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Episode 60—The Godfather of Creative Nonfiction: Lee Gutkind
198 Plays8 years ago
"In many ways the biggest challenge to figure out if you're gonna be a writer of nonfiction is to figure out what stories you can tell that no one else has told before," says Lee Gutkind. Hey, hey, it’s The Creative Nonfiction Podcast! This is the show where I interview the world’s best artists about creating works of nonfiction: documentary film, personal essay, memoir, narrative journalism, killer profiles, and reportage and dive into the origin story, what makes them great, and how you can apply their strategies of mastery to your own work. Today’s guest for Episode 60 (!) of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is none other than the Godfather, Lee Gutkind. His tagline on his website is Writer. Speaker. Innovator. He’s written or edited 49 books like Almost Human, The Best Seat in the House But You Have to Stand: The Game as Umpires See It, Truckin’ With Sam. He also founded the lit journal/now magazine Creative Nonfiction, which is an incredible well of great writing. What are you gonna learn from this episode? Lee tells you that you need to figure out what stories and YOU can tell that no one else has done before. How to find the people who want their stories told, and how to perservere in the face of untold failure. That’s a some good, good stuff. Before we dive into the interview, I ask that you leave a review on iTunes or even just a rating. Reviews are icing on the cake, but the more ratings, the more cred, the more people we can reach. Also, I have an email newsletter that I send out once a month. It’ gives my reading list for the month and what you may have missed from the podcast. Share this with a friend because I know you’re gonna dig it!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast with your host, Brendan O'Meara. This is the show where I interview the world's best artists about creating works of nonfiction. Documentary film, personal essay, memoir, narrative journalism, killer profiles, and reportage.
00:00:21
Speaker
and dive deep into the origin story of the creator, what makes them great, and how you can apply their strategies of mastery to your own work. Sound good? Hit the riff.
Lee Guttkind: The Godfather of Creative Nonfiction
00:00:38
Speaker
Today's guest for episode 60 of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast is none other than the Godfather, Lee Guttkind. He's the author of about 4,000 books by last count. My producer is nodding.
00:00:52
Speaker
His tagline on his website is Writer, Speaker, Innovator. He's written or edited 49 books, like Almost Human, The Best Seat in the House, But You Have to Stand, The Game is Umpires, See It, Truckin' with Sam, and many, many more. We'll put links to his book page for his website and the show notes because there are just far too many to link to individually.
00:01:17
Speaker
He also founded the Lit Journal, now magazine, Creative Nonfiction, which is an incredible well of great writing. I interview many of the essayists from the magazine on my own volition because they're just that good.
00:01:30
Speaker
And what are you going to learn from this episode? Lee tells you that you need to figure out what stories you can tell and no one else has done before. How to find the people who want their stories told in the first place and of course how to persevere in the face of untold failure. That's some good, good stuff.
00:01:51
Speaker
Before we dive into the interview, I ask that you leave a review on iTunes or even just a rating. Reviews are icing on the cake, but the more ratings, the more cred, the more people we can reach. Also, I have an email newsletter over on my website, brendanomero.com, that I send out just once a month. It gives you my reading list for the month and what you may have missed from the world of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
00:02:15
Speaker
Share this with a friend because I know you're gonna dig it. We're starting this interview when I asked Lee what he was driving at.
The Joy of Writing and Exploring New Worlds
00:02:25
Speaker
40 years ago when he was just cutting his teeth as a writer in this genre. Thanks for listening. Oh my God. Well, of course, the opportunity. The reason I do my work and the reason I like my work so much is, first of all, like every other writer, I love to write. It's my passion.
00:02:48
Speaker
It's aside from raising my son, it's probably the most satisfying thing that I can do. It's a very important part of my life, but on the other hand, or the other aspect is to kind of be welcome
00:03:08
Speaker
into these various different often conflicting milieus to be welcomed in or to figure out how to fit in and to learn from so many different people about so many different aspects of life is to me such an honor and a pleasure and a challenge
00:03:29
Speaker
And it fills me with excitement and a bit of trepidation but a lot of excitement to be able to be a chameleon and fit in and learn about stuff that I would never ever know. And so I walk into these situations whether it's baseball or organ transplantation and
00:03:57
Speaker
I feel excited on those two levels that i'm gonna learn something brand new i'm gonna meet some very interesting people who know a lot of stuff about whatever the subject is who are committed and compelled to do important work.
00:04:16
Speaker
And I'm going to have to figure out who they are from the inside out. And that's incredibly exciting. And at the same time, cooking up in my brain all the time is this idea that at some point all the stuff I'm going to learn
00:04:37
Speaker
process i'm gonna have to put on paper and present to a wide audience and so when i walk into these situations whether it's umpiring or something else i think about those two things all the time how i can fit what i can learn from the inside out and then how i'm gonna express it to the world.
00:05:02
Speaker
Where do you think that sensibility and that attraction to being chameleonic and diving into these subcultures to essentially be an anthropologist in a lot of ways? Where did that come from?
Influence of Military Experience on Writing
00:05:18
Speaker
I can't answer that exactly, but I can tell you that I went into the military when I got out of high school. I was fairly sheltered. I grew up in this small area in Pittsburgh called Squirrel Hill.
00:05:39
Speaker
And it was, Pittsburgh is an interesting place because even now, it's not really a homogeneous city. It's a place with pockets of different neighborhoods that are very tight and intimate. And the neighborhoods, even now with Pittsburgh as an international center, a very popular place, the neighborhoods kind of remain islands isolated from one another.
00:06:07
Speaker
And so there I was. And then I went into the military and I met people from all over the United States and of all different colors and nationalities. And I found that incredibly interesting and intriguing.
00:06:24
Speaker
And going back to my hometown afterwards, I thought this was a great beginning for me. This was a way to kind of learn so much more, as I did in the military, about different aspects of the world. So that was one thing. And then the other thing was, when I finally decided that what I wanted to do for the rest of my life was to become a writer,
00:06:47
Speaker
In many ways the biggest challenge the hardest thing to figure out if you're gonna be a writer of nonfiction is to figure out what stories you can tell that no one else is told before and so and so that that's kinda,
00:07:03
Speaker
I look for ideas that that can be turned into essays or more important to me into books and but that's that's how and and then once I gotta say that once.
00:07:18
Speaker
This motorcycle book was not a book about riding a motorcycle around the United States. I did that, but it was because what I wanted to do was learn a hell of a lot about the motorcycle subculture, why people ride motorcycles, who rides motorcycles, how motorcycles are put together.
00:07:38
Speaker
what kind of people, what kind of personality does it take to wander around the country on two wheels in the open air, especially during that time in the late 60s or early 70s when it was in some ways more dangerous to do that than it is today. So it's kind of a double thing. You're immersing yourself and you're doing something, but you're learning something new and then you're figuring out how you can spin that. So what it
00:08:07
Speaker
as you learn can be shared with a larger world. What strategies did you employ early on and then even today with your work to get that, I would say especially early on because now you have more of a reputation. So what strategies did you use to get the kind of access that you've gotten over the years to these subcultures so that they can trust you and let you be a participant or a fly on the wall?
00:08:35
Speaker
Well, first of all, yes, early on it was much more challenging, not necessarily for the motorcycle subculture, but getting involved in the world of umpires. What you need to try to do is to figure out who you're going to write about or what you're going to write about.
Challenges in Accessing Subjects and Overcoming Them
00:08:56
Speaker
People who want, whether they admit it or not, who want to be written about. People who feel in their heart they have stories, true stories, important, real stories that have never been told before.
00:09:11
Speaker
And so that's exactly what happened with with umpires. There were there was at the time only one book that I can remember. This is a long time ago. So maybe there was something else. But there were very few books, very few people were writing about umpires.
00:09:29
Speaker
And so approaching people who have not been written about before, who in their heart really want to be written about, featured and focused on, is one way of showing even though you don't have a lot of experience connecting with the
00:09:47
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them in that way is one way of getting yourself involved. And the other way to be accepted is to remember that you are someone who is supposed to be, as so many writers have said before, a fly on the wall.
00:10:02
Speaker
You have to kind of blend in figure out how to blend in so that even though you're inexperienced and even though you're making people uncomfortable you have to fit in so that you are hardly noticed until you find enough sea legs to take more to be more aggressive in doing your reporting.
00:10:24
Speaker
And then you have to just pretend that you're a really nice, honest, sincere person, and that all you want to really do in life is tell the umpire's story. So I did that, and I, in fact, knew some people who knew some people and vouched for me, and I got the access to these umpires who really wanted their stories told.
00:10:51
Speaker
I think in the very very last chapter or maybe it's even in in that author's note because there's that real that real tense scene where the umpires are the that that core group they're just they're super frustrated with just how the how the tensions are have risen just late in the seasons grind and at the very end like your your main guy is a ventil stat or Wendell stat
00:11:15
Speaker
Harry Wendell's dad, yeah. Yeah, like at the end, they were talking about, can you trust the writer? And eventually, he's just like, he doesn't care. And he's like, they'll be sending me all over the country doing exhibition games. But I'll tell you, I don't give a shit. It's about time people find out what umpires go through. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, so that's exactly what you're talking about. You found the people that really wanted that story told. And similarly, in a book that
00:11:44
Speaker
to me was my most important and personally important and character-shaping book, a book called Many Sleepless Nights, The World of Organ Transplantation. I was able to make a connection with this guy named Thomas Starzel who just died a few months ago, but he was this champion of liver transplantation
00:12:08
Speaker
But he was criticized and literally ostracized by a large block of the medical community because people thought that organ transplantation at that time was immoral and unethical and unscientific and could never work. And there was this guy, Tom Starzel, who said, I don't care what you think. I know I can make this work.
00:12:31
Speaker
I know I can save lives. And during the time right before I met him and connected with him, he had lost six, seven, eight patients in a row, literally in pools of blood. But he knew in his heart that what he was doing was going to change the medical world and change the lives of so many people.
00:12:56
Speaker
And so I caught him at that moment. And again, my promise always is to stay out of a person's way and to just watch and listen and not be a part of the team, but be an observer of the team, like, as you said, an anthropologist. And so I caught him at the right moment. And you have to catch people at the right moment when they think they have something really important to
00:13:26
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get well enough to suit them.
00:13:47
Speaker
at an inflection point sort of in their world where there is maybe that fork in the road or a little bit of inherent conflict which leads to great narrative. How do you position yourself to get at that inflection point in these subcultures' lives?
00:14:05
Speaker
I
Patience and Perseverance in Writing
00:14:06
Speaker
won't say frequently, but enough that you've been able to craft enough wonderful books about this. How do you get yourself to that point where you're at the moment where things are starting to crystallize and happen?
00:14:18
Speaker
Sometimes you don't get yourself there. I mean, sometimes the story gets you there, if you know what I mean. It's like you need to pick. Let me just go back and say that the challenge, that this is the biggest challenge in doing the work I do and the work other writers like me do is to
00:14:37
Speaker
is to find the right story and sometimes you know sometimes it takes a year or two years or three years looking for a book before you even start a book because you're waiting for that moment for that time when you can enter into a subject and you try to enter in before the tipping point.
00:14:58
Speaker
You suspect that there will be a tipping point, there will be the magic moment that compels and incurs change, and you need to get in there before that time.
00:15:14
Speaker
wait, whether it's for a month or a year or four or five years, and wait for that change to occur. And the change is everything. The change is the story because the narrative arc, you need to know when that change is going to occur or when it occurs because that will tell you everything you need to know about
00:15:46
Speaker
So there's a lot of timing involved and a lot of good luck. I mean, what would have happened if
00:15:53
Speaker
it would have been a totally different story, but maybe a pretty good story if Tom Starzell's efforts would have failed and if he had been drummed out of the medical community and if organ transplantation, liver transplantation never saved any more lives or enough lives to make it matter, then it's a different story. But you're still in there prior to that either tipping point or failed tipping point. And so you kind of, that's what you kind of know and hope for in the back of your mind.
00:16:23
Speaker
And then you watch how things develop. You never really know how things are going to go, but your focus is on what's my story and where am I going and how will that affect the people who are part of the story.
00:16:39
Speaker
When I was speaking with Dinty Moore a few weeks ago, he was talking about patience being so key for a writer. And I think he's speaking specifically about the writing process itself, being willing and patient to go through draft after draft after draft.
00:16:57
Speaker
It also sounds like a lot of what you were just saying in the research and the story mining phase that patience is also key. And how important is that sense of patience when the idea in your head you want it to come to fruition so quick but sometimes you do have to just wait and see how things play out and pan out and then when the moment's right dive in with all your resources.
00:17:25
Speaker
you've captured in some ways the unique aspect of writing creative non-fiction and doing this immersion work because if you're writing fiction or if you're writing a personal essay that doesn't require a great deal of immersion observation and
00:17:41
Speaker
research, yes, you will do many drafts because each draft will help you polish your prose better and also figure out what you really want to say about whatever that subject is and it's in no way surprising or shocking, I'm sure, to you or anyone else that writers will write 10, 20, 30.
00:18:06
Speaker
even 40 drafts of something until they feel it works. But what makes this immersion creative non-fiction work so much in many ways more challenging is the fact that you are waiting twice. You're waiting for the story to appear. You're waiting for the characters to do whatever it is they need to do and want to do.
00:18:30
Speaker
And then after it all happens, then you're writing it and going through that incredible monotonous and at the same time exhilarating revision experience. And so time, patience, yes, plenty of patience and plenty of time.
00:18:53
Speaker
And the absolute fight, especially early on in your life as a writer, the absolute fight to keep your confidence in yourself and in your story, that sooner or later something's gonna happen that's gonna trigger the moment when you begin to write, and that sooner or later, after that moment is triggered, if you continue to do draft after draft, you're gonna find that you are rendering
00:19:23
Speaker
the best version of the story that you have been waiting so long to tell.
00:19:28
Speaker
Confidence is so key and so hard to find, and then once found it's even hard to hold on to. How have you maintained your sense of confidence over the years, and how have you tried to instill confidence in others where you see the talent, you see work ethic and rigor, but maybe not the, they don't have the confidence,
00:19:53
Speaker
to keep going. So like two parts, how have you maintained it over the years and how do you instill it in others? Well, it's kind of you to assume that. You know, I haven't the slightest idea how, I mean, there's no magic formula to
00:20:15
Speaker
amassing the confidence and the courage to keep going what especially when you know that it's not working or Even worse when you don't know whether it's working or not, which so happened so often happens to a writer but you have to in the end believe in yourself and Believe in your mission, you know Believe in the fact that you have this idea and that the idea is good and that sooner or later
00:20:45
Speaker
As you work at it you have the work ethic and you have the grit and determination you have to feel confident enough that sooner or later it's gonna come out okay.
00:20:58
Speaker
And that doesn't necessarily mean that we don't have periods of great discomfort and insecurity and feeling of terrible nausea every time you look at your keyboard. But the test of any great writer is keeping going and not letting however you see failure as a way
00:21:22
Speaker
of stopping you. You may stop for a month, you may stop for six months, but you need to keep going back at it until it begins to work. I mean, gee whiz, that's what scientists do. Every major development in science doesn't necessarily happen the first time the scientist walks into the laboratory. It takes a long, long time to figure out how to cure polio or increase lifespan in cancer.
00:21:50
Speaker
and it takes a hell of a long time to shape a manuscript so that it works for you. What did you, when you were coming up, what did you struggle with in terms of writing, editing, revising, whatever? And what do you continue to struggle with now at this point in your career? I have much more confidence now in my voice.
00:22:19
Speaker
So I don't worry nearly as much as I used to about the person who was telling the story. I know I can do that.
00:22:31
Speaker
But I continue to, and that used to be a big problem, especially in the beginning, whose voice are you using? You know, most writers,
Crafting a Narrative Arc in Nonfiction
00:22:42
Speaker
when they begin, they have favorite writers, whether it's Susan Orlean or Ernest Hemingway or Thomas Wolfe or God knows or Tom Wolfe. And, you know, you think, well, I want to sound like Gaye Telise, or I want to sound
00:22:55
Speaker
like this person or that person it takes a while for you a long long while for you to find your voice but that's really important and that's what I initially struggled with now I find that I continually still struggle with to me what is now remember I do mostly
00:23:16
Speaker
in long form, that is to say much longer essays or books, books that are 65, 75, 80,000 words. And I struggle a lot with figuring out the most challenging part of book writing in nonfiction, and that is the overall narrative arc.
00:23:35
Speaker
You know, how do you get 80,000 words to all fit together and how do you go back and forth on 10 or 20 or 30 different tangents with a dozen different main characters and fit it all together so that they all work together and so that there's a great, terrific, compelling narrative line kind of glue that keeps the reader going from word one to word 80,000.
00:24:03
Speaker
And that to me is a gigantic challenge, and I fight with that all the time. So that's craft. To me, that's the hardest part of craft.
00:24:17
Speaker
But the other thing I fight about is the idea of figuring out for myself and for my readers what the story I am telling actually means, the reflection part, the insight part. So journalists generally, reporters generally are warned to stay out of the story, both literally and also from an interpretive point of view.
00:24:47
Speaker
But for most creative nonfiction writers, we are permitted to enter into the story, again, not necessarily as a character, but as a person, as a voice that guides a reader to a deeper understanding of what it is, the story, what of the mission and the meaning of the story that he or she is recreating.
00:25:14
Speaker
That to me is a big challenge to think analytically and to express what I believe and what I feel the stories mean and what the reader is supposed to take forth from the stories that I'm telling and from the insight I provide. And that's really a very challenging thing to me and it's a great balancing act because a reader wants to read a story
00:25:44
Speaker
and in some ways make his or her own determination about what it means, but I also know that a writer needs to guide the reader so that whatever the reader thinks about the mission and the meaning, that it's clear and that it's concise. The reader knows that I, as the narrator, the person on the inside is able to guide them
00:26:11
Speaker
toward a better understanding of the story that is being told and that they're reading.
00:26:17
Speaker
Getting back to that point you made about voice, when I watch this documentary, Jiro Dreams with Sushi, all the time, it's really about art. And if you just substitute whatever your craft is for the art of making the sushi, you can just plug and chug into that equation. And the main sushi chef, he was saying, in order to have
00:26:43
Speaker
Good a good sense of taste you have to eat really good food and then that struck out struck out to me is like alright if you really want to be a great writer you have to read great writing and
00:26:55
Speaker
in developing voice, how do you balance, or how did you balance, and you in general, reading the good writing, imitating the good writing, but ultimately having to then break out on your own spur and find your own taste and your own voice on the page while you've got that simmering underneath those influences of an Orlean or a Thales or all these people? How do you cultivate that?
00:27:25
Speaker
who the hell knows you know it's it's a process it's you know and it's like
00:27:34
Speaker
A writer is like any other artist. Picasso didn't start with his own unique brushstrokes. He learned from the masters and from life itself and slowly but surely created his own style. If you look at the early work of, say, Thales or Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion,
00:28:02
Speaker
You can see where they're going if you look at the early work and then their later work You can see that that there's it's a process. It's a it's a series of more sophisticated development until until there is a diddian voice or is a tilis voice and But but how you do that you do that by continuing at it and learning from
00:28:29
Speaker
from what you've done in the past and again what other people have done as well and because you know there's no really unique voice it's a voice, your voice is created by whatever it is inside of you that's making the words effective plus all the things you have learned from so many other people over the years.
00:28:54
Speaker
Yeah, your voice, in essence, becomes kind of a mixtape of all your favorite things, and then it's this amalgam that ultimately becomes you on the page and what people come to associate as you. Right, right. And I never think about it anymore, to be honest.
Creative Thinking vs. Craft Mastery in MFA Programs
00:29:13
Speaker
I sit down and i write and i mean i think about i think more i don't think about my voice as much as i think about what it is i'm saying and some decades ago i thought about my voice.
00:29:27
Speaker
first and foremost, and not a lot about what I'm saying. And let me say, Brendan, you mentioned to me in one of your emails about your doubts about, and if I'm interpreting this wrong, you can tell me, your doubts about the importance of MFA programs.
00:29:49
Speaker
And I think generally that we teach prospective writers, new writers, a hell of a lot of good things about the craft, about creative writing. But I don't think that we teach nearly enough to young writers, or let's say new writers, about what we can call creative thinking. That is to say that
00:30:16
Speaker
I mean, the fact of the matter is we're trying to write a great story. Yes, indeed, we're trying to do that. But we're trying to write a great story because we're trying to influence readers, because we're trying to impact something on those readers we want
00:30:31
Speaker
to change their minds or inform them about stuff they don't know. And that's our mission. Our mission is the message. Our mission and the way in which, and craft is the way in which you present your mission or your message. But I don't think we spend nearly enough time worrying and helping our students figure out how to polish, shave,
00:30:58
Speaker
clarify, expand their message, what it is their writing is supposed to do for the reader, other than just tell a true story.
00:31:09
Speaker
And how do you define what it means to have like rigor and tenacity and hard work in this line of
Daily Routine and Productivity Tips for Writers
00:31:17
Speaker
work? Because it can be fairly nebulous in an artistic pursuit, but in a, and you hear people go, Oh yeah, how'd you get where you are? Well, I really worked hard, but you know, what does that mean? And I always like getting, getting people's impression about what it means to have rigor and tenacity in this line of work. And I wonder how you define it.
00:31:35
Speaker
Well, you know, that's a tough question because everybody works so differently. So to me, I'm an incredibly regimented person. I get up at the same time, no matter how late I'm up the night before I get up at the same time, I don't sleep in.
00:31:52
Speaker
I drink the same coffee and I go through the same kind of routine and I get to my keyboard and I make sure that I produce something on a regular basis all the time and that really helps me.
00:32:09
Speaker
Whether I do well on that particular day or not, it doesn't really matter. What matters to me is that I continue to produce. Well, it does matter, but it doesn't matter. It doesn't hurt me if things don't go well. To me, the routine of it all is what I value and what has kept me going through all of those years.
00:32:30
Speaker
Other people may have different routines, but my guess is that every artist, every writer and every artist has a routine that they rely on, that they rarely waver from in order to keep the rhythm of your work going, both the rhythm of your work and on paper or on your display, but also in your mind.
00:32:57
Speaker
The book that you're writing or the books that I am writing are always sitting, whether I am doing yoga or taking a run or teaching a class or talking to you in a podcast, there is not a moment. There is not one single moment that I am alive where that book isn't kind of somewhere in the back of my head, just kind of cooking up
00:33:23
Speaker
and resting there, tickling me with ideas about what I'm going to do the following day.
00:33:30
Speaker
I think that's what we need to do. We need to establish a way to work that never disconnects us from our work completely. So that whether we're typing or not typing, the book or the essay is growing and changing somewhere in our minds.
00:33:55
Speaker
expand a little bit on your morning routine. When you wake up and how you go about conserving those cognitive calories, so you put some things on autopilot so you can then focus on the work. I'm in Pittsburgh about half the time.
00:34:11
Speaker
And in Pittsburgh, I know that my local coffee shop, Starbucks, opens at 6 AM. So my alarm will ring at about 5.30, and I'll do whatever people need to do to get ready for the world. And I will walk to Starbucks. And as I walk to Starbucks, I will begin to think much more carefully about what it is I'm going to be
00:34:35
Speaker
Typing or writing when I return and I try to do side streets. It's not that far away It's four or five blocks away
00:34:44
Speaker
but I go through alleys and side streets because I don't want to meet anyone that I know and because then I'm gonna have to talk to them and I don't want to talk to them and I don't want to be rude and I go into Starbucks and they know me and they usually have my my venti dark ready for me and I take my venti book dark and walk home in the same kind of secretive route again so that people don't see me as I take that walk and
00:35:10
Speaker
back and forth, I begin to focus on what it is I'm going to do at that particular point as a writer. And when I get back, I'm kind of ready. And that doesn't necessarily mean that I won't take a look to see if there's an important email. And it doesn't necessarily mean that I won't put on MSNBC or CNN for a minute or two to kind of figure out what terrible thing happened in Washington, D.C. on that particular day.
00:35:38
Speaker
But basically, I stay focused and move to my keyboard. And for the next, God knows how many hours, maybe it's only an hour, and maybe it's three or four or five hours, depending upon how my day and my mood and my momentum, I do what I need to do to continue on with whatever writing project. And I try to do that seven days a week, all the time.
00:36:08
Speaker
And whenever it's done, whenever I've had enough for the day or the day has run out, then I look at the other aspects of my life and move on.
00:36:23
Speaker
And I think what sometimes leads to a great morning is actually having like a good evening routine as well, kind of setting the pieces in motion the night before. And I was wondering, maybe do you have an evening routine where you set things up for the next day so that way you're always winning the morning and then subsequently winning the day?
00:36:46
Speaker
I never go to sleep without thinking for a moment about exactly what I just talked to you about, about what I'm going to write the following morning. And I never leave my keyboard at the end of whatever writing hour or two hours or eight hours. I never leave without figuring out what I'm going to do tomorrow.
00:37:08
Speaker
And this cooking up process that I told you that kind of stays in the back of my head in the back of my mind I planted there before I leave my work and so that again I'm ready for the following day.
00:37:23
Speaker
and before the light goes out and I decide it's time for me to sleep, I think pretty much for a second, it doesn't take a long time, I think pretty much about what my writing is going to bring to me, how I'm going to begin my work the following day.
00:37:40
Speaker
And who at a young age for you gave you the permission you needed to pursue this line of work? Like an influential mentor and permission, confidence to say, oh Lee, keep going. This is, you know, keep working, keep going. Yeah, first of all, okay, so I can give you
00:37:59
Speaker
three people. One, after the military I went into, I had no idea what the hell I was going to do. I graduated high school at the bottom of the fifth of my class, so I was certainly no scholar, and I certainly couldn't get into any major university. So after the military I enrolled in night school at the University of Pittsburgh, and my freshman English teacher
00:38:27
Speaker
Said to me after reading an essay that I wrote said to me and I have to admit maybe it was half joking or half not But he said to me, you know, this essay is pretty good You got to think about being a writer that really that really turned me on that I mean it was the first time anyone had really given me any career guidance or told me that I could do something really well and so that was really helpful and
00:38:52
Speaker
And then there was a professor at the university some years later whose name was Montgomery Culver who was a short story writer and Culver started the creative writing program at the University of Pittsburgh many years ago and he was very encouraging to me. I remember once writing this
00:39:13
Speaker
this short story that I thought was pretty funny. But I didn't know whether it was going to be anybody else thought was pretty funny. And we went to a workshop. It was an evening workshop. It was like an informal evening workshop for kind of invited students, not for credit or anything. And he said, and he would read one story every week, and then we would discuss it. And so I gave him my story.
00:39:41
Speaker
And I was really very nervous, really scared because I was a new writer and I had tried to do something funny. And he looked at it and he read the first page. And about the middle of the second page, he started to laugh like crazy. And that was one of the greatest feelings that I could remember.
00:40:07
Speaker
I made Monty laugh with my work and it gave me a great deal of confidence and he was very supportive of this clever stuff that I thought I was writing.
00:40:20
Speaker
So again, encouragement, encouragement and reinforcement was very helpful. And finally, I absolutely loved the work of Gay Talise. And I read Gay Talise so often, I just thought he did exactly what I wanted to do with my life.
00:40:39
Speaker
And he did it so much better, I know, than I'll ever be able to do. But just reading him, and I reached out to him early on in my life, he's been very supportive and helpful as an advisor and as a friend. So those three things gave me a great deal of confidence.
00:40:59
Speaker
It takes us to the months or maybe years leading up to when you started the journal and then what subsequently became the magazine, Creative Nonfiction.
Founding the Creative Nonfiction Journal
00:41:08
Speaker
What was the motivation and how did you get that off the ground? I'm doing this work, this Creative Nonfiction work.
00:41:18
Speaker
And it wasn't called creative nonfiction then. I'm writing these true stories. And I found myself in an English department, again, the University of Pittsburgh. And it's a fine place. The University of Pittsburgh was a fine place. And my colleagues in the English department and the writing program were absolutely nice people with talented people. But there was this incredible pushback
00:41:47
Speaker
over the idea that nonfiction could be artful, that nonfiction could stay on the same plateau and the same level as poetry and fiction and drama. The pushback was just off it. It had to do
00:42:07
Speaker
One thing with the whole idea in English departments, so often it's an issue of turf sometimes. If we start teaching narrative nonfiction or whatever you wanted to call it, then maybe the poets or the fiction writers or the composition folks or the literary people won't get as much money or as much support.
00:42:28
Speaker
So it was a turf issue, but it was also an issue of the fact that what we always thought about nonfiction was that it was journalism. Journalism was kind of like plumbing, and essays were supposed to be scholarly. But could you do an artful essay, and was it as challenging and important to the world as a good poem or a terrific short story? There was some massive pushback
00:42:56
Speaker
Not just at my university, but at other universities as well. And so I thought, okay, how do I get to these people? How do I get them to see that I'm not competing with them and that we should be offering our students this thing that's coming alive? I mean, Hemingway, Orwell,
00:43:19
Speaker
have written some absolutely terrific non-fiction over the years to new journalism with Gay Talise and Truman Capote. This was all happening and people were reading this work and appreciating it and not giving my students the opportunity to learn how to do this and to learn how important it was seemed to me
00:43:41
Speaker
not to be right and so how do I get to an academic? I get to an academic by maybe doing what they most appreciate and so I decided if I started a literary journal that looked like a poetry journal or looked like a fiction journal but was filled with narrative non-fiction alone then I might be able to get them to see that it was
00:44:05
Speaker
equally important and equally challenging to do. So that's why I started Creative Nonfiction as a journal, a literary journal. And frankly, I thought I was going to do this and I would publish a few issues and I would make my point and I would give the journal to my department and we would start something there.
00:44:29
Speaker
The journal made a significant national and soon and also international impact. But the folks in my department didn't think at that moment that it was worth taking over. And so I decided I'm not going to let this go. This was too important to me. And I established a independent nonprofit foundation and moved on from there.
00:44:54
Speaker
But the reason was I needed to prove to the world that this was as important as any other literary art form.
00:45:02
Speaker
As you write in the introduction to In Fact, it's funny that a lot of those early submissions that came from, say, poets and novelists, some of the people I suspect that you got some of that pushback from in the academic world that didn't want those blurred lines, turned out to be the people submitting, well, the type of person submitting early on to Creative Nonfiction.
00:45:28
Speaker
What degree of surprise did you find when you were like, wow, these people aren't reporters. They're actually the high art writers trying to do something that's verifiably true or a true story. It was really incredibly surprising. It was delightful and surprising. I don't know if you know this, but the second issue of creative nonfiction, every issue has a theme, and the second issue was poets writing prose.
00:45:55
Speaker
I think of that, maybe it was the third issue. Now I can't remember if it was two or three. But because I kept getting these knockout essays by poets, narrative essays. And I thought, wow, this is really incredible. This is wonderful. And it was very surprising to me. And I've got very, very few narrative essays from journalists.
00:46:21
Speaker
I thought it would just be the opposite. I had talked to so many journalists over the years who kept complaining to me that their editors didn't give them the opportunity to say what they wanted to say and the voice they wanted to use.
00:46:37
Speaker
They were hemmed in by the structure of what a journalistic story needed to be and by the idea that we could be objective and we should be objective and not subjective. So I thought this was a great opportunity for journalists to show what they could do, but it just didn't happen. It took a long time for it to happen.
00:47:00
Speaker
But poets flocked to our journal and it was delightful to have it happen. And there were, of course, terrific poets who were, in fact, writing creative nonfiction. W.S. Merwin wrote a wonderful memoir in the, oh, I think it was the late 70s, early 80s.
00:47:26
Speaker
And Diane Ackerman did some incredible work. And then, of course, later on, Mary Carr started writing nonfiction prose. So it was all very surprising and exciting. How has creative nonfiction evolved over the years beyond just the physical format? And where do you see it going?
00:47:48
Speaker
Okay, beyond the physical format, you know, now we have a second magazine, we're moving into the second year of our second magazine called True Story. And True Story is a one essay pocket-sized magazine that kind of looks like half of a chapbook, and which goes to our subscribers once a month.
00:48:14
Speaker
You can put it in your back pocket or hide it under the Kleenex box in your bathroom and read it. So that has occurred. And we'll see how well that goes. We're going to start a Kickstarter. It was funded for the first year by the National Endowment for the Arts. But we need to worry about funding for the upcoming couple of years. So there will be at the end of sometime in August a Kickstarter to try to raise enough funds to keep it going.
00:48:44
Speaker
We have an annual writers conference that we've done for five years in a row. This fifth year, over Memorial Day, and this fifth year, this fifth conference was really quite terrific. We had not a keynote speaker, but a keynote panel with high-ranking editors from Esquire, the New Yorker,
00:49:09
Speaker
Harper's, New York Times Magazine, and the Paris Review. And the keynote panel was the state of the American Magazine. And I led a two-hour discussion on what's going to happen in the world.
00:49:26
Speaker
Why are magazines still prospering in this digital age? Paper magazines, and where are they going to go in the future? So every Memorial Day we have that weekend, we have that conference, and we also have an online school. We offer online creative non-fiction classes to
00:49:51
Speaker
almost a thousand people from throughout the world on an annual basis. So that has occurred. And also we have a book imprint, in fact, books that are internationally distributed. We have some titles that have done very well.
00:50:09
Speaker
And so all of that is occurring, and we've gotten grants or have been recipients of some awards from the National Science Foundation. So all of that is occurring simultaneously. I work really hard to raise this money.
00:50:27
Speaker
And today, the nonprofit world, especially in literature, is not the world it was a long time ago. It's very, very difficult to keep a nonprofit literary organization afloat. And the more income you generate by doing other things like having online schools, the more you can stay alive.
00:50:53
Speaker
As you recall from my conversation a little while ago, we did not receive institutional support from the University of Pittsburgh, which turned out to be the best thing that could happen because now creative nonfiction is independent and doesn't have to rely on any institution to keep it going.
Evolving Definition of Success as a Writer
00:51:19
Speaker
What did a successful writer look like to you at, say, age 20, 30, 40? How did that evolve, the idea of success as a writer? Well, we all think about the same thing. We want to write a good book.
00:51:35
Speaker
And we wanted to be reviewed on the front page of the New York Times or somewhere in the Times or written about in the Times or in some other major publication. And we want to win a prize or two or three or four. So.
00:51:49
Speaker
I mean, that's kind of what most writers want. And so that's the way it looked to me then. And I wouldn't mind front page review in the Times and I wouldn't mind a few prizes. But that stuff now means much less to me than it used to. I think what happens is I know I mentioned this before.
00:52:12
Speaker
But it's really important to me, and I hope to many other writers, that the work we do means something bigger to the world. Yes, being a writer is egocentric and self-satisfying in many different ways. But to me, what my work, whether it's as an editor or a writer or even a speaker, what my work can do
00:52:40
Speaker
to change the shape of the world is to me incredibly important. And if I can touch a reader or two or three enough so that they'll let me know I have touched them, then that to me is the satisfying and perhaps triumphant experience of a writer's career. So it's great to be a bestseller. I've never have been. And I would love that.
00:53:10
Speaker
But that's not really what it's all about to me. And I don't think it should be really what it's all about to other writers. It's what our combined thoughts and ideas and actions can bring to a larger audience. The people we're really writing for. We are not writing for ourselves. We're writing for the bigger world. And I think that that's incredibly important. And to me, that's what keeps me going.
00:53:39
Speaker
And what are some books that you find yourself rereading over and over again, if in fact you are a rereader of books? I hardly reread books, but I go back to my friend Gay Thales' first collection of profiles where that famous Frank Sinatra had a cold profile appeared of fame and obscurity.
00:54:02
Speaker
He profiled Sinatra. He profiled Ava Gardner. He profiled a famous playwright at the time, or famous director Joshua Logan. He profiled Joe Louis. He really showed me how one can immerse themselves in other people's lives and capture those people in a very special way. And then the book that I go back to,
00:54:31
Speaker
all the time, is On the Road by Jack Kerouac. It's not just, I mean, it's the ultimate, the perfect, the wonderful, the greatest road book ever written. And it's so filled with passion and desire and incredibly
00:54:53
Speaker
mine forever and ever and so that's a book that once every couple years when I'm feeling that I need a little bit of inspiration I'll go back and read passages and and imagine Karawak working on that book as you know he wrote that the first the first of his final draft on this roll of paper that he pasted together
00:55:23
Speaker
He wrote it quickly in three or four or five weeks and he sat there the story is he sat there in his In his New York apartment in the middle of the summer changing his t-shirt from time to time and sweating as Air conditioning, of course, he didn't have and maybe wasn't available then and and produced this book So I like to read the book
00:55:48
Speaker
But then I like to imagine Kerouac and how hard he worked and how much of himself he poured into it. And it's an inspiring thing for me to do. If you had to start over at, say, age 25, even 30 in the year 2017, 2018, how would you approach doing this kind of journalism in this media climate?
00:56:15
Speaker
I'm not sure I would do it. I don't know. I don't want to start over, Brendan. That's too difficult. I mean, who knows? My life has turned out to be a pretty damn good life.
00:56:30
Speaker
And, you know, and I expect that I will continue to do my work for a long, long time. Starting over never is something I, it's, I mean, every day to me is a new start, and everything I write is a new start. And I guess I would do the same thing, I guess, I don't know. I don't even want to know.
00:56:54
Speaker
What appeals more to your taste, research reporting, writing, or editing revising? They're all part of the same process. You know, it's one, two, three, four, five. The immersion part to me is the greatest. Again, because a writer is so alone with his or her work, whether you're working, even if you're working in a coffee shop, which many writers do these
00:57:28
Speaker
keyboard. It's you and your yellow pad. It's just you. It drives you crazy. It's the loneliness and the loneliness and the aloneness and the isolation. And you can't quite talk about it. You can't write something and then go to your local bar and talk about what you've written. That would be really stupid. If you talk it out, maybe you're not going to write it out.
00:57:57
Speaker
So what's on your paper, what's in your display is only for you to know until you think you're ready to share it with the world. And so doing these immersions and forcing yourself out into the world is an absolute wonderful thing. It's a great
00:58:16
Speaker
Balance to the lonely independence that you have when it's only you and your keyboard in your room and your coffee and the ticking of the clock as the minutes and the hours go by.
00:58:31
Speaker
What can somebody, an emerging writer, like novice, intermediate, even someone who you would on paper consider an expert, even though you never truly master it, what can somebody do today to become a better crafter of these kinds of true stories? A sharpening the saw type exercise that you might be able to do daily to say, all right, I'm gonna keep trying to improve that little bit.
00:58:59
Speaker
I'm not sure that that sharpening of the saw every day is the way in which you go about doing, you get yourself ready to do this work. I think that what we need to do, I talked to you before about routine, we need to establish a routine, but we also have to be incredibly unbelievably spontaneous to experience as much of the world as we can.
00:59:24
Speaker
So do your four hours with your keyboard and then, god damn it, do something else. Connect with other people and learn from those other people. And it will bring you insight and satisfaction and keep you thinking about not only what you're writing about today but what you're going to write about tomorrow.
00:59:46
Speaker
And before I let you get out of here, Lee, where does your optimism lie with this kind of work and the state of magazines and narrative journalism in general? Well, creative nonfiction is the fastest growing genre in the publishing industry.
Optimism for the Future of Creative Nonfiction
01:00:04
Speaker
And academics more and more are capturing using the techniques of the creative
01:00:16
Speaker
We've been telling stories beginning with the Bible, and we're still telling stories now, and stories are, as I said from a commercial point of view, are incredibly important and popular, and stories connect other people in all kinds of different ways. And here we are, professional storytellers.
01:00:40
Speaker
The art of the story is becoming of the true story especially is becoming so much more recognized and and and lose something really important in our society in all societies.
01:00:53
Speaker
And I think that that's going to continue to happen. I'm encouraged by the fact that more magazines are writing or publishing longer stories. Even our little true story magazine, now we have maybe 1,500 subscribers. And people are reading these long stories and enjoying them and benefiting from them. I'm quite optimistic about
01:01:23
Speaker
There's a lot of things I'm not necessarily optimistic about, but creative nonfiction, the idea of writing true stories, has changed our culture in many very important ways, and I think it's going to continue.
01:01:40
Speaker
That's gonna do it folks. Thanks again to Lee Gookin for coming on the podcast and sharing his experiences and his stories and advice about what it means to create works of great nonfiction.
01:01:56
Speaker
as a final call to action i just ask that again leave reviews share with a friend uh put a rating down uh like i said it all helps helps us ranking invisibility and that's what we're after is to try to be more visible
01:02:13
Speaker
Showcase more writers showcase their work and Be a be a fun place to share these kind of ideas and these interviews and get get their work in front of more people That's always the motivation and the ethos of this podcast. So if you would do that, I would deeply appreciate it Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with another episode of the creative nonfiction podcast. Thank you