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Episode 123—Elena Passarello on Listening to the Book, Polaroids, and Self-Doubt
128 Plays6 years ago
"I wanted to dig deeper into the essay collection AS they essay," says Elena Passarello. Welcome wayward CNFers, it’s the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to bad ass writers, filmmakers, movers and shakers about the art and craft of telling true stories. Here you’ll learn the story, tips, and tactics that will inspire you to greater heights in your own own work. I’m your host Brendan O’Meara, hey, hey. Yeah, it’s Elena Passarello, not only is she wicked smaht, but we had a super fun, loose, entertaining conversation about her essays from Animals Strike Curious Poses, as well as the writing process, Metallica, and a host of wide-ranging topics. This was one of the rare in-person interviews so we had a ton of fun riffing (hey, hey) with each other. I probably talk a little too much about myself in this show, but that was the nature of the conversation, so do with that what you will. You can follow Elena on twitter @elenavox. Feel free to follow me as well @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod. FWIW, I always respond to tweets. Since you’re here, why don’t you consider A)Subscribing to the podcast wherever you jam and B) Subscribe to my newsletter over at brendanomeara.com (hey, hey). It’s once a month, no spam, can’t beat that. Hey, if you dig the show, consider sharing it with a CNFin’ buddy. Why? Because I don’t want to rely on social networks to do the work. We are the social network and if we email and share with friends we are tethered by something more than algorithms. Right? Don’t forget about my newsletter. It’s a fun bit of monthly goodness. Head over to brendanomeara.com (hey, hey) and subscribe. You can unsubscribe at any time, but know that I take it wicked personally if you do. No pressure. Remembah! If you can’t do….interview! See ya! Thanks to today's sponsors Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction and Creative Nonfiction Magazine for the support!
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
The
Introduction & Sponsor Messages
00:00:01
Speaker
Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two year, low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on campus residencies allow you
00:00:16
Speaker
to hone your craft with accomplishmenters who have pulled surprises and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni. Which has published 140 books and counting, you'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey.
00:00:38
Speaker
visit goucher.edu forward slash 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 nonfiction. I'm hearing your electric guitar opening right now.
Podcast Host & Episode Overview
00:00:58
Speaker
That's right, Elena. It's Riff O'Clock on a CNF Friday. Welcome, wayward CNFers. It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass writers, filmmakers, movers and shakers about the art and craft of telling true stories. Here, you'll learn the story, tips and tactics that will inspire you to greater heights in your own work. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara.
00:01:26
Speaker
Yeah, it's Elena Passarello. Not only is she wicked smart, but we had a super fun time. Loose, entertaining conversation about her approach to the work, her essays from Animal Strike Curious poses, as well as her process, Metallica, and a host of wide-ranging topics.
00:01:53
Speaker
This was one of the rare in-person interviews, so we had a ton of fun riffing with each other. She made the trip down from Corvallis. It was great. I think we had a great chemistry, and it was just a ton of fun. I probably talk a little too much about myself in this show, but that was the nature of the conversation.
Interview Style & Guest Introduction
00:02:11
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So do with that what you will. It's different when you can look someone in the eye. This one had more of that.
00:02:17
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We're just two writers at a bar having a beer. And we were here just riffing off each other. It was just that was the nature of this one. And, you know, like I said, do with that what you will. You can follow Elena on Twitter at Elena box. So that's E L E N A V O X. Feel free to follow me as well at Brendan O'Mara. Hey, and CNF pod. F W I W. I always respond to tweets.
00:02:47
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Since you're here, right? Why don't you consider A, subscribing to the podcast wherever you jam, and B, subscribe to my monthly newsletter over at BrendanOmero.com. Hey, it's once a month, no spam, can't beat that. Reading recommendations, I dig it. What else? Oh yeah.
00:03:09
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Today's episode is also brought to you by Creative Nonfiction Magazine. For nearly 25 years, that's a quarter century. Good at math. Creative Nonfiction has been fuel for nonfiction writers and storytellers, publishing a lively blend of exceptional long and short form nonfiction narratives.
00:03:29
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and interviews, as well as columns that examine the craft, style, trends, and ethics of writing true stories. In short, creative non-fiction is true stories well told. Well, this seems like as good a point as any to let you get to know the incomparable Elena Pasarello. One more riff for good measure.
00:04:00
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Oh, that's awesome. Oh, cool. Yeah, we should probably run with respect to your time and so forth. You should probably rock and roll. Let's do it a little bit. But I got it. I'm hearing your electric guitar opening right now. Oh, nice. You know, I often wonder if that's if that's something that people are off put by. But I can't help it. It's me. I'm a heavy metal guy. I love it. We need more metal in
00:04:27
Speaker
Creative nonfiction we need more like power chords and you know like because when you see something that says like creative nonfiction podcast I just imagine you know like somebody's got like a bony bear song Yeah
00:04:43
Speaker
What I what I liked about it too so many podcasts or interviews that do delve into the arts They tend to have a an air of pretension with their music and maybe it is they feel like they're gonna alienate people but in this day and age you almost you have to go to the fringe and in any way you can and you know and that's just part of my my thing I love Metallica Metallica is my band December 5th. I'm I
00:05:08
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Melanie and I are going up to Portland to smash skulls. So that's, yeah, it's baked into who I am. So I figured, you know, why not make my little interview podcast throw up the horns and rock out. Throw the CNF goat.
00:05:28
Speaker
Exactly. Cool. Well, I gotta say thank you so much for making the drive down. This is going to be really fun. Doing these things in person is such a game changer and it's great to be able to look someone in the eye and get a chance to talk about your wonderful work. This latest book is incredible and fun and whimsical and it's an honor to get to talk to you in person.
00:05:49
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Thanks. I'm stoked. Cool. Well, I always love to chart the path of a
Guest's Artistic Background
00:05:55
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writer. And I know yours is winding in the way you got to where you are. So why don't we start at square one and why don't you say, where'd you grow up? And what was your path? What was some of those lead dominoes that got you to where you are today?
00:06:14
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Well, I grew up in Charleston, South Carolina and Gwinnett County, Georgia. Gwinnett County is outside of Atlanta, but it was really far outside of Atlanta when I was growing up. Not so much anymore. The only sort of claim to fame in Gwinnett County when I was growing up is that Larry Flint was shot there.
00:06:36
Speaker
But I think I think we have an American Idol winner from there now. And, you know, I don't know, just regular, regular kid. I didn't really do. I just wrote papers and stuff, but I did a lot of artsy stuff. Right. Like I didn't take U.S. history in school. I had to take it in summer school because I wanted to take orchestra and newspaper and the literary magazine and drama.
00:07:02
Speaker
Oh, wow. Yeah. So kind of just shoved as much art arts oriented stuff as I could. I think I just really liked expression and pop culture and and I liked being with people who made those sorts of things. So it wasn't that I was a musician or that I was a actor or that I was a writer. It was that I just wanted to be in the rooms with those people who are doing those things. Yeah. I think that's the first domino, really. Yeah. At what point did you realize that those were your people?
00:07:33
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Oh, probably right away. I mean, I don't ever, I don't really remember not thinking that. I think I always kind of just wanted to be with dance people and always, or I'd forced like the people in my like friend circle, like on the cul-de-sac, you know, who wanted to play tee ball, I'd be like, let's do a tee ball dance, you know.
00:07:54
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Or like my my I was an only child so like all my stuffed animals I would like make little instruments for them and I'd put a record on and I conduct them like they were in an Orchestra's I think I just always wanted to surround myself with those kinds of people but I don't have a I don't remember not I Don't remember not doing that and I don't remember not reading and I don't remember not writing which I think is a more common thing for writers like yes figuring without was it like that with you were you I
00:08:19
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I was, it's funny, I wasn't into, I liked, I was drawn to reading and writing a bit, but I was also a pretty competitive athlete too, like I played baseball and soccer and I'm sorry, I'm going to fix this boom arm.
00:08:38
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and get back to the pharmacy. It just started sliding on me. That's never happened before. Now it really feels like we're in the room together, right? So it's like we even, the room is responding. It is.
00:08:53
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I might even leave this all in. It's so organic. It's like Saturday Night Live. You never know what's going to happen. What's the phrase they use? They don't air because it's ready. They air because it's 11.30 or something.
00:09:13
Speaker
Yeah, that makes sense. They air. Yeah. Well, in any case, yeah. So I played ball, and my only ambition, really, growing up, was to play pro baseball. And I said this before, I think, but I was just good enough where that dream wasn't quite a delusion.
00:09:34
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You come to realize that you do have to have an element of delusion to push yourself to those extremes. You might want to win the national book award or whatever as subjective as that is, but maybe having that vision in your head is what's going to drive you to be the best writer you can be. It's kind of the aim for the stars land on the moon.
00:10:01
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I think playing or aiming for as unlikely as it would have been to play pro ball, like having that as my North Star made me like a very good high school player and a competent college player before I was cut. So there we go.
00:10:18
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the great lance of college. Exactly. But stories, whenever in high school or when I would write a story and get up there and read it, I could often, the whole class would be laughing. And so I could get, I could, there was that performative element of it that I really enjoyed being able to convey a story and entertain. So in a sense, did you get that sense too when you were little that you could entertain?
00:10:44
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Yeah, or like some I think some people who do things like orchestra or sports, they just do them. And some people really enjoy discourse surrounding them, you know, like people who so reading articles in Sports Illustrated for Kids or whatever or getting to know the the way that the commentators work on TV. A lot of my students and a lot of people that I know that come from a sports background that are writers, that was a part of what they loved about it was
00:11:13
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reading books about baseball or trying to figure out what makes a cool article or reliving something
Parallels Between Sports and Writing
00:11:21
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amazing that happened from waking up the next morning and reading the sports section. I think that's the commonality. I didn't just love
00:11:30
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playing in the orchestra. I liked going to the library and learning more about Beethoven, you know, or like we did Tchaikovsky and somebody in the orchestra was like, did you know that he used to conduct with his hand at his job because he had a dream that his head was going to fall off when he was conducting. And I wanted to figure that out more. And then I wanted to go back to that room and like process the way that writers were processing it.
00:11:55
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You know what I mean? I think the place where that really gets you in trouble is acting. I think you could probably do it in sports, maybe not, and you could definitely do it with music, but I think actors who like to think about acting, writing about acting and writing about performance, I think they get into their own heads and they can't be dumb enough to portray someone else. I mean, by dumb, I mean like...
00:12:16
Speaker
Oh, I know exactly what you're talking about. Maybe it is the same in sports. No, it is. You need to turn it off. You cannot be in your own head. I was ultimately in my own head too much. And it's amazing I did as well as I did, given my various insecurities with it. David Foster Wallace has a great essay about this, how Tracy Austin broke my heart. Have you read that? Totally, yeah. Yeah, that's what that is about. The crux of it is that
00:12:42
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What he was so disappointed about the athlete memoir was them trying to be reflective about it. But that's antithetical to how they're good. They can't explain it. They're able to just, with 20,000 people either booing them or rooting them on, they're able to somehow tune it out. And he himself was a competent tennis player.
00:13:04
Speaker
And he too was too in his own head, right? Eventually, he just couldn't turn that off and was too cerebral. So now it's exactly the same. Maybe that's we should start like polling all like nonfiction writers who come from all these different places like sports or Performing arts and and see if they all Have this this flaw the thing that that allows you to be delusional But not ultimately make it to the stars where you land on the moon It's that you you end up thinking about what you're doing and trying to articulate what you're doing
00:13:35
Speaker
at the disservice of actually being able to do it. You know what I mean? This is my new theory. This is my podcast now. You need to write an essay on this side. It does seem like there are a lot of essayists who come from sports and a lot of essayists who come from
00:13:54
Speaker
Well, I mean, I guess the arts or something, but definitely a lot of nonfiction writers who played sports. My colleague at Oregon State University started in the sports desk at the University of Arizona. He's great, by the way. You should totally have him on. Yeah, I wonder if there's another kind of thing, like it's not David Foster Wallace tennis, but, you know, some other thing with like they're all chefs or something. No. Yeah. I wonder if it's the same.
00:14:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's um, but it is it is the ones who can Kind of get out of their own way or the ones that that that can excel even if they aren't The most athletically gifted there. Have you read money ball by Michael Lewis? No, I just saw the movie
00:14:37
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There's a great moment in that when Lewis is recounting Billy Bean's, his minor league career. And Bean was this, the, just the picture of the perfect athlete, you know, six to big can run hit for power, run big arm, you name it.
00:14:55
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And his roommate was this guy, Lenny Dykstra. This guy, no bigger than me, like 5'9", a little scrappy, you know, little Jack Russell terrier of a person. Oh, cool. And so he's, as he's recounting the scene, Steve Carlton's on the mound, the Hall of Fame left-handed pitcher. And Billy Bean is, like I said, the picture of the perfect physique. And he's thinking, like, out there is a magazine cover.
00:15:23
Speaker
you know, one of the greatest pitchers of all time. And then he turns over, Dykstra's like, he didn't even know, he's like, really? He's like, oh, get up there and fucking stick him. And it's just like, that was the difference. Dykstra didn't care. He just was out there, he's like, I'm going to stick him. And meanwhile, Bean is thinking like, no, I'm going up against one of the greatest of all time and there you have it. And Dykstra had not a Hall of Fame career, but he played 15 years in the pros and Bean never made it.
00:15:51
Speaker
Wow. So there's the head game. There you go. Huh. So so when you found your your people, the more artsy crowd, when did you start gravitating towards acting?
00:16:06
Speaker
I think right away, I think if you would have asked me, maybe even now, at any point in my life, what I would much rather be doing of all the different things that I did, because I did play music for a long time and took lessons and I did start with writing, taking it kind of seriously when I was younger. My parents really encouraged that.
00:16:29
Speaker
I tried really hard to be good at school too, but I think if I had to pick one thing, I would have picked that. It just seemed the coolest and the most fun and the most exciting and I loved performing and I was decent enough at it to like facilitate taking it relatively seriously, although taking acting seriously is like the worst possible thing you could probably do. So yeah, I think that was the first thing. And then everything else I think that I did was kind of
00:16:59
Speaker
Other things that people do when they like doing acting that are probably a little bit more sensitive Sensible, right? Yeah, so And then I stayed so I went to college and I got an English degree I think there was something in my family where they were like you cannot addition for any Like theater schools like Carnegie Mellon. So I went to a school right next door to Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh and
00:17:22
Speaker
And I did theater all through college, but I got a writing degree. And that's where I studied with Lee Gutkins and learned about creative nonfiction and learned about sort of while I was pretending that all I ever wanted to do was be in plays, I got this kind of awesome
00:17:40
Speaker
Nonfiction education from I mean, this is the 90s. So this is when Creative Nonfiction magazine was really in its heyday and the genre was getting sort of super defined by that sort of movement But yeah, then when I graduated I went straight to theater I managed a box office and started acting and I got my union card and I did a ton of plays by the first year of
00:18:02
Speaker
After graduating, I made a rule that I would never do free theater again. So while I didn't 100% sustain myself through theater, I wrote for all weeklies and stuff like that, and I did kind of children's theater and box office stuff.
00:18:18
Speaker
I was advancing toward taking care of myself as an actor and a voiceover artist. And then when I was like 26 or 27, I started seeing some limitations to theater.
00:18:33
Speaker
the probably the most being that I wasn't amazing at it and I'm I am five foot six and I have a football player shoulders and a baritone voice and I'm brunette you know there's for a woman to work consistently there are so few parts she usually has to be kind of shorter and thinner and lighter and I was sort of too old to play Juliet and too young to play the nurse and
00:18:59
Speaker
And I was kind of tired of being beholden to other people's visions. Whether or not I worked was dependent on what plays they were doing and what month it was. So then I started thinking about going to grad school and learning how to take writing seriously and not do it as this thing that I was always just kind of shadow doing while I was making all this other stuff happen, or trying to make this theater stuff happen.
00:19:26
Speaker
And then I went to grad school when I was 27, and I kept acting until about five years ago, and now it's kind of gone. What a long answer to your question. No, that's wonderful. I like the agency that you took, that you wanted to have more control over the art you were doing, whatever that was, and the writing seemed to give you more control. Oh, yeah.
00:19:51
Speaker
I think I kind of get in trouble when I say stuff like this, but I feel like they're kind of opposite each other because when you're an actor, at least when you're doing the kinds of things that I did, you get told what to say and where to stand and who to kiss and what to wear and how the light is gonna hit you and how you're gonna make your money and that's fine.
Creative Autonomy in Writing vs. Acting
00:20:12
Speaker
I like control. I like that because then there's this cage of controls and then the only variable
00:20:19
Speaker
Is your performance rate this thing that you can do with all of these walls set up around you and then the weird sort of nebulous agency that you have where you can slip through the cracks of all those controls and engage with an audience and sort of peek at them from this little cage that you're in i love that.
00:20:35
Speaker
And I loved the collaboration of theater because all those people who are telling you those things, it's not like they're not letting you in. So like you're working on a play with a new playwright or you have an amazing costume designer or choreographer. I loved solving problems with a group of people.
00:20:51
Speaker
So then you go over to writing and it's like the opposite. There's nobody's telling you anything to do. You're just like all alone with a blank page and like no, no advice. And it's just you're accountable for everything. Anything is possible. And it's like, so I think that's kind of why I like nonfiction because at least there are some.
00:21:12
Speaker
walls there, right? Some boundaries, but I definitely overshot it. I think one extreme to another extreme, you know, when you were studying with Lee, what were you reading at that time that excited you about possibly taking up that vocation as your primary art? Nonfiction. Yeah. Maybe even fiction, too. But, you know, non primarily nonfiction.
00:21:38
Speaker
Yeah, I've always been really drawn to non-fiction more than anything. I tried to write poetry because I didn't know really what non-fiction was, but the minute I learned about creative non-fiction, I never wanted to do any other genre. So I was reading... Well, I read James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men with Patsy Sims, who I think she's also been on your show, right?
00:22:00
Speaker
She was a really important teacher for me, even though we didn't spend a ton of time together. She was really hard on me in the way that I thought about books and I thought that was kind of great. In what way? In undergrad, those big seminar classes, you just read a book a week and then you meet for three hours and talk about them. Usually, you'd have to write a one-page thing and I would just blow them out like snot rockets and I'd always get
00:22:26
Speaker
days on them because I read the book, but I wasn't, I was just sort of half. It was like book reports stuff, you know? And she would send it back. She'd be like, I don't think that this is what's happening. And you know, this is a problematic way of looking at this B minus. And I'm like, Oh my God. But she's right. Like she, so then that's when I started sort of.
00:22:45
Speaker
looking at things from a craft perspective and like in the way that I teach now I teach at Oregon State University that like don't just respond to what's happening and don't just analyze it like it's the great Gatsby like think about this as a writer. Yeah, think about these things as choices that are creative and then communicative and she totally like rode my ass about that. Thank you, Patsy. Did you study with Leslie Rubinkowski at all?
00:23:12
Speaker
I don't think she was there when I was there. Rebecca Skloot was in grad school when I was there, so we were in that seminar together. And Lee was there. Bruce Dobler, who was this really kind of fascinating writer who had a couple of novels and then sort of switched over into nonfiction. He's no longer with us, sadly, but he was super special to me.
00:23:36
Speaker
Yeah. So, so in Patsy's class, we read like James Agee and I remember that sort of blowing my mind. Um, somebody gave me John DeGod as Halls of Fame when I was 22. Um, and I, I never really sort of seen the way that you can use lyric distance to sort of communicate something else. That was very kind of important to me. A Ted Conover's new Jack.
00:23:58
Speaker
Okay, yeah. Which I've never done anything like that, but like just like seeing how deep he went and that was a real eye opener. Yeah, Ted's been on the show too when, uh, when, uh, yeah, immersion, his book, his guide to immersion journalism, a year ago.
00:24:14
Speaker
So we got to talking about that. Yeah, he's kind of a hero of mine too, the way he is just so all in. And then just fully, well, New Jack's a perfect example. I mean, he's done it time and time again, made a career out of it.
00:24:31
Speaker
I didn't know you could do that. I knew George Plimpton could jokingly play with the Detroit Lions. Really, I've never done anything past that myself, but I didn't know that you could put your whole family and your life on hold and still think clearly enough to actually make a book.
00:24:48
Speaker
out of it or that you could like make those kind of sustained relationships right with your subjects like I know Eli Sazlow was on your program uh on your podcast I guess you don't call them programs it's like my mom I don't watch my stories in my program on your program
00:25:06
Speaker
But he seems to be developing these six-year relationships with his subjects and slowly getting to a place where he can tell their stories in a way that feels very responsible to him and to them. I had no idea that that was... I mean, that's like acting, right? Yeah, I don't know how... I mean, I've done this to an extent, too, because I primarily write longer features. And it's weird because...
00:25:34
Speaker
you get to know them on such an intimate level. And ultimately, you get you're the one writing their story. And just like Eli said, he's like, this might be the only time they're ever written about. And I basically I have the last word on their story. And so there's a lot of heavy burden. I bet. Autumn and and also getting that close. It's like it's almost like how do you have the right the right distance to write about them?
00:26:02
Speaker
I guess, you know, fairly or even if you have to write about them hard, you know, you're trying to coax out information from them over time, maybe even sharing your own vulnerability, ultimately to kind of like pull that out of them so you can write about it. So it can feel kind of icky sometimes. But I think when they see the notebook or the recorder out, they know there's a
00:26:26
Speaker
transaction in a sense going on. They're there to be written about and the writer's there to do a job. Just like Earl Swift who just wrote this great book Chesapeake Requiem. Oh right, about the disappearing island. So his notebook was always out.
00:26:45
Speaker
And so eventually that was, everyone knew that anything, even though he was very friendly with them and forthcoming, they knew that anything they said could be on the record. So it's just, it's a matter of just being very clear with your intentions and not being like, Oh, you said something cool. Like, all right, I gotta go use the bathroom and then scribble some notes away.
00:27:04
Speaker
You know some people some people do that to try to try to blend in more But he found that blending in to blend in he always had to have the notebook and eventually They just so I got that's just roll with the notebook right like the reality show cameras Maybe not nowadays because I think it's a different game about an early reality show days like real world 90s Yeah, they seem to just eventually forget. Yeah, if they were there But I don't know maybe that's not possible anymore. Yeah Good old puck
00:27:33
Speaker
No, you should have him on. He has to have tried to at least write a memoir. I know. This is the first puck shout out that you've had on your first puck reference. I think is the first reality world reference. Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think Sazlo really took you down these roads. So I'm happy to be bringing bringing the quality to the CNN podcast. I love it. So when you.
00:28:01
Speaker
When you were studying at Pittsburgh and then even going into grad school, what did a successful writer look like to you?
00:28:12
Speaker
like not on the page, like as a human person. Yeah, your vision of what it would be like, how you saw yourself projecting yourself forward, what you would be satisfied with and consider a success. I just always imagined like being at a Barnes and Noble and like a bunch of people waiting to get the book signed and like Eli Cash and the Royal Tenenbaums where I'd like read at a podium and then like ceremoniously close the book and then everyone would applaud.
00:28:41
Speaker
I'd be on, I think I really thought that I'd be on the, not me, but if I were a successful writer, I would be on like, um, you know, Jon Stewart or whatever, Colbert, right? Like, of course authors go on television and talk about their books, but not in Eugene, Oregon.
00:28:59
Speaker
No, the creative nonfiction podcast. I never imagined. But you know what? Like this is like I think I just didn't have access. The only other thing that I had access to if I was trying to imagine a working book writer as opposed to like a journalist or something was these people who would come in like Sandra Cisneros came in to Pitt to talk.
00:29:17
Speaker
And they just seemed like gods to me who lived these lives that I had no access to. They were so full of like, they were artists, like they were cutting their own mantle, or what is it, cutting your own image? Something like that, like they're anointed in a way, right?
00:29:34
Speaker
They were walking their own path. They dressed differently. They held the crowd differently. They talked about these things that took them years to finish and I had never done anything that took me any amount of time to finish. There's no long-term projects when you're 19 or 20 or 21.
00:29:54
Speaker
There's no way that I could imagine what made them who they were. So I think I could only imagine the reception or something. I don't know. So yeah, both are just entirely wrong. None of those things have happened. I also thought that it would be kind of natural to make books.
00:30:15
Speaker
You know, like I thought that they had this predilection so that they would just kind of sit down and books would come out of them like a soft serve machine or something. And then I was like, well, I wrote my first book and I was like, um,
00:30:33
Speaker
Well, that was hard, but now I know how to do it. Now I've made my soft serve machine. And then second book, it was just like I had to build a whole new it was so hard. And now I'm thinking about the third book. And I none of the stuff that I previously learned, I'm able to apply to any new project. Oh, wow. You know.
00:30:50
Speaker
I want to put a pin in that for sure, writing that first one and then how it translated or didn't translate to your second one. The disaster. No, no, it was not a disaster. Try not to be hyperbolic. Yeah. So what about the
00:31:11
Speaker
So you had some experience with people who did some immersion journalism, traditional journalism. You wrote for some of the alt-weekly's, but ultimately what you're making a real name for yourself is with these essays.
Influences & Inspirations
00:31:26
Speaker
I would call them reported essays and a lot of ways deep research. And what about that particular form of non-fiction appealed to you and allowed you to lean into it?
00:31:39
Speaker
Well, you know, so there are the things, the books that I read in college that were assigned to me that by Patsy and Lee and people like that. And then there were these little discoveries that I had that maybe I didn't see as literary, but that felt like they were me.
00:31:55
Speaker
You know, and those things were like sassy magazine, which was this amazing magazine for teenage girls that has this great new life on the internet these because the 90s are back, but it's like these sort of 90s fashions and like early feminist, not early, but early third wave feminist thinking and
00:32:14
Speaker
the writers of Sassy, they appeared every issue and they just talked as themselves and they made fun of themselves and they got mad and they shopped and they read books and they were just like these voices, right? Like in my ear that when I would see them again, when the new subscription came, it was like my friends were there. And then Greel Marcus has had this long running column like 30 or 40 years that's been in various,
00:32:42
Speaker
uh magazines like the village voice or it was on salon when i was in uh college and now i think well the believer had it for a while and maybe vice has it now or somebody vox vox has it now called the real life rock and roll top 10
00:32:58
Speaker
where every couple of weeks or so he just gives like 10, five or 10 things that are happening that are making him think about music and culture. And when I read him talking about Slater Kinney or a new Elvis documentary or a commercial that used Baba O'Reilly and the ability to sort of check in with the same brain thinking hard about all these different things like those kinds of
00:33:27
Speaker
Those kinds of missives, even though they weren't books, that I think was the slide into maybe what I figured out I could try to do, right? Which is be a brain, a person who, again, is not really completing any gigantic large projects, right?
00:33:46
Speaker
often isn't really talking to other people, but is like slowly taking itself seriously as it examines something that's happening with all of those people that I used to sort of love being around in high school. People who are making things, people who are trying to figure things out, people who are expressing themselves, and then on top of observing them, there's thinking about them as they do it.
00:34:09
Speaker
You know, so I think I think when I started and then being an actor, you research a lot. You know, you go in January, you're playing, you know, like a woman on the prairie. And then in March you're playing like a Greek. And then I played a dead cow several times. So then you have to go, you know, or whatever.
00:34:29
Speaker
And I loved going to the library and sort of getting lost learning about it made me feel like I was doing a better job as an actor to check out all the books in the library. So it's probably like this fusion of the things that I knew I could reach toward like those voices and then the things that I knew that I kind of maybe
00:34:49
Speaker
That I felt kind of like theater like that a way to sort of prepare for the role does that make sense? I feel like I'm kind of like half explaining it and half like just like Therapizing this is the problem with when when people when you have to do it in this room it really does now I feel like I should be laying on a couch and telling you about my nonfiction hangups
00:35:06
Speaker
But yeah, so I think when I started getting fascinated by things, I felt confident that I could articulate my voice thinking about things and then in order to bolster that or feel sort of more legit, I would go to the library and find cool fun facts or cool ways of depicting the material and sort of fuse the two together. Does that make sense?
00:35:26
Speaker
It lends a layer of – it's not just self-indulgent writing. You're actually putting some heft behind it by finding research that helps strengthen your argument but also just add more color into those lines that it isn't just you and your brain. It's you and your brain with company.
00:35:48
Speaker
Right, right. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I mean, or just to give you license to even try to think right now, of course, I know that like all essays are just the product of a working mind on the page and we should all have the license to do that. But maybe back in the day, I was a little more and I also figured out pretty quickly that I wasn't particularly great at writing about myself, which was a shocker because I love talking about myself and like, you know, I talk about myself all the friggin time, but
00:36:20
Speaker
Every time I tried to write about myself, I was pretending too much. There was this version of me that I would make that it was like a comedian or whatever. So I knew that I wasn't gonna be able to be honest. Not honest, I don't think anything's honest, but I think a memoirist has a clarity maybe that I wasn't really able to achieve.
00:36:43
Speaker
How did you work through those early false starts with trying to find that voice that felt more true to you? I don't remember. I think I wrote things for all weeklies and stuff like that, and I just knew they weren't great, but they also weren't a part of a larger project. I just did a lot of kind of apprentices, figuring things out, and then I would meet the deadline and get my $20 paycheck.
00:37:11
Speaker
It was successful, but I didn't leave with like the interest to try to do exactly that again, you know, versus like at one point somebody hired me in Pittsburgh to follow a bunch of urban fishermen around like people who fish in like the Alcoa plant waters and
00:37:30
Speaker
I was like getting up at five in the morning and going and fishing and I did I did like that and then I really like talking to like fish experts about what's in there and what we can eat and not and stringing together the scene like I like that or like I would write I wrote like a top ten list about the top ten top ten lists and I started thinking about
00:37:51
Speaker
Well, Around the Way Girl by LL Cool J is an amazing list and, you know, a list, you know, like a manifesto list. And I can't remember what. There's like the Ten Commandments is a pretty sexy list. So like looking at all these different sort of ping pong pockets of culture and then curating them in a way that, you know, and I was, oh, I want to do that again. Right. Versus when somebody I wrote some kind of story about how I passed out in an old folks home playing the upright bass. And I was like, that felt weird. I don't want to do that anymore.
00:38:19
Speaker
for like one time. So we'll get back to that one too. I wrote that for like an alt weekly. I was playing the upright bass like Christmas carols in an old folks home and I passed out and woke up in my training bra in like an exam room.
00:38:36
Speaker
And I wrote it and then I thought it was really funny. And then I read it out loud at one of the very first creative nonfiction 412 festivals. And somebody maybe Lee came up to me and was like, that is one of the saddest things I have ever read.
00:38:52
Speaker
And I was like, fuck this, man. And as I was reading it, I was like, everyone's going to be, I imagine like everybody rolling in the aisles. I think I think just seeing David Sedaris like totally wow a huge crowd in Pittsburgh with his hilarious family stories. And so I had this story that had a training bra.
00:39:07
Speaker
passing out and old people and I was just ready to like you know get my comedy Oscar and it was just nobody laughed at any of the laugh lines and then I thought oh my god I'm the worst writer in the world and my my partner David who was there and he was like Elena that was the saddest thing like they nobody was was like
00:39:26
Speaker
Thinking that the writing was particularly bad, but they did think that it was I mean that was just a tragic essay on like lonely Preteens thinking about death and I just was like man. I really have no radar
00:39:41
Speaker
So then I went to the library and I haven't left. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Wow. I totally forgot about that. I feel better. I feel better sharing that with you, Brendan. Oh good. So when, when you're,
00:40:00
Speaker
ready to write an essay or what is how do you vet out a story that what is that sound in your brain that it makes like oh that's something that it just sticks in your head and it's something you want to go to the library and check out 30 books and read X amount of things like what
00:40:19
Speaker
You know, what is that? What is that like when you when something sticks in your brain and you can't and it can't let go? There's like a preliminary thing, right? Some kind of spark. Yeah. You know, like a fact that I read, like there was a tortoise that was 175 years old and belonged to both Charles Darwin and Steve Irwin.
Essay Development Process
00:40:40
Speaker
And it's just too funny and weird and
00:40:43
Speaker
Also, kind of like, I guess, like this training bra passing out of the old folks home thing, it's like, I can't tell exactly how to feel about it. I'm fascinated, but I don't know if it's tugging at my heartstrings or my nerd strings or my comedy strings. And that will send me on a pretty deep research dive. But often there's a second moment where I have to abandon the piece if all I'm doing is saying, isn't this cool or this happened?
00:41:12
Speaker
Okay. Right. So there's this like preliminary dating phase where I learn, you know, we take each other, me and the topic, take each other out for coffee and, you know, like, but we're not meeting each other's parents yet. We're going to the ball game or like, you know, like we're not sleeping over, right? Yeah. You swiped, right? You're like, all right. Right. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's exactly what I'm a little attracted to you right now.
00:41:35
Speaker
I never remember because I've been with the same man for like 15 years what direction the swiping is and then I bring it up to my students and I'm always afraid that I'm saying the wrong thing and yeah anyway but yeah so the second there's a second moment where it's like not only is this information grilling my cheese as a human I can do something with it
00:41:58
Speaker
And I've lost a lot of projects because I couldn't figure out what I could do with it other than just report. Not that there's anything wrong with just reporting, but because of the nature of what I do, nobody needs you to report what I...
00:42:14
Speaker
Well, Neil Strauss has this great flow chart of his work. His first draft is for me, the second draft is for the reader, and the third draft is for the haters. That first self-indulgent draft might be that courtship. This is what I find really exciting. Then the next one would be,
00:42:37
Speaker
Okay. Let's have a reader in mind. And then that third one, of course is probably like 10 drafts of each phase, but the third one is let's lock, lock tight that research so that people coming at it from direction, trying to poke holes in it. Yeah. They can't poke any holes in it.
00:42:54
Speaker
That's super familiar. To me, that kind of echoed what you were saying, that it does have to be in service of something greater than your own curiosity. Yeah. Does that happen too when you're doing your horse book, like the immersion work, the one, two, three as well? Yeah. I've kind of adopted that too, that it has to be... I'm not the type of writer that writes in fireworks, that people are just going to read what I have to say.
00:43:22
Speaker
Rights and fireworks. I like that. Just because we talked about him earlier, like Wallace. People would tune into him because they want to see his pyrotechnics. And it almost didn't matter what he was writing about.
00:43:37
Speaker
For me, I've just had to resign myself to be like, all right, I find a good story. And as Glenn style, the great editor author has told me and told other people, he's like, let the don't don't try to write so hard. Just let the story do it. And I've got a good nose for story. So if I can just find the good story and then just tell it in a clear way, then that's sort of that's the nature of my talent.
00:44:02
Speaker
And I've had to resign some ego to that because you do want to write and have the fireworks burst in the air and have people sort of ooh and aah at you. But ultimately, people just want a good story.
00:44:16
Speaker
And there's so many different ways that people who are not too, right? That's why I like this podcast plug because it's like, you don't talk about just one kind of nonfiction writing. And I feel like it's always, it makes me nervous to say anything about the way that I write or what I value because I don't want my students or people that are listening to think that applies to all creative nonfiction.
00:44:44
Speaker
Because when you have, like you had Mary Pallone on here, she's talking about a person who's alive, who is thinking things, who's non-neurotypical. She's got a million different responsibilities that have nothing to do with what I do. And her skills are completely different and people read for those different reasons. We're all under the same umbrella, but what a different sort of stock.
00:45:05
Speaker
of aesthetic needs versus working on an essay collection that thinks about the lyric. Yeah, or filmmakers too. It's great to talk to them because ultimately we're all
00:45:21
Speaker
telling true stories, but it's like what palette are you working with? There's some great overlap. And I think there's so much that the straight up narrative journalists, reporters can learn from the art you're making and vice versa. And speaking personally, I'm a weak reporter. I'm a better writer than a reporter. So having just hardened journalists that have
00:45:49
Speaker
you know, they covered, they covered crime and they can teach you so much about the nuts and bolts of reporting. And then you can talk to people, people like you or I'm thinking Nikki Schulack or Andre Dubuis who are brilliant writers that can then maybe learn some of those repartorial skills and then it just makes their storytelling better. So yeah, you can kind of add this to your cart, add this to your cart and then check out with a new set of skills.
00:46:16
Speaker
That's why I think we're really lucky in terms of the genre. You know, we're a weird Motley kind of redheaded stepchild. Nothing against redheads or stepchildren. I love both. But it does sort of feel like there's an ad to cart, sort of dim sum and these wonderful... At the MFA program where I teach, I want to make those rooms for workshops. So when we do a national search for...
00:46:42
Speaker
writers to come in and I always want a kind of a who are the people in your neighborhood of nonfiction so we have like a wine writer and a lyric essay as to as a BFA and straight out of undergrad and Somebody who worked a beat the Mobile, Alabama Education beat who's just trying to figure out now like how to become Tom Juneau or whatever. Yeah
00:47:08
Speaker
When different types of people are in that room together, instead of trying to develop a single language, they just start stealing from each other. Their work starts looking like each other's work, you know? And then they stay in touch after they leave. And I just hope that in the future, that's kind of...
00:47:25
Speaker
It's all like your podcast, you know? Everyone sort of understands not that there's one way to do it or there's one way to define it, but that a reporter and a lyric essayist actually have some overlap, right? Like those three drafts that you were talking about, that's identical to what I do. And I don't, you know, my haters are very different from the kind of haters who would respond to a book about white supremacy, you know? Like I have art haters. It's not the same.
00:47:54
Speaker
What would you say as a writer? And someone as as as talented and hard-working as you are but what do you struggle with oh? Gosh well kind of everything um I I have a lot of
00:48:12
Speaker
I have a lot of procrastination or it's, it's, it feels like it should be called something more than procrastination, like, like crippling inability to make an easy sort of smooth process for myself, uh, which involves laziness and self-doubt and a kind of indulgence of a really circular process.
00:48:38
Speaker
So only one of those things would probably be considered acceptable and the other two are kind of, you know, deplorable or whatever. How does your procrastination manifest itself?
00:48:49
Speaker
It depends on where sometimes I just get hung up on a thing and then I don't want to deal with the thing. So I get hung up on addressing a certain problem in the draft or I get hung up on getting started or developing a pitch for myself and then I just think myself into circles and then I don't do anything.
00:49:12
Speaker
And I'm always, when I finish something, I marvel at the fact that it actually got done. Like I black out for a little while there and then all of a sudden I have an essay, which doesn't make me a great guest. Yeah. Um, I don't know if that's, is that kind of what you were looking for or like, what do I hate about myself as a writer?
00:49:28
Speaker
I'm also I'm not great at writing personally and I'm learning like just like you said how to be I think one of the reasons that I've got so many library books in the hopper where I've been to the library rather than out into the world talking to people that are alive is because I am still sharpening my
00:49:47
Speaker
It's not just interview skills. It's like you said, it's like reporting skills. I think I can interview okay. If I need to talk to somebody and get information, or there's a lot of quotes in my first book, I did all these kind of Anna Deavere Smith style monologues where I would sit with
00:50:01
Speaker
an auctioneer for four hours and have them tell me stories. And then I would distill that into like one story that I put in between the essays of my essays. But that's not the same thing as reportage. Like, yeah, I don't I mean, I think I could really learn or I'm trying to learn how to how to do that.
00:50:19
Speaker
Yeah, there is, down here I've got... This is a big bookshelf, by the way. Radio land people, podcast land people. Yeah. I get rid of so many. I donate so many of my books to friends. That whole pile right there is just, that's going to be donated. Those are library books, but that pile there is... Don't donate those. Yeah, I know.
00:50:41
Speaker
But they're investigative reporters' handbook. Like I said, I'm a shitty reporter, so I've got to read this. Then NPR, sound reporting. Oh, yeah. And then actually, I haven't read this yet, but I think there's probably some good tactics. And the private and guest investigators' handbook, the do-it-yourself guide to protect yourself, get justice, or get even. What does it say? Discover infidelity, locate missing persons, uncover financial fraud, and more.
00:51:06
Speaker
Yeah, collect and use evidence. To me, that kind of sounds like being a reporter. I want to assign that for my students. Discover infidelity, students. Yeah. But I don't know where we were going. Oh, yeah, you were saying that having, you know, developing sort of reporter jobs. I think I can only.
00:51:27
Speaker
that can only help matters and strengthen everything you do. But I wonder too, where do you feel most alive in the process? Like the generative phase or that rewriting phase?
00:51:44
Speaker
Researching and rewriting. Researching is like the KB toys super toy run. I mean, it's just, I love it so much that I love developing a system of responding to the research with enthusiasm, which it's like note taking, but it's like emotional note taking, you know?
00:52:03
Speaker
And I like to research kind of in a spider web way where I look at one thing and then if if I want to go in another direction I make I put a pin and go down that direction like worm holy, you know, and then I have to find a kind of system of like physical note taking to represent all of it so I can think about all the things at once and I just I just love it. It's really overwhelming, but it just feels it just makes me feel so like not lonely.
00:52:27
Speaker
And then editing, I love. Once I have the material kind of down and all I have to do is listen to it and find a way to shape it into the way that it needs to be, just that little bit of guidance, I think it's like I have a script, you know?
00:52:46
Speaker
That's great, but generating, it just tears the ass out of me, man. It takes forever, I suck at it. I never have fun. The only time I ever had fun drafting an essay was, you should get in on this, by the way. There's this thing that essayists do on Twitter.
00:53:01
Speaker
You know, March Madness, right? Every year we pick a kind of sub-genre of music and we have a bracket of songs that represent that sub-genre. Everybody writes an essay about one of them and then people all over the world vote as we winnow it down. So the first year it was March Sadness. We tried to figure out what the saddest song was. Then it was March Fadness, which is one hit wonders from the 90s. And I listened to Return of the Mac for 24 straight hours. I know, it was a bad choice.
00:53:30
Speaker
last year it was March Shredness and I had to write about there was like hair metal but then they gave me pour some sugar on me which I say doesn't shred right there's not even a guitar solo in it really no it's just some chunky power chords and a very simple 4-4
00:53:51
Speaker
It's like Arena Rock. I love it. I think it's a beautiful song. I had so much fun writing. It was for free on the internet, for my friends. Everybody wants to show their chops, so it's not like you just write these one-off things. People take the essays really seriously. My friend Steve Church
00:54:12
Speaker
he wrote like a novella about Dachin, right? So we're taking it seriously, but still, I just was just taking down, pour some sugar on me, but also writing about what I loved about it. And it was like, I felt like a piano player. That is what I imagined writing was going to be like when I was a kid, is like, you know, you just roll up your sleeves and it's like, and just, you know, my David, my partner would come upstairs and I'd be like, this is so fun. And he's like, your body posture is totally different. It was just so great.
00:54:40
Speaker
Yeah. And he was like, why don't you try to write more like that, you know, so that, you know, my marriage won't be so shitty to you or what? But no, for the other than that, that's literally the only time that generating anything has been. Well, no, no, the other the other time was when I wrote the Coco in the the Animal Strike Curious Poses. I wrote the sign language gorilla telling that old dirty joke the aristocrats. Yeah.
00:55:09
Speaker
But I had all the material that was already there because the rule that I set for myself was Coco the Sign Language Gorilla can only tell the aristocrats joke using the lexicon that we know she had. So there are these scientific reports that talk about the kinds of words and word pairings that she would do.
00:55:27
Speaker
her sort of syntactical tendencies. And so I just printed them all up on a huge, you know, size of a dining room table thing. And I just walked past it over the course of the day and pull out things that I could use for sex acts to describe in the aristocrats, you know, or like looking for the way that she would be able to say the aristocrats.
00:55:51
Speaker
which turned into we wonderful snob people. That was fun. That's not really writing. That's more like a word game. So maybe that doesn't count. Anyway, I hate generating content. The end.
00:56:04
Speaker
Yeah. So what do you think changed between your first book and your second book?
Crafting a Cohesive Essay Collection
00:56:10
Speaker
And what did you learn from the first one that carried over to this one, which has gotten such great praise and I think widespread and deserved attention? Thank you. I think I got into the idea or I wanted to dig deeper into the idea of the essay collection as the essay.
00:56:30
Speaker
You know what I mean? Like, so rather than, I mean, like, there's like Pulphead, right? Like John Jeremiah Sullivan, where he wrote those essays for, on assignment for different magazines, and then he edited them a little bit, but put them together as kind of a collection of work that, you know, Susan Orlean, you know, bullfighter checks or makeup, same thing.
00:56:48
Speaker
And then there's like, I'm going to write a bunch of essays that are about the same topic, like empathy exams or my first book, right? Where it's just like, I'm going to think about the human voice deeply and seriously for several years and write 15 essays and group them in some way that's meaningful to me, but really like they're discrete enterprises rather than any of that.
00:57:12
Speaker
The big essay is the book, right? The way that it begins and moves forward and ends is a kind of an argument that is determined over the course of thinking deeply about animals for six years. It's like a concept album.
00:57:28
Speaker
Versus an album of songs that you know don't seem like they were necessarily recorded in the same, right? It's like I'm trying to think in Metallica terms if they have like a singles heavy album versus a concept album like is ride the lightning more Hmm, you know like
00:57:46
Speaker
I think those early albums were designed to go from, say, beginning to end. They play off each other. You know, you ride the lightning, you fight fire with fire, comes out the gate, title track, for whom the bell tolls, then to fade to black their first bowels, so slow it down, then thrash with trapped under ice, escape.
00:58:09
Speaker
They wrote that. They were embarrassed by it as like a radio single. They hate that song. Oh, you're kidding. Yeah. And then they go into, you know, Creeping Death was just a big, big stadium anthem for them and then Call of Cthulhu. You know, they're big instrumental that it's just a big, bold song with no lyrics at all and ends with, you know, the drums and the chords all coming together to awaken the beast.
00:58:36
Speaker
and someone that they echo that Cthulhu, the HP Lovecraft story. They do it in a thing that should not be. And then on their latest record, their Dream No More, which is the Cthulhu Awakening. So yeah, they always harken back to the same monster. Oh, damn. Yeah, it's gone on for like 25 years. Some kind of monster, right? Oh, yeah, there's that one too. Geez.
00:58:59
Speaker
But no, you bring up something else that I really, the difference between the first and the second book. I think both the idea of the book as an essay and this other thing were sort of present in the first project, but I just decided to like lean on them, you know, like put my foot on the gas of them.
00:59:18
Speaker
It's kind of what you were saying with Ride the Lightning. Within that album, it sounds like you're talking about this beautiful pacing that sort of moves you through an experience. And that's this first thing that I'm saying. And it's a pretty death-themed record, too.
00:59:34
Speaker
Well, I would say, you know, you're getting like a singles heavy. I would say like their black album is more single. Right. Right. Sammy and Saba. True Holier Now. Unforgiven. Yeah. Like there's nothing that binds them the way that Master of Puppets or Ride the Lightning. That's mine. Master of Puppets is my favorite too. When did Cliff? When was Cliff's last album?
00:59:53
Speaker
Puppets. But this other thing that you're talking about where there's an instrumental, there's a stadium rocker, there's an illusion album, there's the attempt to go pop. I really wanted to make a book that did that too.
01:00:08
Speaker
And it's a I think it meets some resistance I think because people are like you know I want it all to be like to cool or however you say that right yeah or I want I want all of the essays to be like the the magazine east essay that I wrote or why can't you just have a bunch of insane.
01:00:25
Speaker
There's a book where a sign language gorilla tells an x-rated joke and there's a book where you can sell your essay about the first North American female in space being a spider to the Oxford American.
01:00:41
Speaker
But rarely do books allow for that kind of swing. Music albums all the time do that. My favorite example of that is Prince's Sign of the Times or maybe Henry Nilsen's Nilsen Schmilson.
01:00:57
Speaker
where like part of the enjoyment of the art piece is All the crazy different kinds of backflips that the band or the writer can do right? Yeah I really wanted this book to do to do that in a way that maybe was to almost went too far I if I do anything I'm always do it too far like I that's why I think my mo for most things but just maybe pushed it to the point where it would be a little jarring yeah, you know
01:01:27
Speaker
Did you intend for your book to be read beginning to end or did you like to hit the shuffle button on it? The first book, I think I resigned myself to shuffle button, but this one, I don't care how anybody reads it. I don't care if you don't read it, just like if you want to pretend that you read it, that's fine. But in my brain, when I read it, I read it from beginning to end. Okay.
01:01:52
Speaker
So when you're writing these, um, the essays of this nature that are so deeply researched, how do you, how do you get momentum to a piece and not feel and keep momentum going throughout the course of the whole work? Because there is that element of you start one and you finish and then you got to ramp up again. And how do you ride those energy waves?
01:02:17
Speaker
How do I ride that lightning? How do you ride that lightning? Of putting the whole book together, not within the essay, but how to keep the project, the overall project going. I found that the project asks you to work and to motivate yourself in different ways as it goes along.
01:02:36
Speaker
So in the beginning when you're just trying to figure out like, is this an album, right? Is this a thing? You're just writing a couple of pieces. Like I wrote the first piece that I wrote, I just wrote it because I was writing something. I had no, I wasn't like, and chapter one, right? And when it was done, I looked at it and I was like, there's something about this that feels very sustainable to me.
01:02:57
Speaker
And then I asked myself, what are the components of this that I could replicate? And I realized that it was about an animal who was famous who had a name. So then I just tried to find another one. And I tried to do the same thing. And then I compared those two and made kind of a description that I could carry on to the third essay.
01:03:17
Speaker
Once I got about that far, then I could make a table of contents almost for myself, sort of go and research and sort of date a bunch of potential candidates and make a table of contents. Half of the subjects aren't anywhere near the book, but I just made this list. And so then that was like a second kind of motivation or push is to
01:03:42
Speaker
just sort of start looking around, picking off from that list and trying to make an essay that responds to the first three or the first four or the first five, but also pushes it to another place. Once you have about six or seven essays, then the book starts telling you what it is. The book goes, oh wait, this isn't a book about animals at all. This is a book about people. So now when you look, you need to make sure that these animals
01:04:09
Speaker
or allow you to say things about humans that you haven't been able to say before, or, oh, this is the map of a consciousness of how humans have been looking at animals over 40,000 years, or over a number of years, so you need to arrange it chronologically.
01:04:24
Speaker
oh this book you know i think like around the fourth essay i learned about this thing called the bestiary or the bestiary which is this medieval kind of encyclopedia of animals usually made by monks that had never even seen half of the animals that they were talking about so it was full of conjecture and imagination which is kind of the way that i think my non-fiction is there's like hard facts
01:04:44
Speaker
about the animals and then there's the imagination of the people that are around it. So when I learned about the best theories and I wanted to use that as sort of a model for the book, then I needed to have an essay that helped explain to the reader that this was happening.
01:05:00
Speaker
Because i am this is all implicit work right so i couldn't just be like hello everyone this is my best year right so i had to have an essay relatively early in the book that talks about what the best area is so hopefully that argument will serve project itself.
01:05:17
Speaker
then there's a stage where you're like, so it's a totally different kind of motivation, right? It's like a little challenge. And then, then you're like, holy shit, these are all furry quadrupeds, I need to get some invertebrates up in here. So then you just started googling like famous reptiles, you know, and, and so then the book is asking you to diversify in that way. And finally,
01:05:38
Speaker
when you have the majority of the piece together and you know kind of what the argument is, it's just like putting together a research paper. There are just a couple of planks in the development that you haven't quite addressed. And so the finishing touches are you making sure that you've engaged that plank in the argument. So I realized
01:06:01
Speaker
really, really late in the game that there is no way that I could talk about these 40,000 years of people doing all these things to animals without implicating myself. Because I am no Jane Goodall. Like we talked about before, I don't like to go outside. I'm a representative of a culture that compromises animals in a million different ways. And as much as I hate writing personally or don't feel confident writing personally, I've got to go and try to represent myself.
01:06:30
Speaker
here. Yeah. You know, because that's the plank in the argument that was missing. Nobody was. I don't think the reader that I'm imagining in my head isn't real because it's kind of just me. But that's your ideal readers. No, it's like, you know, I don't like imagine my mother reading this book. I think it's too convoluted a process for me to like.
01:06:51
Speaker
And I would never ask someone to read the book the way that I want the book to be read because it is still a collection of essays that you can dip into before bed and be like, oh, this one's only a few pages long. That's how drunk I am. I'll read that. That's fine. But in my brain, I knew that there was like a missing piece of that logic of what I wanted the ideal reader to how I wanted them to surf the wave of the book.
01:07:15
Speaker
And so then it's almost like a check or a shopping list or something. It's almost like a role in a play where the script and everything's written and all you have to do is just kind of perform it. So yeah, all of that long thing is to say that those are very different requirements and so the motivation level to keep going is fueled by the diversity of asks, if that makes sense.
01:07:44
Speaker
Yeah, so much of what you're saying, I remember when Mary Carr was on and talking about her latest book of poetry. And it got to this question of tracking. Where is one going to slide in versus the other? Even Earl Swift, for his latest book, he talked about proportionality, mapping things out. So each chapter felt nicely weighted and not too bogged down by
01:08:12
Speaker
History or you know, he had to keep his various threads very even Susan same thing she Phi for her latest book the library book and she had a lot of her notes her story blocks on five by seven index cards and she would have various piles on a big table and she'd be like Well, this one's got 30 cards. This one has five
01:08:31
Speaker
And she could see that I got to start moving things around. In that sense, the book was telling her where to put things. So that kind of sounds like what your research was saying, like, oh, yeah, we need some invertebrates up in here and going. I like that you were listening to the book. The book was trying to tell you something.
01:08:49
Speaker
Oh yeah, I think a lot of the groundwork that you lay in the beginning of a project is to get to a place where you trust that eventually, I'm really stalled right now trying to figure out a third book, confession. And I think it's because I haven't felt that sense of trust that I felt when I finished the second or third essay that no matter, and I doubted myself the whole time I was putting the book together, but really deep down I knew that
01:09:17
Speaker
project at least or the subject at least would give me, if I could take what they gave me, I would have ample opportunities to keep going. I would be able, if I kept at it, to have a project that would start dictating to me what would happen. I was pretty confident about that really early on in both books and I think that's why I haven't been able to really pull the trigger on what the third project is going to be because
01:09:42
Speaker
I'm not feeling that trust, that sort of spidey sense, you know, that eventually it's going to be able to talk to me as much as I talk to it.
Seeking New Creative Projects
01:09:52
Speaker
Right. So how do you set up your days when you're in the throes of trying to write this book and you've got your teaching load as well? So how do you orchestrate your day to
01:10:09
Speaker
I'm trying to get better at it. It's like fitness. Every time school's out, I'm like, I'm going to work out every day. I'm going to do yoga in the morning, cardio at night. And then I do. And I'm like, God, I'm so good at this. I'm amazing at yoga and cardio.
01:10:24
Speaker
I'm the rock. I'm going to jump from one building to another building or whatever. And then the world starts and all of a sudden it's like, well, the one thing I can cut for my day is yoga or whatever, or, you know, cardio is, I don't have panic attacks or my new cardio or whatever. Um, it's the same with writing every summer. I tried to develop a really sensible practice. And then, um, once I get busy with this job, it sort of goes out the window. Um,
01:10:49
Speaker
So then I just set little goals for myself to just keep on nodding terms to quote Joe Didion with writing until I can find the space to really hammer down on a project. But when I'm in the throes of a project, when I'm in it, when I'm there and it's all on the walls and all the books, there's the
01:11:11
Speaker
I just sort of sacrificed a lot of time and I hope my boss doesn't hear a lot of professional material to move forward. But the little upkeep day to day, I've never been able to get good at. I don't write every day or anything like that.
01:11:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I was kind of wondering if that was part of your process. Even if you're in the middle of the project, you make sure you get 100 words down or if you had a limit or 45 minutes in the chair every morning or something. No, I think it would be better if I did. I think one of the reasons that I have this procrastinating thing is because
01:11:50
Speaker
Um, I've given myself only spaces where I can work hard and with this kind of tunnel vision. So even if it's like during a work week, it's like, okay, well I don't teach Friday and Saturday and Sunday. I have a do not disturb sign and I'll just like ask David to slide grilled cheese sandwiches under the door. I won't go out. You know, I don't have kids or anything. Um, I have cats, they can feed themselves. You know, we live within a yard with a lot of snakes. They eat snakes.
01:12:16
Speaker
So but I think so then when I have
01:12:22
Speaker
When I have an issue, I'll procrastinate because one of the things that I'll say is, oh, I don't have this ocean of focus and time to devote to it. Whereas if I just kind of nonchalantly checked in with myself as a writer every day, if there was a problem, I'd be like, you know what? You just have to do what you usually do. Just sit down. And it's just like with fitness. Just sit down and just run through the things. And then the endorphins would kick in. And I realize it wasn't so scary. But it's like sometimes going to the gym, the hardest part is just getting to the gym. Putting your shoes on, yeah.
01:12:51
Speaker
There actually yeah walking in the door of the gym because sometimes I drive to the gym and if I can't find a place to park I just drive I think to you know, I'm starting to think a little bit more about writing personally, I think I Think maybe I have a I've been thinking about some ideas where I would have to sort of think hard about my life and I really regret not just Checking in with myself as a person in writing journal at all
01:13:15
Speaker
Not consistently. One time in my life, David bought me a Polaroid camera. It's like 2004. That's cool. And I took a Polaroid every day because I couldn't get myself to write every day. So I was like, you know what? All you have to do is take one Polaroid and write one sentence every day.
01:13:33
Speaker
and I taped the Polaroids and the sentences in this composition book and I remember that I think I did it for about nine or ten months I remember that period in my life it was 2004 more clearly than anything of the past 14 years I remember it so and it was just one image and one sentence so if I wanted to write a memoir at this point I would only be able to
01:13:56
Speaker
about nine months in 2003. But I can only assume that if you were sort of thinking about yourself as a writer, thinking about yourself, not thinking about yourself as a professional writer, but using the tools as a writer to think about yourself every day, you would have that kind of access to self that would allow you to write about yourself more. Definitely. I've kept the journal since I was 16. You're kidding.
01:14:19
Speaker
probably 25 pretty thick journals that are you know when so when I'm so like 21 years worth of 22 years worth of them how often are you checking in about every day and how much are you ready
01:14:35
Speaker
These, the last five years has been much more volume intense. Okay. Um, but before then it was, I kind of did the math on the entries that it's basically been an average of one every three 2.5 to three days for the last 22 years. Wow. So that's, there's a great record of my high school years, which, which plays well into the, the baseball book that I've been, um, trying to finish a personal,
01:15:03
Speaker
Yeah, it's a memoir of my father in baseball. Oh, right. I saw that on your website in segments, right? It's going to be segmented, not a straight through book. Yeah. The one thread is me watching my father play ball at a senior soil pitch softball tournament. Cool. And then the other thread is just our history through sport, him kind of living
01:15:29
Speaker
vicariously through me and how baseball like bond us and then broke us when I was cut and didn't transfer and didn't keep going even though I could have burned out and and then how ultimately like 10 years after I was cut and then I watched those guys go out and win their tournament and I saw how much fun they had and how much fun I wasn't having when I was playing even though I had every reason that fun I was good I was on good teams and
01:15:55
Speaker
and i hated it you know i just was so fried and i saw how much fun they were having like you know what maybe my best way to reconcile the bitter end of my career is to go out and play again so this is an upstate new york and i have hooked up with a thirty and over wood bat league and played again had fun
01:16:10
Speaker
And all of a sudden, like my dad's calling me like every other day. And when we would go for six months without talking. Oh my God. And so I'm like, Oh, light bulb. It was just, you know, sport was our language and our commonality. And it was, and then, so the story just kind of spins on those axes.
01:16:29
Speaker
Oh my god, I can smell that book. It's like it's in the room already. And then are the journals helpful? Oh yeah. Because you're honest with yourself in your journals or you can see through your dishonesty. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm extremely, I am just an insecure person by nature and that's just especially heightened when I was in high school. Yeah. And so there's a pretty
01:16:51
Speaker
a very significant catalog of those feelings through there when I had every reason to be very confident and I wasn't. Good in school, good in sports, and I just had a shit brain.
01:17:06
Speaker
And so that's me, I'm working with Glenn on that to try to get it packaged in such a way. I mean, the thing's been technically done in a sense for a while, but I'm trying to get it to a point where it doesn't sound overwritten and the tone of it. Because sometimes I come in and try to be too funny and Glenn is just like, stop it. This isn't true. You're trying too hard. Stop.
01:17:34
Speaker
you know, stop trying to write the story, let the story write the story. You know, he words it better, but that's been that's the those are the wrinkles that I'm ironing over.
01:17:45
Speaker
And then you just sort of like excise whatever that is and just sort of like step back a few paces and then take a running start at doing it a little bit differently and then you patch that back into the manuscript. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, a lot of that and he notices where things are really thin. Like I need to talk to my sister and my mom.
01:18:05
Speaker
Excuse me, a bit more, just to fill in some holes. I think my dad's been critical about it. He's a tough nut to crack. Irish Catholic guy grew up outside of Boston. These guys don't talk.
01:18:22
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. I mean, I think I've seen seven or eight movies about that. Yeah. That's him. There he is. Is that Glenn's giving me some cool work arounds for that too? You could say like, well, this is just the way things were, or you can try to get, he's like, or you can try to write a novel or, you know,
01:18:38
Speaker
Is that a workaround? That's a too much workaround. This is completely not related, but do you think baseball, American baseball is somehow connected to the type of person who is withholding about things?
01:18:56
Speaker
Do you think there's a connection between the two like the way that the game is the way that it's played or the way that I'm thinking about like like all these like the universal baseball society the Robert Hoover book about this man who kind of lives this quiet like Walter Mitty life and has invented this fantasy league that he plays just for himself with his you know or whatever and then I'm thinking about like field of dreams and all that stuff too and
01:19:20
Speaker
Well, baseball lends itself, and I wrote a paper about this in a literary journalism class when I was an undergrad. It was baseball as literary journalism, and Roger Angel, the great New Yorker writer, you know, where is game time? I've got it up here. Here's game. All this baseball writing.
01:19:39
Speaker
So there's so much time between innings. And I'd argue that football might be more cerebral at this point, the way they strategize in football. And it's so fast, too. So it's almost like speed chess. They can game plan as much as they want, but I mean, you've got 40 seconds between plays, and it's like bang, bang, bang, bang.
01:20:02
Speaker
Baseball is a bit more methodical and allows for deeper thought and I think it allows for deeper writing.
01:20:10
Speaker
It seems like people don't touch each other as much in baseball. I mean, I know there's touching, but that reserve seems, you know, like basketball, you can hear their bodies even if you're watching it because you're in that little arena and football is very much obviously a contact sport. Baseball feels like you have this bat that's like an extension of yourself and someone from very far away throws another inanimate object at you.
01:20:33
Speaker
Yeah. What makes it kind of a sport that lends itself to, that feels quieter about it is that there's no whistles. There's no clock. Oh yeah. Just that organ. Yeah. That was the Fenway Park one. Now they're probably just jamming some Drake or something. Right. In my feelings. Yeah.
01:20:57
Speaker
But also, it's the only sport where the offense does not have the ball, too. The defense has the ball. Oh, yeah.
Baseball & Writing: Individual vs. Team Dynamics
01:21:06
Speaker
You know what I mean? It just has these little quirks to it that lend itself to, I don't know, just deeper thought.
01:21:13
Speaker
Yeah, totally. Oh, wow. And you're so vulnerable. I guess you're even more vulnerable in basketball, but there's not bats in basketball. Yeah. And with baseball, it's unique in the sense that it's a team sport, but it's very individualistic too. It's the pitcher versus the hitter. Right. And then, you know, there are definitely, you know, team strategies, but ultimately there is this one on one thing that happens every single play. So,
01:21:40
Speaker
I don't know how we got onto that. Well, the journals, the journals kind of led to all this. There's just so many nonfiction writers that played sports. And as we're talking, I think a lot of them it's baseball, right? Like Justin, my colleague, he was a baseball player, if I'm not mistaken, where he writes about playing baseball in his book, Son of a Gun, which is really good.
01:22:02
Speaker
I mean, I don't know. I think I like to overanalyze in completely pop psychology ways, things that I have no business analyzing, but there is sort of this weird, and it is America's past time, but it feels so guarded in a way, and isolating. There's unwritten rules. There's a buck this thick of unwritten rules. Is that true? Yeah.
01:22:23
Speaker
Yeah, just the way retaliations thrown at players and you're putting a ball in their ear. So yeah, it's it can get a little nasty.
Nonfiction & Unexpected Historical Events
01:22:30
Speaker
Did you see that documentary that the well, well country guys did about the Oregon baseball team? No. What's the name of it? I don't remember. But they that you know, the well, well country documentary. I don't. Oh, man. OK, so you got to have them on. They're awesome. I feel like I don't have to say.
01:22:51
Speaker
They it's this Netflix documentary. It's just won the Emmy for best documentary about the largest America's largest biochemical warfare attack happened in Oregon and it was propagated by a cult or they wouldn't refer to themselves as a cult but a religious society that lived up in like Antelope, you know up in the above the Dalles
01:23:15
Speaker
And it was in the 80s. They were called the Rajneesh Puran and they all wore red. And so they took over this town that had been just run by kind of cowboys. And it is totally well archived. So there's all this like 80s news footage of this. It's called this place Rajneesh Puran and then things get really crazy.
01:23:33
Speaker
So the two documentarians that made that, the first thing that they made was about this Oregon minor league baseball team that was run, I think, by their uncle. And the Oregon Historical Society helped them with it. It's awesome. You should totally have them on.
01:23:51
Speaker
Related to Kurt Russell, maybe somehow. Wow. We had him on the live wire show. Cool. They were great. Yeah.
Balancing Ambition with Self-Doubt
01:23:59
Speaker
You know, you've referenced self doubt a lot. How do you deal with that? That's going to be on my tombstone reference. Yeah. Yeah. How do I deal with self doubt? Yeah. Um. Do you think it's possible to have a lot of self doubt but still be ambitious?
01:24:19
Speaker
I think it's possible to have a lot of self-doubt and be ambitious and be confident too. I don't know, maybe not. I'm one who's mired in a black blanket of self-doubt. This is what happens when you invite people over your house man versus talking to him over the phone. We're just really gay.
01:24:45
Speaker
I think the in-person thing, there's an energy, too, that allows the conversation to feel shorter than it is, too. And there's a momentum that happens. I can sense when people are glazing over on the phone, too. I swear, like, all right, we're up on an hour. I'll keep you for a little while longer. And here we are, like, up over, well over. And it's almost 90 minutes.
01:25:07
Speaker
You're kidding. Yeah. So I think I am, I think I'm ambitious. I think I'm very ambitious person about certain things, not all things, not fitness. Um, and I think that's the thing. I have a lot of self doubt. I'm, I, I convinced myself sometimes that things that actually happened that are good haven't happened at all.
01:25:33
Speaker
Uh, like real bad. Um, but I think you, even if I have that self doubt to that extent, my, my interest in meeting these kinds of goals that I think I associate with being an actualized person or being real, right? Having not like I want my book to do well, but I want to finish this or I want to, I want to, I want to achieve the thing that I go on off at the mouth about, about nonfiction.
01:26:04
Speaker
Those are the two things. I yell a lot as a teacher about things that I think non-fiction can do and things that I want it to do and things that people who want to make art maybe should consider and those things I want to prove. And then I also want to finish something. This is the only thing that I've ever finished is books. I've never finished anything else. I've never been married.
01:26:28
Speaker
I've never had children. I mean, I guess I got a college degree, but you know, like, I mean, that doesn't really count. Well, those things you like versus but like the how like hungry are you to be to be like the writer of several books? And maybe like the maybe this is more satisfying in a sense. Yeah, I mean, I don't.
01:26:52
Speaker
I don't want to write a million books, but when I get an idea for a book that I know I could do if I was a little bit better than I am, then that's the thing. For the second book, I started out kind of tricking myself and going like, well, just get a book that'll get you tenure.
01:27:15
Speaker
I thought about this little cute kind of occasional essays about animals where I do the research and it's really fun and there's like 40 of them rather than like 15 and it's just this this delightful book that you know your grandma might read it's just full of this one and then but once I get it in on it I just couldn't let myself work like that like the first essay that I wrote I was like you know what I think this really needs to be an iambic pentameter
01:27:42
Speaker
So so and then the shape of this this thing, this way of thinking and this way of sort of making the essay do what I wanted to do kind of took over. Yeah. You know, so even when I try to set a different kind of course, I think that book would have been infinitely more successful. So it would have played to a kind of ambition that I don't think I have. I do love. Knowing. I love I love believing that
01:28:14
Speaker
I don't know how to say this without sounding like cocky. I don't feel cocky at all. I mean, I think my book could be considered completely useless, right? But, you know, so can paintings, you know, so please, I mean, I'm an actor, like we would work for three weeks, you know, 12 hours a day and like ruining our relationships and, you know, whatever, just to make this thing that like 600 people see over the course of a four week run and then it dissipates and it never exists again. Right. So, I mean,
01:28:43
Speaker
I believe, I don't mind the idea of, I don't want to make something that lasts, you know? I don't mind that all of my shit is gonna turn to dust, it's fine.
01:28:53
Speaker
But in a finite space of time, I want people to see that I challenged myself to do something, and it's a challenge that only I even know how to make, you know? It's not like a script or something, it's like a, I set this ridiculous challenge for myself that nobody else cares about, and then I do it. That's the thing. So it's like self-prescription, self-ambition, and self-doubt. It sounds so narcissistic, actually, now that I think about it.
01:29:22
Speaker
But at least it doesn't involve anybody else, so nobody has to deal with it. It's all, you know...
Importance of Completing Projects
01:29:27
Speaker
A lot of people have a hard time finishing things. It seems like that's kind of your...
01:29:36
Speaker
That sounds stupid, but that's the goal. Some people will find every reason not to finish something. They'll be in the ugly middle of this and then they'll be like, ah, there's something shinier over here. I'd rather start something new. You get in and sink your teeth in and you're not going to write the next book until you finish.
01:29:55
Speaker
I don't have the bandwidth to do that. I don't I mean like when I eat a plate that has steak and mashed potatoes and green beans on it I can't eat I eat one and then the other and then the other and I can't write two essays at once I have a really hard time teaching and writing. I'm an Aries, you know, we We were not able to sort of like scope the landscape. We don't have that bandwidth, right? What are you? What's your birthday? July 1st
01:30:19
Speaker
Oh, you're cancer. Cancers are good. Cancers have a lot of feelings, though. But they're very loyal. Very, very loyal. Oh, cool. That's great. Does that make sense in our limited interactions? Yeah, I mean...
01:30:36
Speaker
The only cancers I can think of right now are men, and they all are men and they all played baseball. But yeah, they're like, they're not like effusive, but they're warm and friendly, and you know, but they're not like, they don't perform, cancers don't perform care, they just care.
01:30:57
Speaker
Does that make sense? Yeah, it's like the difference between like a Somebody from maybe New England and a southerner southerners sometimes perform care. Oh, yeah but except like if you're from New York and you care about someone you just Quietly fucking care about them and then yell at them or whatever people from New York Yeah, you see the leaky faucet and you just go and fix it. You just fix it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and you don't go. Oh my god
01:31:21
Speaker
I'm just coming over here. What are you doing? Oh, look at this. Hey, come over here and watch me. No, like they don't do that. It doesn't seem it doesn't seem like I've been to Boston twice. So I don't know if I can if I should say that about twice. I had a great time. Papercuts bookstore in Jamaica Plain. They're awesome.
01:31:40
Speaker
What have you what's what's been your experience with with this latest book and what it what it has been your great takeaway of having gone through this through this and finished this at what if you know what it what. How is this built you up to the point where you are now.
01:31:59
Speaker
the making of it or the reception or the release. Yeah, I guess just the the making of it. How is this made you better for book three? You know, what did you, you know, the carry over and the momentum that you're feeling from this, you know, what are you then sort of excited about for the next one? Well, like I said, I forgot everything that it's just like ground fucking zero again. But
01:32:22
Speaker
I think it was a more ambitious undertaking than the first one. So maybe that's like, okay, then maybe you should be a little more ambitious this time. Maybe more personal with the third one. Yeah, right. Like that's scary. I mean, that may not work. I'll just be coming and talking to you in five years about my book. That's about, it's like, I don't know, like famous beans in history or something. We'll just have you on the show every six months and your third book will be just this running transcript of our conversation.
01:32:50
Speaker
Yes. Oh, that sounds so good. I wouldn't have to do anything. I could get tenure. It'd be great. Yeah, I think I think that's probably the main the main thing is like you. I do trust that setting a high bar will is a thing, you know, that I could do, I guess.
01:33:16
Speaker
I think also, I think some of the things that are kind of not wrong, but that I wish I had done differently in the book, I really want to get right this time. Like I researched the book and the book is full of research, but I think there's an even better and more responsible is not the right word, but more maybe accountable way of doing the research or thinking about research or using the research to motivate material. And I'm ready to do that too.
01:33:41
Speaker
You know, I'm not saying that the book is full of lies, but I know but it's I think there's over 250 sources that you use to write these essays and that's not necessarily something I've associated with essay. Sometimes I always feel like it's more like Sedaris, which is just like
01:33:58
Speaker
When I think of an essay, I think of, oh yeah, his performative piece is based almost solely on memory, which is always true. He does some research here and there. But yours are really grounded in that research. And it's something that can be really hard not to get lost in the weeds of research. So how did you, as someone who loves the library and doing that, how did you not get lost in the research and actually get down to brass tacks and get down to the writing?
Research vs. Writing Completion
01:34:27
Speaker
Well, there was definitely plenty of time where I should have stopped researching. Like 100% admit that I was using it as opportunities to not write. But the cool thing is that eventually the writing project is just like tapping you in the shoulder so hard that you have to abandon the wormholes and get started.
01:34:47
Speaker
And usually it's because of something that you uncover in the research, right? Like when I learned, I learned that this, I was trying to figure out what cat I wanted to write about. I only let myself write about one species for the most part per, I couldn't have two dogs or two cats or whatever. And I learned about this really famous cat poem that somebody had told me about when I was like 27. It's actually missing its entire left hand side.
01:35:13
Speaker
And so I was researching the world of this man when he wrote this poem in the mid 18th century and what it was like, how people treated cats then, which is really sad. And the superstitions about cats and London and the publishing industry. This guy was big and the sort of kind of, oh, I can't remember the name of the street.
01:35:37
Speaker
It was this 1780s writing when there were a lot of newspapers and periodicals, sort of like Samuel Johnson time, right? I was just totally loving taking out shelves of books in the library and reading about the great fire and who was queen, whatever. But then when I learned that this poem that this guy wrote when he was in a mental asylum for a short period of his life about a cat,
01:36:02
Speaker
was not even found until like 75 years ago and they know now that it's missing its left side. I had to stop researching because the project was, I get to try to finish it, right? Like I get to like, it's like the opposite of an erasure, right? Like I get to add and it's kind of, I call it the oh shit moment because that's not really an easy thing to do. Yeah.
01:36:22
Speaker
But I had I mean, I couldn't like the possibilities for that were just sort of like multiplying in my head. And so I had to stop reading about, you know, the way that padlocks worked in the latter 18th century, you know, houses in London or whatever. I had to jump in into the project.
01:36:41
Speaker
Yeah, when I was speaking to David Gran about writing Killers of the Flower Moon. Oh, that's such a good book. It's amazing. It's one of the best. It's probably the best book I've read this year, just in terms of the best narrative book I've read for sure.
01:36:58
Speaker
And, uh, but I remember him talking about, he'd say, Oh, so-and-so was sitting on a stoop. And he's like, wait a minute. I got to make sure. And that there was actually a stoop on this house. And so it's like, he's got to either try to find a photograph or find property records that somehow would indicate if it did have a stoop. So that, that's kind of like a, another wormhole that, I mean, that could take a whole day to try to figure out, is it worth it to have that detail? And if it's going to take you a day to do it, but
01:37:28
Speaker
I've had those days that my space essay was like that. Like every anytime I wanted to use any now and I had to go and everything in NASA is documented. So I had to go. Yeah, which is kind of fun if you don't really feel like writing. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds hardcore, though. Yeah.
Improving Writing Skills
01:37:45
Speaker
What would you say you've learned the most in the last five years or so and maybe a habit that or something five years ago that you're better at today than you were five years ago?
01:37:57
Speaker
Oh, um, I think I'm getting better at sentences, but I'm still got a long way to go. But I do think if you keep going and keep paying attention to yourself and keep reading, your sentences do
01:38:22
Speaker
I'm more nimble with them than I was before I taught a class in syntax in the sentence sort of on a personal dare where I had to really learn I think you're younger than I am but I was the child of like whole grammar so I never really got top parts of speech and shit it was this sort of pre no child left behind way of teaching English and
01:38:41
Speaker
So I didn't know anything about grammar. I just sort of instincted my way through. And then I told myself that I was going to teach this class on style in the sentence and spent a summer trying to teach myself grammar and then trying to teach other people grammar. And then when I started working on the book, I felt more nimble. I felt like I had more tools in my toolbox to play and to make a sentence do what I wanted it to do.
01:39:07
Speaker
Uh-huh and I'm still I mean That there's so many sentences in this book that I wish I could just swallow every page You know that of every copy just just eat it up. But like I do think that that's better I think I think I'm better at being kind of open with myself about what I don't understand And not like showing up and performing as a writer in the early drafts. I think I'm able to sort of write like a apprentice to the piece and I think to
01:39:36
Speaker
And of course, getting better is not meaning that I think that I'm good at it yet. I'm just getting, I'm noting that it is possible to improve. I've always used to just yell that like, because I think my mentor in grad school said it, that the project or the inquiry of an essay should dictate the way that it moves forward, like maybe unlike a memoir where you kind of know where it ends.
01:40:01
Speaker
When you sit down to write in the tradition of an essay, you should not 100% know where the piece is going to end up. Not necessarily in terms of topic, but maybe in terms of argument or form or shape or sound. You don't make an outline and then fill in the gaps of that outline. And while I never did that,
01:40:18
Speaker
I didn't 100% know how to activate that, you know, it's going to figure itself out how to turn the essay on so that it would guide me. I still don't 100% know, but I am closer. I actually believe that I have evidence of that being true now that you can just like I was talking about with the book sort of dictating how it moves, like there is a way to listen.
01:40:40
Speaker
while you're researching. I think research is really important in energizing that theory, right? I think I'm closer to being able to manipulate that in a way that is satisfying and not just a bullshit thing that I scream at
Overcoming Self-Disgust in Writing
01:40:57
Speaker
my students.
01:40:57
Speaker
Every once in a while. How do you deal with, I'm going to assume that you, you like me or get sick of yourself. Oh, I'm so sick of myself right now, man. We've been talking to each other like shut up Elena. Yeah, but not in terms of our actual personalities.
01:41:16
Speaker
But our own writing and going over it like that a big reason why I'm having a hard time even getting through the edits of that memoirs I'm so sick of it. I'm so sick of that person in that story and I'm so sick of the just I can almost recite it word for word and you know the 70,000 words it is I've gone through it so many times and I'm so sick of myself
01:41:38
Speaker
Do you have moments like that? Yeah, I think I have a little bit of an advantage over you because I Often don't get sick of the subject because the subject is so rarely me so I hate the way that I'm writing about this rhino But all I have to do is sit by myself and think about the fact that this rhino
01:41:55
Speaker
Existed and then people reacted to it the ways that they did and the world was so different look at all these cool things you know that never That's inexhaustibly fascinating to me, and if I'm sick of myself It's it's really easy to become sort of so maybe like with like a book where it's you you would have to
01:42:12
Speaker
You maybe talk to someone about like, like I am very energized by your project, even though I don't know you, because you're talking about these kind of larger, you're talking about these things that tap into these larger understandings that I have about this game and about fathers and sons and about
01:42:28
Speaker
what it means to burn out in college. And then all of a sudden the book is there, you know, maybe like talking to people about like the reasons people are going to read that book or not. It's not just that you were alive and you played baseball and then you talk to your dad on the phone more now. It's because all of these things are connected to the archetypal. Yeah, that's the good. That's the, I think the goal is successful. Well, that should be the goal of any successful memoir is that you're more or less a conduit for the reader's experience.
01:42:57
Speaker
Oh, that's so hard. If I've done my job right and I hope I'm getting there, it's it anyone, whether fathers and daughters, fathers and sons, they're going to overlay their experience over mine and my father's. They'll kind of we will dissolve me, dad and everyone else, and then they will be emerged in their own truth through it.
Memoir Writing Goals
01:43:21
Speaker
So that's kind of where I'm at in the thing where, you know, try not to be self-indulgent, but try to tap into those themes that people will, they're just gonna be reading what I'm writing, but they're gonna be kind of lost in their own memories. Yeah. And they'll kind of forget that I'm even there.
01:43:38
Speaker
That's got to be hard to bring into the writing room in a way. I think you can only do it when you're on the 20th draft, which I'm sure is where I'm at at this point. I started it in 2009, I think, and I've taken two two-year breaks from it too. I just put it in the drawer and said, I'll see you when I feel like it.
01:44:01
Speaker
Did you write the Philly book in between or did you write it before? Before. Before. But that was a all the reporting for the Saratoga book was summer 2009, some backfill research into the winter of 2010. And I wrote that. I wrote that book in five months. Wow. Like 3000 words a day. Holy shit.
01:44:25
Speaker
And then it took another, you know, six months to a year of rewrites. And then it was a very, I won't bore listeners with this story, but the way it got published was a very serendipitous thing that maybe I can share a different time. Cool. I'll tune in. And with you off mic. Send me an email so I make sure I don't miss that one. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things where you just have to kind of be open to, here I go.
01:44:54
Speaker
I was just at a retail job, I was sitting across from somebody who happened to know an editor looking for a Saratoga book, and I had the manuscript written. I wrote it on spec, which is not something you typically do in non-fiction, but I just wrote the thing. And then pretty much, I sent it off, and a few months later, they're like, oh yeah.
01:45:14
Speaker
Yeah, we'll publish it. Oh my God, yeah. So that's what happened. That's one of those stories that like when you almost don't want to tell because I think people listen to writers telling their publishing stories so that they can find templates. Yeah. But there's no.
Publishing & Chance Encounters
01:45:28
Speaker
No, no, you just have to.
01:45:31
Speaker
Well, the lesson is you never know what chance encounter might lead to some good fortune for you. You have to just be open to it. Anyone you shake hands with, it could be a person who knows someone, but you're never going into that situation expecting something like that to happen, but you never know if it can. Just go in there with an open mind and an open heart and some
01:45:56
Speaker
genuine interest in the person across from you. And then, I mean, nothing bad will happen, but maybe something good will happen too. Right. And you don't have to necessarily go to like a $200 entry fee writing conference to meet people who can help facilitate your projects. Maybe being in the world for free and being open and empathetic can help too. Exactly. Yeah. Oh my God. That's a good lesson. I think so. Maybe we should leave it in.
01:46:27
Speaker
Just cut all that stuff I said about how much I hate myself or how much I like about myself. Just cut both of those things. Alright, maybe we'll have a group edit for this. I think I should really be mindful of your time. I feel like I could talk to you for another two hours, but that just means we'll have to have another one of these. Maybe I'll bring the rig up to Corvallis and that would save you a trip down here.
01:46:54
Speaker
So, you get the dishes done, you scrub that toilet, don't forget the backside, gets nasty. Did you walk your dog? This was a good dog walking episode.
Sharing and Promoting Podcast Episodes
01:47:05
Speaker
How great is Elena? You want her to be a regular on the show? Like once a quarter? Ping me on Twitter at Brendan O'Mara and maybe even ping Elena too and say yeah.
01:47:15
Speaker
go on the show every three months or so. Check yes or no. Yeah, we rock like we're in middle school. I wonder what it's like to be as smart as Elena or as talented. I wonder what that's like. I wouldn't know. Anyway.
01:47:33
Speaker
Hey, if you dig the show, consider sharing it with the CNF and buddy. Why? Because I don't want to rely on social networks to do the work. Those are just wormholes that things get buried. We are the social network and if we email and share with friends, we are tethered by something more than algorithms, right?
01:47:57
Speaker
Also, don't forget about the whole monthly newsletter. It's a bit of monthly goodness. 12 times a year. Head over to BrendanOmero.com. Hey, hey. And subscribe. You can unsubscribe at any time, but know that I take it wicked personally if you do. No pressure. Remember, if you can't do interview, see ya.