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Episode 48—Roy Peter Clark Redux
140 Plays8 years ago
This week on The Creative Nonfiction Podcast decided to revisit my episode with Roy Peter Clark (@RoyPeterClark on Twitter), this time condensing that two-hour interview and pulling out the best moments. In it we hear Roy talk about how he learned to swim in the language, the moment he learned the true meaning of literacy, and when research can become crippling. I'm experimenting with the form and making it more like a mini one-source profile. Let me know what you think. I think it makes for a better overall listen. Ping me on Twitter @BrendanOMeara with thoughts, or to say hi. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on the Apple podcast app and on Google Play Music. Leave a rating if you're feeling extra kind. Those help. Thanks for listening!
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Promotion
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with artists about creating works of nonfiction. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara, and you know who one of my favorite fictional characters is? Riff Van Winkle.
00:00:29
Speaker
My wife has been rolling her eyes non-stop as I workshop my riff jokes and No, she doesn't subscribe to the podcast make of that what you will Can I ask you to leave a review on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts? Share this with a friend share this on your social networks and help a brother out done begging onto the show and
Inspiration from 'Out on the Wire'
00:00:59
Speaker
Okay, so I've been pouring and pouring and pouring over Jessica Ables out on the wire, the storytelling secrets of the new masters of radio. And I am deeply inspired to tell more stories you find, like on This American Life. It won't be on this podcast, but likely a different one with an Oregonian regional slant. More on that another time.
Ira Glass: The Art of Storytelling
00:01:25
Speaker
A big, big takeaway from Out on the Wire is when Ira Glass, host and co-founder of This American Life, goes out and records all his tape. He and producers like him then take all that tape and log it.
00:01:42
Speaker
It's a loose transcription, but the idea being that you're getting a rough look at the whole of your tape so that you may condense, say, a 12-hour recording down to 20 minutes. No kidding.
Editing Insights with Roy Peter Clark
00:01:55
Speaker
In light of that, I had a couple gasses of bail on me this week, so I figured I'd apply this editing rule to one of my longer podcasts, specifically my episode with Roy Peter Clark.
00:02:07
Speaker
It's rich at just under two hours, but what if I could really boil out the water from the sap and leave you with a concentrated dose of grade A dark amber maple syrup? That's what I've done here. A Roy Peter Clark Redux with a little bit of narration, but mainly the parts of the conversation that most appeal to my taste.
Roy's Early Language Journey
00:02:31
Speaker
Roy had a sequence of mentors growing up and throughout high school and his other developmental schools. His mother, Franciscan priests, editors, professors, and colleagues. Too many to mention, but so many helped guide his way through the language and that all started before he had formed his first memory. I just happened to have this little... I wasn't planning this, but I'm reaching out right now and I happen to have it
00:03:01
Speaker
nearby and it's a really precious family document and it's what used to be called a baby book and so three days after I was born a family that knew my family gave my mom and dad gave my mom this baby book and what it is is a little velveteen covered keepsake
00:03:32
Speaker
in which a mom will write things and keep things. And so there are photographs. Actually, I'm looking at a little lock of my hair, which is kind of scary. I wish I still had it. It has things about my first words, first little picture that I drew. It's quite a little treasure chest. There's this particular place that makes me laugh every time I read it.
00:04:02
Speaker
It says, mother's notes, and it says, age 16 months, right? So 16 months. I'm a mathematician, so I know that's a one year, four months, right? So my mom writes, Roy is at the talk of the neighborhood. He can speak more than any child his age. He can sing every other word of seesaw, Jack and Jill, and I'm looking over a four-leaf clover.
00:04:32
Speaker
Besides a wonderful vocabulary mimics everything and everybody. Okay. Then it says age 24 months. I'm a terrible two year old. The fact that I haven't written anything for eight months should speak for itself. Roy is a real boy and all of my time is spent running around after him. He can recite the entire alphabet.
00:04:59
Speaker
can read the letters A, E, F, W, M, and L. Not bad, huh? Still sings all day long. So look, I cannot even, this is before, this is a time before my memory exists, right? I mean, I don't have any capacity yet. My brain hasn't evolved to the point where I can remember what I was doing at age one or two. And they're imprinted as a result of nature and nurture.
00:05:28
Speaker
is a love for language and a love for music. And I play music in almost every workshop, writing workshop that I do.
Exploring Literacy and Language
00:05:36
Speaker
So it's really funny and eerie and a little humbling to know that because of the way that you came in the world, that your life with language was somehow determined. So as a result of all those things,
00:05:58
Speaker
I wound up and still am living a life of language. Once again, not just that I have this capacity, but that I have this passion. The world would be better if more people could find a way to make that step, to make that leap, to cross the bridge from having language in you to having the ability to kind of
00:06:27
Speaker
swim around and play around inside the language. Which, of course, leads to the question of literacy and what that really means. Think about it. It's not just reading. It's, well, here's Roy again. There was a teacher at Stanford who came to the Pointer Institute one time for a program. I worked with her in a couple of projects. But she asked me a question. It was very formative. She said to me,
00:06:57
Speaker
What does it mean to be literate in America? Really? Okay. I don't know. I'm not, what do you mean? Yeah. Like, well, who are the most literate people in America? I said some smart ass thing. Like, like Shirley, like you and me? No, no, I said, no, they're famous people. And I just blurted out a couple of names. I said, I don't know, um, Susan Sontag and William F. Buckley Jr.
00:07:27
Speaker
And I realized that after I, that I couldn't, in many ways, I could not have chosen two more different individuals, man, woman, liberal, progressive, left, very conservative on the right. She kind of, like, why have you mentioned these two people? I said, well, I'm not sure. She says, okay, what did they do?
00:07:57
Speaker
that makes you want to call them literate. So she, she did this Socratic kind of questioning of me and she told me, I said, look, they, there are these behaviors and if you practice these behaviors, it marks you as literate. And what are they? Well, um, the first two are very, I think are obvious. If you're literate, you read.
00:08:27
Speaker
and you read in certain ways. And if you're literate, you write. And you write in certain kinds of ways. But it's that third element that I think people underestimate or fail to see. And that is that if you are a literate person, you have the capacity to talk
00:08:55
Speaker
about how meaning is created through reading and writing. It's not just a matter of reading and writing. That'd be good enough. That's two thirds of the way to there. But as you grow as a reader and as a writer, you gain the capacity to talk about how reading and writing works.
From Academia to Journalism
00:09:16
Speaker
After graduation from Providence College, Roy soon went to Stony Brook for his PhD. He thought he'd spend a career teaching Chaucer and Shakespeare and medieval literature. After applying to 100 schools by typing up 100 letters, this is the era of typewriters,
00:09:36
Speaker
He received four invitations for interviews. The only job he got was in Montgomery, Alabama, the branch campus of Auburn University, where he taught, but also met a series of editors and journalists. From that point, he began coaching writers in St. Petersburg, Florida at the Poynter Institute.
00:09:55
Speaker
He's been working with writers and reporters ever since. What questions were writers asking of you then? And over the course of your career too, what questions do you most often field from writers looking to, even novice writers, or just anyone looking to improve? Like 40 years ago, what were you hearing? And then what were you hearing going forward in the ensuing decades?
The Craft of Writing
00:10:25
Speaker
Yeah, you know, the Pointer Institute republished the first essay I wrote about my experience in the newsroom. So six months into my experience, I wrote a couple of thousand words, as I recall, for the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. And what was really interesting is how my description of the problem, as I first saw it,
00:10:57
Speaker
has kind of retained its, what would you call it, its viability or its significance? Yeah, its relevance for sure. Its relevance? Yeah. And so it was just things like, it was things that were clarified for me by meeting another writing coach who was about my father's age.
00:11:26
Speaker
came from the World War II generation. His name was Donald Murray. And after Patterson hired me, Tom Winship, who is the editor of the Boston Globe, hired Donald Murray to be a writing coach at the Globe. And Murray had actually won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in his 20s. He was a very young man at the time. And Murray
00:11:56
Speaker
went on to be a very influential writing composition teacher and sort of writing theorists, if you will, practical theorists. So he became a kind of a papal figure for English teachers at every level. And he came to Poynter and he worked with me. He articulated some of these issues in ways that
00:12:26
Speaker
I couldn't quite see it first. So for example, I'm about to echo Murray saying that, you know, to the struggling writer, a good writing looks like magic, but it's not magic. It's a set of rational steps. You can learn the steps. You can learn the names of the steps. Well, what's an example of a step? Well, every piece of writing needs a focus.
00:12:53
Speaker
a central idea, an organizing principle, a nut, a kernel of truth or emotion or feeling, an idea, and all the other parts of the work that you've written reinforce that in some way. And you could be writing a poem or a college dissertation, and ultimately you're still responsible
00:13:24
Speaker
for figuring out what this piece of writing is really about.
Supporting Writers Beyond the Page
00:13:31
Speaker
Just that construct alone allows you as a writer or as a writing coach or as a teacher of writing or as an editor to kind of figure out what's happening when a piece of writing really works and what's happening when a piece of writing is in trouble.
00:13:50
Speaker
Now, I just talked about this in terms of a piece of writing, but that writing is produced by a human being. And the writer or teacher's responsibility is not just to perform autopsies on a cadaver, you know, to fix a broken story. It's to work with a human being or a creative human being in order to help
00:14:19
Speaker
improve their craft, their techniques, to sharpen their strategies, to become a better reader, writer, and a better talker about reading and writing, so that you can step into the pathway of someone who learns something new about the craft every day.
00:14:41
Speaker
Yeah, and so much of your book writing over the years, the fact that you wrote five books in ten years on the craft of writing just blows my mind every time I think about it. Me too. Me too. It must. It's a what a feat of generation and not only just generation of
00:15:02
Speaker
uh... of material but of just such valuable valuable work to to writers and readers alike it's you've stripped down the the artifice like you said like you showed
00:15:14
Speaker
It does feel like magic to someone who hasn't been trained to see where the scaffolding was bolted into the side of the building. What you've done is you've stripped a lot of that away to show, yes, this is very much attainable if you're willing to do the work. Yeah, I think that's right, and I think here's more Donald Murray. Remember Roy?
00:15:42
Speaker
A page a day equals a book a year. You know, what is that? Well, it's a kind of an, it's an aphorism right about writing. It's this kind of like little Zen like saying, but it has practical implications and it has a psychological and emotional implications. So why is it that so many people who finish their PhD, PhD coursework,
00:16:12
Speaker
And even their exams never get their degrees because somehow they lack the capacity to write the dissertation. And I think I could have had another career just coaching people on their dissertations so they could get their degrees.
00:16:34
Speaker
because I think it is, I think that people are paralyzed. I think they're paralyzed by their fear of, you know, the marathon of the ideas that, oh my God, now I'm going to have, how am I going to produce something that has this 300 pages or whatever? You know, I can barely, I can barely write a term paper.
00:17:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's the bird by bird process. Exactly right. And in fact, Don Fry, my dissertation director, and became my colleague at Pointer, one of my best friends ever, he said, when I was getting ready to write my dissertation, he said, look, you can write a term paper, right? Yes. OK. All right, here's what you're going to do over the next
00:17:33
Speaker
four, five, six months. You're going to write, you're going to write 10 term papers.
Exploratory Writing and Political Language
00:17:40
Speaker
And I looked at him funny. He said, he said, do the math. The other thing he did for me is he got me to at first, he was a very good editor, but at first he got me to lower my standards, you know, not to wait until all the research was finished before I started drafting something, you know, kind of the,
00:18:03
Speaker
the value of doing some exploratory writing. And I didn't have all the vocabulary to understand what was happening there. But looking back, that was clearly the case. And I don't think my dissertation was very well written, but I was able to generate out of it. I remember also at the time when I was at Auburn, you know, I think a half dozen journal articles, scholarly journals,
00:18:32
Speaker
at a time when I thought I wanted to be an English professor for life. I remember very vividly after my first experience with journalism is really sitting back and looking at the different life spans of a piece of writing. As in journalism, you could see something on television sparked your interest
00:19:02
Speaker
You can write about it, and people in America could be talking about it two, three, four days later, and there was a whole different bio-rhythm, which sort of attracted me, I have to say. Orwell was an important figure, because Orwell was a journalist, novelist, scholar, and Orwell wrote about politics and the English language.
00:19:33
Speaker
and language was central to works like 1984 and to all of his essays. I remember the first time I ever worked with a group of journalists before I went to St. Petersburg was through, in Montgomery, through Ray Jenkins, and it was a seminar for Southern editorial writers. And I remember exploring, exploring sort of reading their editorials
00:20:02
Speaker
looking at their use of language, looking at the distance between the language that was really fresh and the language that was really stale, talking about the relationship between language misuse and political corruption, essentially Orwell opened that door for me. So it was a good,
00:20:33
Speaker
And I've been, you know, faithful to him ever since. Now, writing about writing, you know, it's always going to draw a certain measure of attention to yourself. It's kind of like if you're a personal trainer, you can't be fat. And it's like, so if you're writing about writing, it's like,
00:20:59
Speaker
you almost, the scrutiny is that much higher because you gotta hold yourself to the standard you're writing about and an even higher standard because it's gonna cause some, people are gonna look at your work a little with a heavier eye. And I wonder how you approach that degree of scrutiny given how much you've coached and how much you've written about writing over the years.
00:21:24
Speaker
It's what I call, you used a good analogy, my version of that is the dentist with bad teeth.
Learning from Mistakes
00:21:35
Speaker
I come from a family where people have
00:21:41
Speaker
some chronic skin problems, you know, uh, over the years, nothing dangerous, but a little, I remember going for the, going to the dermatologist for the first time and the door opened up and there was a woman who walked in. She was a young doctor. I don't think she probably in her, in her thirties. And I said to myself,
00:22:06
Speaker
I have picked like really the best dermatologist in the world. This person of all of God's creatures has the most perfect skin I've ever seen. And then I kind of, you know, she was a fine doctorate, but over the years I said, you know, maybe that wasn't right. Maybe it's the person who
00:22:36
Speaker
has the experience of struggling through something who can better identify with my circumstances. And so I think that about a week ago, just a few days ago, I dangled a modifier in an essay I wrote about
00:23:06
Speaker
Trump's definition of quotation marks. And there was a gleeful correction, especially since the sentence I had written had mentioned the fact that I had written a book on grammar. So to make a grammar or a usage mistake,
00:23:37
Speaker
in a sentence where you're bragging about how good you are with language. But I got out ahead of it. I said I was going to leave the mistake up there for a couple of days and suffer the consequences. And I then admitted that I had done this on Twitter. People thought it was funny. And I think what happened in a case like that is although
00:24:06
Speaker
Nowadays, there's always going to be some trolls, and there are going to be people who don't read your work very carefully and criticize it harshly. In general, if you have a reputation and a history of being a champion of writers, of identifying with the work of writers,
00:24:36
Speaker
their triumphs and their struggles, if you are always in the game, not just coming out of the hills after a battle and to shoot the wounded, that people are going to give you the benefit of the doubt. It's like you earn the right
00:25:06
Speaker
to be, um, you're in the right to make mistakes. And if anybody, I don't hide these, but if anybody could come to my office and look at a 350 or 400 word manuscript that I've written and read the thousand or so marks that copy editors from little Brown
00:25:35
Speaker
make on my manuscript. A lot of them are formatting issues or corrections, but yeah, there's my share of redundancy and awkwardness and insensitivity and lack of clarity.
00:26:02
Speaker
And so, yeah, I'm fortunate enough to have a team of people surrounding me, not just one team, but teams of people surrounding me whose job it is to help me get my best work in print.
Mission to Broaden Literacy Access
00:26:20
Speaker
And it's my mission to open the door for literacy and good writing wider and wider.
00:26:32
Speaker
so that more and more people can imagine themselves as belonging to communities of riders, you know, nations of riders, whatever it happens to be. Yeah, because it's a team sport. Yes. Well, it's not only that, but let's say, you know, I think people are thinking about this right now in a very harsh and contentious political moment.
00:27:00
Speaker
that we say things like we live in a democracy. We say things like we have freedom of expression. We talk about the history and the power of the First Amendment. And every day I walk into the Pointer Institute, every day for more than three decades, the first, the last thing I see before I enter the building is this marble plaque.
00:27:27
Speaker
with the words of the First Amendment on it. So I'm reminded every day that there is this ideal against which I should always judge my own work and help others towards the fulfillment of that ideal in their work. What good is freedom of expression if we lack the means to express ourselves? And that's my articulation of
00:27:57
Speaker
a mission and purpose, both as a writer and a writing teacher.
Balancing Learning and Writing
00:28:02
Speaker
So with books on writing, I feel that writers of any degree of skill and novices, especially, that it's very easy to say, like, oh, I'll start my project, whatever that is, after I'm done reading this.
00:28:22
Speaker
and then it's a way of productive procrastination because you're actually learning very valuable insights but you're not putting into practice per se, but you also need to be mindful of this is kind of a continuing education thing or sharpening of the saw, if you will, and I wonder how you balance
00:28:43
Speaker
that continuing ed portion of like writing about writing or reading about writing and then also making sure that you sit down and and do the work too. There are times when you don't have everything that you could have or all the material in the background that you need
00:29:07
Speaker
And it's not going to matter that much. I do believe in a kind of, I believe in a form of over-reporting, which to say that it's better for you to have done a little too much reporting than not enough. But that being said, if the effect of too much reporting is that you miss deadlines or you don't get to the work or you're not productive enough,
00:29:37
Speaker
then I think you have to reimagine your process and your craft. And all I'm saying is if you do some research, come on back and sit down and write about it for a while. Just write about it for yourself. Send a message to yourself. Send a memo to yourself. Send a memo to a friendly, friendly reader and learn
00:30:04
Speaker
what you need to learn in order to take the next step in the process. In most cases, you'll be shocked to discover you have enough for a paper. You have enough for an essay. You have enough for a book. And if you don't, if some test reader or copy editor thinks that you don't, there's still time to get what you need.
Overcoming Writing Paralysis
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's easy to be crippled by, and paralyzed by research, always thinking like you need just one more, one more source, like I gotta go to one more source, where primary or person, and it's gonna round it out perfectly, but honestly, it's like you'll always find an excuse to try to find one more person if you can, but it's like kinda like what you were saying earlier, like writing before you're ready is also a good way to break that chain of that information flood.
00:31:03
Speaker
Yeah, I'm just going to paraphrase what you just said, and I think it's true. Too often, more research is an excuse for not writing.
Conclusion and Farewell
00:31:15
Speaker
Okay, that is it. CNFers, thank you very much for listening to this latest episode of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. It was produced by yours truly and supported by you guys. The more you listen, the more it gives me juice to do this. So thank you very much for listening. And until next week, have a wonderful weekend and thanks again for listening.