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S3E15: The Secret Lives of Lawyers: Pam Jenoff, Author and Professor of Law
18 Plays2 years ago
Professor of Law Pam Jenoff joins Co-Dean Kimberly Mutcherson to talk about her other life as a bestselling novelist.
The Power of Attorney is produced by Rutgers Law School. With two locations minutes from Philadelphia and New York City, Rutgers Law offers the prestige and reputation of a large, nationally known university combined with a personal, small campus experience. Learn more by visiting law.rutgers.edu.
Production Manager: Margaret McCarthy
Series Producer: Nate Nakao
Editor: Nate Nakao
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
I'm Kim Mettreson. I am the co-dean of Rutgers Law School on the Candon campus, and this is the power of attorney. I always love doing these interviews. It's always a good time to hear more about and learn more about folks who are our alums and doing interesting things in the world, but it's also really, really great to talk to my colleagues who actually work in the building with me and get to know them a little bit more in the work that they do.
00:00:30
Speaker
And this one is especially interesting because it is part of a series that we are doing on the secret lives of lawyers. So that gives you a hint that something interesting is going to happen in this episode.
Guest Introduction: Pam Jenoff
00:00:45
Speaker
So the person who is with us here today is my colleague, Pam Jenoff. And Pam, thank you so much for making the time to talk to me. Thanks for having me. This is fun to get to chat outside the normal auspices.
Pam's Journey to Law
00:00:57
Speaker
absolutely absolutely so Pam I'm going to start with you the way I do with everybody who I interview for the podcast which is to ask you your origin story right so we think about the fact that there are millions of different things that you could have chosen to do with your life and yet you chose at least initially you chose to be a lawyer so where did that come from what made you decide that law was where you wanted to be
00:01:24
Speaker
Well, you know, it's interesting because for me, it actually isn't originally it was about a third career. And the first thing I want to tell you is that I do not come from a family of attorneys or even a professional family. My brother and I are first generation college. And so I didn't grow up around the law. I worked as a messenger at a law firm in college, but I was just trying to pay the bills. And so
00:01:48
Speaker
I was one of those you know young students came not so young but came into law school and never seen a complaint, you know idea what it was about when I finished undergrad I had the opportunity to study abroad, I did a master's at Cambridge and I went over there for 2 years and after that I actually entered a period of government service. So I went to the Pentagon for a year with a mentor of mine would become the secretary of the Army to go West and
00:02:15
Speaker
That was my year where I really felt like I saw the world from the shoulders of giants, to kind of paraphrase Isaac Newton. I went from there to the State Department.
From Foreign Service to Law School
00:02:25
Speaker
I was a Foreign Service Officer and I was in Poland for two and a half years, which is a really interesting place to contemplate when you watch the news these days.
00:02:35
Speaker
And then I went to Poland and I was like, you know, I want to go back to the States. Foreign service was not my long career. I had no marketable skills. So I needed it. What did you major in in college? So undergrad, I was international affairs. I have a master's in history, which was lovely, but prepared me to do very little. And I come from a very
00:02:57
Speaker
Practical family, like everyone kind of went to an office and did a job. Nobody sat in Starbucks with their feet up writing. We're going to go do a job. And so I thought, well, I need a career. And I actually took the LSAT when I was living in Poland. I went to London and took the LSAT. And I think there might have been a bomb scare during it if I'm not mistaken.
00:03:17
Speaker
And the LSAT went well, and I thought, well, I'm just going to go to law school. And so I came back to the States. I actually started at NYU, which I know you have an affiliation there as well. I did my first year at NYU, which was a huge culture shock because I had come from rural Poland, where my neighbors had cows and chickens.
00:03:37
Speaker
And I was suddenly in Greenwich Village on my first day of law school. There was like a chalk outline on the street out front of the dorm. So I was like, whoa. And so I actually did not finish at NYU. I finished at Penn. I came back to Philadelphia to be near my family. And that is how I came to law school. And then I came out in a very, even though it was my third career, I actually came out of law school in a very traditional way. So I summered at a large Philadelphia firm, and I joined that firm. Got it.
First-Gen College Experience
00:04:07
Speaker
Um, I want to go backwards a little bit if, if I could, because as you well know, we educate a lot of first gen lawyers, um, here at Rutgers, um, and folks who, you know, I always say one of the things that I love about this job and that I love about teaching at Rutgers is that we can sort of, um, because we have so many first gen students, we can literally sort of watch people not just change their own individual trajectory, but really change the trajectory of their families by virtue of the fact that they've gone.
00:04:35
Speaker
college and then gone on to law school. But I think that for a lot of our students, there is this sense of, you know, nervousness and disconnect about coming to law school as first-gen students. So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about, you know, what that journey was like for you. First going into college and then, as you said, you know, having this
00:04:55
Speaker
sort of, you know, culture shock of going into law school. But obviously you've been very successful. And I think that those stories are really good stories for people to hear. So, you know, what was that like for you being, you know, first generation college and then moving on to law school?
00:05:10
Speaker
Well, before I talk about my first gen journey, can I gush about our students for a second? I speak to the media a lot. And the first thing I always talk about are our Rutgers students. And I think it is because we have so many first gen students that it's such a special place and a unique culture.
00:05:27
Speaker
of hardworking and unentitled students. I've had students who did not speak English as their first language as children who got the highest grade in legal writing. And it's such a journey for them to be able to go to their families with that and say, look what I did. It's really incredible. And it's a spectacular joy to be here and help these students get where they're going in their careers. And so that's my single favorite thing about Rutgers, not that the faculty and deans aren't amazing.
00:05:55
Speaker
But really, that's my very favorite thing about Rutgers. So the most interesting part of my starting law school was not actually being the first gen, because my family valued education and supported us. I mean, my brother went on to be a surgeon. It was a very education-heavy family. The big shift for me was that
Struggles and Success in Law School
00:06:14
Speaker
I had been out in the working world.
00:06:16
Speaker
And in some ways that gave me an advantage in that I was pretty organized, but it was a very unique challenge to shift to law school mindset, law school writing. And I'm going to be really honest, my first semester 1L grades were dreadful. And I always tell my students that in January, I'm like, I had like the worst one first semester grades and it doesn't define you, you know, what you do from here.
00:06:38
Speaker
So it was like stepping into the classroom again and learning in this new way that I had never actually done before that really took me a little bit of time to get used to. Yeah. Yeah. And were there particular things that you did that you felt help you? We say to students all the time, when you come to law school, we're going to change the way you think.
00:07:00
Speaker
We're going to change the way you sort of see the world. And I don't know that people really get a sense of what that means until you're actually in law school and sitting in classrooms and sort of having that experience. And I wonder if you have any advice for folks who are coming into law school who sometimes can find that transition to be incredibly jarring.
00:07:24
Speaker
I do, although I will say with candor that it's not advice that I would have understood when I was a law student. It's in many terms in retrospect. And also I teach a preparation for practice seminar, which I think about this a lot. But what I tell my students on the first day is think of yourself as a lawyer from the day you walk in the door. And that will make, we will send you out of here better prepared than anyone else in the country. And I mean that because if you have that lawyer mindset, you're going to be
00:07:52
Speaker
a really proactive consumer of your legal education, which is really what we expect from people. You will get to know your own learning style and what works for you. Am I a classroom learner? In my case, I needed to sit with teaching assistants every week. You will seek out those opportunities to network and you will conduct yourself in a professional manner and those kinds of things. I think that's the mindset law students need for growth, really.
00:08:21
Speaker
Yeah. And I also think that that's one of the benefits that people all often experience by virtue of the fact of taking some time off before they come back to law school, right? That ability to kind of, you know, put on that professional hat really early on in the experience can be, um, can be really critical. I think absolutely. Okay. So you graduated from law school, um, and you started practicing law and you were doing employment law.
00:08:48
Speaker
Yes. Okay.
Career in Employment Law
00:08:50
Speaker
Um, and I've said this before, um, on the podcast, but I, I like to, you know, um, reinforce ideas sometimes. So, you know, a lot of times you'll hear people say, Oh, I do employment law. I do health law. I, you know, I do transactions, um, or students say that's, you know, what they want to do. And they really don't have much of an idea of what it actually means in practice to be an employment lawyer. Um, and I think usually what people think is I will either be plaintiff side or I'll be defendant side.
00:09:17
Speaker
And that's just all it needs, sort of. What was your experience like as somebody who was an employment lawyer? What kind of work were you doing? Who are you working for? What are the ways in which you found it to be fulfilling? So I was a labor and employment associate at Morgan Lewis, big firm, center city office. And that means you're always defense side. It's very clearly one side that you're like, it was a shift because when I was in government, I was a Clinton appointee. So this is not
00:09:44
Speaker
management side employment law is not something that came to me naturally. But it was very interesting to do the work, which in many cases, it was not that cut and dry. It was it was nuanced, and it was complex. And I did not feel like I was representing the forces of evil as somebody in fact, when you go into that type of
00:10:02
Speaker
big firm atmosphere. I love big firm training. It was very cutting edge. I love the colleagues that I work with because we spend so much time together and I'm still close to many of those people. The biggest surprise was it wasn't just litigation. There is a huge counseling piece in that type of work where you are working with employers before there's ever an issue to develop their policies to
00:10:29
Speaker
conduct training to troubleshoot situations. And companies even are in many cases trying to do the right thing there. And so there's a much bigger piece of it that if you do it well, you don't have to get to that litigation piece. And so I enjoyed that aspect of the work. Yeah, I did an interview with our grad, Brian McGinnis, not too long ago, who is an employment lawyer.
00:10:53
Speaker
And I asked him sort of what, you know, what are the things that you like the most about your practice? And counseling is one of the things that he talked about. And he talked about, you know, being in a position where you can help employers not just satisfy what their legal requirements are, but help them go above and beyond those requirements in some circumstances. And there's a real value in that. Right. And I think sometimes we have this very sort of black and white view of, well, if you're on the employer side, you're this terrible person who's working for terrible people.
00:11:21
Speaker
If you're a plaintiff's side, you're this great person who's working for great people. And the world is always, always more complicated than that. It is. And for example, I loved learning the different industries that you would represent. And one of my favorites was we represented nursing homes. We did a really interesting practice to learn why it was so important, obviously, to do that job well. In my pro bono practice, I represented the largest food services organization, Hunger Relief, in the area. And they had employment issues. So it was very interesting.
00:11:52
Speaker
Absolutely. So how long did you do that work for?
Transition to In-House Counsel
00:11:56
Speaker
About five years, give or take. And then what was it that made you think, I want to try something different?
00:12:05
Speaker
You know, I didn't plan to leave again. I really, you know, I was like homegrown at that firm and I was there, but you hit those middle associate years where you're either going to go forward or you're not. And I think there are many challenges. I did not have a family at that point. I was not married. So for me, it wasn't that sort of work life challenge. But I actually do think there's particular challenges for women in the profession at that point, whether it's the mentoring or the second generation discrimination issues. And I'm not saying I do any of those directly, but it's a really kind of
00:12:35
Speaker
critical moment. And at that time I was actually approached by a headhunter to go in-house. And so I made the decision to leave my firm and I was in-house employment counsel for Exelon, which is Pico, the power company. So I went over there and that was a fascinating experience. I was only there I think about two and a half years, but it's very interesting to work in an organization like that.
00:13:02
Speaker
The emphasis on what you do is more towards the training and troubleshooting. I did litigate a little bit, but most cases you're going to outsource the litigation because you don't have the resources. But also the decision making in a corporation I found to be much more collaborative than it had been in a firm.
00:13:19
Speaker
So in a firm, you're staffed very vertically, right? You've got a partner, maybe a senior associate and a junior, and you're not often making the decisions and calling the shots. When you're in the organization and you're legal and then maybe there's HR and there's labor relations,
00:13:34
Speaker
I found there was more opportunity for constructive dissent and to have that conversation. And that's actually what's been fueling some of my current scholarship, which I know I'm getting a little off topic, but I'm working on this article about creating space for constructive dissent in large legal organizations. And that really came from those two contrasting experiences I had.
00:13:57
Speaker
So I want to follow up on two threads of what you just said. So one is that you very casually throughout the phrase second generation discrimination, and I would love to hear you explain to folks what you mean when you talk about second generation as opposed to first generation discrimination. And then I also, I'm really intrigued by what you just said about
00:14:22
Speaker
you know, creating space within large law spaces for constructive dissent. And that's really an interesting concept as well. So first, let's talk about second generation discrimination, and then let's talk about, you know, being able to say you disagree.
00:14:40
Speaker
Yes. So second generation employment discrimination, I'm going to use that term really loosely because I'm not up on the literature of the past five years. But when I came to Rutgers and I started writing some scholarship and I was looking at some employment issues, I was reading these fascinating articles that talked about it.
00:14:57
Speaker
It's not the sort of primary discrimination that we think of of you didn't hire me or you didn't promote me. The tangible employment actions that we think about that one might be discriminated against in. These are more the kinds of interactions that enable people to rise or not rise. So I'm thinking about mentoring and opportunities and social opportunities and
00:15:21
Speaker
What you see in any organization, and I'm certainly not talking uniquely to my experience, is that people tend to mentor and relate with people who look like them. And so that's who you go golfing with, or that's who you have lunch with. And those people, when you start to see in some organizations that the people who are kind of rising look a lot like the people who went before them. And I think it makes it particularly hard for
00:15:49
Speaker
attorneys of color and for female attorneys and anyone who doesn't fit the traditional mold to find those kind of mentoring relationships. And so one thing I worked on in my preparation for practice seminar with my students was building those mentoring relationships. And they're not always where you think you're going to find them. But that's what I mean by that, that meeting the people who are going to help you move to the next level.
00:16:14
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. And I think, you know, I think it's one of those pieces of advice that we often will give to students or to young lawyers, right, that the people who can be your mentors, the people who you're who can be your champions and those can be too, you know, completely separate.
00:16:30
Speaker
and distinct people don't have to be folks who look like you, don't have to be folks who had your life experience, but they can still be people who help you move forward in your career. And particularly when we think about how still lacking in diversity our profession is, a lot of times you have to be willing, right, to seek out mentors who are, you know, who are a different gender or a different race or, you know, whatever, whatever it might be.
00:16:56
Speaker
in order to be successful. So that's one of those things that I think folks have to get comfortable with as part of this profession. Yes. And one of the things I love to do in my professionalism seminar, I had a large list of people who were willing to be contacted for informational interviews. And I made my students go out and I signed them, you're going to do three informational interviews. And these were people who I know. And I said to them, when you interview that person, ask them how they know me.
00:17:21
Speaker
And it wasn't often that we had worked together. It would be something sort of random like, I've sat next to Pam at the Eagles game for 20 years, or we did karate together when we were little. And the point to the students was not to hear my war stories, but to understand how broadly you should look for those mentoring relationships. Absolutely, absolutely.
00:17:43
Speaker
Let's shift gears to Rutgers. Let's shift gears to teaching. I was a person who knew very young that I wanted to go to law school. I was 10 years old when I decided that I wanted to go to law school, but at no point did I imagine myself in legal academia. At no point did I imagine myself
00:18:06
Speaker
to be a law professor. So like a lot of folks, particularly women and women of color, I completely embraced the label of accidental law professor. So what
Path to Academia
00:18:17
Speaker
about for you? What is it that made you transition into legal education? And what was appealing about legal education to you?
00:18:26
Speaker
Well, you know, when I was at the firm pretty early on in my first two or three years, one of my colleagues made the transition from the firm into academia. And that was the first time I had ever looked at, you know, I've always loved school, I've always loved academia, but I had never thought of it for me in part because I don't have a PhD. I didn't even think that was an option, but someone had gone from the firm
00:18:46
Speaker
into a tenure track position elsewhere in the country. I was like, oh, wow, this is really very, very appealing to me. And then I had to stop for a couple of reasons. I had a couple of major roadblocks in my way. I do not have a traditional background to come into academia. I was not on law review. I did not clerk. And so I never had planned these things. So I hadn't set the path. And the other thing that was frankly tricky is when you're at a large firm,
00:19:11
Speaker
and you're representing only management side, you're very constrained in the kinds of articles you can write. So I'm not talking about like, oh, I didn't have the time to write because I can always write. It's you're constrained in what you can say. So I wasn't going to be able to say some of the things I wanted to say about employment law. And so me actually from that moment of realizing it until I was able to come to Rutgers was I don't know, nine years or something like that.
00:19:36
Speaker
Oh, wow. So once you made the transition, and I'll just say from my personal perspective that transitioning into academia was a really big shift for me. I had worked at a little nonprofit and then taught at NYU in their learning program. So I was teaching legal research and writing and interviewing and counseling.
00:20:00
Speaker
and all of that good stuff. And it was, the learning curve was steep, I will say, probably more so than I had thought that it was going to be. And you came in also as somebody who was teaching legal research and writing, legal analysis, writing, and research here at the law school.
Teaching Philosophy at Rutgers
00:20:20
Speaker
So first of all, can you talk a little bit about what happens in an L.A.W.R. class, right? Every law school, your first year,
00:20:30
Speaker
you're gonna take an L.A.W.R. class, whatever they call it, whether it's lawyering or L.A.W.R., everybody gets that class in their first year. And what is it that you are tasked with trying to achieve with students in that first year of law school? Because you're only at least here at Rutgers, you're the only year-long class that students have when they first come to the law school.
00:20:55
Speaker
We are, and in some years were the small, you know, the only small group they have that might vary. And so these students come to us in August of their first year of law school. Some of them might be what we call jump starters, meaning they've taken a summer course. Others come in and this is their first week of law school and they meet us. And we take them through a process in the fall
00:21:16
Speaker
where they write what's called a memo. And that's advising a client about an issue. I call it the good, the bad, and the ugly. It's a prediction on their case, an assessment of their case. And then in the spring, they get to brief writing, which is persuasive writing for the court. But what I do on the first day of legal writing is I say, what do lawyers do? And we go through client problem. And you do fact investigation. And where does the research come in? Almost like a linear timeline.
00:21:44
Speaker
Why I put that up there is it's a superstructure, not really for the year, but for the semester, where everything I teach them, I can say, because in the first month, you're just throwing different skills at them in seemingly random order. And I want to say to them, OK, this skill fits in here on our timeline, and this skill fits in there. And the reason is because I want that buy-in from students.
00:22:08
Speaker
that sort of trust the process kind of buy-in, which is really hard to get in the beginning of the year when they're so overwhelmed. And so we take them through that process. It's very individualized. There is practice. There is feedback. And there is revision. And over the course of the year, we work on that.
00:22:28
Speaker
And one of the things that I think is very poorly understood about LAWR and legal research and writing classes in general is the amount of time and effort that goes into teaching research and writing, right? It's just, it's, it is in some ways the most, yeah, I'm going to say this, I'm comfortable saying this. In some ways it's the most practical class
00:22:57
Speaker
that folks will take in their first year, right? In the sense that it is, you know, it's a class about writing, it's a class about research. So it feels like, okay, this is a thing that makes sense. But I have, you know, I certainly remember in lawyering having the experience of students coming in, you know, who'd been English majors or they'd been reporters or, you know, something where they felt like, I'm a writer, right? And they walk in and they're like feeling really, really confident.
00:23:22
Speaker
about their skills and then they get that first draft back and they're like what what's happening here right why is this so different why does it feel so different from what i've been used to so can you talk about that process of helping students understand how
00:23:39
Speaker
legal writing is different or potentially different from other kinds of writing that they have done. And then helping people, right, because your job is to help people gain that skill and teaching people how to write is hard.
00:23:56
Speaker
Yes. And this is why we love having a dean who taught legal writing because you understand, right? You understand that this is very not just labor intensive, but it's highly individualized. Every student comes to the law school with a different skill level in writing, a different level of experience, a different background. And you have to meet each individual where they are in order to bring them forward. So that's why
00:24:23
Speaker
it's so nuanced. And it's really interesting because that whole first month of school, you don't sort of know. And then you get that first draft and you kind of see where everybody shakes out. And it's really taking them through that process. And I believe in, you know, you identify things, but the hardest part is revision. And I know that as well as anybody. And so, you know, so giving them a blueprint
00:24:51
Speaker
I want them to walk away from the first time they sit down with me with a paper. And I want them to know, OK, I always describe it as I write them a prescription at that first conference. And I encourage them to also see the teaching assistants. So I say I have great teaching assistants. I say they can fill that prescription.
00:25:08
Speaker
I'll give them sort of the big three things to work on. And, you know, it's not everything because it's where what is a good draft on October 1st is not a good draft on November 20th. And they have to understand that, that this is a stage and this is a process. And so it's fascinating. I evolve every year. The thinking evolves in what we're doing this semester. I'm doing so many things that I had never done in the other 13 years or 12 years. So it's really exciting.
00:25:37
Speaker
Mm hmm. I love that. And the other thing, and you sort of alluded to this before, the other thing that I really loved about teaching in lowering was that it was the smallest class that students had. And so and because, you know, note
00:25:53
Speaker
I won't say nobody, but it is very hard to teach writing just in a group setting consistently, right? And so you have these one-on-one conferences or one-on-two conferences with students. And I love the ability to engage with students on that level in a way that's not always possible when you've got, you know, 70, 80 students.
00:26:13
Speaker
in a class. And I wonder how that affects your ability to interact with students and the ways in which you're able to use those individualized moments of teaching in a way that students might not get in some of their other classes.
00:26:29
Speaker
It is a spectacular joy to get to keep them the whole year, to keep these students the whole year and to go from the beginning. And so we build this report. I tell them on the first day of class and I tell them on the last day in spring, I say, once I have taught you, I'm yours for life. And I'm always, you know, this is just kind of like the first step in our partnership and I want to be there for them. So it's a really great
00:26:52
Speaker
growth arc. And I do think as challenging as the past two years have been with COVID, there have been some really unique opportunities for growth and engagement. So this semester, the last two weeks before the brief were due, I couldn't meet with them during the day because I was conferencing with their classmates one on one, but they needed to see me. And so I said, every night at seven, I am doing a Zoom check-in. And it wasn't a full office hour like, be there at seven if you want to join me. And they would hop on Zoom and
00:27:20
Speaker
people would ask, take turns. I would get 10 or 12 students a night. And they would take turns asking their questions, popping things up on screen share. And I'd say, oh, this is not quite whatever. And then they would come back the next day and show it to me again. And this was something that was never possible before this era. And so it's been really exciting to build the relationship even further. Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of us have tried very hard to figure out, what are the silver linings of a global pandemic? There aren't that many of them.
00:27:48
Speaker
But there definitely are some of them that you can find and I think that ability to
00:27:53
Speaker
find other ways to engage with students has been really productive. And now we're in that phase of figuring out how do you continue to do that now that we're slowly moving back to something that's a little bit more normal, though still not quite there yet. So I want to get to the secret life part.
Martial Arts Influence
00:28:12
Speaker
So one thing you already said that I know to be a part of your secret life is martial arts.
00:28:19
Speaker
Yes, I was not expecting that one. Well, I wasn't going to say it. And then you said something about karate. And so I felt like, oh, OK, I can bring this up then. So can you talk about that a little bit? I remember years ago having a conversation with you. First of all, you're like one of the hardest working people I have ever met in my entire life. So I don't know where you get the energy or time from. But what belt are you? So I'm elapsed.
00:28:46
Speaker
black belt, but I have a second degree black belt, but I describe myself as a lapsed black belt. So I started when I was 11 and I went all the way and I was going through law school and all of that. And then I took a break. And then when my kids were old enough, we went back and I didn't want to do a separate class from them. So I used to suit up and help with the kids class for several years until COVID hit. And so karate is probably, I think, the single most formative experience of my childhood in terms of just what it gives you in work ethic and discipline. And I really, really loved it.
00:29:14
Speaker
And so we don't go right now. We're actually the least athletic family in the area. But it's something that's very special to me and continues to be very special to me. And it's funny, I have to say, when you say secret life, I'm like, I'm too busy for a secret life. I have one. But yes, I know what you mean. Although I feel like being a Black belt is probably, I have a brother-in-law who's a Marine. He's retired. And whenever I say he's retired, if anybody who's a Marine says,
00:29:43
Speaker
There's no such thing as being retired. Right. Once you're a Marine, you are always a Marine. And I kind of feel like that might be the same thing about, you know, once you're a black belt, you're always a black belt. As soon as the kids are doing their own thing and the pandemic puppies in a better spot, I would definitely go back to karate, like in a heartbeat. All right. Fantastic.
Writing Career and Success
00:30:03
Speaker
And then the other bit of information about you is that you're not just a legal writer. You are a writer-writer, an out-there-in-the-world fiction writer. So I really want to talk about that career because Juan, again, I mean, it speaks to enormous discipline.
00:30:23
Speaker
because you've had, I think it's, is it 10 books? 11, yes. 11 books, right? So you've published 11 books, a number of which have been on the New York Times bestseller list.
00:30:36
Speaker
So that's pretty amazing. And so walk me through that, right? Like, how did you decide in the first instance that you wanted to try your hand at fiction writing on that level? And then not only just to decide that, but then to actually finish a book and to get it out there into the world. I mean, it seems so daunting.
00:31:01
Speaker
And yet you've been able to do it at the same time that you're teaching at a law school and you're mentoring students and you've got multiple kids at home and you're out there doing karate and all these other things. So how do you become a bestselling author in that context? We have three kids and five pets. We never go out here.
00:31:20
Speaker
So, you know, it's a lifelong journey, actually dovetails really nicely with the legal career, but I was a little kid who always wanted to be a writer. My fifth grade yearbook said, The Next Judy Bloom. It was really cool when I met Judy and I showed her that. And so I always wanted to write. But all through those years of living abroad and being in school, I had the time to write and I never got started. You know, like me have that project in your closet, you just can't get it off the ground. And that was the novel for me.
00:31:49
Speaker
And when I lived in Europe, like I tried, but bear in mind, when I lived in Europe, no cell phones, no internet, no English-speaking peer group. I was very isolated.
00:31:58
Speaker
So what happened was I graduated from law school when I came back, and I started working at the firm on September 4th, 2001. It was a Tuesday. Oh, wow. And one week later, 9-11 happened. And actually, that had lots of interesting impact for my legal career and the kind of work that I got to do. But what it did for me as a writer is I said, oh my goodness, this was my mortality moment. I realized that I didn't have forever.
00:32:23
Speaker
And if I had been a 9-11 victim, I never would have become a model. So that was like the wake up call. I took a course. I'm going to say this Temple Night School. I hate saying that because I work at Rutgers, but Temple Night School. We'll accept it. I had 15th and Market, and it was called Write Your Novel This Year. That was the actual name of the class. Later they called that Write Your Novel This Month. I never took that. That sounds like it.
00:32:45
Speaker
I took Write Your Novel this year, and I started working on my first book. But there were a couple of catches, which is that although I was now serious about writing, I was a new attorney in the school. And I had $1,000 a month in student loan debt. So I wasn't going to go to the castle and write these books. I always wrote the books from 5 to 7 in the morning, like every day before I went to the firm for all those years was how I got started.
00:33:11
Speaker
And the other catch was that even though I was serious, it was still a long time till I got published. So five years and 39 publisher rejections. And it was April 8th, 2005, when I got the call for that first book. And then after my first book was published, it was exactly 10 years from March 1st, 2007, when it was published. March 1st, 2017 was when I hit the New York Times.
00:33:37
Speaker
So it was 10 years later. So it's been a lifelong journey, truly. Yeah. Yeah. So again, to go back to that discipline point. So you said, do you still wake up every day at five to write for two hours? Well, I'm going to tell you the secret. There's this thing on Twitter, if you ever see it. I know you're on Twitter as, what, Dean Much, right? Professor Much. Professor Much.
00:34:00
Speaker
I am, there's something on Twitter called the 5am writers club where a lot of people write the 5am. I love 5am. I hate 4am. I hate 4am. And the problem is, if you remember as your kids have gotten older, middle schoolers get up really early. So sometimes 5am doesn't cut it and you have to move to 4am, which is great. But yes, that is my favorite time of day to write. And I'm a short burst writer. So you get
00:34:25
Speaker
Give me eight hours. I can't go for eight hours, but I like those little chunks. So I always try and hit the pre-wakeup chunk early, 4 or 5 a.m., and then the next chunk would be if I'm not teaching when they get out the door. So it's really, I teach my students that it's about knowing yourself as a writer. When do you like to write? Big chunks or small chunks, where, et cetera, et cetera.
00:34:49
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think I'm a person who likes, who loves to write or actually the better way to describe it. I love to have written. I do not love writing. Yes. Right. And it can be such a slog sometimes. And I think that they're, you know, one of the questions I think that people will often ask themselves is can you turn yourself into a different kind of writer?
00:35:15
Speaker
So for instance, I'm a person who often likes to have those big chunks. And then after I had kids, it was so much harder to find those big chunks. And I've tried really hard to turn myself into, you've got 30 minutes, sit down and write for a little while. And I've never successfully done that. And I'm curious whether you think that that is a skill that people can pick up
00:35:40
Speaker
if they sort of focus hard enough on it, right? To sort of change what you might think of as your kind of innate writing style. You know, it's interesting. When I teach my students to know themselves as writers, what I tell them is you can't use that as a constraint. Like, I only work in such and such a time. It has to be a starting point. It can't be limiting, right?
00:36:02
Speaker
I don't know that I'm ever going to be the person who's fresh at like two in the afternoon. I just don't think that can happen. But what I've learned is that there are different skills in different parts of writing, right? Because writing is not just one skill. There's the revising or the outlining or sometimes the researching. And what you have to do is you have to segment up your day in a way that works with the realities of your schedule, but also maximizes productivity.
00:36:28
Speaker
And I think this is one place that having been an attorney, a practicing attorney, really helps with my other writing, which is that if I'd been at the firm and I said, oh, I'm just not motivated to write a brief today, I would have lost my job. And so I always say I don't believe in writer's block because I think there's always something that you can do to kind of move the ball forward a little bit.
00:36:51
Speaker
interesting and are you are you one of those write every day people that you're not really you can't really call yourself a writer if you don't write every day i do write every day um i think on partly because being a short chunk writer you sort of have to you know i'd rather have seven short chunks seven days of the week than one whole day and so i really do um obviously i might miss a day or two but i find the discipline good once i did something called a hundred days of writing where i said i'm gonna
00:37:19
Speaker
touch paper every day for a hundred days, no matter what happens. Right now, I'm not that rigid, I'm not that formalistic, but the realities of what I have to do and balance mean that I do write something every day, even if it's only that little morning snippet.
00:37:36
Speaker
And let me ask you another thing, which is you just said, you know, put pen to paper. Is that just a metaphor or do you actually write longhand? Well, it's interesting. I do all of my, quote unquote, writing on the computer. And that could be it could be different places like it. So if I'm doing the early stages, I'm a pantser, which means right by the seat of your pants.
00:37:57
Speaker
I'm in the early stages of writing. I could pop open a laptop. I used to call it the Panera office. I could work wherever. And now when I'm in big revisions and if we were on a visual medium, I would show you my manuscript that's all tabbed up. I need the big computer screen because I'm just not my eyeballs aren't that good when I have to see it all laid out. So it really is computer. But the other thing I would show you if we were on video is my notebook because I really do always have a notebook at my side. It's more for
00:38:26
Speaker
the troubleshooting, the brainstorming than the actual writing. But I'm very finicky about my notebooks too.
00:38:35
Speaker
your books have very specific settings.
Historical Fiction Writing
00:38:41
Speaker
And those settings really grow out of the work that you did while you were overseas, right? So can you talk to people about that a little bit? And also, I guess the other piece that goes along with this is when you are writing in these very specific, both geographic settings and time,
00:39:01
Speaker
You know, how do you do the research that allows you to write believably about the time periods that you're writing about and the places that you're writing about? So my books, no, I have written a couple modern books, a couple hybrid books, but the nucleus of my work sort of centers around World War II and the Holocaust. And that's because when I went to Poland, those countries, Poland and its neighbors had just come out of a half century of communism, where
00:39:28
Speaker
due to the lack of free speech, they had never been able to grapple with their issues from the Holocaust. And those issues became front and center when they wanted to join NATO and the European Union. I went to Poland, and I'm Jewish, and I was alone over there. And I had become very close to the Holocaust survivors in Krakow. And the US government saw that I had a relationship with them. And they said, OK, that's your job. Go. And so I actually worked on Holocaust issues
00:39:54
Speaker
in ways that were both professionally and personally really difficult but really rewarding and transformative. And so I came back from Poland very moved and wanting to write about it and I consider my books love songs to the people that live through that most horrific of eras.
00:40:12
Speaker
And so there's a lot of things I'm trying to do with that. And in particular, it's very interesting when you look at history, first of all, not to paint with the broad brush. I want to show that history is made up of an infinite number of individual decisions, and that's very important.
00:40:28
Speaker
I love to show people from different backgrounds who were often thrown together by the war. And it's useful for people today to see them transcend otherness. I think it really helps with a lot of what we're going through right now. So way too much to talk about today.
00:40:44
Speaker
In terms of the research, first of all, I should say I write fiction. And I like to say that because I think writers can get in trouble if they stake too large a claim around what is true in their book. So anytime somebody says based on actual events, cross it out, lawyer Pam crosses it out, and I stay invited by actual events.
00:41:02
Speaker
But I do a lot of research. And there's actually three questions about research. I promise I won't answer them all. But I always say it's, how do you do the research? How do you weave the research into fiction so that you don't get a big dump of material that stops the story just because I think it's really interesting?
00:41:21
Speaker
And how do you not mess up the research? And those are all very different questions. But I love research. I love research in legal writing, too, by the way. I'm evangelical about research and the importance to lawyers' careers. So a different topic. But I do love the research. I have a master's in history, so I love the dusty archives. Me too. I'm definitely a history person.
00:41:47
Speaker
So tell me how it feels when your publisher calls you and says, you're on the New York Times bestseller list. Well, I'm going to tell you, ironically, going back to an earlier topic, the first time that happened, I was at karate with my kids. So the New York Times list actually comes out unofficially at 5 AM on Wednesday nights. It publishes at 7, but you usually hear around 5. And I had no reason to think about the New York Times, really.
00:42:14
Speaker
I was getting into my karate uniform. I saw that I had missed a call from New York. I know the extension. So I was like, I'm going to call them back. And they were like, you hit the New York Times. And I was like, I'm like, great. And then I kind of just went about my karate. And they said, are you going to celebrate? I was like, whoa, might have an extra topping on the pizza. So it's really exciting and really fun. But the other truth is, I don't let it change anything. So Wednesday night, I hear about the New York Times.
00:42:41
Speaker
Thursday I'm driving to Rutgers and eating my peanut butter sandwich in the car. It's very nice. My mom gives me the paper with the New York Times. I throw out the paper with the New York Times because I don't want to hang on to it too hard. So I'm very grateful, especially after the many years when it did not happen. Got it.
00:43:02
Speaker
And you're still in this phase where you're combining, um, you know, the work that you do at Rutgers with this other work that you do.
Balancing Law and Writing Careers
00:43:11
Speaker
And it feels to me like you have two full time jobs, right? And then particularly when, when you have a book that's just come out,
00:43:20
Speaker
And, you know, you want to do a book tour and you want to do book signings. And, you know, how do you how do you and I hate to use the term balanced. I'm not talking about a work life balance because I don't believe there is any such thing. But I do think it's worth sort of talking about, you know, how do you balance essentially having, you know, two careers, which is kind of what you have right now, both of which obviously you find fulfilling. And yet I wonder how they
00:43:50
Speaker
you know work in conjunction with each other and how do you make them work in conjunction with each other so they can continue to do you know two things that you really enjoy doing the thing is i really do love both so i always say if i hit powerball tomorrow i don't play powerball but if i had power hit powerball i would still keep momming writing and teaching i just might slow down a little bit but i really do
00:44:14
Speaker
I would not give up anything because I love them all. It can certainly be challenging at points, but you have to bear in mind that my writing career always came up alongside the rest of my life. Like when I was an attorney at the firm, it always had to coexist. And so it's sort of natural for me to
00:44:33
Speaker
do both. And I've slipped down on the publishing. I used to publish a book a year and the past few have been a book every two years. And the reason is it does take so much out of my village to put out a book these days, whether it's the book tour or all the social media asks. And I just don't want to do that every year. I'd rather kind of save it up and do it in a bigger way.
00:44:55
Speaker
It's important to recognize there's tremendous synergies between my legal writing and my fiction writing careers, if you will. So I bring not just to my students about the knowing yourself as a writer and the jump-starting creativity exercises that I bring to them, all of those different techniques. And I actually tell them if they're shy about showing their work,
00:45:17
Speaker
to go on Amazon and read all the terrible things people say about my books and then also self-conscious. I bring a lot of, I do bring a lot of the creative writing to the legal side and then my legal writing really taught me about revision. Because, you know, when you're at a firm, you're at a firm, people mark up your work with that red ink and they don't give you solutions. They give you problems and you have to find the solutions
00:45:43
Speaker
in your own voice. And so that's a strength I can bring to revision, whether it's fiction or for my students. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you said this or alluded to it a little bit earlier, right, that, you know,
00:45:59
Speaker
the writing is in the revision, right? So you get it all on the page. I used to have an English, I always call her professor, I guess in high school they're not professors, but I used to have a teacher, an English teacher in high school who used to always say, first get it written, then get it right.
00:46:15
Speaker
Yeah. And I still work based on that. Well, that's the heart of being a pantser. So there's pantsers and plotters, plotters that make it look nice as they go. And pantsers are the people like me that just go bleh for months. And the words come out in a really random order. And then you have to do something with that. I wish I was not like that.
00:46:34
Speaker
but there's a book called Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and she's a thin Buddhist, right? You know it? Awesome. And that's what started me off, is that approach where you just get it on the page. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Pam, thank you so much. It was really, like I said, I like having these opportunities to talk to folks that are outside of a faculty meeting or of those sorts of settings. And I have so much admiration for
00:47:03
Speaker
the work that you do and for you know how full your life is and at least from the outside you know you make I'm not gonna say you make it look easy because I always feel a little bit tired when I you know hear about all the things that you're doing but I'm just so so so deeply impressed that you've been able to harness things that you love and continue to do them and to do them
Conclusion and Reflections
00:47:28
Speaker
in tandem, and I think that's a really good lesson for people about what's possible when you're willing to put in the work, when you're willing to be disciplined about it. So I think that's really wonderful. Thank you, and thanks for having me on this great series. Absolutely. Thanks, Pam.
00:47:44
Speaker
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