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Episode 179: John O’Connor — Finding Your Donkey
124 Plays5 years ago
John O'Connor talks about his "True Story" piece "Everything Gets Worse" and how every story needs a donkey.
Thanks to Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing for the support.
Keep the conversation going on Twitter and Instagram @CNFPod and find show notes at brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Reading by John O'Connor
00:00:03
Speaker
Ready for a long teaser? It's not so much a teaser as it is today's guest John O'Connor reading my favorite passage from his essay in True Story titled, Everything Gets Worse.
The Illusion of Freedom and Avoidance of Life Choices
00:00:18
Speaker
For all but a few of us, though, the fantasy of freedom is just that, a fantasy. Despite our noblest attempts, we're undone by warring desire and dependence, subverted by comforting familiarity, manacled by fear,
00:00:31
Speaker
Drowned by inertia, hopelessly cement-shued in the murky estuaries of daily life. I am, of course, talking about myself. I spent the past 15 years in an idle, fun-twirling stupor, toiling away on the corporate slave matrix, working without purpose, dreaming passively of a different kind of life. To say I've lacked drive and direction would be an affront to understatement. Mine has been an aimless, undisciplined existence, an ever-widening project of evasion and indecision and self-deception
00:00:59
Speaker
in which I'm forever having a circular conversation with myself. Which path should I choose? Which direction warrants the jettisoning of all others? How do I choose just one life, knowing I'll be unsatisfied with whichever I choose? Instead of choosing, I do the safest thing, nothing. Doing nothing, as I've always done, comes naturally to me. All the time I've wasted, the books I failed to write, thankfully the internet came along, and suddenly doing nothing while pretending to do the opposite became totally effortless.
00:01:28
Speaker
We've moved into an evolutionary phase of frantic non-doing. In this light, my ears of myopic dawdling, of hemming and hawing, of whining and self-editorializing in the bottomless, fatalistic chasm. See, I'm doing it again. I feel almost virtuous. The long and the short of it is, I've always been waiting. For what? For something new and better to come along, sensing all the while that nothing ever will, which is quite possibly what I wanted in the first place.
00:01:53
Speaker
to remain closely settled among my possessions, mainlining Game of Thrones while sailing through my Xanax prescription, nevertheless feeling thwarted by circumstances from pursuing a different path. So I keep on waiting, making little progress in any direction, moving glacially, my life taking shape like Antarctica on a 19th century map, an uncharted, meaningless blank spot. Oh, man. Oh, man. I love that passage, John. Thank you so much for reading it.
00:02:27
Speaker
Alright, that's right, that's CNF.
Sponsorship and Host's Personal Experiences
00:02:30
Speaker
We are CNF, the greatest podcast in the world, and you know we are sponsored by Bay Path University's MFA in creative non-fiction. Discover your story, man, with Bay Path University's fully online MFA in creative non-fiction writing.
00:02:45
Speaker
recent graduate Christine Brooks calls her experience with Bay Pass and that the faculty is being quote filled with positive reinforcement and commitment they have a true passion for their work it shines through with every comment every edit and every reading assignment the instructors are available to answer questions big and small
00:03:02
Speaker
And it is obvious that their years of experience as writers and teachers had made a faculty that I doubt could be anywhere." End quote. Don't just take her word for it, man. Apply now at baypath.edu slash MFA. Classes begin January 21st. So tell me you don't like this quote. Ben Franklin of all people. He said, tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I breathe.
00:03:38
Speaker
Well, that wasn't so bad. Okay, you still doped up on Thanksgiving. We had a vegan feast here, guys. We got a field roast, roast, sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts, two kinds of pie. I'm still here. Oh well.
Introduction to John O'Connor and Social Media Mentions
00:03:58
Speaker
Ah yes, it's CNF, the Creative Nonfiction podcast, where I speak to the best about the art and craft of telling true stories. John O'Connor,
00:04:07
Speaker
is the author of several things, but most recently everything gets worse. You already heard a little bit of him. His essay about Antarctica appeared in Creative Nonfiction's True Story. This isn't a paid advertisement, but you should subscribe to that. It's the highlight of my pathetic little life every month. I kid, I kid, but it is one of the highlights of my month when that little sucker shows up in my mailbox. Fits right in your back pocket. It's pretty cool.
00:04:37
Speaker
Anyway, you all subscribed up to this show? We jam on Apple, Spotify, Overcast, Google Podcast, Google Play Music, so you have no excuse. Stitcher, we're in all this crazy mess together, aren't we? Let's jump and grow wings together, man. Keep the conversation going at CNF Pod on Instagram, Twitter, and dun dun dun Facebook.
00:05:03
Speaker
What have they done wrong lately? Head over to brenthedomare.com for show notes to this one and all the others.
00:05:11
Speaker
For some parts of the first half of this interview, you might hear a dull hum in the background, and that is my saboteur of a spouse using an orbital sander on the other end of the house, not showing an iota of respect for the greatest podcast in the world. But it goes away after a little while. Address letters to the editor, to her.
Personal Reflections on Competition and Influence of John's Essay
00:05:35
Speaker
In any case, I was thinking about comparison today on my bike ride home from work and how toxic it is and how I was thinking of it in terms of not writing or art, but weightlifting actually. That's my primary form of exercise and I'm only in competition with my older self. So say after six to eight weeks, did I pull a better deadlift?
00:05:59
Speaker
Yes, then I'm objectively stronger than I was a few weeks ago. The weight don't lie. I can't care about other dudes who can pull 300 pounds more than I can. Did I pull more than I did a few weeks ago? That should be our only measure. Not who's getting the best bylines or the most retweets.
00:06:22
Speaker
It sounds silly just saying it. Are you better than the older version of yourself? If so, then you're golden. You can't know other people's stories, other people's privileges or advantages or disadvantages. All you can do is look to your own work, your own past performances, and decide whether you're winning or losing based on that metric alone.
00:06:44
Speaker
It's hard to put into practice. As many of you know, it was Jealousy in Competition, that whole game that essentially launched this podcast nearly eight years ago. Anyway, I thought I'd share that. Just something on the old boring hole.
00:07:03
Speaker
So John O'Connor is here. Talk about a great essay and true story, and that passage he read at the top of the show here, it just spoke to me like, few things have ever spoken to me in writing before. I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that, but it is, it was one of my favorite paragraphs of all time. His work has appeared in New York Times, Oxford American, Open City Magazine, The Believer, Best American Sport, uh, sports, geez.
00:07:33
Speaker
Best American Food Writing 2018. He teaches journalism at BC, that's Boston College in Newton, Mass. And his voice appears on this very podcast, episode 179.
Feedback on Writing Style and Historical Contrasts
00:07:53
Speaker
Yeah, it blows my mind to just circle back to what you said before you started reading that, that the people you handed that to thought that that had to come out, or they tried to persuade you to have it come out. So what were those conversations like that they felt that didn't fit? I think that, and it wasn't universal across the board, but generally a comment I got from a handful of people was that
00:08:22
Speaker
Uh, it was off tone or something that this is pretty much a straight kind of history piece. You know, I mean, it wouldn't fly a scholarly history or whatever, but it's, um, for the most part, there's not much reporting in it and, um, and, and not much, um, I mean, the eye appears a lot, but there's not a lot of myself in there and there's kind of two very noticeable
00:08:46
Speaker
sections where I do appear and the other being several pages prior to that. And I guess the feeling was that it wasn't kind of thematically consistent with the rest of the pieces sort of came out of nowhere, I guess.
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, but given that Antarctica in itself is kind of one of these last frontiers, so to speak, and the people that you cite in this history of Antarctica are these people who have sort of eschewed society and they do strike out
00:09:24
Speaker
on their own to kind of make something of themselves or at least make something of themselves to themselves. So it seems great in this day of sort of our own creature comforts. Here you are chronicling the lives of these people that put themselves through so much discomfort. And then to have this paragraph right in the middle that kind of says how easy it is these days to do nothing and to action is for somebody else out there.
00:09:54
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, and you know, it's our comparatively like, um, soft, like easy lives that we have today. It's, um, it's become, I mean, there's a, obviously the contrast is, is pretty palpable, but it's, uh, um, yeah. I mean, I felt that it was very much pertinent to tell us, tell the story. If I wanted to include it then, then why not?
Storytelling and Living Vicariously Through Others
00:10:19
Speaker
I mean, my own sort of struggle,
00:10:22
Speaker
with that as, I mean, that was my interest initially in this whole story was in Raymond Priestley and his kind of ability to endure in this way in a way that most people couldn't. So yeah, it was important to me to tell that part of the story as well.
00:10:39
Speaker
And in telling Priestley's story, was it a way for you to also kind of live vicariously through some of these adventurers that were able to strike it out and to really test the limits of their physical and really their mental fortitude with these kind of adventures and discoveries? Yeah, definitely it was vicarious. I mean, what those guys went through was
00:11:07
Speaker
at an expressible island is insane. I mean, if you read Preetley's book, which I love, but it puts things in such a relatively light, kind of, you know, British, different upper lip stoic perspective, you know, he was just, I mean, not that there wasn't suffering and that there wasn't some real kind of mental and emotional hand wringing, but
00:11:32
Speaker
It's amazing what these guys could endure and put up with considering they weren't, you know, as I say in the piece at one point, you know, they weren't. They didn't have Gore-Tech. They didn't have, you know, moisture-wicking base layer. They didn't have all the stuff that we kind of take for granted now, you know. And so the hardship they went through is kind of hard to imagine, and it definitely puts things in perspective when you feel like
00:11:59
Speaker
You've got it pretty bad because it's 30 degrees out and raining. The rain is horizontal and the wind is ripping your hat off your head or whatever. It could be worse. You know, as writers, there's an itch that needs scratching. So what was that moment like for you when you wanted to tackle this particular essay?
Parenthood and Its Influence on Writing
00:12:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. There are two moments, really, and one is I kind of describe it
00:12:28
Speaker
in the piece where I found Roland Huntford's book on Scotton and Munson. This was years ago in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and at the Great West Side Bookshop there and plucked it off the shelf and started reading. And as I described, I was like kind of mortified. It just shamed my own ignorance of Antarctica, how little I knew and who these guys were and what they were up to sort of vaguely rang a bell, but I couldn't really say.
00:12:54
Speaker
And I was a history major in college, so I felt doubly humiliated and ashamed that I didn't know any of it. The names meant something, but beyond that, not much. And once you start, especially if you like history, once you start scratching the surface of something, it really becomes this rabbit hole that's pretty easy to go into. And I definitely did with you guys. But the impetus to write it didn't come until years later. In fact, it was last
00:13:21
Speaker
year and I don't think I realized this at the time of my son was born last August and I was at home with him for most of the year. I mean I wasn't the only wife and I can share the responsibility for our kids. My daughter also was three at the time and also mostly at home. She went to school sort of part of the day but
00:13:43
Speaker
Um, and so, you know, we're home raising kids, you don't have a lot of time. And I basically swore off, um, doing any reporting work during that year because I just didn't, there just wasn't the time to do it. And, um, I thought I'd just take a year off and, um, you know, cause you just reporting takes a ton of time, um, to do it as, um, you, I'm sure, you know, it's just, you can, um, you know, call someone. I generally had like Fridays to work, um, Friday morning for a few hours to work on my writing and, um,
00:14:14
Speaker
And I, you know, I'm using this example because it came up a couple of times last year where, you know, I try to call someone on like a Friday morning and not get ahold of them and not have a chance to really try to call them back again until like a week later. And it's like almost impossible to do journalism that way. You know, so I just, I just thought, you know, I'm just going to put on the shelf for a while and do something that just is mostly research and just required and I can take my time with it. And I'm not on deadline. And, um,
00:14:40
Speaker
So, and I'd always been curious about Antarctica, and I happened to be, you know, working in the stacks here at the Widener Library, and there's a, and stumbled upon the, you know, whole section of Antarctica, interpolar exploration, and just started pulling books off the shelf, including Priestley's and Frederick Cook's book, and a few others just started reading and kind of slowly writing as I went along and tried to figure out a through line and quickly decided that the polar madness thing was
00:15:10
Speaker
totally fascinating and not very many people had written about it. And, you know, it was kind of morbid, but also kind of thrilling, which are some themes that I've probably written around quite a bit as a journalist.
00:15:24
Speaker
So given that this was more kind of, let's just say for lack of a better term, like lonely research-based and not having to do like the kind of phone reporting or in-person reporting and kind of taking a year off from that, was that kind of a rejuvenating period for you as a journalist and a writer to kind of step away from that kind of work and just kind of be able to do things like this research on Antarctica kind of at your own pace and your own leisure?
Challenges of Writing About Historical Subjects
00:15:55
Speaker
Yeah, well, I don't, it's too early to tell about rejuvenating, you know, but I, because my kids are still at home, but I, um, for the most part, but I, um, you know, I had, um, but the short answer is yes, I think in a way, cause I had, you know, before my son was born, I wrote a couple of stories and, and particularly one in particular where, um, I wrote a profile of someone and, uh, um, two subjects of my story. Um, uh,
00:16:23
Speaker
or neither of them. It's hard as a writer, especially if you're a writer like me, and rely on other people's stories as a framework for your own storytelling. It's hard sometimes to not leave a trail of tears in your wake. No one really likes the way they're written about and portrayed.
00:16:47
Speaker
professor of mine told me one time that if they do, then you probably haven't done your job very well. But still, it's hard in like the real world to sort of deal with her feelings and stuff. And I wrote this profile of a guy in the two subjects who I both really liked and I both became really close to them, hated it. And we sort of had, I had a very visceral falling out with one of them and kind of a more, a tamer falling out with the other. And it was just so disheartening to me to do it.
00:17:16
Speaker
And at that point, I was so sick of it. That was like a month before my son was born. I was like, I sort of said to my wife in some terms, like, you know what, I just, it's like, I'm just tired of this. You know, like you put so much effort into this and send it out there and then to get this sort of visceral negative response was, I think it was like a good time for me to take a break and focus on this.
00:17:45
Speaker
And I wanted to see if I could do it also. I don't think this was unlike anything I had really done before that was so research-based. And, you know, I mean, I talked to a couple, I talked to a couple ecologists and like penguin biologists, but for the most part, it's like 80 or 90% research. And that was like a real sort of breath of fresh air to just shift gears and do something that was totally different.
00:18:10
Speaker
I did not have anybody alive who was going to be pissed at me. So yeah. Yeah, I once asked Glenn Stout after he had written his Babe Ruth selling of the babe for his piece. And he does a lot of historical and narrative nonfiction. And I had asked him what it was like just to be living in the realm of the dead.
00:18:35
Speaker
of dead characters and what that's like because you can't libel them and then of course it's just you know you don't have to deal with uncomfortable conversations. The things are there in the record for wherever they are and you can just kind of pluck at them and tell your stories based on things that have already been reported out by other people. Yeah, yeah. Yeah and I mean it's great, it's a great luxury but it's also your hamstrung in a way and you're sort of reliant on other people's reporting and the history that's sort of been written before and
00:19:04
Speaker
And you've got to sort of go through and wheedle out your own narrative, you know, but yeah, it could definitely be not as daunting as, you know, reporting on people who are living in New York and very potentially have hurt feelings at the end of it.
Inspiration and Satisfaction in Resonant Storytelling
00:19:23
Speaker
Can you point to a story of yours, maybe a breakthrough of sorts, a feature or a profile where you were able to, it was just like, oh yeah, this is the kind of stuff that really makes me come alive.
00:19:39
Speaker
Yeah. You mean stuff I've written? Yeah. Yeah. And then definitely we can look into some other pieces that you've read that you're like, oh, that's the kind of stuff I want to do. I want to be doing what, you know, Eric Larson or Gay Taliz, when they were humming. But for you personally, you know, what was it? Can you point to like, maybe you're kind of that first one where you're like, oh yeah, you know, that's the kind of work I want to be doing. Yeah.
00:20:03
Speaker
I think the first thing that comes to mind is, and before this I had done several travel pieces for the New York Times, but I did a kind of travel, long travel story, like Seven or Eight Thousand Words for the Oxford American, sort of about Peter Matheson and his, I don't know if you've read his Watson trilogy of novels, about it's sort of based on a true story of this sort of turn of the century Florida planter and
00:20:29
Speaker
uh... you know probably uh... serial murderer named edgar watson uh... who lived in the everglades and um... was gunned down by a party of his neighbors uh... in the early twentieth century uh... and that the thin went spent years researching this and wrote a fictionalized version of the three different volumes and then they were condensed into one novel shadow country in the two thousand nine or something i think it won the national book award
00:20:58
Speaker
Anyway, and I went down there and hung out in Everglades, met some of the descendants of Edgar Watson and people who Matheson had talked to and people who were sort of intimately connected to the story and all these little ancillary fingers of the story line and tried to piece together this narrative of Matheson in Florida reporting the Watson murders
00:21:26
Speaker
and fashioning this sort of magisterial work of fiction out of it. And I was interested in the book and interested in the place and interested in the people and that was kind of thematically this thing that I really wanted to do and had sort of tinkered with a little bit before but not done quite so kind of broad strokes. And it was just a fun story to report to go there
00:21:55
Speaker
Um, paddle and, you know, and then the main, these mangrove swamps and like go to the places where some of these murders had, had allegedly occurred and where Watson lived and where Matheson had gone in his, or in his dead in his footsteps, you know, and, um, and, um, and when it came out, I was, I was just like, yeah, this is like, you're saying, this is the kind of thing that I really wanted and really comfortable sort of grappling with the whole sort of man versus nature thing. Um,
00:22:23
Speaker
but through the framework of literature. And I felt like that I was kind of onto something there. But I've also, you know, before that I had done a bunch of these kind of travel stories for the travel fiction and the times of, you know, again, kind of using someone else's stories, either an artist or a writer, their work as a kind of framing device to
00:22:54
Speaker
narrate my own interest in it and in a kind of a different parallel story in a way.
00:23:02
Speaker
And what would you say about some of these people that you've used? Used is the wrong word, but I'll just, you know, used as... You could say used. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah, so what is it that maybe you see in them that is attractive? Or maybe something, I know this is true with me, and sometimes I see things that I admire in the subjects that I've written about that I just deeply admire. Sometimes I wish I was more like them.
00:23:32
Speaker
So maybe who were you drawn to, and what did you see in them that maybe you wish you saw in yourself? Well, I mean, with Mattson that he was such a formidable, terrific writer. I mean, that shadow country is, I think, one of the great works of American fiction in, you know, my lifetime for sure. And so that, and also that they just got so much work done that's so prolific, you know, I don't know. I did another story.
00:24:01
Speaker
about uh... edward abbey you know i don't know that name wrote yeah solitary was like uh... arranger arches national park back in the fifties and uh... i liked it you know i don't how about everything that he's written but i love that book and um... uh... and his uh... you know this kind of middle finger that he was extending towards the literary establishment in a way although he really desperately wanted to be part of that establishment uh... uh...
00:24:30
Speaker
And the fact that he was, I mean, I get grappling with some of the things that I think I grapple with in my writing, which is, you know, man versus nature, the tension between, you know, living in the wilderness versus domesticity, you know, the rural living versus city living and the whole Kantian sublime.
00:24:59
Speaker
stuff, which is my fame interest in Thoreau and Walden and the Maine Woods. And, you know, I like those themes and like love all those books. And so that's, I guess, I don't know if I'm answering your question at all, definitely not succinctly, but that's what I saw in those. And they typically see in the people that I want to write about is that kind of underlying sensibility.
00:25:29
Speaker
And as a writer of these types of stories, sometimes generating ideas that are sticky, story ideas that you can really run with and effectively sell, of course. How do you go about generating ideas or at least maybe logging them and curating them so you know you're at a point where you're like, okay, this is something I can really sink my teeth into?
00:25:57
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know if I have a system really. I probably should. I should probably think more like that, but I tend to just find things that I'm interested to just follow my interests, you know, and the things that I'm interested in pursuing. And that's kind of how I work. So, you know, I think probably in journalism programs, they tell you to kind of do what you were saying.
00:26:22
Speaker
You know, I'll stumble across something I mentioned in the writing, and my interest is just the kind of tip of the iceberg, and I probably don't really know very little about it. I might have read some of the text or something, and I think I know a little bit about it, but until I actually go and report it, I don't really know very much. So I'll pitch something around and see what kind of feedback I get, and if it doesn't seem like it's going anywhere, then I'll maybe try to change the approach and sort of time it with something to make it seem more
00:26:52
Speaker
you know, timeliness being such a thing, and newspapers and magazines, and I, or I'll just, you know, sort of write it on my own, if I can, and then try to sell it afterwards, like with this Antarctica thing. I didn't think that this was really a pitchable story, so, and I don't think it was, unless it would have entailed, you know, more first-person kind of travelogue stuff, but
00:27:21
Speaker
So yeah, I don't think I really have a system, or if I do, it's a pretty lazy one. And having such a history background and everything, are you familiar with Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast?
Podcast Recommendations and Compelling Antarctic Stories
00:27:39
Speaker
No, I'm not. I think you'd really like it. I talk about rabbit holes. He digs into a topic, and one podcast will be sometimes upwards of three, four hours long. Oh, well. Yeah, and the thing is, it's not
00:27:59
Speaker
He doesn't read from anything like he he's done the research, but he's such a an amazing Just vocal talent that in storyteller that he can just speak Things but I don't even know if he uses notes I it's it's quite incredible but it just made me think of you going down a rabbit hole and maybe reading up on the Santa Artica stuff and it's like
00:28:23
Speaker
you know, you're taking all this information in and it just made me think of him and the rabbit holes you can go down. So when you started down this Antarctica path, were you surprised that there was this much material worth mining when you were reading? Yeah, I guess so. I guess I thought I knew, I thought what Antarctic exploration was all about, you know, a bunch of
00:28:54
Speaker
white British dudes like trying to be the first at something you know and and and you know I don't know like just I thought it would be sort of boring in state or or you know maybe punctuated by moments of kind of heroism and
00:29:13
Speaker
and insanity, but I had no idea how dense the literature would be. I mean, the British have this great, I just sort of should talk to the British, but they had this great literary tradition with polar, or just a sort of adventure narrative with any kind of exploration. And so they were great, like Scott was a great writer. Like, Edmondson could really write Shackleton, could really write these guys,
00:29:42
Speaker
or no flowers you know to the quality of the writing was really good and and uh... uh... the quantity of crazy stories you know i mean i i really am just for brushing the purpose and a lot of uh... a lot of instances i was really just eager to to hint at some of the you know that uh... uh... archives of stories that are about that you know uh... uh... martin edit what he went through and
00:30:09
Speaker
you know, Shackleton, the whole Elephant Island trip, and, you know, and even the Discovery, which I only sort of, I don't think actually I mentioned, I mean, the Nimrod expedition with that, um, previously was on with with Shackleton and in Mawson and these guys. I mean, just insane how many, I mean, not surprisingly, in some ways, because of the Antarctica is such a dangerous place, but
00:30:38
Speaker
there was an awful lot of death and like dismemberment and insanity for the first, you know, half century or maybe longer, I guess, about a century of exploration. And that I thought, you know, death on the page is like really interesting, or at least I find it really interesting. And so I, it was always, it was more of became an issue of omitting details, you know, like, like,
00:31:06
Speaker
like forcing myself not to read other books, just so I could kind of steady the ship a little bit, you know, in terms of what to include and not what to include.
00:31:15
Speaker
Yeah, to your point of doing the research and then leaving things out and knowing what to leave in. That's a fine balance because you can be a productive procrastinator by saying, I just need to read one more book and then I'll start. And then there's that kind of treadmill of
00:31:38
Speaker
of ways to procrastinate before you get to the writing. At what point do you know that you put on the brakes of the research and you're like, you know what, I got to get down and start generating some pages here? Yeah, I don't know. I guess it's more of a gut thing. I guess when I decided that polar madness told through this lens of the Northern Party was going to be it, because it was something that people, I mean it has been written about, but
00:32:05
Speaker
but not that much. And, you know, not that people probably have heard of Raymond Priestley or maybe even heard of Noah or what polar madness is and that the thing and that, you know, that was a story I kind of became a little bit obsessed with Priestley and the Northern Party and the idea of telling the story in a way that hadn't been told. And so,
00:32:32
Speaker
So I think that at that point I realized that I was ready to start writing and that I was going to kind of limit my narrative to these maybe few dozen years, literally 20th century. And so, yeah. I mean, there actually are a couple of books if you're interested about the Northern Party, but I don't think they sort of came and went very quickly, unfortunately. And one is, one I quote Meredith Hooper, she wrote,
00:33:01
Speaker
a pretty good book that I read. And then there's another one. I'm actually blanking on the name of the woman. I didn't read it. I just kind of skimmed it. But bizarrely enough, they both have the exact same title, The Longest Winter. But they came out in sort of early aughts, I think, early 2000s. And anyway, I think it was just a matter of finding my, I always forget what it is in journalism. There's like a word for
00:33:28
Speaker
the character like he's like a mule or a donkey who can like sort of carry the narrative for you. And Raymond, once I found my donkey or mule and Raymond Priestley, I sort of knew that that would kind of help me winnow my narrative and my themes also in a way. So that's when I started.
00:33:48
Speaker
I love the line you cite that Priestley had written. You know, you wrote, the weather predictably was abominable, and then you write, quote, like, every step was like drawing a tooth. Yeah. And it's crazy to just think what these guys were doing. But after this long confinement there, it's more or less been stuck in place for 17 months total, you know, and to be out in this sort of world.
00:34:18
Speaker
saving themselves, I think, really, as I try to say, like acquired this flavor for them, you know, and you could see it in their letters and in their kind of remembrances and they were desperate to get back to Cape Evans and like not have missed the right home on the Terranova, which they knew was scheduled to be leaving. They didn't know if
00:34:42
Speaker
The rest of the Scots parties thought they were still alive. No, there hadn't been, you know, no communication since the Terranova had dropped them at Terranova Bay 10 months previous. There had been a couple of attempts to kind of reach them, but there wasn't any certainty. And so they felt a great kind of yank to like get back there, you know, before they'd have to spend yet another year at Cape Evans waiting for the ship to return to get there. And that's crazy, too, to think of that they were, you know,
00:35:09
Speaker
be stuck somewhere for so long is, um, you know, at least a year, if not long, these guys were there. Like Scott's, both of his parties were three, four years long. And, um, that's not even one of those really tragic detail. I didn't include a Scott head, um, um, young kids that he were like, um, I can't remember their ages, but like three, four, five years old at the time. And, um, uh, and a little to leave them behind for that length of time is like, and I mean, completely ridiculous didn't seem, you know,
00:35:37
Speaker
We're only 100 years removed from that time, but it just seems totally inhuman in a way. But anyway, these guys had the work cut out for them, and they were partly driven by desperation to not spend any more time there and just get back to Cape Evans and see what had become of Scott's Polar Party, if they had won or not, beating Edmunds into the pole and
00:36:08
Speaker
who was kind of left if anyone had died and just getting news from the outside world. They hadn't had any news of anything in almost a year. As you're curating this material for the writing, how do you go about organizing your research and your notes so you have them easily accessible for when you're generating the story and the writing?
00:36:36
Speaker
Organizing isn't a word that I would use. I mean, it's just kind of, it's all a real place. You don't have a big stack of books and a carol at the library and, you know, pieces of paper and the pages that I want to use, you know, or found useful. And I'm, you know, to usually taking notes. I'll have a, you both a kind of handwritten kind of inventory in a way of quotes and,
00:37:06
Speaker
characters, but I'll also have a word document of my notes, interview transcripts, and quotes from people I found, and maybe rough sketches of sections, and not really putting it in narrative form, but just kind of an idea of the moving parts, things I definitely
00:37:35
Speaker
I'm intrigued by and probably want to include and Yeah, and that's kind of and from that I usually start writing Not necessarily at the beginning but at a story that seems like it could be the beginning For me actually at the beginning this this was priestly Right off the bat. I think I knew that I wanted to use him because he had been there yet, you know, he survived and
00:38:02
Speaker
you know multiple brushes with death in Antarctica and then went on immediately almost a year after getting back a little over a year he was on the Western Front. He was part of this thing called the Hundred Days Battle or Battle of a Hundred Days or something which is along the Western Front and the Front of the Somme and anyway so he was just a survivor you know and
00:38:32
Speaker
and lived to, he was like almost 90 when he died. But anyway, so in a roundabout way, I guess I knew from my notes that, you know, Priestley's name kept coming up. And I knew I also I could get, fortunately, there's a pretty readable biography of him by a guy named Mike Bullock called Priestley's Progress. And I knew with that I could get a
00:39:02
Speaker
a bigger sort of bird's eye view on the outline of his life. So it would not just rely on the Antarctica documents and his own Antarctica venture, which allied so many details. I mean, I think it's a great book, but it talks about omission. It just, it omits all kinds of details. So yeah, I needed like multiple sources to
00:39:31
Speaker
still in the blanks. What would you identify as some of your greatest hits of maybe long-form magazine pieces, even books, that you return to as a way to kind of re-educate yourself and also remind yourself maybe how it's done when things are going well? Yeah, that's a good question. I think probably for many journalists,
00:40:00
Speaker
starting out fall under the spell of like Hunter, Hunter Thompson or, um, and, or Joan Didion, you know, those were two writers that I read a lot of early on and, and felt like that's how I want to, although they're pretty disparate writers kind of when, um, held up against one another, but, but also in some ways, not so much, but I felt like they were, um, examples of what I wanted to do. And, um,
00:40:26
Speaker
and also you know deeply i think one of the person that read and um... you know when i and grad school but for around that time um... but one of the thing that read that they may take that maybe journalism and that actually really cool is that uh... pick not to have a cold you know by getting the p c did worry doesn't actually talk to not robot i've talked to like a hundred people or something including the wick maker and mom who would like to do it and uh... uh... hobo politics and it's such a terrific
00:40:57
Speaker
piece, which is underselling it considerably, and that made me think that, you know, yeah, that just made me think of journalists as, and so did sort of Didion and Thompson, but Achilles made me think of it as something that was not just cool, but intellectually, like, challenging. And then in terms of journalism, you know, I feel like writing-wise, mostly I am influenced or have loved
00:41:26
Speaker
fiction writers over the years. But I do really love the writer Jeff Dyer, who's an English comic English writer. I always return to his book that just came out late last year. He's just a guy that I return to again and again as someone who's kind of forging, creating a new form almost in a way. It's sort of a hybrid of memoir and like journalism and fiction and
00:41:56
Speaker
and who's leapfrogged from topic to topic, you know, with very sort of small books like in a couple hundred pages and then that code two years later will come out with something that's completely different and 180 degree sort of sea change and topic and style. He's also very good at like finding like the right idiom, like the right language for to suit a particular topic or subject matter and
00:42:20
Speaker
He wrote this book a few years ago called Another Great Day at Sea. I don't know if you know that book, but he was, I don't know how he landed this gig, but he got this to basically serve a kind of, I don't know, like a retreat, writer's retreat almost on board a US aircraft carrier. And I think they're like in the Persian Gulf or something or in and around there. I don't know if he ever actually says, but
00:42:49
Speaker
So he spends two weeks there and wrote kind of able to wrench a book out of it. And it's just a remarkable piece of journalism and kind of empathy and kind of merging the sort of first person with the, you know, historical background. And anyway, so those are some of the writers that I really am drawn to a lot. And but also a lot of, I'm leaving out a lot of fiction writers that I've loved a lot over the years
00:43:19
Speaker
return to you again and again.
00:43:22
Speaker
How do you go about building a reading and writing discipline around your life? You're teaching your family so you make sure that you're being able to read and stay up on things, research and so forth for pleasure or for work. And then of course carve out those times to put together the kind of journalism or long essay, reported essays that you want to do.
00:43:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I don't know if, did you use the word discipline? I don't know if I heard you say that. Yes, yeah. Yeah, and again, like, I think it's like, I mean, I almost think of it less of a discipline than just as routine or as like a desperation to like, get work done. Yeah. You know, and so I have not as much time as I used to, anywhere close to as much time as I used to have to work, but with kids and with teaching and stuff. But I, you know, when I do have
Writing Routine and the Joy of Rewriting
00:44:20
Speaker
time,
00:44:20
Speaker
A couple mornings a week I go To the library really just one time amount of time I had to work on my own stuff is really just one morning But whatever splitting hairs, but I go to the library and I work I see you know sit and work for as long as I can before you know The drool starts sort of pooling in the corners of my mouth you know But I am and that's really
00:44:46
Speaker
I don't know if discipline, again, is really the right word to describe what I do, but I am sort of desperate to get stuff done. While I'm not with my kids, they're not grading papers and so on. It seems impossible, but at first, when you start working on something, I'm actually just beginning another long project that's kind of similar to the Antarctica thing.
00:45:15
Speaker
It seems impossible now, sort of trying to look down the road, how or if it'll ever get finished. But hopefully it will. I think this, you know, if you have the standard, I think time, I always hear from like my fellow, like other writers and journalists, you know, three or four hours a day to see your kind of butt in a seat working for as long as you can.
00:45:44
Speaker
And I'm not quite able to pull that off anymore, but I think whenever I can, I try to sit and work. And we've read, and even if I'm staring off into space a little bit, I count that as work. Right, yeah. As long as I'm just not connected, no one can reach me on the phone or the internet or anything. It's incredibly hard to work these days with all this evolution of all this.
00:46:13
Speaker
all the ways that you can now be interrupted by people. So I try to turn off my phone, turn off the internet and just concentrate, but it's not easy.
00:46:29
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. All these ways that we've enrolled in various kinds of interruptions and then we wonder why we can't get any satisfying work done. Yeah, I talk to my students about this all the time because they have it far worse than we do. At my age, I can imagine another, I remember another reality, but the kids who were 19, 20 years old today, they grew up, they came of age with this stuff.
00:46:55
Speaker
uh... having problems and and that may be the come of age of social media clinton left after years so i guess but um... but they really are on them have a far worse than we do you know they don't feel i think that they can turn that shut that stuff off for a moment torture to them even fit into our class uh... so we know reaching for it uh...
00:47:22
Speaker
In the process of writing or editing or rewriting, where would you say you feel most alive or most engaged in that process? Rewriting, for sure. That's the funnest part. When you get to the point where you feel fairly confident that you're sort of several drafts in and I feel pretty confident that it's not a total disaster. That doesn't require reinventing the wheel, you know, or reinventing the whole thing from top to bottom.
00:47:50
Speaker
where I can just rewrite and improve and solve problems, that's like the most satisfying part. You definitely do see the light at the end of the tunnel and it's just a process of making it better. I mean, I have some considerable anxiety when it comes to working with editors and making sure that we're kind of our thinking is a lot. You know, you want people who you're working with to see things like you see them.
00:48:19
Speaker
I'm sure the opposite is true for them too. But mostly rewriting is where I really feel like the switch is starting to flicker in my brain. During the actual writing, it just feels like a chore, like real frontal lobe cognitive work, where rewriting just feels more like fun.
00:48:43
Speaker
Does that make sense? Oh yeah, absolutely. There are some people that I talk to where they're most engaged with just pure research. The writing is torture and everything else is torture, but they love that part. I like you. I like the rewriting phase because I especially love just say just arbitrarily there's a thousand words. I love making like the big
00:49:08
Speaker
250 word cut out of that and then just getting it that I love that's kind of my favorite part just being you know what this is this is gone the work is still there even though you can't see it but I love taking off big limbs so that's kind of where I like it too that's surprising to hear that because I don't what I mean I'm saying something similar but I hate like I'd be that whole like having labored you know so in some instances for days over a paragraph almost realize at the end of it that it has to go I'm not pretty
00:49:37
Speaker
I'm impressed that you were able to, you know, kind of move on so easily. Yeah, it's just I have so little like the connection to a lot of that. But to me almost, here's the thing, I am naturally a cluttered, disorganized person. And so when I'm able to declutter and simplify things and get things out of the way, like I feel like my brain just, it defrags and feels better.
00:50:07
Speaker
And that's what workspace with the house, and then especially with the writing. If I'm able to trim everything down to its most minimal thing, it feels less decluttered. So it probably just has a lot to do with that. I'm decluttering in sort of Marie Kondo. Yeah, magic life of tidying up the whole piece. Getting it down to that part is where there's a lot of appeal in that, at least for me.
00:50:36
Speaker
Well, I could, I mean, it's funny, I use the same language to talk about my, probably a lot of people do to talk about writing, the writing process. Can I ask you, is your, like, physical life sort of, for lack of a better word, sort of cluttered also? Like, is your, are you kind of a neat freak in that respect also about kind of putting things where they belong or do your kind of, I think, sort of more willy-nilly and sort of left, sort of lay where that is thrown kind of thing?
00:51:00
Speaker
My natural out-of-the-box software is definitely disorganized disarray. My wife is very regimented and organized and it drives her insane that I'm able to just kind of throw things in places. I want to be like more organized and neat and make sure everything has its place and I'm always working at being more intentional like if I take my hat off like
00:51:27
Speaker
place it in a nice place that's appropriate for it. And so that's always the battle. So I definitely gravitate towards it and I feel better when things are more organized, but it's definitely not my, it's, I'm not naturally like that. It's always a battle.
00:51:46
Speaker
So not your default. So your mental space you like kind of unclear, but physical space not so much. Yeah. And then even because my brain is always going in a million different directions too. Sometimes I have a hard time finishing things. I just want to go to the next shiny new object. So it's a lot of times it's just getting tasks done, getting things on a list, like going down the list, finish it as best I can and then move on and then get some mental declutter out of the way. So it's kind of frenetic.
00:52:15
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I think I mean as I said, I think like a lot of people you know writing is there's so many so many kind of like Metaphorical possibilities here but but to me writing is in some ways like kind of a lot like pushing furniture around and like sort of finding the right right place for it and also as you said just like just a process of decluttering and You know a process of finding clarity of some sort
00:52:47
Speaker
Yeah, my wife and I are the opposite. I'm incredibly neat and orderly, and my wife is the opposite. She's the kind of person who would be happy to just let everything, even with our kids. She's the kind of person, if you were to offer her, to hire someone to come to the house and clean it top to bottom, she would say, no thanks, like the way it is. But I'm not.
00:53:13
Speaker
I'm not like that. I like a clean workspace and a clean living space. Yeah, I think the same goes for writing. I like to kind of have a great deal of satisfaction in the rewriting of moving things around and making sure it kind of has an orderliness to it.
Timeless Themes and Thoreau’s Philosophy
00:53:37
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and with this true story piece you wrote, and the fact that it goes back 100 years to this exploration of Antarctica, but also it's really, it is tethered to today in so many ways, and especially the way, you know, that passage that you read earlier.
00:53:56
Speaker
What about this piece felt timely to you? And also as a second part to that, what did you feel like maybe you discovered about yourself as a writer and a person over the course of writing this particular piece? Well, to answer your first question, what feels timely about it, I think, is this whole question that you kind of put to me
00:54:25
Speaker
And then in your first email to me, I think, and I'm not going to get it right, but something about you, you felt your own sort of the Rovian kind of quest for a while or something like that. That's not quite it. But, um, but, you know, this, the whole, um, and this is probably, um, you know, go, you know, sort of timeless feeling, but, um, this whole, the whole tension between kind of domestic life and a life in the wild, you know, um,
00:54:55
Speaker
that Thoreau kind of wrote about. It's interesting because if Walden was like, we live like now in a 15 minute drive from Walden Pond. And it was never, I don't know if you've ever been, but if you've ever tried to go on a summer weekend, forget it. The parking lot's closed before 9 a.m. sometimes, it's so packed. But even in Thoreau's day, it was never
00:55:24
Speaker
this pristine wilderness. It was always like a few easy miles walk to Concord for him. He often would go home in the evenings to have a meal with his family. And his mom would do his laundry for him. And he had neighbors at Walden. There were a couple of ex-laves that lived there. What's his name? A weird person named Bristol Freeman.
00:55:52
Speaker
And his sister, who were ex-flaves, he fought, or Bristol fought in the Revolutionary War and had been a slave. And I think his sister's house was next to Thoreau's beanfield or something. And there's a terrific biography of Thoreau that just came out. This is kind of all very present in my mind because I just finished Laura Dasso-Wall's
00:56:17
Speaker
biography of Thoreau that came out I think last year, maybe it was 2017 anyway. And there was this whole community of railroad workers and immigrants and castaways basically, people who couldn't afford to live in Concord or Boston or weren't respectable enough. And Thoreau was friends with these people and he was like an inductor on the Underground Railroad and helped put
00:56:47
Speaker
runaway slaves on the trains to Canada. And he always thought of his, it wasn't just about solitude and nature, you know, can be the quiet communion or something like that. It was all, it was all also about this community. People, their nature was very, just as much about people who lived in it, you know, and, you know, train trains passed even back then, like a dozen times a day, depositing, like
00:57:16
Speaker
swimmers and hikers and fishermen. And so it was far from this sort of pristine, um, unsullied wilderness. Um, and, um, and that was important to throw. And he, his unsullied wilderness, he took, as you probably know, three very arduous sort of backbreaking expeditions to Northern Maine in his lifetime. And he wrote a book called The Maine Woods. And that for him was the kind of nature and the kind of wilderness that did not sit with him. I think he calls it
00:57:45
Speaker
He calls man like a vast Titanic and inhumane or inhuman. You know, Walden was a wilderness light, which is I think the kind of wilderness most of us want, you know, to be frank. And that's, I think, a timeless kind of quality, you know, I mean, I, and I'm talking about myself too, I mean, I don't, I try to do at least one, if not two, you know, sort of back country camping trips of the year.
00:58:13
Speaker
And I know myself well enough to know now that after three nights sleeping on the ground, I've had it. I'm ready for a bed and for a hamburger and for ESPN highlights and air conditioning. As much of the joy that that stuff is to me and as much of a salve that it can be to the everyday busyness of life, it also has its
00:58:43
Speaker
it's real, very little real limitations, which, you know, a few, few characters in my, my Antarctica piece kind of grapple with and, and at Abby was another one who, you know, he was a very sort of the epitome of the back country kind of rugged traveler could live by his own wits in the desert, you know, and it was, it was the lights and sort of the bars and the women of Mohab that always sort of
00:59:11
Speaker
animated him and, you know, was always kind of one of his reasons for doing it in the first place was the relief he saw that being back to civilization when it was all over. And that seems like a, again, I'm repeating myself, but like just sort of a timeless kind of tension and, you know, sort of quality to modern life modernity, you know, this sort of
00:59:42
Speaker
the sort of toggling back and forth between sort of technology and trying to get away from it. And the fact is, it's gotten a lot harder to get away from it. At least on the East Coast, it's very difficult to escape, and I think it starts to feel very claustrophobic. I think they said, like even the Appalachian Trail that I read,
01:00:07
Speaker
somewhere recently. I did part of the Appalachian Trail two summers ago, just a section of it. And the longest distance between, like until you hit like between paved roads, I think is how they measure it. Paved roads and utility wire crossings is seven miles. That's as far as basically, so in a way, as far as you can get from civilization along the Appalachian Trail is seven miles. A lot of those, you know,
01:00:33
Speaker
mountaintop vistas and stuff, with the exception of Maine, which is a little more rugged and sort of wild. A lot of these vistas along the, you know, Virginia and the Carolinas, you get up to the top of these mountains and it's beautiful, but what you also see is the turnpike, you know, and the travel plaza and the steak and shake. And so, and that, so I guess that's like another kind of vein of like timeliness that I am
01:01:04
Speaker
was thinking about when I am always usually thinking about and I think lots of people are and I was thinking about when I was writing this piece.
01:01:14
Speaker
I forget the other part of your question, man. I'm sorry. Will you remind me again? Oh, yeah. It basically kind of what you, in essence, kind of learned from yourself in writing this piece, you know, given especially that passage that you read earlier, because that was kind of that animating force. And I feel like, yeah, that was, you know, there was some definite self-reflection going on over the course of writing this essay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess what I
01:01:44
Speaker
I don't know if I'm going to be able to put this in words or what I learned about myself. I guess I just maybe just put myself could help me like put myself on a continuum of sorts to see that, you know, this is the ideal of progress was maybe a little oversold or something that there's a lot to just to not doing.
01:02:14
Speaker
And there's a book, I haven't read it, there's a book recently by the writer I know, Jenny Odell, but I can't remember the name of that. Oh yeah, it had to do nothing. Yeah, she's been on the podcast. Oh, she has? Oh, okay. Well, she could put it much more secretly than I am. But I'm sure she did, because just that impetus of, which is in some ways, I guess, in a roundabout way related to Thoreau II is just, you know,
01:02:44
Speaker
like just casting off the material distractions of, and professional distractions of everyday life, everyday busyness of, concentrating and throwing, you know, and, and the real effort and struggle to sort of pay attention and, and to not get caught up in this sort of wave of progress is,
01:03:09
Speaker
It takes real effort. I'm looking forward to reading Jenny's book, but I haven't read it, but I think the themes are exactly the kind of things that I'm really interested in and are very sort of important to people today to grapple with, especially with technology being so omnipresent in our lives.
01:03:37
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Well, John, this is great to talk to you about this piece and everything. I'm so glad you were able to carve out the time to do it. I'm deeply appreciative that you made the time to do it, and you were able to make the time to do it. And also, thanks for writing this piece. This was a real pleasure for me to read, and I suspect others. So thank you for the work, and thanks for hopping on the podcast. Oh, thank you, man. Thanks for talking to me. It's been a pleasure.
01:04:05
Speaker
Yeah, take care John and we'll be in touch.
01:04:13
Speaker
At last we've come to the end. Thanks CNFers for making it this far. Thanks to John and thanks to Bay Path Universities for making it happen. As you know, show notes to this and all the other shows are available at brendanomare.com. Hey hey, there you can sign up for the monthly newsletter where I give out reading recommendations and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast.
01:04:36
Speaker
Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Keep the conversation going on the interwebs at Twitter, ping it, at cnfpod, same for Instagram, same for Facebook. You link up to the show, I will definitely jump in, give you digital fist bumps, horns, skulls, maybe a James Hetfield headbanging gif, gif, gif, what's the jury? What's the jury say? The gif, I think it's gif.
01:05:05
Speaker
unanimous not a hung jury on that one hey i hope you had a wonderful thanksgiving i'm grateful that you listened to this thing i loved the highlight of my week to put this thing together for you guys we're all in this together and you know what else i'm grateful that if you can do interviews see ya