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Episode 237: A Fiction/Non/Fiction Festival with V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell
133 Plays4 years ago
Podcasters and writers V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell come by CNF Pod HQ to talk about their writing nonfiction, writing novels, and producing their wonderful podcast Fiction/Non/Fiction. It is part of the Lithub Radio Network.
Follow the show @CNFPod and if you dig this CNFin' enterprise, consider the killer options at Patreon page, patreon.com/cnfpod.
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Transcript
Genre Naming and Podcast Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Type in the name. We always say fiction slash non-slash fiction podcasts because you got to put the slashes in. That was a thing that we did that looked cool at the beginning and now we're like, God, that was maybe not a smart idea.
00:00:18
Speaker
And away we go. It's CNF, the creative nonfiction podcast. Show where I speak to badass writers, podcasters, as the case may be, and whoever the hell else about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan Amara. Hey, welcome. CNFers.
Meet the Hosts: Sugi and Whitney
00:00:38
Speaker
Today I'm highlighting showcasing headlining Vivi Ganeshanathan, better known as Sugi, and Whitney Terrell, the co-host of the fiction non-fiction podcast. They throw a lasso around the two genres and corral them for one toe tap and good listen.
00:00:58
Speaker
Their thing is that all the things you see in your Twitter feed have likely been covered in some way in literature. It's part of the Lit Hub Radio Network. Go check it out. If you already have it, I bet you have. Look them up on Twitter and Instagram. Sugi is the author of the novel Love Marriage. She's an essayist and journalist and instructor at the MFA program at the University of Minnesota.
00:01:25
Speaker
Whitney Terrell has spent tours in Iraq as a reporter, and he wrote the novel The Good Lieutenant. His work has appeared in the Washington Post magazine, the New Republic, and a billion other places. He teaches creative writing for the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
Podcast Origins and Collaborations
00:01:44
Speaker
I was punching way up in weight class in this podcast, as you will soon notice. You hear what I mean. Plus, if you've seen that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry shades his chest hair, so that kind of happened here. Oh, you'll see. Do you want to hear any housekeeping or do you want me to just get on with it?
00:02:07
Speaker
Stay tuned for my parting shot for what it's worth. Not a whole lot this week. Call for submissions for the audio magazine, some Patreon riffing. I want to give a shout out to Brett Smith, Isidra Menkos, and Suzanne Biro for jumping on the CNF and bandwagon at the Patreon membership page. So big ups, big thanks.
00:02:33
Speaker
Yeah, big ass shout out because you deserve it.
The Concept of Connecting Literature and Events
00:02:38
Speaker
And that's it for now. So here is the brilliant duo behind the fiction non-fiction podcast, Suki and Whitney. Oh yeah!
00:03:02
Speaker
lunch that we had? I think it was at AWP in the spring of 2017. We had met in the fall of 2016. I was visiting faculty at the Iowa Writers Workshop and Whitney came back for a memorial service for James Allen McPherson. And so we met there and then we were both going to AWP and he said, do you want to grab lunch at AWP? And I was like, sure, sounds great. And I was like, oh, we're going to have like a fun drink. That sounds fun. And then he was like, I have an idea.
00:03:29
Speaker
And, but first though, but wait, we got kind of, we got like drunken Iowa though, up there at the, what was that club? I don't remember what it was called, but it's, yes, it's true. There were like a number of, um, like right near campus. Yeah. And we were with, we were with, um, other, some of Jim's other former students. Um, but yeah, I don't remember what that, cause that club hadn't been there when I was a student and it was sort of a place with like, I don't know, artisanal cocktails. Um,
00:03:55
Speaker
It was fancier than anything I remember. I was like, as a graduate student, I would not have come here. We met and talked about writing and I really liked what you had to say and I was really interested in your background as a journalist and everything. I thought we got along well and it was you were fun to talk to. Then I had been thinking about this idea of doing a podcast that was
00:04:20
Speaker
said, you know, all the news that's in the in your Twitter feed or on the evening news, as we say, every podcast, you know, has already been written about in literature. And and I've been looking for someone to do that with because I didn't want to do it by myself. And then after meeting Suki, I thought, OK, this is
Podcasting's Impact on Teaching and Perspectives
00:04:35
Speaker
the person. And then we had that lunch at AWP.
00:04:37
Speaker
Yeah, it was really fun. And it was really funny because I remember when the podcast started, people were like, how many times have you met Whitney in person? And I was like, I think it's been twice, maybe three times. And people were like, you're doing a podcast. Like, do you know how much work a podcast is? You're doing a podcast with someone you've met three times. And I was like, it's gonna be fine.
00:04:55
Speaker
You meet Whitney three times and you would know that it would be fine. And yeah, it was just funny because like a lot of people sort of spoke to me like, Oh, you're taking this enormous risk. And I was like, Hmm, I don't think so. And yeah, I mean, I just have to give what a lot of credit for I mean, it was his idea. It's a great idea. And I think he sort of really
00:05:15
Speaker
had the chops to make it so that we actually did it, which is like a combination of force of personality and like know-how and that ability to acquire know-how that he didn't already have and to encourage me to do the same. And so, I don't know, like now I own a Yeti microphone and I'm speaking into it, which is an exciting development in my life. And I've also, I think, you know, it's been great for me as a teacher and as a writer to sort of like think about
00:05:40
Speaker
Right. It's essentially like having like I have a coworker who's not in my department. Like that's a great treat. And so there's like also again, like that freshness of perspective. I feel like Whitney has doubled my mental Rolodex as a teacher. So now they're sort of just, you know, I don't know, I'm teaching a class. I'm like, huh.
00:05:57
Speaker
I could assign this thing or I could assign this thing that we talked about on the work, on the podcast. And I know less about it, but I've had more interesting thoughts and like more recently in conversation with Whitney than I would have had by myself. And sort of, I think even that structure of doing things with another person, like I was teaching that humor class this term and I was like, oh, being in dialogue with Whitney was a great way to do this. And if I'm teaching this comedy class, there's someone in another department teaching a comedy class.
00:06:23
Speaker
if we do comedy lectures together, each class will have that benefit of a little sneak preview into the other.
Guest Selection and Diversity
00:06:30
Speaker
And that worked. And I think it was much more interesting for our students to see a conversation and student teachers asking each other questions. And so I think, I don't know, I find the structure of the podcast to be really fun. And I think it's in part because we have some of the same vocabulary from having had common experiences as students. And we have a lot of the same friends, but we know them in totally different ways.
00:06:54
Speaker
Well, I would add that we don't have the same friends. You have brought a lot of guests to the podcast. Know a lot of people. You're very affiliated. You have a lot of friends. I have a lot of friends, but they're not exactly the same friends. The people that you have brought on as guests were people that I would never have asked.
00:07:16
Speaker
you know, Britt Bennett was a suggestion that you made and Kiki Petrosino and Daniel Evans, I mean, you've suggested some of our great, you know, some of the great guests or some of our best episodes, you know, so that to me, that has been the way that we've been able to work together to find good guests for the show. And it is way opened up my like, it's opened up the world of writing in America to me in interesting ways. And I've met people that I wanted to meet, but didn't know that I wanted to meet necessarily. So that's been great for me.
00:07:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think we've had the great good fortune to have wonderful emerging artists and also really establish people on our show and sometimes
00:07:52
Speaker
one is leading to the other. So, for example, we had the novelist, Maurice Ruffin, who's from New Orleans on the show. And then we wanted to do the next episode at the student suggestion on the anniversary of Katrina. And we said, Maurice, who can you suggest to us? And he mentioned Christina K. Robinson, who I hadn't heard about before that. And she's a visual artist and writer and just sort of thinks about visual language in this stunning way. I mean, she's brilliant and he's brilliant. And
00:08:19
Speaker
I mean, I just have been following all of the stuff that she's done since. And it's a treat to kind of watch these conversations lead from one to another in these ways that, I don't know, like expand the way that we get to think about things. So it's been a lot of fun to juxtapose things that you wouldn't necessarily, I mean, as Whitney was saying, like, I mean, just to put together someone Whitney knows with someone I know and then watch them have a conversation that neither one of us would have imagined in the first place on our own is very cool.
00:08:49
Speaker
Well, the interesting thing was that I was not listening to a lot of literary podcasts. I was listening to political podcasts. I was
Balancing Podcasting with Life and Growth
00:09:00
Speaker
listening to, I think originally, Slate's Political Gab Fest is probably one of the oldest political podcasts. They just celebrated their 15th anniversary. They were one of the very first big podcasts. But I listened to that show.
00:09:13
Speaker
So, I mean, we're in our four seasons, so four years ago, I mean, I was still listening, I listened to 538's podcast. But I was listening to news podcasts, and I was constantly thinking, like, God, if we could, if they could also talk about this boar hay story was really relates to this, that would never come up. And so I just kept having ideas that I was writing in my notebook about like the way the news seemed to be imitating or
00:09:40
Speaker
refracting through books that I had read, but they were books that were 100 years old or 10 years old or whatever, and that the political people weren't aware of them. And the political gab fest would have a little thing at the end, which they would call cocktail chatter, where they would maybe plug a book or so, or something like that. But they would never relate that book back to what they had just been discussing.
00:10:02
Speaker
in the political section of the show. And I just felt like many writers that I knew were incredibly good at talking about politics and were passionate about politics. And I was also seeing writers write about politics on social media, but not get a chance to talk about it in a podcast forum. And I just thought, you know, that I knew we would have no problem finding guests. I knew that writers would want to do it. I knew that they would, you know, so that was how that was what I was listening to.
00:10:28
Speaker
I'll be interested to know what your schedule is, but I end up having to work on the podcast at night. I do the podcast when it comes to editing or writing scripts or whatever, and then I try to write in the morning from 9 to 1.
00:10:44
Speaker
And or if it's, you know, three hours is fine. So I just try to protect a morning area. And then and then the rest of it is free game. So either grading or working on the podcast is anything outside of that three hour writing space.
00:10:59
Speaker
Yeah, I think on the pandemic time it's been really weird and actually next term I'm not teaching so my schedule I'm sure will dramatically change. Yes, it's delightful. God damn it. That's not fair. I think, you know, it's one of those leaves you apply for before the pandemic and then the pandemic happened and you still have the leave.
00:11:21
Speaker
So jealous. I can't even talk to you. That's it, everyone. The podcast has ended unceremoniously in this moment. But yeah, I mean, as someone who teaches, I think my best times creatively are often at night or in the afternoon. So I think I sometimes am working the opposite way that Whitney works. And I think I also probably have a slightly more irregularity for just a variety of personal reasons.
00:11:49
Speaker
And so I have had to work ad hoc around those. And I think the things that I try to hit every day are to write and to read something that is for fun, even if it's a paragraph that is not for class or not prep for something.
00:12:08
Speaker
And that is a nice touchstone. And then also, I definitely do better when I exercise. So just anything any any day. And so I also Whitney and I both got pandemic puppies. Yeah, I'm looking forward to our shameless advertising campaign for our podcast featuring the dogs. But the dog is definitely like really improved quality of life in that she's like, would you like to go outside? And I'm like, I wouldn't. It's really cold. We live in Minnesota. And she's like, no, let's go anyway.
00:12:36
Speaker
And no matter how cold it is, that's always the link between walking and writing has been well-documented by so many people. And I think it's also true for
Scripting and Spontaneity in Podcasting
00:12:47
Speaker
me. So those walks have been really helpful to clear my head and think about in a big picture way. I'm like, oh, I'm going to go back to my desk in half an hour. What is it that I want to get done? Or what did I just do? And how can I process it? And the podcast also just provides a kind of every two weeks, this thing is going to happen.
00:13:06
Speaker
I am super more organized because of it. I cannot fuck around anymore. There is no time for that. If I'm going to write a script for this thing, I'm just going to do it. I don't get to have the, I need to think about this. It's happening. And sometimes we have to crash these scripts. And we do have to write them. I don't know.
00:13:31
Speaker
Brendan, what you do, because you're doing a single voice, because both of us are talking for it to work, we have to sort of write out what we're gonna say. And Sugi and I will be up the night before a show, both in a Google Doc, we've co-written scripts really fast, you know? And it's the first time I've ever really written with someone like that, but we're both in there, you know, just like talking on the phone and writing the script in a Google Doc at the same time, like we gotta do this in an hour, here we go, here we go, you know? And that's an interesting sort of new way of,
00:14:01
Speaker
of writing for me, really. I also really hate that feeling when I'm listening to the final, we get the last draft of the final audio back from the producer and I'm listening while I'm jogging usually on a Wednesday and the thing comes out on Thursday and I think, oh my God, I should have asked this. That doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's a bummer. The script is the thing that I think that helps you not feel that way.
00:14:31
Speaker
Yeah, well, I was just going to say that it sort of is, I mean, along the lines of what we had said before about outlines, I mean, it's great to have the outline. And then so much also, we improvise and diverge from the scripts also all the time. And that often, like sort of the surprise of the moment when one of us kind of like decides to do that, or ask a question that is in the script is also, I mean, it's the fact that we have the freedom to do that. Like, I think the script provides a certain sort of security.
00:14:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's funny, the facsimile of a freewheeling- If you're boring that day, you have the script. Yes. Exactly. I remember realizing, I was like, oh my God, we're going to script the banter. I was like, the banter is scripted. All of the banter that I've ever seen, so much of it must have been scripted.
00:15:18
Speaker
And I think I used to assign in that comedy class his role Friday. She walks in the newsroom and she's sort of like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she's got this very fast-paced, witty thing. And of course, you'd like to think it's off the cuff. But in fact, she wrote it in a Google document the night before, thinking very carefully about it. Sometimes we would have the interns get to write scripts as part of being an intern. And they'll write, in parentheses, banter here. And we're like, no.
00:15:45
Speaker
No, that's not how this works. Some of them have written great banter for us. It's really funny. I remember having an intern be like, so I'm writing in Whitney's voice. And I was like, yes. And they were like, what sort of jokes would Whitney make? And I was like, you tell me.
00:16:02
Speaker
One of the interesting things about podcasting is that there's no gatekeepers, which is a positive thing because voices get on the air. Our podcast allows writers to do things that they don't otherwise get to do. NPR doesn't call up.
00:16:18
Speaker
Claire Massoud is going to be on our next episode and ask her to talk about politics all the time, right? But she's a fantastic novelist and would be interested in talking about that kind of stuff, right? So the fact that we don't have to ask someone permission to do that and we can just get on the air and do it. And we have the support of Lit Hub, which really helps, you know, is a good thing. But it also means, conversely, that
00:16:40
Speaker
You know, people can go on and be bad and nobody's going to tell them that they're not, you know, I mean, their listenership, I think, will eventually tell them. But yeah, I mean, I think it allows people to imagine that they can do something that they're maybe not putting in the effort to do well.
00:16:57
Speaker
Well, I think as we mentioned the scripts already, Whitney had written scripts I think before doing the show and I really hadn't. I remember an early piece of feedback. He was editing the audio when the show started and he was like, have you considered finishing your sentences? I was like, wait, how often do I not finish my sentences? And he was like, I don't know, like one out of every four. I was like, oh God, that's horrible. I'm sorry. He was like, just make my life easier and finish your sentences. Don't just trail off.
00:17:22
Speaker
And so sort of paying attention to my own verbal habits and then listening to the audio and being like, oh, I said like a lot. And I mean, some of it is I'm going to sound like who I sound like. That's OK. But being conscious of those habits has been helpful. And I remember early on in those scripts, I would sometimes write questions and the questions would have multiple questions at the end of them. And that's maybe fine in a written interview, but in an audio interview,
00:17:50
Speaker
you can only ask one question and then generally the person will start answering because they're listening to you. So that was another habit that I got rid of. And then I think also,
00:17:59
Speaker
having a little patience for someone developing a thought. But I think we also will often, we're generally giving our guests a heads up about what we're gonna talk to them about. So we're trying also to not necessarily, we're not trying to put, it's not a gotcha podcast, we're not putting people on the spot. So trying to ask them questions that will give them an opportunity to talk about things they're excited about.
Episodes on Race and Identity
00:18:22
Speaker
Yeah, I would say the thing that the podcast has done for me is made me feel much more connected to the world. I mean, when I'm working, I'm, you know, coming toward the end of a novel that I've been working on now for like four years. And usually during that period, I feel very isolated and like outside of the literary community and not really participating, and I'm not publishing heavily. And this way, I'm like talking to writers,
00:18:46
Speaker
that i know sometimes that are friends but others that i don't know and and i have a daily you know a bi-weekly product that i'm putting out there it's like publishing regularly and so i feel much more engaged and for that i'm is like super useful um it helps my writing it helps my thinking it helps me think about how you know it also sort of takes away that pressure of being out of the marketplace for a long period of time during which you're working on a novel so i like it for that i think
00:19:16
Speaker
when we're dealing with subjects that I, for me, when there's a crossover between subjects that I'm writing about or that I'm passionately interested in about, and then we get to talk about them on the podcast. So I think things that we have talked about, some of our best episodes have been about
00:19:32
Speaker
race and identity and writing across different identities and thinking about that as a practice, which is something that I do in my fiction. But I want to talk to writers from different identities than mine about that issue.
00:19:48
Speaker
That is very exciting to me. We did a series, a couple of back-to-back podcast episodes on whiteness with Timothy Yu and Jess Rao that I thought were really good. When we're dealing with issues like that, I find that to be really helpful.
00:20:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think my favorite episodes are the ones where either I get to talk about ideas I've been thinking about for a long time, but with people who view the topic in a totally different way or just from a different angle. And then also just things that make me think about aspects of craft and how they connect to politics. So, I mean, I still all the time think about like we did an episode on trans writers and we had T Fleishman on and T said, talked about how people think of
00:20:32
Speaker
like the word trans woman as a metaphor for women. I just was like blown away. I just think about that, that sentence all the time. And just like, how are all of these, I mean, things about language, what are all of the things that are parts of our fingerprints? And we're just taking them for granted. We're just have inhaled these assumptions. And how can I like pull them out of myself and like take a look at them and then decide if I want to
00:20:59
Speaker
if I want to use them or not, because I thought that was so accurate. I had heard people do that, but I hadn't heard anyone articulate it in that way. That's an example. We did episodes on race and publishing with Donielle Clayton and Aisha Pandey. We did two episodes on mass incarceration.
00:21:23
Speaker
And to talk to people who had written about, you know, the experience of being incarcerated in America, which is a common experience in certain like, right, a terrifyingly common experience and especially among like, black populations, like native populations, Latinx populations, right, like their communities where that's disproportionately
00:21:42
Speaker
high number of people being incarcerated or having encounters with the police and to sort of talk about what kind of language do we use for that was really helpful to me as some of these events and things were unfolding around us. And I think there's a sense of involvement there because that's an issue that I had heard a lot about.
Creative Challenges in Fiction Writing
00:22:01
Speaker
read a lot about but hadn't written about and had done nothing about right you know and at least if you're going to get some really terrific writers on who can talk about this and express their you know their expertise on that subject and get their words out to more people at least you feel like something you know you're doing something other than just
00:22:24
Speaker
feeling about it. I think in recent years I've been much more interested in writing fiction, but every once in a while, I think especially when I see the mainstream press cover something in a way that I think is not great, then I sometimes feel an urge. But yeah, I haven't really
00:22:42
Speaker
I don't know, had the bandwidth to do much other than fiction writing in recent years. And I do miss it. I think my idea of the fantasy place to write a novel would be in the middle of a newsroom. Like if someone would just give me a cubicle and plant me in the middle of the newsroom and let me write my novel surrounded by all of that news chatter, I would be delighted. Do newsrooms even exist anymore, Sugi? I don't know. I mean, I remember newsrooms from when I was at the Kansas City Star, but I don't think you could find them anymore.
00:23:06
Speaker
Well, I think in pandemic era, there was just that story about the Hartford Current in the oldest newspaper in the United States that is in the city where I was born, and they've given up their office. They're still going to publish, but I was kind of horrified at the idea that their newsroom... Yeah, I mean, plenty of newsrooms are gone. The newsroom that I used to work in at the Star is condos now. Oh, God.
00:23:29
Speaker
Yeah, I think sometimes the thing I miss more than journalism or as much as journalism are just journalists. And of course, there is overlap between fiction and nonfiction writers as our show addresses. But I find that often people who are in the business of reporting the news, their brains just seem to work at a different speed than other folks. And it's just they're a joy to be around.
00:23:51
Speaker
And since they're often not in academia and paths that necessarily cross those of fiction writers, that is a thing that I miss. Well, I was just going to say going back to your original question when you were talking about like, well, I start writing fiction. I just think, well, I'll make it. This will be I just make this nonfiction because I can find a real person. For me, it works exactly the opposite. I've always
00:24:10
Speaker
Even when I was reporting as an intern reporter at the Kent City Star thought, boy, I could turn that into a short story. So I have always sort of explicitly used nonfiction as a way to find information to write fiction about. I mean, it was most explicit when I wrote my last novel.
00:24:30
Speaker
The Good Lieutenant, which I went to Iraq twice as a reporter, but I knew I was going to write a novel. But the only way that I could get into Iraq and find out enough about the place to write a novel was to write nonfiction starting with that. So my approach has been kind of the opposite. I don't feel like there's a difference between, I mean, between creative nonfiction and fiction. The idea that one would be loftier than the other is sort of, I mean, that was what people thought in the 60s maybe, but
00:24:57
Speaker
One of my professors in college was John McPhee, and he would get really pissed if anybody ever said anything like that because it was his life project to prove that there was every bit amount of creativity and interest and talent and skill in writing creative nonfiction as writing fiction.
00:25:17
Speaker
I would agree with that. I've been running a creative nonfiction graduate workshop this semester. It's been my first time doing that in a while, and the stuff that we're reading, the stuff that we discuss, it's just as creative if just in a different way than...
00:25:34
Speaker
then running the fiction workshop. And it was nice for me to return to that actually after a little bit of time away. And McPhee is a great example of someone who, I mean, my God, what a beautiful writer. So kind of acquainting, I feel like there is sort of like an old school, there was, I think, an old school snobbery of poetry and fiction sort of in relation to creative nonfiction, right? I don't know, in terms of
00:26:00
Speaker
formal training or what have you. Maybe it's the late comer to the scene, but I don't really see
Writing Process: Overcoming Doubt and Feedback
00:26:04
Speaker
that. You can find great old school essays. It's not a new form. And then you can also find these really fascinating works that sort of travel the line in between, like, fake memoir or
00:26:21
Speaker
I don't know, like nonfiction purporting to be nonfiction or the other way around. And I mean, there were periods of time when people cared so much less about the differences between genres. And I think there might have been an essay about this on LitHub. But of course, when the pandemic started, I was thinking about the journey of a play gear, which I studied in journalism school, and it's a novel.
00:26:42
Speaker
And it's like a recounting of a plague. And it's sort of masterful. And it's the way that it kind of renders like, wait, how do we how do we convey that we think something is real, like, actually, in fiction and nonfiction, the tools are often really the same. Well, I mean, Suki and I are both trying to finish novels right now. And at this stage, I think where we've read
00:27:03
Speaker
I looked at hers and she hasn't looked at mine yet, but that period where you're trying to get over the hump and get a novel done is, at least for me, one of the most vulnerable periods because you've already put in a lot of time.
00:27:16
Speaker
And you're like, but what if this isn't the thing that I thought that it was? And I have that experience with every single novel that I've written. And I find that difficult. That's what I think where I feel the most vulnerable. Like why didn't I figure out how to do this sooner? Why am I four years into this and I'm not done yet? What is wrong with me? Why didn't I, I should have written this in six months. Joyce Carol Oates would be done by now. And so then that's for me, that's the hardest.
00:27:43
Speaker
period. That's interesting because I think it's I mean, maybe it's like the interregnum, right? Like the the period of time between when the president is elected and when they take office, it's like, oh, I finished a first draft. And someday this book will come out. But what will that period after the inauguration be like? I'm not really sure.
00:27:59
Speaker
And I think, I don't know, there's a sort of like strange period of like private limbo and uncertainty and speculation that, yeah, I mean, that's for sure part of the uncertainty and insecurity. I do think that, I mean, I've never written, I mean, I don't think I've ever written anything, an essay, a piece of journalism.
00:28:15
Speaker
a short story, a book that did not turn out to be something different than I thought it was. So I think if I think of that as like more of a, like a reassurance, like this will be guaranteed to be weirder in some way than I had originally planned or conceived. Like I will never get it to actually line up, but maybe that will produce something more interesting. I guess, I don't know, it's like a world of uncertainty. And because the uncertainty is rooted in yourself and not in others, like you can't even necessarily like, I mean, it's not always, I think there are plenty of scenarios where
00:28:45
Speaker
One's urge with an insecurity is to kind of put the blame in other quarters. And I think here so much of it just has to do with oneself. So that's always fun. I don't get a lot of feedback these days because in a weird way, you're more isolated as you get an agent and have an editor.
00:29:06
Speaker
The most feedback I get is generally from my agent who is an excellent reader and mostly it's like you're doing a terrible job. I mean, I know when I give it to him, he is like the princess in the pee, right? So if there's even a minor problem, he's going to wake up bruised and like, oh my God, we can't use this bed, this bed's a disaster.
00:29:33
Speaker
But that's what I want. I want like the hardest read possible. And I've learned I used to get super nervous about that. But now I realize, okay, all right, I can listen through what he's saying to what the real problems are and sort of think, okay, I do need to change this, I do need to change this. And so if it's direct, I'd much rather have it be direct, then nice, but indirect.
00:30:00
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that like that sort of feedback, sometimes I'm just looking for a sense of how someone feels like I have what a friend I went to grad school with who is a poet and so we were never in class together. And she's like a wild and good reader but I mean her feedback is sometimes like she'll get to page 11 and she'll be like this feels incorrect.
00:30:21
Speaker
I'm like, do you have any more specifics? And she's like, no. But she's always right. And so figuring out that she was always right was really helpful for me. So sometimes, I mean, I think also there are people who are great at articulating their feedback, but I think also learning how to value the feedback of people who are trained in different ways. Like another really good reader for me is my college roommate, who's a lawyer who she has an uncanny memory. I mean, she remembers things I said when I was 19 that I don't recall.
00:30:49
Speaker
and she'll both psychologize what I've written and be like oh this part is about like this preoccupation that you have with this thing and I'm like oh god like please don't tell me that I don't actually want to know um but then that sort of feedback is also hugely useful for revision her level of precision and the minutia and also just the like her her sense of history with me is really informative and then I also get a lot of reads from people who are
00:31:13
Speaker
who I write mostly about Sri Lanka, so sometimes I talk to people who work on Sri Lanka and other fields specifically. There are a couple of anthropologists who I will often ask to read my work and they can provide me with a sense of like whether how are the ethics of what I've done and how plausible is what I've done and that's really useful as well.
00:31:32
Speaker
One of the pieces of advice that I give to my students is make sure that whatever it is you're writing about is something that you care about enough that you're going to get through that period where you think that you want to die.
00:31:45
Speaker
rather than write it anymore. And so if you are totally committed to this particular not you can't think like, well, I think this will get bought, or I think this is a popular topic, or I think this might be easy. Those are not good reasons to write something. But if you're totally committed to the material, then that will be the thing that will read that will ride you through
00:32:05
Speaker
that period of difficulty and pain. I looked up something really quick because this is a non-fiction podcast and I also wanted to mention this guy. I had a guy named Tom Schroeder who used to be at the Washington Post who edited a very long story that I wrote once about Iraq.
00:32:19
Speaker
And he wrote, this is the kind of feedback that I like. He wrote, generally, this is a good first draft, meaning this is not a good story. Generally, though, it is too expository and not narrative enough. Plus, there's only one character we get to know anything about personal about Sergeant Tate. The whole piece should read like a short story, three or four characters you get to know chronologically.
00:32:36
Speaker
following your days with the group, culminating in the near-death experience, but with the explanatory stuff coming off the narrative as opposed to the other way around. Much more personal storytelling, less newspapery. That was the whole comment. And I wrote the piece exactly like that. I mean, it was just a reminder. Those were all things that I knew to do, but that I had forgotten to do in the mess of trying to get my notes onto the page, you know? And so sometimes an editor can just remind you of stuff that you're already supposed to know can be doing a good job.
00:33:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think that, um, I've heard a lot of people in recent years emphasize like the value of fresh eyes. And I think, of course, at some point when you've been writing something endlessly, you, you can't be your own fresh eyes. And so either you put something away for a long time and then go back to it, or you get someone who you trust to be fresh eyes. And I mean, it sounds actually like that editor, Tom shorter did a great job of doing that for you at me in that instance. And.
00:33:32
Speaker
I think just having someone who has almost no knowledge of your project, that's always the kind of feedback. Sometimes they'll react to something in a different way and that can re-energize me about
Teaching Creative Writing and Humor
00:33:43
Speaker
something. But I think it's also true that because you as a writer are always going to spend more time with your topic than anyone who reads your story, you really have to be so deeply interested in it, like really obsessed.
00:33:53
Speaker
And so sometimes forcing yourself to take that space can also be difficult. But in my first novel, I put away for several years and then went back to it. And I was pretty sure it was never going to see the light of day. And then when I went back to it, all of its problems were very clear to me, which I think was just a function of my forgetting a lot of it and then sort of turning into my own fresh eyes again.
00:34:19
Speaker
The other class that I taught this term was a comedy and humor class, a class that I began teaching several years ago because the material that I was immersed in was so deeply unfunny that I needed occasions when I was like, I will be guaranteed to see a happy thing on this day. I realized, so I taught that class as a literature class a few times. And then this year I taught it as a creative writing class. And then at some point I realized that my students felt like under intense pressure to be funny and that they were sort of like,
00:34:47
Speaker
it just wasn't actually helping them. And then at some point I was like, just so you know, I'm not actually grading you on whether you're funny. I'm grading you on whether you have turned your stuff in. A, because there's like a freaking pandemic. B, because there's no way it's going to help you to sort of like,
00:35:03
Speaker
freak out about, you know, I'd rather you try like a weird joke that doesn't work than tell me like, you know, the knock knock that I've heard four times before. And so they all immediately seem to calm down. And I think I even calm down a little bit as I was reading them and sort of didn't have to think so much about that. So I think like, I don't know, creating an atmosphere where people aren't self-conscious, which means that the ability to be bad at things in front of each other
00:35:28
Speaker
they watched a lot of stand up and they had a lot of opinions about it. So actually watching people bomb on stage with like terrible jokes and then watching the way that they reacted, because an audience will react to you immediately and sort of like not laugh at your joke if they think it's not good. And so how did all of these comedians handle it? And I think like watching a lot of professionals
00:35:46
Speaker
be vulnerable in that way and fail was actually really helpful. Um, I don't know that I'm going to be assigning standup to my fiction classes anytime soon, but I actually, I don't know. I mean, I think I might think about it because like there's, I mean, some of that stuff makes it into the comedy specials, you know, like you watch, um, Amy Schumer or John Mulaney or someone tell a joke and then they're like, well, well that one, that one I should have left on the, on the floor of the green room or whatever. And they have to, they have to deal with it in real time. And I think that my students were really comforted by
00:36:15
Speaker
I feel like I'm too easy easily allow myself to write bad material. I don't have the problem repressing it. I just write lots of really bad scenes and then have to cut them all. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. I do think that that is just I just know that that's how my
00:36:34
Speaker
My process works for me when I'm writing fiction. Now, nonfiction is a different deal. I mean, I have a totally different physical process for writing it than I do writing fiction. Like fiction, I write on a typewriter, which may sound weird, but it prevents me from editing so that I can write bad scenes.
00:36:53
Speaker
But with nonfiction, I'm always working on a computer first draft. I mean, I put the fiction on a computer eventually so I can edit it, but I'm working on a computer and editing as I go and trying to write it like finished copy from start to finish.
00:37:09
Speaker
I think I actually have less tolerance for writing bad stuff in my non-fiction work than in my fiction. I do plan the non-fiction work more. I do tend to use an outline. I'll have notes and I'll order those and I'll use a bunch of sticky notes and all that sort of stuff. That's harder for me to get started if I don't know what I'm doing.
Improvisation in Writing
00:37:35
Speaker
Whitney mentioned planning stuff out. And planning stuff out can be helpful to give one a sense of security. But I think I remember going to see the comedian Russell Peters, who's Canadian, Indo-Canadian. And I saw him at the, I want to say, the Fox Theater in Detroit back when going to things in person was a thing. And I had watched him on YouTube a bunch. And then I got to this live performance. And he had such a select number of perfectly polished diamond jokes.
00:38:04
Speaker
and I had seen them all. And I was like so underwhelmed. I was like, I mean, and this was someone who I had- You mean it's like going to a concert where people played exactly like it was on the album? Yeah, I mean, I was just like, I wanted like so much of the joy of watching art or even sort of creating art for myself is that like, I like having the outline and then I also like messing it up. And sort of the moment when you diverge from the path, like, right,
00:38:32
Speaker
But do you do that with your nonfiction too? Yeah, I think so because I mean, I'm also I mean, we were both traditional reporters, but I think I think I now think of myself as an essayist before I think of myself as a journalist, which is probably a little bit of a mental flip for me. And so often an essay will take a turn that I did not anticipate coming, which I think probably didn't happen as much with straight reportage.
00:38:55
Speaker
and tends to happen more with essays and or occasionally like magazine writing. Oh, no, just I mean, it's it keeps it more interesting for me. And so I sort of think about it also as one of my students who had been taking I mean, if you think about it in a screenwriting way, right, like you see the plan to like rob the bank and in the movie, you know, the plan before you see the scene if it won't go according to plan. And if it's going to go according to plan, then you just see it happen.
00:39:23
Speaker
And so either way, you're surprised. And I think, I don't know, maybe that's something of what I want. I'm curious to know what both Brendan and Suki think of. I teach an essay by Donald Bartholme, who, postmodern fiction writer, not a journalist. And it's called On Not Knowing. And he asserts that what fiction writing is is improvisation, and that you're not supposed to know what to do. And if you did know what you're doing, it would just be journalism.
00:39:52
Speaker
It was an essay written back in the day, Brendan, where when somebody like Bartlett may thought of nonfiction writing as a lower form than fiction. But I tended to think increasingly that there is improvisation, particularly in creative nonfiction, that if you know all of the plan when you're going in, you won't be able to make those leaps.
00:40:11
Speaker
The leaps are different. I mean, you can't like decide that a character has a different backstory than they originally did. You know, like as you can in fiction, you can't do that in creative nonfiction, but you can decide to organize the story differently or have a different structure or start at a different beginning point. I mean, those were all the kinds of things that McPhee always talked about as being his inspirational moments were mostly about structure. Whereas in fiction, for me, those are about plot.
00:40:39
Speaker
and plots a thing you can't really change in nonfiction. Well, he's a super accessible guy and he is incredibly generous and giving. And he was the first person to line edit my work and then sit down with me and go over those line edits. And that's what he did in his class.
00:40:56
Speaker
And I remember writing a nonfiction piece for him that was a set piece, what he calls a set piece, which is about how to do something, a physical process. So I wrote him an essay. I wrote a piece about how to hang a seine net, because I had worked as a seine fisherman in Alaska.
00:41:15
Speaker
he wrote at the end but he blinded the hell out of it lots of marks and then at the end he's like. If you ever want to sign your work Whitney Terrell instead of Ebenezer ink stain you're gonna have to correct these kinds of mistakes so he was a very direct editor and for me that was like thank god cuz I felt like I'd been walking around with you know.
00:41:37
Speaker
my pants undone, you know, and suddenly he was like, no, no, no, dude, you got to zip that up. And this is, you know, that doesn't look good. You know, and I was like, okay, thank you for telling me. I appreciate it. But that was all I knew how to write, you know, I mean, I nobody had really ever done that for me. And so it was extremely it mean, it was incredibly helpful. I mean, other other than that, his ideas on structure and the things that were in his class, which is a famous class,
00:42:02
Speaker
he fortunately has written a book of essays that has a lot of those lectures in it. And so those essays have appeared in the New Yorker over time. You can find them. I mean, those are the things that he would talk about in class as sort of a distilled version of those stories and ideas about structure. Well, I think in many ways, I think my students are so far ahead of
00:42:27
Speaker
I don't know, people of my generation who are educators, like, for example, they're so fluid in different forms. You know, they're working on video essays and hybrid genre and I teach in a hybrid genre program. And so I think for me, that's been it's been hugely useful for me as a writer to teach in a hybrid genre program to have like, say,
00:42:45
Speaker
poets in my fiction writing workshops and then also that forces me to rearticulate basic things that I think about fiction and to defend them in a way that has been helpful. So I think and I've also you know I teach my colleagues in fiction are Julie Schumacher and until recently Charles Baxter and Charles Baxter has been so key to it's been really interesting to watch how his development of a specific kind of vocabulary has been really useful for people
00:43:11
Speaker
and thinking about certain concepts. I mean, what Whitney was saying about how one of the things you can change in fiction is, of course, plot, and all of the different ways that Charlie talks about that. So thinking about, I don't know, what are the terms that I have? What are the analogies I return to over and over again? And I think, I don't know, maybe after a good decade of doing this, I have a few of those, which is nice. But I'm not the sort of person who sort of...
00:43:37
Speaker
sit around writing a lot of craft essays or I haven't. I think it's possibly something I would turn to you, but I think, I don't know, almost more than things like that. I hope that what I provide in some measure, what I think I can provide in some measures is a little bit of what we were talking about before, like kind of permission to fail.
Connecting Students to the Literary World
00:43:57
Speaker
I mean, I think an MFA program, for example, like the one that I teach in, it's three years long. You have time to try something interesting that might fail. And I hope that I am able to model risk-taking in different ways. And that's about as ambitious as I think I can be on that front. Whitney, how about you? Well, I try.
00:44:18
Speaker
I'm always aware, I teach at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, in our RMFA program, and I mean, and Sugi's at Minnesota, so we're both in the Midwest, and I always try to remember
00:44:30
Speaker
that for my students, the world of the New York literary publishing houses, presses and agencies far away. And I try to make sure that I am providing them with information about it and a sense of connection to it that to make that it not feel so strange and far away to them. I am a reader for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award.
00:44:58
Speaker
So we were reading, that's an award for writers under 35. So you're often reading first novels by people. I try to have my students read those and look at them and think about them and notice that some of these books are not very good. So that they're seeing who's being published and what's being published for the first time. And maybe they're looking at their own work and saying, oh, my work stacks up to this. I'm not that far away.
00:45:23
Speaker
I try to constantly remind them of that, that I think the biggest difference between my students who are very talented and students who might be going to Iowa but come to Iowa from Harvard or an Ivy League school or who are going to Columbia in New York City or NYU or whatever, the biggest difference between those students and my students is that those students believe that they have a right and an expectation to be published.
00:45:52
Speaker
And my students don't. Right. And so I want them to recognize that they're good and I want to give them as much positive and personal, you know, I don't want to use the word appreciation. Encouragement would be a better word. Right. Like realistic encouragement.
00:46:08
Speaker
I think there's plenty to be realistically encouraged about and and you know the podcast helps with that we have students who work on the podcast so they get to have interaction with the writers that we have on and they're often the writers that they like that they're aware of so they know hey I can email this person that's a real person that look.
00:46:25
Speaker
Suge and Whitney are interviewing this writer that I know on the podcast. They're not a distant, hugely looming figure. They're just a person. And so I try to get them involved in the world of literature as much as possible in that way.
Promotions and Community Engagement
00:46:39
Speaker
My website is just my name, whitneyterrell.com. You can find my novels.
00:46:45
Speaker
there and my and all my journalism as well and and you can also find us at the show is at lit hub and they have a lit hub radio tab and if you scroll down there's a bunch of podcasts on lit hub radio and we're the fiction slash non-slash fiction podcast so there's little slashes between our names
00:47:03
Speaker
in our words. And I'm at Vasugi.com. That site hasn't been updated in a while, but my Facebook page also, that's sort of more recently updated. And then you can also find the podcast on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, all of those good places. And yeah, and then in all the podcast apps, then the LitHub radio station, which described is the streaming player. But you can find us, as you mentioned, on iTunes, Stitcher,
00:47:30
Speaker
Et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, just type in the name. We always say fiction slash non-slash fiction podcast, because you got to put the slashes in. That was a thing that we did that looked cool at the beginning, and now we're like, God, that was the maybe not a smart idea. At the end of my intro, what I think was the Kool-Aid man? What was that?
00:48:00
Speaker
Anyway, how about those two? Wicked snot. Best not to get in their way, in my opinion. Know what I'm saying? I know when to get the hell out of dodge and when not to. It behooves most people if I get the hell out of dodge, certainly this time around. Keep the conversation going on social media at CNF Pod and consider becoming a member of the Patreon community. Patreon.com slash CNF Pod. We're slowly building a coalition.
00:48:28
Speaker
Now, tier four, the ultimate high tier, is a $2,000 value that you ultimately get 10% off by being a member. If you're working on a book or working with me, it's like earning an MFA for $1,800. It's $150 a month and that's it. You're basically getting
00:48:52
Speaker
in my opinion, MFA for 1800. So that's just year four. We're going to be adding a fifth episode of the podcast every month as I'm partnering with the Atavist magazine.
00:49:04
Speaker
Say we're Darby and her team, they always put out one blockbuster feature per month. Wicked long, wicked good, you know it. If you don't know what they're about, go check them out. And I will interview that writer and dig into that incredible journalism that they're doing. Sound cool? I think it does.
00:49:26
Speaker
The interviews will probably be a little shorter, I'm thinking 25-30 minutes just to really get granular on the one piece and really hype it up and also so I don't get too overworked while still celebrating what Sayward and Atavist are doing. Can't wait to do that. First one's coming soon, probably end of the month.
00:49:44
Speaker
point being tier one membership is four bucks a month. And so that what podcasts or I was doing 52 a year, you know, that was already less than a buck per episode. And now it looks like we doing like 64 a year. I'm going to get my calculator out. Let's see. So 64 podcasts a year. So we're going $48 per year in the end divided by 64. That looks like 75 cents a podcast.
00:50:17
Speaker
75 cents per podcast plus get new transcripts, get transcripts from the moment you enroll, get exclusive access to the audio magazine, plus exclusive audio that I just feed into the for patrons and other written content. And that's just the $4 a month tier.
00:50:40
Speaker
I'd hate for there to be only four people listening to the summer audio mag when over 500 people and more will download it over the course the year. 500 people have enjoyed the one on isolation. Bringing in some scratch helps fund the enterprise because it is a lot of work and I'm not kidding and I want to put that money in writer's pockets too. A little bit in mine but also writers because they're putting in the work and writers deserve that kind of
00:51:10
Speaker
It deserves something, right? I think so. Got my first submission for the Summer magazine already earlier today. So if you've got games, submit your essay, 2000 Words of Fewer, the creative nonfiction podcast at gmail.com with Summer in the subject line. Let me see your best. I want your best. And if it's good, if it's good enough, we'll worry about recording at that point. But write a killer 2000 word or less essay or fewer essay.
00:51:40
Speaker
And no matter what, you're gonna get a detailed critique from me. None of that form letter bullshit. Got it? Good. You can also head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to subscribe to the monthly newsletter where you get entered in book raffles and get
00:51:57
Speaker
book recommendations, cool articles, news from the podcast, and an exclusive code for the monthly Zoom happy hour. This past Wednesday, we're publishing on this CNF Friday two days ago at the moment of this recording, and it was with WAX last night.
00:52:18
Speaker
Anyway, you get it by the time this hits your feet. It will be it will have been two days ago whatever and Elena passerello a CNF pot alum and just one of the best essayists in the goddamn country I am telling you man animal strike curious poses. Let me clear my throat
00:52:38
Speaker
She's just a brilliant, amazing writer. So smart and funny, charismatic. And she was the featured guest on The Happy Hour. And so the people who joined The Happy Hour got to converse with Elena and pick her brain a little bit. And she picked other people's brains. She was incredibly generous. And it was just a whole lot of fun. And that's the kind of thing that's going to be coming down the pipe. It's the third one we've done. And I think we're just going to keep refining it and get it better and better.
00:53:07
Speaker
if there's no guest oftentimes I just pick a theme and that theme is in the newsletter and then we'll just riff on that theme see what's going on with you how can we help how can we get you know make your work better make you feel better about the work and all that stuff because it's easy to feel awful damn crummy these days even though it's just the start of the year and you're supposed to be all new year's resolutions up and
00:53:30
Speaker
Sometimes you just feel bludgeoned by the world, by the circumstances we are under and living under. So it's meant to lift our spirits, and sometimes we need that. Sometimes we need that more than once a month, but at least we'll be there to lift each other up on that day. Once a month, no spam. So far as I can tell, you can't beat it. What else? What else is going on?
00:53:57
Speaker
hit a little snag in the registration of Exit 3 Media, which is the production company that puts this together. It's essentially me. I think I accidentally registered it as a sole proprietorship when I really wanted it to be an LLC. So I reached back out to the Secretary of State and got to get that squared away.
00:54:17
Speaker
That's where we're at. Tired as hell. So I'm going to call it quits. Is that all right? I'm going to call it quits, OK? So stay cool, CNFers. Stay cool forever. See ya.