Transcript
Speaker: CNF, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, is sponsored by Goucher Colleges, Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two -year, low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on -campus residencies allow you to hone your craft
Speaker: with accomplishmenters who have polter prizes and best -selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni, which has published 140 books and counting. You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit goucher .edu slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA program for creative nonfiction.
Speaker: Well, speaking of that, CNF is also brought to you by Bay Path University. Discover your story. Bay Path University is the first and only university to offer a no -residency, fully accredited MFA, focusing exclusively on creative non -fiction, attend full or part -time from anywhere in the world.
Speaker: In the Bay Path MFA you'll find small online classes and a dynamic and supportive community. You'll master techniques of good writing from acclaimed authors and editors. Learn about publishing and teaching through professional internships and complete a master's thesis that will form the foundation for your memoir or collection of personal essays. Special elective courses include contemporary women's stories, travel and food writing,
Speaker: Family histories, spiritual writing, and an optional week -long summer residency in Ireland, with guest writers including Andre De Vise III, Anne Hood, Mia Gallagher, and others. Start dates in late August and January. Find out more at baypath .edu slash MFA. Well, CNF -ers, you must be this tall to riff.
Speaker: It never gets old. It. Never. Gets old. Alright well, Chuck Closterman is here. If you haven't read some of his work over the past 20 years, then we're gonna have words. He's got a new book out, his first collection of short stories called A Raised in Captivity, fictional non -fiction.
Speaker: But wait Brendan, I thought this was a non -fiction podcast, shut up. It doesn't matter. When it's Chuck Closterman, especially when he's written hundreds of thousands of non -fiction words, and this new collection of fiction is written like non -fiction, he gets to come on the show.
Speaker: This is CNF, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, where I speak to badass writers, filmmakers, radio producers, and podcasters about the art and craft of telling true stories. He fits into that for sure. There might be some newbies taking out a room in the CNF and hotel this week. Welcome. This is how we roll in these parts.
Speaker: You can head over to BrendanOmara .com, hey hey, for show notes and to subscribe to the podcast's kick -ass monthly newsletter. I give out book recommendations, essay recommendations, fun stuff. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. As always, keep the conversation going, keep it alive. On Twitter, at CNF Pod, Instagram too, at CNF Pod, Facebook, wherever. Tag me and the show and I'll jump in the fire with you, baby.
Speaker: Consider leaving a kind review, why not? I mean, why not? A few more poured in as birthday gifts, and I dig that, man. Means the world to me. Like I said, I'd love to reach 100 for no other reason than I'd like to reach 100. Nothing will change, but I think it'll look pretty damn cool.
Speaker: You know how often, how I often ask guests where they feel most alive and engaged in the process? I get that feeling when I'm in the pocket talking to these CNF -ers, you know? Chuck, of course, who I was sort of freaking out about and probably did too much research, which led to me feeling a bit scrambled, but, you know.
Speaker: the other morning
Speaker: had to get up early to record. I wasn't necessarily feeling it. I slept like shit the night before. But when I got in the pocket and I was reading the defense, man, I was jacked up. It felt good to get to that moment. I've been super stressed with this new job and I feel very detached from this show. I haven't had the energy to really promote and engage on social and even record interviews. I've exhausted my backlog of what I had
Speaker: in the can, so things are going to be challenging going forward. But the podcast has felt like kind of like this phantom limb in a way. So I don't know what I'm trying to say. I guess just getting in front of this mic and talking to you, talking to people like Chuck and Ali Robotem makes me come alive.
Speaker: And I think you'll dig this conversation with Chuck. He's written 11 books. He's been the ethicist for the New York Times. He's written cover stories for Esquire and GQ. He wrote for Grantland. He appears on Bill Simmons' podcast with Lunar Regularity. Was even parodied in The Onion. I mean, jeez. So yeah, here's me and Chuck Callosterman, episode 160. Yeah.
Speaker: sometimes people it's odd you know I'll get asked to do extremely small podcasts from people who just seem to be like saying I'm gonna just roll the bones and see if it'll happen but the bigger podcast not that often it's it's
Speaker: Five years ago, I got to ask more, not much anymore. That surprises me given when your last book came out. But what if we're wrong? I mean, it's like you're on Comedy Central and a daily show, CBS and all that. And here I am thinking, all these people want to get their teeth into you. But that surprises me that they're not knocking on the door quite as often. Well, that's a little different because that's like, you know,
Speaker: three weeks when the book is coming out with a publicist sort of pushing me to these places. For the most part, I'm just sitting at home. And you know, I think like some people think I still live in New York. Some people still think I live in North Dakota. It's always interesting to me.
Speaker: Yeah, being able to, you know, what kind of a luxury is that for you or a handicap if as a writer to be able to mainly kind of just sit at home, someone who was identified as a journalist early on in your career and now you can kind of just, you know, sit in your own press box, so to speak. Well, I mean, how much is an advantage to it? It's an advantage to my life. I'll never know if it's an advantage or a disadvantage to my career. I mean, maybe, you know,
Speaker: I live a pretty insular life now. I mean, I really do. There are many days where my wife, my kids, and maybe my kids' teachers are the only people I talk to. I mean, that happens a lot. So it is strange. I went from having sort of a vocation where my entire job was interacting with the world.
Speaker: and sort of engaging with culture to a life where I'm almost more detached than like a factory employee. Because like I'm not, I don't even have, at least a factory employee like has four people they talk to at lunch and like has to like, you know, uh, you know, see the HR guy or whatever. It's like, I, I, my, my life since moving to Portland is,
Speaker: I guess more different than I anticipated. It's better than I anticipated, but also stranger. Do you find that you're kind of stricken with any feelings of kind of loneliness given that you spend a lot more of your time sort of interacting in a more insular way, kind of like you said? I don't really experience loneliness. I don't know if I ever have. I mean, you know, when I lived in Germany for like five months in 2008,
Speaker: us teaching at the University of Leipzig. So in East Germany, where obviously the language is German and the second language is Russian, that was probably as close as I ever came to feeling lonely. But even that did not seem as though to fit the way at least sort of like the kind of the literary or cinematic definition of loneliness is. I mean, I find that
Speaker: that the loneliest situations I've experienced were often when I was around people. I mean, because it's almost like if you're around people and you're not connecting with them, it really amplifies kind of the alienation you have. Whereas if you're by yourself, especially now with the way technology operates, there are a lot of people in New York who my relationship with
Speaker: is completely the same as when I live there. I see them just as often, which is never, but I see what they write on Twitter. And I kind of see them, because some people sort of use Twitter as a way to sort of exist in the media sphere. It creates this kind of awkward condition where there are some people who aren't really at all involved with social media.
Speaker: and I miss them very much, then there's some people who I never even liked that much to begin with, but I see them every day. Like, I know everything going on in their life, but because I'm involved with reading the platform, I just sort of have to accept that there are now these people who I know everything about their day -to -day life, even though I've never cared once.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. I even have very close friends that because we stay tethered digitally, you realize that it's like you can go two or three years without seeing them, but not feeling like you haven't seen them. It's very unmooring in a way. Well, it's the inverse of a certain kind of relationship that I used to experience in the 90s. Say when I was at college, I had some people in my life
Speaker: who I viewed as extremely close friends, like people that I assumed I would probably talk to pretty consistently for the rest of my life. But now I realize that actually our relationship was based around partying and just sort of going to the same venues and settings and watching the same sporting events and listening to the same music. And then when we moved away from that,
Speaker: period, it was like, well, I guess we didn't really have anything in common because we never really talked that much. We just could have experienced things together. And now those people are kind of, you know, these distant old friends that I don't really have any connection with. Whereas what happens now is you build these relationships around a specific kind of communication.
Speaker: It's not like talking on the phone. It's not like writing letters. It's not even really like writing email. It's just these sort of bursts of exchange that mark the passage of time. And I sometimes wonder if I ran into some of these people if it would actually be awkward or if we would just talk the way we text because that's kind of what our relationship is, you know?
Speaker: So growing up in North Dakota, I was curious as to maybe what and who you were reading at a young age that started to maybe click with you, that maybe, I know you said the idea of being a writer as a vocation was so foreign to you at that time, but I wonder who you might have been reading at that time that maybe gave you the bug that this might be something you want to try doing.
Speaker: Oh, well, like what age are you talking about? I guess, I guess high school seems like a good starting point. Maybe a little younger if that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, there was, it's an interesting deal because there's like this period of my life in about eighth grade where I can remember what I was reading as clearly now as I can
Speaker: about like what I was reading six months ago. I don't know why that is. So, I mean, I guess to answer your question, it must have been around that time when somehow the meaning of reading changed to me. And I wasn't, you know, that it somehow went from something that I just kind of liked to do, or was kind of an escapist thing to something where I kind of cared about it in a way that
Speaker: my thinking changed. And you say like, what was that? Well, I remember reading Animal Farm by George Orwell, and Black Boy by Richard Wright, and a biography of the basketball player Connie Hawkins. The book was called Follow. It was a long book for an eighth grader, I thought. And I read like these three books. And I just, I read them one after another. And there was no real reason why.
Speaker: There was no explanation as to why I picked those books. Nobody gave them to me. I just, I found them in the library, I guess. It's just an interesting thing. You know, it's, it's like, as you become an adult and as you become sort of like a professional writer or whatever, you know, you start thinking sometimes you try not to think about the kind of person who reads your work or you don't try to write for any kind of specific person generally. Um, but sometimes, but when you think about it in your mind, you know,
Speaker: you always sort of imagined, you imagine this kind of a pretty intelligent adult who's real discerning about, you know, what they consume and kind of a compliment if they like your work. And yet in truth, the most meaningful things that I read all happened before I was 20 years old. I mean, like, you know, it's like, like, that really is the period of your life where reading shapes who you are as a person. So
Speaker: You know, as I've sort of seen as I've gotten older that particularly like my first three books, they often now seem to be consumed by like senior and high school freshmen in college. And sometimes people will look at that as sort of a negative thing. Like these are books for people who haven't totally intellectually matured, but I love that.
Speaker: I mean, I think that the idea that these books could somehow play any role in someone's intellectual maturation and maybe be the springboard for them to read things that are maybe a little more dense or a little more sort of a
Speaker: you know, less voice driven and more sort of ideal. I mean that's great to me. I mean if that ends up being what that early part of my life is as a writer, I mean that would be good to me. Do you find that people who read your work, maybe younger writers or aspiring writers or struggling writers of any kind,
Speaker: might discount the amount of reading that you really have to do to be able to forge a good argument and to bolster what it is that you do. I think a lot of your work feels so conversational and stream of consciousness, but anybody who does this kind of work knows that there takes a tremendous amount of research and reading that goes into it. So I wonder if maybe you run across people that might discount the amount of reading one has to do to do this well.
Speaker: Oh, I don't know. I mean, if that's what they're discounting about me, fine. That doesn't bother me. If somebody... If someone perceives my writing is like, well, he can do this without reading anything else. I don't know. That almost seems like a compliment. I don't know. It's a strange thing.
Speaker: There is a kind of a cliche you're supposed to say when you're a writer and somebody asks you about writing. You're supposed to go read as much as you can, read constantly, never stop reading, every minute of your life read. And there's like, of course, well, that's not gonna, reading is good. It's an enriching experience. But I will say this, that if the more you read and the more you think about what you're reading, from a structural, technical perspective,
Speaker: the more your writing is going to move in this somewhat homogeneous direction. I mean, that is true. I mean, I can't say that for everybody, but sometimes I do think that if you consume other people's work, what you have to do to understand the world, the one downside is it does make you more like the rest of the world. And what I'm trying to do at least,
Speaker: I mean, this is like, I don't know if this is, it's always sounds so ungrateful or something or weird to say this, but very often when someone writes about your work or reviews your work, you know, they'll compare you to another writer and it's almost always supposed to be a compliment. Okay. Uh, you know, and it's cause it's often somebody who is like more canonical or has, um, you know, uh, is sort of established themselves as great.
Speaker: And someone saying like, well, this person is also good. They're kind of like this person who is great. But I have to say it never feels like a compliment to me. Like, I don't want anyone to think I'm like a different writer, even if that writer is way better than me. I mean, kind of the joke I always use about this is like, if you start a rock band and someone says to you, it's like, oh, you know, you're great. You know, you're like Led Zeppelin.
Speaker: that they're complimenting you, but that's only a compliment if you're in a Led Zeppelin cover band. I don't want to be like other, I mean, that's, and that is something that's, you know, it's a, it puts you in this kind of awkward position where I do think a lot of writers and particularly a lot of novelists and fiction writers do have a desire
Speaker: to sort of become the work they have loved. And to sort of, you know, it's like, I've talked to people who like they love, you know, Philip Roth or whatever. And they're like, you know, they basically want to write a novel that's like a Philip Roth novel. And I don't feel that I'm not criticizing that as a perspective, because that's kind of a kind of a formal way of looking at writing, like, there's a way this can be done. That is in, from my perspective, you know, perfect. And
Speaker: These other people have sort of perfected this craft and I want to be part of that craft. But I'm not like that. I just I don't feel that way. And I sometimes worry that that is like the most egocentric kind of narcissistic thing to think that the only work I want to do has no relationship to any other influence. But I definitely do feel that way.
Speaker: Yeah, you said that you've come to the conclusion that you don't really want, you don't want to become a writer. Well, you don't become a writer until you don't want to be influenced by other people, or that's when it starts. Yes, absolutely. Are we always sort of becoming then? Is there a point where you have felt that you have, or at what point did you feel that maybe you broke free of people that you were being compared to? Well,
Speaker: I mean, I don't know. That's that's a that's a harder question because it's not like the people who I think I went through phases of wanting to be like aren't really the people I I get compared to that much. I mean, you know, it's when I did like when I killing yourself to live came out. There is just a ton of articles and reviews that
Speaker: would compare me to Hunter S. Thompson. But all the person was doing was saying, okay, this is kind of a journalist, but it's a different kind of journalism, and he does drugs, and sometimes he's funny, and sometimes it's not funny. I'm gonna say this is like Hunter S. Thompson as a form of shorthand, which also just sort of allows anybody reading that article to go like, he is not as good as Hunter S. Thompson.
Speaker: You know, like when someone compares you to someone, it also does sort of create this situation that anybody can then hear that and like you less because somebody else pretended you were like someone else. But I don't think there was ever a time where I wanted to be like Hunter S. Thompson. If there was, I don't remember it. When Margaret Rock City had come out, it was the same thing. There was like, you know, they used the, like, Grim Marcus and Lester Banks because they're like the two rock critics.
Speaker: you know, people know of who don't follow rock criticism. I don't really think my work is similar to either of those guys. I mean, I just, I don't, doesn't seem similar in any way to me, but the comparison gets made. And then once the comparison gets made, it's almost partially true because a lot of people will just sort of accept what somebody else that they assume, uh, no, no, you know, they assume the other person knows what they're talking about. This must be the case.
Speaker: I mean, for me, it was just different. I would just go through these periods where it's like, oh, I think the last one was David Foster Wallace, I think was the last person I remember reading. And I was like, boy, I wish I could produce anything that's like this. And then that just kind of faded. And then it never happened again.
Speaker: I love this passage from eating the dinosaur where you say sometimes writing is difficult Sometimes writing is like pounding a brick wall with a ball peen hammer in the hope that the barricade will evolve into a revolving door Sometimes writing is like talking to a stranger who's exactly like yourself in every possible way only to realize that this person is boring as shit
Speaker: I just I love I love that because I've rarely heard you refer to work writing as like hard work and like laboring through it and I was wondering if maybe you could speak to that in terms of the work that goes into forging these things that are you know exclusively you know from your own head and your own pen so to speak well you know okay first of all I
Speaker: among all those things that I compare to. Also, sometimes writing is kind of fun. I think that it is a pretty fun way to live. I can't believe that this is my life, that I haven't been paid as much money as I have to do this thing, which as far as I can tell, does not really give that much to society. That seems to be, you know, like I'm getting more from society than I'm giving back. Also,
Speaker: You know, just, I mean, not to make it sound like I'm Laura Ingalls Wilder or something, but like growing up in my hometown, there is nobody in my hometown who has a job as easy and lucrative as mine. I don't, not, not only a few people, nobody, not one person. I mean, it's just like my, the way that my family lives and works, it's just, it's, it is, you know, so it's hard for me to look at writing as difficult
Speaker: But that said, of course it's not easy. Like it would be weird if it was easy. Everybody would do it if it was easy. There is something hard about, you know, building your entire life around being creative and having to come up with creative ideas all the time. And then to also know that you're doing something that
Speaker: sort of exists in this odd paradox. It's like you're supposed to be an artist fundamentally for yourself and you're not supposed to think about how that artist is being consumed by other people because that will affect the way you build it, the way you make it, that you have some money to separate that. And yet your ability to do that as a living is dependent on other people liking it.
Speaker: and also writing as a communicative art. So if you're not communicating ideas, you're not very good at the art you're trying to do. So you're in this weird situation where you constantly have to look at the writing you're doing as the single most important thing that exists in the world while simultaneously realizing it doesn't matter at all.
Speaker: And that's a strange kind of cognitive dissonance, but it's the only way to make it work. And someone will ask you a question about like, oh, what do I need to think about if I'm a writer, if I talk to a college and so write in class? I feel like I'm constantly giving them advice that is literally impossible to do. You can't do it. You can't make yourself believe two opposing things on purpose.
Speaker: Yeah, it's tricky that you have to try to divorce those things, especially when I've heard you speak that your strategy is always to be maybe one or two steps ahead of the reader, so in a sense that as they're reading that sentence, it feels like they are writing it out of their own mind.
Speaker: And that is incredibly, I can't imagine how hard that is to do, but at the same time, you're able to, you are able to divorce your own writing, but then you ultimately always have, you do have this reader in mind, so that is incredible. Well, yeah, I mean, when people ask what I spend the most time on, I spend the most time on making my writing more clear and more straightforward.
Speaker: because I do what you just said is absolutely true. I guess I've said it a bunch of times, so maybe it's just like the thing I say, but I always am trying to make the person who's reading my work feel as though that they are writing what they're reading with their own mind and to make them feel almost like, I could have done this, like he did it first, but I could have done this. I think that that, in a certain respect,
Speaker: That's what people, you know, when they feel like when they say they connect with a piece of writing, in a way, I think that's just their natural sort of kind of self -focused human nature is. It's like you feel as though the thing you're reading is something that came from you as much as another person. And of course, that is an illusion. That is kind of a trick. But I think it's, you know, it's a
Speaker: It's a beneficial trick to all involved. I mean, you know what I'm saying? I think it makes everyone like the process more, except maybe for me.
Speaker: I love the the the an introduction to the interview you gave with with Jonathan Franzen in your book 10 and it what what struck me about that introduction is something I've never heard you speak to before was almost this this kind of professional jealousy because he's the one person you've interviewed who's actually kind of doing the same thing you're doing but he as you said is more respected as an American novelist and everything and
Speaker: I was wondering how you process those feelings of competition and jealousy among peers as it came through in that little intro essay at on Franzen. Well yeah, it's like it would be weird if I was jealous of Kobe Bryant. That'd be weird. It would make no sense. Or Eddie Van Halen or something. I don't play any instrument. I'm jealous of this guy because he can play guitar. That makes no sense. With writers, it is different.
Speaker: You know, uh, and that was an example where I'm talking to somebody and it's like, there's just a, there's just kind of this weird power relationship because, you know, from a distance of 2 ,500 miles or whatever, we're doing the same thing. Or, you know, somebody who doesn't care about books or writing, there's not any difference between us. And yet within the small world of writing, there's a vast amount of difference. So vast, in fact, that it would be like insane to imagine Jonathan Franzen
Speaker: interviewing me. Like that would be the career that would like that could never happen, right? I mean, writers are jealous people. I'm a jealous person. I try not to be but I am. Almost every writer I know is because we have almost, well, without trying, we have created a really problematic relationship. I guess this is true for all art, which is that
Speaker: there are two ways to be successful. You can be successful in a commercial sense because your work is purchased and that you're like a success in that way and sort of the traditional way. Or you can be a success among your peers, which is usually built on the idea
Speaker: that you're not that successful and people don't realize how good you are and maybe you're not successful because you're so good that the average person doesn't really get it, which means no matter what happens, you're probably going to be deficient in one of these two categories. Now, France is a little different. France is one of the rare people who is extremely commercially successful and extremely
Speaker: appreciated and well -respected. Although you can see this has happened just because we've sort of democratized the way media works. Jonathan Franzen is one of the most criticized people on a platform like Twitter, of which he is not involved with. But I mean, if I went on Twitter right now and put Jonathan Franzen into the search and I looked up what people were saying, it would mostly be negative.
Speaker: Or it would be people criticizing the kind of person who thinks Franzen is good or whatever. It's this strange thing. It's really difficult to be a writer and feel satisfied about both of those components. To the point where I don't know if I have met more than, I think, one guy. I would say, I've cleaned my mind. I go into one person who seemed, as far as I can tell,
Speaker: pretty comfortable in both of those silos, you know? So it's going to really sort of spur jealousy and envy because you're always going to want the thing you don't have. Even if you look at like Franzen and David Foster Wallace, those guys were friends. And Wallace was definitely envious of Franzen's commercial success of like the corrections and stuff like that. And Franzen was definitely still, I think, a bit envious of the way
Speaker: Wallace is perceived, both as a writer, but also as just a guy who is like, oh, he's so, we love him so much. He's such a wonderful person, you know? Um, so even guys like that are kind of shackled with this jealousy. Hmm. Yeah. It's, uh, it, I almost feel like there's, there's probably an element in friends and I could never know this, but he, the fact that he's famous in part because he was friends with David Foster Wallace for a while and they were, had this competitive sort of friendship.
Speaker: Yeah, although that really that really wasn't a component of his fame. I mean, you could say that like friends in Spain didn't really kind of explode by not going on the Oprah Winfrey show. But I think that that sort of was a it made a lot of people have suddenly an opinion about the guy who'd never really thought of him before. People who had never read that book were like, Oh, I get that. Or like, that's terrible. He should be thankful. You know, it's like, and
Speaker: I think that that just kind of his public posture in a way that he could be on the cover of like, I don't know if it was Time or Newsweek, he was on the cover of one of those. And it's hard to imagine that happening now. I mean, if it did, it would be for some secondary reason. It would be like the guy from Game of Thrones or like J .K. Rowling or something.
Speaker: being on the cover and it wouldn't just be about the fact that they're a writer. It's that this has moved into some other aspect of culture. Also, now that we're talking about this, I guess it wouldn't happen because do Time and Newsweek still exist as publications, as print? I don't think Newsweek does. Time might, but as I am. Yeah, I think you're right.
Speaker: Yeah, but it wouldn't matter like it's like now anybody could be like when the publications gets a small like that They could put anybody on there. It's like we'll get a shit I want to circle back to this thing that they said just about writing being pretty pretty damn fun and
Speaker: When I was reading Raised in Captivity, I felt like you were having a lot of fun writing these stories. It's such a great collection of stories where really the ideas you're coming across seem to be the main character of all of them. And then you have all these little characters in there that are just kind of the foils that allow the idea to stand tall. So what was your relationship to writing these stories? Because it did seem like you were having a really good time doing them.
Speaker: Well, I mean, this was something like something a guy says when he's promoting a book, but this is just true. This is the most fun I've had writing a book since Fargo Rock City. And it's not even close. I mean, like, like Fargo Rock City, basically, I wrote with no belief that it would ever be published. I was just doing it because it's like I was living in Akron and I had a computer for the first time and I didn't have any friends. And I was like, I wonder if I can do this, you know? You know, like that was super fun. And then.
Speaker: After that, it was just different levels of, oh, it's like, what does it mean that I'm doing this? Or is this good enough? Or will people like this? Or should I care that people like this? Or is this up to my standard and all these things? And I had wanted to do this kind of this anthology of fiction for a while. What I would do is
Speaker: You know, like anytime I had like some weird idea, or like a weird bit of dialogue or something, I would just put it into the my phone in like the notes function. I had like hundreds and hundreds of like sentence fragments. And then I just use those segments, those sentence fragments to sort of come up with ideas for these stories. And, and, you know, they were, they were short, you know, I, the original plan,
Speaker: I don't know why I had this plan. I feel stupid talking about it now, but it's true. The original plan was that I was going to write a hundred stories that were all exactly a thousand words long. That was my formalist fucking dream or whatever, you know? So I start trying to do that and it like, it doesn't, every story is either being kind of fleshed out to get up to a thousand or I'm cutting stuff out to get down to a thousand. I start realizing it's like, well, when this book gets edited,
Speaker: I'm going to have to go back in and make sure all these stories, you know, like, you know, what if I miss type or something and I got to figure out a way to get these back to a thousand or whatever. No one's going to care that I did this. Like, you know, literally no one is going to be, no one's going to buy a book because it's like, Oh, did you hear about this book? Every story is the exact same length or whatever. So then I scrap that idea. And when I, and prior to that, when I was actually trying to do this,
Speaker: This was like a terrible writing experience because everything about it was based around this made up and obstruction. And then when I said, I'm just going to write these whatever length they should be. It was great. It was just fun. Like it was pure writing and the way that I just hadn't done. I mean, I guess professionally ever, like I don't think I've ever been at some time. I guess there's some parts of like.
Speaker: Some parts of sex drugs and coca puffs, I guess, are a little like that, where I just like, oh, I'm just gonna write this and see what happens or whatever. But for the most part, that's not how it works, you know, like, it's just, you know, for the most part, you're not you're not writing without the idea that at the end, there should be something that people
Speaker: take away or get or feel that's very specific. And that if they don't take that away from this piece of writing, the writing has failed. And that's not how it is with this. I mean, this was just fun. In fact, like, if I could do this, if I could write books like this one for the rest of my life,
Speaker: That's what I do, but that's not a reasonable thing to do. I mean, I just – that's not – also, it would get – eventually, it would get repetitive and everything gets boring eventually. But right now, that's how it feels. At what point did you land on this idea of writing a short story collection that is basically written like nonfiction stories? Well, I don't like the way most fiction is, and I'm not criticizing it. I'm not in any way saying that, like,
Speaker: Like, everyone's bad at fiction and I will do it right. That's not what I mean. I just don't like the way it's written for me. Like, I like reading nonfiction. I like the experience of how nonfiction works. And when I read fiction, I very rarely feel that way because even when I look at the two novels I wrote, I think that
Speaker: that I thought, in my mind, it's like, well, this is a different modality. There's got to be something different about this. There's like certain things fiction needs to do and all of them, you know? And at some point, I was like, well, why do I think this? Like, no one told me that. Like, I have been socialized to believe that this is how it's supposed to be. And you know, it's like, I'll start reading. Like, I would say,
Speaker: Like an embarrassingly high number of novels I start, I do not finish. Not because I'm not interested or I'm too lazy. It's like, this is a waste of my time the way this is coming occur. Like they're not, this does not feel like a practical use of my time. And I suspect, sadly, that this is partially due to the influence of the internet. I do think the internet has
Speaker: changed the way most people, maybe all people read, certainly has changed the way I read. And I guess I just kind of conclude, it was like, well, I don't know, this is maybe the best way to describe it. I think that very often, when anybody is writing a book, they lose track of the fact or they forget that the book can be whatever they want. That like you're literally creating your reality.
Speaker: that doesn't have to be the way other books are. It just doesn't have to. It seems like it has to. And there's some sort of kind of non -spoken cultural pressure to have things be the way they've been before or that there's a style that you use when you're doing one thing and a different style when you're doing something else. And that's just how it is.
Speaker: And I guess I finally got to the point where like, I don't think that way now. It's like, I write fiction and not fiction the same way, which is just the way I do it.
Speaker: Do you think that you have that kind of creative liberty at this point in your career because you're a famous writer with some notoriety that you can kind of cash in on that and write fiction in the way that you see fit and not in some sort of market shoe box or a market corner that maybe someone else with that panache can be that creatively bold, if you will? Yes. That's absolutely true and it's fucked up, but that's true. I mean, it's sort of like
Speaker: If you're a new writer trying to convince a publishing house to publish your new work, what the publishing house, of course, will say is that we're looking for the new voice. We're looking for the new thing. We're looking for what's never been done before or whatever. And 99 .9 % of the time, if they get that, they say no.
Speaker: because they also have a different pressure. They have the pressure of selling these books and that they are a business and that they're a business that's involved with art, but it's still a business. It's safer for somebody who they know has, I don't know, a small following or a cult following or wherever you look at it because their audience might be more receptive
Speaker: to this and they can take the risk. They can be like, well, maybe this is actually great and it will kind of spill into a whole different, you know, a sector, whole different kind of class of readership. You know, I just, it's weird, but like I did a story on U2 once and I was, and Bono of course was talking in his Bono -like way, but he said something that I think is true. He's like, U2 has more freedom
Speaker: than a band playing in their garage to no one. Because it's like a band playing in their garage to no one, it's like they can't play forever. They gotta go to work the next day. And like they have all these limitations. It's like if they, you know, they gotta find these other ways to live and make money and all that stuff, whereas YouTube can actually do whatever they want. He was like, this is not like some, like, you know, I don't know, it was a golden bird cage or whatever. He's like, that's not how it is. He's like, we, you know,
Speaker: that having success gave them more freedom. Now, obviously, I'm not nearly as successful as you two in any context, even if you sort of adjust music and writing or whatever. It's like not even close, but it does seem as though that if I want to try something, somebody wants me to try it. I mean, somebody seems, I mean, they've been
Speaker: I feel pretty supported. I don't feel as though I have an adversarial relationship with anybody in the publishing industry. Do you find that your non -fiction and because you're writing from a similar just artistic platform that your non -fiction and this fiction kind of talk to each other in a way? I'm thinking of the story Execute Again and also something you wrote about Mike Leach and the read option and
Speaker: voyeurism in dinosaur eating the dinosaur and then like visible man and then there's there's a cults you know a cult story in your race against captivity but you also wrote about like Waco and Cobain so I wonder like if you're if some of that fiction well the nonfiction is like what this if I'm able to twist this into a short into something fictional this is that's the inspiration for this and this is the kind of fun I can have when I break free of the nonfiction mold I mean
Speaker: Okay, I don't, I don't really know what you mean when you say talk to each other. I know what people mean when they say that, but in a real term, I'm not really sure. But yeah, I mean, I guess for like, yes, in that sense that, I mean, and I can't be the only person who thinks this about their own writing or whatever. But like, I've written now, look, okay, is 11 books. You know, if you can't, if you don't count the anthologies as nine books or whatever, but
Speaker: It feels to me like I'm writing one very long book. In a lot of ways, my central interests have never changed. My specific interests have changed. But the abstract things that interest me are always the same questions. They're just always there.
Speaker: I guess someone could hear this and be like, well, that kind of proves that he's uncreative. And I don't know. Maybe that is the case. I mean, or that or that I have not evolved as much as someone should. That's also possible. I don't know. But I mean, yeah, what you're what you're saying is true. I mean, I I think it's really odd.
Speaker: In fact, when people are like, well, you know, it's very common to say like, I like his nonfiction. I don't like his fiction or whatever. I have no idea why somebody would feel that way. It doesn't make any sense to me. I could see someone liking both of them or disliking both of them. It seems odd though that they would like one and not like the other. I just don't know why, but you know.
Speaker: Yeah, I wonder if that is, for people that like to read strictly nonfiction, they know that there's a certain contract and then you're playing on a certain field and then, you know, saying these certain things with the contract of nonfiction and then maybe that voice bleeding over into fiction, then they don't know what is fact versus imagination or something that might be... Well, I think it's more this. I mean, the fact of the matter is, is like,
Speaker: Even a bad nonfiction book is not a waste of time. Where bad fiction is a waste of time in a lot of ways. I mean, like if somebody reads one of my nonfiction books and like they don't like it, they might be like, well, at least I know how the first Steely Dan record was recorded now.
Speaker: Or like, you know, it's like, or oh, I learned this weird thing about dinosaurs or whatever. It's like, you can still get information from it. Like if you watch a real boring documentary, it is much more enriching than watching a really boring, like rom com. Because if nothing else, you can say like, well, I went to class today. So I think maybe some people view that with like, you know, why we've become such
Speaker: a non -fiction culture. I mean, the whole culture is non -fictional now. And I think it's because one of the things the internet has done to the way people read is that it's now much more common for someone not to look at reading as enjoyable or enriching or somehow improving the way they think. It's like they want the information.
Speaker: Like I'm reading because the world is crazy and there's so much access to information now that in order to be competitive, I gotta just know what's going on. So.
Speaker: I'm not going to read horizontally. I'm going to read vertically and give me as much to read as you can in the next 40 minutes. And I'm going to try to read as much as I can and get as much information so I can move on. And if I have a conversation with somebody, I can talk about, you know, what's happening in the Sudan or like, what do I think about, you know, about, you know, Camila Harris or whatever. It's like, they just, they don't think of it as something that is supposed to be
Speaker: Uh, enjoyable. That's how they think about television. Yeah, that's too bad because I still will consume reading as, as, as my, as my escape as a way to be entertained. Like when I read an essay of yours, you know, before bed or one of these stories that I've read a few times, it's just like, Oh, that's my little, that's my bite of goodness and fun. Like I'm not necessarily, I don't need information to be consumed. Oh yeah. And the people I'm guessing listening to this podcast are like,
Speaker: Like the person who's listening to this podcast has probably just heard what I said. It's like, that's not true. I'm not like that. You're probably not like that. It's like the people who would see this podcast and be like,
Speaker: I don't know, I don't need to hear a writer talk about himself. And when you were, some of you said that you were corralling all of these sentence fragments and dialogue fragments and everything into your phone and forming those into what might ultimately become a story. What was that process like of getting those and then curating those and then trying to sort of garden those so they bloomed into something that you were proud of? What was that routine like?
Speaker: Well, okay, that's a good question. Part of the reason that I wanted to do this project now, or maybe I guess part of the reason I did this project now, even though I maybe wanted to for years, is the way it fit in to the way my life temporarily is. I mean, right now, my days are incredibly regimented.
Speaker: And weirdly, it turns out I like this. I spent my whole life thinking I wanted freedom. As it turns out, I like living in my own self -made prison or whatever. But it doesn't seem like prison to me. It's actually the way I like to live. So my days are that my son wakes up at about 5 .45, and I get up, and I let him watch the Ninja Turtles or whatever. My daughter gets up at about 6 or 6 .15. Then I make them breakfast, get them dressed,
Speaker: take him to school, get home at about 8, 45, or 9. I go to the gym for one hour. I take a shower. I eat lunch at 10 .30. And then I go out to my office from 10 .45 till 5, which is that I go back to get him from school. So from that period of time, that's all I have. I can't write at night anymore. I can't write on weekends. I got that block of time. So I was like,
Speaker: I'm going to write a bunch of stories that are exactly a thousand words long because the way this will work is on, you know, like on Monday, I will kind of start writing the piece on Tuesday. I will finish writing the piece on Wednesday. I will go back and edit a story from last week.
Speaker: On Thursday, I will go back and edit the story that I wrote on Monday and Tuesday. And then on Friday, I'll start planning what I'm gonna do next week. And that's how I did it. So I basically wrote a story a week. Like there's 34 stories in this collection. I think I wrote 55 of them. So I basically wrote a story a week for about a year. And kind of a weirdly mechanical way. Like when I say it like that, it actually seems the opposite of
Speaker: of how I always kind of viewed creativity working. Because before I had kids, and certainly like before I was in a relationship, like I wrote whenever I was moved to write. So I would maybe write, you know, I would start writing at 11 o 'clock at night on a Friday night or whatever. Or I would just, you know, whenever I felt like, whenever I felt like now I want to write, I'm going to do it. But what I found is that this limitation sort of prompted me to be like, okay,
Speaker: you're writing fiction, but you're doing it the way that you used to do when you worked in a newspaper, which is, you do the interview, you transcribe the interview, you do the interview, you transcribe the interview, you do any other secondary interviews you need, you write the piece, you turn the piece in. It's like there's a, I guess I operate well in that sort of,
Speaker: System, you know, yeah, I read they at times sometimes you would start writing it at midnight and right till four and then when you when you had a you know relationship in a family these These these walls get put up but it's like what a you know, Jocko willing says like discipline equals freedom It's kind of amazing like if you have this block This it's kind of amazing what you can get done when you know that that is all you get for that day. I
Speaker: Absolutely. Absolutely. And it's things that people have always said and yet you never believe them. I never really believed it. I would have never made myself do that. There's nothing I could have ever read or heard that would have made me say, okay, I'm going to write six hours a day, five days a week at the same time. I would have never done that. It's only when I was forced to. But, you know, it's just this
Speaker: It's one of these weird, nobody wants to be forced to do anything. And yet when you look back on your life, what were the most satisfying things? Very often things you were forced to do. I would never have had kids if my wife didn't want them. It's the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. It is the most profound thing in almost like the most typical way. And everybody I ever knew who had kids said that, and I thought they were all lying.
Speaker: I just assumed that's what they said. I just assumed that these people were saying how profound it was. And I was like, well, yeah, your life is terrible. So you got to say this to kind of compensate. It isn't that way. It actually is the greatest thing, you know, and I just, you know, 47 years old now. And it's just amazing to me how I'm still constantly realizing how many things I've been wrong about my whole life. And I just could tell it's never going to stop.
Speaker: that I'm going to be 88 years old being like, Oh my God, why did I, you know, it's like, I just know what's going to happen. Hmm. And when you were writing, writing these stories, let's say, um, where do you feel most alive and most engaged in that process, the generation or maybe the rewriting and the editing phase? Oh, the initial typing, typing it for the first time, always, you know, it's like you write a sentence and you're like, that's perfect. That's great.
Speaker: And then you look at it again later and you're like, yeah, it's good. Maybe it could be better. And then you work on it more and you actually make it better, but it seems worse. And then it becomes part of something larger and you read the whole large thing and you're like, ah, God dammit, that's terrible. And it comes out, it's actually published and you hate it and you're embarrassed by it. And people say they like it. And you're like, you must be an idiot if you think that's good. And then you don't get it for two years.
Speaker: And then two years later you look back on it and you go, that's a good idea. I wish I'd been a better writer two years ago. I wish I could have that idea now. That's how I often feel about stuff. It's like, I don't really go back and read what I wrote because it just drives me crazy. But every so often I'll have to go back and I'll like, somebody will want something I've written for like a, I don't know, for like a textbook or something like that. So I got to always go back and check. And the feeling I always have is like,
Speaker: Boy, that was actually, I was an original idea. Like, that's not me stealing somebody else's idea. That was my own idea. Like, that's real new. Boy, though, I wish I could have written it better. Like, I could really write that idea well now. The only problem is I could never have that idea now because I've been exposed to too many other smart people who've given me so many ideas that I can't really think of anything on my own. What would you say you're better at now than you were even five years ago?
Speaker: From a technical perspective, everything, everything. My writing is much more concise now. I am much less likely to include a bad idea just because it's interesting. I use parentheses less. I use semicolons less. I use footnotes less.
Speaker: I think that I am more aware of how at times the amount of voice I use can actually detract from the experience of reading. The thing I'm not as good at is I have become more like other writers. I can just tell that. I'm just, I mean, you know, I moved to New York and I met
Speaker: some of the most interesting, brilliant people that I've ever encountered. I mean, I would never give up that experience. It's like, just the people at Spin Magazine were just some of the people who I just really changed the way I thought about everything, you know? But as a consequence, it's like some of the sharp edges got ground down in a way because
Speaker: Now I second guessed myself in a way that I didn't when I was younger. Like one thing I've noticed people who like, like, I don't know, I don't want to criticize this, but like, you know, some people will go to like creative writing, MFA programs and stuff like that. And I'll talk to them about the experience. Um, and it often seems to have made the person a less confident, less interesting writer.
Speaker: Because what happens is they write a piece and then you have 10 people workshop it. And the 10 people who are workshopping it feel an obligation to say something about it, something positive and something negative, just a normal reaction. And what's often going to happen is that the things that they pick out are the things that just fall outside of the typical norms of writing. Anything that they notice that seems different than what they would have done
Speaker: or most writers would have done. And I see that these guys and these women remove those things from their writing. And by the time that they're finished, it's almost like all that person and the 10 people who critique them, they're like 11 copies of each other now. And I think that's why a lot of fiction to me, it seems like it was almost made by like a collective computer in a way. And that happened to me a little bit
Speaker: just from being in New York because I used to have really bold, strong opinions and I'm not really like that anymore because I've now met so many really smart people with kind of contradictory ways of thinking about the world that I think about all those people anytime I have an opinion now.
Speaker: Like I just, you know, and it ends up moving everything kind of toward the middle. You know, I do wonder sometimes that if I had never left Akron, if I had just stayed in Akron, um, if I would be, uh, like a, uh, like a, a worse thinker, but a better writer because I wonder if maybe my writing would be more unique. Hmm. Do you share your work with anybody at all?
Speaker: Well, not till it's pretty close to being done. My wife reads it. I have a friend who's a librarian in Akron, Ohio named Bob Ethington. He's read almost everything I have written before it's published in terms of books. And then I have a collection of friends who are writers who usually do read
Speaker: Uh, like not all of them, but some of them, I kind of will think like, this is the person who should be reading this, or this is the person who could give me insight on that. Um, and sometimes it's helpful with nonfiction. It can be helpful because the main thing you're doing is, is you're giving it to someone and saying, what parts of this, uh, do you just feel are false and tell me why, or like,
Speaker: Are there any things that I'm just missing that are going to be obvious to anybody who understands this topic and stuff like that? Or, you know, just all like nonfiction writing is a little closer to bowling in the sense that like you can be perfect. Like you can do a story or an essay that's just perfect. It's like there's nothing, it's not missing anything, you know. With fiction, if you have someone read it,
Speaker: I basically have one question, which is, tell me what parts are boring. That's the only thing that really matters. Everything else is subjective. Like, I want to know what part you couldn't get through. I don't really care what you thought about the other parts, as long as they were interesting enough for you to finish. And in terms of boring in your fiction, do you like the short story form because there's greater economy and maybe less of a chance to be bored by a piece?
Speaker: Well, yeah, that's, that's part of it. I mean, also, you know, it's like, um, when I think of writing that I like or things that I read that I, that I still, you know, remember, it has to do with like, what was the idea in the story? I am not, um, you know, super, uh,
Speaker: obsessed with character development and like plot mechanics. I appreciate those things when I read it, you know, like, especially plot mechanics, sometimes you'll read a book and you'll be like, boy, this person, this is a different kind of skill than I have. I mean, this is like a, uh, like they just know how to, to, to engineer, um, the way a story moves.
Speaker: But I like things where it's like, well, you read the story and you come away with an idea. And a short story can do that in a way that is a little more efficient because you don't really have time. The character can't really change in 1 ,400 words or something. Or if they change, they can change once. And there can't be too many plot mechanics. And if they are, you're just going to be describing what they are.
Speaker: And that's not really supposed to be part of it. So that that's probably that's probably what it is. I mean, like, you know, you maybe remember a story when you were you read when you were young, the lady and the tiger. Do you remember that story?
Speaker: Yes, yes, a little bit. Yeah, we're a woman has to choose between two doors and behind one door. She's basically choosing which door her boyfriend will open. And if he opens one door, it'll be a different woman who will get to marry. And if it's the other door, there'll be a tiger who will eat him. So she'll either have to save his life, but watch him kind of fall in love with this other person.
Speaker: a terrific situation. In a lot of ways, I always think of that as the perfect story because it's set in a time that is also timeless. It's set in the past, but you don't really know exactly when in the past it's supposed to be happening.
Speaker: You imagine it's probably kind of in the gladiator period, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. It has a central question about, what are your real feelings? And then it has an unclear ending. So it allows the consumer to kind of think about both answers. That is the kind of thing that I love. These stories in this book, whenever someone says, what are they like?
Speaker: In my mind, they're kind of like episodes of The Twilight Zone, where we're like, when you watch The Twilight Zone, the idea is the book or the story or the show. The idea is everything. It's not even how the thing necessarily unspools or how deftly it's kind of woven together. It's like this is the idea and it hinges on one change.
Speaker: I guess that's what I like. I'm describing this in a way I thought about but never really said, but I guess this is how I feel. Yeah. They're great stories. I love them. I read the book cover to cover and then I read several of them over again, some of my favorite ones. It was great fun to be able to dive into this. Is there anything else you'd love to add about this book in particular or do you feel like you've said all you wanted to say about it?
Speaker: Well, I'll say this. We're doing the audio book for it now. And this is very kind of exciting to me because it's like, look, there's first person stories and there's third person stories. And I am reading the third person stories and the first person stories are being read by different people. And it's like this fascinating
Speaker: collection of people, it's like, Brent Musburger reads one, Curt Loder reads one, like Mike Birbiglia, my friend John Dolan, my wife, I think Chris Gethard's gonna read one, like Aisha Taylor, like maybe the guy who plays Pete Campbell from Mad Men's gonna read a story, it's like, that to me is a real exciting thing. I imagine what it must be like. You're a playwright.
Speaker: And all of a sudden, someone makes the play. Like, it's fascinating to me to have this happen. The idea of Brent Musburger even knowing who I am, I can't believe that. That blows my fucking mind, you know? Now, granted, you might not really know who I am. They may have just given him this pages, and he was like, OK, let's go. But still, it's like, that's, they haven't
Speaker: Like it's not done yet. There's still actually, because we're recording this in June, there's like still doing it. So maybe when this comes out, it'll be done. Um, but, uh, like I'm looking forward to listening to that. Yeah, me too. Jesus, much as I read this and will continue to read it, I want to get the audio book now just to have that different kind of experience. Like you said, like it's like a screenwriter than getting able watching the Avengers then, you know, act out your screenplay. Sure. You know, it's like,
Speaker: Okay, so I've been very lucky in my life that it seems as though that something that if people like my writing or think it's okay, they kind of like the voice in it. But now sometimes with fiction, they feel there's too much voice. It seems like every character is me. That's what they said about Downtown Owl. Every character is just him talking or whatever, which is kind of true because I fucking wrote them all. It wasn't me who did it. I came up with it. But anyways,
Speaker: So people go like that. So now these first person stories, particularly, it will not be my voice. It will be a different voice. And I wonder if people will hear these stories differently than, uh, people who read them because, you know, I've done like a lot of podcasts and stuff like that now. And I mean,
Speaker: I realized that some people hate my voice. Not the voice I wrote with, the voice I actually speak with. Then they can't unhear it when they read. Exactly. I know. I sometimes wish I would have never done any of these things. I'm serious. I've never done a podcast. I've never gone on TV. Because here's the deal. If writing has a lot of voice and the person doesn't know the voice of the author, they create
Speaker: the best version of their own voice. Like if writing has a lot of voice but they don't know who the author is, they just kind of use their own voice in the best possible context and that's what they hear. But once they know the voice, you can't swing back. Like I defy anyone to read a Malcolm Gladwell book now and not hear Malcolm Gladwell's voice. I don't think it's possible. Like it just can't be done.
Speaker: Absolutely, yeah. And what a great strategy, too, to have you read the third -person stories, because then it further divorces the first person, and thus making it feel more like you reading that story. And it is, the characters are you. So that's a great strategy for the audiobook, too.
Speaker: Well, I hope so. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Chuck, you've been so generous with your time. I really appreciate you carving out the time to do this. Best of luck with the book. And I hope to do this again sometime, maybe when the next one comes out. Anytime, man. Fantastic. Take good care. We did it, guys. We did it. Thanks to the incomparable Chuck Closterman.
Speaker: And to our sponsors, Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction and Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Check them out, visit their websites, see what works for you. Go by Chuck's latest book. He's got a book tour going. He's gonna be up in Portland in early August. Hopefully we can fist bump. Visit chuckclosetermanauthor .com and say hi on the Twitters at C. Closterman.
Speaker: Right there, of course, keep the conversation alive on Twitter by pinging the show at CNF Pod. Share across your platforms. I'll jump in the fire and give you the horns and a skull. Let's riff. Also, sure to sign up for that monthly newsletter. Head over to BrendanOmero .com.
Speaker: Four show notes, sign up for that newsletter, and even consider leaving a review of the show. Whatever, we're all in this shit show together. I think that's it. We gotta get outta here, man. Remember, if you can do interview, see ya!
