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Episode 203: Emma Copley Eisenberg — A Window into Journalism World
133 Plays5 years ago
"I tried to write fiction and other things and it just kept being there and wanting to be written about," says Emma Copley Eisenberg about her nonfiction book, The Third Rainbow Girl.
In this show we talk about her soiree into journalism world, the many false starts her book took, and pushing the boundaries in creative nonfiction.
Follow her on Twitter @frumpenberg. Follow the show @CNFPod on IG, Twitter, and FB. Keep the conversation going, man.
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
So it was important to me to keep updating, although it's never really possible, right? Because I would like to go back in and re-update some things now. But at some point, it's a record of yourselves and where you are at the time, I suppose. Hey, it's ENF, greatest podcast in the world.
00:00:24
Speaker
Creative Nonfiction podcast where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. You knew that right? How they became who they are, what they're thinking about, and what they're working on. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara. Hey, hey.
Featuring Emma Copley Eisenberg
00:00:39
Speaker
We've got Emma Copley Eisenberg on the show for you today for the 203rd Rodeo of the CNF & Fun. Yee-haw! She's the author of the 3rd Rainbow Girl, The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia.
00:00:54
Speaker
That's published by hatchet. Or hatchet? I don't know where the accent is on that word. Make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you get your podcasts and keep the conversation going on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. At CNF Pod. Ping the show and I'll run like Batman to the bat signal. For reals. That's what I'll do.
00:01:19
Speaker
Also head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to subscribe for the monthly newsletter where I give out reading recommendations and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. I also raffle off books to subscribers. So as long as you don't unsubscribe, which I take wicked personally, you'll always be entered to win free books. Not a bad deal. Moving on.
Writing Process Insights
00:01:45
Speaker
In my journal this week, I was writing about the supreme overwhelm I've been feeling with the memoirvel. I'm retyping the entire thing as some of you may or may not know. Sort of rewriting as I'm going, cutting off various limbs and letting them rot in the gutter.
00:02:04
Speaker
and I'm about 40 pages in of about 270 roughly but I'm thinking that'll cut down to 250 at least maybe more that'd be cool to be like a nice solid six like eight pack
00:02:21
Speaker
abs of a 225 page book like that is just that is ripped in any case anyway it's a slog but the only way through it is through it you plow through you clear the road letting all the garbage in that gray gross snow just fall to the side and sucks you just kick it away that's all you can do I've been ambitious in setting a timer for 20 minutes it's kind of been a lunch break project
00:02:50
Speaker
I recommend 10 minutes because it's just a smaller bite and whatever those little things add up, right? But I find that 20 is good and when I'm really going that 20 minutes feels like five minutes and then I quit. There's no sense in blowing at a rotator cuff or being overly quote unquote sore.
00:03:10
Speaker
Speaking of that, totally deadlifted 405 pounds last week. Who says vegans a week, right? Super stoked
Emma's Book Themes and Inspirations
00:03:17
Speaker
about that. 405 has been like my white whale for years. Stupid fish. Emma Eisenberg is here, like I said before, and we dive right into her book.
00:03:28
Speaker
the third rainbow girl and we talk about her window into journalism world the many shapes and forms her book took until it ultimately landed on the structure she settled on and the fluid nature of creative non-fiction as a form pushing those boundaries so let's give a power chord welcome to Emma who
00:03:57
Speaker
So with this particular story, would you say it found you or you found it? Definitely it found me. Yeah, I talk about it a bit in there, but I was living in Pocahontas County in this place that I was really excited to be in. Obviously I'm not from there. I was learning a lot and working a lot. And I happened to be in this writing group of people that were mostly a bit older than me. Many of them had come to the area.
00:04:27
Speaker
as Back to the Landers or as AmeriCorps VISTA as part of the AmeriCorps National Service Program, which was then what I was also doing. And it was kind of just like, in some ways, an accident or an active happenstance that the person who had actually discovered these women when they had died was in that writing group with me and was the dad of
00:04:50
Speaker
like a young guy I was getting to know. And he wrote a poem about finding the bodies of these women who had been killed in the 80s and his grief and the way that had stayed with him was so palpable and clear and everyone in the rooms as well. And I think it's one of those kinds of things where sometimes like something happens or you witness something and it takes many years to kind of
00:05:19
Speaker
Metabolized down into a place where you can Make sense of it or write about it and that was the case for me. It took me many years of like after moving away from Pocahontas County and deciding to pursue writing that This story kind of returned and came knocking and mixed with many of my own confused and ambivalent feelings about like the work I had done as a quote-unquote national service worker and the presence I had been and
00:05:48
Speaker
as a young woman from elsewhere in this community and the ways that I saw both like a lot of non-traditional masculinity in a tender way and also a lot of sexism and misogyny play out in this place that made me kind of remember that I had heard about these killings and kind of made it all mix in my brain of like this is something I really need to look further into and something that's very
00:06:17
Speaker
It became part of the work I was doing in my own life to figure out some of these questions about place and class and violence. And it just kind of wouldn't let go. I heard Maggie Nelson, the writer, talk about her work on Jane, A Murder, and then her book, The Red Parts. And she kind of said, like, it was the biggest boulder I needed to roll out of the way before I could write other
Narrative Challenges and Structure
00:06:45
Speaker
stuff.
00:06:45
Speaker
And that's kind of how I felt about this book, too. I tried to write fiction and other things and it just kept being there and wanting to be written about, I think.
00:06:58
Speaker
Yeah, there's a challenge sometimes in mental doing the mental calculus, whether you want to like keep pursuing the thing and as you say, like move this boulder or, or try to just plow like try to finish it or, or move on and, and, uh, what were, what were some of those creeping thoughts that came in your head, uh, or just the mental calculus of whether you wanted to actually elect to move the boulder or just maybe walk around it.
00:07:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. I mean, I think I really did try a lot of different ways to move around it or through it, and they just didn't work. I certainly did try to write this story as fiction, focusing on this cross country road trip that these three women took together, two of the women being Vicki Durian and Nancy Santamero who were killed and then their friend
00:07:54
Speaker
Liz Gendreau, who ends up splitting off from them at the very last moment and not going on to West Virginia where the other two were killed. But they had this kind of idyllic three friend cross country road trip that really obsessed me for a while. And I tried to write fiction about that. And I kind of tried to separate my own story from my increasing obsession and research into the murders as well. And just like maybe I thought I would write a short
00:08:23
Speaker
like magazine piece or something about the murders or I also worked on some personal essays just about my own relationships in the community. Mostly the kind of contradiction I began to feel and shame and guilt I began to feel about having been in this community to quote unquote like serve it or help it as is the mission of the AmeriCorps program that I was participating in and then the true lived reality of
00:08:51
Speaker
being a young person trying to figure your shit out in a place that has been so systematically oppressed and abandoned by policies and resources in America and feeling like the reality is so far from what you had hoped or envisioned you would do specifically for me. I was there to, quote unquote, empower young women in this part of southern West Virginia
00:09:20
Speaker
But, um, I quickly found that like the people who are my age and we're staying in the region, um, personal writing, which in some ways has been happening in a very fluid way for, you know, decades, not anything new, but I think we still have a lot of feelings and unresolved, um, questions about what it means when someone does that. My, um, thinking about my own book and making that decision was, yeah, I originally was not planning on including my own
00:09:50
Speaker
sort of my own body, the character of Emma Eisenberg in the book in that way. It was originally a book about specifically set in 1980, exploring these crimes, exploring the trauma that was inflicted on the community of Pocahontas County as these crimes were investigated poorly. And then poorly is not the right word, but in a complicated way, they were investigated to the best of folks ability, but the investigation itself caused a great deal of
00:10:20
Speaker
trauma and difficulty for many people in the community. But I often like to kind of think about, like, there's a term in country music, the third voice, where, you know, it's amazing and beautiful to have a really strong singer, sing as a beautiful ballad or something. And then when you get another singer to sing a duet, there's something that can sometimes happen in that duet that is greater than the sum of the parts. Like there's a third
00:10:50
Speaker
almost magical element that happens when two different forces come up against each other. And I kept trying to write this book just as a straight, I suppose, as we would call like true crime story with, you know, history mixed in, etc. And then on the side, I was continuing to write this material processing, my own experience, my ambivalence, my own role, this idea of insider outsider, the ways that my own personal
00:11:17
Speaker
like body and life came into contact with a lot of surprising elements of sexism, misogyny, but also unexpected openness, unexpected moments of communication about like my queerness in this rural space. And it just seemed to me like I actually, the book I actually wanted to write was more than a simple true
Merging Personal Narrative with True Crime
00:11:39
Speaker
crime accounting. And when I opened the door to the idea that I might include
00:11:44
Speaker
parts of my own story, it felt to me like the collision between the two modes was producing something a bit more interesting and more satisfying to me than just one mode. And I think it's also worth saying that I didn't want to write a book that portrayed this part of West Virginia as the past, as anyway done, old fashioned, backwards, et cetera. This crime happened in 1980, but I wanted to make sure that people understood
00:12:14
Speaker
and understand this place as modern changing influx containing a vast variety of citizens with different jobs, different futures, different political views. There's been so much treatment of West Virginia, particularly as quote unquote Trump country that I wanted to show, you know, a modern reality of what it would look like for someone like me living there and being part of the community. And so introducing my own story was a way to offer a modern, hopefully diverse like frame on the events as well.
00:12:44
Speaker
When you're putting yourself into the story and in the way that you do it, it's not like an evenly balanced seasoning of you throughout the piece. There's these chunks of the past of the trial and everything, and then there's a chunk of you and so forth.
00:13:05
Speaker
The challenge I think in that situation is it can feel like someone walking in front of the TV and like blocking the view and kind of interrupting what you were experiencing and like, oh, what's going on here? So I wonder what, you know, as you were writing this book and making those decisions about how to fold your story into this,
00:13:27
Speaker
What were those challenges? What were you thinking about and how you were structuring, how you felt to layer in your threads versus the other reported threads? Yeah, totally. There were so many different things we tried and so many different ideas I had that
00:13:47
Speaker
like I ended up being like that's ridiculous or my editor was like no like I think I had um I think it's worth saying too that another reason that I felt it was important to include the um personal sections was to make really clear like my positionality on this story like who I am that I'm not from the place that I'm you know middle mobile class um that uh that I'm a woman that I'm queer all these things like I wanted the reader to be uh to understand those things so that they can understand like
00:14:17
Speaker
my biases are the ways that I want to tell this story because I try to make the book so much about the ways that like who tells a story and how it's told is you know hugely influential and what we decide is true. So in order to make that even more clear I kind of at first I was like well I just want to tell the whole story of the rainbow murders and these nine men who were investigated and arrested and many of them incarcerated
00:14:45
Speaker
And then at the end, I'll pop in for 40 pages and just tell my stuff as it is relevant. And in order to foreground the events of others, trying not to overshadow the past events with my story or my feelings, that feeling of getting in the way of the camera. And my editor was like, absolutely not. That's really dumb. He was like, you cannot backload
00:15:13
Speaker
your own experience like that. Although it's interesting because I just read Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe and that's what he chooses to do. He chooses to tell the whole reported story and then at the end has his sort of own insights and his relationship to the book and how it came to be and all of that is like the last 20, 30 pages. And I actually didn't mind it, but I know that for many people, the sense of like, we want to know who's telling the story and we want to know kind of what to come in the book in the first
00:15:43
Speaker
know, several chapters, it would be strange to shift modes like that at the end. And I understood that. So we kind of scrapped that idea. And then at first, I thought I was going to start like, you know, chapter one would be like me explaining all these things. And then chapter two would start in with the murders and, and the place. And again, we just felt like
00:16:06
Speaker
Like, what is the core of the story? It's not really me, and it's not really even the martyrs. It's really Pocahontas County, the town, the place itself, and the richness of that place. So it felt important to really start Chapter 1 in Pocahontas County, not these women traveling there, not me being there, not anything. But it starts with this road, 219, which is the main road in Pocahontas County. So that felt important. We were like, all right, we want to start with the place. But I still did want to find a way to
00:16:36
Speaker
make clear to the reader what kind of book it was, that it was not like a traditional who done it true crime book, that it was not a book that was going to climax around who had committed these murders. Like, it was very important for me to tell the reader upfront, like, this is information as it stands. This is what I think is true. Like, stay and come along with me on this journey of now trying to figure out like what it means. And so that became this kind of chapter one, which is two things are almost a forward. And it's really just a list of facts.
00:17:06
Speaker
which again, I think some people have found strange and other people really like and it's like, who's to say it's taste. And then I think I just tried to use my voice as a place that could kind of bounce back against the material that had been shared and offer an additional element rather than a completely separate storyline. So I tried to think about putting chunks of material from the past that would then speak to
00:17:31
Speaker
these interludes of my own story and just kind of keep it's not a one-to-one alternating chapter structure which actually is kind of a pet peeve of mine. I tend to feel like there's no reason we have to do that and I would actually rather in some ways see a continued arc like let the whole arc play out and then it's almost like beats or verses in the song I suppose rather than going back and forth. So we tried a lot of different
00:17:55
Speaker
structures and complicated things. I had this whole thing at one point where I was like, I want it to be like a bluegrass song, which is five pieces, and there's five sides and we're going to alternate them, like A, B, C, D, E.
Creative Integrity and Storytelling Style
00:18:06
Speaker
And it just, I was overthinking it and making it overly intellectualized. And in the end, we just kind of grouped the sections by what felt right and what arts needed to be told and then just continued to move the pieces around until we came to the best solution, you know, that we could think of at the time.
00:18:25
Speaker
I love that, the fall starts or the growing pains of the book. I love hearing that. Was there a particular structure that you spoke, you speak of the bluegrass structure, where you just deep in your bones, you're like, I want this to work out. How hard was it for you to eventually just have to scrap this idealized structure for you?
00:18:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think that was really attached to that idea that I was going to be at the end, this idea of I don't want to take up space. I don't want to take up attention away from the story. And I want to make clear that I don't think that my experiences or insights are more important, or they're not nearly at the level of what happened to
00:19:17
Speaker
the people who are the main players in this story and I had all this like shame and worry that like I didn't want to yeah I didn't want to be at the beginning I didn't want to draw attention to myself and I think in writing actually that list true things which is now the start of the book and that was also the list that like you know I had written many pages of this book and showed them to my agent and she was kind of like yeah this seems interesting like keep going
00:19:46
Speaker
And then I was like, no, we're ready. Let's do it. And she was like, no, you don't know what this project is yet. And that happened a couple of times. And then I wrote that list, True Things, which would become the start of the book. And she was like, OK, we're ready to sell this now. You know what this is. And I think that list started to function as a true north for me in some senses, including the structure, because the list is
00:20:13
Speaker
facts about the case it is insights that I believe are now true after talking to many people about the nature of power and class and the place and they're also you know true things that I witnessed or happened to me and just at the end of the day like knowing that you know an experience what happened to me is as true as what happened to others even if it's not of the same magnitude was helpful in remembering that I do belong in the story and sort of overcoming that
00:20:43
Speaker
worry about being present throughout the book. And then the bluegrass structure, I think, I had this whole other like part of the book that was about bluegrass music and all I learned about bluegrass music and its history and the way that it is so American and woven into this tradition of people being both sidelined into what we were what we call trash land in this country. Like that's how the stigma against a lot of Appalachia began was that
00:21:12
Speaker
know, people came over from Europe, they were sort of forced into these lands that were quote unquote worthless or trash land and that bluegrass was the music that began to be played in those places. Like, right, it had this like whole long rant about it and the ways that it really mattered to this book. And again, my editor who was very smart was like, no, he was like, this does not part of the main trunk of this book, which is about these crimes.
00:21:37
Speaker
And he was right. And so when we cut that section, I think my attachment to a sort of bluegrass structure also left me. And maybe it will live again in some other place. And maybe someone else who's from West Virginia and a much more accomplished musician than I will write it and it will be beautiful just to say.
00:21:57
Speaker
When I read the True Things chapter, which of course starts off the whole thing, I'm like, oh, this is unique. I knew off the bat, of course, that this wasn't going to be some sort of suspenseful whodunit thing. I mean, you basically – you just come out and say, this is who was accused. This is when he was exonerated. This is who actually did it.
00:22:19
Speaker
And so and then you just go through a bunch of other things so then you know you're in for a different kind of Exploration that is just kind of like hung on the wireframe of this of this these murder this double these double murders that took place Almost 40 years ago, and I I thought that was just like oh alright cool. I'm in for a different ride now Which I which I really appreciated Thanks, yeah, that was definitely the hope of just being like
00:22:46
Speaker
you know, we may lose some readers there who are looking for a more conventional genre experience, but hopefully I would also gain readers from other places like people that might not normally be drawn to what we think of as quote unquote true crime. And yeah, it's been really cool to be in conversations like this one exploring, you know, nonfiction as a more fluid and flexible and multifaceted place to write. So yeah.
00:23:14
Speaker
And you write in the true things part that if every woman is a non-consensual researcher looking into the word misogyny, then my most painful and powerful work was done in Pocahontas County. And it was just, at what point did that sort of ethos or that theme really hit you in the time that you were working in Pocahontas County? I think it was always
00:23:40
Speaker
there, again, because the structure of my work was already so gendered, I was supposed to be, you know, again, quote, unquote, empowering young women, which within this structure of, like many true things about the region, you know, one of them being that it's much more difficult to be a young woman in this place, like looking for work, being able to stay in the place where you're from. But on the other hand, there's a lot of
00:24:08
Speaker
Like if you're a girl with good grades from this place, like you leave and find opportunity elsewhere is what a lot of those folks do. And we, as part of that organization, we're often part of connecting young women from the place to, you know, really exciting opportunities and education elsewhere that a lot of the young men were not given access to or were not able to, you know, connect with on their own. And so the sense of like, there's
00:24:36
Speaker
pain here, there's misogyny here, there's division here, and the outcomes are not clear and the mechanisms are not clear was certainly present always, but I think it really did come partly out of my personal experience dating a guy in Pocahontas County, even being queer, dating across the spectrum, et cetera. But our relationship being complicated and me being
00:25:03
Speaker
complicit in being, you know, much more welcomed into the community to some extent, when I was occupying the role of like his girlfriend, and the ways that that offered kinds of power and access that I was not expecting. And, and then also the ways that that could be taken away or undercut or used, you know, to shame me felt important. And I do just want to be clear that it's not that I think this place is more misogynistic or sexist than
00:25:33
Speaker
any other place in America, I do mean that, which, you know, in that sense too, is just like, it could have been done anywhere. That work that we all, you know, everyone does as a, as a woman and probably as a queer person too, is done in all places across America, but this, for whatever reason, in whatever universe, synchronicity was the place that, you know, that work was done most for me. And I, yeah, I think I, that contradiction of trying to not make, like, this part of
00:26:02
Speaker
Appalachia fit into the stereotype of like shitty toxic masculinity was difficult to balance with the reality that, you know, there was a lot of that present there as well as there is, you know, anywhere in America. And I think that that insight though, like certainly that line, which appears in the two things section wasn't written until, you know, very close to the end of the process of writing this book. Like, I think it takes a lot of years of
00:26:31
Speaker
looking at your experiences, making sense of them, writing the draft, looking at them, writing the draft, making sense of them, changing your mind. I think that line was put in on almost the last possible opportunity I had to make any substantive changes. And I think that speaks to the joy and the pain of writing a project that takes so long. I worked on this for about seven years. And one thing that's beautiful about that is that you get to keep changing your mind and keep getting deeper into the insight part of it.
00:27:01
Speaker
So I'm grateful in some ways that it was slow because it brought me to insights like that, even if it was also a slog to go through for seven years. Yeah. Yeah. I can attest to what it's like to go through the slog of a long project and I'm in the midst of a slog, so it's not done yet. And it's like, oh yeah, it's the worst. Empathy for that.
00:27:27
Speaker
Yeah, and it's one of those deals where it's like the person you are, or at least the writer you are at the beginning is very different than you are, like later in the process. And so it's like the longer you drag on, it's like, the more you feel like you have to go back to the beginning and sort of comb through again and be like, All right, I'm a little bit better. I need to make it smoother from the beginning to the front. Like, did you experience that over the course of a seven year arc of this book? Oh my god, yes, totally. Yeah, I feel like
00:27:57
Speaker
Something I wish we talked about more as a, you know, literary community or reading community about nonfiction, although I'm sure it's true. I think it is true in fiction to some extent, just in a different way. That is like when a book comes out, you know, it's like maybe the self that you're then reading aloud to lovely people who consent to come to your events or support your work, as we are now doing, like the self that is,
00:28:27
Speaker
in the book versus the self that you are now talking about the book is at least like two or three selves ago. I think the very first draft of this book was like four selves ago and then the draft that I sold was like three selves ago and then the draft that's published is probably two selves ago. There's just so many changes that you go through and you're thinking about a project like this and definitely the writing itself of course is
00:28:55
Speaker
is transformative. So yeah, there were so many moments where I just had to go back and be like, well, I don't think that anymore. And I had to kind of, I fully rewrote this book at least twice. And part of that was, you know, just retyping it from like, I would just print it out and then retype it fully because I felt like there were so many small
00:29:15
Speaker
syntax or word choices or things that would indicate like a worldview about this case or these people or this place that I had no longer, you know, I no longer believed or had access to. So it was important to me to like, keep updating, although that it's never really possible, right? Because I would like to go back in and like re update some things now. But at some point, it's a record of of yourselves and where you are at the time, I suppose.
00:29:41
Speaker
And given that, at least I think at the start of this process or the start of this book, you weren't like a reporter or a journalist per se, or didn't come out of J school or have like years of newspaper experience.
Developing Journalistic Skills
00:29:56
Speaker
So what was that the experience like of digging into the repertorial stuff that you and the interviewing and the journalistic style of interviewing to that to tease out the story? Like what was that like for you as you were building that muscular chair to synthesize this book? Yeah, something I'm like really passionate about too, because I feel like there's like this strange divide we erect between like the literary and the literary nonfiction or
00:30:26
Speaker
memoir or whatever you want to call it, essay versus journalistic or repartorial work. And it's like they're close cousins of each other and use a lot of the same skills. Yet I think so many people feel uncomfortable with the other side or feel like you can't possibly ride the middle in some way. And I, I feel like I definitely come more out of the literary MFA world.
00:30:51
Speaker
and definitely consider myself like a fiction writer first. And nonfiction was just not something that was really on my radar as a child. Like I just didn't read a lot of the great books of nonfiction or members really until I was older. But to be fair to myself, I had worked in newsrooms both before and during my MFA. So I had
00:31:19
Speaker
some of the basic skills. I worked at like a very cool alt weekly here in Philadelphia that's since folded where I got actually a lot of mentorship in reporting and fact checking which makes me sad that I think a lot of young reporters like aren't getting that same attention from older editors of maybe I did or maybe other people did so I was very lucky in that regard and I was still working at a small newspaper
00:31:46
Speaker
in Charlottesville, Virginia when I was getting my MFA in fiction. So I suppose the line there has always been a bit blurrier than I tend to tell in my own story. But yeah, I think it kind of came down to the last year of my MFA in Charlottesville, it was a very strange and difficult time in that part of central Virginia. And I kind of joke like for Buffy fans, it was kind of like the hell no.
00:32:14
Speaker
opened in Charlottesville. And it felt like the culture wars lived in Charlottesville. And this was a couple of years before the white supremacist rally that happened in Charlottesville. But all the forces that would coalesce to become that rally were very already present in the town and very felt. And it was a place of immense inequality and division.
00:32:44
Speaker
very visibly so, like if you just walk around the town. And a few things happened that fall, the last year of my MFA, I was teaching a composition like to undergrads and the rape on campus, UVA, Rolling Stone article came out that November, I believe, and the world kind of exploded from there. And it was just extremely divisive and hurtful and exposed, like all the ways that
00:33:13
Speaker
even though there were some significant parts of the article that were factually incorrect, that the writer had put her finger very precisely on the kind of rape culture that was happening at that school. And as far as I understand, it's still happening. And then there were several other events, including two women that went missing and are presumed killed, one of them a white EVA student and one of them a black trans woman named Sage Smith. And
00:33:39
Speaker
I was reporting on the Sage Smith case as part of the little newspaper I worked for in Charlottesville. So I did have a bit of a window into journalism land during that time and then ended up kind of taking on some of my own projects more significantly, like just kind of teaching myself the skills as I went along to write about some of those events. It just was a moment where I felt like I cannot go into my room.
00:34:07
Speaker
and close the door and write fiction or write about my life. This was a moment where I wanted to look outward and I wanted to learn from other people. I knew that I did not have the information or insights that would be required to say something true about that moment. And so reporting just was a necessity. It was just like, well, I need to know the answer to this question and I don't have it. And so I'm going to figure out how to
00:34:37
Speaker
find it. And I did end up doing one semester of journalism school and dropping out because I felt like I actually do know how to do this already. I know what I have to do and I know what the story I want to tell is I was, you know, very deep into thinking about the third rainbow girl at that point. And I think in a lot of ways, the skills I had already been taught about how to tell a story
00:35:04
Speaker
and then the reporting skills that I just kind of learned on the fly from working in newsrooms and my curiosity were like good enough.
Importance of Fact-Checking
00:35:11
Speaker
And then I invested in a wonderful fact checker to check the facts in my book, which is like a pet project of mine. I just want folks to know that most nonfiction books are not fact checked because it's very expensive and it's usually at the expense of the author that comes out of their advance. And I knew that
00:35:32
Speaker
because this book was so big and it had so many threads and it had so much reporting that I could not possibly correct myself or check myself. And so this book was checked by a great fact checker who used to work with the nation. And I just feel really lucky that I was able to do that and would definitely hope that that becomes part of the conversation too about how we talk about reported nonfiction. It's a big, big help and helps me sleep a lot at night.
00:36:01
Speaker
all creative writers segwaying into nonfiction, I think, should have a wonderful fact checker, if they can afford it. How much did that end up costing you? Great question. I'm writing an article, hopefully for... It's for Esquire, but hopefully coming out soon, about all the financial costs involved in writing a nonfiction book, because I think it's something we should talk about more, and writing reported nonfiction can be extremely financially prohibitive. I think we're losing a lot of great books
00:36:31
Speaker
due to how much it costs. So I got quotes for my fact checker that range between $2,000 to check the book and $20,000 to check the book, which I think, yeah, speaks to how unregulated the industry of being a fact checker is because the publishing industry really doesn't have a solid standard for what that looks like. I ended up spending 11.5, I think,
00:36:59
Speaker
almost 12,000 on checking. And yeah, and there were also some other big chunks. It cost me about $7,000 to get the trial transcript for the trial that plays out in this book. So I think it's something we need to keep talking about. And there are some grants available to folks like the Whiting Nonfiction Grant and a few others for research, but it's tough and expensive. And it's tricky to figure out how much money you're going to pay
00:37:29
Speaker
as a debut author and all of that. Nice. Yeah. And what was the process like of being fact-checked? It can be pretty invasive and it's just a tough process to go through. So what was that like for you to have to answer the question like, where'd you get this? Where'd you get this? Where'd you find this? Oh my god, it was awful. It was the worst, but in such a beautiful way.
00:37:58
Speaker
I always say it's awful and you're so grateful. I'm so grateful for every second of it and it sucked. Yeah, this person was extremely thorough and did such a good job and that did mean that it was eight-hour calls, sometimes Monday through Friday where we would just sit on the phone and she would go through everything.
00:38:19
Speaker
yeah, it was horrible. And I was so glad when it was over. And I'm so glad that I did it. But the legal check is also tough. Like you go through a legal check from your publisher to make sure right as you know, like nothing in the book can get you sued. And that was also difficult and involves a lot of tricky questions of like, like I had to clarify in one part of the book that I am not alleging that this guy like raped me, I'm aware that there's a
00:38:48
Speaker
Um, but that's a legal term, you know, you have to, um, it affects sometimes like the way you end up writing your sentences and the way that your book can be read based on
Reading and Writing Routine
00:38:58
Speaker
like, uh, some of the legal concerns that have to do with books too. So that was not more difficult, but I would say like up there as well.
00:39:08
Speaker
How do you build a discipline around reading and writing so you are ensuring that you're filling the tank, but also finding a way to burn off that fuel, that clean fuel, hopefully, that lets you get to the work the way you want to? Yeah, that's well put. I definitely feel like it's filling the tank. If I don't read, there's nothing going in, and then I feel cranky and thin in what I have to offer.
00:39:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think, um, I mean, I think there's a ton of different perspectives on getting an MFA in writing, which all of which are valid. I think for me, its main purpose was just like that initial burst of being taken seriously and being given the sort of financial validation of like, we are giving you money to perform this work. And it was the first time that I think I felt like I could conceptualize of
00:40:06
Speaker
reading and writing as like labor, just like any other labor. And so I, you know, lost and unrooted for a good bit. I'm sure of grad school, but one thing I did build there was, yeah, just like mornings, like nine to one, I would, I usually like read for an hour when I'm having my coffee and then write like for that two or three hours, but I'm alert and
00:40:32
Speaker
My anxiety hasn't kicked in yet. Not too many people send me emails stuff like that like I do I am pretty fiercely protective about The morning time like not responding to emails like I just tell students and friends and people I just don't respond or engage with anything before 1 p.m. Which I think took some time and like fear about you know
00:41:00
Speaker
being that sort of pushy or just kind of stringent in my routine but I think that helps a lot and yeah I just I know a lot of people that are like oh I can't read novels when I'm writing a novel or I can't read non-fiction when I'm writing non-fiction but I just felt like so much of writing this book The Third Rainbow Girl was just trying to read all the books that had made my book eventually be possible like I just tried to read everyone that had sort of
00:41:28
Speaker
come before me in this tradition who had made the work possible and just kind of try to get a sense of like what were the structures that were available like I do have kind of just like nerdy survey course mentality I think when it comes to when I sort of start to know what the project is I want to read like all the books that are connected to that and I do think that's important but not for everybody for me it just makes me feel like I've
00:41:54
Speaker
done my homework and I could kind of see what the options are so I can then reject all of them.
00:42:01
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I think what you're talking about too is the development of a voice and that's putting all these things in the funnel and then out the other end, hopefully is something that is at least uniquely you on the page and so forth. Maybe you can speak to that. Who's the family tree if you're at the branches of your family tree in terms of what informs your writing style?
00:42:30
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Um, it's so tough because I feel like this book Well, I don't know. I think I have this like worry that I think because I was in some ways working in a genre that I wasn't as familiar with in writing this book that I was worried that I had to do it a certain way like so much of nonfiction is written like especially reported nonfiction especially reported nonfiction about crimes is reported in or is written in this like serious nonfiction voice like with very
00:43:00
Speaker
along, you know, sentences or and very like precise or very literary sounding verbs. And I just knew that that like humor is really important to me. Onomatopoeia is really important to me. Like, writing, frankly, about sex and sexuality and queerness is really important to me. And I just eventually I think there were many drafts when I was like, just, I think I had read, you know,
00:43:26
Speaker
I did read books by like David Grant and Bob Koltler, all of whom are great, like sort of sprawling nonfiction writers. And then I did go back and read, write like in cold blood, because everyone was like, well, if you're going to write a book like this, like, you have to reread, turn me into a podium. I was like, okay, okay, okay. And I did. And I, it's very enjoyable. But I also am just like, this is a beautiful work of
00:43:53
Speaker
non-fiction slash fiction like there's just no way that um like it's so crafted it's so um beautifully made as an object it's not just like a work of journalism and it's not i i don't believe for a second that that in cold blood could be fact checked like it's just no there's no way and i think and i think that's okay like i think i'm interested in um the ways that like of course like fiction and non-fictions lead together and
00:44:22
Speaker
what we even mean by truth and all of that. So it doesn't disqualify or question the integrity of in cold blood for me, but it just wasn't exactly what I wanted to do either. Because I knew that I couldn't stand behind creating dialogue in that way or creating details of scenes that one could never really know having not been there. But yeah, and then I think like Grace Paley has been a big influence of mine. She wrote nonfiction and fiction too. And so I admire that about her and
00:44:51
Speaker
She has a lot of humor and warmth and a real attention to dialogue in her, and like dialect almost in her work. And also she's extremely politically serious and engaged in a kind of social justice tradition that I, and Jewish tradition that I really appreciate and gravitate towards. And then Janet Malcolm to like, and certainly the journalist and the murderer, which is maybe her most like reference book in this vein, but also
00:45:20
Speaker
you know, her exploration of just when she kind of digs into the case itself that makes up the journalist and the murderer, like she writes with a lot of humor and a lot of specificity, like you can tell it's her voice. And reading that I was like, okay, like I don't have to write this in like faceless white old man words, like I can write it in my words.
Embracing Uncertainty in Writing
00:45:43
Speaker
And that was really helpful. And then, of course, Maggie Nelson, the red part, another
00:45:50
Speaker
work that was really helpful for me of just like, right, one can include one's own insights from a critical background, a queer background, a feminist background. And also just there's so much, there's so many times in the red parts where Maggie Nelson says, I don't know, I don't know something, and I never will. And I think that, and also John Didion's like reporting, especially on like the Central Park Five case where she's also just like, I don't know.
00:46:19
Speaker
I don't know what happened there. That was really key for me in being able to say like, that's the most interesting answer a lot of times is I don't know. And we we hunger so much for closure in these kinds of books. And certainly people are like, but who do you think did it? And I'm like, actually, like, it's a fine question to ask, but like, we'll never know. And learning that that was possible in this kind of work was really helpful for me.
00:46:48
Speaker
And what would you say as a writer at this point that you feel like that you struggle with, that you're always kind of wrestling with when you sit down at the computer or at the notebook? What do you feel like it's something you have to maybe work extra hard on to overcome? Yes. Oh, and I should also say James Baldwin is a huge part of that literary tree that I skipped. His writing specifically like remembrance of things not seen like covering the
00:47:16
Speaker
Atlanta child murders when no one else was covering them. And the way he opened up space for unknowing and complication and to include his own experience as a black man in America reporting on this case was just, yeah, I stand. Okay, but the things that I struggle with, so many things. I think I do still struggle with like,
00:47:44
Speaker
I preach it to my students all the time, but the difference between a writer who's in their first 500 pages of work versus someone that's published five, six, seven books is the ability to just sit in the chair and not go anywhere, not get frustrated and get up for a cup of coffee, not feel like you should know what you're doing and get up for a cup of coffee, not feel uncomfortable because you don't know what you're doing and go to Twitter.
00:48:12
Speaker
I struggle with that every day of like trying to be comfortable with the fact that I don't know where I'm going and a piece of work is hard. And yeah, it's still a struggle every day. Like I want closure. I want to know what the piece is. I want to know I want certainty. I want to know like what the next sentence is going to be. And when I don't know that feeling of like panic of just like I can't do this is definitely something that I struggle with.
00:48:41
Speaker
I think I also, you know, and you might feel this way too, like we start to get a sense of our own, like what you fall back on when you don't know what to do in a piece of work. And I think I do lyricize and have a playfulness of language that is kind of like my fallback and that I can, to make something pretty or to describe something.
00:49:05
Speaker
is something that I will use when I'm not sure what I'm really trying to say. I think so. Going back and thinking critically about each sentence and the way I've written it. And does it obscure what I'm trying to say more than offer meaning? And those are often things that I'll take out or get edited out in later drafts. And I think I do lean really heavily on
00:49:34
Speaker
dialogue and other people's voices like I think that was a big thing in the third rainbow girl is that I use a ton of verbatim speech like either through court documents or the trial transcript or the coroner's report because I'm really sometimes more interested in like what was the exact phrase that was used and what does that then mean more so than like me as the narrator telling the facts
00:50:00
Speaker
And I think that that was something that my editor did have to address with me. And, you know, he was like, you know, like you are confident you can tell the story, you don't have to hide behind a quote, like, yeah, just like a quoted piece of dialogue or something that was written in a in a transcript, like you can offer your own voice. And I do think that that balance between how much is quoted or sourced in a nonfiction work and
00:50:28
Speaker
And then also just dialogue or bringing in the voices of others in fiction is definitely something I reach for when I'm not sure what to do. I think that that moment you said about like just get it somehow getting comfortable just being in the chair and not being distracted by other things and finding something else to take you away from it and just really muscling through is really integral and important. I think I've heard Seth Godin talk about
00:50:57
Speaker
He used to be friends with Isaac Asimov, who was just an incredible producer of work. And he would quite literally sit in his chair from 6 a.m. until noon and type for six hours, basically, and not even stop. He probably produced 90% garbage, but through that, he produced 10% gold. And that's ultimately what you can then run with. But you need to be comfortable sitting with the bad stuff, right?
00:51:27
Speaker
Totally. And I do feel like it's kind of just like a tightrope, like in the, you know, in the like, you know, Roadrunner cartoons where it's like, you're going over the edge and you just like, don't look down. And you're just like, okay, don't looking there. I'm just not going to deal with it right now. Like just not, not looking. Yeah. And, and just not panicking. Like it's sort of Buddhist to like, there's a lot of writers who are also sort of
00:51:53
Speaker
fake or real Buddhist. And I think that feeling of like, I'm just not going to, I'm just going to sit with what's uncomfortable and like not panic is a huge part of it.
00:52:03
Speaker
And to your point, too, of falling back on these crutches that you have to essentially edit out, I totally relate to that. I'm not particularly clever or funny, but I try to be clever and funny. And so it's like when I see that emerge in the writing, I'm like,
00:52:23
Speaker
You know what? You might think this is clever or funny. It's not. Take it out and then surrender to the story. I always have to tell myself it's all about the story. Just try to get out of the way as best you can. You're not a pyrotechnically gifted writer. Just find the story and get out of the way. So that's usually what I have to wrestle with. But it sounds like you have your own little thing to wrestle with too.
00:52:48
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's right. Totally. I feel like I often talk to my students, like it's easier to recognize when someone else is in the way of the story than when you are in the way of the story. And I feel like I often talk to my students of I'm like, I feel like I'm looking at the story through like a dirty window. And I just want you to take the pane of glass out so I can see the story and they're like, what? And sometimes what I'm trying to say makes sense and sometimes not. But I have this strong sense of like,
00:53:14
Speaker
Right. I need to just take the pane of glass out and tell the story. Yeah.
00:53:19
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. And I know in some notes that I've gotten from from my from editor, I work with on this never ending my Marvel thing is like there's one note he he wrote in there. He's like, don't get writerly on me now. I was just like, yeah, like that's sometimes you try to get pretty. It's just like, no, just get the hell out of your own way and let the story lift. But that's what rewriting is for that to get
00:53:46
Speaker
to skim all that stuff, like all that garbage, all that writerly stuff, the pretty stuff that I thought I was putting in. I'm by no means a pretty writer. I don't like, I don't adhere to it. I'm not, I'm just kind of an ugly, grungy, punk, rocky kind of writer. So I have to get out of the way of that stuff when it tends to creep in. But that's like, like we're saying, like, that's our rewriting is for. Yeah. And like, revision is, um, I feel like I used to dread revision and
00:54:12
Speaker
Like, again, with my students, like, I feel like they're like, well revision is just like taking what you say is bad and then fixing it. And I was like, hmm. And I think that it just, it took me so many years to realize that like revision is like where the good
Refining Drafts and System Skepticism
00:54:25
Speaker
stuff happens. Like I look forward to revision. I'm like, huh, finally I have some like words I can make better as opposed to nothing, you know.
00:54:33
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I kind of, um, I was thinking the other day, I think I might've even been riffing on this in my journal and I journal every day just cause I have since I'm 16 years old pretty much. Yeah. That's all. Yeah. Going on almost what is this 20, like 23 year journaling habits. Kind of crazy when I think about it, looking back on it. Um, but I was just thinking like the, you know, the early synthesis of a thing is like having a 3d printer that just basically
00:55:03
Speaker
builds up a cube. And then your revisioning is just like, all right, now you have material through which to like further shape, kind of like you're saying, it's like you can start chipping it and shaping it and over time make it look like something that someone would want to look at and read, perhaps. Totally. Yeah, until like coronavirus got real bad, I was very devoted to this pottery class that I've been taking for the past like
00:55:29
Speaker
year on and off and I feel like now everything is a clay or pottery metaphor to me because I'm just very obsessed with it but yeah it's just like in pottery they have this it's called trimming like where you like make a giant blob or like real fast on the wheel and then you go back and trim it and like
00:55:47
Speaker
It emerges in the trimming. It's just a tool that is basically just shaping and taking away extra clay, extra weight, the stuff that just weighs down the piece. And I was just like, if only I could do this in my writing.
00:56:02
Speaker
And I have just a couple more questions for you, Emma. One here just about Third Rainbow Girl, that just given the way the investigation plays out and the way the trial played out,
00:56:20
Speaker
What is your degree of confidence in the justice system and the way that plays out to render convictions that oftentimes are problematic or even false? I mean, I think that the justice system is made up of people, humans who are... That's the problem, right? Right, exactly. So it's not like it's so bad and everything's terrible and it's all evil and it's like, no, of course not.
00:56:50
Speaker
made up of people who have complex motivations and human error and who are fallible and who are hungry and tired and parts of oppressed classes and living in communities where the outcome matters to their families and their future and all these things. So, right, I think it's in this particular case, like I think
00:57:14
Speaker
the story that was being told about the crime was connected to a larger story that had been told for a long time about this region. And the jury was made up of local people of West Virginia from the southern part of West Virginia. And I think that there's a way that when a story has been told about you and the community that you're from for so long,
00:57:38
Speaker
and the ways that we talk about Appalachia with such disgust in this country, it's impossible not to internalize that and to not sort of retell that story to yourself. And a lot of what I try to talk about in the book is the way that even stories are beautiful and powerful and they're also really dangerous and they're also really harmful. And so I feel like the the justice system is about as
00:58:03
Speaker
I'm willing to trust the justice system as bad as much as I'm willing to trust like any story that you could tell about a person and why they do something which is not that much but also respecting that like no one is evil in the telling. It's the factors that shape like what stories get told of course are so much bigger than one person. So I think I really liked I got to interview this woman Elizabeth Loftus who's kind of
00:58:33
Speaker
like the big, like she's like the doctor, the psychiatrist, the researcher in thinking about recovered memories, false memories and the ways that that intersects with eyewitness testimony and the criminal justice system. And she wants the sort of swearing in statement for eyewitness testimony to be changed to, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth or whatever it is you think you saw?
00:58:59
Speaker
And I'm on board for that. I think if nothing else, I've learned that without the presence of DNA evidence, without the presence of forensic evidence, which there really wasn't much of in this case, people are often not to be trusted, not because they don't want to be or not because they don't try, but because the human brain is a mystery that we don't know how to match up to a really black and white
00:59:28
Speaker
systems like the law. So eyewitness testimony I'm extremely skeptical of is what I will say. And you you've written extensively across lots of genres, you know, essay criticism, narrative nonfiction, you know, memoir fiction. So what sandbox do you most enjoy playing in? Yes, I think I do. I definitely do like hopping from sandbox to sandbox. That's
00:59:56
Speaker
definitely the most enjoyable motion to some degree. I think that like straight up reporting like this is what happened. This is why it matters like these are facts that no one has seen before but that need to sort of go on the record. Like you know George Orwell has like his whole essay why I write and sometimes it's just like to put something on the record to make sure that something that's happened is written down. I have that impulse and I think it's important it's not
01:00:25
Speaker
where I most prefer to play. I would say like I do that work because I think it's important. I think facts are important. I think putting things on the record matters. But it's not, it doesn't feel like fun for me. So some parts of the reporting for this book were not fun, but I think were important. And like I do, yeah, I wrote like a long piece about that woman, Sage Smith, who was a black trans woman who went missing from Charlottesville and
01:00:51
Speaker
I would not say that that was like a fun sandbox to play in, but I'm glad that piece exists, which was hopefully the point of it. But I think the most enjoyable, like, I really like the researching and creating a story out of it, like the parts where I got to like research the history of how class played into current perceptions of West Virginia and the park.
01:01:19
Speaker
I like my other did indulge me by keeping in this one section, which I really appreciate, which is about all the ways that West Virginia is actually like better than Virginia. I feel like Virginia gets this rap is like the kind of cooler, more progressive part of that equation. And West Virginia is like the backwards redneck state. And actually, it's whole much more complicated than that. And in many ways, West Virginia is a much more radical left state of the two.
01:01:45
Speaker
And so like that kind of work, like performing research and then creating a story that kind of hopefully shifts people's perspective or refrains a narrative in a certain way based on new or little known information. I find that extremely fun. And then I also find getting to include other people's words in my words extremely fun, like finding the quotes and the source materials and things I wanted to use as epigraph.
01:02:13
Speaker
which I feel like so often happens more in what we broadly call creative nonfiction or essay. I find that really fun. And then fiction, I find super fun, probably just from a pure pleasure perspective. I like to play in the fiction sandbox. And as we wind down here, what are
01:02:33
Speaker
What are some things or advice that you would give to somebody who might be stuck or struggling or wants to be dabbling in this line of
Advice for Writers: Embrace Uncertainty
01:02:44
Speaker
work? You can speak from a place of authority given the critical acclaim that the third rainbow girl has, the experience of having written it, and also how you teach and how expansively you write. Maybe what are some things that people come to you
01:03:00
Speaker
for advice and maybe some advice you would offer to someone out there who might be a little stuck. Aw, thanks. I mean, I feel like I did this time the coronavirus has opened up. It's awful and it has closed down so many things of which we are all well aware. And I think it has also opened up an interesting moment for sharing knowledge and for like classes that are popping up on
01:03:28
Speaker
Zoom and moments of exchanging information kind of across professional levels. And just there's a little bit more of a breakdown of the usual, you know, business as usual. And so I did decide to teach a class kind of towards the beginning of the pandemic that was just like, hey, like, are you a literary writer? You know, it began as like for fiction writers. But I think that memoirs, the number of memoirs who ended up being in the room to an essayist of just like, do you want to learn
01:03:58
Speaker
basic reporting skills, like here's how you pick up the phone and call someone. Here's how you check a court case on the pacer or like whatever. Those are things that were pretty like hard one. And for me and that were learned on the fly and that, you know, friends and exes and people who like just liked me and for whom to whom I'm very grateful taught me, but that I would not have had access to otherwise. And I just feel passionately that, again, that like literary, the literary mode and the
01:04:27
Speaker
Um, reportorial mode are not so far apart and it's not any, you don't, I don't think you have to go to grad school and spend $120,000 to gain those skills. So I would say like, yeah, if you're, if you feel like you need answers beyond what your own brain can provide, you probably do. And it's not that hard to get them. Um, basically what reporting is, is asking the people who know, um, and it does involve like, it's not going to be on the internet. Like you have to go pick up the phone and call people.
01:04:57
Speaker
And I would say that picking up the phone is not that hard, actually, and that most people really want to tell what they have to say. And maybe they've never been asked before. Most people haven't. And I do think the impulse to put something on the record that's never been said before is worthwhile. If you're struggling to feel like, is it worthwhile to do that? I think it is, especially for stories that haven't been told before. And then I think just the unknowing part,
01:05:26
Speaker
especially in this kind of environment where things are like, you know, to write a book on proposal, you have to know what it is and you have to have the answer. But I always had a team of people who never forced me to like, create a false story that has a real tied up with a bow outcome. And I think just saying, especially when it comes to nonfiction, like, I don't know
01:05:53
Speaker
what the answer to this is and then writing deeper into that, I don't know, is like the place that was the most true for me in this project.
01:06:04
Speaker
That's great. And I think I know Pamela Koloff was just an incredible reporter. I think even she she I think she has a hard time, you know, picking up the phone and everything. And I think I've read her on Twitter, and maybe even on podcast or something. And I'm hoping she'll come on this show. We've been in conversations, but she's working on some other things that preclude her from doing other things. So she's backburnered for this podcast, but she'll be on nevertheless. But I think she even writes up a script.
01:06:33
Speaker
like on her computer screen when she has to make a call. And this is Pamela Koloff. And so she reads from that just to make sure that she's like, you know, hitting the right beats. And I think it overcomes some nerves and stuff. And I've adopted that too, because I have a hesitancy to pick up the phone. Like it just kind of triggers hyper anxiety to have to make cold calls, right? So sometimes having that script there is a way to appease that. And I think people of that
01:07:00
Speaker
of that cut of silk when they need to do something that seems almost amateur. I think it goes to show you that it's not amateurish to do that, and it goes to knowing your strengths and your weaknesses, and it's nice to know that people of that cut of silk, it's still neat. They're not just perfectly polished. They're really working on it too. Absolutely. I feel like I'm totally a trash panda of
01:07:30
Speaker
reporter, but that cares about, you know, getting things right. And I think, yeah, Pam is a great example of that too, because she's so smart, she's so empathetic, but she's not right. I think the more you are empathetic, the more you embrace the unknown, that means like the structures of being perfect, like have to fall away. And I don't think there's any, you know, box that that is labeled journalist or labeled writer that we must fit into and like almost certainly trying to do that is useless. So yeah, I don't think
01:07:59
Speaker
I hate picking up the phone even as I love it. Those contradictions are all true and it's okay to feel all those things at the same time. Nice. Well, Emma, where can people find you online? Where do you hang out online the most if people want to kind of ping you? Where can people find you? I do love a good tweet. I'm on Twitter as Frumpenberg. Yeah, my website is just my full name, emacopleeisenberg.com.
01:08:27
Speaker
I tweet a lot about ice cream, a lot about frump style, which I feel I have reclaimed as a not bad adjective, and a lot about just how to survive in this current moment, cooking, baking, eating ice cream. So yeah, come hang out. Awesome. Well, cool. I think we're going to hang out on Twitter then because that all sounds awesome. Yeah. Thanks for the questions and taking the time.
01:08:53
Speaker
Of course. Well, thank you, Emma, and take care. Take care of yourself, and we'll be in touch. OK, sounds good. You too. We did it. We made it, CNFers. Thank you so much for listening. Be sure you're subscribing to the show. Of course, this crazy show is produced by me, Brendan O'Mara. I make the show for you. I hope it made something worth sharing. And if you really dig the show, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Show notes are at BrendanO'Mara.com.
01:09:23
Speaker
Follow the show on the various social media channels at cnfpodacrossamall. Get that newsletter at my website, win books, win zines, hang out with your buddy BO. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Are we done here? We must. Because if you can't do interview, see ya!