Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 153: Amanda Petrusich—Clinging to Tiny Victories, Letting the Process Sustain You, and Wet Jeans
183 Plays6 years ago
"It's like wet jeans, that's the feeling of generating a bunch of crappy writing," says Amanda Petrusich, a staff writer for The New Yorker.
Amanda can be found @amandapetrusich on Twitter.
She's the author of Don't Sell at Any Price and she came by the show to talk about her career and early struggles.
Thanks to Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction for the support.
You can join me on Twitter @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod. Instagram is @cnfpod.
Subscribe to the show and share with your fellow CNFers!
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, CNF, is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is 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 pulled surprises and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network
00:00:22
Speaker
of students, faculty, and alumni, which has 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 nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published when Goucher College is MFA for creative nonfiction. More specifically, their MFA program in nonfiction
Guest Introduction: Amanda Petrusic
00:00:54
Speaker
I don't think there's a more fitting guest for my intro music than Amanda Petrusic. So let's hit it.
00:01:07
Speaker
Yeah, buddy. Amanda came to play ball, CNF-ers. Oh yes, this is CNF, the creative nonfiction podcast where I speak to badass artists about the craft of telling true stories. Amanda is a music critic for that dirty old rag, The New Yorker. She's also a teacher at New York University where she enlightens today's and tomorrow's leaders and gets her health insurance there.
00:01:36
Speaker
So you could say she's a straight up baller. You're gonna want a notebook for this episode because she lobs in some great pointers and tips and things that'll make you feel good about yourself. Make you feel not so damn lonely out there. How do you guys like the new logo? My wife was like, I like it, but will people know what it means? I was like, good point, but the fact is the people who this show matters to know what it means.
Podcast Growth and Listener Engagement
00:02:05
Speaker
So people searching for CNF or Creative Nonfiction will see it and be like, ah, I get it. At least I hope. You'll help, right? You'll share this podcast with a friend. The show's been losing traction of late and I don't know why. Maybe I'm getting a bit too verbose with these intros. Maybe people are like, don't bore us, get to the chorus. Maybe, I don't know. In any case, subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts.
00:02:31
Speaker
and maybe consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts. If you do, take a screenshot of the published review, send it to me, and I'll coach up a piece of your work of up to 2,000 words. It's an offer. You can choose to leave a review out of the goodness of your CNF and heart, or you can take advantage of this offer.
00:02:54
Speaker
Keep the conversation going on Twitter, at Brendan O'Mara and at CNF Pod, at CNF Pod on Instagram, Facebook too. I deleted Twitter off my phone for like the hundredth time. I had to do this in the short term just because I get sucked in and for what, five, 10, 15 minutes go by and I'm like, bravo Brendan, way to waste your life looking at nothing, you piece of shit.
Bay Path University's MFA Program
00:03:20
Speaker
Discover your story. Bay Path University is the first and only university to offer no residency, fully accredited MFA, focusing exclusively on creative nonfiction. Attend full or apart time from anywhere in the world. In the Bay Path MFA, you'll find small online classes and a dynamic and supportive community. You'll master the techniques of good writing from acclaimed authors and editors,
00:03:44
Speaker
Learn the ins and outs of publishing and teaching through professional internships and complete a master's thesis that will form the foundation of your memoir or personal essay collection. 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, with guest writers including Andre de Bist III, Anne Hood, Mia Gallagher, and others.
00:04:11
Speaker
Start dates in late August, January and May. Find out more at baypath.edu slash MFA.
Amanda Petrusic's Career Highlights
00:04:21
Speaker
So Amanda Petrusic is here at Amanda Petrusic on Twitter and Instagram. Check out her archive on the newyorker.com. She's also the author of Don't Sell at Any Price, It Still Moves, and Pink Moon. She's got three bucks, she's under 40.
00:04:39
Speaker
All of these things can be found at BrendanOmero.com where the show notes are. Link up to all her great stuff. In the interview, it can be found right after this riff right here.
00:05:00
Speaker
It's pretty awesome. Yeah, my friend Jeff Geiger, who's a writer in town here in Eugene and everything. And I ran into him up in Portland. And he was asking me, like, oh, what are we doing? What are you doing? I was like, I don't know. On this night, I might check in early just to kind of decompress a bit and hit Friday a bit harder. And he's just like, yeah, man, he's like 15,000 introverts are just going hard this weekend.
00:05:27
Speaker
It's so true, man. It's so true. You know, everyone goes back to their hotel room and is like, whoo, thank God that's over. Yeah. Like uncorks a bottle of whiskey. It just like stares into the middle distance.
Amanda's Upbringing and Influences
00:05:40
Speaker
Exactly. Oh, that's pretty good. Nice. I feel like talking about
00:05:44
Speaker
you know the writing process is one of those incredibly nerdy sort of indulgent feeling things I almost never get to do so I am thrilled to be here thank you for having me. Awesome yeah and to that point and we'll certainly get there because you have a great sentence in your Metallica review in the New Yorker from November that really hits upon process and we will definitely unpack that but I always like to kind of chart
00:06:06
Speaker
a writer's origin story first a bit. So if you wouldn't mind, can you tell me where you grew up and what kind of crew you ran with as you were growing up? Sure. Yeah, I grew up in the Hudson Valley in northern Westchester County in New York, about 45 minutes north of the city. My parents were public school teachers. My mom taught art. My father taught math.
00:06:29
Speaker
I had an older sister. I was, you know, from a very young age, I feel very fortunate in this. From a young age, I just I was obsessed with books and I was obsessed with music. So the idea that, you know, one day I would kind of get the opportunity to combine my two passions is still extraordinary to me. But but I was kind of a nerdy kid. You know, when I was young, I read a lot and loved school.
00:06:52
Speaker
As I got a little bit older, I had a punk rock awakening. I became something of a petulant teenager, although I still loved school and kept up with my classes and all of that. But I was close enough to New York that it existed.
00:07:08
Speaker
this kind of glimmering city on the horizon. And I could go and take a Metro North train with my friends and buy records on St. Mark's Place and see all ages shows and things like that. So that was a kind of a huge influence on me when I was younger. And then when it came time to college, I left, I went to college in Virginia. And that was when I really started kind of thinking about writing as
00:07:33
Speaker
You know, something if I was really lucky, maybe I would get to do as some sort of part of my job one day. I was an English major. I studied film and I worked for the college newspaper. So that was my my first gig as a critic. I was a film critic for The Flat Hat, which was I went to William & Mary and that was what our college newspaper was called.
00:07:52
Speaker
And were you, I consider myself kind of a 90s dirtbag just into the grunge and I still wear pretty much the same clothes I wore when I was in high school in the 90s and everything. Would you kind of classify yourself there kind of getting into the grunge scene of the 90s? Oh, totally, man. I was into it. Like, you know, I loved Nirvana. I loved Hole. I thought Courtney Love was incredibly cool. I got into the Riot Grrrl stuff pretty early.
00:08:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that was it. You know, it was like the those like baby doll dresses that are very 90s. I would dye my hair with manic panic. Doc Martens, like flannel shirt over the whole thing. I mean, that was, you know, that was the dream. Nice. Have you seen Captain Marvel yet with its allusions back to back to this very era that was very formative for both of us?
00:08:42
Speaker
No, I have not, but I have to say it is weird to see the 90s being sort of codified and exalted in the aesthetic of the 90s. It's weird. I feel like you reach that age where your childhood suddenly becomes like the culture has cycled back to it and it's incredibly unsettling. It's really, really weird. It is weird. Yeah, like your childhood years have now become a period piece. It's like, oh, no.
00:09:05
Speaker
I know. I feel like that's really the moment where I'm like, ah, God, I'm old. You know, like I'm old and I am in the way as I think Jerry Garcia put it. But yeah, no, it's incredible. I teach at NYU. I teach undergraduate writing there. And yeah, I mean, my students sort of look at that era of music like with this kind of vague sort of nostalgia and this kind of fondness. And I think, oh, my God, I can't believe I can't believe we're here. But we are. Here we are.
00:09:33
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, that's great.
Evolution of Music Criticism
00:09:35
Speaker
So as you're working for the school paper, willing to marry and starting to think about like, oh, this is something that might be able to merge a lot of the things I love. What were, you know, what was that experience like and what were you, you know, maybe particularly good at, at the time that allowed you to lean into it more with rigor and hard work?
00:09:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like for me, especially at that age, I was obsessed with sentences. I was obsessed with language and voice. And I think I kind of came to criticism more as a, and this is gonna sound pretentious to say, but sort of more as a writer first, and the convenience of criticism was you just sort of had something in front of you and you got to kind of put your sights on it and sort of throw all these words at it. But I think for me, it was less an impulse or a desire
00:10:25
Speaker
uh, to sort of judge or even parse and more just, I wanted to write and I needed something to write about and, and being a critic in some ways seemed like the easiest way to have this kind of ever replenishing well of material. Uh, but I loved film, you know, and, and I was studying it at the time and, uh, you know, I remember starting out in that gig, it was sort of like, I think every critic probably struggles with this and perhaps, you know, over the course of an entire career, but certainly at the beginning of a career,
00:10:52
Speaker
which is like, well, what do I know? You know, I don't know anything more than anybody else. In fact, it's quite possible I know a lot less than everybody else. So sort of how do I, you know, how do I accept this role that I have and how do I kind of do it in a way that I'm comfortable with? So yeah, I mean, figuring out a critical voice was tricky. And I think, you know, out of college, my first kind of real gig as a music writer was at Pitchfork, which was still then, you know, a very young website and also a website that was sort of
00:11:22
Speaker
beloved and infamous and equal measure for its honesty and occasionally its cruelty and its snark and all these other things. The site has since moved away probably very correctly from that voice. But I feel like it was a moment where it was like, oh, you're a critic. That means you get to be an asshole. That means you get to wield this strange, awkward authority. So that was also, for me as a young writer, trying to figure that out, navigate that.
00:11:50
Speaker
decide if I was comfortable with that or not. And as you were developing that voice, what ended up becoming your barometer of what was good, like a very good criticism versus bad criticism?
Influences on Amanda's Writing Style
00:12:08
Speaker
You know, it was a different time, just to kind of reiterate how old I am. It was a different time and I feel like back then
00:12:16
Speaker
There was this consumer guide aspect to criticism in part because critics were given early access to records. So we sort of had the goods and you were telling people whether it was worth their time to invest their hard earned cash in these things. And I feel like now
00:12:32
Speaker
Not only is there not really that same exclusive access anymore because things tend to leak to everyone at the same time, but there's also not really money in the equation so much. You know, it's less about sort of advising someone whether or not to spend their 15 bucks on CD because no one is really paying for music anymore. So I feel like we've moved away from that kind of thumbs up, thumbs down model where it was like, this is worth your, you know, your cash and this isn't.
00:12:56
Speaker
into a place where criticism feels a little more idea-driven, it feels a little more about sort of contextualizing and unpacking a thing, asking questions of it. So for me right now, the barometer of good criticism is writing that does that and does it in a useful way, does it in an earnest way, does it in an intelligent way.
00:13:19
Speaker
And I'm kind of excited about that shift. I mean, for me, that sort of track by track kind of breakdown, this is what this sounds like. I'm going to describe the guitars again. I'm going to kind of dump a score on this. That has gotten less interesting for me as I've gotten older. And who were you reading at the time as you were developing your voice and then maybe transitioning into who inspires you now as you look to just keep your saw sharp in this craft?
00:13:46
Speaker
Sure, yeah, good. So after I graduated from college, I finished a semester early and I moved to New York to take an internship at Rolling Stone, which I did that spring and that summer. And then the following fall, I enrolled in the MFA program at Columbia University and I was studying nonfiction there. So I feel like some of the earliest people I was reading and trying to emulate weren't necessarily critics, but it was the kind of books and, you know, and essays that were being taught to me in graduate school, which were
00:14:14
Speaker
you know, broader, it was, you know, Joseph Mitchell and Joan Didion and, you know, writers like that. David Foster Wallace's nonfiction, you know, is this really kind of, I mean, the more I think about it, it's really voice driven writers. It's writers who feel very kind of alive and present on the page. So those were kind of, you know, formative authors for me, I think, when I was young.
00:14:38
Speaker
John Jeremy Sullivan is another magazine writer that is a friend now. I feel lucky to be able to call him a friend, but someone who's writing just kind of knocked my socks off early on. One of those writers where I thought, God, I didn't know you could do that. I didn't know that was allowed. I didn't know you could.
00:14:53
Speaker
could, I don't know, write things that sort of work this way. So he's someone I still look to as kind of the high, you know, the kind of high watermark for this job. Katie Weaver, I think is amazing. Taffy at the New York Times. You know, and even many of my colleagues at the New Yorker, a place I kind of still can't believe I get to work. You know, Richard Brody, I think is one of the best film critics in America. You know, certainly,
00:15:22
Speaker
my fellow music writers there, Wasu and Kerry Betan. God, I don't know, I could go on forever. That's great, yeah.
00:15:31
Speaker
You know, such a kind of student and fan of, you know, good magazine writing, good criticism, good long-form narrative journalism that it's, you know, I have to kind of force myself to read other things sometimes. Well, it's great to hear the quilt of all those writers that kind of inform how you've carved out your own voice. That's that amalgam of all these influences and then put through your taste and your filter and your experiences.
00:16:00
Speaker
And then out the other end comes something that is wholly something you, but it's fed and informed by all these people you're mentioning. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think every writer probably has some sort of strange kind of gnarled, you know, internal thing, like a kind of weird family tree in there of all of the writers that they have read and admired over the years. And it's, yeah, I mean, it's a really lovely, beautiful thing. I think whenever I'm feeling kind of stuck or
00:16:26
Speaker
You know, a little stymied in my own work. It's really as corny as it sounds. It's incredibly inspiring for me to, you know, pick up a book that I love. I just did this yesterday with James Baldwin and just and just, you know, kind of feel it. I don't know. It's like you feel the heat come back on a little bit. You know, just sort of reintroducing yourself to the idea that, you know, language can move you, that language can be powerful, that can be magical. It's easy to forget that in this business, in this line of work. And I feel like returning to the books that I love
00:16:57
Speaker
Yeah, it just sort of reignites that for me. It turns it back on. Yeah, to your point, when I was talking to Glenn Stout about, he was coaching another writer and who was having a little bit of a hard time just cracking the lead of his or her story. And he said, just pick up like any anthology. I think it was a sports story. So he told her or him or her, I don't know what.
00:17:22
Speaker
to pick up best American sports writing and just shotgun leads just yeah, I love that term just like go from You know read the first 500 words or so of every every story and like don't copy it But just start pumping your body full of these leads. I was like, oh that is so Brilliant to kind of like you said the kind of a you know, warm your body back up. Yeah I love that phrase. It's a great phrase but yeah, I think it's you know, there's also a
Competitiveness in Writing
00:17:50
Speaker
I feel like there's a slightly competitive thing, you know, that gets the kind of gets in the blood to when you read really, really great prose and you think like, ah, fuck, I want to do that, you know, I want to be that good. And so I don't know that's energizing to in a weird kind of way. Not that I think people should cultivate terrible insane competitive relationships with incredible dead writers, but you know, but there is some like you become aware of the possibilities and I think you you hunger for it in a different way.
00:18:15
Speaker
That's a great point and that's something I like asking people about is actually when you feel those sort of almost toxic feelings of competitiveness and jealousies like creeping into your body because I think they're very real and I know I feel it all the time which is why I love asking people like you.
00:18:36
Speaker
countless others, how you process it and deal with it. Because if you let it faster, it is a gnarly, gross feeling. And I wonder if you ever found yourself looking over your shoulder at your peers or people you admire and you're like, how you deal with it and process it and redirect that energy in a way that's more constructive for you.
00:19:00
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's a great question. And I think anyone who says they don't feel that competitiveness from time to time is probably lying. Even if you don't want to feel it or you think, oh, this is ugly, this is stupid. But yeah, I mean, I think you have to find a way to sort of transmutate it into something useful and kind of positive and proactive for you. Otherwise, it's just, as you said, it's going to sort of fester. You're going to start rotting from the inside out.
00:19:26
Speaker
I feel like I felt it more a little bit earlier on in my career and very, very lucky now that I have the job I want in many ways. So I feel like I've been able to kind of let go of some of that anxiety. But I see it in my students all the time, where they're kind of like, well, but she has 15 internships and she's taking all these classes and she has a job to end up after graduation. And it's very hard to kind of convince someone that like, well, we're all moving at our own paces here.
00:19:55
Speaker
And we're all doing different sorts of work and the work gets made in different ways and the payoff arrives at different points. But I think it's important to kind of repeat that to yourself. I know you have spent the weekend at AWP, which is the big writing conference.
00:20:11
Speaker
I feel like an event like that can kind of ignite some of those feelings too, where you're among all these other writers, they're assembled into panels, they're giving readings and lectures, and everyone's shaking hands, and there's this sense of, am I doing this right? Am I making the connections I'm supposed to be making? Am I doing the work I'm supposed to be doing?
00:20:29
Speaker
And it's hard, you know, with writing, there's no kind of clear path through this job. There's no kind of clear line through this profession. So it's really tricky to know if you're doing it right. And I think when you start to worry about that, that's when you start really comparing yourself to other people.
00:20:45
Speaker
That is so brilliantly put. It is so true what you're saying just that because what you end up seeing is you see these people on panels or you see the work you're doing at the New Yorker and she's like, a man that she's this young woman who's at the New Yorker, she must have just been anointed.
00:21:05
Speaker
As we have slowly unpacked, you were very bookish. You were a reader. You kind of knew you wanted to be a writer early. You got an internship early. You moved to New York, and there were these sequential steps, and you actually had a conceited sort of vision, and you were working towards that. But a lot of times, all we see is she writes for The New Yorker. She teaches at NYU.
00:21:28
Speaker
How the hell did that happen? But it was kind of like years and years of hard work have got you to this point, but often maybe people are only seeing the end result and not the years of grinding away, wondering if this was a bad idea or not. Oh, God. Yeah, so many years of that. Yeah, it's really...
00:21:48
Speaker
I mean, again, this is going to sound sort of corny and I'm almost embarrassed that I'm about to say it, but I say this to my students all the time, which is like the work itself, the process has to sustain you because everything else about this job is going to be awful for like a decade.
Embracing the Writing Process
00:22:05
Speaker
Like the job itself is going to be so hard and there's so much kind of rejection and insecurity built into the gig.
00:22:11
Speaker
that you have to really, really love sitting down and typing. You know what I mean? That has to be enough, because the other stuff is not going to come until so much later. You are going to spend so much time typing until you get a decent paycheck or you get a little bit of glory that is available to us. It just takes so long. So I think you really have to feel that kind of hunger for the work, that desire for the work, the satisfaction in the work, because God knows otherwise this industry and this job will make you insane.
00:22:41
Speaker
Yeah, to your point, there's a passage I pulled out of Don't Sell at Any Price that you wrote, and I'll just read it real quick. It was, you know, these guys knew what would make them happy, whether that happiness actually manifested itself at the end of the quest didn't necessarily matter. I believe in all those old and sippid chestnuts about the journey trumping the destination, about the process being more important than the product.
00:23:06
Speaker
And I was just like, I lifted that out and you just echoed that entire sentiment perfectly a moment ago. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's true. You know, I feel I mean, I think about this all the time. It was certainly very, very true with record collectors, where it was, you know, it was the hunt and it was the search and it was the.
00:23:24
Speaker
the kind of, I don't know, that sort of wild meandering path toward the thing, that was really where the joy was. I think you get it. I mean, everyone's experienced this, right? You want something so bad, and then you get it, and you're kind of like, all right. And it's sort of on to the next thing. It's really hard to sort of stay present with a moment of satisfaction when you sort of achieve something you want. And that goes back to what we were saying earlier, too, about competitiveness and all.
00:23:50
Speaker
Sure. Okay. You feel competitive with someone and you say, they have a job I want, then you get that job and you're like, okay, well, what's the next thing I want? You know, it sort of will, it will never end if you kind of let it keep spiraling on that way. Uh, but I think so much of the, the kind of pleasure of, of, of this gig for me is in, you know, the writing itself. It's something I really treasure. It's the best part of my day. Uh, I mean, which is not to say I don't have, you know, many stretches where I am, uh, you know, kind of just.
00:24:19
Speaker
struggling and you know feeling very hung out to dry but but I love it you know I mean maybe you have a similar experience to where you kind of you know you express something on the page and it's exactly what you wanted to say and it you know it just it feels so good there's no feeling like that so to me it's just clinging to that you know to those small joys and trying to pay less attention to some of the other stuff and as you were as
00:24:45
Speaker
I love what you were saying earlier about you were attracted to a lot of these very voice-driven writers. And as a writer trying to form your own voice, that can be very dangerous when you try to imitate those people that are just throwing up fireworks and pyro all over their work.
00:25:05
Speaker
And did you have any growing pains associated with imitating the Wallace's and the Didion's and John Jeremiah Sullivan's of the world as just flying too close to that sun and kind of forgetting who you are? I mean, I think probably, I mean, yes, of course. Yes, absolutely. And I think probably every writer does that a little bit. You know, when you're starting out, you're like, how do I do this? So you kind of look at someone that does it in a way that you enjoy and you sort of try to, OK, I'll try to mimic that.
00:25:35
Speaker
And I think many of our best writers probably are very good mimics. I mean, for me, I don't know what your sort of early reading experiences were like, but I was in grad school. And even after I was obsessed with the new journalists, you know, I loved Truman Capote. I loved Tom Wolfe. I loved, you know, even the Gonzo, like the Hunter S. Thompson, all these Norman Mailer got these writers that are these
00:25:56
Speaker
you know, incredibly out of fashion now for good reason. But I loved it. I mean, they were fabulous and they were raconteurs and they were, you know, quite arguably many of them charlatans. Certainly not models of like responsible ethical nonfiction writing as a place like the New Yorker would define it. But I just I loved their work. And so I think for me, my early kind of imitative, you know,
00:26:19
Speaker
experiments were with those guys. And I can't, you know, everybody reads Hunter S. Thompson and thinks that they can write like Hunter S. Thompson or you read Jack Kerouac and you think you can write like Jack Kerouac because they make it seem so effortless and there's a strange kind of propulsive rhythm to the work. And you think like, I just need to have like six cocktails, you know, and just let myself go. So I feel fortunate in some ways that a lot of my really truly embarrassing early kind of imitative screeds were not
00:26:49
Speaker
published, but certainly, oh my God, I hesitate to even bring this up because I don't want anyone to go back and read them, but I'm sure, I am sure many of my early reviews at Pitchfork were that way where it was like, I don't know how to be critic. I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm going to read a bunch of criticism and sort of try to do that. And so, you know, reading guys like Robert Crisquell or, you know, Nick Toches and, and, and for me, I think as a young woman in, in a profession that,
00:27:18
Speaker
back then at least was almost exclusively male. I think I was trying to assume this kind of almost sort of macho, like aggressive authoritative voice that was not my voice. It was not my voice at all. It was not how I experienced or metabolized music, but I just thought that was how criticism worked. I thought it was supposed to be that way. I thought that's what readers wanted. It's this kind of odd, like,
00:27:44
Speaker
you know like the guy at the record store who's sort of looking down his nose at your you know your purchases as you lay them on the counter I thought it required this kind of antagonistic relationship with the reader this sort of snobbish perspective and I think it took me a long time
00:27:59
Speaker
to kind of unlearn that or to sort of realize like, oh, it doesn't have to be this way. I can write about this stuff differently. You know, I can write about it in a way that feels a little bit truer to my experience as a fan, my experience as a listener, my experience as a person on earth. But I think you have to get the imitating out of your system. I don't know that there's a way around that. I don't know a writer who has come of age without having that period of, you know, I don't know, trying to find a voice and sort of just casting about willy-nilly.
00:28:27
Speaker
So as you're progressing through your low to mid 20s through the internships and your first gigs and the MFA, so what are the next steps in your career here that eventually gets you to the New Yorker where you're at now? Sure. Gosh. So after I finished graduate school, and I'd started at Columbia in the spring of 2001.
Amanda's Career Journey
00:28:52
Speaker
I was 21 years old, which is a little bit young for an MFA.
00:28:56
Speaker
candidate. And it was, you know, I didn't really know what I was doing. I didn't really know what I wanted to write. But I had started, you know, I was really interested in the essay as a form. And I'd been sort of messing around with, you know, personal essays that kind of touched on the idea of, you know, pop music and the formulation of identity or pop music and the formulation of American identity. And around then I started trying to freelance. And I didn't even really know what that word meant. But I had, you know, I was at shows all the time. I was sort of
00:29:24
Speaker
hanging around with people who were really into music and kind of eventually found the right channels to send some pitches out. So I believe my first real published piece of criticism was in The Village Voice and Chuck Eddy had commissioned it from me. It was a review of a Will Oldham album. It was the Bonnie Prince Billy Singh's greatest palace music. And it was the first time I'd seen my name in print. I'd done a few little web things before, but that, that to me, you know, I think again, like every writer or journalist, you hold that thing in your hand.
00:29:53
Speaker
your hands for the first time, and it's got your name on it, and you're just like, whoa. It's so exciting. It's also terrifying. But I think that moment was, and I was in school at the time, was sort of the moment in which I thought, maybe this is possible. Maybe this is something I can do. I might have to have five other jobs, but maybe this is something I can keep doing. And around then, that was when I got hired at Pitchfork. This would have been around 2003.
00:30:20
Speaker
Back then when you got hired as the staff writer at Pitchfork, you had to write two reviews a week, which maybe doesn't sound like a lot, but is a lot. At least it was for me to sort of process and write about two new records a week was hard. You're listening all the time. You're kind of trying to have ideas about these things.
00:30:41
Speaker
It was a good boot camp in a way because especially back then, Pitchfork I think was running six new reviews every day. We're reviewing everything. That's 30 records a week. There's not that many records released. Especially the scope of coverage at Pitchfork was a little more narrow than two. We're talking about 30 indie rock records. I think it was six reviews a day. It could have been less than that. Anyway, it was a lot of indie rock records a week. Of course, many of the things I was getting assigned were these
00:31:11
Speaker
mediocre as a new band, it sounds like pavement. I felt like it was really hard to develop interesting and useful ideas at that rate and with that material. In some ways, I still think of that training as having been priceless for me because you're describing music and sound, which is already really difficult trick.
00:31:37
Speaker
And then having to write about things that not only did I not have a lot of time to spend with them, but things about which I maybe wasn't reacting in any particularly interesting way. I'm listening to record. I'm like, okay, but now I have to write 700 words about it. So it was hard. It was really, really hard, but I learned so much. So I think of that as being my sort of strange crucible in which I just trained. It's like the training montage from Rocky or whatever. That was my training montage.
00:32:03
Speaker
But as I was doing that, as I was working at Pitchfork and freelancing a little bit elsewhere, I had a million other jobs. It was just like odd job after odd job. I worked at Children's Museum for a while. I worked in restaurants. I worked at a library. I was kind of cobbling together a living while trying to sort of imagine a future in which maybe I could just write.
00:32:25
Speaker
This is really important that what you just said, the fact that you have these other other day jobs that you're just kind of like trying to piece together a whole so you can sustain this thing you really love doing. And it's not something people are very forthcoming about. So I love that you're sharing this. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don't know.
00:32:46
Speaker
I don't know how someone could kind of come out of the gate and just write full time. I think it isn't at least for me. And in my experience, it was an excruciatingly slow process in which I had to do a lot of other things for money. And that said, that sounds way more salacious. Nothing untoward, nothing illegal. But, you know, a lot of kind of weird jobs that I didn't really care about, you know, that would just sort of
00:33:11
Speaker
let me make ends meet while I wrote at night, or I wrote between shifts, or I wrote in the bathroom while at work, or whatever it was, whenever I could find time. I think of a lot of my early 20s that way. My friends used to make fun of me because I wouldn't go anywhere because I wanted to stay home and write. They would be like, oh, man, it wasn't a deadline. I totally deserved all the ribbing that I got, but it was really
00:33:38
Speaker
valuing this work and trying to make room for it in my life when it was not yet the thing that I did for money full time.
00:33:46
Speaker
And how did you keep yourself from growing resentful or bitter? You know, given that you had a great undergraduate education, like William & Mary's, like a top-notch school, a baby Ivy, I think. You know, MFA, Columbia, I mean, you're like on this Ivy League track, and then, you know, you're trying to carve out a life as a critic, but you're also like,
00:34:11
Speaker
highly educated and compelling income from various streams and not yet sustaining yourself on the thing you love. So how did you, that can lead to some bitterness and entitlement and resentments. And I wonder how you avoided that.
00:34:28
Speaker
Yeah, no, of course. Yeah, I should say, too, I don't know if I said this earlier, when I was in grad school, I couldn't afford an apartment in New York. So I was living with my parents. So I was living in, like, about 45 minutes away from Columbia and commuting back and forth on the train, you know, with all the sort of business dudes. You know, I would see them at the end of the day, like, cracking like a tall boy, you know.
00:34:51
Speaker
Budweiser in the paper bag on the train, and I was like, this is my life, I'm like a commuting dad. But, you know, so it was hard, I mean, it was, Columbia's an expensive school, I had a fellowship, I was lucky, but it was still, you know, I still wasn't making enough money to live in New York City. I feel like that's the other thing that people sort of look at New York writers from afar, and they're like, well, there seems to be a piece of information missing, where it's like, how is this person living in this lovely brownstone in Fort Green and, you know, in freelancing?
00:35:19
Speaker
I think often there is a piece of information missing. It can be hard, I think, when you're looking at it from a different place and trying to figure out how people are making it work. And there's some mysterious source of income in the mix that is not always necessarily disclosed. But anyway, but you asked me about, you mean resentment early on in my career where I thought, man, I did everything right. I went to a good college. I worked hard. I got into a good grad school, and I'm still not.
00:35:46
Speaker
able to do this full time. I think it's normal to feel that way again. I feel like it's one of those things where you have to say, all right, here's this shitty feeling. I'm kind of pissed off. I feel like I did all the things I was supposed to do. Why don't I have the job I want? And you have to find a way to kind of turn that into energy, to kind of turn that anger, that resentment into energy that you will then pour into your work.
00:36:10
Speaker
You know, writing is by no means a meritocracy, but I think sometimes it comes kind of close. And if the work is really, really, really good, eventually people will notice it. But you have to be really patient. And again, you have to kind of put your resentments aside. You have to put your entitlement aside. You have to think, all right, nobody really deserves this job. I'm going to work really, really hard. I'm going to work harder than anyone else.
00:36:34
Speaker
And then maybe, maybe I'll get there. But of course, it's all easier said than done. None of it is easy to do. Right, right. And so in terms of this work, you had a lot of different things sort of dipping into your time. And you only had so much time, but yet you still found a way to carve out your sacred writing time.
00:37:03
Speaker
When was that in the course of your days and how did you wall that off and keep it sacred so that you were constantly chipping away at what it is you were working on? Yeah, you know, I used to write very late at night. I can't really do that anymore. I'm still not a morning person, but I tend to write kind of earlier in the day.
00:37:26
Speaker
but I used to just stay up until all hours of the night working. And I think in some ways it's a nice time to work because it's quiet and no one's bothering you and there's really nothing else to do, nothing's open, whatever your home, you're in your pajamas. So it's a kind of undistracted place. I think also early on, I sort of liked being, this is gonna sound incredibly weird, I liked being a little sleepy, like I liked being a little soft around the edges. You know, when you're home alone at night,
00:37:53
Speaker
sitting in front of a screen, I think you're a little vulnerable, you're a little lonesome. And I think I liked that feeling. I feel like it sort of worked its way into my writing from that era in a way that I found sort of useful or it helped me be really honest. I don't know, it's kind of a strange way to talk about it, but when I look back on it now, I'm like, oh, that's what I was doing. I was cultivating, I was putting myself in a weird sort of vulnerable kind of liminal weird space from which to work.
00:38:20
Speaker
because I felt like it made the work more interesting or it made the work more honest or it made the work a little less calculated. I don't really do that so much anymore. I feel like now, you know, another big thing is if you're lucky to have a space that is a space in your home that is dedicated to writing or, you know, you sit down there and you think, okay, I'm here. This is where I do my work. I think that can be really helpful. I have a good friend who's a poet and also a teacher at UMass. And he was saying he has a laptop that he uses just for
00:38:51
Speaker
writing poems. He tries to answer emails and other stuff on his phone because he doesn't want to associate the computer itself with all that kind of terrible, distracting, busy work. The keyboard is for writing. The laptop is for writing. And he will try to do all the other kind of stuff we need to do electronically elsewhere on another device. And I thought, oh, that's really smart. One thing I used to do, and I feel like I maybe gleaned this tip from
00:39:16
Speaker
Ernest Hemingway, who I take all my writing tips from. Just kidding, I definitely don't. But I feel like maybe he mentioned that he did this, which was stopping in the middle of a sentence. So when you kind of come to finish your work for the day, instead of finishing the sentence, stop in the middle so that when you return to it the next day, you don't have that kind of terrified, unmoored feeling of where do I begin? You're already in the middle of a sentence and you can finish it pretty easily. And then you've done some writing and you're sort of off to the races.
00:39:44
Speaker
I would do that early on, too. I would stop in the middle of an idea so that when I returned to it, I would have the energy right away. And so as you're doing this, too, how close are you to eventually landing, say, your first published piece with The New Yorker and then coming on more permanent, of course? Sure, yeah.
00:40:07
Speaker
God, I published three books before I got the job at the New Yorker.
Path to The New Yorker
00:40:12
Speaker
So there was a lot of kind of stuff happening in between. But when I was in my early 20s, I'd started writing for a magazine called Paste, which had just launched. And it, you know, it was covering music that I was kind of interested in, then a sort of American vernacular, you know, kind of traditional folk music, but sort of updated versions on it, you know, I mean, it would
00:40:34
Speaker
It was like Sufjan Stevens and Wilco and Iron and Wine and that sort of stuff. And I'd written a piece for the magazine, a feature that ended up becoming kind of the kernel of my first book, which was a travelogue about the idea of Americana music. So I was 25 when I got that first book deal, which is, you know, looking back on that now, I'm like, Oh my God, I had no idea what I was doing. I was really, really lucky. You know, I just, it was sort of right place, right time. I'd written a magazine article that had caught the attention of an agent in New York and
00:41:04
Speaker
She had asked me if I wanted to try to sort of turn it into a book proposal. Of course I did. We kind of got the right editor at the right time. And so that was kind of the first big project I did that made me think like, oh my God, I'm really a writer. I'm a real writer, like capital W writer. And I don't think I believed it until that moment. So that was when that kind of started for me. And I think that book opened other doors.
00:41:33
Speaker
you know, for other sorts of projects. But I really just hustled as a freelancer for a long time in the city. It was, you know, a combination of living off of book advances, fairly modest book advances, teaching as an adjunct instructor for a long time, you know, freelancing here and there.
00:41:51
Speaker
I had a job at the New York Times for a couple of years where I wrote the pop and rock concert previews, which were these little blurbs about like, you know, a dozen upcoming shows. So that was a weekly column that I did for the paper. And so that was a steady income. You know, I got paid every two weeks for that. And that was a huge relief in terms of, you know, how do I pay my rent? Yeah. That anchor gig is real important. Oh my God. Yeah.
00:42:16
Speaker
It really is. And you know, and that was a tedious job. I mean, it was fun writing like the two sentence little blurbs that described the, you know, the show or the artist, but it was, you know, 75% of that job was like looking up, you know, venue information, and, you know, compiling all that stuff. It was incredibly boring. But, but yeah, but it was, you know, it was a steady gig, and it was money that I knew was coming in, as I kind of hustled in a zillion other different low paying gigs.
00:42:44
Speaker
So all of that went on for a while. Trying to remember what the sort of catalyst was for starting at the New Yorker. Around the same time, so I'd been adjuncting for a while and when a full-time faculty position opened up at NYU, I was incredibly excited to apply for it. And it was around the same time that Sasha Fair-Jones, who was the pop music critic at the New Yorker, had decided to leave the magazine.
00:43:14
Speaker
So I think I can't quite remember the precise mechanics of this. I think that maybe I had sent an email to my agent and said, uh, you know, Hey, Sasha's leaving the magazine. I don't know if they're looking for a new pop critic, but I'd love to, you know, be part of that conversation if true. Um, but at some point I was in touch with willing Davidson who is who edits the pop music column for the magazine, a really just incredible top notch, you know, best of the best editor.
00:43:40
Speaker
Uh, and I had done an edit memo for him and, you know, it just sort of slaved away on this thing. You know, it's kind of, for me, at least pop music critic at the New Yorker, I thought, ah, fuck, you know, and that's the Holy Grail. Like I, you know, I can't believe I'm even getting to sort of throw my hat in the ring for this. Uh, it's kind of slaved away on the edit memo, sent it in.
00:44:01
Speaker
A few weeks later, Willing got back to me and said, you know, I don't know. We don't know if we're going to hire a pop music critic. Thank you. You know, thank you for your time. Best of luck to you. And I thought, man, OK. But but at the time, I had also, you know, he had passed my name along to Sean Alliance, another editor there who was hiring someone to work on kind of front of the book stuff.
00:44:23
Speaker
And I had decided to take this full-time teaching gig at NYU, so at the time I was not really looking for a full-time editorial job. I also don't really have a lot of editorial experience, so I'm not sure I would have been the right person for that gig. But she ended up putting me in touch with Michael Ager, who's the culture editor for the website. And I think the first time I emailed Michael, it was the day after the MTV Video Music Awards, I guess in maybe 2014, 2015.
00:44:50
Speaker
And I said, I'd love to pitch you some stuff for the website. And this back then, the New Yorker.com was sort of still finding its legs a little bit. It was a strange sort of digital entity that has since, I think, figured out what it is and what it should do. But back then, it was a little bit of the Wild West. And I was like, well, what kind of pitches are you interested in hearing? And Michael wrote back, and he was like, well, you know, the VMAs were last night like something about
00:45:15
Speaker
you know, Miley Cyrus at the VMAs, like stuff like that. And I was like, I can write that, you know, and just sort of snuck, like kind of insisted upon myself, sort of snuck in there. And he was like, all right, you know, write something up and send it to me. And that was the start of that. So I, you know, worked as a contributing writer for the website for a while, and then eventually became a staff writer at the magazine.
00:45:36
Speaker
What is the process by which you become sort of knighted as a staff writer? There is this contributor stream, but then what does it mean to finally be dubbed staff writer? Yeah, it's a great question. I don't exactly know. It's one day someone just sort of taps you on the shoulder and says, hey, guess what?
00:46:00
Speaker
And again, I think it's probably different for everyone. It could be contractual, your contract's a little bit different, or it could be the fact that you have a contract. I don't know, there's a lot of, you know, the magazine business is so mysterious, and I think that New Yorker itself is somewhat mysterious that, you know, a lot of us are like, I don't know, okay, you kind of don't ask questions, you just say thank you. So I'm sorry, that's not very helpful, but that's kind of all I know. I don't know how the decisions are made internally.
00:46:28
Speaker
But I know that once you are a staff writer, there's a certain amount of work that is saved for you throughout the year. Then you get the cute little cartoon headshot and then you know you've made it. Yes, man. The day you get that little avatar, I have to say, is a very thrilling moment. It's very exciting. Stanley Chow, who's that incredible illustrator who does those,
00:46:55
Speaker
Uh, you know, you send him a headshot and I remember just saying in my email, like make me look cool, which I think is why I have this, I have a pair of sunglasses on top of my head. So I am grateful to him forever for the sunglasses on top of the head of my New Yorker avatar.
00:47:11
Speaker
which does make me look way cooler than I am. A great sentence I love when you reviewed the Injustice for All 30th Anniversary Metallica collection, the Titanic thing that I can't wait to get my hands on if they're even still available.
Insights on the Creative Process
00:47:27
Speaker
You wrote on James Rift tapes, which is a great
00:47:30
Speaker
sort of a document of sorts that shows how the work is getting made. And you wrote like, if you're interested in the odd and inscrutable alchemy of creative work, it is an engrossing document. Little bits of melody eventually either coalesce into coherent songs or they don't. And that's such a great testament to them being forthcoming about this is the raw shit that eventually might become blackened.
00:47:56
Speaker
So take us into that sentence and how enamored you are with the creative process and how you forged your own so you can get your work done.
00:48:06
Speaker
Yeah, sure. It was so fun to write about Metallica. They're a band I really like. And I had never had the opportunity to sort of go, I don't know, going hard on them. And some kind of monster, the documentary that I mentioned in that review, is like a formative film for me. It's a movie that means a lot to me. I think it's maybe one of the best films ever made about the creative process or the sort of weirdness of being stuck or trying to make art. And it's just not working.
00:48:33
Speaker
frustrated and you know it sucks. You know what you're doing sucks, but you kind of can't, no matter how hard you try, you can't make it good. And I find that just incredibly poignant. It's really moving. And I think James's rift tapes is a sort of similar thing. It's a kind of, you know, suddenly the curtain is drawn and you can kind of see how the sausage is getting made. And it turns out it's not these sort of strokes of genius that, you know, come flying down like lightning bolts, but instead is this kind of sustained, long, hard work where a lot of the stuff you're generating is
00:49:03
Speaker
terrible, but you kind of, and it's boring and it's, you know, it's stupid and it's frustrating. And then you do that and you do that and you do that. And then eventually you get this one little thing and that one little thing is beautiful, you know, and, and, and you kind of, you dust it off and you hold it close to your chest and you try to sort of build that thing. Uh, but I loved being made aware and I love how kind of fearless Metallica themselves are in terms of revealing that, you know, saying like, well, look, this, this is how we did this, you know, this is how this happened.
00:49:30
Speaker
And so the rift tapes, I feel like, are kind of the perfect metaphor, the perfect vessel for that idea of you work and you work and you work and you generate a lot of nonsense. But you have to kind of hope and believe and have faith in the idea that eventually you will land on something that is not nonsense. And so do not sort of give up the ghost too early.
00:49:54
Speaker
what you're underscoring to the the important point that especially a lot of a lot of people who don't necessarily maybe they're just getting into this kind of work and they feel like when they they read like you know this great Amanda Petrusic column or or here a record that just really pops is that you don't understand how many
00:50:14
Speaker
Awful bad words you had to write in order to get to something that really pops but you're comfortable in that bad work just like the way Metallica is comfortable and throwing a bunch of crap together and then eventually Something coalesces and it's like oh yes. There's puppets so So in that sense how it how have you over the years gotten comfortable? Sitting in that pocket of just bad writing to get to what eventually becomes really really nice and
00:50:40
Speaker
It's so hard. I mean, it doesn't feel good. You know, it's like you're in there and it's like you're just, you know, like when you get stuck in the rain and all your clothes are wet and they're like sticking to you and you're on the subway and everyone smells and you're like, this feels awful. Like I hate that I am enduring this. It's the same feeling, right? It's like wet jeans. That's the feeling of generating a bunch of crappy writing. And you just, I don't know, you kind of can't get them off, you know? And it's, I think you, it's almost,
00:51:10
Speaker
again, this might sound sort of melodramatic, but it almost feels to me like the way other people kind of process religious faith, which is I don't know, you know, I don't know for sure. But I think and I believe in my heart that like, if I stick this out, you know, something sort of beautiful and wonderful and true will come of it. So it's hard, you know, and again, it's kind of mixing so many metaphors, but I feel like it's like endurance training, you know, you kind of just train yourself to get sort of stronger and
00:51:36
Speaker
and to kind of learn how to endure pain a little bit. But I think you just have to believe, you know, you just really have to believe, like, I've got ideas in this head, and I know how to write, and I've been doing this for a long time, and I, you know, I have some sense of how sentences work. And if I just keep at it, if I just keep writing, I will get there. You know, the only way through it is through it. The only way to kind of
00:52:01
Speaker
I don't know, the only way to get better at writing is to write. And so you just, you suffer. You kind of grin and bear it, you know? Exactly, exactly. And also to that point of being comfortable of putting the bad work on display to get to the good songs. As you can already discern, I'm a Metallica junkie. And they are my home. I love it. They are my home team.
00:52:24
Speaker
And the videos that they put out ahead of their latest record, the making of whatever, spit out the bone, and then you realize how really jumbled and ugly the song sound. Even vocally, you're like, ugh, that's no good.
00:52:44
Speaker
and they put it out there and then eventually they work through all that and then when you hear that final track you're like oh yeah that is Metallica but for a while it was like oh this is gross like no thank you. Right and I'm sure you feel that you know as a writer too it's like your first draft is gonna be insane you know I mean it's
00:53:05
Speaker
It's like there's so much sort of, I mean, everyone says writing is rewriting and I think it's true. I mean, for me, it's like, and that's where the real kind of joy and fun of it is when you're sort of chiseling the marble, you know, when you've got the raw material in front of you and now you get to make it awesome. But getting the raw material out is really hard. But then that process of chiseling and sort of forming and editing and thinking and rethinking and moving things around.
00:53:27
Speaker
I mean, I'm a very kind of modular writer in a way. I almost never start with my first paragraph. I just kind of start in the middle and kind of warm my way out. I think often, actually, this quote from John Coltrane, which was, start in the middle and write in both directions at once, which is something I do. So there is that period at the end, once I've kind of thrown up all over the computer screen, where I'm just moving things around and trying to make sense, and it's like piecing a puzzle together.
00:53:53
Speaker
But to think of like that first draft where it's just a bunch of, you know, too many words. Yeah, I mean, that is excruciating and embarrassing and I do not have the balls Metallica have. So I certainly could not put that out in the world without, you know, just being mortified. But yeah, but I love that that band does that. I love that they're kind of fearless about it. You know, and they've earned it. I mean, they've been, I don't need to tell you, they've been around for so long. They've made so many incredible records.
00:54:20
Speaker
They mean so much to the people who love them that, yeah, they've earned it. And how are you these days building your writing practice?
Balancing Teaching and Writing
00:54:30
Speaker
What daily rituals do you adhere by so you're getting the work you want done, but you've also got a lot of other things on your plate. So how are you still carving out that sacred time for you to get your contracted work done, but also probably more creative stuff too?
00:54:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's really tricky. It's especially tricky with teaching, which is something a lot of writers do. And it's a nice counterpoint to the, you know, the more solitary and kind of lonesome work of writing. Teaching is really social. You're part of a faculty, you know, you're part of a class. You also get benefits at a steady salary and vacation days and things like that.
00:55:07
Speaker
So for me, balancing teaching and writing is always really hard because because teaching too is a creative act that takes up a lot of energy and it, you know, in the middle of the semester, it can be it's it's hard, you know, I'm barely sort of staying on top of my New Yorker contract and my duties as a professor. So it's hard to find room within that for, you know, other things I might want to do that are a little more creative or a little more weird or a little more I don't really know what they are, but I want to write it anyway.
00:55:32
Speaker
It's really hard. I mean, I maybe every writer says this, but I feel like I have an almost unhealthy ability to just spend, you know, all of my time by myself. I like solitude. I mean, I'm very fortunate. I have a loving partner. I have wonderful friends, but it's
00:55:51
Speaker
I really love being alone. And so I will just kind of lock myself in a closet. And that's it. I don't want to talk to anybody. And I'm very happy in that space. So I take little sojourns out of town. I think getting out of town really helps. I'll rent a little cabin somewhere in the woods and just go there by myself for a few days and just write and write and write and write and not talk to another
00:56:17
Speaker
living human will only talk to, you know, the birds and the trees and the stream and whatever else is around. But sometimes it is, you know, it's, it's as simple and also as, as kind of dramatic as that, you know, I just have to get out of town, have to go somewhere and say, all right, I'm not going to do anything, but right. And to, you know, make space for it that way. It's a luxury. And I know I'm very fortunate to be able to do that. And kids are, you know, family members who are relying on me, so I can, I can
00:56:45
Speaker
be sort of selfish about my time in that way. But that to me is a big thing. I'm a big fan of residency programs, which are also competitive and I know can feel like the sort of rarefied thing that only very lucky, already successful people get to do. But there is something about taking yourself out of your own context, taking yourself out of your own mess and going somewhere else and just saying, all right, I'm just going to write. Even if it's like just a friend's house while they're at work and you go and you spend the day there, I feel like that can be really helpful.
00:57:15
Speaker
What kind of self-talk do you employ if you find yourself a bit stuck creatively? God, I wish I had a good trick or a good thing. I mean, as I mentioned earlier, sometimes reading someone who I think writes really beautifully or writes really effectively, something that will ignite a little competitive spark in me can be really helpful. But in terms of sitting down and saying, like, Amanda, you know how to do this,
00:57:40
Speaker
you know, that you've been doing this for a long time, you have studied this, you teach this, you know, this sort of internal pep talks where you kind of try to convince yourself that you are something of an authority in your field, even when you don't feel remotely like one. Yeah, I mean, it's really hard. I don't know. I feel like it's you kind of reinvented every time, you know, and there's nothing more terrifying than looking at a blank space, you know, blank page and thinking, oh, my God, I have to fill this and I have no ideas and I don't know any words. And I don't know, you know, it's like the self doubt kind of creeps in so quickly.
00:58:10
Speaker
Um, and again, it's just this weird sort of question of faith of like, well, I can do this, or at least I'm going to try, right? I'm going to sit down and I'm going to try and maybe I'll get four or five words I like, or maybe I'll get one sentence I like, or maybe I'll have one idea and I'll express it in a way that feels somewhat true or somewhat useful. Uh, and you just kind of cling to those tiny victories, uh, until, until you have enough of them that it starts to feel like a real thing.
00:58:35
Speaker
And lastly, because I want to be mindful of your time, we're up against it, and I think a great place for us to kind of wrap things up would be you're of course a brilliant music writer, music critic, and what is it like for you? What are those times where you put a record on the record player or put your headphones on?
00:58:57
Speaker
if you're depends on the mood of course, but like what kind of records do you like to just put on from track one and play right through to the end to have that kind of immersive experience? Oh, it's a good question. Hmm.
00:59:10
Speaker
God, I'm such a big Dylan fan, which is, you know, I feel like that's a lame answer because everybody loves Bob Dylan. He won the Nobel Prize. But, you know, like Blonde on Blonde or Blood on the Tracks is a record that always energizes me. It's, you know, it's familiar, but I'll find something new in it every time. I've been having kind of a funny sort of jazz year. I know I already quoted John Coltrane, but I feel like, you know, Coltrane someone I sort of came into late and
00:59:38
Speaker
You know, those records, I've been listening to my favorite things, you know, over and over and over again, a lot the last few months. Yeah, so stuff like that. I don't know, jazz is kind of new for me, but I feel like there's a lot there that's really exciting. You know, a lot I don't understand yet. And for me as a critic and a writer, I think I'm, you know, I'm drawn to things I don't quite understand or I don't quite know how to explain. So that's been big for me the past few months. A lot of John Coltrane, a lot of Sonny Rollins.
01:00:07
Speaker
Yeah, I'm trying to think of what else. It's so hard, too, with my gig at The New Yorker. It's like every week it's something new. So I don't get as much kind of recreational listening time as I would like. I hear you there. With the reading for, say, the podcast or something, it'll be like I don't have a whole lot of latitude to maybe read a novel I'm interested in. I've got a gigantic pile of books just to try to churn through some supreme chore.
01:00:36
Speaker
I don't have the bandwidth to read a novel I want to read when there's this other pile of books to be able to have an educated or at least a deeply researched conversation with someone on the show. So I totally get where you're coming from.
01:00:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's really tough. And with reading what I'm teaching, it's the same thing too. It's like I'm reading my students' work or I'm reading the books that we're reading in class and there's not a ton of room for other stuff. So it's hard, you know, because you want to read expansively and read widely and listen expansively and listen widely. But it can be at odds with the job sometimes. Yeah. Amanda, where can people find you online and get more familiar with your work if they're not already?
01:01:14
Speaker
I'm sure I'm on Twitter. It's just my name, Amanda Petrasich. I'm on Instagram. So those two places probably the best and easiest way to find me. But also, you know, the New Yorker, I'm writing almost always at least one thing a week over there. So
01:01:33
Speaker
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for the time. I hope this is the round one of many in the future. There's so many things I'd love to dig into, but we're up against it right now, and we'll just have to pick up where we left off at another time, I hope. Yeah. Thank you so much, Brendan. It was such a pleasure to talk to you about all this.
01:01:51
Speaker
What a kind person. I can tell by the tone of someone's voice if they're into it. And Amanda was into it, man. Means the world to me. Go check out her work at the New Yorker and buy a book or two of hers. She's got a piece about Romstein, German metal burned, in this week's New Yorker. Check it out.
01:02:14
Speaker
the
01:02:34
Speaker
We tell true stories, man. To quote Seth Godin, people like us do things like this. This is our little corner of the internet. Let's broaden the corner we've painted ourselves into. Rage against the algorithm.
01:02:46
Speaker
Thanks to Goucher and Bay Path for the support. Hey, and thank you. This is what it's all about, man. Thank you for listening. Anything else? Oh yeah, consider leaving a review. I'd love to see us hit 100 ratings and we're 36 away. Are there 36 of you regular listeners?
01:03:06
Speaker
who have three minutes to get, I'd be honored for the review. So, all right, it's time to go. Remember, if you can't do interview, see ya.