Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 298: Rachel Krantz is 'Open'
201 Plays3 years ago
Rachel Krantz (@RachelKrantz) is the author of Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation, and Non-Monogamy (Harmony, 2022).
Social: @CNFPod
Support: patreon.com/cnfpod
Sponsor: West Virg. Wesley College's MFA in Creative Writing
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Support for Writers
00:00:01
Speaker
AC and efforts it's that time of year you're getting on that treadmill you might even be hiring a personal trainer for that hot body or soft AF in my case but maybe you're writing needs a boost that little something something in your corner someone
00:00:19
Speaker
to cut me, Nick, or maybe even throw in the towel. No, we don't do that here. We don't give up seeing efforts. If you're working on a book, an essay, a query, book proposal, and you're ready to level up, email me at Brendan at BrendanTheMare.com, and we'll start a dialogue. I'd be honored to help you get where you want to go, okay? Writing a book has taught me it really takes a village, or ideally you have a village around you supporting you. And I think especially, potentially, if you're writing memoir,
00:00:49
Speaker
That's very important because it's just so emotionally difficult in different ways and different moments to not take things personally or to not feel afraid of, you know, how it's going to be received.
Rachel Krantz & 'Open': Themes of Love and Non-Monogamy
00:01:10
Speaker
Oh, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going? Rachel Krantz is here. Her last name ends in a Z. How badass is that? Debut author, and no, she did not play it safe with her first book.
00:01:30
Speaker
She's the author of Open. No, it's not the Andre Agassi memoir. It's Open, an uncensored memoir of love, liberation, and non-monogamy. It is published by Harmony. That's how you pronounce it. The book chronicles Rachel's experience in a polyamorous relationship. Polyam for those in the know.
00:01:50
Speaker
She is still non-monogamous with a different partner from the one in the book, though this is a raw, ruthless, and sexy story. She wrestles with this idea of liberation, jealousy, gaslighting, queer relationships, you name it. She journaled extensively and even recorded several of her conversations with key characters in the book. So she took her journalism skills and turned that shit on herself.
00:02:16
Speaker
As I speak with her about the book, I told her at some point it was exhausting. Seeing multiple people, then perhaps feeling jealous of the other people that your primary partner is seeing, the constant worry.
00:02:34
Speaker
It's a great book, though. Great book. I want to remind you, of course, to keep the conversation going on Twitter at cnfpod or Creative Nonfiction Podcast on Instagram. I'm still in the Twitter deprivation chamber, but I'm probably going to come up for air and check it for the first time in over a month, February 1st.
00:02:53
Speaker
Who knows what is even there anymore. It doesn't matter. I don't think anything matters. You can support the podcast by becoming a paid member at patreon.com slash cnfpod. As I say, this show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. Members get transcripts, chances to ask questions of future guests, though no one really takes me up on that offer, though I think it's pretty cool.
00:03:12
Speaker
special podcast you remember Sonya Weiser from last episode so 297 yes 297 she was just on the show depending on when you listen to this she was just on the show
00:03:28
Speaker
and she is open to doing like little micro podcasts, maybe even little video podcasts for the Patreon audience. I don't know, man. My New Year's resolution was less. One word, sum it up, less. Do less. I'm not doing less. I'll riff on that in the parting shot. Riff.
00:03:46
Speaker
free ways to support the show if you if you can't go to the patreon leave a kind review on apple podcasts or a nice little rating on spotify spotify is starting to be king and might even supply an apple podcast so getting those ratings up over there that's a free way to support the show quick and easy doesn't cost you a dime man
00:04:07
Speaker
written reviews for a little podcast that could go a long way toward validating the show for the wayward cnf'er who might not otherwise recognize uh... certainly my name in the show and the logo sucks so but if they see there's a shit ton of reviews it might be like alright i'll give this a chance and they might listen to rachel krantz and be like holy shit what a book what a person show notes and my up to eleven monthly newsletter can be found at brendanomare.com
00:04:35
Speaker
Once a month, as far as I can tell, you can't beat it. No spam. I got it all out of order. I don't know what's happening anymore. Support for the Creative Nonfiction podcast is brought to you by...
00:04:46
Speaker
West Virginia Wesleyan College's low residency MFA in creative writing. Now it's 10th year, 11th year maybe, I don't know, amazing. They've been at it for a while, so have we. This affordable program boasts a low student to faculty ratio and a strong sense of community. Recent CNF faculty include Randy Billings, Noble Jeremy Jones, and CNF Pottalum, Sarah Einstein. There's also fiction and poetry tracks with recent faculty including Ashley Bryant Phillips and Jacinda Townsend, as well as Diane Gilliam and Savannah Sipple.
00:05:15
Speaker
So no matter your discipline, man, if you're looking to up your craft or maybe even learn a new one, consider West Virginia Wesleyan right in the heart of Appalachia.
Rachel Krantz's Career and Personal Practices
00:05:25
Speaker
Visit nfa.wvwc.edu for more information and dates of enrollment.
00:05:31
Speaker
Had a great time talking to Rachel. Good time, great time. She's at Rachel Krantz on Twitter, and her website is racheljkrantz.com. Don't forget that, Jack. She was an award-winning journalist. She worked as the namer? Is that it? Let me look at this again. She is the namer of Bustle, huh, and one of its three founding editors.
00:06:01
Speaker
Wow. Wow. She served as features editor for three years. She worked at the Daily Beast as the homepage editor and was the lead editor for the nonprofit Mercy for Animals. She's a vegan, so we jam on some vegan goodness early in this conversation, so you'll forgive me, bro. But we talked some vegan mac and cheese recipes because we don't like contributing to the industrialized torture of billions of helpless animals, okay?
00:06:27
Speaker
I'm fired up today. Just threw around some sick iron in the CNF pod gym. I'm jacked up on that post-workout testosterone which makes me want to punch holes in the fucking walls. So let's kick it with Rachel Wright. Let's do this riff.
00:06:54
Speaker
figure that you've reevaluated or evaluated in how you're approaching the new year? That's a nice question. I mean, I feel like it's great timing with my book coming out on January 25. It's like kind of this very natural feeling of, yeah, this is a major transition. And there's a clear new goals that come around that and opportunities. So
00:07:23
Speaker
I feel like everything is pretty much centered around that right now. But I also think that this whole process, it is so filled with potential highs and lows that it kind of just reinforces to me the importance of having a meditation practice and I don't know the ways in which we think that happiness will come from these external
00:07:51
Speaker
accomplishments or events and sure those are fun but really it's like when you have this feeling like oh my god so many dreams are coming true right now and yet I'm still not in all moments like totally present with that or in ease it kind of just reinforces the importance to me of continuing to deepen my practice and to like view
00:08:20
Speaker
The goal, quote unquote, is just being able to be present in my own life and not viewing life as something that's going to happen once I reach certain benchmarks, because there's always just going to be more to reach.
00:08:35
Speaker
Yeah, and how have you, over the years, coached yourself to be content with the journey as the goal versus these outside, very capitalistic metrics that we as an American society so often attribute to our visions and our goals and our ambition? You know, how have you settled into that pocket of the journey versus, yeah, those outcomes? Well, I think it's very much a work in progress in that, like I was saying, this whole
00:09:05
Speaker
publishing a book process has revealed the ways in which I have a long way to go on that front and still feel myself really influenced by external factors. But I think the most important thing for me has been over the last, I guess, three or four years now, having a daily meditation practice and also having other daily practices that help me cultivate gratitude and appreciation. I've been really interested in
00:09:33
Speaker
teachers like Tara Brock and Rick Hansen, who study, you know, Rick Hansen studies the brain and talks about mindfulness from that perspective. And that was a sort of like hack so that you can be better at making money in your business. But like, how do you cultivate that sense of feeling more ease in your own life? And of course, they'll say meditation, but there's also really specific tricks that can make a big difference that I actually share at the end of my book.
Mindfulness and Gratitude in Writing
00:10:00
Speaker
just because they've helped me so much in terms of pausing to savor. Because we have a negativity bias, negative experiences get more readily encoded in our working memory, but positive experiences don't tend to register as something kind of worth forming that deeper neural pathway unless we really savor. So having a practice of, for example, whenever I see a bird landing on the tree outside my window when I'm working, I try to make it a practice to
00:10:31
Speaker
stop and pause whatever I'm doing and just savor this beautiful bird for like 10 or 15 seconds. And even just that change and that kind of interrupting and bringing myself back to reality in the present moment has been very helpful. Also keeping a gratitude journal where I write down five good things about each day at the end of the day I found really helps again retrain your mind
00:10:59
Speaker
not just to feel more gratitude, but to kind of combat that natural negativity bias because you're like on the lookout for the good. And when you know you sort of need to get your five good things, you start forming the mental habit of just noticing how much good is always happening all around us rather than only the things that are going wrong, which there are certainly many in the world, but there's also so much every day that I feel so grateful for that's just like,
00:11:26
Speaker
basic, you know, like having water and parts of my body that haven't broken down. And like, I mean, it's just amazing when you start counting them, they're way more than five. So yeah, those are some things I do.
00:11:39
Speaker
Yeah, I do a bit of a daily download of sorts at the end of the night, a very analog thing where I just kind of like, I've always journaled in the morning and then I've adopted in a different notebook kind of in my planner bullet journal. And at the end of the day, I just write a few sentences, but I also sometimes do like a sensory download. So I'll be like, what's one cool thing I saw, heard, tasted, felt, and
00:12:03
Speaker
smelled or and so that way it's it really keeps me all day sort of attuned to the senses and be like okay what you know what is cool like oh yeah that garlic cooking in the oil yeah I saw two bald eagles the other day that were just roosting up in a tree and so like those little things I found kinda kinda cool to just kinda I don't know it's a great way to sort of catalog the day be like alright yes I might have gotten like three rejections today but seeing those two bald eagles up there that was pretty cool
00:12:33
Speaker
Totally. Yeah. I love that. I'm going to try that. I love the idea of having it be through the senses and yeah, same idea. You're cultivating appreciation, right? And it really has been shown to me too, like just a greater sense of
00:12:49
Speaker
ease for people the more they can cultivate that in themselves. Yeah, and I found too, as much as I love to listen to podcasts or even music while cooking or walking the dog or doing anything of that nature, sometimes I feel like, whether it's food prep or let's just use food prep as an example, like just cutting the vegetables instead of having like
00:13:11
Speaker
an interview buzzing through your ears where you're trying to learn something. I found that it's just sometimes nice to just be totally quiet and just like, I don't know, just focus on making good cuts, making good slices and just staying in kind of more grounded in that moment instead of like constantly being bombarded with stimuli. I don't know if you feel that way too. Yes, absolutely. No, I love to do that too and be aware of that as well because I think just
00:13:38
Speaker
starting to go on meditation retreats gave me such a greater appreciation of silence and how draining it is even when it's good input to have all this input all the time of sounds or noise or podcasts or music it's all all those things can be great but you really notice when you spend some time without any of it in prolonged silence how restful it is how much easier it is to
00:14:07
Speaker
be present and define beauty in whatever you're doing because you're not as distracted and you have to make your own entertainment by appreciating things. And yeah, I really try to cultivate silence. Another way I do that is my partner and I moved in together during the pandemic. You know, I was living alone before and I realized that even though things were going
00:14:32
Speaker
pretty well considering we were now both home all the time, both around each other in a relatively small space that I was really missing solitude and that I was sometimes creating through being passive aggressive or kind of distant the space that I required. And so I was like, what if I just try to, what if we try to build some space into this very space lacking situation preemptively rather than
Relationship Dynamics and Vegan Lifestyle
00:14:59
Speaker
you know, having to get annoyed at each other or something to create it. And so we do this practice called Day of Silence every week and it's the expectation, it's in the calendar every week to reoccur where we just don't talk to each other that day and we try not to text or do any of that either. And it's really restorative to just not talk for a day. And, um,
00:15:26
Speaker
and great for the relationship too, because, you know, desire needs distance as Esther Perel writes about. And I think, you know, it's just, we take rest days when we exercise, hopefully, otherwise we would just like injure ourselves, but we don't tend to have that same attitude towards our romantic relationships, but it's very important so that you can kind of repair and keep growing. And where do you live right now?
00:15:56
Speaker
I live in Sacramento in Northern California because he's a Davis, but I pretty much move like once a year at this point. So yeah, I don't think we'll be staying here long-term and even thinking about, you know, maybe before we officially move, I could go somewhere else for certain months. Cause I, I've just really realized I love being in nature. I'm not quite in nature.
00:16:22
Speaker
Yeah, my wife and I were in Sacramento in early October for a big rock festival, aftershock festival. And yeah, that was really, really fun. Well, the concerts obviously, but also checking out some great vegan haunts in Sacramento because that's what my wife and I are plant-based vegans.
00:16:44
Speaker
Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, that's all I wanted to talk. Yeah, that's on my things that I wanted to talk to you about, too. There's an awesome bakery, and I can't believe I'm blanking on it. Oh, here it is, Mud Pie Stand. Have you been there?
00:16:58
Speaker
Oh, no, I haven't. Oh, my God. It's just a quaint little place, sort of downtown-ish there. And we went there for breakfast and lunch a couple of times, and they have an amazing cupcakes and everything, too. It doesn't look like your classic bakery that you would see in a movie, like really cute and everything. It's just this nice little place. It's just got some really great grub, and this breakfast burrito there is like off the hook. It's so good.
00:17:27
Speaker
Nice, I'll check it out. Thank you. Yeah. What is your, I'm always in search of the greatest vegan mac and cheese. What's your go-to vegan mac and cheese if you make that at all? Oh my gosh. Let's see. If I make a mac and cheese and I'm not claiming this is the best one, it just tends to be my go-to one because it has all these hidden vegetables in it in the sauce.
00:17:55
Speaker
My partner's allergic to cashew, and most of them are cashew-based, so this one I use, like macadamia, is by Vegan Recha.
00:18:04
Speaker
Mac and cheese is pretty nice Yeah from a few years ago a kind of a go-to is from I think it's called just from vegan comfort food I don't know it's kind of a kind of a You know just an obscure cookbook, but the the base of it is like Yukon gold potatoes carrots You know some oil of some kind yeah cashews are macadamia nuts, and you could either go all cashew or all macadamia nuts so like I
00:18:29
Speaker
use that, you blend that up and that's really a good and with some boiled onions and carrots and that way it all comes together. Oh, that sounds very similar to the one I use actually. Oh, nice. Yeah, and then it's a really good canvas to start from because then we'll make like a maybe a buffalo sauce and kind of trickle in some of that buffalo sauce and make like a buffalo you know quote-unquote chicken mac and cheese and you know whatever protein you want in there and it's a
00:18:57
Speaker
Really, it's just fantastic and it's rich and it does taste creamy even though there's not an ounce of dairy and it's amazing Now you're you're someone you've got a lot of publishing credits from across all sorts of different kind of media like whether it be You know radio and print online and you've got this book coming out, too So how is all that sort of media training and all that media experience and writing? how is that comparing to what you're now doing for your sort of book marketing and book promotion and
00:19:27
Speaker
Um, well, it's been very useful because a lot of the coverage I've gotten has been through just knowing how to network through Twitter or reach out to people. And I think that having a history of connections with people or having all those clips helps me just kind of, you know, seem more credible to people, even though the topic is one that people might write off as not serious on first glance that they can also just see my background in
00:19:57
Speaker
Journalism and the awards and all that and be like, okay, maybe she's legit and I think it's also helped me in knowing what a smart strategy might be in terms of marketing and you know placing excerpts but also original pieces and and kind of
00:20:18
Speaker
stuff that I could do that doesn't necessarily need to be directly about the book that still helps promote the book that I think people would be interested in or that helps kind of also give some love and press to other writers in my writer community. So yeah, I think it's definitely helped a lot. And I've felt for the people in my in my author community, which was started by this writer named Liv Stratton,
00:20:47
Speaker
during the pandemic for debut authors with books coming out in 2020, 2021, and now 2022. And for us to kind of commiserate a network and exchange ideas and yeah, see how it's really been a big advantage for me to have had this background and try to help how I can, you know, pay that forward. Now, where did you grow up?
00:21:14
Speaker
I grew up in Oakland, California in the Bay Area. Okay, very nice. And so growing up there, how does young Rachel sort of get the writing bug?
Rachel's Early Writing Journey & Overcoming Writer's Block
00:21:27
Speaker
Well, I think ever since I learned to write, I was writing. So in second grade, I remember they had where we would often like make books and they gave us sort of like a laminated thing to put on the cover and
00:21:42
Speaker
And I was always writing nonfiction. I was always writing about my best friend or about a trip I took to Seattle or these other things. So I guess I was always kind of inclined to do first-person journalism, but not quite journalism yet. Then in fourth grade, I remember we had an assignment to retell
00:22:07
Speaker
the creation myth, I went to a Jewish day school and I thought that was really cool. And I just remember that being the first thing where I really felt like very recognized by my teacher and other people like, whoa, what did you do? Cause I did this whole like feminist retelling of the creation method. And I think people were kind of shocked. And, and that was when I started, I think maybe more formed the identity of people saying like, maybe you're going to be a writer.
00:22:33
Speaker
And, you know, I met in high school. I was really lucky to have great English teachers and a great journalism program. And that's where I started learning to report and also after school program now called YR Media, then called Youth Radio that helped train high school age kids in radio production. And so, yeah, I just learned a lot about how to report when I was still in high school, which was a huge
00:23:03
Speaker
advantage for me when I started entering the field after college. Did the reporting and information gathering process of this whole morass that we're in, is that something that really appealed to you early on and might still appeal to you most right now? Yeah, I do enjoy gathering information. I do. I think what I enjoy most is the excuse to talk to whoever I want to talk to, almost anyone.
00:23:33
Speaker
I feel like that's a lot of what drives me is I just really enjoy having conversations with people, but I'm also somewhat introverted. And so when I have this pretense of a recorder or I'm doing an interview, I just, well, you know, you can like ask whatever you want and you can have these conversations where you wouldn't otherwise have and find out about other people's lives and experiences. So I very much identify with the type of journalist who's saying, you know,
00:24:03
Speaker
I guess like Didion, what did she say that I understand? I write to, you know, basically understand what I believe or think. And I think that's really true. I often feel like I'm at the point now where even though I can articulate things out loud relatively well, I don't feel like I can ever say it as exactly as I can write it. And so, yeah, reporting on things I just always like to
00:24:30
Speaker
have context for my thoughts and what I'm saying and get other perspectives and try to transmit something like the truth, I guess, but of course, knowing it's incredibly subjective and it's kind of just this record of my impressions right now frozen in that moment of wherever I had to stop reporting, basically.
00:24:53
Speaker
Now as writers, a lot of time there can be a fraught relationship with the blank page, the blinking cursor, all sorts of kind of self-doubt and negative self-talk that can creep in as that thing is just kind of blinking at you and taunting you. So what is your relationship to the blank page? Yeah, I mean I definitely sometimes experience writer's block where I guess the image that always comes to me is it sort of feels like
00:25:23
Speaker
if you're sick, and you know you have to throw up, but you can't, and you know you're gonna feel so much better after you do, but you just, everything in your body is resisting, you know? And that's what it feels sometimes like before I start something new and important, and there's just that blank page. I tend to work well with a deadline, so once I had the book deal, I had a year to write the book, and I,
00:25:53
Speaker
I didn't struggle with writer's block, hardly at all. And really, because of my training in media and being used to so quick turnaround, I was able to write for really long stretches of time, a lot of stuff, a lot of information work for long stretches, and not struggle with writer's block at that point. But I think that, you know, where I'm at now, thinking about, okay, what's next, I think it's a little bit
00:26:22
Speaker
difficult to make that leap just because this book is about to come out. And so I'm still so much in that realm of talking about open and talking about the themes in it that it's hard to kind of think about the next thing. But I'm definitely somewhat staring down that blank cursor. I've started on other things, but I don't feel like I'm in that flow yet or really show what the next book is. But I also trust I'll get there.
00:26:53
Speaker
I think that also with writer's block, something that's been important to me to recognize is the not writing is part of writing process. And if we're always writing and just saying the first thing that comes to our mind, that might keep us in the practice, but we also might not have much that's very digested or interesting to say. And so I've found it helpful to start thinking about observing the natural rhythms in my
00:27:21
Speaker
writing practice and viewing them almost as seasons so that there's going to be periods of sort of fallow periods that appear like nothing's happening, but it's like a necessary part. The seed is planted. It's, you know, it's fermenting and all of that. And then you're going to have spring where maybe the writing starts and fall will be the harvest and that's maybe like, you know, revision and editing.
00:27:50
Speaker
So just kind of recognizing that the fallow periods are necessary. Of course, it requires a self-knowledge of when you're just using that as an excuse or you're stuck and you kind of need to push yourself. But I'm not really of the school of like, you have to write every day. I actually think that for me, it's more like
00:28:11
Speaker
you would be wise to stare at a wall or stare at a tree every day and do nothing, or chop vegetables like you were talking about in Silence. That is equally important. Yeah, I 100% agree. My good friend Sonia Huber, who's an author, a great essayist, and teaches creative writing for a college in Connecticut, and she has a thing called tending the fallow, which is exactly what you're getting at.
00:28:39
Speaker
whereas like you basically kind of engineer a fallow period in into your writing year whereas you know this is the year all I'm going to be doing is I'm not going to write I'm not going to put any pressure on myself I might do a lot of reading I might just be taking a lot of notes maybe I'll do some research but just to
00:28:59
Speaker
There's this ethos of you just got to be on the treadmill the entire time but like as you were saying earlier about like for exercise you need rest. I think equally so. It's like you got to give the writerly part of you a bit of a reprieve and that way you can fill the well so you're not constantly just running on this on a quarter tank of gas where you just have to go to the gas station every single like every 10 minutes. It's like you got to let it refill.
00:29:24
Speaker
Yes. I love that. Tending the fallow period, that's what she said. Yeah. I love that. I'm going to think of that. I think that it's a symptom of the capitalist mentality of must always be productive. It's so ridiculous when you stop to think of it because it's like writers, our job is
00:29:47
Speaker
literally to like have interesting ideas and be able to communicate them in ways that are beautiful and effective and then make people feel things, you know, and it's like, how do we expect that if we're not actually taking the time to observe or appreciate life or think or do nothing, that there's going to be anything interesting to say, really, it's just going to be kind of ringing more hollow, I think, because, yeah, we're
00:30:16
Speaker
Is it just coming out of thin air? Maybe for some people, but not for me. I mean, for me, the best things come from the actual living and then digesting that and then figuring it out through writing and revision.
00:30:29
Speaker
Yeah, also the culture tends to have this hustle porn mentality where it's like you gotta crush and you gotta hustle all day long, no sleep, burn it at both ends, man. And that whole thing is just so antithetical to what it means to live a life worth living. So yeah, it's just always these kind of conflicting things, but if you can get away from that, you'll be a much more satisfied writer.
00:30:57
Speaker
And of course it's a luxury though. I want to admit, like, you know, I think so many people might feel that pressure because they're like, well, I have a day job or I have kids. And like, if I don't write during this two hour window, like I'm not going to be able to write and I have empathy for that too. And I feel that, I mean, I don't have kids. I used to have a day job might have to go back to having one, but part of the reason I
00:31:28
Speaker
was able to do this book and finally write the book proposal that I'd been putting off for a while and had no desire to do was I just quit my job to do it because I realized for me it was not going to happen unless I felt the pressure of like, I will not have any money coming in unless I get a book deal, which is kind of
The Writing Process: From Quitting Jobs to Creative Routines
00:31:48
Speaker
nuts. It's not a great plan, but it ended up working for me where I got lucky and I got a book deal that I could
00:31:55
Speaker
live off of while I was writing the book and really live that kind of authorial lifestyle of having lots of time in the day to structure as I wanted between writing and having that deadline but also you have plenty of time to think and rest so but yeah I just want to acknowledge it not everyone
00:32:16
Speaker
gets that opportunity. Well, take us to that moment where that's a big moment of bravery and it's a real brave moment to be like, you know what, the best way for me to
00:32:33
Speaker
crack the whip on myself in this sense is to really burn the bridge behind me and go all in. So what were the conversations you were having with yourself or maybe with some trusted friends when you were right before you made that that decision? I think I was thinking a good amount about death. And what would I regret if I were to die in a year? And this was, you know, pre-pandemic. I'm just kind of
00:33:02
Speaker
obsessed with thinking about that as a lot of writers are. And, um, and I think I'd also just been through something so emotionally trying and intense, um, with the relationship I depict an open and had had this idea of maybe one day this will be for a greater purpose than just myself. And I'll be able to like go back and retrace my steps and make sense of what happened. I had gotten to a point by the end of it of basically losing
00:33:32
Speaker
I'll trust in my judgment. I had accumulated so much audio at that point through this coping mechanism of recording conversations throughout that relationship with the idea that one day I might want to write about it, but really it was a coping mechanism because I felt so out of control in my open relationship, in this sub-dynamic where I was the submissive, and then also
00:34:00
Speaker
in this very eventually gaslit situation where he was always saying, no, you're misinterpreting reality. You're remembering things wrong. That's not what I said. And so with his consent, I was like, can I just record some of our difficult conversations? Some of our, every therapy session I was recording of my own and couples therapy, just an insane amount in an attempt to
00:34:26
Speaker
have some sort of solid record of something like reality because I no longer trusted myself to be a reliable witness. And so there was a desire to go back and see like what had actually happened and a real fear of that. And I knew that just the way I am, I do love writing, but I do thrive on having space for that. And because my job was already working as a writer, I just felt like,
00:34:55
Speaker
I was gonna keep putting off moving forward because I feel too tapped out, not have enough left of that desire to rank and be creative because I was already sort of getting those needs met through working as a freelance journalist. So yeah, I think it looked like having enough money saved that I could buy myself four or five months and just having encouragement from some great friends who were like,
00:35:24
Speaker
think you can do this. And also just that belief in myself, you know, that I had built my career to that point that I trusted, okay, this is difficult because I'm leaving a job at Mercy for Animals actually that I really loved, but I also trusted I'm probably going to be able to get a job if I have to, you know, and it might be annoying, but this can be a temporary leap of faith.
00:35:50
Speaker
When it comes to advice and everything, I've had a hard time with asking people, what's the best advice you have for people? And sometimes I feel like people who, and you hear this all the time with certain podcasts where there's always a Q&A component. And sometimes I struggle with that in a sense that
00:36:13
Speaker
A lot of people I feel like are trying to get a quick fix. You're like, oh, if I get the answer to this, then it will unlock something. And maybe to some degree that's true, but sometimes I feel like people are doing that as a way to sort of avoid doing the hard work of just kind of, I don't know, sometimes the only way through it is through it and through getting all those experiences.
00:36:34
Speaker
So I just kind of wanted to extend to you kind of a two-parter in a sense, like maybe, you know, what is some of the best advice that you've received? And maybe what is some of the best advice that you've just received from yourself, just hard-won advice through your own experience? That's a good question.
00:36:52
Speaker
Um, and do you mean advice about writing or just advice in general? I guess, I guess, uh, well, if you have, if, if anything readily comes to mind in both instances, by all means, I was kind of thinking maybe just with respect to writing, maybe just to simplify matters, you know, maybe just, you know, you can keep it to writing, which in a lot of ways can be really applied to life and vice versa. Okay. With writing, what is the best, oh my gosh, there's been so much. And I do tend to really like listening to podcasts and hearing other
00:37:22
Speaker
writer's advice, but I hear what you're saying. And it can be a form of procrastination, but I also feel like it's part of my process just to feel more in dialogue with even people I haven't met and in community hearing what works for them. I mean, a lot of what we talked about in terms of the respecting the fallow periods is really good advice that I don't know if someone gave me or it gave myself. I feel like that's really central for me. I also actually,
00:37:52
Speaker
Really, just on a practical small level, felt like the advice Adam, who's the central person in the relationship in the book, gave me around writing early on was to, when he would write, he would always start the day with reading, and then he would write. And I think that really instilled in me the importance of always reading.
00:38:17
Speaker
and kind of warming up your brain with other people's voices a lot of the times. And I still find that a really nice practice to kind of, when I'm in the flow of writing to, before I jump in in the morning, you know, read someone else who's doing good work. And I find that, yeah, reading is so much of becoming a good writer and reading outside your genre is important as well.
00:38:45
Speaker
So I guess that's maybe some advice that comes to mind.
00:38:49
Speaker
Nice, nice. And what was the second part of the question? I guess it was, well, yeah, advice you might have received from other people, and it looks like that Adam, who's a pseudonym for the person in the book, gave you that. But then there's others that you just kind of, advice that you've just earned yourself through doing the work. Like, oh, this is really, this is work for me just through sheer, the sheer act of will of doing the thing. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think
00:39:19
Speaker
That meditation is, again, like a really important part I've realized of potentially a writing practice because it, for me, just cultivates more clarity around my own thoughts and is so connected to the writer's mind, which is kind of already observing from the outside. But I think it just increases your ability to sit with discomfort and that a lot of the best work can come from
00:39:49
Speaker
the scariest places inside you to confront. And so the more you can fortify yourself to be able to confront those, not through just meditation, but also through having some sort of writing community, having a therapist, ideally, doing other practices that help your mental health. Like for me, that's baking. I bake pretty much every day, usually in silence. And that is part of my writing process,
00:40:16
Speaker
than just kneading the dough and thinking and working out the emotions often that I was surfacing and writing about some pretty traumatic, difficult things. Dancing, even getting stoned in moderation, I've realized is an important part of my practice. I think that in the book, you see me abusing marijuana to a point where it's no longer beneficial to my practice or my life. But now I'm lucky I'm in a much better place where I've realized, oh,
00:40:45
Speaker
When I hit that point where I'm pushing myself too hard and I'm stuck or I just need to process something on a different level, getting high and keeping a notebook out and writing down ideas and then dancing is a really great thing to do once every two weeks or something. I find it actually is a very important part of my process that I've embraced. I think it's all about just finding those things that
00:41:11
Speaker
fortify you, help you sit with difficult emotions, and yeah, help you process on kind of deeper levels than just the cerebral.
00:41:23
Speaker
Now with your book, part of the hook of the selling of it, I forget where I read it, so it might have just been an email from your publicist, but it's a reported memoir.
Crafting 'Open': Balancing Personal Narrative and Research
00:41:38
Speaker
And why was it important for you to use that as a qualifier as part of the memoir and sort of the branding of this memoir? Yeah. Well, because first of all, it is.
00:41:53
Speaker
I did, you know, five years of both immersion journalism and interviews and research and reading incredibly widely went into this book. And so it really is both, even though it reads very narratively, like a memoir or novel way, that there's this kind of interwovenness of outside context. So I'm sort of the case study and then you have
00:42:21
Speaker
psychologists commenting on how this is indicative of larger trends or you're learning about, you know, what percent of people also have these desires or, you know, whether what I'm or other people experiencing, like, how does this reflect larger things going on in our society? And to me, it was just really important to have that context. And it was also what came naturally to me as a reporter who likes to write first person journalism.
00:42:49
Speaker
And I think that with this subject matter, there is such a way that women especially who write about sex or the romantic are dismissed as confessional or less serious. And a big part of the political statement I'm trying to make with this book is that is a harmful and false Madonna or binary to say either I can be a serious, respected, investigative, award-winning journalist
00:43:19
Speaker
or I'm someone who writes about her sex life and her romantic and sexual psychology in explicit unflinchingly honest detail and no one's gonna take me like as a professional person anymore. And I just think that that binary is just very indicative of how puritanical we still are and also how we silence people especially who are marginalized by making them have to choose between
00:43:49
Speaker
being quote unquote respectable and being able to tell the true experience of their lives and you know, sex and relationships, it drives so much of our life. Like arguably the most of it is about that at the root of it and power dynamics as well that I really explore. And so yeah, I'm just kind of, I guess in saying that demanding that journalists who might be
00:44:17
Speaker
tempted to dismiss the book as, you know, just a tell-all memoir, or do I have to maybe take it a little more seriously because it is reported. Now, given that you recorded so many of the conversations you had and you were also extensively journaling throughout your entire experience, you know, it's one thing for a lot of people who write memoirs that can, that are, they're relying on memory and they're picking out a scab that it can be like a,
00:44:45
Speaker
problematic or traumatic. But you actually had like stone cold audio at your fingertips as well as your journal entries. So what was that experience like for you to go back and mine that information given that it's so visceral? So what was that experience like for you to relive it in such really vibrant media that you had at your disposal?
00:45:13
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, thanks for these questions. It's so fun to like talk about the process behind it and I really appreciate it. I felt that it was both incredibly therapeutic and validating and also at times re-traumatizing and made me feel like, oh my God, I'm crazy. You know, like, and just feel a real compassion for myself because I would have that voice being like, this is crazy. Like you have years of therapy sessions recorded. Like that is,
00:45:40
Speaker
That is like, how much crazier does it get? But also like a compassion of understanding why and looking at the dialogue of, you know, the reality of how I was being spoken to and just being so grateful that I have this record and also kind of as I was living it, I was like, I'm in no way sure I'm going to ever write a book. I'm definitely not in a state
00:46:05
Speaker
to write a book now, I can barely focus on reading, but I know this is interesting and could potentially be valuable to show how someone who starts out relatively self-assured can over the course of years in the right power dynamic and enough gaslighting kind of lose all trust in her own judgment and let someone else's mind overtake her own in such a way
00:46:35
Speaker
I just felt like I knew enough to know as I was living it, like this is an interesting story and it became, like I said, a sort of coping mechanism. So I guess going back and looking at all that, I felt this mix of like on the one hand, this impulse to judge myself or be almost like terrified by this record I had amassed and also like compassion for myself and sort of a pride of like
00:47:03
Speaker
good for me, like that's pretty badass. And so it was a whole mix of things. And also I had to be careful to, you know, keep not just talking with the therapist I was interviewing for the book and who are reviewing any of those transcripts, but, you know, my own counselor and trying to parse apart like how much is too much. So for example, I had recorded every couples therapy session
00:47:31
Speaker
And it was just way too many, you know, I did audio transcripts wasted way too much in my advance, arguably getting those transcribed. I just realized, like, this is too painful. Still, I can't, like, this is the equivalent of emotional cutting to just, like, make myself reread all of this. But I did select and choose and had the wherewithal at the time to kind of almost mark in my phone, like, important conversation, you know?
00:48:00
Speaker
I just kind of chose a couple out of the many, many, many conversations that would have illustrated how gaslighting works or emotional abuse works. I really just chose to like focus on only a couple and go really in depth on that and have those be the ones that psychologists are commenting on in the footnotes. And working on that was like very validating, but it was also often really upsetting because I had to continually confront
00:48:29
Speaker
what had happened and also the ways it might have been more harmful to me than I was admitting. And also the ways in which his voice was very much still in my head throughout the whole process, trying to say, oh, this is what you're going to do. This is how you're going to spin the narrative, making yourself some victim. And I was having to still kind of do battle with that. But I think for me, just because of my particular psychology and leanings as a writer, it was what I needed
00:48:59
Speaker
to do to kind of find some sort of closure. Now, to write a successful memoir of any kind, of which this one is very much so, you need some degree of distance. That's always the advice you'll hear from anybody. It's just like, do you have enough distance from the subject to write it and to write it well?
00:49:19
Speaker
And given the material that you had at your disposal, like the fact that it was so, I don't know, very present because you could listen to things and read transcripts, did you ever run into the problem that it...
00:49:35
Speaker
it closed the distance and made it harder to write or maybe it was the other way around. I don't know. I can see it, that information being or the transcripts or the audio that you had that you might have thought you had some distance and then all of a sudden it maybe you didn't have quite as much as you thought. There were certainly times where I was like, oh, why is my, you know, I write about this in the book, like, why is my heart being in my ears? Like, why am I dizzy? And I'd be like, oh, I'm having a, like,
00:50:05
Speaker
stress PTSD response to, you know, having been looking at, uh, you know, a chapter that describes like my own physical assault, like, you know, working on this for hours. And, and it was almost, yeah, like continually humbling. Um, so definitely that happens sometimes, but I do think more often it helped me
00:50:29
Speaker
form some distance because I just, especially when I was looking at the transcripts and the places where I was having psychologists comment on them, it was like I was able to, yeah, like view it as, okay, this is Rachel and Adam, you know, speaking, and I am not the same person now. I'm sure he's not the same person now. This is really what happened to verbatim.
00:50:57
Speaker
But there's that distance when you sort of see it in print rather than just your memory as this kind of recorded transcript in the same way I've put together so many stories over the years, you know, based on transcript, transcribed interviews with people. So it didn't help distance things and sometimes for sure.
00:51:17
Speaker
Now there's an interesting sort of structural thing I wanted to ask you about as well. And so over the course of reading the book, just given my impression of Adam, let's say, just for me as a reader, early on I could tell like, ooh, this feels controlling. And even gaslighting before you bring in gaslighting. I could just get the sense. And it's a testament to you of a true like a show versus telling thing. Like I just felt the pulse of that.
00:51:47
Speaker
And then at the very close to the end, you were sharing pages with people close to you. And in solidarity, a lot of people were like, yeah, like fuck him, kick him in the nuts or whatever. And then it was kind of like an author's note in the end embedded in this chapter.
00:52:04
Speaker
of you saying, like, listen, I don't want him to, I try to be very honest. I'm not trying to make him look bad. I don't have any score to settle, essentially. So I was just asking you, like, why maybe did you put that there versus maybe an author's note at the beginning as like kind of a preface? I just wanted to get a sense of what that decision was like for you. Yeah. Wow. Thanks for asking. I think it was essential to me to add that because I just have wrestled with
00:52:33
Speaker
that so much over the course of this of how do I tell the truth in a way that's ethical, that doesn't reduce him to a villain and me to a victim, but his complex character portrait of flawed people on both sides. And I saw how difficult it is not to fall into that structure or narrative, even when you're consciously trying to avoid it. And I know that I didn't put it in the author's note at the beginning because I don't
00:53:02
Speaker
want to ruin it for people too early. Um, but that's where it's going.
Complex Relationships and Authenticity in Memoir
00:53:08
Speaker
I like that. Yeah. They're kind of picking up on the red flags themselves, but maybe they're not really sure till later on. And I also know people skip offers notes a lot. And by the point someone reads that at the end of the book, they have been through so much of this with me and ideally also.
00:53:26
Speaker
you know, seeing what's compelling and lovable about Adam as well. And so it's had those moments of feeling conflicted or, you know, even sorry for him in moments hopefully. So I feel like it's important to reiterate that, especially just to model how I hope we will continue having conversations in our culture in this kind of, quote unquote, post-me-too moment where it's very important for people to tell their stories
00:53:56
Speaker
But I think it's also very important that we have compassion and exploration for what is the psychology and suffering that's driving mostly men to do these things? Like how is this a symptom of patriarchy and the ways men have been forced to push their emotions down and disown their own fragility? And so then they try to control others to prove their strength.
00:54:24
Speaker
I think that that's not the same thing as absolving people at all for responsibility, for their behavior. Like anyone who reads it will see I have really, in some ways I've protected Adam so much by changing identifying characteristics and his name and trying to make him a very complex person that he was and saying what I still care about and love about him. But I mean, in other ways, like he's really fully exposed here and didn't have much say in it at all.
00:54:53
Speaker
And to just have compassion for that, to remind the reader that, like, I don't want you to cancel him because this is going to be enough as it is. And I'm not saying people getting canceled or losing their job is never a right or just outcome in other situations. But in this situation, that is not what I'm asking for or what I want. What I want is actually for him to examine himself and also for the reader to examine themselves and see how
00:55:22
Speaker
Both ends of this kind of dynamic and power structures might be playing out in their relationships. Given that the title of the book is open and uncensored memoir of love, liberation, and non-monogamy, to me it felt like it was definitely more about the gaslighting. It could very well have been like confessions of a gaslit polyam relationship. I wonder if just at what
00:55:52
Speaker
point over the course of your your writing in the discovery phase of this as you're looking to embark on writing this did it feel like it was yeah there there's a lot of the very overt sex in it but it really is underneath it's very much more about someone who's gaslit and recovering from it and traumatized by it yeah um i think that yeah be clean clear and though writing the book that that was so much part of the story you know is like
00:56:21
Speaker
The nominogamy is how it's being marketed and it's how I sold the proposal because that's the sexy thing, right? And it is also the lens in which I was viewing this imaginary future book through as I was in living still, right? And kind of the fantasy of like, oh, maybe one day I'll write about this, but I wasn't imagining I'll write about gaslighting. But I did also sort of know that that was a lot of what was actually interesting
00:56:50
Speaker
that what was happening because I was often recording examples of that with this consent. I think one important turning point was after I sold the proposal, my editor, Donna Lefredo, to her credit, I told her, look, I actually have like a couple chapters I've just written on my own about the beginning of this relationship. This is not how I initially sold the book. It was going to be a little more distanced and a little more
00:57:20
Speaker
you know, would be weaving in memoir, but it was not going to be linear narrative and so much centering on that relationship so much as profiling other people's relationships. And she was just like, this is very compelling. I think you should write the book you want to write and it can be narrative. And that was just like such a blessing that she let me do that and deviate from what I had proposed and sold to her. And I was able to just kind of let it come out as a story the way
00:57:50
Speaker
I like reading stories, which is with plot, you know, that tends to be more compelling to me. And she also suggested, I think when I was maybe mostly done with the manuscript, but had not turned it in yet, I finished pretty early and had a lot of time to rework before it was actually due. She said, have you read my Dark Vanessa, which is a novel about
00:58:19
Speaker
a, another relationship of a, of a younger woman with an older man. And there's a lot of gaslighting and it's sexy and it's disturbing. And, um, I was really taken with that book and I think it gave me some ideas of how, how, um, it's a permission to allow that to be part of the story and to investigate further with the psychologist, what had been going on.
00:58:45
Speaker
And to kind of also realize that that is part of what can drive the narrative is this tension between, on the one hand, many readers potentially finding him very sexy or the situation sexy in moments and on the other hand, finding him quite disturbing and wanting to read on because they don't really know where this is going and what they should be feeling.
00:59:11
Speaker
Now in reading the book too, and this is kind of like how I interpreted it as kind of like a meta-experience or being in non-monogamous relationships where it was like at times for me just
00:59:27
Speaker
And I mean that this is not a knock on the book. Like, I was exhausted. Like, there are times, too, where, you know, where Adam's going on other dates, you know, you're, you know, and you felt like you were knocked from, knocked down from primary or you weren't so, that was in flux or whatever. And it's just like, he's going on two dates a week. You know, he's got his, you know, his main partner and Rachel. I'm like, it just, and then you're, you're doing your thing and seeing other people, too. And I was just like, oh, my God.
00:59:57
Speaker
Like, I'm so tired. And so I was wondering, like, for you, maybe it was during this time or maybe it is energizing for you as someone who has more experience now. But is it exhausting? Like, were you exhausted? Because it came across that way, at least for me as the reader. Yeah, I was exhausted, often at the time, for sure. And I think it's part of why I was smoking so much weed, because I was just anxious and tired and, like,
01:00:26
Speaker
needed to slow time down if all the things around me refused to slow down. Yeah, it was exhausting and unsustainable the way we were practicing it. But I mean, now that I'm still non-monogamous and practicing in a different way, that is much less fast paced, but very much an important part of just the environment and fabric of my life, I guess.
01:00:52
Speaker
I find it gives me more energy usually because I just feel more alive and less like I'm trying to suppress parts of myself that I don't really want to suppress, which takes a lot of energy and just kind of the novelty of new experiences or things to look forward to gives me a lot of energy. So yeah, I think it just really depends on the dynamic you're in and the way you're practicing and how healthy your communication is and how you
01:01:22
Speaker
spend your time. There are certainly some polyamorous people I've met who, who do, you know, have three partners, and they don't seem exhausted at all. And that's just kind of what's natural and working for them and all the people in the equation. But I think for most people, yeah, time is a limited resource, even if love isn't. And so navigating that as part of the adjustment to trying on non-monogamy
01:01:50
Speaker
is like, how am I gonna make this work with the reality of only having so much time in the day? Yeah, and you just said something really great about love. You essentially said it like it's not a, it's an abundant thing. It's not a zero sum thing. Is that one of your big takeaways as well that love can be more abundant and it's not, yeah, like I was just alluding to like zero sum? Definitely.
01:02:16
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think I got that from the expression polyamorous people tend to say, yeah, love isn't finite, but time is. And I think I agree with that. And it's definitely true for me that being non-monogamous has opened up more ways I fall in love now. It's become, I think, easier for me to fall in love, but it's also that love takes different shapes. So because I'm not necessarily
01:02:45
Speaker
looking at everyone as a potential life partner or needing to be compatible with them in a way of like you might someone you share home with or see every day. I'm kind of more able to just fall in love with whatever our dynamic is more naturally supposed to be and let it take that form. Of course, not always perfectly, it's very hard to escape those expectations or structures or not to kind of
01:03:14
Speaker
view everything through that lens of, is this my soul mate or not? But I do find that my experience of love is much more expansive now and fluid and that I've had many more relationships now or flows from friends to lovers or lovers to friends and that that's okay. And it's like just change of shape and I feel
01:03:40
Speaker
more of a sense of peace with that and the love doesn't go away. Yeah, there's a moment too, like kind of on the opposite end of the love spectrum where you write, you know, jealousy is made all the more infuriating by how much you watch it invite exactly what you're trying to prevent. Yeah. Yeah, I just, when I read that phrase, I'm like, oh my God, like that's such a great embodiment of what that is. And then of course you're really wrestling with that feeling the entire time.
01:04:10
Speaker
Definitely. Yeah, and I think the jealousy was definitely a big main part of the journey and the challenge for me and the question of can I be non-monogamous because it was very clearly to me, clear to me from the beginning, I definitely can on my side. Like this feels very natural, very fun. But the question was more can I deal with a partner enjoying the same freedoms? And I think that
01:04:38
Speaker
My extreme jealousy was also in retrospect a symptom of how there were other issues going on in a relationship like, you know, Kathy Labriola, the counselor in the book, she writes that, you know, jealousy is like a smoke alarm. It's there to alert you that there might be a fire, but it's up to you to like check and see, is there actually a fire or do I just need to change your batteries? And so sometimes you might experience jealousy and realize like, okay,
01:05:07
Speaker
I can sit with this, this is not based on like rational fears or actual, you know, things that are happening in the relationship or what I fear might happen is not likely to happen. And sometimes it might really be a symptom as I think it was in this case of you don't have good communication. You really don't trust each other. Maybe some stuff is going on behind your back that you're feeling you're not being alerted to. And so that's why you're feeling so mistrusting and jealous.
01:05:36
Speaker
And it turned out all those things were issues. So I think that was part of it too. And then, I mean, also I just felt a lot of shame around my jealousy, which wasn't helpful because of this narrative that Adam had established that jealousy was a ugly, unloving, destructive, unevolved emotion. And that basically the more I struggled with it, the less he said he wanted to be with me.
01:06:04
Speaker
that was understandable because I saw how I was being a huge pain in the ass and very unattractive. Like exactly like you said, it's not like you watch yourself just being basically like the least attractive version of yourself, clinging, you know, petty, like insecure, all these things that are just like, no one wants that because there wasn't a lot of compassion or understanding of those feelings.
01:06:31
Speaker
the cycle just kind of was able to keep exacerbating itself because I felt more and more unsafe and alone and ashamed and he felt more and more restricted or turned off by my jealousy.
01:06:44
Speaker
And there's a moment late in the book, too, where you kind of reach a higher plane of enlightenment with your mentor, Tashi, and you guys talk about non-attachment versus indifference. And he concludes like, no, actually, non-attachment allows you to leave a relationship. Non-attachment means that you're not fixated on a particular outcome.
01:07:09
Speaker
that you're actually allowing for the fact that everything changes. Of course, that differs from indifference is just being like, okay, whatever, go with the flow. When you came to that realization, what was that light bulb moment for you when you heard that? Very empowering. I didn't believe it at first. It took many more retreats with Tashi and interviews with Tashi.
01:07:36
Speaker
really parse out these things and just studying more Buddhism because it had kind of been introduced to me a little bit before Adam, but especially by Adam as a kind of framework and argument for like why Namanagami was more enlightened. But I was getting his version of it, which was not very accurate. And so I sort of have this half understanding of these concepts of non-attachment. And so it's very important to me to show that part of the story to the reader
01:08:06
Speaker
and also bring in actual Buddhist teachers to comment on what these terms that are getting thrown around are increasingly actually mean in this lineage. And yeah, it was just a really good distinction to have because I was confusing non-attachment for spiritual bypassing, for indifference or dissociation. And it's really not. It's about allowing for the fact that everything
01:08:35
Speaker
changes and not trying to impose an outcome on that. But also if someone else is trying to like impose an idea of non-attachment onto you, that in itself is their attachment. So it was very helpful to make that distinction that even the sort of wholesome or enlightened ideas can often be wielded as forms of control. And I think it was important to show how that
01:09:03
Speaker
might happen because I think, you know, if nothing really new, of course, as we see with like so many cults or communes with stories coming out of women being, you know, brainwashed or sexually assaulted or all these things within it because of these very charismatic gurus telling them, you know, it's just about your enlightenment. So I think it is important to make those distinctions.
01:09:31
Speaker
Very nice, and as I like to take these conversations down for a landing, Rachel, and you'll have to forgive me, I forgot to prime the pump with you on this one, but I think you'll do okay. I like to ask guests for a recommendation of some kind for the audience, and that can be anything from a book to a brand of coffee to a certain brand of socks here I can love with.
01:09:53
Speaker
So I so I'd extend the question to you and by all means take as much time as you need That's what the edit button is for Yeah, what would you recommend for the listeners out there?
01:10:05
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Okay. And I can only pick one thing. I can pick a couple of things. It's okay. It's not just one, you know, you can be like, Oh, I have a professional one. Like, Oh, I love this particular software. And then maybe a more recreational one, like an awesome pencil sharpener. Just looking at things on my desk right now. I think, you know, there's so many writers and thinkers who have influenced me. But if, if you're interested in the themes I've been
01:10:33
Speaker
talking about, I really recommend Kathy Labriola's writing on Namanagami, as well as T. Nahan's books about mindfulness and Buddhism, a lot of what we talked about, and kind of making these distinctions, and seeing if you can incorporate any of that into your writing practice. He has one book called Your True Home, where there's just one teaching per page.
01:11:02
Speaker
And it's like very useful because you can kind of pick one a day to keep in mind and practice. And that's another part of my writing practice often has been kind of looking at that at the beginning of the day and seeing like, okay, how can I keep an eye on that aspect of life, these different lenses. So I really recommend that book and that idea of having some sort of daily practices that help you keep a greater perspective on your work
01:11:32
Speaker
And then it's not a specific brand of anything or person, but just having a writer community, I think it's just so important. So finding that however you can online, I think virtually it's also like never been easier. And, you know, if you have difficulty finding that or reaching out to other people who've spoken about it, like me or you, I'm sure, and seeing if they have any recommendations, because I just think
01:12:01
Speaker
Even though this is a very solitary practice, writing a book has taught me it really takes a village. Or ideally you have a village around you supporting you. And I think especially potentially if you're writing memoir, that's very important because it's just so emotionally difficult in different ways and different moments to not take things personally.
01:12:27
Speaker
or to not feel afraid of how it's gonna be received.
01:12:31
Speaker
Very nice. Well Rachel, I gotta say thank you so much for coming on the show, making the time, and of course writing this wonderful, wonderful book that's really just eye-opening and lightning and raw. It's a wonderful tribute to a chapter of your life and a very great experience to read and I think a great service to the community at large. So I just gotta commend you on a job well done and thanks so much for the work.
01:12:58
Speaker
Oh, thank you so much. That means a lot to me and I really appreciate all the questions you asked me and having the opportunity to talk about these things. It just really means a lot to me, so thank you. Rachel Kranz, everybody. Give it up. Give it up, Hank.
01:13:22
Speaker
Producer Hank is in the other room. He's in Snuggle Fort right now. Yes, we have a Snuggle Fort. Don't judge me. Thanks to Rachel. Thanks to West Virginia Wesleyan College's MFA in creative writing.
01:13:36
Speaker
And thanks to you, the listener. Thanks to the Patreon crew, too. Can't do it without you. Speaking of Patreon audio magazine and shit of that nature, I am finally getting into the hero essays, starting to read them. Gotta pick them off. I've got a big weekend ahead. I might even read them all. And, uh, well, we're gonna get after it. See you in efforts.
01:13:55
Speaker
less okay so i think about doing less but i'm failing to do less i'm working with someone who really digs my baseball memoir believe it or not uh she's all in she really loves it like blew my mind i was like fuck finally someone uh so that's good news
01:14:16
Speaker
bad news is she's like, I can't sell this shit. What else are you working on? And at any given moment, I have like 15 different ideas in my head. But I looked over my bookshelf because I have some research material for a particular book project that I think is hot. And I told her it was one idea I had.
01:14:34
Speaker
And I felt like I was rambling for a bit, sort of like I am now, but when I stopped, she was like, I can sell that on proposal. She was like, I can sell that on proposal. So I'm working on a book proposal about that story, and I'm going to keep that one close to the chest until it actually happens. So let me be clear. Let me be real. It's probably not going to happen, right?
01:14:55
Speaker
I mean, does that make me a realist or some self-fulfilling prophecy of failing? I need to figure out a through line through the story. It's hard for me to conceptualize right now. What can I bring to it that's new, revelatory? I don't know. I don't know. It's what I got to work through.
01:15:18
Speaker
I think I can. There's a massive anniversary for this thing coming up and she's confident she can sell it on proposal. And she's worked with some dope ass writers so...
01:15:28
Speaker
Who knows? Then if she sells that and it does okay, the memoir will be an easier sell at that point. My dad will probably be dead at that point, but hey, we tried. I've got a deadline coming up for our Writers Digest essay. I'm taking a business course because I suck and I'm getting swole. I'm going to see Metallica again in Boston over Memorial Day weekend.
01:15:50
Speaker
Also Foo Fighters and the Strokes and Weezer that weekend another festival then a Foo Fighters again in Seattle I think I serve the patreon audience and the non patreon audience For anyone who's still listening I still record these even though I don't think anyone does the Spotify analytics say like 1% of you go all the way to the end which means Melissa
01:16:18
Speaker
Omicron made me skip out on AWP panel I was supposed to be on. First panel that I've ever been invited on. I'm not one of these people that gets invited to many panels. It's the first one I've been invited on. Here I am.
01:16:35
Speaker
not going. I don't really feel like flying cross-country at this point and just risking this whole thing. Some other people are like, on the panel, are like, fuck it, I'm going to get all my life. And I'm like, I'd rather just stay here. So maybe come August for Hippo Camp, I'll be ready to fly, but not for this spring. So anyway, as you can, as you can tell, seeing efforts, I'm a mess. Seeing it from a goddamn mess. I'm not even drunk yet.
01:17:03
Speaker
But I'm going to get drunk right now. I have a 2018 Pina Noire from Sylvan Ridge. Here they do Pina Noire like nobody's business. So I'm gonna get a little buzz on. Stay wild, see you at effort. And always remember, from my heart to yours, if you can't do, interview. See ya.