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Episode 340: J.B. MacKinnon
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J.B. MacKinnon is a freelance writer based out of Vancouver, BC. His piece, "True Grit," appears in the November issue of the Atavist Magazine.
Social: @CNFPod
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Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction & Promotions
00:00:01
Speaker
ACN efforts and Atavistaeans, it's that time of the month for an extra podcast. Happy Halloween, by the way. We'll be digging into this month's Atavist piece, and there are some spoilers. You've been warned. Oh, and some of you know, I like to crack open a beer on this podcast from time to time. Sometimes it contains alcohol. Well, let's face it most of the time, but sometimes it's also a near beer.
00:00:27
Speaker
I'm a brand ambassador for athletic brewing, a brewery that makes my favorite non-alcoholic beer. And if you use the promo code BRENDANO at checkout, you get 20% off your first order. Head to athleticbrewing.com and order yourself some of the best non-alcoholic beer I think you'll ever drink. I mean it. Also, they don't sponsor the podcast. This is just me spreading the word. I get points towards like flair and beer, but no money. So go
Introduction to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:55
Speaker
ahead, check them out.
00:00:55
Speaker
That's exactly the subconscious tickle. I can die happy now. Oh, hey, it's CNF Pod, the creative nonfiction podcast, the show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Meara. How's it going?
Guest Introduction: JB McKinnon
00:01:20
Speaker
Today's guest, JB McKinnon.
00:01:23
Speaker
who has a wonderful piece, as they all are, in this month's Atomist, about the resilience of cows. The editor of this piece, the esteemed Jonah Ogles, called this story a shaggy dog story, and it's not a pejorative. It's a story that would have a hard time finding a home anywhere else besides the Atomist. And I love these stories, and it's a nice change of pace as we start to close out.
00:01:52
Speaker
the Adivis calendar year. Magazine.adivis.com. Go there. Subscribe. I don't get any kickbacks from subscriptions. You know my recommendation is true. Just here to celebrate everything that they do.
00:02:08
Speaker
JB digs into a lot of brilliant things about the reporting and the writing and everything like that, the pitch promotion. It's great. I think you're really going to have fun with this one, but we'll tease that out a bit later. Show notes of this episode and at last count about a billion.
00:02:29
Speaker
Yes, a billion others are at brendanamaro.com. There you may also sign up for my up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter. That's where I like to hang out. I don't like to hang out on social media very much, but I am wanting to put a lot of effort into a kick ass newsletter that I think entertains, gives you value and sticks it to the algorithm, right up the algorithms keister. If that's your thing, sign up. Been doing it for a lot of years, first of the month, no spam.
00:02:57
Speaker
As far as I can tell, you can't beat it. It's here where I will kindly remind you that leaving, kind, reviews on Apple Podcasts helps validate the enterprise for the wayward see and ever. At one point or another, you too were a wayward see and ever. And think how much seeing a bunch of reviews helped you make an informed download and subscription.
00:03:21
Speaker
also there's patreon.com slash cnfpod helps keep the lights on cnfpod hq the show is free but it sure as hell ain't cheap go on shop around see if there's a tier that appeals to you we have two new members i'd like to give props to brandon m stickney and marylin paulino thank you so so much and also for the other patrons who
00:03:45
Speaker
still aboard it's amazing it's nice to see it grow and it's great to see people stick around so the support means the world you have no idea
Editor Jonah Ogles: Story Insights
00:03:55
Speaker
okay we're gonna turn the wheel over to lead editor jonah ogles right now we're gonna do the little thing where i get out of the car and i'm gonna go into the other chair and then i'm gonna put jonah in that car and give him the keys and say all right you know just the seat it is your turn to drive you're ready let's do this
00:04:26
Speaker
I didn't know what to make of this one like it's really good, but it at the same time. I'm like This is this is wild. This is pretty trippy Yeah, yeah, I know I know it's a good one for us to do I remember when I when I first took the job with the atavist I was
00:04:46
Speaker
I was actually playing tennis with an Atavus copy editor who was also the outside copy editor at the time. I was picking his brain because he'd been working for the Atavus for a long time. I was like, what's your favorite way of describing an Atavus story? How do you think about it?
00:05:09
Speaker
And he said that the thing he loved about out of his stories is that his favorite ones were sort of the shaggy dog stories that maybe wouldn't have a home anywhere else, but were compelling in sort of their own way, but not quite the way that like an outside or a GQ or you know, Vanity Fair story might
00:05:35
Speaker
might be. And this is like a classic shaggy dog story because it's a little odd. James meanders quite a bit in
00:05:52
Speaker
from the narrative itself to explore other things.
Cow Resilience Story: Initial Exploration
00:05:57
Speaker
It's not your traditional magazine story, but it's really a fun read and worth telling and reading about, I think. What did this pitch look like when it came across your desk?
00:06:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, he basically, I mean, he pitched this Dory, I mean, he hooked us with, with the cows, you know, there's a hurricane cows are swept out to see, remarkably, some of them survive, you know, okay, so right there, you've like checked.
00:06:29
Speaker
sort of the tension check box. But he said in the pitch, he wanted to use it as a door to discuss cows and what we know about them and how little we know about them and what
00:06:49
Speaker
we think maybe we're learning about them and what the story might exemplify. And, you know, we liked that. And I think it's a story that we would have liked in any pitch meeting. Sometimes, you know, you assign a story that
00:07:07
Speaker
you think maybe you would have rejected in another meeting if people hadn't been in the right mood. I don't think that's quite the case with this one, but I was, I think, in a receptive mood. Maybe we've had a lot of just very straightforward, classic, good magazine stories, and this one felt different, and I think we were in the mood to do something a little different.
00:07:34
Speaker
What makes this piece, in a way, for lack of a better term, I would say maybe dangerous for, let's just say, I don't know, the beef industry or anyone who has a certain measure of cognitive dissonance between how the industrialized cattle industry, speaking of nothing of like chicken and pork and all that stuff, are treated is that a lot of people find cows as just kind of like these dopey,
00:08:02
Speaker
dull-witted meat factories unto themselves but this as JB's reporting pans out is like they might have they might be aware of you know far more like a sentience on the level of animals that we historically would never consume and would be horrified if they were treated as poorly as cow industrialized cows are
00:08:30
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's sort of a sideways way into that, you know, because I think, I mean, we've had pitches before about, you know, sort of like exposés of industrial animal culture, agriculture, which like, don't get me wrong, I'm sympathetic to that. And, you know, I can read those stories when I see them, because I feel like we sort of
00:08:59
Speaker
owe it to ourselves this does that this approaches some of the same thorny questions without I guess it's with something with a narrative that is really compelling and that sort of keeps you keeps you moving through and it's it's a good you know I hope I hope people
00:09:23
Speaker
like it and I hope they feel like they learned something from it. I mean I learned all sorts of things and I had a couple of cows when I was growing up. My dad works for the USDA and has spent like literally his career working with farmers to
00:09:43
Speaker
raise cows in more holistic ways. I'm a bit of a believer already. Our cows had names if we were coming up. My sisters slept with them the first night we got them in the barn. I'm here for this story, ready to take everything in.
00:10:09
Speaker
and still was surprised by what I learned, by what the reporting turned up. What was really kind of a fun nugget to read about here, too, was at first the media was reporting out that surviving cows might have been swimming for upwards of four hours. I'm like, okay, that's a long time to be
00:10:35
Speaker
bobbing out there in turbulent waters to find some random island out there on the outer banks. But it turns out it could have been at minimum seven and a half, but maybe as long as 25 hours. And that just speaks to some incredible resilience that maybe we would never attribute to cattle, wild or domesticated.
Crafting the Cow Survival Narrative
00:10:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's the great question posed in this, is what do we make of this? Does it go beyond merely survival instinct? Because throughout anything, a human, a dog,
00:11:14
Speaker
into water like that and the odds of survival are not great. The great question that James explores in this is, well, what if it's not just luck? What if it's not just survival instinct? What does that say about the species? It's an interesting read. I feel like I know when we have a good story when I've started
00:11:43
Speaker
telling people about the pitch like as soon as I get it and this is one of those stories that like basically anytime I'm talking to someone new and they ask like what's happening with work I'm excited to talk about this story you know it just sticks with you.
00:12:01
Speaker
And what I always love getting your insights on are the unique editorial or editor puzzle making that you aim to solve, solving the puzzle of a particular piece. So for you, when you were reading early drafts and working with James, how did that puzzle manifest itself this time around?
00:12:25
Speaker
Well, this one was one of the easy ones on the editing front. It came in mostly in the form you see it now. I think we moved a few things around. Most of what I did was trimming. And most of that came from a rather long section about climate change, which obviously is a thing
00:12:55
Speaker
I wasn't trimming it out because I don't believe in it or anything. Jonah Ogles, climate denier, what? There's this cow and climate change overlap, which I think most people are aware of with methane gases.
00:13:17
Speaker
And cows being either the industrial agriculture being rightly, I think, vilified for its role, or even just cows themselves being vilified for existing in such a great number, which is obviously out of their control. So we had this big section about what it means, and this is
00:13:40
Speaker
There's a hurricane, so there's a climate change aspect to that. There's the outer banks, there's a climate change aspect to that. The big question for me as an editor was basically, how do we balance this narrative and what I thought of as more interesting philosophical questions with these important
00:14:05
Speaker
issues, sort of current event type, current issue type things that we have to mention, we have to talk about, but how long do we need to talk about them? And so really, you know, all I had to do in this one was tighten things up and say, okay, I think we can make our point in this many words instead of the original number.
00:14:29
Speaker
And James has been just an absolute pleasure to work with and is always really receptive to that. So this one actually didn't require a big like tear it apart, put it back together. It was really just refinement of particular arguments and ideas.
00:14:47
Speaker
Oh, fantastic. Well, as always, Jonah, this is always fun to get a sense of your side of the table when you're working on these things. And yeah, and this piece is really fun and it's nice to see stories like this, like when you start looking at the helicopter view of the entire, like, out of its calendar for the year, like, you know, just going back a couple months, you know, say words, investigative piece, which is really heavy.
00:15:13
Speaker
You know last month was Cassidy's adventure piece, and then this one has a bit of a It's great in that it feels a bit more light-hearted, and it's a little shorter so it in the pacing of the year I think it's like a really well-placed piece
00:15:29
Speaker
Oh, good. I'm glad. Even though we're not a traditional magazine, we do pay attention to the mix. This is a good one. We like doing these types of stories. I hope writers who have something similar can think of us when they stumble onto these types of ideas. Shaggy dog stories. I like that. Shaggy dogs. Send them our way. We're dog lovers over here.
00:16:00
Speaker
always fun jamming with Jonah. But now it's time to bring in the lead guitarist, JB McKinnon. He's the author or the co-author of five books of non-fiction. He's an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, National Geographic, and The Atlantic.
00:16:18
Speaker
I don't know. I haven't heard of them. As well as the best American science and nature writing anthologies. He is an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of British Columbia where he teaches feature writing. That's cool. Man, I wish I could take a feature writing class with JB. Visit JBMcKinnon.com to learn more about JB and his work. Follow him on Twitter at JBMcKinnon. M-A-C-K-I-N-N-O-N.
00:16:48
Speaker
Are we still cool with Twitter now that we're in the Musk era? I'm not so sure. I'm just going to kind of keep my finger on the pulse of that. Stay tuned. But for now, it's time to dig into the pitch, the reporting and the writing of this piece. Great stuff here. See you in efforts.
00:17:08
Speaker
It came across my radar just through, just as one of those news stories that floats around them and you kind of seize on it and you think, I think there's more to that. And so there were, you know, there was this kind of weird, brief media circus around the idea that these cows had somehow swam from one island to another.
00:17:33
Speaker
in a hurricane off the coast of North Carolina.
Connecting to Past Survival Stories
00:17:39
Speaker
It was just presented as this quirky good news story, but I thought there's got to be more to this. It seemed to me like it had to be more extraordinary than met the eye, and it certainly turned out to be that way.
00:17:56
Speaker
When people sometimes think, like, how do you get your story ideas? And I think oftentimes a great well of story ideas is often these things that are just momentarily sensational. They're just kind of quirky on the surface. But then the hit and run reporters move on as they must. But sort of the narratively driven reporters would be like, you know what? There's something more there. So maybe on the surface, like,
00:18:26
Speaker
your instincts told you there was more there, but what was telling you there was more there? Really, I think the swim, probably also the story kind of intersected with a story that has been lingering on my mind for some years, which I wrote years ago for an outdoors magazine here in Canada.
00:18:48
Speaker
And it was about this polar bear that had been radio tagged and satellite collared and all of that kind of thing. And then it jumped into the ocean and set off to swim out to the sea ice, which I guess is something polar bears do in Alaska.
00:19:06
Speaker
And they're used to it being quite a ways, like they're used to having to swim 100 kilometers or something out to the sea ice. This one, because of ice retreat, this one swam for 700 kilometers across nine days in continuous swimming. I mean, there was no way that it was able to sleep in the water. It had a cub with it when it entered the ocean and it didn't have one by the time it came out. So somewhere along the line, the cub drowned.
00:19:33
Speaker
And there was just this incredible feat of perseverance and just sheer physical power and kind of blew my mind. And so I've had this, my eye has been open to animal survival stories since then. And when I saw this one with the cows, I mean, even though it was described as a swim of four miles in the media,
00:20:00
Speaker
It was still a class one hurricane and even four miles. I mean, one of my first thoughts was like cows can swim. And I realized I don't really, you know, I don't know how extraordinary this is, but it seems
00:20:18
Speaker
pretty incredible and I wanted to you know I thought this might this might be the cow version of my polar bear swim and then of course cows we have such a weird relationship with cows and I started thinking this might be not only just kind of a cool take on the survival story genre but it might have important things to say about how we relate to cattle
00:20:48
Speaker
Oh, it certainly gets you to, and people at large, like to interrogate your relationship to them. They're not just, you know, dull-witted meat factories unto themselves. They, you know, that they could in fact have or do have a high degree of intelligence and sentience and a drive to survive. And that can be problematic for people who
00:21:15
Speaker
consume them as food, so that starts to throw a wrinkle into how people will view them, I think. That's kind of a central tenet of your story, I think.
00:21:26
Speaker
Yeah, I was kind of pitching this story as the perfect storm meets consider the lobster. So David Foster Wallace's famous essay about lobsters and whether we should eat them. And that story starts out as just this delightful jaunty travelogue to a lobster festival in Maine. And then it turns into this kind of harrowing Peter Singer-like essay on animal welfare.
The Evolution of the Cow Story
00:21:54
Speaker
And this one I thought had kind of similar kind of potential because the narrative is incredible. I mean, it's just this story that turns out to be much more incredible than the initial reporting suggested as a survival story. But at the same time, you're starting to realize throughout it
00:22:15
Speaker
as I did, that it's hard to explain how so few cattle survived this swim when a whole herd of them was washed into the water and so was an entire herd of horses. How did just three cattle survive this swim if it didn't come down in some way to their individual willpower, their conscious desire to stay alive, and if individual cattle have these kinds of
00:22:45
Speaker
I mean, something more complicated is staring back at us in the meat aisle of the grocery store than I think almost any of us has considered. Well, yeah, it's, you know, with the three cattle who survive, or we can say at first, like maybe three and a half,
00:23:04
Speaker
And, you know, two might have been drawn or driven by their own herd mentality to survive together. And then the one, which is sort of the, we can call it the central figure, the central bovine, you know, turns out to be with calf. So, and that suggests an entire new level of a drive to survive. It was beyond her own survival.
00:23:33
Speaker
Yeah, so right, we've got this pregnant cow who turns out to be, I mean, that is certainly the orneriest of the cattle. You know, survives the swim on its own, apparently, is then very difficult to round up and take back home and just a real, just a real battler on, you know, in every direction.
00:23:56
Speaker
And then, yeah, it turns out to have done this when pregnant. And of course, you know, this is one of the unanswerable questions of the piece, but we do raise it and think, you know, I do kind of think aloud about it. I mean, was this cow motivated not only by a desire to save its own life, but a desire to save the life of its calf?
00:24:18
Speaker
And I should just say here too, this is one of the instances where as I reported, you know, deeper into this story, I just kept going like, what? You know, first all I hear about is some cows swam through a hurricane. Well, that's cool.
00:24:35
Speaker
Then I hear that they may be descendants of Spanish colonial cattle thrown overboard 400 years ago. Then I hear that one of them was pregnant. Then I hear that it gave birth to a calf. And then I hear that the calf was born with one brown eye and one blue eye, as though to be kind of surf and turf expressed through its eyes.
00:25:03
Speaker
This story just was one of those ones that just kept on giving and was so fun to work on. Now let's back up to maybe how you establish a pitch for this story. Like you said, it was like this polar bear meets Consider the Lobster. So when you're thinking of where you want to land this piece, and of course it lands with the Atavus,
00:25:26
Speaker
you know how are you selling the piece and selling the notion of it to be like yeah this is a it sounds really weird and quirky but like uh let's get let's give this a shot
00:25:36
Speaker
Yeah, I mean it was a tricky one because I was really excited about the story and I had just finished my last book, The Day the World Stopped Shopping and I was exhausted and I wanted to do some kind of story that was gonna be a little lighter, a little more fun and so I started picking away at this one and I just got so excited about it. I just started researching it and reporting it. I basically had it more or less
00:26:05
Speaker
I had the research more or less complete other than needing to make a trip out to the actual location where this whole story played out on Cedar Island in North Carolina. So it wasn't really until that point where I thought, who's going to publish that? And then it suddenly, it wasn't until then that it struck me that this is indeed a quirky story that not every editor
00:26:34
Speaker
is going to look at and think, oh yeah, I see what you're up to here. And so I, you know, I made a very short list of places that I thought might be interested. And the activist of those really kind of made the most sense. I just thought that they, you know, partly I just thought, well, they've they've done these kinds of survival and extreme circumstances type stories before. And so they may
00:27:01
Speaker
naturally be attracted to one, a story of that same type, but with everything kind of made unfamiliar. I mean, instead of humans, we've got cows and that makes it, and instead of, I mean, I think one of the limitations of the survival genre is that often the only takeaway you get is kind of, wow, human perseverance, you know, it can be amazing. But in this one,
00:27:31
Speaker
You're saying, wow, a cow's perseverance, it can be amazing.
Philosophical Implications of Cow Survival
00:27:36
Speaker
Why? In what way is a cow's survival similar to or different from how a human would survive in the same kinds of circumstances? And again, it just kind of crashes us up against the human-cow relationship and takes us to a deeper place than I think is usually possible in a survival narrative.
00:27:59
Speaker
Nice. And as we kind of put the story on the table and give it an autopsy of sorts, what was the process by which you went about the reporting and the research of this, given that our central figures are essentially non-English speaking? Indeed. That was certainly something I had to give some thought to. And so I just thought, well,
00:28:28
Speaker
I will try to track down anyone who knows the inside of a cow's head. And that turns out to be a pretty limited group of people. And again, this kind of gets into that human-cow relationship territory.
00:28:46
Speaker
There really wasn't until recently very much research being done on cows as individuals or on cows, the psychology of cows, for example, or even how cows communicate with one another. And of course, there are reasons that that research wasn't done until recently. And it's because these are not questions that society is hankering to investigate
00:29:12
Speaker
across a history in which we eat a lot of cows. So it's really only recently that folks like Monica Padilla de la Torre and Laurie Marino and some other folks have started to investigate these kinds of questions. So I talked to those people and they were good enough not only to share with me their research, but also to actually sit through interviews in which I said things like,
00:29:41
Speaker
At what point in the journey of these cows do you think they might have experienced loss or grieved? How would they have communicated to one another as a storm surge set upon them? And they really helped me build scenes that hopefully
00:30:03
Speaker
bring this story to life in the absence of the ability to interview the protagonists. Getting to the reporting and the interviewing of experts where at some point or another you have to, as anyone doing this kind of work, you kind of have to be okay asking questions that feel kind of silly.
00:30:25
Speaker
Eve but ultimately it gets to building building scenes and you know in this case getting into the headspace of a of a cow. So maybe over the course of your you know your career today in certainly with the story you know how have you developed a certain degree of. I don't know training or in. Comfort with asking these questions that seem kind of a name on the surface but really fundamentally help shape the story you're looking to write.
00:30:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it's even just normally reporting scenes. People find that experience very unfamiliar because most people's impression of a reporter or a journalist is that they're going to come.
00:31:12
Speaker
So to ask just facts, they're going to fire some questions at the interview subject and they're going to get to respond, you know, yes, no. And that'll be done. And then, so as soon as you're starting to ask, well, you know, what color was your jacket?
00:31:31
Speaker
I remember asking some biologists who'd shot a wolf one time. I was just saying, they said, oh yeah, we went down there with guns and we had to wait for this wolf because it had to be destroyed. I was like, what kind of guns?
00:31:46
Speaker
It ended up becoming quite an operation to extract that information because they start to wonder, why do you need these details? There's something about probing for details that makes people just naturally suspicious, I think maybe particularly in this day and age.
00:32:06
Speaker
You know, I just tend to approach it by saying, look, I need to paint a picture in words and I need the reader to be able to see what you saw or experience what you experienced within their mind's eye as a reader.
00:32:22
Speaker
I find that most people can go along with that, but I also find that it usually requires going back to interviewees more than once and just trying to develop that level of comfort through a bit of relationship building.
00:32:43
Speaker
In this case, though, it was actually strange. I mean, the sources, cow people just turned out to be amazing people. And people didn't blink an eye. They were just like, oh, yeah, OK, let's walk through this. You want to drill for details? Great. I want to help make this story come to life.
00:33:05
Speaker
Yeah, they're in Robert Caro's memoir, Working, where he talks about more or less his process of how he's gone about doing these Titanic biographies on Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. One of his central questions when he's interviewing somebody is just be like, what did you, like, what did you see? Or what did they see? Like, if I were standing over your shoulder, what would I be witnessing?
00:33:31
Speaker
And oftentimes, you're like, oh, I don't know. And he just kind of keeps going at him and kind of pecking at him. Okay, so you saw that tree in the distance. There's just my own interpretation. But oh, you saw a tree. What was that tree? Was it windy? And so on and so on. And it seems so banal to the person asking, like you said, why is this important?
00:33:56
Speaker
But when you get to that degree of granularity, when you weren't there to witness it yourself, it just really, it just paints such a nice three-dimensional picture that it really immerses the reader, and that's ultimately what we're after.
00:34:10
Speaker
Yeah, I've used exactly that line. I've used that line. Like if I was standing there beside you, what would I be seeing? I've used exactly that line. And all of this really came to a head during COVID when you couldn't travel and you couldn't go to these sites. You couldn't go to locations and kind of paint scenes. And so a lot of the work, a lot of the detailed description
00:34:32
Speaker
that appears in the piece doesn't come from my actual visit to the location. It comes from the reporting I did sitting right where I'm sitting now at the desk that I work at and talking to people on Zoom or on the telephone. The story I just mentioned where I was writing about these conservation officers who were waiting for a wolf.
00:34:52
Speaker
I wrote that entire scene and then I went back and looked at it and I was like the only detail that I ended up using from a visit to the actual location was a description of like the shape of the beach and a kind of shell that's found on that beach and
From Research to Storytelling
00:35:09
Speaker
everything else in the scene had come from reporting the scene. And when you get all your information together from your reporting and your research, at what point do you feel confident to start writing?
00:35:23
Speaker
Uh, I think I feel confident to start writing I guess there's that old phrase when you when you meet yourself coming the other direction I think that's that is really has been my experience of it that at some point i'm i'm talking to people who are saying like
00:35:38
Speaker
you should talk to so-and-so and it's somebody I've already spoken to, or I'm reading research that is saying something that already appears in my notes. Once I've started hitting enough indicators like that, then I feel like, okay, my research has become focused enough and I've pushed it far enough along that it's time to put something down on the screen.
00:36:08
Speaker
Now are you much of an outliner once you get all your information together?
00:36:13
Speaker
I really used to be, I mean, I'm somebody who's, I spent a lot of time earlier in my career thinking about structure a lot of times and probably because it was a weakness initially. And so I used to do a lot of outlining and I used to do a lot of, you know, just sort of a lot of doodling around structure. At this point, I actually think that I have ingested structure to the point where
00:36:41
Speaker
I generally have a pretty plain sense when I sit down to write of how the piece is going to start, where I think it's going to end, and kind of what the basic big blocks are within it. I've got some general sense of
00:36:57
Speaker
you know, what the arc is, how long it is, all of those kinds of things. And yeah, so now I can, I can, I mean, the great thing about having gone through the agony of focusing on structure for for a while, is that now it is something now it's become intuitive, you know, it's gone back to feeling like the writing is intuitive.
00:37:21
Speaker
Oh it's something akin to maybe a guitar player who can just kind of tune the guitar by ear. You know you don't necessarily have to go and get out this tuner and like really fiddle with it. It's just like you kind of know it when you hear it and I suspect through all your reading and all the stories you've written and all the research you've done that like a certain story presents itself and you're like oh I can kind of
00:37:46
Speaker
I can kind of see, like to use a golf term on a putting green, like I can kind of see the line, you know, curving to the hole. Yeah. And I guess you start to develop an eye for, for kind of themes and threads that are rising up through the research as you do it. I mean, in this case, the idea, the issue of names and naming started to rise up for me because of course we, we generally don't name, we don't name livestock because we're going to eat them.
00:38:14
Speaker
And so in this case, there was this strange circumstance where you have these two herds of feral animals, one horses and one cows, and they all get swept off this island by a storm surge. But when I start to look into it, all of the horses have names. And of course, none of the cows have names. And yet it's the cows that survive. And at the very end,
00:38:42
Speaker
one of the cows is awarded a name by the human community. I was picking up those kinds of resonances and pretty quickly that turned into, well, this is how I'm going to start my story. I'm going to start it not with the cows. I'm going to start with the horses because they have names and then we're going to work around to the fact
00:39:05
Speaker
Oh yeah, there are also some cows. They didn't have names. But hang around and see what they do. Yeah, as I was progressing and reading through the piece, given how you started it with the names of all these horses and how
00:39:23
Speaker
how they're named in these sort of isolated island communities on the Outer Banks, I was just like, all right, I really hope one of these cows gets a name. And I was like, at the end, I'm like, yes, they got a name. That's exactly the subconscious tickle that I was aiming for. And yeah, I mean, if that's what you experienced, then I can die happy now.
00:39:54
Speaker
But I mean it was just so astonishing when I did learn eventually that one of these cows had been named and I was just like wow like they go from nameless to named and it's just so such a crystallization of
00:40:11
Speaker
how learning the story of one of these survivor cows can kind of re, you know, it can certainly put your thoughts about cows on a new trajectory.
Unexpected Developments in Research
00:40:25
Speaker
Yeah, and given that you come across this story and you start maybe, and I'm just presupposing, that maybe you have an idea of how it's going to unfold in your head before you've done the lion's share of the reporting. But then you start going there and you start doing your work, doing the rigorous interviewing and so forth.
00:40:48
Speaker
You know, in what ways did this story maybe in particular surprise you or maybe throw you a curveball and sent you on a different trajectory than you had originally envisioned when you like set out to do it?
00:41:02
Speaker
You know, I think probably, well, there's a few. I mean, most basically, I now, you know, really understand that cows can swim. It's amazing, actually, as I talked about this story with friends and acquaintances and so on, that question came up again and again. People were saying, well, you know, cows can swim. And then, of course, you remind them, you remember the Wild West films where the cows get swim across the ford of the river.
00:41:28
Speaker
And then people go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it shows just how profoundly we underestimate cows as beings, I suppose. So that's kind of a very shallow level one. But more profoundly, I think learning about how cows
00:41:54
Speaker
More cows used to be like these cows. And when they were like these cows, we had a different relationship with them. That really struck me and was completely surprising to me in the research. So I learned through these kind of heritage cattle, heritage livestock experts about these Spanish colonial cattle and their descendants,
00:42:22
Speaker
And how these cows used to be, I mean, they're just so tough. They can eat whatever. They can drink brackish water. They can handle a heat. They can handle a cold. They can defend themselves from predators. They're just almost a completely different animal to what we see in the industrial cattle production world today. And when the cattle were like that,
00:42:51
Speaker
people really respected them, kind of in the way that we respect horses. So you would have these ranchers who, in some of the research I read,
00:43:02
Speaker
they talk about how the ranchers would would get upset if somebody brought a dog to the cattle roundup because they didn't want they didn't think it was respectful for for anybody to round up their cattle with dogs or they resisted the idea of fencing these cattle because they thought you know it was unbecoming
00:43:22
Speaker
of one of these Spanish colonial type cattle to be confined by fences. And in the main report that I read about these older heritage types of cattle, the author kind of says,
00:43:38
Speaker
thinking about these cows, maybe we too should not be fenced in. Maybe we too were not born to be fenced in. And suddenly you've got the cow as a symbol of liberty. So that really kind of stretched my
00:43:56
Speaker
my expectations certainly. I thought we'd kind of get into the nitty-gritty of how individual cows, how is it that some cows were able to kind of dig deep and persevere with that kind of survival mindset that
00:44:13
Speaker
that we recognize as being important in human survival situations. I thought we'd get into that. That didn't shock me too much. But the way it kind of opened this window to the much broader human-cow relationship took me by surprise.
Collaboration with Editors
00:44:29
Speaker
And as you were generating your early drafts and then working with Jonah on this, what were the conversations you were having, editor and writer, as you were beginning to shape this into what it would eventually become?
00:44:46
Speaker
We didn't really have a lot of conversations on this one. We talked a little bit about what I kind of needed to scare up when I was
00:44:59
Speaker
on my trip to two-seater island where this cow swim occurred. But I think, you know, right from the proposal stage, we were on the same page about what this thing was, which was a narrative-driven story about, a narrative-driven survival story with a side of human-cow relationship analysis. And it never really changed.
00:45:29
Speaker
Yeah, and maybe you can speak to just being with ambitious pieces of this nature, longer pieces. I think the draft at least that I have that I read is around a little more than 8,000 words, between 8 and 9,000 we'll say.
00:45:45
Speaker
And, you know, that's a long that's a long piece. So what was just the what's it like for you on your end, you know, being having been edited and being edited on a piece of this nature because it is it's an ambitious piece to write. But of course, it's also an ambitious piece to edit.
00:46:05
Speaker
Yeah, no, I mean, it's been terrific. I think, oddly enough, this was kind of part of my first real effort to start trying stories that really had strong narratives at the core of them.
00:46:23
Speaker
Prior to this, I'd really written more in essay styles, particularly reported essays. Those would generally have storytelling elements, but they weren't really powerfully narrative-driven. That may be because early in my career, I had one editor say,
00:46:45
Speaker
you don't really get narrative and I was like oh yeah well I'll just go to my dictionary and look up what narrative means because I mean I really didn't know what narrative meant I'm more or less self-taught as a writer I didn't study it in university and I actually if I'd been put on the spot in that moment would not have been able to define narrative
00:47:13
Speaker
So I really didn't know and probably was a bit shy about approaching narrative-driven stories. But after this last book, I was just really craving
00:47:29
Speaker
I was really craving the opportunity to write something with a powerful narrative because it kind of powers itself. You don't have to crunch it as much as you do an essay, for example. It's difficult in new ways, but in terms of
00:47:48
Speaker
Where does it start? What's the start, middle, and end? Narratives are a lot clearer that way. So this was kind of my first big narrative project. And the editing there, I think, that's where the editing from Jonah has been really, really helpful, was kind of... He basically said, you know, there's a lot of... The diversions in this piece are fun, but there's a lot of them.
00:48:18
Speaker
And we really need to let the narrative rise up and breathe. And that, I think, was kind of the main work of the editing. But it was really kind of a pleasure for me because I could recognize right away that this was something I needed to learn about
00:48:40
Speaker
pieces that are powered by narrative, first and foremost. And it was kind of beautiful to watch how stripping things away allowed it to rise and become so much more visible.
00:48:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of amazing how that can happen. I've never had an atavist level edit yet in my writing career, just based on the outlets that I've been published in. Grateful as I am, I just haven't had that degree of...
00:49:12
Speaker
You know narrative narrative editing even line editing where just you think you're turning in something that is like really sharp and clean and it turns out to be just like a total bloodbath when you when you get it when you get it back, but it must have been just a really
00:49:28
Speaker
That must have been really illuminating just to see what it's like to be like, okay, you know, I really, initially I felt a lot of this stuff needed to
Balancing Style and Narrative Clarity
00:49:36
Speaker
be there. And then when it fell away, it was like, oh my God, this thing is like, it's like a perpetual motion machine now that I've like stripped away so much of like the drag.
00:49:47
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think what I was doing in probably the first draft was I would lose confidence that the narrative could do it on its own. And so I'd be like, let's throw down some Easter eggs. Let's take an essay-like diversion.
00:50:04
Speaker
down the history of the discovery of this peculiar variety of storm surge that I talk about in the story. And then, yeah, Jonah, I think, came in and he said, some of these diversions, yeah, you know, let's stick with these others, a fair number of others. Let's remove those. And it was, yeah, I mean, it was really just a
00:50:32
Speaker
a reminder to me that you can be confident in a good narrative. If you have a good narrative, you can be confident that it can run itself to a pretty good degree, and you don't need to be doing handstands and cartwheels along the way.
00:50:52
Speaker
Well yeah, that's just it. It gets you, well you brought up David Foster Wallace earlier because Consider the Lobster was something of a formative text as you were writing this and talk about someone who was fireworks and cartwheels. A lot of us sometimes get into this racket because we're so inspired by that that we want to have a similar imprint on the literary scene, as lofty as that sounds, or douchey as that sounds.
00:51:22
Speaker
But like but you like those experiences that we have by reading someone of that nature a stylist You're like, oh man, that is so cool. Like I want to do that But then sometimes you realize like oh when you try to do that a you're sounding like someone else who's already done it like a more power to them but you realize that you're just putting a
00:51:42
Speaker
are you just putting too much weight in the boat and you're really sagging the hull where really you need to get rid of so much of that ballast because you're slowing down the thing as you're trying to imitate these people to your own detriment. Yeah, I mean, it's one of my favorite aspects of the process is when you get to that place where you're stripping things away. I'm generally not somebody who hesitates to murder darlings. I mean, I can get that way
00:52:12
Speaker
probably more at the line level like at the level of the wording of a sentence than I can about like let's remove this whole chunk that I might be I might have thought was was pretty wonderful but I kind of recognize now that often often when you do that you really you just immediately see greater clarity it's kind of like when you've been sitting around trying to figure out how to
00:52:42
Speaker
how to fix some highly convoluted line in a story and then you realize you can just say like they went out the door, you know, and then you just feel this great sense of relief that you've hit the simplicity that gives it the depth.
00:53:01
Speaker
Well, to that point, like if you're, I don't know, just decluttering your wardrobe or something and you're coming across, you know, shirts and especially t-shirts, you know, things you're like, oh, man, I remember this thing. But then it's like, you know, you get rid of it and it kind of stings at first. But in a week, in a month, forget about a year. You don't even remember that you had the thing.
00:53:24
Speaker
And it's like, it's the same thing when you're line editing and killing darlings. It's just like, it's some things that seem so precious. When you strip it away in service of the of the whole, you're like, oh, I don't even remember that line. That seems so important to me. Yeah, I think a lot of this comes comes back again to I think the entire culture of of writing and how much weight it appears to put on beautiful language instead of beautiful structure.
00:53:54
Speaker
And I think we can really get bound up in in trying to You know just trying to produce beautifully written sentences with wonderfully well chosen words and You know, I think you can easily get lost in those kinds of darlings that's for sure and it's it's the appreciation for for structure and how much
00:54:21
Speaker
force and beauty structure can bring to writing that
00:54:28
Speaker
that make it easier, I think, to say, no, no, let's strip things away because we want that structure, that underlying structure to be visible to the reader. And when it is, I mean, you don't want it visible in the sense that they can see every lever you're pulling, but you just want the beautiful architecture
00:54:53
Speaker
to catch their eye and not just be buried in blackberry vines. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's kind of like when you see a Tesla on the road, you're noticing the beautiful lines of the design. And that's intentional. It is certainly style, but it also is not hitting you over the head. So there's that fine balance. You'd be like, oh, that looks elegant and beautiful, but it's not ostentatious.
00:55:20
Speaker
and like over the top and I think with a piece of writing you wanna be able to show like nice smooth contours, smooth lines without saying like hey look at me, look at this thing. Yeah and I think so often writing, that structure can just get covered up by
00:55:42
Speaker
by by language you know just by the by the the the incredible efforts that we sometimes go to as writers to to just you know pick just the right word or or or produce that that rich uh description of something and yeah i mean certainly you know it's not that i that i don't pay attention to those things but
00:56:06
Speaker
Over time, I've become more and more appreciative of the fact that the underlying structure is often what gives the most force to a piece of writing rather than dazzling word choices, I suppose.
00:56:26
Speaker
Sure, even even like compound modifiers that are just like that can be let's say in the hands of somebody else can be like, oh, it's over the top. There's a particular novelist that I won't throw under the bus. That is something I read from their work a long time ago. I'm like, oh, my God, another compound modifier. Let's just let's just like pump the brakes on this as someone who has overused similes to his detriment.
00:56:52
Speaker
So I know what it means to like go over the top with things you're trying to be too clever to describe something. But one compound modifier in particular that I really loved from your piece was just a very small thing about describing how a cattle walks and you just say like a walking on the moon gate. And it was just like such a really wonderful thing that I highlighted. I'm like there's a little dollop of style amidst everything that gives you a little glimpse of who you are as a writer.
00:57:20
Speaker
I appreciate that. Like I say, it's not that I don't pay any attention to those things. I certainly do. I hope also that by dropping in a flourish like that,
00:57:36
Speaker
but not too often that they do stand out a little bit more and kind of grab the reader's attention in a way that they might not if you know if I was laying that on really thick and heavy
00:57:52
Speaker
Well it's kind of like if you're having like a well-composed dessert and there's like lime zest or lemon zest and you're like oh that's a that's a nice little pop of flavor you know when it's well balanced or like the right amount of salt and you get a little citrus zest it's like holy shit that like that's kind of lighting up my palate and
00:58:14
Speaker
I think that's exactly what you what you've done with like a little a little zest like that with a you know something like that it's like oh cool like that's a that tasted nice yeah that's um that's good to hear of course i mean it's it's uh i do
00:58:32
Speaker
I mean, as I say, this kind of structural stuff is something I thought about a lot. And often I'll ask people about writers they like, and they'll say, oh, I like such and such writer. And I'll say, what do you like about their writing? Oh, the writing is just so beautiful. It's so descriptive. They're just always getting just the right word. And then I'll go and look at the writing, and it'll be pretty.
00:58:59
Speaker
pretty straightforward, you know, it'll be somebody just kind of laying down words, very few of them, three or more syllables, you know, they'll call things that are blue, blue. They won't say they're cerulean, they won't say they're azul, you know, they'll
00:59:19
Speaker
Let the reader have their own blue, you know, in a way. And what you find, you know, what I find with, you know, often when I look at it is that no, those pieces are just beautifully well put together. And so that, you know, that blue, you know, the description of something as blue is just doing exactly the work it needs to do and no more and no less.
00:59:40
Speaker
The whole form that the piece has taken is what's generating the sense in the reader that they are reading beautiful writing. But if you break it down to the actual word choices and how the sentences are composed, I mean, it's not Pushkin, right? It's often pretty straightforward stuff.
01:00:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of like what just kind of popped into my head is that if the writing process is kind of an uphill process, for the reader it should be a downhill read. Like it should be easy and almost carried on by gravity.
01:00:17
Speaker
Yeah, I think, again, that's an excellent
Promoting and Pitching Stories
01:00:20
Speaker
point, I think, because it's something I always try and remind myself of now is that the reader isn't paying anywhere near as much attention to what I've written as I do. Not even probably 1%, right? They're probably giving it 1% of the attention that I gave it. And that has, I mean, it has a couple of effects. One is that it's made me a lot less concerned about
01:00:47
Speaker
about whether I say and or or. I would never get into those kinds of editorial battles where it's just, should we say this word or that word? I'm just like, the reader's not going to care. It's a big one. There's that aspect of it, but also understanding that you need to
01:01:05
Speaker
That you really need to make things you really need to make what you're doing pretty plain pretty pretty not not as I say in such a way that it's that fine line I guess between the reader feeling like you're hitting them on the head with what you're trying to do and
01:01:22
Speaker
the reader just not noticing but kind of wandering through this house where they just say wow these stairs you know that the banister on these stairs is just the height that I want it to be and it's so smooth and you know and just where they feel like they might want to sit and gaze out the window there's a comfortable chair that that's really what what I'm trying to trying to do without without the reader ever noticing of course
01:01:50
Speaker
Now, as the piece publishes, oftentimes now, it's incumbent upon the writer to engage in some degree of promotion of the thing and engage in that post-publication thing where you have to be like, you know, as much as uncomfortable as I might be in this, I have to be like, hey, look at me. This thing is out there. I hope you will read it and so forth. So for you, how have you metabolized or processed
01:02:17
Speaker
You know that part of the publication Journey where it is now time for you to be like, okay It's time to tweet this out and then engage in that whole process I mean you you're definitely right that This is not my I mean not this this is actually very enjoyable. I love talking about writing but but yeah, the promotions process is not a
01:02:41
Speaker
Is not my it's not my absolute favorite part of the writing process. That's for sure but what I have realized with it something that you can learn from it I suppose is that it's when you go out to promote any story or book it kind of really demands that you have
01:03:02
Speaker
that you have the idea of that piece of writing reduced to a very simple form, which is really helpful in a professional sense in that this is often what you have to do when you pitch. So when you pitch a story, or if you have that kind of three seconds in the elevator,
01:03:24
Speaker
You need to have the core idea of the story crystallized in your mind. And publicity and promotions, that process is really good for that. And I'm not at all inclined that way. I mean, I'm a highly recursive thinker and often a highly recursive speaker.
01:03:47
Speaker
And I tend to sort of see the things I'm working on as containing the universe and not being a single grain of sand. So it's very helpful for me actually to have to go out and talk to an audience or be interviewed by media about a book I've written or a story I've produced.
01:04:11
Speaker
Well, it what's kind of really cool about hearing you You know think that through is that it that it does come it comes back right to the start It comes right back to the pitch, you know You eventually had to sell an editor or a publication on the idea and you go through that a whole whole rigmarole and then as it's coming to light it's almost like it's coming right back to the the central tenet of what
01:04:36
Speaker
got you excited about it and also got someone else excited about it to pay you for it and that's going to be what ultimately sells it to the readership.
01:04:45
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm starting to realize just how valuable it is to try and get there earlier in the process because I wrote my first book quite a few years ago now, and it was about an uncle of mine who was assassinated in the Dominican Republic in 1965, an uncle I never met. But I wrote a book about that. I mean, like many people, I did a family story as a first book.
01:05:09
Speaker
And then it really wasn't until late in the editing process for that book that I realized the whole underlying theme was forgiveness. And what do we need in order to forgive? And how do we forgive? And is forgiveness different for different people? All these kinds of things. Well, how handy it would have been to have realized that early in the process and not at the end. It probably would have. I mean, it certainly would have.
01:05:39
Speaker
changed everything about how I approached writing the book and it would have made it a better book. As I say this has been kind of a gradual
01:05:47
Speaker
realization for me because I'm just my brain is not inclined towards Reduction. It's I think it's inclined towards expansion but it's you know, I've started to realize that it's very important to try to to try to kind of reduce things and and get that clear eyed sense of of why I'm interested in writing about things so that
Exploring Creative Outlets and Fulfillment
01:06:15
Speaker
whatever it is that drew my eye can power me throughout the entire reporting and writing process.
01:06:23
Speaker
Well, that's amazing stuff. Well, JB, as I like to bring these conversations down for a landing, I always love asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. And that can be anything that you find cool or fun, be it a brand of coffee or a fanny pack. And so I would extend that to you, JB, as we're bringing this down. If there's anything that is exciting you that you would recommend to the listeners out there, what might that be?
01:06:51
Speaker
You know, I'm going to actually do a little shout out for maybe an underappreciated nonfiction outlet. That is a place called Hakai Magazine and it's h-a-k-a-i-magazine.com.
01:07:10
Speaker
and they're just a you know they're they're a great literary science magazine up here in British Columbia and just doing all kinds of like really interesting stuff and it feels like a place where as a writer the reins are kept pretty loose you know you you get to you get to you get to breathe a little when you're doing a piece for Hakka and I just would like more I think it's a place that that
01:07:38
Speaker
that uh... deserves more readers and and more writers as well i think that's that's really cool that what's really good to underscore is that i i think a lot of us in as writers you know there are you know the big headlining outlets where you know we'd love to see our work publishes because it reaches more readers but also kinda scratches that that that itch that our ego wants you know for the prestige purposes especially among writers like
01:08:07
Speaker
you know for readers publishers don't matter but for writers like yeah we know where everyone we know those publishers that are uh that are like the really cool ones that would be really nice to have like on your cv um but like when you're reading let's say i like a best an essay collection say like best american essays or sports writing or whatever and i'm sure there are any number of
01:08:31
Speaker
anthologies of that nature in Canada as well. What's wonderful is that like say you can look in the main collection but also in the notable selections is you'll see these all these other publications that you have never heard of and they're doing that kind of work that you're obviously attracted to so it's giving you more ideas of like more or places to pitch like I never even knew who like n plus one was a few years ago like oh they're
01:08:57
Speaker
They publish like surfing things in that way. Isn't that kind of cool? And so you start to be able to cast a wider net to get the work you want published. And yeah, here it's a way to get your stuff out there. And it's not the New Yorker or outside magazine or, you know, there are all these places doing amazing work. And you're saying, you know, you saying that, you know, Hack Eye Magazine is just another example of cool places doing amazing work.
01:09:22
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's often those places that are a little bit off the beaten path where you can explore your style and your voice a little more readily than you can with the sort of bigger, more established houses. I mean, they've got
01:09:40
Speaker
Well, for one thing, you're just going to be too terrified to really flex your writerly muscles for these bigger outlets. But yeah, working with a smaller place, I mean, you're still going to get, in many cases, really superb editing, but you're also going to get to maybe try some things that you wouldn't dare to try in a picture or proposal to.
01:10:04
Speaker
to one of the big outlets. So yeah, I kind of swing between the two and have throughout my writing career so far. Fantastic. Well, JB, this was amazing to get to talk to you about how you went about this really cool piece for the ad of it. So I just commend you on a job well done. And thanks for coming on the show to Talk Shop. This is a lot of fun. Thanks so much. Yeah, really appreciate it.
01:10:35
Speaker
Alright, big up CNFers and thanks to the great Jonah Olds and JB Mack for the time. Head to magazine.adivis.com to subscribe to the Adivis. Some of the best 25 bucks you'll spend in a year, let me tell ya. You get great stories, access to their archives, and you're supporting the incredible storytelling they're doing. I don't get any kickbacks, so you know my recommendation is as true as they come. Still New Jersey.
01:11:02
Speaker
going to be here for another few days or so before I hit the road back to Oregon. And my father-in-law, he's big on watching the local news. Trust me, there's a point to this little parting shot. And it got me thinking about local anchors and TV personalities and how some make it to the big time, kind of move their way up to bigger markets and others either thrive or languish in the small regional markets.
01:11:30
Speaker
You have to figure that for some of them, if not all of them, they wanted to maybe be the next Diane Sawyer or Katie Couric, Dan Rather, Dan Patrick, if you're into sports. And yet somewhere along the line, they either chose lifestyle over ambition or they simply weren't good enough or maybe didn't have the look or the polish. Who knows?
01:11:53
Speaker
And I wonder if they're sad at where they are, or if they've made peace with it, or if this is where they wanted to be all along. Like when I was in Saratoga, working for a little newspaper up there, the Saratogian, we had a guy who did so much game coverage. He didn't do any pagination, like a lot of us had to do as well as game coverage, but he was just kind of, he was a machine. Probably had two or three stories a day, an occasional feature. Like I said, just a machine.
01:12:23
Speaker
But he wasn't a good writer at all. Everyone knew it. He was objectively average, and that's probably stretching the compliment. And I got to thinking what it must be like to just totally plateau in a small market and not be able to rise up out of it. Like, is there more? Is that sad? Is that an admission of defeat to stay there?
01:12:48
Speaker
Now for frequent listeners of the show, you know how impossibly frustrated I've been over the years with my own development as a purveyor of the mighty True Tale. I'm coming to terms that I might just have to be like kind of a small tier local guy, like a local TV hanker. Maybe even start my own thing because the gatekeepers don't exactly like peep me behind the velvet rope. I don't know what the answer is.
01:13:17
Speaker
I don't know if doing my own thing is an admission of defeat or an act of creative courage. On some level, we all seek the validation and prestige that comes with an elevated, invisible tier of publication. And if you're kept from it, maybe you're unlucky, maybe you don't pitch enough, or maybe you're just not good enough.
01:13:38
Speaker
That guy I spoke about earlier, nobody in their right mind that, let's say the athletic or ESPN.com or the New Yorker sporting scene, we'll keep it in sports because it's sports, whatever publish his things. But you know what though, the guy who is beloved or is beloved in upstate New York, he's by all accounts a really happy guy and he's a great guy and maybe that's all that matters.
01:14:03
Speaker
Maybe we shouldn't be so swept up in these trivial matters of publication and glossy magazines. Are we getting even a little bit better every day? Are we having at least a little bit of fun? Are we causing no harm? Are we paving the road and filling in potholes? Are the people coming up the road behind us?
01:14:27
Speaker
Greasing the skids, if you will. Then I suppose if you were doing those kind of things, then that's a pretty meaningful way to go about a career. And maybe that should be the focus. Not necessarily on these merit badges. We can pin on our sash. Anyway, stay wild. See you in Evers. If you can't do, interview signal.
01:15:09
Speaker
you