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Episode 100—Mary Karr Talks 'Tropic of Squalor,' Grinding Through Early Drafts, and Cellos
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"If I can get through the horribleness of the first draft, I have a chance," says Mary Karr. Today’s podcast is brought to you by the 2018 Creative Nonfiction Writers’ Conference. Now in its 6th year, the CNF Writers’ Conference is three days celebrating the art, craft, and business of writing true stories. May 24th through 26th in downtown Pittsburgh. Details at creative nonfiction.org/conference. Listeners of this podcast receive 20% off the registration price by entering coupon code CNFPODCAST during checkout Promotional support is provided by Hippocampus Magazine. Its 2018 Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction is open for submissions until July 15th! This annual contest has a grand prize of $1,000 and publication for all finalists. That’s awesome. Visit hippocampusmag.com for details. Hippocampus Magazine: Memorable Creative Nonfiction. Whoa, boy, CNFers, it’s Episode 100 of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast. 100? Here for the first time? This is my jam, the show where I speak to the best artists about telling true stories: leaders in narrative journalism, memoir, doc film, radio, and personal essay to tease out tactics, habits, origins, and routines so you can improve your own work. I’m your host Brendan O’Meara. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your pods and share with a fellow CNF Buddy. Man…Are you serious? 100 episodes and for this special occasion we here at CNF Pod HQ bring you Mary Karr. I’m sure 99.9% of you know who she is, but if you don’t here’s the rundown: She’s the best-selling author of The Liar’s Club, Cherry, Lit, The Art of Memoir, and five books of poetry, including her latest, Tropic of Squalor published by Harper. Mary is a professor at Syracuse University and is best known and most responsible for the boom in memoir when The Liar’s Club kicked all our asses and showed us what a personal story could be. We talked a lot about the importance of patience, working through dozens of drafts, the nature of talent, and cellos, yes, cellos. She’s @marykarrlit on Twitter and Facebook and her website is marykarr.com. Be sure to stick through the end of the show where Mary reads two amazing poems from Tropic of Squalor. You don’t want to miss out on that tasty goodness. If you head over to brendanomeara.com you’ll find show notes as well as a chance to subscribe to my monthly reading list newsletter. And, no, if you click through and buy books I don’t get any kickbacks so you can rest assured that I’m selecting books that I enjoyed and get no compensation for. Once a month. No spam. Can’t beat that. You can also support the podcast by leaving a review on iTunes as that helps our little corner of the internet get a little bit bigger. If you leave an honest review and send me a screenshot, I’ll coach up a piece of your work of up to 2,000 words. No diggity. That’s gonna do it, CNFers. Here’s to the next 100 CNFin’ shows up in your ears.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Promotions
00:00:00
Speaker
Today's podcast is brought to you by the 2018 Creative Nonfiction Writers' Conference. Now in its sixth year, the CNF Writers' Conference is three days of celebrating the art, craft, and business of writing true stories. May 24th through the 26th in downtown Pittsburgh.
00:00:22
Speaker
Details at creativenonfiction.org forward slash conference listeners of the show receive 20% off the registration price by entering coupon code CNF podcast all one word during checkout.
00:00:41
Speaker
Promotional support is also provided by Hippo Campus Magazine. It's 2018 Remembering November Contest for Creative Nonfiction is open for submissions until July 15th. This annual contest has a grand prize of $1,000 and publication for all finalists. That's awesome!
00:01:03
Speaker
Visit hippocampusmagazine.com for details. Hippocampus magazine, memorable, creative non-fiction. Let's do the show!
Celebrating the 100th Episode with Mary Carr
00:01:16
Speaker
Oh boy, CNFers, it's episode 100 of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. 100? Here for the first time? This is my jam, the show where I speak to the best artists about telling, true stories, leaders in narrative journalism, memoir, documentary film, radio, and personal essay to tease out tactics, habits, origins, and routines so you can improve your own work.
00:01:44
Speaker
I'm your host Brendan O'Mara, hey. Be sure to subscribe wherever you get your pods and share with a fellow CNF buddy. And man are you serious, 100 episodes and for this special occasion, we here at CNF Pod HQ bring you the one, the only, Mary Carr.
00:02:03
Speaker
I'm sure 99.9% of you know who she is, but if you don't, here's the rundown.
Mary Carr's Literary Insights
00:02:10
Speaker
She's the best-selling author of The Liars Club, Cherry, Lit, The Art of Memoir, and five books of poetry, including her latest, Tropic of Squalor, published by Harper.
00:02:23
Speaker
Mary is a professor at Syracuse University and is best known and most responsible for the boom in memoir when the Liars Club kicked all our asses and showed us what a personal story could be. We talked a lot about the importance of patience, working through dozens of drafts, the nature of talent, and cellos. Yes, cellos.
00:02:47
Speaker
She's at Mary Carlett on Twitter and Facebook and her website is marycar.com Be sure to stick through to the very very end of the show where Mary reads two amazing poems from tropical squalor You don't want to miss out on that tasty goodness. I had a blast speaking with her and I hope you enjoy listening Let's waste no more time. Here's episode 100 with Mary Car
00:03:14
Speaker
Very nice. Well, like I said, yes, what was kind of cool, like I, you know, I tweeted out yesterday to you that, um, you know, that I've read tropical squalor, you know, cover to cover three times and it's wonderful. It's one of those books that just seems to get a bit richer every time you do it. And it's nice to be sort of in the hands of someone who really knows what they're doing. And it's just such a lovely piece of work and I want to thank you for it.
00:03:37
Speaker
Oh, it's so kind of you. It's just, oh, it's the nicest. It's the nicest. It's all you want to hear. I mean, it's all you want to hear. So yeah, thank you. I've been I've been surprisingly lucky with it.
00:03:49
Speaker
Yeah, it's a nice, you know, luck, of course, doesn't have a whole lot to do with it. You know, this thing is a grind and a craft and it, the what you're able to distill with what you're writing, it just, it's so lean and so like beautiful and powerful. And so what does that process look like for you as you're looking to just squeeze the most out of every single word?
00:04:13
Speaker
Well,
Crafting Poetry and Authentic Voice
00:04:14
Speaker
I think mostly I think the way I try to describe it to my students who are, you know, obviously engaged in the in the page. I throw out a lot, but I also I have a tendency to rewrite like completely overhaul.
00:04:35
Speaker
A friend of mine said, you know, it's like you buy a hatchet from Abraham Lincoln and you know, 100 years later, you have to change the head and 100 years after that you have to change the handle, you know, and so I feel like that's most every poem in there started out. I always make a joke that every poem I've ever written is I am sad being by Mary Carr, you know, like it usually comes out of grief or rage or joy or some strong feeling and then you just try to be
00:05:04
Speaker
The poems aren't for me. They're supposed to be for readers, so I just try to make an experience for a reader is what I'm shooting for. And at first, I've heard Neil Strauss say something like, the first draft is for me, and the second draft is for the reader, and the third draft is for the haters.
00:05:26
Speaker
Isn't that cool? And yeah, and he's doing, you know, reported nonfiction and so forth. But I wonder if on some level, if that kind of hits home for you, that maybe your early drafts are for you, but then there's a conscientious effort for the reader and then, you know, just that kind of honing as you're rewriting things. You know, I always have, I almost always have a very specific reader in mind.
00:05:54
Speaker
Uh, it might be a very literary person, somebody I admire a lot, somebody I'm afraid is going to read it. Uh, I think I often go to like the scary and the scariest place I can go. I think there's a chance John Delillo could read this poem. And then, you know, if it's terrible, I'll have to, you know, lie down on the train tracks. But, um, but, uh, yeah, it's more like the, the 60, the,
00:06:24
Speaker
dress three to dress 50 or for the haters. I really do literally do like 50 drafts of a poem. Like the things that are sonnets started out being, you know, two pages single space. So I just try to hack away stuff that's really boring or really obvious or the language really. Or everybody has a sin they commit as a writer.
00:06:51
Speaker
I always want to think I'm clever, which I'm, you know, I'm not particular. I mean, there are plenty of much cleverer people than I am. But so I often find myself cutting out things where I'm trying to be glib or steer away from what was difficult.
00:07:10
Speaker
Mm-hmm and is that usually a Trusted reader tells you that or or is it something that you stumble upon you like? Oh, yeah, you know Mary you're trying to be you know, too clever in this instance work harder Right, right it when I was about 12 I I you know all the kids in the sixth grade picked on me because I was reading TS Eliot and I started saying indeed because I was an asshole because
00:07:38
Speaker
Let me say I started saying indeed because I was a horrible person. Can I say asshole in this show? Oh yeah. You can say anything you want. Okay. I thought I, I sounded like a dick and, and you, but that was like one of the, those, those poets, those European, you know, European influenced American poet who you descended kind of from the French
00:08:06
Speaker
fancy, French, symbolist poets who ate opium and drank absense and, you know, boffed hookers by the boatload. And, you know, they were smarter than everybody else. And they kind of teased the bourgeois reader with difficulty. And I think that's not the nature of my ability. Whatever I bring to the page,
00:08:32
Speaker
is usually much more about heart or about connecting with people. So while that's a perfectly fine way to write and that's a perfectly, that tradition has influenced poetry in English the past 170 years or 50, 60 years, I guess.
00:08:50
Speaker
To your point, it's like, what, what was that process like for you in a, you write about, you've always written about the nature of talent, finding voice. And I wonder what was that process like going from someone who felt like they had to say indeed to someone who was comfortable writing horse dookie horse horse dookie. You know, an even better one is horse hockey, but a lot of Yankees don't know what it means. But horse hockey, isn't that a good one? Yeah.
00:09:19
Speaker
Well, I mean, I think when I got sober, which I did before my second book of poems, I literally typed up my second book of poems in a mental institution. I was in the hallway with a typewriter for certain hours a day that would let me type. And I think I was living in Boston and around Cambridge where everybody was such a smarty pants.
00:09:46
Speaker
And I think I had surrendered. I surrendered to the idea that while I was a little pit bull and I would try very hard and I would read everything, I didn't go to the store bar. I didn't speak seven languages. And I don't know. I think as we get older, I don't know, you sound young, but as we get older, we become, in my sixties, you become more and more yourself.
00:10:15
Speaker
Right. Kind of almost, you know, it can be a really bad thing. I think for me in terms of my writing, it's been, I feel freer to say what I want. And how long would you say it took you to come to that and to be comfortable being who you were on the page versus trying to imitate somebody else that was an early influence? I would say,
00:10:43
Speaker
I really started writing when I was a kid, I mean like five. And, but I started writing a lot kind of on a schedule when I was about 19 or 20. So maybe 35. Uh, it was, it was, so what is that? 15 years, I think. And, and it's just that, you know, the Carnegie, how do you get to Carnegie hall? You know, practice, practice, practice. I just.
00:11:10
Speaker
Wrote a lot and I don't think everybody should go to an MSA program or sit note workshop, but I was somebody who. Really profited. I had a great teacher guy named average night. I think I write about him and lit. Who is this? African American rusty handed ex con who Gwendolyn Brooks had discovered and. I think in prison in Michigan at the time, though he was from Mississippi.
00:11:40
Speaker
And he moved across, say, the Princeton campus like a man from Mississippi and not like somebody impersonating an intellectual. He was an autodidact and he was self-educated and he was also a brilliant poet. And I remember him tapping my, taking a pencil and tapping my shoulder with it like, your heart, Mary Carr, your heart, you know, you don't, you're not going to be a philosopher.
00:12:10
Speaker
And I was thinking, of course, I'll be a floss figure. I had these very grand ideas with my little redneck squirrel murdering self. But then I also had teachers who were Robert Haas or Louise Glick or Heather McHugh, who were part of the Academy, who went to the schools with the fancy names. But actually, Louise was a dropout. Tobias Wolf was a dropout.
00:12:41
Speaker
I naturally migrated towards people who were not coming out of the Academy, even though I met them in a sort of in the graduate school sort of in the Academy. And but nobody when I was in graduate school, I wasn't the one that everybody said, Oh, she's really gonna do something. I, I think I was, I was lauded or rewarded for being a little bit of a workhorse for
00:13:11
Speaker
reading more books than other people did because I was so behind. When I got there, I was so miserably educated, mainly for having dropped out of school. I mean, you know, through no fault of my, my teachers from being just such a feckless, you know, itinerant. And people, it's not that I got honors, I think every semester I was there, but it was not really for the writing, it was much more for being
00:13:40
Speaker
doing more essays than everybody did and really trying to learn something about history because I really didn't know anything written before Elvis. I wonder where you got that strength and conviction of patience through that 15-year apprenticeship that you underwent through having to read more than everyone else to catch up and to write more than everyone else to catch up. Where did that doggedness come from?
00:14:11
Speaker
Again, I had some amazing teachers, but I also didn't really have anything to go back to, did I? I mean, I was going to, what was I going to do? I was going to go to work at the brewery. I was going to, I don't know, maybe I could have gotten an education degree and taught high school English or something like that. I mean, in the best case scenario, but, you know, most of the pathways I took were very unconventional.
00:14:40
Speaker
I think there was that doggedness. I think I worked very closely with Robert Haas when I was in grad school and he read Pound and Elliott and Stevens with me and was kind of an expert on on all of them. And so
00:15:02
Speaker
I remember when I was reading Pound, I went to the library and tried to look up every word in the cantos, you know, that's used, is written in like, you know, 14 different languages, including ancient Greek and Sanskrit. And I thought I was going to look up every word I didn't know and understand the cantos. And I called him at home and I was crying from the phone booth, because I couldn't afford a phone.
00:15:32
Speaker
I said, you know, Bob, I can't read the cantos. And he's like, well, then don't read them. And he he urged me to think about the sound of the poems. You know, he said, why don't you try to learn how to pronounce French and Italian instead of learning all these different languages just in the short term? You can learn how to pronounce stuff in about a month. You know, why don't you why don't you just do that? So suddenly I began to
00:15:59
Speaker
He gave me things I could do that made me less afraid of kind of the monolithic task of trying to educate myself. But it was also, I guess when I, even when I was a little kid, writers were kind of the way, you know, guys in Texas feel about the Dallas Cowboys, you know. I felt about, I felt about, you know, some great athlete. Writers were just so,
00:16:29
Speaker
They were like unicorns or griffins or centaurs or something. They were just so glamorous. And that especially poets who could do something in such a small, with such economy, you know, just a small page, a handful of words that could really knock the bejesus out of you. And so it was actual, it was two things. I think it was a combination of loneliness
00:16:57
Speaker
and devotion. They spoke to me. They made me less lonely, both on the page. And then I met them, and they're peculiar. And they were kind of peculiar in ways that I was peculiar. They were solitary. They were smart and fun to talk to, but they didn't brook a lot of nonsense.
00:17:16
Speaker
It seems it must have been kind of empowering to see that everyone kind of ran their own race but ended up kind of in a similar place. Like it didn't have to be a singularly charted map. Like you found all these kind of quirky roads that everyone took to the same place and then you realize you're sort of among your own people. And they were, you know, they were, it's not like anybody said, oh, you're going to be a great poet. I wasn't encouraged like that.
00:17:45
Speaker
But just to be part of the conversation, just to be in a room where people were talking about poetry, not just the great writers like Louise Gluck or Robert Haas or Etheridge Knight, but, you know, just my fellow students, you know, who were, you know, Mark Doty was in grad school with me and just meeting young poets and young authors.
00:18:09
Speaker
I felt so lucky. You know, I grew up in this town where you couldn't buy a book. And here are these people who like me would, you know, forego buying groceries to load up a paper sack at a used bookstore. It just seemed marvelous. And more nourishing in a sense. Yeah. And that, so that's where the patience came from. It was, what else
The Comfort of Reading in Childhood
00:18:32
Speaker
was I going to do? Was I going to be suddenly like get a job as
00:18:35
Speaker
a secretary somewhere. I mean, I'm not confident. I would be worse at that than I was at this.
00:18:42
Speaker
In one of your recent poems, you know, read these, you had mentioned his loneliness was an invisible crown, and then there was a tweet you sent out not too long ago that, you know, I write for the same reason I read, to find a better way of being alone. And I love how you phrased that, in that it's not eschewing loneliness at all, but having these words at a capacity for language and reading this stuff, it allows you to
00:19:08
Speaker
You know, to be solitary and like you said, a better way to be alone. So like, how did you arrive at that comfort that this was, like you said, a better way to be alone? Well, even when I was a little girl, I think, and I lived in this household where there were bullet holes in the wall. And I mean, plenty of people grew up worse than I did, but the older I get, the worse my childhood seems to me. I think it didn't seem as bad to me when I was closer to it.
00:19:35
Speaker
And now when I just think about any of the things that happened to me that, you know, could never have happened to my son, I remember asking once, were you afraid of my mother because she had threatened to slap him? And he said, Oh, you would never allow that to happen. And even when I so even when I was a kid, and I was depressed, and really did a point of suicide when I was under 10. And
00:20:02
Speaker
insecure and lonely, reading was socially sanctioned disassociation. I could disappear down the valley of a book and, you know, Eeyore and Winnie the Pooh and Piglet were my friends. It was, it's really kind of pitiful when you think about it, but it imbued the process. It became a place of comfort to me.
00:20:30
Speaker
and has never stopped being that, has never stopped being a marvel to me. Words on a page. You titled the first part of Lit escaping from the Tropic of Squalor and the title of the new collection of course is the Tropic of Squalor and I wanted to know maybe what made you want to return to that title in that place?
00:20:59
Speaker
a lack of imagination, I guess. It is a great title, just as titles go. And I was still haunted by the place, by the physical place, you know, those poems about Texas and about my father. And I wanted it to be a book like Dante, you know, starts in the inferno and then worked his way to paradise. And I feel like I started in this
00:21:30
Speaker
the darkness of this swampy hellhole surrounded by these flaming towers. And New York City could be its own hell, certainly. But for me, it's my periodiso. It is amazing. I mean, last night I gave this reading, and it was like standing room only at a book service. It was shocking.
00:21:58
Speaker
And there was a guy right on the front row who was pretty clearly homeless and didn't have teeth, as it turns out, which no one else could see but me and the people right next to him. But I asked for questions and he said, don't you have any happy poems? And I said,
00:22:24
Speaker
Yeah, but not very many. And he said,
Arranging Poetry Collections
00:22:28
Speaker
Why not? And I'm like, I don't know, you know, I, I feel, I guess I'm a sad person, you know, but, you know, happiness writes white or something. But, but he was just a guy who'd wandered in to get off the street and have a place to sit down. And we were having a conversation about the nature of art. And you know,
00:22:52
Speaker
If I lived in Peoria, I might not have that kind of conversation as I could have on Broadway and 82nd Street last night. What's the process like of choosing which poems make the cut for something like this and then tracking it like an album? What is that like for you in terms of the order?
00:23:23
Speaker
That's exactly how I think of it. I have a lot of Prince Room musicians, even when I was a kid, you know, I was one of those girls who dated the guitar player, you know. So I often think of like a fast song and a slow song for the first half of the book before you get to the less than holy Bible part. I thought about
00:23:54
Speaker
Starting, I don't know, I always, the poem ends with my friend Dean Young, who's a great poet. And we had just, and he was dying. He actually got a heart transplant and didn't die, but his mouth was blue because he didn't have enough oxygen and his heart was failing. And we come across this dying squirrel and he bent like a waiter to the squirrel and said, with no irony at all, you know,
00:24:23
Speaker
I honor your struggle little brother when just such a sweet was such a crazy sweet thing to say. And so I thought as an opening, I wanted everything else in the book to be about honoring, you know, my struggle, certainly that everybody, but eventually I lay everything out. What it looks like if I lay it out around my apartment, like I think, well, this poem probably goes at the end. Like, that's what I think.
00:24:53
Speaker
And then the Less Than Holy Bible I had been working on for all these poems that I wanted to be like a journey from specifically from the inferno to paradise and from the void from Genesis into some kind of resurrection or something. So I thought well okay well then these poems that are more exalted or
00:25:20
Speaker
about a more obvious redemption have to come later. And so then how do you build up to the, you know, I tried to make some kind of arc or narrative. Yeah, I love picturing you moving these poems around physically to get us to really see it visually and have your hands on it and to see how that map plays out and see if it makes any sense.
00:25:46
Speaker
You know, I just had a, I do that with my thesis students at Syracuse University, where I teach they, when I work with a, you know, an MFA student at the end of the semester, when they're about to graduate, they come to my apartment in New York. And we lay out, one of them will come and we'll just, so one of them was just here and we were laying out his palms.
00:26:10
Speaker
all around my apartment and he was standing in the middle and he was moving one way and I was moving another and we were sort of shuffling everything around and he stood in the middle and held his hands up. I wish you could see Jacob Meyer. He's so such a beautiful kid. And he said, I feel like I'm in the middle of a whirlpool. It's just so funny. So sweet.
00:26:32
Speaker
It's great that you brought up your friend Dean, too. That was one of the things I wanted to talk about, especially with how all the poems kind of link together, because you started with the organ donor's driver's license as a black check, and then later there's Dear Oklahoma team smashed on reservation road. And I wanted to get a sense of your relationship to Dean and maybe what happened to him, but he kind of alluded to that already. So who is Dean and what's your relationship with him?
00:27:02
Speaker
Well, there are two poets right now. Well, there are three really, that I feel kind of the greatest admiration for. I mean, there are a million, actually there are probably four, but certainly in the top two, it kind of ping pongs back between Terence Hayes and Dean Young. So he's a guy, I didn't actually, I've known his work for a long time, but he published a book called Skid, maybe 15 years ago.
00:27:31
Speaker
13 years ago, and it just knocked my socks off. It just came at me at a time that really wowed me. And I was like, I have to mute this guy. So we wound up teaching in a summer program at Sarah Lawrence and became kind of best friends just as he was dying. He began to die. I mean, he was dying.
00:28:00
Speaker
before they found donor heart, he was, you know, he was on the list and he might have died before that happened. And so he lives in Austin, teaches at University of Texas. And I went down there shortly after, well, before the surgery when I was pregnant, he was going to die and then after. So he's just also somebody like anybody who's really looked into the abyss. The poems really changed from, from
00:28:30
Speaker
facing his own mortality. I saw him as a he's a dark, you know, he's a dark he's no Richard Simmons, you know, he's a dark bastard. But that's who Dean is. So
00:28:41
Speaker
What a couple of the other poems that I wanted to talk to you about that I thought were just so so like prescient and moving were the Carnegie Hall rush seats and the cello has always kind of been something that kind of just bellows and is always like cut into my core if you will and I love the way you put it is that it just kind of it it aches and
00:29:08
Speaker
And I wanted to ask you, what has been your experience maybe listening to music like that? And why specifically maybe does the cello speak to you so much so that you wrote a poem about it? That's so interesting. Well, I used to date this kind of famous concert pianist named Awa Dodgen Pratt. We're good friends now. It was long, long ago.
00:29:38
Speaker
Uh, but I, so a couple of times I, you know, I would go with him on the road and I would go to where he was, he was playing. And, and we, I used to joke because he was very kind of. Handsome guy. I used to joke that every, at every orchestra, there was some bowlegged cello player, you know, looking at me who had somewhat woman playing the cello hated me. And, um, I would show up at rehearsal and, and I, we would joke about the bowlegged cello player, but like you.
00:30:09
Speaker
I'm one of those people every time I hear the cello, it's like the hair on the back of my neck crawls up my scalp. And then Pratt actually put out a record with a famous cellist that I listened to kind of over and over. And I was thinking, what is it about that noise? What is it about? It's so mournful.
00:30:37
Speaker
But there's something so, it makes you feel so alive. And so, yeah, I guess I thought it was sexual and I thought it was, you know, also about balancing on the edge of a pit, you know, about being, you know, right at the edge of the darkness, right at the, you know, a tree's had its heart packed out to make the instrument. I don't know. I guess all those associations.
00:31:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:27
Speaker
It's like cutting the blubber off it. Almost everything can benefit from being 10, 20, 30% shorter than it is, if not shorter than that. It's just the nature of word economy, that things should be the shortest possible piece of work that they can be, whether that's an 80,000-word memoir manuscript or a 150-word poem. Right. Are you a poet or a memoir person? I can't tell.
00:31:55
Speaker
I'm more of a narrative journalist and personal essay memoir guy myself. I've historically been kind of great. I'm sorry. Yep.
00:32:07
Speaker
No, go ahead. I was just going to say, historically, I've been sort of poem a verse, but I've been trying to open my mind to it by reading really, really good poets like yourself. And that's like been opening the door, a crack to some other things that I haven't been quite as familiar for. I've just kind of closed my mind to it. So I'm just trying to, you know,
00:32:27
Speaker
be a little more diverse in my reading across all things because there's a true story component to poetry that I like and a word economy that appeals to me. Right. Well, if you try somebody just between you and me, if you try somebody like Dean Young, he's kind of an experimental poet as his parents say, my other favorite American poet right now, H-A-Y-E-S.
00:32:55
Speaker
They're both experimental, which means the poems aren't all if you that you're not going to like all the poems and you're not crazy. The poems vary to me wildly and they have a lower batting average than somebody who's working in a more traditional way. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think so. So I think a lot of people when they read poetry, if they're dealing with a kind of bolder
00:33:25
Speaker
person than I am, the poems that are great are better than heroin. But you just have to trust yourself when you hit one that you don't like to say, you know, there's nothing wrong with me. This is just, it's working in a way that I can't, I can't enter it. I don't know. So that's interesting. But I also think that nonfiction essays right now are really
00:33:54
Speaker
enjoying a Renaissance. Last night, a lot of people were talking about them. Yeah, yeah. Kind of getting back to the cello, have you read Jose Saramago's Death with Interruptions? Absolutely.
00:34:08
Speaker
That novel, like, like, I just love it's one of my favorite books of the last 15 years or 10 years, I guess. And he wrote the way he writes about the cello and that like kind of like when I read yours, I'm like, Oh, that kind of echoed back to the way he handled the the cello piece of the cello aspect of that book. And I was, that's great that you've read it. So you kind of have a touchstone there.
00:34:30
Speaker
Yeah, he's just such a genius, isn't he? Yeah. Oh, man. That hearkened back to that for me. And what I also like in Tropical Squalor was the like button. And that seemed kind of dystopic, especially in our age of social media and how our validation comes so much from people liking a tweet or liking a post on Facebook or something. Where did that poem come from and surface from for you?
00:34:59
Speaker
Well, I, I, um, I tell, I tell people all the time, I can sort of gauge my spiritual state by how much I want to kill my fellow New Yorkers. And so I, I am, so I do, I actually do a spiritual exercise that I kind of made up that a Buddhist friend of mine says that Tibetan Buddhist princess is an actual meditation practice, which is when I am very irritated, uh,
00:35:26
Speaker
and I'm walking through the city, I'm in a big crowd, I start praying for each face. You know, God bless, you know, the guy in the plaid shirt, God bless the woman screaming, you know, in a pile of excrement, God bless the, you know, whatever. And instantly people kind of look different to me. I was apropos of something. Remind me your question again.
00:35:55
Speaker
It fell out of my head. Oh, yeah. It dealt with how in this age, so much of our validation is drawn from that little dopamine. Oh, right. Yeah, from the like. Right. So what started happening was that people who used to look horrible to me began to look beautiful to me. I mean, just try this. Honestly, even if you don't believe in God, just say, bless this person.
00:36:24
Speaker
When you're like in a crowd and you're being irritated, you're in line for, you know, at the airport or whatever. And people actually start to look different. They become more specific and they become less whatever category you put them in. And I thought based on the social media thing that wouldn't it be great if we evolve that button on our heads and we stopped liking the Kardashians and started liking
00:36:53
Speaker
you know, the unfortunate, the suffering, enough to the poor, enough to kind of maybe, you know, take care of them a little bit, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that's I got the reference to like the glass on the on her ass. I was like, Oh, yeah, there's that. But then you know, we're right.
00:37:16
Speaker
Yeah, you know, she's such an irritant to me, because I've never clicked on a single thing having to do with any of them. And I see their faces every day, probably five times. Oh, man. The algorithms are still somehow pointing her to you. Yeah, what kind of filter do I have to put on my phone to stop
00:37:36
Speaker
having having such people fly at me you know oh man i wish i knew mary because there though certain things that just keep popping up like there are other people that i want to see pop up in my various feeds i'm like what where are they did they disappear but no i keep getting stuff about the avengers
00:37:57
Speaker
It's so funny. It's very funny.
The Joy of Rewriting and Editorial Feedback
00:38:01
Speaker
And in your writing process, where do you feel most engaged and most alive? In terms of writing? Yeah, writing or rewriting or the editing phase, what part sort of excites you the most? Definitely editing. I'm definitely a better re-writer. I'm not much of a writer, but I'm a
00:38:24
Speaker
I'm a pretty good rewriter. I can make things better. I'm able to make things better. If I can get through the horribleness of the first draft, I've got a chance, I think. And for me, it's getting everything I really want to say has barnacles on it.
00:38:53
Speaker
I think I, I try to even after all this time, I try to hide and I, I don't do it on purpose. I want to tell the truth, but I'm, I'm, I'm ashamed of myself in some way. So I still bob and weave and hide and dodge and faint and, and, uh,
00:39:15
Speaker
And only with time can I kind of actually unearth or find the angel in the stone, as Michelangelo would have said. And you came to a high degree of visibility with your work around the age of 40 or so. Right. And what advice might you give someone who might be mid-career, has a little bit of talent or a lot of talent, but things just haven't clicked yet?
00:39:44
Speaker
Um, what would I say to somebody in that situation? I mean, I really, I, I really profited from a writing group, um, from a work, you know, from workshops and to not be afraid to take edit. I think a lot of people, um, a lot of my, a lot of young writers in my classes argue with me, I will edit something for them and they'll argue with me.
00:40:16
Speaker
And I understand that they have an idea about it, but I think the younger and more uncertain the writer, the more fiercely they defend an original idea. And one of my students said, well, how many edits do you take? What kind of, how are you at taking edits? I said, probably, I don't know, I probably take 98% of the suggested edits.
00:40:41
Speaker
even the ones, even the ones I rankle against from an editor, even somebody in a magazine or even somebody some that I rankle against. So I would say to not be afraid to rewrite it. It's not like painting where you people literally have an idea that you can break the palm or break the piece of writing if you
00:41:06
Speaker
tear it, but you can always go back to an earlier draft and you can paint past something and ruin it forever. But a writer can all, you know, you can tear it apart and try to do it another way and always go back to an earlier draft if you're not happy. But I've just found in the tearing apart, I often see truths that were evading me with some earlier version.
00:41:31
Speaker
Yeah, the right answer if someone's willing to give you such great edits is thank you. It's not to push back against it. Well, I bet, you know, I was the same way. I was the same way. And I asked, I recently asked to Lillo and he said, oh, I take, he said, take most edits. Yeah, I take most edits.
00:41:54
Speaker
We're kind of coming up against our time. I was wondering if you'd like, if you're willing, is there a particular poem out of your collection you wouldn't mind reading? I'll read the Carnegie Hall Poem if that's the one you want, or the Voice of God Poem. I think those are two kind of shortish poems. Sure, that would be wonderful. Okay, I'm trying to think which of those. I'll do the Carnegie Hall Rush Seed.
00:42:23
Speaker
No, I'll do the voice of God because because I'm a prayer I pray and even before I believed in God I started praying just like I said before just in that blind way almost just like God help me almost like that almost like cursing at the sky and I actually I pray for people who are sick and you know, I don't know if it changes things but it changes me and sometimes I change things so I
00:42:51
Speaker
But I actually ask God for advice, I say, like, what should I do about, and even though I never get any lottery numbers or anything good, I do sometimes get a leaning. And people have asked me what the voice of God sounds like to me as a prayer. And so this poem has kind of been answered to that. The voice of God. 90% of what's wrong with you could be cured with a hot bath, says God through the manhole covers.
00:43:19
Speaker
But you want magic to win the lottery you never bought a ticket for. Tenderly, the monks chant, embrace the suffering. The voice never panders, offers no five-year plan, no long-term solution, no edicts from a cloudy white beard hooked over the ears. It is small and fond and local. Don't look for your initials in the geese honking overhead.
00:43:48
Speaker
or to see through the glass even darkly. It says the most obvious shit, like, put down that gun. You need a sandwich. That's great. But I'm also happy to read the Carnegie Hall if you prefer that and pick which one you like. I'd love, yeah, if you could read the Carnegie Hall one too, that'd be wonderful. I would use both. OK, since that's the one you brought up.
00:44:17
Speaker
Carnegie Hall rush seats. Yeah, I, again, my friend Awa Dodge and Pratt, I used to follow around to rehearsals and always when I heard of cello, I just felt like I felt like I was floating on hashish smoke or something. So this poem is called Carnegie Hall Rush Seats. Whatever else the orchestra says, the cello in fifth, you're dying.
00:44:45
Speaker
It speaks from the core of the trees hacked out heart, shaped and smoothed like a woman. Be glad you are not hard wood yourself and can hear it. Every day the cello is taken into someone's arms, taken between spread legs and lured into its shivering. The arm saws and saws and all the sacred cries of saints
00:45:13
Speaker
and demons issue from the carved cleft holes. Like all of us, it aches, sending up moans from the pit we balance on the edge of.
00:45:25
Speaker
Wow, that's one. There you go. That's so great that you did that, Mary. I really appreciate you doing that. I could speak to you for another three hours, but I know we're up against our time. I feel the same way. Well, thank you so much for making time for a harmless book of poems.
00:45:46
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think it's good. I appreciate it. Of course. And, you know, where can people get more familiar with your work online if they, if for some reason they haven't, haven't heard of you in your work and want to plug into what you're doing? Yes. Well, let's see on Facebook, I think it's marycarlit. I think that's right. And Twitter, marycarlit.
00:46:10
Speaker
There is a website, marycar.com, that has those feeds on them. But I'm in the process of updating it, so it's a little dated. Well, fantastic. Well, Mary, thank you so much again. Thank you so much for your work. And hopefully we'll be able to keep in touch down the line. And thanks again. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Gary. You have a good weekend. You as well. Take care. OK. Bye-bye.
00:46:42
Speaker
Do I need to ask you how great that was? Thanks to you, friends, for listening. And of course, thanks to Mary for the time and her awesome work. Thanks also to the Creative Nonfiction Conference for sponsoring the show, as well as to Hippocampus Magazine for the promotional support. If you head over to BrendanOmera.com, you'll find show notes, as well as a chance to subscribe to my monthly reading list newsletter.
00:47:08
Speaker
and no
00:47:17
Speaker
and get no compensation for. Once a month, no spam, you can't beat that. You can also support the podcast by leaving a review on iTunes, as that helps our little corner of the internet get a little bit bigger. If you leave an honest review and send me a screenshot, I'll coach up a piece of your work of up to 2,000 words, no diggity.
00:47:38
Speaker
I am at Brendan O'Mara on Twitter and Instagram. The podcast is at cnfpod on Twitter and at cnfpodcast on Facebook. Find it wherever you like, like it, engage, got any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out. That's gonna do it, CNFers. Here's to the next 100 CNFing shows in your ears. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Let's do it again next week. See you later.
00:48:57
Speaker
you