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Episode 346: Lyndsie Bourgon
330 Plays2 years ago
Lyndsie Bourgon (@lbourgon) is a freelance writer, journalist, and oral historian and author of Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods.
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
Social: @CNFPod and @creativenonfictionpodcast
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Transcript
Promotion & Offers
00:00:01
Speaker
ACNFers, shout out to Athletic Brewing. That dry January time of year is fast approaching, and you might want to give it a go. Delicious stuff. I'm a brand ambassador and get no money, and they are not an official sponsor of the show, I want to be clear, but I'd encourage you to visit athleticbrewing.com, use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout, and you'll get a discount.
00:00:24
Speaker
All I get is points towards swag. No money. So I just want to spread the love. And also, since I have a little bit more time on my hands, if you leave a review over at Apple Podcasts, I'll give you a complimentary edit of a piece of your writing of up to 2,000 words. Once your review posts, usually it takes about 24 hours,
00:00:46
Speaker
Send me a screenshot of your review to Creative Nonfiction Podcast at gmail.com and I'll reach out and we'll get started. Who knows, if you like the experience, you might even want me to help you out with something a bit more ambitious. Let's do this.
00:01:01
Speaker
You don't know until you get out there. You don't know who's going to help you. Who's going to say no. Who's going to say yes. You don't know why. You don't know what might happen four months from now that might change someone's mind about speaking to you. So I say all the time that my job is like serendipity and I just constantly just show up.
Introduction to 'Tree Thieves'
00:01:27
Speaker
Hey CNFers, it's CNF Pot, the creative non-fiction podcast. It's a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, how's it going?
00:01:37
Speaker
Oh man, today we speak with Lindsay Borgon, a Canada-based writer, researcher, oral historian about her book, Tree Thieves, Crime and Survival in North America's Woods. It's published by Lincoln Brown Spark. This book is rich, empathetic,
00:02:00
Speaker
It's a great examination of why people are driven to certain extremes, some for basic survival, some reacting to a sense of injustice. It also reveals the ugly nature of extractive industry, driven by capitalism, of course, how lumber companies or timber companies pump the community full of identity-driven work, and how callously they pick up anchor, leaving the working class, the working poor, in the lurch.
00:02:31
Speaker
You get a sense of the great resentment locals feel towards the government, national park system, and tourists and environmentalists who want to look at big trees and don't much care about the human wreckage of those left behind by industry.
00:02:46
Speaker
Lindsay expressed how happy she was to talk about the writing of this book, which is something she doesn't often get to do in myriad interviews. She's done regarding this book since it came out a couple months ago. But I don't feel like we talked about it as much as I would have liked. You know, sometimes that's all I talk about and a little bit about the book. And this actually kind of, I think it might be more along the lines of 50-50 of kind of like that writerly talk versus the content of the book.
00:03:15
Speaker
It's always such a funky balance. You want to honor the work at hand and unpack the content of the book. For one, I always read these books cover to cover, so I want to be able to talk about it. Also, the author put in all that work and we want to talk about what's actually between the covers.
00:03:32
Speaker
but you also want to get into the mechanics of it. Because it's fun for host and guests, but also I imagine it's why you see an effort. Listen to the show because you might draw new insights into how you might approach work that you're doing, be it a book or an essay or whatever. The show attempts to serve many masters in that sentence. Sometimes the balance can be a bit skewed. Even after 346 of these, I still struggle with that balance at times. Okay, just a little bit of housekeeping.
00:04:02
Speaker
show notes to this episode and a billion others are at BrendanOmero.com. There you can sign up to the up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter. I put a lot of effort into this newsletter that I hope it entertains and gives you value, invites you to a monthly 40 minute happy hour.
00:04:18
Speaker
and sticks it to the algorithm. Right up the algorithms, Keister. If that's your thing, sign up. First of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, can't beat it. And if your attention isn't already enough, which is amazing, you might want to consider heading to patreon.com slash cnfpod. Helps keep the lights on at cnfpodhq. Show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap.
00:04:43
Speaker
Super grateful to the 20 patrons we have but I'd love to build the community even more so we can get the show in front of more C&F or so we can all feel a little less shitty Got a couple new written reviews. I'm just gonna read one for now. I'll read the next one next week I want to share one. Okay, this one Fray Quincy Emma E capital M capital ma
00:05:11
Speaker
We'll leave it at that, titled, I've Learned a Lot. I've been listening to CNFP for about a year now and find it incredibly helpful and interesting for an amateur writer like myself. For me, learning about the craft process and mastering the craft from others is a joy, especially when it's sports-related. So thanks, Brendan, for the effort in producing each episode. As a fellow content creator from Puerto Rico, I can attest on how tough it is. Keep it up.
00:05:39
Speaker
So thank you very much. Awesome stuff. And he sent me a screenshot of this review and he sent me a piece of his work for me to kind of look over and edit. If you do the same thing, like I said at the top of this introduction, send me that screenshot and piece of your work up to 2000 words and we'll get after it.
00:06:01
Speaker
So Lindsay Borgon is a writer, oral historian. In 2018, she was a National Geographic Explorer. Based in British Columbia, she writes about the environment and its entanglement with history, culture, and identity. Her features have been published in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Guardian, The Walrus, Hazlet. She's at El Borgon on Twitter. And you can hear her right now, Riff.
Challenges in Securing Interviews
00:06:39
Speaker
It's not only trying to drum up story ideas worth pitching, it's also lobbying people to go on the record and to talk about it. In your experience as a researcher and historian, journalist, how have you had those conversations where people are, might be a little reluctant to talk, but you're like, I need your insights and I need your name attached to this because it gives that degree of authority that we really need.
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah, well, that's a great question. I think it depends a little bit on the source itself. I had to take a few different routes, particularly for tree thieves in terms of
00:07:19
Speaker
You know, for instance, uh, I, I spent a lot of time doing interviews in the town of Orick and I approached interviews with people that lived there a little bit differently than I approached or sorry, then slip of the tongue a little bit differently than I approached the poachers themselves. Uh, so when it came to getting deep color, essentially, uh, and deep understanding of the town of Orick, I did that through doing life history interviews. So I approached.
00:07:49
Speaker
any of the sources that lived in Orick and had lived there for generations, really, by saying, I want to understand this town and I want to understand it through the experiences of your family and I want to hear about when your great grandfather came here and why and what your grandfather did and eventually we'll get to you.
00:08:09
Speaker
So that was a big, that was really important to me. I think I have a background in oral history and I wanted to ensure that people understood that this wasn't going to be kind of a 20 minute interview where I ask you only about the crime being committed in your town and I get a focus on why your town is run down.
00:08:28
Speaker
I wanted to understand what the town had been like, which I knew was really important to the people that lived there. It was a little bit different with the poachers that I spoke to, one of them in particular because his case was ongoing, so I knew that that would be
00:08:43
Speaker
really hard to approach him and say, listen, you know, if you speak to me, people had basically said he's not going to talk to you because it'll be like admitting guilt, which I totally understood. Right. I was like, oh, okay, you're right. But I'll ask him anyway. And he said no. But eventually I just
00:09:01
Speaker
How can I explain kind of how I work this? So for one of the poachers, I essentially interviewed so many people around him that he eventually decided to speak to me. I think that first of all, he had probably heard from his network what those interviews were like, and they generally were quite relaxed. I mean, I wasn't approaching this with a
00:09:24
Speaker
with a sort of hard-headed news approach. I wanted, you know, I said, I'm writing this book about timber poaching. It's also about your town and it's about conservation history and the park. And so I didn't put as much emphasis on the crime at first. I wanted to understand the context behind it. And so I think that that was communicated to him.
00:09:45
Speaker
And then eventually the case progressed. And so the way that this came about, particularly with this character, Derek Hughes, was that I had called somebody else to do an interview and I said, you know, we were talking about how he had been
00:10:00
Speaker
kind of associated with a group named called the Outlaws in, in Orick. And I said, do you, are you aware that you're considered part of this group? And he said, yes. And we talked a bit about it. He said, you know, there's another outlaw in the living room with me right now. And it's Derek Hughes. Do you want to talk to him? And I thought, Oh my God, like I've been writing him letters and emails and talking to his mom and talking to his sisters. And, and of course, as, as it is with these things with creative nonfiction, it was a little bit of just right place, right time, like,
00:10:29
Speaker
I could have not called that source at 2 p.m. on Tuesday, you know. So, yeah, I interviewed him right there. Yeah, it's kind of crazy how serendipity plays such a role in research and reporting where, you know, you just don't know what's going to happen or a name someone's going to drop or a phone number that they'll have when you end the conversation like, you know, who else can I talk to? And you're like,
00:10:56
Speaker
my god I've been looking for that phone number forever and you're just like pulling it up out of your phone right now and you would never do it you would never know it had you not just kind of you know made this phone call as uncomfortable as cold calls can be and interviews can be sometimes if you're a little anxiety-prone as I am and it's like it's like one of those things where the more legwork footwork you do the more opportunity there is for maybe luck to intervene and
00:11:26
Speaker
you're voicing exactly something that I say all the time. And to be honest, I find it a little bit frustrating because you have no control over it, right? And so I can be a little bit, I also have anxiety and so I like to plan things out. And also I find that in the industry, people actually want more of a guarantee
00:11:45
Speaker
than ever before they assign you that you've got your sources in the bag and even what they're going to say, what they're going to argue. And it's just, I mean, the unwritten thing or the unsaid thing often is just, you don't know until you get out there, you don't know who's going to help you, who's going to say no, who's going to say yes, you don't know why.
00:12:06
Speaker
you don't know what might happen four months from now that might change someone's mind about speaking to you. So I say all the time that my job is like serendipity and I just constantly just show up. You know, I think that that's
00:12:21
Speaker
It's not even a tactic. It's just the way that things have to be. And sometimes I'm just, I feel like maybe any writers listening to this who do creative nonfiction, they're going to understand this. There are so many times when I just don't want to do the last interview. I always do it because then it turns out that there's some amazing thing in there and you're just like, Oh God, you know, why is it always this way? Yeah.
00:12:46
Speaker
Yeah, and the other, you know, kind of it's somewhat similar to that too is like if you're you're sending things out and you're constantly getting rejected and you're like, damn, damn, like, why is this getting rejected? And then it's like you keep tinkering and working on it and you're like, and then maybe it gets accepted somewhere and you're like, oh, my God, I'm so glad it was rejected all those times because it just wasn't ready.
00:13:10
Speaker
and like you know you had that other opportunity to speak to somebody else you're like oh wow that was an entirely different nut that was worth cracking and it just made everything so much richer but it wouldn't have been there had this been accepted when i sort of jumped the gun and submitted this thing before it was ready it's like yeah you gotta let the things yeah absolutely and like the the hard thing with that that i always say
Early Career Reflections
00:13:34
Speaker
is that when you're growing and getting better that's that's
00:13:39
Speaker
really uncomfortable and you think that you're ready and then you find out that you're not like when it, when the story sells or when it develops a bit more. And you, but it's just, you know, you really have to kind of live with this understanding that you might feel like you're ready, but maybe you're not. Um, and that can kind of suck sometimes. Sometimes you want to say, listen, I am fully formed. Let's do it, you know?
00:14:04
Speaker
I know. When I was in my late... But you're not. Exactly. I remember pretty much my early 30s, late 20s to early 30s, and I was starting to get turned on to a lot of the long form writers that I really admired. I'm like, I want to be doing this. Why can't I be doing this? Why is no one giving me the opportunity to do this?
00:14:24
Speaker
And the fact of the matter is, still to this day, I don't think I'm good enough, but I certainly wasn't good enough back then. And I'm like, thankful I didn't get the opportunities, because I don't know how I would have been able to handle it. Did you run into that, especially in the early, early part of your career? Oh, yeah, God. Yeah, you're describing probably what I've spent many hundreds of dollars in therapy on.
00:14:50
Speaker
on this topic. I think all the time about that Ira Glass speech where he's saying it's really hard because you have good taste and you want to produce that, but you're just not there yet. You can't. I still think I'm there. I'm at the point actually where I don't want to leave that spot because that's what makes you get better. Otherwise, why are you doing it?
00:15:18
Speaker
Right? So for me, it's, I'm getting to the point where I'm okay with, with maybe always feeling a little bit like that. Definitely earlier in my career, you know, I graduated in 2008, which was a pretty rough time. And, and I entered the industry being a freelancer to me, that was like, okay, I'm just going to have, if I want to write, I'm going to have to be freelance because there's not a lot of jobs out here.
00:15:43
Speaker
the jobs that are, frankly, I just couldn't, I couldn't really get the foot in my door, in the door, I didn't have the kind of foundation underneath me that a lot of other people had, right? So I kind of just had to constantly pitch and put myself out there. At the same time, I was reading all the time, these like amazing magazine articles. And around this time, I was learning about like, Chris Jones, who's Canadian and writes for Esquire and is amazing. And I was looking at this being like, how can I
00:16:09
Speaker
I can do this. I want to do this. How can I do this? At the same time, I was 25, you know, so I just didn't have any of the just like emotional and life experience that would allow me to do what Chris Jones does so well. You know, I didn't know that at the time. I can say that now with.
00:16:26
Speaker
a decade worth of hindsight essentially. I needed time. I'm not really a patient person and that was hard. And also just kind of constant, like I'm very stubborn so I wasn't willing to
00:16:42
Speaker
I wasn't willing to just admit that I would never get there and give up and say, I'll just read it and enjoy it. I wanted to prove that I could do it. And I still try to prove that. Oh, for sure. Basically. It's so hard, right? Because the best thing you can do as a writer is read. And there are times when I just get so
00:17:06
Speaker
When I was writing Tree Thieves, I had to stop reading nonfiction to be honest with you because I was, I would just get so kind of worked up about like, am I doing this right? Am I going to succeed in this? You know, I definitely wasn't going to be reading any of the people that I admired, frankly, because I was so, my self-esteem was like so raw at that point because you're writing a book and it's very emotional.
00:17:28
Speaker
Oh, 100 percent. I just couldn't. You know, I was like, I can only do fiction right now because it's not something I write. So I'm not going to compare myself. Yeah. Well, and also to lay around, you know, say 2008 and then and in the few years after that, if you were prone to insecurity and maybe not and not, let's say, patient to put in like basically what amounts to a 10 year apprenticeship in long form journalism.
00:17:56
Speaker
social media was just starting to Really take hold and you're starting to see people doing the things you want to do and they seem to be crushing it and killing it I know for me and I and 2008 2009, you know, I'm 28 29 I'm a little older than you but it was just like really affecting me and I got really kind of sucked into kind of life hacky things like Tim Ferriss experiments and I'm just like
00:18:22
Speaker
Why am I not just doing the work instead of trying to hack my way to an audience, thinking that that's going to make me better at what I do? It was just a mess. 100%. Yeah. Oh, man. I identify with this a lot. And in some ways, I think, oh, if I could go back, I would essentially just bury myself in good books and good writing and try to absorb it all and try to put the other stuff to the side. But it was a different time to be online, too, right? Yeah.
00:18:51
Speaker
I mean, it's kind of amazing because otherwise I wouldn't have known about so many of these people that I admire and whose work has really influenced me.
00:19:00
Speaker
And I will, you know, I can't, I can't kind of downplay the fact that all of this amazing stuff has been brought to me through those networks, but they are a huge distraction. And in a way, you know, they are a tool for sharing your work, but they can also be used to sometimes make you not want to work, which I've been guilty of, you know, of seeing these things being shared and thinking, what is the point?
00:19:25
Speaker
You brought up that wonderful Ira Glass taste in the Creative Gap talk, which is just amazing. I've listened to that frequently whenever I get a chance to. Yeah, me too. A central to that is you might not necessarily have the skill, but you've got great taste. You mentioned Chris Jones. So where was your taste manifesting itself? Oof.
00:19:52
Speaker
I realize now that a lot of it was essentially writing about emotions that was kind of disguised as writing about something else, which I think is something Chris Jones does really well. He's writing narrative nonfiction about the Zanesville Zoo or the Roger Ebert profile, all of these sort of big stories that came from him that are
00:20:18
Speaker
You know, they're really, they're really about empathy and learning and trying to figure out kind of what the human condition and where, where it can go, um, where it can become really complicated and it might appear negative and sad, but, but that that's what makes it so human, even if it's an animal story. So I didn't realize that at the time, but that was what was really driving me. Um, and, you know,
00:20:43
Speaker
moving kind of ahead from that, you know, I'm a big fan of writers like John Jeremiah Sullivan and Susan Orlean, lots of sort of people that are writing narrative, often with humor involved.
00:20:59
Speaker
Uh, that is, that is really about often things that are a bit more philosophical. I guess that was what was really, I realized now I can put a, I can put a pin on it now that that's what I really liked about it. I liked coming away from narrative stories that followed a, you know, kind of a traditional storytelling method, but that left you kind of sad or, or thinking more about how complicated and difficult things are.
00:21:26
Speaker
Now, when you're taking on a subject of any kind, be it tree thieves or anything else, it's like, okay, there's the little a of what it's about, tree poaching.
00:21:41
Speaker
But then there's also, you know, the big A, what it's about, which is probably like cultural identity and, you know, cultivation. So that's like the big capital A thing.
Themes of 'Tree Thieves'
00:21:51
Speaker
You know, is that something that strikes you early in the process or is that something that you finally, it kind of like slowly bubbles up to the surface?
00:21:59
Speaker
With Tree Thieves, it hit pretty quickly for me. I think when I started off with Tree Thieves, I heard about this tree poaching case in 2012. I saw a news hit about it and I thought, oh, that's a great magazine story. Like I'm going to start reporting this out.
00:22:18
Speaker
at the time I was living on this island chain off British Columbia called, well, at the time it was Queen Charlotte Islands or Haida Gwaii is the indigenous name for it. And I had read John Valiant's The Golden Spruce and so I was kind of getting a sense of this sort of environmental atmosphere and this tree that was poached was poached from the same region really.
00:22:43
Speaker
And I, you know, as a magazine writer, I thought, okay, I'm going to reach out to the park rangers and the RCMP and we're going to get the RCMP is the local police detachment. And I'm going to write a kind of law enforcement crime narrative around this.
00:23:01
Speaker
maybe go to some mills and see where the wood ended up. But right away, that was pretty much thrown out because I interviewed an investigator who said, this is a really long standing issue. If you're interested in it, you should look into the history of poaching and you should look into the history of the region. And once I started reading the history of poaching, I was like, oh, this is big and this is about so much more than
00:23:27
Speaker
Then a crime infected almost like transcends the crime in a way. That was what ended up motivating me So that happened really really quickly. Yeah. Yeah, and actually in the acknowledgments of of tree thieves, you know, you write that your your guiding light was a a passage from James AG's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and this is something I can read as an aside. Oh, you know, I love a good aside So here it is the James AG quote
00:23:57
Speaker
To come devotedly into the depths of a subject, your respect for it increasing in every step in your whole heart weakening apart with shame upon yourself in your dealing with it. To know at length better and better and at length into the bottom of your soul your unworthiness of it. Let me hope in any case that it is something to have begun to learn.
00:24:25
Speaker
JABOOM!
00:24:38
Speaker
Oh, thank you for reading the acknowledgments and catching that. No one's brought that up to me yet. So James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is this sort of amazing work of narrative nonfiction or even history really where he
00:24:56
Speaker
went and spent time with the working poor across the United States, really mostly in Appalachia, if I remember correctly. And it's just a deeply emotional work that in the time of the depression really laid bare the realities of how difficult it is to be poor in North America. And
00:25:19
Speaker
The minute I started reporting on tree thieves, I knew that this would become a, that it would be a story threaded by class because people don't commit crimes really for no reason. And it's often for money and often for need. And I knew that I wanted to approach not just the poachers themselves as humans, but my writing with, with a lot of sort of deep
00:25:45
Speaker
empathy and emotion around that. I knew that I wanted it to come through how difficult it is to be working in America, working in the forest and how impossible it can feel to do just the basics of being a human in this world, of feeding yourself, of heating your home, of living with your family and loving them and being part of a community. Once I really got into this subject and once I had met so many amazing
00:26:13
Speaker
Not just amazing scientists, I don't want to take that away from it, but just really amazing people that live in this region of the Pacific Northwest and welcome me into their homes and like fed me pie and talked to me about writing and magazines and stuff.
00:26:29
Speaker
You do feel a little bit of shame. I think that that's that Janet Malcolm thing about knowing that what you do is indefensible. I wanted to write my way through that. I knew that I had a lot of knowledge that should be shared because otherwise this topic would either not be written about or it would be written about solely as a problem.
00:26:52
Speaker
that needed to be stopped and 100% bad. And I knew that it was more complicated than that. And so I wanted to revisit constantly my own emotions of feeling of feel of those along those lines, you know, my own kind of judgments around
00:27:11
Speaker
poaching and crime and, and to be honest, even like, drug use, drugs ended up becoming a huge part of this story. And I had to do a lot of work on myself of like, doubling back and thinking, why do I think that's bad? Why do I? Why is that the worst thing that's part of this? Why is that negative? And so I wanted to interrogate all of those judgments that I had as I was writing and then through the writing.
00:27:36
Speaker
I think what could be a good part to talk about, too, is how extraction industry has a way of extricating itself from blame and sometimes pinning that on. Timber has a way of pinning it on the environmentalists, like, no, they're the bad guys.
00:27:57
Speaker
even though the industrial logging industries have long ago took jobs away, shipped it overseas, closed down mills, but they were able to label aim elsewhere and extricate itself from a lot of that. And in your writing on your master's thesis on whaling and certainly on this, maybe you can speak to that and how those extraction industries do have a tendency to, this is the kind of game they can play.
00:28:26
Speaker
capitalism, right? I mean, they're very extractive industries, I think are really interesting. They are very good at when it suits them, creating a
00:28:38
Speaker
an environment that really sort of boosts identity and boosts belonging and says, you are part of an amazing group of people that is developing this country, especially logging. Logging expanded this country west. It fulfills a need for families from
00:29:01
Speaker
from east to west and you know you create homes and you're part of the war effort and you know your family is a group of hard workers and don't you want to be a part of that and we can offer you the ability to contribute to that and you're very skilled and all of that in a way is true in its own right. It's very easily forgotten when
00:29:25
Speaker
eventually the trees run out, the forest runs out. And you know, or it's cheaper and you can make more of a profit by doing manufacturing elsewhere, milling elsewhere. Um, and so I'm very critical of that. I think that it's really cynical to be honest. And I think that you see it a lot in oil and gas. So I'm from a province in Canada called Alberta, where we have the oil sands in the north.
00:29:51
Speaker
And the overlap between the oil sands and logging that I saw was just really, really clear. So you've got industry that's really good at mobilizing a workforce against government and saying government doesn't have what's best for you in mind. They don't want you to work. They want this to be a
00:30:12
Speaker
completely shut down they don't understand you they you know sometimes they're even saying like you know this is going to become a welfare state you know really kind of quite harsh points of view and and harsh rhetoric and of course they're taking advantage of a group of folks that that love their work and do see importance of it and see their families being built up by it and shaping the narrative and you know that narrative doesn't include what you're saying which is
00:30:41
Speaker
maximizing profits at all cost even the cost of the worker eventually you know i don't think that that's obviously they're never gonna say hey by the way we're gonna move on to a cheaper manufacturing process elsewhere in another country when we're done with you when we're done with the logging so
00:30:58
Speaker
I don't have a lot of sympathy for the corporate side of things. Part of that might also be a legacy of sort of globalization. I think that a lot of folks in Northern California felt very attached to the family logging firms that had been in the region for decades. And then when those firms were bought up or consumed by multinationals, the
00:31:25
Speaker
Any sort of local presence and local concern kind of just by necessity disappeared with that Yeah, it's bonkers how it's you just see it and I mean just even in our stock and trade in journalism and you look at you know something like Gannett going out and just like their identity is tied to this and then it's just like that that capitalistic machine comes through and just gobbles it up and then you're left in the lurch and
00:31:52
Speaker
with maybe too late in life to feel like you can pivot to anything else and that is so integral to the story you tell because a lot of generations of people have been holding chainsaws and then suddenly it's either it's been combated by conservationists and preservationists you know rightly so in many many cases or
00:32:13
Speaker
the timber companies just up and left because this shit ain't corn. It doesn't grow in a season. It takes 100 years. So 70 years in case of Doug Fur sometimes. And so they leave and what are they left with? This crushed identity, like a crushed can of empty can.
00:32:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, identity is huge, right? And work is a huge part of anyone's identity. And I think that sometimes it might be difficult to understand that when the work is very different from your own.
Identity & Industrial Impact
00:32:45
Speaker
So for instance, you know, I spend
00:32:48
Speaker
the vast majority of my time behind a computer and I might see industrial work as something that you only do if you have to do it you know like you might only work in a factory if it's the only thing you can do but that's completely not true people working
00:33:04
Speaker
factories for all sorts of reasons. They want to stay where they grew up and this is the main employer. That was a factory that employed their dad and it sent them to a nice school and a nice summer camp and what have you. And so I think really understanding how identity works into all professions is really important. It's not just the sort of white collar professions where you think this is a calling. It can be a calling to be a logger.
00:33:33
Speaker
you know, a lot of people feel that and believe that. So that was something really important to me to communicate because, and I don't mean this against anyone because of course in my own friend group, I don't have any loggers in my immediate friend group, right? So you're not hearing a lot of like, I felt called to do that, but it's true. People do. And I don't think it's fair for anyone to tell me, for instance,
00:34:01
Speaker
Well, you know, too bad you thought you were going to be a journalist and a writer, but the industry went another way, suck it up and retrain. Like I, if I get insulted by that for me, I'm going to get insulted by that for a logger and a miner too. Yeah. There's a, at my old newsroom, uh, before it closed down, there are iconic pictures over the years that were taken by register guard photographers. And, uh, of course, you know, the timber was a big, uh, a big beat, uh, before the newsrooms were categorically gutted.
00:34:31
Speaker
But one of the photographs is, it's a tight shot, but it's in a clear cut. But there's basically a grandfather, a son and grandson walking from behind. But you see this little boy dressed like a logger, a lumberjack. He's about two feet tall and holding his dad's hand. And it's like the most adorable photograph. But there you see it in that photograph.
00:34:59
Speaker
the generational identity that is tied to this and what it provides. Yes, and the same with farming, for instance, right? I mean, you were mentioning corn, but all sorts of like ranching and agricultural work is exactly the same way. It's often highly male, which I think is important.
00:35:20
Speaker
perhaps not so much now, because it's, you know, we've, we've, in some ways, we've moved on, but a lot of the corporate work in terms of communicating with employees and potential employees is related to masculinity and kind of
00:35:35
Speaker
be a man, work in the woods, you work really hard, you provide for your family, you don't want to take welfare because you're a hard worker and your son will be a hard worker and you guys can do it together. You can be the men of the family. I mean, it's all sort of connected in that way and it makes it really, really fiery and uncomfortable and explosive when big policy decisions are made that affect that.
00:36:05
Speaker
Well, and there was a particular chilling moment in the book, too, where you describe a prologging rally or a protest where one woman held a sign that said, like, if you take my husband's job, he takes it out on me. I was like, holy shit.
00:36:20
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. They are highly, well, unemployment and domestic turmoil are highly linked. And yeah, domestic violence is a big problem in a lot of these counties that were former.
00:36:38
Speaker
that were former logging hubs and that have really struggled through downturn and have struggled to also diversify their economies, which is very interesting, right? Because often diversification includes traditionally female jobs, I suppose, so healthcare education. And so part of the challenge of
00:37:02
Speaker
of transitioning economies is that you're also transitioning a cultural and a social order. I don't disagree that, like, obviously I think that should happen. And I don't think that we should just leave these counties alone to be, to have sort of highly masculine jobs that, you know, women are expected to stay at home. I completely disagree with that. But when you make that transition, these are the thorny things that come out
00:37:28
Speaker
It's funny, a few days ago my wife and I were just talking about we were watching Top Chef in the one particular season there in China and there's such a like such a glut of antiquity in China just because it's so old in these temples it's like wow
00:37:47
Speaker
And we're like, in this country, in terms of that degree of architecture and anything, this country is so young for that degree of culture. And it's just like we don't have anything that's super old like that. Except for nature. Except for the national parks, right? Like Bears Ears and yep. Yeah. And you wrote at one point early in the book, in North America, trees are our deepest connection to history, our versions of cathedrals and standing ruins.
00:38:13
Speaker
And that stuck out at me too as someone who's been able to drive through and see those redwood forests and hike on the coast where you see these amazing old growth, these sentinel trees. And I was just like, you know, for you, what does it speak to? What does it say to be among these sort of natural cathedrals?
00:38:34
Speaker
Yeah, I question this a lot in my own writing because I am often quite critical of nature writing that is very nature-centric and does not always consider human use. But at the same time, it's completely impossible to drive north from San Francisco into the redwoods in Northern California and feel completely overwhelmed by these trees because they will
00:39:01
Speaker
Take your breath away. I pulled over my car numerous times to just sit and look at these trees that are just lining a regular highway that are, you know, the most ancient things I've ever looked at, probably. It blew my mind that there was one particular English-American businessman, William Waldorf Astor, who he had purchased and shipped to England a circular slab that was 35 feet in diameter.
00:39:31
Speaker
Yes. He wanted to, I think it was 11. No, that would be wrong. Anyway, he wanted to have many, many, many dozens of people sit around this same dining room table. That was the, that was the goal for him. Um, so. Yeah. A 3,500. And clearly in their own country, they had already logged to the brink in England, right? So, um, they didn't have that level of old growth and they didn't have those species anyway. So.
00:39:58
Speaker
this was this was a personal goal of his. Yeah. Well, and I think it just speaks to I mean, you know, I've gone through the the forest and seen trees that might have like even felled trees that maybe fell due to natural causes that are like, you know, maybe 12 feet or 15 feet in diameter. And they it's just like, oh, my God, that is it is almost unfathomably massive.
00:40:25
Speaker
And the fact that this one is a 3,500-year-old tree that might have been that 35 feet in the diameter, we were on a hike the other day and I was pointing out like, I was like, Melanie, from here to over there is the diameter of one tree. And she's just like, I can't, it's like a universe. Yeah. Can you imagine having seen that and the feelings that you might, I mean, sometimes I think what person stumbled, what colonizer, frankly, because an indigenous person already knew that those exist and had left them.
00:40:55
Speaker
what new American colonizers stumbled across this and thought, okay, we better take that down. You know, like that is a particular point of view of how a tree should be used that is depressing in a way. And it clearly
00:41:12
Speaker
Not just in a way, it's depressing that someone would see that and think, I better cut that down because this guy back in England is going to want his dinner table made out of that. Exactly. Some people look at a massive tree and would be like, oh wow, there's a lot of two by fours in that. Well, that's how things have spiraled out, right? Is that you've got a place
00:41:41
Speaker
that had been managed for millennia or tens of thousands of centuries.
00:41:51
Speaker
by indigenous peoples who had ways to get what they needed to live and still in many ways keep the trees standing that needed to be there. And essentially to coexist in a balanced way. And the sort of growth and profit driven method just throws that out the window. And then you do look at a tree and think that's probably worth a lot of money.
00:42:21
Speaker
You probably don't even care if it gets used for 2x4s, to be honest with you. It's just looking at the tree and seeing its value. And it surprised me, just the pervasiveness of poaching, not only locally in terms of the region I live in, but also globally and how
00:42:41
Speaker
how big a billion dollar industry poaching trees is. Was that something that struck you as particularly surprising of how pervasive it is and how lucrative it is? I think I'd always known that, particularly in the global south, that deforestation
00:43:03
Speaker
was massive business and that it was harming environments and local populations, but that our globalized system and our immense demand in the Western world had kind of led to this
Poaching Perspectives
00:43:19
Speaker
happening. I didn't know how much of it was illegal. To be honest, I just thought
00:43:23
Speaker
Well, those countries probably have export laws and things that are allowing this to happen, which is horrible. And the law should be changed, but I didn't know how much of it was illegal. So that was shocking. And in terms of North America, I had no idea, like even so US wide, it's estimated to be at a billion dollars every year of trees are poached.
00:43:47
Speaker
in my province in Canada alone it's 30 million and I suppose compared to a billion that doesn't sound like a lot but that is a lot of trees being cut down that are that's that should be standing you know and and so even on a local level I found that to be quite
00:44:04
Speaker
to be quite shocking. It's also interesting to me because it's often framed in this way of these trees are being cut down and sometimes that dollar figure is determined in a way of it's being taken away from public taxes and normally the government would fill this tree and the money would go back to public services and that's also kind of a harsh way of looking at it, I think, that we're just losing the financial
00:44:32
Speaker
gain of cutting it down legally as opposed to everything else that's lost. Yeah, I'd love you to speak about or speak to the element of subversion and sort of Robin Hood ethos that the tree poachers have as a way of sticking it to the man, essentially.
00:44:54
Speaker
Yeah, and this is a really, this is an ancient perspective. And so when you say Robin Hood, you know, it's very clearly for a lot of poachers, really their work, their motivation for poaching is highly linked to Robin Hood. And that's because they see the park often, the National Park or the Forest Service or the Provincial Park.
00:45:17
Speaker
as a sort of institution of power, which it is. We might see it as power for good, but for a lot of people it hasn't worked out that way. It's been power that is top-down managed and that they see as directly taking away work. So often there is a lot more complicated factors that have gone into the decline of an industry than just that, but parks provide a very visible
00:45:44
Speaker
person or institution to blame, particularly in Orick where there's lots of burl poaching, redwood poaching, and the Redwood National Park is based and operates out of that town. And so every day there are people that have lived there for generations who have found it very hard to find work, particularly work that they want to do and that they feel connected to.
00:46:09
Speaker
And they see the park operations as the reason for this. And so really in the tradition of these sort of swashbuckling, you know, 17th, 16th century era poachers from England, they head into the woods and they say, I'm taking from the rich and I'm giving to my family and to myself.
00:46:33
Speaker
and I'm making a statement, and the statement is that this is our forest. It was removed from us, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop taking from it. Often because tree poachers are taking one or two trees at a time, they're saying this is sustainable, you know, like there's no way that I'm clear cutting. I'm not taking down a lot of wood that's going to make a huge difference. Many poachers are taking
00:47:02
Speaker
bits of wood that may have fallen, bits of trees that may have fallen naturally, or driftwood. And they're saying, you know, this is already down, the industry term for this is dead and down. And I'm going to use it, I'm going to cure it for firewood, or I'm going to make a bowl out of it that I sell to a shop. And this means nothing to the park itself. That is technically not really true. I mean, the park will
00:47:31
Speaker
And biologists will tell you that dead and downed trees are really important to the biodiversity of a forest and that they actually feed back the forest floor that grows new trees. And so you might not be taking a tree that is ancient and standing, but you're actually removing the potential for new old growth to come in. But the perspective from a lot of poachers is that you'd rather there be new old growth in 2000 years than me eating today.
00:47:59
Speaker
Yeah, and that gets to the argument of climate change to how people like like why should I stop? Why should I ride my bicycle down to the grocery store and or take a job or not take a job 15 miles away because the one only one I can get and not put you know not put gas in my car for
00:48:17
Speaker
I don't know. So the ice caps will stay icy in 150 years. It just doesn't compute in our heads. I mean long term versus short term thinking. I will say that it is very hard to
00:48:35
Speaker
I think it is unfair to expect people that live in poverty to kind of think of the park in too much long-term thinking. I think it's very emotionally and physically and mental health taxing to live in poverty.
00:48:55
Speaker
That is something for the rest of us to burden and to take on the burden of and to think about, I think. I don't know if that makes sense, but it is hard. I think it's hard when you don't know when you're going to eat next to think, don't take that wood because mushrooms grow on it. Right. Or as it's decomposing, it's home for insects, which will help feed birds and other things. Exactly. And we hate the birds.
00:49:20
Speaker
that it's gonna feed. So screw that, you know. Exactly. But it gets to the point you can really feel, and you write and cite things in such a way that you really get an empathetic feel of the people who are really on the ground in a rundown.
00:49:38
Speaker
town that was supposed to be basically repurposed for tourism. And you cite Jennifer Sherman's work, and she says the government prioritizes the interests of urban liberals, such as the reviled environmentalists who are blamed for current impoverishment. Most residents feel that neither side has much interest in their material well-being and economic sustenance.
00:50:02
Speaker
And it's just like, yeah, they're just on opposite ends of the pole. One's like, no, leave the trees. The other's like, we got to eat. And it's you get a sense of like, there's got to be some common ground here. But where is it?
00:50:14
Speaker
I actually think that the common ground is that I didn't get the sense in Auric that people were saying redwoods, they're great to cut down and we shouldn't protect them. I actually think that there is real nuance thinking there around. People in Auric, for instance, they live among some of the most beautiful forests in the entire world. They're very aware of that. They feel that beauty. They see that beauty. But they might also say that
00:50:43
Speaker
there's a way to ensure that we can still harvest some of this timber and keep some of it standing.
00:50:53
Speaker
I think that those decisions were probably needed to be made like 50 years ago, likely more, maybe almost 75. When technology was advancing to the point where clear cutting was becoming the way of logging as opposed to kind of teamwork logging where you're taking down one ancient tree over the span of a week, right?
00:51:16
Speaker
But I think that, you know, I do think that there's there's this seeming divide of like city people see the beauty of the tree in the forest and they want to keep it that way. And the rural industrial working folk just want the money for taking it down. And I don't think that that's true. I don't think that I don't think that research has borne that out. You know, there's also a fellow whose name I apologize, I can't remember, but, you know, he
00:51:43
Speaker
he found that people that I think the line from him is that loggers work in the forest because they love the forest, right? And they actually think that this respect for the woods and for the forest comes from working in it and that actually just feeling guilt around preserving it isn't actually love and isn't actually respect. It's still keeping yourself apart from that natural world.
00:52:14
Speaker
I think that's a really interesting perspective. And given a book of this nature that has a lot of research, a lot of interviews, archival stuff that you're digging into, that kind of research, how do you organize your research so you can access it in the best possible way?
Research Challenges & Methods
00:52:33
Speaker
Yeah, poorly. I mean, it's a learning process. Oh, man. I'm struggling with this myself and a big project. I couldn't tell it like.
00:52:46
Speaker
First of all, I think at some point everything just feels like a mess. Okay. So I do that. One thing I've really learned is to be like very careful about, I pretty much export anything I read online into a PDF form in case the website goes down. So that's, that's really important. Um, just recently I'm working on, on a new idea and you know, when everything was happening with Twitter.
00:53:08
Speaker
I was like, I need to go in and kind of take out every link I've saved for these new ideas I have because this website might go down. So, you know, I'm a big fan of PDFing everything. I kind of subdivided them into history, a whole section for crime stuff because I had, you know, I had a lot of legal paperwork and
00:53:31
Speaker
Court records and things that I needed that were that are very different really to deal with than a historical document and then Inter not interviews but some like present-day Discussion and ethics and things like that like I knew that I wanted to talk at the end of the book I do a lot of talking about you know, sort of the
00:53:55
Speaker
30 by 30 project and kind of looking forward into the to the future of conservation and so I kind of you know divided it into those three sections and then within that I subject matter divided it and I transcribe all my own interviews and print them off and I tend to work with interviews kind of in a physical like
00:54:18
Speaker
you know, I transcribe off of the transcription into the document. It became it became very overwhelming, right? And I don't know if I have a lot of help for you. You know who I'd love to hear talk about this is Patrick Radenkief, because I just feel like I read his books and I'm like,
00:54:34
Speaker
how did you do like where did you save your documents just like really basic I've had him on the show before I didn't ask him that but I do know that he might not be and I think he's admitted this too and he might have admitted it when I spoke to him it was a while ago but it was it was he's like you might I'm basically not as organized as you might think because
00:54:55
Speaker
He was in the very final stages of the book Say Nothing, and he was going through his notes. And as he was going through his notes again, he stumbled upon that he basically solved the murder.
00:55:09
Speaker
Yes, no, I know. And so I think about that all the time because sometimes I get a little bit like, I mean, anyway, kind of hard on myself or I'm like, I'm missing something or I'm forgetting something or, you know, how did I gloss over that the first time? And I think, you know, there's just only so much that your brain can possess. So it's okay, but always go through it the freaking 10th time, basically. But, and I'm a big fan of like, definitely when I was writing,
00:55:35
Speaker
It was really important to me that I only, I never skipped around. I only did kind of one focus at a time. Otherwise I felt like, you know, and often I would say, okay, well, that really relates to, for instance, the use of DNA in identifying tree species. So I would just put a little highlight and note it, but I would never go write that section right away because I felt like once you start skipping around, you're kind of in danger of losing
00:56:03
Speaker
your sources in a way, and like losing understanding of what you have. So I only, you know, I focused on history for much of it only, instead of leading right into the, into the contemporary interviews and poaching interviews.
00:56:19
Speaker
But yeah, my office was a mess. I don't know if I have good advice for you on that. I use Scrivener and that can be helpful, but then sometimes I think, oh, all this software is just giving me one new place to be disorganized.
00:56:36
Speaker
Anyway, I feel like that's not a lot of help, but I'm staring down the barrel on another thing like this now where I'm like, wait, how do I do this again? Well, most writers, all writers tend to have some degree of idiosyncrasy around their writing, how to get into the right headspace, how to psych yourself up. For you, when you were writing The Tree Thieves and
00:57:00
Speaker
you know what were you know what was the groove you were looking to settle into so you could you know get the work done hit your deadlines and make sure you were taking it was really hard right because it's my first book too and so um i think i had approached it and i knew what my working habits were for my dissertation for instance and i
00:57:21
Speaker
I think I'd wanted to emulate that and it just didn't work. I had always considered myself a morning writer, but for Tree Thieves, I did most of my work between 2 and 5 p.m. for some reason, and I just had to kind of give myself over to that. I think having very strict boundaries around what I was writing about that day was really key to that because I wanted to
00:57:44
Speaker
I really tried hard to provide a balance. And so in order to do that, I wouldn't allow myself to give caveats to anyone else on the day that... So the day that I was writing about the park rangers, I was just writing about the park rangers and I would go back later and try to smooth out the language, if that makes sense. Like it was... Otherwise I found I'd become overwhelmed and I couldn't write anything because I would think, well, I know what Derek Hughes thinks of that.
00:58:11
Speaker
or I know what I heard about Derek Hughes from this park ranger. So I won't include that. Like, you know, I found it to be quite, um, like, like turning a tap off once I started to, to kind of caveat everything in the moment. So for me, it was like,
00:58:27
Speaker
today and I often I would have folders right so I would say today I'm only doing this folder and this folder has an interview with so and so and it has this academic article and it has this content and I'm only writing about that today and that I found that to
00:58:43
Speaker
to be helpful in the end because I didn't give myself any room to waver. Are there anything or lessons you learned from writing Tree Thieves that you're like, okay, I'm definitely not going to approach my next long article or my next book in the way that I did it with that one because that was pure hell.
00:59:02
Speaker
I have very little desire to work with court documents again. That was something that I had to learn a little bit on the fly because I don't live in the States. And so it changes region by region kind of how you access things. And it became quite complicated and worrisome for me. So I hope to perhaps not be
00:59:28
Speaker
focusing on a crime next time. Stay out of the court system. I'd like to. The benefit of the court system is that everything is recorded. Once you find the person in the system that's willing to help you, you just hold on to them and just love them so much. Anyway, there was this woman who really helped me at the humble court who I just
00:59:55
Speaker
I owe her so much. But we were talking at the beginning about serendipity and control and stuff, and that was one area where I felt like I didn't have a lot of control that I don't wish to revisit. I knew that with the poachers maybe saying yes or no to interviews that things could change, but I was quite stressed about the court system, so I don't.
01:00:18
Speaker
I don't want to revisit that. Anyway, because I was also working across jurisdictions, so I was trying to figure out American publishing law versus Canadian and all of this. What else would I say? I mean, I was hindered a little bit by COVID, like so many people, so I only did
01:00:37
Speaker
about a quarter of the on-the-ground interviews that I wanted to do, and I don't want to revisit that, and hopefully we won't have to. Although I will say that, and I think maybe some of your listeners will know this, but when you're reporting on small communities, working class communities, working class folks, an invaluable tool is using Facebook Messenger. I think
01:01:07
Speaker
for a lot of reasons, it is really quite key to contacting your sources. And so that was a big learning lesson for me. I think previously to that I thought, why am I on this website? And then it ended up becoming just a really important reporting tool.
01:01:27
Speaker
I hate how good a reporting tool like sometimes Twitter and Facebook are. I bristle at it. I'm like, I don't want to be here, but it often is like a great way to knock on doors.
01:01:43
Speaker
Yeah. And especially, I mean, anyway, you know how it is. It's like you, you friend someone on Facebook and you're going to find probably a source in there that you've been trying to find their email or something. And it's like, there they are in their friends list. So yeah, that was a, that was a lesson for me that I, that I won't let go of that. I, you know, I learned something positive from that, which is that I really need, I really need to keep that tool up and running.
01:02:10
Speaker
And that's key, to see it as a tool, but not as a tool. It's a tool.
01:02:15
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And like I've been, anyway, I keep my, I have a professional account on there, not a personal one, if that makes sense. So, you know, I'm not kind of sharing birthday updates and things like that. It's very much a, it's very much a personal or sorry, professional, professional tool for me.
Writing & Personal Recommendations
01:02:33
Speaker
I think what I would do differently for sure next time is, is give myself big chunks of time only for writing. And that might mean going on a,
01:02:42
Speaker
or very likely will mean doing a residency or going on a retreat. I think I, again, in the past when I've written long things, I've tended to do it as a sort of slow plod. But I think actually with a book having uninterrupted extended periods of time would have been really helpful.
01:03:01
Speaker
Well, it helps with context, too. If you can unplug from your everyday cookie cutter distractions in your place, you know where all the snacks are, you know where everything is. But if you take yourself and put yourself at wherever, it's just like, oh, the context of this place is I only write here.
01:03:23
Speaker
I think Cheryl Strayed, like sometimes she'll binge write where she'll go to a hotel and haul up for a weekend and just bang it out. And it's just like that context can be really helpful.
01:03:36
Speaker
I think so. I really understand. Like, I mean, I've read that too about Toni Morrison would do that. And I remember reading it at the time, like, that must be nice. And now I'm like, I think I have to do that. Like, I think next time I really have to give myself like, even not even a huge chunk of time, right? Just two weeks or something. Just to kind of go and say, I can't be found and I'm going to be, because there were parts of tree thieves that
01:04:02
Speaker
that needed the sort of contemplative work that maybe writing a memoir or straight nature writing or, or something kind of more poetic that I wanted it to have. And just being in the world made that really hard for me. And so I think, you know, this is if that's something I want to improve on or what have you.
01:04:25
Speaker
That's what that means, right, is quiet and time. Like, you're not going to reach that just by sitting down one day and looking at the computer and having the internet running. So, yeah. All right. Well, I always love to bring these conversations down for a landing by asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. And that can be anything that you're just excited about, could be professional or just, you know, a cool brand of socks you're into.
01:04:50
Speaker
So I'd extend that to you, Lindsay. What are you excited about that you'd want to share with the listeners? I love that. I don't have a brand of socks, but...
01:05:05
Speaker
I live on an acre of land and we have quite a few apple trees and I'm really getting into cider and so I would encourage your listeners to seek out any sort of local cidery to them. I have one near where I live that's really wonderful and the benefit of it is that it tastes really unique because the apples are grown in the land near you.
01:05:34
Speaker
Um, and so I, I would recommend looking for any sort of local cider company, particularly anyone that does natural ferment. Uh, it's very, gives it such a unique taste. Um, and at the same time, if you want to read it, the writer, Harley Rustad wrote an article for the Walrus about
01:05:57
Speaker
about his local cidery and it was very nice. So that's what I would, that's what I would recommend. Fantastic. Go seek out some cider. Excellent. Well, Lindsay, this was wonderful to talk about tree thieves and how you go about the work. And I love the book. And I just, thank you so much for carving out the time to do this and talk shop. Oh, thanks for having me. It was, it was a pleasure.
01:06:25
Speaker
Oh, thanks for making it to the end, CNF. Thanks to Lindsay for playing ball. Name of the book again is Tree Thieves. Crime and Survival in North America's Woods is published by Little Brown Spark. I wasn't sure what this parting shot was going to be about. I had two options. One was getting an email from my agent whose emails I've come to dread because they are really never good news about the book proposal.
01:06:49
Speaker
leaving me want to walk naked into the woods never to return or this notion of how little writing I actually do I'm choosing the latter because of the two bummers I'd rather riff there I'm blown away by how little writing I actually do and I purport to be a writer and I just I don't do it
01:07:13
Speaker
You don't do enough of it. There's an illusion of lots of writing. Like I write in my journal every morning, a couple hundred words, nothing much. Usually that's probably about 150. I write these scripts right here for this podcast every week, a few hundred words again, not much.
01:07:29
Speaker
None of this writing actually moves the needle, so to speak. I find myself stuck in the mud without a winch. And then when I get out of the jeep and assess the situation, I'm like, holy fucking shit. You don't write anything that you truly want to write and publish. I mean, I want to write this, but it's not publishable in a traditional sense. But like, B.O., you don't report on anything. You have ideas. Whoopee-doo.
01:07:55
Speaker
but you never put them into action. Instead you hide behind your microphone, my high LPR 40, and talk about it, but you don't do anything. You read way too much.
01:08:07
Speaker
Is there such a thing? Well, yes, in the same way I think that a filmmaker might watch too many movies and not make any. I think a writer can read too much without actually doing any work. It's the trap of craft essays and books on writing. It gives you the illusion that you're doing it, that you're learning, but you've got to put it into practice. Like I said, it creates an illusion of work. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.
01:08:32
Speaker
I haven't had an essay run in over a year. I think it's that Metallica one I wrote for Brevity. I haven't submitted anything besides query letters and ages and I wonder why I have no work to show for it. It sounds like I'm not doing anything. I'll probably drink too much. Definitely eat too much. Now if I'm being honest, definitely drink too much. Read too much. Check email too much. Wash the dishes too much.
01:09:00
Speaker
You know, all those things, not writing shit. This isn't to say you shouldn't just stare at the rain for 20 minutes every now and again. I'm gonna do that as soon as I'm done with this little thing. I wanna listen to it hit the tin roof of my patio. It's one of my favorite things. I could just stare into oblivion if it's raining. I might even sit in the rain for a bit. I love the rain, I love it.
01:09:25
Speaker
Taking this audit about the actual writing is pretty jarring. I mean, this right here is technically writing, but it isn't what's, it's not exactly something I would put like in my email signature. You know, Brendan's work, it has appeared in his parting shot of his podcast where he bitches about how little work he's doing. His Twitter handle is. Anyway, point being, I hope you're actually doing writing and not doing things in the margins that feel like work but totally aren't.
01:09:55
Speaker
Wasting time is the worst feeling in the world. You know, going to bed at night knowing, like, you kind of wasted the day. It's like, damn it. It's the worst. It's like one of the worst feelings. That email from the agent kind of rattled me a bit. Things are okay. The book might still be a thing. Maybe. It's just... it is just. All right. Stay wild. See you in Evers. And if you can't do Interview, see ya.
01:10:41
Speaker
you