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Episode 124—Natalie Singer on Finding the Time to Write and Living a Creative Life Around Day Jobs
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Natalie Singer, author of California Calling: A Self Interrogation comes by the show this week. So here we are again. Happy to say last week’s episode was featured in Creative Nonfiction Magazine’s November newsletter as a “distraction,” meant only as flattery, of course. Jane Friedman, THAT Jane Friedman, also gave us a great shoutout in a blog post a few weeks ago. That’s riff worthy… Oh, you didn’t think I was gonna drop that hammer did you, sucka? Hey, this is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the best artists about the craft of telling true stories. I’m Brendan O’Meara (hey, hey) and this is what we do. Today I welcome Natalie Singer, author of California Calling: A Self Interrogation to the show. We talk about confidence, or the lack thereof, books as mentors, and day jobs and feeling shame for day jobs. I hope to change that perception over the next six million episodes, but shame is real, man, it is real. Well, are you subscribed to the show? You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and just about anywhere else you get your pods. If you like this episode, tell one friend. Hand the show off like a baton and let them run with it. I’d love to see the show grow. It’s getting there. We march on. Got a newsletter you should consider subscribing to. I give out reading recommendations, but I’m also thinking of sprinkling in some other cool stuff I’ve stumbled on over the past month in the vein of Austin Kleon’s newsletter. I love his newsletter. I’m gonna Steal Like an Artist. See what I did there? Thanks to our sponsors in Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction as well as Creative Nonfiction Magazine. So, the show is @CNFPod on Twitter and I’m @BrendanOMeara on Twitter. I don’t know. Following either of those two would be pretty rad. The show is on Facebook too if you’re into that.
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Transcript
Introduction to Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction
00:00:00
Speaker
The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two year, low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on campus residencies allow you
00:00:16
Speaker
to hone your craft with accomplishmenters who have pulled surprises and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni. Which has published 140 books and counting, you'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey.
00:00:38
Speaker
visit goucher.edu forward slash nonfiction to start your journey now.
Podcast Recognition and Intent
00:00:44
Speaker
Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA program for nonfiction.
00:00:55
Speaker
So here we are again. Happy to say last week's episode was featured in Creative Nonfiction Magazine's November newsletter as a distraction, meant only as flattery, of course. Jane Friedman, that Jane Friedman of Episode 102 fame, also gave us a great shout out in a blog post a few weeks ago, along with Brad Listy's other people and Joanna Penn's Creative Penn podcast.
00:01:23
Speaker
That is riff worthy.
00:01:32
Speaker
Oh, you didn't think I was going to drop that hammer, did you? Sucka. Hey, this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the best artists about the craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Hey. And this is what we do.
Guest Introduction: Natalie Singer
00:01:50
Speaker
Today, I welcome Natalie Singer, author of California Calling, a self interrogation to the show.
00:01:59
Speaker
We talk about confidence or the lack thereof, books as mentors, and day jobs, and feeling shame for day jobs. I hope to change that perception over the next six million episodes, but shame is real, man. Shame is real. Well, are you subscribed to this show? You can find this on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and just about anywhere else you get your pods. If you liked this episode,
00:02:26
Speaker
Tell one friend. Hand the show off like a baton and let them run with it. I'd love to see the show grow. It's getting there.
Creative Nonfiction and Writing Updates
00:02:34
Speaker
We march on, man. We march on.
00:02:38
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It's also November now, and the creative non-fiction magazine is doing a nami-ribo. Is that how you pronounce it? For memoir instead of novels. That's cool. Yeah, it's a good chance. Maybe I can use this month to get through a titanic round of edits on my 20th draft or so on Tools of Ignorance, the old baseball memoir I've been working on for years.
00:03:04
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It's at least 20 drafts. It's probably more. I'm not ashamed of that. You should know. All drafts are rough. Some of us take a long time to get there. If you take a lot of drafts to finish anything, you're not alone.
00:03:19
Speaker
Got a newsletter, just came out this month. You should consider subscribing to it. I give out reading recommendations, but I'm also thinking of sprinkling out some other cool stuff I've stumbled upon over the past month in the vein of Austin Kleon's amazing newsletter. I love his newsletter. I'm gonna steal like an artist. See what I did there? Hey!
00:03:44
Speaker
Today's podcast is brought to you by Creative Nonfiction Magazine. For nearly 25 years, Creative Nonfiction has been fuel for nonfiction writers and storytellers, publishing a lively blend of exceptional long and short form nonfiction narratives and interviews, as well as columns that examine the craft, style, trends, and ethics of writing true stories. In short, Creative Nonfiction is true stories well told.
00:04:15
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Well, I think that's it.
Natalie Singer's Creative Routine
00:04:19
Speaker
Okay, this is my conversation with Natalie Singer.
00:04:29
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writing or doing anything in that realm. What do you like to do to unplug or what kind of exercise or personal wellness things do you employ? So it actually lets you come to the work with a fresher mindset. What's exercise, Brendan? What is that word you just used?
00:04:55
Speaker
I should totally fake it right now. I should be like, well, I try to get in like an hour run every day. No, I am pretty good about unplugging. Not always with exercise. I do yoga, which is nice. And that's kind of more of a mind relaxer. So one of the things that I juggle with along with just having a very busy life is making space for my mind to quiet down.
00:05:25
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And I need to do that, obviously, just to stay sane, but also because, you know, I find like that's when ideas come to me and that's when I can sort of, my brain can sort out questions around writing that I've been frenzying over. And when I'm using like my conscious brain, I have a lot of ideas and I kind of get into a frenzy and sometimes I can't solve them or figure out where to go.
00:05:54
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by doing a kind of activity like yoga or just completely unplugging and doing something fun with my family. Kind of the sort of opposite happens, I guess, when I take my mind away from those concerns, ideas and new routes kind of form almost subconsciously. And when I come back to the writing,
00:06:19
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Um, I have those. So sometimes it's hard for me to remind myself to do that because I think, you know, I'm trying to solve this, this writing problem. I'm trying to come up with a forum for this essay or this project and I can't, and I'm circling around it and mulling it over. And I sort of have to force myself to walk away because I know logically my logical brain knows that that's when, um, I'll get answers. So I tried to do that regularly. Um,
00:06:48
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Yeah, and just unplug and go do something fun. I read a lot. And yeah, this year also I started in 2014, I finished, or I went back rather to school as a kind of an older student to get my MFA. And when I finished in 2016, I kind of stepped away from the whole
00:07:12
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you know, writing community, writing classes, workshop space. And this summer, a couple of years after that, I went back to that and I took a couple of workshops, which seems counterintuitive, but that, for me, that's kind of relaxing and engaging in a different way because I'm not sitting alone with my work. I'm kind of in community. And so by doing that, I was like reminded that this is really useful for me and also
00:07:38
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You know, we're never really done necessarily with that kind of thing. Maybe we have our degree, maybe we have a book published, maybe we have several books published, but there's something that you can get from that kind of community space that I think we always need. So I have been reminded of that and I'm taking advantage of that. When you're in those unplugged settings, how are you, and when the idea strikes, how are you recording these ideas so you don't lose them?
00:08:07
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Yeah, you're going right to one of my problems. Good. Five minutes in. Yeah. I try to have a notebook with me at all times, but that is hard because, you know, a lot of times something will come in my head and I'll think to myself, there's no way you'll forget this. Like this is so good. This is so important. Of course you're going to remember this. Like don't even worry about it. And of course that night or the next day, it's like completely gone. Yeah.
00:08:37
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Um, so I always have a notebook with me, but even that is hard sometimes to get to a notebook. But what I've started doing recently that I'm pretty excited about is that, you know, writers are always looking for like, what, what programs are you using, um, to write your book and how do you keep your notes and what do you do with revisions and things like that. And, um, my husband who's kind of a nerd and also works for Microsoft, um,
00:09:05
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started nagging me a year or two ago to try to use OneNote for my writing work. And I was like, what are you talking about? Who does that? But I recently tried it. I started trying it. And I really like it because it's got this system where you can have pages and tabs. But the thing that I like best about it is it's very accessible from my phone. Obviously, we all have our phones with us constantly.
00:09:33
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And I always have my phone in my hand. Even when I'm unplugging, I'm taking pictures of my kids or what I'm doing or checking in. And so it's very easy to open up that page that's synced to all of my work and add an idea in right there. So I've kind of recently bypassed the whole paper notebook thing and just try to log anything that comes to my mind right in the system where I'm
00:10:03
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putting my creative work. But sometimes I also just believe that I'll remember and I don't do anything that I don't remember. And it's called OneNote? OneNote. OneNote, okay. Some people use Evernote too, which is kind of similar in a sense.
00:10:21
Speaker
Yeah, say things and it does sync across various platforms. But that one, though, that sounds interesting. I love talking about like gadget tools and programs that, you know, anything that kind of helps trick trick yourself into getting the work done, whatever that is. And it's always nice to get someone a fresh take on that.
Literary Influences and Mentors
00:10:38
Speaker
So that's really cool that you share that. And you said you were reading a lot these days, too. And the mark of any competent writer is being a voracious reader. And so what are you reading these days?
00:10:51
Speaker
That's a great question. Let's see. Recently, I've read a couple of books I love. They're there by Tommy Orange, the novel, which everyone was talking about this summer was a fantastic read, along with heart berries. And I just read this book actually have it right here. I don't know if you've heard of this, The Cost of Living by
00:11:21
Speaker
Deborah Levy. And I just got done with that. And that is a fantastic, fantastic memoir. The subtitle is a working autobiography, which I love. I think right now, even though I read, I recently read a couple of novels, I mostly read nonfiction, creative nonfiction, and I'm really interested in
00:11:50
Speaker
if you're not surprised, books that are authors who are kind of upsetting or disrupting the memoir, creative nonfiction genre and doing things with form or approach that are different. And it's one of the reasons I like this cost of living, the cost of living book, because, you know, it can be described, I guess, in one way as a divorce memoir
00:12:20
Speaker
But it's more of an idea book, kind of more in the vein of Rebecca Solnit type of investigation and exploration. And this idea of calling something a working autobiography, meaning, you know, in one way that the text is being used to work out questions or problems more in the way that an essay would, rather than, you know, a memoir novel with a traditional narrative arc.
00:12:47
Speaker
is really exciting to me. So I'm trying to spend time with right now books that are disrupting form and expectations. So that's what I'm looking for at the moment. And I also just read a book. I can't tell you the name of it right now because it's not out and the name's not set, but a wonderful kind of fragmented memoir of postpartum psychosis.
00:13:16
Speaker
by a writer I know and I'm working on a blurb for this book and it's going to be out in 2019 and it's fantastic. Cool. Yeah, I might have to have her on then when that book comes out. Connect to you. Very nice. Yeah, I'd love to. Now, I love the idea of books as mentors and those books that kind of change your world from black and white into color, the ones that unlocked what it was possible for you to do with the written word and so forth.
00:13:45
Speaker
So what are what if you can name any maybe peeking over your shelf? Are there three to five books that you often reference reread things that showed you what could be done? Yes, absolutely. I mean, I don't know, actually, where I would be without books like that, because more than anything, you know, those books are just what you said. And I still
00:14:14
Speaker
You know, honestly, I still have dark moments where I think like I can't do this or I don't know how to do this. And I will go back to those books year after year. So yes, those books, one of those books is the Chronology of Water by Lydia Yaknowich. Yeah, that book's amazing. Right. Which really, really, really just
00:14:39
Speaker
opened up for me the possibility of how to tell personal story and the power of both text and silence and the permission to tell a story in a way that reveals things and keeps other things hidden intentionally, not because as an author you're afraid of it, but intentionally for aesthetic and for story. And so that book gave me the permission to
00:15:09
Speaker
approach story in that way and I go back to it constantly. The writer Abigail Thomas is a huge influence on me and she has a few books, she has many books, but the book that, one of the few that I go back to very often is called Safekeeping. And essentially it's a memoir of a relationship that's been lost, the person has died,
00:15:38
Speaker
But the book is deceptively simple. It's told in a series of vignettes. So each chapter is maybe as short as a paragraph, maybe as long as a couple of few pages. And these vignettes are layered on top of each other. It's not chronological. We move around in time. We move around in perspective and point of view. She utilizes characters in brilliant ways. And I go back to that book constantly.
00:16:07
Speaker
to remind myself what the possibility is of writing in a very contained and distilled way. And then two other authors that I often reference, I mentioned Rebecca Solnit, who, it's hard to use Rebecca Solnit as a reference because every time I look at her work, I'm like, okay, she's so brilliant that, what can I possibly draw from this? But I do, and several of her
00:16:37
Speaker
of her collections of essays, one the far away nearby I look at all the time as a way of, right now I'm really obsessed with whether it's possible for the form of a creative nonfiction book length work to both exist as sort of self-contained components or what you might think of as essays, while also simultaneously
00:17:04
Speaker
carrying forward the arc of an on the ground story chronologically. And it's something I've been puzzling over as I'm working on my next project. And that book, The Far Away Nearby is sort of one of the closest examples I've been able to find of kind of what I'm thinking of. And so I've been looking at it a lot just in terms of form and how she's weaving many threads together. And she's talking about
00:17:32
Speaker
both the literal stories and events in her life and the sort of broader kind of conceptual ideas. And then there's another author who's more well known, I think, as a poet, but I adore her essays. And her name is Leah Porpura. And she has a few collections of essays. And I think she's coming out with a new one in 2019. And she's one of those
00:18:00
Speaker
sort of quiet writers in that, you know, maybe, maybe people don't necessarily know about her. And she is, she kind of has a quiet sort of not out there public presence. And she comes out with these beautiful books every handful of years. But her essays are just beautiful lyrics, sort of prose poetry. And I'm very drawn to the kind of language in that. And see a little bit of that reflected sometimes in some of my writing.
00:18:30
Speaker
and go back to her to remind myself that you don't need to be writing about a huge thing. You don't need to be kind of laying out stick by stick a massive argument in order to tackle something big through language, the language itself. And she's just a master at that and I love her work. So there's a handful of very influential writers
00:19:01
Speaker
Yeah, I like the idea that you can go back to those writers or specific books and they kind of realign yourself in a way, like let you know the possibilities and kind of let you...
00:19:16
Speaker
Inspire you in a way like alright, you know, they they they were able to pull it off and it's you know You draw that kind of inspiration and energy to to apply it to your to your own work in some capacity You know, you can try to get as close to that star as you can but at least you know They're showing you the way they're taking your hand in a sense Absolutely. It also makes you feel like or it makes me feel I should say like You know, there are people there are writers out there that I'm in conversation with
00:19:46
Speaker
And obviously writing can be lonely and you're working on something that you don't know if it will ever be read by other people out there and you don't know how it will turn out.
Confidence and Belonging in Writing
00:20:02
Speaker
And this idea that when I sort of feel like I falter a little bit in my confidence or question what I'm trying to do, I think of these other
00:20:14
Speaker
writers as touchstones and who are out there and that my writing is trying to be in conversation with their writing and it helps kind of realign me. Don't think about anything beyond that. Think about this is a conversation going on that you're engaged with and your writing is going to be part of that conversation.
00:20:38
Speaker
It's funny you bring up confidence because that's something I've been thinking a lot about lately. The nature of this podcast is I talk to dozens upon dozens of people that I greatly admire and respect their work.
00:20:55
Speaker
oftentimes it's very humbling to read the work and then to even try to come back to my own and in a lot of ways it's kind of crippling in a sense because they're so good and then I'm like, what can I contribute to this? At least maybe I can have a conversation about it. And it does kind of
00:21:18
Speaker
It does bruise the confidence a bit. It's just my nature. I'm a little insecure by nature. I think a lot of writers are. Yeah. And you brought up confidence. And I wonder how do you remain confident in the face of people whose work you admire that you feel like you could never aspire to, but also writing for not knowing if your stuff is going to be red.
00:21:48
Speaker
that's an element of it as well. Yeah, that's a great question. I think in the beginning, when you don't know if your stuff is going to be read, you know, you pursue your work both out of, you know, I kind of feel like for myself anyway, if I sort of think back to the younger Natalie or the essence of who I am, that kind of confidence question
00:22:18
Speaker
is tied very much to a desire to kind of belong. I want to belong. I want to be part of this group. And so when I was beginning and I didn't know if my writing would ever be published, that kind of fueled me. Like both that, like I want to belong. I want to try this. I want to be, I want to get from here to there.
00:22:43
Speaker
And also just the desire, you know, when you're a writer or an artist of any type, most of us are really driven to do that art for ourselves. Like we can't not. We have to write. It's how we make sense of our world. It's how we think about it. We have to. So those two things, kind of the inner need to write and also the desire to belong to this group, this world, kind of drove me at first. And then I think once,
00:23:14
Speaker
people do read your writing and they respond to it in the way that you had hoped, then you can use that. And then that's in your toolkit also. Then you think that's a confidence booster because you realize, you know, people love this book. They, or people love this essay or they, you know, I just shared two paragraphs at an open mic and now someone's crying. Um,
00:23:42
Speaker
Once that happens, then you realize, okay, my words can have an impact. Maybe I'll never be a cultural commentator or a North star the way that Rebecca Solnit is. But I can contribute to that and impact people. And so once you see that happen, even on a small scale, you can use that. But before you have that, I think being driven by
00:24:13
Speaker
your desire to make art and also letting that kind of insecurity whatever version it is for you but letting that drive you and saying okay like I am insecure I am unsure but there's a reason I want to do this I want to belong I want to be part of this conversation just accept that and kind of let it let it push you and and that is what I did and it worked
00:24:35
Speaker
You said you, like most writers, have to write filmmakers.
Transition from Journalism to Creative Writing
00:24:40
Speaker
They have to make film and so forth. Where did that come from, that hunger and desire to write? Even in the absence of audience, it's something that you have to do. Yeah. I mean, I guess that it started, you know, when I was a kid and I was an interesting child.
00:25:05
Speaker
I'm like one of those people they say like I'm an extroverted introvert so you know I'm introverted and I was as a child in the sense that you know being in a large group and sort of having to assert myself made me very nervous and so you know what if everyone ignored me and what if no one knew I was here and what if I'm actually literally invisible and I just don't know it and
00:25:31
Speaker
You know all of those worries and so I spent a good amount of time alone as a kid reading and writing and I also had a very confusing childhood where I Think a lot of things were sort of read the book and people read the book They'll see some of this a lot of things were kind of shouted in mystery and I also was very obsessed with mystery and with the unknown, you know some my favorite shows were like the Twilight Zone and Ray Bradbury theater and
00:26:03
Speaker
I would wake up at 5 a.m. when it was still dark out when other kids would, you know, be getting ready to watch The Smurfs and other 80s cartoons and I would like watch this dark, dark stuff that I could do because my parents were still asleep and no one would say, what are you watching? And so I really liked, you know, this kind of unknown world and the way that I could kind of wade through the unknown was to, to question it. And I did that through writing and I would kind of invent
00:26:32
Speaker
scenarios to explain things that I didn't understand. And then, you know, later when I was a teenager, very angsty, I would use writing to kind of work through some of my feelings. And so I've always felt like I need to turn to writing to kind of ask questions and to process things. And then I didn't really pursue writing as art.
00:27:01
Speaker
until much later. My background is journalism. And when I was in college, I was kind of floating around and I didn't know what to do. And I had to place myself in that conversation about, well, what are your talents? Like, what could you do? Because you can't live in a box. On the street, you have to find a career. And I thought, OK, well, I can write. So might as well just go into journalism. Not really thinking that through very much. And so then I spent a lot of years
00:27:30
Speaker
of working on those writing skills, but in the sense of learning how to tell other people's stories. So I was writing and I was kind of satisfying that need, but in a different way. And then, um, I think when about 10 years ago, um, I realized that there was kind of a part of that, that wasn't fulfilled. And that was like the desire to make art. Um, and so that's when I got serious about saying, you know,
00:27:57
Speaker
all of this angsty stuff and all of this processing your reality and these questions, that's all served you well. But actually, you can turn this into something beautiful that other people want to read, and that can help them too. So kind of moved in that direction.
00:28:15
Speaker
What did being a reporter teach you about the type of writing that you ultimately want to do, which is more, you know, more artistic versus, you know, the inverted pyramid style? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like in a way it taught me everything. First of all, it taught me, I think, the value, the importance of people's stories, like everybody
00:28:45
Speaker
has an important story, and that stories happen in very small moments. Some people have crazy things happen to them, and they write books about those crazy things, and those are fascinating. But most of my favorite books and essays are not about crazy things at all. They're about very, very ordinary lives, ordinary occurrences.
00:29:15
Speaker
realities that happen, can happen to any one of us. And I think being a reporter and learning how to listen to people and listen to their stories and look for that, you know, what Barr calls the punkdom in the photograph, that moment of sort of crystalline emotion that center our heart
00:29:42
Speaker
of something which doesn't have to be a huge, huge event, but can be the tiniest moment. Learning how to find that I think was something that I learned to do, being a reporter and listening to people and giving them the space and the kind of compassion and empathy that you have to have as a reporter, because it's terrifying to speak to a reporter, somebody you don't know about something that happened to you or that you observed or your feelings or something that impacts you.
00:30:12
Speaker
And it's like utter chutzpah to ask somebody to do that. So you have to be so empathetic and so gentle. I mean, some reporters aren't, but I felt like that was the only way that I could do that job was to just give them the space and the kind of respect to say whatever it was that they needed to say. And so learning,
00:30:38
Speaker
to build that muscle, then I was able to have that muscle on to turn it on myself, turn it to myself, and give myself this sort of space and empathy that would kind of counteract that voice like, well, nothing huge happened to you. It's not like you were in an airplane in 9-11. Come on. Why do you get to have the space to tell people a story? And I could kind of counteract that voice with that very well-exercised muscle of empathy.
00:31:07
Speaker
which was you know everybody has a story and there's something that's very universal in here and just let's just calm down and get to it. So I think that that's kind of the most important thing that I brought out of journalism and then also just language and words and sort of being excited about exploring how to distill something to its most essential language as a way of as a way of communicating and that's kind of the type of writing that I'm
00:31:37
Speaker
doing right now is I've been calling it like getting to the quick of it. And you know, that's why I've been playing a lot with sort of fragmented writing. Instead of relying on these whole, you know, architectures and structures the way you know, an absolutely incredible, beautiful essay by somebody like Rebecca Solnit does. Right now I'm more interested in
00:32:05
Speaker
these sort of glimmers or these quicks, getting to the quicks of stories and emotion. And I think that's kind of an outcome of being a journalist and working with 12 inches to tell this person's life changing story.
00:32:29
Speaker
Yeah, you've cultivated a skill of not only what to put into a story, but ultimately what needs to be taken out of it, right? Right. What about writing short and fragmented is appealing to your taste
Exploring New Writing Forms
00:32:45
Speaker
at the moment? And certainly an element that you use with aplomb in a California calling. Thank you. Yeah, I think what's appealing to me is kind of combining
00:32:58
Speaker
It's combining the things that I love about... Here's my dog. Oh, nice. It's a dog-friendly podcast. I'm gonna let her in. Cool. What kind of dog? Come on. She's a labradoodle. Oh, very nice. It is. What's her name? Her name is Mabel. Mabel, all right. She's a sweetie. All right, lie down.
00:33:28
Speaker
So yeah, so I think it combines like two things that I love. One is sort of this advantage of more of a traditional essay, which is built on inquiry. And you can have a question that you don't have an answer to or a series of questions and layer them and explore the purpose of this body of writing of this text is to explore a question. And, you know, hopefully you get to
00:33:56
Speaker
a place at the end that's different from the place that you started in. It doesn't necessarily mean you've solved it. In fact, I hate the essays that sort of artificially tie something up with a bow, but you get to a place of new understanding. So I love that about the essay form. And then what I love about sort of the more traditional narrative arc is that you have this forward moving story that, you know, you're hooked from the beginning and it's sort of that essential human like
00:34:25
Speaker
desire to find out, well, what happened next? Then what happened? Then what happened? And so I'm trying to, I think, take elements of both of those things and combine them into something that, um, a kind of tax that's allowed to ask questions and explore unknowns as a way of working, working things out. Um, and also moves forward, but kind of,
00:34:54
Speaker
I guess slices away the parts of both of those forms that are maybe unnecessary. Um, and it's an experiment, right? Because, um, you know, I find like some of the writing that's, that is in California calling and some of the types of writing that I'm working on now, I'm asking a lot of the reader, you know, I'm asking the reader to do a different type of work than
00:35:22
Speaker
you're asking the reader to do when you're writing a novel or a memoir that's a traditional narrative arc that's driven forward mainly by story. You know, what happens, what happens next, what happens next, chapter by chapter. And you're asking the reader to do a different kind of work than you are when you're writing a traditional essay where you're laying out a lot of questions, but the narrator is constantly coming in and expounding on those.
00:35:50
Speaker
you always feel the guiding hand of the narrator in a traditional essay. The narrator's right alongside of you, sort of unspooling this inquiry, and you know that a version of the narrator, the version of the narrator that has finished writing this essay knows where it's going, and you feel that, and you feel that kind of thread unspooling and that hand holding taking you along. And, you know, this kind of hybrid
00:36:18
Speaker
I'm asking something different of readers. I'm asking for trust, but I'm also saying there are gaps here. There are gaps that you are going to need to fill in. And that these silences that are being left here intentionally are meant for the reader to pick up and utilize to help fill in the story. And it's a different kind of request. It's a different kind of work.
00:36:44
Speaker
Honestly, I'm exploring this type of writing in part because it's what I'm very excited about as a reader right now. I'm enjoying reading that type of work, work that's in that hybrid ecosystem. I'm employing it as a writer and asking my readers to go along with me on that.
00:37:09
Speaker
And when you were writing this book and all your writing in general, how do you approach your days when you're in that generative phase of the process? What kind of routines and rituals do you employ so you can confidently approach the work for that given day? Writers have all different types of processes. I've never been the writer
00:37:37
Speaker
who will be able to tell you, you know, I wake up and from five to seven in the morning, I always write and then I have my tea break. And then from 10 to noon, I revise. I don't have a schedule like that, both because, you know, my life doesn't really allow that kind of a set schedule and also because my brain doesn't really work that way. So I do tend to generally write in spurts of an hour or two at a time.
00:38:06
Speaker
But they vary, they vary wildly over time. If I'm engaged closely in a project, in the developmental stage of a project, which I am right now, then what that could look like is maybe I'll wake up in the morning before I start the other parts of my day and I'll make some notes or I'll revise something that I did the day before. And then later in the day, I'll come back and spend an hour or two
00:38:35
Speaker
trying to generate new work. And then I might leave it for a few days. And what I'm doing when I'm not writing is thinking. And I'm finding that the kind of writing that I'm trying to do is predicated on thinking that happens away from the page. And so I'm learning to give myself space and not get frustrated or frantic. If I haven't written 3,000 or 4,000 words this week,
00:39:06
Speaker
maybe I've written a thousand words this week or 500 words this week, but the time away I've been able to advance some of these ideas by being away from the page or by just letting them simmer a little bit. So the process is kind of unpredictable. And some days I might write for hours and then I might go a week and not write anything, but it feels like I'm still doing work during that time.
00:39:35
Speaker
Do you have a way of recording or measuring these even these these spaces of thinking so you can actually reflect back on it and and feel like you did in fact accomplish something and not look back on the day and be like, shit, what did I do? No, I like to actually flagellate myself and say, you're useless. You've done nothing this week.
00:40:04
Speaker
You're not a writer. That's part of it. Staying in that mentality. We've got a lot in common. I'm a habitual note taker, so I take a lot of notes. For a year or so, I was joking. Basically, the year where California Calling was essentially done, but going through the editing march toward publishing process.
00:40:33
Speaker
Um, that year I was sort of joking when people would say like, what are you working on next? I was saying things like, I don't think I'll ever write another book, but I'm going to write a lot of notes in my life because all I could do is take these notes. So, but it turns out that those notes, those notes are writing, those are, those notes are the work. Um, and so I find as long as I'm like, if I'm having thoughts and ideas, as long as I somehow
00:41:04
Speaker
log them, you know, that could be very detailed or that could be like one sentence, like can't stop thinking about image of a cookie in bakery. I know what that means. Like I know this scene or this memory that I've been turning over and over in my mind for weeks. I know that that, you know, will remind me or hint at hint at that. And then, you know, my mind will allow the rest of it to flood back. So just taking notes,
00:41:34
Speaker
kind of solidifies those ideas somewhere and then I can come back to them when I'm in more of a production mode and I can make use of them. So it's a process that I think I finally feel comfortable with and confident that that time isn't being wasted as long as I find a way of sort of recording some of those thoughts or ideas for use later.
00:42:01
Speaker
Yeah, I like this idea of you like collecting string in a sense, picking something from here, here, here and here. And then when you have those moments where you can expand on a thought or just a cool idea or the smell of these fresh cookies or something, it's something that you have readily accessible because you've been collecting and curating things throughout your day and your week. Yep, exactly. Yeah, it's like a
00:42:28
Speaker
Essentially, it's a toolkit to choose from. I recently worked on an essay that I guess essentially the topic of this essay could be described as female rage in the face of living in a world that seems to many women and girls to be very threatening toward them or violent toward them.
00:42:55
Speaker
you know this sort of essay pairs together this sort of scene where my family went on vacation to the seaside in Oregon and we rode these kind of rickety go-karts that we ride every year and there was I have two teen daughters and there was another family there with some teenage sons and so part of the essay tells the story of what happened on the track with sort of the
00:43:25
Speaker
energy and tension and dynamics of the men and women and teenage girls and teenage boys in this space. And then there are other parts of the essay that, you know, literally are these kind of glimmers that I'd been curating and collecting over the previous couple of months. You know, I wrote a fairy and a man was walking with his wife and he crushed a soda can in his hand like it was a piece of tissue and the noise made me jump.
00:43:55
Speaker
and I wrote it down that day, like what does that mean? What does that mean to just be out and about in your daily life? And being reminded of the physical strength of men, you know, makes you jump as a woman, makes you look around. And a few other kind of incidents and things from the news. And so somehow it became clear to me after, you know, kind of curating and jotting those,
00:44:23
Speaker
totally disparate events and thoughts and ideas down over a few months, these all belong together. They're actually working together to talk about something that's difficult to talk about. So I'm finding that can be the outcome of maybe not churning out a lot of work in the moment that something happens or the moment you have a thought or idea, but kind of letting that build and grow and making note of it. And I love the way you use the word curate because I think that's very accurate.
00:44:53
Speaker
When you're working on something or even in the spaces in between where you're doing a lot of thinking about the process, I always love getting a sense of how each individual artist defines rigor and tenacity and hard work in this line of work where sometimes it's not always tangible that
Recognizing Productivity in Writing
00:45:15
Speaker
a lot of
00:45:15
Speaker
actual nose to the grindstone, bloodied up hands, blisters, all that kind of stuff that's apparent in something more physical, but with something that is of this nature. Sometimes it's hard to define what hard work is like, and I wonder how you would define that. So when you do
00:45:36
Speaker
sit at the computer or with your notes, you can be like, Oh, yeah, that was that was a good day. I feel good about the time spent and the work spent today as a, you know, how you measure that. I always like getting a sense of that. Yeah, that's a great question. Right, because you in a sense, if you measure it by what you publish,
00:46:01
Speaker
you have to be so patient, such a long tail that you can't only measure it that way, right? Because most of us would go insane. I think for me, the way that I recognize most that I've been working hard and that something just came from that labor is that I look for that moment when I can reread something that I've written and I get kind of a little,
00:46:32
Speaker
like a little frisson, like a little chill. And it's just like, I'm sure every writer or artist has a version of that in their different way. Maybe it's not a chill, maybe it's a who knows what it is, but sort of feeling like this is good. And that'll usually happen like maybe it's two or three paragraphs, maybe it's one paragraph, but it's that for me is like,
00:47:00
Speaker
the indication that you have been working and this, like now you have this and this is the fruit of that labor, however much labor went into that. And sometimes it's, you know, weeks or months. And sometimes you sit down and something incredible comes in 30 minutes, whatever that type of labor was, that this is the fruit of it. And I always had that kind of physical sensation.
00:47:29
Speaker
I guess it's excitement or belief in it or feeling moved by what you just wrote or feeling the sense that this is going to move somebody else. And so I look for those and those kind of carry me along and help remind me that there's going to be a bigger payoff for this work down the road, but that I'm on the right track.
00:47:53
Speaker
And when you're in the throes of a project, too, whether it's book length or even just an essay, long or short, and you were talking earlier, right back when we started about dark moments, and oftentimes it's like ugly middles, messy middles, those times where you're too far away to turn home, but you're also, the lighthouse is way off in the distance.
00:48:19
Speaker
How do you deal with that, that grind in the middle to put your head down and to try and finish and not get too weighed down by just being so sort of lost in the middle of the dark forest? Yeah, yeah. I think I'll try anything I can. And it's different every time. You know, sometimes in those moments, that's when I stop
00:48:48
Speaker
And I reach for those authors that we talked about earlier and others like them. If I really, really hit a wall and I really feel like I'm completely in the dark forest, I might start having thoughts like, this is insane. What you're trying to do isn't a thing. You're going nowhere. You're going in circles. You can't get from where you are now to the thing
00:49:14
Speaker
you're envisioning, like there's literally no path of breadcrumbs to see. Sometimes I'll just stop and I'll go and read the writers who I feel like have done that and almost every time I'll read, and it doesn't have to be like a long break, I'll read something from one of these other writers and I'll say, oh yeah, like, okay, I'm back on the track, like I can see the path.
00:49:44
Speaker
Like they did it, this is what I'm trying to do, I can do this. So a lot of times it's actually walking away. And sometimes when you have a deadline or something, it's more just forcing, slogging. And a lot of writing teachers talk about just keep typing, just keep your fingers moving, just write crap until something beyond crap comes out. And I'm not very good at that at all.
00:50:12
Speaker
Usually, if I force myself to do that, nothing good comes out. Even coming from newspapers, you have a hard time doing that? Yeah, I do. I'm more of a planner and a plotter, so I'm more like, I'll stop with the right thing, and I'll go back to the notes and the thinking, and I'll diagram, and I'll make lists of associations, and I'll go backward to the blueprint stage.
00:50:42
Speaker
of something and I'll get myself unstuck there and then I'll go back to the writing. And you know, it's different for everyone. I do wish that I sometimes was, I would be able to, you know, just use the keep the fingers moving and something eventually good will come out kind of approach. But I think it's the same sort of skill as writing fiction, which I'm not great at, which is the sort of sitting down to the blank page having
00:51:09
Speaker
sometimes no idea what you're gonna do and sort of you hear fiction writers say like I'm gonna let the characters tell me what happens next. That's like a terrifying sentence for me. I don't think I could ever operate that way and I wish I could because I'd love to be able to write you know good fiction but it hasn't happened yet. I kind of need to get through the thinking first and I need to come to the page with ideas or direction and so when I get stuck and I'm in the forest I'll back out and
00:51:38
Speaker
I'll go back to the ideas in the direction and reading the writers who are kind of in that similar conversation and try to get myself unstuck there. And I will be pretty ruthless about it. It's not like I'm giving up and walking away. It's that I'm kind of going to these other doors and trying to get in through that way instead.
00:52:01
Speaker
Would you characterize yourself as a very strong finisher of work? When you get to a point where you can see the end of something, even if you're three quarters of the way through, you're able to power through. Yeah, I'm definitely a finisher. I'm almost mercenary in that sense. For me, I'm not a writer who has a ton, ton, ton of
00:52:30
Speaker
unused writing just sitting there like, I have five novels in my drawer kind of thing. I'm, I'm really mercenary. Like if I'm working on it, I am going to use this in some way. I don't care how, you know, I don't care how many times I have to revise it. I don't care if I have to set it aside for the next essay or the next project. But like, if I'm working, if I have work, I'm going to try to use it. And I think that's a kind of a combination of
00:52:56
Speaker
you know, coming from the sort of journalist background, which is like, you don't have a choice, you need to finish, you need to finish in a certain amount of time. And there's not really the luxury of waste. You can't, you know, you can't write three or four news stories that never get used. Like you have a certain amount of time, certain amount of energy, you have to make this work in some way. So I think part of it is that and part of it is just, you know, I have a really busy life, like,
00:53:24
Speaker
like we all do and the last sort of 10 years when I've really been focusing on my creative writing, I've almost always had a full-time job. I'm a mom to two kids and I have to have this juggle. So I don't really have the luxury of starting things for fun that I never come back to or kind of just letting something go because it maybe isn't speaking to me right now.
00:53:53
Speaker
I have to finish things and I have to make them work.
Balancing Day Jobs and Writing
00:53:59
Speaker
you alluded to day job, of course, being a mom, too. I think this is a good point and worth expanding on, this idea that most, I would say, nine out of 10 people I've had on this show, and you're probably gonna be episode 124 of all these people, whether they're essayists, memoirs, stock filmmakers, narrative journalists, you name it. And most, if not all of them, do have
00:54:28
Speaker
day jobs and then they find ways to write long features or essays or even books. It's not their primary form of income and I think a lot of people, myself included, sometimes just feel like a loser.
00:54:46
Speaker
when you can't support yourself wholly on your art. But the fact is so many like you're agreeing like a lot of people you got to subsidize your art with something more steady. So what are some jobs that you have or maybe your current job? Well, like what do you do? That eats up most of your time. So but then you're able to, of course, find your writing time and make time for the art that matters to you. Yeah, yeah.
00:55:13
Speaker
Yeah, it's something that so many of us struggle with, right? And it's just a reality. And I used to think that it was, you know, the worst thing, the worst thing in the world, the worst reality. And now I've kind of come around to realize, like, first of all, it's the most common reality for so many artists. And I also think just kind of looking at my own trajectory, that it actually has helped me over time. So, you know, some of the things I've done, I mean, the job that I have now is I work
00:55:41
Speaker
my day job in corporate communications. So I work for a large technology company and through an agency as a vendor and I help them shape their communications. And sometimes that can be creative and sometimes it can be really the opposite of creative. And then I've also been a magazine editor. I've been a freelance writer but more as a journalist. For a while I owned my own small
00:56:11
Speaker
children related business. So lots of different things. And in the beginning, I found, especially when I was working as a journalist, I found that like I was really kind of drained of creative energy at the end of the day, even though it was a different kind of writing, I just kind of felt drained. And then as I kind of moved into other types of day jobs, which weren't so creative, I felt like
00:56:39
Speaker
my creative writing became more and more like a necessary outlet. And then I sort of needed to do that just kind of for my own sort of like a release valve. And so in a lot of ways, like that kind of second job of creative writing, while it was difficult to manage the time, it sort of fed me and it allowed me to be
00:57:07
Speaker
creative in part of my life and then the other parts of my life that weren't creative were easier to manage or I was able to approach them with a more creative state of mind because I had opened the door to my creativity. I wasn't shutting it out or pushing it down. What does that look like in reality though? When I was
00:57:30
Speaker
When I went back to get my MFA, I was, I think, 37. This was a few years ago. I was 37 when I went back to school. And there were people in my program who were 22 and who had just gotten out of their undergraduate program and were pretty carefree, like living in a house with six people and paying $150 in rent and just studying. And I was like, this is hilarious. How am I going to
00:57:58
Speaker
How am I going to create comparable work alongside these people who maybe had less life experience but the luxury of time that I couldn't even imagine? And when I started that program, I thought I would be taking a sabbatical for my day job. And a month into that time, my husband was laid off. And so it suddenly became impossible for me to quit my job. And really, it wasn't a possibility in my mind for me to step out of my MFA program that I had waited so long
00:58:28
Speaker
to kind of go back to, waited until I could afford it, until I had kind of advanced on my career and sort of built some security in my life. And I was like, I'm not going to give this up now. I'll just have to do both. And what I learned in that two years, and that program was where I started essentially the framework for California Calling, which was part of it was my thesis. What I learned in there that surprised me was that
00:58:58
Speaker
I was kind of coming into this space with so much energy, even though I was exhausted as hell, but so much creativity. And you know, I wasn't doing less work than these other than my peers and my cohort who didn't have a job and who didn't have a family. I was producing as much as them because I was so there was so much on the line for me. And I had so much at stake. And that sort of pushed me
00:59:28
Speaker
to work. And I think it's the same thing with parenting children, especially, I guess I can only speak for myself as a woman and maybe some fathers have had this experience too, but when you have children, your identity kind of takes a beating. You're like, who am I? I spend now, suddenly I spend so much of my time caring for these people and what happened to the parts of me from before. And it feels like
00:59:57
Speaker
there, there's a lot at stake, too. Especially with me, I have daughters and, you know, I never want them to grow up and think like, you know, as an example, my own mother, you know, before she had me and this was in the 70s, she went to art school and she had a portfolio and she was she was a wonderful artist. And then she kind of stepped into motherhood. And then that was what you did. You let everything else fall away in those days. And I remember as a kid, her big, huge
01:00:26
Speaker
black leather portfolio kind of sitting in the closet and I would always ask her, can I look through it? Can I look through it? And sometimes she would let me and there were these beautiful, you know, oil paintings and acrylic paintings and all this beautiful work. And I would sometimes ask her, you know, do you ever want to do this again? Do you want to go back to this? And she would say like, Oh yeah, I don't really have the time. And I never wanted to show that possibility to my kids. I wanted to show them like, if you have a passion, you stay with it.
01:00:56
Speaker
And so there's so much at stake, both when you have to, you know, make a living and support yourself no matter what. And when you have children, I think nowadays that for me, that kind of fueled my production. And I was never so productive as when I had all of these things to juggle. And my best friend always, she's in the book, her name is Suzanne, and she always jokes with me, like, you just need to pile on one more thing, don't you?
01:01:24
Speaker
And I do, and it makes me more productive. So for me, that's what works, and that's what fuels me.
01:01:34
Speaker
It's amazing how these kind of boundaries and structures can actually make you more productive if you have that. On Monday morning, there is only 45 minutes to get anything done. This is anybody out there listening. If you only have 45 minutes and you're focused on that, you can probably get more done in that 45 minutes than you could in 90 minutes if you really focus. Absolutely.
01:02:03
Speaker
Absolutely. Like I wrote parts of this book, literally, I'm not kidding you in 20 minutes while in the car, you know, while a kid was having a soccer practice in 20 minutes since. And I read this story a few years ago while I was working on this book, and I wish I knew who it was. Maybe I'll find him someday. But a story I heard from someone about this guy, local authors in Seattle, who they knew.
01:02:34
Speaker
who basically, he was kind of in a similar scenario. You know, had a full-time job and he had young kids and he would take his minivan, which I kind of, I comically related to because I had this like horrible minivan at the time that I just like, I hated. It was like this symbol of like everything that I didn't want to become and I had to drive it. I don't have that anymore. But I had this minivan at the time and I heard the story of this guy who,
01:03:01
Speaker
was a dad, he had young kids, he had a full-time job, he had this shitty minivan and he was writing a book. And the only way that he could get writing done was he'd take the minivan and he'd leave the house at six in the morning and he'd drive the minivan to the Fred Meyer, which is like, you know, the Fred Meyer, it's like a grocery store slash Target, Walmart type of place. And he'd
01:03:26
Speaker
park it in the parking lot and he'd sit in the back of this minivan, which I don't know this guy, I don't even know who he is, but I always pictured like just a disaster, you know, like old smelly sports clothes and like soccer balls and towels and, you know, all kinds of the gross stuff that you would have in the back of the minivan and he'd sit there and he'd write for an hour. And he wrote a book this way at six in the morning in this parking lot of, you know, basically like a Walmart type place.
01:03:56
Speaker
And I always used to think of this guy and say, well, if my friend said that this guy did it that way, then I'm not going to waste 20 minutes that I have sitting in my minivan while my kid is on the field. And I wrote so much of this book in those little spurts. And exactly what you said, nothing is wasted. If you have 45 minutes, you get to work. And you, you're mercenary. And you do not waste. Sit around for 45 minutes and think, I have writer's block.
01:04:25
Speaker
Like writer's block is a luxury that I think sometimes can get in our way or can kind of harm us. If we don't have the time or the luxury for writer's block, then we just put that aside and we just get to work.
01:04:40
Speaker
Yeah, similarly, I know I say this periodically when it's Jermaine, it's when I had Andre Dubuis III on like a while ago. You know, we talked about his memoir, Townie, but we were also talking a lot about just his writing process. And when he was writing House of Sand and Fog, this novel that was one of my favorite books ever.
01:05:05
Speaker
Yeah. He wrote that book in 17 minute spurts in his truck. He would drive. He had a 17 minute window. He had three kids, a wife, you know, supporting. He was a carpenter and he would drive to the side of a road near this graveyard and he would have 17 minutes to write long hand in his truck. And he wrote that book in those little spurts.
01:05:30
Speaker
just sandwich, finding that little crack of time in the course of a day, look what he made of it. It's a life-changing book and of course he teaches today. He doesn't solely live off book sales. He's got his own kind of day job and so forth.
01:05:49
Speaker
But they just speaks to, you know, that was the time he needed or the only time he had and he made a brilliant piece of art that was life changing. And he did it in 17 minute increments. Like you don't need eight hours a day to do it. You just need a little bit of time and rigor and persistence. That's an unbelievable story. I'm so glad you told me that. I'm going to go listen to that now because that is
01:06:12
Speaker
I mean, that's literally one of my favorite books and like just an unbelievable piece of beauty. Like you look at a book like that and you're like, how, how, how. Yeah. Yeah. It's episode 54. I'll send you the, I'll send you the link too, but it's fit. Yeah. It's episode 54. If I recall. Yeah.
01:06:29
Speaker
Oh man.
Future Projects and Connection with Natalie Singer
01:06:32
Speaker
You've had the experience of writing California Calling, this self interrogation of these snippets of asking yourself these questions, open-ended questions and you're able to just have these little vignettes throughout the whole thing and it reads like a nice little sort of
01:06:51
Speaker
interrogatory slideshow, if you will. And it's cool, it's fragmented in that sense that it's really sort of exciting to you at the moment. From the creation of this book and what you're working on next, what have you learned and how have you grown as a writer from this form and to what you might be working on next? Yeah, that's a great question.
01:07:18
Speaker
Well, what I'm working on next, I thought in the beginning was going to be more of a collection of sort of traditionally structured essays. And I'm working with right now some concerns around wildernesses and how we relate to wildernesses, both literal wildernesses and metaphorical wildernesses. And I've always been
01:07:45
Speaker
strangely terrified of the wilderness, the woods, nature. And in a weird way, in a way that biologically, according to my research, we're not supposed to be, we're supposed to feel this sort of sense of biophilia or affinity to nature. And I have never felt that. I've always felt kind of a terror. So this project began as an idea of looking into that. And as I thought about that,
01:08:13
Speaker
idea more and also as sort of some themes kind of emerged on our national landscape and our cultural landscape, I started to become obsessed with the multiple meanings of the idea of wilderness. The wilderness, let's say, of loneliness and the wilderness of middle age and the particular wilderness of
01:08:44
Speaker
launching your daughters into the world as it is today, as they're on the cusp of becoming women in the wilderness of middle marriage and things like that. So I thought at first as I began working on this, that I would be able to use a form of standalone essay to kind of interrogate again, if you will, the sort of different ideas about wilderness and how
01:09:14
Speaker
we can approach them, these wildernesses. And as I've been working on it, it's sort of, it's kind of morphing into more of kind of a structure that harkens more back to what I used for California Calling, but is different in the sense that I think, you know, one of you asked me what I've learned and something that I've learned with this, you know, freshman book is that form can be very exciting.
01:09:44
Speaker
And we want to try a lot of different things. And I think kind of being in an experimental mindset at the time that I wrote California Calling helped shape it. And I think this next book will take some of that, but maybe evolve it in the sense that I'm hoping that there's a story on the ground that will hang together more tightly and kind of advance with a narrative arc.
01:10:13
Speaker
and that that story on the ground will be embedded within this larger constellation of kind of essayistic ideas. And like I mentioned before, it's been difficult to find some books that have this type of structure. So I don't know if, you know, I'm crazy and kind of trying to invent something that doesn't exist or whether it's not possible or whether I'm pushing new ground
01:10:42
Speaker
So I'm kind of in that space right now of trying to figure that out. And if it's pushing new ground, then that's great and it's okay, but I need to figure out how to do that. So that's sort of where I am right now. And I think, you know, one thing I've learned is, you know, it's fun to experiment, but I also need to keep in mind what readers need and what's going to be most effective for readers. And then also,
01:11:06
Speaker
you know, learning that not everything has been done yet. And it's okay to figure out how to do something, figure out how to do something new. So I'm kind of in that space of experimenting again. And I don't know really where it's going to lead me, but hopefully some are good.
01:11:23
Speaker
Well, I think that's a wonderful place for us to end this very first conversation of what I hope will be many between you and I in the coming years as more and more of your work comes out. I hope so too. Yeah. Where can people find you online and maybe get more familiar with your work if they don't already know? Yeah. They can go to my website.
01:11:51
Speaker
which is nataliesingereights.com. And I post links to interviews and writing and events and appearances and things there. And if they want to, they can also figure out how to follow me on Twitter and Facebook through that website and Instagram. All my links are there. So yeah, and I do sometimes teach
01:12:19
Speaker
classes in Seattle, I'll be teaching a class on the essay this winter as well as a class on how to juggle, I think it's gonna be called Feeding the Beast, how to basically juggle art and your real life. So what we talked about and I think that'll be through Hugo House this winter if some folks are in Seattle. So you can find out about all that good stuff at my website.
01:12:46
Speaker
Oh, that's really cool. And yeah, you're just up the road from me. I live in Eugene, so Eugene, Oregon. So we're not too far away. So I hope we get to talk again soon. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you very much for the time for coming on the show and coming on a Sunday morning. So this is a lot of fun and I look forward to, like I said, more conversations like this in the future. So thank you for your work and thank you for your time.
01:13:16
Speaker
Well, that was fun. There's been maybe five podcasts in the run of the show that were not fun, but this was not one of them. This was a fun one. So the show is at CNF pod on Twitter and I'm at Brendan O'Mara on Twitter. I don't know. Follow either of those or two would be pretty rad. The show is on Facebook too, if you're into that. I'm also on Instagram, which is not so on brand.
01:13:45
Speaker
It feels like a real trip. I post drawings, audiograms, pictures of me as a dinosaur. It's a mess. So it's perfect, because my decidedly childless life is a mess. I got 99 problems, but a podcast ain't one.
01:14:02
Speaker
You doing the newsletter thing? Subscribe at my website BrendanOmera.com, hey hey. And if you like this show, share it with a friend. Just one friend. The pod needs to keep on growing. Otherwise, what are we doing? Otherwise,
01:14:17
Speaker
people won't want to come on the show they'll be like you're not worth my time and I'll be like man that hurts mom so please share it with a friend and subscribe if you haven't already oh yeah and if you can't do interview see ya