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Episode 127—Sam Chiarelli ‘Digs’ Deep with Dino Memoir image

Episode 127—Sam Chiarelli ‘Digs’ Deep with Dino Memoir

The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O'Meara
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125 Plays6 years ago
Did you know it’s Di-November. Not die as in death, but dino as in dinosaurs, which is how and why today’s guest is Sam Chiarelli (@DinophileSam on Twitter), author of the memoir Dig: A Personal Prehistoric Journey, published by Hippocampus Books. What is up? It’s the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to bad-ass writers, filmmakers, producers, and podcasters about the art and craft of telling true stories. I try and unpack their artist journey as well as habits and routines so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. I’m @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod on Twitter. I’m Brendan O’Meara in real life. Sam’s book is about chasing your curiosity and following your deepest passions, or re-finding them again as if they got lost in the rock years and years ago. Maybe consider excavating what excited you as a child, that time when you did what you wanted for no other reason than you thought it was fun and cool. Oh, by the way, Happy Thanksgiving. Thank you for coming along this CNFin’ journey. I’d be deeply grateful to you if you shared the podcast with your immediate circle and, if you’re feeling extra generous and maybe a bit doped up on food, writing a review over on iTunes. Thanks to our sponsors in Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction as well as Creative Nonfiction Magazine.
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Transcript

Introduction and Sponsors

00:00:00
Speaker
The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two-year, low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on-campus residencies allow you
00:00:15
Speaker
to hone your craft with accomplishmenters who have pulled surprises and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni. Which has published 140 books and counting, you'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey.
00:00:38
Speaker
visit goucher.edu forward slash non-fiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA program for non-fiction. Okay, let's do this CNF-ers. It's about 4.30 in the morning my time, so I got to keep this thing a little bit lower.

Meet Sam Shirelli, Author of 'Dig'

00:01:02
Speaker
Gotta dial it down a little bit. Did you know? It is die November.
00:01:08
Speaker
Not dies in death, but dino as in dinosaurs, a dinosaur. Which is how and why today's guest is Sam Shirelli. Dino File Sam on Twitter. Author of the memoir, Dig, a personal prehistoric journey published by Hippo Campus Books. Hey, what is up? It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
00:01:35
Speaker
The show where I speak to badass writers, filmmakers, producers, and podcasters about the art and craft of telling true stories. I try and unpack their artist's journey as well as habits and routines so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. I'm at Brendan O'Mara and at CNF Pod on Twitter. I'm Brendan O'Mara in real life.

Exploring Childhood Passions

00:01:58
Speaker
Sam's book is about chasing your curiosity and following your deepest, deepest, deepest, deepest, deepest passions, or re-finding them again as if they got lost in the rock years and years ago. Maybe consider excavating what excited you as a child. That time when you did what you wanted for no other reason than you thought it was fun and cool. And speaking of that,
00:02:26
Speaker
I know I often get into the trap of not rereading as many books or rewatching as many movies because the act of revisiting something is a missed opportunity to try something new, to read another book or to see another movie, etc. But kids are unashamedly capable of watching a movie they love 50 times, often restarting the movie the second it ends.
00:02:52
Speaker
I think we need more of this as adults. I read The Great Gatsby every year, kind of around this time actually, and I'll watch certain movies and documentaries several times with a pencil and notebook to see how the movie gets stitched together. Same with narrative radio and books for that matter.
00:03:13
Speaker
My point being, the great power of Sam's book allows you to surrender to those childlike whims without fear of embarrassment.

Understanding Dinosaur Passion

00:03:21
Speaker
Hey, guess what? Today's podcast is brought to you by Creative Nonfiction Magazine. For nearly 25 years, Creative Nonfiction has been fuel for nonfiction writers and storytellers publishing a lively blend of exceptional long and short-form nonfiction narratives
00:03:36
Speaker
and interviews, as well as columns that examine the craft, style, trends, and ethics of writing true stories. In short, creative non-fiction is true stories well told.
00:03:50
Speaker
Oh, by the way, Happy Thanksgiving and good luck out there on Black Friday if you're one of those folks. Thank you for coming along this CNFing journey. I'd be deeply grateful to you if you shared the podcast with your immediate circle. And if you're feeling extra generous, maybe a bit doped up on food, I don't know.
00:04:11
Speaker
writing a review over on the iTunes, Apple Podcasts, or whatever they're calling it these days. Oogie-doke. That is it. Let's get this thing rolling. Episode 127 with Sam Shirelli.
00:04:32
Speaker
It's great in reading your book. I got the sense of how important dinosaurs are to you and how passionate you are for it. So early in the book, it's great how you refer to the various stages of stage one dino-philia. How did you come to that as a way to start the gradations of dinosaur passions? So how did you approach that?
00:04:59
Speaker
I wanted to explain what every kid goes through because it's kind of like the chicken pox, like where everybody gets it for a little while and then certain people get stuck with it for a little bit longer and then certain people are lifetime. I mean, they just, it never goes away. So I wanted to treat it like it was some sort of condition.
00:05:28
Speaker
And that's why the whole dino-philia stages came about. And it seemed like a funny way to explain something that is actually like really deep, but everybody, it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. So it gives you a way to talk about that and a reference point that everybody can understand and kind of place themselves somewhere on this spectrum.
00:05:54
Speaker
And a lot of people come to me and be like hey, I'm in stage three or my son is in stage two So it's it's a lot of fun nice and of course as growing up you You were you got the dinosaur bug early at what point did writing and and stories sort of also Inoculate you and get into your blood I think I was I was always
00:06:23
Speaker
interested in reading and in I think actually not as much classical literature that I ended up studying later but more of the science just so I could learn more about dinosaurs and learn about nature. So I was always thinking someday I'd love to write a book but I never thought of myself as a writer. It took a very long time and it was really after college where I started to think about
00:06:52
Speaker
possibly writing a book or doing something more with that writing bug. I was writing music. I was writing lyrics for a while. I did some music industry kind of stuff for a little bit. And so there was always that writing outlet, but it wasn't until sometime

Creative Nonfiction and Connection

00:07:11
Speaker
later that I started to take it more seriously. And one of the assignments I had, I did the Wilkes University's creative writing
00:07:21
Speaker
master's program and one of the first assignments I had was something about writing about your childhood and I started to write about going to museums to see dinosaurs with my parents and for some reason there were three parts to that assignment so everybody got used to hearing about dinosaurs and then after that I did something else and everybody in my class said where are the dinosaurs this week and I said well I don't want to just keep writing about dinosaurs I mean that's
00:07:49
Speaker
not why I'm here. And they're like, no, you should keep doing it, though, because it's really, it's really good how you do it. Because I'm not coming from a scientific angle. I'm coming from a person who's just really passionate about this and can translate a lot of that science, which is, yeah, there's a lot of it. So you have to you have to keep up with it and then give it to people in a package they can understand. So that's that's how it started. And then after I had done a few of those, my, my mentor said, I think you should
00:08:18
Speaker
I think you should consider doing something with this and I had never thought of it before, but seven years later, here we are.
00:08:28
Speaker
Right, right. And what was that moment like when you when you're starting to vet out creative writing programs and trying to take that leap and explore that, that or scratch that itch that was nagging at you? Like what was that transition or that moment like in in that period of your life like? Well, I had I had sort of an interesting
00:08:53
Speaker
interesting path to that, I guess, because it's not really the way I've talked to other people who agonized about that decision. But for me, I went to Wilkes as an undergrad. And I had several friends who went from undergrad right into that program. And they were telling me how great it was. And I was doing music stuff, I was on the road, I was working on, you know, in a band. So I thought, man, if I ever have time, I'm going to do that.
00:09:23
Speaker
And when that, um, when that started to wind down, um, I knew I wanted to just get into that program. So I started writing a lot and reading a lot and getting, you know, prepared and I, and I got accepted. So, um, it wasn't like I, I had a vet, a lot of different programs. Um, it kind of was just something, it was a natural, um, a natural progression. What were you studying in undergrad? Was it a music, uh, music, uh, track?
00:09:53
Speaker
Well, partially, so I majored in English literature, and then I minored in music and in history. But I spent a lot of time in the library reading all the dinosaur books. So it was just kind of a little bit of everything. And I think in the book, too, you'll see there's a lot of references to music, there's a lot of references to literature, stuff about allosaurus being compared to
00:10:22
Speaker
Grendel and Beowulf and stuff like that. So there's a lot of fun connections that I don't know if other people have explored in the same way.
00:10:33
Speaker
You write in the book, too, of this little passage I pulled out that despite the occasional taunting, I spent my school years quietly. I tried to avoid social interaction whenever possible. While I was generally accepted by my classmates, I never felt like I belonged. And I wonder, where did that come from and how did that foster an internal life for you at a young age? That's a great question.
00:11:02
Speaker
I grew up on a street where there weren't any other kids at all. And I didn't really have any cousins or anything that were around my age. So I spent most of my childhood by myself and just reading or thinking about dinosaurs or watching documentaries and all that. And so my friends were the dinosaurs.
00:11:29
Speaker
To me, that's who I spent all my time with and who I was learning about. And that was the default setting for me. So yeah, I think growing up and even now, I mean, it's awesome to be around people. I love sharing the passion for nature and dinosaurs and paleontology, but it's not something that necessarily comes easily
00:11:57
Speaker
from within to do that. So it's something I've had to work on. And I think in the book that you said that your favorite dinosaur is a Stegosaurus, right? Yeah, Stegosaurus and Deinonychus. That's my answer for favorite dinosaur. Okay. What does someone's favorite dinosaur reveal about them, do you think? That's another great question.
00:12:24
Speaker
I think it has something to do with either what attracts you to shapes, because dinosaurs have a lot of interesting features. They have horns, they have spikes, frills, plates, clubs, huge teeth and claws, sails, so they have all these wonderful crests.
00:12:53
Speaker
So they have all these wonderful attributes. So you might be drawn to something because of that. But I also think it's something about your personality. So Stegosaurus is kind of the speak softly and carry a spiked tail sort of guy. So I think that was my, I think I liked that sort of like, well, you know, don't mess with Stegosaurus.
00:13:18
Speaker
Yeah, I bet most kids, of course, gravitate towards T-Rex, and probably after 1993 with Jurassic Park, you know, Velociraptors, was liking the Stegosaurus kind of a way of you in your late stage dineophilia to sort of push back against those kind of trends and try to find something a little different to like than what everyone else was liking at the time? I think I'm kind of like that naturally.
00:13:49
Speaker
I tend to like, in a movie, I'll like the supporting actors. A lot of those other characters, more than the main characters. And I do think I have major, major respect for Tyrannosaurus Rex. It is a wonderful, incredible, terrifying animal. But it's just not my favorite. It's not the thing that gets me the most excited about dinosaurs. That's it. He's one-dimensional. He's a one-note dinosaur.
00:14:16
Speaker
Well, I don't know about that, but I think it's very easy to like T-Rex. And I think there's always a T-Rex chapter in all these dinosaur books. There's always a lot of... I saw a really funny tweet a while ago and it was kind of like, a T-Rex is...
00:14:40
Speaker
twice as big as half a T-Rex because everything is always based on how big T-Rex is. That's the unit of dinosaur understanding. I think it's just the hub of the wheel for a lot of people. The gateway dinosaur. There's so much more out there. It's the gateway dinosaur. Absolutely. There's a lot more out there than just T-Rex.

Challenges in Writing 'Dig'

00:15:02
Speaker
So what was it, when you entered this program, this MFA program, a graduate program for writing, and then you were writing true vignettes, memoir vignettes, what was it about writing in that genre that appealed to you? There was something, and I should mention, I thought I was going to do fiction at first, even though I had no idea what I was doing with fiction.
00:15:31
Speaker
I don't know, that was the idea. But I gravitated toward creative nonfiction because it was an outlet to connect with people about the things that I am passionate about and that I find really important. And that the wonder and love of the natural world, the appreciation and the awe
00:16:00
Speaker
for that is what I think is a really powerful tool to help us stay in touch with that childhood part of us that's just in awe of everything. And I think when we lose that, as we get older, a lot of people kind of lose that in the shuffle and they lose the happiness and the excitement just to be alive and to keep learning about things. So I found that
00:16:31
Speaker
This was an outlet for me to do that, to talk to people about things they hadn't thought about since they were kids. Dinosaurs are not something that people talk about every day, but as soon as you get them going, they won't stop. And that was really amazing for me because I didn't expect that reaction, but it kept happening. Everywhere I would have to do some sort of presentation or talk or pitch or something, people were going,
00:17:00
Speaker
Bonkers about this idea and had to be talked away from it because it's just something everybody's fascinated in I've never heard anybody say I hate dinosaurs. They're dumb. It never happens. They're so interesting. So That's what drew me to it. And I know you know other people use creative nonfiction for telling really powerful stories about their personal lives or you know, they really have some deep things to talk about and I
00:17:29
Speaker
I think that's all really important and really something that as a culture we've benefited from and will continue to as more people share those voices. But I also think it's a way to talk about these things that will elevate us and lift us, especially in these really divided times that we're in now. To have some sort of curiosity and excitement about this huge continuum of life that we're all a part of, I think it's
00:17:57
Speaker
so important and it's going to help as an antidote to this really negative climate that we're in at the moment.
00:18:05
Speaker
Why do you think there isn't that childlike adherence to dinosaurs as kids get into their pre-teens and teens and then into young adulthood? As you were saying, people always want to hear about it. They're still so curious about it, and it does trigger the imagination
00:18:28
Speaker
in ways that no other animal can. So why do you think there is that fall off and a lack of adherence to a love of dinosaurs for most people? I think there are several elements of growing up that are socially acceptable. So you can be a fanatic about sports and talk to anybody.
00:18:57
Speaker
grownups, kids, everybody's okay with that. And there are other things too that everybody has a good reference point for, but I think people with really intense passions for things, dinosaurs or, I don't know, certain, those interests that are just all consuming, people who collect things or maybe artists
00:19:27
Speaker
fill in the blank, you know, anybody who's listening, you'll know what it is and you might be doing it now. But it's those things are harder to kind of wedge into an easy social structure that everybody understands. And so I think either people go, they sort of drift from it and try to fit in with the crowd more, or they double down on it and get ostracized from everybody else and just kind of like, oh, yeah, they're kind of
00:19:56
Speaker
you know, odd or whatever. So, um, I think I was trying to balance that and not do either one and just kind of keep it. Um, I, for a while I did, um, have sort of like dinosaurs were in the background and I wasn't really paying attention to them. And then I got back into them. That's the, you know, when I got into stage three and I realized I was missing something. I was missing this, this big part of who I was and I wasn't going to lose it again. And that was right at the end of high school. So ever since then I've been, um,
00:20:26
Speaker
Sounding the trumpet as often as possible and I found If there's any younger people listening to this if you're really interested in something and people think you're kind of weird Keep doing it as much as you want Because what's gonna happen is after a few years have gone by everybody's gonna think it's really cool that you have a passion in something It's not gonna be uncool. If it is uncool now, it won't be for very long, right?
00:20:52
Speaker
When you were pursuing your advanced degree in writing and then transitioning to really leaning into what would become DIG, did you experience any false starts and really those confusing moments where you really weren't quite sure what the shape of this thing was going to look like? Oh, boy. Yes.
00:21:16
Speaker
So the reason that so this book took seven years to write and the reason is because I had no clue how to put it together. And I don't think anyone else could really help in a substantial way with it. It was something that I had to do. And what I realized after a while was happening was that I had a lot of different puzzle pieces and I was just shuffling them around. And so you have a really good
00:21:45
Speaker
section, but you could put it almost anywhere and no place seemed like the right place to put it. Because the book, as you know, there are a lot of elements to it. There is certain, you know, reflections about childhood and more memoir segments. There's history in the book. There's science in the book. There's first-person experiences in the book.
00:22:13
Speaker
And, um, there's also sort of, you know, more, um, lyrical elements in it at certain points. So all those elements were just sort of floating around and no matter what I did, I couldn't feel good about them. And what I realized after a while was that, um, the thing to do was to use those first person elements as a spine.
00:22:42
Speaker
a spine from my skeleton. And those would connect the book together. And so the idea of making this pilgrimage out west, which I always wanted to do, became the focus and the through line of the book. And then everything else, the side trips and the going back and forth in time and bringing in interview segments and all this other stuff, really
00:23:05
Speaker
latched onto that spine and made the whole thing work and give it a drive and an energy that it didn't have before. So I'm really interested in the structure of things in writing and how they all go together and how you can make all that work in a seamless way that interests a reader without losing any of that excitement or losing the elements that you want to have in there.
00:23:30
Speaker
Yeah, I felt your train trip out west and that very kinetic element of you moving and you and your friend Tim moving across the country to this dig site was elemental to the story because then you could hang any of the other vignettes off of that spine, but you definitely needed some of that, like you were saying, that thrust.
00:23:58
Speaker
to go through because you could interchange a lot of the other scenes and like all right they may you could have very well opened the book with your reflections on Jurassic Park and but instead you you know that's more in the second half of the book so it's like you could have I'm sure you were experimenting with that stuff but it was that's a really great move and that you were thinking that through that you needed that sort of kinetic element to it yep absolutely that's and that's
00:24:26
Speaker
And the personal elements kind of came into it later too, because I was going deeper and deeper down the well, which is I think why the Jurassic Park section is towards the end, because you're just going down and down this rabbit hole of dinosaur fascination. And there was this sort of other story, which was I had over the years acquired this really terrible travel anxiety.
00:24:53
Speaker
And I didn't have it at all at one point, and then it got worse and worse and worse. And that sort of made its way into the book, too, to sort of overcome this so I could do this trip and be a part of it. So this project saved my life. It really opened things up for me, and it became something more than just about the science. It became about me, too.
00:25:21
Speaker
Hopefully, my hope for this is that other people are going to read this and they're gonna wanna dig into whatever it was that fascinated them and electrified them when they were younger. Whether that's dinosaurs or something completely stamp collecting or ballet dancing or whatever it is. I hope people really dig back into that stuff and kind of reconnect with who they are.

Anxiety and Writing

00:25:49
Speaker
In what way did this book project save your life? Um, I think I was really, you know, the, the anxiety thing, if, if, I don't know, you know, what your experiences with that are, if any, I hope you don't have any, but, um, it was getting, uh, it gets worse and worse as time goes by and you just feel like you can't, you can't do certain things. I couldn't, I couldn't get on the highway at all. It was, it was just driving me.
00:26:17
Speaker
You know, it was, it was really driving me crazy. And, uh, so I would go to like, if I had to go to Philadelphia, like I, when I went to, um, to see the dreadnought us, for example, I drove down there on these back roads. It took me like a whole day to make what would be a two hour drive from my house. Um, you know, it took like all day and I had to stay overnight, um, with my, my cousins down there and like, you know, take a train into the city. Cause I couldn't drive. Like it was, it was bad.
00:26:44
Speaker
So the train trip to go out west, because flying is out of the question. So the train became this thing where the first fossil hunters, that's how they went out to the west. They took trains out there. And I had been trying to get on a train or try to go out west, and I couldn't do it. I was getting defeated by this. If I was going to finish this book, which I'd been working on for years, so I didn't want to tell everybody I abandoned it.
00:27:14
Speaker
Um, I had to go out there and I just, I wanted to go out there and I had to go through, you know, all the steps to, to, to get control of myself again. And it was a really, it was a tough process, but it was, it was the best. I mean, to get to do this was a dream come true. And it was, it was great to actually have my life back. So now I can drive wherever you want me to. And I can, uh, you know, I can be the places I want to be. And, um, I think that's.
00:27:42
Speaker
You know, the dinosaurs helped with that a lot. And my friend Tim, you know, that was one of the great things about Tim being there was that he's a very, very agreeable guy. He's really happy. He's really friendly and really funny. And he just, he just thought this was a cool idea to go, you know, across country. He was going to take some pictures and just enjoy it. He had no like demands. Like he didn't want to see anything. He's just like, I'll just come along for the ride. And it was good to have him there because I felt like I had a,
00:28:12
Speaker
you know, somebody who was going to, if I did start getting really worried, he would be there. But we didn't really have any trouble at all. And was there a particularly traumatic moment when you were younger that made it hard for you to travel and get in a car or train and certainly an airplane? Well, I had a weird experience on an airplane where I was probably
00:28:44
Speaker
I don't know probably like around 12 and I was in an airplane we had an air pocket kind of thing we fell a bit in the air and no one else seemed to really care about this but I wasn't happy at all because I'd never really liked heights to begin with but I had it I actually it's it's kind of remotely dinosaur related I went on a trip with an ex-girlfriend of mine and her parents out to Chicago and
00:29:10
Speaker
And we were driving through Ohio and Indiana, and it's just flat. And it's just nothing to look at. And I had actually hoped that we'd go to the field museum while we were out there. And just the way it happened, we weren't able to go. But just the monotony of just all those corn fields and just nobody was really talking on this trip. It was sort of alone with my thoughts and all this stuff.
00:29:40
Speaker
from inside you start bubbling up and I just yeah I had this massive panic attack and ever since then it was just it got worse and worse so yeah it was I was still going places but I was had to go the long way around
00:29:56
Speaker
I'll be sure to send you a link to my friend Scott Neumeier. He's got a great podcast called The Anxiety Diaries. And it dives into his own anxieties with panic attacks and everything. But he also interviews a lot of really prominent writers and everyone involved in mental health.
00:30:20
Speaker
And it's a terrific podcast. I mean, I have my own hang ups and everything. So listening to that is often like a really, it's a really great show to realize that people that suffer from panic attacks or whatever, you know, wherever you fall in an anxiety spectrum that you're not alone.
00:30:40
Speaker
And it's really a tremendous resource, and he does amazing work with it. And it's very raw and vulnerable, and I think that's largely the appeal of it. So I'll be sure to send that along to you. Yeah, that sounds great. So what did writing this book, over the course of seven years, what did it reveal to you? What did you learn about yourself in the process of writing this book?
00:31:10
Speaker
That's a deep question. I have to think about that for a second. I think I realized how much the dinosaurs were a part of my life. There's a segment early on in the book where I'm talking about all of the dinosaur stuff I had.
00:31:39
Speaker
just like the clothes and the decorations in my room and everything I was doing was somehow dinosaur related. And I wrote, dinosaurs were the glue that held my life together. And I didn't really think about that before. And I don't think I realized how much, you know, you don't realize when you're a kid how much your parents sacrificed for you to do things, you know, to go places to get you the things that you're interested in.
00:32:09
Speaker
taken to the museums and the bookstores and all that stuff. So that was there too. But I also kind of, one of the reasons I wrote this was because there were like a few reasons that everybody said were the key to dinosaur popularity. The original answer was they're big, they're scary and they're extinct. And I thought, well, there are a lot of really big animals in the fossil record. There are a lot of really scary
00:32:36
Speaker
animals in the fossil record and there are, you know, 99.9% of everything is extinct. So I don't think that's the whole answer. And then other people said, well, there's, um, you know, dinosaurs allow for kids to explore these really scary things, but in a safe way because they can't get hurt. And I thought about all the nightmares I've had about dinosaurs and I thought that can't be right either. There's no way that they're, they're safe because they're terrorizing me in my imagination.
00:33:07
Speaker
So that part of the book was like trying to answer that question. And I have an answer that I don't think anybody has fully articulated to this extent before. I've not really seen this answer, but it really has to do with our imagination and that we as humans have this capacity to wonder. And that's what really sets us apart from the other animals, not tool making or language, but awe and wonder, like we were talking about earlier.
00:33:37
Speaker
And I think that's the key. I think the only way that we can see the non-avian dinosaurs is to imagine them. And that gives us, you know, that's a primer for this really human, essential human characteristic that we have. Right, right. And given the breadth of time from when you started the book to when it ultimately published, you know, a length of time of seven years,
00:34:07
Speaker
What was the shape of that time? How often did you put this book in the drawer and then just stepped away from it and said, I'll come back to you in a few months? Did that happen at all? It happened a lot, but I don't know. It's all a blur. So when I finished, there are two parts to the Wilkes program. There's the master's part and then there's the MFA part. When I finished
00:34:36
Speaker
The master's part, I said, I got to kind of go away for a little bit. I got to figure out how to do this thing that I'm trying to do. And I was away for, I guess, three, four years before I came back and finished the MFA when I was ready. Um, cause I had to do the train trip. I knew that. And I wasn't, I wasn't ready at that point.
00:34:59
Speaker
Um, but I also didn't know the shape stuff that we talked about earlier. So I would work on it really feverishly for a while and then, you know, like you said, put it in the drawer, not, not work on it and try to recharge. So it was, it was, it was tough, you know, and, and every, we all have these conversations about like writing projects and doing different things, but we all have our, our lives too. And sometimes life stuff comes up or, you know, whatever. And it's really hard to work. So, um,
00:35:29
Speaker
I think that was, there was a lot. These seven years have been like, you know, it's awesome now that the book is out. But I feel like these have been really challenging years in a good way, you know, like in a positive way, but there's been a lot of stuff. And I'm happy that that everybody can go on this journey now. And something positive has come from it. But it was definitely it was it was tough. Yeah.
00:35:53
Speaker
And you, uh, in the book, you also reference, uh, key mentors and, uh, like, what was, uh, it's a woman, is her name Becky? Becky Bradway. Yeah. So how important and influential was she for you in your, as you were developing this book and just your becoming as a writer? Uh, Becky was, uh, you know, she, she was the one who convinced me to write this, first of all.
00:36:21
Speaker
It was really her prompting. But she's amazing at putting pieces together and kind of knowing how to bring the best out of you when you're trying to do multiple things at one time in a piece of writing. So she was very important in terms of encouraging me that I could do it all along the way.
00:36:49
Speaker
As you know, writers, we can be very temperamental. I think she was a very good cheerleader, but also very reassuring. Then she was like, I live in Denver, come out here. I'll take you around. I'll go places with you because after a few years,
00:37:10
Speaker
She got into it, too. So, yeah, we got to go to a lot of places together out there and she's in the book as well and her husband. So that was really cool. You know, we got to like do a lot of this journey together from start to finish. But I think if you're, you know, if you're looking for a mentor and you're not in a writing program or something like that, you have to find someone that that you have a similar working style with. So you understand each other and you sort of have the same
00:37:41
Speaker
literary inclinations, even if you don't, you know, do exactly the same kind of stuff. So I think we both have similar working styles and that really helps, you know, know when to dive in and when to keep working and all that kind of stuff.
00:37:58
Speaker
And in that time away from the, the writing of the book, what, if you can remember, what were you reading at the time to that, you know, there's kind of showed you kind of coached you along as a book is books as mentors, as I like to say too, you know, what were you reading that helped inform what would eventually become your final product? Yeah, that's a great question. That, that was really the key spark of
00:38:28
Speaker
how to get out of the I have too many puzzle pieces conundrum was reading for like the MFA paper that I had to do and some other just outside reading just to figure out how to do this. I started to read these nature and science books, which I'd always kind of liked, but I started to read them as a writer and to see how they were put together. And there are a lot of books coming out in the last few years where there's a person, either a scientist or
00:38:58
Speaker
just an enthusiast or a journalist, but somebody who's really passionate about a subject, a particular animal or extinction, some sort of subject, but they're doing these first-person explorations on it, and they have a sort of kaleidoscopic outlook. So they're talking to different people and interviewing them, they're going places, they have a lot of research elements in them, and I realized
00:39:28
Speaker
that I wanted to do that and that no one had really done that for dinosaurs, which I wanted to read that book and no one had written it. So that was, you know, I seem to be one of the people who had the strange set of skills to bring that to life. But, you know, there are great books about dinosaurs that aren't as personal. And so it was kind of like a way to address that in that
00:39:58
Speaker
new kind of way that people have been writing about so eloquently recently. Those books, if you want, I can give you a huge list of books that are in this vein. Yeah, that'd be great. I think some of the ones that are really readily available and that people may have read, I think H is for Hawk is in there. That's a really personal one. There are things like The Sixth Extinction,
00:40:26
Speaker
Elizabeth Colvert, which are exactly what I'm talking about, where there's one person on a quest.

Inspiration from Nature Books

00:40:35
Speaker
Tor Hanson's Feathers was a good one for this. James Proseq has a book about eels, which just blew my mind. It's very scientific, and yet it gets spiritual.
00:40:53
Speaker
I wasn't ready for it and I was a little skeptical, but I was blown away. So yeah, Helen Scales has written several books about marine biology, which are absolutely excellent. And again, with that sort of like, you know, guiding you through the whole, the whole world under the sea. And I'm trying to think Katie Fallon's Cerulean Blues is another one that was really, was really important to me in terms of how you could,
00:41:24
Speaker
write about yourself and also follow this nature thing because in her, you're figuring, you know, in the first chapter, okay, this book is going to be about songbirds and, you know, how they're threatened by, you know, habitat loss. And in the second, the second chapter, there's like the Virginia Tech school shooting massacre, and she's involved in that. And so the whole book is her like,
00:41:52
Speaker
going through this and trying to overcome it. And that was really eye opening for me too. There are a lot of others, but those were definitely the ones that were forefront of my mind when I was putting this together and figuring out how to do it. So I think if you're writing anything, as you said, other books can be a really useful tool to help you figure out how to get out of the big problems you're having, because you might not find
00:42:21
Speaker
the answers to questions that no one else is asking online. So you might have to just kind of go into the things that you're naturally gravitating toward and see how they do it.
00:42:35
Speaker
And when you were writing Dig and getting back into it after taking sort of a leave of absence from it, what was the shape of your days and what was your routine around making sure you got the work done? When you were getting up in the morning, when did you find the time and the energy around your life to get this done? I had this terrible premonition earlier today that you were going to ask me this question and I realized I have no good answer for it.
00:43:05
Speaker
I tend to work in really intense bursts, which I don't like saying, because I'd love to have a writing routine, and I'm hoping to do that in the future. But it would kind of be, if I was working on something, it was always on my mind. I was writing while I was at work. I was writing while I was doing other things, and I would come home and just write a lot and work on stuff. And then when I wasn't writing, I wasn't writing.
00:43:35
Speaker
there were periods where I was just kind of letting it all simmer because your mind's always working on it. So I was doing other things and stepping away from it. So I think it's been like a lot of really intense bursts. I mean, I know there are people who like they stay up all night and they write and all that stuff. I don't do that. It'll be like when I'm consumed by it, that's all I'm working on. And then when I'm not, I'm not.
00:44:04
Speaker
Not actively working. And what's your day job? What do you do for primarily your form of income? Internet marketing. The social media team leads.
00:44:35
Speaker
Because sometimes a lot of us, I think the vast majority of us have to have some sort of a day job that might not necessarily be, let's just say our writing might not necessarily be supporting us in the way maybe our loftiest of dreams would be. But we have jobs and then we make the art around that job. And I would like to kind of break
00:44:42
Speaker
at an internet marketing company here in Scranton, PA.
00:45:04
Speaker
maybe break that wall down because I think there's a lot of shame and feeling of shame involved when you're if you're a writer with some talent and you can't so solely support yourself that you feel like you've failed and I'd like to dispel that so it's great that you you know you're in internet marketing that's that's what's put paying your bills and putting food on on the table but you're yet you're finding time to to explore your artistic creativity with with this kind of work so
00:45:32
Speaker
It's like I'm very glad that you're just sharing that with me, so thank you for that. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and how have you approached that? You've got your hours and so forth. How do you find the time to fold that into your life and to not feel weighed down by any kind of inadequacy because it's not like your sole gig writing?

Balancing Work and Writing

00:46:02
Speaker
Um, I, I think, uh, it's a great question. Um, I think people are very caught up with the writer's life in quotations. Right. And I, I mean, that's awesome, right? Like it's, it's, it's really cool. Um, if you can do that, but I was never interested in it.
00:46:28
Speaker
purely for that, for the Instagram version of what a writer does. That's a great term. That's a great term. I just wanted to share what I thought was valuable with other people. Honestly, we're talking about work. I find a lot of value in working. I love my team. I love where I work. I have a great time there. I feel like we're doing good things.
00:46:54
Speaker
That actually lifts me up. I feel more positive that I have something like that that's stable. I don't have to worry about if I don't make this deadline, I'm not going to eat or I'm not going to pay rent. Then you have to make the compromise of balancing things out. Now, for me, it's not about being a writer. For other people, that is their whole mission in their life. That's what they're about.
00:47:24
Speaker
And that's great. That's just not the path that I'm on. So for me, it's more about making those connections and helping people to be at their best. So it's really all about what you value, what you put your emphasis on, what really brings you joy. And if you want to do something, you'll make time for it. If you have to do it, you will. And I think work
00:47:54
Speaker
Work is just another, you know, it's another part of what you gotta do. So, yeah, I don't think anybody should feel, nobody should feel inadequate if they have a job.
00:48:06
Speaker
Yeah, I think maybe the inadequacy comes from if you're an artist of any kind and there's this, like you were saying, the Instagram version of it where it looks like someone with a certain degree of talent, they're posting that, that blow dried version of themselves and I'm comparing that to how ugly I feel day to day.
00:48:33
Speaker
And they must be supporting themselves with their paintings or their writing. But they're not showing the grind of the day job that they might have to subsidize their art that maybe they hope will one day support them. So you're comparing your ugly day-to-day to the highlight reel of everyone else. And sometimes it can really pull you down. Yeah. And the only thing that matters here
00:49:02
Speaker
is the writing. Not how it happened. You're either going to enjoy a book or an essay or something that you read online. You're going to enjoy that or you're not. It doesn't matter how many cups of coffee went into it or what exactly happened during the writing of it. That's really cool too and that's an interesting topic and it informs what comes out, but I don't think anybody
00:49:32
Speaker
is going to tell the difference between whether I had hot chocolate in a dinosaur mug while I was reading something or not. I probably did, but I don't think it really affects your experience of the work based on where it was written, how it was written, what happened. It's really the work itself and what it does in your mind.
00:49:54
Speaker
Do you have or an experience, an internal voice that is a voice of limiting belief? And if you do, like, what does that voice sound like? And how do you overcome that? That's another like really deep question that I feel like I could talk about forever and try to, like, as we're talking about it, try to figure out what I'm talking about. I think I have
00:50:19
Speaker
Struggled a lot with that in the past where I would think this is lousy. This is terrible. I hate this But I don't I think I don't do that so much anymore And I don't think there's anything to do with it was before the book was published. So I think you know Obviously now people who are listening to this who want to be published are like, oh sure easy for him to say But I don't think the publication is really validation for me
00:50:49
Speaker
I think it's more about, it's an opportunity to connect with more people. So it's not, it's not saying you're good or bad. Cause it's all about, life is about the fit. Do you fit in with this thing? Right? Like, is this a good fit for you? So you can get published in a place where you get no support and it's, nothing happens to your book and you can say you're published, but what does that mean? It doesn't mean anything.
00:51:15
Speaker
Or, you know, you could be the best writer and not have anything published. And you can't tell yourself that you're terrible because no one knows who you are yet. You just haven't found the right fit for you and your project. Yeah. So I, I don't think that, um, I think we, we creative types have a tendency to be extreme and be very negative on ourselves. And I, uh, one of the, the best,
00:51:45
Speaker
things to do in those situations is think about what you would tell someone else if they were saying what you were saying to you. So if your friend came to you and said, I'm having such a hard time, I don't feel like my stuff is very good and I'm tired of working on and maybe I should do something else, you would say to them, no, hey, like, you know,
00:52:05
Speaker
the next place you send it to might be the place or the next breakthrough might happen tomorrow morning. So just sit down and work on it and it'll come. But we don't treat ourselves that way. So treat yourself the way you would treat someone else that you really care about and it'll get easier.
00:52:23
Speaker
And the nature of this kind of work lends itself to being kind of lonely and it is a solo pursuit in a lot of ways. So how do you fight off loneliness and self-doubt in those moments of loneliness? I have a really weird relationship with loneliness because I like it. There aren't really any interruptions on your imagination and you can just
00:52:52
Speaker
you know, go wherever you want to go. Um, sort of Carl Sagan's spaceship of the imagination stuff, I guess. Um, but I also think, um, for creative nonfiction, at least I, I, I won't speak for the fiction writers who have a very difficult, um, proposition on their hands there. But for creative nonfiction writers, I think a lot of, uh, a lot of writing, especially the writing I do is, is the opposite of solitary.

Community in Creative Nonfiction

00:53:21
Speaker
There are a lot of people that may dig happen. If you look at the acknowledgement section of the book, there are a lot of people in a lot of places that helped make this thing come to life. That's amazing to me in itself. That's a miracle. A lot of people will help you and spend time with you and give up a lot of energy and effort to help you with whatever you're researching, whatever you're writing. It doesn't have to be this kind of natural history stuff.
00:53:51
Speaker
I don't think it's as solitary as we like to think of it in the main, but if you're talking about the actual sitting down and writing part, that can be very solitary unless you think about why you're doing it. What I hope, if you re-dig, I hope that you feel like you're not alone reading it, that you're with me and it's
00:54:20
Speaker
In your head, it's me and you and every dinosaur that's ever existed. And we're gonna have a really fun, amazing adventure into the deep past and into this amazing world of science and history. So you're not alone. And I think that's what books are. That's what you mentioned that other podcasts. We're not alone.
00:54:48
Speaker
In the last five years or so, what would you say you have improved the most? What about you has improved the most over the last five years with respect to your writing? I think the... Man, this is tough. I think I've gotten a lot better
00:55:17
Speaker
at knowing when something is strong. And that's a consequence of seven years of polishing. That's really what— It's also a lot of being comfortable writing a lot of very bad sentences and pages to start to learn what is good according to your taste, right? Yes. There are hundreds of pages of this book that are gone.
00:55:45
Speaker
Um, and it, and it would be the same sections rewritten, rewritten, rewritten from scratch every time. So, uh, yeah, not afraid to throw things away. Keep the idea. You know, I wasn't throwing out concepts. I was throwing out versions of the way it was written. Hmm. Yeah. So, um, and then not being afraid to cut stuff and make it work. But I think just knowing how to make this put the energy into the sentences. I think I'm, I'm better at that than I was.
00:56:18
Speaker
I don't feel like I'm naturally good at anything. It always takes me a really long time of working on something to get a level of comfort with it. That's why it takes a long time, but if you put the time in and you work,
00:56:35
Speaker
It'll happen. In your experience in these bursts of writing that you're able to do, when you sit down to do that, what is your stamina in your endurance for the writing and how long can you sit there and churn on a given day? Probably a few hours, but not all in one sitting. It'll be like really intense focus for a little while and then I'll go in
00:57:05
Speaker
have a snack, and then I'll come back and work a little bit more. So it's very concentrated work in bursts. And then on a larger level, it'll be like periods where I'm doing that really intense work. And I found that it would actually be a little while after I had done something. It wouldn't be immediately after. So like if I went to meet with someone, do an interview for the book,
00:57:34
Speaker
I wouldn't sit down the next day and work on it. It just, I wouldn't be in the right mood. I had to process that for a little bit. And then, you know, maybe a few weeks later, I'd make sure I had all the audio. I'd make sure I had everything recorded and my notes and everything, but I wouldn't work on it for a little while. And then by that point, I'd be ready to sort of grapple with it from the writing point of view.
00:57:57
Speaker
And part of what's been kind of fun following Hippocampus is tweeting and marketing and promotion of your book as well as yours is that the curiosity plays a very strong thread through the story of the story. And so what is driving your curiosity now?

Curiosity Beyond Dinosaurs

00:58:23
Speaker
In terms of the dinosaur stuff or the book or what do you mean exactly?
00:58:27
Speaker
Yeah, I would say you exercised and fed your creativity and your curiosity through your love of dinosaurs, and it comes through strongly in the writing. I guess the better question is, what is peaking your curiosity these days, maybe outside of dinosaurs? Well, there's certainly a lot more paleontological projects that
00:58:56
Speaker
are in my mind. I hope I have enough life in me to tackle all of them. But I think if you're a curious person, and I think all of us are to an extent, and we either lose that or it's worked out of us somehow, but you're curious about everything. Almost anything in the world is really fascinating if you dig a little deeper.
00:59:26
Speaker
you know, how they make stuff or why certain things are as they are historically. You know, I had a really interesting conversation with my mother yesterday about why breakfast, lunch and dinner are called what they are. You know, we had to look some stuff up. So everything is really fascinating. And I think that that's, if you can be
00:59:55
Speaker
Really grateful when you wake up every morning that you could have the chance to learn new things and to be excited about the world and excited about Doing good things while we're all here Then you want to be curious you want to be You want to be interested in everything because it's it's precious and it's amazing and it's America over here at all So hmm. Yeah, I don't think it's it's almost more to me. It's like what do I have to do to like calm that down and
01:00:23
Speaker
Right. So you can focus. Yeah. We're having a conversation now. I could very easily just talk to you about how cool Styracosaurus is for the next 45 minutes. No problem. You can't function that way though. It's really just keeping it under control and using it in a positive way. That's the issue for me, not what makes you
01:00:51
Speaker
curious, but I think we're all like that. It's just about different things.
01:00:56
Speaker
What struck me in the book, too, is when you talked to some fairly prominent paleontologists that they actually weren't super passionate about dinosaurs the way you were, and that really was very surprising to you. How unmooring was that for you that these people you admire for their science and their communication didn't really share the same energy and passion for dinosaurs the way maybe you were hoping?
01:01:27
Speaker
Yeah, that was surprising. You're right. Mark Norell was the first one. I had this great line of questioning prepared for him. One of the first things we said to each other, he basically said, well, people think you're really passionate about dinosaurs and I'm not. I remember just feeling
01:01:55
Speaker
Disintegrating emotions in my and I just like sank into his sofa and just thought I don't know what is gonna happen now because Not only do I not have a conversation plan in place But I also I'm gonna look like a freak to this eminent man. Yeah Because I don't want to seem like an Excited five-year-old even though that's what I am right now
01:02:25
Speaker
And I want to try to, you know, not be, you know, I have to be an adult right now. So that was that was interesting. And then Paul Sereno, who is another huge name in the field, said the same thing to me. And they both had different reasons for loving dinosaurs. That's the other thing. There are so many elements of it. You know, if you like dinosaurs, you get into not only natural history and biology and evolutionary biology and all that stuff and paleontology, but geology and geography and
01:02:55
Speaker
Um, chemistry, like all these other, um, all these other fields. So I think Mark Norell was, he just loves travel. I mean, if you talk to him for a little while, he just loves that. And Paul Serino was more interested in like the adventure of it, like, like going, you know, going into these remote places and bringing back really wonderful specimens of something. Um,
01:03:20
Speaker
But they're at the top of their game. I mean, they're not like, they don't like what they're doing. They love it. It's just they went into it for different reasons. And I've found out subsequently that a lot of, a lot of paleontologists are more like me. I mean, they're just like, they're really, really obsessed with dinosaurs. Um, and I think, you know, Steve Bressati is one of those people. For sure. Yeah. So yeah. So it's, it's, it's been interesting to talk to people about that and how they got interested and what their level of
01:03:49
Speaker
of interest is, and I think maybe, you know, maybe there's some benefit to not being super close to what you're studying. Um, but then again, you know, Nizar Ibrahim that I talked to for the book, he's, he's like, you know, he's really intense. And, um, and he was like that since he was a kid. And he said, it helps him, um, it helps him to understand things. And so I think it's all, you know, again, it's all fit. It's all, it's all, it's all how you fit into the, um,
01:04:17
Speaker
how dinosaurs fit into your worldview and how you use that interest and that passion. I can attest to that. Having been a sports writer, being a sports writer often ruins sports for you. I cover a lot of horse racing. My first book, Six Weeks in Saratoga, burned me out on horse racing for a few years. I couldn't even go near the sport.
01:04:44
Speaker
For a while after that is so you can too much of a good thing can fry you it's Which kind of leads to My next question with you is like, you know, I want to ask you why Maybe you didn't become a paleontologist given your passion for it. You know why you didn't pursue that Yeah, that's another good question that I had a wrestle with during the book The whole book writing process I
01:05:14
Speaker
have at least once a year I go into this sort of funk about it. But I think there's a lot of really practical, boring reasons. One of them is that as much as I love science and I absolutely yearn for all this knowledge, I was never big about doing experiments and actually like doing the science.
01:05:43
Speaker
Also, I was never a great lover of math in school. I never had a teacher who knew the extent of what the dinosaur thing was and said to me, you can do the math. You can do it. It's not impossible if you really want to follow this path. I also think that's because I'm in Pennsylvania. We have
01:06:10
Speaker
rocks that are twice as old as the Jurassic dinosaurs. So we have a lot of ferns up here. We have a lot of really interesting carboniferous fossils, but we don't have any dinosaurs. So if I had to do dinosaurs, I would have had to go out West or other places in the world. And when you're whatever, how old you are when you're trying to pick what you're going to do in high school and college, that seemed like a really huge thing. So I was like, I don't know.
01:06:40
Speaker
And plus, like we said, with, you know, curiosity and passions, I have a lot of passions, not just dinosaurs. So I was interested in music, I was interested in, you know, in literature and all these other things. So those seem to be easier to gravitate toward in this area. And that's what I did. But the dinosaur thing, you know, came back with the vengeance. And I'm actually happy to fulfill this role now.
01:07:07
Speaker
Because I think a lot of the people I looked up to and still look up to are science communicators. And I don't think we have enough of them. And if we do, they're getting drowned out. There's just a lot going on right now. So I hope I can help with that. I hope I can be a gateway for people to get into nature and science a little bit that might not have found it

Science Communication Goals

01:07:36
Speaker
through the existing conventional ways to do that. So even though I'm not a paleontologist, I feel like hopefully I'm going to contribute something to the conversation around that and help people get reignited about it.
01:07:57
Speaker
the duration of a dig that it can take five years, maybe even the case of, was it Drednautosaurus or that? Drednautus, yep. Drednautus, that it could take 10 years to carefully
01:08:13
Speaker
Chip away the rock to get to the the skeleton lad that that blew me away in a way that was like oh Yeah, you know you think you just get out the brushes and and you know it's you know a couple weeks later There's your skeleton, but like it takes years. I couldn't believe that Yep, it's a really a really time-consuming process Depending on what you're dealing with depending on what kind of rock the the scientists and they're digging it so
01:08:42
Speaker
in the case of Drednautus, which is one of the largest and most complete of these supermassive Titanosaurs from Argentina. It's not anywhere near the biggest. I think it's something like 60 tons, which doesn't sound like something that's small. It's the size of a 737, but it's in this really
01:09:12
Speaker
tough rock for them to dig in. So it took five years to get the bones out of the rock. And then another five years of preparation at three different museum labs to prepare those bones and preparing them means cleaning the rock matrix from them, using glues and other adhesives that are very special and won't destroy anything.
01:09:38
Speaker
to keep those bones together. What's amazing about dinosaur bones is they're really fragile. You wouldn't think they are. They survived for millions of years, but they're survived because they're encased in this rock. These days, there's also a lot of digital scanning going on and recreating things on computers and putting this stuff together for the public.
01:10:04
Speaker
In the old days, they used to take the bones out, drill holes through them and put them on metal armatures to mount them for exhibit halls, but now we're not as invasive and destructive about it. It's a huge, really long process. I was a paleontologist for a day. It was a really long day in a place where we knew there would be something there.
01:10:30
Speaker
Um, you know, you weren't guaranteed to find something, but you were, you were in a really likely place and you knew what to look for. And it was still a, it was a long day. It was a great day, but, um, you know, it makes you appreciate these really long, arduous, um, dig seasons, especially when you know, you watch documentaries and there are months where whole expeditions of people find nothing.
01:10:56
Speaker
and they have no running water, no comforts of home, no great food, and they're finding nothing for weeks at a time in the middle of the desert. So it's like, man, I don't know if that's what I want to do with my life, but I'm glad there are people out there doing it.
01:11:14
Speaker
Yeah, well it's like with the planet Earth nature documentaries and if they're able to get 10 seconds of this beautiful bird of paradise doing a mating dance, they might be out there for a week or two weeks sitting in one spot in the rain or in the heat with their cameras.
01:11:34
Speaker
waiting and waiting and waiting for 80 to 100 hours to get maybe 10 seconds of footage. But we just see that 10 seconds of footage and think, wow, what a job. Exactly. Exactly. So huge appreciation for that. And for David Attenborough, who's like my hero and is often the narrator of these shows, right? So
01:11:57
Speaker
Well, Sam, out of respect for your time and your Sunday, I'll let you get out of

Conclusion

01:12:02
Speaker
here. Thank you so much for writing the book. Thanks for taking the time. It's a wonderful book. I hope a lot of people scarf it up. It definitely taps into your imagination and you do such a great job of inspiring awe in these creatures that lived millions of years ago. Well done and thanks so much for coming on the show.
01:12:25
Speaker
Thank you, Brendan. It's been an awesome time. You're doing amazing work yourself and I really appreciate you having me on and getting to talk about dig and dinosaurs. Hopefully, we'll stay in touch and for anybody who's listening in, follow along with what's going on. What's your Twitter handle so people can follow you if they want?
01:12:49
Speaker
So all of my social media handles are the same. It's dino-file-sam, D-I-N-O-P-H-I-L-E-S-A-M. And if you can't remember that or it's too tough, go to samthedynostorman.com and you can get all the links on there.
01:13:05
Speaker
Fantastic. I love that everything right down to your email address just harkens to your passion for dinosaurs. I love it. And it's easier than spelling my last name. Yeah, no kidding. Is it Chiarelli? Is that how you pronounce it or is it something different? That is how you should pronounce it, but no one, including my family, does. So we just say Chiarelli, but you're pronouncing it correctly. Fantastic.
01:13:30
Speaker
Awesome. Well, enjoy the rest of your day, Sam. Thanks again for the time and best of success and best of luck with the book. It's a fun journey. Thanks, Brendan. Thanks so much. You got it. Take care. You too. Bye.
01:13:48
Speaker
Okay, not too shabby. That's two. Count em two dinosaur themed podcasts this year. Steve Brassati being the first one for episode 117. You can dig it if you want. See what I did there? Before you bounce, maybe consider giving me a follow across the socials. Feel free to reach out with questions on craft, interviewing, etc.
01:14:14
Speaker
That's what I'm here for at Brendan O'Mara or at CNF Pod on the Twitter. Facebook is the creative nonfiction vodcast or at CNF Pod host.
01:14:25
Speaker
Though with all this nasty stuff going down with Facebook, I might be getting rid of it. Might be getting rid of the whole shebang. I don't know. We'll see. Maybe you'd like to ask a certain question, have me ask a certain question of the guests. Maybe there's something you want to know from them so you can have a greater authority when you approach your work. And you know, this podcast is really in service of you guys, the listener.
01:14:55
Speaker
So, yeah, maybe you'd like me to ask a certain question to guests, like, I wish you would ask them this. I'm definitely open to it. Also, if you dig the show, consider leaving an honest review on iTunes. They all help out. But more importantly, if the show meant anything to you, share it with just one friend and consider subscribing so you can keep the show.
01:15:16
Speaker
on the air. I think that's it. Happy Thanksgiving, and remember, if you can do it of you, see ya!