Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 88—Rachel Corbett says "Stop Trying So Hard."
135 Plays7 years ago
"It's usually when you stop trying so hard that something happens," says Rachel Corbett, a New York-based writer and author. Hey, there CNF-buddys, I’m comin’ at you live from my shiny new digs. New house up in Eugene and I’ve got a nice little office I can call my own. There’s no foam on the walls yet, so please pardon the audio, but we’re making strides to be the best. Part of that is me shutting the front door and getting the hell out of the way. I still haven’t quite figured out a way to completely edit myself out of these interviews. But I’m working on it. Don’t worry… Rachel Corbett joins me this week for Episode 88 of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with the best artists about creating works of nonfiction, leaders in the world of narrative journalism, essay, memoir, radio, and documentary film where I try and tease out origins, habits, routines, mentors, key influences, so you can apply some of their tools of mastery to your own work. Rachel is a freelance journalist whose work appears in a few rags you might have heard of: The New Yorker, the New York Times, etc. She’s also the author of You Must Change Your Life, The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin. She is @rachelncorbett on Twitter. Rachel hits on some key points about carving out your own niche How things come easier when you stop trying so hard Listening vs. talking Getting away from the work so you can come back refreshed. And the power of being dumb and defeated (some of us were born this way). Stay tuned to the end of the show for some incentivized calls to action. In the meantime, here’s my conversation with the brilliant Rachel Corbett.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and New Beginnings
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey there, CNF buddies. I'm coming at you live from my shiny new digs. New house up in Eugene, and I've got a nice little office I can call my own. Not a cloth-us like I had in my last place. A hybrid office closet. No, no.
00:00:16
Speaker
an actual office with a window and lamps. There's no foam on the walls yet, so please pardon the audio, but we're making strides to be the best, and part of that is me shutting the front door and getting the hell out of the way. I still haven't quite figured out how to completely edit myself out of these interviews, but I'm working on it. Don't you worry.
Guest Introduction: Rachel Corbett
00:00:39
Speaker
Rachel Corbett, she joins me this week for episode 88.
00:00:44
Speaker
of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak.
00:00:47
Speaker
with the world's best artists about creating works of nonfiction leaders in the world of narrative journalism has a memoir radio documentary film by trying these out origins habits routines mentors key influences so you can apply some of their tools of mastery to your own work Rachel
00:01:17
Speaker
She's also the author of You Must Change Your Life, the story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin. She is at Rachel N. Corbett on the Twitters.
Finding One's Path and Career Choices
00:01:31
Speaker
Rachel hits on some key points about carving out your own niche, how things come easier when you stop trying so hard, listening versus talking, getting away from the work so you can come back refreshed, and the power of being dumb and defeated.
00:01:47
Speaker
Some of us were born this way. Stay tuned to the end of the show for some incentivized calls to action. In the meantime, here's my conversation with the brilliant Rachel Corbett.
00:02:04
Speaker
But certainly before we get to that, something that really struck me in the introduction of the book was that you had really no intent on becoming a writer. So before we unpack that a little bit, I want to maybe ask you, what did you think you wanted to be when you were younger and coming up? When I was young, I didn't really know. I would say,
00:02:28
Speaker
I think I wanted to be a doctor, actually. But I didn't, and then it wasn't really until I went to college, and I studied psychology, so I wasn't really into arts or into writing at all. But I, excuse me, I think it was, I wanted to, I thought about maybe going to law school, I thought about, I wanted to do some kind of
00:02:58
Speaker
something kind of activist I wanted to go into maybe like public policy or advocacy or some kind of I want to work with women. So it was a it was until after quite a while after I you know until the end of college that I ever considered writing.
00:03:18
Speaker
And what was that moment like where you made that pivot where something clicked in your head that was like, oh, this is the direction I'd rather go in? I had this teacher as professor in college and I was finishing college and I was sitting with her and having like a kind of like end of the year meeting and she said, you know, she said, what are you going to do now? And I thought, I said, I don't know, I'm thinking about
00:03:45
Speaker
moving away. I really just wanted to leave Iowa. I said, I might just move to Chicago or something or Minneapolis and get a job and figure it out. And she said, well, you're a good writer. Why don't you go to New York? And you could you could intern for a magazine or something and you could write for Harper's or the New Yorker or something she said. And that was kind of mind blowing. I never thought about that before. So I so I did. I really had no I just didn't know what to do. I was really aimless.
00:04:14
Speaker
So I did, and I got an internship at this little kind of political news, kind of women's news website. And they were great because they paid like $9 an hour or something, which is amazing for an internship at the time. And then I just stayed in New York. I got another internship, and then I went to grad school, and then finally started getting work. What was the name of that website? It was called Women's E-News.
00:04:43
Speaker
It's still around. It's great. Actually, they just do kind of like, it's very small. They publish like a cup, maybe like a couple stories a day, just about very global kind of women's health issues politics around the world.
00:05:00
Speaker
And as you arrive in New York and get this internship, what was your experience with writing articles? And what were some of your early, for lack of a better term, growing pains as you were looking to craft stories for this website? Well, I think at that point, it was just figuring out how to not write term papers and how to write
00:05:26
Speaker
journalism. Because I was right out of school, so I didn't really know. And also, I think I was still figuring out whether I wanted to be kind of in advocacy or in journalism. I didn't really understand the difference at that point. So this was a kind of in-between venue, because it was, they did real journalism, but it was
00:05:51
Speaker
you know, it had obviously its own kind of political agenda in the sense that it was focused on women and it had, you know, kind of progressive view. So I think for me, it was sort of figuring out how to, whether I wanted to really go into maybe like the nonprofit world, or really go into journalism and writing, which would mean kind of taking a different kind of putting my politics in the backseat a bit more, I think.
00:06:20
Speaker
And that was kind of a defining moment for me, realizing that I kind of had to choose. And I'm happy that I did in the end. I'm happy that I did go the way I went. But it was, I think that was, it wasn't immediate, obviously. I think that happens with a lot of young people when they're starting out. It's very hard to be a good opinion writer. And I think
00:06:50
Speaker
It's something you have to really develop and not everyone can go in with a point of view. Yeah, and I think with a lot of or maybe a misconception with a lot of opinion writing is that there that it is just simply hot takes and that there isn't a whole lot of research or reporting that can go into something that's an opinion based. So some people might think that they can just go in and just like just
00:07:14
Speaker
I don't know, just kind of just be a blowhard in a sense. But like truly great opinion writing actually is founded in superior reporting. And was that your sense that like when you had to develop a repartorial muscle? Yeah, exactly.
The Journey into Journalism
00:07:30
Speaker
Because it doesn't read that way. You know, like the best writing of course reads like it's very easy. And like it's like they just had all these facts in their head, you know, and they're just great arguers. But but of course,
00:07:40
Speaker
you realize, you know, when you try to write that way, it doesn't turn out so well if you don't do all that research. So that was I think for me, you know, that's why I went to journalism school. And I think it was partially to develop exactly what you're talking about there. Something, some kind of, just some kind of support system. I didn't feel good enough as a writer yet, I guess, to be that, you know, and I think that's also why I didn't write fiction because it didn't,
00:08:11
Speaker
I didn't feel like I had enough in me alone with just my thoughts. I kind of always needed to draw from the world research. And you went to Columbia School of Journalism? Yeah. So when you got there, what did you feel like were your strengths and your weaknesses as a budding journalist? They're kind of two sides of the same coin. I would say one is I didn't know that
00:08:41
Speaker
you could just basically call people on the phone and they would tell you, you could ask them questions and they'll tell you things and they'll answer you. And it's very simple, but it really, I lacked that sense of entitlement, I think. And it was really useful for me for that reason. It's something that maybe not everyone needs to go to journalism school for, but for me, it was kind of powerful just to realize that you can just
00:09:10
Speaker
go places and ask those things and then they'll give it to you. And so that that was like, I guess, my weakness going in. But also, on the other side of that, I was pretty impressionable and pretty open minded. I kind of it was all kind of amazing to me. And so I think I was really I was a kind of good journalist because I was very receptive and
00:09:39
Speaker
I didn't have a lot of, I was so kind of, I mean, I was also like 20 at this point. So I was really, I was really kind of, I didn't have any, I really wanted to tell other people's stories. I didn't have anything else. I didn't have a real agenda of my own. So I think I was really kind of a sponge in a way that was maybe, maybe useful.
00:10:02
Speaker
Did you struggle at first when you were, say, interviewing people in power and then having, not to be adversarial, but to be something to pick up that phone and be somewhat forceful and not combative, but you do have to sometimes push back? And that's a weakness I have. I tend to just let people talk.
00:10:26
Speaker
I have a tendency to just let them talk and not really push back much because I'm just kind of listening. So I wonder where you fell on that and how you developed your interviewing chops and repartorial chops on that spectrum. Yeah, I'm the same as you. It's just a practice and kind of nerve to push people on topics, though there's something to be said for
00:10:55
Speaker
There is some advantage to saying nothing and just letting people go forever. Eventually they fill the silences with information and things that they might not otherwise say if you were really kind of directing them. So I think there's benefits to both sides.
00:11:15
Speaker
Yeah, I know like I'm just not a like a press conference type reporter, interviewer, you know, like, oh, yeah, it's horrible, elbow your way in and or you know, that kind of it just, yeah, to my taste. And is that the same case with you? Yeah, it's terrifying. I don't like I don't like to, you know, do interviews in front of a group of people either. Like, I don't want to like publicly, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to just shout my questions over a room room. You know, that's that's hard.
00:11:44
Speaker
or under that kind of pressure, you get one chance or something. It's definitely nicer to have a conversation with somebody in private. What did you gravitate towards, I guess, as you were diving deeper into your grad school studies? How did your tastes evolve and change? And how did you ultimately pick the course of journalism that you're on now? I wish it was a better story, but it was a little bit practical.
00:12:14
Speaker
When I finished, it was 2007, and it was right when all the May companies were starting to lay off, you know, economy mass was gutting jobs and, you know, it was right before the economy collapsed. And so there just wasn't any work. And I was like thinking about moving to like Arkansas or like a place like this to go work for one of the all weeklies, but then they started closing too. So then,
00:12:44
Speaker
I thought, well, I might as well stick it out in New York. And it seemed to be that like the only places that were doing okay, or were still hiring were these like, like higher end magazines, like luxury magazines and like fashion or lifestyle of art. So I just, I got a job at one of these magazines and started an arts like column there just to kind of make it more
00:13:11
Speaker
pleasant for myself, you know, to have to have it. It was like, it was a kind of like a fashion, lifestyle, food, travel, whatever. And they didn't have much art, visual art coverage. So I started that. And then I was kind of started freelancing on the side for art magazines. Like, I think maybe Art News was one of the first ones, because they were a more journalistic focused one. And they, so they, I always felt like they, there was a need for
00:13:41
Speaker
more accessible arts writing. And also for, there were also places like that seemed like always needed good writers who were not necessarily, you know, who could write in an accessible way. And also, you know, there was, I think writers were not going that direction because they were intimidated sometimes by art or just by the content. So it seemed like there was a kind of
00:14:11
Speaker
a space that needed to be filled and I kind of found a little niche for myself in there between kind of art and journalism. Yeah and were you always drawn to the art scene and you felt like that was a niche you could dive into or did you recognize it as a niche and you sort of were like all right well that's a place where I can take my writing skills and make my own niche. Yeah it's a little of both I mean it was kind of practical like there was
00:14:41
Speaker
I really did feel like there was a need for somebody and a kind of opportunity just professionally. But also, I don't know what it was. I think my brother is an artist and my dad was a kind of an amateur artist. And I think it just was something I felt comfortable around. And a lot of my friends have always been artists. So I don't really know why it happened, but it was,
00:15:11
Speaker
Definitely. I can't explain exactly why. I think it was both practical and it just felt very natural. I don't know what else to say about it. I wish I had like a clear like, you know,
00:15:30
Speaker
trajectory, but I don't really know. And so how does, because it is on its surface, it feels hard to get into and hard to understand and people who want to educate themselves more might feel a little insecure that they're going to sound foolish or missing a fundamental element of understanding
00:15:53
Speaker
art or high art. So how have you been able to convey what it is? And as you said, like a very accessible way to a reader that then they might be able to graduate to like higher discussions and on higher discourse when it comes to talking about, you know, sculpture or painting or or poetry? Well, two things like one is that like when I started doing the journalism, for me, it was like the art world also had
00:16:22
Speaker
like every aspect of the story you would want to have like, there was money and power and you have characters with the artists, you have visual things to describe. It was, the whole scene was great for any journalist really. But in terms of like actually talking about art and making it, you know, I think it's really just the matter of simplifying the process a little bit.
00:16:51
Speaker
I think a lot of writers try to write about the ideas and try to tell you what things mean before they've really looked at something. And so I think it's like if you really start out and really accept that you're kind of dumb when you look
Art and Writing: Making Connections
00:17:07
Speaker
at something and just sort of humble yourself in that way, then I think you can start describing it, writing about it as a way just to kind of start to
00:17:20
Speaker
to look at it or to understand whatever the object is. And then you can kind of start to draw conclusions. But I think it's really just allowing yourself to kind of
00:17:36
Speaker
be dumb and defeated before when you start and then moving from there. That's the story of my life, Rachel. Dumb and defeated. Me too. I don't know. It works. Whatever works.
00:17:51
Speaker
Do you recall a first sort of illuminating moment when you went from Dumb and Defeated before a piece of art and then you really start, you were able to unpack it and crack its code? Did you have a particular piece and a moment around that? Oh, that's a hard question. I mean, probably, yeah. It's the same way.
00:18:22
Speaker
when you kind of try to dissect it line by line, you know? So that's, I feel like that's the whole, that's also the whole theme of this book, basically, you know, is how to look at something and let it kind of, let it kind of open you up, let it kind of change the way you think. So I think in terms of, I'm trying to think of like a particular example. I did it a lot.
00:18:48
Speaker
with Rodin's, you know, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to describe those in the process of writing this. So going to like the Philadelphia Museum or something, they have a Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. Things like the man with the broken nose or some of his, you know, some of his hand sculptures could spend a lot of time because they're also so, they're so kind of narratively driven, you know, his
00:19:18
Speaker
His figures are so, you know, they have so much drama in them that you can really kind of spend a lot of time imagining the stories. Yeah, it's kind of amazing that something that is static by its very nature is actually incredibly kinetic if you just stare at it long. Well, and that's like, that was certainly what he really wanted to convey.
00:19:43
Speaker
more than anything probably is that sense of a kind of a movement or a kind of inner turmoil or a striving towards something. So that was definitely his project.
00:19:56
Speaker
Yeah. And in the introduction to the book, you have this moment where your mother hands you letters to a young poet. And what was that exchange like and how illuminating was it to then be reading through that book and then to ultimately realize it was a book that was gifted to your mother at a similar age?
00:20:20
Speaker
Yeah, it was like the perfect time to read it. Like that was the perfect age and the perfect circumstance. And I don't know if it would be the same if I were to read it now. It might be too old now, but I think it was, I'd never really heard of it, but it's exactly like, you know, it's like less than 100 pages. It's very short. It's very accessible in its way. And I was just like, I don't know what it is. It just turns, it's,
00:20:50
Speaker
It just makes, like it's just, it's for that age where you don't, you just, everything's a little bit undecided and you have this kind of aimless will towards something. Like you know, you have all this desire, you have all this like longing to do something, but you have no direction, like no place to put it. And it kind of, I just felt like that book really puts you at ease. It kind of says it's okay to,
00:21:18
Speaker
To not know it's okay to not have answers to not have money to have the any any any Anything to be alone to be completely You know without anything and so I think at that age when you really feel like you're You have nothing figured out. It's just the perfect just it's very comforting and she she she was actually given to it by a
00:21:47
Speaker
She had this boyfriend who was leaving the country, like he was taking a job out of the country and he gave her this book when he was leaving. And she had never read it before, so she read it then. And she just thought it resonated with her. And so she, when I was finishing school, I think I was just finishing college, and I was just like lost and trying to figure out where to move. She gave me that book.
00:22:16
Speaker
I never expected my mother to give me a book that I would like, but it was amazing. I read it like four times immediately and then I kept reading it every maybe couple of years. I still have it.
00:22:32
Speaker
And did you find that, you know, reading that book, it allowed you to give to cultivate a certain sense of patience with your own work and your own career that if you just kind of put in the work that good things would eventually come to you? Yeah, I mean, it's a weird I don't know how much like actual practical advice there was in that book. Like, I don't know if I really carried it with me, but it was it's definitely comforting, like in your
00:23:02
Speaker
you know, most direst, most dramatic, like emotional moments, something very comforting about it. But I don't know that I really understood what I mean, I think if the real lesson of what he says is basically like, is basically just to kind of keep working. And eventually, if you're good enough, something will come. I mean, it's not very, and to be alone and to, you know, provide yourself the conditions in which you can work.
00:23:31
Speaker
the sort of the main messages of letters to the poet. But I think it was more like in moments of despair, I would like to flip it open. And it would it would tell you that like your despair was exactly the correct feeling to have at that moment. So so embrace it. And that was kind of so it was more like in those kind of moments that I found it to be useful.
00:23:58
Speaker
And Rilke was a, he was starving for a mentor, mentorship, but did you find it odd that a poet would seek someone in another discipline as his prime mentor? Yeah, it is interesting, isn't it? I mean, he had tried to find other writers. He had sought out Uyotolstoy in Russia and
00:24:24
Speaker
George Simmel, the writer and philosopher in Germany. And of course, his other great mentors, Lou Andres Salome, the writer. So he had had a lot of literary mentors. But I think that Rodin was very particular for him and the influence was so great because it was a different medium. And because he really envied sculptors. His wife was also a sculptor.
00:24:53
Speaker
And he really wanted to make, he envied that they could make real objects that sat in the world. And he always felt like poetry was a sort of lesser form because it was intangible. And he thought that the highest, like if certain poets could, like Baudelaire could
00:25:16
Speaker
make sculptural type poems, at least. And that would be that was what he wanted. So he felt like studying sculpture would be the closest way to figuring out how to make his poetry have more weight, basically, or more structure. He had always had like a he was kind of coming out of this German romantic style at the time when he was very young. And he's he was much more sentimental. And so he really took a full
00:25:46
Speaker
kind of 180 and started he stopped kind of writing about human feelings and started writing about objects in this way in this attempt to kind of create objects through writing about them.
00:26:01
Speaker
One of the questions I always like to ask people I have on the show is like, what other artistic media do you consume to help inform your writing or whatever your main vocation is? What thing do you do differently to help inform that? And it's kind of like Rilke was doing that by looking at sculpts like, how can I make my poetry look like that statue? And that's kind of like maybe a good
00:26:30
Speaker
a good lesson for anyone to maybe look outside your discipline to make your own discipline better. Yeah, exactly. And I think it has to do with just that process of observation, like less about what it is you're looking at and more about that kind of careful study of how it was made. And then once you really understand how that thing was made, step by step, you can kind of, that close attention I think is the best
00:26:59
Speaker
a lesson and you can kind of understand how things are done. And I think that's really what, you know, I think he could have probably done it with music or he could have probably done it with dance. I don't know, you know, it just happened to be sculpture in this case.
00:27:13
Speaker
Rodan was very much, it was like work, always work. So maybe it was one of those things where you might idolize or you look at someone's finished products and you think it just came into being. But maybe Rodan grounded a sense of work ethic and rigor in Rilke, in a sense.
00:27:38
Speaker
to us the reader that is just like, yeah, you know, ultimately it's, you just got to sit down and, and, and do the work somehow and, you know, how illustrative that can be. And then the final product will speak for itself, but it is an ugly process that eventually elicits beauty, but you have to be willing to deal with those ugly middles. Right. Exactly. Yeah. That's well put. And he, you know, he had like the, his redundant, you know, example was like to be like,
00:28:06
Speaker
They were sitting together one day by the pond or something, and Rodin plucked a mushroom from the ground and turned it over, and he showed Rilke all the gills on the underside of the mushroom, and he was like, see that? That's good work. Or cathedrals. He really loved the Gothic cathedrals because he felt they were really a testament to the power of labor and just one brick on top of the next for hundreds of years.
00:28:36
Speaker
that was to him like the highest form of artistic achievement, something that you know, where you can see the, you know, it results in something completely different. The transformation happens through kind of a tedious process. And that was certainly what he taught real good to do, you know, to start small with a mushroom or a rock or a leaf or whatever to describe it. And then
00:29:04
Speaker
from there, you know, something that whatever the magical transformation into art that happens happens naturally kind of along the way. Whereas, you know, that's why you can't start on the other side, you can't start with the meaning or you can't start with the artistic message you want to convey, you kind of have to start and then and then with a simple thing and then you discover it along the way.
00:29:29
Speaker
in your own writing, in your own practice of writing, did you have similar moments of elucidation of when it was, I don't know, whatever influential books that you had and you saw those finished products and as you were starting to get to your own finished products, did you have those
00:29:51
Speaker
like a moment of a Eureka moment that oh, yeah, like it was work for them. It's work for me. I just have to endure and persevere and then I can get to something that's very that's very fully formed at at the end, you know, sort of like, you know, Rodan picking up the mushroom and be like, this is good work, but, you know, you got to grind through it. Yeah. Well, that's writing a book, isn't it? Like that's the whole thing. That's the whole.
00:30:20
Speaker
I mean, that wasn't my experience all the way, kind of. You know, just like it was just a process of frustrations, I think, you know, I think of it just was like going to I would just be I would just spend every day in the library and just kind of, you know, you put down all the facts is nonfiction, so everything has to be correct and careful. And then and then and then you and then you kind of sit with them and then you think, all right, what is
00:30:50
Speaker
What is this? Have I just written a timeline? Have I written anything of use here? What is this? What do I do with it? And then there's these moments of doubt and frustration, like maybe this is not going anywhere. Maybe there's nothing creative about this at all. And then it happens. Eventually, there were plenty of those moments that I don't really know. It's hard to tie them to anything. It's usually when you stop trying so hard.
00:31:20
Speaker
Right. Something happens. Yeah, you just got to get unbridled and just let it rip. Yeah, right. Yeah. Or like, it's like kind of when you get... There's so much about it that's uncreative, you know, like just like the, when you're like, for me, I always put down like all the, all of the, I just make sure all the facts are correct. So I always do that first. And it's so kind of kind of hollows you out.
00:31:48
Speaker
It's just really tedious and really boring, kind of. It's useful. You learned your subjects, but in that process, you have to go away for a few days and then come back and then look at it fresh, I think. Maybe you'll see what's
00:32:08
Speaker
but it's actually kind of magical about this information. You know? In those moments when you had to, say, go away for a few days, what would you do in that time to help recharge yourself so you can come back to the work fresh? Well, I would just try to do something completely different, like not think about it at all. I mean, I would have probably, you know, when I was writing it, I was also working, so I would go, maybe I would go work, you know, do a story about whatever.
00:32:38
Speaker
something, you know, for some magazine, and then just put it away completely and then come back, you know, a couple days later, I would just try to segment the days so that they were completely different. One was purely the book and one was purely maybe a magazine story or something.
00:32:55
Speaker
And how do you keep track of that and schedule your days so you can make the most of it when it is, say, book day versus magazine deadline day? Do you have a particular practice so you can keep things straight? Yeah, I just plan it out ahead of time. I just try to decide which days will be which. And I usually change locations. Like I would always work, I would go to
00:33:24
Speaker
the Columbia library usually when I would work on the book because it's quiet and You know, I can't get phone calls and stuff so and then I would do and then when I'm writing for doing journalism it would be I'd work at home or I'd work at an office or Depending on you know, if I would go into the magazine or whatever So that usually like the entire the whole structure of the day would be different I just try to plan one so that the other doesn't interrupt the other you know, it's just two different ways of
00:33:55
Speaker
of thinking, so it's usually not too hard to separate them out. Yeah. And one thing that really struck me when I was reading the book was how, you know, Rilke, he, at one point, I think it was when he was kind of, he couldn't get a toehold with the right mentor and so he designed his own syllabus of study.
Exploring Rilke's Influences and Legacy
00:34:16
Speaker
which I thought was really brilliant and it's something that anyone can do today. Sort of like you can make your own MFA if you want. Save the money and just go find the people you want to be like and read their shit and study their stuff. His is hilarious because his was like learn Danish and learn more about
00:34:40
Speaker
the celestial body, like learn more natural history, like learn the origin of stars. I love that so much and I thought that was like such a great way to sort of seize your own study and be as self-made as you can.
00:34:59
Speaker
So I took that was something that really stuck stuck in my head and I wonder as you were doing your research and as an artist who works in true stories and these were also artists you were studying in different media what what did you learn and take away from studying them that maybe you were able to say like oh that's cool I'm gonna steal that and apply it to my own work. Certainly like
00:35:27
Speaker
I mean, what I do like from his idea was when he was making that syllabus was to actually not include any literature in it. So it was a syllabus basically to broaden his horizons, to learn other things. So I thought that was actually really useful. So it would be
00:35:52
Speaker
The closest he would come would be maybe to learn about architecture or something. And I think that's really useful to kind of, you have to, you all the time have to read if you're a writer, and I all the time am looking at art. But I think it's really, I learned a lot about history and when I was working on this about the architecture in Paris and the way the city was constructed,
00:36:21
Speaker
and about psychology and the history of how the impact between aesthetic philosophy and psychology and origins of Darwinism. And these were all ideas that were completely relevant to the artistic scene at the time, but you don't necessarily associate them together now, or you wouldn't actually do it. So I think there was a real, I mean, he was absolutely right that studying Darwin had everything to do with
00:36:52
Speaker
or Nietzsche had everything to do with understanding the kind of the literary circles too, because everything's coming out of the same culture. So for me, I also read a lot of Nietzsche and Darwin and some of the philosophers at the time, because those, I don't think it was just that time period, but these ideas were all commingling and creating the whole culture that I was trying to write about. So I think that's a good,
00:37:21
Speaker
but actually a very good lesson. Yeah, and something else in your book, too, you talk a lot about the artist, the female artists in West Off and Becker. And they're, unfortunately, they're fairly tragic lies, because at that time, you know, Rodin is saying that women in your lives are manipulative and will smother your art.
00:37:45
Speaker
And so these women who are very talented in their own right were just, were silenced in a lot of ways and not allowed to express themselves to their fullest potential. And, uh, you know, given your start as, you know, writing for, you know, women's e-news and having that, that bent as a journalistic entry into your, your writing career, uh, what was it like for you to tell their stories and, you know, in this sort of in this climate too?
00:38:14
Speaker
You know, I was a little conscious that I was writing a story about two kind of, you know, old dead white man, like in a time when it's, you know, not necessarily, I mean, it's not something that needed to be done necessarily. But I mean, it didn't matter to me. I wanted to do this story. But I think in a way, like one of my a comment that I get a lot since it came out is that is about the women characters. And people tell me a lot that they are really happy that they feel like
00:38:44
Speaker
full characters, especially Paula and Paula Becker and Clara Vestoff. And that that's, of course, makes me very happy. Because I think it was really hard to find information on them. Not not so much Paula, because she's quite celebrated, but or also Rodin's wife. There was just because they weren't famous, they didn't. There's not a lot written about them. But it was important to me to to make them whole because
00:39:13
Speaker
You know, as dismissive as Rodin was of women, certainly Rilke was not. I mean, he always was with extremely accomplished women. He always admired them and looked up to them and sought them as both kind of mentors and lovers. So it didn't seem possible to really tell his story without telling his wife or Lou Salome.
00:39:44
Speaker
It was a lot more work in a way because I had to really dig to find stuff about a lot of them. But I think it's worth it in the end because they do, I hope, become real people. And I don't know, maybe it's because I'm a woman or something, just kind of naturally inclined to make them.
00:40:01
Speaker
human in the book, but I don't know. It wasn't conscious. It was a great addition. Those are some of the parts of the books that I felt really popped because it departed from the two main figures and you realize that there were these other influential people and you got a sense of sort of their desperation for visibility and artistic fame, but they were just kind of always in the shadows, unfortunately.
00:40:31
Speaker
tragic. It's really sad. And they all have kind of sad endings too, unfortunately. Paula Becker died tragically young. Camille Clodel ended up in an asylum and Claire Vestoff got kind of stuck raising the kid and had a career but not the one she wanted to have.
00:40:54
Speaker
you know, loose Alameda maybe she's maybe she's the kind of one silver lining, you know, yeah, she swim with Freud in in God. Yeah. And that's another wonderful element of the book, too, is that like, you know, Freud kind of plays into this whole thing is like them and also the women's stories where were they were those elements of the book things that surprised you as you dive deeper into the research?
00:41:23
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I had no idea about the connection between Freud and Rilke. That was completely a shock to me. And it's still not even completely confirmed. I mean, there's this essay that Freud wrote about a walk that he took with a poet. And it's assumed by a lot of scholars that that poet was Rilke, though it's not 100% confirmed. But I never knew that. And I knew that this kind of
00:41:53
Speaker
this sort of nascent science of this self that was happening at the time was part of Rilke's story because he wrote about that and he wrote about it. It infused his own work and he himself thought about going into psychoanalysis, I mean, as a patient, as a doctor. And he had his dreams analyzed for a while.
00:42:21
Speaker
So I knew that there was some relationship between the origins of psychology and Rilke's life, but I didn't know that he had such direct contact with Freud and that through Lou Salome, he kind of rejected psychoanalysis. He decided he thought it was this kind of romantic view that if you underwent psychoanalysis, it would cure you of
00:42:50
Speaker
of both the angels and the demons. So he might become happier, but he would also take away his creative powers. So he didn't fully submit to the doctrine, but he was able to take from it here and there through Lou, who was a student of Freud's and also became the analyst of one of Freud's daughters. So you see how it plays a lot into Rilke's later life.
00:43:19
Speaker
And as you were looking to, as you were crafting the book, and even maybe before you got to writing it, did you have any example or model books that you were like, okay, that's, I can help, you know, I can, this is what I've read. And this will help sort of inform the structure and the sort of this co biography angle I'm looking for. Were there any influential books that helped you along the way?
00:43:48
Speaker
Yeah, well, the co-biography, I'm trying to think of it, I mean, I must have, I read a lot of biographies, I kind of think of what I read, I specifically had like a dual one. I mean, though, I certainly read a lot about Rilke, you know, I read, I read on Anne Rodin, of course, I really loved William Gass's reading Rilke, which is
00:44:18
Speaker
which I'd actually read long before I started this project because it's really this dance between philosophical musings and a dissection of the way different poetry is translated and he lines up different translations side by side and then takes them apart and kind of shows you how they come to be and also a kind of close reading of Rilke's life
00:44:50
Speaker
That book was always that really stuck with me. I read it many times. Of course, I read it again when I was working on this project, because it had that kind of that bit of everything in it. So it wasn't like a, you know, certainly wasn't a dual biography, but it showed you how to kind of put together different, all the different elements of a life, the creative part, the critical part of, you know, looking at the work. And then of course, just questioning
00:45:18
Speaker
Yourself as an author, you know his that whole book is him. So questioning the different problems of translation And I don't read German. So this is something I was kind of coming against a lot And doubting myself and questioning how how I should approach Interpreting certain poems or talking about them So for me that book was probably the most important
00:45:46
Speaker
And it's the kind of unlikely model. I don't know if I had a good, I had like a real model. I'm thinking about it. Yeah, and I read that, you know, there were just a lot of, you know, I really liked, Jeff Dyer had written a really nice essay about the two of them, about, and about Rilke and Rodin, and also about the relationship of kind of, I think it's called Genius Envy. It's about, and he looks at other kinds of,
00:46:16
Speaker
joy of figures like this. I can't remember who the other ones are off the top of my head, but two people were they kind of two creative, you know, stars that kind of how they influence each other, and how they maybe envy each other and the push and pull between their, their relationships. And that was, I think, also important to me at the time.
00:46:38
Speaker
Yeah. And is there a writer or two out there that you admire to the extent that Rilke admired Rodan and someone that you just achieved to be? Or achieved to be is a weird way of saying it, but someone that you aspire to be, I'm sorry. Yeah, well, there's a lot of them.
00:47:07
Speaker
It's so funny because it's like, I mean, in different ways, I think a lot of the books that I loved before, you know, like, certainly, you know, I think William Gaff is one of the great thinkers that I loved during these last few years. But before that, I always really liked writers. I think I always liked writers who had really good sense as a place. And I always, I sort of loved, like, Annie Pru or
00:47:35
Speaker
Cormac McCarthy or Michael Givmore. Those are always, they always wrote about kind of landscapes like the one I came from. And I, so I think those, oddly enough, were the ones that I, you know, I wanted to be like, you know, they always, you know, if I read something recently about how, if you look like the subjects that writers are drawn to are often the same subjects that they
00:48:02
Speaker
were interested in before they were like 20 years old or 18 years old. And so there's a kind of, and I find myself often, I find that to be true the same, you know, maybe that's why Wetherstein Poet worked for me was such an important catalyst for this book because I read it at that formative age. And so I think like those writers who come from places like I did and write about the places like I come from that I'm always drawn to them.
00:48:38
Speaker
When you're when you're in that that mode of doing something extensively big as a as the book and how do you set up your days so you can accomplish the work? And I know you say you like mapped out, you know, like X days, book day, blah, blah. But on a day to day basis, how do you set up your day so you feel sort of victorious when the sun goes down? Well, that's I don't know. That's a really good day.
00:48:52
Speaker
So I would say there's three in-room guests.
00:49:08
Speaker
Um, you know, I go far away, you know, I go, it's like an hour from where I live. I go far away so that I'm there really for the whole day and there's nothing else to do. And then I sit there for like an hour. Usually, you know, I, I, I'm good. Like in the morning, I like to start very early first thing in the morning. Um, and I think clearly I try to write a little bit and then I get,
00:49:35
Speaker
tired of writing and so then I read a little bit or I'd kind of do research and then I go to distract myself by eating something or whatever. I mean, it's so boring. I don't know if this is like the least interesting thing to talk about in a way. And then you can work a little more. I don't think it's very often I feel victorious unless you've had one of those really great rare moments.
00:50:03
Speaker
Yeah, I guess maybe in lieu of victorious would be like accomplished, you know, like, all right, yeah, you know, you know, I hit my word count for the day or page count or Oh, yeah, you know what I mean? Like, maybe a better a better way to say is like, after you've set up your day, like, how do you measure what it means to have had a good day? I think it's like, if I had like, you know, something, a new idea came on. Yeah, I don't have like a word count goals, really, maybe I should, but
00:50:32
Speaker
I don't really have that. So I kind of, you know, hopefully I, you know, move, hopefully something moved, you know, I got from one place to another, something was put down. And then like, some new ideas came about where to go next, you know, or some, like, some little offshoots formed that maybe I could explore, that I didn't know were going to be there first. So, you know,
00:50:59
Speaker
probably a little combination of that. Just a little movement, I would say, is good. It's an accomplished day. How do you manage distractions when you're a little fatigued from maybe the writing or the research? How do you avoid going down social media rabbit holes and stay focused? Do you have any sort of practice you like to employ? That's a real problem for me, and I would love to know
00:51:27
Speaker
advice from you or your other writers on that because I haven't figured that one out yet. I'm really bad. I'm increasingly bad. I don't know. It used to be, I mean, I would say that I guess part of it, I do, I go to the library so that I don't have like domestic distractions. I don't have like, you know, things to clean or, you know, laps around my apartment or something, you know, or like doing chores.
00:51:54
Speaker
That's part of it. But then the distractions of the internet are really hard for me because I haven't figured out a way. I don't think I haven't figured out a way to work without the internet yet because I do a lot of research on it. Um, and so I would like to figure out a way maybe to turn it off and just make notes of things I want to look up later and then turn it back on and look things up and then go back and fill in blanks, you know, because otherwise the problem is I look things up immediately all the time and then I
00:52:23
Speaker
I do distract myself. I'm going to go down a rabbit hole.
Modern Challenges and Online Presence
00:52:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think I've heard Neil Strauss talk about a particular app. Maybe it's called Free or something. But what it does is you set up, say, a 90-minute window and it will block your computer's capacity to connect to the internet.
00:52:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's something that it's forceful. It's not like you it's not like just turning your Wi-Fi off like it will not let you do it So yeah, so as he's writing, you know, if there's something he needs to check or he'll make a note Be like, okay when I'm back to internet time, this is what I can look up So maybe that's something we're looking into. Yeah. Have you tried that? I have not But I should try it. Okay, I'll look that up. I need I definitely it's time to do something like that Yeah
00:53:14
Speaker
Very nice. Well, you know, with Rachel, with respect to your time, I'll let you get going. Let me let you get out of here by just asking where people can find more about you and your work and you know, you must change your life and so forth. Oh, yeah. Well, my website has everything on there. It's rachel-corbett.com. And I have like, you know, you can there's reviews and events, you know, I do some talks.
00:53:43
Speaker
about the book here and there. So there's more information there, I would say, is the best place. And then of course you can buy it on Amazon or Indie seller, whatever, I think that's the name of the Indie book seller online. Yeah. And are you most active on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook? Yeah, I have all of that. I try to be active. I mean, my Instagram is basically just
00:54:11
Speaker
pictures of the art that I see on a weekly basis. That's either great or boring, depending on your taste. I'm on Twitter, too. It's at RachelNCorbett.
00:54:29
Speaker
and so we've come to the end. Big thanks to Rachel Corbett. Rachel N. Corbett on Twitter. If you've made it this far, this is where I will ask you to kindly leave an honest review or rating on iTunes. Ratings take 10 seconds. Reviews take a little bit longer, but here's the thing. If you do that and you show me evidence of it, I will
00:54:56
Speaker
that the
00:55:12
Speaker
and see episode 60 you'll get that transcript with hyperlinks and all sorts of goodies in there also I have this really great monthly newsletter that seems to be growing every month
00:55:28
Speaker
It is a little non-fiction digest of books that I recommend as well as some documentary film and radio or podcasts, so it's a great little thing to give you some things to chew on for a month. So it's once a month, no spam, and you can't beat that. That's at BrendanOmera.com. That's gonna do it, friends. Until we do this again next week, have a CNFing great week. Thanks for listening.
00:56:44
Speaker
you