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Episode 84—Adam Valen Levinson: Young and Restless
127 Plays7 years ago
Hey there CNF buddies, hope you’re havin’ a CNFin’ great week. What fuels you? What gets your engine revved up? What makes you redlined? For me it’s an interview and, dare I say, a riff… It’s the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the world’s best artists about creating works of nonfiction, leaders in the world of narrative journalism, memoir, documentary film, radio, and essay and try tease out the origins and habits so that you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. For Episode 84, I welcome Adam Valen Levinson. Adam’s a smart guy, a real smart guy, and he’s written the wonderful book “The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah: Fear and Love in the Modern Middle East.” Flip the book over and here’s a blurb from Buzz Bissinger, “Adam Valen Levinson is too young to have written a book this good: eloquent, analytical, funny, sad.” Still not impressed? Peter Theroux said, “A fabulously written primer on the darkest countries in the world—or not so dark, as Valen Levinson shows with his toolkit of sharp sociology and brilliant humor.” Well, I feel inadequate. Here’s a little more about Adam from his dust jacket bio: He is a journalist and travel writer whose work focuses on human stories in conflict areas. His work has appeared in numbers outlets, including VICE, the Paris Review, Al Jazeera, and Haaretz. He is an affiliate of the Middle East Institute in Washington DC and a Fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, studying humor as a key to cultural understanding. Damn. I make donuts and talk to people. Okay, so here’s that part where I ask you that if you dig the show, consider subscribing and sharing it with a fellow CNFer. Leave an honest rating on iTunes, which takes a few seconds, or leave a rating and a review and in exchange, I’ll coach up a piece of your work, up to 2,000 words. That’s the deal. That’s like a $100 value once I’m all done because I read things three times and mark things up like it’s my job.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
whoa hey there cnfers cnf buddies hope you're having a cnf in great week what fuels you it gets your engine revved up what makes you redline for me it's an interview and dare i say
00:00:18
Speaker
It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the world's best artists about creating works of nonfiction. Leaders in the world of narrative journalism, memoir, documentary film, radio, essay, and try and tease out origins and habits, routines, so that you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work.
Who is Adam Valen Levinson?
00:00:44
Speaker
And for episode 84, I welcome Adam Valen Levinson. Adam's a smart guy. A real smart guy. He's got a Yale.edu email, so that'll tell you how damn smart he is. And he's written the wonderful book, The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah, Fear and Love in the Modern Middle East. Flip the book over, and here's a blurb from Buzz Bissinger.
00:01:13
Speaker
Quote, Adam Valen Levinson is too young to have written a book this good, eloquent, analytical, funny, sad, end quote. Still not impressed? Peter Thoreau said, quote, a fabulously written primer on the darkest countries in the world, or not so dark as Valen Levinson shows with his toolkit of sharp sociology and brilliant humor, end quote. Well, I feel inadequate.
00:01:43
Speaker
Here's a little more about Adam from his dust jacket bio. He's a journalist and travel writer whose work focuses on human stories in conflict areas. His work has appeared in numbers of outlets, including Vice, The Paris Review, Al Jazeera, and Haaretz. I'm not pronouncing that right.
00:02:02
Speaker
He is an affiliate of the Middle East Institute in Washington DC and a fellow at the Center of Cultural Sociology at Yale University, studying humor as a key to cultural understanding. Damn, I make donuts and talk to people.
How can listeners support the podcast?
00:02:18
Speaker
Okay, so here's that part where I ask you if you dig the show, consider subscribing and sharing.
00:02:25
Speaker
Leave an honest rating on iTunes, those help, which only takes a few seconds. Or if you want to take a little more time, leave an honest review. And in exchange, I'll coach up a piece of your work up to 2,000 words. That's the deal. That's like a $100 value once I'm done because I read things three times and mark things up like it's my job.
00:02:47
Speaker
Okay, I'm tired of me. I'm sure you are too. Here's Adam Valin Levinson, episode 84.
What drives the theme of restlessness in Adam's book?
00:03:01
Speaker
Your book was incredible and I really got that true like restless feeling that you were feeling. Like I just got that undercurrent of restlessness going through the whole thing. And so that's something I definitely want to tap into here. As we get into the book, I wanted to maybe ask you first, like, where do you think that restlessness, that inherent restlessness comes from? That is, I'm so glad that that's something
00:03:28
Speaker
that you picked up on, I think that's probably the truest. If there had to be one emotion in the whole thing, that really is it. That's what it is to be an adolescent for starters or a kid, you know, just the feeling like you have all this energy and you have to put it somewhere. And then I think also in the context of, you know,
00:03:54
Speaker
America in the 90s and early 2000s with parents who were very open and didn't didn't force me into any particular path. It just made it so that, you know, there seemed like 1000 different roads and I wanted to take all of them. There was every reason to do anything but no reason to do anything in particular. And so there's just all this energy that builds. And I'm not putting it into anything.
00:04:21
Speaker
specific. And I think after a long time that turns into, it's a real pressure cooker. It's hard when you start overthinking something to ever just put your feet on the ground and start doing because you can't think your way out of overthinking. And I think in a lot of ways that's what kind of the book is, is me turning
00:04:43
Speaker
turning concrete, something that really is an abstract kind of service, an abstract kind of restlessness, but trying to put it in a place where I could look at it and it would be a very externalized, obvious way of facing something that was going on inside me.
00:05:02
Speaker
And when you were a kid and a teenager and you had a lot of options and you weren't necessarily guided into one thing in particular, what were some of those interests you had in those interests? What did you find yourself gravitating towards more than others? Man, I was interested in really everything you put in front of me. I think at a very young age,
00:05:32
Speaker
I made a kind of religion out of indecision and it just made it so that anybody who likes something, if I wanted to believe that they were a valid human being in any way, I would go, well, they must like that for a reason and let's see if I can figure out how to like that thing too. But you end up getting kind of pulled apart that way.
00:05:59
Speaker
My dad is a contemporary classical composer. So he composes the kind of music that I guess most people would like run away from really fast, you know, they would go this is just not even the kind of stuff people who like classical music are like, this is a lot going on here. My, my, my mom is a therapist, very pro kind of openness and, and exploration, I think
00:06:28
Speaker
It just made it so that I was never able to really critique anything. So, you know, like when I was a kid, I played in the college's Balinese Gamelan, you know, and I tried to go to soccer practice and I played in the jazz band at school. Then I also tried to be like really good at, you know, math. Just whatever was on the table, I just tried to keep it together. And
00:06:56
Speaker
That's, it's really tough. I think when you keep trying to make, you keep trying to avoid actual decisions and keep trying to make the choice that makes it so that you don't have to make choices. I managed to keep that up for like a really, really, really long time. I think almost until probably this year or a few years ago where you realize you can't be all of the things fully.
00:07:24
Speaker
Right, right. And so
How did 9/11 impact Adam's curiosity about the Middle East?
00:07:26
Speaker
when you were like 12, well I think it was 12, 9-11 happens when you're 12 and then all of a sudden that kind of cracks the world open in a different way. And what was it about that moment that triggered a curiosity in you that ultimately leads to the Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah? So maybe put us in that moment and
00:07:52
Speaker
where your curiosity was and how you wanted to come to a greater understanding of this other thing. Yeah. I think that was really the first moment where I had something to push back against. I wasn't that rebellious of a super young person. I could listen to what my elders would say and go, yeah, they got a point. I could see what my friends thought. And I'd go, yeah, everybody's right about everything.
00:08:22
Speaker
There wasn't a huge dissonance, I think, until after 9-11, where it seemed like a lot of people that I used to put a ton of faith in, just whatever I heard on the news at that age and my parents saying, you can't go to these places. It might not be that everybody hated us. I wasn't a child of extremists in that way, but this whole part of the world is off limits.
00:08:51
Speaker
for just really deep in me was like, that can't be true at all. That's just way too simple. Nothing is ever like that. Like even as like a nine year old, you're learning in American schools, like everything has multiple sides and looking at this way and also this way. Like there's no way that they were that right about that. And
00:09:18
Speaker
That's just a moment where you start, where I started, I think, coming apart from my parents and it's like, you know, in East of Eden, Steinbeck has great quotes about this kind of thing, about how you start seeing the holes in your parents' logic and you're never quite whole again, that kind of growing up, you know? Where you lose absolute authority, but it's a process you gotta go through and
00:09:42
Speaker
I mean, it took a really long time. I think I was trying to reconcile what my parents thought and what the State Department thought and what the media thought. All these institutions that I still trusted, while at the same time I was like, I don't, but I don't, at one level, I don't believe you. I believe in you, but I don't believe you. So I think that's a major tension in really growing up.
00:10:06
Speaker
which is a big reason the book is called the Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah, not just because I had my belated one over there, but because it's a story about that conflict. Yeah, and you're right. In one particularly tight sentence somewhere in the middle, it was like you're looking or you're exploring that distance between fact and fear. And it seems like in the bridge between, say, 9-11 and the time that you then went over to Abu Dhabi and then started
00:10:36
Speaker
exploring the Middle East, like that is really a central tenet of A, your restlessness, but also you trying to reconcile what you were questioning from your peers and from mentors, like parental mentors and so forth. I don't know if that's something that really galvanized for you when you were over there. Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, I'm really glad that there are tight sentences. That is good to hear.
00:11:06
Speaker
I think it's a really big issue even now. We talk about fake news and we think that it's going to be identifying the fakeness and that's going to be what sets us free or puts us on the right course or calibrates us to what reality is. The trouble is that there are legitimate fears that are based in real facts and a lot of things that the media were reporting.
00:11:34
Speaker
all of the facts that were being reported were true. I'd go to a place like Afghanistan where maybe people would say, or say as maybe a really specific example, on the Iran-Iraq border there were these hikers that were taken into Iranian custody. Some people said they were spies or they were stupid, they were crossing over this border. Anyway, they ended up imprisoned in Iran in this place that people said, this must be so dangerous, this part of Iraq.
00:12:03
Speaker
And that was a fact. It was true. That really happened to them. But you'd get a collection of all these stories from the Middle East. And it was a collection of all these truths that skewed you towards believing that the only thing that could be there is fear. That all these truths taken together created an emotional kind of understanding that was pretty inaccurate. And I ended up going to the same place where these hikers were kind of disappeared. And it's like,
00:12:32
Speaker
It's waterfalls. People go for picnics. It's just like a chill place. What happened to these hikers is still a little bit mysterious, but probably took some very different steps on their part than your average tourist would take. And it made it so that what I wanted to find were the kind of stories that, unfortunately, based on the incentives and the setup of media, you can't have
00:13:00
Speaker
a story that's like a thousand Iraqis have a dope picnic today. You just can't. We're just not going to get that. I wish you could. But I was like, I want to I want a book that gives you first of all, it gives you the truth. But the truth is is on a day to day basis is so much of that. And that's what calibrates you back towards reality is having these things that fill in
00:13:24
Speaker
the other sides of daily life or annual experience so that you actually get a true sense of the place. What were your expectations when you went over there and how were those challenged and how were your expectations of your trip and your experience met when you got over there? What did you think you were going to come up to and then what hit you when you got there?
00:13:55
Speaker
It's tough because I think I was almost always of two minds, which was that I was partly fueled by the expectation of fear. I mean, that was what had driven me there. But at the same time, I didn't believe it. So it was like I was going into the place because it was accused of being fearful or being dangerous. And at the same time, I was like, no way I'm going to prove that wrong.
00:14:24
Speaker
So I'm never really sure what my expectations were. At moments, there were places that, as a huge relief, I knew nothing about. If I went into Oman, or the strange island in Iran, or even Somaliland, I really didn't know anything. And that was nice, because you could start to just experience a place on its own terms. But most of the time, I think I, it's like going on a first date where somebody tells you,
00:14:55
Speaker
The person you're about to go on a date with, she's super creepy. And you'd be like, I don't think so. I'm going to go on a date, but I'm not going to be able to get that accusation out of my head. And it colors your whole experience. Even if you go, I'm going in there with good intentions and everything. I'm going back trying to find the truth, whatever. It still framed your experience. And it took me
00:15:18
Speaker
really the whole course of the book. And I didn't know that I was writing a book really until afterwards, but it took me all of this time to realize that that framework, that even having that accusation in my head and desiring to go to the places because of that, made it so that I could never really engage the places on their own terms.
00:15:44
Speaker
Yeah. At what point did you feel like you were, that you had a book on your hands or were you always taking notes while you were over there or journals or something that you ultimately were like, oh, maybe I can cobble this together into something that could be illuminating to a general readership.
How does Adam document and reflect on his experiences?
00:16:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:05
Speaker
Yeah, totally. So much of my reason for going was a bit of a contrarian impulse. I think so many of the people around me, even well-educated, poli sci majors and future diplomats and my well-traveled parents, they're wrong and I want to share the stories beyond just
00:16:28
Speaker
the fact that when I come back from a fun trip in Afghanistan or something, people in bars are interested. And then you start going, well, if they're interested, then who else would be? But if this were now, if I were leaving for Abu Dhabi now, I probably would have been posting Snapchat and Instagram stories. And that's probably what there would be out of this. There would have been some way to process and share information really quickly.
00:16:57
Speaker
This was a bit before that time. This is the early days of Twitter. I had all the right compulsions, but there weren't these platforms yet. I was typing notes on my phone all the time. I was recording voice memos
00:17:18
Speaker
constantly that I ended up transcribing. I was blogging a little bit, I was taking pictures, I was videoing. I wanted to somehow capture everything because I went, you know, basically every minute that I'm in a place that so many people I know think couldn't possibly be like this, every minute is an argument against that kind of fear. Every minute is something that could be used as evidence against
00:17:45
Speaker
the kind of fear that I think has been really corrosive. And so I wanted to use it for something. I didn't know what the right format would be and I think that in a book, hopefully, what you can do is you can engage with real complexity. You get 100,000 words of detail that
00:18:06
Speaker
often have contradictions in them and engage with the messiness where you're not giving a hot cake that says, you think it's dangerous, it's actually all fine. It's more complicated than that, but I thought that this could really be the kind of thing that maybe would help, basically would help people be less afraid. That was what I was trying to make.
00:18:28
Speaker
And you also, at one point, you quote Albert Camus that travel without fear is nothing. And at what point did you feel like you had sort of a courage when you felt maybe that itch of fear that that might be a time to lean into it? It was time to hit the gas and maybe go forward instead of maybe sit back and be more observant. But instead, you kind of leaned into it.
00:18:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's worth taking one slight step back, you know, Camus, I think said something even even more accurate to this book, which is like, he said that the only philosophical question worth asking is, is like, whether or not you should stay alive, basically, you know, because he goes, basically, everything you do, you've already, you've implicitly made the choice, like, should I kill myself or not? You know, it's just,
00:19:26
Speaker
very French, very philosophical, but also really true. And I think if you want to understand indecision taken to its maximum, you know, a young person who's like, I came out of college, you know, and I don't actually know what I want to do. Like, I have ideas, but concretely, what am I doing?
00:19:50
Speaker
you know, indecision dialed all the way up to the max is like, I don't even know what whether life means that like, what is life for. And one of the one of the easiest ways of addressing that, that really long term indecision and confusion about you know, what to do is by just narrowing that time horizon down to
00:20:17
Speaker
you know, down to the moment where you think, hey, look, there's a possibility where I might get killed or kidnapped or something in the moment. It's a huge relief if you're that decisive. And so in that way, I just didn't feel fear the same way that I knew other people did.
00:20:39
Speaker
And I wanted to make that useful. It's like finance guys always talk about your comparative advantage. It's like, what do I, okay, not just finance, everybody. What do you have to offer? And I recognize that the relief that I got by putting myself in a place where at least I could hold on to some kind of expectation of danger overpowered the actual fear that I felt and ended up being just a net positive.
00:21:08
Speaker
Yeah, like you said, the best decisions were the scariest ones in a lot of ways. Yeah, totally. And at the same time, that still has that seed of accusation and of framing the place in a way where so long as I got an adrenaline rush from going to a place, it definitely made it so that I couldn't fully see it as a
00:21:33
Speaker
just a place where people lived as a place where daily life was also still a thing.
00:21:42
Speaker
So where did the writerly impulse come from? In the back of your head, you knew that this might be something you want to write about, but even before that, there has to be some kernel of, you know, I want to be a writer, I want to tell true stories, and here's your unique experience to tell. So where is the genesis of your need or your want to tell stories and subsequently true stories?
00:22:12
Speaker
I feel like there's probably no real super clear answer to that. But there was definitely a history of kinds of storytelling in my family. So I'd seen that it was possible. My dad being a composer, it's expressing ideas in a way that just targets emotions right up front. And I saw that that was a possibility. My grandma was a young adult author and wrote
00:22:41
Speaker
wrote and so from a really young age I saw that that was a thing that existed that you could do and I remember she lived in San Diego I remember when I was I must been nine or ten or something writing I won like third place in the in the you know Delmar winter story competition or something for writing for writing a little story and I could kind of understand that that was a way that you could
00:23:09
Speaker
Connect with the world you could process your own thoughts and put them out there. This is a story about having
00:23:17
Speaker
having been really panicked out in the water surfing and thinking that there were sharks and then paddling in really fast until I heard some girls on the beach going, oh, look, dolphins. And that might have planted a seed for trying to nip fears in the bud, you know? Identifying fears that were based on something wrong, turning it to panic that I missed some good waves that day, you know?
00:23:48
Speaker
But I think probably there's an even larger cultural history of Jewish storytelling and of dealing with the paradoxes and the messiness of the world by turning it into jokes and stories and art and other things that don't really have a conclusion. There isn't like, I solved the problem now, but it's turning
00:24:16
Speaker
the kind of chaos of life into something that you can use to connect other people. And I think I always believe even, you know, I'm glad that this didn't turn into a Snapchat story, you know, a series of Snapchat stories or something because I think that, you know, with a written word, you can get into a kind of detail that, you know, human beings have been trying to perfect for a couple million years.
00:24:43
Speaker
And when you're dealing with something this complicated and messy and charged, especially the Middle East, where any word you say, people already have a ton of opinions and think that you're on one side or another, that you need words to be able to get into detail like that.
00:25:02
Speaker
Yeah, you can't just have something that is digitally evaporative. It'll just be gone in 24 hours. You got something that was concrete out of the experience that you could later digest when you are ready to write about it instead of having it just dissolve into the ether until you could take the next round of Snapchats or Instagram stories or what have you.
00:25:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think even if the picture is up there forever, you can see a picture and you can respond to it by saying, well, what are you trying to say? What are you trying to prove? Oh, you must be trying to say this. And in writing, if this is your goal, you can constantly be saying, here's what I'm trying to tell you. And here's some of the many connotations that spiral out of this idea, but let me try and
00:25:57
Speaker
stay aware of what all of them are and keep telling you, here's where I'm trying to let this lead. I just think that that's super important. Did this kind of journalism, did this kind of sneak up on you? Was this something you saw yourself doing? Or was it something that kind of took you off guard and you're like, oh wow, here I am writing this kind of narrative nonfiction that
00:26:24
Speaker
You know, I got another way of saying it was like, was this always a goal? Or did it just kind of this experience happened and then it allowed you to write about it, if that makes any sense. That's kind of a weird phrasing. No, it definitely does. I think it's both, you know, I mean, I I've been writing but in different ways, like I
00:26:47
Speaker
I interned at the Colbert Report and The Onion when I was in college and wrote for our fake newspaper at Columbia.
Why is humor important in Adam's narrative nonfiction?
00:26:57
Speaker
I wrote jokey kinds of things and tried to under, and really trying to have big conversations, but in a way that I thought was accessible. And I think at the end of the day, the writing from the Middle East came out of that same kind of childish childhood
00:27:17
Speaker
impulse to keep everything together. This is something that I might be able to create that still takes into account as many of the things that I'm trying to do as possible. I did want to report stories from places. I did end up going back to do more straight reporting from places like Afghanistan or Tajikistan, but the personal side of it made it so that
00:27:46
Speaker
I mean, what I was really interested in was how people felt and how I felt and changing how other people felt. And I think that in that kind of narrative, personal narrative, nonfiction, it was the clearest way of keeping all that together, if that makes sense. And in some ways, it's kind of why at the end of the day, I'm a little
00:28:14
Speaker
There's a downside to this being put on the non-fiction shelves or especially in the travel shelves because people come to it in a particular way. People then read it as non-fiction and say, I'm reading it for the facts instead of the way you might come to fiction where you read it for the feelings. There's always a tricky balance there.
00:28:36
Speaker
Yeah, and what was particularly good, like the sort of the ballast to your fearlessness and restlessness was your relationship with Masha in the story too, because she in a lot of ways represents maybe the more fearful, the more tentative.
00:28:56
Speaker
person at least that that was sort of like my feeling for and that also grounded that and gave it a more an extra like emotive layer some of you are saying like, you know, something that is a little more that has more of that a motive power. So was that part of the the strategy of including that into the folding Masha into the and the emails into the structure of the book? I think she's just kind of
00:29:20
Speaker
more rational in a lot of ways and more and more normal. I had some kind of screw loose in the way that I felt fear. She was more of a well-adjusted human being and just in the interest of reporting, it's good to have a baseline in some ways. Just saying, yeah, this is what maybe normal is and then here's
00:29:51
Speaker
here's kind of where I stand. But that was also something that was really a huge part of my experience in the Middle East, I mean, of affecting how I was feeling in any given moment. And I just wanted that to be true to share that, you know, in the in the story that I was still really connected to somebody in America. And as much as I was trying to
00:30:18
Speaker
push my own limits and maybe find out information that could be in some ways nationally helpful if presented the right way. I was still caught up in just a one-to-one relationship in the kind of way that most people are at some point in their lives. And I also think that there's a huge connection
00:30:44
Speaker
between the way that you might be afraid of a new place because you're unsure of it and you've heard a couple things and whatever, and the way that you can be afraid of a new relationship. Just that there aren't that many different kinds of fear, if any, that they manifest in a similar way. In a process of growing up and trying to get more responsible about the way that I
00:31:09
Speaker
just face choices and uncertainty and what I did with fear when I felt it. It comes out in similar ways both in relation to the Middle East and to her.
00:31:25
Speaker
And as you were looking to package this and try to get it represented and sold, you know, in the acknowledgments, you know, big hat tip to your agent and to which she said, you know, italicized in the acknowledgments was like, this might just be a thing. And what was that experience of trying to
00:31:48
Speaker
you know, get this thing to the negotiating table, so to speak. What was that process like turning your idea for the book into something that was ultimately sellable to a publisher?
What challenges did Adam face in publishing?
00:32:02
Speaker
Yeah, brutal.
00:32:08
Speaker
I left my job in Abu Dhabi at the beginning of 2012, and I came back saying, all right, this is the time. I got to try and write this. This is the challenge. And by about summer 2013, I'd written a lot there, and then I wrote more when I came back, and I had about a thousand-page manuscript. And it was just full of so much that I
00:32:37
Speaker
I knew these stories inside out and backwards and I already stopped being able to actually read it and decide for myself with any confidence whether or not the sentences made sense or they were interesting or how they went together. That's pretty unwieldy, especially when you're like, it's a book kind of about everything. It's about growing up and it's about the Middle East, but it's not about the Middle East. That's the love story, but it's not.
00:33:06
Speaker
And my first round of approaching agents, probably because I tried to pack too much into a pitch, it just wasn't successful and I lost hope pretty quick. I mean, I just went, look, this is what it is and I can't simplify it anymore to tell you what it is and it's not working. About a year later,
00:33:36
Speaker
Jane von Muren at VEDIS, she sent me a note, she said, you know, it was a friend's aunt's agent who passed us along to her. And she said, I really like what this sounds like, which other people had, but they would like it and they would say, but it's a nonfiction memoir by an unknown, just come on, man, who's gonna, how are we gonna, what are we gonna do with this?
00:34:13
Speaker
She she worked with me on just putting together a proposal, you know, thank God with nonfiction You're putting together a proposal that is not nobody's trying to read the whole manuscript, which I just wouldn't have been able to make But they read excerpts and then the idea about what you're trying to make So she really helped me do that and when the Norton Norton was interested and then I had to hire hire an editor who had been a former teacher of mine Jacob Levinson to help me and
00:34:28
Speaker
hits whatever the opposite of buzzwords are.
00:34:38
Speaker
edit, help me edit and cut things down and use his eyes instead of mine to say, look, you've said this before and we don't need this here and cut this out and basically cut the thing in less than half, which it absolutely should be. It does not deserve to be a thousand pages. Did you have this work in hand to take it to your MFA program to hopefully hone it down? Were you working on this throughout your Goucher MFA?
00:35:09
Speaker
Yeah, you know, when I came to the Goucher, I probably, you know, that sort of 500 pages and I guess I showed up thinking like, hey, maybe they're gonna just tell me how to structure things and then I'll be able to flesh out, you know, just put the flesh on a skeleton and cut things out and that'll be great, you know, but at the end of the day, like editors for the most part, you can't, they can't do that. They can, it's, it's a lot easier to start from a blank page and say, here's this outline and
00:35:39
Speaker
And go do it, but you get into trouble where you you come with a lot of things And then you ask people to kind of do this back formation saying well Here's what it looks like you got we'll analyze it now and then we'll work back through it And then you'll build the thing that we are saying you've already built I think some people had that those editorial chops you know where they can look dispassionately at something they've done and and chop it up, but I think that
00:36:08
Speaker
I never really, yeah, I never really get there with my own stuff. And so things kept kind of building a goucher. And it was a lot of talking through the idea about what it's trying to be. I think when I came in, I somehow had this idea that I could write a book that didn't purport to be about anything in particular, that it was like, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna
00:36:32
Speaker
tell you true feelings and true stories. And then whatever you get out of it is cool. I won't try and push you in any direction. I won't try and make points. That's bullshit. You're always making points regardless. And I think if you're not aware of that, then most of the time it just means that your readers are... You're not giving them enough.
00:37:01
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, I just want to make a ton of metaphors. I don't know what's going to work, but it's like you just start cooking food in like an apartment and you don't tell anybody it's a restaurant. And what do you think is going to happen? Nobody's going to know how to approach you or how to get to the place or how to get, okay, that wasn't a great metaphor. Do you know what I mean? Like you need to give people some tools and to be self-aware enough so that you really, you can use all of this evidence that I was trying to put together.
00:37:30
Speaker
you should want to use that to make points, to make particular points. You just have to decide what it is you're trying to do with them. So I think that at Goucher, at the MFA, there's a lot of years of sitting with the grander points of the whole thing, the abstract points and letting those crystallize as much as they could so that this thing that ended up getting written over basically something like five or seven years
00:38:00
Speaker
was actually saying something instead of just throwing a bunch of sentences at people's faces.
00:38:07
Speaker
And so what was that process like for you when you were in that generative phase of writing 1,000 pages? How are you setting up your days to create that much work that I'm sure ultimately you knew was going to have to be pared down by 60% or 70%? But what was that process like for you as you were really getting into the thick of things?
00:38:34
Speaker
I should say I'm really bad at routines. I almost as a matter of kind of ideological commitment, even though I wish I had routines, but it's like I never, partly I'm not organized and partly I go, but I want to be extremely flexible. And if you set things up always in a particular way, then what if, then do you stop being able to change and evolve and
00:39:04
Speaker
all that kind of thing. I was either on or off. When I came back from Abu Dhabi, I basically left having any real limits, any deadlines or any kind of thresholds.
00:39:25
Speaker
I just worked constantly. I mean, I would just like get up and then basically sit in one place until I literally couldn't bear it anymore and then I would completely stop for the day. I couldn't go back and forth. I couldn't really take lunch breaks. Like I was living with Masha who was in law school at the time. There were, you know, full days of the time where I didn't eat and she would go, what is going on? And I would just say, well, I didn't,
00:39:52
Speaker
didn't, I didn't want to. And I didn't feel, I feel like the feeling just didn't have a place to bubble up with that. I was just in, I was, I was writing, I, I can't write any of the same time. So I didn't want to eat. Or other times where I went, I can't, I just can't break the, I can't break a train of thought, but that was largely because I was so disorganized that really, unless I was holding the thought in my head, I was gonna lose it.
00:40:22
Speaker
And I kept that up for, I think I still work in that way to a point, but yeah, I kept that up for a year, a year and a half until I went, yeah, this isn't working. Now I got a thousand pages and it's just not gonna, doing what I'm doing is for sure not going in the right direction anymore.
00:40:42
Speaker
What made you want to stick with it? Was it a matter of, because if you generate that much work sometimes you might, there's two ways to think of it. You put that much work into it so there's no way you're giving up on it or you've put so much work into it and it's just too big to get your mind around that maybe you just abandon ship and go to something else. Clearly you stuck with it. So what made you want to keep
00:41:09
Speaker
Just keep hammering at that nail until you got it to the point where you were satisfied with it. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it would be crazy if I said that kind of making good on work you've already put in wasn't a huge part of it. Even when in the first few months, if I was writing tons of pages per day or whatever,
00:41:36
Speaker
there's this kind of concrete feeling of like I'm accomplishing something and then that stops being a concrete accomplishment you can point to. But I think there's a real feeling that this kind of story just wasn't out there enough.
00:42:00
Speaker
I looked, you know, I was always happy to find something where I went, cool, that's doing this. Maybe I could just spend my energy trying to promote something else. Like this wasn't, I don't think it was fundamentally motivated by going, I wanna stamp my name on a particular idea or whatever. It was like, I just, it's still that teenage kind of contrarian impulse that are like, a lot of people are saying a lot of things that are wrong.
00:42:30
Speaker
I just want to poke them. I just want to poke holes in arguments that are wrong first just because they're wrong and that's enough and also because they had these really detrimental effects and the way that people feel and interact with each other and you know make policy for other people's sakes. I believe I mean I really I really just I really believe that I think because every
00:42:57
Speaker
because I kept being able to talk to friends who were knowledgeable and working in related industries and tell them stories where they were surprised. Other people's surprise was the kind of thing that made me feel like, hey man, there's still something here.
00:43:15
Speaker
And what would you say with respect to your writing and your writing practice? What are some things that you struggle with that you have to constantly lean into to work around? What are some of those struggles that you need to level up to your strengths? I definitely have trouble with organization. I often feel like you could take apart
00:43:45
Speaker
sentences. You can take apart paragraphs into their component parts or a whole page into whatever sentence. And you could rearrange things in whatever order. And it would just be another version. It would be fine. It would be another fine version. And I go, how do you decide? I'll write in ways that I think have. They just don't follow an order that makes sense.
00:44:13
Speaker
Or they do, but I can't be sure. I reread it and I go, should this sentence be first? Should everything be turned inside out? I think in some ways it's because
00:44:23
Speaker
I don't know. I believe in soup, but you stew everything together and then you get real complex flavors and then you get just the truth. You give somebody a thousand true ideas and you say you connect them however you want. You're right. I don't want to force you to connect things in one particular way. That's boring. I think it's making the choices about exactly how to arrange things because we're still three-dimensional
00:44:51
Speaker
creatures or whatever you know, we still time still goes in one direction and You have to make that choice. That's that's always been really tough. And then and so I think I end up relying a lot on basically like flow and and the the music of how how things sound in my head or how they sound out loud because that's something that you can't
00:45:16
Speaker
That's something concrete that you can look at and say, well, it could be in this order or this order. It could be arranged in this way, but I want things to read in a way. And maybe this just comes from my dad's musical influence or just liking music myself, that it really matters how the words end up sounding.
00:45:36
Speaker
Yeah, and how do you achieve a flow state in your work? Is there a way that you check in with yourself to get to that point or do you just put your butt in the chair and just hammer until you get to that place where you're limbered up and you're able to just rock and roll? That's tough for me. I think I'm generally driven by a kind of
00:46:03
Speaker
some sort of emotional connection to what I'm doing but there's a balance. It's like if you're mad, if you're really mad and you're trying to write the mad part, sometimes you're seeing red too much to see the page and there is a sweet spot somewhere. But yeah, I think it's, I have a feeling that the things that I write quickest are often the best.
00:46:32
Speaker
I don't know how many people feel that and that the things that have to be really hammered, you know, not just like polished and tweaked a little bit, but really just forced into being something often come out the way that like an omelet you over beat is going to, you know, just, just too tough. How to get into that state. Yeah, I think it's, it's a lot of just trying to keep some kind of clear head space where
00:47:00
Speaker
where you're writing for the reasons you write, you're really writing to get the ideas out and you're not writing for other purposes. And that's been tough, you know, something like, say, writing op-eds that are supposed to be in connection to publicize the book or something where there is this other incentive that you're thinking about while you're writing the thing that you're writing. And it just keeps poking at you going, hey, well, maybe you want to say this in order to put that kind of stuff, that kind of
00:47:30
Speaker
you know, writing for multiple masters, that's definitely something to try and keep at bay. What point of or what part of the process do you feel most engaged and most alive with or alive in? Other people reading it. I don't love
00:47:55
Speaker
spending my days in my own head. I think that there are a lot of, there are writers who are happy sitting in a hut somewhere in the Hebrides kind of writing when the storm comes in and there's nobody else around and every once in a while they send a letter strapped to a pelican's foot to their publisher and they never see other human beings or something like that.
00:48:22
Speaker
And I would much rather, I don't know if that's a thing. That seems like that would be a thing. But I would much rather spend time with other people and there's a certain kind of doubt that never goes away. I think when I'm writing, that's like maybe something resonates.
00:48:41
Speaker
I write something and I go, that flows well and it says exactly what I mean and I don't think you could take this in any other way or whatever way you take it. I agree with that. It's great. But there's still some seed of doubt that's like maybe this is nonsense or maybe even worse. Maybe this is like pretentious, trite nonsense. Maybe this is obvious. And there's something about, honestly, the moment, whatever moment it is where somebody else has gotten involved in the process that's like,
00:49:10
Speaker
That's how I can stay basically connected to what I'm trying to be connected to, you know? That's like, not to say that it was your favorite part about the writing processes and when it's over, because I don't think that is over. I think all the responses come back into the next thing that you do and to, you know, to continuing to work.
00:49:35
Speaker
And what's your criteria for vetting out that feedback that you might get from some chosen readers? Is there a way that you say, oh, this is good? Or I'm like, no, I'm not going to follow that line of reasoning. But thank you for your input anyway. But how do you choose which ones you want to put into practice?
00:50:00
Speaker
That's super hard because I don't think I've ever fully made a choice about who it is I'm trying to write for. And I know that that's such a kind of a basic, that's a basic instruction, you know, figure out who your audience is and imagine them reading. And I go, well, I'm not trying to rule anybody out, at least not specifically. And so by that token, kind of anybody's opinions are valid in some way. And say somebody reads something and they go, well,
00:50:31
Speaker
This just didn't make sense or when you're missing this or something like that and maybe it's just because they didn't read closely enough or because they took something out of context or whatever, but all those ways of reading are possible, you know, and I kind of want to keep them in mind. It's really hard to
00:50:54
Speaker
to rule out somebody's input, still going back to that same kind of, how can I incorporate everything and somehow reconcile everything with everything else? And it's not possible. It's not actually possible. And so in some ways, I always fail to some degree. But it's kind of like the things that I would rule out are the things that probably jive the least well with other comments.
00:51:24
Speaker
Or that maybe come from a perspective that I actually can rule out. Like if somebody says, you know, this is, say, too provocative and it's going to make people think this and this and this, I can sometimes say, you know, by your reasoning, I'm still okay with it. You know, you made this conclusion and I
00:51:43
Speaker
I agree with everything that gets there, but I don't agree with the reaction to that conclusion. And then I can say, you know, I'm confident in poking people or something like that.
00:51:56
Speaker
And when you were writing the book, and even beforehand, who were you reading that you were kind of using as models? And even a spur of that question is, who are some of those writers in fiction or nonfiction that really inspire you to do the kind of work you're doing? And people you revisit all the time, you're like, oh yeah, that's how it's done.
00:52:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think somebody like Pico Iyer, who wrote, you know, this kind of very emotionally connected nonfiction travel writing. He, he was definitely a model where I felt like I was both learning about places in a way that that felt just really, really, really emotionally connected, you know. I should also say that, like, I have
00:52:54
Speaker
crazy trouble actually reading and not Basically like anything that I connect to I have you know a hundred thoughts that pop out of every sentence that I That I love you know and it makes it makes it tough to read whole books so much of the time you know because you're going man this makes me think of this and this and this and Then I have to do that. I want to incorporate this idea and this idea and this idea but
00:53:23
Speaker
So in that way, you know, it's like almost anything I read or had read for the past seven years probably has some footprint in the book. You know, somebody like Fanon, you know, Franz Fanon's writing about kind of race in Algeria and in France, you know, there were these ideas about how you felt when you saw other people looking at you. And that was something that was really key.
00:53:50
Speaker
And then, you know, after I'd kind of written the rough manuscript and was editing it, a friend gave me East of Eden, which I'd never read. That, you know, I read. I read all of, you know, and was kind of frantically underlining the whole way. And I started to see the whole book as kind of an homage, honestly, to East of Eden, which is all about choice. It's all about how human beings just need to
00:54:19
Speaker
need to come to terms with the fact that we maybe uniquely get to make choices and we have to do it, and that's what makes us people. And I think that's a lot of what my, that helped me kind of crystallize some of the main, one of the main points of my book, saying that's yeah, that's what, I think that's what I'm saying too.
00:54:39
Speaker
And are there particular books that in the event that the sentences don't make you think of a hundred different things that you find yourself rereading over and over again? I wish I reread stuff. I think maybe when I'm older, I'll be better at that. I think I still have the, maybe it's a young person's addiction to novelty.
00:55:07
Speaker
But where I go, got to get more in, there's so much out there, and kind of explore more things, and pretending that I remember the things that I have read or watched before, and just adding new things to the mix. But yeah, I mean, East of Eden is something I definitely go back to, trying to understand the multiple ways that that can be taken. And Pico Irish stuff, definitely.
00:55:37
Speaker
Yeah, it's nice to have that, but it's a great point. I got to figure that out. I got to figure out how to reread, but maybe I have to read properly first. I don't know. If you ever find yourself in creative funk or just down in the way that all artists sometimes get down, what kind of
00:56:03
Speaker
How do you pick yourself back up out of that? Maybe what kind of self-talk do you use to kind of remind yourself just to get back up that you have some value to give, some value to offer? Because I know it happens frequently for me and I know others I've spoken to that they do get down and they have to kind of pick themselves back up somehow. So I was wondering if you experience that, how do you go about getting yourself back up so you can get the work done?
00:56:31
Speaker
That's basically a constant. Even at the better moments of writing this book, I don't really think there's ever a day that went by with full confidence. And honestly, not really a full moment. I think we're all of multiple minds at the same time. At least some percentage of my energy was spent telling me, you're a fucking idiot.
00:56:59
Speaker
And really there's no, there's actually no way around. Like if you, if you're really interested in understanding just what's, what's true, there's no way that you're ever going to prove that wrong. Like to some degree. And I think I always knew that I was playing with a kind of danger of writing a first person, you know, nonfiction memoir, you know, side note, I'm not sure it should be legal to write a memoir when you're under,
00:57:28
Speaker
I want to say 60. There's some part of it that's extremely unhealthy and even before the culture of Instagram stories and reporting every second of your life, I still felt like there's something dangerously narcissistic about this and unless I could turn it into something else, then
00:57:53
Speaker
then it was going to be a huge mistake. Unless that cost became worth something in a different way. This is a huge tangent, so that was there the whole time. It basically made it so that I couldn't really rely on abstract
00:58:17
Speaker
conceptual pick me up, you know, to get back on track because I've had whatever thought and its opposite and already been having the argument with myself, you know, this is really worth it. It's worthless. It's really worth it. It's worthless. And to take a step back and unconsciously say it's worth it. You know, every other conscious part of my head was like, dude, we already heard you. I get it. But
00:58:44
Speaker
this other thing. We've already had the stock. So the things that help I think are way more
How does Adam overcome self-doubt?
00:58:54
Speaker
concrete. They're like being with other people and actually getting out of my head because my head is where that war is going on. In some cases, it's like just being a part of the war, you're going to lose.
00:59:12
Speaker
the way to save that energy is by just getting out of it and trying not to engage in that conscious way and trying to just do things and find other places to get energy back. I thought about this a lot. I think at one moment where
00:59:32
Speaker
During the first round of approaching Asians and getting rejected, I wrote this little essay called Hope on Loan. There were hope sharks, and I would find ways of getting hope, finding change in between the couch cushions. Just wherever I could get it, because I knew on one level I wanted to keep doing this project, but I also could not afford it, hope wise.
01:00:01
Speaker
And it's like, what can I, what can I pawn for hope to keep this going? And some of those sources of hope are really good ones, you know, those are the kinds of things that make you go, I got to get outside and see human beings and like be a part of the world in a really good way. And then some of them I think are turned into, you know, kind of unhealthy practices or trying to convince yourself of things that don't really hold up.
01:00:29
Speaker
Is that essay, is that available online somewhere? I don't think anyone ever ran it. I'm using it actually as a treatment for a scripted TV pitch, which I thought, because wouldn't we all want to see what the world would look like if hope was our currency?
01:00:54
Speaker
which I think it is. I think it actually kind of is in a lot of ways. What did you learn from this book that you're hoping to apply to the next one? Maybe it's just that there's a certain kind of certainty that just never exists. Maybe in a moment it does, but the idea that you hit on something that is
01:01:25
Speaker
you know, unable to be critiqued from any angle and does exactly what you want and that's not really the goal, you know. And I think there's a kind of, one of the ways that I found to avoid choice, you know, to avoid making decisions for forever was to stick to
01:01:55
Speaker
to absolutism as a way of making choices. Just stick to some sort of absolute. That's where things are clearer. It's like, yeah, but none of the actual world is there. There's nothing that I'm ever gonna write where I think everybody's reaction to it will be in the family of things that I find okay and all the, or even something that I read back to myself and go,
01:02:24
Speaker
It says everything I need it to. Because, you know, every sentence is a part of a paragraph, and every paragraph is part of a page, and every page is a part of a whole book or something, and you can connect those in every possible way, and interactions are created, and you just, at a certain point, you stop, you know? At a certain point, you gotta trust your gut. So I think that's probably the hardest, that's really the hardest thing, I think, especially,
01:02:54
Speaker
in that transition from having written zero books to having written one, and then from one to any more than that, where you go, oh, my gut is actually good enough. At least for starters, it's not gonna be perfect, and people are gonna respond by saying, yo, your gut instincts are bullshit. Some of them are, nowadays people will say, your gut instincts, some of them are racist. Some of them make you,
01:03:24
Speaker
an atrocious human being. Some of them mean you're an impulsive animal. And then you get to respond to yourself, or however, saying, I don't care, or great, or oh, that's cool, I get to change now. I think the hardest thing is just engaging with the conversation for starters. And that's probably what we don't have enough of nowadays, is actual back and forth conversations based in real stuff. But what I would take the book is, yeah, for a next book, I get the,
01:03:53
Speaker
tell myself, look, you know, this is just it's just the start of it's just the start of a thing. And whoever engages, you get to engage back with them. It's not it's not supposed to be the beginning and the end of something. And where is your your gut and your taste taking you for your next project? So
What are Adam's future projects?
01:04:17
Speaker
I'm definitely working on some things in TV, which are driven by a lot of same impulses, basically about exploring kind of off-limits places in a really, really human way. And on the writing side, some of that turns into writing scripted projects that also have the same, it's like, what do we do to keep reinforcing the idea of
01:04:46
Speaker
of common humanity. I think that's, I know how extremely trite so much of this can be, you know, like just arguing for, just arguing for humanity. I mean, that's ridiculous concept. But what we're seeing happen now is, you know, in the
01:05:11
Speaker
had European friends call this the culture wars in America, I think Americans do too, that we're picking ourselves apart in a way that is not helpful, that actually makes it so that argument for common humanity is not a universal thing. Like my, I think, high school English teacher said, if you're writing an essay and nobody can disagree with it, it's a bullshit essay.
01:05:37
Speaker
But people actually do disagree with this now. You know, partly the rise of tech is also eroding certain things that used to be the domain of of humans and human choice. And so I found myself I think more comfortable writing about and working on projects where this thing that I used to. I used to kind of shit on myself as like a Pollyanna kind of perspective as being like actually worth fighting for.
01:06:07
Speaker
And it's tough because nobody wants to be.
01:06:12
Speaker
Nobody wants to be Pollyanna. You're right. Well, I knew from the opening sentences of the book, I knew it was going to be a fun ride. You had a real fluid way and inviting way and a great tonality to the voice on the page that was just fun to be with for the 335 pages it was. So I just want to thank you for the book and for the work.
Closing and social media presence
01:06:39
Speaker
And where can people find you online, Adam? Thank you so much, man. I am on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Should be findable. My name is sometimes spelled wrong on those things as a joke. But if you search for me, you'll find me.
01:07:03
Speaker
And yeah, the book's hopefully everywhere. Every time I pass through Barnes and Noble, I grab and I move it to the front, which I think, I shouldn't have admitted that on the podcast. That's all right. We all do it. I heard from somebody who was like, I got caught doing this, and perhaps the most embarrassing thing, because they check the jacket. They're like, this is you.
01:07:32
Speaker
but important right of passage. Yes, of course. Well, Adam, thanks so much for the time and for the book. And yeah, we'll have to do this again when you've got some other workout. We'll have you back on for round two and dig into more of what it means to write true stories. So thanks again, man. Absolutely. Can't wait. Take care, man. You got it. All right.
01:07:59
Speaker
That's another episode in the books as they say. I think that's what they say. Thank you to Adam and thank you for listening. Still Jones in for some non-fiction material? Sign up for my monthly newsletter where I send out my monthly book recommendations as well as what you might have missed from the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
01:08:24
Speaker
I'm thinking of adding some radio and or podcasts and some documentary film recommendations to the newsletter too, so it'll be this nice non-fiction hub for you to digest over the ensuing month. Still once a month, no spam. Can't beat it. And where do you sign up for this? You go to BrendanOmera.com. There's a smart bar at the top of the website and there might even be a pop-up that comes up in the middle and says, hey, sign up.
01:08:53
Speaker
Do it. It's a growing list. It's fun. Once a month.
01:08:57
Speaker
Say hi on Twitter. I'm at Brendan O'Mara or at CNF Pod. CNF Pod has one follower right now. I'll give you one guess who follows it and it's not my mom. I've got some ringers in the queue and 2018 has barely started. I hope you stick around because you're in for a CNF and great year friends. See you right here next week for another episode of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. Thank you.