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Episode 65—How to Start Your Own Conference with Hippocamp Founder Donna Talarico
126 Plays7 years ago
Support for this podcast is brought to you by Hippocamp 2017, a conference for creative nonfiction writers. It’s this weekend, as in September 8 through the 10th. So here’s the deal, good ol’ Hippocamp sponsored the Creative Nonfiction Podcast again, but I didn’t run that snazzy new ad because this week’s bonus episode is with Hippocampus Magazine and Hippocamp founder, Donna Talarico, @DonnaTalarico on Twitter, give her a follow. Maybe I should mention that this is the podcast where I speak with the world’s best artists about creating works of nonfiction, leaders from the world of journalism, essay, memoir, radio, and documentary film, and try to tease out their stories and tricks of the trade, so that you can apply those skills to your own work. Donna brings such a great entrepreneurial sensibility to this episode so if you want to organize your independent nonfiction career, or start a magazine, or start a CONFERENCE, this is your episode, your time to let your freak flag fly. I’m on my second cup of cold brew and I’m pretty fired up, so I’m just going to come out and ask that you kindly leave a review on iTunes, like this nice five-star gainer from HannahinLA, “Great interviews that provide useful nuggets and inspiration for writers and other creatives.” If you leave one, maybe you, too, will get a similar shout out. The biggest endorsement the show can get is these reviews, but also sharing it amongst your friends who like to dabble in this kind of work. Let’s do the show!
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
Support for this podcast is brought to you by Hippocamp 2017, a conference for creative non-fiction writers. It's this weekend, as in September 8th through the 10th. What are you waiting for? A riff? Is it a riff? It's a riff, isn't it?
00:00:20
Speaker
So here's the deal. Good old Hippocamp sponsored the Creative Nonfiction podcast again, but I didn't run that snazzy new ad because this week's bonus episode is with Hippocampus magazine and Hippocamp founder, Donna Tallarico at Donna Tallarico on Twitter. Give her a follow. Now I will wait.
Podcast Focus and Guest Introduction
00:00:44
Speaker
Maybe I should mention that this is the podcast where I speak with the world's best artists about creating works of non-fiction, leaders from the world of journalism, essay, memoir, radio, and documentary film, where I try to tease out their stories and tricks of the trade so that you can apply those skills to your own work.
Entrepreneurial Insights for Aspiring Writers
00:01:04
Speaker
Donna brings such a great entrepreneurial sensibility to this episode. So if you want to organize your independent non-fiction career or start a magazine or start a conference, this is your episode. Your time to let your freak flag fly.
00:01:21
Speaker
I'm on my second cup of cold brew and I'm pretty fired up so I'm going to come out and ask that you kindly leave a review on iTunes like this nice 5 star gainer from Hannah in LA, quote, great interviews that provide useful nuggets and inspiration for writers and other creatives, end quote.
00:01:40
Speaker
Thank you for that slam dunk. If you leave one, maybe you too will get a similar shout out. The biggest endorsement the show can get is these reviews, but also sharing it amongst your friends who like to dabble in this kind of work.
Listener Engagement and Main Content Transition
00:01:54
Speaker
That also is a huge endorsement and I deeply appreciate it. We're two minutes into this intro, you know what? Let's do the show.
Donna's Memorable Encounters and Early Influences
00:02:06
Speaker
I'm thinking that every podcast naturally has to start with the question of how does one begin to teach Faith Hill how to do the Hokey Pokey? I was promotion director at a country radio station back in Northeast Pennsylvania and there was an after party after the conference. Now this was I believe in 2000 or 2000, no,
00:02:34
Speaker
It might've even still been the late nineties. This was before she exploded into popularity. So she was still playing at a relatively small theater in, in Wilkes-Barre. So the record reps and the radio station staff, we went to the hotel across the square and we were just hanging out and.
00:02:57
Speaker
I can't dance. So I always try to request funny songs so I can still get up on the dance floor. But if I look silly, it's okay, because it's a silly song. So I had requested the hokey pokey. Now, I think I was only 22 or 23 at the time, so I was much younger.
00:03:13
Speaker
and a little more bold. But at the same time, Faith Hill had come down from her hotel room and she was just kind of in casual clothes, almost pajamas. And she said, the Hokey Pokey, I don't think I've ever heard of that before. When the song came on, we all went up and I stood next to Faith Hill and I was showing her the movements, how to put the right hand in, put the right hand out, you know, and turn about and do the Hokey Pokey. So it was really fun.
00:03:43
Speaker
She had asked for, you know, hey, no pictures please. And this was the day before social media. So there really isn't much out there that kind of says, hey, this happened. But my college roommate at the time did take some pictures. So I do have a couple of pictures of it.
00:03:59
Speaker
Very nice. Very nice. Yeah, I remember like towards the in the mid to late mid to late 90s when like just before she was getting big like I remember just like my Friends and I we would have like CMT on the background. We just like love that video of like hey, baby Let's go to Vegas and we were just like wow it's like this is this is some good stuff and then yeah She took off so maybe we can we can thank you the hokey pokey sent exploded her into stardom. I
00:04:28
Speaker
I think it did. I think it made her comfortable to just be who she is and to be fun, and I'll take responsibility for that. My goodness. Well, congratulations. The title of this podcast will be How Donna Telerico Propelled Faithful to Superstardom.
00:04:43
Speaker
That's awesome. So as I like to I always love to get a sense of where writers come from in a sense of when and where did they start to fall in love with language and reading and books and I'd extend that to you like when did the switch go on for you that you just you know you loved stories and then you wanted to be a creator of those stories. I think for me one of my first memories of learning that
00:05:11
Speaker
words can be fun. And I think that's what it's all about. You know, I just think that you put letters together to form words that form sentences that form stories. And when I was a kid, I kind of stumbled upon wordplay or maybe puns. I moved from, I guess, outside the Philadelphia area, the Philadelphia suburbs as a kid to the Poconos.
00:05:37
Speaker
which is a region in northeast Pennsylvania, it's very mountainous, it used to be considered the honeymoon capital of the world. And I don't know if I remember this or if my mom told me about it. And so now it feels like a memory. But I was sitting between my parents in the van, you know, before days where you needed car seats, you could just kind of walk around a van as it was driving. But I kept
00:06:02
Speaker
touching my nose and I kept going, Poconos, Poconos, Poconos. So that really wasn't a memory of wanting to be a writer, but I think that's my earliest memory to know, hey, you can play with words, you can put them together and you can have some fun with them. And what did your parents do for a living? Well, the reason we were moving to the Poconos
00:06:26
Speaker
was they were entertainers. This was my mom's second husband who had adopted me. That's where I got the Telerico name from. And she was a disc jockey, like a mobile disc jockey who set up her turntables and her records. And Tony Telerico, my adoptive father, was a singer-songwriter. And he would play guitar, just his acoustic guitar.
00:06:52
Speaker
And we moved to the Poconos because they wanted to play campgrounds, honeymoon resorts, music festivals. So I spent a lot of time as a kid in a van just driving around with entertainers. And what did that do for you creatively? How did that experience and those inform your own creativity as you were growing up?
00:07:14
Speaker
I think traveling so much and being around new people and new surroundings all the time opened me up to just having this curiosity. I mean, maybe I was born with curiosity, but it really instilled that in me to ask questions, to learn more about these people, the places I'm going, just discovering new places, little nooks and crannies of the world, learning that everybody has a story,
00:07:43
Speaker
You know, I was never afraid to talk to strangers as a kid. I always wanted to learn about people. And I think that just that ability to always ask questions and be open with people kind of, you know, my first love was I wanted to get into journalism, not necessarily write creatively. So I think just always being exposed to new people and new surroundings was the first, was how I developed that love of curiosity and answering questions.
00:08:12
Speaker
Was there a particular journalist or a writer that you were clued into early on maybe as you were in middle school and high school that really made that sunk their teeth into you and you know you wouldn't let you go so to speak? You know I don't know if there was any one writer or one journalist that really sparked my love of it. What I will say is that the first folks I really remember getting into were
00:08:39
Speaker
uh the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys super mysteries and again that just that love of finding the story chasing that story figuring things out and then I uh you know I didn't gosh this is such a hard question because it's really forcing me to go back and think but I think maybe it might have even been talk show hosts like Oprah just asking people questions and getting them to open up
00:09:02
Speaker
She might have had some impact on me, but I can't remember a specific person, time, or place where I said, hey, this is what I want to do. It just felt like it was always there. I just always wanted to ask questions and tell stories and interview people. Where do you think you got that knack to want to ask the, or maybe even a love or a hunt for maybe kind of that perfect question, the one that gets people talking and speaking in stories? How did you develop that skill?
The Art of Interviewing: Asking 'Why'
00:09:33
Speaker
You know, and this even goes back to recently just, you know, working in higher education or other companies where we had student interns and where they would have to interview somebody. And they would just come up with a list of questions that would say, how old are you? Where are you from? You know, and just all those basic questions that you could go out and you could find that by finding their bio, by, you know, doing a little bit of research.
00:09:58
Speaker
So I always wanted to dig a little deeper, you know, get out the shovel and ask people questions that they haven't been asked before, you know, just to get that person, that interview subject thinking about things that maybe they hadn't thought about in a long time, kind of like how you just asked me which journalist inspired me. And it was, you know, hard for me to come up with that answer right away because you asked me something different, if that makes sense.
00:10:23
Speaker
Yeah, what does that look like to you? How does that research kind of manifest itself? When you're doing this kind of work or preparing to interview someone, you might come up with some questions and be like, okay, the fact that that came to me so early probably means that everyone's going to ask that question. So what does that look like for you to go deeper at that point?
00:10:51
Speaker
How do you come up with that set of questions? I think when you're interviewing somebody, the most important, you learn about the five W's in journalism and the H, the how. I think what gets to the heart of the story is the why. I think sometimes people are just so used to answering the surface questions or used to asking the surface questions,
00:11:21
Speaker
But I think when we frame the conversation around why, we get out those motivations, those kind of those hopes and dreams and the deeper stuff, the more personal stuff when we kind of go behind why all this matters, why do you do this? So I think the question of why, especially for a human interest story really matters. Of course, if it's a hard news story, you really do want the facts. But I think when you're trying to tell
00:11:51
Speaker
a deeper story asking those why questions. Yeah, of course. And they're hard to, sometimes they're hard to ask because they can sound judgmental sometimes. Like, okay, you did this. Well, why do you do that? Or so it might be, it's a challenge to maybe like buff that question a little bit. So it doesn't sound judgy, but you actually want to get to the
00:12:17
Speaker
to the heart of an answer and ultimately that leads to maybe what's conflicting about a particular subject and then that conflict obviously is what makes for a great narrative.
00:12:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And sometimes it is harder and not everybody will want to open up. So it really becomes a relationship between the two people or the multiple people that are part of the conversation to just trust each other and want to open up. And sometimes that's hard. One of my classes in undergrad, we had to do oral histories. And my professor, Andrea France,
00:12:59
Speaker
You know, the way she explained oral histories is you could go in there and maybe spend a half hour or an hour with the subject. But what you're capturing is that person's life in that particular day, that particular mindset. You know, maybe they had a rough night the night before and their answers are really short, not as deep. Whereas if you had interviewed them on a different day, the story could be completely different. So sometimes it's not even a matter of the questions you ask.
00:13:29
Speaker
It's a matter of just that time and place. It's just so interesting how a story can change based on who is telling it when they're telling it. How long do you think it might have taken you to get comfortable asking questions that would be, that can be very probing? I think I'm still getting used to it. I think, you know, every new interview subject is different. And sometimes I feel more comfortable than others, you know, sometimes
00:13:58
Speaker
I can be intimidated by somebody i'm interviewing you know, right now i'm working on a future story for an alumni magazine of a business school and i'm talking to some.
00:14:10
Speaker
I mean, I don't want to say they're not famous people, but they're like high profile people that are really successful in their fields. And then sometimes I think, do I have a right to be asking them about this business concept or that? So I think I'm still getting comfortable with the idea of doing it. And I just take each one, one step at a time.
00:14:31
Speaker
That's tough because you want to ask good questions, but sometimes the best question makes you feel kind of stupid to be asking it in the first place. But I think that ultimately that comes from a place of confidence that you're willing to be like, hey, you know, let me know. You're the expert. I'm just the conduit. So yeah, enlighten us and everything. But yeah, that's great.
00:14:55
Speaker
you skirt you like got to a good point there like how do you deal with maybe a little of that performance anxiety that might creep in when you're trying to talk to someone who might be high profile or even interview someone who's yeah who's got that big big spotlight on them and you have them for an X amount of time and yeah how do you navigate the anxiety that might go into talking to someone of that high profile yeah that's a good question i think
00:15:23
Speaker
what I do is just try to try to remind myself that we're both people, we're both humans who have the a lot of the same needs and wants. And I might be the peon reporter that's interviewing somebody that's done something really remarkable. But then I think about situations where they're just their normal person. And I might be in a situation where I might be the remarkable one. So when I see us both
00:15:51
Speaker
as just common people that both have a job to do, that really helps me just get into that mindset that reminds me that, hey, I'm a professional, trusted to do this job by an editor or by somebody. And this person agreed to speak to me because they want to share their story. So I think that really helps. And then also just no matter how
00:16:18
Speaker
anxious I might be inside, also just putting on my game face that, you know, hey, even if my hands might be trembling, you know, they don't have to see that, you know, and I can hide that. When you were starting to develop and even consider this kind of work as a vocation, at what point did you feel comfortable giving yourself permission to pursue what you're doing?
Gaining Confidence in Story Pitching
00:16:46
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question too. I actually never worked full time as a journalist. I was always an independent features writer or on the news side, a stringer that covered meetings, you know, school board meetings, municipal meetings. So I think because I was always so curious and had these questions
00:17:12
Speaker
I would pitch stories to newspapers and magazines that interested me. And because I was fascinated by a topic and what I might find, I knew that readers might too. So I think because I had such good success with pitching my stories and usually at a local level, I mean, that's where most of my experience is, is local and regional papers. But I think that instilled the confidence in me that, hey, they like these ideas, they're letting me run with them. So I definitely think that,
00:17:41
Speaker
helped boost my confidence for both writing and throughout the rest of my career that, hey, I have good ideas. These stories matter. My ideas matter. I can do something with them. How do you cultivate or curate ideas? And then how does your querying and pitch process manifest out of that? So I keep a bunch of
00:18:06
Speaker
Well, going back a long time ago, I have a shoebox that I used to just put ideas in. This is back even when I worked in radio, when I had to come up with promotion ideas. So I would always be coming up with business ideas or story ideas or ideas for a contest. And it might be on a bar napkin. It might be on the back of somebody's business card. So I threw them all in this shoebox that I have, but it was funny because
00:18:32
Speaker
you know, there was the term thinking outside the box. So I have a big label on this shoe box that says, I think outside the box, but I do need a box to put them in. So it was just like I even would joke with myself on this box that nobody has ever even seen inside. So today, how I keep my ideas, you know, they're still on scrap papers everywhere, but I put them in a folder. And, and then sometimes when I'm really ambitious, I add them to
00:19:01
Speaker
a spreadsheet of story ideas. And the spreadsheet has different tabs. So there's some ideas that I have that are in progress that I might put notes in. I use a browser extension called Pocket where I save articles that might be good sources for some of the ideas that I have just to keep them organized so I can find them again. And then as far as the pitching process goes for on the journalism reporting side,
00:19:28
Speaker
I have a spreadsheet that says the idea that I pitched, who I pitched it to, the editor's contact information, and then I track all the follow-ups that I did, and then eventually I'll go through and fill in. I'll either highlight it green that it was ago, or red that it was turned down, or I gray it out if I didn't hear back.
00:19:48
Speaker
And do you do you have a process of OK I've got this idea I could like all right my dream patch is like or I like I can see this in the New Yorker there's my home run swing and then and then from there OK maybe if they say no you go here here here here here until eventually you're at
00:20:07
Speaker
You're at the bottom where either you're going to pitch it to some like very local place, maybe a place for free, or do you just kill it all together? Like how does that work out, work itself out? Yeah, I think that that's a great question. And I think a lot of freelance writers struggle with that too. You know, I have a dream publication. Okay. It got turned down there. Here's the next tier that I want to hit.
00:20:32
Speaker
And eventually, you know, if you're really passionate about an idea, you don't want it to just die. So I see a lot of people will, um, you know, publish it on medium and, or their own blog, just so the story gets out there. And I'm completely still okay with publishing places that do not pay or pay, you know, a smaller fee. If it's important to me to get the story out there, I, you know, there's just.
00:20:59
Speaker
The landscape is changing and there's a lot of great venues out there that just don't have the budget to pay what freelancers used to make. You know, when $1, $2 a word was the standard, it's just changing so much. So sometimes we just have to make peace with the idea that we're not going to get top dollar for every freelance article that we write.
00:21:22
Speaker
And how comfortable are you doing a piece on spec if you really like it and you're having a hard time getting someone to buy it on query alone? Like, have you had an experience where you just go forward and you're like, I'm going to just pursue the story, write it, and then try to sell the whole thing? Yeah, I've done a couple articles on spec. And they were usually the ones that I was really passionate about. They were stories that didn't really require a lot of outside research.
00:21:52
Speaker
So if it was something like an op ed piece or something that was more of a first person account, I would feel pretty comfortable writing that on spec. I don't do that as much lately. A lot of my freelance work today has been on the content writing side of things when working with agencies. But when I really do feel passionate about a story, I sometimes do write it on spec and we'll send it to places.
00:22:18
Speaker
And you were alluding to it earlier that freelancing, the landscape being what it is, that the money isn't great. And even if you do get paid something, the amount of self-employment and taxes you have to pay out of it, it just kills you. So it's, what can people do to,
00:22:42
Speaker
Supplement that i think i often think that there is a temerity to share that. You know sometimes you need side work to help subsidize the work you really like to do people don't want to talk about that is wanna.
00:22:58
Speaker
I maybe put up a facade that it's the freelancing that is 100% supporting, but they might have a job at a bookstore to help or wait tables. And I wonder what your experience is like trying to subsidize your writing and then see where your work sort of falls on that continuum of day job versus the work that you really want to be doing.
00:23:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great observation. I think a lot of people who decide to leave their full-time career type jobs, you know, your typical nine to five jobs who want to leave to freelance full-time will find that it does take a while to build up a client base and to build up regular income. And I think it's really important that you have to treat your freelance business like a business.
00:23:51
Speaker
You know, so I have spreadsheets, I have, you know, projects and income reports that I do to project what I think I might come in. I have income goals. Um, so I, I try to run it like a, a true business and I, I left my full-time job in 2014 to focus on my own creative writing and to put a little more time into Hippocampus magazine. But through all this, my own writing has suffered a little bit because the freelancing really did take off.
00:24:20
Speaker
And I should add that I keep using the term freelancing because it's what most people know it as, but I try not to say it myself because I think there's this stigma around it, you know, so I call myself an independent writer and marketing consultant. You know, just maybe a matter of semantics, but there's so many people that are struggling out there with them, you know, and I'm sure you've heard of them, the content farms or people that just think they can hire a freelancer for a couple bucks.
00:24:49
Speaker
So I think just by changing how I refer to myself kind of just elevates it a little bit. So I would encourage anybody that's listening that calls themself a freelancer to maybe just try calling themself an independent writer, independent content writer. So to get back to your question, I do, most of my income, like I said, isn't on the creative writing side, it's
00:25:15
Speaker
with content marketing. So I use some of my skills from when I worked in higher ed to help other colleges and universities, sometimes directly with the client, sometimes through an ad agency to work with content. So that's where most of the income comes in. But where the fun projects come in or the crazy ideas I have, I want to learn more about pajamas. Maybe I'll set that idea in a mental floss and learn about why we have night caps and why we wore dressing gowns and things.
00:25:42
Speaker
So those kind of feed my soul. So I would recommend any freelancer or independent writer to diversify, to have some larger clients where you're paid a little more. It might not be the prettiest, most fun work, but it does make a difference. And then fill in the gaps with some of the journalism stuff or writing for news websites or different blogs.
00:26:06
Speaker
So at what point in your writing career did you start to gravitate towards essays and that type of creative nonfiction that would ultimately sort of inform the work that you did while founding Hippocampus? And we'll get into the logistics of why and when you founded that, but I want to get a sense of where you were as a person and as an artist.
00:26:31
Speaker
as you transitioned into that. But so where were you? Like, how did you started to gravitate towards the type of writing that you feature in hippocampus?
Journey from Journalism to Creative Nonfiction
00:26:39
Speaker
I had mentioned earlier that I worked as a radio promotions director. And I took when I took that job, I dropped out of college. I was a communications major. And I thought, oh, my gosh, I got offered a full time job at a radio station. I had been working there part time since high school. So I thought, I don't need to go to college. I already have my radio job.
00:26:59
Speaker
So I didn't actually finish college until I was in my late 20s. So then in my early 30s, that's when I went into the MFA program, because I really liked the journalism stuff. I was working as a freelance reporter for a local paper and for a local alternative weekly. But I think it was kind of the oral history project that we did, and that was just one project.
00:27:28
Speaker
I just really like the idea of people having a story to tell. And so I think I'm more seriously considered writing creatively. You know, I always had ideas for movies and for novels, but I wasn't serious about it. So I applied to grad school and I was going to go to, I was accepted to the new school for social research to get a master's in media studies, their sociology of the media. And then
00:27:56
Speaker
I just made a last minute change because my alma mater was starting an MFA program and I just decided to stick a little closer to home and do that. At first I thought I would do fiction, but it was a low residency MFA program. And during your first project semester, you picked two genres and I did fiction and creative nonfiction. And as it turned out, my, um, instructor I worked with for the nonfiction side of things,
00:28:22
Speaker
said you have some interesting stories here about your your family and I don't think I realized my upbringing was that different or that unique but it was really through discovery and these just writing prompts and simple assignments you know that said wow I might have something here so I switched to non-fiction and you know about a year later is when I founded Hippocampus so it was kind of you know I always wanted to tell stories but I wanted to tell other people's stories
00:28:49
Speaker
Not realizing I had one of my own until it came out. Do you remember what those prompts were and then what those prompts prompted from your memory? Yeah, one of the prompts was right about a kitchen of your childhood. I struggled with that one because I didn't have a kitchen of my childhood. I had about 15 kitchens of my childhood.
00:29:18
Speaker
I think that's when I realized that, wow, I kind of had, you know, a non-traditional upbringing. I was in a van a lot. We were, my mom got divorced again and we moved from house after house after house. And it just kind of all hit me at once when I realized I don't, I don't have a home. Like in college, when people say, are you going home for the holidays? You know, it just really hit me. Oh my God, I don't have a home. And to this day, I don't want to be a homeowner.
00:29:46
Speaker
because I feel I just want to rent. I don't want to be tied to something. So I think this notion of moving so much really affected me and a lot of my philosophies on life and about roots. And it really didn't hit me until that assignment. Write about a kitchen of your childhood. So I did end up picking, writing about my dad-o's
00:30:11
Speaker
in Italian, a lot of times they say, I'm Datto. And this was my adopted father's father. And his kitchen had wallpaper and it had like names of pasta in cursive writing. And so I ended up writing about that kitchen because even though I moved so much with my mom, I always went back to this kitchen. And, you know, to this family that, you know, adopted me as one of their own, even though I wasn't a blood relative.
00:30:40
Speaker
That becomes a theme in my writing, too, that I think I don't have a home, but here I kind of had one all along. But it was with people. And I'm going to cry during this interview now. But it's, yeah. Wow. I think the kitchens of your youth or the kitchens of my youth would be a great title for an essay if you haven't already done that already.
00:31:04
Speaker
No, no, I haven't, but I have plenty to write about. And you've alluded to this idea of this entrepreneurial nature that I think has been somewhat embedded in the work you've done, because then you've, you know, of being an independent
00:31:25
Speaker
Creator and content creator writer and having these spreadsheets and everything you do see yourself as As Susan Orlean says like you are
00:31:36
Speaker
you are the raw material but also the producer of the raw material so it's like you're the same, you're the coin in both sides of that coin and then you obviously you founded Hippocampus magazine too so there's an entrepreneurial side to that so what did that look like when you were trying to start that and how did you get the idea and what made you say I'm gonna found my own creative non-fiction magazine?
Founding Hippocampus Magazine: Inspiration and Process
00:32:03
Speaker
Between my work in higher education and I worked in e-commerce for a little while, but between the time that I left college and then went back, I worked as an admissions representative for a career college, which is a group of schools that might offer programs in the trades or medical field, people that want to be a skilled worker but don't necessarily need to go to traditional college.
00:32:33
Speaker
I found myself working as an admissions representative there and being really good at it. And I wanted to capture people's stories. And I don't talk about this a lot because this was before I really knew self-publishing versus traditional publishing. But I put together an essay collection called Kids Have You Seen My Backpack. And I put out a call and I collected a bunch of stories of adult learners who went back to school. So this was in 2005.
00:33:03
Speaker
And so I kind of always had this idea I wanted to bring stories together and tell them in some way. And while the heart of those stories are fantastic, I definitely had a lot to learn about putting together, you know, work. So that was kind of like my false start. You know, I did something that I thought was really great. But
00:33:26
Speaker
those days at that school, I was trying to, you know, basically it was a sales job. And I was telling everybody, hey, you need to go back to school. You need to improve your life, blah, blah, blah. And here I was at college dropout. So that's kind of when I went back. But that was the first time I knew I might have a knack for bringing people together and producing content. So that kind of idea always kind of stayed with me. And then when I got into the MFA program, I didn't want to tell people, oh, I
00:33:53
Speaker
you know, self-published a book of other people's essays one time. So I kind of, but that's out there. That's in my history. So during the MFA program, once I decided to do nonfiction, you know, just like in any writing program or even workshops that you attend, people encourage you to send your work out there into the world, either to get it published or to get feedback and just know if there's an audience for it. And at the time, I should say now I was working for an e-commerce company.
00:34:22
Speaker
So I was developing online marketing skills, web skills, you know, all of these things were growing with me. And when I decided, or when I found that there weren't a lot of online magazines yet that were really high quality that focused on nonfiction. Of course, there are plenty of print magazines and online magazines that focus on everything. But as far as being strictly nonfiction, strictly online.
00:34:45
Speaker
Brevity was really the only one making waves at the time. And they've been around for 20 years. Dinti was on a previous podcast. So I thought, well, maybe there's a home for another one that focuses on longer nonfiction. I came up with it during an in-class exercise.
00:35:02
Speaker
Um, where we had to come up with, we could pick from like a couple different projects. So we didn't actually have to create the magazine. We just had to come up with an idea for it. And I worked with two other women, um, who are, are still close friends today. And we came up with, um, a nonfiction magazine and I thought of the name Hippo campus, but we went with another name for our in-class project, but I thought.
00:35:26
Speaker
I'm registering this domain name. I'm going to do something with Hippo Campus magazine one day. So it was about a year later that I really got serious about launching the idea.
00:35:34
Speaker
What were the logical steps to getting it from the perfect idea you had in your head to something published? What did that look like and how did you go about sequencing that so you had something that you could publish every month starting in 2011?
00:35:57
Speaker
I knew, and this goes back to my country radio days, but we had a bunch of file folders that were for each letter of the alphabet, and we called it show prep material. So some of it was live, what was happening in the news, but we had file folders for information about all of the country artists. And in the Kenny Chesney section of the folder, there was a country weekly article that talked about Kenny Chesney had
00:36:25
Speaker
And he might've got this quote from somebody else, so I don't know the origins of it. But Kenny Chesney had been around for a long time. He had like five, six, maybe even seven CDs out before he became really famous. So he said in an interview, take off like a rocket, fizzle like a rocket. And that always stuck with me to not want to rush and do something.
00:36:50
Speaker
And I do see a lot of young online magazines that get really ambitious and because it's very easy to create a website today that they just, they'll throw up a website and say, we're open for submissions. And then they'll get all their social media handles and set up everything, but they don't have a strategic plan. They don't have short, long-term goals. So I think that's what I did differently. I treated it like a business from the beginning. So I announced that we were coming out into the world.
00:37:18
Speaker
six months before we did. So we had plenty of time to build everything right and to get submissions and to already have, you know, submissions for a couple months of content, you know, and that's, again, my beginning ahead of the, um, our conversation, but that's why I didn't launch the conference right away. That's why we didn't launch the books all at once because we had to grow slowly and smartly.
00:37:45
Speaker
How did you develop that kind of patience to let it grow slowly and even have the confidence to do the work and wait for it to get that critical mass or to gain the traction that gave you the confidence that you could keep going? Yeah, I think it's just about having patience and hope. But really, it's just about being organized and creating a solid foundation
00:38:15
Speaker
And I think I definitely think working for the e-commerce department, I worked in the corporate marketing department by the time I left that company. So I learned a lot about project management. I learned a lot about, you know, SWOT analysis. And, you know, so I really just learned about the strategy behind things and that if you want to do something, sometimes you need to start, you know, a whole year in advance and work backwards from your launch date or
00:38:43
Speaker
whatever it may be. So I think I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to work for a technology company that really was big into the project management and milestones. And so that helped give that helped teach me the right way to launch something, whether it's a product, whether it's a magazine, whether it's a whether it's a book.
00:39:03
Speaker
Did you set certain parameters on yourself, like if we don't hit sort of this mark by a certain time, then maybe it's not going to happen and we should pull up anchor and move on to something else? I don't know that I set anything like that. I had goals of where we wanted to be. And for some things, I sort of have a contingency plan.
00:39:32
Speaker
Also working in the communications field, you always want to prepare for a crisis or if something goes wrong. So for the online magazine, I really, you know, don't have plans for that, but, you know, a couple of weeks before Hippo Camp last year, Mary Carr was our keynote speaker and I had a dream that she broke her leg. And I thought, oh my goodness. So, okay, if something does happen to a keynote speaker, if something does happen with this, what are we going to do?
00:40:02
Speaker
So I think if you always think about the what ifs, if a what if happens, you're going to be more calm and you're going to be prepared for that to happen. So I think any, if you're planning an event, if you're planning a launch, whatever you're planning, you do need to know what you're going to do in those scenarios and maybe have next steps in case something like that happens. I also think working in higher education helped with that because
00:40:30
Speaker
It's so sad to say, but we have to have emergency management plans. And I went through some training on that. You know, if there's an active shooter on campus, if there's a weather event, you know, what do we do? We already have some messaging already set up that we can tweak, but that way we don't have to think as much about it when it happens because we've already done some of the work. That high level kind of thing that you might not think about for a literary magazine, it's just kind of embedded in me.
00:40:58
Speaker
What do you think some struggling writers who have talent might be getting wrong in terms of trying to get that critical foothold that allows them to maybe make a living and make a go of it as a writer?
Seeking Feedback and Launching a Conference
00:41:17
Speaker
I don't see this in everybody, but I see a lot of people that are overconfident. So believing in yourself,
00:41:28
Speaker
You need to, you need to believe in yourself. But I think there comes a point where you can be, you think you're too big, like maybe you're too big for your britches already. You know, I see a lot of people that will submit stories to literary magazines, or maybe on, you know, the freelance writing side submit pitches to editors of like commercial magazines. And they just, they don't know the, they don't have necessarily a professional approach.
00:41:58
Speaker
Or maybe they think their story is great, but they didn't take the time to workshop it or get a second opinion. You know, if we show our work to our spouses, to our parents, to our best friends, to our grandma, they're going to tell us we're the best writer ever. But so I see a lot of people that don't get critical feedback and don't know how to take that critical feedback to heart. They get offended easily when somebody says, oh, you might be doing this wrong or you could do this a little better. So I think
00:42:28
Speaker
I guess what I'm getting at is you need to be open to critique and you need to be open to trying things a different way. So I think that's the biggest mistake I see is people sending things out that aren't ready. I still do it. Um, you know, things that aren't ready. And then the case of when you're pitching stories to say, you know, like, um, a good housekeeping magazine or something like that, just not having the tact and the professional communication.
00:42:58
Speaker
just because email is quick doesn't mean you don't have to be professional in how you approach somebody. So I think communication skills are really important. So I think the better you can communicate an idea, but also be cordial, I think that helps too.
00:43:13
Speaker
And communicating ideas and community is kind of what leads us into HippoCamp. And at what point during the HippoCampus magazine journey did you say, okay, I want to start a conference. At what point did that come into your mind? Yeah, I think it was probably maybe 2012. I've always loved conferences back in high school.
00:43:42
Speaker
I was in high school in Oklahoma for a couple of years and I wrote for the school paper and it was called the, we submitted awards or our stories for awards to the Oklahoma Interscholastic Press Association or OIPA. So the one year I got to go to, I think it was OSU or OU, I forget which one it was, but it was a high school journalism conference. And one, I fell in love with being on a college campus.
00:44:09
Speaker
But two, I just, it was my first exposure to meeting other people that did the same thing. And then fast forward to when I worked for the e-commerce company, we had a conference for our clients where they came in and learned about our products. And so I was involved with that. And then my first conference that really hit me was called High Ed Web. It's short for Higher Education Web Professionals. And they do a fantastic job with making a really fun conference
00:44:39
Speaker
but one that's also so informative, so innovative and cutting edge. And I just fell in love with the conference, with the people, with the how it was arranged. And by this time I had been to some writing conferences that weren't as exciting. So I thought, you know, I want to do something like this for Hippocamp or for Hippocampus. And then I thought, and we have the perfect name because we have camp built into our name. So we call it Hippocamp.
00:45:05
Speaker
Um, but I thought we, I don't want to jump into it just yet. We're still the new kid on the block. So I kind of wrote it down as like a, a three year global, what let's just do this in a couple of years from now. So what were the.
00:45:19
Speaker
the next steps in logistical plans and the sequence to actually coordinating, booking, and getting a conference from the idea to something that people are going to pay, they're going to attend, they're going to travel. What were those logical steps to get this thing from idea to actual hypo camp?
00:45:45
Speaker
The first thing we had to do was think about our programming and our format. What do we want this to look like? And then once you figure that out, then you know what kind of space you need. Because if we just wanted to do a one day event with a couple speakers, we could do that at just like a local meeting space. But if we wanted to have a bigger conference with, say, a keynote, a couple breakout sessions where people can go to different rooms,
00:46:13
Speaker
you know, that affects where you, where you go. And then that in turn affects what your budget's going to be. So you kind of have to figure that out. And then, you know, so we priced around different places, you know, geography, where do you want to hold your conference? So for us, I considered the idea of it being a traveling conference where we went somewhere different each year. But then I thought, even though we're an online magazine,
00:46:42
Speaker
We're in a pretty cool city that, you know, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that I'd love to see more people visit. So maybe we can bring our online magazine to life and build a sense of place because we call Lancaster home. Maybe we can do it here. So then it was about finding the right venue in Lancaster. And then you figure out what your expenses are going to be. And then that's kind of then how you price your ticket. And I'll be honest right now that
00:47:11
Speaker
You know, maybe by year four, this will be, you know, revenue generator, but right now we're just interested in covering our expenses. So that's kind of where we're at now. So you have to, if someone is planning a conference, you have to work that into your ticket price. So if you do want to make X amount of money from this, you know, this is what the costs are. This is what, you know, the other expenses might be. So it kind of works it down to, you're going to have to do some math.
00:47:39
Speaker
your first HIPAA camp, you're able to book Lee Guttkind as your keynote. So what did that look like? How are you able to court the Godfather to be the keynote to the first annual HIPAA camp? Well, that's a secret. I think when you're working with a certain level of speaker, you have to go through a speaker's bureau sometimes. So that's what we do for most of our our headlining speakers.
00:48:08
Speaker
Not all the time, but that's generally what most conferences have to do. And there's a lot of speakers agencies out there that work specifically with literary rock stars. So there's some really great options out there for that. And then for other speakers, it was really important to me to have well-known speakers, but more importantly, it was for me to have everyday writers also getting to share their stuff.
00:48:37
Speaker
So the bulk of our content at the conference is done by attendees for attendees. So we put out a call for submissions, for proposals, for breakout sessions. And we try to even invite people that aren't from the literary community, but people from the marketing world, from maybe life coaches to come and help us know how to better balance our time or how to better market our stuff. Because I think sometimes we have to reach beyond our industry to learn.
00:49:07
Speaker
Like, for example, in higher ed, there's a woman, Georgie Cohen, I went to a session she did about college news websites. And when she built the new website for the college, she worked it at the time, she didn't look at other college news websites because they weren't doing them right. So she looked to NPR, to Fast Company to, I forget exactly which websites, but she looked outside the industry and did something really amazing. So that's what I try to do with Hippocampus in general,
00:49:38
Speaker
is bring what I learned from other industries into what I do. And I think it makes a difference. How validating was it for you just in year one to get Lee, and then year two, Mary Carr, and now year three, Tobias Wolf.
Growth of Hippocamp Conference and Future Invitations
00:49:52
Speaker
That's got to say something to you that you're doing something that's valuable and has a ton of merit.
00:49:59
Speaker
Yeah, it makes it hard to think about your number four now. But no, I think you're so right. I mean, with each year, with each speaker we have, it just, you know, and I will say, even if you have to go through a speaker's bureau, they still have to believe in your event and believe in you and want to be there and want to travel to it and be a part of it. So it means so much to me and to our attendees that
00:50:27
Speaker
these amazing writers and teachers have said, yes, I'll come to Hippo Camp. Mary Carr was so amazing last year. She answered questions longer than she needed to. She came out from behind the podium and talked to people. And, you know, and then when it came time to look for a speaker this year, you know, we went with Tobias Wolf.
00:50:49
Speaker
And we also do an attendee survey and we do ask for input of who would you like to see speak at the event. So we take reader input or I'm sorry not reader input, attendee input into the decisions we make as well. So Mary Kaur and Tobias Wolf are names that came up after year one and two that helped us form year two and three.
00:51:09
Speaker
How would you characterize where you were from, say, like, Hippocamp 1 to the third one? And what's changed? What improvements have you made? And how have you just whittled it down to something that's, you know, just that gets better and better each time? The first year,
00:51:29
Speaker
You know, I worked on conference committees before so I knew some things you needed to consider about the logistics, you know, of conferences and how far out you should do certain things. And, you know, marketing plans, you know, so I had a sense of some of those things, but I never planned Hippo camp before.
00:51:50
Speaker
Booking so many writers and you know and and all of that. So the first year we learned as we went. But I recorded and tracked everything that we did so that way we had a framework for year two and for year three. After year one we took all of our speaker evaluations the conference surveys. We took all of that into consideration and made a couple changes for year two. And then we did the same thing from last year to this year.
00:52:20
Speaker
So I think listening to your audience is so important, you know, and it's not just about what's on the surveys, but it's about looking around the room, seeing how people are reacting to certain things. So it's a mix of the qualitative and quantitative that you look at when you make changes. And sometimes you don't need to make any changes because things went over really well and you just do them again. You don't change things just to change things.
00:52:46
Speaker
You keep doing the things that work well and you change things that need improvement. But because the more you do something, your audience will come to expect certain things. So you can't shock them the following year by not by doing something completely different. If that makes sense. Yeah.
00:53:01
Speaker
When people want to, say, start a business or something, a great place to start is scratching your own itch. What is something you really like that you're not seeing? And do that, and others will probably follow. And I wonder, how did HippoCamp scratch your own itch? And what were you looking for in a conference? And how did you manifest that in your own vision? I developed and formatted HippoCamp
00:53:31
Speaker
The way I did was because I saw again, I think I tried to fill a gap. There's a lot of different types of writing events you could go to. And I recently was able to share my thoughts on writing conferences on a post on brevity earlier this month.
00:53:51
Speaker
And sometimes there are workshop environments where it's a really small group and you're doing a lot of, you know, workshopping, hence the name together and writing and getting things done. And then there are really large events like AWP that are just panel after panel and so many topics and so many people and so many voices. So I kind of wanted to do something that had a lot of great voices, but in a smaller environment.
00:54:20
Speaker
And I think the biggest thing that I wanted was to have solo presenters. I am not the biggest fan in the world of panels. There are some really great panels out there, but I think we can do better with how we moderate them and how they're conducted. Because when you have a captive audience, I really think sometimes just having a solo presenter up there focusing on one topic
00:54:47
Speaker
and what they're good at really lights up a room sometimes more than just a panel. And when we have panels at Hippo Camp, and I do enjoy panels, but I wanted to do something different and that's why I personally, that's what I personally love. And I think it really works well for Hippo Camp. And there have been some people at Hippo Camp that work with other conferences, and I won't say the name, I don't feel comfortable, but one other conference,
00:55:14
Speaker
now added solo presenters instead of just panels to their lineup, because I think it does bring a certain energy. And I would love, you know, Hippocamp is a small conference. It only has about 200 people. But if seeing more events like this popping up in the writing world happens, I'd be really pleased. Is there anything else you'd like to add with respect to your third annual Hippocamp? Hashtag Hippocamp17.
00:55:42
Speaker
Yeah. Well, depending on when this is, is running, I mean, obviously it will be archived. So people will be hearing this after the event, but if you're listening to this before September 7th, there might be space available. So please sign up if you're relatively close geographically and have the weekend free, but if not follow along with the, with the hashtag and, you know, and maybe consider coming next year.
00:56:07
Speaker
It's just so awesome to create something and then see people come to it and talk about it and tell somebody else on the same thing. I mean, if you write an article, if you write a book, write a song, you know, just to see somebody enjoying the content. I mean, that's, that's what it's all about. I mean, we all have to make a living somehow. Um, you know, at this point, I mean, I'm investing into hippocampus. I'm still at that phase. And one day maybe, you know, if the goal is for it to be, um,
00:56:36
Speaker
a revenue generating business. But until then, I'm just putting my heart into it. Yeah. Well, your time is worth it. Like you should get to a point where you can make a living, make some money off of it because you're investing so much in it. It's like what Penny Lane, the documentary filmmaker I spoke to a few weeks ago,
00:56:55
Speaker
At one point she was saying, oh, should I just undercut myself? And then she was like, no, fuck that. My time is valuable. I should get paid for the work I'm doing. It's good work. And so I think there's nothing wrong with that, especially given the trajectory you've set HIPAA camp on that I hope it continues indefinitely and that you're handsomely paid for it for your work. Oh, that's the goal. And I joke with some people now.
00:57:23
Speaker
I talk about how people that go to certain churches and have their paychecks tithing. I joke that Hippocampus is my church and part of my income goes to rent, to the car payment, to my student loan, and to Hippocampus. But it won't always be that way. Awesome. Donna, you feel good about this? Yeah, absolutely.
00:57:52
Speaker
Thanks again to Hippocant for supporting this week's episode of the Created Non-Fiction Podcast. And thanks to Donna for her time. I had a blast and I hope you did too.
00:58:03
Speaker
Did you know that I have a monthly newsletter? The beauty of it only comes out once a month, 12 times a year. In it, you'll find my reading recommendations for the month and what you may have missed from the podcast. That is it. No spam ever. Head over to my website, BrendanOmera.com to subscribe. You know what? And ping me on Twitter while you're at it, at Brendan Omera to say hello. I will say hello back. Here's a fist bump from me to you.
00:58:34
Speaker
See you next time.