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Episode 250: Lindsay Jones and Her Atavist Story 'The Lives of Others'
146 Plays4 years ago
Canadian writer and journalist Lindsay Jones stops by HQ to talk about her Atavist story The Milk Box Babies about the cottage hospital industry of rural Canada and the secret that upended two families.
I also speak with editor-in-chief Seyward Darby.
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Transcript
Spotlight on Lindsay Jones and Newfoundland
00:00:01
Speaker
All right, see you in efforts. It's the end of the month, and that means one thing. Will your rent check bounce? Now wait up.
00:00:09
Speaker
Looking over at my producer and she's saying that's the wrong thing. Thank you, thank you for this. Oh, it means that we celebrate the Addivis magazine's monthly blockbuster feature. That's right. This one features the Canadian writer, Lindsay Jones, in her deep dive into the cottage hospital industry in Newfoundland and how the lives of families and individuals got turned upside down.
00:00:37
Speaker
What is family? Has family decided by only blood? It's a story of place, and when we can't really extend our wings and fly beyond the confines of our home offices and the like, it feels good to be taken somewhere else. Hey, this is 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, let's riff.
00:01:06
Speaker
Okay, this is the third rodeo celebrating an out of his story and an out of his writer.
Admiration for Lindsay's Work
00:01:12
Speaker
Previous episodes in this vein are with Scott Eden and Phil Hoad. Go check them out. If you subscribe to the show, you dig into the vast archives of interviews with long-form journals like Susan Arlene, David Grant, Ted Conover, Patrick Radenkeith, Mary Pallone, Luisa Thomas, Bronwyn Dickey, and wouldn't you know, Seyward Darby.
00:01:33
Speaker
And speaking of Seyward, she's the point guard for this piece and in this bread and butter section of the show. Seyward gives you a bit of a tease to Lindsay's piece, how it came together and how to trampoline moments, how to put trampoline moments into a piece to sustain a reader's attention for the duration of a long story. So let's do this. Batting lead-off is Seyward Darby, editor-in-chief of The Atmos Magazine.
Newfoundland as a Character
00:02:15
Speaker
about Lindsay's work that excites you? Yeah, so periodically at The Atomist I would say like once or twice a year I do a push where, I mean, we always accept pitches, right? But then once or twice a year I'll just come up with a list of names of writers whose work I've recently read and really enjoyed and I'll reach out and say, I love what you do and if you ever have something that you think would be a fit for The Atomist, let me know.
00:02:41
Speaker
And some people have stuff, some people don't have stuff, some people are unavailable for the foreseeable future. And in Lindsay's case, one of the things I really loved about her work was that we don't have all of our stories, or I shouldn't say all of our stories, the vast majority of our stories are based in the United States, or at least have a US focus in some way. And I loved how she brought to life
00:03:09
Speaker
these kind of remote rural parts of Canada in a way that made place really feel like a character. And so the work of hers that I'd read, let's see, in the Walrus, Globe and Mail, a couple of other places, she just had such dedication to place. And it was a place that I felt like
00:03:28
Speaker
in the Adidas, we hadn't had a story like that in a while, or on my watch, certainly we hadn't. And so I was excited when she came back with this incredible story about Newfoundland, a place I've never been, but now I very much would like to go when coronavirus allows, because I really think that
00:03:48
Speaker
she does a masterful job of conveying what the place is like, but then also making the place a character in this story, because it really is like it. And there's a line in the story even where, where she says, you know, in some ways, this story couldn't have happened anywhere but Newfoundland, because of the peculiarities of place. So
00:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, so that that was that was, you know, the main reason I reached out and then I thought, too, you know, she was just a beautiful writer and very unshoey and just told good stories with a lot of care. And that's always appealing to me. I like that you say unshoey because that is it's one of I think a lot of
00:04:31
Speaker
people, and I know I've been victim of this, maybe you come across writers that it's just like fire and pyrotechnics on the page and you're like, man, I want to do that. And then you try to do it and it just, it falls flat. And it's like, you know what, I am trying to belabor a cliche, like square peg round hole.
00:04:54
Speaker
what I should really be doing is surrendering to story, getting out of the way, telling it as straight as possible, you know, not trying to be David Foster Wallace or you name your pyrotechnic writer. It's so being on show is actually sometimes the best way to to be the most artistic version of yourself by just surrendering to what is surrendering to reporting your research and getting out of the way of the story.
00:05:22
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I feel like in this case, you know, this story, and I don't want to give too much away, but there's some real surprises in it. Like, yes, and I think it becomes abundantly clear early on that it is about two people who are switched at birth and discovered it, you know, many, many decades later in a very, like, kind of shockingly mundane way, frankly.
Babies Switched at Birth: A Story Unfolds
00:05:45
Speaker
And but then, you know, the story really takes some turns. And I think it took some turns for
00:05:49
Speaker
Lindsay as a writer while she was working on it. And I know when she and I were talking initially about structure, we were like, okay, how do we sprinkle these surprises? And they're not necessarily gasp worthy surprises, but they are things that add like new layers of intrigue and new questions into the story. And it was like, okay, how do we space those out in the story such that, you know,
00:06:15
Speaker
they feel like they're really going to give the reader the push to move on to the next section, where it's like, oh, wow, I didn't really see that coming. Where's this going to go now? And so we talked structurally about how to do that, how not to give everything away upfront, but rather just let the story unfold. And I think, again, she did a really, really lovely job. And her writing, I mean, I think her descriptions are both
00:06:43
Speaker
Spare but also Incredibly evocative which you know to me is is an enormous feat when somebody doesn't feel the need to include ten adjectives Yeah, you know so so yeah, I hear you about you know pyrotechnics
00:07:00
Speaker
And sometimes pyrotechnics are great fun, you know, doing something a little wild with your style and and whatnot. But I feel like with out of his stories, especially, you know, I'm always coming from a place as an editor with with the writers we work with of thinking story and structure first. And then, you know, style, they can bring style however, however they like. But really, it's those building blocks that matter the most for us. And when people are, I think maybe a lot of a lot of people, they they think that they
00:07:31
Speaker
that they can write 3, 5, 8, 10,000 word, 12,000 word stories, features. And they think that it's within reach, but then you start thinking about it and it's really, it's very, very hard to do. It takes a lot of heft and reporting and research and organization.
00:07:50
Speaker
So what is the challenge that you find for you as an editor and maybe for people whose stories fall flat to try to sustain the kind of momentum it takes to write a story in the five digit word ballpark?
Challenges in Sustaining Long-form Writing
00:08:04
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, I mean, gosh, it's such a good question and such a big question. But you know, the way I I'm actually not an outliner. So like when I write personally, I very rarely outline. But what I do is I talk to myself or I write on post-it notes.
00:08:20
Speaker
or index cards or whatever, I think about the beats of a story. So I think about what are kind of the key beats that I want to hit or that the writer wants to hit and I'm trying to help them do that. And then it's about distributing those beats.
00:08:36
Speaker
Because you, again, in a more traditional feature, you often have a lot of the beats up front because you're giving lots of context. There's the nut graph, all these different things. And then the rest of the story, because you're usually only writing up to 5,000 words or so, is, or obviously less, in many cases, you're just fleshing out what you've said up front. And with out of his stories, when you're talking, or any story that creeps into five-digit land,
00:09:03
Speaker
You know, you want to think about how to space out key moments and developments, and in some cases themes, because when you get to those beats it's almost like hitting like a trampoline at various points in the story to keep going.
00:09:18
Speaker
And so I think that that, for me, when I'm talking to writers and we're thinking about structure, it's not that I need a detailed outline, you know, in this paragraph or in this section, I will do XYZ. It's more, okay, what is the story we want to tell? What are the key beats and how do we space them out? How do we situate them?
00:09:35
Speaker
And then obviously there's a lot of filling in that happens from a scene standpoint, from a dialogue standpoint, but really, you know, those beats are, I guess, now I have this trampoline image in my head which I've never actually said or thought of before. It's like a video game, right, where you bounce on something and it pushes you farther than your little character would otherwise be moving if they were just hustling along. That, for me, is what is
00:10:01
Speaker
so helpful when you're thinking about stories of this length. Because you can get really bogged down in the details and you can worry, you know, oh, well, I, you know, I feel like I need to get all of the best stuff up front. And, and I always tell people, no, like, save good stuff, save good stuff for the middle, save good stuff for the end. And we have very discerning readers, people who want to read these stories all the way to the end. Like, that's the point of an out of a story.
00:10:27
Speaker
And so how do you space out the material such that the reader, by the time they get to the end, feels like it was really worth it? You know, they aren't losing steam by the time they get there. I guess, lastly, as we sort of trampoline into the conversation with Lindsay.
Universal Themes of Family and Emotion
00:10:45
Speaker
When you got the final product and you put the final seal on it and hit publish on this, what is it about it that just really excites you about it and you're excited to put into the hands of the reader?
00:11:02
Speaker
I love every story we publish. I love all of my children equally, as they say. But something about Lindsay's story just has really stuck with me personally. And I think because it is at once an incredibly intimate story about this place that doesn't have a lot of people, these families that are very tight knit, these communities where everybody knows everybody's name,
00:11:29
Speaker
And yet at the same time, what happens in the story feels enormous because it is enormous from an emotional standpoint. And I think it's just it has this really special mix of themes that I think are very universal. And even if you've never been to Newfoundland, even if, you know, you have no interest in going to Newfoundland, like this story, I think
00:11:53
Speaker
I don't know, it just kind of gets inside your heart in a way that not every story does. It's about family, it's about love, it's about, you know, what is family? Like, does family have to be defined by blood? Can it be defined by choice? Or in this case, you know, defined by error, frankly. And I hope that readers take away from it the same
00:12:16
Speaker
feeling feeling both like warm and fuzzy because it is kind of that sort of story it is about family and about love but then at the same time you know there's a good bit of shock and surprise and so I hope that I hope that readers come away feeling the way I did when Lindsay first told me the story and then absolutely you know when it was there on the page and I was able to read it.
00:12:38
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, always a pleasure speaking to you, Sayward. So now everyone just needs to stay tuned for my conversation with Lindsey Jones. So thanks for coming by again, Sayward. Thank you so much for having me and for having Lindsey. What are the tools that you're bringing with yourself?
00:13:07
Speaker
Um, my iPhone. So I'm big into taking tons of pictures, um, of everything because I, I always inevitably go back and ask a million questions about, you know, what's the color of your front door and
00:13:27
Speaker
Just like what, you know, what is your dog's name? And so, uh, I take a ton of photos and so I have my iPhone. I bring a tape recorder, pens, a notebook. It's not, you know, some granola bars, water. That's about it. I mean, I, for this, I was driving all around Oakport, Newfoundland for this story. Um, I crossed some serious terrain in, you know, I made a mistake and rented the
00:13:57
Speaker
smallest crappiest vehicle that was the cheapest option. And I'm driving in the middle of these torrential rainstorms on some dirt roads and things. And anyway, I learned my lesson when in Newfoundland, always rent a four by four.
00:14:17
Speaker
Yeah, the notebooks I love to use, they're a little small, but they're real sturdy and heavy duty. It's the Field Notes heavy duty thing. It's got a really hard chipboard for the front and the back. So it's almost like it's kind of a built-in clipboard if you will. It's really sturdy. It fits in your back pocket, inside pocket, like any little pocket.
00:14:36
Speaker
And that's kind of like the analog thing. And then I have an old iPhone 5C that I just use as my voice recorder if I'm in an environment that's conducive to using the voice recorder. So I love just hearing what the reporter Swiss Army Knife is like for all different reporters, how they go about getting all that information so they can synthesize it into something like the amazing piece you wrote for Atavist.
00:15:04
Speaker
Well, thanks. I feel like I have too many notebooks going at all times and I just really use whatever's on hand. I don't really have like your field notes, but I'm going to look that up and maybe, you know, I need the hardback. A lot of times like I'm outside when I'm reporting and I don't even take notes. I just take a lot of pictures and I listen.
00:15:32
Speaker
And, or I put my recorder on and then that's painful later to have to go through and you know, pick out some of the dialogue. When you're asking those detailed questions, those things that to us light us up, like the color of the door, the name of the dog.
00:15:47
Speaker
When you're talking to someone, oftentimes they're going to be like, why the hell do you even want to know that? We're details people. Those are the things that really reveal things to us as writers and journalists. How have you gotten comfortable asking those often mundane questions to get the details in the face of someone who's like, why do you care about this?
00:16:11
Speaker
So usually I warn people and say, I'm going to follow up probably a hundred times and ask you a lot of really personal questions. And I make fun of that process a little bit to them. And so I think they're warmed up for it. You know, when the texts come into their iPhone or into their phone and I'm asking all those
00:16:40
Speaker
Um, details of their lives that they're not caught off guard. And, um, yeah, I just try to be gentle about it too, especially where some of the questions are a little more sensitive. Um, yeah, sometimes I text, sometimes I call.
00:17:00
Speaker
really depends on what I'm asking. Right. And do you have any anxiety around the phone and cold calling and doing that kind of reporting and research, especially when you're reaching out for the first time? One thing that I've learned early on is that making a ton of phone calls is what makes you a good reporter.
00:17:27
Speaker
And not to say I'm a great or good reporter, but hopefully I'm okay. But I feel like, you know, that is like base level. You know, you have to have that ability. And so, yeah, I mean, it just comes with, I feel like it just comes with the job just.
00:17:49
Speaker
be comfortable cold calling people and I bumble my way through it and I, and maybe that's why people talk to me because I come across as, um, you know, like we need, people probably think we need to help this woman. She, um, she can't get across what she's asking, but, um, like I made myself for this story particularly because it was involved so much of trying to track people down and former employees and.
00:18:17
Speaker
and women who had given birth at the cottage hospital. I made myself make three cold calls a day. Maybe that doesn't sound like very much, but yeah, that worked for me. And then I give myself a little reward after and like a nice coffee or like a chocolate.
The Pre-reporting Phase and Story Discovery
00:18:39
Speaker
Oh, I love that.
00:18:41
Speaker
Yeah, so I realize it's tough to do to make those calls. But you really, I don't know if it's just Newfoundland or if it's just like, you know, the last art of cold calling. But I, I hit the jackpot quite a few times with cold calling. You know, I just somebody gives me a name of somebody else and then I look up, you know, on
00:19:07
Speaker
someone would look up names for me. The people in Newfoundland are so nice. They'll look up names in the phone book, which is, you know, an archaic tool nowadays, you know, where people live and what their name is, is so important in Newfoundland and still so resonant that it, it really helped me find people. And so people that had never met me before, I'd cold call them and it would be the wrong number, but they'd look up numbers for me and their old phone book from 1999 and
00:19:36
Speaker
And then I, you know, somehow find somebody through that connection and they tell me some stories. And so it, we really need to be getting on the phone more, I think then. Um, and also during COVID, you know, that's how you have to do a lot of your reporting these days. So.
00:19:57
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, it's definitely a, it's a muscle that you have to exercise and build and get into shape and learn how to, like you were saying, kind of bumble through. I'm the same way. I'm just kind of marbles in the mouth, cotton mouth, just stumbling through the conversation. They're probably like, just shut up. I can tell you want some information. Just ask me the damn question. Yeah, exactly. I think they're trying to put me out of my misery by that's that that helps me get places.
00:20:25
Speaker
I'll give you anything you want. Nice. Tell me how you arrived at this story. Well, I heard about this story on CBC, which is our public broadcaster here in Canada. I heard about this and I was really intrigued by it.
00:20:45
Speaker
And then, you know, I think I put it on the back burner for a while. And I, I have this, this great friend, she's an amazing feature writer. And she and I talk about structure all the time. And she's a real structure nerd. And, um, I think I sent her this story and I was like, Oh, wouldn't it be amazing to look at these two men's stories and, and, um, Think about like a twinning narrative in the way of telling it. And, and so.
00:21:15
Speaker
I first thought about it in terms of, you know, try the potential of storytelling there. And I also, CBC is great. I didn't feel like the story had been fully explored, these two men's experiences and what they'd gone through. And I was left wanting more. I really wanted to know more about their lives and just the, I was so intrigued by cottage hospitals as well and what those were like and what the type of people that worked there
00:21:46
Speaker
And so I told my friend who doesn't live in the, on this side of Canada, you should do this story. And she's like, no, you should. And then, um, sure enough, I've been working on this, um, this unsolved murder, uh, story for two and a half or three years. And that piece had just finally come out and I was looking for something else to sink my teeth into.
00:22:13
Speaker
And I got a form email from Sayward Darby, the editor of this piece, that she probably sent out to thousands of people. And it said, hey, I love your writing. And that she's looking for stories. And I thought, oh my goodness, maybe this is the story. And it took me some time to pre-report it and get people on side willing to trust me and talk to me and share their stories.
00:22:44
Speaker
And that's how it came together. I love that you brought up the fact that there is an element of a pre-reporting phase of the bulk of the ultimately become the reporting phase. So what was the pre-reporting slash discovery phase of this project like for you? I felt like I really came across something interesting when I was trying to
00:23:14
Speaker
figure out, you know, more about the cottage hospitals in Newfoundland. And I started to look into that and I realised, oh, there's this book written about them, but I couldn't get the book. And it wasn't in a library where I live in this province of Nova Scotia where I live, but it did exist at a library in Newfoundland. And so I
00:23:37
Speaker
looked up on the internet, the author's name and phone number on Canada 411. And I happened to get him on the first try and he had a copy of the book and he mailed it to me. And then we had a big conversation. And so before I ever got the book, he and I talked on the phone one night for a couple of hours and he told me about this head nurse at the hospital.
00:24:05
Speaker
and that her name was Tiger. And that he told me this anecdote that he'd heard while he was researching the book about her, I don't want to give away too much of the story, but about identity bands and her relaxing the protocol around when they're put on. And
00:24:29
Speaker
I just told you too much of the story, didn't I? I don't know if people read the story and then listen to the interview and then read the story. My feeling is people will read the story and then want to hear you talk about it. If I put a little spoiler alert at the start of this,
00:24:55
Speaker
Then people will be like, okay, well, because it's right embedded in the story itself. So I suspect people will read it and then want to hear what you have to say about it. And I can put like, spoilers in this interview, read the story first, then listen to Lindsay talk about it. Okay. So Edward Lake, the historian author of this book, told me that story and
00:25:20
Speaker
As soon as I heard that story, I was like, oh my goodness, there's this potential central character here who I want to know more about. Where is this woman and what happened to her and was she a good person or a bad person? Then I reached out back to the families again and we had a conversation.
00:25:45
Speaker
And I asked them if there were any names on there. So they had a very rudimentary, redacted copy of their birth records. And during my research for the story, we ended up getting the full birth record. We had it unredacted or the blacked out parts taken off. And so we could read the whole thing.
00:26:11
Speaker
And so I said to them on the phone, you know, is there a name on there? And they said, Kellyanne. And, and then I, you know, I just put it together in my head, like, holy shit, you know, this is, there's something here. There's a, you know, not that she's to blame or anything, but there's certainly, you know, something with legs here to look into deeper. Like this is, this person is going to be as much of a character as these two men and how,
00:26:40
Speaker
she impacted their lives. I love the there's an element of the story that reminds me kind of like in Harry Potter when he like dips his head into the Pensieve and it's like you see all these characters in the past and they're very alive and it's very everything in the past there is informing the present as he's getting information from the deep backstory and like the the it's Kalinan is that how you pronounce her her name? Yeah.
00:27:07
Speaker
Yeah. And just like when you bring in her as like this, it, you know, you just got a sense of this almost a sepia tone backstory of what, you know, this, this is how her, how she was involved in these cottage hospitals and, and, you know, the relaxing of the ID bands and all this and how, how it eventually informs, you know, your current, your, your primary storyline of these two
00:27:33
Speaker
two babies that were born in the same day switched in different families on the same island. It informed the present narrative of the story so well. To me, it had this effect of dipping my head in the pencil, even seeing how this thing played out in the past. Good. Well, I so wanted to step back in time and see what it was like inside these cottage hospitals back in the 60s.
00:28:02
Speaker
I still want to go back there. I'm glad that you feel like that worked well. The great thing about Newfoundland is that so much of it is still set in the time of the 1960s in a lovely way, but the sense of community and
00:28:30
Speaker
how people care for each other and neighbors and it's still very much back in time. And yeah, there's still dirt roads there and there's people live in the communities they were born in. It's a beautiful place.
00:28:48
Speaker
And there's something to be said about these old fishing towns and how tightly knit they are, because a lot of the men go out to sea for however long, and a lot of people are left behind. And then there's a lot of danger out at sea and who's coming back and who might not. And it really fosters a very cohesive community around the particular industry. And I suspect the oil industry is
00:29:17
Speaker
taken root up there and might be faltering, but these old fishing towns have that kind of... They share a similar kind of DNA, if you will. Yeah, it's amazing being in these very small communities where the men went out to sea and basically
00:29:40
Speaker
This was told to me by one of the family members. So I feel like I can say it. Come home long enough just to get drunk and get pregnant. And so that's the regime there. That's the sort of way the calendar rolls. And yeah, so the women were dependent on each other. And you were dependent on your children and your large family, that everybody
00:30:08
Speaker
Um, had a role to play and yeah, they're, they're Petering out now. They, this, these small places, there's, um, not a lot of families left there, but, uh, it's amazing to, uh, to go and visit and, and like you said, you know, you can envision.
00:30:28
Speaker
what life was back in the 60s because very little has changed. And with the sensitive nature of the story where you're dealing with these babies that were just inadvertently switched at birth, they're basically put in milk crates, carnation dried milk crates.
00:30:51
Speaker
And on ID, you can picture the nurses just being like, OK, this baby, OK, this one's for you. This one's yours. We don't know. Here it is. What's the difference? But that manifests itself oftentimes toxically down the road. And so how did you navigate that as a reporter with such sensitive material and subject?
Emotional Engagement and Empathetic Listening
00:31:19
Speaker
are we're very open to sharing their story because they really wanted to help. They really want to know what happened. And so I like to dig and get details and go back in the past and get documents. And so I promised them I would do whatever I could to find out what I could about what happened to them. And I feel like the story answered it almost. I don't know if we can ever really know what happened that day. Um, but
00:31:48
Speaker
I feel like we got there, we got close. And so they were very much open to trusting me with that story because I guess maybe I could help them find a piece of the puzzle of their missing lives. And so what they probably didn't
00:32:09
Speaker
sign up for was me sort of prying into their emotions as much as I did. And these are two very sort of strong Newfoundland men who don't perhaps talk about their emotions. And I guess the way that I found to
00:32:31
Speaker
Explore more what was going on in their heads was to talk to the women around them and so their wives and their sisters and so they noticed what was going on with them emotionally and So I talked to so many more people than ever appeared in this story So I guess I would talk to the women Get their sense of what was going on and then go back to the men and say, you know, is it fair to describe?
00:33:01
Speaker
it as this was going on with you at the time and most often they said yes.
00:33:10
Speaker
I guess being really being tuned in to, and I think that I absorb a little bit of like, of what people are going through something emotional. I think I tend to absorb a little bit of that and feel that myself, like empathy. And, um, it's not always good for me, but like when I first got the birth reports, the full birth reports back, and I saw like the weight of, of one of the women and you know, what time her contraction started to get
00:33:40
Speaker
um, worse and more painful and, and just seeing her whole chart prenatal, she became so real to me. And, uh, I like one night after reading that birth report that came into my email, um, at night, I couldn't sleep. I was just thinking about this woman and, and, you know, what she'd gone through over those 24 hours. And, and then that, you know, this life you grow inside you.
00:34:08
Speaker
is just taken away and you have no say over it. Yeah, does that answer the question? I kind of went off on a tangent there. I think I just get really invested in the hearts of the people that I'm talking to. Yeah.
00:34:28
Speaker
I was just speaking with a researcher and author, Jimena Benguachea, about her new book is Listen Like You Mean It. And my favorite part of her book is Towards the End, where she talks about recovery and
00:34:49
Speaker
and listener drain. It just sounds like you're listening hard and asking very personal questions and taking a lot of that on yourself and that can be very, very draining.
00:35:05
Speaker
for any reporter and I might extend that to you. To what extent might you suffer being, for lack of a better term, suffer from listener drain and how do you pull yourself, how do you recharge after spending time with such material that can really cling to you? Yeah, well I think it's important to be able to go there emotionally.
00:35:34
Speaker
in order to tell this type of story. And so, um, what do I do? Well, I, I mean, I, I go exercise, I get outside. Um, do you run or walk? Yeah, yeah. I go for a run. I go to Pilates, you know, during COVID and I work from home generally, like it's really important for me to get out of the house. Um,
00:36:03
Speaker
So I, I, I try and just, I take a, like, I need, I will need to take a big break from, um, uh, writing for a little while after this, I think after this story, uh, I write things that are more, um, you know, maybe a story about the, the environment. Yeah. Yeah. Bridge stories that are, yeah. Bridge you between the emotional drains. Yeah. Yeah.
00:36:31
Speaker
But this story is also, I feel like it's so close to my heart too, because Newfoundland is such a beautiful place as well.
Portraying Newfoundland's Charm
00:36:39
Speaker
And I just, I put so much stock in trying to portray it as it is, as this beautiful place. But yeah, there's something backwards that happened there too.
00:36:49
Speaker
You were talking with your friend who's kind of a structure nerd. I love talking structure and getting people's sense on structure. I think listeners really love to hear how writers, reporters, Morris essayists, whoever
00:37:05
Speaker
is writing under this genre, how they go about structure, when they're thinking about it. Are they thinking about it early in the process as they're reporting? Or are they waiting till they get all their information and then figure out the best way to do it? So what's your approach to it? And maybe you can overlay your approach to how you structured this story that you wrote for Atavist. This story is structured a little bit differently than how I first envisioned it.
00:37:35
Speaker
and say word helped shepherded in that direction. But I, I guess I always try to start with like a, I feel like structure is intuitive for me. And it's when, if I'm telling somebody a boat, a story, then that's what I start with. I start with what, what is most, I'm most excited about and how I want to set it up. And, um, normally it's a scene and.
00:38:03
Speaker
that scene is going to lead to something else that is going to help unravel the story. And in this story, I've always felt like I wanted to start in 1962 and it is starting in 1962. I had it structured a different way in 1962, but then as the story of Rita came out, I mean, I didn't know any of this when I first started out that she would
00:38:32
Speaker
have gone through so much leading up to the birth of Claire. And so when that came out in the reporting in second draft, I think it was, that's when, you know, say word was very struck by her story. And so we put that up top. And then
00:38:58
Speaker
I feel like your last guest, the last out of a story, Phil Ho did a really good job of this and in his piece. And I really, I really hope I'm so close to this. I can't even tell anymore if it's there, but just setting up a little bit of tension around not really knowing whether your, your central characters are, are good or bad. And.
00:39:23
Speaker
seeing where that goes and I'm not sure if it, I hope it does that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's a wonderful, it's a wonderful piece and it's a, you know, what's nice about it too is that it takes us to a place where, you know, to New Finland and to Canada where a lot of
00:39:46
Speaker
at least a lot of us south of the border here, you know, haven't been there, haven't experienced that. So not only are you telling this deeply personal and motive evocative story of these people, it's also very just of a place which takes us there, which I think in this day and age when we
00:40:06
Speaker
When we're where we can't travel and get out of our own heads half the time. It's nice to for a story like yours to transport us to another place and To put us there on the ground. Good. Well, I was lucky to be able to go there because
00:40:23
Speaker
Due to COVID, our borders were shut down most of the time. And there was a small window in September where we had what we call the Atlantic bubble. And so it's like the Atlantic region of Canada, which is where I live. We could travel within it to the four provinces here.
00:40:44
Speaker
So that's how I was able to get there. And then it closed up when COVID started spreading. And so it was very, it was a chance that I ever got to go to Newfoundland at all last fall.
Supporting Atavist Magazine
00:41:05
Speaker
Pretty slick, right? Thanks for sticking around and listening. And thanks to Sayward and Lindsay. If you don't already subscribe to The Addivist, consider doing it to support the team that goes into making great pieces of journalism. That's why they list the names of the copy editors, the fact checkers, the designers, the editors, and the writer because it takes a village to raise a long-form story.
00:41:30
Speaker
and while you have your wallet out you might just want to head over to patreon.com slash cnfpod to help keep the lights on here at cnfpodhq it's the only way you'll get exclusive access to the audio magazines more like a literary magazine with personal essays the next one's going to be coming out in
00:41:47
Speaker
early, well, late June, it's themed summer, so it's coming out the first day of summer. I have a pile of essays to curate and edit and get into the hands of the writers and then hopefully we can record those and I'm gonna put them all together for a beautiful little thing that'll take you into the summer, into the sun, to the beach maybe. I don't know, I haven't read them yet.
00:42:14
Speaker
and you know that your dollars are doing some serious heavy lifting because well for one you get it you can get transcripts you get the subscription to into the audio magazine yeah even some one-on-one coaching but like the heavy lifting part your dollars are helping to pay for hosting and tech upgrades
00:42:34
Speaker
Podcasting is pretty expensive to do and it takes a ton of time. Let me tell you that because I do it all in-house and I don't outsource it or anything. So here we are. And most importantly, part of the money, a good chunk of that money, is going into the pockets of writers whose work I accept for the magazine. So check it out. It's patreon.com slash cnfbot. Shop around. Window shop.
00:43:00
Speaker
Cool stuff. I'm also doing that thing where I give coaching for a written review on Apple Podcasts. So if you go to Apple Podcasts and you write a written review of the show, email me a screenshot and I will coach up a piece of your writing of up to 2,000 words. Not too shabby, right?
00:43:20
Speaker
So keep the conversation going on Twitter and Instagram at cnfpod and head over to brendadomera.com. Hey, for show notes and to sign, did my voice just crack? It totally did. Wow. Just roll with it, right? Head over to brendadomera.com, hey, for show notes and to sign up for the Algorithm Averse monthly newsletter where I give out reading recommendations, podcast news, links to articles, and enter you into random raffles for all the books I receive.
00:43:48
Speaker
If you're on the list, you're always entered in the raffle. Not bad for a free thing. Once a month, no spam can't beat it. So what do you say we get on out of here? Stay cool, CNFers. Stay cool forever. See ya.