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Episode 358: Erica J. Berry
452 Plays2 years ago
Erica J. Berry (@ericajberry) is back, this time to talk about her book Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear (Flatiron Books).
Social: @CNFPod
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Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Promoting Athletic Brewing
00:00:00
Speaker
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00:00:25
Speaker
So give it a shot. Try the athletic light or the free wave. They're my personal faves right now. And that's been a little bit of a learning curve for me to figure out how to silence those internal critics that get louder when there's more of an external audience.
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:46
Speaker
ACNFers, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going? Today's guest is none other than Erica J. Berry. Sound familiar? She was on the podcast way back in the early run for episode 76. That was in 2017.
00:01:08
Speaker
I shudder to think of the audio, but it's there if you want to check it out.
Discussing Erica J. Berry's Book 'Wolfish'
00:01:12
Speaker
Her first book is out and it's called Wolfish, Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear. It's published by Flatiron Books. Funny aside, my father-in-law saw me reading this book and he was like, what's a wolf fish?
00:01:27
Speaker
He had a point. It's sort of like catfish, right? Anyway, wolfish, not wolf-fish. Go ahead and shelve Erica's book beside your copies of anything Leslie Jamison or Rebecca Solnit wrote. It belongs next to them, alright?
00:01:43
Speaker
Come at me, bro. We talk about how the wolf is the vector to tell this story. OR7, who was a famous wolf in Oregon, has something of an egg binder in this story.
00:01:59
Speaker
the terror of having to deliver on your book proposal and how Erica's writing and her relationship to writing has changed since we last spoke.
Evolving Relationship with Writing
00:02:08
Speaker
Rich stuff. See, I'm finding that every five years or so, my relationship to writing kind of changes. I want to stop short of saying evolves, but it kind of evolves. So anyway, that was on my mind. So I wanted to get her sense of that.
00:02:26
Speaker
Make sure you're heading over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for my up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter for a collection of things I think will add value to your writing life, your writing journey, your whatever. First of the month, no spam. So far as I can tell, you can't beat it. All right, hey, why wait? Why wait any longer? Let's get after it with Erica J. Berry.
00:03:01
Speaker
It's actually been 10 years because at Bowdoin College in 2013 was when you started really exploring this stuff, and it's coming to fruition in Wolfish now, 10 years later. Yeah, it is. I should have. I find it painful to listen to my own voice, of course, but if I'd re-listened to that earlier one, it would be interesting to see that as a core sample of how I was thinking about
00:03:25
Speaker
wolves and certainly some of the similar themes of sort of uncertainty and fear and
00:03:32
Speaker
how we relate to stories and folklore at that time. Yeah, where I wanted a good jumping off point too, given that it's been five and a half-ish, six years since we last spoke, when you started as a writer and you're low to mid-20s and now you're in your low 30s, so there's like a 10-year arc there.
00:03:56
Speaker
In my experience, my relationship to writing kind of evolves or matures, or I don't know how you want to call it, but the relationship to it changes, I would say, about every five years or so. I wonder for you, in the last, you've had essentially two five-year bumps, so in a sense, how has your relationship changed to it over the last 10 years, but maybe specifically in five-year chunks there?
Challenges of Book Proposal During Pandemic
00:04:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question.
00:04:24
Speaker
I think there's something about those early years that I now look back quite sort of nostalgically in the way that I'm probably prone to. It's a bad habit, as many of us are.
00:04:36
Speaker
I felt like nothing, it was all just noodling around in a way. And the experimentation felt really, nobody was watching, so there was nowhere to fall, really. It was really feral feeling. And I think at the time, I felt like the stakes were really high, but now I see my early 20s, the hunger to just experiment. And in some ways, I think that
00:05:03
Speaker
Having that time and in my MFA where I was asked to take, I took, got to take classes in fiction and doing classes in poetry, like there was just this real like, why don't you just associate and write about, I would like write about a pun and just like follow. Oh, this word makes me think of two different meanings. And I'm just going to like write a thousand words about it. Um, and I wasn't thinking about the salability or the scalability. I was just like doing it at that time. And I think, you know, there's a lot of benefits to studying creative writer, creative writing later.
00:05:34
Speaker
in your career, in your, your life. I ended up doing my MFA in that sort of early mid twenties period when I was young. And yet, like, I just didn't, there was the beauty of it was that I was just sort of like flailing and doing a lot. I was throwing a lot of stuff at the wall. And I would say the last five years, I've been more sort of looking outward, like, Oh my God, I've like, I'm sitting on this pile of research. I've done so much writing and now I actually am in a different stage of like sifting and filtering.
00:06:03
Speaker
And that means that you're sort of inevitably tuned to like that question of audience and who you're filtering for. And I think there's been a lot of the challenges of writing have been silencing some of those external
00:06:15
Speaker
the feelings of, okay, people are going to be watching and judging and, you know, like the inevitable parts of like pushing a part of yourself out into the world, publishing a book feels a little bit like self amputation. I say that, you know, having never come close to cutting off my own finger, but yeah, I guess there's a different tension about looking outward now. And that's been a little bit of a learning curve for me to figure out how to silence those
00:06:41
Speaker
those internal critics that get louder when there's more of an external audience.
00:06:46
Speaker
Did you ever run into that feeling of when you were embarking on these essays and before you had a contract in place, let's say, you're like, oh, wouldn't it be nice to be able to pursue this as a book? And then that moment comes and you're like, oh, shit, this is kind of real. Was there a moment of panic where you're like, oh, God, now I have to deliver?
00:07:12
Speaker
Yeah, oh, totally. And I think it really dovetailed in a strange way with the pandemic where the day that my agent was going to try to sell the book
00:07:23
Speaker
was the day I think the stock market crashed in New York. It was that March 13th day. I just remember not hearing anything from her thinking, maybe this is normal. Things are fine. We had the proposal all polished and glossed. Then a few days later, I'm evacuating where I was living. I'm moving home. My teaching is going online. It's full chaos. I just thought the book is done. The book is done. A few weeks later, we checked in a few days later and it was like, we're just going to hold the book. Obviously, now is not the time for the book.
00:07:51
Speaker
And I just, I felt this weird relief and this weird grief because this, well, yeah, I mean, there's just so much. And later the book ended up selling that September of that first pandemic year. And in a way, I suddenly entered into this space where I was still kind of in quarantine. I was living near my parents, so I was trying not to be out and about too much, just thinking about that, you know, my pod.
00:08:14
Speaker
And so I was really just living in the world of this book. And that was definitely a dread-inducing space, both because the external world was very scary and unfamiliar, and also suddenly my internal world was like, you've got to write this book, and now somebody's waiting for it. So yeah, there was a strange sort of, the pandemic kind of hangs over the final project of this book in a weird way, where I was sort of writing it on this
00:08:39
Speaker
a sort of dock in the sea, a drift while the world felt really scary externally. And I was, of course, writing about fear and how we live with that uncertainty. So, yeah.
00:08:52
Speaker
I have lost the original thread of your question, but I think very much so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you mentioned, too, that there was the moment your agent and you were putting the, you know, buffing the book proposal, and that unto itself is a labor, a laborious chore, if you will. And I recently went through a year-long process of really honing a book proposal.
00:09:20
Speaker
And it was my first experience in doing it side by side with an agent. So I was just like, I felt like an idiot most of the year because I just wasn't sticking the landing on various beats. And I've written a proposal
Integrating Personal Experiences in Writing
00:09:32
Speaker
before, but never to this extent. So what was that process like for you as you were honing that? I imagine that's something people would love to get a little insight into.
00:09:42
Speaker
Yeah, well first, congratulations. That is just like pushing it out there is horrifying. It feels so crazy. I think one thing I've thought about since leaving my MFA when I talked to other young writers is that I wish, I didn't exactly know what a proposal involved.
00:10:04
Speaker
when actually leaving studying. I loved my MFA. I had a great experience, but I did not really learn what a proposal was. And so when I queried my agent, I sort of had a list of the essays I was thinking of including. And at that point, I was really thinking of this project as an essay collection. Now I don't refer to it as essay collection. It's a book, even though the chapters sort of hang. There's three lines throughout them, but they are sort of self-contained in a sense as well.
00:10:32
Speaker
But at that initial stage, it was a process of saying why I was doing this project and why I was interested. And I think that page of like, why are you writing this thing? Why are you writing it right now? And why will it resonate with readers? I probably wrote that version
00:10:51
Speaker
like five times. It takes so long to figure out sort of how to frame this thing, especially when it's been years and years and years of your life. Like what's the opening scene? I think thinking about it almost like a movie and like if the curtain is going to rise and someone hasn't seen this at all, what's the first moment that they see? And especially for a project like this, that's dealing with both kind of on the ground immersive scenes, but also scenes of memory and research. I was sort of like, what is my
00:11:19
Speaker
hook to the reader. So there was some framing and we actually ended up putting part of the proposal with like a first person lens where I'm sort of talking very intimately in the voice that I think I ultimately found in the book, which is very rooted in my own embodied experience and my own lens and my own experiences of
00:11:37
Speaker
fear and of thinking about symbolic and real wolves. So that felt important to actually center at the start of the proposal. I don't know if this is like how other proposals work, but it was interesting. My agent Mariah Spence is brilliant and sort of helpful at Tetris-ing those different components. So I think I thought that, okay, from Googling online, which is what I was doing before working with her, I was like, I'm going to need this marketing section. I'm going to need this platform. And she was sort of like, well, every book and every proposal is a bit different. And like,
00:12:07
Speaker
you know, fill in what you can with these sections, but then we're actually really going to focus on like foregrounding the research, foregrounding the voice, and ultimately attaching a couple writing samples, which for me were chapter or essays, I guess that had already written sort of excerpts that I saw as chapters, but also some pieces that I'd published externally. My New York Times letter of recommendation was in there, which is loosely about fear,
00:12:31
Speaker
a piece I'd published for Literary Hub about wolves and fear. I also had some ancillary pieces and I don't think I knew that those kinds of things were allowed to go in a book proposal. I think a general takeaway was just there's not one cut and dry format for that and the massaging, the ratio of my own words, third person, first person, all of that came down later with the help of my agent.
00:12:58
Speaker
The other question that has to be asked also and is what I was wrestling with as well and I imagine you did too because wolves have been written about a lot is like what new can be said and what hasn't been said and what are you bringing to it. So as you were peeling back that onion so to speak to get to the core of what this was
00:13:20
Speaker
What was the challenge of trying to convince people that there was more to be said about the wolf and fear and what that embodies? Reading Leslie Jamison's book, The Recovering, was really helpful for me in thinking about that because she, I think, asked this question at one point.
00:13:40
Speaker
how do I write about addiction stories when they've been written about before or when this subject has been well trod? And even just her asking that question and like verbalizing it, I felt like gave me permission.
00:13:52
Speaker
verbalize that and in the introduction I do sort of I call that out like the obviousness of it like there's so many wolf books. I think one of the things that immediately this goes back to like where I fit into it you know I think some with so many non-fiction projects the writer is figuring out what amount of themself should be in shadow versus should be in the light. Ted Kuz or the poet has a great line about
00:14:15
Speaker
about poetry being like you're turning up the dial. You imagine a person standing in front of the window and as you're darkening the world outside, the person's shadow appears in the window glass or disappears depending on how light it is outside. And I've thought of that metaphor a lot in nonfiction. And with this project, I was trying to figure out who am I? Am I just a sort of like reporter walking around? Am I just a researcher?
00:14:40
Speaker
or is this about my family or is this actually about like my psyche? You know there's sort of these different levels of how much of myself to put in.
00:14:47
Speaker
And at first I sort of thought I'm looking at the wolf as a researcher or as a journalist. And I just, at a certain point, it was like so many people are doing that and they're doing it so brilliantly. And that's actually not where I'm most comfortable in my voice. And it wasn't until I sort of, I'd had an experience in graduate school where I was grabbed on a dark street in the middle of the, I guess not the middle of the night, it was like dusk.
00:15:10
Speaker
and sort of felt my body shut down, this interaction with a stranger that was really scary and left me very sort of unsure how to move around the world. And I was thinking about Little Red Riding Hood a lot and thinking like, Little Red Riding Hood is actually tied to how I'm thinking about the wolf and I don't want it to be and I would like to really like untangle these two corollaries.
00:15:32
Speaker
And at the same time, I'm interested in what it feels like to metabolize these stories and to grow up beside them. And I'm interested in not just the shadow wolf that these fairy tales have created or the symbolic wolf.
00:15:44
Speaker
that is kind of living beside the real wolf. But actually, the same stories have created a sort of symbolic woman and a sort of shadow victim. If the wolf is the villain of this big bad wolf story, someone is always in opposition to that. And so I found that looking into my own experiences living with these stories,
00:16:04
Speaker
actually became, I didn't feel like anyone else was doing, had done that with the wolf with quite the same intimate case. So I then, I guess, I think of this book as pretty omnivorous and realized at a point, well, maybe I can just do it all. And that felt crazy for a couple of years or months where I was like, I can't do it all. And then, you know, found editors and agents that believed that there was a way to dance between these different modes of research.
00:16:32
Speaker
And a lot of the chapters in the book, like some are very like personal essay-ish, memoir-ish, some are like very journalistic. And over the course of researching and writing these, you know, which hat did you like the most and just maybe felt most settled and rooted in?
00:16:52
Speaker
Yeah, a good question. I think at one point thinking about my own experiences in some way, I had to separate and think like this isn't a journal entry. This is finding a form of evidence and authority in lived experience in the same way that I'm going into the archives to look for evidence or I'm calling up the scientists to look for evidence. And so feeling like to create, to tell a certain story about maybe how we think about
00:17:20
Speaker
the boy who cried wolf or wolves and truth. I'm going to think about what it means to cry wolf and that means I'm going to cite this person and cite this psychologist on the research of it. Also, I'm going to think about this memory that I'm suddenly investigating in my own life and seeing my own experiences as another form of evidence or another tool to bring to the table to build my authority. I think my agent, again, Mariah Spence referred to it as your lived authority,
00:17:50
Speaker
becomes as important as your learned authority. Once I accepted that, I think it was easier to write those scenes. It was hard. I definitely wrote a lot of personal scenes that did not get in this book. I was trying to work out my relationship with fear and with how I internalized the idea of the wolf externally and the symbolic wolf as well. I just was writing anything I could think of. A lot of that got carved away.
00:18:20
Speaker
The research phases, I'm so happy going down rabbit holes. I used to be afraid of being a dilettante where I should be a specialist, I should be a wolf biologist to write about wolves, or I should be a folklorist or something. I think giving myself permission
00:18:39
Speaker
I think Joan Didion has a quote about this too. She's like, I'm not an expert. My job is I bounce between the experts and just owning that as your practice. Once I again accepted that I was going to be calling up an expert and saying, you're going to need to talk to me like I'm a teenager here because I don't know anything about linguistics and I want you to walk me through this thing.
00:19:07
Speaker
And that takes such a humbleness that was definitely uncomfortable at first. I think it's easy to think I should be smarter to be writing about this, but actually writing from a place of not knowing and writing from that beginner's mind and from sort of total openness to like, prove me wrong.
Empathy and Fear in Writing
00:19:22
Speaker
Teach me this. It was actually so generative.
00:19:24
Speaker
You're bringing up Didion. You bring up one of her famous insights about, it's a very Janet Malcolm-esque insight that the journalist is always selling someone out. And that's actually something that in our first conversation that you said writers are always selling people out and you always chafed against that because that's not how you want to be. And that was five and a half years ago when we spoke.
00:19:49
Speaker
Is that something in your relationship to Didi and that you still push against? Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you remembered that. I'd been thinking about that at the time because it has been a, it's been a thing I've grappled with and now I think I call myself less a journalist than I did at the time. And I think Rebecca Solnit has written about like the difference between being a journalist and an essayist and like if I'm an essayist that does interviews and
00:20:14
Speaker
I don't know my relationship with those genres, maybe it doesn't matter, but I'm very sensitive to that. I think writing about wolves, which are politically controversial, is challenging for me because I usually relate to the person I'm talking to and I'm empathizing with their story and then trying to figure out how to bring these different stories into conversation and find the nuance there.
00:20:40
Speaker
means that you're sometimes not, of course, saying exactly any one-party line. I felt like that was important to do with this project. The wolf exists on so many of these binaries, and I didn't want to feel like I was
00:20:54
Speaker
been very aware of not wanting to sell the rancher out or the conservationist, but rather to bring them into conversation. I think Didion's point, I can see it now with some, when you actually have a book, these power dynamics are sort of crystallized in a different way. But going back to even that piece we talked about six years ago, The Beast of Bray Road, I recently got a message on Facebook from somebody
00:21:20
Speaker
who had found that piece and he lived in rural Wisconsin and he'd recently read it, like within the last six months. And he said that he knew the subject of the piece, who'd written about werewolves and he'd always judged her. He was a journalist and he'd always judged her. And he said that reading my essay about her gave him more empathy and helped him see her in a new way. And I thought, my God, that's like the best possible thing I could hear.
00:21:47
Speaker
After writing about someone is that other people are able to like bring a new empathy to the table Yeah, and speaking of that essay too, and I when I was reading wolfish I was expecting to basically read that essay like word-for-word and in the book and it surprised me that it wasn't in there at all and so it just kind of gets to this point of I guess selection and And what what felt like it?
00:22:13
Speaker
at the time, serve the true story piece, which is the little chat book thing that you wrote for Creative Nonfiction versus what serves the larger book. So what was the calculus there of not including this and including other things?
00:22:29
Speaker
The sort of consensus from the editorial powers that be my wonderful agent and editor and teams were that that one was a little bit less. I'm trying to think how it was described. It wasn't as personally rooted for me. I was sort of more floating through there and this book is pretty
00:22:52
Speaker
intimate with my own relationship and evolution with fear, very much in my own body as a young woman. And I think that project was more, you know, to go back to that earlier metaphor of like, how much I was, me the narrator sort of turned up or turned down. I think I was less in that piece in a certain way. And I had it in an early draft. And then we were sort of thinking, well, what if we wrote about
00:23:19
Speaker
that piece was about werewolves and werewolf stories and like what if there was another way to think about the werewolf like how does the werewolf really relate personally to these grappling's I'm having with fear and I started thinking like maybe it's interesting not to look at how somebody else is telling the story of the werewolf
00:23:38
Speaker
but to look at when I've actually felt like a werewolf or like how these werewolf stories, how we metabolize them sort of internally in terms of when I have scared other people. And so that ended up being the essay that went in as about when I was in.
00:23:55
Speaker
Sicily and there was a poisoning incident, shall we say, that I was involved in. That became a moment to think again about werewolves in a different context that was a little bit closer to my own narrative thread. But the stuff that's left on the cutting room floor, that's hard. I was very tied to that other essay and so that does speak to, in some ways, this book is not the
00:24:19
Speaker
the total capstone of my project about wolves. There's all these other pieces and strands that have been floating around on the side.
00:24:28
Speaker
Yeah, that essay from Sicily when you were at the cooking school and, you know, the... Mandrake, yeah. Mandrake, there it is. And there is, I don't know, it was just the way it was prepared or the way it wasn't prepared that became toxic? It just was a toxic plant. And so we forged it essentially without knowing
00:24:53
Speaker
we'd never been told about this toxic plant. I was living at a cooking school and we hadn't really been warned. There was a level of hubris. We thought we were going to be safe. We couldn't imagine that this bad thing could happen to us. I was living there at a time where I felt we lived in this secluded little bubble of this
00:25:12
Speaker
very idyllic cooking school in the middle of Sicily. So when eventually this very near-death experience sort of unspooled, it felt very surprising, whereas so much of my other experiences with fear had been deeply anticipated or I'd been a big worry war. This time I was like just chilling, having a great time drinking wine, hanging out and like I have the scariest night of my life. So that moment, this sort of quick transformation felt there was
00:25:41
Speaker
sort of werewolfishness about that. And actually in looking at the history of werewolves, we found that some of those legends had kind of roots in similar potential stories of people eating plants like that and also in the Mediterranean. And so then it was like, okay, this is actually kind of an unignorable thing.
00:26:00
Speaker
Yeah, and it's one of those deals, too, where you had an anxious, fearful streak in you. Yeah. And then in that moment where here you are kind of letting your guard down, be like, yeah, trying to be a little more blasé. And the moment you do, it's like you almost look yourself into other people. Exactly. I know. I mean, I think in some ways, I was just as horrified by that moment.
00:26:26
Speaker
To write about the wolf as a symbol of fear, I really had to say like,
00:26:31
Speaker
do I personally have anything specific to say about fear? And I'm not sure that I do any much more than anyone else, but I think any one person's life, you could zoom in on the moments that sort of shape our relationship with fear. And even those like micro moments are going to do something to you, right? And I think there were moments where I had felt very much like victimized from scary encounters that were not really big moments. Like they were not like,
00:26:58
Speaker
near death, near murder experiences, as far as I could tell, they were just sort of like bad moments. But then this was an experience where like, I was so rattled. But part of that was because I'd almost really harmed someone else. And the sort of shock of being like, oh my god, I did something really scary. I participated with my own hands. Like I'm culpable was almost as sort of horrifying to me as like, you know, some of these experiences where I'd felt threatened myself.
00:27:24
Speaker
Yeah, there's a moment, I believe it's in that chapter too, where you cite the high wire artist, Philippe Petit, about, what does he say? He said, I see fear as an absence of knowledge. And that's true too, like the more you can kind of educate yourself on certain things is a way you can learn how to dance with an anxiety or quell anxiety.
00:27:45
Speaker
So, in there is kind of this lesson of sometimes the more you know, the more you might be fearful, but also the more you know you'd be like, okay, I can kind of defang this as well. Well, and I think so much the projects that are so interesting to me essayistically
00:28:03
Speaker
with the essayistic brain, maybe they're not essays, but they're where the writer doesn't know how they feel about something and they're like trying to write their way into an understanding. And I definitely didn't set out to write this book being like, okay, I'm kind of writing this as kind of an anxious wreck and I'd like to feel better by the end. So I'm going to like investigate the stories we tell about fear and anxiety. And yet at a certain point, I'm a completely different person
00:28:25
Speaker
at the end of the book than I am at some of the scenes in it. I don't know how much of that is growing up, but I think part of it is just writing into that and really examining the cultural scaffolding and narratives around the things that scared me or that I was told should scare me. Actually, that really helps. I do think I'm always aware of the idea that writing isn't therapy and that we shouldn't
00:28:51
Speaker
It's not catharsis. I mean, it like feels like peeling off your fingernails sometimes to write about your own life. And yet I think there's a degree of like, sometimes that does happen. Like you do ID, you like defang your own brain writing into it. And I think that's such an important part of this process in some ways.
00:29:11
Speaker
Yeah, to that point of feeling, even let's just call it like a performance anxiety of some kind, I feel that a lot when I go into these interviews or even when I'm interviewing people for, be it an article or book stuff.
00:29:26
Speaker
Maybe more for podcast stuff because I tend to leave myself open to a little more discovery when I'm doing stuff for articles or books. But for this is sort of a different interview beast. And I find that when I'm most anxious is when I'm not as prepared.
00:29:45
Speaker
And I always equate it to like a quarterback who has to watch a lot of game tape. And the more tape he sees, he can read more defenses. He can see where things are going. And it's like, if I do my film work, I can go where the guest is going and be armed to go in the direction that the quote defense is sort of, I can read that defense and go in those directions.
00:30:14
Speaker
I don't know about you, but do you find that if you have a certain measure of performance anxiety and what you're doing, that preparation is your salve for it? That's a great point. Also, really, my brain is going trying to understand football. That was a good practice for me. I'm trying to become a sports person. I've decided low stakes following sports.
00:30:35
Speaker
Yeah. I speak in sport metaphor often. A blessing and a curse. This is good practice. Flexing that muscle for me. Yeah, I think that's such a good point. And it maybe does go back to both this sort of privilege of being able to have beginner's mind. Is this phrase, I don't know, like who coined that, what that idea is. My mom recently said it, and it's just really stuck. Where in, you know, you going into an interview where you're just sort of like,
00:31:00
Speaker
responding very impulsively to what people are saying. There can be a beauty in that static, but it can also, it can be terrifying when you don't know where that's going to go. Similarly, I feel that whether I'm on the page or doing an interview and I think, what's an example of somebody? I talked to the ecology of fear biologist who I spoke with, Liana Zenette, who's Canadian and
00:31:27
Speaker
we had this wonderful conversation where I was trying to read up on her field, which she's studying, which is how predators, say, influence the other animals in the landscape and this idea of an ecology of fear that is shaped. In the process of our conversation, I was like, okay, at some point, maybe I'm going to be open about the fact that I'm also writing about humans, and I'm trying to think about ecologies of fear in human environments.
00:31:57
Speaker
And I don't want to tell her a scientist who's studying animals. I want to be aware of drawing a metaphor that's not there or creating a corollary that's scientifically inaccurate. And yet the poet inside my brain is like, of course, there's this static connection that's being built. And we ended up having this wonderful conversation where we were both talking about our experiences
00:32:21
Speaker
has women to a point walking in streets, and she's then bringing up how raccoons move around when there's badgers. It went off the rails in a way that was exactly what I'd hoped, but I wasn't sure we would get there. I think a lot of that is building a trust and humbleness. For me, it's been breaking some of those rules that I thought I would do as a journalist, which is like, you're not going to talk about yourself.
00:32:48
Speaker
but giving myself permission to be like, well, I'm not sitting here writing a strict journalistic book about wolves. I'm also very much talking about my own experience. So I'm going to give myself permission in the interview to say like, I have this feeling, which is that I'm bringing your scientific research about animals into my experience as a human. And can you just tell me like how wrong that is? Like is that accurate? And that being able to sort of say things like that actually opened up really interesting.
00:33:16
Speaker
interview conversations, even if there's not a clear scientific extrapolation. Can you pinpoint or maybe you can speak to like when was the first time that you were like very cognizant of fear in your own fears?
00:33:33
Speaker
Yeah, that's a very good
Influence of Identity on Writing
00:33:36
Speaker
question. I write about something in an early chapter about Little Red Riding Hood in the book where I had just gotten to college and I was on the East Coast and everything was very unfamiliar and strange as like, you know, your first months of college often are for people. And I was walking home from the library one night and saw a group of
00:33:58
Speaker
students that I could, they were male, it seemed coming towards me on the path. And I sort of told myself, okay, you feel a little bit nervous, but like nothing wrong has ever happened. Like, I'd never had any really scary experiences that made my own body feel at risk. And to that degree, I was incredibly privileged as a teenager.
00:34:18
Speaker
And so I'm also in this like liberal arts campus bubble, like everything still, I'm sort of telling myself that I'm just being irrational, that I'm sort of aware. And as these group of people get closer down the path, I see that they're wearing white t-shirts over their heads and they have like, they have eye holes, like slits cut for their eyes and on their hands, they're wearing these white socks and they're sort of glowing in the moon. And, you know, I suddenly couldn't tell who these people were.
00:34:47
Speaker
They seemed like athletes, they were like big guys, and it was terrifying. I stood there and they surrounded me in a circle. My brain was sputtering like, this is this thing that growing up in a young woman's body, you're told that you're going to run into someone scary on the street who you're not going to know and they're going to want to hurt you. I had really been taught to be brave and to be fearless and came of age in this girl power.
00:35:14
Speaker
early 2000s phase. And this was the moment where I was like, oh, wait, it's happening. And like, what do I do? And it felt so bad. And so I actually just ran through their hands. They didn't do anything. And it turned out that they weren't probably threatening. They were like,
00:35:30
Speaker
drunk soccer players that were being hazed. But something about that as a specter of fear like it made me aware that that could happen. And later when I had other experiences that were more sort of like tangibly upsetting, I do think the imprint of that, that night, just sort of like I think in the book, I say it like
00:35:48
Speaker
opened a little window of how the world could be, that you might be walking down the street and the stranger wouldn't just pass you, but that he'd instead surround you or something would happen. I think there's a number of incidents like that that were all these little splinters. They didn't feel inherently like this is this big trauma with a capital T in her book.
00:36:11
Speaker
Girlhood, Melissa Phibose refers to these moments as events. They're not quite sure what to say about these micro moments. But I think at a certain point, I became aware that those were accumulating in a way where I was moving through the world completely different than I had a few years earlier. And I think of it like you're in the dog park. And before, you've just been running around this off-leash dog. And suddenly, I was the leash dog standing near the fence. And I couldn't quite figure out when it had happened.
00:36:40
Speaker
But I had sort of become someone who was walking into my house and checking under the bed with looking for people in my house. And I couldn't figure out why I was doing that or when it had happened. And so it became very imperative to me to go back and think about what had gone awry in my brain or in the world that I had gotten there.
00:37:02
Speaker
you said a moment ago to the house maybe maybe the stranger will just pass you by but maybe not and maybe they'll sit next to you on a train and that was so incredibly chilling what what you went through there because you just want to
00:37:17
Speaker
just be guarded and ignore what's happening. But this guy, I mean, you were truly, you know, there was a real threat. Yeah. Well, and I think that was an interesting, I was taking a train to a writer's residency thinking like, I'm just going to write about wolves. Like I kept just thinking like, I'm going to be able to write about this animal as a, for like an animal, and I'm going to be able to write about the science and the pampering and blah, blah, blah.
00:37:40
Speaker
And then like on this Amtrak ride across the country, I sort of had an experience with a man who I didn't know. He didn't know I was a writer. He wrote me these scary letters that he gave to me. And we ended up, the man got, I don't know, I won't spoil it. It escalated. And I think there were all these moments where it just became clear that like to be,
00:38:05
Speaker
To have a body while you're going through the process of researching, like my body is like a youngish white woman's body is a particular sort, but any sort of reporter has a different body that they're bringing into their reporting and like to acknowledge that and the ways that that both like opens and closes doors, I became interested in that. And of course, Didion writes about that like being, and I quote her, the sort of privilege of being
00:38:30
Speaker
hypothetically small and unassuming. I'm thinking of the Dylann Roof article by Rachel Codseak on saying her name right. It's such a brilliant article about
00:38:43
Speaker
She goes to Dylann Roof's parents' house, and she's a Black woman, and she's very open about what it's like to knock on their door at night. And I think she goes and has a beer with them. And sort of peeling back that, look at us, look at these power dynamics. Who are our bodies? And the room is over doing these investigations.
00:39:01
Speaker
I'm really interested in that kind of nonfiction. And I started feeling like my own experiences of fear are sort of leaking in porously to how I'm writing about these stories of fear on the page or in history or in science. And what if I let that happen rather than sort of trying to silo them and separate them as I'd been doing in the first part of my process?
Symbolism of Wolves and Fear
00:39:21
Speaker
the booklies said a while ago that you were originally kind of conceived it possibly as just essays, stand-alone essays, and I think some of these can kind of stand alone, but you do tether them together with a through line, specifically OR7, which is a very famous wolf in Oregon. Here's maybe you can just speak about, for one, the challenge of
00:39:45
Speaker
creating a through line throughout the whole thing where you're going on sort of different tangents, for lack of a better term, but also this wonderful, incredible life of OR7, this wolf that dispersed and made its way through Oregon and Northern California. Yeah, you know, that was an interesting thing because centering his story, his journey, I will say, he left his pack when I was in college first starting to look at wolves for my environmental studies thesis in 2013.
00:40:13
Speaker
So, he was first my kind of window into he became this kind of wolf celebrity. There were social media accounts following him and I'm like a, you know, hungover college student in my library reading about this wolf, like why I've never cared about wolves before. Honestly, I wasn't like a big wolf person. I think some people assume I must have been to write this book.
00:40:34
Speaker
I was just like a member of the curious public that was like, wow, this wolf is a spectacle. It's like breaking all these headlines. And I became really interested in how people were watching the wolf and what it was kind of conjuring. And then the wolf came back to Oregon and eventually got a family and a pack and that pack started like
00:40:55
Speaker
some of his offspring were predating on livestock and it became sort of headline grabbing in another way. And by the time I moved back to Oregon and was actually selling the book, I won't totally ruin the ending, but like something else had happened to OR7. And I was talking to editors actually during the auction process about the whole kind of container of the book and the chronology and the sort of backbone
00:41:19
Speaker
that holds this research together, which is kind of my own relationship with fear as it's evolving kind of as through a coming of age reckoning. And also my own research into the wolves, because they're sort of like a meta through line of me going on these research trips and, you know, thinking about the subject. And it was like, oh, wait, we kind of, oh, our seven is also a through line. He'd been sort of there conceptually, but I hadn't thought about kind of writing him in as a character.
00:41:47
Speaker
until actually those editorial conversations. And I think that's one thing that other writers who might be facing that process of
00:41:56
Speaker
getting to have editorial conversations with potentially interested publishing teams is what a beauty it is to talk to these really smart people and have this sort of editorial workshop sessions where because I sold this book on proposal, I didn't sell it as a finished book, even though I'd written many parts of it, they were sort of weighing in and saying, we think it would be interesting to like have a wolf kind of be a through line as well that people can kind of hold on to.
00:42:23
Speaker
And I kind of liked the idea of this wolf coming in and out of the pages and then like disappearing for 30 pages. And that's frustrating on a degree as a reader because you sometimes just want to like dwell with this wolf.
00:42:34
Speaker
that's also how it felt like to be a human watching OR7. Sometimes there's no good updates and his caller is sending signals, but we don't always get them. What's that frustration of being a human wanting to really closely understand and watch this animal? You just can't because they're kind of inscrutable. I was interested in sort of representing on the page the way that
00:42:57
Speaker
My journey away from home his journey away from home are sort of like weaving and you know sometimes I'm looking to him and I'm feeling inspired or there's a sort of metaphor there but ultimately it doesn't mean anything it's just like his life is coming in and out of contact with my life and neither of us inherently are that.
00:43:14
Speaker
special were both just like two bodies that your sort of the lens is zoomed in on. He's wearing a collar. So his long distance journey was trackable. There's other wolves that took long distance journeys that just probably weren't tracked in that way. And similarly, like I'm sort of leaning closely to my own life just because it's, it's the life I can see. And I think there's something kind of, there was something interesting in that parallel.
00:43:37
Speaker
Yeah, and wolves are, obviously, they're pack animals, but occasionally you get one that wants to disperse and will go out and try to form its own pack, and that was the story with OR7. And, you know, you were raised to be very, you know, your parents instilled a lot of
00:43:59
Speaker
I think a lot of strength to disperse on your own. So in what ways did you see overlap in your own life in the lives of say an OR7, like a dispersing wolf? Yeah, I think I was interested in this idea of like a lone wolf in a human perspective, I thought was like, okay, it's this wolf that just like wants to be alone and really doesn't want to be with anyone else.
00:44:21
Speaker
And actually the more I learned about wolves, the more it was like, oh wait, usually a lone wolf is just a young member of the pack that's leaving because they are aware of, somehow subliminally aware of the problems with Lupine incest. And so they're like, I should go find someone else, find another territory. And it's actually kind of normal to be a lone wolf. And it doesn't mean that you're not looking for anyone. It means that you are looking for someone.
00:44:45
Speaker
or for another wolf. I thought there was sort of a poetry in that, and I think that idea of I was never leaving my family because I wanted to get away from my parents. I'm very lucky. I have a loving, supportive family. I'm very close with them, but I felt like I was leaving to
00:45:04
Speaker
to find my way back to them in a way. It's interesting, if the pandemic hadn't happened, I was teaching in Michigan at the time and my job ended and I fled home when things went online, as many people did when it wasn't sure what else was going to happen. That became my boomerang trajectory. I don't know that I knew I would come home. OR7 eventually did
00:45:32
Speaker
also come back to Oregon and settle down with a pack, not right where he'd been raised, but in this different part too. I think I was thinking about what does it mean to, it's messy to come back and to be in contact with other bodies. For OR7, that was like having a family suddenly and being around sheep and cows. There's a lot of room for these intersections that are messy in a way that when you're just one wolf wandering,
00:45:59
Speaker
in a rural mountain area, there's less ways that things can go wrong, I guess. That's true for my own life too. The messiness of entanglement and of coming home was very real, but I was attracted to that. I think I'd spent a lot of time just thinking the most exciting thing was to go off on the adventure and to go set out and move to this country where I don't know anyone or move to a state where I don't know anyone. Actually, I was like, what if at this point it's brave
00:46:26
Speaker
to come back and just like sink into the messiness of being entangled with people who I've grown up with and that felt like its own new adventure.
00:46:56
Speaker
quick beat response to that. I think part of it is very much tied to coming to terms with the idea that the wolf in the Western storytelling tradition I grew up with was kind of the perfect villain. It was the kind of canonical one. And realizing that my own identity as a young woman was sort of the opposition to that. And if I was having a hard time accepting or understanding how to live in my own body in certain ways,
00:47:26
Speaker
It became interesting to look at the opposite pole, which would be the wolf. Of course, I had already been researching wolves and was fascinated in what they told us about
00:47:38
Speaker
kind of conversations around America and mythology and wolves. There's this huge legacy of the expulsion of wolves is really formatory in the building of statehood in Oregon. The first law that was passed in my home state was about getting rid of wolves and a bounty on them. And you have these early American policies that were like,
00:48:01
Speaker
trying to force forcing essentially indigenous inhabitants to kill wolves and turn in their wolf heads for money, for example, in colonial America. So there's all these legacies that I felt like the story of America and the story of Oregon
00:48:18
Speaker
to name my home state, cannot be actually told without talking about wolves. At the same time, the story of my own body as being scared maybe out walking on a dark street, that's also really influenced by wolves. It ended up feeling like, oh my God, wolves are in everything. Everywhere I see there's wolves and I just have to lean into that.
00:48:43
Speaker
Yeah, is it one of those deals now where you just see it everywhere? Oh my God. Just today, I was taking notes on something, which was about ... A lot of the East Coast was deforested. The hilltops were blackened because they were cutting down trees to try to rid the area of wolves. I was like, this is true in England. There's other evidence of that, but I came across that again today and was like, oh my God, the landscape looks the way it does in, say, Maine, where I went to college, perhaps because
00:49:12
Speaker
wolves were driven out, right? And that led to part of this deforestation. And so when you start to look at that, like I'm such a sucker for that kind of interconnectivity, that the wolf as a vessel, it's really overwhelming to look at like early forest policy for me, but to look at how it might be influenced by just the wolf, using the wolf as that vector, as you say, became a helpful lens to like look at all these other facets of American mythology and sort of stories around wilderness and fear.
00:49:37
Speaker
Yeah, there is a moment too where you talk about the wolf and the predator-prey relationship and how it was when your mother got a tick-borne illness and things were really kind of touch and go for a bit.
00:49:56
Speaker
And they brought up this whole idea of the predators are in there because by feeding on certain prey they are able to keep certain diseases under wraps and so forth. And there's this whole interconnectivity of animals that we take for granted just for capitalistic gain and expansion. And maybe you can just speak to that.
00:50:18
Speaker
just incredibly complicated web of influence and what happens when you start to the depredation of an apex predator gets ripped out of there and how out of whack things get. Yeah, I mean that was sort of fascinating to me because I think I'd always thought like well wolves belong out there because like they should just be allowed to walk around like the rest of us or like wouldn't it be cool for me to see a wolf and it wasn't until I was in college and my mom got sick and we heard that
00:50:47
Speaker
This took a long time to figure out that it was a tick-borne disease and somebody offhandedly said, well, we have more ticks because we have more rodents because the predators are gone and this whole ecological train is a skew. I had never thought of predators actually playing a role in something as trickle down the line causing humans to get sick.
00:51:09
Speaker
A lot of the research on that has come out of Yellowstone National Park where wolves were reintroduced in the 90s and have sort of been studied for the ways that maybe songbird populations are
00:51:22
Speaker
thriving or certain willow trees are not getting grazed as much because the elk are more aware because of the wolves. Many of the researchers I spoke to were wary of that narrative going too far, like saying wolves will heal these broken landscapes, like wolves save all the other animals.
00:51:42
Speaker
that is probably too simple and that's sort of putting the wolf on a pedestal as this sort of savior animal, which is in some ways, you know, as much of a mythology as the wolf, as this like villain animal, like it's another extreme. At the same time, I think it was really helpful for me to see the way that wolves have really, as with other apex predators and often in tandem with apex predators, if you're in a landscape with bears and wolves, like, you know, they'll eat each other's carry-on. There was something about like,
00:52:12
Speaker
wolf kills helping to feed grizzly bears as they're coming out of hibernation. That's actually, they're supporting each other in these weird interconnected ways. That's so fascinating. There's some research about wolves in an area will scare deer off the roads. Deer were actually not being hit by cars or cars were hitting fewer deer. It was saving all of these
00:52:35
Speaker
crash. It was like saving humans and saving money. This was in Wisconsin. That sort of study is so fascinating because you would never think they were trying to make an economic argument for like, we should support wolves here because fewer humans are getting in car crashes. The discrepancy between those two things before I started researching this
00:52:53
Speaker
I would have never connected them. And I am pretty interested in the ways that like, how can we think about kind of coexistence in the land in ways that aren't just about, well, this is better for humans, this is better for human economics, economic life, but like, how can we really think about this web that we're all in? Not just as a sort of like aesthetic, it's nice to have everyone sharing the land, but like, what are we actually, how are we shaping the land together?
00:53:18
Speaker
Now, as getting close to the end of our conversation here, you know, last time we spoke, you had said that you were a pretty bingy writer.
Writing Process and Productivity Tips
00:53:28
Speaker
Is that still the case, that you're more of a binge writer than someone who does it sort of methodically every single day? Yes, and you know what? I've thought about how I said that because I think I've had a really hard time accepting that now that I took off
00:53:49
Speaker
Yeah, I was teaching full time or 30 hours a week, four days a week in high school during the sort of phase when I was doing this.
00:53:57
Speaker
honing of the proposal and really beginning to focus on this book. And I just, the day I wasn't teaching would just be this like giddy, absolutely full of writing day. Like I got so much done when I only had one free day. And in the periods afterwards, now my life is much more start and go. I'll be, I taught for a month this summer, quite intensively in Oxford, but then I like, you know, spending a month at a residency where I have suddenly all this unstructured time.
00:54:24
Speaker
And it's such a gift to have that unstructured time. And also I keep thinking every day should be like the rush of words that it was when you only had one free day a week and it's not, you know, it's harder. And so.
00:54:39
Speaker
I do think accepting the binge, I just have to keep telling myself that. And I think Blair Braverman was the first person who sort of gave, she was doing dog sledding stuff. And she was like, give yourself permission to make some days about the writing and some days about living off the page and doing other things. And I think one of the things about my practice as a sort of writer who's thinking omnivorously across discipline and field is like,
00:55:03
Speaker
you're going to find I'm constantly discovering things when I'm not trying to. So like one example is I was, remember working writing about wolves and a friend was like, let's go to this documentary at an art museum. And I was like, I can't go I got to work. But as things happen, you know, it's like 7pm, you have a beer, you're like, obviously, I'm not gonna work, I'm gonna go to this movie.
00:55:22
Speaker
And in the movie, which was about police militarization, it was just a documentary, I would have to think of the name, but it was wonderful. And there was a bit about these sheepdog seminars that where police officers were trained with a certain language discourse of some people are wolves, some people are sheep.
00:55:39
Speaker
the wolves are just always going to attack, you just have to kill them. A lot of this fairy tale language of the wolf reincarnated in ways that had real life stakes. It was this fascinating connection that I would have never discovered if I'd told myself, no, Erica, doing work is writing 1,000 words a day. In some sense, giving myself a leash to be like, now you're going out, you're seeing a movie, you're wandering around, you're talking to people, you're at a museum. That's where those connections are coming out of.
00:56:07
Speaker
So I think in a way like giving myself permission to expand what that writing looks like. Sometimes it's not on the page. It's like me at a movie taking notes on my notes app and understanding that that might come back in a useful way later.
00:56:22
Speaker
Yeah, in terms of, you know, having, let's say, you know, maybe it's a Tuesday or something, and that's the day you can do that. Sometimes that Tuesday isn't going to always be there. So in what ways do you try to fold in some degree of structure so time just doesn't get away from you? Oh, it's so good. And I'm obsessed with the apps for this. Somebody recently told me about toggle, which you can use to sort of track your time. So I will do it like I get pulled into
00:56:52
Speaker
say, reading research articles, so I try to keep track. Like, if I'm trying to write 500 words that day on an essay, maybe I'll start my toggle track as I start reading scholarly articles, say.
00:57:07
Speaker
After 45 minutes, I'm going to cut myself off, and then I'm going to start a new toggle, and I'm going to tag that like writing. By the end of the day, I can see what percentage is spent on, and actually for answering emails, I do that too, like what percentage is email, what percentage is research, what percentage is actual writing. There's a great method that I think was from my grad school professor, Sugi Ganashanathan, where you have a calendar and you use glitter gold stars to mark every day that you write something.
00:57:35
Speaker
And there's something about sort of tricking your brain into like you see this chain of glittering things and you just can't stop. Like you want to be yourself. And I think like gamification, I'm here for it. I want there to be more gamified ways to get me to write because I do find that that's useful.
00:57:53
Speaker
and I've had accountability groups with people, Jamie Attenbergs, sprints of 1,000 words a day, what's it called, 1,000 words of summer. Those things are really useful and finding ways to have that accountability even right now. I'm at the beach for a couple of days and I have a friend who's texting me like, okay, how's the essay you're going working on and
00:58:13
Speaker
building in those kind of checks and balances are really helpful. And I use freedom on my devices to block out social media at certain times and even block out the internet and just like really have to be, it's a lot of carrots and sticks for me to build in that structure when the days are sort of loosey goosey.
00:58:32
Speaker
Yeah, I love the idea of an accountability partner. It's like a gym partner. You could easily skip out on your own, but if you've got a partner there, it's like, I gotta be there for this person. I gotta spot him.
00:58:44
Speaker
Totally. Well, and I think I've done this too, where you say like, okay, on a Friday, we're each going to send each other a thousand words every Friday and we're not going to read it. Or there's going to be no pressure to respond. Like if it's in my friend's inbox, maybe he's going to read it, but, um, that's not the point. And then the next week you send another thousand words and something about that was really useful. I've done that when I'm in like big generative stages and I do it with my sister sometimes where we just say.
00:59:11
Speaker
You have to send 300 words every morning and we're just each going to send them and it's not going to be workshopped, which creates a little bit of a lower stakes to just do it. But I really like that approach.
00:59:21
Speaker
Nice. And Erica, a little something new that I've done over the last couple years since last time you were on is that I like to end these conversations by asking you, the guest, a recommendation for the listeners. And granted, you did say toggle and freedom, which are great recommendations. But I'd say if you have anything else, what might you recommend for the listeners out there?
00:59:42
Speaker
Okay, love that. Okay, well the best book that I read in the last year about writing, this is probably, I'll think of something that maybe more people have not read, but for those of you that maybe haven't read it, Annie Dillard's A Writing Life was so revelatory for me and she has this one pack
01:00:01
Speaker
passage about spend it all, don't save anything, don't sit on it, just charge forward with the exciting things that you're writing. That now is on my desk as a quote and I've flipped open the book so many times when I just want to get in that writer
01:00:19
Speaker
brain. That has been a favorite craft book to revisit. I think one book that I think is coming out this year with Bloomsbury, I got a copy in the UK a few years ago, but it's Daisy Hildiard's The Second Body. Actually, Daisy's fiction, I'm a big fan of too. There was some recently published in Orion and she has a new book coming out that I have not read yet.
01:00:45
Speaker
that's fiction, a novel. But she wrote this book, The Second Body, that's essentially a book length essay on thinking about how humans are a part of animal life. She has this idea that we have our first body, which is bounded by our bones. It's what we think about being our body. Then this idea of the second body, which is the parts of ourselves that are leeching outwards or
01:01:10
Speaker
you know, maybe what we're consuming or this idea of like a larger footprint that sort of interacting with the world too. And I don't know, she goes and she visits a butcher and farm animals and she's like by a river as it's flooding her house and like the the porousness between self and world, especially in an environmental lens, I felt like she just captured so wonderfully, it like changed my whole conception of what it meant to like have a body in the world.
01:01:37
Speaker
And so anything Daisy Hildiard writes, I'm now really attuned to.
01:01:43
Speaker
Awesome. Well, I love it. And Wolfish was such a wonderful, insightful journey to go on. It felt like a wolf migration, if you will. Just going to all these places in the landscape of fear and your story and OR7 and just wolf as a cultural totem. It was just such a wonderful experience. So I just got to commend you on the job well done. And it's so great to be able to talk to you about it, Erica.
01:02:12
Speaker
Well, thanks so much for spending time with it and for, you know, following the wolves and I for a couple of years now. Oh, thanks for listening, Sienna. Thanks to Erica for coming back on the show. It was a real treat to get to talk to her again. It's amazing that it's been nearly six years since the last time she was on the show and the last time I actually spoke to her.
01:02:37
Speaker
You know, like many people on the show, I've never met them face-to-face or physically face-to-face. And when you occasionally engage on Twitter and you see them pop up on Twitter and tweet, you get this false sense that you've, like, met each other and you've been in each other's lives.
01:02:57
Speaker
for the last few years and i have to remind myself like oh no we've only spoken the one time back in 2017 and now we spoke this time and we've actually never met and it's uh it's kind of a weird dissociative experience but there we there you have it if you like this conversation as much as i did go ahead and share it and tag me in the show on twitter at cnf potter rapper in the domera and uh creative non-fiction podcast on instagram i know
01:03:24
Speaker
and also consider heading to patreon.com slash cnfpod
01:03:28
Speaker
Got a couple newbies. Yes! Thank you. You can throw a few bucks in the tip jar. The show is free, but as you know, it sure as hell ain't cheap. I recently added a post about my prefontaine research this week with a photo, and it's available only to patrons. And don't forget, you can always rage against the algorithm with my up to 11 monthly newsletter by just going to BrendanOmera.com. Hey, hey.
01:03:58
Speaker
thinking of the tight deadline that I'm on with this book and I try not to get freaked out. I mean this I usually I routinely wake up between two and three in the morning and then I can't get back to sleep for at least two hours and it's usually the tightness in the chest that comes with having to deliver on the proposal.
01:04:20
Speaker
So as some of you may know, my first draft of The Gift is due April 24. No, April 2024. I hope to write a biography that's in that 100,000 word range, maybe longer, definitely not shorter, it can't be shorter.
01:04:38
Speaker
And I'm thinking backward, how do we do this? Let's break it down. So I did the math on those NaNoWriMo folks who write 50,000 words in a month if they stick with it. If I did my calculations right, I believe that is 1,666 words per day. Let's just do that, 50,000 words. Let's just divide it by 30 days, okay? Yep, 1,666.
01:05:06
Speaker
Yet doing math on a calculator is riveting audio. If after 11 to 12 months of research, can I write 100,000 words, roughly 400 double-spaced pages in two months, so that taking that 1666 words a day every day for 60 days, I think it's doable.
01:05:27
Speaker
I think it's possible to load the quiver with all the research, the interviews that I hope people will agree to and stop avoiding me, all the newspaper and magazine stuff, and get the outlines and the structure ready. Load the spring.
01:05:46
Speaker
And then what's 1666 divided by 2? I think it's, here we go. Here's more math. Great audio. 833 words. Can I write 833 words before noon? Take a breather. Write another 833 maybe after a jog or a session in the gym. That seems really manageable, right?
01:06:11
Speaker
Believe it or not, I wrote Six Week in Saratoga back in 09, 2010 by doing close to 3,000 words a day. And that book was like 75,000, I think, in the end, I think. I wrote it in like four months, I think, but that includes the rereading and rewriting. I did about 1,500 words in the morning, and I'd take a break and do another 1,500 in the afternoon.
01:06:36
Speaker
And I had all my research, all my interviews, I had all the transcripts, so in a way it was almost like taking dictation, because all the heavy lifting was done, so the writing was kind of like the downhill part. 100,000 words in two months. It seems like a lot until you digest it. You don't eat a Chipotle burrito in one bite, you monster. You take little bites, savor it along the way, and by the end of your meal, you got a book.
01:07:03
Speaker
So stay wild, see you in efforts, and if you can't do, interview. See ya.