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Episode 479: Jeff Sharlet and Finding Real Toads in Imaginary Gardens
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"You're an outsider. And as you linger in that space, you start to become an insider ... but you're still an outsider. Don't forget that, even though you know more about it, you're an insider and an outsider," says Jeff Sharlet about when he's reporting on, say, far-right religious groups.
OK, we’ve got Jeff Sharlet, which is pretty stunning when you think about it. I mean, this guy is the author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, The Family, among other books. He often covers the far right and far-right fundamentalism and what’s he’s been able to document is scary and often unsettling. We don’t dig too much into that, because mainly we just talk about doing this kind of work. It was really a fun and illuminating conversation and I’m pretty stoked.
He teaches writing and creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College. That was where I desperately wanted to go to school. I was set to be their starting shortstop, but I couldn’t get my goddam SATs above remedial and thus I attended good ol’ UMass … back in the late 1990s, if you could funnel a beer in five seconds you got a scholarship #yolo
In this episode, Jeff and I riff about:
- His key influences
- Treating your book badly as a way of treating it well
- Using your outsiderness to your advantage
- His love of sportswriting, or interest in sportswriting, despite not following sports
- And real toads in imaginary gardens
You can learn more about Jeff and his work @jeffsharlet on Substack and his newsletter there called Scenes from a Slow Civil War … I admire people like Jeff who are just so damn smart in how they articulate things seemingly on the fly. Meanwhile, ya boi BO sounds about as coherent as a chimpanzee.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Announcements
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, CNFers, the frontrunner is out, and I think it's gaining a bit more traction out there. Been getting some nice texts, some emails. Turn those texts and emails into online reviews, please. An event!
00:00:11
Speaker
On July 27th, there will be a live taping of the podcast featuring ya boi, B.O. CNF Pod's reigns handed over to Daniel Littlewood. I don't know how I feel about that, but we'll get there.
00:00:25
Speaker
I am led to believe he's a top-notch guy. 1 p.m. Gratitude Brewing in Eugene. Go on, get yourself a front runner. Is this a podcast where I can swear?
00:00:36
Speaker
That's the dumbest fucking shit, you know? I mean, none of the the dumbest fucking shit disguised under disguise under creativity, what we are encountering.
00:00:53
Speaker
It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the art and craft of the true tales they tell. Or some shit. and Brendan O'Mara. You're damn right.
Guest Introduction: Jeff Charlotte
00:01:03
Speaker
Okay, we've got Jeff Charlotte, which is pretty stunning when you think about it I mean, this guy is the author of The Undertow, scenes from a slow civil war, The Family, among other books.
00:01:16
Speaker
He often covers the far right and far right fundamentalists. And what he's been able to document is scary and often unsettling. And we don't really dig into that that much. I mean, a little bit.
00:01:30
Speaker
ah Because mainly we just talk about doing this kind of work. It was really fun and illuminating conversation, and I'm pretty fucking stoked showing us at this episode and more at brendanamero.com. Hey, there.
00:01:44
Speaker
You can find links to hot blogs, tasteful nudes, and forms to sign up for the flagship Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter and the hottest thing since me in 7-inch seam shorts.
00:01:55
Speaker
For all my body dysmorphia, I do have nice legs. What? Pitch Club, where I have a journalist's audio annotate a pitch that earn publication. If you're a working journalist, you'll want to subscribe.
00:02:06
Speaker
If you're a journalism teacher, you'll want your students subscribing. Forever free, welcome to pitchclub.substack.com. And if you want to support the show and its infrastructure and my ego, go to patreon.com slash cnfpod.
00:02:21
Speaker
You get FaceTime with me to talk some things out, depending on your tier. It's not very organized, but it's something. God damn it, it's something. So Jeff is here.
00:02:32
Speaker
He teaches writing and creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College. That was where I desperately wanted to go to school. I was set to be their starting shortstop, but I couldn't get my goddamn SATs above remedial, and thus I attended good ol' UMass.
00:02:45
Speaker
Back in the late 90s, if you could funnel a beer in five seconds, you got a scholarship. Hashtag
Jeff Charlotte's Influences
00:02:52
Speaker
YOLO. In this episode, Jeff and I riff, riff, about his key influences, treating your book badly as a way of treating it well, using your outsider-ness to your advantage, his love of sports writing, or interest in sports writing, despite not following sports,
00:03:08
Speaker
and real toads in imaginary gardens. I don't know what that is. Really good stuff. I know I say that every week, but seriously, really great stuff. You can learn more about Jeff and his work at Jeff Charlotte on Substack and his newsletter there called Scenes from Slow Civil War.
00:03:25
Speaker
I admire people like Jeff who are just so damn smart and how they articulate things seemingly on the fly. Meanwhile, ya boi B.O. sounds about as coherent as a chimpanzee.
00:03:36
Speaker
Parting shot on playing seasonal sports as a writing analogy? Stick around, it's a banger. For now, cue up the montage. Riff.
00:03:52
Speaker
know I don't even know what's in my tool belt, let alone how to use it. Yeah, I mean, what is this genre if not hybridity? I respect that sentence. Is that an option? Because I choose that option. is This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:04:17
Speaker
Coming up as a reporter and a journalist and ah in particular, like such a as such a brilliant narrative writer yourself, you know, who are some of the the reporters and authors that you really locked into early on that helped ah kind of pave the way for the kind of journalism that you would lock into?
00:04:34
Speaker
I mean, there won't be original responses except in as much as I can remember the the kind of the sort of precise time and and and space of the encounters, which is i went to i went to Hampshire College and my idea was to go and be an actor.
00:04:52
Speaker
And Hampshire has a pretty good art school. And so i was pretty quickly disabused of that notion by these sort of, you know, these graduates of the fame school in New York and so on. So I'm not going be an actor. My plan B was to be a forest ranger that involved too much science. Oh, great. Here's a writing class that will fit into my schedule.
00:05:14
Speaker
And it was with a writer named Michael Lessie, who's best known as author of 1973 book called Wisconsin Death Trip, which is still in print and has become this sort of strange kind of hybrid experiment of of of archival photography and clips from old newspapers and Lessie's own writing and then a fictional character who is a town narrator.
00:05:37
Speaker
And he was teaching, i was calling it literary journalism. And you know I've always been interested in all the kind of all the names for this genre of ours. And there's in there're always some kind of mashup, creative nonfiction, literary journalism, lyric essay, whatever it is, it's always a mashup.
00:05:53
Speaker
and And in that class, i remember I remember all the readings from the class, the two that were just transformative for me were James Agee with Walker Evans and Joan Didion.
00:06:05
Speaker
And I remember Hampshire College had no money, so the library was just practically made out of cinder blocks, like cinder block bookshelves. But I remember this cubicle reading James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the deep subjectivity of it and the awareness and declaration from the first page that this very endeavor of nonfiction meant right from the beginning, failure.
00:06:30
Speaker
and i've never that that's you know And I was like, wow, that's something about that was like, yes, that's great. A whole genre in which I can never do anything but fail and that that's the work.
00:06:41
Speaker
But it was it was it was thrilling to me. And and you know it was even thrilling to me to sort of like, look, he's got ah an oil lamp on the on the table in this little
Narrative Style and Teaching Philosophy
00:06:51
Speaker
sharecropper's cabin in rural Alabama.
00:06:54
Speaker
And he thinks part of the story is he can't sleep. And he's going to describe this this oil lamp as fully as he can. um And that part of the facts and data and reporting are the associations um he's bringing to this.
00:07:11
Speaker
um So that um he's thinking about, you know, he's thinking about the graves, the burial mounds, these sort of dirt graves and there's photographs but walker evans of these and he's describing as the inverted boat and now he's thinking about a boat and a ship and it wouldn't be till later that i saw aj was a screenwriter as well and uh most famously well actually i think most famously african queen but more interestingly um night of the hunter with robert mitchum and it's there's a robert mitchum plays an evil preacher you know though If you've ever know like the old sort of love and hate meme of the hands struggling against each other, that's Robert Mitchum from Night of the Hunter.
00:07:48
Speaker
and These two little kids are fleeing and the rest of the movie doesn't matter, but for this five-minute sequence of them floating in a boat on a river at night, they've just escaped, they don't have a paddle, and one of them is singing a song.
00:08:03
Speaker
and It's important to understand the film is to zoom in, or i mean this the moment, to zoom in on a spider watching them as they go by. that was reporting that was non-fiction and that you know that was ag sensibility so i remember that and then joan didion we read slouching towards bethlehem which is in a way i guess to me in some ways the sort of the the long tragedy of my life has been having read having read slouching towards bethlehem first because there's other good didion but there's nothing like that the white album almost but nothing like that and um
00:08:36
Speaker
And I remember, i you know, I remember ah talking to a friend who was also in that class and she was telling me she had migraines and Joan Didion famously suffers from migraines and she wears the big giant sunglasses and they're very chic. But when you know about the migraines, you're like, oh, oh, she's also hiding from the light.
00:08:57
Speaker
and And the preface is slouching. She talks about how... Her advantage as a writer is her profound shyness, right? That's also the sunglasses. But this friend of mine is was a whiskey drinker as I was not then. And I was impressed and admired that. And that seemed very Didion-esque to me. And my friend had migraines. And I remember this pang...
00:09:20
Speaker
of idiot jealousy. I wanted migraines too, so that I could be more like Joan Didion. And i almost sort of think of of of my generation of writers in time. And you know if you were studying writing at that time, and and this is a white spectrum, and I'm aware of that, but that was sort of the spectrum into which I was coming.
00:09:41
Speaker
there was You either wanted to be Hunter Thompson or you wanted to be Joan Didion. um And with respect to those who care for your Hunter Thompson, and I've come to respect that work for what it is over time, but I loathed it. um I wanted to be Joan Didion.
00:09:59
Speaker
And it's Joan Didion and Agee who give me my sense as a reporter. And you speak of a reporter and journalist. I didn't know as a reporter and journalist for many years until practicing it because i I came to it through this literary journalism and this kind of narrative writing.
00:10:15
Speaker
And over time that's intersected often enough with things that the rest of the world considered news or important that I, they're like, oh, okay. I'm a reporter too. And now I've very fully embraced that term.
00:10:29
Speaker
um And, and, and in fact, I'm teaching a class now, which is creative nonfiction, but I'm just calling it the reporters because if anything, I think part of,
00:10:41
Speaker
well this is my grumpy old man complaint, and I'll stop, is is that that everything has been sort of centrifuged so that reporting is over here and is very dry and hard news and comes from a very particular journalistic tradition, which is by no means definitive.
00:10:59
Speaker
And the creative nonfiction is over here, and it's almost all memoir or a personal essay. um And, you know, those writers that going back to beginning They weren't making those distinctions and this mutant genre shouldn't make those distinctions. Whether we draw on fiction, we draw on poetry, we draw on everything.
00:11:18
Speaker
We do not say sharp lines. We bring it all into this space and reporting memoir, all it right there at once. I love that that image of the of, as you say, centrifuging it because there is it does feel like there's this distinction that if you're a reporter, yeah, you're like covering zoning boards and and and that, but the the backbone of great narrative is just ironclad reporting. like You get those great details, and you only get those great details through that rap reporting, interviewing and records and all that stuff.
00:11:56
Speaker
We'll start to ah layer. Those are all the paints that you paint with. And that's what can really make something evocative. And it really, it stems from the reporting. ah A story I heard, and and I'm not going to name names. It doesn't matter. You'll get the structure.
00:12:13
Speaker
so A writer who I love, and and I teach this person a particular piece by this person, and and it's just this deep immersion in a place and time and people, and it's just a fantastic story. And this person ah had been a newspaper reporter and then had gone to an MFA program in creative nonfiction and...
00:12:36
Speaker
as the story is handed to me, they're workshopping this piece, which is astonishing. I mean, it's it's it's it's it's one of those stories that I think for some of my students functions the way A.G. and Didion did for me 30 years ago.
00:12:50
Speaker
And it's so intimate to this place. and and And the MFA students in this class love this work, but they're puzzled. How did the writer You know, you're describing this moment and how this person felt and what they thought. And how did you know that?
00:13:07
Speaker
And the writer who had been a newspaper report, says, I asked. I asked. and And a number of the students were outraged.
00:13:18
Speaker
Well, that's not art. That's not art. And, you know. i don't know, is this is this a podcast where I can swear? That's the dumbest fucking shit. you know I mean, none of the dumbest fucking shit disguised under disguise under creativity. What we are encountering is a very rigid 19th century aesthetic. And it reminds me of, you know, that term new journalism, right? There's never, yeah it's never one word, right? New journalism, Joan Deaton's a new journalist and And supposedly Tom Wolfe invents it in the 1960s. And like everything else, Tom Wolfe said it was a lie.
00:13:52
Speaker
It comes from that. I'm not a Tom Wolfe fan. um um You find this phrase, and I bet Tom Wolfe knew this conservative kind of intellectual that he was.
00:14:02
Speaker
Matthew Arnold, the British literary critic in the late 19th century, eighteen eighty s I think. And he's got this... sort of seemingly rhapsodizing description of what's happening in American journalism.
00:14:13
Speaker
And he says it's filled with, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's filled with voice and character and humor and digression. And it's it's this democratic rumble.
00:14:24
Speaker
And you're like, wow, this is great. And he says, and that is why it must be crushed. um Because there must be, he's coming from a British conservative tradition, which is journalism is the practice of listening to experts.
00:14:41
Speaker
And art is when one goes, one, one goes and communes with the muse. And these must be carefully kept separate and in a hierarchy, right?
00:14:52
Speaker
So when I see that centrifuge, which I kind of have a I've been thinking a lot about this lately. I think we're kind of in a moment, and I am being a grumpy old man, where that I see it more and more, that hard that hardening line between creativity and reportage, which is does a disservice to both, and which is sometimes framed as in service of art and ostensibly almost a progressive bent about it.
00:15:20
Speaker
That's 19th century British conservatism. And with it comes all the implicit reactionary sentiments um of that world. Yeah. I mean, what is this genre if not hybridity?
00:15:33
Speaker
And hybridity is constantly mutating. Yeah. And how have you sought de-centrifuge all that stuff in your own work and to, yeah, to to uncrush it as the the the British sought to do?
00:15:48
Speaker
Yeah. And it's sort of interesting when when you think about like, like so you know where is the work? where Where do you first come to this work? and And I think I was lucky in that sense of A.G. and Evans. So from the very first thing, I'm like, oh, so if you're going to you know, not only is it what A.G. is doing, but it's also Walker Evans's photographs. And and I think a lot about photography. And I was studying with this man, Michael Lessie, who um Wisconsin death trip, he sort of backed into this genre. He's doing a history PhD at Wisconsin in the early 70s, but the world was collapsing. you know Madison, Wisconsin, the the math building was blown up and someone was killed. ah
00:16:29
Speaker
Someone flew a crop duster over campus and dropped Molotov cocktails. um you know Incredible political violence. And the the traditions of of historical narrative, which he was trained to do, weren't making sense. How do I make this story? So he didn't start from, in some ways, he didn't start from tradition. He started from the ground up. I just have this materials. How do I put it together? right And that's how I encountered it. And that's what I see A.G. and Evans doing. They're sent down If people don't know that story, they're sent to Alabama. They're working for Fortune magazine, which is its own story. Fortune magazine in the 1930s is like, oh, let's see, we have ah some economic data here.
00:17:09
Speaker
We better get a poet to write about it. i mean, they were doing all kinds of innovative things in that kind of um that modernist moment of the 1930s in which documentary collage, all this kind of stuff is coming up. you know They decide that to just to document the lives of these sharecroppers is going to mean all this other stuff and that the photographs are not going to be the photographs, which to us are now maybe familiar because they're so iconic in American photography, but they were weird then.
00:17:36
Speaker
Wait a minute, Walker, we sent you down to document sharecropping and you have a close up photograph of a wall papered with magazine advertisements, or you have a photograph of a boot.
00:17:49
Speaker
Walker, what the hell is this? you know And encountering it like that, that sort of that's where I started. i think over time, you know making a living and and making books and magazines is always are always those compromises. Yeah.
00:18:05
Speaker
I think ah ah my favorite book of mine is a book called This Brilliant Darkness. And and it began on, it's just words and pictures because I'd always been fascinated with photography. And I started using Instagram in 2014. And I was also always interested in graphic work and in comics.
00:18:21
Speaker
And when I get stuck as a writer, I will read a superhero comic, which I loved as kids.
Inspiration and Techniques
00:18:27
Speaker
I don't, Great for those, I don't collect or anything superhero comics now, but that gets me back to that space. You know, the gutter, which is what comics artists call the the space between panels, right? Yeah. Panel one, Wonder Woman's about to punch someone. Panel two, it says pal, right? And our mind sets it in motion.
00:18:44
Speaker
And when I'm stuck as a writer, I'm like, oh, I'm stuck. I need to that motion between panels. And so I was looking at Instagram in 2014 and thinking, oh, look, um I can't draw, up but this is like a this is framed out here like a comic book. And I could i got about 400 words in each one of these things. And I could have a snapshot and then a picture and I could make my own comic book. And I was just doing this in this very, you know, just for fun and way.
00:19:10
Speaker
That ended up becoming this book called This Brilliant Darkness. of words and pictures and putting me in conversation. there was ah There's a National Geographic writer, he's very good narrative writer named Neil Shea, and he had sort of stumbled on the same thing.
00:19:24
Speaker
And I think, and want to speak for Neil, but partly sort of, he does this wonderful work for Geographic and loves it. But there's also, you know if you're working in magazines,
00:19:37
Speaker
There's the thing called the nut graph. and i mean And he had he had a hashtag, killing the nut graph, right? so So you know the the photograph becomes the first sentence or the first paragraph in your story. And you don't need a nut graph.
00:19:51
Speaker
um And you start to then to start thinking about going back to Diddy and slouching towards Bethlehem, which is really just an array of snapshots. It's just an array of fragments. um And the work of it is the juxtaposition.
00:20:05
Speaker
I put this scene here and this scene there, and I count on you to leap across that gutter no to make that association. And I think that's that's kind of informed a lot of the pros I mean, this brilliant darkness, this photo and and words is a prose work. But even you know the last book, it's called The the Undertow.
00:20:28
Speaker
And on one hand, I think it's recognizable to some people because I also often write about these sort of right-wing movements. And so I know there's plenty people reading who care less about literary journalism, creative nonfiction, craft, whatever.
00:20:40
Speaker
They just tell me about those sons of a bitches. you know yeah It's okay. You don't get to control how people read your book. And if they find something valuable, then it's great. um But maybe they're going to notice that to tell you about those sons of a bitches, um I'm writing about Ashley Babbitt, who was um killed on January 6th. She was an insurrectionist and was climbing through a window and a police officer shot her. She was carrying a knife. She was there to storm the Capitol, as she put it. and I mean, it's all like, to write about Ashley Babbitt, first we write the scene of her death, right? Which I'm able to reconstruct because there's so many, there's a whole lot of video, right? From all kinds of different angles.
00:21:20
Speaker
And then I'm going to go to a church and the church is not really about Ashley Babbitt. And we're going to think about that. And then Ashley Babbitt, the insurrectionist. And when I use... The F word fascist, I'm not using it lightly. That's just that's sort of like, you know, I don't know. You might be a Democrat. She's a fascist. Everybody's got their affiliation.
00:21:38
Speaker
and ah And people are always surprised that her favorite movie is The Big Lebowski. And and that could have been a color detail. Right. But to me, I'm thinking, you know, I'm thinking about A.G.
00:21:51
Speaker
and his oil lamp that this is part of the reporting. So part of the reporting of Ashley Babbitt and the Insurrection meant me rewatching The Big Lebowski many times and thinking about that and then seeing, oh, The Big Lebowski, which you know first time I seen it, I hadn't noticed.
00:22:10
Speaker
it's It's another collage of the Coen brothers, noir, Western. And so suddenly I'm going back to all these pieces and then I'm saying, OK, well, in this book, we're obviously going to need a photograph.
00:22:22
Speaker
You're not going to be able to understand January 6th. and Unless I tell you about the Big Lebowski. And then we got to talk about the musical scene. And then we got to have a photograph from a Busby Berkeley 1930s musical of 100 synchronized swimmers kicking up in the air at once, right?
00:22:39
Speaker
Look, I know even describing this, this sort of risks, incoherence, and narcissism. I think you have to take that risk with the understanding that you will fail and it will collapse into that, but that sometimes you will encounter, this is to me what the genre is, the possibility of that encounter with, that documentary encounter with reality that is not constricted to the one, two, three, the ABC, the the stack of facts, the inverted pyramid of of traditional journalism.
00:23:08
Speaker
Yeah, i i love hearing you you deconstruct that, and um yeah be it other other people's work or your own and how you're you know ah formulating formulating that the that holistic approach. and i was listening sounds I'm sort of a knucklehead sports writer, and it I was listening to the Dan Patrick show, and he had a Hall of Fame offensive tackle ah Joe Thomas on the show. And the the way he was, our ah Thomas was articulating what it meant to be a pro, like leveling up to to a certain level, was like he learned from the some of the veterans in the locker room before him. And it was just like they taught him how how to watch film, what to look for, and how to take notes to to get better and better. You know, they're all physically gifted at this point. But then there's a level of study that
00:23:58
Speaker
that puts them above and potentially a Hall of Fame or certainly Pro Bowlers or whatever. And ah I love extending that metaphor to to writers and too, like like yourself. you know what What is your film study and how do you deconstruct something and and so that it sticks in your brain too?
00:24:19
Speaker
Well, now that you're saying this, Brendan, it makes me think I've got to go through your archive and found find your interviews with sports writers. Because this is a thing that I think is really interesting, too. Because part of, you know, when I said Matthew Arnold decrying the new journalism of of the United States, one of the things he hated were the so-called um the the sporting gentleman's weeklies, which were these...
00:24:40
Speaker
I mean, really sensationalist, true crime and sports papers for, they were not gentlemen. Gentlemen did not read these things, right? They were the Joe Rogans of their day, but Joe Rogan had not yet been invented and they were actually engaging with this kind of narrative writing. and I think about this because I don't follow sports in as much as I've ever been much of an athlete. It's just like, I'm going to go for a long run.
00:25:10
Speaker
But because I love this genre, it puts me in this relationship with sports writing. And I tend to think that a lot of where it comes from and gets overlooked is those that early sports writing, which is doing this thing. It's like one thing to tell someone. and I think you you know this is a sports writer. It's one thing to tell someone what the scores are or to speak analytically.
00:25:30
Speaker
It's another. to what did it feel like to be at the fight? you know yeah you know like Norman Miller, some of his best writing is about boxing and W.C. Hines A.J. Liebling. I mean, boxing in particular as as as lending itself to that. and That kind of... net like the the one, two, three of sports writing isn't going to work, right? It's going to be boring, except for anybody, you know, a true sports fan is like, fine, that's okay. I'll run the film myself and fill in the narrative.
00:26:00
Speaker
and And I think about the way sports writers are always doing that in interesting ways. And um like, I'm and just behind the screen right now is I have ah Wright Thompson's new book, who I know mainly as a sports writer. That's where I've encountered him this is these great portraits, but his new book is called, um,
00:26:17
Speaker
the barn and it's about a barn near where he's from in Mississippi um where Emmett Till was killed. And I'm just starting it, but I'm already sort of thrilled by one digression leading to another, like to understand this text, the barn, it seems almost sacrilegious to put that horrific thing and combination with say watching sports film, right?
00:26:41
Speaker
But to understand this play, you have to understand really precisely, right? it's sort of like you you better know every curve of that oil lamp, right? But you can't exclude any data, like whatever, like, okay, so that, you know, that oil lamp, before they were on this team, they played on this team and they had that coach and that coach trained there and all this is coming in to play, right? Right.
00:27:03
Speaker
It's like the deep, deep layering. and and and so i but I've long wanted to do it and I haven't had the courage. I wanted to teach a course on sports writing, which would be hard because I know the students would be sports fans and I'm not and I would know nothing yeah except for read this beautiful piece about this person who plays this, you know I used to say something stupid like, read this gorgeous essay about this football match.
00:27:27
Speaker
and My students would be like, football match, what are you talking about? It's game. But because that big because that layering is there in sports writing and and and you know it's there in true crime too, which is in that 19th century writing is like, how do we how do we write about crime? Mostly badly.
00:27:46
Speaker
I mean, and it's probably true is like most sports writing is not great. But think about all the, I mean, you must think about this, the the the the sports writing that is great that we read long after we anybody remembers who that athlete was.
00:28:03
Speaker
we read about games that, you know, uh, you know, how many people have read about Roger Federer who would care less about tennis, you know? Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. Well, right. Does that particularly well? I mean, he's made a whole career out of it. Uh, there's,
00:28:22
Speaker
yeah ah Sport as a backdrop is just such a great vector to talk about so many things, you know, society, race, money, and and everything. And it is, it and baked into it is often that that ah there's there's tension if there happens to be an event or a sporting event there. So there is this built-in, there's a built-in clock often.
00:28:43
Speaker
and And, and so much of that stuff, you know, then you can get creative with the structure of things. So yeah, it's just something I've locked into for forever and love dissecting it. um But yeah, you know, it ends up, ends up being just a yeah really rich way to, you know, the best ones you come to over and over again.
00:29:02
Speaker
I love what you say about the built-in clock. and and and i think i'm gonna I'll cite you, but I'm going to use that because I think about that. like You look for those moments with a built-in clock because it allows you. it does if you know If you're doing uncreative nonfiction, it can make for a very tedious structure. If you've got that built-in clock and the way that it allows you to play with structure because that's there, right that's kind of simultaneously grounding you.
00:29:28
Speaker
like Because I think about like all these digressions. The digression always has to be, has to that's the tension is is is between the built-in clock and the subjectivity of the writer going off in this other direction. And I and you know i mean, i another mutant term for this genre, you know the art of fact, right? which And don't even like puns, but I'm always like, wow, isn't that great? How can no one ever talk about how that sounds like an artifact?
00:29:55
Speaker
um yeah But art of fact, and I would think, oh, okay. So it's it's this tightrope. And you're balancing on this. And that's the tension. That's what makes this sort of story exciting between the built in clock, which is the real and the structure and the narrative that you're messing around with, which is your imagination and your perception.
00:30:18
Speaker
Yeah, ah it it is. Yeah, that is really beautifully put. And I, yeah, and with, them and I'm always looking to, you know, I ah read a lot. I'm not the, I'm not the fastest reader, but i read all the time.
00:30:32
Speaker
And I'm often, I'm often surprised at how, like, I wish what I read could be more sticky in my head because so often it it just, it will end up just kind of eroding from my memory.
00:30:43
Speaker
and, i and Yeah. And I wonder just for you, like when you're, when you're reading to make things feel more sticky, you know, in your head, how, how are you processing what you read and the notes you're taking so that, you know, you can better convey it to your students, but also just, you know, for your own edification to, yeah, to keep it in your head. So you can just, uh, you can pull on those threads more, more readily.
Literary Metaphors and Genre Exploration
00:31:09
Speaker
You know, I remember when I was young, uh, reading about Faulkner, um who I discovered in the best way. i had a job working in a library, college library, summer job. And, you know, i was like, whatever, 16, I didn't want to do my job. So I would just hide in the stacks. And I started reading, I vaguely heard of Faulkner. I started reading As They Lay Dying.
00:31:34
Speaker
I'm like, okay, I'll try this. And that's a weird fucking book. There's one whole chapter that is, my mother is a fish. That's it you know and you're like, what? What? um But I got pretty entranced by it.
00:31:47
Speaker
um And I remember learning that Faulkner, and he was probably lying. He's a big liar, but um I can't even remember the name. i think Dostoevsky is one. He had like three or four writers. He says, like, basically, I just read those over and over and over.
00:32:03
Speaker
And this was so at odds with the kind of, you know, to be a good citizen, one must keep up with, you know, ah read what others are reading. And I do, I am drawn into the current, but I think my advice for writers and, and I i have a friend who's a great writer. I'm not going to name her either because this, this is our disagreement. um But I don't know. She she started writing late in life. She didn't start her, you know,
00:32:33
Speaker
She didn't start even doing magazine articles, much less books, until she was 40 or so. you know She lived another life. And so she had a certain amount of insecurity about literary world. And so she reads every big buzzed book, right?
00:32:45
Speaker
She reads it. And then I'll get a call. I'm like, I don't get it. This is this is not very good. I'm like, oh no, of course. That that guy just told horseshit that book. You don't need to read that. Why is everyone talking? Oh, you know, and maybe I know enough gossip to know how that one got sort of launched or or maybe I don't.
00:33:04
Speaker
I'm just like, you know, like why don't you just reread that book that you love? And I don't want to be so conservative, like, and you know, pick your classics because you're always adding to that canon. Like, I don't reread AJ anymore.
00:33:16
Speaker
um You know what I reread lately? And know this was a buzzed book that I resisted for a long time. is for Hawk by Helen McDonald. and And I have to admit, i saw like, this is a book club book. That's nice. You know, it's like reading Olita in Tehran. It's like, that's nice. It's perfect for a book club discussion.
00:33:35
Speaker
wow. McDonald's book is so good. And, uh, I listened to it as an audio book first and I liked it so much. Then I had to read it and then I taught it and then I keep coming back to passages. So then it starts to stick. And of course, you know, I don't know. It's, it's always interesting me with students. Not everyone has, some people are, are, are, are tidier and sound like bend the pages in your book, you know, uh, scrawl all over it.
00:34:03
Speaker
You know, ah that, Treat your book badly as a way of treating it well. And and you start to to learn that. But the same thing, though, I will say, i mean, I think partly I don't actually have a very sticky memory. And I and and don't want to generalize too much, but I do you feel like I know a fair number of other writers in this genre of ours who are the same, which is kind of like why we're sort of doing this. Because we're like...
00:34:31
Speaker
yeah You know, this is like, this is like John McPhee, right? who i don't know if he had a, he's still alive. Yeah, I think he's 90, 91 or 92. Yeah. yeah I don't know if he has a sticky memory or not, but I mean, you know, I know this one thing about him is that, you know, he would linger in a, in a groove for a long time. So he's going to write about geography or geography ah geology.
00:34:51
Speaker
He knows a great deal. Um, and his practice though, as I understand it was always just to ask stupid questions. Um, and And I interpret it as both because great that you know we want the person talking and hearing how they understand it.
00:35:08
Speaker
But also there's that kind of the but vague, you know we're not experts, those of us who do this kind of work, right? So like i'm I'm never going to go into a space and say, ru finem I know about this. like What does that yeah I write a lot about really just fundamentalism.
00:35:27
Speaker
I was just at a church, a very fundamentalist church in Spokane, Washington a few weeks ago. and I knew the history of this church. I knew its denominational background. I knew its theology and so on, but I'm talking to this associate pastor and I'm asking the dumbest questions, both because I want him to say it, but also because there's that, the anxiety of stickiness. I'm like,
00:35:49
Speaker
do I understand this? Wait a minute. You tell me again what yeah this thing is. And, and, you know, and that, that doesn't always work, but in that case, it led to this sort of interesting space. And you can have that same relationship with the book is like, did I understand that again and again? I reread a poem called poetry by Marian Moore.
00:36:08
Speaker
Um, uh, And there's a sports story with Marianne Moore, the sports writer you'll appreciate. So Marianne Moore is this high modernist, very difficult poet ah of the 20th century, strange reclusive character. she wore capes. I think she lived with her mother, ah had this sort of deep relationship with the visual artist, Joseph Cornell, but I'm way off the factual map here, but i don't I think it was mainly through correspondence, even though they lived close to each other.
00:36:39
Speaker
But I like to imagine this world, and again, I'm off the factual map, but there's a baseball game somewhere in there. And we're going to say it's opening games for the Yankees of, I don't know, 1963, 1964. And they want somebody really, you know, a real figure to throw out the opening pitch.
00:36:59
Speaker
And the past is a different country. There is a world in which apparently they said, hey, let's get that difficult, reclusive, high modernist poet Marion Moore in her cape to throw out the pitch.
00:37:13
Speaker
What a fucking world that was. um yeah Anyway, the poem that I keep going, Marion Moore, and she came, she wrote this poem called On Poetry, and she just kept rewriting it for 40, 50 years. There's so many different versions. It's hard to know which version she likes best. and And by the end,
00:37:33
Speaker
And the last version was down to three lines, the first of which was, I too dislike it. um you know and And she starts from that place. So it's the same James Agee, like, look, it's never going to work. But she has this line down and and in the middle. She says, you know not until and we can all be literalists of the imagination.
00:37:50
Speaker
Is that what it was? Literalists of the imagination. we can have Can we have it, this poetry? And what she describes it as, um as imaginary gardens with real toads in them. um And I'm indebted for this recognition. Oh, you're describing creative nonfiction to a friend of mine, Jeff Allred, who's a literary scholar, and he's studying sort of documentary culture of the And he's like, imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
00:38:15
Speaker
That's it. that's That's what we're doing. you write you know You write about the baseball game. and And, you know, Marion Moore is your real toad. 1963 or 64, now we're getting into imaginary garden. Or the structure, the clock, you know, the clock is the real toad.
00:38:32
Speaker
the The way that you narrate the event, that's the imaginary garden. I mean, if it was up to me, I wouldn't call it creative nonfiction literary journalism. I would call it, you know. The NEH is going to you know give, well, the NEH isn't going to give grants to anybody anymore.
00:38:48
Speaker
Back in the old time when poets threw out the opening pitch and Trump wasn't president and the and NEH gave out grants, you get a grant in fiction or poetry or ah real toads in imaginary gardens. That would be our genre. ah I love that. That's ah in a ah ah moment ago when you were talking about you know going to that church in Spokane and um yeah the under the ah you know the the theme of asking ah dumb questions.
00:39:13
Speaker
Oftentimes, and I think a lot of journalists well will feel insecure about asking those dumb questions and this kind of gets to interviewing and all all that stuff too.
00:39:25
Speaker
Just how have you ah contended with that feeling of, yeah, I'm going to look or sound like an idiot, but it' it's all in service of, you know, setting aside that insecurity so you can, you know, let the let the people you're talking to, your sources, you know, um voice that for you?
00:39:44
Speaker
I mean, you walk into a scene, Emilie, a place that is not yours, you're by definition an idiot, right? I mean, literally by definition. You can't see the full horizon.
00:39:56
Speaker
yeah Your vision, that's what an idiot is. um um its that I'm not speaking the figuratively. That's the old the old term, right? you You can't see the whole world. And you're trying to see. You're trying not to be an idiot. um And you're in this sort of...
00:40:12
Speaker
ah You're an outsider. And as you linger in that space, you start to become an insider. You start to know things about that place. and And no one likes to say this because it sounds, oh, I'm just, you know, you will probably start to know that place better than many of the people who are there, right? Because they...
00:40:29
Speaker
they are wholly and naturally in their locale, but like, oh, I see this piece connects to this piece and this person told me this. And then I read this history that you never bothered to read about your place and everything. yeah so But you're still an outsider. Don't forget that. Even though you know more about it, you're an insider and an outsider.
00:40:46
Speaker
I mean, i think about this, actually, when I was saying the dumb questions and I suddenly thought, like wait a minute, can sports writers do that? Because you have to have trust with an athlete. If you come in and, you know, you can't say, um you know ah you know, ask a
00:41:06
Speaker
you know, this is how I know sports. I'm looking for dumb terminology. I can't even get the dumb terminology. But you have to show, mean, because there is some of that too, right? You show respect. Like I have some of the language here. and And the same thing in that Spokane church, I'm using some of the languages as, look, I bothered to understand.
00:41:23
Speaker
a little bit about this. Maybe in sports writing, I wonder if you have to do even that more, but you're also always an insider outsider. Like if you're, you know, you could be covering college basketball for 20 years, you know, it probably better than any athlete you're talking to, but you don't play it.
00:41:41
Speaker
So you're an outsider that, yeah that's another one of those tight ropes that I think is actually really productive tension. Yeah. Yeah. i think what you're getting at too is, is being able to use the vocabulary of that subculture, even if you're not an expert in it, least if you're speaking the language, you can, you can kind of get them going you because you in in sports too. And I used to write a lot about horse racing and, um, that's got its own language in a weird subculture. And when the mainstream press would pick up horse racing for the Triple Crowns at Kentucky Derby and Preakness and Belmont, you could tell they were just swooping in for that mainstream event because they just weren't using the right terms.
00:42:25
Speaker
ah And so you're like, oh, yeah, I can. yeah You can tell who knows their stuff and who doesn't. So that's just a matter of, yeah, it's just immersion. It's like going to another country and you immerse yourself like, OK, you know,
00:42:38
Speaker
ah a morning workout, you know, an easy workout for a horse. you That's when you're breezing the horse. It's a breeze. You know, four furlongs in 48 seconds. um And so it's it's one of those one of those things that you absorb through being in that subculture. And that's something, you know, covering religious fundamentalism, fanaticism in the in the country, you're like, yeah, you've you're steeped in it so you can speak that language and invite the commentary that you're looking for as a journalist.
00:43:06
Speaker
Yeah. Wait, say that furlong phrase again, will you? Oh, yeah. So like, ah you know, a morning workout is ah is a breeze. um And I handily or sort of in hand, ah that's more of a stiff workout.
Understanding Subcultures
00:43:19
Speaker
But a mile is divided into eight furlongs. And so typically a good workout, 12 seconds per furlong, which is almost 200 yards of And you said four four longs and 48 seconds, which is lovely phrase. And I didn't know what it meant, but I enjoyed it. And I think that's a big part of this genre too, is yeah how it it it's sort of, if you feel constricted in your life and then you encounter in creative nonfiction, oh, look at all this language. And and here I will give a name, a shout out. There's a student of mine yesterday, Cassidy Exner, young writer and wrote this, shared this fabulous piece with the class.
00:43:59
Speaker
And she's raised on a horse farm. and as a champion equestrian, but is writing this gorgeous essay about the difference between horse people and riders. The people who show up to ride the horse that someone else has trained versus the people who are in the muck and everything.
00:44:17
Speaker
and She reads the story of the class, and I have to say probably a third of the language none of us knew. but we felt it and we loved it all. And it was such a gorgeous use of bringing us into that vernacular and and and that language. and And I think about that too, because the way that, like with the example of fundamentalism, I'm remembering, I think this was a Times Magazine piece decades ago. And this is when I had first started writing about fundamentalism. And I and i backed into that by accident too.
00:44:47
Speaker
I was writing... mainly about varieties of religious experience. And I didn't think I wanted to write about fundamentalism at all, mainly because I'm like, oh, I get it. you know It's this guy, you know Jerry Falwell, Southern guy, too tight suit, pound in his pulpit, talking bullshit in a very predictable way, which is a caricature.
00:45:07
Speaker
And um I was too dumb to know that, in fact, almost always where there's a caricature, you probably have a story because it's going to be more interesting than that caricature as the many, many varieties of fundamentalism are.
00:45:21
Speaker
But I had just started getting into it and I backed into it mainly just i was writing ah friend of a friend, knowing I was writing about other kinds of religion, and so would you speak with my brother? He's kind of gotten involved in something we think is a cult. and She was from a conservative Christian family, so it wasn't that it was Christian, but it was pretty weird. and He invited me to come and live with him in this community, and so I did.
00:45:43
Speaker
and um And it was a kind of fundamentalism, but not in any way recognizable compared to that. And so I was writing about that. And the Times Magazine, this was in like 2003 for the ascendance of George W. Bush, the cyclical ritual of the American press going back to 1925 when it looks at fundamentalism as if it's something new.
00:46:04
Speaker
And they sent a writer down to a megachurch in Arizona and writes about this piece. And I don't know this particular church, but I know it's Assemblies of God. I'm kind of puzzled because the term spiritual war, as I recall, is not in the piece.
00:46:19
Speaker
And think that this, I shouldn't even do this, but I think there was somewhere there was an interview with Bill Keller, then the editor in New York Times about this piece. And he he talks about ah the times going out of their way because they didn't want to you know they didn't want to exoticize this church. They didn't want to make them weird.
00:46:37
Speaker
So they left out fundamental practices like spiritual war, which is right at the heart of Assemblies of God theology and does not mean actually hitting someone with an ax or something like that. um in the same way that jihad doesn't. Jihad means personal internal struggle until sometimes it concretizes, right?
00:46:55
Speaker
And someone takes the metaphor and flattens it and says, oh, actually, I have to get into conflict, whether it's blowing up an abortion clinic, a Christian fundamentalist, or or an act of terrorism, someone who's taking jihad very literally, right?
00:47:06
Speaker
And Keller had said that they were proud of leaving all this stuff out. Like all, you know, they left, it's like but they went to the the horse racing and they didn't talk about furlongs or hands or all those good, that good language.
00:47:19
Speaker
Yeah. Cause they didn't want to make it seem weird. I'm like, oh no, no. What you mean is you want to make it seem like yourself. And that means that you imagine that you're at the center, which is one of the great mistakes of American journalism always is to imagine that an office in Manhattan, and I have nothing against Manhattan, which I love.
00:47:35
Speaker
But to imagine that someone who went to a college like the one I'm sitting at and then went from there to an office in Manhattan, that they're the center versus ah megachurch in Arizona, which is just by the numbers, more the center, right? So let's go understand that language.
00:47:54
Speaker
um ah we're not We're not cooling the temperature by leaving out um some of... And this this goes actually, i think, to the point too where I think... What's interesting about creative nonfiction is that there's a way in which, apart from true crime, which is almost its own thing, I think there's an unfortunate tendency to avoid conflict with the idea that conflict is a kind of sensationalism and is at odds with empathy. And I don't think that's the case. I think you we're called toward empathy for the devil as much as for those with whom we agree, um not out of any virtue, but simply, what is it how does it make sense? like I think of Carrie Howley's writing on January 6th, where Carrie Howley's a great
00:48:41
Speaker
I think literary journalist, um Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, which is her very strange, weird book about Reality Winner, who was a real name. Reality Winner was a person who worked for the government, gave information on some some crimes and is now in prison. And um And you know what does it feel like to make sense to storm the Capitol?
00:49:05
Speaker
And when you're drawn to that level of conflict, it it also draws you to an interesting relationship with language because you have to encounter that language that might be adversarial to your very state of being.
00:49:18
Speaker
How does it make sense? How does that language account for an idea of the world? You don't have to agree with it. and In fact, you can say flat out, this is wrong, but, but what is wrong?
00:49:31
Speaker
know What, what is the wrongness of it? Right. What is the thing that you are saying is wrong? What does it feel like for that to make sense? yeah Yeah, and you know even in, um I've heard you speak about it, and in reading the undertow, too, when you would ah enter, say, the some some of these churches, are you you know they you were immediately pegged as like not one of them. you know they they just they It was just like a mask. like They were just like, yeah, that guy's not one of us.
00:50:01
Speaker
ah But still, you're you're there, you're immersing with them, and you're ingratiating a certain measure of trust um to get people to talk. So, you know, how do you, you know, ah yeah navigate those, those waters so that people are, you know, open to talking to you, even though you're by far an outsider to them?
00:50:20
Speaker
I mean, that is changing right now. And I think that's one of actually, the subtitle of that book is Scenes from the Slow Civil War. And slow civil war, I mean, we're not mostly not shooting at each other, but it's a simmer. And I know on on the show, you like to ask people about, you know, sort of best writing advice they've been given. And and I think back actually to that first teacher of mine, kind of lifelong mentor, Michael Vesey. And I can't even remember the story. And I was asking, like, I'm going to go...
00:50:51
Speaker
Was I going to go to a sawmill, the last family-owned sawmill, which is a genre story, the last man in town at Whittle Worth a Dam. You find some dying craft and you go hang out there. And I was asking Michael, what should I wear? What should I wear go to this home?
00:51:10
Speaker
clothes? That was the writing advice. You should wear clothes, right? Like don't put on costumes. Um, you, and, and it will never work. You put on costumes.
00:51:21
Speaker
Now you're not trustworthy, right? Um, now you're trying to put one over on them. Um, You're going to stand out no matter what. and so You go into a church and I'm usually, not always, usually pegged.
00:51:35
Speaker
I remember years ago working on a book and I was in the Billy Graham archives at Wheaton College, which is an evangelical college in a very evangelical town. so Everyone on this campus is is is evangelical.
00:51:49
Speaker
It's Billy Graham archives. I'm just taking a lunch break and I'm sitting out on the steps. And this guy who would turn out to be, he was a graduate student there in missions. He was learning how to be a missionary. And this guy probably never got the credit that he deserved because I think he would, the greatest missionary on earth, at least in identification.
00:52:07
Speaker
I happen to be Jewish. As a proud Jew, i don't think I look particularly stereotypically Jewish and even if you look stereotyically Jewish, I'm on a campus where everybody's evangelical and this guy comes up to me says, have you heard the good news?
00:52:22
Speaker
I'm like, how did you peg me? How did you know? I'm sitting in front of the Billy Graham archive. What do you mean? But you're right. No, in your sense of things, I have not. Yes, I know what you mean by it, but no, I i don't share the the belief.
00:52:36
Speaker
um and And I think that's a big part of that, like use that outsider-ness um that you come into this Like this church in Spokane.
Reporting Challenges and Intimacy
00:52:48
Speaker
and First of all, this is and this is churches are getting more militant. So like in Undertow, I write about, I that always go into a church. Now suddenly I'm encountering churches where like a militiam and an armed militiaman says, leave.
00:53:01
Speaker
Yeah, like that one in Omaha. I'm just a writer. yeah you know And that seemed like, yeah, that seemed like, i'm du but I just got a pencil. And he's like, I don't fucking and care. I've got a gun. yeah And it's not good writer, or bad writer.
00:53:12
Speaker
journalists That's it. You're demonic. And and this is this is a heightening of tensions. And I think the sad thing is people have probably imagined for a long time that those barriers were there and they weren't. And now they are. The barriers that were imagined now are there.
00:53:26
Speaker
But in Spokane, i show up by myself. So that's a red flag, but not totally because there's other there's other guys who sort of wander in. This is a very militant church. They actually have a war plan. They have a written down war plan, which ah calls for at some future date, don't worry, all men not all men of fighting age who do not submit to biblical law, there's window.
00:53:49
Speaker
And then once the window's passed, you're executed. um so this is like a this is this is like a handmaid's tale level church. not aesthetically like A Handmaid's Tale. The music is great. it's this kind of heavy metal that's pretty good.
00:54:04
Speaker
excuse Kids running around dancing. i show up as an outsider, and which is at first a problem. The only other guy who will speak to me is another outsider who's a biker who's just gotten out of prison. And he's the guy who shows up by himself because he's just trying to keep himself afloat. He doesn't know how militant this church is. It's just a church. Please keep me sober.
00:54:23
Speaker
But eventually sort of a pastor comes on and says, hi, you're not from here. and I'm like, I'm really not. And um I think so much of, you know, like you use the term ingratiating and and and look, I would be lying if I didn't say there's not some element of...
00:54:41
Speaker
Yeah, let's smooth these things over. I mean, this church promises to kill me in the future, but they say, hey, look, for now we can talk, right? um And even then, I forget that lesson sometime. And and and December, I was at a church.
00:54:53
Speaker
I'm not actually writing about churches now, but it's sort of wherever I go as a writer, I always go to a church on Sunday, not because I'm a Christian, but because... how lucky, like if I'm trying to understand a place, you can go into this building where people are talking about intimate things that and and they're all and singing. You can hear people singing voices and people who are not good singers will suddenly be vulnerable. right that so It's just a great thing. I was at church in, can't remember the town, rural North Carolina.
00:55:21
Speaker
i did I was curious about this church because I knew about this one was even more militant. and right wing and I start pulling down the driveway and then two big SUVs. I've never actually seen this in real life. It was like an action movie. They like squeal in front of me. Yeah. Come out and they've got actually like again, like in a movie, like Secret Service wires coming down and they're in suits and like, what are you doing here? And I'm like, oh, well, I'm just a writer. I'm traveling through you and I wanted to go to this church and it's back and forth. And I'm like, this is the jig is up. There's no way they're letting me in. And they're like, well what's your home church?
00:55:54
Speaker
And I'm like, you got me, guys. I'm a Jew. And I think it's over. And I've forgotten the berries. They get on the their wires. Bring them down. And... bring them down and And I think I'm going to sit in the back, but instead I'm brought up to the front of this church, extremely right wing, but they have an idea, you know, Israel plays a role for them in their idea of the coming revelation, the apocalypse and so on.
00:56:21
Speaker
They start singing a song in Hebrew for me, for the Jewish gentleman who is here. I'm singing the front row. I don't know Hebrew. They know Hebrew. They're singing and they're like waiting for me to sing along. And I'm like, I don't know. That's as far as I can go.
00:56:38
Speaker
um And but you know just as sort of the the the lesson being right that your outsider-ness is is, you don't have to do a whole lot of work In fact, you have to let your outsiderness do that work for you to to to sort of open those doors for you because people recognize that you're not of that place. And they wonder, who are you?
00:57:00
Speaker
What are you? And that helps them ideally. Who are we? What is this place that this person's? Why is this person coming here? What is what is interesting about us? Yeah. oh and ah I was ah clicking around you know um your wonderful sub stack and the some of the syllabus items that you that you share.
00:57:19
Speaker
ah was particularly drawn because I love love the the art and craft of interviewing. I love hearing how people articulate it, whether they use recorders or not. And that's something I'd love to ask you in a sec.
00:57:30
Speaker
um But i yeah I just love how how journalists and reporters you know think about how they're going to get information so they can better craft these stories. um So with the Isabel wilker Wilkerson, she has almost like this seven-layer dip of ah breaking down those walls and everything. So just, you know, in as that is something of a thematic backdrop to this, just how do you think about interviewing and in a you know having those conversations?
00:57:58
Speaker
Yeah, that, what's that? Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Many Suns, and it's ah a short craft piece. And a lot of craft pieces I don't love, but this is called Accelerated Intimacy. And I love that she calls it intimacy and just like tells young writers, that's what you're going for.
00:58:13
Speaker
Yes, you want information. But you're almost the work is to get out of the interview, right? What do you want from an interview? To get through it so you can get to the good stuff, which is the conversation. And and you often, I think, have to sit there and let people like give you their official story.
00:58:30
Speaker
And you and you want to you you do want that information. It's useful to you, right? But um ah probably your story is going to be somewhat to the side of that. And I think Wilkerson, by naming intimacy as as the project,
00:58:45
Speaker
a of interviewing. And I think by doing so also alerts writers to intimate, you know, we think of intimacy, you have intimacy, maybe with a romance or with ah a really close friend or a family member.
00:58:59
Speaker
Intimacy happens in all kinds of strange little spaces. And, yeah you know, i that that syllabus that I've been posting online, um with class of reporters. And I started with a story that I got from this woman, um Suzanne Farr, who was this organizer and in nineteen seventy s created a radical lesbian commune in rural Arkansas, which you can imagine was maybe not the most welcoming place for that.
00:59:30
Speaker
Um, and, and Suzanne is tiny and she has the demeanor of a sort of a Southern granny, which I can say, cause my granny is, was from Tennessee and very similar, you know, and she's telling this to a group of young activists. She's talking about this and she's talking about how in, at the time, ah ah women and violent relationships, fleeing the relationships. with Where do I go in rural Arkansas? There's no shelter. I'll go to this shelter or to this commune. Maybe they'll take me in. They did.
01:00:00
Speaker
And then angry men would come with guns. And what did these women do? Suzanne Farr weighs maybe 120 pounds. They stood their ground. And this young activist says, oh, that's so beautiful.
01:00:12
Speaker
You made a safe space. And Suzanne Farr, the sweet old brain, puts her hand on the young activist. And she says, oh, honey. There are no fucking safe spaces. And the activist is shocked. And is this, is she really some kind of right winger? No, her, her, her her point is that there's not, there's no, there are safe moments, right? That's the intimacy that I think happens so often in our journalism, right? Where, where even you're talking across a very sharp divide as I often do.
01:00:42
Speaker
And yet somehow we're being vulnerable. with with each other. And sometimes it can be a common ground. I remember talking with a QAnon enthusiast in a parking lot outside. ah We'd been at a Trump rally.
01:00:53
Speaker
We'd kind connected afterwards and we're sitting in a car for two hours. Everyone is gone and she really wants me to understand this stuff. So that's part of it. We're sitting in a car in an empty parking lot.
01:01:04
Speaker
And At one point she gets out to smoke and she says something about not shouldn't be doing this. um She'd had a heart attack. I had a heart attack at a 44. It's sort of like, whoa, you're from New Jersey. I'm from New Jersey. You had a heart attack. I had a heart attack, right?
01:01:21
Speaker
and And it's just, that's a safe moment. This is not a safe space. We're in a parking lot of a Trump rally. This is a woman who, believes either she can convince me that Democrats are cannibals or I am a cannibal. Those are the those are the binary options, right?
01:01:38
Speaker
um But we're in this kind of safe moment of intimacy. And I think that's what sort of interviewing, and i think what Isabel Wilkerson is so great. I mean, you see that in the warmth of many suns. um the profound vulnerability, these people sharing their lives with her. I think that's, that's what we're doing. and i always record everything.
01:01:55
Speaker
Don't always use it, but I record everything because I love voices. um And I love the texture of voices. And if you're recording things, and this is just my method, I have no other writers do different things.
01:02:07
Speaker
If you're recording things, you also have a note. One, if someone like, look, we're putting the notebooks down, we're really just listening. We can do that. Right. Or if I do have the notebook, great. That's recording. I got your words.
01:02:18
Speaker
ah now I can be drawing a picture of your beard or the way you nod or something like that. and I can't draw very well, but they're just scribbling stick figures. This is coercive and manipulative, but there are people who feel more comfortable if they see your hand moving, writing things down. right But then you have that little audio and you can you can use that too. And you can, there's a, there's a podcast. This I really recommend and it and won't be on everybody's radar because um it's kind of regional, although it's listened to all over called Rumble Strip by Erica Heilman.
01:02:53
Speaker
And she's up here in Vermont. She was a private eye. And then she got into, if I say Studs Terkel kind of thing, I mean, they're mostly, you know, if she was going to story about you, that wouldn't be like what we're doing. We're you know asking questions and so on. It might just be you talking. It might be sitting in a car.
01:03:13
Speaker
You hear the rain on the roof and a guy's just gone out of prison and he's just thinking out loud. And it's so good. She is the, I think of her as a podcaster's podcaster. She's like one of those writers, like John Edgar Weidman, you know, never sold that many books, but he's a writer's writer, you know, everyone knows who he is.
01:03:32
Speaker
And I love the show so much. But also, if you record your stuff and you get a good little clip, Erica is always collecting sound. You can send it to her. And to me, the greatest achievement of my life is when she uses a little clip of one of my interviews.
01:03:46
Speaker
Fuck this story. I'm going to write out of it. I got... two minutes on this podcast rumble strip of my interview with this guy talking about his conspiracy theory about cell towers.
Podcast Recommendations and Storytelling
01:03:57
Speaker
Um, and is gorgeous because it's put in that kind of cacophony of voices that she's collecting and you become part of that choir. Yeah. Well, a lot of people will, I use recorders also, but it's, we'll argue that it makes them lazy I've never I can see how you can maybe get complacent and maybe not listen. But to me, i i just for my own taste and my own experience, it actually makes me a better listener.
01:04:25
Speaker
And I'm a less frustrated note taker because like i'm I'm not furiously trying to keep up with things. And you go back to the tape and you can hear where they have a certain inflection, which you can then italicize on the page.
01:04:37
Speaker
and And just so many other things. There are and just out a tiny anecdote. When I was reporting this Saratoga horse racing book, you know way back when, know, I was interviewing Nick Zito, this trainer, and, know, we were just having a conversation at the backside by his barn.
01:04:53
Speaker
And in the background, you're just hearing Blue Jays and you're hearing Robins. And it's not a lot, but it is that little patina that adds see it adds flavor and seasoning to a scene.
01:05:05
Speaker
And I wouldn't have caught that if I was furiously keeping track of Zito because everything that guy says, that he's just a quote machine. It just pours out of him. A lot of these old horsemen, they just talk in these amazing, amazing quotes and he is no different.
01:05:20
Speaker
It's just, yeah, I will always advocate for the recorder in that in that way, because, yeah, for for me, it frees me up. I find it more liberating than confining than some people who think. Yeah. And i've got I'm going to it's your anecdote, but I'm going to say the Bluebirds and the Robins are a lot. Right. You know, just like, like early on, I was talking about that scene in night of the hunter, James Agee and a big part of the scene.
01:05:42
Speaker
I mean, the kids are fleeing the evil preacher. That's the plot, but really they're just on the boat on the river and the camera lingers on a spider as they pass by. And that's a lot. That's what this genre is. That is outside the who, where, when, what, why of this, the horse trainer that you're writing about, but it's so much. And when, yeah, when you hear that stuff,
01:06:02
Speaker
When you hear it on playback, and which you may not have noticed is exciting, but I also think maybe for me, what has worked as the antidote to laziness, because I get that though. But maybe if you start to think like, even though but you are a podcaster, I'm not, but...
01:06:16
Speaker
um ah I'm alert because I love listening to podcasts and I love listening, you know, but I think shows obviously like This American Life and and so on, yeah which are using not just the words, but the atmospheric sound and or or the intonation, right? Right.
01:06:35
Speaker
If you're alert to that, like if you're if you're just thinking about that always, you're not lazy when you're recording because you're just thinking someone said, oh, Zito is sitting there talking and there's bluebirds behind at the same time. This is going be some great audio, right?
01:06:49
Speaker
Yeah. And it brings you more. and There's a way in which the recorder, and instead of being an excuse to tune out, can be just a zoom into the moment and I think you can kind of, you can kind of train your ear to do that without, you don't have to be a professional podcaster to do that. You just have to be someone who likes listening to them.
01:07:08
Speaker
Oh, for sure. Yeah. And then i with, with my notebook is a so many times and I do this when I'm doing interviews of this nature, but also if I'm doing more reporting type conversations, it's just like, well, they said something really cool. I'm like, I'm to put a pin in that.
01:07:23
Speaker
And a otherwise, i would miss so many opportunities to follow up if I didn't have the recorder there to like catch everything and then I can be selective later. And this way, notebook, okay, yo that was a really cool word. I'm gonna circle back to that, but I don't interrupt them right now.
01:07:39
Speaker
And then when they're kind of done with that thought, it's like, okay, you said something really cool. Let's kind of like unpack that a little more. I would miss that if I didn't have a recorder. And that's just for me and my skill, but in others, well, ah Darcy Frey, you know, he...
01:07:52
Speaker
definitely didn't use a recorder for the last shot. You know, ah old guards like McPhee and Talese don't, don't use them and scores of others. But ah yeah, I mean, we're kind of circling the same, the same thing here. People who are coming from an era of schooling in which you learn shorthand, which I did not. know so me either So there's that advantage too. I, my teacher, Michael Essie, his whole method, a great and out of print book of his called Forbidden Zone, which is just sort of,
01:08:19
Speaker
going and hanging out with people, work with death in different regards. It's a beautiful chapter about a slaughterhouse. um And, you know, he would just go and spend time in the slaughterhouse and then he would leave. And then as soon as he pulled over as quick as he could, and then he'd write down everything, not it is very But that was his way of accessing the subconscious as well. because and He said this and he said this and my left foot itched, no editing at all. right complete yeah and you know You can do that as well as ah ah as with recording too. I think ah what you're looking for is the thing that but lets you be as present and as just exhilarated to the peculiarity of this moment. and
01:09:04
Speaker
And yeah I should say, i I have to get going. But so here's my last anecdote, because it's my first recorded interview. um His name was, think, Ed Sodowski. I was in college. um And my father had a reel-to-reel tape machine that could be hooked up to a phone. And he was a legendary, I'd read about him, he's a legendary leader, labor leader, and should have been the president of the Steelworkers, but it was a crooked...
01:09:30
Speaker
ah election, there was a murder, everything. And this guy talked so beautifully to me on the phone for an hour and a half and I'm watching the reels going and he' says he's describing this other world that isn't.
01:09:45
Speaker
It's elegiac, it's utopian, but it's all in this gruff yeah like Midwestern steel workers voice and it's fabulous. And of course, get off and I can't wait to hear it back and I've completely fucked it up.
01:09:59
Speaker
And the tape is blank. I did try and call him back and say, Mr. Sotlowski, could you please say those things again? It's like, what the fuck, kid?
01:10:09
Speaker
So it's not that's not a story of successful. But the thing about the recording it does is it reminds you this was a moment in space and time, right? This was not just things that Zito said, right? this is This is a moment when this bluebird sang that note, right?
01:10:24
Speaker
And, yeah um, however you can get to that space and time to me is, is that's the method, whatever it is for the writer. Oh, that's amazing. well Well, Jeff, I'm such a great admirer of your work and I'm so happy that you're able to carve out a little more than an hour here to to just talk shop about how we go about this kind of work. So just thanks so much for the time and everything you do.
Collaboration and Creative Rejuvenation
01:10:43
Speaker
Thank you, Brendan. And it's good talking to you. And I'm going to go, I'm going to go digging in your archives for, for sports, especially, I mean, i all your, all your guys, but I want to think about more about sports writing.
01:10:56
Speaker
And then I'm going to press on you. If I ever teach this class, I'm going to ask you to come in and, and, and speak to it um about that in particular. Cause I think, look I think, I think there's a, there, there's a Rosetta stone stone of creative nonfiction there and in sports writing.
01:11:11
Speaker
Well, I'd be honored and thrilled to do so. So any anytime. Thanks. Take care.
01:11:24
Speaker
Awesome. Can you believe it? Jeff might invite me, will only to talk sports writing if he teaches the course. I'm going to Dartmouth after all. Suck it, Coach Whalen. and I'm so kidding.
01:11:36
Speaker
You just retired as the single wing winningest baseball coach at a single institution in Ivy League history. Curse my public school mouth. Yes, thanks to Jeff for coming on the show. Really fun.
01:11:49
Speaker
I love when people discover they can swear on the show and then they just start dropping F-bombs. I have to imagine it's like taking your bra off at the end of a long day. Exactly like that.
01:12:02
Speaker
ah This parting shot hit me while i was on a run, as many of mine do. That's why I run with a notebook and a pencil and my shame. Many of us athletes of a certain age, we never specialized in a sport, maybe very late in our careers, but not early.
01:12:19
Speaker
Not from the start. For me, in the fall, it was soccer. In the winter, it was either indoor soccer or indoor track. And spring and summer for me was baseball.
01:12:30
Speaker
Each season brought a different focus and different way of moving the body through space, different skills, different planes of movement. Yes, there was likely one sport that you wanted to be great at.
01:12:43
Speaker
But playing a different sport in a different season didn't detract the skills from the other. It actually made you a better athlete. And better athletes, well, better athletes can leverage sport-specific skills better than most.
01:12:57
Speaker
I bring this up because many of us as writers, we tend to stay in one particular lane, right? We identify as a writer of personal essays or memoir biography or narrative journalism. And we feel that maybe a word written outside of that is wasted.
01:13:11
Speaker
I was on a podcast last week when, and when we were off mic, the host told me how he can't read a single word of fiction, you know, being a nonfiction guy himself. And and while I said i and I understood his affinity for sticking with nonfiction as his bread and butter.
01:13:27
Speaker
I offer that in reading fiction, we as nonfiction writers can really level up our prose and as reporters seeking a greater sense of our sources interiority can perhaps be better probing interviewers to ask questions that reach the depths of the human experience.
01:13:45
Speaker
That's how I like to read fiction. But I challenge you, challenge me, even to play a different sport now and again. You know I'm more of a narrative journalist and biographer. The occasional personal essay, humor piece, craft piece here and there. But in the spirit of hanging up the bat and glove for a particular season, maybe scribbling some short stories.
01:14:05
Speaker
Maybe a screenplay, a television pilot, maybe poetry. and I try to write like humor poems, which I think is a lane most writers avoid. Not your boy B.O. though, LOL. Or maybe it's just fucking around making videos. I don't know.
01:14:20
Speaker
On the surface, maybe you're thinking you can't waste a moment on other elements of art and style because you haven't quite arrived where you want to be with your bread and butter.
01:14:32
Speaker
But I have feeling that playing a different sport from time to time will reinvigorate your energy and level up the thing that's more on brand, you know? Sometimes the thing is a dragon bums you out, which probably means you're putting too much pressure on yourself and burning out.
01:14:50
Speaker
When I ran a couple of seasons of indoor track, I did it mainly because I wanted to be a faster runner for baseball. it ah you know It sucked lining up in the 300-yard dash knowing that I was going to get my ass kicked by actual track athletes.
01:15:04
Speaker
I quit after two years, but I should have stayed on. I could have met some, I could have maybe gotten a little bit quicker, or I could have, at the very least, maybe met some cute sprinter girls from other schools, since I wasn't there to be a high performer.
01:15:16
Speaker
God damn it, B.O. You wasted your time. You wasted your damn life.
01:15:22
Speaker
Too many kids specialize from a young age in sports, and i don't know, that strikes me as kind of boring and kind of sad, ah but, uh, That's neither here nor there. But I think you get the idea. You get the premise.
01:15:36
Speaker
So stay wild, C.N. Evers. And if can't do interviews, see