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Episode 80—The Wild Life of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
134 Plays7 years ago
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of several books including "Tamed and Untamed," says, "I don't think I followed a very traditional pathway. I did what I felt like doing." What shenanigans are we up to here? It’s the Creative Nonfiction Podcast where I speak with the world’s best artists about creating works of nonfiction. Leaders in the worlds of narrative journalism, personal essay, memoir, radio, and documentary film come here to talk about their origins, inspirations, and work habits so that you can apply their tools of mastery to your own work. For episode 80, I had the privilege of speaking to Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who co-authored “Tamed and Untamed” with Sy Montgomery (of episode 79 fame). Elizabeth’s career is wide, vast, and prolific as you’ll soon hear. We talk about: Lessons she learned from reading Hemingway The Power of Ignorance Walking off with wolves How circumstances organize the work And the clear feeling of the early hours While we continue to party on here in the intro I cordially ask you for HONEST reviews over on the iTunes. It’s what drives visibility and credibility to CNFers like yourself. Send me a screenshot of your review and I will give you a free hour of my time to edit a piece of your work. You give you get. T’is the season. Make sure that review is time stamped in December 2017 and you’re golden. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the podcast. Thanks for listening.
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:11
Speaker
Hey CNFers, my CNF buddies, dig the new song. I know some of you are probably rolling your eyes and I get it, but there's something about that charge I get from the almighty riff.
00:00:26
Speaker
it's also episode 80 so go big or go home to what shenanigans are we up to here this is the creative nonfiction podcast and I'm your host Brendan O'Mara and I speak with the world's best artist about creating works of nonfiction leaders in the world of narrative journalism personal essay memoir radio and documentary film
00:00:54
Speaker
They come here to talk about their origins, their inspirations, their work habits, so that maybe you can cherry-pick and apply a lot of their tools of mastery to your own work.
Discussing 'Tamed and Untamed'
00:01:07
Speaker
For episode 80, I had the privilege of speaking to Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who co-authored Tamed and Untamed with Cy Montgomery of episode 79 fame.
00:01:22
Speaker
Elizabeth's career is wide, vast, and prolific as you'll soon hear and you can check out her website and her work by going to show notes at brennanomera.com head over to her site you can learn far more about Elizabeth and her work in this episode we talk about lessons she learned from reading Ernest Hemingway
00:01:47
Speaker
the power of ignorance, walking off with wolves in the Arctic, it's a thing and it happened, how circumstances organize the work and the clear feeling of the early hours. And while we continue to party on here in the intro, I cordially ask you for an honest, operative word honest, review over on the iTunes.
00:02:13
Speaker
It's what drives visibility and credibility to seeing efforts like yourself. So send me a screenshot of your review and I will give you a free hour of my time to edit a piece of your work. You give, you get. Tis the season. Make sure that review is time stamped in December 2017 and you are golden. So now sit back, relax, and enjoy the podcast. Thanks for listening.
Co-authoring and Column Writing
00:02:43
Speaker
My hobby is making quilts, and I'm making three quilts for three people. And I kind of like doing it. It's hard work, but I like it. And a friend of mine and I wrote a book together, Si Montgomery, and I wrote a book called Tamed and Untamed, and it's a lot of work to do for the publicity part of that.
00:03:10
Speaker
book signings and interviews and appearances and stuff and that all takes time and it's very hard to write for me with a lot of other stuff hanging around. I have to just be alone and concentrate and go into that other world that you're writing about.
00:03:29
Speaker
It's funny, you mentioned quilting and then untamed and untamed almost in the same sense because in a way, that book is a quilt of your incised essays, right? Yes, it is. The two occupations are strangely very much alike, so I enjoy doing those.
00:03:55
Speaker
What was the process of co-authoring a book like? What were the machinations of that? Because most people, and yourself included, have written several books that are just, you are the pitcher on the mound. You're the one author. And this one, I know you and Si have been friends for years and years. So what was the experience like to do split duty, double duty on a book?
00:04:26
Speaker
Well, we together wrote a column for the Boston Globe, a newspaper. And she would write for the first week and I would write for the next week or two weeks or something, whatever the schedule was, I don't remember. And so we had a lot of essays from that. And then the Globe discontinued the section of the paper in which the column occurred. So we start writing it, of course.
00:04:54
Speaker
And a publisher asked us what we would think of putting these essays together in a book. So we did. And not only that, but we added quite a few, no, we added maybe a certain percent of the essays in their original just because we felt like it wanted to add some work. And it was very, it was, I love, I love doing it. And I think she did, and I know I did too.
00:05:22
Speaker
And we're hoping to do it again sometime. It's very fun. And it's quite easy. If you write an essay, it has one subject. You don't have to tie it to anything else. It has to make sense only in itself. And it's fairly easy to do and fairly fast. And you can write about anything you want if you're writing an essay. You don't have to stick to anything.
00:05:50
Speaker
So I loved it. And was there a method to you and Shai sharing the stage? Did you originally want it to alternate a lot? Or did you realize that maybe in, say, Dogs and Cats section, I think you have a lion's share of
00:06:13
Speaker
of that section. Was there a rhyme or rhythm to how you guys divided up the work?
00:06:31
Speaker
The first week, I wrote what I wanted to write about the second week, and I happened to write a lot of things about God and God, which is why my stuff is higher in those. Hers is higher in many other things, probably more other things.
00:06:46
Speaker
But we have about an equal number of essays in there.
Early Influences and Writing Journey
00:06:50
Speaker
Yeah, what's great in reading about your career and your work is the globality of it, if you will. And, you know, your first, you know, Harmless People being your first book, I believe. You know, you were in the 50s, you went to what is now Namibia.
00:07:10
Speaker
to follow some of the final or last hunter-gatherer peoples on the continent, really. And at that point in your life, what was pushing you in that direction? Well, my dad, he wanted to go there, so he took us with him. I was in my late teens, but I was thrilled to go. And I loved being there, and it was probably the most important, single most important thing I ever did in my life.
00:07:38
Speaker
aside from marrying my husband and having my kids. I think that was it. And what made you want to sort of pick up the pen and make something of that experience? I like to write before that. Okay, I was in college and I was in, I went to Smith. Okay. And I was, this is a strange thing to say, but Forrest, it fits through.
00:08:06
Speaker
which I was lucky to be able to do because my parents wanted me to take a course in anthropology and Smith didn't have an anthropology department. Okay, so I went to Radcliffe and I like to write and I get all kinds of things like writing. I also like to
00:08:26
Speaker
to paint it. If I say so myself, I wasn't that bad at it. But the writing was compelling. And the other thing is, and I was asked to major, I was supposed to, I mean, my parents advised me or wanted me to major in English because that seemed to be the best thing for a woman to do at the time, but they wanted me to take courses in anthropology, so I did both of those. And in the English major, you could not get credit for a writing course
00:08:55
Speaker
unless you were a major in English, and then you could. So that also helped made me decide to major in English. And I did, and I wrote a lot, and I won a prize for writing a short story. So I was already writing by the time I went to the Connery. Yeah, and winning that prize, in a sense, puts a little fuel in your tank and validates you that, like, okay, this is something I could possibly do something with.
00:09:26
Speaker
Well, after I wrote the story, a publisher asked me to write a book about the experience, so I thought, okay, I did. So in a sense, who were you modeling yourself after and at the time when you were starting to take up this kind of work? Like, who did you see yourself becoming and who were those maybe mentors, even if they were just in books?
00:09:55
Speaker
I didn't have Menders. Nobody. The answer is nobody. I mean, I didn't know you had to have one. So I just wanted it by myself. I might've been better off with a Mender, but I really didn't have one. I had a very wonderful agent, and I liked her very much. She was super. And the publishers were super. The editor, who I had at the time, was very helpful and very nice. I mean, if you just do it,
00:10:25
Speaker
you'll get the people around that area will step in, I think. So what were some of your early growing pains as you're not having the rudder that can be a mentor to help kind of guide you in the right direction? What was early experiences that, yeah, those growing pains as you developed as a young rider? Well, that's a good question.
00:10:52
Speaker
There was one course that was very hard to get into, but a lot of people who turned out to be pretty good writers got into it and they were in it at the time. And I would say it was taught by Archibald MacLeish, poet, and it was a great class. It was another excuse to write. But I think that just being in that class was helpful, I guess.
00:11:18
Speaker
I don't think I followed a very traditional pathway. I just did what I felt like doing and kept on doing it. But Ted Hogan was in that class and he's a wonderful writer and I still remember that he wrote a wonderful book about, he
00:11:40
Speaker
He joined a circus and was one of the caregivers of the animals and he wrote about that in the Catman is the book that he wrote. It's a wonderful book and I still remember sentences from it. So that kind of thing is very good for people.
00:12:00
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What kind of books were you into and reading as you were, you know, right to say before and just after you were starting to write your own books? You know, what were some of those that you were into that helped shape the type of writing that you wanted other people to read?
00:12:23
Speaker
Well, I mean, if you major in English, you've got to read a lot of books. I did. Luckily, past the test. But, you know, somebody who was influencing an awful lot of people at the time was Hemingway. I mean, there's a lot of poetry and a lot of writing that I love, but I don't write like those people. And I don't, nobody can say they write like Hemingway because nobody does.
00:12:52
Speaker
I just like shorter, direct statements and a certain simplicity in what you're writing about. And also another thing, very many writers, they describe, over describe what the subject of the novel is doing or what the scenery is around and so forth and so on.
00:13:20
Speaker
And I find that a little irritating, so I don't do that unless it's very important to say what the scenery is around. And Hemingway didn't either, I noticed. He never does that, never did that. But Hemingway, I can't imagine there's a person who Hemingway did not influence, so I was one of them.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, the description part is really important. Some people, probably people, and I think I've been guilty of this too, is that you're guilty of over-describing because you feel like you need to paint the picture. But in reality, if you just kind of lay out the most simplest thing, just maybe let the, if there's a certain tree, just maybe let the reader picture whatever tree it is that they want.
00:14:07
Speaker
Geographically, I mean, out west, you know, deciduous trees are not native. You know, it's more evergreen. So, of course, you need to get some of those facts right. But by and large, it's like, well, yeah, let the reader sort of patch in holes and, you know, give them that credit and you don't have to force-feed every single detail down their throat. Yeah, exactly. Yes, he walked toward the door. He grasped the handle. He turned the handle. He opened the door. He went through the door.
00:14:35
Speaker
He was in the next room. You can just skip it and say, well, in the next room, such and such happened.
00:14:45
Speaker
Oh, and then you described the room. Yes.
African Adventures and Dangers
00:14:51
Speaker
Nobody cares. What was a great takeaway from your first book project, The Harmless People? What was the next steps for you as you parlayed that into your next projects as you were snowballing a career?
00:15:13
Speaker
Interestingly, my agent submitted The Harmless People to The New Yorker, and they turned it down. But then the editor of The New Yorker asked my agent why she hadn't submitted to him, and she said she did, but it was turned down. And he said, oh, well, would Mrs. Thomas write another book?
00:15:36
Speaker
The answer is a resounding yes. And then I thought I'd been, well, I did hunter-gatherers. Now I'll do pastoral people. And I went to Uganda with the support of the New Yorker and wrote another book called Warrior Hertzman about the Dadaat of Northern Uganda, who there was sort of, they're like, something like the Maasai, they're central Nilo Hamites, what the anthropologists call them.
00:16:05
Speaker
and they related languages and so forth and related lifestyle. They're all pastoral. They have these people. They have large herds of cattle, and they measure their wealth, as it were, in cattle, not in money, or they did, and still do. And it was, to me, quite fascinating. My kids, I had two little kids by that time, and they brought them with me.
00:16:34
Speaker
And people, well, people said you brought your kids to Africa. And I said, well, yeah, there's lots of other kids in Africa, right? So I can't, what's, it's amazing to me, like, I know I think there's, it must have been, I mean, it's,
00:16:57
Speaker
There's a fearlessness about your willingness to step into foreign countries and they have foreign cultures and to do this kind of work that I think a lot of people lack. And where did that fearlessness come from to be able to pursue the kind of stories you were pursuing early in your career? Well, I'm not sure. Well, I've kept on doing it. I mean, I don't do it now. I'm too old now.
00:17:26
Speaker
I was not too old then, but I'm not sure it's fearlessness. I think it's, well, I guess it's fearlessness in a way, but it's also a little bit of ignorance because I didn't know that, I mean, I thought cars were bulletproof, which they're not. And the Dadauth were fighting with another group called the Turkhanis, and the Turkhanis had rifles, the Dadauths had spears.
00:17:52
Speaker
And so a raid by Krikanis on the people where I was might have resulted in bullets flying. But I thought I'll just get in the car and... It'll be all right. It's very helpful. Yeah. Or it can be. I met Eddie Almead. Nobody knew his importance at the time. He was a colonel in the King's African Rifles.
00:18:22
Speaker
And the army came up to try to put an end to the raiding, and he did some terrible things. He went with the people. The people I knew went with him because they were going to see about a raid that had just taken place. The Turkhanas, who were east of the Dadaas, had come up from the Rift Valley and taken some cattle.
00:18:49
Speaker
So, Idi Amin took his soldiers down into the Rift Valley. They went into Kenya. We were very close to the Kenya border, and they went into Kenya after the Turkanas, which was a raid, which was completely illegal. That was war type thing. And they killed a lot of people. They found a village and killed the people. Terrible. Somebody I knew saw Idi Amin
00:19:19
Speaker
A little girl was sitting by her, was crying, holding on to her mother who was dying, or already had died. And he, I mean, took the little girl and broke her back with a stone. And even the Dadaaf, who, I mean, they were warriors and then some, they were horrified by that. And if you've been horrified at Dadaaf,
00:19:46
Speaker
uh... anyway it was it would have been okay he did that kind of thing but he came back up with his he with he shot some cattle and brought with the body of a man back up to the to the to the to the higher left ground where the the government and he came to my camp with the body and he asked me to take it in my vehicle down about fifty miles to a government center and uh...
00:20:15
Speaker
So what do you do? Do you leave your kids with itty yummy or do you put them in the car with a corpse and drive them for 50 miles? That's one reason not to take your kids. I thought I'll do the woman thing and seem helpless and ignorant and I did.
00:20:38
Speaker
I said, well, my car isn't strong like your big army trucks and I don't know if I can drive well enough to do that. And he was angry, but he, but he, he, he went stamping away. And so I didn't have to, I mean, I didn't do it. Wow. Of course, of course. So then when, what I found out later that the guy who had done that was, Eddie, I mean,
00:21:04
Speaker
So, not everybody's mad idiot, I mean. So what happened after that? Well, he put the body in a truck and took it away. I don't know where he took it. Wow. Did you have any more overlap after that or was that the extent of it?
00:21:29
Speaker
Not with him, the rating went on, but he wasn't there, which was good. So with these first three big stories you wrote about, how did you go about cultivating the access you needed to pursue those stories with such rigor and access?
00:21:54
Speaker
by stories you mean about the Dadaaf? Yeah, just the stories that you pursued in Africa. How did you line those up and get access so that you were able to freely report on those cultures? Oh, well, all the people I met were really very nice. They took us in. They helped us. They understood what we were doing. They were in favor of it.
00:22:24
Speaker
me it was them and I met some very wonderful people and was kept in touch more or less from the Kalahari. Let me return to the Kalahari for a minute. The area we went to was about 120,000 square miles which was quote unquote unexplored and
00:22:49
Speaker
I mean, it was called that because white people hadn't been in there. But the Bushmen, now called the San, were pre-contact and they had been in there for, oh, well, two archaeological work was done later and one encampment was found to have had continuous occupancy for over 80,000 years and another for over 30,000 years without any particular change in the material culture.
00:23:18
Speaker
So what we were seeing was something that had gone on for that many thousands of years. We descended from the sand. The sand were the first people. That's been shown genetically by DNA studies. So that's what humanity was like for a long time. I'm diverting a little bit.
00:23:48
Speaker
If you've been there for 80,000 years, you've done the exploring. I mean, they do every inch of those 120,000 miles. And now I can't remember why I was talking about this. They had heard about white people. They hadn't met them, but they'd heard about them because
00:24:14
Speaker
everybody in that area, all the Sam people, they were interconnected in one way or another. And they would visit each other and news would travel from one side of the space to the other in about a year. So if someone had a bad experience with white people, which everybody did, everybody who had encountered white people had a bad experience. They were a little suspicious of us, but they at first, but we, I mean, they were very gracious.
00:24:42
Speaker
they let us use their water. There was no surface water, no rivers, no lakes, no nothing in the dry season. So we had to share, we had to, somebody had to be nice enough to let us use their water from their water home. And the people offered it to us. They were glad, they were very generous and welcoming. That's part of their culture is to get along with other people.
00:25:11
Speaker
and everybody gets along well. The whole culture is designed for that. The marriage system, kinship system, who you're named for, that system. Partnerships of various kinds. They're all designed for cohesion. But is that survival for them? That was survival for them. And we've kind of lost that. I think the Neolithic ruined that.
00:25:41
Speaker
but it was very interesting to see. Yeah, Sebastian Younger's latest book, Tribe, kind of talks about that, about how the tribal cultures are sort of more, they look out for each other more, people are more satisfied in those cultures. We found that the
00:26:06
Speaker
you know, the American colonists or the British colonists would come over here and they would, some would, if they were taken by some of the native peoples that they came back to society, they would often run back to the tribal culture and eschew the Western civilization. So yeah, I'm sure you kind of saw that firsthand.
00:26:29
Speaker
Yes, that's true, that's true, but it's infectious. Western culture is infectious. Well, the same people today keep it to some degree, oh, I know what I was going to say, all that time and all that space and the way they live. But I mean, now it took us months to find people.
00:26:56
Speaker
We just tried and tried because there was nobody who knew where the water sources were so we couldn't have a guide or anything but when we found people
00:27:10
Speaker
Let's see, I still can't remember where I was. It'll pop up. Sorry. That's okay. In this process, in doing this kind of work, where did you feel most engaged and most alive in this process?
Passion for Field Research
00:27:31
Speaker
Was it like in the field doing the research or what did it end up being like when you came back and trying to process and organize it?
00:27:38
Speaker
What most appealed to you? In the field, in the field, yes. And after I did two books about people, I wrote a couple of novels about Paleolithic people, but then I began to write about animals, which is what I wanted to do in the first place. And so, and then I felt much more engaged when I was in the field. Okay. I mean, it's transporting to do that. It's fascinating.
00:28:07
Speaker
Yeah, that's kind of where I wanted to, it's great that you're taking us there because I wanted to, given that your early work was, you know, human based and then you made the pivot to animals, the covering in writing about animals. And what made you want to make that pivot? Well, like you said, it was something you always wanted to do. So what finally prompted that moment to get to the core of what you really wanted to write about?
00:28:36
Speaker
That's a good question, but I had a sort of hot subject, which was dogs. And oh, another thing is that by that time, my kids were older and they had to go to school, so they weren't portable as they had been before. So I was more or less at home just not doing anything in particular except being a housewife. And I thought,
00:29:05
Speaker
that it would be, I thought, but we had a dog at the time. We were taking care of somebody else's dog who roamed around. There was no leash law, so he could roam. And he roamed, and he'd come back, and then he'd go up again, and he'd come back. And I wondered what he was doing. And I thought, why don't I find out what he was doing? This was very interesting for me. It led me to a lot of things. And you don't need anybody
00:29:35
Speaker
You don't need any funding to do that. You just need a dog and a pencil and a notebook. And I had that. So I began following him. And it opened a world that I wasn't surprised to find. I was suspected it was out there. But it was very interesting. And after that, I wrote about, I've written about animals. Oh, and I later went to Baffin Island, which is
00:30:05
Speaker
way up in the Arctic Circle, as you know, and it was daylight all the time. I went with some people who were studying the, they were studying caribou. They had studied the wolves and they were studying caribou at that time. And I separated from them and went by myself to, so I was all by myself, to where there were a den of wolves and the wolves were raising a letter.
00:30:37
Speaker
I would call them a married couple, a mother and father wolf. There are three offsprings from the year before and a new letter of pups. And they like the other, like the people, like the das and the sihan.
00:31:00
Speaker
They put up with me. They let me be there. They didn't move. They didn't leave. They didn't bother me. They come and look. When I was asleep, there was a little cave that I found. A little bitty cave. And I slept in that. And they would come when I was asleep. And examine my things. But they could have had me for lunch. And it would have saved them a lot of trouble. They didn't. I didn't have any gun or anything. I mean, it's their land, not mine.
00:31:30
Speaker
I wouldn't want to go somewhere and kill all the people that I was, the creatures that I was there to see, any more than I would if they were human. And so that was, that was, I mean that, the dog thing led me to that. That was a terrific experience. I never wrote a book about that as such. I've included it in almost everything else.
00:31:56
Speaker
The Arctic is wonderful. It's always, at that time of year, it was in the summer. And it's always about 11 o'clock. The sun never sets. And 11 o'clock in the morning is an optimistic time. I mean, the day is in the middle of the day and the night is far away and you've got plenty of time and it's just a very good feeling. It's nice.
00:32:19
Speaker
Wow, so what gave you the confidence to go off on your own and to go seek a familial pack of wolves and sort of live in their orbit? And did you at any point feel threatened that they might choose to feed you to their pups? No, it didn't occur to me that they would. I mean, historically,
00:32:44
Speaker
have caused very, very few. Somebody did a study of deaths of people caused by wolves, and they were very, very few. And the only one I remember is a man who dressed up as a bear, and a bear cub, and
00:33:00
Speaker
pretended he was injured. But I don't think, again, it wasn't courage or fearlessness, it was sheer ignorance. And I didn't know, well I did know, but polar bears would be dangerous, a polar bear would be dangerous. But the polar bears really didn't go inland very much and the
00:33:30
Speaker
I never saw one, so there was someone there. So I don't know what I would have done if I saw one, but I'd have thought of something or tried to. How long did you hang out with the wolves up there? I was there for a summer, several months, a couple of months, three. And it was heaven. I just loved it. It was heaven. I've seldom been happier than I was there.
00:33:59
Speaker
And the wolves were fascinating. They weren't. That's all they did was work. I mean, they hunted or slept. When I first got there, one of the people who were studying caribou, they had been there before and they knew where the dens were. So one of them showed me this den. And when we arrived, there was no wolf at the den.
00:34:26
Speaker
But then they found that I was there. After that, they always had a babysitter. Someone would return from hunting, would go up in a high rock where the pups couldn't reach her and bother her, and she would sleep. And the others hunted, and then another one would come in from hunting, and the babysitter would go hunting again, and the newcomer would sleep. But they never left them alone after I was there.
00:34:54
Speaker
which I think tells you something. I mean, wolves are brilliantly smart. Yeah. What did you notice similarities between, say, the neighborhood dog that you were following and these wild wolves in the Arctic summer? What did you notice between the two that struck you as similar? That's a good question and I don't really have an answer because, I mean, they were both dog types, but, you know,
00:35:24
Speaker
acted. The wolves acted like dogs, and the dog acted like wolves, naturally. But the dog, what he wanted to do, I think, was establish his supremacy wherever he went. He had varying degrees of luck with that. The wolves didn't have to. They were the only wolves in that particular area, and they had their social relations all figured out. I never saw any
00:35:53
Speaker
struggle for a supremacy or a sign of one well saying I'm better than you or I'm above you on the wolf ladder. It just didn't happen. Everybody knew everybody else. They were united in that they had a common goal, which was to feed themselves and each other. That's true of almost anything that lives in the wild, especially birds and mammals.
00:36:21
Speaker
So after you've gone into the field and you've filled up your notebooks, what's your next steps as you begin to organize and process the research? Oh, I just start writing. I mean, lots of people figure the book out before they write it. And I should do that too, because it makes the book better and everything easier. But I don't. Maybe I should. Maybe next time I write a book, I will.
00:36:48
Speaker
But I just don't. I just start writing. I think of something in writing. And then it kind of flows from there. It really isn't the best way to write a book, but I don't know. I kind of like it. I mean, I write for fun, you could say. So I might as well do it the way I want and have fun doing it. But I think it probably is better to organize it ahead of time.
00:37:17
Speaker
But also there's one other thing, which is that circumstances organize it for you. I mean, there's a procession and when you go someplace and watch what's happening, something will happen and stuff will go on, something. And that's the key to what you're going to write about. I mean, that's kind of haphazard, but it works. Yeah. It worked for me. I mean, I'm not saying that my stuff is
00:37:45
Speaker
My work is, you know, the greatest literature, but it's not bad literature, not at all.
00:37:51
Speaker
So it's acceptable. I think it's more than acceptable. How do you go about setting up your days and your mornings to ensure that you have a successful day at the ledger? When do you wake up? You even said when you're in the Arctic, 11 a.m. is the most optimistic time. So maybe that's a real sweet spot for you.
00:38:17
Speaker
you know, set up your days so you're getting the most out of your writing time. Oh, that's a fascinating
Writing Routines and Styles
00:38:25
Speaker
question. Thanks for asking it. I wake up very early. Well, my dogs sleep in the same bed with me and when breakfast time comes, and breakfast time comes at about 4 am, sometimes 3.30, which is fine, and I get up.
00:38:44
Speaker
And I feed the dogs and the cats. And then I start working. And by 4.30, I might be working. And then you have four hours until anything can happen. I mean, nobody's going to call you up. You can't go into errands. There's nothing you can do except work. And there's a wonderful, clear feeling, I think. And by that time, by the time you've been working for four hours, you're in it. You're going.
00:39:11
Speaker
And the disturbances don't, don't, don't bother you that much and you don't get very many anyway. And so you can just keep going. And I love to do that. I just, I can work all day until dark, from dark morning before the sun rises to the afternoon sets, perfectly happily. And I get very involved and enjoy doing it.
00:39:36
Speaker
And I just have to let the dogs out once in a while and, you know, give them something for that. Give them a little snack at dinner time, give them some dinner, and the cats, and they go back to work. And then, I mean, sometimes I don't even drink a cup of coffee before I start or eat breakfast. I mostly don't. So around noon, you know, I might have a sandwich and then go back to work. But I love to work. I just, I love being completely absorbed in something else that's very nice.
00:40:07
Speaker
How long can you write in a given day without getting fatigued? Are you writing that whole time or do you do it for 45 minutes and get up and go for a walk? How does that work for you? I should. I should. No, I don't. I just keep going. I love doing it. You get momentum and then you're hot and then you're doing it and you're happy.
00:40:36
Speaker
And just the thrill of doing it carries me. And how long does it take you to maybe get into that flow state? Flow state being the place where painters, musicians, writers, everyone's looking to find that area. So it's like you're creating downhill, so to speak. So how do you get that momentum? Yeah, downhill. That's a good word, yeah. Oh, well, it doesn't take long.
00:41:05
Speaker
I'm waiting to do it while I'm feeding the dogs and the cats. And as soon as I can get out there and start, the happier I am. So I wake up wanting to do it. And maybe I was dreaming about it or I was thinking about it before I went to sleep. Frankly, the conditions of the world today aren't the greatest. And if you don't have to think about them for a while, that's a good thing.
00:41:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So what does your workspace look like? When you're writing, are you writing longhand or you go straight to a computer? I used to write longhand, now I use a computer. I was a good typist because I had a job as a secretary for a while. I had various jobs in my life. And I was a pretty good typist, so using the keyboard was easy.
00:42:03
Speaker
But the quality of your writing changes when you write long hand and when you write with a computer. And mine did. It just changed. It's different. A little different. And I don't know. But I did it anyway because it was easy and quick. And you can edit it very easily. It's not like editing long hand or typing or typing. So I was glad to do it.
00:42:31
Speaker
It's the stuff I wrote long hand is a little different from what I wrote on the computer. In what ways would you characterize that difference? Well, I don't know. It's hard to describe. I've been writing on a computer for a long time now, ever since computers came to being. So it's hard to remember, but the flow is kind of
00:43:00
Speaker
better with longhand for some reason. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it's a little slower and you write more slowly by hand than you do by typing. Yeah, I think you're right. It's good to have a little more time, I think. Yeah, I think so. I think for some reason, anytime I do anything longhand for what it's worth, it does feel a little more immersive in a sense, if that makes any sense.
00:43:29
Speaker
Yes, that makes lots of sense. That describes it, yes. That's good.
00:43:36
Speaker
So, you know, you're able to get a lot of this momentum. And I think a lot of people, what they struggle with too is the middle of a project. You're past the honeymoon of, you know, the idea is great, the idea is green and you just want to go with it. And then you get into the middle where things can get dark and ugly and you haven't, you know, you're too far from home to turn back and you're right there in the thick of it. So, how do you...
00:44:06
Speaker
deal and muddle through your way through the middle of drafts and just keep forging ahead. Well, I edit all the time. That's the thing. I read what I wrote yesterday. I read what I wrote last week. And I can't train myself not to start doing this at the beginning. So the beginning of every book I've written is, in my opinion, better written than the last chapter, which I
00:44:35
Speaker
probably was in a hurry because there was a pub date or something, publication date, and I was hurrying. And I noticed that when a book comes back from the publisher with the, you know, they edit and then you edit their edits. But I can't stop revising. I can't. And I think about it all the time. I would still be revising the Hermos people if I had my way. I'd like to revise the Hermos people. It's very naive. It's a naive book.
00:45:05
Speaker
I wrote another book about the Bushman called The Old Way, which is vastly better and more sophisticated, but there are people still in print and it keeps going, so that's okay too. So when you're in the process, that generative phase, what part do you feel most connected to, like the editing, rewriting, or the actual just like pure generation of material?
00:45:34
Speaker
I have to say the editing. I can't stop. I can't stop. And when I'm driving somewhere, I'm editing it in my mind. And I have a notebook in the car, so I pull over. I think I should have done. But editing is good. I mean, it's good too. The more you edit, the better the book is. Well, you can over edit. I've done that.
00:45:54
Speaker
There's this little known syndrome called the shiny new thing. When you're in the thick of something, sometimes it can be easy to get distracted by a new project or something, and sometimes it's hard to finish things. You've had a career of finishing very long projects and untold essays and magazine articles, I imagine.
00:46:18
Speaker
as well. So what have you found helpful to ensure that you finish something before you start getting distracted by the next news story that just is gnawing at your brain? Well, I would probably go to the next news story if it was gnawing at my brain and crash what I... But I have a
00:46:46
Speaker
two compulsions, one is about worrying, I worry, worry, worry, worry about everything, which is, I think, a very good thing to do, because that's why my house hasn't burned down and why my dogs haven't got run over and so forth and so on, so far. But, I mean, my kids and everybody says I worry too much, and they don't worry at all, but somebody has to do the worrying, so it's me. So that's one thing.
00:47:16
Speaker
of a distraction. But the other thing is finishing things. And if something is unfinished, it just nags at me until it is finished. I mean, if I go and get the mail and there's a bill and I need to pay it, so I pay it right then rather than putting it off, that kind of thing. And I mean, that takes your time, but at least you don't have to worry about things that aren't finished. So that's just a personality problem, I think.
00:47:46
Speaker
And it's something I kind of cropped up the other day that I wanted to ask you. Your work has been so prolific and beautifully rendered. And I wonder if you look at your strengths and weaknesses in how you go about the work, what has always been your struggles and what's been your strengths.
00:48:16
Speaker
What did you choose consciously or unconsciously to lean into? Would it be to lean into your strengths or to try to bring up your weaknesses to your strengths?
Balancing Accuracy and Style
00:48:27
Speaker
Did you ever give much thought to that? Oh, it's a wonderful question. I think weaknesses would be making mistakes. Or a weakness that I have and much too much of is that I
00:48:43
Speaker
I, if I get a piece of information, I'll turn now to my colleagues in Montgomery with who we wrote the essays for the globe and the book came in on time. She had training as a journalist, and she's like a scientist. I mean, she gets a fact, so to speak,
00:49:06
Speaker
She doesn't just assume that that's right. She checks it and double checks it, and she's sure. So when she says something, it's true, okay? My weakness is that I don't do that enough. And I mean, I'm perfectly happy to accept certain things as true, and they may be partly true or maybe outdated. They're not completely false, I hope, but they, I mean, I recently wrote another book called, which is still,
00:49:37
Speaker
It's with the publisher now, and it'll be out in March, I think. And it's called The Hidden Life of Life. I walk through the reaches of time. And that required an awful lot of stuff that I had to study. I mean, I don't know that much about the predecessors of mammals, for instance, without reading some of the scientific stuff.
00:50:08
Speaker
But so I hope I have done a good enough job on the fact-checking and things, because the book is now with the publisher. And I did try, but I mean, I just don't do it as well as I does. The other thing is that what I want is for the sentence to be good. I don't care nearly as much about the truth as I care about the sound of the sentence.
00:50:36
Speaker
And that's led me astray quite a lot. I mean, I would remove a word or change a word, even if it was the correct word and put in the less correct word, if the less correct word sounds better in the sentence. I'm an aspiring poet at heart, not an aspiring scientist.
00:50:57
Speaker
And being friends with Sy and being a writing partner with her, how has that partnership helped you improve?
00:51:16
Speaker
What have you learned, like you said, the fact-checking and that sort of rigor of double-checking things was something you really learned and took away from Psy. What else, being in close proximity and then professional proximity as in the book, what is that relationship added to your life and career, like having that kind of a partner in a sense? Oh, I think it's added very, very much.
00:51:43
Speaker
We read each other's works. I mean, I show her what I'm writing and she shows me what she's writing, you know, pretty much. And especially if I have doubts or she doesn't, she has doubts. And we're, I mean, it's in a way, I mean, I love her work. I really admire her work. And she likes mine. So I know when she sends it that I'm going to like it. But we can help, we can help each other catch things that aren't,
00:52:13
Speaker
aren't right and or things that could be done better. I've seldom find anything in her work but it's a good thing, it's a good checkpoint, it's a good safety valve there and I find that very helpful. Also she has a very wide, I mean the animals she studied are range from
00:52:43
Speaker
the Octopuses, which she's just written a very successful book about the soul of the Octopuses. She does scuba diving and she studied tarantulas. I would love to do that. I just haven't had the time right now. One of the things is I had kids and she didn't.
00:53:13
Speaker
was a little bit of a limit on my doing such things as scuba diving. And also my husband, in recent years, he became ill, and he's no longer living. And so I stayed with him. And so our traveling, well, I mean, it's not that I didn't do a lot of traveling, I did.
00:53:43
Speaker
But it's been limited in recent years because of that.
00:53:48
Speaker
So what is, you know, as we, you know, I want to be mindful of your time here.
Joy of Writing and Future Projects
00:53:55
Speaker
So, and I'll let you get out of here in a moment. But I wonder, you know, you've got the hidden life of life coming up. But, you know, what is still, you know, driving you and excites you when you, you know, flip open the computer and get to work? And what is, you know, still bringing you joy when you start a writing project or start the research?
00:54:19
Speaker
Oh, the fun that it is to do that. How much I like doing that, that drives me. I mean, it doesn't drive me intensely there. And when I'm very busy now, like there's been a lot of interviews and a lot of book signings and appearances and stuff. And that, I mean, it's very hard for me to write and get involved in something if I've got upcoming things every couple of days, that sort of thing then.
00:54:43
Speaker
You just can't focus, so I'm working on a quilt. You can do that with a quilt, but you can't do that. And just the joy of doing it is what gets me there. Yeah, just the sheer enjoyment of the actual process versus the outcome of the process. Yes, the sheer enjoyment of the actual process, yes, yes, yes.
00:55:12
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Elizabeth, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast for the show to talk about your career and your life and your writing process. This was a lot of fun. Tamed and Untamed is a great collection of your work and size about animals, wild and domestic. It's a wonderful little collection. And I can't wait to dig into more of your
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:55:35
Speaker
work. And yeah, maybe we can have you back on for when your next book comes out.
00:55:40
Speaker
Oh, that was very nice. Thanks so much. I thought interviews vary. Some feel a little better than others, and this one feels very good, and I'm very happy. Thank you. Oh, fantastic. That makes me feel good. Well, thank you for the time, and we'll be in touch. Thanks very much. Thank you. All right, take care. Yes, you too.
00:56:05
Speaker
well there you have it friends cnf'ers another podcast in which get out of it what are you going to take away from what are you struggling with
00:56:19
Speaker
Feel free to email me or ping me on Twitter. I'd love to hear from you. Also, I've got this slick monthly newsletter where I send out reading recommendations and what you may have missed from the world of the Creative Nonfiction podcast every month. Like I said, monthly, the first of the month. Head over to the website, BrendanOmera.com and sign up once a month. No spam. Can't beat it.
00:56:43
Speaker
And lastly, that friendly reminder to leave an honest review on iTunes. Editorial offer stands. Thanks for all you do by being a part of this little community. And I'll be here next week. I hope you will too. Thanks for listening. Bye.