt is something that saves your life?
00:34:12
Speaker
Oh, certainly. Yeah. Um, you know, I don't know how many suicide letters you've written in your time, but when, and you know, that's a very serious subject. I take it very seriously. By the time I reached the end of the letter, I always realized how much gratitude I have that I'm
00:34:39
Speaker
that I get to do any of this at all.
Writing as a Tool for Connection and Reflection
00:34:43
Speaker
And that if I can survive till tomorrow, then it's one more day of bearing witness to something that is really difficult to witness and fully take in. Life is brutal. And I have it comparatively easy.
00:35:09
Speaker
There are many people that are worse off than I am for sure. So yeah, I have nothing but gratitude for being here. And I forget sometimes, and I think writing, if you're doing it correctly, even though I write a lot of at least my own personal dark shit, I hope that I can find the beauty in it and remember that all of this is worth doing.
00:35:39
Speaker
as long as I can possibly do it. Yeah, I'm just thinking when you're like, you know, rhetorically, you're like, yeah, how many suicide notes have you written? I've just riffed on that idea in my journals all the time, just from my own, just bleak outlook on things. But it's like, I always come back to how good I have it. It's just, it's some faulty wiring.
00:36:05
Speaker
But for you, does it take writing a suicide note to make you realize, oh, it's maybe not as bad as I had originally thought? No, it doesn't take that. I don't do those anymore, kind of. I write to the New Yorker. I write a letter to the editor every week.
00:36:35
Speaker
They never read them. You could say whatever you want. And some days I write, you know, how bad it is here, feelings wise, obviously. I mean, I feel bad because I know, you know, like so many other people have it so much worse and you just feel like your pain matters. And then you're like, wow, people are,
00:37:00
Speaker
in objectively far more pain than I am seem to be doing better. So yeah, I don't write, I haven't written one of those in years and I've only written a handful. Yeah, I don't need as much effort these days to understand that every day here is a gift and I try to remind myself of that a lot.
00:37:22
Speaker
Uh, but yeah, as I was saying, I was just, uh, I imagine that maybe writing through a lot of the stuff that you write about it, um, it probably does have a cathartic effect on you. And you're like, yeah, it's, um, it, it, it evokes something in you, but, uh, but having that, you know, having it evoke something in a reader is like, oh, okay. And you know, the writing I'm doing is, is of service and, you know, and that feels good too.
00:37:50
Speaker
Yeah, that story, I don't remember when I shifted. I wrote a lot about my divorce, about this trip that I had with my children, a bunch of essays about that when they were real little and we went from Fruta to Alaska. And the people that read that, they seemed to enjoy it. But, you know, I think it was, they changed really with that other story that you read, the Captain America one, when I first started writing about my dad.
00:38:16
Speaker
And I wrote another essay, like I said, Kong, and that went into the sun and that got a lot of readership. The day that they posted that online, I think I got 22 emails from random people. And the overwhelming response was, you gave me my father back. So whether their father was dead or in many of the cases, they had just stopped talking to their father. That story made them pick up the phone
00:38:46
Speaker
And they got their dad back. And that to me is like, even if it's just one person that never emailed me, you know, like I can't get my dad back, but maybe if it's just one person out there that got their dad back and they never had to tell me about it, that would have been enough for such, uh, to have such an impact is, uh, you know, there's a sense of like, like, I don't want to know, you know,
00:39:15
Speaker
don't say thank you to me like you did it. You picked up the phone. I always believe anyway that writing and reading, that is when you're reading somebody's work, it's a 50% or more contribution. My job as a writer is to take a nebulous idea. There are no words to it, a feeling and the feeling I shoot for
00:39:43
Speaker
I hope is beauty or whatever the collective unconscious can be defined as, and to package that down into, in the case of what you're talking to me about, a single sentence, and then hope that the person on the other end using the bare minimum, 26 characters, a handful of punctuation, black on white,
00:40:12
Speaker
if that's what colors you read it in, and that they can unpack a gateway into all of us all at once. So much of it is like on the reader's part. So I'm like, don't thank me, man. You did it on your own. You transcended the plane. It's the most amazing art form to me. And so, yeah, I was really happy when,
00:40:38
Speaker
anybody reaches out. Some lady just emailed last week. She read a story about my brother. And yeah, they tell you that it's beautiful. And it's like, you know, I'm sure some part of me wants to be beautiful or see myself as beautiful. I know that I don't most of the time. So it's nice when people think that the things that I do are
00:41:02
Speaker
Yeah, and to take that pain and that trauma and to make art from it that moves someone to, A, reach out to you, or even better, that they pick up the phone and reach out to someone that you no longer can reach out to. It's kind of bittersweet because you can't pick up that phone in that instance for either your brother or your father.
00:41:31
Speaker
you've lit that flame for someone else to do something. Maybe they've gone years without talking to someone, like they realize they can't get that time back, but at least they might have tomorrow. And so you kind of, I don't know, you kicked that door open for them, but they had to walk through. Yeah, but that's awesome, you know, because I think as far as I know, everyone's going to die.
00:41:53
Speaker
unless you know Christianity and Elijah I think he went to heaven on a chariot while he was still alive but I might be wrong there but nope I just read this quote the other day because we were talking we've been talking a lot about my friend all of our friends um something along the lines of um death death is often by error and it is also inevitable for anybody to reach out to anybody else for any reason say hey I really appreciate that you're here whatever that's far more like I'm never
00:42:23
Speaker
I don't think you get over the death of people that are really close to you that you love, that are your family or whomever, you know. Maybe that... I always think about this, my aunt for one reason or another decided she was gonna walk into traffic on the I-5 and somebody hit her and she didn't die. And I tend to think about that person
00:42:47
Speaker
Who was in the car, you know, they got they were going from a to be doing something completely different and they were unwittingly pulled into a different plot line for a minute. And so the interaction can be that quick that
00:43:02
Speaker
you know, you have this event that you're not going to get over. It's just something that you carry with you, like a scar or, you know, a tumor or something like that, that doesn't go away. It's just what you have now. But yeah, being able to affect the shape of someone's scar, someone who, if you can still try to repair that relationship. I had a friend who talked about, fiction was all about connection and disconnection.
00:43:32
Speaker
That's it. That is the entirety of all storytelling is connection and disconnection. And, you know, there's probably other things that it's about. But I think so much of real life is about connection and disconnection. And if anything anyone can do to reduce disconnection seems like as long as that nobody's hurt, you know, it's a good thing.
00:44:01
Speaker
Yeah, and we live in such lonely and isolated times. Now, I think of the incredible graphic memoir, if you want to call it that, on loneliness that Kristin Radke wrote a couple of years ago. And it's just so moving and touching. But then some people, if they seek that connection in online chat rooms that just
00:44:29
Speaker
devolve into neo-naziism. It's like, well, that's connection, but that's not good. We need connection, but not all connection is created equal. Yeah, and it's funny because you sense as if desperation for connection, settling for that is more acceptable because you'll take anything. There's a craving
00:44:59
Speaker
I don't know. I can't speak for authority on humanity. But it does seem like people are really short of connection. Yet we have more ways to connect to each other than we've ever had.
Writing Education and Influences
00:45:12
Speaker
I wish people read more. I mean, it feels like I'm participating in an art form that's dying. And I can't speak for my work, but I can look to other work that I've read in my art form and say, like, here are the fucking answers. Like, it's all here.
00:45:29
Speaker
You don't need to go look somewhere else like it's here. And it just seems like people don't have the time or want to make the time or want to have feelings that are not like the feelings they already had. Like they were looking for validation, not for more complexity.
00:45:50
Speaker
At least in the limited sample size of what I read from you, I think there's a great emotional reflection going on in reading it. I could feel a certain pulse that resonated with me as a reader.
00:46:09
Speaker
And the more you put that kind of work out there, the more opportunity it has to hit someone who might share it with someone or just randomly hit someone who needs to see it. And it might turn a switch on. It might get them engaged in a different way. They might find connection in a different way. And you can't control that once it's out of your hands. But in reading your work, I think your gift and your talent and what you've been able to put out
00:46:41
Speaker
They're bridges for the taking, if I can go so far as to say that. I mean, one can hope. It's really messy on this end, and I try to clean it up, but then when I send it out into the world, it can become far more messy, because people bring their own mess. The hope is the overwhelming response is,
00:47:06
Speaker
positivity. There's always going to be somebody that's upset and that's got to be okay. I'm sensitive to that but like also you can't think about that when you're writing anything because you wouldn't write anything. My hope is that there are more people than 22 that
00:47:22
Speaker
got their dad again. Oh, yeah. No, I would certainly say anything. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And it's just in terms of reading what I've read. And it's got such a strong voice component to it. And I almost was like, it sounds like you avoided the MFA trap. And then I noticed that you did earn an MFA from
00:47:51
Speaker
from Anchorage, Alaska. And I say MFA trap, I earned one myself. I think it, I met great people, but I think it did something to my written voice that it took me several years to break.
00:48:07
Speaker
And I wonder for you, it looks like you managed your voice seems to have come out of it strong. Did you wrestle with a certain MFA uniformity that you were able to break through? I think realizing why you're there, I got really lucky. One, the program that I got into was magical. They weren't trying to produce uniformity. I don't think any of them are, but this one really
00:48:38
Speaker
It made a space for me in my existing voice, which was less refined, but I think it was still there. But the other thing was before I attended the program, I just completed my bachelor's in weirdly business. And there was a woman there, shout out Carol Lund. She's amazing. And she said,
00:49:08
Speaker
You need to not write about business anymore. You cannot anthropomorphize stocks. You can't make narratives up for quantitative research. You're doing something that is great. It's just not here where it belongs. She's recommended that I go to the MFA program and I said, I don't want them to tell me how to write.
00:49:34
Speaker
And she told me about her brother who was a painter, and he was a gifted painter. He painted his whole life. And she kept trying to get him to go get educated in painting, and he kept refusing because he didn't want them to change.
00:49:45
Speaker
He had this revelation when he got there that your goal, when you do that, isn't to learn how to write. It's to learn how writing works and then pick the tools that help you get your vision where you want it to go. It's not there to teach you how to write like everyone else. You can hear everything they have to say. Your job is to pick your instructors and pick the tools and pick the things that you can learn from there that help your vision get closer to where you think it needs to go.
00:50:15
Speaker
or where it wants to go as its own thing, which I think listening to the story is the most valuable thing you can do. Get you out of it and just start listening to the story. And so I actually, the first year I got coupled up with this dude and he was the best. And he threw me all of this really good fiction I'd never heard of. And he never said, no, man, I could send him the wildest shit. And
00:50:39
Speaker
and crazy shit. And I sent him three times the amount of work I was supposed to produce in a year. And it was great. It was a huge time of experimentation. And through that, I think I learned that my voice as it was mattered. I just needed to stop doing some other things from a craft perspective to get out of my own way.
00:51:00
Speaker
Well, Nick, as we're kind of coming up on our hour and I like to ask a recommendation of some kind for guests as we bring this airliner down for a landing. So, you know, as we come up on our time here, I wonder what you might recommend for people out there. That's something that's bringing you some excitement and joy that you want to share. Yeah, I think back to those Pope Allentine references, like I can't emphasize enough in the nonfiction essay world, I don't think there's much like him.
00:51:30
Speaker
Um, 501 minutes to Christ and things I like about America. Um, every aspect of those books are amazing. They're even printed really tall and narrow. And like he says at the beginning, 501 minutes to Christ, which is a number. It's not spelled out that he put a number on it because he didn't know where librarians would file it. Like the whole thing just says, get the fuck away from me. Like I'm doing something different here, which makes me love it even more.
00:51:57
Speaker
And then if you haven't read Festival Days by Joanne Beard, get it in your house. It's the best collection of essays that if you wanna call on that or whatever. I mean, she has this, have you read that yet? I have not. It's got this like beginning essay that talks about fiction and nonfiction and what the difference is between the two. And that book is absolutely magical. Yeah.
00:52:25
Speaker
There's an essay written in first-person perspective from a woman who utilized Jack Kevorkian's services. How do you do that? Like, jeez. Yeah, and it's incredible because that woman is not here to do that anymore, to write that thing. But she worked with her family, and she got permission, and she wrote this thing. And it really challenges what we think of as nonfiction or nonfiction essays. Yeah, Festival Days by Joanne Beard.
00:52:55
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show here and talking a little shop and doing so on such short notice as well. So just thanks for the work you've been putting out there, Nick, and thanks for coming on the show. This was great. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for reaching out and talking to me and whatnot. I appreciate it a lot.
00:53:18
Speaker
Nick came on the show very
Reflections on the Podcast's Future
00:53:20
Speaker
short notice pretty much bailed me out this week so he had a new episode so thanks for that it's getting harder and harder for me to put these new shows out every week and I might have to start running encore episodes from the backlog thanks to a chat I had with a buddy today he suggested that as I get increasingly overwhelmed by the book that it might be best to step away from the grind of new interviews and refresh the backlog with new introductions
00:53:48
Speaker
It's full of great evergreen interviews, but who's scrolling all the way back? You know, it's just it's so much and no matter what you say They feel old How often do you go to the backlog and a podcast backlog it might be like 2018 or 17 and doesn't that be like? Oh my god, it's like five six years ago. That's that's old the audio might be really crappy and
00:54:17
Speaker
So anyway, ones that are really good, I'll start drumming up my favorite ones. And that way you can be like, oh wow, I didn't realize Laura Hillenbrand was back there or Mary Carr. That happened. That was a long time ago. Oh, you mean David Graham was on more than just this last time. He was on episode 99, not just episode three, whatever.
00:54:42
Speaker
I originally had something of a longer parting shot. I deleted it. It was bleak, even by my standards. So I'm just gonna go. I'm not gonna drag you down anymore. Best of luck with what you're doing, and we'll catch you next week. Sound like a plan? All right. Well, if you can't do, interview. See ya.
00:55:16
Speaker
you