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Episode 79—From Potholes in Parking Lots to the Jungles of Borneo with Sy Montgomery
126 Plays7 years ago
"I have never picked the safe option and I have never regretted choosing what I've chosen ever," says Sy Montgomery. Hey there, CNFers, hope you're having a CNFin' good week. My, oh, my, where do we start? Maybe if you're new to the podcast I should let you know what it's about. This is the show where I speak to the world's best artists about creating works of nonfiction: leaders in narrative journalism (like Susan Orlean), personal essay (like Matthew Mercier), memoir (like Pulitzer Prize-winner Madeleine Blais), radio (Joe Donahue), and documentary film like (Jeff Krulik and Penny Lane). As of now it's mainly writers, but I'm scurrying like heck to get more filmmakers and radio producers on the show. It's my job to tease out origins, habits, routines, and points of craft so that you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. I also hope that in having these conversations you might also not feel as lonely or alone in your artistic pursuits. You'll notice every single guest has the same set of anxieties you have and they manage to get the work done. I deal with my own self-hatred and lack of worth from the moment my alarm goes off at 4 a.m. so there you have it. Today's guest is Sy Montgomery and you probably know her from her gargantuan bestseller The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the World of Consciousness. It was a National Book Award Finalist and just one of the literally dozens of books Sy has written about animals. In this episode we talk about: Sy getting her start as a business writer in Buffalo, NY Belief in projects even when you don't believe in yourself Being open to your expectations of a story changing as you go And much, much more Frankly, I came away from this conversation feeling good, just good, and the people who make you feel that way are the people you want to surround yourself with. I know I ended that sentence with a preposition, but whatever. Before I send you off into the Animal Kingdom with Sy, here's that part where I ask you to leave an honest review on the iTunes. Any review posted from now through the end of 2017 gets an hour-long editorial consult from me, which is a $50 value if you like putting dollars and cents on things. Simply send me a screenshot of your review and I'll reach out. My pile of editorial is growing thanks to you. Reviews are the currency we play with to reach more people and empower them to do the kind of work they find most inspiring.
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Transcript
Introduction to CNF Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey there, CNF-ers. Hope you're having a CNFing. Good week. My oh my. Where do we start? Maybe if you're new to the podcast, I should let you know what it's about.
Interviewing Leaders in Nonfiction
00:00:11
Speaker
This is the show where I speak to the world's best artists about creating works of nonfiction. Leaders in narrative journalism, like Susan Orlean. Personal essay, like Matthew Mercier. Memoir, like Pulitzer Prize winner Madeline Blaise. Radio, like Joe Donahue.
00:00:29
Speaker
and documentary film like Jeff Crulick and Penny Lane. As of now, it's mainly writers, but I'm scurrying like heck to get more filmmakers and radio producers on the show.
00:00:42
Speaker
It's my job to tease out origins, habits, routines, and points of craft so that you can apply those tools of mastery to your own
Artistic Anxieties and Common Struggles
00:00:50
Speaker
work. I also hope that in having these conversations you might also not feel as lonely or alone in your artistic pursuits.
00:00:59
Speaker
You'll notice every single guest has more or less the same set of anxieties that you have and they manage to get the work done. And great work at that. So I deal with my own self-hatred and lack of worth from the moment my alarm goes off at 4am. So there you have it. If you have a similar feeling, know that you're not alone.
Introduction to Sy Montgomery
00:01:20
Speaker
So in any case, today's guest is Cy Montgomery. And you probably know her from her gargantuan bestseller, The Soul of an Octopus, a surprising exploration into the world of consciousness. It was a National Book Award finalist and just one, one of the literally dozens of books Cy has written about animals.
00:01:44
Speaker
In this episode, we talk about how Psy got her start as a business writer of all things in Buffalo, New York. Belief in projects, even when you don't believe in yourself. Being open to your expectations of a story changing as you go, and much, much more.
00:02:05
Speaker
Frankly, I came away from this conversation just feeling good, just good. And the people who make you feel that way are the people you want to surround yourself with. And I know I ended that last sentence with a preposition, but whatever. So before I send you off into the animal kingdom with Psy, here's that part where I ask you to leave an honest, not even a positive, just an honest review on iTunes.
00:02:28
Speaker
Any review posted from now through the end of the year gets an hour-long editorial consult from me, which includes this kind of questionnaire I send out, but also then I will edit and really crunch down on about 2,000 words of your work, which is about a $50 value if you like putting dollars and cents on things. Simply send me a screenshot of your review and I'll reach out. My pile of editorial
00:02:53
Speaker
Stuff is growing thanks to you. Reviews are the currency we play with now.
Sy Montgomery on Managing Multiple Projects
00:03:00
Speaker
So to reach more people and empower them to do the kind of work they find most inspiring, these reviews help the podcast be more visible to those people like yourself.
00:03:10
Speaker
Alright, that was a bit long, I know. But let's do the show, let's do it, let's just get right into it. Here is Cy Montgomery. Thanks for listening.
00:03:26
Speaker
beginning of the year, I was talking to a lot of people on the podcast about how they were setting up their year, kind of like those New Year's resolution type things, too, so they would have a good year. And now we're 11 months later, and I wonder, like, how do you process or maybe review the year that you've had and then maybe setting the table to have a good 2018? Like, how are you processing this time of year? Well, this year,
00:03:56
Speaker
I have been dealing with six books at once and that's too much. And I don't want to do that anymore because you feel like you're running out into the street in your bathrobe catching a taxi to the airport every minute. It's terrible. And I've had lots of experience loving researching and I always love the research, but I don't always love the writing part. And when you're writing with a gun to your head, you really don't like it.
00:04:24
Speaker
So I have had a hard time enjoying writing with so many deadlines and so many, you know, and you look up and there's another one looming on the horizon. So this is insane. So I'm not going to do that anymore. But, you know, here's the thing. I mean, I've been doing this full time
From Journalism to Freelancing: Sy's Journey
00:04:50
Speaker
working for myself.
00:04:51
Speaker
since, gosh, five years out of college, you'd think I would have gotten the hang of it, but no, no. I say yes too much because I love all the stuff that I work on and I consider it
00:05:09
Speaker
you know, not only is it a joy, but it's a, you know, my husband kids me, I'm doing the octopus ministry now, you know, because my last book was all about octopus. But, you know, I'm doing stuff that I deeply believe in, and I think, you know, it is an honor for me to be part of the movement that is, I think, changing the way, changing people's relationship with the rest of animate creation. I really think that's
00:05:36
Speaker
happening right now and I'm thrilled to be part of it. But anyway, I just can't say yes, like I've been doing for the past couple of years. So I'm switching to, let me check my calendar. Right, right. I mean, it's sort of like, yes, yes, I'll have it. How about yesterday? That'll work great. But there's, you know, with Solemn Octopus, that book did very well. It's now and it's, let's see, it's got
00:06:07
Speaker
We just sold Spanish, so that's 12 languages. And you feel like, oh my gosh, it's my 15 minutes of fame. I've got to say yes to everything because I'm never going to get an opportunity like this. That business part of it, too, is actively working. But then I'm going to turn 60 in February. As much as I love my writing and research, I also love
00:06:36
Speaker
the little town I live in. I love Thurber my puppy. I love my husband, who is also writer Howard Mansfield. I love it all.
00:06:47
Speaker
And I just have to slow down a little bit. So that's my goal for 2018. Now, are these six book projects that
Sy's Creative Process and Fieldwork
00:06:58
Speaker
you've got in production, is this really a direct result of the success of Soul of an Octopus? Well, you can't really tell. You can't really tell. But you do kind of think that if you've got a national bestseller,
00:07:15
Speaker
that usually for the month for a little bit. So I pitched all of these things. It wasn't like people came to me on their knees, oh please write this book. But I pitched them and I pitched them pretty fast. So the six books that are on their way in some point of the Python, some of them are fixing, one of them is coming out this spring, a book on hyenas.
00:07:41
Speaker
I've got another book coming out for little kids on Inky, the octopus, the real octopus who went down the drain and escaped back to his original sea home in New Zealand. And then in the fall, I have another book, which is a memoir called How to Be a Good Creature, a memoir in 13 animals. That's coming out in the fall. And I just Monday pressed send on a book on wildebeest.
00:08:10
Speaker
That's, you know, the first draft is done and I sent it to my editor. And last month I got back from the first of two expeditions to California for a California Condor book. And then I've got a giant manta ray book that we're still in the planning stages of, you know, doing the research. But goodness, you know, I haven't been diving, I haven't been scuba diving in
00:08:39
Speaker
couple of years actually and for this I'm going to need a scuba dive so and you can't just hope you're going to remember that you should go over the boat you know. So I need
Exploring Animal Consciousness
00:08:53
Speaker
to have some time brushing up on those skills and oh gosh I don't know what else is in production. I mean I counted up and there were six.
00:09:06
Speaker
So, I mean, there were so many that I wasn't even keeping track of them. And it was one of those things that I could always tell when I've got too much going on when I smack my head against hard objects frequently. Not on purpose, but, you know, you're like whacking your head as if you can't remember, what is it my neck ends in again? Oh, yeah, it's by your head. So when you're getting in the car and you smack your head, when you're going down the basement, you smack your head, it's kind of like someone's slapping you and saying, get out of your life.
00:09:37
Speaker
All right, so before we get to maybe how you're peeling back from a lot of that work, I want to say that you've got those projects going in the hopper in various forms of completion. So this past maybe year and a half, two years that you've taken on a lot of this work,
00:09:59
Speaker
How have you been juggling that, and how have you been setting up your days so you can, you know, hit send and meet your deadlines? Like, how have you been doing that? Well, you know, I was trained as a journalist, and right out of, well, in college, I worked for a daily paper, so every day had a deadline, so you just don't miss a deadline. And it also helped that my father was an army general.
00:10:26
Speaker
So discipline was a big thing. I don't miss deadlines. It just doesn't happen. It's not an option. Now, if the Kakapo is not nesting that year, you can't do the book, so you're not going to make that deadline. Or if the researcher broke her foot, so you can't do the Altai Mountains looking for snow leopard,
00:10:56
Speaker
Well, that's different. But I always make the deadlines. And so that's always priority one. And it really helps to be married to a writer who totally understands that. He actually hired me, Howard hired me on the college newspaper and totally understands the deadlines, totally understands the writing life. So everything in our life, you know, we purposely did not have children. However, we have a
00:11:26
Speaker
Border Collie and I am now taking him to dance lessons. So go figure that one out. That's amazing. Well, he's a genius and you know, he's making it to his play dates. He's making it to his lessons. But, you know, I guess there's
Persistence and Gratitude in Writing
00:11:44
Speaker
a lot of stuff that I don't do with my life that other people do. You know, I don't have to
00:11:54
Speaker
I don't have to pick out what I'm going to wear in the morning or put on makeup or even comb my hair. I work at home. I live in a little rural town where you expect there's going to be chicken shit on the bottom of your shoes. There's a lot of stuff that we don't have to worry about. That's kind of how you do it.
00:12:22
Speaker
in the morning usually. I mean today is an exception but most of the time the phone rings in the morning I don't pick it up. In fact I often just don't even have the ringer on. I don't check my email usually in the morning when I'm actively writing something. The writing is everything. That's what you do and everything else
00:12:45
Speaker
comes after that. Now, that's kind of not true because the very first thing I do in the morning is I give Thurber an hour-long walk in the woods, but that's really good for your brain. Yeah. Yeah, of course. There are untold volumes of essays and good work of writers just waxing poetic about the need for walking as a way, as part of the writing process. Yeah, I think it's a great
00:13:14
Speaker
way to sort things out. And also just to be in the woods with an animal who you love is great for me. It's great for me because it's real. This is as real as it gets. And it tethers me to why I do what I do. Because what I am, what I'm trying to be in my writing is a servant to
00:13:44
Speaker
the rest of animat creation. And here is one of the emissaries, my joyous, intelligent, emotional, delighted dog right there, reminding me who else is out there and who's counting on folks like me to be their spokesperson.
00:14:08
Speaker
And when you've been doing this kind of journalism, freelancing, and so forth since five years out of college, when you were hanging your shingle at that point, so to speak,
00:14:23
Speaker
Did you have this type of naturalist writing this advocacy for animal intelligence and animic creation from the get-go, or is this something you sort
Literary Influences and Writing Advice
00:14:36
Speaker
of slowly folded into over the years? Oh, it was definitely from the get-go. But you know, when you get out of college, you got to take whatever job there is.
00:14:49
Speaker
I actually started working for the Buffalo Evening News, and I was a business writer. I didn't know anything about business. My first story was writing about potholes in parking lots. So I worked for them for a while, but I knew the job I wanted. I wanted to work for the Courier News in Bridgewater, New Jersey, New Jersey being the state with the highest number per capita of scientists and engineers.
00:15:16
Speaker
because I wanted to write about science, I wanted to write about environment, and I was also interested in medicine. And that was the job that I got after working at the Courier News for one year as an area reporter, then I got to be the science environmental writer. And I knew that that's what I wanted to do. And then after like four years on the job, I took a vacation with Earthwatch
00:15:43
Speaker
which appears paying laymen with scientific projects around the world. And my father gave me a ticket to Australia and I decided I didn't want to just go vacation there. I wanted to work there for an environmental project. So that's where Earth Watch came in. I worked on a project with Dr. Pamela Parker of Brookfield Conservation Park, studying the southern hairy-nosed wombat. And after two weeks of living in the field, studying these beautiful animals,
00:16:13
Speaker
I knew that I didn't want to go back and work in the newspaper anymore. This is what I wanted to do full time. So I, I quit my job and got a tent and moved to the Outback and studied emails. Wow. And I had no money. I was not paid for it. I, my airfare was not paid for, but Pamela Parker paid
00:16:38
Speaker
for my food. I mean she gave me food that she had on hand for her research park and I basically had no expenses. So that's what I did and I lived in a tent for six months and followed emus around finding out what they did all day. And even though I loved my job at the Courier News and I was still friends with a lot of the folks that I work with and they're very talented and they treated me really well and I
00:17:08
Speaker
I had grown a great deal there and had been given a lot of freedom. But after that, I knew that I really needed to work for myself.
Final Thoughts on Personal Growth
00:17:20
Speaker
My husband and I moved to New Hampshire because it had more tree cover and more of its original wetlands than any other place that we could find near a major metropolitan area, which was Boston, and started
00:17:37
Speaker
we both started freelancing. I mean, we were out on the limit. Everyone said, you're nuts. Everybody told me you're insane. Because, you know, I had this great job and I was given all these nice raises and I had a lot of freedom within the job. But this was what I wanted to do. And, you know, so often we writers are told when we do what we believe in that we're crazy and that you really should pick a safer option and
00:18:04
Speaker
and I have never picked the safe option and I have never regretted choosing what I've chosen, ever.
00:18:16
Speaker
Wow, so what gave you and your husband the courage to do that and to be those full-time freelancers and to deal with those ups and downs that comes with hanging your shingle as a freelancer? How did you guys weather that? What were some of those early growing pains too?
00:18:39
Speaker
Well, early on, you know, my husband worked in a bookstore for part of the time. He worked in the post office. I worked shoveling horse shit in a stable, which of course for me was very honorable work. I loved being with the horses. I was honored to do that for them. Um, and, you know, my friends were horrible, but I liked, I liked doing that and how it's time in the bookstore was also extremely useful. I mean, now we have a,
00:19:08
Speaker
We still have a very close connection with the bookstore, but that's because they're selling our books. My husband and I both understanding what
Podcast Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:19:22
Speaker
it means to be a writer, I think, was really key. If we had had any other mate, it would have been
00:19:31
Speaker
far more difficult, unless of course one of us had the sense enough to marry like an astrophysicist or a doctor or a banker or something like that. But far more than having enough money to live. And really, you know, we can live on very little money. Howard and I, we both feel like we have everything we want. We have too many things.
00:19:57
Speaker
We never like want some other thing. I mean, you want new food every week cause you ate the last food, but you know, um, what else? Cause you possibly want in the world. There's just stuff everywhere. And if you don't wash your clothes that often, they last forever. And, um, you know, um, we're very, we're very happy. Healthcare was always interesting in the, in the beginning.
00:20:26
Speaker
because we didn't have any insurance, but we were young, so nothing weird happened, although I kept flinging myself into jungles. Very early on, I got dengue fever, for example, when I was in Borneo researching my first book, but even if I'd had money, I was in the middle of nowhere. I couldn't have found a doctor even if I could have afforded one.
00:20:54
Speaker
With a lot of these things, you either die, in which case, well, you don't have any problems, or you get better. But as far as just having the courage to do what you want to do, what I would say about that, it's not that hard to do unless you've already tied yourself down to
00:21:22
Speaker
a whole lot of things or some other kind of life. I mean, if you've got 10 children and a mortgage, that's going to make a different kind of life for you. But we didn't have that. We knew what we wanted and it was not that hard to have it. The hard part, of course, was getting rejections. It wasn't the money or the insurance so much, but it is hard as a writer getting
00:21:52
Speaker
pitching your stuff all the time and of course you're going to have rejections.
00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah. How did you deal with rejections and self-doubt that inevitably creeps in? If your big project's getting rejected on big projects, if that one feels like a gut punch because you put a lot into it, then there's some of that mercenary work that sometimes you can get a rejection one day and then send it out the next day and get an acceptance.
00:22:22
Speaker
How did you deal with those little micro rejections and macro rejections and then still have the strength to keep going? I don't always believe in myself. I can't just believe in myself because I'm not that great. But I do believe in my project. I do believe in my animal teachers, my human teachers. I believe in the experience that I've had. And so when that gets rejected,
00:22:53
Speaker
I'm looking at, you know, can I learn something from that rejection to make that experience to fulfill what I owe that experience? That way you don't feel like you personally have been rejected because I think that makes people's ears and tail go down and then they want to crawl into a hole and die like a rat who had poison.
00:23:22
Speaker
I've always had complete confidence in my teachers and my message. So I've never lost faith in that. I just need to be a better messenger. And sometimes the rejections can help you be a better messenger. Other times you just have to ignore those people because there's no accounting for taste. Oh, that dress makes you look fat.
00:23:49
Speaker
Maybe it doesn't make you look fat. It's just people's taste and that person's individual taste on that particular day. But still, just like a focus group, you can take a look at what those people who rejected your story said. Why did they reject it? And can you make it better by addressing something? Then look at them as somebody who's helping you, someone who's being useful to you.
00:24:20
Speaker
Right, that's real important that you mentioned that the other person's taste on the other line is a matter, it's an intersection of maybe what they've already published, what they've already accepted, timing, and even mood for that given day. You just, there's so many things. Right, right. When did they eat? Were they hungry? They found that judges, verdicts, are remarkably different
00:24:46
Speaker
right before lunch and right after lunch. You could have committed the exact same crime, but if the judge decides what to do with you right before lunch, you're going to get a much more severe sentence.
00:25:01
Speaker
Oh my, that's encouraging. I know, I know. So, I mean, take your editor out to lunch. Yes. That's my advice. Yes, give him a delicious sandwich, a healthy side, some sparkling water.
00:25:19
Speaker
So as you were developing the stories that really resonated with your personal taste, these projects that you, even if they were getting rejected, like you deeply believed in, what did those stories look like? And how were you advocating for them so eventually you were getting more of those acceptances to allow you to do the work that you felt most strongly about? Well, sometimes it just meant that I had to kind of
00:25:47
Speaker
switch the form. Very early I started writing books but continued to write magazine articles and newspaper articles and stuff like that kind of to finance the books and to forward the research. Often I would just find an editor with whom I clicked and we would discuss the assignment together so that we were both on the same page and could go
00:26:19
Speaker
go forward and then I would stick with that, you know what I mean? That was a big help. But, you know, I have had some kind of dramatic setbacks. My first book, Walking with the Great Apes, which is about Jane Goodall, Diane Fosse, and Brute Galdikas, the first three ladies to study humankind's closest relatives, and that book is still in print. When I first sold it,
00:26:47
Speaker
I think it was to McGraw Hill or something. And I had gone to Borneo where I got dengue fever and I put a lot of research into it already. I came home from the trip and discovered that the publisher was no longer selling trade books and they had canceled my contract. It had nothing to do with my work.
00:27:12
Speaker
I was screwed. This was bad. This was bad. So my agent, who I didn't know very well, she and I are very good friends now. She's been my agent from the start. And I were thinking, well, we have to sell it somewhere else. Well, my best friend, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who's considerably older and more experienced than I am and was a multi-bestseller.
00:27:43
Speaker
had her editor over for lunch, Peter Davison, who was the poetry editor for the Atlantic, and he had his own imprint at Houghton-Mifflin. And she told Peter about me, and my agent the next day sent over my book proposal to Peter. And he accepted that thing and gave me way more of an advance than I'd had from McGraw Hill.
00:28:10
Speaker
And it worked out being a great thing. But let me tell you, I was feeling like I was hanging over a volcano by a hair thin thread because I'd already put so much into that book and then all of a sudden it wasn't even going to be published. And I've had all kinds of things go incredibly wrong. When I went to India and Bangladesh, my first expedition for Spell of the Tire,
00:28:39
Speaker
As soon as I got to India, which was where I was going to do most of my research, I discovered that my scientist, my translator, and my speedboat operator all fell through. And when I got myself out to the mangrove swamp where the man-eating tigers lived, then
00:29:04
Speaker
Civil war essentially broke out in India. It was Marshall wall was declared and people were burning other people alive and it was just a big mess and I was I was stuck out in this border area on the border of Bangladesh and I couldn't get out of there and no one else could go in there and There I was without a translator and everyone's speaking Bengali. It was it was a big problem But
00:29:34
Speaker
almost without exception every one of these horrendous problems worked out to be a tremendous help what happened to me and when everything fell through in india was that instead of hearing the scientist story of what was going on i got to be very good friends with the villagers and when i went back and i went back a second time and a third time and even a fourth time
00:30:00
Speaker
I got a story that no one else could have ever gotten because no one was listening to what these villagers knew. Everyone was dismissing them. And they probably weren't particularly eager to tell it to some big deal government official or, you know, because of the caste system and everything. Whereas they were delighted to tell an author that Bengalis have an incredible literary history and love
00:30:30
Speaker
for literature of all kinds to the point that these people who were certainly not wealthy, a lot of them did not own any shoes, they didn't have running water, their houses were made of mud, they asked me in Bengali to recite Shakespeare in English for them. They knew who our Shakespeare was and then they would recite Rabindranath Tagore and they are great Bengali poets in Bengali for me.
00:30:57
Speaker
They were so respectful of the fact that I was writing a book that they wouldn't let me put my notebook on the ground because it was disrespectful to the book. The opportunity that I had and I had that opportunity because my original plans were swept away.
00:31:17
Speaker
That's right. It kind of goes to how the whole making lemonade from lemons, like with the Borneo book, it looked like it was dead, but it just threw sheer endurance and just making the right connection that eventually gets greenlit to something better, a better deal than before. And then with this
00:31:41
Speaker
This experience in India, it looks like your original plan was toast, but what came after just by sticking around and keeping your antenna tuned to the story or to what's happening around you, it turned into something probably better than you could have ever imagined. Absolutely. Yeah, what did those experiences just kind of like teach you about the nature of just kind of hanging around and letting things unfold and then just being open to it?
00:32:11
Speaker
Well, you pretty much named it. I mean, when you're doing nonfiction, you have to let the story speak to you. And often when you're doing what I do, if you're talking to people who live close to the earth, for example, they may tell you things that at first seem impossible. I did another book called Journey of the Pink Dolphins. And people told me that these dolphins were very difficult to study, by the way, they lived in
00:32:41
Speaker
either very dark or very opaque water. They don't leap out of the water like oceanic dolphins do. These are river dolphins. So they're very hard to study. They're hard to even see. Well, the local people would tell me stories about how these dolphins turn into people and they'll come out of the water and they'll show up at dances and they will seduce you. And they would tell me that this had happened to them.
00:33:12
Speaker
And they would tell me that, you know, in the morning you wake up and your lover has given you a beautiful watch or a lovely necklace and you look on the night table and your lover is gone and the jewelry they gave you has turned to a pile of silvery fish. And this would happen to me in West Bengal and India as well. People would tell me, oh, the tigers, they can become invisible here. The tigers can fly through the air. They would tell me that when a tiger kills a man
00:33:42
Speaker
When the tiger picks them up, the corpse shrinks to half its size in the tiger's jaws. And I'm writing all this down. I'm listening very carefully to this. And I am not judging it. What I'm doing is listening for their truth. And this is what you do when you fling yourself at nonfiction.
00:34:05
Speaker
You, of course, are forced, unfortunately, to have a preconception because you have to write these stupid book proposals saying, this is what I'm going to find out, which is just an exercise in garbage as far as I'm concerned. And I hate it that we have to do that. But you got to be open to it being a completely different thing and let it sweep you off your feet like you've fallen in love and listen to the new truth that you're going to hear.
00:34:34
Speaker
that maybe you're hearing for the first time, maybe no one else has heard that truth. Maybe you're the one that gets to bring that truth to readers all around the world. And that has happened to me. Wow. That's incredible. And when you're out in the field doing your reporting, do you rely on a recorder at all? Or are you just strictly pen and notebook?
00:34:58
Speaker
Well, I've had some bad things happen. I really, really did have an orangutan eat my interview tapes in Borneo. It was horrible. And so even when I tape an interview, I also write everything out verbatim. And the other thing that I have learned is to duplicate things whenever you possibly, possibly can.
00:35:28
Speaker
I started doing all of this before there was anything like an internet and I normally don't carry a computer with me because ants are going to get in there, it's going to fall in the water, Wolverine is going to pee on it. The usual things reporters are dealing with. So I try to keep things simple and also a lot of times I have to carry things kind of a long way.
00:35:58
Speaker
i'm just so glad i'm not a photographer and i work with wonderful photographers sometimes but boy do they have to shill up a lot of stuff but i'm so glad i just have like a little notebook and a pencil it's so much easier but it's also a lot easier you know to pick be taking notes while you're hiking in the alpine mountains of the gobi desert or uh... lately you know i've been doing some scuba stuff and i have a scuba slate that you can actually take notes underwater but it's
00:36:27
Speaker
That's very hard to do, I've got to say, because when you put on your mask, it distorts your vision. And also, just by touching your slate the wrong way, you can wipe out all of your notes. Oh, wow. Yeah, but I just kind of keep it simple. And at the end of every day, what I do, even though it's the last thing you want to do, at the end of every day, I try to write in a journal, longhand.
00:36:55
Speaker
not just what happened that day like Dear Diary, but a little essay about what that day showed me or what the theme of the day was.
00:37:05
Speaker
Sometimes there is no theme, but often there is one. Right. That's real valuable. That just adds extra sort of texture to whatever like hard stuff you're able to gather and you almost give it a beating heart that it might not ordinarily have if you were just like writing down like bullet facts and some quotes, I guess. And I often take directly verbatim from my journal. I mean, not just a sentence or a phrase, but
00:37:31
Speaker
largely whole paragraphs. Sometimes the stuff you write in your journal is the best stuff you're going to write. And you think not because you hurt your hand on a stick or you really needed to get those hundred pepper ticks out of your leg first but you instead wrote what you needed to do or your sleeping bag got wet and you're not very comfortable but write the journal first. Always put that first.
00:37:59
Speaker
Wow. I'm just picturing a leg full of ticks and you're like, I got to write in the journal first, then I'll worry about picking these things off my body. I'll make an exception for leeches. Leeches have to come off before anything else.
00:38:17
Speaker
And you said earlier how you really sink yourself and love the research, and the writing is kind of the agonizing part. It can be. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's great. But sometimes it is like pulling teeth.
00:38:32
Speaker
Yeah. So how do you, because the research part can be sort of a fine line between doing too much to avoid the writing or doing just enough, doing the research that you need to do to write the thing. But then sometimes you can get lost in wormholes as a form of productive procrastination. So as someone who really loves the research, how do you know when you're done and you're, and it's ready to, you're like, all right, all right, Si, I got to start writing.
00:39:03
Speaker
Well, often my research is largely in the field, and the field expedition is over and you're out of money, so you have to write, and you have a deadline. So that's how I stop the research. This is the order in which I usually do things.
00:39:23
Speaker
I usually do most of the book research and academic type interviews before I even go into the field. So I have all that loaded into my brain, ready to be surprised, ready to know like, oh my gosh, what I just witnessed isn't in the literature, or oh geez, this is exactly what David told me that I would see, or
00:39:48
Speaker
This reminds me of the thing that Jane wrote about in 1960 of a different species over here. So then I go into the field and then I come back from the field and I try to start writing as soon as I can. Now, not everything works like this. When I did Soul of an Octopus, the field mostly was going to the New England Aquarium every Wednesday.
00:40:19
Speaker
But I knew when I had finished, I knew when I had finished that book, that that book had a very clear point at which I was ending. And that turned out to be when the giant ocean tank, which was completely, I mean, I didn't plan it this way, but when I started my research on
00:40:48
Speaker
soul of an octopus. It's a book about transformation. I mean, who's more transformational than octopus who can change color and shape and pour their body through tiny opening, right? But at the time I was researching this book on transformation, the whole aquarium was transforming itself and the central pillar, the giant ocean tank was being redone. So when it reopened,
00:41:17
Speaker
and had remade itself, I knew that was when the book would end with that. And it also kind of had to simultaneously end with the death of one of the octopuses who had been very important to me. So I knew when that was going to end. And that's when I stopped going to the field.
00:41:44
Speaker
But usually I plan these things so that I do the book and interview research. I then do the field research. I come home and bang, I write it. Was that refreshing in a sense when you were doing Soul of an Octopus that the structure kind of revealed itself and the construction of that new great ocean tank? Oh, I couldn't believe it. I was lucky with that book. Man, I was unbelievably blessed.
00:42:12
Speaker
Wilson Monashie, who is the octopus enrichment guy and one of my close friends now, he constantly says to me, you know, you could not have written that book today. Because things, the things that were going on, the people who were there, the whole setup for being with the octopuses, none of that had ever happened before. And things have been so remade that it never will happen again in that way.
00:42:42
Speaker
So I just let the octopuses lead me. I just let the story completely take me and sweep me away. And all I had to do was see what the story was. It was laid out for me. And that has happened over and over and over. And this is why I just hate having to write these stupid book proposals. I think of them as a selling tool. And I understand why the publishers have to have them because they want to know
00:43:10
Speaker
that six other books, just like this one, sold great. Okay, so you can just see like the stain for having to do this, and I also find it personally insulting, but... Because, gosh, don't you trust me now? I've written 23 books or 24 books, but anyway, it just ain't the way it used to be, but you just gotta be open to
00:43:37
Speaker
the sweep of the story and be free to let yourself go with it and be surprised and be educated and be delighted and and experience the sorrow and I mean that's the
00:43:52
Speaker
the joy of non-fiction and it probably is the joy of fiction too. I just don't know how to write fiction so I don't know what that's like. Do you go into a project taking Soul of an Octopus as an example? When you started that, did you basically
00:44:10
Speaker
not know, you knew basically, oh yes, an octopus has eight arms. And that's kind of all I know. And then you go in and then just totally write what you don't know. So that way you're open to learning the whole thing. Or do you sometimes go in with, oh, I have a general understanding, but I'd love to just take a deep dive with some experts. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so what's your starting point typically with those?
00:44:38
Speaker
I did know that octopuses were smart, and the whole reason I chose octopus was that here is a mollusk. Mollusks are snails. Mollusks are clams. Clams do not even have brains. Here is a mollusk who is smart. Here is a marine invertebrate, which is what most of animals are on the planet, who is smart.
00:45:07
Speaker
Can I get to know someone like this? And if so, what are they like? Do they have consciousness? What is consciousness? So I knew when I walked through the doors of New England Aquarium with an assignment from which I had pitched to Orion Magazine, I knew that there could be some very rich material there.
00:45:37
Speaker
I didn't know what it was. And I also did not know that I could become friends with an octopus. But the minute I met Athena, the minute this intelligent creature looked me in the eye, her eye swiveled in its socket and locked onto my face.
00:45:57
Speaker
And she slid over from her lair and she changed color with emotion. I mean, she felt something about coming over to see me and I could see it on her skin. I could see her attention riveted on me. I could see the curiosity of the panel. How many people have that experience with any marine creature other than maybe a dolphin or, you know, a sea turtle?
00:46:23
Speaker
But how many people even experience that with a fish? But how many people experience that with a musk? And so I knew this is about consciousness, this is about intelligence, this is about the nature of our souls. And I knew it was the most important book that I could write at this time in my career. And I knew also that I had been working up to writing about invertebrates for a long time.
00:46:52
Speaker
uh... my first book you know being about walk with the great jane goodall diet possibly britain gal because and the animals who are so close to related to us you can get at blood transfusion fusion from a champ you know i i knew that uh... these these are animals court easy for people to relate to it particularly when i'm standing on the shoulders of these giant women these great leaders in the apology
00:47:20
Speaker
at a time when women in science was a kind of hot new thing. And from there, I continued to write about large vertebrate animals. I wrote about tigers, and I wrote about dolphins, and I've written about birds, and I wrote about my relationship with my pig, who was a great big Buddha master, you know, that kind of thing. But I knew all this time that if
00:47:47
Speaker
I got wise enough and if I was able to find the right teachers that I would love to write about invertebrates because most of us here on earth are invertebrates and no one writes about them. No one knows anything about them. And why do you think that it connected so strongly with people, the soul of an octopus? Wow.
00:48:15
Speaker
I'm not sure. My husband's even more unsure. I think if he'd been hit on the head with a meteor, he couldn't have been more surprised on how well this book did. But people, I don't know. I do think that people are interested in other minds now in a way that they haven't been in the past. And it's something that I've been working toward along with a lot of my colleagues
00:48:45
Speaker
friends like well Jane Goodall, Barbara King, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, tons of Sue Savage Rumbaugh, Brenda Peterson. I could just keep on naming Diane Ackerman. A lot of women aren't they? But there's been a lot of interest
00:49:12
Speaker
lately that I think has been building for a long time. And I don't think there's anything I did to be frank. I think it's what the zeitgeist and I think it's what these, these individual animals who I knew gave me. They gave me so much of themselves when they gave me their friendship and their friendship was irresistible.
00:49:42
Speaker
Who were, as you, you know, you've written so many books, and who were people early on, and then even as you progressed, that you found yourself reading or re-reading, and also writers that you might have modeled yourself after as you were trying to develop your own voice? Well, my favorite writer of all time is a guy I married, Howard Mansfield. He is, and his talent is so much greater than mine.
00:50:12
Speaker
He writes about totally different things, although we both are trying to kind of hold the world together. He writes about preservation. He writes about the souls of towns and of buildings and of streets and of houses. He writes about what museums have to tell us. At heart, we sort of are writing about the same thing, but I'm writing about the animal world and he's writing about the human world.
00:50:40
Speaker
So I've always been one of his first readers, and he's always one of my first readers, and I've learned a lot from him. My best friend is Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who is an incredible writer. I grew up reading Farley Moatt. I grew up reading people who understood that animals had thoughts and feelings,
00:51:09
Speaker
and mines, you know, like Pope Riden. I read everything Jane Goodall ever wrote. I read everything. Well, Diane Fosse wrote a beautiful book, Gorillas in the Mist. And Maruti Galdikas wrote her books after I wrote mine, I think, but her books are beautiful too. But I do mostly, with the exception of Howard, I mostly read about
00:51:38
Speaker
animals and about the natural world. I recently read that wonderful book, The Hidden Life of Trees. Oh my gosh, that knocked my socks off.
00:51:50
Speaker
Well, you talk about some... Oh, sorry, go ahead. Oh, I was going to say, yeah, you talk about, you know, these animals that mollusks in an octopus that you didn't... that most people didn't realize have consciousness and feeling and even in memory. And so, like, you're reading Peter Wallibin's Hidden Life of Trees. Like, there's another thing, like...
00:52:12
Speaker
Do the, do the plants they'll, all the trees they'll help out an injured tree. If there's a tree cut down, they don't know it's cut down, they know it's hurt. They'll funnel resources to it. So it's like that's kind of goes right to what you're doing. You're sort of just peeling back.
00:52:29
Speaker
the levels of, you know, what we understand, these, you know, giving a greater sense of sort of consciousness and mindfulness to things that we often think, oh, well, they're subordinate to us. So they can't possibly have this degree of, you know, sentient thought or something. Yeah, exactly, exactly. There's a wonderful quote attributed to Thales in Militus, and it goes like this. It says,
00:52:58
Speaker
The universe is alive and has fire in it, and it's full of gods. And to me, that's what I get to be learning in my research, that the world is far more animate and far more exciting and far more holy than most of us might at first imagine.
00:53:26
Speaker
And so you mentioned a lot of great writers there, your husband included. What are some books that you find yourself revisiting over and over again, just to see, try to see how they're working and get into their bones a bit? Well, you know, I kind of don't look behind the curtain when I read. I just let it sweep me along. And I think it just seeps into you. I mean, maybe this is just me being lazy.
00:53:56
Speaker
But the cadences of Bible, for example, when I was growing up, were part of my literary tradition very much. And also as a public speaker, I do a lot of speaking now, and a lot of the preachers that I met in church were really helpful. My father,
00:54:23
Speaker
was a general and he would be called upon to give speeches as well. But whether it's speech or whether you're reading it, I think it just kind of seeps into your body and you feel like what you're absorbing is the story, but it's also the language at the same time. But the language, a lot of times the best language is completely transparent, as you know.
00:54:50
Speaker
My husband reads poetry in the mornings. He's reading a lot of Elizabeth Bishop these days, which is a lovely way to start your morning. But, I mean, my poetry is walking in the woods with my dog, Thurber.
00:55:05
Speaker
Yeah, and how have you cultivated a sense of patience in your work over the years to let things unfold as they can? Especially when you're young, you're hungry for that toehold and that validation. I wonder when you were getting started and
00:55:32
Speaker
How were you able to be patient enough to let that toe hold come when it came? And then how did you just manage to run your own race and just get those early victories to snowball you towards where you are now? Well, I certainly was very nervous. I mean, you have this, you have this feeling that you can fail your destiny. You know, I had all of these wonderful animals that were
00:55:59
Speaker
helping me. And what if I just wasn't good enough and was going to fail them? And I felt that all the time. I felt so nervous about it all the time. And I wish I could go back and tell my young self that you do have to work really hard, but it's not you that's going to succeed. What's going to succeed is the message that you get to hear. You know what I mean?
00:56:29
Speaker
It's not, it's kind of like not about you. You have to work a tail off, but it's that pure message that's going to eventually get through. Trust your teachers, trust your material, trust your message. And if you just work hard at it, you will succeed just like you want to be a great concert pianist. Well, it's easy. All you have to do is practice every day for five hours. That may not be true. I mean, there's also some degree of talent, but
00:56:59
Speaker
I certainly know I am no more talented than anyone else. Just lucky. Yeah, and well, luck comes to those who put in the work and they're prepared and the opportunity intersects with the hard work. And a concert pianist is a great sort of analogy, like when they play their scales over and over again.
00:57:27
Speaker
What are, how would you define writer scales and what does hard work look like for you so that you've done hard work and then you can be ready for when the opportunity strikes? Oh, that's a very, that is a very smart question. Well, the hard work means, you know, covering all the bases. If you're doing, if you're doing research, just leave no stone unturned.
00:57:52
Speaker
wait until you're getting the same answer over and over and over again. And don't quit early and be creative about all the bases, covering all of those bases. The other advice I would have for people, and this has gone a long way for me,
00:58:22
Speaker
Just be really courteous to all of your sources because they'll want to talk to you again. They'll want to help you if you're super courteous and if you send them the article that you wrote or if you fact check the thing with them and make sure that everything is correct. Just simple courtesy and doing what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it goes a heck of a long way.
00:58:50
Speaker
And then your sources who are helping you are going to call you up with their ideas. They're going to help you in all kinds of, they're going to help give you connections and help you in every way. I think that's probably the one thing that I've consistently done right, is I've tried to be really courteous. But I think I've somehow just started losing track of what the first, what does hard work look like.
00:59:20
Speaker
Sometimes hard work just looks like doing what you said you were going to do when you said you were going to do it. And you would not believe how few people do that these days. Why do you think that is? That there's this tendency to shortchange that thing that sounds so simple on the surface of just holding up your end of the deal, basically? I don't know. What do you think?
00:59:50
Speaker
I don't – it could be as – perhaps people are so bombarded with very like getting peppered with various distractions that sometimes it's easy for an email that you wanted to timely respond to somebody. It starts to move farther and farther down the inbox or – yeah, or just –
01:00:14
Speaker
Texts and tweets and other kind of notifications that pop up on people's phones and computers that it's just it's like the minds getting hit from so many angles that perhaps it's just easy to sweep common courtesy under the rug for the For it just to it's to be biting at various
01:00:32
Speaker
sweet treats that just pop in every now and again. I don't have a good answer for that myself. I know that like you, the only thing I probably have as someone who is not very well known in this line of work is to be courteous and to be timely and not only meet my deadline but meet it by a week and try to make my editor's job as easy as possible because I'm just that grateful and
01:01:01
Speaker
and grateful for that opportunity. And it sounds like you come from a similar place. Yeah, absolutely. I think that also kind of prepares your heart to do a good job in the world in general. And it keeps us humble. And gratitude keeps us humble. And being grateful, like what you just said, being grateful for this opportunity.
01:01:30
Speaker
I think that fills your whole life. I think it fills your work too. And that's the point that I want to be writing from, from a point of gratitude
01:01:46
Speaker
And do you find that writing about the natural world and animals has reaffirmed your, it gives you that footing of gratitude and sort of that you're a greater part of the animal kingdom too? Like it kind of, I don't know, gives you more energy than maybe writing about people when you're- Oh, yes.
01:02:08
Speaker
Well, yes, absolutely. I mean, I've always I like people and, you know, I married one and everything, but I I'm much more. I'm much more interested in the other. Because it is other. And I love exploring. That doesn't mean I don't love the familiar, but I love to explore.
01:02:35
Speaker
And I find the world gets wider and wider as you see it through other, not just other eyes, but entirely other senses. And that's what animals let you do.
01:02:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of like when you're walking your dog in the mornings. If you just take a peek and look at the happy smile on your dog's face as you're taking that walk, it totally imbues the walk with a different set of experiences. It's seeing the world through the dog's eyes, if you will. It's like, wow, this is a pretty lucky and joyous thing I get to do every morning. You're absolutely right. You're absolutely right.
01:03:18
Speaker
You know what? I'm going to have to go to the dentist. Oh, I'm glad I can send you off to the dentist. Well, Cy, this was what a pleasure to get to speak to you about your work and octose and other kinds of animals. This was a lot of fun. And maybe when your memoir comes out, we can have you back on and talk a little more shop and how you came to that book. Oh, I would love that.
01:03:44
Speaker
on this and i'd love to do that that would be fabulous i'm gonna pass your name onto the public this and not lose track of you both of the real pleasure thank you for all your smart questions and you're good listening in and little letting me connect with your listeners off and as well thank you and uh... we will certainly be in touch and keep up the great work side thanks again thanks so much uh... hi
01:04:07
Speaker
Yeah, baby. That's another CNFing conversation in the books. Thanks to Cy Montgomery at Cy the Author on the Twitters.
01:04:18
Speaker
I'm at Brendan O'Mara on the Twitters. Feel free to reach out with feedback and maybe what you want to hear and maybe what you're even struggling with. That'll help me maybe pinpoint some questions at these people and be like, you know what? These are what is concerning you. So maybe I can ask them and then they'll just going to offer their brilliant insights to how they deal with it. That might help you out. So don't be shy.
01:04:41
Speaker
And if you're feeling froggy and want an extra monthly nugget of goodness, I have a monthly newsletter that I send out on the first of the month with my book recommendations and what you might have missed from the world of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. I plan on adding some extra goodies to the newsletter in 2018, but in the meantime, it's books and pods. Once a month, no spam and you can't.
01:05:04
Speaker
beat it. Have a CNF and good week friends and we'll do it again next week with another conversation from the world of creative non-fiction. Thanks for listening.