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Episode 194: Michael Schulman — Driven by Joy, New Yorker Profiles, and the ‘Secret Word’
153 Plays5 years ago
"Selection is as creative as generation," says Michael Schulman, a staff writer for The New Yorker.
CNF Pod is brought to you by Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing and my monthly newsletter!
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Transcript
Introduction & Call for Submissions
00:00:00
Speaker
Maybe it's all the social distancing. Maybe it's because I'm trying to find new and innovating ways to serve UCNFers. But I got something I'm desperate to announce. And the best part about it? It might not work.
00:00:17
Speaker
So what is it? Here it is. It's a call for submissions. CNF Pod is going to put out its first, and maybe only, audio magazine in a few months. And I'm putting the call out now for original work on this theme. You ready? Social distancing. Essays on or from. Isolation.
00:00:38
Speaker
Now, it can be coronavirus related, but I suspect the introverts among you know a thing or two about social distancing, certainly my fellow Gen Xers. These essays can be funny, sad, touching, voice driven, scene driven, journalistic, or memoiristic. But they have to be great, and they have to be read in 15 minutes or less. And they better be true. That's the deal.
00:01:04
Speaker
We're not talking super long essays here, maybe 2,000 words at most, so let's aim for that. 2
Recording Tips & Production Style
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Speaker
,000 max. I will accept the submissions as Word or Google Doc attachments, email them to creativenonfictionpodcastatgmail.com with cnfpod submission in the subject line. If I want to run your piece, I will reach out and we'll begin the editing process.
00:01:30
Speaker
you will have to figure out a great way to record your essay. There's tips I'll be happy to offer when the moment comes. Yes, you might be recording underneath a comforter.
00:01:41
Speaker
The submissions might get fancier down the road, but for now email them as written work. But bear in mind, this is audio. Pay attention to the music of the language. I'll produce these essays with some music that sort of reflects the mood of the piece. Think how this American life is structured. I'll be like Ira announcing each one, teasing it out and so forth.
00:02:04
Speaker
this audio mag is probably only going to have three to four essays so hopefully i get at least three or four essays hopefully i get 20 30 40 50 and so i hope so this is a great chance for you to
00:02:19
Speaker
work in this and have published work. This is no joke. This is a new way to have your work published. So bring your A game and given the theme, this is a way to express yourself and possibly work through some complicated feelings. We're all under, we're all under a bit, a bit of stress with this, some more than others, but this could be a way to express yourself creatively and work through some things.
00:02:47
Speaker
As part of this, I'll be soon setting up a Patreon account. It's partly to support what I'm doing with CNF Pod on a weekly basis. You know the deal. But also, it's about finding a way to pay writers for work and also pay for the production that's going on with this audio mag.
00:03:07
Speaker
Hope you share this with people you think might be thrilled to submit their work. It's a challenge. It's going to be fun. It's thrilling and exciting and scary. And that's the point. Why do
Supporting the Podcast & Celebrations
00:03:18
Speaker
anything else that doesn't push us into uncomfortable territory? I hope you're as excited as I am. Deadline, we're going to turn this around fairly quick in terms of deadline. Deadline is CNF Friday, May 1st.
00:03:33
Speaker
so you'll have to hustle. I'll be promoting this pretty hard to ensure I can get as many people submitting essays on this theme as possible.
00:03:42
Speaker
You know this show is a hub to talk shop with badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. You know we go deep here and we unpack things on a subcutaneous level, baby. This is yet another way for us to seek and destroy. Now get to work and show me what you got. And now back to your regularly scheduled programing. I kind of crave co-workers, although not right now, because I don't want to get coronavirus, so I'm not going anywhere.
00:04:17
Speaker
Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the greatest podcast in the world, sponsored by Bay Path University's fully online NFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing. These faculty have a true passion and love for their work, shines through with every comment, edit, and reading assignment.
00:04:33
Speaker
The instructors are available to answer the call, answer all your questions, and their years of experience as writers and teachers have made for an unbeatable experience. Head over to baypath.edu slash MFA for more information.
00:04:51
Speaker
And as you know, this is CNF, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Hey, hey. Follow the show at CNFPod on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and be sure you're subscribed on whatever podcast player you prefer. I'd love to hear from you, man, in either email, form, via tweet, DM, comment, your choice.
00:05:21
Speaker
Hey, oh, yeah, by
Interview with Michael Shulman
00:05:23
Speaker
the way, Michael Shulman is here. He's a staff writer for The New Yorker. He's written some of my favorite profiles of late on people like Adam Driver, Bo Burnham, and most recently, someone made me reach out to him. He wrote about James Corden. The man can spin a yarn is Michael Shulman. He's at MJ Shulman on Twitter, but we'll get to him shortly.
00:05:49
Speaker
So while you're washing your hands today, several times, one hopes, for upwards of 20 seconds, one hopes, singing happy birthday two times, sing happy birthday to the podcast. This day, this CNF Friday, March 20th, is when this podcast launched seven years ago. This day, exact day, I can't believe it.
00:06:16
Speaker
Though I hadn't heard of them at the time, I was only behind the long form podcast by like 32 weeks. So we kind of started around the same time. They stuck with it while I floundered a bit until about the end of 2016 and really got rocking and rolling in 2017. In any case, this show has nearly published 200 interviews with the best of the best.
00:06:39
Speaker
Seven years. I can't tell you what it means to have made it this far. To get to make this show every week and make the friendships the show has allowed. I get to talk to you. I get to share this with you. Make this for you. What a privilege, right?
00:06:57
Speaker
person I was seven years ago is unrecognizable to the person I am now in large part because of this show and what it asked of me. So here's to seven more years, right? Happy birthday CNF pod. If this show has meant anything to you, tweet some love at it at CNF pod and maybe leave some cake. If you know what I mean on Apple podcasts.
00:07:25
Speaker
So, I tell you, it's been another week seeing efforts. It has been another week. Never got the tool last week, so understandably so, but no tool show. This was the first full week of day job from home, and it's disorienting.
00:07:43
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certainly a bit on mooring, just tooling around on social media. You can see people are going a bit crazy, a bit wacky. I get it. Though, I gotta say, I'm thankful that I have a job where I can do this from home because I know there are a lot of people out there struggling with this whole quarantine stuff. If you're struggling out there, if you're getting laid off or your hours are cut, I'm thinking about you.
00:08:13
Speaker
I really am. Lean on your community. Lean on your CNFers. If you need to, email me. Email the show. Ping me on Twitter. I'll put my arm around you and say we're going to get through this. Maybe even submit an essay on social distancing. You caught that at the top of the show, right?
00:08:32
Speaker
It's going to be a slog, this whole thing, but let's try and do our best work because when things get back to normal, we're going to want to read in here and see what you're capable of. I mean it, man.
00:08:46
Speaker
So Michael Schulman's here. He's the brilliant writer behind many of your favorite profiles. In this episode, we talk about his working at the New Yorker Festival for nine years, which led to his break at the magazine, his background in theater, how he learned to interview for story and reportage versus live interviews, how his work is driven by joy and how he likes to boil down his features and his profiles to one word.
00:09:14
Speaker
You're gonna love this one, CNF-ers. So let's get after it. Stay safe, stay home, enjoy this show. All right.
00:09:33
Speaker
Even before, as it was kind of lining you up, I was listening to This American Life a couple weeks ago, and sure enough, it's just like everyone's a critic episode, and then Ira starts talking about this writer named Michael who wrote this book on Meryl Streep, and he's on the intro in This American Life. How did that happen? How did that shake out?
00:09:55
Speaker
Well, so I have a friend named Amanda Duarte who does a live show called Dead Darlings, which is writers talking about things they've had to cut or, you know, things that never sell the light of day. And I was just telling her one night at a party about this method I had for, you know, keeping myself sane with my Amazon critics, which is looking at clicking their names and looking at what products they like.
00:10:24
Speaker
you know, like a cupcake stand that came in polka dot or whatever. And she invited me to do a version of that in her show. So I made a whole PowerPoint presentation and did it for an audience of like, you know, 40 people in downtown Manhattan, half of whom were, you know, homeless people who just came for the snacks because it was at the church. And then, um,
00:10:51
Speaker
And then one person on the bill with my friend, Elna Baker, who works at This American Life, she invited me to do it at a live show that she does called Talent Show. And, and then they asked to record it for This American Life. And then after, so I performed it for, you know, like 100 drunk people in Brooklyn. And then they asked me to come into the studio and talk with Ira about it. So it just, I mean, it started as really something very,
00:11:18
Speaker
offhand and casual, and then suddenly it was a very popular podcast. And I have to admit, I was very nervous about it because talking about handling criticism and Googling yourself, it's kind of embarrassing. But I was happy with how it came out because Ira is such a
00:11:38
Speaker
disarming interviewer and Made it really comfortable for me. That's amazing and to what extent I'm always curious about this Especially when I was talking to say like David Kestenbaum or even like some of his other reporters in that intro So it might be a little different than your experience, but I wonder to what extent that interview is semi
00:12:01
Speaker
Scripted for lack of a better term like it or was it 100% organic. You didn't know what was coming in When you were you know recording that intro Yeah, no, it was totally organic I mean he I Chatted with him a little bit as I came in about sort of what is this is this gonna be sort of cutting back and forth with? The live version that he taped and he said it was which you know in the final version he decided not to use the live recording and
00:12:28
Speaker
of me doing it for an audience. But no, I didn't know what was coming. And there was one point where he turned the tables on me and said, have you ever looked at your five-star reviews and seen what those people reviewed on Amazon? And he had prepared examples for me, which were hilarious. But I had never thought of that, and I certainly didn't see that coming. Yeah, that cracked me up when he's like, have you ever looked at this? You're like, oh, no. And he's like, well, we did.
00:12:57
Speaker
Yeah, no, it was a total setup because he made me go through some of the reviews that I had talked about on stage. And one of them was the person who gave me a one star review and then give a five star review to a gift card on Amazon. And I just sort of riffed on that about how ridiculous that was to review an Amazon gift card on Amazon. And then that was a total setup because then he said, Oh, you know, here's someone who gave your book a
Michael Shulman's Career Journey
00:13:23
Speaker
great review. And they also
00:13:25
Speaker
Reviewed an Amazon gift card. It was a brilliant set up. It was so great. I thought it was really funny. So we talked for about 45 minutes and he used nine minutes of it. So it was nine minutes in the end and I don't know. I thought it was very well put together.
00:13:45
Speaker
Now, this is always something I've wondered about in terms of editing audio and what it means to edit down to the best possible sound, but also honoring the time that you are putting in. So you spend 45 minutes with him. He uses 20% of that.
00:14:07
Speaker
How does that make you feel in terms of, all right, I spent close to an hour, but they used 10 minutes. How do you like that? I was thrilled because they used a good nine minutes. I didn't want everything to be in there because I was sort of stumbling and trying to find my point and saying things that I was like, oh, I shouldn't have said that. So I was very happy with it. I'm used to it because I interview people all the time.
00:14:36
Speaker
for long pieces and I don't use most of it. Exactly. I use the best part.
00:14:44
Speaker
Exactly. It's weird. As writers, as feature writers, when you think about the three hours you might talk to a source and then you use one quote, you don't kind of think about it when you're composing a story. But sometimes the audio part, it almost feels a little more like, oh, you had to sat down, we're recording, the mics are on.
00:15:07
Speaker
that you want to use more of it, but really in service of that part of the story and certainly in service of what you're writing, you need to use the juicy parts to make them sound best, but also just to get the gold that you've been panning for the whole time. A professor of mine in college said selection is as creative as generation, meaning that, you know, this was a theater directing class.
00:15:33
Speaker
But to choose, you know, the act of choosing is creative. You know, as important as coming up with something from nothing.
00:15:44
Speaker
and and what i like about at least how this how this thing came about where you were on this american life is that you at first you did you know you're on this dead darling show and then you know you perform for forty minutes for forty people and then another you know hundred people men of course you know someone in that audience happens to be this person in there something to be said about just putting yourself out there and like being out in in the world creatively and that's kind of how these
00:16:12
Speaker
these experiences kind of generate themselves because you had somewhat of a creative courage to kind of go out on that limb and look what happens as a result of that, right? Yeah, I guess, except I was a little freaked out by it, too, because I hadn't planned on the whole world hearing this spiel I did for the drunk people in a church. So, yeah, it was, I don't know, came as a surprise to me.
00:16:41
Speaker
Very nice. All right. Let's back up a little bit. Tell me where you grew up and what your folks did and what you were like as a kid. I grew up in Manhattan, actually, which people find very surprising because there's a lot of people here in New York, but not a lot of people who are from here. I was born and raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. My father's a lawyer. My mother is in
00:17:08
Speaker
early childhood education. I was a pretty shy kid until I was about 10. And then I went away to summer camp and one of the counselors thought that I'd be good in the plays. So he cast me as the scarecrow in Wizard of Oz. And that started my coming out of my shell process. And I don't know, I was a bit sort of dreamy and spacey as a kid and then became more extroverted.
00:17:35
Speaker
Were you a bookish kid, always into stories and stuff of that nature? Yeah, but I also loved things like Broadway shows, which we would go to see all the time. I was obsessed with The Muppet, so I think I had a bit of a wild, chaotic side that was waiting to come out.
00:17:57
Speaker
At what point did you kind of get a validation as a creator, as a writer that this is something that you might be able to take up as you were, say, going through high school and into college? Well, I really kind of backed into writing. As I said, I started acting in camp plays and school plays when I was 10. And really into that, I loved acting. I took an after-school theater class.
00:18:24
Speaker
And then in college, I started theater directing, and that was really my main activity. And I saw myself going into that or possibly going into filmmaking. And it wasn't until I met this professor named Deb Margolin that I really got interested in writing. She has an interesting background. She's a performance artist who came up in the feminist downtown performance scene of the 80s.
00:18:49
Speaker
in New York City, and her class was a lot about just getting people to write, even if they didn't think they were writers. You know, if you were an actor taking the class or a director or whatever, and not necessarily a playwright, she would just get people to write. You know, we write in our journals, do automatic writing. We do these fill in the blanks as prompts. You know, she just made it really easy.
00:19:14
Speaker
And, you know, other writing classes that I had taken in college, you know, there was one that was a, I think it was a poetry writing class that I didn't end up taking because the first day the guy just went around the table and asked people to name their favorite poet and then just, you know, ridiculed everyone's answers. So, you know, there was kind of, there's kind of like this hazing element through a lot of creative, you know, creative writing classes.
00:19:41
Speaker
And Deb just didn't have any of that. She just wanted people to try it. And we all did our own, we created these solo performance pieces, which were really, you know, like personal essays that were staged or character pieces. So that just made it seem like it was something that was accessible and got me interested in doing it. And then, you know, it wasn't until I, I don't know, I mean, I nevertheless, I graduated, I moved back to New York and I did have this plan to
00:20:11
Speaker
maybe be a theater director, maybe go to film school. I did a bunch of odd jobs in the city. I worked in a nursery school. I assistant directed a children's magic show off Broadway. At one point I was working for a guy who bought and sold Civil War memorabilia. So I was taking photos and writing descriptions of these letters from soldiers back home, or medallions and things, and learning all these terms, like models,
00:20:41
Speaker
Then I applied to film school with the idea of, you know, studying screenwriting and directing. And the week I got into Columbia film school, and it's turned down by NYU, that week, I also was offered a job at the New Yorker, working in the special events department that put on the New Yorker festival. So, and I had this background that appealed to the director of the festival, Rhonda Sherman,
00:21:09
Speaker
which was that I was an English major, but I also knew how to put on a show. And the whole thing about the New Yorker Festival is that it's translating the New Yorker into a kind of live version on stage. And so I decided, you know, I could go to film school, but I feel like this scares me more in a way. I had never worked in an office. I liked the New Yorker and didn't know how it worked. And the idea of sort of being there just kind of terrified me, but I thought I should learn how to do this. I'll just do this for a year and then I'll
00:21:39
Speaker
I'll apply to film school again, because you couldn't defer. So I took the job with the New Yorker Festival and worked there for a year, applied to Columbia again. I got in again. And the same week I got in again, the woman who edited the theater listings for Going Is On About Town started sending me on assignments to review plays. And these were unsigned capsule reviews of 80 words.
00:22:07
Speaker
But I still thought, you know, I should see where this is going. I'm now getting this little opportunity to write for the magazine. And back then, there was no website, really. So that was the only, like, there were very few avenues into writing if you were a young person who worked in the office. So at that point, I turned down Columbia Film School again and thought to myself, okay, I'm clearly not going to film school. You know, I've made this decision now two years in a row. They are very nice to let me in, but they, I mean, I must be like a complete crazy person to them.
00:22:36
Speaker
Um, and I think I should stick with this New Yorker thing for a bit more. And so I wound up working on the New Yorkers festival staff for nine years. Oh, wow. Um, and that was really my, that was really my, my sort of my day job there. But during that time I branched out, I really wanted to write for the talk of the town section, uh, which I, I just love, you know, I still write for quite a lot. So, and to me, you know, I had never studied journalism. I had never done any journalism.
00:23:04
Speaker
But Talk of the Town seems to me much more in keeping with these writers that I had loved who were kind of absurdist playwrights, like Christopher Durang and John Guare and Tom Stoppard, these kind of very cerebral but silly writers of plays. And, you know, Talk of the Town pieces are basically like one-act plays. You know, they have a beginning, middle, and end. They take place sort of in real time. They are very dialogue-heavy. And they're all about sort of observing the, you know,
00:23:34
Speaker
joyful ironies of life. So I just felt like I got them and I could do them. And again, this was a point where the magazine didn't have original web content. So that was pretty much the only game in town to get started writing. If you worked there is to is to write for the talk of the town section, aside from the anonymous theater reviews that I was writing. I did a bunch of trial and error where I pitched pieces and wrote them and they weren't quite right.
00:24:02
Speaker
But the editor, Susan Morrison, was so encouraging and just kept saying, you know, try again, you know, I'm sure you'll be able to write them. And kept telling me, like, if I had an idea, she'd say, oh, yeah, go try it. Finally, around the summer of 2006, I was living near the South Street Seaport in downtown New York. And one day I went out and I saw this guy at a sort of exhibit
00:24:28
Speaker
outside the seaport under a tent. And he was a Cooper from Colonial Williamsburg. And Coopers are people who make barrels and tubs and things, you know, anything that involves a wooden stave bound by, you know, loops of metal. I just grabbed him. This is a Saturday. And I said, What are you doing tomorrow? And he said, I don't know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna walk around the city with my wife. And I said, Can I come with you? Can I write about? Can I write a story about you? He said, Sure.
00:24:55
Speaker
And that's when I thought, well, we should go to, since you're from colonial Williamsburg, we should go to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which back then was not really the gentrified place it was now. It was really like a hipster hotbed. It was really, it was really like a crunchy place for like college kids, which is on its way to gentrification, but not, not, you know, big, glassy towers. So I took him and his wife to Williamsburg and
00:25:23
Speaker
I thought he was going to just remark about how trendy everything was, but instead he would just point at all the barrels that he saw, like in the back of bars and critique them. And, you know, the water towers on top of buildings, which are also, he'd be like, oh, that's Cooperidge. So it was just absurd. And I didn't even pitch this story. I just, I just did it and wrote it and turned it in. And that was my first talk of the town piece. And so then I started writing them more regularly and, you know, eventually was able to do
00:25:51
Speaker
longer profiles and I started freelancing to build up my experience. So, you know, this is the long answer to the question, how did you get, you know, who encouraged you to write or how did you get into it? It was really just like a series of, you know, a little, just a series of accidents and I still haven't, you know, ever taken a class in journalism or anything like that.
00:26:15
Speaker
Yeah, in a sense, you might not have had the formal class in journalism, but working on the New Yorker festival staff for nine years and being immersed in the culture, and of course, most likely, well, you like the talk of the town piece, so you're reading those, you're reading the magazine. Really, in some ways, there's no better education than to go out and just read the stuff you want to be writing. It seems like, yeah, it may be not a formal education, but
00:26:43
Speaker
In a sense, you were kind of auditing a master class. Yeah, and also you learned by being edited. I really needed some heavy editing at the beginning and was so grateful that this editor, Susan, took the time to get my pieces in shapes that I could learn. And I would sit and study, okay, why did she make this change? Why did she write this sentence this way? And for that section, Talk of the Town, it's so much about
00:27:11
Speaker
rhythm and tone and humor, and it's extremely specific. So I would spend a long time trying to think about, you know, after a piece came out, I'd think, okay, how did it wind up this way? Why is this the way? And that's how I learned how to do it. But it's still a bit scary
Developing Interview Skills
00:27:28
Speaker
to, you know, learn how to write journalism while writing for The New Yorker. So I sometimes do wish I had taken a class or something. Yeah. You know, learning how to interview also with another skill that
00:27:42
Speaker
It's difficult. It took me a while to figure out how to do it. Yeah. How did you cultivate that skill of not only just interviewing to get information, but interviewing to develop narrative and develop story? For Talk of the Town pieces, they're also really – they're a lot about observation too. You don't want to just have an interview. You want to have someone out in the world.
00:28:08
Speaker
you know, interacting with other people, doing things, interacting with a location. You know, they're really not kind of sit-down interviews. I'm trying to get some examples. I mean, even for celebrity interviews that I do for that section, I try to get them out into the world to do something. You know, like, there's one example that I loved doing was when Emma Thompson came out with her movie, Saving Mr. Banks, about P.L. Travers, who wrote the Mary Poppins book.
00:28:36
Speaker
I thought, OK, how do we do something? That's Mary Poppins-esque. And I cajoled her into going to fly a kite in Central Park. So I went and flew a kite with Emma Thompson. And the piece was about her flying a kite. And then in the middle of the kite flying, she would talk to me about P.L. Travers. And I'd ask her about her experience with nannies. And I feel like it's a great format because
00:29:05
Speaker
you know, people especially who are promoting a movie or a project or a play, they go a little bit on autopilot in terms of, you know, their spiel. Just getting them out into the world is a great way to get something fresher and more original. And also to describe something a bit funny and absurd. Yeah, and in terms of just learning how to interview, you know, it's obviously, you know, 70%
00:29:35
Speaker
an organic skill, just the ability to talk with people, the ability to sort of read people quickly and then put them at ease and figure out what they respond to. But then you learn to, I guess, anticipate things that you'll need later, you know, if someone's telling a story that they didn't say, you know, where the story took place, what year it was, you know, I know now to stop and say, okay,
00:29:59
Speaker
explain this a little bit clearly, more clearly. And then also, you know, when people get sort of off track onto something that you just know is not going to be super helpful how to politely steer them back. It's not brain surgery interviewing, but it's not easy either.
00:30:13
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. For a lot of people, they don't realize that it is kind of like a skill you kind of learn. And then it also, it's on you to have, say, the courage to stay, like, stop and slow them down, be like, oh, no, this is great. Like, I'm trying to... Can you, like, dig deep on this? Because this is something they've been stewing on for years, and here you are hearing it for the first time. You're like, oh, no.
00:30:36
Speaker
Let's slow down. Let's expand on this. Let's go back. Put us in context and slow them down in that nature. It's definitely something you learn and cultivate over time, which it appears that you've done quite well being able to write these long features and these Talk of the Town pieces. And also sort of trusting yourself to not be too scripted in what you're asking, allowing for there to be spontaneity.
00:31:06
Speaker
within but also getting what you need, you know? Yeah.
00:31:10
Speaker
Yeah, there's a great interviewer I know who, his name's Joe Donahue. He's my favorite interviewer. He hosts a couple shows for WAMC Public Radio in Albany, New York, so about two hours north of you. And he just kind of calls it like a call and response thing. He does his research, but he's also like, he's a great listener and he's very open to wherever the conversation stirs it. And he just has a great way of
00:31:38
Speaker
navigating that and not just reading off a list of questions which you know is irritating to a listener if you ask me yeah yeah and different different forms of interview also require different kinds of things I mean I've now started doing more interviews for the New Yorker radio hour and you know as you know audio interviews are completely different skill something that people are going or you know being in the New Yorker festival I've now you know interviewed people live on stage a number of times and
00:32:07
Speaker
You need to approach it completely differently than something that's going to be written up and more descriptive and observational. They're all slightly different skills.
00:32:21
Speaker
Yeah, the live interview, that must be tricky, because there is an essentially, well, maybe not for you, because there's a performative element to it, and that kind of tethers back to your experience as an actor, at least in studying the theater. Was that kind of a natural transition for you to be able to be comfortable in that chair up on a stage speaking to somebody? Yeah, I don't get nervous about being on stage at all. I'm pretty comfortable with it, and I like it. You know, I'm fine with that.
00:32:50
Speaker
it's it's tricky in other ways, you know, if you're interviewing someone on stage, you really have to let them shine. And, and people just some people just have different wavelengths and others. I mean, I did one with Nathan Lane. And he just he was very he was sort of tight lipped backstage. And I thought, Oh, my gosh, Nathan Lane actually not fun. And then we got on stage in front of me in front of 600 people, and he just lit up.
00:33:20
Speaker
like that and was just did a show, you know, I asked about five questions and in an hour and 15 minutes and it was over. It was so easy. But, you know, but then other people are a little more challenging.
00:33:38
Speaker
When you were starting to gain some momentum with these Talk of the Town pieces, even the first one with the Cooper, and you were starting to see how you were being edited, what was that experience like, you know, turning in something that you thought was like, all right, this feels fully formed, and then you get it back, and it's like, holy shit, I have a lot of learning to do here. Well, I never thought it was fully formed. I mean, I'm happy to be edited, and editing is so great.
00:34:06
Speaker
What was exciting about it was that I loved talking to town. I read it religiously, just hoping to be sort of just soak it in and do it. So seeing a sentence get a little bit more talk of the towny, a little bit funnier, a little bit sharper, it was great. I was so happy about it. It wasn't always what I expected. A lot of the time it was just about simplifying things, clarifying things. It was never about making anything sound
00:34:37
Speaker
If that makes sense, you know, it was, it was much more about subtracting than, than adding or, or, or clarifying really. And sometimes.
00:34:47
Speaker
she asked me for a little more detail about something or even a little more reporting, which is great. And as you started doing longer and longer features, how did you start to develop the pacing and the endurance to carry a story to five and eight and 10,000 words after developing some of those finer muscles in Talk of the Town? How did you start to develop that endurance to carry a narrative over the course of
00:35:16
Speaker
several thousand words. Yeah, it's you know, it that that was a more that was a steeper learning curve, I think, when I first started writing things that were, you know, 500 5000 were New Yorker profile, because you do have to think much more about structure. You know, I hadn't done it before. And I had the same editor who was great and very patient.
00:35:41
Speaker
But you know, it's learning things like, you know, the quote unquote bio section where you say so and so was born in 1980 in Birmingham. You know, knowing how one of the one of the earliest things that she encouraged me to do is just delay that delay that you have to care about the person first before you start, you know, find out about their childhood, things like that, that weren't obvious to me. And, you know, they're just complex, you know, puzzles.
00:36:09
Speaker
And those were cases where, again, I'd have to at times go out and report a little more because it didn't have quite the, you know, there was some element missing, you know, the idea of mixing scenes with interview, you know, seeing people, you know, you open on a scene or shift to something where someone is in a, you know, shopping for scarves or whatever. You know, the New Yorker profile has a certain
00:36:38
Speaker
this certain rhythm and this certain structure. You know, I'll tell you something, the first one I was signed, never ran. So my first attempt at this completely failed. And it was a combination of reasons. One is that I had no idea how to write them. And was just making it up as I went along and turning in drafts that were not quite right. And so I had to go back report a little more, redo them and
00:37:09
Speaker
and, you know, sent in a completely new draft. And then at the same time, so the subject of this profile was a Broadway composer who had just had a big hit. And I think the editors thought, okay, well, he's writing, you know, three more musicals. So one of them will be on Broadway in the next year, and that'll be the time to run this piece. And meanwhile, I was trying, failing, trying, failing to, you know, get it in shape. And, you know, musicals take
00:37:38
Speaker
years and years to develop. And this guy kind of stalled in where his shows were going. The piece was just stuck. It was just stuck. My writing was not good enough. He didn't have a show kind of landing on Broadway right away as the sort of sophomore effort to this big show that had been a huge success. So it just got stuck and I was so discouraged and
00:38:06
Speaker
Finally, I went back to the editor and said, can I please just put this aside and, you know, try something else? And thankfully, she gave me a new subject who was a playwright who had a play going to Broadway like in three months. And that was my first profile that got published. And it's one I'm still very happy with. So I think it did take me this, you know,
00:38:31
Speaker
this belly flop to figure out how to do it and to get a subject who kind of clicked. How did you find the confidence to bounce back from that discouragement of banging your head against the wall of that first profile to then sink back into the pocket of the second one, which was a great rebound effort for you? I don't know. I was really stressed about it.
00:39:00
Speaker
And, you know, this went on for like two years, maybe, but I was just kind of working on this one piece. I remember seeing a friend of mine from college around that time when I was really just sort of just torturing myself over it. And he was a friend from out of town and I saw him, you know, maybe once every year or two. And he said, listen, if I see you next time and you're still working on this piece, I'm going to be furious at you. You need to, you know, you can't you can't live your life inside of this.
00:39:30
Speaker
thing that's going nowhere. And that was really helpful. I was like, yeah, he's right. I can't, you know, this is this can't be forever. I can't let my entire small budding writing career just stall out because of this one story. You have to keep moving. And, you know, I won't lie and say it was, you know, that I was just confident and happy the whole time that something would work out. And in fact, when I realized that the story was not going to run, no one ever really told me it wasn't going to run. It just didn't. And then I finally was like,
00:39:59
Speaker
you know, please give me something else to work on. That didn't necessarily have to happen, you know, I might have just, you know, it might have just ended right there. But I do think it's important to just keep moving as a writer and not just not get stuck in something that takes over your life and makes you miserable. I don't know, I needed to keep moving and found a way to do that.
00:40:25
Speaker
Yeah, and with
Balancing Writing Projects
00:40:26
Speaker
respect to keeping moving as a, you know, as a staff writer for New Yorker, but also freelancing pieces here and there, how do you keep that flywheel in motion, and how do you generate your ideas and go down, you know, go down maybe multiple rabbit holes so you can, as you say, keep moving? Well, I'm always working on a bunch of things at once. You know, and they're a combination of short things, medium things, and long things. To go back to theater for a second,
00:40:54
Speaker
The late, great director, producer Hal Prince always said that whenever he had a show open, his first meeting for his next show was scheduled for the next day. You know, there's something about keeping moving. I just always have a list of things that I'm pursuing or in the middle of working on. So it never feels like anything just grinds to a halt.
00:41:21
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a... Austin Kleon has a great term for that, and he calls it like creative chain smoking. It's like whenever you finish one project, you use the ember of that dying cigarette to light the next project. That way, you never do stall. Right, yeah, and I get pretty miserable the few times when I don't have something exciting that I'm working on, you know? I'm kind of in this for the fun, I should say. You know, as you probably picked up, I never, you know,
00:41:48
Speaker
I'm not the kind of person who went to journalism school or, you know, worship newspaper reporting or hard news. I just kind of thought, like, you know, I was like a theater kid who fell into a tight, this very specific type of journalism that is kind of like nonfiction humor. And it makes me really happy to do so. Yeah, I kind of pursue fun and try to make, you know,
00:42:17
Speaker
try to put out writing that is sort of driven by, I don't know, by like an element of joy. Are there other things you're doing on the side that help sort of subsidize and supplement the writing you're doing or is the freelancing you're doing like the main gig that is sustaining you?
00:42:42
Speaker
Well, I'm not a freelancer anymore because I'm now a staff writer. So that's, I really got one gig, but you know, over the years it's been, it's been a few different situations. Um, you know, after nine, so after nine years in the New Yorker festival department, I had sort of worked my way up this tiny little department to a point where I was booking the festival and you know, it's 50 events in three days. So that's a really stressful job and dealing with, you know, a thousand different elements. And, um, you know, it was a really great job.
00:43:12
Speaker
But I felt at a certain point like, okay, this is actually really tough. And I feel a bit chained to my desk. And I realized that I wasn't moving as quickly as I wanted to within the New Yorker while working in this department. So that's the point where I started thinking about wanting to write a book. And when I got this book deal, I quit my job.
00:43:41
Speaker
I went from being at the office five days a week to working at home five days a week and just waking up every morning and thinking about this one thing. So that was really different. And this is your Meryl Streep book, right? Yeah, yeah. So I would just wake up every day and it would be another day of thinking and writing and researching all about Meryl Streep. So that was a pretty intense way to live. And I didn't do a ton for The New Yorker during that time. I kept my connection with it, but I didn't
00:44:10
Speaker
I didn't have co-workers, I was just on my own. And then as I was finishing that, the magazine just happened to have like a part-time editing job. And I wasn't, you know, I wasn't ready to give up my, you know, writerly life at home, but I also missed having co-workers and it was the perfect situation for me. And that job, which was actually taking over the editing of the theater section of Going From the Bad Town, which I had written for
00:44:39
Speaker
for many years at that point. That was just a great way to get back into the magazine. And that's what led me to being a full time writer for them. So I've now so I've now had situations where I was full time at an office, zero time at an office and half and half. And for me, I think half and half is a really good way to do it because I'm a very social creature and I don't like being on my own all the time.
00:45:08
Speaker
I kind of crave co-workers, although not right now, because I don't want to get coronavirus. I'm not going anywhere. But I also don't want to be in a sort of office environment every single day. Right now, I have this freedom to go in when I want to or when I'm closing a piece and have to have meetings and stuff like that. And I usually go one or two days a week into the New Yorker. But I don't know. I also like working at home.
00:45:37
Speaker
So.
00:45:39
Speaker
So I get a little bit of both. And I'm never completely desperate for people for socializing. Yeah. And I like this idea of, too, when you're trying to bring a piece home. That's when you kind of go into the office for maybe those two days and try to stick the landing. So what's that experience like when you've got this thing? It's just about there. But you're at 10,000 feet and you're coming down to JFK. So what does that look like as you're maybe going back and forth with your editor?
00:46:10
Speaker
Well, at that point, a lot of people are involved, you know, that we have a very, very thorough fact checking process. So and the fact checkers are totally great. They're so brilliant. So you have a fact checker who, you know, you've been working with for, you know, a week or two. You have the subject usually, you know, on schedule, the subject always freaks out when they're being fact checked, because they suddenly hear this grocery list of
00:46:38
Speaker
thing is that they, you know, what they said and what they wore on whatever day two months ago, and they're suddenly think, wait, who, what is this? What's in this story? And one of the benefits of fact checking is that the freak out is then, and you can deal with it and not, you know, the moment it appears in print, or online. So you're dealing with a fact checker, you're dealing with the subject. And, you know, if it's a celebrity, a publicist who is having all these, you know, last minute concerns,
00:47:08
Speaker
with your editor, of course, with a copy editor. And there are multiple levels of editing as well. There's our editor in chief, David Remnick, who reads things and sometimes weighs in with his own notes. So it's just there's a lot of people involved. And I love that aspect of it. And we usually end with a closing meeting with the editor, the fact checker, the copy editor, and the writer. And we go page by page. And if anyone has any laughs,
00:47:37
Speaker
changes or questions or whatever, we can all do it then. We all go around one by one and fine tune these very last things. I love that. I always have a good time doing it.
00:47:51
Speaker
Yeah, it sounds really, really cool, like you're a social critter yourself, but also that it does have this element of collaboration, which is really, I don't know, I think kind of nourishing in a way to get all those kind of voices, because ultimately it serves the piece in the end to have all these voices who really want this thing to sing. Yeah, and you know, working on a long piece, it's just a big puzzle, you know, and
00:48:21
Speaker
one sentence up top will affect some other sentence on the last page. And, you know, like we just had one where it was like, oh, we changed this one line. And that means that we don't mention anywhere that the subject has three children. Do we need to put that somewhere? We lost that fact. Where do we put that? You know, this has to go before this other thing. You know, it's just a big project that with a lot of moving pieces and that's fun to work on.
00:48:48
Speaker
And I imagine that the James Corden profile that you did a few weeks ago, well that published a few weeks ago at this point, that must have been a great intersection of a lot of your passions and everything, given that it was a brilliant celebrity profile for one and nobody does celebrity profiles better than a New Yorker in my opinion.
00:49:08
Speaker
but also the fact that he's a performer and came from theater and all this and he's a singer and all this, it must have really just overlapped a lot of interest for you as the reporter to do this piece. It did, yeah. I mean, I love writing about performers. I love writing about actors. He was a kind of born and bred performer. That was a challenging
Celebrity Profiles & Narrative Techniques
00:49:32
Speaker
piece, actually, in part because a lot of people don't like James Corden.
00:49:38
Speaker
I knew that going in. I knew that he just kind of bugs people, certain people, not everyone. Some people I know like just were thrilled and they loved him. They're like, Oh my gosh, he's such a talent. Um, you know, for me, I had a lovely time with him and I went to the set of the late late show for a week and everyone was really nice. But I was also aware that they were in some sense putting on a show for me. And you know what the tricky thing was that I wanted to invite in people who were reading who
00:50:09
Speaker
don't like James Corden or had their doubts about James Corden and say, OK, I see you. This is not a puff piece. This is not a takedown either. But we're going to talk about what it is about him that people either love or don't love. And that I just found very tricky.
00:50:28
Speaker
Yeah, that must have been – did you come in knowing that that was the approach you wanted to take to the piece and then realize, like, this is going to be kind of a tough nut to crack, but in order to tell this story the best possible way, I'm going to have to address the sort of nuance around, you know, him and, you know, who he represents. Yeah, I mean, for me, there's always – with the celebrity profile, you're always writing about
00:50:54
Speaker
kind of two things at once. One is who the person is at their core and why they are that way. And the other is who they are in the culture and their their importance. You know, to give another example, a few months ago, I wrote a profile of Adam Driver, who and that, in a way, it was a much easier profile to write, because he, first of all, he's just so eccentric. And he's just like this big ball of, you know, anxiety. And, you know, the stuff that's interesting about him, just
00:51:24
Speaker
comes out of every pore. He's just an interesting person to write about. And I knew it would be a fun story to work on. You know, but I was also writing about why is it that this guy is suddenly in everything? And why is it that all these great directors love to work with him? Along with so I didn't want it to just be like, Adam Driver is a kooky dude. You know, it was also is Adam Driver
00:51:49
Speaker
an important actor of his generation and why. People who live very public lives, you kind of have to write about their public persona, don't I, I guess. That to me is something really fascinating, you know, how people interact, you know, with the world, you know, how they deal with fame. I think fame is a really, it's like this,
00:52:18
Speaker
catalyst that just it almost switched metaphors. It almost magnifies certain elements of people's personalities. And, you know, it's a real challenge for some people to sort of see how people's personalities and past intersect with, you know, them becoming famous with James Corden. That was also a big topic because he became famous in England as a 20 something. And
00:52:47
Speaker
went through a period where he acted like a huge jerk and admits that he was being a huge jerk. And basically everyone in England just turned against him. And he had to almost restart his career in America. So I found that arc so interesting. And a lot of people who know him here in the States, this was all news to them that he had this kind of tabloid life in England 10 years ago. And that was a real revelation for a lot of people who read the profile, who didn't know
00:53:16
Speaker
where he had come from, why this British guy was suddenly on their TV screens five nights a week. Yeah, and getting to the reporting of the piece itself, I think there's only one instance, because I just put a box around it, where you essentially said that he told you something. I don't think you lean on that.
00:53:42
Speaker
that device very often and like when you do that in a piece are you just trying to signify to the reader that or signal to the reader that was like hey this is this is a part of this is reporting that I got firsthand from him and not like something that I was able to like say pluck from I don't know a Vanity Fair interview or something no I mean it's all it's all things you know I I rarely quote previous profiles you know it's all things that I observe and experience
00:54:11
Speaker
You know, I think maybe what you're asking is like the moment where I kind of put myself in it a tiny bit. I think I do that at the end when he's packing in his house and he talks to me about cats. I mean, I just, you know, I sometimes like to have a moment where I don't really put myself in it as like a subject, but I want people to imagine me having a conversation with him just because it's a weird moment that opens up a little side door to something or is revealing in some way.
00:54:38
Speaker
and isn't necessarily just a sort of disembodied quote, or even him going about his business at the Late Late Show or whatever. You know, I had that in the Adam Driver profile, too. There was a moment where we were talking about Fight Club, and I said something about toxic masculinity, and he had no idea what I was talking about. It's like, toxic masculinity? I haven't heard much about that.
00:55:04
Speaker
And then it kind of, he thought about that. And then I saw him later that very day and he brought it up again. And he was almost frustrated at that point. And it, because he felt like he's this kid who grew up in Indiana in a very conservative religious environment. And he still feels like he just hasn't learned sort of some sophisticated stuff that people talk about, you know, in this, in this milieu that he's been now of, you know, kind of Brooklyn-y pop culture.
00:55:33
Speaker
So I just thought that that was really revealing and interesting. And so I, you know, I kind of wove myself into that part a tiny bit.
00:55:43
Speaker
Yeah, that choice that a reporter makes always fascinates me. I'm always keeping my ears attuned to when and if are they going to fold into the story and why are they doing it. I always love unpacking that a bit, so that's kind of cool to see your process behind that.
00:56:04
Speaker
as a strategy for telling the story. Towards the end of the Corden piece, I love this part that you were able to cite. It was from Gary Shanling's diaries or something to the effect that Corden was reading it. It's something that
00:56:22
Speaker
Shelling had written it says like don't I don't identify yourself with your career. You are you you are not your job Also the summer work on your stand-up. That was a note. Shelling was writing to himself and that's right at the end of the piece and I kind of extend so that you're coming down to the hammer so that you know, there's
00:56:40
Speaker
definitely meaning there and I'd extend that to you like how do you sort of you know maybe get back to doing quote-unquote you know stand up and not identify yourself too much with the craft that you're doing you know what is that how does that manifest for you maybe hmm oh that's an interesting question I will say first of all that the second that that happens I knew that was going to be the end of the profile like the moment I heard him talk about that scary channeling quote and say maybe it's not so healthy to
00:57:09
Speaker
have a standing ovation every day. I was like, that's it, there's my ending. I mean, that's perfect. So no matter, you know, there's a whole part after that where I went to London with him and met his parents and everything, but I thought, okay, I'm gonna work my way back to that. And so it was a huge relief to have an ending. You kind of know when you hear it, and I knew it right then. I was like, that's the last line. But for me, you know, being a writer, you have to just remain interested in things and not,
00:57:38
Speaker
and not cut yourself off from experience. For me, I think it's more of a challenge. There's so much talk now about being a brand, especially on my social media. What's your brand? And to me, the challenge is more, how do I just shake myself loose of that a little bit and not worry so much about what's my brand? Is this something that people would expect me to do? Sometimes I like it.
00:58:06
Speaker
do something and someone's like, oh, that's such a Michael thing, like a story or I like to keep myself on my toes a little bit and not be too on on brand. Even right now, I'm sort of feeling like I want to do something that's not just a profile of a performer, although I do. That's what I'm actively working on right now is another one of those keeping myself on my toes and not worrying about too much about sort of what people expect or or, you know, what what my kind of
00:58:35
Speaker
circle of interest is perceived to be. I think it's helpful on some level to know that, but it also boxes you in. Have you, and pardon me if you've done this and I just didn't find it in my research, it's kind of performer adjacent. Have you done profiles on professional athletes who do have some degree of demonstrability about them?
00:59:04
Speaker
I'm telling you, I'm the last person you want to write about anything athletic. I can't do sports. I don't know sports. It's like, no. That would be a disaster. I'd be like, what's a touchdown? No.
00:59:23
Speaker
And just one more thing, Michael. When you found that ending for the cordon piece, when you stumbled upon it in your reporting, at what point in your reporting, over the course of the timeline of your reporting, did that ending strike you? The moment it happened, the moment I heard him say that line, I don't think it's healthy to have a standing ovation every day. The moment I heard it, I was like, that's the end.
00:59:51
Speaker
Um, but I, I should mention like before that happened, I, one way I focus profiles. I have been doing this lately a bit is that I give myself a secret word that is kind of the theme of the piece. And that helps me just focus, you know, for, for James Corden, for instance, it was joy. Um, because I felt like his, the way he sees himself is he's someone who tries to create happiness and joy for an audience. And.
01:00:20
Speaker
whether or not he does that or whether or not he himself is happy kind of became a through line of the piece. You know, for instance, but okay, so some other examples. I wrote a piece about Bo Burnham and the secret, the secret word for me was anxiety for some for someone else that was coming of age for someone else that was insecurity. So that really helps me make a profile that's not just a collection of anecdotes and facts.
01:00:50
Speaker
but something that coheres. And the nice thing about that is that a lot of the time, I don't use this word in the piece more than once, but I've noticed more times than not, when it comes time to write a headline and a subhead, the editor will use that word without my saying anything. Like, you know, I think with James Corden, the subhead of the piece online was
01:01:18
Speaker
you know, James Corden keeps his job as, you know, you know, to create joy, or with, with Bo Burnham, the web headline was Bo Burnham's age of anxiety. So I always find that a bit validating when, when my kind of secret theme word is picked out as the headline. I'm like, Oh, I succeeded. Like this actually does cohere around that idea. For that moment, that moment where, where Corden
01:01:48
Speaker
was reading the Gary Shamling book and wondering, is this job my key to happiness? That's why it worked, because it was him questioning his own happiness while doing this job that's all about creating happiness for others. And so it
Conclusion & Social Media Engagement
01:02:12
Speaker
just hit me. This sort of speaks directly to that
01:02:17
Speaker
that question in that theme.
01:02:20
Speaker
Very nice. Well, Michael, this was awesome getting to kind of unpack how you go about these profiles and about the work and how you got to where you are with the New Yorker. And yeah, reading these profiles that you do are always just a, you know, to piggyback on the theme of your cordon piece, just a joy to, they are a joy to read. And so anytime I see your byline, I'm like, all right, cool, like I'm gonna strap in here for an hour and have a damn good time reading this piece.
01:02:50
Speaker
So for people who want to get more familiar with your work, if they're somehow not already familiar with it, where can they find you online? Well, my work's at The New Yorker. I have a website, michael-shulman.com, where I post stuff. I don't know. I'm on Twitter, MJ Shulman. So I usually post up there. Yeah. And let me plug my book. My book is called Her Again Becoming Meryl Streep. So I have a lot of writing in that.
01:03:16
Speaker
Fantastic. Yeah, I can't wait to dig into that. Maybe sometime down the road, we can unpack the book, or even whatever next book you have coming down the line. That'd be wonderful. And there's also this great essay, great piece you wrote in, Believer, about Groundhog Day and the writer for Groundhog Day that we didn't get to talk about, which is awesome, too. Oh, thank you. You got it, Michael. Well, thanks again for the time. And yeah, enjoy the rest of your day, and stay healthy. All right. You too. Good to talk to you.
01:03:45
Speaker
We did it. We made it, CNFers. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you're subscribing to the show. Of course, this crazy show is produced by me, Brendan O'Mara. I make the show for you. I hope it made something worth sharing. And if you really dig the show.
01:04:00
Speaker
Leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Show notes are at BrendanOmero.com. Follow the show on the various social media channels at CNF Pot across them all. Get that newsletter at my website. Win books, win zines, hang out with your buddy BO. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Are we done here? We must. Because if you can't do interviews, see ya!