Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 165: Steven Kurutz—The Power of the Library, Getting to New York, and ‘Fruitland’
129 Plays6 years ago
Steven Kurutz, features writer for The New York Times and author of Like a Rolling Stone, stopped by CNFPod HQ to talk about libraries, getting to New York, and his incredible True Story essay "Fruitland."
Subscribe to the show wherever you listen to you podcasts and keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod and on Instagram @cnfpod.
Thanks to Goucher's MFA in Nonfiction, Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction and River Teeth for the support.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Podcast Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
ACNF, Creative Nonfiction Podcast, greatest podcast in the world. Sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. Goucher MFA's a two year, low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere while on campus residencies allow you to hone your craft with accomplished mentors who have Pulitzer Prizes and best selling books to their names. Program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni.
00:00:27
Speaker
which is published 140 books and counting. You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit Goucher.edu slash non-fiction to start your journey now.
MFA Programs Promotion
00:00:39
Speaker
Take your writing to the next level and go from Hopeful to Published and Goucher's MFA for Non-Fiction. CNF is also brought to you by Bay Path University.
00:00:50
Speaker
Discover your story. Bay Path University is the first and only university offering no residency, fully accredited MFA, focusing exclusively on creative nonfiction, and then fuller part-time.
00:01:02
Speaker
from anywhere in the world. In the Bay Path MFA, you'll find small online classes in a dynamic and supportive community. You'll master the techniques of good writing from acclaimed authors and editors, learn about publishing and teaching through professional internships, and complete a master's thesis that will form the foundation for your memoir or collection of personal essays. Special elective courses include contemporary women's stories, travel and food writing, family histories, spiritual writing, and an optional week-long summer residency in Ireland.
00:01:32
Speaker
with guest writers including Andra to be the third and Houdini, a Gallagher and others. Start dates in late August, January, and May. Maybe May 2020. Hmm. Find out more at baypath.edu slash MFA. Go on. Look under your chairs. You get a riff. You get a riff. You get a riff.
Meet Brendan & Guest Introduction
00:02:04
Speaker
Welcome, welcome CNFers. I'm Brendan O'Mara and this is CNF, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, where I talk to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I tease out origins. That's another word, orange. I always want to say oranges. Tease out origins and get to the heart about how these CNFers go about the work so you can improve your game. Today's guest is Steven Kurtz.
00:02:32
Speaker
at S. Kurtz on Twitter. S-K-U-R-U-T-Z. He's a features writer for the New York Times, and he was the very, very first writer in creative non-fictions. Amazing. And dare I say, it's best product. True story.
Discussion on 'Fruitland' Story
00:02:51
Speaker
It's called Fruitland.
00:02:53
Speaker
amazing i think it's online somewhere i'm pretty sure you cannot get it in hard copy anymore but it might be like a long reach feature link in show notes if it's available in any case you have that to look forward to make sure you're subscribed to the show i mean why wouldn't you go do that wherever you get your pods keep the conversation going on twitter at cnfpod and instagram also at cnfpod
00:03:19
Speaker
This grows on the backs of your support. If you dig it, pass it along. And if you do, tag me in the show. I'll be sure to light you up with digital fist bumps and maybe an on-air shout out like this. Thanks to Austin Pickens for supporting the show and reaching out on Twitter. It's fun having Metallica Conversations. It means a lot.
Brendan's Personal Reflections
00:03:39
Speaker
I got to thinking the other day that I've got to strip things down to the bones. Now bear with me as I go through this little diatribe. I've been caught in this trap of trying to do it all and do too many things. The 40 hour work week day job, the 20 hour a week or so podcast, well that's like reading, research, production, promotion, etc.
00:04:03
Speaker
freelancing stories and columns, trying my hand at some content marketing writing, flirting with the idea of doing some dog photography, writing a kid's sportsbook for girls. I mean, it's a mess. Forget about the freaking memoir that I've been writing. It's no wonder nothing really gains traction or momentum. I suspect many of you might have the same problem.
00:04:26
Speaker
So once I'm done with some of my horse racing commitments and I'm done with this hippo camp talk that's given me anxiety up the wazoo, this is what I'm focusing on. The day job because that's what keeps the lights on and the podcast.
00:04:42
Speaker
I'm tabling the memoir, tabling all writing except my journaling, tabling all pipe dreams and shiny new ideas. This podcast is my squeaky Kong filled with delicious peanut butter. This podcast it needs, needs to hit a new level and it needs all of my attention. So I can deliver the best product to you and build what I hope is a ripe community. The other stuff will be there when it's ready.
00:05:07
Speaker
Kind of what got me thinking about this, I just put a little thing out on Twitter that said, like, baseball is pretty much the only thing I've ever really been good at. And especially hitting. And trust me, I was never a natural. I'm not a natural. I was a good ballplayer because it was all I cared about. It was all I focused on.
00:05:26
Speaker
And I thought about my guys Metallica. And you know how those guys and countless other thriving musicians make it, right? It's not because they're geniuses, though some are. And I don't think the gods, the middle gods, somehow found four geniuses then and they happened to meet in the same place in the same time. No, it's because in their spare time, they played the guitar for eight hours a day or more. And that's it.
00:05:55
Speaker
They went on tour in small clubs only so they could play maybe another small club and then they would get their reps. It was that singular vision that they all shared. And some bands make it and some writers make it and fill in the blank. But commonality among anyone who makes it is that singular vision.
Steven's Writing Journey & Influences
00:06:14
Speaker
And I wanted to share that because maybe we're only as far away from our dreams and goals as our focus or lack thereof.
00:06:24
Speaker
Now I know you didn't ask for that little lecture, but it was on my mind, so I had to blurt it out. I understand there's a skip ahead, or like 15 or 30 seconds on your podcast app. You can feel free to use it.
00:06:40
Speaker
Anyway, Steve Kurtz is here, Steven Kurtz, and he's got a great story about how he became a writer and how he found his way to writing features for the best NAM newspaper in the country. Before we get to him though, just want to give one more shout out to River Teeth, the literary journal, for the promotional support, you boss. Okay, now, it's finally time for the show, let's kick it.
00:07:12
Speaker
and then some other essays that you've written. So this will be fun. I know you've got a particularly, I always love charting how a writer becomes a writer and especially when they have sort of, they don't necessarily have like a classic sort of literary background. In an essay you wrote, your father preferred to work with his hands and as you wrote in one essay you said, my mother when confronted with anything text heavy would raise a palm in resistance and say, I'm not a big reader.
00:07:41
Speaker
So I'd love to say, how did a reader and a writer come out of that parental dynamic? You know, I don't know other than it was a bit innate, I guess. You know, I've been around enough writers and been a writer long enough. I think there's a writer disposition. You know, the writer disposition is somebody who is just more comfortable on the sidelines watching things. You just gravitate to that kind of role. You know, you're not necessarily the
00:08:11
Speaker
person is just quickly participating, but you're sort of taking you're always kind of looking at life and a bit of a remove. I have that personality. And I think probably early on when I started reading books, I must have recognized that in the other authors and
00:08:30
Speaker
And also, just the act of reading kind of takes you out of, you know, the stern and drying of life and you're a bit on the sidelines and contemplative and thinking about things. But I have to say, in parents to my mother, and I think maybe I put it in that essay, my mother and my father were big magazine subscribers, so there were a lot of
00:08:51
Speaker
magazines in my house growing up, you know, my dad was in the train, so they were train magazines. And my mother liked houses and architecture, so they were decorating magazines. But later on, when I got to New York and ended up working in magazines, you know, and doing a lot of magazine writing, it just somehow looking back on it was like, oh, this feels natural. And this makes sense. I grew up in a house teeming with magazines.
00:09:17
Speaker
And now I'm working in a magazine. I love how you came to the library and kind of revered the library growing up as a way to seek the outside world without actually having to outwardly engage with it as you can because you don't have the means to get out into the world. But the books specifically like Cannery Row is very influential for you.
00:09:41
Speaker
So how important was that? Take us to your childhood library and how important that place was for you as you were developing that sort of writerly disposition as you say. I mean it was huge and I should just put this in some context in terms of where I grew up. I grew up in a very small, 1,500 people, one stoplight town in central Pennsylvania.
00:10:09
Speaker
And it's not just a small town, it's a small town plopped in the middle of thousands of acres of, you know, state forest preserves. So it's a very remote, insular place. You know, like the nearest bookstore was 50 miles away, the nearest record store was, you know, 30 or 40 miles away, the nearest mall, all that sort of stuff. And it's in the middle of the state, so it's three and a half hours to Pittsburgh and three and a half hours
00:10:37
Speaker
to Philadelphia, so you're not really around the city. So in that environment and then also, you know, in an environment where very blue collar and there's not a, it's not a literary type environment, a place like the library was just hugely, hugely important. And my mother early on when I was little, you know, they had these children's reading classes and she enrolled me in those
00:11:04
Speaker
You know, I just sort of caught the bug and I spent a lot of time there and it was the kind of place I wrote an essay about this library. Where again, like wasn't like every was a big reading community. So I would go in there and you just have the place virtually to yourself and it felt like it was your own library. You know, you walked in and there was a on the left.
00:11:27
Speaker
If you went there were two rooms and then in the middle there was the librarian's desk on the left hand side. The left room was a children's reading room. The right hand side was the adult reading room and you know when you were 12 or 13 you got to pass from the children's reading room to the adult reading room. You weren't allowed to go in there, you know, until you were a teenager.
00:11:49
Speaker
And so just that experience and just being in there completely alone and I still I still go back there, you know, my, my folks are there and I visit a lot and I enjoy going to the library. And again, it's just one that adult room was just one room of books. It wasn't like you were going to find the deep cuts, you know what I mean, or even more
00:12:12
Speaker
metropolitan, cosmopolitan writers like Philip Roth, you weren't likely to find that, but you would find the three classic books by Hemingway and, you know, The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald and then, you know, Shakespeare. It had all the kind of classics that you needed, you know, to get a one, maybe one Dostoevsky book. So you could get an education, a literary education,
00:12:40
Speaker
that, you know, by going there. At what point did you start to think that this was a vocation that you wanted to take up? Well, when I got to college, I had a good major in English. I went to Penn State, the big state school. And there was some way the major worked where you could put an emphasis on something. So I had, my emphasis was on fiction writing and creative writing.
00:13:06
Speaker
Uh, and I, so I did it there. You know, I got some encouragement in high school from, from an English teacher. And then I got some encouragement in college from a teacher, but I was pretty directionless. You know, again, when you come from a, uh, an environment where they're really not very, not very many people have ever gone to college and then gone out to the sort of professional world or, or been away to cities, uh, you know, and worked and lived there.
00:13:36
Speaker
It's all completely foreign. So I had no, I had no understanding of how to get a job as a writer or a magazine or, or any of those things. So I really, after I graduated, I had this degree in English and I kind of floundered because I didn't know how to make that transition from college life into the professional, you know, working world.
Early Career Challenges & Lessons Learned
00:13:59
Speaker
What happened was I got a, I threw resumes everywhere and,
00:14:04
Speaker
By chance, I got an internship at Entertainment Weekly magazine in New York City and the internship paid $8 an hour. And that allowed me, I had a little bit of savings from working jobs in college that allowed me to move to New York. And then suddenly, you know, I was made aware of this whole world of publishing in magazines and the career path. And I think that's really when things kicked in.
00:14:32
Speaker
Before that, I sort of had these half-baked notions that I was going to play music or something, which I'm not very good at. You know, I would have been sort of disastrous. Once I got to New York, you know, I didn't even know about the New Yorker magazine until I got to New York. And then when I got to New York and learned about these other magazines, you know, in a magazine like the New Yorker, it just became a Bible for me. And again, sort of like the library, it just opened up this entire world where it was like,
00:15:01
Speaker
Oh, all these amazing writers that have published in here over the years. And, you know, I love the tone of the magazine and, and the level of, of quality and the book reviews and just the whole literary thing. And then kind of got the ambition to really do it. I would say a year or two after being in New York and, and, you know, I've been doing it since.
00:15:24
Speaker
Who were some of the writers, as you started picking up the New Yorker, that you were reading, they were like, oh my God, turn the world kind of black and white into color for you. I have to say, I mean, it really was the totality of the magazine, everything. I mean, the short, the talk of the towns, these quick 800 humorous, 800 word stories that are often funny or charming in some way.
00:15:53
Speaker
you know, to the features. But, you know, at that time, Susan Orlean, you know, was a big one, and Alec Wilkinson. And then I went and got all these, you know, bought all these books that Alec Wilkinson had written and read those. Calvin Trillin, Tad Friend. And then, you know, learning more about the history of it, E.B. White and, you know, these other writers. I'm looking at my bookshelf and I have that
00:16:24
Speaker
amazing book, Portrait of Hemingway, that grew out of a New Yorker by Lillian Ross, you know, so it's basically an extended New Yorker profile of Hemingway. And it's just incredible, you know, like these are John Hersey, you know, Hiroshima, I mean, these books are just amazing, and these writers are amazing. And for a long time, you know, the New Yorker
00:16:53
Speaker
uh... really was you know i was i was getting an education through uh... through reading it and in look looking at your bio of course you know you you write for new york times new york times magazine features reporter front and for a lot of people listen to show me and myself included like that to me is like such a a gold standard of a place to do the kind of writing you do in a lot of the writing that just we desire we read when you look at that it sometimes feels like
00:17:22
Speaker
to get there you know you are somehow anointed and I know that's not true and so you started at as the in intern at entertainment weekly and I'd love to just maybe chart how you got to where you are today and some of those growing pains in early lessons you learn so from entertainment weekly how did you start building some momentum that ultimately would put you on the path where you are today
00:17:44
Speaker
Okay, so I was in Entertainment Weekly in 99. I came to the city in the winter of 99, and the internship lasted six months. And, you know, I met some friends there and got excited about magazines and, you know, but even still, again, I had these half-baked notions. So I spent that summer of 99.
00:18:10
Speaker
in turning in a recording studio, which was unpaid. And I, you know, got coffee for bands, thinking maybe I would try to still, couldn't decide music or magazines or, you know, or publishing. I didn't like working in a recording studio. I didn't like the environment. And I, so then I just started, I temped for over a year, a year and a half maybe. I temped in just various office, offices in the city.
00:18:39
Speaker
I don't know if temping is still the same robust industry as it was at the time, but it was really fascinating. You'd be in one office for three days and then you'd be somewhere else and all over the city. And I did that. And at the same time I did that, I started freelancing. I placed a couple of pieces in salon back then and a few small pieces in Entertainment Weekly magazine.
00:19:08
Speaker
based on the contacts that I had there. And then eventually one of the editors that was at Entertainment Weekly went to Details Magazine, a men's magazine that's gone now that was kind of like GQ or Esquire and it was being revamped at the time. He reached out, I think he reached out or maybe I pitched him a story
00:19:33
Speaker
And he said there was an opening. So it was an editorial assistant opening. I got the job. So that was my first a full time job. No, actually, it wasn't my first full time job before that I got fired from timeout magazine. I got hired to be a music critic from for timeout magazine, which at the time timeout magazine, it was like this place where
00:19:57
Speaker
If you were an up and coming writer, you worked in the trenches at time out and then you eventually went to time or the New York Times or some other place because it was very fast paced and you got to learn the ropes and learn the city. I flamed out after six weeks or something. It was just a terrible fit between my boss and I. I really basically got fired because my
00:20:26
Speaker
depth of indie rock knowledge wasn't really where it should have been. And, you know, I remember specifically, I didn't know who some person named Momus was. And it was like, you don't know Momus, that's it, you're out. I still really don't. I don't, 20 years later, I still don't know who Momus is. But, but, you know, it was, it was devastating for me at the time to get this magazine job. And, you know, and I'm fine by the seat of my pants in New York and stuff. And
00:20:56
Speaker
And still just sort of barely making it. And then now, now I'm unemployed again, you know, then I got the
Long-form Writing Challenges & Growth
00:21:02
Speaker
job of details. And that was great. And that was the first job that allowed me to, I got, I traveled, you know, travel for a story, you know, like you're an editorial assistant, you know, you're doing some kind of secretarial managerial stuff, but then you're, you know, if there's extra things they need you to write, they write them. I got, they had this column.
00:21:24
Speaker
a Q&A every month. I got the interview out in John, you know, which was an amazing thing. And then I eventually took the column over and interviewed a big prominent older celebrity. The column was called Wise Guy. So I got to do that. I flew to Miami to report a story about a race car driver. You know, like it was a really great experience. However,
00:21:50
Speaker
um you know you're right like the times is the place you know if you know the new yorker and the times these are really the the places to do amazing writing and the kind of writing i wanted to do with a magazine it's formatted you know you have like the the celebrity on the cover that sells it and then you have the various formatted type stories and each magazine has its own demographic that it's trying to appeal to
00:22:17
Speaker
And if you find a story that's outside that demographic, it really isn't a fit for the magazine. And I have always been a generalist. It was being limited by, okay, you've got to find sort of like the 25 to 35 year old guy who's doing something cool in some industry, you know, to write that story month after month. I just didn't, it was frustrating after a certain point. So I started freelancing for the times for this section called the city section.
00:22:48
Speaker
that doesn't exist anymore. But it was very much like the New Yorker, it covered the city. It was a weekly in a very literary way, you know, it was like Joseph Mitchell, that kind of, you know, that kind of writing where you're rolling the city and you're writing about interesting characters in different neighborhoods, certain freelancing for them. And then a position opened up. And then I got the position. The position was not a
00:23:16
Speaker
It was not a full time staff position at the times. It was the city section had five or six contract writers. You've got a certain amount every month. So you did get a stable paycheck, but it was not an avenue into the paper. It was a really amazing job. My, my job, each of us had different neighborhoods around the city that we were assigned to cover. And my neighborhood was Manhattan below 14th street. I mean, it's just like the epicenter of cool.
00:23:45
Speaker
uh, you know, for the city, for the country, you know, it's not, if not the globe. And I was covering those neighborhoods, these village in the Lower East Side and Soho and all that stuff. So it was an amazing job, but it was not a, it was not an avenue into the paper. Um, and I know this answer is long winded, but I'll, I'll wind it up, which is that, okay. So I, I did that job for three years, but I was getting close to 30 at the time and I had no health insurance. So,
00:24:15
Speaker
I, I thought like I can't continue to do this. So eventually, even though I love the times, you know, it was like dating a girl who's never going to marry you. You just, at some point you have to be like, okay, I know you're beautiful, but I, I have to, you know, I have to move on. And I ended up, I got a full time job at the wall street journal and I was there for a couple of years, uh, covering, uh, arts and books and things like that.
00:24:42
Speaker
And I didn't expect it to ever happen, but a position opened up at the Times, and it was for a section, the home section, that I had been freelancing for while I was doing city stuff, and the editor knew me, and I got the job. And then, you know, after a number of years of freelancing, basically, for the Times, I became a staffer at the Times, and that was in 2011.
00:25:08
Speaker
That's amazing. I love that there was something that you really wanted here and the door wasn't necessarily open, but you kind of kicked it open just enough so you could always be on the forefront of these people's minds. You did the work. You did good work so that when the time came, when there was an actual position,
00:25:29
Speaker
That could hire you it was like you had done the work and proven yourself and you you ran with you You did what you could with what was offered to you at the time and then it definitely paid off by by 2011 So that just speaks to you like your rigor and tenacity to kind of play the long game, right? Yeah, I mean it's true. I mean, I don't know I didn't know if I was playing a long game at the time like I
00:25:55
Speaker
You know, I was just probably in my 20s and the world was new to me and being in New York, but the rigor and tenacity is certainly true. I mean, you know, it's probably cooler to say that, you know, I can pick up a story and report a story and open a laptop and just write it and it flows out. That's just not the case. That entire decade in my 20s was educating myself about good writing.
00:26:25
Speaker
trying to get better at writing myself, trying to get to venues that would allow me to do the writing that I really wanted to do and stories that I really wanted to do, learning from lessons, you know, mistakes I had made, just, just reading constantly, just, you know, just really falling in love with it. And
00:26:48
Speaker
You know, yeah, and the city section, it was a weekly and you had to produce. And so there was nothing like the joy of, you know, and there still isn't anything like the joy of when you just reported a story and now you're sitting down to write it and, you know, like shaping it and sculpting it and all that sort of stuff. You know, I did spend all those years and a lot of that time
00:27:18
Speaker
focused on really one thing only and that was writing and getting better at it.
00:27:23
Speaker
When you were starting out there in that turbulent decade and you were writing and reporting, what were shortcomings you noticed in your own skill set that you felt like you needed to really work and practice and research and put in the repetitions on the
Publishing 'Fruitland' & Finding the Right Fit
00:27:42
Speaker
T? Or as a musician and someone who writes a lot about music, learning your scales, what were some of the things that you were struggling with that you eventually got better through practice and repetition?
00:27:53
Speaker
I think I at the time I remember because I had started and I did work at my college paper and that's what got me. My senior year I worked at the college paper and that's what got me the internship and entertainment weekly. But at that time, you know, the college paper pieces were short entertainment weekly, you know, there are feature story. Maybe it's like 2000 words at the most. And then you had all these little
00:28:20
Speaker
150 word stories. And I love doing them because they were, they were, they had to be as tight as haiku. I mean, you know, the magazine had a fleet of editors and copy editors. So it's just because it's 150 word story doesn't mean, you know, like you knocked it off. It was almost harder in some ways to write 150 word story.
00:28:43
Speaker
But even timeout was small. And then the city section, they had these things that were called neighborhood reports that were four or 500 words. And then if you did a cover story, maybe a cover story was 1800 and 2000. All of which is to say the thing that in those years for me was the difficult and challenging thing was length. I would just look at a New Yorker story or a New York Times magazine story that was
00:29:11
Speaker
five or six or 10,000 words and just be amazed. And it was all about, I don't know, it's like working up, for me it was at least, maybe some writers just start out writing long and big features, but for me it was like working up to like, okay, you're hitting balls in the infield and now you can get some balls into the outfield and then you're capable of hitting, putting a ball, you know, over the fence in a home run. So like, you know, that was,
00:29:39
Speaker
that was the struggle for me of a 3,500 word story just seemed monumental to try to report and write and figuring out all that information and where does it go and how do you, you know, the amount of reporting that's involved in writing the 10,000 word piece. So that was something that, you know, it took me many, many years to be doing, you know, like Fruitland,
00:30:08
Speaker
the, which was a true story for creative nonfiction, that was a 10,000 word piece. I haven't written many 10,000 word pieces. I did end up, I did write a book years ago. So you could say, yes, I, you know, wrote long, but even still, you know, to write that long and to do the depth of reporting is still, I always kind of take a pause. It's like, you know, to use another metaphor, it's like you're climbing Everest or something. And you're like, okay, you know, one step at a time.
00:30:39
Speaker
Yeah, I think a lot of people, and I lump myself into this, you think that writing anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 words, it's a matter of just squeezing the words out, but really, I think people,
00:30:54
Speaker
undervalued might be the wrong word or they underestimate the amount of research and reporting goes into something of that length and actually when you're writing five or ten thousand words it's like you've that's the shortest possible version of that story if you've done it well and the type the mass of reporting you have to do people might not realize how much
00:31:15
Speaker
how much there is. Did that surprise you as you were trying to write pieces of this nature like Fruitland that the research and the reporting was like nothing you had ever done before? Yeah, especially early on because I think you're totally right. I think what happens is that when you're early on in writing, you wish you had more space.
Storytelling Satisfaction & Personal Focus
00:31:40
Speaker
You're like, man,
00:31:41
Speaker
I have so much to say about this if they just give me five thousand words and you know I only have a thousand to say it but you can't do a thousand you can't do enough reporting for a thousand words and then try to stretch it into five thousand words because what happens is as you're going along it's it's like it feels really thin you know what I mean it's like you're making soup with no with no hearty ingredients and you just got
00:32:10
Speaker
this sort of this weak broth. And when you're really young, as a writer starting out, you think your voice is going to get you the other 4000 words, you know, it's like, Oh, well, you know, I can just riff. And some people can riff. Some people are good at riffing. And they're stylists. I'm not one of those people. And so yeah, I mean, you see a piece that's five or 10,000 words, that
00:32:37
Speaker
reporter may have spent three or four months on it, like they may have done enough reporting that really they could have written a book. And it's a 10,000 word piece and not a book. But you know, and then when you get into books, which was my ambition for a long time is still, you know, I've written one book, I hope, I hope I'll be able to write more. The amount of reporting that goes into a book is just like, you know, boxes and boxes full of reporting.
00:33:05
Speaker
And again, maybe there's someone who can just kind of riff a book out, you know, but for most people. And if you wanted to really have the heft that that a great story has, you can't, you can't do that. You really have to
00:33:21
Speaker
do a lot of reporting.
00:33:39
Speaker
the page as a maybe an insecure and a developing writer you're you're like I want to do that I want to be like that I want to be recognizable at the first power chord like oh that is this band that is this writer so of late for me it's been showing the restraint and let the story do the heavy lifting and that's something I noticed with your work like you're it has such a nice
00:34:04
Speaker
a nice rhythm to it. Like Fruitland reads so well and you know that you're laying your work at the feet of the story and you're showing that narrative restraint and letting the story do the heavy lifting. Was that something you had to consciously learn over the years to kind of show that restraint and let the story do all the heavy lifting? Well, yes and no. And again, you're totally right. I know what you're saying. There are some books that are almost
00:34:32
Speaker
dangerous in terms of being influential because you fall in love so much with the writer's voice that you want to do that. For me, there was this writer, Bruce J. Friedman, who was mainly a novelist in the 60s, contemporary of Philip Roth, 60s and 70s, but he also did nonfiction writing and this collection of his nonfiction
00:35:00
Speaker
came out in the late 90s, early 2000s, right when I, you know, soon after I got to New York and, and was discovering all this stuff. It's called even the rhinos were nymphos. And he has, it's a little bit like Closterman where he just has a really comic, fresh, unique take on things. It's very voicey. He can do really smart, you know, nuanced thoughts on things, but at the same time, tell a joke.
00:35:30
Speaker
And that book was just like, it was dangerous for me because then I spent the next couple of years just trying to write Bruce J. Friedman stories, you know, even John Jeremiah Sullivan, that
Narrative Restraint & Thematic Focus
00:35:42
Speaker
book, Pulphead, which I absolutely love. I mean, I, I, I take that book down off the shelf a lot, but I, you know, it's like, if I took that book down off the shelf at 24, it would have been too powerful for me. Like now, now I know.
00:36:00
Speaker
to enjoy, to take certain things out of it, like structure and other things, and leave certain things behind because he has a very singular, amazing fly off the page voice. And I don't have that. But the other thing is that, going back to what we were talking about earlier, you know, the fact that I was so enamored with the New Yorker, where the New Yorker has an institutional voice,
00:36:30
Speaker
but it like Chuck Close to men, you know, it wouldn't publish in the New Yorker. Maybe he has, I don't know, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to assume things. But it's just like, if Chuck Close to men would have started his career at the New Yorker, he wouldn't have been Chuck Close, you know, because they would have beaten him down.
00:36:53
Speaker
and kind of taken that voice away. So, but the New Yorker, one of the great things about it is that it's more about the story than about the voice. It has this kind of institutional voice. It's all, it's very, a lot of it, you know, is very understated. Susan Orlean, you know, is a pretty voicey writer and she made a career at the New Yorker. So there are exceptions, but generally speaking, what you're really, what I learned to appreciate
00:37:22
Speaker
was the cleanness of the prose and the insight of the thinking of the writer. That's what was venerated in those pieces and at that magazine. And so then I wasn't a person who was screaming of like, I have this very unique voice and I have to get it out, like I idolized
00:37:51
Speaker
reporters who are a little more in the background and let their voice, there's other ways that voice comes out too. I mean, that's the other thing. Voice comes out in what you choose to write about. That's a big part of voice. Voice comes out in what you choose to say, what you don't say, how you structure a story. I wouldn't call John McPhee necessarily a huge voice writer.
00:38:19
Speaker
Um, or I mentioned that book, Hiroshima by John Hersey. I mean, it's not a first person piece. I don't know if he even appears in it, but you understand his, his, his point of view, his morality, where he chose, chooses to place the tension of the story. All of those things are voiced too, but they're just voice in a subtle or way that doesn't
00:38:45
Speaker
Like you said, it's not like the first power chord and you know immediately. I haven't heard that articulated that well before. That sometimes voice just comes through the subject matter that you're just really excited about. And McPhee is a perfect example. He's a hero of mine. He's why I love and write.
00:39:04
Speaker
and try to sell narrative journalism pieces and write narrative journalism books. He likes really sort of on the surface kind of boring topics, but there's no doubt that he is excited about it and even though he's a pretty understated writer, there's plenty of voice there that comes through the things he's very interested in, whether that's oranges, canoes, or lacrosse.
Exploring 'Fruitland' Themes
00:39:27
Speaker
And I love that. How did you come to recognize that as a – something that is voicey but not like pyrotechnically voicey if that makes any sense? I don't know. I mean at some point over time – let me take that back. At a certain point after I've been doing this for a while, I've been doing it for 20 years. So after I've been doing it for a while, either a friend of mine, a fellow writer.
00:39:56
Speaker
or, um, you know, occasionally an editor, someone would say, this feels like a story that you would do, or I've read about this something, or, you know, sometimes happens to me. People are not, people that are not in journalism and writing aren't as byline focused as people that are in writing. So if it's just like your uncle who's reading the New York times, you know, or your aunt or something, they're just reading the art, the article, and they're not really paying attention to who's writing it.
00:40:24
Speaker
So frequently what would happen is someone would be like, it would be a close friend of mine or somebody, family member or something. And they'd be like, I read that piece in the Times. Oh, and then I realized afterwards you wrote it. And I was like, Oh, of course you wrote that story because I didn't, wasn't conscious, but I just gravitate to certain subjects.
00:40:44
Speaker
And my spin on certain subjects is unique to me, just like your spin on a subject would be unique to you. So when you write long enough, and if you write in one place, like I have with the New York Times, or you get an association with someplace, then other people may even recognize things about you that you don't realize. Oh, do you notice that you often do these kinds of stories or you like protagonists
00:41:13
Speaker
that are such and such, you know, or you like stories where this happens or whatever. So I think it was probably a combination of people saying to me, that feels like your kind of story. And that's how I got Fruitland. A friend of mine heard about the album and said, you know, this feels like you, you should pursue this and do something. So it's a combination of that and a combination, just my own realization of, okay, I'm not a pyrotechnic person here in terms of voice.
00:41:42
Speaker
But I can put myself across the page in another way by the kinds of things. The world is just vast, and there's a vast amount of information. And how you filter it can be unique to you. What you take in and what you choose to write about, that can be your voice.
00:42:07
Speaker
Yeah, and with Fruitland, it was published as Creative Nonfiction's very first true story imprint, which from the moment they released these things, I love them. I love that you can fit these things in your back pocket and mark them up and everything. I know. They're so cool. And so you were number one. You were batting leadoff.
00:42:28
Speaker
I wonder how you, you know, as a writer and writer of a certain platform, of course, with, you know, being able to write for the Times or Times Magazine, how do you sometimes choose where something you want to write ultimately ends up being published? So like, why was Fruitland a good fit, say, for a true story submission versus maybe trying to shoehorn it elsewhere?
00:42:52
Speaker
Well, I did try to shoot, you know, I mean, full disclosure. Yeah. And that story, that story is a little, has a little bit of a unique backstory, which, which is that I
Episode Wrap-up & Listener Engagement
00:43:05
Speaker
wrote it first, you know, because I'm at the times, my first inclination with every story is it's a New York time story. And also because the times, unlike, you know, a magazine that has a specific,
00:43:19
Speaker
demographic or a specific commercial market that they're going after. The Times is a great place for a generalist because there's the sports desk and the business desk and the magazine and styles and the book review and all these different components. So it's pretty much any story can fit somewhere within the Times. So I was writing for the home section of the Times at the time and
00:43:44
Speaker
a really important thing in the late 70s in rural Washington. These two brothers, Donny and Joe Emerson recorded an album, self recorded an album on their farm. And the album went nowhere because they had no connections to the record industry and they were living in the middle of nowhere. And it just sat in their basement and a few copies got out in the world.
00:44:13
Speaker
It just so happened that 30 years later, one of those copies, a music blogger found it in kind of like a junk, you know, like a brick and brick shop in Spokane, Washington, and, and bought it and played it and fell in love with it. And it's a really amazing, unique album. And it just caught on in this underground world of people who were into what are called private press records,
00:44:43
Speaker
self-recorded, self-released music. And it became a kind of minor sensation and songs that are on that record have shown up in movie soundtracks and they've been covered by other artists and things now. But anyway, and there's many, many layers to the story. That's kind of like the quick version, but place was really important
00:45:11
Speaker
to that album. I mean, you know, the fact that they recorded in pretty much total cultural seclusion, Donnie and Joe did not even have a record player in their farmhouse. They didn't, they never saw a concert. They, they had a radio and a tractor and they listened to the radio in a tractor and that, that was it. So the fact that place and home was so important to that. It was like, oh, okay, I can make this work as a home story.
00:45:39
Speaker
And I did, I wrote as much as I could at the time, like 2,500 words or something in the home section. But the story, you know, there's just so much more there. And I did, and I had to kind of shoehorn it a little bit to make, to play up this home angle and to make things work. And it just didn't fit with me. This was like an amazing, amazing story. And I did not feel that I hit it out of the park and
00:46:06
Speaker
you don't get, you know, you get good stories, you know, you can get good stories, but to get this, like this, to get a story this rich, and then, you know, it doesn't come along that often. And then to feel like you sort of, you know, you didn't do it full justice, it just sort of ate at me. And I was like, all right, you know what, for my own satisfaction, I'm going to do this story the way I want to do it. And I went, I went back out there, I spent more time on the farm, more time with Donnie and Joe, I did more reporting,
00:46:36
Speaker
and then things that happened in the course of that year with them because the album had got rediscovered and it brought up a lot of emotional ghosts for the family and for Donny because he made this music as a teenager and a lot of things and a lot of water had gone under the bridge in all those years and then Donny and Joe came to New York City and did this amazing live show you know which was a
00:47:05
Speaker
Just an incredible experience. So I had all this other material that I didn't have at the time. I had reported it for the paper and so then I just I wrote a 10,000 word version and 10,000 words is it wasn't a 30,000 word story. It wasn't you know, a 5,000 word story. It was a 10,000 word story I didn't have any word restrictions, but when I ended up when I finished it and when I
00:47:30
Speaker
Hattie Fletcher, the editor, a true story, and I went down with it. That's what it ended up being, and that was the right amount to tell that story with the right way. That's how that happened. But in terms of where it would go or how do I choose where a story goes, 99 percent of the time for me, it's going in the New York Times, and the writing I do, personal on the side,
00:47:59
Speaker
There aren't many places who are going to give you 10,000 words. You know, I mean, I, the magazine industry has imploded a magazine like Esquire, maybe at one time on Vanity Fair or something. And also as a great as Fruitland was as a story, it probably wasn't sexy enough for, for Vanity Fair. And I don't have connections with the New Yorker and then also.
00:48:21
Speaker
it had been previously, I did do a version of the story for the New York Times. So, you know, no magazine would want to, they might say, okay, well, we don't want to take this because a version of this is already out, even though the two versions are just night, they're completely different. But so in that case, it was like, okay, who's printing 10,000 word stories still. And, and it was, you know, literary magazines. And so I sent it to creative nonfiction, things just happened to work out. They were,
00:48:50
Speaker
launching true story. And, and these true stories, as you say, they're really incredible. I mean, it's like a mini magazine, you're right, like it's portable, you know, it's not on online. I mean, you can get it as a digital download, but it's kind of like, it's a harkening back to print. It reminds me of, you know, those paperback books that, you know, GI, you know, they sold the GIs in the 1940s and fifties or something that, you know, it really,
00:49:18
Speaker
respects print and that idea of sitting down with something. So it worked out really well. But in most cases, I would say it's literary magazines are the places to do long form writing like that.
00:49:37
Speaker
Do you think Fruitland connected with you on almost visceral level because of the place and the setting given that you kind of grew up in a very small remote town and then these guys of course grew up in a small remote town? Do you think that connection really expressed itself and why you were so interested in this story in the first place?
00:50:05
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. But I didn't know that at the time. I think I, going back to what we were talking about before, about the kind of topics you choose as a voice, I often write about underdogs, underdog stories. And that, you know, underdog can be a very broad kind of thing, you know, but I'm just drawn to those kind of stories. So initially, the reason a friend of mine said this sounds like something you'd be into,
00:50:31
Speaker
And the other thing I write about, I tend to write about is the past and how to kind of reconcile the past with the present and matters of nostalgia and matters of things kind of fading away and dying as new things as the world moves forward. I've been doing a lot of that at the times lately. For example, the retail world is imploding. And then I went and did a story in Philadelphia about
00:51:01
Speaker
this place that's the last great men's clothing store, department store in America called Boyd's. And that's just my kind of story because they're underdogs, like the world's crumbling around them, but they're finding some way to hold on and to thrive in this changing landscape. And they have to figure out how to bring the past and the future. So those kinds of things initially
00:51:31
Speaker
interested me about about fruit land and that's why a friend suggested to me it wasn't until I got out there and and went to fruit land Washington and met the Emerson's and saw how remote and what kind of cultural isolation they had lived in that to your point it resonated on a really deep level because of where I grew up and and my own kind of cultural education and trying to
00:52:00
Speaker
you know, when you grow up in a place like that, it's just like, that world is so far from you. It's so far removed. And they're, you know, I live in cultural abundance now in New York City. And you're talking about you may never know band is ever coming any within 100 miles of your 200 miles of your town. And there is no bookstore, there is nothing like that. So you have to, you have to find you have to figure out where you're going to get it and you become
00:52:29
Speaker
really kind of like when you do, if you become like a miner for gold, when you do find it, it's really, it's all that much more powerful. And it's like, Oh my God, like, there's this place, you know, and they've got like records, you know what I mean? This is incredible. I didn't think I'd find, you know, this book in this out of the way location, that sort of thing. So
00:52:55
Speaker
and Donny, all he had was the Lawrence Welk show on television. And he was telling me about like, you know, you'll think this is corny, but I asked him, I was like, well, what were your influences if you didn't have a record player and stuff? He was like, I watched Lawrence Welk on TV. He was like the squarest person in America you could even think of, but it was a musician on television and they were playing music and was coming into his living room in the middle of nowhere
00:53:25
Speaker
Those were the things that I really responded to.
00:53:31
Speaker
you know, once I got out there and spent time with him, so for Donny, just like the other issues about trying to resolve the past and figuring out what part of the past you take with you to your present day life, he was struggling a lot with that when there was all this attention put on this album that he had done when he was 16 years old and now he's a 50-year-old man and very far removed from that time and place.
00:53:58
Speaker
And in your own work, over the course of your career, oftentimes, especially as you're developing and trying to get a toehold, sometimes you start playing the comparison games and the comparison Olympics, and you look over your shoulder and sometimes you wonder,
00:54:15
Speaker
how so-and-so did this, you know, I feel like I'm every bit as good as this person and I'm like kind of in the mud and they're up here. So I wonder like how maybe you've processed feelings of competition or jealousy over the course of your career and maybe channel that into a more productive way of moving so you can kind of get the work done and do the wonderful work you've been able to do for going on two decades. You know, yeah, I think that I think I had those feelings more so when I was in my 20s really
00:54:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's just, you know, youth or ambition or what. I had more of those, I think. Okay. Like I, you know, I did this book years ago, like I came out in 2008 on tribute bands. I followed around this Rolling Stones tribute band. And so my thing was always like,
00:55:10
Speaker
I want to write a book so bad and look at this person. They got a book deal and I didn't get a book deal and that sort of thing. And then I wrote a book and the book came out and I was very happy with it, but it didn't change my life. You know what I mean? Like there was someone else then who had written three books or someone else was on, someone else was onto their next book. So you look at those things and you realize that at a certain point,
00:55:40
Speaker
And also, we're talking at a time we're talking in a time when the industry is, frankly, it's just like imploded. So that kind of stuff, like when I first came up in the late 90s and early 2000s, you know, it was like, well, you work at time, but the people who work at Conde Nast are like higher up on the totem pole than the time people and
00:56:04
Speaker
But the New York Times, you know, it's like all there was all this like, where are you on the ladder? Where are you on the totem pole? And it's like, oh, this author got, you know, this $500,000 advance and this this happened. And it's like, we're all now in an industry where you're just fighting to live, you're just fighting to hold on and magazines have closed and other magazines are just sort of shells of themselves. And maybe they're still giving out huge book advances occasionally, but
00:56:34
Speaker
You know, I don't know. And so it's not really even about that. You realize that a certain point, it's about the work. The only thing that's going to give you the sense of satisfaction is if you told the story you wanted to tell, and you did it the best way you could, and you're satisfied with the result, I really, you know, the satisfaction comes
00:57:02
Speaker
you know, truthfully and seeing it in print. And yes, you want to see it in a place that prestigious or gets the most eyeballs or whatever. But really, it's just about it existing and it existing. That's the satisfaction because you can't you're there's not monetary, you know, you're not going to get rich off of it. The great majority of people aren't even
00:57:28
Speaker
people who've published 10 or 20 books, you know, maybe they have problems publishing the 21st or whatever, all that kind of stuff is really just noise. And it takes you away from the task at hand. And the task at hand is finding a good story and being present and telling that story and then finding a good home for that story. And then learning from that experience and moving on to the next story.
00:58:00
Speaker
Nice, huh? He's at S. Kurtz on Twitter, S-K-U-R-U-T-Z. My volunteer editor said she couldn't find much to cut from this episode, so that's a testament to a killer guest, am I right? Keep a conversation going on Twitter, tag me and the show at cnfpod. We'll get the band back together, man. Also, consider leaving a nice review on Apple Podcasts. Mission 100 is still in effect.
00:58:28
Speaker
Let's get there. Let's get there, CNFers. Thanks to Goucher's NFA, Nonfiction, Bay Path University's NFA, Creative Nonfiction, and Riverteeth for the support. Thanks also to Laura Tillman who edited the interview portion of the show, Big Ups.
00:58:48
Speaker
Could that possibly be it? I feel like I'm forgetting something, like nobody's business. Oh well. Remember, if you can do the interview, see ya!