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Episode 55—Do Funny Things Always Happen to Nikki Schulak?
125 Plays8 years ago
"What writer at my age gets to have parents be dead? I don't have to worry about what they think!" says Nikki Schulak. I suggest visiting Nikki's website and then perusing her extensive archive of essays. In this episode we talk about how stories come to her, how she stays attuned to the world, naked bike rides, and the power of performing for an audience and the validation that ushers. This is the last episode before my 37th birthday. Wanna give something to me? Leave a review on iTunes. You don’t even have to wrap it. The best part? It’s free and takes less than a minute. Can’t beat that right? Thanks for listening!
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Transcript
Jealousy as Writing Motivation
00:00:02
Speaker
going and listening to what other people are writing is important to me. And then feel, you know, feel jealousy about it. And then that's a prompt for me. Always to hear something, hear somebody else read and I'm like, oh man, I'm going to go home and write.
Introduction to the Episode and Guest
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Speaker
Welcome to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a podcast where I speak with the world's best artists in the genre of creative nonfiction. Whether they be essayists, memoirs, journalists, straight up writers and documentary filmmakers, it don't matter.
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Speaker
And this week for episode 55, speak with Nikki Schulack, a writer based out of Portland, Oregon.
Analyzing Shulack's Comedic Writing Style
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Speaker
She's a comedic writer and her essay in Creative Nonfiction's latest issue, titled Dentistry's Problem Children, fits the bill on the hilarity spectrum.
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Speaker
So in this episode we talk about how stories come to her, how she stays attuned to the world, naked bike rides, it's a thing, and the power of performing for an audience and the validation that that ushers.
00:01:17
Speaker
This is the last episode before my 37th birthday.
Engagement with the Audience
00:01:21
Speaker
Wanna gift wrap something for me? Leave a review on iTunes. You don't have to wrap it. Best part? It's free. Takes less than a minute. Can't beat that, right? Let's get on with the show. But first, a word from our sponsor. This rips.
Inspiration from Life Events and Details
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Speaker
How did I come to this story? I think really the story came to me, which is how I think most of my stories happen is that they come to me and then I write them down. And I have friends who say, okay, not multiple friends, but I have one friend who says to me, how come all the weird stuff happens to you? And I've thought about that because I
00:02:12
Speaker
I get a lot of work out of my life. A lot of my writing comes from my life and from my kids and from things that happened. And is it that weirder things happen to me or is it just that I pay attention, I look for things, funny things that happen in my life and then I write them down. So I think that
00:02:41
Speaker
That essay started, it's all true. Although when I submitted it, my boyfriend, who's a writer, said, they're never going to take that piece. It's comedy. It's not really creative nonfiction. And I said, but it is. It all happened just the way I wrote it down.
00:03:04
Speaker
And that's creative nonfiction.
Comedy vs. Creative Nonfiction Truthfulness
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Speaker
He said, no, no, it's comedy because I had written it originally in a different version for a show called Listen to Your Mother. And I performed it. But it had never been published. And it was a shorter version. And it was a piece about what we go through as parents and try to make good decisions. Each thing happened, you know, my son,
00:03:34
Speaker
Leo really did lose his teeth at preschool falling off in a quick piece of equipment. And we really did, you know, he really did look at shoe porn all the time and tried to get me to order him Adidas and Nike shoes and like all the things happened. But I didn't know that it was going to be a story until the last thing happened.
00:04:04
Speaker
with the Nerf gun. Because I write everything down, and I put them into folders, and they're like, well, these things sort of go together. I think this might become a story. But it's not until there's a climax that really happens that I feel, oh, OK, I get it. I see the shape of the story now. Everything that needed to happen happened, and now I can put it all together. And so that's how that story happened, is that each thing
00:04:34
Speaker
Happened and then my background as a teacher There was the storm and I did you know we really did play the ABC swearing game and and the kid that my kids tell these stories too because they They remember all these things happening to us but but the story happened it just happened and I recorded it and then I edited it and and and and I
00:05:04
Speaker
perhaps, oh, engineered it a little bit. Although I really do have to say, for the most part, it's true. There's always an element of shaping in the personal essay, too. So where did you feel like in this story that you needed to play with it and maybe exercise some poetic license? Poetic license.
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Well, I'll tell you, I was very surprised when I went through the editing process, creative
Fact-Checking Adventures
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Speaker
nonfiction. It was wonderful. I always love being edited. I wish I had an editor with me all the time, like right now. I did not anticipate that they were going to fact check my piece. That was new for me. I've never had a fact checker. So for instance, I
00:06:03
Speaker
There's a part in the story where I talk about the fact that he had, it was a premolar that was coming out. And the fact checker said very kindly, children don't have premolars. They just have molars. It's only adults that have premolars.
00:06:30
Speaker
I had, you know, I chose to say premolar because it was into my eyes. It looked like a premolar. It didn't look like a big molar. It looked like
00:06:40
Speaker
But I didn't know about the architecture of a child's mouth. So I wrote back, I said, well, it really was. It was a small molar. I would call it a premolar. And the fact checker wrote back and said, well, according to Colgate.com, kids don't have premolars. So then, of course, I check out Colgate.com, and I see exactly what they're talking about. So even though I felt premolar really was the more poetic way
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Speaker
putting it, I had to say, OK, it was a molar. That's what it was. The name of the Nerf gun, I don't have the article here in front of me, the essay. But the essay, so it did happen that we were at Freddy's, and it was a Nerf gun that cost more than $50. I'm sure of that.
00:07:39
Speaker
But by the time I wrote the essay, I had thrown away the box. In fact, the gun was gone. We didn't have Nerf guns anymore in our house. So I couldn't check the actual brand or the actual name of the Nerf gun. And I remember when I wrote the essay, I was so entertained by the names of Nerf guns, because they're pretty amazing, that I created a hybrid
00:08:09
Speaker
name of a Nerf gun that wasn't real. Well, it needed to be real. The fact checker wanted the name of a real Nerf gun, and I did not have it. And I ended up calling Fred Meyer to try to find out, like, corporate office to find out what Nerf guns might have been for sale that year that cost $50, and they're like, we have no idea.
00:08:40
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thousands and thousands of products and we just don't record things that way and I can't tell you and probably nobody will ever be able to tell you what was for sale that that year on that shelf and I ended up getting on to a Nerf gun chat group that's about Nerf guns and I found this person in Seattle and it was
00:09:10
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an archive of a conversation of this person talking about this Nerf gun that he bought at Freddy's someplace outside of Seattle that cost about 50, and they were on sale for $50. Everybody should go down and go down to Freddy's. Now you can get this Nerf gun for 50 bucks. So that ended up being the Nerf gun that I used in the essay. The N-Strike Vulcan EBF-25.
00:09:39
Speaker
Yes, it's for real. And I'm sure that was not actually the gun that I bought for Leo, but it was close. It was a pretty close match. And first, they said, oh, they don't sell Nerf guns, or they don't sell toys at Freddy's. It's a grocery store. I'm like, well, some of them do sell toys. And then the next reply I got was,
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Speaker
Well, not for more than $15. I'm like, no, this gun definitely was more than 50 bucks. It was just it was interesting to have those facts questioned and to have to do that research to satisfy the need of a nonfiction piece. Because as a comedy writer, I've never been asked to do that before. So that was that was interesting. It was fun.
00:10:35
Speaker
And obviously, it's continued to entertain me. Have you read The Lifespan of a Fact? No. Have you heard of the book? No, no, no. It's great. Yeah, it's basically what it is. It's this book that is the back and forth dialogue of the writer John DeGata and the fact checker from
00:11:17
Speaker
this complete back and forth like the gottos writing this essay about you know suicides in las vegas and he was just taking he was just at times just making things up or twisting facts to the point where he liked the sound of a certain number better in terms of pros so he was just like i like it sounds better in the sentence so i'm gonna change it and the guys like you can't do that
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Speaker
I believe his
00:11:40
Speaker
Yeah. And going back and forth, it sounds like the exchange you had was far more civil. But that's kind of the idea. The fact checker was on the staunch side of everything has to be verifiably true. And then the God who was like, well, this is art, and I'm going to take liberties. And it just goes on and on like that for the entire book.
Creative Liberties and Reader Trust
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Right. Yeah, exactly. Here's another one. We're driving the Honda Odyssey to the hospital.
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in my essay. Well, the truth is we don't have a Honda Odyssey. We have a Toyota Sienna minivan. But the Honda Odyssey was so much more poetic to me than Toyota Sienna. So I said Honda Odyssey. Well, nobody questioned that. And now, of course, it's public. Now everybody knows that I wasn't telling the truth.
00:12:40
Speaker
You've been outed. But does that matter? I don't know.
00:12:53
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Something as sort of trivial as that, in theory, it doesn't, what gets, what will raise certain people's hackles on something like that is like, okay, well, if so and so took a liberty with the automobile, what else could they possibly be making up? And then the trust erodes. So that's the slippery slope of that. Well, as it says in my bio,
00:13:22
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I am not always the most reliable narrator. Exactly. So you're right up front. It's the disclaimer. So something you said earlier, what I really liked was how you allow certain things
Gathering Material and Story Development
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Speaker
to come to you. You're constantly recording things. And I think that's what a lot of when you watch comedians at work, you know that they're
00:13:46
Speaker
they have this material, their antenna are constantly tuned to the world around them. That's how you're gathering, you've got this big, big fish net that you're just gathering all this information. And I usually had, you know, you were writing a lot of this stuff down. And I suspect that takes a lot of patience to let some of these things develop into something that could possibly be a story. And so how do you process
00:14:12
Speaker
all this information that you gather on the day-to-day to then write essays of this nature or some of your other comedic work. I always have something with me to record on a notebook. And when my kids were younger and I drove them around and they were in the back seat, it was so rich. It just never stopped.
00:14:43
Speaker
The material never stopped coming. So I recorded things throughout the day and then at night I would put it into a file in the computer. I'd type it in and I did that for years.
00:15:03
Speaker
And then I continued to do something like that, although as the kids got older and I had more time, I would actually just carry my laptop with me and write things down as they happened. And then I would have these long files called things like miscellaneous two with a date, and recently,
00:15:32
Speaker
in the last year, I took some time out of my writing practice to just go through these files. And I took everything, put them all into one big file, like every little note I had taken over the last 10 to 20 years. And I had 80,000 words, and I was really surprised. And some of it was
00:15:59
Speaker
You know, a lot of it wasn't interesting, but a lot of it was. And I started to cut and paste things into, oh, well, this belongs with this and this belongs with this, which is usually how I write is I will start a file that, for instance, for dentistry is part of the children. I had an ongoing file of everything that happened having to do with teeth and kept that filed because I knew it was going to become a story.
00:16:26
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But you don't know that everything is going to become a story. So a lot of it just ends up for me in a big folder of stuff. And then I need to go back and organize it. I have a lot of files that literally accumulate over the course of years, thinking this is going to become an essay. This has potential. It's not quite ready yet. I don't have quite enough to finish this story.
00:16:54
Speaker
But if I wait long enough and I continue to live my life and look for interesting things that happen, this story will come to an end. So like right now, so Saturday is the, I don't know if you have a naked bike ride in Eugene.
Essay on Naked Bike Ride and Body Image
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Speaker
Well, we have a big one here. Like 10,000 people come out for this and take their clothes off and ride naked.
00:17:23
Speaker
through the streets of Portland. And this year will be my fourth year doing it. So of course, you know, I started writing about it the first time I even thought about doing it because I thought about it for a couple years before I was actually brave enough to do it and the circumstances were right.
00:17:52
Speaker
So I've written about it for four years now, although I, the last year, um, I didn't do it. So it's, it's for various reasons, but I wrote about that too. So now I've got four years of notes about the naked bike ride and how my life was, how, you know, what it was like each time. Cause I was a, each time I was a slightly different person. So this year.
00:18:17
Speaker
will be my actual fourth time writing. And I think this is gonna be it. This is gonna be the final episode to this essay that I've been working on for a long time now. And I'm just sort of waiting to see what's gonna happen. Is it gonna happen the way I want it to happen? The way I want to create it? So, you know, because I wanna have this ending. Well, who knows? Who knows what's gonna happen?
00:18:46
Speaker
And that's exciting. But I'm ready for it. I'm ready to experience it and then get it down and then be done with that piece. What prompted you to want to do this in the first place? Well, it's a really big deal here. And I think when you moved apart, I've been here 17 years. So for a few years I heard about it. It was sort of this myth.
00:19:16
Speaker
that there's this thing called the naked bike ride. But then at some point you see it. You're out the night that it's happening. You're having dinner or you're going to the store. And all of a sudden you get cut off. You're driving. You get cut off by 10,000 naked bike riders. Like, Oh my gosh, it's true. It's not a unicorn. Like there really is such a thing that happens. It does exist.
00:19:46
Speaker
Yes. And you've got the kids in the back seat and they're pointing and they're like, Mommy, why are those people? Why are those? Why is everybody naked? And then you and then it's over and then you start thinking about it. Like, would I do that? And I so I kept thinking about it and then and I wanted to but it but it I'd never done anything like that before. And then I don't mean I don't even bike. I didn't even own a bike. And and then
00:20:15
Speaker
This friend of mine was turning 50 and she said, I want for my 50th birthday, I want you and a bunch of other friends to do the naked bike ride with me. I was like, okay, I guess this is it. I guess this is what I'm supposed to do. And that, and that was the impetus. So, so we, we all did it together. It started at the art museum and,
00:20:45
Speaker
down in the park blocks in Portland. It was not in the dark. It was still light out. It was late afternoon. And people start arriving. And you take your clothes off, and then pretty soon, it feels weird if you see somebody who's wearing clothes. Like, what are they doing here? And the art museum was
00:21:11
Speaker
they were letting people in, they were charging however many articles of clothing you were wearing. So if you took it all off, you got in for free. It was crazy. It was amazing. There's all these statues in the park blocks and people were climbing up on the horses, the statues, the horse statues, and they were naked and posing with the various statues in the park.
00:21:40
Speaker
and then pretty soon we're all taking off and it's, you don't know the route and we're biking over the Burnside Bridge and then we're biking by Franz Bakery and the truckers or they can't get out with their bread. But yeah, they're not too unhappy because you're watching all these naked people. And then I was hooked. I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I can't believe I'm doing this and it's
00:22:09
Speaker
wild and it was exhilarating. Everybody cheers for you. It did not feel like there was a lasciviousness or it wasn't creepy at all. It was very empowering.
00:22:28
Speaker
And then I wanted to do it again and again. So I'm sort of hooked on it. And I am not probably the typical naked bike rider because I'm overweight and I'm 50, almost 50, and there's all these really beautiful bodies.
00:22:49
Speaker
That was part of it for me too. It was like, okay, I'm going to choose to do this and I am not going to let myself stop myself from doing this. And so the essay that is going to come out of this is really about weight and weight loss.
Body Positivity Message
00:23:10
Speaker
And because I've done the Naked Bike Ride now at a weight that I was really happy with and now
00:23:16
Speaker
that I'm not happy with, but I'm going to do it anyhow. It doesn't matter. So it's sort of a statement I'm making for myself, that it's not about the shape of my body, about whether I get to get naked in public or not. What would the Nicki Shulak post bike ride tell the Nicki Shulak that was thinking about doing it?
00:23:39
Speaker
It's sort of what I heard other people say to me when I would say, how can you do that? How can you take your clothes off and go riding naked through the daylight in front of all these people? And people would say to me, oh, it's super fun. There's so much camaraderie and freedom. And I didn't believe them. It's like, no, it's really all about how you feel naked.
00:24:06
Speaker
But you let go of that pretty quickly. And also, I can remember saying, yeah, but isn't it uncomfortable to be on a bike without any pants on? And they'd say, no, not really. And that's what I would say. It's like, no, it's really OK. It's not uncomfortable, although the first year I did it.
00:24:27
Speaker
I my friend and I had to rent bikes because we didn't own them now I do now I have a bike because of the naked bike ride I now have a bike and I and I use it I mean I'm a fair weather biker but I do use it but that first year that we rented bikes and then we had to return them the next day and
00:24:49
Speaker
And there were people waiting to rent them. And I said to the woman behind the counter at the bike shop, like, oh, we had the best time. And she was going like, ah, shh, shh. Oh, please tell me that'll be in the essay. That's a perfect little set piece.
00:25:09
Speaker
But that's exactly the kind of note, you know, I went home and I wrote that down. Like I couldn't have made that up. I could, I mean, I'm sure somebody could have made it up, but I wouldn't have, but that it happened. And then I was like, Oh yeah, of course I shouldn't say what we were just using the bikes for. So that goes into the note, the, the, the file about naked bike ride. And there's just so many, there's just so many funny things that happen when you put yourself
00:25:39
Speaker
in a position to let those things happen and take those kinds of risks. And believe me, that was a risk. That was risky for me to do. Yeah, well, the symbolism embedded in just de-robing and doing that is so poignant that you're just really opening yourself up in this really raw and exposing way. And you come out the other end completely changed. Yeah.
00:26:09
Speaker
Yeah, you do. Life makes those kinds of opportunities. The great comedian Whitney Cummings, she has a great line that art can't imitate life unless you have a life.
Openness and Vulnerability in Writing
00:26:22
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah, so it's this kind of stuff. It sounds like, especially if you want to lead a writing life of any kind, you do have to get outside and be vulnerable and be open. And it sounds like that's exactly, I don't know, it's probably, it's an ethos that you can tell that you live by because you're taking all these notes and you're being open to so much that's around you and you're turning it into wonderful material. Yeah, it's fun too.
00:26:53
Speaker
How did you develop that sensibility and that taste? I had very creative parents and we always had crazy stuff happening at home. Did I get this from my parents or is it just the way I grew up that I expected that there would be things that happened and to keep your eye open for them. My dad was a good storyteller and
00:27:21
Speaker
He was always looking for material. Things happened, and then he would tell those stories. So I think that's probably where it came from, where it started, that he was a storyteller, and we had eccentric life. So there was never lack of material. And we kept a sense of humor about it, I think,
00:27:47
Speaker
which is a really important part of it, because otherwise it could just be tragedy. So you said you led an eccentric life and upbringing. Define what that is so we can see that eccentricity. So I grew up on a farm outside of Detroit. It's not rural anymore. And my father was an architect.
00:28:15
Speaker
He and my mom bought a farmhouse out in the country, and neither of them knew anything about farming or gardening, but they decided this is 1963. They decided this is the life that they wanted to have with this artist's life. And my dad was very successful as an architect. We had a very nice life and a very cultured life, but we also lived
00:28:46
Speaker
out in the country, the people who sold the furniture to him for the architecture for him, they would drive up the driveway. They're like, are we, is this Shulak an associate?
00:29:01
Speaker
I would come running up in my bathing suit with my goat behind me from the swimming pool. Yeah, that's my dad's office. I can help you. And it was just never, and then the goat would jump up on the hood of their car and make trouble. It was just, I brought a pig home at one point and the pig lived in the house. There were just all kinds of interesting things.
00:29:27
Speaker
happening and then other artists who would come and Skinny Dip or my dad's business associate was he was Greek and he was always making all kinds of wonderful Greek food and he'd eye my goat and say don't even think about think about touching my goat.
00:29:49
Speaker
So what was funny to you growing up and how did you develop your comedic sensibility? So in high school, I did something called forensics, which is not a medical thing. It's like a competitive speaking organization. And it was very big in Michigan. So I was a
00:30:17
Speaker
And there were different categories that you could enter. And I was in the humorous category. So I loved humor then. And if I look earlier, I loved Shel Silverstein as a kid. I totally got that. And I loved Garrison Keeler as a kid. That was really rich, wonderful storytelling for me. But I don't know.
00:30:46
Speaker
Maybe in seventh grade, I started keeping a journal about things that happened. And I feel like that's when I started to write things down. For instance, my dad, I said we had peacocks. Well, my dad decided he wanted to have peacocks. So this is before the internet. So how do you find some place where you can buy a peacock? You look in the phone book.
00:31:16
Speaker
So he looked in the phone book and found this place called Peacock's poultry, I think it was called. And he tore off, he would always tear out the page from the yellow pages. And he'd get in the car and go and find it. So he gets to Peacock's poultry and says to the farmer, I'd like to buy a peacock. Well, the
00:31:42
Speaker
The farmer says, we don't sell peacocks. We just sell frozen chickens. I'm Mr. Peacock. So the farmer was named Mr. Peacock. So it was Peacock's poultry. So that was a story that my dad brought home. And I thought it was really funny. And I wrote that in my journal, my seventh grade journal. I think that getting the reaction from the teacher
00:32:12
Speaker
that I thought it was funny and my family thought it was funny, but then to have this person read it and react to it and think it was funny, of course, made me want to keep writing funny things to get that reaction. Again, it made me happy. And then I learned more about comedy when I started doing that in high school, being the comedic readings, because I read lots of funny
00:32:40
Speaker
funny things. And then started, I was in an improv group. And I don't know, I just, I think humor was was really important to, you know, I'm not talking about the tragic stuff. But I think that's the flip side is that when you have tragic things happen, of which there were things, tragic things that happened, you can either go that way, and be miserable,
00:33:11
Speaker
Or you can, you must be Irish. I'm Jewish. And I think it's a Jewish thing to making comedy out of tragedy. I mean, I don't think the Jews own that, but I think it's a part of, it's definitely a part of the culture. We had a lot of fun. There was lots of joy.
00:33:36
Speaker
And lots of laughter, always, despite the fact that there were tragic things going on. You know, death and cancer and different kinds of mental diseases. You know, there was bad stuff.
00:33:53
Speaker
Yeah. Did your parents get sick at a fairly young age? They did. Yeah, they did. Well, they lost a son. They had a son who died who was killed by a car in front of our farm when he was 13. And that was pretty much as a parent, I get that now. I mean, I thought I got it before, but now that I have my own teenagers,
00:34:22
Speaker
I get the tragedy that you never recover from. So they never recovered from it. And, you know, they kept going and we, I was born after that. And, um, I was sort of the, the child who came after the tragedy. Um, and sometimes I think I felt like I had some kind of responsibility to be
00:34:50
Speaker
the one who brought joy after the tragedy. I mean, not in a conscious way, but now looking back as an adult, I had arrived in this family that this tragic thing had happened to, but I wasn't there.
Freedom After Parents' Passing
00:35:06
Speaker
And it was my job to make it better, to bring back happiness to the family. And again, that wasn't something that I thought about,
00:35:18
Speaker
as a kid, but it's something I look back on now. So my parents suffered a lot because of that. And then my mom got breast cancer when she was my age and just 49, so I was 12. She survived a long time, but eventually she did die from breast cancer.
00:35:47
Speaker
Um, and then my dad died just shortly after, about six weeks after she died, he died. Um, sorry to hear that. Yeah. I mean, that was 20 years ago, but, and, but I, you know, that's irrelevant. It's a, it's, it's something I, it's relevant as a writer because, you know, what writer at my age gets to have your parents be dead?
00:36:12
Speaker
Like, you know, I don't have to worry about what they think. I have a lot of freedom to write about them and about my childhood without worrying about what they're going to think about it. And I feel like that's really opened me up to be able to feel a freedom to write about my past.
00:36:35
Speaker
Yeah, because there's no fear of offending or libeling anyone. You do have an infinitely long leash, an infinitely long creative leash to just turn yourself loose.
00:36:52
Speaker
Yeah, although although I don't know my husband would say the same thing. Although he'll say, you know, you're going to write what you're going to write. But I do I do know writers who they've got lots of material and they're like, if my mom would just die, I could.
00:37:14
Speaker
So with regards to your writing and wanting to become a writer, do you remember a particular moment that you're like, oh, this is something I want to do as a vocation? Well, writing is not my vocation. Teaching is my vocation in terms of how I make money. I'm a teacher. Yeah, I mean, sure, I would love to be able to make a living
00:37:44
Speaker
as a creative nonfiction writer, but I'm not there yet. And even if I don't ever get there, where it's my vocation, I'm not gonna stop. I mean, I can't stop. I can't not write stories. But in terms of when I first thought, huh, people do this and some people have a lot of financial success, it is doable, it's possible.
00:38:14
Speaker
But I came to that, I think, late-ish. I always wrote, I always had a writing practice, but it wasn't until I had kids at age 30 that I started to finish things, to not just journal and come up with ideas, but actually finish
00:38:44
Speaker
pieces. One of the pieces that I finished, it wasn't when I was 30, it was about 10 years later, but it was something that came out of 10 years of taking notes. I finished something and I gave it to a friend who happened to be an editor in a local literary anthology. She's like, this is really good. You should submit this.
00:39:14
Speaker
to this anthology and I was like, oh, really? You really think I should? Because I didn't know anything about submissions or that that's how it gets done. She's like, yeah, this is really funny. You should definitely submit it. So I submitted it and it got in. And that was my first publication in this publication called Voice Capture, which is still going. And I've been an editor for it.
00:39:42
Speaker
a couple of times. It's an amazing journal. And it's a journal where a lot of people get a first publication. So I just was lucky because they used my piece as part of the publicity campaign. And I got some quotes put on postcards that got set up in bookstores. And it's a really raunchy piece about
00:40:12
Speaker
waxing and like the decision to wax my butt hair. I wasn't doing the naked bike ride yet. It was called the pieces called my midlife thong crisis. I decide, you know, I like decided to wear a thong and then I got these new glasses and I was looking at myself in a thong and I noticed that, you know, that I had a lot of
00:40:39
Speaker
Hair on my butt and I couldn't wear a thong without taking care of that But I didn't know how to take care
Audience Interaction and Performance
00:40:46
Speaker
of it. So the whole piece was about sort of what builds what built towards My getting my hair waxed are actually eventually laser laser treatment, but um You have to read it It's on the to-do list now This piece
00:41:09
Speaker
It was early. We have a literary festival here in Portland called Wordstock. It was a pretty, you know, maybe Wordstock had only been around a couple of years, but I was invited by this magazine, by this journal, to be one of the readers. So I got to go up in front of this room full of people and read my essay.
00:41:32
Speaker
And it was so much fun because it brought back all these, like what I had been doing in high school with the competitive speaking, except for that it was my own work that I got to perform. With that piece, I then went and performed with this group of female comedians in Portland, like people who are way, way ahead of me. And I learned a lot from them
00:42:02
Speaker
And then I was like, huh, this is really fun. And it wasn't about writing becoming a vocation. It was just sort of like, how can I get more of this fun in my life where I get to write something that's my own work and then perform it in front of a group of people and they laugh and then they come up to me afterwards and want to talk about it. Like it was addictive.
00:42:32
Speaker
that cycle was addictive. So it's not so much the writing, it was the performance piece part that I loved, but in order to get to the performance, I had to do the work of writing. So it became this wonderful cycle.
00:42:51
Speaker
So you said that for years and years, whether it was journaling or something else, you had a pretty good writing practice. So what does that look like? And what does your routine look like when you're in that generative process?
Writing Routines and Narrative Challenges
00:43:09
Speaker
And then even as you graduate to revisions and rewrites, so what does that whole package look like? So I live with a writer.
00:43:20
Speaker
And I call him the real writer because he gets up at five in the morning and lights a candle and like really every day does this and sits his butt down in the chair and works for a few hours.
00:43:48
Speaker
I won't wake up for hours after that. He's already up and he's written a chapter in whatever it is that he's working on. I'm a night writer anytime after 9 o'clock is really good for me. I suspect it has to do with, I take Ambien because I have terrible insomnia.
00:44:17
Speaker
And I think by about 10 o'clock, or 9 o'clock the next day, 9 o'clock in the evening, the ambient has finally worn off. And so then I can write. Like, generate new stuff. Editing I can do during the day. Editing I can do any time. In the morning, in the car, at the traffic light. You know, I love that part.
00:44:45
Speaker
But the generating new material for me happens at night. And sometimes if I can see that I've got all the components of an essay, they're all there. But now I have to do the organizing. I have to figure out the order. I have to figure out what stays, what doesn't. That's when I will lock myself in a room for a day and not let myself out until I finish that.
00:45:14
Speaker
That's the part that is, I know that it's coming. I know that it's so close to done at that point to be able to have a first draft, but it's a really hard point for me where I've got everything. I've got pages and pages and pages and I have to figure out how it all goes together. What's your favorite part or the part of the process that is most appeals to you? It's the, yeah, I prefer the revision part.
00:45:44
Speaker
Well, I guess there's two parts I like. I like the living part, like the doing part, having the experience part that generates the material and writing that down. And then I like the part when all those experiences are written down in a pretty good way and they're ready to be refined. But it's that part in the middle where you've got all this stuff and it's a mess.
00:46:14
Speaker
And it's like torture trying to figure out how to put it all together. But I know there's going to be a reward. So it's worth doing. But that's the part that is hard and can take a long time for me.
00:46:28
Speaker
at jessica able who is uh... on the podcast uh... the episode last week of fifty three and she wrote this great book called the growing gills which is about creative focus and uh... she also wrote a great she's a cartoonist and she wrote a great uh... sort of black and white graphic book about the called out on the wire about
00:46:51
Speaker
the uh... masters of narrative radio storytelling and a lot of them uh... while not using is that it was jed abenrod from radio lab who coined the term of the dark forest but all of them experience what is called the dark forest where they get to this point in the research or in the experience or in the revisions and it there's no way out you don't know how you're going to get out of it you're so deep and so embedded that it just seems
00:47:20
Speaker
There's no light, but as Jessica writes, when you're in the dark forest, that's where you're growing. And you will eventually get out. You just kind of have to lean into it and embrace that darkness and work your way out. I love that. I mean, that's just exactly what it's like. And I think that I do trust at this point that it happens, but it takes
00:47:50
Speaker
Sometimes it just takes a long time. And sometimes you have to put it away. For me, I have to put it away because it gets so dark.
00:47:59
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I was, you know, in speaking with essays, Mary Heather Noble, like her essay from a couple episodes, a couple episodes, a couple issues of creative nonfiction ago, it was the eulogy of an owl or eulogy for an owl. And it was an essay that she put in a drawer for a long time. It just it wasn't right yet. And then sometimes it just
00:48:23
Speaker
it has to sit and gestate and you know there's value in the drawer and it takes it you were alluding to it earlier with this with patience and um there's a lot of value to that and uh like how how have you been able to cultivate that patience and to say like this piece is i know it's i know there's something good but it needs to be put into it's a seed that needs to go in the ground for a little while when i first
00:48:49
Speaker
started writing, I thought that I had to start and then finish something. Once I built up enough material, I knew that I could put away something and take out something else and work on that. And I think that's where I learned to have patience. It's like, all right, this is going to get put away for a while. But look, I've got all these other things I can work on.
00:49:17
Speaker
they all live together in the closet and you know who's going to get to come out of the closet today and get work done and sometimes it's comforting to to read the things that are further along remind myself that it will you know I will be able to get this piece that is hard to parse right now to it to another place because look you did it over here
00:49:47
Speaker
And look at this one. This one's even further along. It's not done yet.
Deadlines as Motivation
00:49:52
Speaker
So I think for me it was getting to a point where I have enough files of stuff to work on, enough essays that have titles and need work that I can feel like I can put something away because I've got other things to work on.
00:50:10
Speaker
When I was speaking with Melissa Chadburn a few months ago, essayist based out of Los Angeles, essay journalist and so forth, novelist too, she said she had heard a quote from George Saunders that when he, like he's getting ready to write for the day, on his table he might have like five or six short stories just all spread out on the table and he just walks up to it and he kind of claps his hand and says, all right, which one of you wants to play today?
00:50:41
Speaker
Yes, exactly. But on the one hand, too, it's kind of like a shiny new object syndrome at the same time. It's like, maybe at what point do you decide, all right, I can't be distracted with all the other projects and I do have to just finish. I do need to see this one through the finish line. How do you gauge that on that spectrum of all these things to work on and then eventually, all right, this is the one that has to sprint ahead and finish?
00:51:12
Speaker
I watch for submissions and contests all the time. And when I find one that fits something that I'm working on that isn't done yet, I check that date. And I say, OK, you're going to be ready. You, Essay, are going to be ready for me to submit to this whatever it is on June 25.
00:51:39
Speaker
And I'm working on something right now that's a flash essay contest. And I have a piece that I feel could work. And so I've been working on that one a little more than the others, thinking, all right, this one's going to come. This one's going to rise. And I'm going to work on this. And I love having a deadline like that.
00:52:05
Speaker
And that's what gets me to finish something, is that kind of deadline for something that needs to be submitted.
00:52:15
Speaker
What practices do you put in place for yourself to sharpen the saw and become a better crafter of essay, crafter of words, just maybe just some sort of thing that you use as a, I don't know, like a warm up or a way to practice and just the way to continually improve? I like to listen to people.
Listening for Authentic Dialogue
00:52:40
Speaker
I'm always working on listening to people's
00:52:44
Speaker
voices. I'm interested in dialogue. I'm interested in trying to do authentic voice in dialogue. So I'm always listening to how people talk. And then I'll write that down. I'll just write down something that sounds like, oh, I would love to have somebody say that, just like that, just the way she just said that. And that can happen anywhere.
00:53:13
Speaker
But I think that I go to a lot of events. We're really rich here in Portland. You can go to a reading every night. You could go to two readings a night. So going and listening to what other people are writing is important to me. And then feel jealousy about it.
00:53:41
Speaker
And then that's a prompt for me, always to hear something, to hear somebody else read. And then I'm like, oh man, I'm going to go home and write. I don't know that that's healthy that that is. And then I have my writing buddies in my writing group.
00:54:08
Speaker
who expect me to produce work to show up, to show up at the writing group with stuff to share. And they, you know, they're great about calling me out or to point out the things that sound great and that I should keep going here. I'm a pretty social writer and I'm always trying things out
00:54:36
Speaker
on people, like telling stories and seeing the reactions that I get from people and then amending things. You know, oh, people laugh when I say this. It may not be totally a conscious thing, but I feel like my writing often is a very social process because I want to get people's reactions.
00:55:02
Speaker
It's like what you were saying about getting that reaction from the audience. Lots of comedians, that's what draws them to the stage. And not that you're a comedian, but you're a comedic writer. And it's an instant validation that, oh, wow, that works. I got a rise. And they're howling. And I made that.
00:55:29
Speaker
Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah, man, nothing feels better than that. Big, big thanks to Nicki Shulak coming on the show, sharing her story. Go check out her work at nickishulak.com. And did you know I'm recording this outro underneath a blanket.
00:55:50
Speaker
It's like a sound booth, only worse. Hey, this program is produced, edited, and conducted by me, Brendan O'Mara. One last question for Nikki. How much would it cost to get my own wife to subscribe to the podcast? More than $50. I'm sure of that. I'll see you right here next week for another episode of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.