Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 12—Sarah Einstein on writing an other-person-centric memoir, Jane Eyre, and Count Chocula
150 Plays9 years ago
Sarah Einstein joins me to talk about her wonderful new book "Mot: a Memoir." Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a nice five-star review on iTunes!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Updates
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Hashtag CNF Podcast. I am your host, Brendan O'Mara, and today's guest is Sarah Einstein, author of the wonderful memoir, Mott, a memoir. In it we talk about her really smart decision to really make this man this sort of unrooted man that she
00:00:28
Speaker
new from her time as a social worker, the central figure of her book versus having herself the true central figure. Really well done how she approached it. And it's just a really, really good book published by University of Georgia Press.
00:00:50
Speaker
Beyond that, you know, I think it's been about three months since I posted an episode, but that's kind of how it goes. These things, they just come up when they can and we just got to roll with it. You know, be sure, of course, to subscribe to the podcast. It's never going to be something that completely inundates your podcast feed, kind of will show up when it does, when I can.
00:01:18
Speaker
If you have any inquiries or any other kind of questions, you can go to BrendanOmara.com or email me Brendan at BrendanOmara.com. Real creative there. So in any case, we've got Sarah Einstein and I hope you enjoy this one. So be sure to give it a listen and share it with friends and buy our book. It's a darn good one. Thank you.
Childhood Memories and Book Release
00:01:46
Speaker
What was your favorite breakfast cereal growing up? Oh, this one's really easy. Count Chocula. Oh, nice. I'm always worried when I ask that question that someone's going to say, like, grape nuts or Wheaties. And at which point the conversation's over. Yeah, we actually weren't even supposed to have it. And my grandfather, who came to see us every morning before school, used to smuggle it into us, along with sugar doughnuts from the bakery.
00:02:16
Speaker
Wow. Nice. And the beauty about Count Chocula or Cocoa Puffs isn't necessarily the cereal itself. It's what happens to the milk afterwards. Absolutely.
00:02:31
Speaker
Well, very nice. Well, without further ado, I want to be respectful of your time, so let's get going about your book. When does it come out exactly? It comes out this month, or it might already be out. The official launch date is September 15th, but it's already shipping and out in the world.
00:02:55
Speaker
Nice. How does that feel to know that your book is out there and chipped and there's nothing you can do about it anymore except try to promote it and see people react to it? Absolutely terrifying. In truth, the whole time I was writing it, I never thought really about anybody reading it.
00:03:21
Speaker
It always sort of seems like an exercise between myself and my graduate school advisors and a few post readers. And there's something about it being out in the world and people starting to respond to it that is, it's frightening. Exciting,
Ethical Challenges in Memoir Writing
00:03:38
Speaker
but frightening.
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah, why do you think that is? Is it a loss of control now that it's published or is it just because the story in so many ways is so personal and raw that it's like, okay, now people can judge me based on the me in the book instead of the me who is just out there living day to day? I'm actually not that worried about people judging me
00:04:06
Speaker
But in some of the reviews that people have posted online, they've used words from Mott that make me uncomfortable. One reviewer called him insane, which is the word that makes me uncomfortable. And a big part of what was challenging about writing this book was the ethical representation of Mott and making sure that I presented him in all of his complexity.
00:04:32
Speaker
And I worry sometimes that I have failed to do that in the way that I needed to when readers respond with kind of a reductionist idea that this was.
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think what you've done, and I mentioned this before to you, is I think why the memoir is so good and done so well is that you really focused so much of the attention on Mott as the central figure that we follow, and I know I
00:05:06
Speaker
was like kind of rooting for him like hoping that he found a certain degree of balance in his life to quiet some of those voices that have that have haunted him for for as long as he's been alive and try to like piece together all the
00:05:22
Speaker
Or come to peace with all the trauma that happened in his life. I know as I was reading, I was rooting for him and hoping that he could pull through in a way that I think was satisfactory to you seeing as how emotionally invested in his life.
00:05:44
Speaker
You were, and I think you did a phenomenally good job with that. And I can understand that it is a bit upsetting to hear people reduce him to an insane person when it's far deeper than that. Right. I mean, the truth is he was brilliant in so many ways that I would never be brilliant. Part of what fascinated me about him was that he lived in a far more difficult world than most of us with it.
00:06:12
Speaker
And she came up with solutions to problems that would never have occurred to me. That she was able to figure out that, because Romania will provide, or at least at that time, would provide dental care to anybody, how to use his meager social security check to apply to Romania to get his teeth fixed. And he started to, when his teeth started to go bad, I was, that astounded me. I just had a person who sat at home and complained about my teeth falling out of my head.
00:06:42
Speaker
and didn't ever find a solution for that. That would have felt like an insoluble problem to me. And I was so fascinated by its brilliance in leading this incredibly difficult life, even if it didn't look like a livable life.
00:06:58
Speaker
Yeah, he's incredibly resourceful in that sense. I think there's an exchange in the book, too, where if you were willing to take about, I don't know, four days to fly across the country, that you could just wait for these standby tickets at a discounted rate and kind of hopscotch your way across the country in such a way, if you had the time, as someone like Ma did, because he was sort of a...
00:07:23
Speaker
you know, unconnected to a lot of the normal societal tropes like your day-to-day jobs that most of us are tied to. But again, it really speaks to his resourcefulness and I think that's something that you successfully illustrate throughout the whole book and I think something that you truly admire about him. Absolutely. Things like the fact that, you know, when I met him, he was 66, which means that he had never been in a setting
00:07:53
Speaker
where people use computers, but he taught himself how to use computers in the internet just at public library. I mean, that's really amazing.
00:08:03
Speaker
Yeah, because you just think about how just people of a certain age sometimes have a hard time grasping smartphones and tablets. I know even I'm starting to, I have to ask my eight year old niece how to do certain things and I imagine being someone who's 66 and nomadic and teaching himself how to use newer technologies without the grounding
Friendship with Mott: From Life to Memoir
00:08:35
Speaker
education and whatnot that most of us take for granted. And here this guy is, he's able to just get a sense that he could just find new and inspiring ways to create fire that we would never imagine. That's a great way to put it. I think he was always finding new and creative ways to create fire because he always had to do things differently. His illness never let him stay in one place very long.
00:09:04
Speaker
and it overwrote everything with fear. So he always had to find new ways to go about something. And so how did you come to this story and why did you feel compelled to write about it? Or at what point did you realize, I can't sit on the story any longer and I just need to make sense of this on the page and tell this great sort of buddy movie story between the two of you?
00:09:32
Speaker
So I keep having to confess this now that I'm talking about the book, which is that if you tell people you're gonna go drive to Amarillo, Texas to visit your homeless friend in his homelessness, they kind of roll their eyes at you or say, oh no, we can't allow that. That's a terrible idea. If you add, so I can write a book, they think, oh, that's great. Would you like to borrow my pen? And the truth is the book started out as a room
00:10:02
Speaker
I never actually imagined that I would write this book. I never actually imagined that I could write any book. I tend to work mostly in short form, and the idea of a book that makes work kind of terrifies me. But because I had started writing, and because people knew that I was writing and putting out short form work, when I said, I'm just going to write a book about this, it suddenly made most of the objections to my trying to continue this friendship go away.
00:10:30
Speaker
And so I took a lot of careful notes, and I swirled everything away, but I don't think I ever thought that the book would actually get written until after Mott had left. And then it was really the thing that filled up the space of missing him. It was a way that I could try to both honor the friendship, and although I realized I couldn't keep it alive, it wasn't to keep going once this illusion
00:11:00
Speaker
had made me a fearful person and now I'm afraid I've just given away the end of the book. It was a way for me to keep engaged with that and figure out for myself why I had needed to do that and what was so important in my life about that.
00:11:17
Speaker
What kind of discipline did it take on your end to wait until he was fully sort of out of your life to then write the book? Because I think a lot of people would want to, you can almost see it unfolding in the process, but you were able to hold back enough to create enough distance I think at that point to then structure
00:11:44
Speaker
what it was that eventually became the book. So how are you able to approach that and not jump into it too soon? Well, the truth is I think I jumped into it maybe a little bit too soon, which is why this book has gone to about a million drafts. And it's a sense that if there on the page exists more from the drafting process than from my not writing about it, to believe you have to give memory time
00:12:14
Speaker
sort of mellow and age and become a narrative. And because I started writing, I probably did start writing within a few days before he left. But before that, I had been doing so much note taking. There was so much work to be done in terms of capturing that. That itself was the kind of work that was just at that stage of the project.
00:12:41
Speaker
It was really important to me, for instance, that I actually capture dialogue with him in a really accurate way because he has such an idiosyncratic way of speaking. And so often while we were spending time together, I pull out my notebook and try to recreate the dialogue and he would look at it and correct me if I was wrong. And sometimes that meant that I had these pieces of dialogue
00:13:11
Speaker
I recorded that I knew were wrong because sometimes his memory would become imbued with his delusion. But most often he just was better at remembering accurately exactly what was said. He had an almost idyllic memory.
00:13:27
Speaker
What was the most uncomfortable part about writing this book? Sitting down and just hammering it out however long it had taken you. What were some of those challenges and those uncomfortable moments as you crafted your book? I found it really hard to write the part about my life at home away from Mott because I was in a marriage that didn't succeed and
00:13:58
Speaker
I didn't want at any point to make it seem like the reason it didn't succeed was somebody else's fault. There were a lot of tensions in that marriage. My ex-husband and I had very different ideas of what the marriage should look like. And I was very aware that because the book is from my position, if I wasn't careful, I could make him look like a real jerk. And I hope I haven't done that because he wasn't a real jerk. He was just a person
00:14:28
Speaker
with a very different idea of what home and family should be. Oh yeah, go on, I'm sorry. And I think also writing about Mike, the other homeless young man who lived in our apartment, because Mike had more to lose if he came across in the book in a bad way, and Mike had been less of an active participant in the decision to write the book.
00:14:57
Speaker
And so I really wanted to make sure that Mike wasn't too present and that I focused on the things about having Mike live with us that were positive, although I had to acknowledge the challenges as well.
Understanding Mott's Mental Illness
00:15:10
Speaker
And it appeared with your ex-husband who was very committed to his patient in Rita, and then you were also very committed to Mott in such a way. And I was wondering what it was that maybe the two of you sought, what sort of hole do you feel that
00:15:35
Speaker
spending so much time with people who were mentally ill and having to help them through their daily lives, what that did for each of you, because it seems like maybe what you were unable to fill with each other, you were able to fulfill with, say, Rita and Mott. I think we each believed, and I think she still believes, and I admire this,
00:16:05
Speaker
i'm not sure that i don't believe it that if you can make one person's life genuinely better you have somehow made a significant change in the world and i've stopped believing that you can actually you can't you can help other people too do what they want to do if you certainly picked out what we have to be certainly made we don't like better but i don't think i actually made an appreciable difference
00:16:35
Speaker
in Mott's life. And I think that sort of, I think it's often now called the White Savior complex. For me, the real, what I really got out of the end of my friendship with Mott, because I want to be clear that what I got out of the friendship with Mott was friendship, and friendship, and joy, and all of that. But what I got out of the way that it ended
00:17:03
Speaker
was sort of an awareness of my own ridiculous and silly, banal sense that as a white middle-class woman, if I really put my mind to something, by gosh, I could fix the social ills of the world, that somehow I was sufficient to fix something as complicated and broken as the social system that was supposed to be there, just a Fort Mott, and wasn't.
00:17:35
Speaker
to understand that there's kind of this myth that we put out in the world that the way that we fix societal problems is through individual effort. And in fact, that energy is often better spent working towards policy change.
00:17:52
Speaker
Did you get a sense that as you were trying to sort of like coach Mott through your friendship to try to like sort of bring him down from
00:18:07
Speaker
his delusions and stuff, did you feel like that it could have been, his life got inadvertently sort of complicated and that led to, that might have led to a sense of more tangled thoughts for him as he tried to come to grips with a quote unquote more normal life?
00:18:33
Speaker
I always worried about that and I always trusted him because he was very articulate and he understood that he was ill. He understood that his thinking was disordered. And he was pretty good at reporting to me and acknowledging in himself when that was better or worse. So when he would tell me things like having somebody to talk to help, humor is good and help them kind of get past fear.
00:19:02
Speaker
I trusted him in those things. And I think that the only way to have a genuine friendship with somebody is to trust them in their self-reporting of their experience. And we've talked together about the danger that trying to forge a friendship that went against his disordered thinking might be dangerous to him. And he felt that it was worth it to make the effort. So I kind of left whether or not things were okay
00:19:32
Speaker
Yeah, and given his, his experience, he seemed, he seemed like pretty, pretty forthcoming and he understood when to, when to, when to, when to shun and when to allow you in and so he was almost like a good, a good gauge of when
00:19:52
Speaker
when he could use the help and when he just didn't care for it and I was that hard for you to be volleied like a tennis ball back and forth between each of those states and not knowing which you know maybe not not being able to properly foresee which you know which part of your friend you are going to encounter
00:20:16
Speaker
it was and it it helped me a real left and that and i kind of keep raising it that way because something i don't want anybody to come away from this book believing is that this was about going there to learn a lesson that was not the point of course all life experience he picked up something and i think i have somebody who have always accepted responsibility for things but i actually didn't uh... and the kind of person who apologize that probably
00:20:45
Speaker
can feel responsible for things that I didn't make happen, particularly bad things. And I think one of the things that I had to learn to be better about in order to be a good friend to him was recognizing that I actually couldn't control the way things were going. And that if there was a day when he said, I can't be around you, it wasn't because I had done something bad
00:21:15
Speaker
It was because it was a day he couldn't be around me, and that I had to stop looking for explanations or even understanding of exactly why that was. I just had to believe him and trust him. Yeah, because I think a trap might be, and you learn this through experience with him, but maybe a trap would be to
00:21:38
Speaker
I don't know, try to persuade him otherwise. Be like, no, I'm a good presence for you right now. Let's hang out and try to work through
The Conclusion of Friendship
00:21:46
Speaker
this. But you came to a point where if he said, no, I can't be around you right now, you kind of have to learn to say, just to agree with that and move on because on Wednesday, it might be a better day to have a nice day with him. Right, and that's why when he finally did leave,
00:22:08
Speaker
You know, I felt compelled to go and look for him, but I actually knew I was only looking at places where I wouldn't find him. Um, it was kind of a way to kill a couple of hours after I discovered he had gone and come to terms with it. But I understood by that point that the friendship was going to be impossible for him in any kind of long-term way, that it was something that he had tried, but it hadn't worked. And
00:22:37
Speaker
I felt as though respecting that was key to why we'd ever been able to be friends in the first place, that I didn't think of him as separate from his disordered thinking. I had to think of that as just part of who he was and to respect that that was his experience and not to try to say, oh, but that part's delusional, that part doesn't count, but rather to say, okay, this is your experience and it is this delusion
00:23:17
Speaker
you're actually, you set out to look for him. And you say, I tell myself I'm not going to find him, then I set out anyway. So early on in the book, there was this part of you that would chase him incessantly to find him and to, you know, and to forge this friendship. And then late in the book, as you just alluded, it was when he left
00:23:25
Speaker
And we just have to listen to that.
00:23:42
Speaker
left the apartment or the house where he was staying, you made the decision where this is where I stop chasing him. What do you think changed for you where you were able to make that decision and not pursue, as you say, look for him in places that you knew you wouldn't find him? Well, one of the things is that the two situations seemed very different to me.
00:24:08
Speaker
uh... because i knew he had intended it at that early part of the book but he doesn't show up with the pet you well actually you know he had to do that and i knew that he with a person with enough that she might have i've had a difficult time carrying that and that she had told me where i could find them by telling me that he was sleeping in the parking lot before aria wal-mart mhm and so it felt like like pursuing him and more like
00:24:39
Speaker
just going to see if he was where the other place he had said he might be. By the end of the book, it was clear that instead of telling me that he was trying to be there and be my friend, he had started telling me that it was time for him to stop trying. That now he was done with death. And he said it in very kind ways. There was no meanness. There was no anger. It was
00:25:09
Speaker
very full of disordered thinking, but it was also very clear. And again, I feel like this just comes back to accepting that that disordered thinking was still his experience in the world.
00:25:24
Speaker
So through, before the book obviously you've got a very, very big investment in terms of emotions and time spent with Mott. Then he leaves and you write the book and however long it took you, you had the experience again from the construction of the book to kind of fill that sort of void left by him. In a lot of ways the book and the writing of the book I imagine kind of replaced
00:25:54
Speaker
his presence and now that the book is done and you're talking about it, there's still kind of a revisitation for it. I wonder how have you dealt with the absence of Mott and now that the book is out, there are these chapters of sort of his removal from your life.
00:26:14
Speaker
At what point have you, or maybe you already have, come to terms with the complete disappearance of him from your life, in a physical sense and a more abstract sense? It's definitely true that he left in absence. The friendship though only lasted for a number of months.
00:26:42
Speaker
pretty quickly my life changed dramatically. He left just as I was starting graduate school. My husband and I divorced a couple of years after he left. And my life just dramatically changed shape. And so while I will always really be glad that I had the time that I did have with Lot, I also recognize that lives change and move forward. And sometimes you can't always carry these friendships.
00:27:12
Speaker
through all of those changes. And I'm not even sure it would have been possible without the delusion for us to have remained the kind of friends we were for this long. And I think there's
Sarah's Writing Journey and Influences
00:27:24
Speaker
a chapter in the book about the first man who I took into my home when I was in my 20s, a homeless man who was dying of cancer. And there came a point in that friendship too, where in order to move on with my own life,
00:27:42
Speaker
I ended up leaving the house that I had shared with him and finding a way for him to be able to stay in it. When I sold the house, I made sure that the people who bought it gave him life estate and a little apartment that he lived in. But I think lives continue to move forward and there's a level of sacrifice that I feel isn't appropriate in friendship where you might say, well, I'm not going to let my life move forward in order to accommodate this.
00:28:11
Speaker
And I never, these were never friendships that I felt carried greater responsibility than other friendships that make sense. They were just shaped differently. And so while I missed Scott, he doesn't feel an empty place in my life without him. I just missed his conversation and his wit and humor and his brilliance and his sometimes being able to make me see things in a new way for the better.
00:28:41
Speaker
Yeah, and I guess shifting gears a little bit, what was your routine when writing the book and like how did you approach the actual work of getting it done? I had a copious copious note and I started up in the chapters pretty rapidly. I felt like in order to capture memory
00:29:09
Speaker
with any accuracy, the first thing I needed to do was kind of right through the whole thing. And that was a really ugly draft. That was bad. They always are. I'm happy that the hard drive on the computer those pages were composed on has long since died. Because they were a jumble. And then the work was to sit down and try to craft
00:29:37
Speaker
of the
00:30:06
Speaker
Sorry about that, I'm not sure what happened. Oh, no worries, no worries at all. So yes, you were talking about you had just gotten through your ugly first draft and you were going through your notebooks and just reshaping what you had written. Yes, and I started my MFA as I was writing, as I was starting the book, and I was really lucky to study with Kevin Oderman who,
00:30:34
Speaker
just the most beautiful prose on the planet. And I had this story, but I had very few skills with getting sentences on the page. And I was, I can't say enough what a great stroke of good luck it was to get to study with somebody who is so good at exactly the things that I was struggling with, which is how to make language into art.
00:31:04
Speaker
And so I had the best mentors possible. He was certainly not the only one. Sarah Prichard was invaluable. And Tim Moore has been invaluable. My workshop peers were invaluable. And I think there's, I'm not sure that this could have been a book without the structure of graduate school to help get me through the process. Now I'm scared because I'll have to go and do it without that next time.
00:31:31
Speaker
Well, the truth is, as someone else who went through an MFA program, we share a colleague in Maggie Meset that
00:31:41
Speaker
Though you may no longer be enrolled in the program, you always have that community, which is sort of the long tail of having gone through the program. I know through Goucher there's a pretty good Facebook group that everyone shares a lot of work that they find from elsewhere, their own work. It's just kind of this little hub.
00:32:06
Speaker
So yeah, like no longer in the workshop setting, but in a lot of ways you still have those connections where you can tap into that vein for some help or maybe some criticism and pointers. And I imagine if, is this the MFA program you went to at Ohio University? No, I got my MFA from West Virginia University and my PhD from Ohio University.
00:32:35
Speaker
And now I'm a junior faculty member at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where I have a fabulous colleague, and where I'm really hoping that the sort of nurturing that I got through my process is something that I will have an opportunity to give to our undergraduate students. Having come through such an incredibly nurturing program, actually two incredibly nurturing programs,
00:33:02
Speaker
I'm really committed to the way in which writing programs can help young writers or new writers. I was certainly not young when I went to my MFA program. Learn the discipline of writing as well as the craft.
00:33:18
Speaker
So how do you reconcile teaching with the practice of writing? Do you find that it takes away or strengthens your writing? How do you find that balance between coaching and playing, if that makes any sense? For me, it's completely necessary. It is absolutely necessary both that I teach
00:33:45
Speaker
and that I serve as an editor on at least one journal. Right now I'm the prose editor for the journal Turing, as well as teaching four sections of creative writing. And if I don't have that prod of interacting with other people's work, if I don't have the work of writing, which goes beyond doing my own writing to do, I tend to get a little lost in the work.
00:34:11
Speaker
it's important to me i have i have a third number of hours every day that that dot the work of writing and sometimes that work is responding to other people's writing and sometimes it is doing my own having all of that path that are associated with the people are careful allowed me to take note these four hours every day are are hours involved in the work of writing and not to that wonder up it but i think that
00:34:41
Speaker
So what does the first hour of your day typically look like? Well, the first hour of my day, it depends on whether or not I have an early class. Often it looks like hopping in the shower and running out the door to fix traffic on my way through Chattanooga. But on days when I am home and writing, I get up, I go in and turn on the computer, text email and Facebook,
00:35:10
Speaker
And I open up whatever my latest project is, and I tell myself that it can't possibly be as bad as it looks to me at that moment. I make some coffee. I go back and look at whatever the current piece of work is again and hate it some more. I probably check Facebook a couple more times. I probably clean something. And then about 40 minutes after I sat down at the computer, I actually started engaging with the writing. And I'm so proud of this because it used to take two hours
00:35:39
Speaker
Nice. It kills me like being down to less than an hour is a major victory. Yeah. And do you do any journaling at all? Or do you typically just don't waste that kind of writing energy when you can put it elsewhere?
00:36:07
Speaker
I know that this is probably going to sound like a silly answer, but I think that Facebook is a form of journaling. And so in that way, I think that I do have some journaling practices, but they're small and they're inconsequential. And it's mostly about catching those moments in a day that say something to me that are never going to be big enough to go into a larger work. My Facebook post often feels to me like very micro essays.
00:36:37
Speaker
But other than that, I don't really do any journaling. I actually tried it for a while, and I found that for me journaling damaged my ability to write creative nonfiction. I was trapping memories in amber before they really had a chance to settle and turn into something that I could find, and they were becoming too complicated.
00:37:00
Speaker
That's interesting that it's, yeah, some that, uh, that I guess writing it when it, even just jotting down those memories as they, as they came up, it kind of, it didn't allow them to, those, those memories to like sort of sink into any deeper meaning, I guess is kind of what you're, yeah, they don't, they don't have a deeper resonance when you kind of cement them down on the page too soon, I guess. Yes. And for me, I think it was particularly sharp,
00:37:30
Speaker
Because even when I would journal, I would sort of write about how I felt about the thing in that moment. And then it always felt false to me if the way that I felt about it two weeks or a month or two years later was different. I felt as though that the distance that I had from it, although intellectually I know I probably had a clearer vision, I felt like somehow I was not being honest with the reader.
00:37:58
Speaker
if I replace the initial feeling with that. I'm one of the people who really believe that nonfiction needs to be non-fictional. And so it set up for me a kind of weird echo chamber around that that just went away when I stopped journaling because then what I thought as I was writing wasn't contradicted by what I had thought 5, 10, 15 minutes, 6 hours after an event.
Art and Literature's Influence on Writing
00:38:25
Speaker
And did you find that maybe the feeling or the meaning of the event that happened is better left?
00:38:39
Speaker
to the Sarah Einstein that comes a few months or weeks later. But did you ever find that at least through the journaling, it made sense for you, so things weren't non-fictional, that X, Y, and Z happened just to know that it happened and say it happened on a certain day and you were able to sort of cement the facts, but then to let the meaning resonate later? I guess in some sense there might be value in the two. At least you got
00:39:09
Speaker
I guess the time and the place down. So that's accurate, but then you let that gestate for a long time so you can get the true meaning of what those events happen. So I wonder if there's any sort of validity to that for you. Well, I think there is. I think for me, I lead such a documented life. If anything of note happens,
00:39:37
Speaker
chances are that there's a flurry of emails around it and other things that that kind of getting the facts out is something that I have access to by going back into my correspondence and into my calendars and that sort of thing. I'm a big person for calendars. I have a terrible memory. So I have all of these other artifacts and one of the things about those artifacts is I'm not
00:40:05
Speaker
processing the events of the writer. That's where they're just being reported. And I think that is really important. And I'm happy that for myself that the way in which that gets captured doesn't engage my writer brain. It just engages my sort of planner brain and my reporter brain. Yeah. And what other artistic genres, media do you draw inspiration from?
00:40:36
Speaker
I am absolutely somebody who finds all kinds of art fascinating and inspiring. I feel really lucky now to live in a city with some wonderful art museums and a big art community. My husband does a lot of digital art, and I find I find a lot of inspiration in just the creativity of other people. I am particularly drawn
00:41:05
Speaker
although I have no talent for it, to photography and the way in which photography is very much like creative nonfiction in that what is there is indeed there, but then there's the act of composition and arrangement and angle that is the thing that the artist brings to the photograph.
00:41:29
Speaker
Yeah, it's that artist's sensibility that it's something filtered through their sensibility and thus it makes it truly theirs. I think it's like no two people will sort of write the same game story to watch the same baseball game or whatever, but you'll often get two different stories. In a lot of ways, that's kind of what you're referring to with the photographs.
00:41:57
Speaker
Exactly. And I feel like the creative nonfiction functions in the same way. Here are the things that happened in this piece are true and really happened, but you're only getting them through the lens of how the author sees it and also what the author has decided is important, where the author's focused. And so photography, for me, is a great way to think about, particularly the essay.
00:42:26
Speaker
Also, I love the artistry of cooking, but that's just because cooking is fun. It's awesome. Just moved to the city for a great shot, but it's actually really... I love ephemeral art. I mean, I say that, like, I love cooking because it's fun to eat and it is. But I also, I think that art has its time and place and that not all art is forever. And one of the things I like about cooking that also informs
00:42:54
Speaker
my sense of writing is sometimes things only are going to be, sometimes things have a limited shelf life and that doesn't mean they're not valuable. And I feel like a lot of my writing is very much of a place and time. And that thinking about other forms of ephemeral art, gardening, where the garden dies back down,
00:43:21
Speaker
cooking, things like that, is really useful when thinking about what you want most particularly. And what are, if you had to name five of your favorite books, what would they be? Okay. Oh, I lost this question. So the first two would be by Abigail Promise. Faithkeeping and Three Dog Night, which just blew the world up in terms of what I thought would be done with creative nonfiction for me. And I would say,
00:43:51
Speaker
have almost everything to do with not just how I write but with why I'm even able to write at all. And the same thing would be true in a different way for Dorothy Allison's two or three things I know for sure in which the radical level of honesty and disclosure changed what I understood I could do on the page and how I could create myself in a way that felt honest and ethical to me rather than creating myself
00:44:21
Speaker
as sort of the central heroine in my own life story, which always feels kind of gross and unethical to me. So those three. And then I've just finished, so these are all, of course, all going to be things that are kind of top of mind, but I just finished Mackie Nelson's Argonaut. And it has blown me away more than any book in the last five years. I think Argonaut is
00:44:49
Speaker
incredibly seminal work in blending the memoir and the essay and kind of the intellectual work that goes into leading the life. I thought that was fabulous. And then the last one is going to be just fully out of left field and ridiculous, but it is Jane Eyre. It's just the first book that I fell in love with enough to reread it over and over and over again. Yeah.
00:45:19
Speaker
Jane Eyre is the book that in about third grade turned me into a person who has to count books in a wonderful primary relationship. It was the first time that I found a book that I just fell into and needed to go back and revisit the characters and felt I understood then what it meant to be a participatory reader. And so that book was really critical in starting me as a person who just loved the written word.
00:45:49
Speaker
Isn't that, that's just really cool how sometimes a book or a movie or something can move you to such a place where it actually like...
00:46:00
Speaker
It that totally like rebooted and reconfigured your internal software. Like you got a new software update when you read that book and then it's never been the same ever since. It's kind of cool how like one piece of something like that, be it people like us, it's more often than not going to be books.
00:46:20
Speaker
And it's pretty neat to think that that one piece of work is kind of set you down. It was kind of like a seminal moment for you in a way, and you didn't know it at the time, but it set you down sort of this path to where you are now, where you're actually creating something that might have that kind of impact for somebody else, and you just never know. Yeah, it is.
00:46:44
Speaker
I don't think anybody ever becomes a writer without going through that transition into becoming a reader. And I think being a reader is a real thing and a real skill. And it's more than just being someone who sometimes reads books. It has to do with our relationship to the world through the written word and through the page. And I am really grateful to my mother for giving me that book so young that they think if it hadn't happened at a pretty early age,
00:47:15
Speaker
It might not have happened. So put books into the hands of the kids, people. Yeah, I might hand that to my... How old were you when your mother gave you that book? I think I was eight or nine. Yeah. And it's not really, it's certainly not a children's book, but I think there's a lot of value in giving children books that aren't children's books. It starts out with the main characters, but that's okay.
00:47:43
Speaker
And she has dead parents, which every little girl for some reason needs in a book. But it's a book that, part of what is so, to me, so intoxicating about reading is the way in which it challenges and stretches me. And it's certainly a book that will challenge and stretch a reader at that age.
00:48:05
Speaker
And I think reading a timeless book of that of that nature and then getting into it when you're younger is that it's almost always it's always changing as you mature and you just kind of pick out different things you probably never notice were there because you were just you had a blind spot for it when you are nine and then at twelve and then at fifteen and then you just
00:48:25
Speaker
You start seeing things, and it almost evolves with you as you mature. Even though that thing is a purely static piece of work, it still somehow has a life of its own. It's kind of bizarre in a way. Absolutely. I think I can actually sort of trace my own maturation process by which character in the book I identified with, because I have reread it so often. As a kid, I identified with Jane and thought her story was very romantic.
00:48:55
Speaker
sort of in that awful dot the at-least dark i've identified with the Rochester that women in the attic and then finally effector settled on being great or with that the housekeeper who took everything all apart
00:49:15
Speaker
Well, that's great. Well, Sarah, I want to be respectful of your time and I really appreciate you carving out a few minutes in the morning here to get this done. Your book, again, it's Mott, a memoir by University of Georgia Press. It's a wonderful, wonderful memoir and I hope a lot of people go out there and
00:49:34
Speaker
scarf it up and buy it and buy it in droves and give it to friends because it's a really great piece of work and how you focus, you tell your story but you really hang the narrative on Ma, which I think was just a brilliant move and it makes the book so, it makes it very powerful and just a compelling read because you always want to know what's going to happen with Ma and the relationship and the friendship that you guys have. So again, well done and thanks for coming on the podcast.
00:50:05
Speaker
Well, thank you very much. I had a great time. Fantastic. All right, we'll be in touch there. Take care. As we close out yet another successful, invigorating, enthralling episode of hashtag CNF,
00:50:18
Speaker
I just throw out a call to action to give the podcast an old subscribe. And if you frequent the podcast, by all means go to my website, BrendanOmara.com, and subscribe to the email newsletter, which only comes out when I post something. That way you get the latest sort of updates for
00:50:42
Speaker
the podcast and other stuff I may be working on to your email once a week or whenever stuff gets posted. If I don't post anything then you don't get anything. So it kind of works out and you never feel too flooded or overwhelmed with nonsense. No spam ever. N.S.E. So that's about it. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening. Take care.