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Episode 21—Bronwen Dickey on the Tao of Henry Rollins, Binaural Beats, and Her Three Rules for Any Writer
163 Plays9 years ago
Author and journalist Bronwen Dickey stops by the podcast to talk about her new book "Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon."
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Transcript
Introduction and Theme Music
00:00:00
Speaker
So Bronwyn Dickey enters a room. What would your theme music be? Oh man! Brendan asks a girl a question and she laughs at him. Like high school all over again.
00:00:19
Speaker
Anyway, what we're looking at here is just another episode of hashtag CNF. Episode 21 with Bronwyn Dickey. I wish that wasn't the only time she laughed at me. You'll just have to listen and find out.
Insight into 'Pitbull: The Battle Over an American Icon'
00:00:33
Speaker
So she wrote a kick-ass book, Pitbull, The Battle Over an American Icon, published by Knopf. As is always the case, the podcast is a conversation that was very wide-ranging. Everything from the Tower of Henry Rollins, binaural beats, and the embarrassment over a certain book that will remain, for now, unnamed.
00:00:57
Speaker
So without wasting too much time, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and subscribe to my monthly email newsletter, my website, BrendanOmera.com. I send out a little list of five things or so that I find interesting over the course of a month. Any emails with questions, queries, or you just want to say hi, it's Brendan at BrendanOmera.com.
00:01:24
Speaker
So that's it. Enjoy this conversation with Bronwyn Dickey. Cool. Well, thanks for indulging in what I'm working on, but why don't we talk about your wonderful work.
00:01:45
Speaker
Yeah, like you've got this wonderful book named Pitbull, The Battle Over an American Icon, published by Knopf, that comes out this May, well, this month.
Anxiety of Book Release and Public Attention
00:01:54
Speaker
And it's a one- Next week. One week. One week. Can you believe it? I mean, I feel like I've been watching, like, through, like, since we've connected on Facebook and everything else, like, I feel like this has been, it's just been brewing and brewing and brewing, and now it's finally here. So, like, how does that feel that it's just, now it's, it's game time?
00:02:15
Speaker
Absolutely terrifying. Absolutely terrifying. I think whatever that whatever that piece of most writers is that's so excited about pub day or the attention or reviews or any of that stuff that makes some people so excited and thrilled for me it's just absolute terror.
00:02:37
Speaker
I am really, really frightened. I mean, it's being under a microscope that I've never been under before. And especially as like a journalist or nonfiction writer, I'm so used to, I love meeting people and I love hearing about their stories and I love having the focus beyond them.
00:02:56
Speaker
often very uncomfortable and strange for me to have people asking me questions and you know for the focus to be on me in any way so it's very very anxiety producing and then you know it's almost like you've given birth to this thing and then it goes out in the world and and who knows what's going to happen out there you know it could get shredded
00:03:16
Speaker
It could be and it's no longer yours at this point. You've done your work and now it's up to other people to dissect it, embrace it, reject it, this, that and the other and that loss of control. How have you mentally prepared for the arrival of the book to the masses?
00:03:41
Speaker
Oh gosh, a lot of nail biting, a lot of pacing, a lot of beer. There's really no way to prepare yourself at all, I don't think. It's just, I mean, you just kind of close your eyes and jump. I think that's really all I can do. But there's always this fear of, you know, when I'm lying in bed at night, my, you know, eyes are open, like I practically have like toothpicks holding them open.
00:04:11
Speaker
Um, all I'm thinking about was, is there one, one thing I could have done differently? Was there something I gotten wrong? You know what? All these, all these doubts you have, and there's just nothing you can do about it anymore. So I guess all I really, all I can do is just cross my fingers and hope that I'll get through it. I think.
00:04:33
Speaker
You brought up an interesting point about now that you're used to doing all the interviewing, asking the questions, and now you're kind of thrust into that spotlight. I feel the same way, not that I've been interviewed extensively, but I get pretty
00:04:50
Speaker
I get pretty petrified if anyone's asking me questions. I get really nervous when I talk to other writers or just interview people in general. I don't know if that's just something with me and my own anxiety issues, but I wonder what it's like for you. How do you approach your interviews and your research in that sense? What do you deal with to get that game face on and get into reporter mode?
00:05:18
Speaker
That's you know, that's in the beginning I think when I was in school when I was just learning how to do it I was
00:05:26
Speaker
the kind of performance anxiety stuff was very immobilizing for me and I would have to psych myself up for like days sometimes just to do an interview because I really thought you know interviews I thought the important part of an interview was for me to prove that I was a professional and that I deserve to be asking these questions and I didn't want my sources to think that I was you know ignorant of what they were of their work or I wanted them to like have this
00:05:55
Speaker
nice impression of me and when over the years you realize, you know, it's just not about you at all. As self-conscious as you are, that just has nothing to do with any of it. And if you approach people with a genuine interest in who they are as a human being, just like kind of like you were saying earlier when we were kind of chatting back and forth in email, just like you were going to go get a beer with somebody, I'm interested in everybody's
00:06:24
Speaker
Everyone has something to say. And so rarely do we ever get a chance to sit down with someone and tell someone else our story. That when I come to people and ask them in a genuine, open, sincere way for them to tell me about their lives, they're usually tremendously grateful.
00:06:44
Speaker
And I always come away learning something from it. So the best thing I ever did for myself that way was just to get over myself and get out of the way.
00:06:56
Speaker
Yeah, it comes down to, like you said, there was this fear of being ignorant of their work, but that ends up being a strength sort of in your corner. Your power is, I am ignorant about what you do. I respect what you do. Exactly. Now tell me what you do.
00:07:15
Speaker
Exactly. And help me get excited. Like, you know, if because as a writer, what you have to do is you have to translate that to an audience who has absolutely no knowledge of it. So when especially when I'm doing something, if I'm interviewing someone who maybe does something very involved and technical, some type of scientist or whatever, I always say, please explain this to me the way you would to say a smart, curious eighth grader.
00:07:45
Speaker
So that kind of strips all the jargon out of it. That strips all the over-technicalities out of it. Just make this as simple as possible so that I don't miss anything. And then once I have that understanding of what you do, then we can build to the higher technical stuff. But first of all, strip it all down for me and explain it.
00:08:05
Speaker
in this kind of smart, the smart eighth grader standard, because that is usually how I will have to strip it down for the audience and explain it piece
Simplifying Complex Topics
00:08:15
Speaker
by piece. Not that everyone who's reading what I'm writing are smart eighth graders, but you know, let's say a smart 14 year old is, you know, they're curious, they're interested, and they have a very, am I allowed to swear on here? Oh yes.
00:08:32
Speaker
Very low tolerance for bullshit and they get bored very fast, right? So if you're just leading them on this ridiculous tangent that has nothing to do with your story, they'll say, this is boring and I'm stopping reading. So I always kind of think about that in the back of my head. I try to obviously write for a very, very broad audience, but I think if I had to explain this to a smart 14 year old or a smart 13 year old, would I be able to do it? And that's kind of the gold standard.
00:09:00
Speaker
And that's where ignorance really helps you. You know, just my, my mentor patio tool in graduate school used to say that the journalist motto should be ignorant and proud of it, you know, which is kind of true. I mean, there's ignorance where there's willful ignorance, where you're not caring about what someone says. And then there's, I don't know about this. Help me learn.
00:09:23
Speaker
Right. And I wonder, like, how did you get your start in this type of storytelling? What was the draw for you? And what? Yeah, what was what made you want to take this leap and get into this into this line of work?
00:09:40
Speaker
I actually I had I always wrote on my own throughout high school and college The first kind of real essay that meant anything to me was It was one that I wrote right after my dad died when I was 15 and I
00:10:05
Speaker
There was so much kind of emotional chaos around that experience that the first thing I wanted to do was kind of make it linear for myself by putting it into a story form that helped me make sense of what was happening to me and I hoped that it would be something that other people could relate to as well.
Personal Essays and Family Influence
00:10:26
Speaker
I wrote a thousand-word essay. My father died and I took two weeks off school to go to the funeral and deal with stuff at home and then I went back and I had an English paper due and it was an essay on anything that we wanted to write so I wrote about that experience and I ended up sending that to Newsweek magazine and it was my turn column in 1997.
00:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, I mean it was really shocking because I never when I wrote it I didn't think it I didn't think about it going I mean I was 15 years old I didn't think it would I I just wrote it for myself But the letters that I got from people that said your experience really spoke to me And you really touched on some things that I've been going through and this helped me Really showed me what?
00:11:19
Speaker
the power of non-fiction so storytelling can do so so i wrote the route. Throughout high school and throughout college and i didn't think i would be a writer for sure my thoughts.
00:11:33
Speaker
I thought because my father was a writer, my brother's a journalist, I really wanted to go my own way and do my own thing. But there was just nothing else that I enjoyed as much as I enjoyed writing. So after college, I did a whole bunch of kind of
00:11:54
Speaker
crappy menial jobs. I explored the dimensions of marginality for a while. And then I kind of rolled the dice and applied to an MFA program and figured, well, if I get in, maybe it's a sign that I should actually pursue this. And if I don't, maybe I need to get a second job waiting tables or something. And I got in, so that was that.
00:12:22
Speaker
So what impact did your father, who's James Dickey's a famous poet and writer, what did he have on your, what impact did he have on your life? Oh, tremendous, tremendous. I think about him every day. Just I think the amount of time he spent with me, amount of time he spent engaging my ideas, he never
00:12:52
Speaker
He was a ferociously curious person and I think a lot of my kind of natural curiosity
00:13:00
Speaker
was nurtured through a lot of the things we did together, whether it was reading encyclopedia articles about something that might have been in the news or watching a nature documentary or looking at maps of places like Papua New Guinea. I mean, there were all these kinds of things going on. He lived an incredibly active intellectual life. He was always trying to learn about something. He was either writing his own stuff
00:13:27
Speaker
And when he wasn't doing that, he was learning about other things. So that kind of life of the mind and the environment that he created around that was really, really important for me as a kid, especially because I was a very awkward child and I really didn't have many friends. I was bullied in school pretty badly. So I was alone a lot of the time and
00:13:53
Speaker
Yet I grew up in this wonderful house full of books. There were books, there were floor to ceiling bookshelves on every wall of every room in our house. It was absolutely amazing when I look back on it now and just having access to all that information. I think
00:14:14
Speaker
something I always think about is the great Henry Rollins once said, I love this quote, he said, music is written, music is made by the people music saves. And I think stories are written by the people stories save in the same way. And stories absolutely saved me for sure, from a lot of loneliness, a lot of boredom. And he was
00:14:44
Speaker
absolutely instrumental in that. The way you describe him being curious and very mindful and just introspective and seeking out the deeper meaning and just being, like I said, deeply curious, isn't that just the very core of being a journalist and a true storytelling person?
00:15:07
Speaker
It is, it is for sure. And that's kind of the thing that I love most about the work that I do is that especially with nonfiction, I mean, fiction writers feel this, I know, too, and they do it in different way. But to be able to have a question pop into my mind, like, I wonder what X is like. And then to be able to go out and explore the world of X
00:15:34
Speaker
for as long as I want and then tell other people about it. It's just, it's the greatest job in the world. There's nothing like it, nothing in top of it. So you said you were, you know, awkward in school and bullied. In what ways were you awkward and like, how did, you know, what was it like growing up, you know, feeling like you had that sort of bullseye on your back and not, certainly not a positive one? Yeah. Well, my, you know, as,
00:16:04
Speaker
wonderful as my dad was in so many ways, and my mother too. They were both really fascinating, smart, caring people, but they, as I say a little bit in the book, they had some very significant problems of their own. My father's alcoholism is what killed him when I was
00:16:25
Speaker
15 he was bedridden for three years before he died and My mother had a very significant significant substance abuse problem as well. So There was a lot of turmoil a lot of emotional stuff around that and because my father was who he was It was very public those problems were very public and so sometimes things would be in the newspaper or you know, it was just
00:16:55
Speaker
It was a really hard, hard fishbowl to grow up in, and other kids were incredibly cruel about it. So I had a couple of friends here and there, but I learned, I guess I learned to kind of look at the world from an outsider's perspective a lot. And I think when I read and listen to interviews with a lot of other journalists,
00:17:21
Speaker
interesting how many other writers have felt that way, that you didn't quite fit in and therefore you learn to observe the world around you really carefully, what motivates people, what their relationships are like, what they're going through, you know, all these things that you might not necessarily be part of yourself that you have to kind of observe from outside.
00:17:44
Speaker
And it sort of drives you inward, too. And there's almost nothing more sort of intimate than being with books and with stories, because you get to be of and with another writer's mind. Exactly.
00:18:01
Speaker
And I imagine for someone like you who got such negative attention that when you were taking part in these stories, it was an avenue of non-judgmental entertainment where you could just be one with something and not feel attacked.
00:18:19
Speaker
Oh, exactly. And you could just have these wonderful escapist adventures. You can go down the Mississippi with Huck and Tom. You can climb Mount Everest with Edmund Hillary. You can do all these amazing things and be teleported into the minds of these incredible people and into their lives.
00:18:44
Speaker
especially knowing how many of the struggles that I or anyone else go through, how universal they are. I mean those stories, like a great story, I was talking to a friend about this today and he reminded me of something that I said years back that I didn't even remember I said. But he was saying, remember when we were talking about the power of story and you said that
00:19:09
Speaker
a great story collapses the distance between two people to zero. And I said, no, I don't remember when I said that, but well, that's actually pretty good. That's true, because that is exactly how I feel. You don't feel alone anymore. You can have these wonderful adventures in your mind all over the world with all these, with as many friends as you want.
00:19:38
Speaker
Now you said that because your father was a writer and your brother was a writer, that you were trying to sort of carve your own path sort of away from those paths. At what point, let's say, what did you have in mind and then at what point did you just ultimately relent to just the momentum behind you that this was what you were going to do?
Choosing Writing Over Other Careers
00:20:04
Speaker
I probably thought I might get a PhD in English or something like that or maybe go to law school. For someone who's heavily into the humanities and has absolutely no aptitude for math or particle physics or anything like that, the options are fairly limited.
00:20:32
Speaker
But at a certain point, you know, I just realized I didn't want to deal with the politics of academia at all. I love teaching. I absolutely love teaching the opportunities that I've had to do it. I've loved every second of it. But I can't I can't abide the politics of academia at all and being on committees and that kind of thing that I just wasn't interested in that. And with law, I just, you know, I just
00:21:01
Speaker
It was something that I was intellectually interested in, but I couldn't see myself getting tremendously passionate and fired up about. So unless I was, you know, maybe something like constitutional law or civil rights law or something like that. But I saw so many people that I know kind of go into the meat grinder of law school and come out as a
00:21:27
Speaker
doing something they didn't really want to be doing because they had to pay off all those loans and and I just I didn't really want that so I crossed my fingers and said if I if you know God help me if there's any way I can actually make a living as a nonfiction writer I'm I'm gonna try it so and here I am. What were some of your early of repartorial and nonfiction gigs like?
00:21:56
Speaker
Oh, goodness. Um, bumbling, uh, bumbling, like, weird adventures in an aptitude, I think. I mean, I had no idea. I had never worked on a school paper. I never reported for the school paper in high school or college or anything like that. So after
00:22:23
Speaker
After the two years of my MFA, everything I learned to do, I really just had to learn, I learned by doing. Doing and failing and doing and failing and doing and failing. I remember the first reported story I ever tried to do was about heavy metal tribute bands.
00:22:49
Speaker
Nice. And yeah. And I followed this one band on the road for a while. And this thing, this story got so complicated. Like I overwrote this thing to such an insane degree. It was awful. I mean, it was, I, I had lists of questions. Like I typed up lists of interview questions for like each member of the band that ran like five pages single spaced. I mean, there was just like,
00:23:19
Speaker
It was stuff like how did you experience like what was your existential experience of the of the 80s? That was like this weird like I was trying so hard and I wasn't getting to the meat of anything I was just like spinning wheels So but I learned a tremendous amount about what does not work from the heavy metal tribute band Opus that was not So that was that and then
00:23:46
Speaker
During grad school, I was just desperate to get any work that I could. So I took assignments from any magazines that would have me. My first kind of assignment that a magazine sent me on was an artist profile for Garden and Gun, actually. And I didn't know anything about art. I didn't know anything about writing profiles.
00:24:14
Speaker
And I definitely bumbled my way through that one and I, you know, learned all kinds of lessons. And then I was like taking, one of my teachers had a student who worked at a travel magazine and that travel magazine was willing to give me a shot. And then I did an assignment for them. And then I did like captions for them. And it was just like one thing after another. I did book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle for, I think like $200 a piece.
00:24:42
Speaker
And yeah, a lot of book reviews, a lot of here and there, a lot of catch as catch can. So what was your query process like to get these early assignments? Most came through knowing someone who knew someone, who knew someone who was willing to give a new writer a shot. And I think that's, I mean, that's still kind of an important
00:25:12
Speaker
a part of how the whole business works. It's a lot like dating in that way in that it's really hard to go up to someone in a crowd if you're a complete stranger and ask them to go on a date with you because they might be a serial killer. Your severed head might end up in a bag. It's much easier to say, I have a friend of a friend of a friend.
00:25:37
Speaker
who maybe you're not totally into, but will you go to a movie with this person? I love that's where your mind went. Well, one never knows. I watch a lot of Dateline. Talk about a perfect arc in story healing.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah, so a lot of the business is really navigating personal relationships that way. So it was those early travel things were because my teacher had a former student who was working at a magazine who was willing to take a shot, who had been a young writer once and remember what that was like and was willing to take a shot. But a lot of times, I think, yeah, I'm not sure I've ever pitched anything without some kind of intro to somebody.
00:26:28
Speaker
Well, and the ones I have have always bombed, so I'm not really the person to ask. Whenever I've cold-pitched anything, it has not turned out. I'm not good at it. It is not my forte. I am not a salesman. So, eventually, years go by and you get to the point where you're
Cultural Impact of 'Pitbull' Title
00:26:50
Speaker
You're writing this book, Pitbull, Battle Over an American Icon, and I wonder how conscious you were of putting battle in the subtitle with a dog that is so now just unfortunately so associated with fighting.
00:27:07
Speaker
Yeah. Very conscious. The book, the original title of the book was actually Dog Fight. It was like dog backslash, you know, fight. Because what I learned most from the process of reporting and writing the book is that we are the ones doing the fighting. This is about our
00:27:33
Speaker
This is about us hashing out our issues with each other, and we're using dogs as proxies to do that. So the battle that is going on is a human battle between groups, and it's a battle over culture, it's a battle over values.
00:27:49
Speaker
But yeah, I was very conscious of that because I wanted to, and my editor and I went back and forth about titles a lot, but we did want to convey that this is something controversial.
00:28:03
Speaker
there's tumult kind of there, that it's not like a static history, that it's a dynamic story. So yeah, for sure. But certainly, and I'm sure people will pick up or they'll see battle and they'll think about, you know, fighting or whatever. But I hope once they get into it, they'll see that it's really about us fighting and not the dogs.
00:28:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's something that I found so striking and engaging about it is that caught in the middle of just our human strife was just this poor animal who was, as you say in the subtitle also, that it was an American icon. I was just in Hawaii. I was at Pearl Harbor.
00:28:50
Speaker
went into the bookstore and there was like a man i forget the name of the book but it was like you know uh... sort of like hero dogs in history and right on the corner a little medallion right in the dead center is what we typically refer to as a pit bull and i was just like oh shoot how great is this you know i'll be talking to brown one about it and then it's just that is just evidence of what she wrote so beautifully about in this book um i like how
00:29:15
Speaker
At what point did you come to this realization that the pit bull was at one point like the darling dog of America and then it just took a total like 180 degree turn in just a few decades? Yeah, pretty early on. Pretty early I started noticing
00:29:37
Speaker
that when I would kind of ask people because you know I'm so again curious about what people kind of like what the man on the street thinks or what the woman on the street thinks that I would early in the research
00:29:50
Speaker
I would do my interviews and I would do my reading and stuff, but I would also just be asking people around me. Like if I was, you know, having a burger at a restaurant on a reporting trip or whatever, you know, I would ask the wait staff, what do you think about pitfalls? And so I did a lot, a lot, a lot of that kind of just really informal information gathering from anyone and everyone I could. And what I noticed most when I asked people that question,
00:30:17
Speaker
is how fast they pivoted from the actual animal to the person they perceived to be behind the animal. So it wasn't really, they weren't parsing the specifics of canine genetics. They were saying, well, the dog, I don't know, might be okay, whatever, but it's those people
00:30:39
Speaker
you know, those people, those tough macho, you know, asshole, whatever, they're all kinds of like horrible words used, but it was always drafted at the person. The person seemed to be the big point of anxiety. And so, and that happens so often that I was just kind of struck by, we weren't really talking about dogs anymore. And so when I was digging into the history,
00:31:08
Speaker
and then started noticing how much that had been true for hundreds of years. Dogs are such a part of our lives and they live in such close proximity to us and we have such tight relationships with them that we end up projecting lots of positive things onto them about courage and loyalty and bravery and all these wonderful virtues. But we also, we forget that we
00:31:35
Speaker
Easily project negative things onto them as well. And so if you you know a lot of as I kind of talked about in the book a lot of the Marketing for lack of a better word around breeds is about branding. You know, what kind of person are you? Are you a Maltese person? Are you a cockapoo person? Are you a Rottweiler person and we all have what we all have an idea in our heads what that means but
00:32:05
Speaker
A lot of that is marketing and history and culture and all kinds of stuff and it really doesn't have a whole lot to do with science. So there are dogs like for people you might think are like you and there are dogs you might think are for people not like you. And if you have a real problem with a certain social group, if your social group is in conflict with another, there's no reason to think that somehow their dogs would be exempt from that.
00:32:35
Speaker
Yeah, when I was reading the book on the air, I was finishing the book up on an airplane and my father-in-law turned to me, he's like, you're not getting one of those dogs, are you?
00:32:47
Speaker
And I was like, well, no. I have two other dogs. And I was like, no. Melanie, my wife, and I, we don't plan on getting a pit bull. But I wouldn't mind having one. They're wonderful dogs. But it came down to, I was like, well, this book really isn't strictly about the pit bull. It's about how it became, it's between the strife between people and it being a scapegoat and also
00:33:16
Speaker
getting it such a bad rap because it's sort of like the outlaw dog du jour.
00:33:21
Speaker
Yeah. And it's just like, yeah, I guess that's why I don't like it. It's kind of like this outlaw thing. And that just goes right to he was picturing the people who typically own what he pictures them to be. And so it was like, wow, that's just like right to the core of the book. So yeah. And it all has to do with the position, you know, where you're standing to as to whether that's a good thing. Like for, you know, as I talk about a lot,
00:33:48
Speaker
In the 90s when the dogs became like a you know late 80s early 90s when they became kind of a hip-hop icon If you were a kid growing up in the south side of Chicago you know then that the dog is the hip-hop icon and
00:34:04
Speaker
you'd see a pit bull and think that dog defends people I know. That's a dog I feel safe with. That's the dog that I have all these positive feelings about. Whereas, for instance, as we know with all the police brutality and stuff that's happened in Chicago, seeing a police dog might fill you with absolute terror. So whereas if you go out into the suburbs,
00:34:33
Speaker
The white woman going to the grocery store might see a police dog and that makes her feel safe, whereas the pit bull is associated with this world she doesn't spend any time with, and that's terrifying. But it really all has to do with where you're standing. And the dogs, they're on the same behavioral spectrum as dogs of any other type.
00:34:53
Speaker
And I'll read here the opening epigraph that you chose for the book by Bertrand Russell. It says, quote, neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of great fear. And I wonder, when you read that, what struck you about it and why did you choose to put it this sitting out right up front as the epigraph of your book?
00:35:22
Speaker
Um, because I went right away. I was reading, um, one of Russell's collections of essays on, I think it was on critical thinking or skepticism or something.
Empathy in Journalism
00:35:34
Speaker
And I was thinking a lot about the influence of, of fear on the mind and on decision-making. And I wanted people right away to be kind of alerted to that as the large theme of the book. Like, what are we willing to do when we are afraid?
00:35:52
Speaker
How much reason are we willing to put aside? How many people will we allow to suffer? What kind of things that are not in accordance with the values we think we have? What will we do if we are frightened enough? And what are we truly frightened of, more or less? And so I wanted that to kind of prime the reader's mind for what was coming.
00:36:20
Speaker
So what was it like dealing with Diane Jessup, who, she struck me, she's a very interesting character in this book, a very interesting woman, very passionate woman. And you two kind of, you two, you stand up to her. And again, stand up to her in this. And I think you guys came, you have a mutual respect for each other, at least that's the way you came across.
00:36:47
Speaker
But I wonder what was it like in dealing with her and her approach to the breed.
00:37:00
Speaker
I knew her only through her reputation, the books that she had written and also she has a very active presence online and she is very kind of no holds barred and she writes very angry posts that she calls her asbestos glove letters. And so I only knew her through that and I thought I really, I don't know, I assumed that we would have nothing in common.
00:37:30
Speaker
And yet, because she is such a figurehead for kind of the historical pure American pit bull terrier,
00:37:43
Speaker
I figured I really wanted to talk to her and learn why she was so passionate and why she felt this way. And it was a huge and very important lesson for me when I went out there because her online persona is this one way. But again, it's like that thing where you sit down with somebody and you learn their story and that distance just collapses.
00:38:04
Speaker
And so we were able to have these really long, thought-provoking, in-depth conversations, and I could see where she was coming from, even when I didn't agree with her.
00:38:16
Speaker
Um, and so I was upfront and honest about what my opinions were, but I was also, I also told her, you know, I'm, I'm here to listen and you've got some really interesting things to say. And, and that's what I want to highlight. So it's not my job to agree with you on everything. It's my job to, you know, it's not my job to believe what you believe, but it's my job to present what you believe in a fair and accurate way.
00:38:41
Speaker
And I think because I was so transparent and just kind of sincere about wanting to learn, um, she was really wonderful. She was very gracious to me. We had really wonderful talks and she loves her dogs with this profound, you know, almost spiritual
00:39:02
Speaker
I've never seen a relationship between working dogs and handlers that is as deep and kind of that mutual understanding as the relationship that Diane Jessup has with her dogs. And so wherever she and I might disagree on things, I thought that was absolutely beautiful and I completely respected it.
00:39:23
Speaker
So many people who have a lot of conviction, it's almost like they come from a place of defense because no one's willing to take the time to understand them. Yeah, I think that's a good observation, yeah.
00:39:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I was like, at what point did you come to that realization that like maybe this person just, she needs, it's like that little bout of empathy and understanding is kind of like what the water that puts the fire out. Like I wonder when you came to that realization with her that maybe that's when the hackles went down and here was a person and you just trying to understand where this woman's coming from.
00:40:03
Speaker
Yeah, very, I mean, that's very astute. Yeah, and that happened fairly fast. Because she's, I mean, as you saw in the book, I mean, she's very funny, and she's very smart. And there is, there is absolutely not a minute that goes by in her presence where something hilarious
00:40:22
Speaker
off the wall, you know, strange, cool. I mean, everything is, and I think that's kind of why she's drawn to her particular type of dog is she lives at this pretty intense volume. And like she says in the book, we need robust things in our lives. Like we're in the age of the insipid, spineless person.
00:40:47
Speaker
Um, but yeah, she had, she had such great stories and it really happened very fast. It was just one person being open to another person, the other person letting them in. And that's really a gift for any, any storyteller to have somebody let you into their world that way and to let their guard down so much is something that I take very seriously.
00:41:13
Speaker
And so, again, once you find that people reach that point of vulnerability, how do you then handle
00:41:29
Speaker
what then has to be the reality of what you do and then write the story and like using that information and To tell your to to tell the story you want to tell even though it may not shine the greatest the most flattering light on the person yeah, I that's something that I struggle with tremendously because you talk again you talk to most people long enough and I
00:41:58
Speaker
I think I'm kind of cursed in a way that no matter who I'm talking to, I can always find something in them that
00:42:09
Speaker
If I'm willing to put in the time, if I spend all day with somebody and I'm really asking open sincere questions, then I always come away with a sense of empathy and a sense of that common humanity, even if we have completely different views. So I never want anyone to feel that they let their guard down.
00:42:28
Speaker
and they were somehow betrayed or that I was not careful, that I kind of used that against them because I think about how much I would hate it if someone did that to me, how hurt and upset I would be. And so up front, I always make very clear and that's what I do with Diane, that's what I do with everyone.
00:42:48
Speaker
saying, you know, I'm here to listen. And as I said before, I'm not here to believe what you believe, but I do want to represent what you believe in a fair and accurate way. And that doesn't mean I'm going to agree. And that doesn't mean you're going to like everything that I say, like we will have points of disagreement.
00:43:05
Speaker
So, you know, that I kind of put that on the table right up front, because I, I think I don't think there could be anything worse than really letting your guard down and letting someone into your life. I mean, there are people talk to journalists almost the way they talk to therapists, because a lot, a lot of times, you know, a lot of people who don't have therapists and they don't have that experience of
00:43:29
Speaker
immersive conversation about their life story and their struggles and their conflicts and all these things. They can end up being very fragile in that space. I can't imagine if I did that with someone and then they just shredded me in some mean-spirited way.
00:43:53
Speaker
And I hope came across even with the people in the book who I didn't agree with. I really tried to basically to be empathetic first, you know, to say I really do understand why this person feels this way.
00:44:11
Speaker
I don't agree, but I understand why they feel that way. And I really can't stand mean spiritedness in writing. I don't like it when other writers do that. I don't want to do it myself. I don't like gotcha journalism. I'm not out to get anyone. If I truly dislike somebody, I just won't write about them.
00:44:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's a cheap shot that ultimately the writer sort of has this power and has this sledgehammer at their disposal. It's in poor taste to take someone and just hit them over the head with it and make fun of them.
00:44:51
Speaker
I think Elizabeth Gilbert, she was on the long-form podcast a couple weeks ago. She used to do that in some of her early columns to which she spoke about it with some regret. That wasn't cool. I would go meet these people who are super passionate about
00:45:12
Speaker
XYZ and then she would go back to her computer and then just rake them over the coals and she admitted that that was just kind of a low blow but that's essentially the power that is at a writer's disposal and it's up to you ethically to leave it in the holster or just bury that hammer and never use it.
00:45:34
Speaker
Yeah, and in the course of the book, I found, you know, I did so much research. I mean, just so much more than what is actually in there. And I found many unflattering things about many people that I wrote about. And especially unflattering things about the people whose views I really did not agree with. And so there was an ethical consideration for me. Do I use this?
00:46:04
Speaker
to quote, win an argument, basically. Am I going to use something like this that could potentially really, I don't want to say ruin somebody's life. I would never do that. But that is not germane to this particular topic. Do I use it because I have it and because it's out there in the public domain? Or am I
00:46:29
Speaker
going to take a higher road than that. I just didn't want to be a person that goes and digs up unflattering stuff and just puts it out there for everyone. I hate the spirit of that. Nobody deserves that. I'm sure there are lots of people that wish I had, but that's just not the writer I want to be. The only time I would ever
00:46:53
Speaker
I would ever publish something unflattering, like truly unflattering about someone as if I believe that that was important for the public to know because that person was doing real harm to someone. You know, like if someone was
00:47:10
Speaker
I don't know, harming, you know, a pedophile or harming children or, you know, a politician who's, you know, crooked and taking bribes and like hurting people's lives. Like that would be something that I would, I would feel okay. But just digging through people's personal lives and sharing and flattering information. I just, I'm never going to do that. No.
00:47:31
Speaker
And to give people an idea of the extent of the research you did, in the galley I have, there's over 30 pages of end notes. And what can only be termed as eight-point font or something. So we're dealing with just exhaustive research in the most flattering sense that you use to tell the story. Thank you.
00:47:56
Speaker
Yeah. What was, I mean, it looks like there was a lot for you to comb through. How did you sort it out? How did you organize it all to thread and sort of braid this whole story together? Yeah.
Organizing Research with Evernote
00:48:12
Speaker
And I think in the manuscript pages, it was almost 100 pages of endnotes.
00:48:17
Speaker
So, and I had to like cut big chunks, you know, because it was like literally every word was like an in note, an in note, an in note, and you can't like have half your book be in note. So, it was a, it was really enormous. I mean, my book was a year, almost two years late.
00:48:36
Speaker
Because I just couldn't stop researching and I was like soothing my anxiety about writing by doing more research and more research and more research and it became this kind of like OCD obsession and I actually had to talk to a few colleagues about this because it was really keeping me from moving forward in the same way that you know that.
00:48:57
Speaker
the obsessive can't stop washing his hands and he is always late to work and sometimes miss his whole days because he just can't stop washing his hands and that's kind of the way it was. I would check and I would recheck and I would go find five more documents and I would go to another library and I would interview another person and I would find another way to keep going and going. Eventually, my editor was like, you got to stop doing this. You have mountains of information, you already have more than you can use.
00:49:27
Speaker
And it was fear of, I think, fear of my contract getting canceled, or fear of not being able to do a good job, or just kind of the shame of not turning it in on time pushed me to go ahead and do it. But the organization was really something I struggle with a lot. God bless Evernote. Everything changed for me when I finally started using Evernote. And that was probably two years into the process.
00:49:56
Speaker
Then I had to go back and re-file everything and scan everything. That was absolutely the best invention of all time ever to be able to have everything keyword searchable, to be able to tag things, OCR, all that stuff really made my life so much better. Once I got everything in that format, then everything started moving a lot more quickly.
00:50:24
Speaker
So how did getting kind of granular on Evernote, how did you use it to your advantage? Yeah. So I had a notebook for every major theme I wanted to talk about. I tagged the shit out of every single article with everything I could think of. And also, because a lot of it was historical, I would
00:50:49
Speaker
if they were, whether it was an academic journal article or a newspaper clip or a photo or anything like that, I would put the year in the, at the beginning of the title of the note. So then when I alphabetized it, everything immediately fell into chronological order. So if I get like, for instance, I had a chapter on, you know, I could have a chapter on guard dogs, like the whole culture of guard dogs from like the late sixties on.
00:51:17
Speaker
And so then I could look, okay, I can basically go from, you know, 1700 to the present and look, you know, what was going on in 1974? What do I have from 1974?
00:51:31
Speaker
And boom, I can immediately call that up and it's all in order. So I would do like basically the year and then the month and the day and then everything would fall into immediate order. Thank you Evernote. You are the best. If I could do product placement for Evernote for the rest of my life, I would do it. It's amazing. Yeah. So what was your routine like when you were writing this book? When I wasn't crying. When I wasn't curled up in a ball.
00:52:00
Speaker
When I wasn't saying, I can't do this, I can't do this, it's too much information, I'll never finish. Well, even before you answer the routine question, how did you pull yourself out of the fetal crying fits? The fetal crying fits, yeah. It really was. It was like the fear of failing and having nothing was greater than the fear of doing it.
00:52:23
Speaker
And so I guess it was some kind of sense of self-preservation. But interestingly enough, I had to get away from all that research in order to be able to write the first draft. So I had to, when I was sitting in my office with all my filing cabinets, and I mean, I just had, I accumulated so much shit. Like, I had like,
00:52:48
Speaker
scrapbooks full of like actual scrapbooks that people had put together on like a breed ban in in Florida Someone actually sold that on eBay and I was like shit a whole scrapbook full of articles about pitbull bands in Florida on eBay Yes, thanks. I had stacks of photos that I had bought from various like estate sales I had all this stuff and like I think I think it was between a hundred and two hundred books
00:53:16
Speaker
on the shelves just about this. And then all my interview notes and my notebooks and all this stuff. And it just came, it got to the point where sitting in that office felt so oppressive to me. I just couldn't, I couldn't think. So I had to get, basically I had to completely get out of there. I went to Duke Law Library and I sat in a carol that had no view. And I just banged out what I already knew.
00:53:47
Speaker
off the top of my head like what was coming to me is most salient because if I was constantly checking and rechecking and referencing and quoting and whatever then I couldn't move forward. So to do the first draft I had to just basically write things from memory and once I had that
00:54:04
Speaker
I went back and I made sure the quotes were accurate and I checked the dates and I checked the times and I did all the kind of granular fact checking work and then I refined the ideas and all that stuff. But I couldn't really make progress until I just got all that stuff out of the way. How would you describe the nature of your talent?
00:54:27
Speaker
I don't really think about talent. Honestly, I think I probably have more pathological self-doubt than any writer I've ever known. We could probably go head to head on that. I think I might get to be. I really don't. The word talent does not even enter my anything because if I think about anything in terms of talent or trying to have it or if I have it, I'll just drive myself insane.
00:54:55
Speaker
All I know is that if I put in the work, there are all kinds of people, all kinds of people who can easily outright me, but there are very few who can outwork me. And I know that the work part is the piece that I have control over. So if I'm willing to take it through five drafts and someone else is only willing to take it through two, then at the end of five drafts, it's gonna be better than it would have been otherwise.
00:55:24
Speaker
That's all I really, it's work. I just consider it, it's just like putting in studs in a house, or carpentry, or anything like that. That's the only way I can think about it, to be able to do it. Glenn Stout, who is on this podcast, and I guess a writer, editor, and one of his big things was, the only thing you can control is your effort. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.
00:55:54
Speaker
Even when people like use, like when the word talent somehow floats around a conversation, it just like it gives me hives or something. I just, because you know what, you know, it's like a unicorn. I mean, I don't know, you know, I don't know. Um, I think, I think if there's anything I'm, let's see, I think there's anything I'm good at is just like how far I'll, I'll go to like how much effort I will put in, how many drafts I'm willing to take it through.
00:56:21
Speaker
how much research I'm willing to do and just that ability to go the extra mile.
00:56:27
Speaker
I think that's the only talent I have. Now, Eva Holland, who I interviewed a while ago. She's awesome. Oh, she's the best. She's really great. But she said something that kind of cuts against what you just said in that to do this kind of work, she's like, I don't know how you can't believe you're any good or you can't believe in your own talent. So I have to think on some level.
00:56:52
Speaker
You believe, it's not just the work that you put in that you believe in. You have to know, you went through a graduate program, you've come, you had a touch, you had that story you wrote when you were 15 about your father passing away. At some level, you must believe in your ability and that you do have talent that makes you rise above a lot of other people.
00:57:21
Speaker
Well, here, I'll tell you what, I think what I believe in is I know if I work hard enough, I guess I think most about possibility, because every single piece I do is
00:57:40
Speaker
The current piece I'm doing is always an attempt to redeem the last piece that didn't turn out as well as I hoped. So it's always like kind of next time I'm going to nail it. Next time I'm going to nail it. And it's a kind of I guess it's like almost like a gambler's addiction in a way. It's like I yeah I think
00:58:02
Speaker
Yeah, I turn ideas over in my head really thoroughly. I really enjoy what I do. I'm very passionate about it. I don't know if I'm any good at it, but I do believe that if I keep at it, I can say something interesting. I do believe that it's like the Australian novelist Tim Winton, who's a surfer as well.
00:58:24
Speaker
often writes about or talks about the experience of writing as you're like a surfer out there on your board waiting for a wave and you don't know when it's going to come and you don't know if it's going to be good, if it's going to be big or if it's going to be small or whatever, or if it's going to be a storm or who knows what's going to happen. But if you sit there long enough, the law of the ocean is a wave will come.
00:58:46
Speaker
And so I think about it kind of that way a lot myself in that if I just keep at it, something will happen. And I'm not gonna attach myself to like how good it is or if other people think it's good or whatever because I just don't have any control over that. I'm gonna do the best job I can do. And I'm gonna keep putting myself out there. And I'm gonna keep trying to redeem the last piece I didn't nail. And in your eyes, have you nailed any piece?
00:59:16
Speaker
No, no, I'm still I'm still redeeming ever, you know, and the same thing is like the conspiracy piece. I'm like, ah, you know, because in your head you I can always see it's like thinking about a Rubik's Cube and all the possibilities. You can see all these possibilities and they all look so great in your head. And then when you commit it to paper, it's like.
00:59:36
Speaker
I think Calvin Trillin talks about this. He said, it's always like 20% less good than you thought it would be. Or like that idea that sounded so good in your head just does not work at all on the page. And so there's like the disappointment, but then you have to keep going. So yeah, it's always that process.
00:59:53
Speaker
So what other artistic media do you consume that you draw inspiration from? Music.
Music's Influence on Writing
01:00:02
Speaker
I was gonna say, it's gotta be music. When you pull a Henry Rollins quote...
01:00:07
Speaker
out of your bank, like, all right, here's a punk rocker. I mean, I'm not like a huge black flag fan or anything, but I love that quote. And I think he's like a really interesting cultural figure. I actually think, you know, he's kind of like infuriating, but super passionate. And sometimes he says things that are like really brilliant. And sometimes he's kind of a buffoon. And he's like a really interesting guy. I would love to have like a beer with Henry Rollins if he still drinks. I don't know if he does.
01:00:33
Speaker
Um, but yeah, music, music, music. I talked to so many writers, um, so many friends of mine, um, who, you know, like I'm very into, um, classic rock and the history of rock and roll and blues and jazz and all these things. Um, and some of my friends are totally bewildered by this.
01:00:56
Speaker
And I always want to say then, you're a writer. What you do is music. You are putting music on the page. Your work will only pay it out if what you say is musical and pleasing to the internal ear of the reader. So how can you not be into music? I think writers should spend
01:01:19
Speaker
all their free time listening to music. Why certain songs work, why certain lyrics work, how the metrics of a line, how the meter works, all those things I think are really, really important to writing, even though I can't listen to music when I write, which is interesting. That was just gonna be my next question. Why can't you listen to music while you write?
01:01:49
Speaker
I'm just too distractible. I actually have to put earplugs in and have noise-canceling headphones on top of the earplugs. I do that sometimes too. Because I just can't, I'm so distractible and I'll look for any reason to like escape the hell of
01:02:07
Speaker
facing the blank page so I have to have total silence, yeah. Something else I do like sometimes I'll do that other times I'll put one particular instrumental song on repeat and I just do the one song over and over and over again.
01:02:24
Speaker
And it kind of just, after a while, just puts me into a meditative trance, where it's just kind of like, it's something that kind of just resonates on sort of an ethereal level. And then I just, I don't even know it's there anymore. Other times I just throw Metallica on and just go fucking ballistic. Oh, good for you. I'm so glad that works for you. I would love if I could throw Metallica on and it would actually work.
01:02:51
Speaker
I think it was Darcy Frey who wrote...
01:02:55
Speaker
He wrote the last shot that kind of was the basis for Hoop Dreams and some other stuff. He was one of my teachers in my MFA program. I think at one point he talked about an entire, I think it was him, he said trying to get the feeling of the rhythm of a piece by listening constantly to the Rolling Stones. And I was like, yeah, I so wish I could do that. I love the Rolling Stones. I would love to put sticky fingers on and like get into the rhythm of like, you know, and have that kind of transport me away. But unfortunately it just,
01:03:25
Speaker
Doesn't happen there was a while when i was like you know really really blocked and i couldn't write anything i was like maybe binaural beats binaural beats will be the answer and i was i don't know if you've ever listened to binaural beats these like entrainment things like that have certain frequencies and they're supposed to help you focus or something
01:03:46
Speaker
But it's like weird, weird, weird sounds. Like it was made by aliens or something. And so sometimes I would like fall asleep and I would have these crazy dreams. I was like, no more binaural beats. I can't do that anymore. It's so weird. No, no, it didn't work. So that's hilarious. Oh, man. So what are what are your what is your go to music to listen to? Yeah. Hard Rock.
01:04:16
Speaker
classic rock, I mean, Stones, Classic Soul, Marvin Gaye, Sam Cooke, I mean, just anything. I love Ray Lamontagne, yet I also love, you know, Guns N' Roses, yet I also love, you know, pretty much anything, honestly, pretty much anything, but probably bluesy, bluesy classic rock slash hard rock.
01:04:45
Speaker
stuff is probably like the sweet spot or classic soul. So Bronwyn Dickey enters a room. What would your theme music be? Like, what would I want it to be? Yeah. Or what song would it be? Oh, God. Oh, God.
01:05:09
Speaker
like, what it would actually be, what I want to be. Oh, God, I would love to, like, have You Could Be Mine by G&R, like, Terminator 2 playing everywhere I go, like, feeling like the biggest badass in the world. But it would probably be something like
01:05:26
Speaker
I don't know, Beaker from the Muppets or something would probably be like crickets and weird circus music or something. Sweet Child of Mine would be a great theme song. Nice, nice. All right. That's my ringtone. Yeah, I think if I lay up, when I go into a room, it would be like the final countdown.
01:05:48
Speaker
Oh, okay. That's bold. All right. All right. Yeah, I don't know why. I think I just saw that guy go commercial recently. So that song's coming to the forefront. Have you seen the documentary Anvil? No.
01:06:03
Speaker
Oh, you got to watch that. Oh, you got to watch it. It's so good. It's so good about this like washed up heavy metal band that like never happened. And they were like trying to make it happen. And they're so sweet and earnest and oh, it's great. You got to see it. Anvil. It's amazing.
01:06:19
Speaker
So that kind of brings up an interesting question of when do you give up as an artist? Now, I think I'll preface that. Clearly, you don't write a book of this magnitude and get it published by Knopf without having the requisite ability to do so. But I wonder what goes through your mind if you had yourself, like, oh, if there was
01:06:48
Speaker
I don't know, a deadline or something in your head that would say like maybe it's just not going to happen. Did you ever roll that around in your head? Like what you would sort of like an escape valve or were you just full bore? I'm just doing this until I die. You mean for the book? No, not for the book. Just like you in general. Like what validation did you need to keep going?
01:07:14
Speaker
Little validation can take you a really really long. I'm a validation camel So really I mean I just you know 500 knows and then you get one yes, and that can take you through the next 500 knows so I think just
01:07:36
Speaker
Yeah, just getting little assignments here and there and just the faith, really just keeping the faith that you keep going. It's the law of averages after a while. You keep learning about your craft. You keep working on improving your skills. You keep putting yourself out there and learning about the field. And eventually, again, the wave has to come in, whether it's an idea or a yes or whatever.
01:08:03
Speaker
I think if nothing had ever worked out and I was truly making myself miserable, if I got to the point where I just didn't enjoy it anymore, where I couldn't get motivated, I couldn't get excited, I couldn't talk to people. You go to a cookout and someone says, hey, what do you think about X? And you don't immediately vomit out 50 ideas because you're so excited, then I couldn't do it anymore, for sure.
01:08:33
Speaker
Yeah, because if someone asks you what you do at a dinner party or cocktail party and you say, like, oh, I'm a writer. I try not to go to cocktail parties. Yeah. I've never been invited to one, but. Yeah, right. Who goes to those things?
01:08:49
Speaker
Exactly, but like if you if someone asks you what you do and you say that and like you kind of swell with a little bit of pride because it is it is something that takes it takes a certain a measure of courage that a lot of other people don't have and I think if you can say it with that certain courage, you know that you're it's you are meant to do it and there you really can't stop it's just kind of in your bones and
01:09:13
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'm still not there yet. I still say I, you know, I talked to someone about this recently, too. I usually say it feels so weird to say I'm a writer for that precise reason. So again, I always kind of for myself just to not freak myself out or to not get too self conscious or precious about it. I always focus on like the
01:09:39
Speaker
the crap like the actual work that I do. Like I say, I'm like what I get, I'm a journalist, or I'm a reporter or whatever. And that takes the pressure off, I think for me for them, for for everything, I just once it gets too lofty, once that balloon that helium balloon kind of like starts getting really big and like floating away with like, we're capital W writer and literature and talent and, you know, all these things I just
01:10:06
Speaker
It's too easy for me to tie myself up in knots anyway. So I just focus on like one foot in front of the other, hammering that nail that one day. Binaural music. Binaural beef. Binaural beef. That's just a trip and a half.
01:10:25
Speaker
All right, so I'll transition to a few rapid-fire questions that don't necessarily need rapid-fire responses, because I want to be respectful of your time. OK. Are you up against a clock here, or are you still good to go? No. I'm good to go. Cool. All right, so if you were moving to a tiny house or a moat island paradise, and in a move, you could only ship or carry 5 to 10 books with you, what would you choose to keep?
Books for a Deserted Island
01:10:55
Speaker
Number one would be Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov for sure, because every time I read that novel, I get a completely different something out of it. It's so deep and so complex and so universal at the same time. It's just everything. It's my favorite novel ever. Um, I would take, I would probably take the Riverside Shakespeare.
01:11:24
Speaker
Um, because I don't think you can get, when you look at how much Shakespeare added to the language, how he used language, the music of his language, what he reveals in his characters about human motivations and relationships, I think will never be paralleled as long as we all live. Um, I would take Joan Didion suction towards Bethlehem. I would take.
01:11:55
Speaker
collected essays, Annie Dillard. I would take Michael Hare's Dispatches. That's one of those books that I read again and again and again and again and I still can't figure out why it works. But the language is just hypnotic and amazing.
01:12:18
Speaker
I would take Tim Winton's Breath. It's a novel about surfing. But again, it's one of those ones where the language is so incredible and it never feels cumbersome. It just feels completely organic. And he uses words in ways I didn't know they could be used. And yet, you're not constantly drawn to like, oh, look at me. I'm showing off kind of thing. So I don't know how he does it, but he does it. It's great. I would take James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time.
01:12:46
Speaker
Uh, I would say, God, I mean, yeah, okay. That's, that's probably 10. I've got a count of seven. So if you want three more, you can have them. Oh God. Um, well now, now I'm going to like, I would take Thomas Lynch, the undertaking.
01:13:05
Speaker
That's a fantastic essay collection. Thomas Lynch is a poet, but he's also his family business. His family ran a funeral home, so he's an undertaker and funeral director. And so he wrote these incredibly beautiful essays on the process of death that I think are just magnificent, and I go back to over and over again.
01:13:34
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's probably it. I mean, you know, unless I could take more I'll probably take more to see if he probably take some thought or Hemingway this guy the guys So what uh, what book or books and you refer to one already do you reread the most and I'd say probably dispatches okay, which which is really odd because I I
01:13:58
Speaker
I remember reading that book for class in college and being like, what is going on with this book? Like, I don't even know, like, is this some kind of like beat something or is it, which I usually don't go for that aesthetic. Um, but holy hell, Michael here. I don't know how he does what he does, but I could read, there's a chapter called illumination rounds. That is one of the most beautifully written
01:14:26
Speaker
passages I've ever encountered in my life. He just makes Vietnam the process of being in Vietnam in the 60s completely. It's like the psychedelia of the 60s is kind of in there, the horror of war, the fear, all these things are in there and it's just
01:14:46
Speaker
Astonishing so I probably that's the one I I could never write like that It's very different from the way I write but I aspire to to such such things So and what what does the first 60 to 90 minutes of your day look like? Well a when do you typically wake up I
01:15:11
Speaker
Usually about seven. Here it is. I wake up at seven and I think today is gonna be the day when I go for that five-mile run and it's really gonna happen today. And then it doesn't happen. Sometimes it'll happen like way later in the day, but I always think today is gonna be the day I feel like exercising right now.
01:15:32
Speaker
and it is never the day. So there's the shame that goes to that or the guilt or the, am I gonna do it or am I not gonna do it? So you start your day with a good helping of shame. Good. Yes. And then I get up, actually the first thing I do usually after breakfast or whatever is I usually read a lot of the magazine articles that are on long form or whatever. I usually kind of do a lot of my magazine reading, seeing what people, I check social media and see what articles
01:16:02
Speaker
people are posting. I usually use social media most as kind of like a broadcast mechanism, so I want to know what people are reading or interested in. Twitter, if anything, has happened newsworthy that I need to know about. For instance, when Ferguson was happening, it was so great to be able to check exactly what was going on by the minute.
01:16:24
Speaker
So I'll just kind of get a sense of what's happening in the world and then I'll kind of fill in on the long form stuff who I know that might have an article out, that kind of thing. And then after that, I have to kind of like prime the pump to write by reading something really where the language is really kind of inspiring to me. So mostly that's fiction.
01:16:53
Speaker
But sometimes it'll be something like, you know, Michael Hare or it'll be Ethan Winton or it'll be Annie Dillard or something, you know, one of those people, I'll just read a couple of paragraphs or a couple of pages to kind of get excited about language and kind of psych myself up that way. And then I just honestly, I just bang it out. But a lot of times, you know, I'll put it off and put it off and grab my head and rearrange my sock drawer and
01:17:21
Speaker
you know, that kind of thing or, Oh, I have an errand. I really can't work until I had this errand done, you know, and that's really kind of how that goes. But when I was really working intensely on the book, it was basically I got up, you know, I got to the library and I was in the Carol by nine and, you know, work from nine to 12, take a lunch break outside, you know, one to five back in the Carol and just banging it out. So, um, do you journal at all?
01:17:52
Speaker
Not in terms of like narrating my day. I do, this is another thing that, it's like when you get flocked, you'll try anything. And I remember all these like woo woo people, like things that I would never thought I would do. Talk about like, oh, well you should just free write like three pages every day just to like get the cobwebs out of your head. And I was like, that sounds like some kind of new age bullshit. And that's not me. But holy Lord, when I started doing it, it was amazing.
01:18:21
Speaker
Like it was amazing, seriously. Like to just be like, I'm worried about X or, you know, I need to go to the store or like whatever pops into your head and just get three pages of it out so that it's not like clogging up your pipes. Really helps. Who knew? Who knew? Thank you, new age people. That is a great idea. I do that all the time.
01:18:45
Speaker
That's the Julia Cameron approach. It is. And I swear to God it actually works. I know. I hoped you weren't going to say the title of the book that I didn't want to say. I'm sorry. But I knew where it works. It works. It works. I don't know if you've ever done it. Oh, I have. I journal three pages every morning. Oh, you do it too. Yeah. Wait. Or do you narrate what happens in your life?
01:19:11
Speaker
Oh, it's everything. It's an airing of Insecurity, just dealing with demons, errands. I mean, it's everything. It's a dialogue I've kept with... I've actually kept a journal since I was 16 years old. That's amazing.
01:19:28
Speaker
And, well, thank you. But I adopted the artist's way approach two years ago. So before the artist's way sort of routine, I averaged about a journal entry every three days, just kind of checking in with myself, whatever, whatever you want to call it. And then I started doing the artist's way thing, just hoping it would kick me in. Can we just call it something else?
01:19:55
Speaker
I know. Just call it the morning pages. That seems a lot better. And didn't you find like your writing got clearer?
01:20:05
Speaker
Did you find that? I found that I was more productive. That's for sure. It's funny, I've been in a little bit of a journaling slump of late and I've noticed, I've just kind of fallen off the rails and just been kind of lazy with stuff. I'm like, oh, well, shit. I haven't been keeping up with waking up and then just hitting the journal for a few pages. And I'm like, all right.
01:20:29
Speaker
Probably why you're kind of in this slump so yeah, it was weird Yeah, like I don't deal with writer's block per se. Yeah, that's just something that doesn't happen Yeah, because in nonfiction. It's like alright. Well if I don't have any material is gone talk to somebody exactly right I think Philip Garevich said this great thing in a talk I went to once when he says the great thing about Nonfiction is if you don't know what happens next you just call up one of your characters and ask yeah
01:21:00
Speaker
which is awesome. Exactly. I can't support it enough as a practice just to warm up. As you said, prime the pump. It's amazing. I didn't want to talk about AW, but I do the thing in the notebook that's actually the first thing I do. I do that thing that helps a lot.
01:21:26
Speaker
Yeah, that thing that that woman who wrote that book tells you to do. Which freaking works! Who knew? Who knew? Everyone should do this. And I'm not being paid to say that. I do not have any kind of promotional relationship. Sponsored by Evernote and Julia Cameron. Oh, God. Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah, but no, it works. It definitely does. So, yeah. That actually helped me a lot, actually, when I was working on the book, too.
01:21:56
Speaker
So a couple more things. When you hear the word successful, what or who comes to mind and what does that mean?
Defining Success in Writing
01:22:07
Speaker
The most successful writers I know, honestly, are the people who are the most generous and caring and nurturing of other writers. And so the two that come to mind
01:22:25
Speaker
are, you know, they've had commercial success, obviously, but that's really not why I consider this. So like Pat Conroy was a good friend. And he was, no matter how, you know, many books he had sold or whatever, he was so generous, open, interested in other people can just just
01:22:51
Speaker
loyal, compassionate bunny worm. He would go out of his way to help others. He would sign books.
01:23:02
Speaker
for hours upon hours upon hours. He was just so giving. And so when I think about what it is to be a successful writer, it really doesn't have to do with like sales or name recognition or any of that stuff because I'd actually prefer never, ever, ever to be under the kind of microscope that someone like Pat Conroy was under. But his generosity was just everything. And the other one would be Ron Rash.
01:23:30
Speaker
who wrote Serena and a bunch of other really good novels. He is so warm and kind and helpful to other writers, so supportive of young writers, always helpful with a blurb or a contact or anything like that.
01:23:55
Speaker
the writers that don't indulge in backbiting about other writers, I think that's fantastically poor form and I just think that's ugly and you see a lot of it in the writing world because there's so much insecurity. But I just think that's the ugliest thing in the world and I would never
01:24:15
Speaker
you know, want to help someone who was talking smack, you know, talking shit about other people. I would never, you know. So I always tell when I'm taught or when people ask me about like, whoa, you know, how do you be a writer or whatever, I say there are like three rules. The first one is show up. The second one is don't be an asshole. And the third is don't die.
01:24:41
Speaker
And and honestly everything you need to know falls under those under those three things show up You know, do you work turn things in on time? Sometimes I will you know my anxiety keeps you from doing that but Don't ask for raises. You don't deserve don't
01:25:00
Speaker
you know, be hard to work with, be respectful, be interested, be open, all those things, like show up, take opportunities, put yourself in the place of opportunity, in the path of opportunity, and don't be an asshole, don't talk shit about other people, don't, you know, flake, don't do all those things, and then don't die, like don't get swept up in all the self-destructive bullshit that writers easily get swept up in.
01:25:28
Speaker
Well, that's poignant and beautiful and terse advice. It works, I swear. It's just like morning pages. Yes. I swear. Those things that that woman tells us to do in that book. Exactly, exactly. It works. It's simple and it works. All right, lastly, where can people find you online? So when the book promotion's going full bore and then even when that slows down, where can people find you to stay abreast of your work?
01:25:55
Speaker
Um, I have a poorly maintained website, but that's probably the best place or on Twitter. So brahmedicke.com is my website and I'm on Twitter at brahmedicke. Well, fantastic. Well, this has been an absolute pleasure for me to spend some time and getting to know you and talking to you. Thank you. Yeah, you did a wonderful job with the book. I wish you the best of success going forward. Thank you so much, Brennan. I really appreciate this. It's a great talk. Fantastic. Well, we'll be in touch and take good care.
01:26:47
Speaker
provide five copies, well, one copy per person of my book, Six Weeks in Saratoga, the paperback with fewer typos, signed and personalized and mailed to you. So if you've made it this far, all you have to do is subscribe to my monthly email newsletter. And the first five people I see come through the system will get a signed and personalized copy of
01:26:48
Speaker
All right, take care. Bye.
01:27:15
Speaker
the book. So that's it. This is a test. We'll see who made it and who didn't. So thank you for listening. And if you made it this far, an even special thank you. Thank you.