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Episode 177: Steven Moore — Essays About to Break, Keeping Track of the Positive, and ‘The Longer We Were There’
128 Plays5 years ago
Steven Moore is here to talk about his memoir The Longer We Were There: A Memoir of a Part-Time Soldier (University of George Press, 2019).
Thanks to Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction for the support.
Link up to the show on Twitter and Instagram @cnfpod.
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Transcript
The Art of Essay Writing
00:00:00
Speaker
I think one of the most challenging and sometimes frustrating parts of essay writing is when you learn how to write an essay, you basically just learn how to write that essay.
00:00:19
Speaker
Even L. Moore, author of The Longer We Were There, a memoir of a part-time soldier, University of Georgia Press, is here to talk about things. But first, a word from our flagship sponsor.
00:00:35
Speaker
Discover your story, man, with Bay Path University's fully online MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing. Recent graduate Christine Brooks recalls her experience with Bay Path's MFA faculty as being quote, filled with positive reinforcement and commitment
00:00:50
Speaker
They have a true passion and love for their work. It shines through with every comment, every edit, and every reading assignment. The instructors are available to answer questions, big and small.
Introduction to the Podcast
00:01:01
Speaker
And it is obvious that their years of experience as writers and teachers have a faculty that I doubt can be beat anywhere. End quote. Don't just take her word for it, man. Apply now at baypath.edu slash MFA. Classes begin January 21st, first, first.
00:01:21
Speaker
Well, it was Nelson Mandela who once said, the greatest glory in living lies, not in never falling, but in rising every time we riff.
00:01:45
Speaker
oh boy i found a list of hundred famous quotes and you're in for a hundred of those riff jokes you've been warned so this is the creative non-fiction podcast my podcast cnf the greatest podcast in the world i'm your host brenda domera hey hey this is the show where i talk to badass writers radio producers documentary filmmakers about the art and craft of telling true stories
00:02:14
Speaker
here
Reflections on Personal Growth
00:02:15
Speaker
we are how are you how's it going i was thinking today i was looking over at my bookshelf and it something made me think of something that took place like eight years ago or so it made me think of how our 30s are a time of when things are supposed to be starting to happen
00:02:35
Speaker
I'm getting to the end of my 30s and nothing has happened. Feels that way. I mean, it feels that way. Stalemate, it's kind of a stalemate feeling and it's frustrating and demoralizing. You're up against that wall of, am I delusional to keep going or am I just a late bloomer? Piers and certainly idols, they were moving the chains, man, in their 30s. At least I felt that way.
00:03:02
Speaker
I remember my early thirties. This new book came out called The Next Wave. It's on my shelf right here. It's a collection of a new generation of literary journalists. It's edited by Walt Harrington and Mike Sager. Mike Sager's been on the show, I believe, episode 95. To this day, I have no business being part of such a great anthology.
Origin of the Podcast
00:03:23
Speaker
But I remember at the time being so angry with myself.
00:03:27
Speaker
and the world that I wasn't doing the type of work that I wanted to do. Certainly, I wasn't doing the kind of work important enough to get noticed that time, eight or seven or eight years ago, whenever it was. And I was getting better because I didn't even know how this next wave even got the opportunities to ride that wave.
00:03:49
Speaker
I was on the beach, man, and didn't even know the wave was coming, and then it was gone. I remember at that time that feeling further imprinted over the next few years of being on this escalator. But it was going down, right? And I was walking up. And with every step, I was staying in place.
00:04:11
Speaker
Or if I really sprinted I might make it up two steps might slide back down tired burned out bitter resentful meanwhile peers people I admired around the same age a little bit older some sometimes younger were on the up escalator and only that but climbing up so that that's how it felt I felt like everyone was just creating this distance and it was about this time that I decided to start this podcast of course to work through a lot of those charbroiled bitterness
00:04:41
Speaker
feelings. But now I'm almost 40 and I feel like I wasted my 30s. This time when we're supposed to start moving, when your career is trending in a direction that makes your 40s all the more exciting. Ever feel like you lost a decade of your life? That's what it feels like.
00:04:59
Speaker
Can't get it back. So what are you going to do about it?
Meeting Stephen Moore
00:05:02
Speaker
Today's show is also brought to you by sunk costs. A cost you can no longer recover. Sunk costs. Go on. Waste a decade. Anyway, Stephen Moore is here. And we met about a year ago. I was standing in line.
00:05:16
Speaker
An overflow crowd to see my best friend Elizabeth Ross. She's not really my best friend, but I like saying that. My real best friend is Bronwyn Dickey. She's not really my best friend either, but I like making things weird. I was in line to see Elizabeth, and I happened to be talking to her friend, and then this guy turns around because he recognized my voice, and that I was from this Soggy Dog podcast that you listened to, and his name was Stephen Moore.
00:05:46
Speaker
Fast forward a year, and his memoir, The Longer We Were There, a memoir of a part-time soldier published by University of Georgia Press, came out and won the AWP Award for Creative Nonfiction. It's an amazing book and one of my favorite memoirs of the year, right up there with the honey bus and the recovering.
Stephen Moore's Early Writing Journey
00:06:04
Speaker
In any case, Steven is here to talk about his book and his writing and what it means when an essay is about to break. Oh yes, and this episode is also sponsored by this riff.
00:06:23
Speaker
Um, well, I was always like, I mean, I was always a reader. I was always interested in, in books. And I, I came, like I've only understood this really recently, but I came from a position where I, I was, I was around, like, I was in like a school where we had like a weird amount of like creative writing opportunities. Like we had like a dedicated creative writing class. There was a literary magazine in my high school, even though it was a pretty small high school. Like there were, there was advanced creative writing. There was like.
00:06:53
Speaker
other classes on literature and prose where it was contemporary reading. I had kind of this space where I was really encouraged to pursue it, which I've come to understand is pretty special and pretty rare. And then from there, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to keep studying. And that was the thing that I was really passionate about was books and reading and writing and being able to communicate and express that way.
00:07:20
Speaker
Just by chance, I grew up half an hour from Iowa City, so my National Guard was there anyway. I wanted to study writing. It was a really straightforward decision. I went on a campus visit to the University of Northern Iowa just to do one other school, and I talked to this academic advisor, and she's like, what do you want to do? And I told her, I want to study writing and books. And she's like, yeah, you should not go here. You should totally go to the University of Iowa.
00:07:49
Speaker
I was like, yeah, yeah, that's probably right. And so I went there and I started studying mostly like fiction, and I did like a year of poetry during undergrad. And then from there, I got into nonfiction, like my last year at Iowa. Yeah, during around this, you know, the same time, like the other part of my life was the National Guard, where I enlisted when I was 17, I started going to drill
00:08:18
Speaker
during this senior year of high school, I would go to do training in the summer. And it was kind of like this alternating piece, which became like increasingly and increasingly strange, especially when I got to Iowa City, where, you know, being on campus was a certain kind of like culture, a certain kind of community. And then on the weekends, I would be a training and it was just the absolute flip side is the absolute opposite. And paying between those
00:08:48
Speaker
to identities was something that I started to want to use my interest in writing to think through and talk about.
Balancing Military and Writing Life
00:08:57
Speaker
And so what was your thought process in terms of enlisting in the National Guard? And take us to that moment of why you wanted to pursue that as part of your adult career options. Yeah, it's weird.
00:09:16
Speaker
it seems really juvenile in retrospect, like, it was really, it was really about like belonging, I think to me, like, I really was like attracted to this idea where you just like show up, and people would tell you what to do, and you would do it, and the people next to you get told what to do, and they would do it. And then it would just kind of add up to this larger, this larger accomplishment in this larger, important thing that you were all doing as a group, it seems so
00:09:44
Speaker
ridiculous, because that's how all jobs work. But it was like kind of couched in this really savvy rhetoric of like service and selflessness and like giving of yourself. And that felt very, that felt really attractive to me. And I really liked that I could still be like a student within that culture that I didn't have to completely, completely stop the rest of my life. I could kind of do it
00:10:12
Speaker
on the side, which for me just made it a little bit more strange. That's kind of where I was coming from. Did you find that it was really hard to have a boot in each world? It's such disparate territory, so to speak. Yeah, I did. I found it really difficult because college is that time when you're really figuring out your identity and you're kind of playing with things and you're trying to figure out who you want to be.
00:10:42
Speaker
I would kind of show up to actually like in literature classes or just being around other writer type folks on campus. And the context there, the rules there seemed like to be of one kind of space. And then I would be in this different, much more conservative culture with the guard and on the weekends. And because they were so different, I had a really hard time figuring out what
00:11:12
Speaker
was important to me. I would just be seeing these totally different communities, these totally different cultures, and it just made it very difficult for me to figure out what I valued and what I prioritized because I was looking at these totally disparate versions of how you could see the same events. Instead of making it very clear, one of these people is right and one of them is wrong,
00:11:37
Speaker
I just didn't know what to make of it and I had a really hard time sorting through it. I had a really difficult time deciding what I felt and who I was going to be and what I was going to take from each one of these experiences and what I was going to go forward with.
00:11:53
Speaker
Yeah, that it strikes me as something that it's got to be very kind of not confusing in a way because you want like if you're in one territory you almost feel like you know if you're you know with your guard unit your your mind is probably like I Kind of wish I was writing or reading and then in the other way you like feel the burden of the other thing so it must have been hard to just feel settled in one or the other and
00:12:17
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And like, there would be these weird moments where they
Embracing Nonfiction Writing
00:12:21
Speaker
would kind of like clash, like they would immediately like confront each other. And like, this isn't in the book, but there's, I remember this like moment where, um, I was on deployment. I think it was in, what's been in logman province and I had like some downtime and I was reading John DeGata's about a mountain and my lieutenant like walked by.
00:12:40
Speaker
my bunk and he's just like, what the fuck are you reading? I told him what it was about and I was like, well, it's about, you know, like how we store nuclear waste and like the kind of the theoretical implications of this really specific thing. And he's like, so who wrote it? And it's like, it's this nonfiction writer. He's like, how, like, how does he have the authority? Like what makes him such an expert? He's like, well, I mean, he's a smart guy. He did his research. I don't know. Like he wrote a book. Like I had no idea how to explain.
00:13:10
Speaker
Like the rules of this like book of creative nonfiction to my lieutenant and I was just like he's a smart guy He's a he's a writer and he did it and he's just like well. I'm a smart guy and he walked off Yeah, I guess so but like it was just like weird clash right it was completely incapable of describing like what I valued about this book to somebody like who is from just like a different different kind of culture, but those kinds of things happen and
00:13:40
Speaker
where they would kind of conflict and those moments just kind of stuck with me. And I was just kind of curious on like about how to work through them.
00:13:50
Speaker
When you took the non-fiction class, and you kind of allude to it in your memoir, too, that it was kind of like almost like a thinning of the fiction herd, and you hit the, to kind of usher you into that direction. And what was that experience like when you, having probably read a lot of fiction and poetry and like, and then seeing that a lot of those tools can be applied to the non-fiction backdrop? What was that like for you?
00:14:18
Speaker
Yeah, so I what was happening at Iowa at that time is they were creating a creative writing track. So like within the English major, you could kind of focus on creative writing and you had to pick a genre to apply and everybody wanted to be in fiction. So they kind of had to take people from fiction and be like, yeah, sure. Maybe you should try nonfiction.
00:14:41
Speaker
And I was one of those people and I was sort of grumpy about it and reluctant to do it. But I had two instructors who were just like the best ambassadors you could imagine for nonfiction writing. And, you know, the syllabi were just really full of exciting essayists. I mean, it was Didion and Baldwin and like Eula Biss and Andrew Monson, Abigail Thomas. And part of what was so interesting is like,
00:15:11
Speaker
Some of it was identifiable tools from fiction and identifiable tools from poetry, but some of it was just so different than what I thought nonfiction was. It was really exhilarating because it just felt like a completely new genre that I had never heard of before, the way that they were practicing it.
00:15:29
Speaker
You mentioned, of course, Diddy and Thomas and a few of the other writers, but who were some that really clicked with you in a sense? If I'm really humming on all cylinders, I want to kind of aim for him or her. That's the stuff that really clicks with me. Yeah, it's tough because a lot of the people that I was really excited about, I don't think you could see their work in any of my work. I was really excited to read
00:15:58
Speaker
Andrew Monson for the first time, because those essays felt so different to me than what I thought nonfiction looked like. We read failure and iteration, which I think was in a ninth letter at the time, and then it was in one of his collections. But it's so visually different on the page, and it's so driven just by like the force of his thinking. And it always feels like the essay is about to break. And he's just like always having to keep it
00:16:27
Speaker
together and keep it moving. And you can kind of see like, it's it seems almost really frail, but also very nimble. And that was a really exciting piece for me. And I was always like, that's a piece that I could return to and feel inspired by, just because it's so the research of it is so interesting. And just like the the thinking like on the page, like the inquiry, like
00:16:56
Speaker
on the page was excited. When you say the essay feels like it was about to break, what do you mean by that? It seems like I think the kinds of like pieces that I feel really excited to read and like to write are the pieces where it feels like the writer is a little bit lost and they're kind of at the limit of something or they're taking some kind of risk on the page. And I think
Reading and Analyzing Writing
00:17:25
Speaker
Monson is one of those writers who's doing that pretty frequently, really pushing himself to write a version of the essay that he doesn't know about yet. It's not like he's seen it and he's just trying to follow a vision, at least the way that it seems to me, but that he's actually sincerely in the process of discovering the form and discovering the topic as it goes. It feels really alive.
00:17:54
Speaker
Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's really, it's great. I'm reading Elisa Gabbard's, oh shoot, the word pretty, and I'm gonna be speaking to her in a couple hours after you, and there's just, there's the reading, like for me, reading how writers read and approach reading has been really kind of interesting to me, because I wonder how,
00:18:21
Speaker
how writers can read so in depth and I wonder how fast that process is or if they really are like laboring over a sentence how often it takes to reread an essay or a book to really be able to drill down on a lot of these things that are so like insightful and uh... as some I just kinda I can do about a book a week and I feel like I'm having to hustle to even finish a book a week so I'm like how are these people like drilling down on such a
00:18:48
Speaker
Getting to such great depth of the way you the way you were able to just kind of unpack that That essay that's about to break. I'm like hi. I love hearing that process I think it takes a long time one of the examples that comes to mind is one of the like first essays like in that first year of nonfiction when I was like just being introduced to nonfiction and it was just like absolute honeymoon period for genre is we were assigned you libous is the pain scale and
00:19:19
Speaker
remember our class kind of arriving to class like before we're gonna talk about it and everybody just loved it like as the way that I remember it at least is people were just really like electrified by how weird it was how interesting it was the range of the piece and our I think our instructor was kind of frustrated because once the conversation started nobody knew what to say like nobody knew
00:19:44
Speaker
how to analyze it or unpack it or interpret it. No one knew how it worked. It was just this like amazing document that this had created, but no one knew how to talk about it. And I think our instructor thought that like no one had read it and we were just like kind of being meek because we hadn't done the homework, but it was just like, we didn't know what to do with it. And so it was one of those pieces that I was very interested to return to over and over. And I remember
00:20:15
Speaker
later like when I was teaching during grad school I taught that essay and one of the things that I tried to ask my students was like what can this essay like not do like what are the rules and I'm like what would it essay look like if this piece broke those rules one of my students was talking about like I mean that the essay brings in like hurricanes and God and just like it goes in all these directions and one of my students was talking about like the essay couldn't
00:20:44
Speaker
describe something tactile. Like this couldn't write a paragraph where she's just describing an Oldsmobile. That would break the essay because it's too tactile, it's too physical, and it's too outside the self, it's too objective. The essay's kind of structure is about being able to communicate pain, being able to communicate something that's very, very interior, and if she just started talking about an exterior thing that two people could both see, it would break the essay.
00:21:13
Speaker
And I was so glad that one of my students figured it out because I hadn't figured it out at all. It was a totally sincere question. And that was, I mean, that was like years later, whereas like one of my students like helped me see like what was so cool about that piece. And I think the pieces that I really respond to, I just accept, I'm gonna have to sit with this for a while. It's going to take me a while to really understand how it works. And I just have to, I just have to feel comfortable with that. It's just going to take a super long time.
00:21:41
Speaker
When you're a way that I can liken this too is if you're you know a football team and you're watching watching film you're trying to break breaking down defense at some point it's like okay you know you're starting to get you're starting to see the seams and this is how how it works and and there's another level of it too like the more you
00:22:03
Speaker
sort of unpack it. It can be, I imagine, a bit stifling too because if you're just trying to generate some kind of work but then you've got this knowledge about how it could be further unpacked and deeply layered, that might be hard to generate in the face of
00:22:22
Speaker
of trying to strive for some deeper meaning. Do you ever find that in your own writing that sometimes that analytical, very readerly brain can get in the way of generating work? Oh, yeah, I mean, I think I can get in the way of reading, like I think I can get in the way of, of like, just experiencing the text, like, especially if like, your, your editor brain is turned on, and you're like, trying to line edit,
00:22:47
Speaker
an essay as you're reading it, or you're trying to guess why it was edited the way it was, you're trying to guess like, why the syntax is structured the way it was, like you can get in the way of just like, absorbing what the writer wanted, because you're, you're just like trying to break it down as it's happening. And it can be, I mean, it can be really unproductive or really counterproductive. I don't have like a, I don't have a special method for turning it off. But I try to recognize when it's happening, because then you're just
00:23:12
Speaker
you're doing the writer a disservice because you're just not engaging on the terms of the piece. But yeah, I think it's difficult. I think you have to try to separate it into experiencing the art for the first time on its own terms and then trying to be able to go back and approach it and say, okay, I'm going to put on my other hat and now I'm going to study it. And now I'm going to try to figure out the mechanics of it and figure out how they made it.
00:23:41
Speaker
I do think it's important to try to separate them, but it's really difficult to do, at least in my experience. That's like the great challenge, to be able to split, cleave those two in half, the editor brain and the writer brain, because you need to be unbridled on the one so you can be a bit more strict in the other. To that point,
00:24:05
Speaker
point like when you were you know writing when you're writing essays and certainly stuff that you end up linking together for you know the longer we were here your memoir how did you check in with yourself to set up a good sort of writing discipline that you could approach the work and get something on the page that you could later edit and rewrite well I mean I wrote a lot of it during the MFA program at Oregon State and I
00:24:32
Speaker
Like the sheer velocity of that program required just a ton of production and a ton of generative work. And I think that's kind of my habit anyway. I generate way more work and way more writing than is actually useful for the piece itself. The MFA program, like just the speed of it and the amount of work that was coming out at that time.
00:25:00
Speaker
I mean, I just, I had to do it. Um, and the process that was actually like probably the most significant was figuring out what was being successful, like what was successful on the page and what wasn't figuring out like, which pieces were breaking and like, why, and like, not necessarily like adding a band aid to that essay.
00:25:24
Speaker
But if it's breaking for this reason, what does that tell us about what the essay actually wants or what it can actually be? And then how do you start over? Based on what you've learned about the essay at that breaking point, do you need to just rewrite it from a different perspective? Do you need to bring in completely different scenes? Being able to take seriously what you've learned about the piece and then do a sincere, literal revision of the work
00:25:54
Speaker
And I think like the pressure of trying to do that really, really quickly. I mean, it was really helpful because it's, it's, it's really difficult work. I think if I had my own like schedule, my own pace, it would have taken three or four times longer.
Life After MFA
00:26:10
Speaker
I would have just like, I would have just sat with things. I would have wrestled with stuff, but.
00:26:15
Speaker
there was just a deadline, there was pressure. You have to bring something in to a workshop and you have to be hopefully satisfied with it. You have to be ready to stand behind what you've done. So you just, you gotta show up and you gotta be quick about it. I think in a way that helped a great deal. Is that something you've been able to, let's see, are you still in the program or have you since graduated?
00:26:38
Speaker
I graduated in 2016. Okay, I didn't realize it was that long ago. So you're teaching at OSU? No, I work at a nonprofit. Like I have an office gig at a local foundation. Okay. So I do like my writing work in the morning and then I have like a nine to five.
00:26:57
Speaker
Okay, that's great. I love hearing that sort of day job-iness of people's lives who also want to accomplish their art and do their art and have their day job kind of subsidize that in a way. That's wonderful.
00:27:15
Speaker
So given that, given that you've got your nine to five, what's the routine by which you set up your days so you can make sure that you get some of that done, because it's very important to you? Yeah, I just wake up early. I try to get at least two hours of work done before I had to go to the office. For me, it has to be first, because that's when I have the most energy. If I try to do it,
00:27:43
Speaker
after work and I'm just I've already been through eight hours of work even though I'm not like I don't have like a super physical job, but by the time it's by the time it days over I don't have the same like just mental energy to sit down and Work on something. So yeah, I do it first I do some reading in the morning. I try to spend at least an hour hour and a half working on
00:28:10
Speaker
my project and then I usually have to arrive to work like half an hour early now because I'll walk in and then whatever whatever idea I was like churning over in the writing time will keep churning while I'm walking into work and then I have to get there early so whatever I was thinking about I can like get down on the page before I have to like clock in but yeah that's what it looks like
00:28:31
Speaker
Yeah, how do you keep it separate? And making sure that after you've had that 30 minutes to kind of wind down that writer brain, how do you make sure that one doesn't bleed into the other?
00:28:45
Speaker
What do you mean like? To give you an example, even with my various day jobs over the years, sometimes I'm constantly thinking of either the writing or the podcast or anything. Even on the clock for that thing, I'm always kind of like,
00:29:05
Speaker
not sneaking away, but lack of a better term, sneaking away to promote some episodes, get some tweets out, do some of that promotion. So there's always, one thing is always kind of trespassing on the other, so there's never 100% focus on anything. It's just something, I have a hard time delineating, just because, I don't know, it could be, it's just a deficiency in my out of box software.
00:29:33
Speaker
But I wonder like how you successfully like cleave off one from the other. That way, you know, morning is writing time and then I'm sorry, all right, clocking in, going to work, and then doing that part of my day. Yeah, I think it's, I mean, I don't think I'm that good at separating them either. I think one of the things that I'm trying to be good at is like, I'm trying not to like, give like my day job, like my work,
00:30:02
Speaker
like a smaller position. I don't want to just like think to myself like, well, this is the less important stuff. The thing that actually matters to me is writing. And this is the other stuff that I have to do to get paid. Like I want to bring as much of myself as I can to like the work that I'm doing. Like mostly because like in the nonprofit work that I have, I do have an opportunity to learn a lot about my community and be kind of involved in my community.
00:30:28
Speaker
And I want to take that just as seriously and I want to give it just as much of a sincere effort as I would to my writing work, even though they're separate kinds of things. When I first got back from deployment, like my wife and I moved out to San Francisco and I took this office job and it was, it was just kind of boring and drab. And I had this, I had this attitude that like,
00:30:53
Speaker
The thing that I'm doing in the morning between like 4 a.m. and 7, that's the important stuff and that's who I really am. And then I go to work and that's just like what I do because I have to do it. And whatever my behavior is at this job, it doesn't really matter. It was just kind of like, I just had this like position toward it where it doesn't, it wasn't really who I was. And I'm trying to be like better about like really like showing up like 100% of the time. And even if it's not like,
00:31:21
Speaker
I'm not really bringing my writer skills necessarily to my office work. I'm still like trying to approach it in a way that I don't know that I find like fulfilling instead of just like kind of slipping it off because it's not it's it doesn't like correspond to that part of myself or like it's not like a literary position, you know, it's not like the literary community. So
00:31:42
Speaker
Yeah, because there's an element and I've struggled with this for years and years that when there's a part of you that as a writer, journalist, whatever it is, it's like you want to be known or that is the thing you want to hang your hat on.
00:31:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so that when when you have to do this other thing over here sometimes in this I'm just speaking for myself like I just feel kind of like pathetic I feel like a loser like I've I've lost I'm not doing the thing that I kind of set out to do and here's the thing that's taking up
00:32:15
Speaker
a significant chunk of time that's not contributing to the thing I would like to be known for and then it just kind of festers and it sounds like you know you're developing a good approach to that where you know they can be you can have the one thing and then the other thing and it doesn't mean you're any less of an artist because you have to go over here for a few hours every day yeah one of the things that I've noticed about it is that like I think like it's it's like a
00:32:42
Speaker
a non-literary eight hours of my day in a way, but I'm also just really interested in the ways that this stuff that I'm doing would be seen through a literary lens. I'm always around people now, and they're always talking about community and this strengthening community, and it's this very dry nonprofit language.
00:33:08
Speaker
Um, but like what they're talking about is like place. Like if it was a writer showing up to that conversation, the word that you would use is like place. What we're thinking about is having a sense of like belonging to place, but like the nonprofit folks always call it like
Juggling Writing with a Day Job
00:33:22
Speaker
community. And it's just like a slightly different language to describe like the geography of like belonging, but because it's not like a literary space, there's just like a different vocabulary for it, but it's not like a, it's not like a lesser.
00:33:35
Speaker
version of the conversation. It's just happening among different people. I mean, it's still the same things that show up in essays. It's still the same things that show up in literary work. It's just that the conversation happens in this parallel way that we're not always paying attention to.
00:33:54
Speaker
And I like having these kind of conversations around day jobs that don't necessarily tether directly to the art that we want to make. I think there's this, just look at your bookshelf. All those authors there, it feels like that's all they do. And my goodness, wouldn't that be great if that was all I did?
00:34:16
Speaker
And so to know that so many people like, you know, you're you're awesome. Like this memoir is amazing. I loved it. And it won a prestigious award to AWP. And you wrote this, you know, as a big, big chunk of it as part of your MFA. And it's also it but it's not like you're 100%.
00:34:35
Speaker
gig, you know, you were able to do a lot of this writing with a lot of other things going on. And so it's like, people can accomplish, you know, really a great art that can connect people while while doing the other things to survive. Well, I can tell you, like, so I graduated in 2016, I had a thesis version of the book, and I had a lot more work to do. And one of the pieces that I wanted to write
00:35:03
Speaker
Um, it's the last chapter of the book and it's about an interpreter that I worked with overseas and writing that essay required me to, um, interview him several times and he is, he still lives in Afghanistan. And so for, for me to do that, um, for the, the time to be convenient for him, I'd wake up like at like three 30 in the morning and try to be prepped for an interview at like four and I'd talk to him.
00:35:31
Speaker
over like Facebook chat for like an hour, an hour and a half. And then I would transcribe for an hour or so, try to make notes about what I learned from that conversation. I would do some like research based on what he had told me. If I needed to do like some additional like background interviews, I would try to find people who I could talk to. And I would be doing like writing work up to like, you know, 637.
00:36:00
Speaker
And then I had to be in the office at that time I had an eight to two job, which is also just like a really privileged thing to be working less than a 40 hour gig. But then I would work eight to two and then I'd come back and I would do editing on the essay from like 2.30 to like 4.30. It was just really weird because I'd show up to the office in the morning and
00:36:24
Speaker
I just felt like I'd lived about two and a half days already by that time. And nobody else knows that. You can't use it as an excuse. I woke up six hours ago, I'm super tired. You can't use it as a reason to not engage with whatever you've gotten to play for that day. It was really happening around my office work. And that's just how it went. And it took a longer amount of time than it would have
00:36:53
Speaker
I was in the MFA program, but it came together still. With this book, I love your writing style in this book. There's kind of a leanness, sort of a Gen X, kind of almost like a detachment to it in a lot of ways. I just love the wit to your language. It's really lean, a lot of short sentences. How did you approach this just from a technical writing point of view? How did that voice surface for how you wanted to tell your stories in this book?
00:37:24
Speaker
Well, I started one of the first pieces I wrote, it's called it's called Rhino snot in the in the book. And it's kind of a collage piece. And I started writing just like a lot of really brief kind of vignettes and anecdotes. And I was kind of interested in figuring out like what the contours of a memory would be. Like there were there's a lot of these moments where there's like a specific kind of moment of language or there's just something like a detail that I remember.
00:37:54
Speaker
wanted to figure out like what's the smallest amount of information that I can give somebody where that vignette has the same kind of effect or force that it does to me that it has like the same amount of like kind of narrative weight even if it's just by itself and I wanted to figure out like what's what's the like most succinct version of that of that kind of detail or the most succinct version of
00:38:21
Speaker
how I kind of experienced something that somebody said that stuck with me.
Crafting a Cohesive Narrative
00:38:26
Speaker
And then once I had that kind of anecdote, then trying to figure out how to arrange them in a way that formed some kind of story. And so it started out as really like a project about trying to be succinct and trying to be brief, but kind of stringing together
00:38:48
Speaker
these things that I know that they're important to me, but it takes me some effort to figure out like why and it takes some effort to figure out how I can make them important for other people. But that was like kind of the, the inciting kind of thing where I got really jazzed about trying to write out these scenes in a way that I could kind of convey their importance or try to explore their importance. And that's kind of where it started. And I think that was,
00:39:13
Speaker
I don't know if that answers your question at all, but that's kind of how I started getting into the pro style, I think.
00:39:20
Speaker
Yeah, no, for sure, because you get across a lot of information in a real tight package, and of course a lot of these little vignettes or these tiny set pieces, a lot of them were essays that were on their own, and then of course you're able to stitch them together, because this reads very cohesively, certainly to me. What was that challenge for you to take
00:39:45
Speaker
You know it parts that stood by them stood on their own and then stitch them together in a way that felt you know rather seamless I think I think that's one of the really good reasons for having like an ongoing like reliable set of like readers like whether it's in an MFA program or otherwise like having people who are familiar with the last thing you did and
00:40:10
Speaker
but also having to start anew every single time. If you're going to take it out and make it stand on its own, you can't assume anybody has read it before. But if your readers have read it before, you have to do both at the same time. You have to keep them engaged and not just give them a paragraph they've already seen. But you also have to look for those new readers who have never seen any of your work before and you have to approach it for the first time.
00:40:40
Speaker
Like one of the pieces in the book, the way that I did that, um, is I had like a new set of readers, like in a class that I was writing for, and I wasn't sure how to place them in space and time. Like I was going to be in the, the, um, bad pic Valley of logman province in 2011. Like, how do I get this new batch of readers to understand what it was like to put this in context? And so I just started writing.
00:41:09
Speaker
other, writing about like other popular stories that they might have heard about. And I'm trying to put those in perspective, like this story you might have heard about took place five years ago, 50 miles to the north. And this story that you might have heard about took place 20 miles to the east, you know, three years ago. And this book that was written in about Afghanistan took place, you know, 100 miles to the south. And those events took place. And it was just like one
00:41:37
Speaker
like try to attempt to get a new audience situated while trying to think about like, if I bring this in to the fuller story, it has to be a method of doing that that I haven't already done in a previous chapter has to be a new attempt at kind of setting the stage. And I think that's a really useful thing to do to keep like keep your reader on their toes a little bit and keep them engaged and thinking
00:42:07
Speaker
because if you're going to take them out and try to sell each one individually, like that's going to be like it's just a logistical necessity. And what were you reading at the time that helped inform the process of you writing this book? I remember I was really, really engaging with Sarah Manguso's books around this time. Like I had I had just read ongoingness and I had just read the two kinds of decay.
00:42:37
Speaker
um, which is like her memoir about like an illness. And I was really interested in the two kinds of decay, especially because it was, there's a lot of like specialized language and it's a very specific experience that I have no, like no connection to. And she has to like teach you a lot of like technical medical procedures and she has to teach it to you in a way that like helps you be there and helps you understand it.
00:43:07
Speaker
without it just feeling like explanation.
Learning New Essay Forms
00:43:09
Speaker
Like here's the dry paragraph. You're just gonna need to know this for something else later. Like the explanation itself has to like get you there. It has to like help you understand it. Like she's got these paragraphs where she's trying to explain what it's like to have these like the specific kind of like blood transfusion and explain what that feels like to go through. It also like give you the technical information.
00:43:38
Speaker
move through a very specific experience, one that it's very likely none of her readers have ever been through before, and not just coach them through it and lecture them about it, but get you to be part of the process and to let you be as thoughtful as she's being, and think through what each of these things means alongside her. That's such a difficult thing to do, and I think
00:44:06
Speaker
She's really good at it, and I was really entranced by her nonfiction around that time. And as a writer, what do you feel like that you struggle with, that things that you feel like you need to overcome, things you maybe wish you were better at, trying to balance the musculature of your writing body, if you will? Oh, god. So many things.
00:44:37
Speaker
I think one of the most challenging and sometimes frustrating parts of essay writing is when you learn how to write an essay, you basically just learn how to write that essay. And then you have to start over and you have to learn how to write the next essay by learning how to write that next essay. And it's so hard to be responsive to the piece that you're on right now.
00:45:04
Speaker
I just feel like, well, I did this form one time. Maybe this form will work again. And it doesn't. Well, I did this form one time. Maybe I can just bring up this form to it and that'll work. And it doesn't. You just want to take this stuff you've gotten good at and just do it again. That's just not how it is. You have to be really listening to what this new piece wants from you. And then you have to learn how to do that new thing.
00:45:34
Speaker
And I think that it's such a time consuming skill that I feel kind of resistant to it. But I know it's the right thing to do. It'll end up being the most efficient way forward. So if I just make a genuine effort to listen to this piece and figure out what it means. But it's so hard.
00:45:57
Speaker
As a writer, too, given you're a few years removed from your MFA program and you're, of course, several thousand words removed, you're, of course, progressing, what do you feel like you're better at now than you were, say, five years ago? I don't know. I would love to have a long list of things.
00:46:27
Speaker
I think I'm a little bit better at doing the research and doing some of the legwork and being prepared from an essayistic perspective, figuring out what the trajectory of the idea is and trying to follow along with it.
00:46:53
Speaker
Instead of just like, well, what's a scene from my life that I've already been through that I could put here that might get the idea a little further, um, like trying to open the aperture a little bit and, and decide like, well, maybe, you know, if scene isn't the right thing.
00:47:09
Speaker
what's the document that I need to chase down? Or like, what's the information I need to chase down? What's the history I need to read? Who do I need to talk to? I think I'm a little bit more open to that than I used to be. And I think it's because I have fewer deadlines to hit so I can be a little bit more aggressive in my research. And I think I'm getting better at that. And I think I'm enjoying it more. I think like I'm getting more interested in
00:47:39
Speaker
research where once I've got one document, I want to have all the documents. I want to keep finding out so much and it can be a little bit counterproductive, but I think I'm getting better at that, at trying to go after the information, what has already been said about it, what does the conversation already look like, and then use that in a creative way and a piece. I hope I'm better at that at least.
00:48:02
Speaker
Yeah, that that discovery and detective work is some of the most fun that I have to. It's just a blast to go into those documents and see what document and form that document and then see what people are writing about that and then start curating it and then letting your own taste and your own talents, you know, take it from there. It's really it's really invigorating. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's it's one of those things like one of the writers at the book festival yesterday was talking about it, about like, how, who wasn't I mentioned this?
00:48:32
Speaker
being so excited by the research and then having to do the more sober editorial work of deciding, do you really need to show this to anybody? Is it actually relevant to the thing you're doing? I think it was maybe Peter Rock who mentioned it. I found this document.
00:48:52
Speaker
Is it actually furthering the work that I claim that it's furthering or am I just excited and I want to show it to people? I think that's the hard thing because you just get so excited about the process and it's hard to do the analytical work of what's the most important thing and how do I show it and how do I present it and how do I make it creative.
00:49:11
Speaker
With research, too, it can be really, really easy to let research be a way of being a productive procrastinator. Have you found a good balance of doing a lot? Enough research where you feel confident to write, but not in such a way that you're like, well, I'll start writing if I can just find out a couple more things and let that whole cycle perpetuate itself. Have you found a good balance?
00:49:36
Speaker
I think I've developed a barometer for when I've gone too far. I think I've learned like, okay, this is one book more than I needed. I think I've learned what that feels like rather than instead of saying this is maybe not the right book, I need to read three more. Maybe that's the problem. And just thinking like, no, okay, I've got what I need. I'm really out here on the periphery.
00:50:04
Speaker
the most important stuff. I've read it and I need to go forward with what I've got. I think I'm developing that barometer.
00:50:13
Speaker
That's the hard thing because you can always keep going. You can always imagine someone else wrote the perfect thing. Someone else wrote the perfect passage that I could respond to. The perfect detail is out there and I just got to keep chasing it.
Staying Motivated Through Rejections
00:50:28
Speaker
And in the course of submitting various work to various places and then I wonder how have you dealt with the ubiquitous rejection that we all deal with? What's your approach around that?
00:50:43
Speaker
One of the things that I started doing is keeping a record of like positive feedback. Um, so like, I think I'm sure probably everybody does this, but like I keep like a spreadsheet of like what I sent, who I sent it to, the date that I submitted it, when it comes back. Um, and then I just added a column for like, if I get a personal rejection, like what are the things that they liked about it? And I just add that in so that when I'm doing this sort of business-y work,
00:51:11
Speaker
of sending stuff out, I can look back and see that an editor at this place liked this thing. Even if the essay never made it anywhere, nobody took it, nobody liked it enough to publish it. Here's two comments from an editor where they appreciated it and they just didn't have a spot for it. But here are the specific things that they mentioned that were going well. And I've just tried to collect that information so that I'm not
00:51:39
Speaker
just thinking that I'm sending it out into the ether. No one's really reading it or no one cares about what I'm saying. It doesn't matter. And then it gets turned down and it's just depressing. Because I think we all know better. I think we know that there are a ton of really amazing readers. There's a ton of amazing editors who are working really hard. They want to publish tons and tons of stuff. And it's just not the right moment. It's not the right fit. But that process is just never how it feels and it's never how it looks.
00:52:09
Speaker
Preserve as many artifacts of like the good stuff like the goodness that I can and try to keep myself Keep eyes on it so that when I go back to try again, it doesn't feel it doesn't feel like impossible
00:52:22
Speaker
Mm-hmm and kind of a picky backing off of that Certainly these days with with social media sometimes it can feel like our peers and people we admire are just like constantly crushing it all the time and They're just winning and then we're just like kind of stuck and like knee-deep in the mud and it's just like you know, man I just I want some piece of that but really they're they're struggling to and it can be
00:52:53
Speaker
Even though we know that, sometimes we can struggle with these feelings of competition and jealousy. I wonder if that's ever something you've wrestled with. How have you processed that? One of the ways that I think about it is if you see somebody who's just on a hot streak with publishing, usually what that means is they did a ton of work a year ago or like nine months ago or 18 months ago.
00:53:18
Speaker
And they were like waist deep in the work at that time. And they were just like, they were pressuring themselves probably to get stuff done. They were creating a ton of essays and they got to it and they sent stuff out. And it all came together for them just by chance, all at the same time. All the legwork they did way back in the past, it kind of coalesced in a moment where it looks like they are just on a hot streak right now. But really it's just like evidence of what they did
00:53:48
Speaker
Um, a bunch of months ago, like I had, I don't know. I think it was like two or three essays come out at the same time or like a really similar times away, like a while back. And someone mentioned like, yeah, you're doing really great right now. And like, I wasn't doing anything at that time. Like I had done a ton of stuff, um, a year ago and all of those projects had just kind of hit publication dates at the same time. And all of the work was way back in the past. And I remember just mentioning like,
00:54:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's going well right now, but the real question is going to be how I'm doing nine months from this moment because the work that I'm doing right now will be judged, yes or no, from a while from now, it's going to be down the road. And that'll be the moment where the work I'm doing now will be either successful or not. I try to keep that in mind.
00:54:41
Speaker
Even if I don't have anything that's coming out right in this moment, I can be doing the work. I can be showing up and I can be doing the research and I can be reading and making the effort so that I can try to be setting myself up to be part of the conversation and be engaged in the future.
00:54:59
Speaker
That's awesome. When I was at Hippo Camp a couple months ago, it's a great non-fiction conference in Pennsylvania. I highly recommend it if you ever get a chance to go out to it. It's great. It's just totally creative non-fiction. It's a small, intimate conference. It's awesome stuff.
00:55:17
Speaker
I was listening to one of the speakers and she was citing I think it was Lisa Romeo who's been on the show a while ago and I think it was Amy Fish who was quoting Lisa and she said something to the effect of like in you know for an upcoming year like you should aim for a hundred rejections.
00:55:37
Speaker
And I love that so much because there was like a fearlessness and a courage just to submit it. But I have a feeling that people might submit like five times a year and then they wonder why they don't land. It's like how are you gonna get any bull's-eyes if you only throw three darts? Like you gotta throw a thousand darts to hit maybe two bull's-eyes. So I love that of aiming for the rejections. It's a fearlessness and guess what? I guarantee you you'll have a career year if you submit a hundred
Conclusion and Future Outlook
00:56:05
Speaker
times.
00:56:05
Speaker
Yeah, aim for 100 rejections. Yeah, I think like you can get too specific with like you're like too targeted. Like here's a magazine that has my exact aesthetic and my exact like
00:56:20
Speaker
They published the exact word counts that I'm working on right now, and this is the perfect home for the thing that I'm doing. And you've just analyzed it to death, and you're like, this is exactly where it's going to be. And you've got like three of those. Like, I just need to send it to one of these three places, because they would be perfect for one of these three places. But a lot of the things that I've sent, I'm a little bit surprised. Like, I thought it was like, it was a long shot. Like, it seemed unlikely that the place might want it, but they might want it. And it seemed like kind of
00:56:49
Speaker
one of the more long-shell opportunities and those things come through sometimes and I think it's worth it. I think you've got to find a balance where you're being careful and respectful of the magazine's time and you're trying to get something that's kind of in their wheelhouse but you can't be too presumptuous to know about like everything they could or couldn't want to at the same time.
00:57:09
Speaker
Yeah, of course. And it wouldn't be like throwing random darts at random places. But if you're like, all right, this one essay, I think this could potentially land at five different places. And then it's just like going from there, of course. As we wind down here, Steven, what is exciting you and bringing you to the page every morning for those two hours before work?
00:57:35
Speaker
What's the juice in the tank right now that you're excited about to bring to your work? Yeah, I do have a project I'm working on. And I think the thing about it that is most compelling to me is that it always feels like I'm a little bit lost, but in an exciting way. That there are things I don't understand, but I'm almost there. I'm really close.
00:58:04
Speaker
I think there's a balance between being kind of confused by a moment or confused by a text or kind of frustrated by two things that don't quite make sense and then just pushing on it and pushing through it.
00:58:24
Speaker
trying to like either resolve them or figure out how they can kind of be in balance with each other and those like those moments I think are really compelling because it's just like you're always like almost there and it just takes like a little bit more a little bit more work and then sometimes it comes through and it's really rewarding. It's so exciting to like to learn that other people
00:58:48
Speaker
are also out there. Like it's a solitary thing, but like you start talking to people and like, yeah, I have to, I have to show up to this. This is my like passionate thing that I'm working on on the side. This is like what I've got going. These are the irons I've gotten the fire. I love learning what everybody's got kind of like, like moving, like the thing that they're trying to.
00:59:08
Speaker
move forward. I love learning about that kind of stuff. Nice. Well, being, of course, mindful of your time, Steven, this was great. I hope this is the first of many conversations we have. You know, we're practically neighbors here. So I hope we're able to meet up again and have more of these conversations recorded or unrecorded. So thank you so much for carving out the time, man. Yeah, I hope so too. I really, really appreciate it. It was good talking to you.
00:59:38
Speaker
a good times were had by all the sizes of thanks for listening to show as you know was produced that it conducted soup to knots by your buddy brand a head over the merit of the day for show notes
00:59:57
Speaker
to sign up for that monthly reading list newsletter once a month no spam can't beat it you know I hate it when hosts say thanks for listening and then you know they don't mean it they're just like hey thanks for listening it's like you can tell they don't mean it I mean it man
01:00:17
Speaker
Yeah, you. Thank you for listening. The show is for you. I hope I've made something worth sharing. So please consider linking up to the show across your various platforms. You are the social network man. Subscribing is the best way to keep it chill. You know something.
01:00:32
Speaker
I feel like it's just us in that car in Wayne's world. There's like five of us, and we're headbanging to Queen. That's how I see this. Tag the show on Twitter and Instagram at cnfpod, and I'll jump in the fire with you. Devil horns, skulls, and fists. Might even get the Hetfield jiff. You know who you are. I think, are we done? I think we're done. Yeah, let's get out of here, because you know if you can do interviews, say yeah!