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Episode 76—Erica Berry on Binge Writing, Writing as Learning, and Werewolves
134 Plays7 years ago
“Joan Didion said ‘Writers are always selling people out’ and I have chafed against that because I don’t feel like I want to be," says Episode 76 guest Erica Berry. In a week where Creative Nonfiction reached its Kickstarter goal to support its monthly offshoot True Story, what better than to have the latest True Story author on the show? I’m your host Brendan O’Meara, and this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with leaders in narrative journalism, essay, memoir, radio, and documentary film and try to extract the stories, habits, and routines, so that you can apply their tools of mastery to your own work. For Episode 76, I welcome Erica Berry. She’s an essayist, journalist, and eavesdropper. She’s a liberal arts fellow and MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of Minnesota. She spent nine months at the Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School in rural Sicily co-producing a documentary about endangered culinary traditions. Now she’s working on a book of essays about fear and that’s what brought her here today. Not fear of the podcast. This is a safe place after all, but the fear she courted in Beasts Among Us, her True Story story, about the myth of the werewolf. It’s a chilling tale that feeds off of local lore and Erica’s own visit to the town where people swear they saw the man-wolf. And to start off the podcast, I have a treat, but first a little housekeeping. I’m still offering a free hour of editing/coaching for a piece of you writing. All you have to do is leave an honest review—notice I didn’t even say a nice review—of the podcast on iTunes, take a screenshot that also shows the date of your review, and email that to me. Anything postmarked from November 2017 to the end of 2017 is eligible. It’s my way of saying thank you. One friendly Canadian has already redeemed the gift and I hope dozens, if not more, of you will as well. So Erica was gracious enough to read from the first section of her story Beasts Among Us, so we’re going to ease into that. As a warning, the hairs on your arms might just stand up.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to True Story Project
00:00:00
Speaker
In a week where Creative Nonfiction reached its Kickstarter goal to support its monthly offshoot True Story, what better than to have the latest True Story author on the show? I'm your host Brendan O'Mara and this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
00:00:16
Speaker
a show where I speak with leaders in narrative journalism, essay, memoir, radio, and documentary film, and try to extract those stories, habits, and routines so that you can apply their tools of mastery to your own work.
Meet Erika Berry and Her Werewolf Interest
00:00:31
Speaker
And for episode 76, I welcome Erika Berry.
00:00:35
Speaker
She's an essayist, journalist, and eavesdropper. She's a liberal, I can't say that word, liberal, liberal arts fellow, and MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of Minnesota. She spent nine months at the Anatasca Lanza, probably pronouncing that wrong too, cooking school in rural Sicily, co-producing a documentary about endangered culinary traditions.
00:01:03
Speaker
Now she's working on a book of essays about fear. And that's kind of what brought her here today. Not fear of the podcast. This is a safe place after all, but the fear she courted in Beasts Among Us, her true story, story about the myth of the werewolf. It's a chilling tale that feeds off local war. Did I say war? Local lore.
00:01:33
Speaker
Anyway, and it's Erica's own visit to the town where people swear they saw the man wolf. And to start off the podcast, I have a treat, but first a little housekeeping.
Podcast Review Incentive
00:01:45
Speaker
I'm still offering a free hour of editing or slash coaching for a piece of your writing. All you have to do is leave an honest review. Notice I didn't even say a nice review of the podcast on iTunes. Take a screenshot that also shows the date of your review and email that to me. Anything postmarked from November 2017 to the end of 2017 is eligible.
00:02:10
Speaker
It's my way of saying thank you. One friendly Canadian has already redeemed the gift and I hope dozens if not more of you will as well. So Erica was gracious enough to read from the first section of her story, Beasts Among
Werewolf Mythology in Wisconsin
00:02:27
Speaker
Us. So we're going to ease into that and warning, the hairs on your arms might stand up. So this is the beginning of Beasts Among Us.
00:02:40
Speaker
Mark Shackelman was in his early thirties, a night watchman at the St. Colletta School for Exceptional Children on the outskirts of Jefferson, Wisconsin, when he saw the beast. It was 1936. The home for developmentally disabled youth included a former Franciscan convent. Its sprawling grounds comprised orchards, gardens, a religious sanctuary, stone buildings, the color of old teeth, and allegedly several Native American burial mounds.
00:03:10
Speaker
This whole swath of southern Wisconsin is filled with animal-shaped burial mounds, which date back as far as 500 BCE. An estimated 80% of the mounds are now gone, built over or plowed under like the bird that appears to have once had a quarter-mile wingspan near the Wisconsin River not far from present-day Muscota. Still, according to the state's Department of Natural Resources, this region is America's hub of effigy mound culture.
00:03:37
Speaker
To Linda Godfrey, the Wisconsin cryptozoologist and reporter who wrote about Shackleman's sighting, the mounds are astounding, and their proximity to the sighting always seemed more than coincidental. Shackleman was out walking the grounds a bit before midnight when he saw it, a shaggy dog-faced creature with a muscular human torso. It was kneeling on one of the mounds, digging into the must earth. Slowly, Shackleman backed away. The creature, too, backed away.
00:04:07
Speaker
At some point it ran, but it ran like a man, two paws on the ground, two in the night air. Shackleman was a heavyweight boxer. He was also a devout Catholic who rarely went to the movies. That is to say, Werewolf of London had come out a year earlier, but who knows if he saw it? What he did see when he went back to the mound the next morning was the earth torn by the rake of claws, the echo of a beast. That night during his daily rounds, he returned to the area
00:04:36
Speaker
Again, midnight, that he was carrying a flashlight like a club. Again, the creature, and now it stood up to greet him. It was covered in thick, dark hair and smelled like long, dead meat. It had fangs and was over six feet tall. Its thumb and forefinger seemed shrunken so that it appeared to have only three fingers. It looked him in the eye and offered him a three-syllable lump of noise, something between human speech and animal growl. Schackelmann began to pray to God.
00:05:05
Speaker
He saw the creature sneer at him, and then he saw it start to back away. He prayed again, this time, thank you. Even after the beast was gone, its dead smell stained the night. Later, Shackelman told the story to his wife, and then he swept up his words and made her promise to keep them secret. That, for a while, was that.
00:05:28
Speaker
Oh man, it's like hearing you read it while reading it myself and then hearing you read it, it feels like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. Thank you. That's a real honor to be compared. Yeah, it's like a fun thing to be trying to create. I mean, in my mind, it is this creepy thing and I never even went there.
00:05:55
Speaker
Or, you know, when you're writing something like this, that's all from sort of testimony and then the way that other people have written about it. And then, you know, you do all the research you can to build the scene. But that it's always great to hear that there's those scraps of what is haunted comes through the page.
00:06:11
Speaker
So what's also really great about this story, too, is like, and it's something I'm deeply drawn to as a writer, is like these obsessive people. So Linda Godfrey, she's this woman who lives in that region and really immersed herself in these weird creatures and specifically these werewolf sightings.
00:06:38
Speaker
It's so cool to see you expand on this obsessive personality, but also going, you know, going there, getting the Airbnb and trying to, you know, try to wrap your mind around it. So how did you arrive at this at this particular story?
Erika's Obsession with Fear
00:06:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, I am drawn to obsessive people. I mean, maybe that's just my way of being obsessive as a as a writer.
00:07:05
Speaker
And so I'm writing this book of essays that are about fear loosely, but there's sort of the theme of the wolf or the figure of the wolf sort of threads in and out of them. I was studying the wolf from an environmental studies standpoint as an undergraduate. It's being reintroduced to Oregon, super controversial. And I sort of realized the wolf was this vessel for so many different sorts of fears and anxieties about how humans relate to the natural world and to each other.
00:07:35
Speaker
Um, so I was always, I've got my ears like always sort of perked up for wolf related things. And when I heard about this, I really just sort of, I forget even how I stumbled on it, but sort of hearing that this catalyst of werewolf myths was like not far from where I'm living in the twin cities right now.
00:07:54
Speaker
And I just sort of had that like, well, what would happen if I went somewhere online, described it as like Roswell, New Mexico in the UFO way, but for werewolves. And I think that was a past tense description. Like it's very much not like that now, but I was just like on a gut level, pretty curious what would be like over there and whether
00:08:15
Speaker
there was a sense of like fear related to, I didn't quite know what the fear would be about this creature that people couldn't make sense of. And that was one of the things that was interesting to parse in the piece is there's like an emotional or there's this sort of like psychological unrest as much as you know, an unrest about what would actually be in the forest.
00:08:35
Speaker
What was that first meeting like when you met Linda, this person who writes a lot about this stuff? So you saw her in print and then you get to meet this person who's writing about these myths and this kind of fear and local lore. So what was that experience like when you met her face to face? Yeah, it was really, I think I
00:08:58
Speaker
I wasn't sure, honestly, where she fell on, like, if she, you know, the way she wrote about it a long time ago was that she didn't believe these stories, right? She was just a journalist who went in to follow up. Why were people seeing these, you know, dog, human creatures? And then she slowly sort of like came to believe that she believed these people. Right. And that belief was more important than any sort of like scientific logic or rationale for her.
00:09:28
Speaker
And so I was sort of struck pretty quickly in the conversation by the parallels between us. Like both of us were kind of coming or had come into this with like a sense of skepticism right from the rational world. And you know, to this day, I don't believe that there are like werewolf creatures, but I didn't want that to somehow like disvalue what the belief that both she had in the witnesses and that I had in her own, you know,
00:09:58
Speaker
dedication to this story. Like that was really interesting to me. And so the sort of similarity between the way that we both thought of this almost anthropologically, pretty quickly became clear. And I felt just a real empathy and like joy talking to her, which is one of the things, you know, I always feel often with sources, Joan Didion said, you know, writers are always selling, selling people out. And I just have like chafed against that a good amount, I think, because I
00:10:26
Speaker
don't feel like I want to be. So what hooked you about this to invest your time and resources to go to this city, this little town, and try to unearth something? What brought you there? I think there was a level of challenge. You know, people don't. She quotes in one of her introductions to one of her books, you know,
00:10:53
Speaker
or whatever, I'm totally blanking on the line, but that thing about like, if you lie down with the dogs, you're rolling with the fleas, right? And like writing about supernatural creatures, cryptozoology, like you're covered in fleas. And I think the challenge of writing something like that felt really interesting. Like there's a certain point where I go in and I say, Oh, well, for example, like I tell my Airbnb host, I'm here to talk about werewolves. And there's like a level, an immediate sort of guard goes down and skepticism.
00:11:20
Speaker
And it was interesting because I'm not a cryptozoologist. I also have that skepticism. But I was sort of interested just to like, this is the stigmatized story. And I guess I wanted the challenge of being able to present it in a way that other people on the outside wouldn't close their blinders and be like, this is about cryptozoology. This is not real.
00:11:42
Speaker
I don't have a way to relate to this story. And I would think I had read some stories. There was an activist story last year about fires that seemed to be starting spontaneously in Sicily. I should find the name of that story, but I was really captivated by it. I'd lived in Sicily for a while and was just interested in this sort of structure of the story of like, here's this thing that's unexplained.
00:12:05
Speaker
And the reporter's job is sort of, in that sense, an old-fashioned detective. I grew up loving Nancy Drew obsessively and appreciating the writer's role as someone who's just going to go in and be curious and listen, which I think was appealing about this piece immediately.
00:12:24
Speaker
So what was the challenge of pursuing a story of this nature where you're, in essence, kind of trying to explain an unexplainable phenomenon? And the understanding in the end is that –
00:12:39
Speaker
you're not going to be like face to face with the werewolf or something, but instead it's still, it's still a compelling read. So what was that challenge and, and, you know, kind of teasing out the possibility of through all these stories of seeing it, but also just knowing ultimately that it's not like Erica Berry is going to be seeing it through her eyeglasses or something. So like, I don't know. What was that challenge explaining that explainable? Yeah.
00:13:07
Speaker
I think at first, you know, I thought, oh, I'm going to talk to the witnesses. Like, I want to hear it through their words. I want to try to make sense. I want to witness their witnessing, you know? And so I sort of had this list and I started tracking them down and I really went to the public library there and, you know, it's like getting phone records and I'm sort of a combination of what happens, which is like loose ends and to not overlapping schedules and someone had just gotten out of surgery. And I pretty quickly just realized,
00:13:36
Speaker
And I was meeting with Linda and suddenly it was like, well, Linda is really like the magnifying glass that, or that's maybe the wrong metaphor, but like all of these stories have come through her. And so in some ways, like talking to this disseminator, like I'm witnessing her and she's the one who has witnessed these people who have witnessed this creature and Linda hadn't seen it either. So she and I became, um, these interesting sort of like.
00:14:02
Speaker
studiers of the story in some way, but I was also studying her. And that started to feel then more interesting. Like there was a point where I realized, oh, I'm not going to figure out what these witnesses felt really. And that's not just like, I'm not going to figure out find the beast. You're kind of alluding to it, I think. How did
00:14:24
Speaker
you go into or enter this project or what expectations did you have going in and then how did you pivot from what you were maybe hoping to see and report on versus what you actually filled up recorders and notebooks with that informed the writing ultimately.
00:14:44
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's so helpful to have a model piece when you go into working on something like this, especially in creative nonfiction where I'm not always sure because I've worked more hardline journalism and I've worked more hardline personal essay and like
00:15:00
Speaker
this sort of breed of a little bit of both. The balance, I'm never quite sure what it's going to be when I go into it. You know, I didn't have this lined up for where I was going to publish it or anything. So I didn't know quite who I was writing for, per se. So I did have a model though, that felt like this was like this sort of tone. And it was Leslie Jamison's The Devil's Bait, which ran in Harper's and then was in her collection, The Empathy Exams. And she basically goes to a conference for people
00:15:28
Speaker
who believe they have more gallons of disease or more gallons, which is like little worms coming out of your skin is sort of the gist of this. And she's at this conference center and she spends a weekend there.
00:15:41
Speaker
And she's just talking to them and getting to know them. And she previously had had a past experience where she'd had a Bolivian bot fly in her ankle. And so she sort of could associate with some of the compulsion. And this is this disease that's totally unrecognized by doctors and sort of scoffed at it. You know, one of the things that she comes to by the end of the essay, she says, like, I can't really tell these people that I believe in this disease. I mean, I'm oversimplifying her words, but she's walking a very fine line of like, I really want to
00:16:10
Speaker
have a lot of like believe that their pain is real and believe that what they're seeing is real to them and that it's causing them suffering, but maybe this disease, right? Like isn't real. And that was like a helpful sort of model of even the journalistic empathy that I was going to bring in, which even when I later learned, Oh, I'm not going to be talking to these witnesses. I still felt like I wanted to like preserve some sense. You know, I think I could have gone into the story and just assumed
00:16:40
Speaker
everyone's bored. It's a small town in the Midwest, like people are going to see these things for kicks, right? And there is an element of like, oh, people are dressing up like teenage boys dressing up like werewolves. And sitting on this road for Halloween or like, you know, there was an element of that. But I think I wanted to believe that there was also something more deeply like resonant and powerful about this thing that people were seeing. And, you
Linda Godfrey and Investigative Parallels
00:17:08
Speaker
know,
00:17:08
Speaker
not just assuming this was people. I mean, you know, there's an element of entertainment, but also something deeper.
00:17:17
Speaker
Do you think this story appealed to you in part because growing up in the Pacific Northwest, there's of course the Sasquatch myth and there are untold people here who swear, swear by it. And I wonder if maybe just the growing up with that mythology in your, in sort of in your out of the box software, if that helped sort of inform your curiosity in this particular tale.
00:17:45
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think I've definitely had a level of interest and I would say this sort of extends to religion too. Linda Godfrey later spoke about like her own belief. She's Lutheran and spoke about how her belief in God, she thought sort of like was tandem to her belief in these creatures ultimately. And like, why do we judge people, one sort of people's belief and honor another sort of people's belief was sort of her thing she was saying about that. And I think, you know, I'm not personally religious and I don't think I've ever
00:18:14
Speaker
maybe had a short-lived belief in Sasquatch or something. But I did always get the sense like I had relatives who would tell these stories about ghosts in some old haunted hotel in Montana. And it's like I would be looking in their eyes and they would 100% feel it was real. And that was what was interesting.
00:18:33
Speaker
And so yeah, I think that sense of conviction and feeling like that was a really interesting thing that I personally didn't have. I'm just like, I'm a Libra. I'm always doubting things. It was like, oh, anyone who can speak with that sort of conviction about something that they think they've seen, I have so little of that personally that I was really drawn to that in other people.
00:18:56
Speaker
And as you were leaving the town with having done your research and your interviews and having sort of immersed yourself in that, what was maybe the self-talk you were telling yourself as you were leaving and driving away, as you were trying to process everything that you had just
00:19:17
Speaker
seen and heard like what were you what were you telling yourself as you're getting ready to synthesize everything you all your research into what ends up being just this really really great story you tell. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think, you know, the word essay or in French means to try
00:19:37
Speaker
And I feel like so much of in that phase was just like having this constellation of quotes and things that felt interesting and surprising. You know, I wasn't expecting Linda to talk about her religion. I wasn't expecting her to talk about all the other things in the forest that scared her, not this creature, you know? And so it's like you sort of had this constellation of things. And I was just really like trying to figure out what the sort of beating heart of the essay was going to be. I mean, I think sometimes
00:20:04
Speaker
I know when I'm writing. And this one, I really wasn't totally sure. And part of that is that a lot of the things that crystallized about the piece for me were when I had these other sort of layers of historical knowledge about the place. So, you know, when I went to the library, sort of at the end of my trip, and I saw that, oh, the same week that this werewolf had sort of there'd been coverage of that in the paper, the KKK had been having a resurgence. And that was a certain click for me of
00:20:33
Speaker
helping to, you know, I love doing historical research and helping to contextualize like, what would the mindset have been of this person who is experiencing this thing that I'm writing about? Like, it's always helpful to sort of have that peripheral landscape knowledge. And when I heard about the KKK, like, that was really helpful in being like, Oh, yeah, there is
00:20:52
Speaker
about that is emerging at night. And like, how is that not related? It felt so obviously related in some way. And then when I got home, that was when I found out that this Kennedy daughter, Rosemary Kennedy, was actually at this home in the same county where this first sighting had been. And, you know, her, she was very sad. She was there after a failed lobotomy. But I mean, the lobotomy wasn't even legitimate in the first place. Her parents sort of ordered it and
00:21:22
Speaker
This is an incredibly devastating story and those other sorts of sadness just started looming larger. As much as I was writing about a supernatural thing, suddenly the other secrets or things about a place that are just the everyday
00:21:41
Speaker
Sadnesses like felt like they were just getting bigger and like that actually those were the things that I was starting to understand about this place And the werewolf was related to those for sure. But once I had those other layers of research The narrative started shifting for me How did you? How long did you maybe stew on the material before you started diving into the actual writing? Well, I will say that I
00:22:10
Speaker
was writing this first round for a workshop. And I just had to write it. It was like one of those deadline things where, you know, I can't remember exactly how much time, but it was like basically within two weeks of coming back. I think I had finished a draft and I'm a pretty bingy writer. Like I would like to
00:22:36
Speaker
maybe be the person that just writes in even like four hours every morning and then like reads not, uh, you know, but I tend to like go all in and I wrote like the bulk of this first draft, um, not just because of the deadline, but I think my sort of, well, my own obsessiveness, like I wrote it just over most of a day in a coffee shop and I wrote a large chunk of it. And then sort of continuously, it was sort of this one weekend that was just like,
00:23:03
Speaker
There was one immersive weekend of research and then the next immersive weekend was just writing this piece or writing the first draft of it, which was different from the version that was published ultimately.
00:23:17
Speaker
Given that the tone or the heart of the piece changed based on some of the extra reading and research he did after the initial reporting on scene, when did this piece finally feel finished?
00:23:34
Speaker
And you know what I mean? Because maybe you could have read something else that might have changed the tint of it again. So at what point did you feel confident that I found that this is the theme I'm running with? Yeah, that's a very good question. I think I'm thinking about the silver bullet thread that comes throughout. And that was a later research thread where
00:24:03
Speaker
So I was reading this other book on the side about this sort of monstrous, it's called The Beast of Gevaden, this creature in medieval France basically that was presumed to be a wolf but it killed more people than like we can ever imagine a wolf killing sort of in our contemporary
00:24:21
Speaker
was basically an anomaly. Anyway, there's a great book about this. And I was reading sort of the histories. And the book is actually saying, like, why did people believe in this thing and looking at the cultural context, not like trying to figure out what this wolf was. So that was also an interesting, helpful model. And reading about it. And eventually, this wolf had been killed hypothetically with a bullet that was said to have been like carved from a Virgin Mary coin. It was this sort of whole mythical story. I sort of forget the detail. It's in the book or it's in the essay.
00:24:48
Speaker
And so that was like the root of this myth of the silver bullet was that the silver bullet could kill this mythical monster. And then the silver bullet I found, so I tried to get police reports from the Beast of Bray Road. There was a guy who was arrested for having a gun on this road.
00:25:08
Speaker
And he said he was werewolf hunting, but it seemed like maybe he was out to get an old boss. Anyway, I'd gone to the police station and I'd totally gotten dead ends when I was actually in Wisconsin. And I sort of thought, I don't know what I'm going to get from this. But then later, like in the mail, they did send me the reports of this guy's arrest. And, you know, later was I was finding out that they'd
00:25:29
Speaker
once he was on trial testing him for his werewolf belief, the silver bullet came into that conversation too. They were like, oh, if you really had a gun for hunting werewolves, wouldn't you have had a silver bullet? And the actual bullets were investigated. The DA jokingly called for this in the trial.
00:25:46
Speaker
So and then I just started to think it was like this strand of the silver bullet, I was even thinking about the lobotomy. And there's like a certain way, right, that the silver bullet is like the easy answer that we think is going to solve something. It's a tool, but you don't really know, you know, it's elusive. And once that that thread wasn't at all in the first one, the first draft, but that started to be
00:26:12
Speaker
helpful and think about the easy answer that I wasn't going to find about this county. That thematic thread helped it to feel like there was something there that could tie together this historic creature and these modern day tragedies in this place.
00:26:33
Speaker
So what I find interesting too, after the process of, say, writing it, which is – it's a significant – for an essay, it's very long. So there's a lot of – not like laboriously long, but it's a lot of investment on your part to write a piece of this nature, not knowing if it'll be published, but knowing you'll probably include it in your book.
00:26:56
Speaker
But what was that process then like of trying to find a home for it after you've invested so much of your time in it, knowing that maybe it's not going to get picked up somewhere. It's kind of a gamble and a sense that you're investing all that time to write something of this nature.
From Submission to Publication
00:27:15
Speaker
So what was your submission process like and then maybe how did you come across True Story as a way, as a potential avenue to publish this piece?
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah, it is a freakishly long piece. And I think I was having a lot of anxiety about that in the edit process. Because at first I thought like, I've got to keep it under, you know, 6000 words, that sort of like the going word count, right for a lot of like submission places. And then it quickly just like, I just wanted to add more and more and more. And then once it was there, I like just couldn't chop it, I wanted to honor it as it was. And so I want to say,
00:27:51
Speaker
You know, I sent it out to a few places that had submissions of up to 10,000 and true story was the one I heard first. I think I had a sense. I might've sat on it longer and tried to think about fiddling with different things or weighing things, but I sort of had a sense in the back of my mind. It was like May when I sort of finished it and thought like, you know, October's coming up. There is a real sort of Halloween peg on this, which Hattie Fletcher just like caught up on right away. You know, she accepted it.
00:28:21
Speaker
I think a few days really after I submitted it and said like, can we get this for the October issue? Um, so that was sort of helpful to like, you know, I think one of the hard things about trying to plan submissions and thinking on a print scale when I, you know, I'm used to like often submitting things on a digital scale, right? You're trying to always think this far out in advance. So it did seem like a sort of lucky, like I did like the idea that having a specific peg and then it was like once true story,
00:28:50
Speaker
Which I'd heard of before I'd heard of one story for fiction and sort of heard rumors that there was this nonfiction equivalent and it just started feeling so a hundred percent like the perfect place for it, you know to Not have to chop it down or make it more I don't like I would be able to maintain the balance of like sort of essayistic rumination with
00:29:14
Speaker
more narrative journalism and that felt really appealing. They were really open to that whole balance and the true stories have that real range. And so it was, I felt like I was going to be in good company.
00:29:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's so it's just the form is really cool. It's just it's its own little chapbook. It's got to be like, you know, what would it's just I just love the form and I love that you can tuck it into your back pocket. And it's it's by itself. It's its own thing. It's your issue for your month. It's sort of like you're the headliner. So it's what was that moment like when when they greenlit it when you got that email?
00:29:51
Speaker
Oh, it was great. I was actually on a writing residency and the sort of cabin in the woods in Wisconsin felt a little bit, or sorry, not Wisconsin, Washington, but, you know, dealing with my own like feelings of hauntedness over there. And then this was just this like really exciting thing. Cause I felt like I had written out of, you know, you write out of your own sort of just trying to make sense of something. And when someone else, like when it clicks for them and they're like, Oh yeah, like what you're trying to make sense of is helping me make sense of something.
00:30:21
Speaker
Anyway, not like Hattie said that directly, but it was awesome. And yeah, no, I was really, really honored and thrilled to be there. And I think I thought of the piece to almost, I mean, I listened to a lot of like podcasts or watching, I'd just like been watching Grizzly Man. I'm not really sure what the specific pegs, but I was, I did feel like the piece was immersive in a sense, like where you're going into somewhere,
00:30:48
Speaker
living in this sort of subculture and then coming out of it. And I appreciated that about what this form would do. You know, it wasn't going to be tapped in a magazine with other pieces, which I mean, I love reading stories like that. Don't get me wrong. But like, I appreciated that someone might just like sit down in an armchair with just this and like be able to dwell in that mind space, which I think is the beauty of this form, too.
00:31:11
Speaker
What's your, to date, what you would consider your crowning achievement for publishing? Would you say it's this piece or is there something else that really resonates with you more?
Poetry to Creative Nonfiction
00:31:23
Speaker
I think, you know, I was just thinking about this when it did come out and I do feel like this piece is closest to the type of writing that I feel most at home in blending these different sort of
00:31:39
Speaker
arms of journalism and retrospection and historical research and all of that. And so yeah, I think this is like, I've certainly published other things I've been really pleased to have an audience for and like have gotten really helpful responses from people. But this piece feels like where I want to be going. So yeah. So you say the the writing that you feel must home in, how did you
00:32:05
Speaker
develop and cultivate this current taste in your reading and your writing that this is the stuff you want to do. What's the road that led you to this area, this sort of genre of not true storytelling? I started, I wonder how many of your guests say this, but I was
00:32:27
Speaker
all poet back in the middle school, high school days. I think nonfiction I thought was really boring. I didn't read it. I mean, I read journalism a little bit maybe, but probably not even. I was just a kid that liked stories, and then I also liked poetry because I was obsessed with language.
00:32:47
Speaker
I didn't even know creative non-fiction existed, as most of my students don't know. And then I sort of in college was still pursuing poetry, but was pivoting and doing journalism and meeting people that were journalists. I started editing our paper and
00:33:05
Speaker
feeling a real rush of that. I ended up really liking going into interviews, and I liked the energy of trying to process something more lifetime. A poem has a very different pace, and so while I was really, really grateful for the ways it had attuned me to the language and the buildup of images, and I really credit a lot of my poetry instructors with helping me be able to string the themes of a lyric essay or of a more narrative essay.
00:33:33
Speaker
And then I cried at the journalism with getting me out there and not making me as freaked out to just call someone on the phone or to chase someone down. But I also knew that that wasn't the forum that excited me. I felt like that was formulaic in a way that was really pleasing and satisfying. I don't know, cooking something that you know how to cook and it tastes good, but I wasn't like, whoa, this is really wild and exciting. And the essay lets you learn as you're writing.
00:34:02
Speaker
realizing that I process so much of the world through writing it. And I don't always know what I'm thinking until it's written. And I had one teacher who was teaching basically the great nonfiction. We were reading McPhee and Didion. And I started realizing, oh, this is a thing people do. I didn't know this was, it had never occurred to me that you could report with this first-person voice. And that was suddenly immensely
00:34:32
Speaker
I think I'd often been telling stories in my mind, or to my friends rather, about my own life and I was aware that like
00:34:41
Speaker
Story storytelling helped you reclaim the narrative right if something embarrassing had happened and you were recounting it at dinner You couldn't make the punchline and like that felt like a great sense of power as like a high school girl or a college Person who was confused about everything, you know So I really appreciated that sort of personal voice early on but only later could I like see that how that would merge with some of the journalism that I really enjoyed doing and I
00:35:08
Speaker
At a young age, at a middle school, high school, into college, did you always see yourself as wanting to become a writer? I did. I don't think I knew exactly how possible that would mean. We didn't really know people that were writers. Since living on the East Coast now, I meet people who have friends whose parents are journalists.
00:35:36
Speaker
know, it's more tangible how they have books like what people do. And, you know, in Oregon, I didn't totally know people who were writing who didn't like, have a spouse who did something else who supported them or like, I don't know, maybe I'm oversimplifying it. But I don't think I knew what it would mean to try to be an independent writer. But I
00:35:59
Speaker
liked it as an idea so much. And as I've grown older and sort of have seen different models of people stringing together and making it work in different ways. Of course, it's not that not it's not like you're a writer if you're a full time writer, but I've seen people like more on that side of the spectrum, where you're not juggling necessarily something else full time to I don't think I remember like as a second grader, sort of saying like, I just want to be a mother and a writer.
00:36:26
Speaker
I thought that was just like a really simple answer. So I was basically just like a little nerdy kid mom, like, I don't know, I'm not a mother now, but it's like, it's stupid how long I've wanted to just be writing. Who was instrumental at a young age that gave you the permission to pursue to pursue a career in writing? Yeah, I think.
00:36:53
Speaker
there was a level of like maybe, you know, I think my parents were certainly supportive when I was like doing this. I don't know that they actually thought, you know, they were definitely pushing me to also like be doing other things, which was good. And like, I studied environmental studies in college, and was sort of like interning at nonprofits and like thought that I would be doing, I also studied English and was doing creative writing and like knew that was where my heart was on some level. But
00:37:20
Speaker
Um, I think part of it was like, I wanted to prove it to the people that actually didn't think that it would be possible to really be a writer. Um, so maybe there's some level of like that competitive edge, not that my parents ever said like, you can't do this, but there was just a like weariness, which is good. Right. Um, and I just always wanted to like show that I could, um, you know, try to do that. And I remember I had one teacher in high school who said like, not
00:37:49
Speaker
You know, it's such a hard thing because writing, it's like a crazy career path, as you know, it's not even a career. I don't even like to think of it as a career path, right? It's a vocation that sometimes people make money from. Um, but he sort of said some people, some people like will be able to do this and build a life for themselves out of it. And not everyone can, but there's always going to be someone that can. And that sort of stuck in my mind, like, oh yeah, wait, there's going to be someone who's writing.
00:38:16
Speaker
the pieces in the magazines or like the books that we love. And like, if you just work really, really hard, like maybe you can work towards trying to be that someone I think that sort of has stuck in my mind still.
00:38:30
Speaker
Yeah it's to your to your point it's like if it was really really easy. Everyone would be doing it like these like there are roadblocks in the way that kind of that out the people who like if you really want to write for the new york or any of the big glossy magazines like.
00:38:48
Speaker
You really have to, I mean, there are a few chosen that somehow seem to, they're 20 or 25 and they get in there. And so it's like, you know, if you're coming from a different mindset, you might like want to pull your hair out. You're like, what am I doing wrong? And all this. But the fact is, you know, there is a tremendous amount of rigor and you need a lot of patience and endurance to reach those levels of publishing. You need to have that slow burn.
00:39:16
Speaker
So I wonder how have you approached that nature of hustle and rigor and patience to maybe see yourself fully realized and more visible and also as a way of making a living? Yeah, I was just listening to a long-form podcast with Ta-Nehisi Coates where he was sort of quoting David Gran who told him
00:39:42
Speaker
or David Carr, I guess, saying like, yeah, you just do this long enough. And then it's like the pool gets narrower because more people drop out. You know, like I'm not a long distance runner because I drop out, but, uh, this is the closest that I could think like, you know, keeping that little spark alive of like not getting beaten down by any rejection. I mean, I think dealing with rejections is one of the,
00:40:08
Speaker
most disconcerting. It's like you're dealing you're getting rejected from things that would have paid you maybe you know $150 or maybe more sometimes but it's like there's just a futility if you think too much about it where it's like oh my god what is this but I think just the really like incremental mess of it. I saw Mary Rufel speak yesterday essayist and poet and she was saying like she thinks patience is the top thing a writer can have and I think part of that is like
00:40:37
Speaker
I set low but steady goals for myself, I would say. Like at the beginning of the year, it's like, okay, I want to write one essay that I'm proud of and I want to publish one thing. Like I did sort of have a sense that while my writing is a personal, it's like I do it for myself and I do it to process the world and it's not mediated by say publication, my sense of success.
00:41:03
Speaker
But I also am aware that publication is how you get an audience. It's how opportunities open. It's always hard to hold those two things, especially when you're young or trying to make sense of this. And so I think setting goals and realizing that my goals in those two fields are different. Like, OK, I do want to publish an essay. I also want to write something I'm really proud of. And those are different.
00:41:25
Speaker
goals maybe, but I have them both. And it's not like I need to publish this essay in The New Yorker or anything. It's just this sort of incremental, as you say, and holding yourself responsible for those goals, I think, and realizing I'm always inspired when I hear about people tacking up their rejection letters or keeping track of what hasn't been placed. And it's like I can look at my submitable account and see all of those declined or rejected from a few years back.
00:41:54
Speaker
and think like, I'm so glad that I didn't stop then. And I think it's just that level of like self-competition and also competition with, there's a certain sense of like a lot of other people that I do see. I mean, I think like Twitter is really good for this. You see other people who are writing cool things and you sort of, when you come across someone in a magazine, their name, it's just this little byline and it's sort of like the person is hidden. And on Twitter, you see the person
00:42:24
Speaker
And you see what they're writing and that's a cool that's like the really healthy good competition I think which I don't even know if competitions the right word But it's a sense of like we're a community and we're fighting for this thing the written word right in our crazy world and that feels really inspiring and I'm like often motivated by Just being communities of writers like that. How do you navigate that that line between being like?
00:42:50
Speaker
that to use the term competitive like that can be really toxic and like jealousy forming or it can it seems like you found a good balance of how of like using maybe just using not being competitive but using seeing those other people as not
00:43:10
Speaker
not opponents, but actually advocates in a way. Like, oh, they're doing that kind of work. That means eventually I can too, instead of that zero sum game. But like, oh, they did that. That means I can't. So if I can do it, no one else can. Like, how did you figure that out for yourself? So it doesn't feel zero sum. It actually feels more opportunistic instead of competitive. Yeah, totally. I mean, it's hard. I think growing up, I felt like I had competitive relationships with
00:43:40
Speaker
like my high school friends who I love dearly, but like we were competitive and writing wasn't the seat of the competition, but it definitely soured me to the ways that like, you know, being friends or being friendly was also often in tandem with this like competitive for layers of resentment or something. And I have been like consciously aware of feeling really like put off by that now. And I think the sense too, that like the literary world, there's all these different circles, right, of who reads what and
00:44:09
Speaker
you know, maybe, for example, like some big piece that comes out in the New York Times magazine is going to be read by a wider circle than a piece that comes out in like a literary journal and feeling like, OK, but those people who are up there sending out the big pieces like that's going to get my maybe my if my aunt and uncle in Montana read that they're going to be excited and like feel more accessible to them. Pick up this X or Y other piece and just feeling like, you know, we're all just trying to
00:44:39
Speaker
Not that we're fighting screens or any of the other distractions, but I do think that any things that are happening in the literary world to some degree are helping everyone else who's in that world just get out and get someone's attention and fight for space in this world. On a person-to-person level, I think that having friends of different generations or different
00:45:05
Speaker
even different sort of fields of writing, like it's very helpful in my MFA program. I'm sort of working very closely with both poets and novelists or short story writers, fiction writers, and like sort of comparing, like we all are sort of figuring out our own sphere of the writing world in different ways and like being able to talk about those things, but then also like being friends with people who are older and who have come at this, maybe come at writing from a different, you know, through the like,
00:45:36
Speaker
magazine glossy heyday of the 90s or whatever 80s and like it's helpful to just have those different points because I think there is something when you're young and just like there's a real chomping at the bit excitement to like get out there and that can feel like you lose perspective pretty quickly if that's the only people you're talking to.
00:45:57
Speaker
And when it comes to the writing process itself, what part appeals to your taste a little more, like that generative phase or the rewriting and editing phase?
Writing Process and Challenges
00:46:11
Speaker
I love the generative stage because I love the connection making. I was just reading an interview with David Legault, who was an alum of my program, who just wrote a book about sort of obsessive collectors. And he was saying that like, you know,
00:46:27
Speaker
an essay, you're drawing connections between disparate things. And a lot of that happens through like research and picking up little scraps of like physical memorabilia, good quotes, like observations. And I feel like that sort of like collage-y-ness is really appealing to me about writing. I write very slowly and tend to edit as I go. So then I'll finish a draft and think like, okay, this is
00:46:52
Speaker
this is kind of solid. And then of course, it's not like the next morning, you're like, Oh, my God, there's so many holes in it. And then I end up just like putting it away for a while. If I can, you know, and then a week, or whatever later, it's like, come back and cut into it a little bit more. And then I think I find the pleasure in the revision for sure. And it's like, it gets easier and easier.
00:47:16
Speaker
kill your dialings for sure. What do you feel like you struggle with personally with the work and generating work? What's a point of weakness for you that you find yourself always trying to improve upon? I personally just have a hard time because there's so much generative excitement that comes from like drawing the constellation of ideas together in my mind. It is hard to plot out
00:47:44
Speaker
exactly where I know something is going. And I think sometimes, you know, I don't want to do that. I think often essays that know exactly what they're going to be at the end, like you can tell as a reader, and sometimes that's not as exciting. That's not always true. But I do want to have be a little bit better about being able to like visualize on the grand scale, sort of what I'm going into, or to know when to be able to do that. Right now, I sort of have this big
00:48:16
Speaker
of associations, and I want to be able to plot that a little bit more, which I think helped
00:48:24
Speaker
writing something on spec or you like you've written a pitch for something and you want to deliver something specific and you like you want a sense of that flow and I'm always trying to get better at like reading other pieces trying to take away figure out the scaffolding that made those pieces successful and then like think about how do I build my own scaffolding before I start writing because often I'll write a lot and then like overlay the scaffolding or something if that makes sense like
00:48:52
Speaker
Yeah, that definitely does. I know you brought up John McPhee earlier. He's the big proponent of really setting up the scaffolding beforehand, and he will labor on that structure element before he even starts writing. So yeah, there's that element. Is that something you want to improve on? You would like to see more scaffolding before you start writing and maybe paint yourself into a corner that you don't want to be in?
00:49:21
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I admire him so much for what, for the way he talks about that craft. I think I'm torn between feeling like a lot of the pleasure, you know, of the actual writing for me, the writing process comes when I'm like knee deep in a scene that I'm writing and I like have some realization and I can like go down that rabbit hole. And so I guess I'm sort of in between of two minds where like, I want to be able to
00:49:50
Speaker
do that, I think. And I had an advisor in college who would have me read books and then plot them and send him these plot diagrams. And then he would say, you didn't do this. Do it again. And it frustrated the heck out of me. But it was probably helpful, definitely helpful. But at the same time, I've appreciated now that maybe the first draft of something, right now I'm working on a piece that is a similar immersive piece to the werewolf one.
00:50:19
Speaker
And I know that my first draft, which is right now like 12,000 words, it's way too long, but I needed to write a lot of those scenes to like build the connections and like see different themes rise. And I'm just aware that like now I'm going to do some of that scaffolding and that feels fine. I think, you know, I'm sort of at peace with that in some way too.
00:50:40
Speaker
So I want to be able to do both and be able to trade off between them, we'll say. What would you say are a few books that you reread over and over again? I like to call these books, they kind of remind you of why you do this. Or they're keys that unlock these doors that you want open in your own work. What do you revisit for that kind of inspiration?
00:51:07
Speaker
Yeah, I love the way you were to that. I think that's totally true. I think about like John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead or actually the same day that I bought that. This was like a while ago at Powell's Books in Portland. I bought that book and a Susan Orlean collection of essay of profiles. And there's something about both of those books that like make me just so excited and curious about other people, which is where so much of my drive
00:51:37
Speaker
in this writing is just like wanting to get to know people deeply and like try to understand them and just the world, right? And like, those books are like, I'll still go back and flip through them and just like get excited about that whenever I'm like, I'm not sure what I'm writing or need some sort of idea, hearing their language and excitement about that they bring to other people is really helpful. But I think formally like Eulopuses, Notes from No Man's Land, these incredible like associative
00:52:09
Speaker
my mind of what the essay could do and again scrupulous research reporting at times but in a very like lyrical way and I think on that same boat like Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts or The Empathy Exams which I mentioned earlier like these books really changed in this sort of like post-adolescent phase where I was like realizing that creative nonfiction
00:52:37
Speaker
was a thing and trying to figure out what it was. Those books were the first ones I read. I guess I would throw Didion in there. She has the memoir where I was from
00:52:48
Speaker
that is, I mean, it's a memoir, but it's making sense of the West and its mythology. And I felt like that was a lot of what I was trying to do. I'm like very interested in sort of the myth of pay and how we look with the myths that we make right on a family level, a personal level, a cultural level, the national level. And she's reconciling a lot of those in that text. So that was, that was a book I looked at a lot through the years. Yeah.
00:53:15
Speaker
What other artistic media do you use to maybe push the boundaries of what you know? I definitely really appreciate reading fiction and poetry right now. There's this whole sort of like canon right of fiction that feels like it's moving in what I would think of as sort of essayistically.
00:53:39
Speaker
Valeria Luiselli. I'm reading Renata Adler's Speedboat right now. Jenny Ofils, Department of Speculation. A book called Flights by a Polish writer Olga Togarzuk, probably pronouncing that wrong, but they're these sort of books that are almost lyrical essays. They're maybe told in associative chunks of prose that look more like Maggie Nelson or something.
00:54:08
Speaker
But they're building narrative in a really interesting way. And those have been really interesting and informative for me. I don't watch enough TV. I think that's a real thing to be saying. I want to. And that's sort of my vacation thing, because I think TV is so smart about plugging plot and narrative right now. And so I want to hinge on that more. I do listen to a lot of podcasts.
00:54:38
Speaker
and especially hearing writers talk. When I left college, I was living abroad in Sicily by myself. Basically, I was helping with the documentary, but spending a lot of time in a pretty isolated rural place. And every day, I would go for these walks or runs and just
00:54:59
Speaker
listen to long form podcasts, or this was when I was sort of coming out of doing a lot of college journalism and trying to figure out what my writing life wanted to look like. And I just felt like it was this sort of like boot camp in training. And, you know, there's other writing podcasts, this podcast, there's kill fee, there's the New York Public Library interviews with writers. All of these were just sort of these voices, it was like my free sort of
00:55:28
Speaker
first grad school experience or something was just like being able to binge on hearing how people make sense of this crazy life. Would you say you're drawn more to interview podcasts versus narrative ones? That's a good question. I totally have binged on narrative ones as well. Um, but maybe there's something about my attention
00:55:56
Speaker
where I tend, I really like to read narrative. Like I often am reading novels, not even just the ones that are essayistic, but like I just, I love reading narrative like that. And so something about my intention span when I'm listening, I do tend to be drawn to more interview ones. Yeah.
00:56:17
Speaker
I find some of the better interview ones, what I like especially for artists are ones that get a little bit tactical because that way it lets the listener maybe cherry pick something like, oh, I love that little habit. I'm going to experiment with that. I'd maybe extend that to you when you're writing your true story piece or anything else for that matter of late.
Morning Routine and Productivity Tools
00:56:41
Speaker
How do you set up your day so you can accomplish the work you'll be proud of at the end of the day?
00:56:48
Speaker
Yeah, so I had a professor, Sam Friedman, who's a journalist in New York who's visiting and he was always like coffee and inspiration. That's the move. And I do think that's totally true. Like I do drag myself out of bed around, try to be around seven or so. I kind of aspire to be the person who does that earlier, but I'm not good enough about going to bed early. So like get up and just like start reading something that's getting me excited about the written word right away. Sometimes that's like
00:57:17
Speaker
Poetry or essays or you know, if I read the news like that doesn't count to me like I love to read something like that but that's like a different sort of thing and then I sort of like Will get my coffee and put on classical music. I've gotten really into classical music right now It kind of helps balance the like caffeine panic that inevitably sets in unless it's like really crazy harpsichord or something and then I like rush to turn it off but I
00:57:43
Speaker
Yeah, and I think like I do like to journal in the morning. And that's sort of a more aspirational like everyday thing. I'm not quite there yet. But I do think like so I use Scrivener for writing and it's just a godsend for the amount of like research and interviews that I end up usually cobbling together.
00:58:02
Speaker
And, you know, there's these settings in Scrivener where you can say like, I want to write 1500 words a day and I need to get to 10,000 words by November 20th or something. And then it sort of has these little bars. It's like in a video game, there's like the bars of how much food you have or whatever. That's like green or red. That's exactly what it is for this. And you're just like feeding the beast of Scrivener. And that is really helpful.
00:58:27
Speaker
for me when I'm having a real writing day and knowing I need to do that. And I just bought Freedom, the app, which is amazing. I think Zadie Smith credits it in her Acknowledgments for books. And I'm always on the internet for research. And that means that I wish I didn't have to be often, but it's just a reality. And so being able to block
00:58:54
Speaker
Twitter or the New York Times or Facebook or whatever it is, is really helpful and like freeing. I think it sounds real, I don't know, I don't like that I have to do it, but it's made my writing chunks much more productive. Yeah, basically, you set what it works on your phone and on your computer and you set which apps you want to block or which websites you want to block. And then you can set up a daily schedule. So now I've actually sort of trained my
00:59:24
Speaker
writer brain like so for example at 8 30 it'll click on in the morning and then I basically don't have access to any of these sort of rabbit hole internet sites until lunchtime and then I like have an hour and you know often it's like I'll be writing you the equivalent of emails like through Facebook Messenger or you know because those are tied up in your work or Twitter like all those things feel
00:59:51
Speaker
like something I do want to spend some time on it just really limits like what I would do. So then I like for the afternoon I have another like four hour chunk where I'm not going to be on anything. And it just sort of like I'm used to that routine now my brain works around it in the mornings I know that I can like get caught up immediately if like there's something going on. But then
01:00:12
Speaker
it's just time to clock out. Yeah, so I think whenever you have a, I have a pretty stay at home work day now, I'm on campus a few days a week teaching and such, but trying to build the regimented, this is my free time now, because otherwise I would work all the time, I think, and that sort of half work where you're half on Facebook and you're not satisfied that you're having fun and not satisfied that you're working, and I'm trying to be better at both of those things.
01:00:42
Speaker
Sometimes I feel like, too, that to have a successful morning routine, it helps to have a good night routine as well that kind of rolls the ball uphill. That way, you can just push it downhill in the morning. Do you have any nighttime rituals that help you unwind but also set the bowling pins for the morning? Yeah, I think one, I do love to read before bed and think of the
01:01:11
Speaker
like sort of omnivorous reading or omnivorous research that I'm realizing is really helpful for essays where I'm trying to make connections between disparate things. And so I'll often like read like the Harper's, the section at the beginning where they have all these like sort of short, I think it's fine. No, I'm blanking on the name of it, but it's like, you know, excerpts from different stories or poems or like essays or whatever.
01:01:36
Speaker
and like sections like that are so fun to read because you're like seeing really disparate things. Anyway, so before bed, I like to read something random basically. And who knows like what sort of connections will be there. I don't believe really in like procrastinatory reading. I think like you could always get something surprising out of it. And I found that actually with like films too, if I'm watching something,
01:02:02
Speaker
that usually that may be helpful again. But basically, it's like, I just know I need to go to bed by a reasonable hour. And I have friends who like, you know, throw in the towel, and they're like, I'm done writing, and now I'm up, and I'm free till the day. And it's like, I'm pretty aware that if by like, 11, I'm not winding down, like, my morning is going to be a lot rougher the next day. So I do feel like guarding, you know, guarding nights on some level during the week,
01:02:32
Speaker
the next morning too. And I like the journal as well.
Journaling: Observation and Emotion
01:02:37
Speaker
That's something I've kept a journal for over 20 years. Oh man, a lot of journals. Yeah. Oh, so many. And more in the last like five years or so, I've actually, and I used to just kind of do it when I felt like it ended up averaging like every other, like every three days through like the first 15 year run of the journals. And then of late, I make it a morning practice.
01:03:00
Speaker
And I wonder how you, I have a point to bringing up my journaling practice to get to yours. Like I've struggled a way because sometimes, you know, when you're writing your journal, you want to be sort of as honest as possible. You know, there's no sense in lying to that notebook. But say you have like a lot of negative thoughts. A lot of times I have a ton of negative thoughts, but I feel like
01:03:26
Speaker
Is it bloodletting or is it actually imprinting? Because a lot of times the words and the stories we tell ourselves really manifest themselves. So if you're really imprinting negative self-talk in a journal, is it making it worse or are you purging? I wonder, is that something you experience and if you do, how do you sort of
01:03:46
Speaker
Keep the negativity to the journal and then be positive and fruitful with your work or I wonder is that something that yeah, you think about that's so well articulated I don't feel like I thought of it in exactly those terms and you know when I think about the times where I haven't journaled as much It's like in college at the beginning I like definitely didn't have that regular practice and I think part of that was I didn't know what the narrative Was in my mind about it like I was uncomfortable with my own discomfort at times
01:04:14
Speaker
about certain things. I went to school on the East Coast and like had a good experience, but it was super I was like in culture shock a lot of it and just like personal shock and like didn't know journaling felt to me like I was committing to a certain emotional narrative that I like wasn't sure I wanted to like I was aware enough that I will go back and read journals and like didn't know what I wanted to like feel about that time. And now I think it was sort of freeing to realize that like the journalists
01:04:43
Speaker
Sometimes just a very like descriptive place for me. Like I'm just writing what things that I've seen I'm always sort of like eavesdropping or You know just trying to like have my eyes open whenever I'm outside and like riding the bus often I'm just like trying to take notes of like scraps of really beautiful things that I've heard or seen outside the window, you know, and so now I think some of
01:05:10
Speaker
even in my personal journal, it's like partially just, if I've seen some, I recently like saw a friend laughing and was like, Oh my God, he's like laughing. Like he's about to be sick. Like he holds his belly and like falls over on himself. And it was this like kind of revelation that I was like, I don't know what exactly what this is helpful for, but like, it feels like an interesting characterization that maybe will come up in something. So like, I would just write about like going to dinner with a group of friends or something, but it would be like more observations like that then
01:05:40
Speaker
any like looking for any sort of deep personal thing. And I think I'm trying to articulate my emotions. I was thinking about this right now because I like was writing a lot after the election last year because that was such a really deeply hard emotional time in that like trying to make sense of what the future was for my generation, for everyone, right?
01:06:05
Speaker
Like, I think one of the reasons why I'm writing about fear right now is just like trying to figure out what we do in a world that feels scary. And I'm like scared of the world in a lot of ways, um, because I've had experiences that have made me scared of it. And just because like my mind works that way. And I'm also really scared for the world and like scared for other people. And like on a global warming level, it's like, what do we do with this? And I think that's the sort of like large scale anxiety that the journal sometimes becomes the
01:06:35
Speaker
becomes the home for and just like, how do we live with all this stuff that's there? Like, how do we reconcile it? And sometimes that just comes from like noting little things. And like, I'm sort of, I am aware of like what the psychologists say about like, if you write down things you're grateful for, you know, they've sort of proven that like, you can fend off depression or something if you make these like gratitude lists. And so I think now I am consciously aware that like, writing bad things, writing dark emotions,
01:07:04
Speaker
does maybe feel like purging, but also like, I don't know, I am like looking for the other spin on them, I think as a way of reconciling them.
01:07:14
Speaker
Yeah. And before I let you get out of here, I'd love to go back to that time when you were in Sicily and you were listening to the podcast and then you were ruminating about the writer you wanted to be.
Contemplating Writing Futures in Sicily
01:07:29
Speaker
And I think that's probably a key moment for you. So what were those conversations you were having with yourself and maybe with other people as you were looking to
01:07:38
Speaker
turn that page to the to the person and the artist that you want to manifest and the one that really gives you you know fills your life with life like what was that like in that moment what was that like yeah i think one of the things i mean you and i are both not talking right now from like new york city right and i think there was always a sense of like is that what i have to do to be a writer especially when i like to
01:08:10
Speaker
I had never applied for any of those. I wouldn't be able to do an unpaid literary internship or something. I just knew.
01:08:22
Speaker
It was sort of a question, I think, when I was abroad of like, what am I going to come back to? And am I going to try to go into that world? And one of the things that I was because, like, quote, is that the only way to do it? And something that sort of crystallized out of talking, listening to some of these people, I say talking because I felt like we were having conversations, but it was mostly just like me in my head and thinking that, oh, I could do this and I could go somewhere else or I could be living in the mountains somewhere and still be finding stories that were interesting. And like the Internet is
01:08:52
Speaker
really good for that, like allowing that to happen. And I think started to free me into thinking about like, there's not one path that this needs to be, but like the constant is just going to be that I'm going to like, work really hard and not ever take anything for granted in terms of like, you know, that's sort of the dispiriting thing is you talk to people who have a lot of books that are who have been freelancing for 30 years, and they're still like,
01:09:22
Speaker
sense of insecurity because that's what this field is and that's what their path is and like just accepting that that's going to be something and I like can't think about it to macro level but keep thinking like I mean you do think about it hypothetically macro level but really just being like methodical and sort of plotting forward and like having some sense of quiet faith and I mean again this sort of like competition or whatever that other word is that just is like
01:09:50
Speaker
I think I can try to do it, too. And I can try to put myself, try to emulate things that I like reading to a certain degree. You don't want to do that straight up. But maybe that's just how you move forward in this sort of thing, being inspired. Great. And Erica, where can people find you online? I am on Twitter, at Erica J. Berry.
01:10:17
Speaker
And my website is www.aricaberry.com. My dad is like a big old pec nerd and so he reserved the domain back in the day. I guess I needed to do something with it. I don't know. It was, it was hanging over me in elementary school.
01:10:35
Speaker
I'm picturing like 15 years ago, like you saw the first GoDaddy ad during the Super Bowl. I was just like, you know what? I'm going to save this for her. I know. It's weird. So bless him. Now it's there. And I am always putting more links on it. So.
01:10:52
Speaker
Oh, fantastic. Well, Beast Among Us was so good and a great, it's the first time I've been introduced to your work and I'm a fan and I can't wait to read what you've got coming next. And when your book comes out, we'll have to have you back on the show and we can dig into some fear a little more. Well, thank you so much, Brendan. It's such a pleasure to be in such good company on your podcast and it's been great to talk to you. Thanks so much. All right, Erica, we'll be in touch. Thanks again. Take care. Bye.
01:11:23
Speaker
That is it. Thanks to Erica for her time and her insights. If you head over to BrendanOmera.com, not only will you see show notes for this episode and every other podcast, you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter where I give out book recommendations as well as what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it.
01:11:51
Speaker
If you've made it this far and you valued the show, please subscribe and share it with a fellow CNF-er. And even leave an honest review. It doesn't even have to be a nice review. Just something short from your brain to the benevolent podcast Overlords at Apple. I'll be right here next week for another episode of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. I'll see you then. Happy Thanksgiving. Bye.