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Episode 47—Shawna Kenney on 'Zines, Advice, and Finding Your Tribe
132 Plays8 years ago
Shawna Kenney, author, writer, teacher, coach, editor, joins me on The Creative Nonfiction Podcast to talk about her origin story as a teenage fanzine founder, punk rock, and her delightful short essay “Never Call Yourself a Writer, and Other Rules for Writing,” a brilliant piece of satire. She grew up in a conservative family in small-town Maryland, so the nearby punk scene in Washington D.C. held tremendous appeal. “I always wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson without the drugs,” Shawna tells me. Her work has such an edge that I was surprised that she didn’t have that edge in conversation. “I’m much better on the page than I am verbally,” she says, which isn’t true at all. She’s great on the page, and she’s a great conversationalist. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, the New York Times, Vice, and Playboy, just to name a few. Be sure to follow Shawna on Twitter @ShawnaJKenney and go to her website to read more about her and her work. Thanks for listening!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast Q. Momentous Riff So this week's cast
Shawna Kenney's Writing Philosophy
00:00:24
Speaker
Shawna Kenney wrote a killer blog post over a brevity called Never Call Yourself a Writer and Other Rules for Writing. It's brilliant. Go read it. It's in the show notes. Everything. Everything you've come to expect. Okay, so I read it, then went to her website, found her email, and two weeks later, here she is. Send thank you notes to the internet.
00:00:52
Speaker
She's written and edited a few books, but we don't talk about that because I'm hoping to have her on again when her new book comes out this summer. It's a book she's co-written with her husband, so stay tuned to that.
Punk Roots and Formative Years
00:01:05
Speaker
But we do dive into her punk rock roots and the fanzine she founded as a teenager. You know, the usual good stuff you've come to expect from CNF HQ.
00:01:16
Speaker
Do me a solid subscribe to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, aka hashtag CNF, wherever you get your podcasts, namely the Apple Podcast app or Google Play Music, and give it a rating. Also, subscribe to my monthly newsletter where I send out my reading list just once a month. You listen to all these writer's talks, so naturally you like reading, right?
00:01:42
Speaker
Okay, I'm tired of talking. Here's Shawna Kenny.
Emerging in the DC Punk Scene
00:01:46
Speaker
Enjoy. It's about an hour and a half south of DC. It's very rural. All that's there is a Navy base, which is what brought my parents there and Amish people. Um, so it's a weird mix and my closest neighbors were miles away. So there was really no,
00:02:08
Speaker
punk scene or literary scene for me to get into. I spent a lot of time alone. I spent a lot of time creating with friends. And then when I got to be old enough to go to D.C., I was traveling with friends as a teenager to D.C. for punk shows. And I was really influenced and captivated by that culture. And I started doing a fanzine when I was 16 in high school called No Scenezine because I lived in the middle of nowhere and there was no scene.
00:02:37
Speaker
And that, I think, became a way for a shy kid to have an excuse to talk to people. My fancy was all about skateboarding and music and pop culture. And I would create it for hours and for months on end with friends cutting and pasting. And then we Xerox a whole bunch of them and go up to DC and sell them or hand them out at shows and
00:03:02
Speaker
trade them with other zine stirs and trade them with other zine stirs through the back pages of Maximum Rock and Roll. And so I was becoming pen pals with people all over the country and the punk scene sort of became this whole pre-internet web of people for me to connect with. So doing zines was really my beginnings of being a writer, although I didn't know that.
00:03:30
Speaker
Yeah, that's a very entrepreneurial thing that you did then to kind of just like, oh, but here's this thing. Where do you think that comes from? Well, I think I witnessed what was going on in the DC punk scene. It was very DIY. Kids were starting their own record labels. Ian Mackay was 18 when he started Discord Records.
00:03:55
Speaker
They put out their own records, folded the covers, did their own artwork and distributed them themselves and put on their own shows. And I saw all this happening nearby. And I think that really empowered me. It showed me and a whole other generation
Overcoming Shyness and Gatekeepers
00:04:12
Speaker
of kids how to do it. You didn't have to wait for the powers that be to sanction your work or buy it and promote it in a certain way. This is something that you could do yourself.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, like it's totally just bypassing the gatekeepers in a lot of ways and doing the thing that you feel strongly about. Yeah. Yeah. And that's stayed with me. I mean, I think that's an ethic that has carried me through life.
00:04:39
Speaker
It's funny you said you were a shy kid and the zine was a way for you to break out of that shell. I think a lot of journalists and reporters, some of them are kind of reticent by nature, but the vocation is a way to break out of that.
00:04:58
Speaker
What about that? Did you embrace? Was it something, like you noticed you were shy and you were like, this is a good way for me to break through? Or was it just, I don't know. How did you process that? Yeah, it wasn't a conscious choice at the time. I just loved to create. I've always been a creative kid. I made things out of clay. I drew and painted. And I think when I was a teenager,
00:05:27
Speaker
I played bass and I played trumpet, but I realized I wasn't a good enough musician or maybe a confident enough musician to ever be in a band. So my way of contributing to the scene was by making a zine. That's something I could do and something that I felt confident about. But looking back, now I see that it also enabled me to talk to people. It gave me an excuse to talk to people, which the natural progression was I got into journalism.
00:05:57
Speaker
in high school and in college. I wrote for my school paper and never really knowing that I wanted to be a writer. Like that was just something I did for fun on the side. I didn't know that people could be writers. I don't know. I come from a very working class family, right? And I'm a first generation college student. So, you know, the best that my parents could hope for was that we would, my sister and I would graduate from high school. It was hard to really think beyond that.
00:06:26
Speaker
college wasn't talked about in my home. My dad was a maintenance man for the Department of Defense and my mom was a secretary. So, you know, people in our family were not artists.
00:06:40
Speaker
Right. So what was it? Do you think about books in words that you were so attracted to at a young age that eventually like spring springboarded you to writing for your high school paper and then and then from there, you know, it blossomed into something much more.
Finding a Writing Voice and Influences
00:07:01
Speaker
Yeah. Well, like any reader, of course, I loved that they could take me away. Like stories could transport me out of my small town.
00:07:09
Speaker
and out of my sheltered experience to other eras, other countries, other dimensions. But then when I started to read things like, you know, Judy Bloom, or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and all of the S.E. Hinton books, I felt like, wow, writers can say so much on the page that maybe we don't talk about in real life.
00:07:37
Speaker
But that's what it's done for me. I mean, I'm much better on the page than I am verbally. And I feel like writing has enabled me to talk about some of those things that I would never have been able to talk about in person, whether it's poverty or awkward teenage years or sexuality, feminism, just concepts that I find difficult to talk about. It's easier for me to
00:08:07
Speaker
to struggle with on a page. Yeah, it's one what's so great about reading your work is that you do have such a distinctive voice on the page. It's just so like it crackles with your style, which is just so wonderful to read. And I wonder, how did you come to that?
00:08:31
Speaker
to the voice that you have today. What were some of your early software that you were able to update over the years to come to this crystallized version of who you are on the page? Maybe just repetition. I was always journaling, keeping a diary as a kid, and then the zine really helped me to develop that voice because I had this outlet
00:08:53
Speaker
with no rules, no editor. And I could just kind of be free on the page. I'm the one in charge. I'm the one putting this out. So it was really no holds barred. And I think that gave me the freedom to sort of figure out who I was and how I sounded on the page. And then journalism too. Journalism taught me some rules that I didn't know about. The zine was
00:09:23
Speaker
anarchy and then journalism gave me this framework to work within, but I think that all of that helped me to develop my voice.
00:09:32
Speaker
Right, and doing that early on, you gave yourself permission to do that kind of work, and eventually, at some point or another, you need, or maybe you didn't, but a lot of times you need some degree of validation.
Punk Community Support
00:09:48
Speaker
Who was in your corner at that time that kind of gave you, say, you know what, Shauna, keep going, keep going.
00:09:57
Speaker
I guess really it was my punk community because I didn't know any other writers. I didn't know anyone in academia. I wrote Ian Mackay, a fan letter. My mom cut an article out of the Washington Post when I was 16. They'd done an interview with Ian Mackay. He was starting his band Embrace after minor threat, pre-Fugazi. And he mentioned in the interview that he answers all of his fan mail.
00:10:25
Speaker
So of course I got to work writing him a letter and I'm 16 and I do a zine in Southern Maryland and no one cool lives here. And I'd like to interview you. And he wrote me back like a month later, I got a letter back from him and he encouraged me to keep going. And he also encouraged me to introduce myself next time I saw him at a show and said that he'd like to meet me. And I think just that,
00:10:52
Speaker
accessibility and that little bit of encouragement was all I needed. So I did end up interviewing him and writing back to him. We went back and forth a few times and then met him at a show and I think just seeing what he was able to do on his own without the permission of others and then just those little few words of encouragement were enough to keep me going during those years.
00:11:20
Speaker
Right, right. It's so important to whatever it is we do to kind of like find your people and find your tribe. And it seems like from an early point like you were able to sort of weave your way into some sort of tribe and that was those punk years.
00:11:40
Speaker
Especially and then you know, you could probably got into your writer writer Lee tribes and and and such but so what was it about the the punk life and the punk tribe that Drew you in it was so Opposite of everything I'd been exposed to before, you know, I lived in this small conservative Navy based town grew up with a in a strict Catholic military family and You know just hearing
00:12:11
Speaker
bands like the Dead Kennedys and circle jerks and sex whistles just be so anti-establishment was mind-blowing and exciting for me. I was like, wow, there's a whole other world out there that I need to find. It speaks to me. I never really felt like I fit in here, but maybe I fit in somewhere else. Or maybe there are other people like me somewhere. I was like on an alien planet or something.
00:12:39
Speaker
And when you were able to land the big interview with Ian, what were some of the things that you asked him? Oh, God, I don't remember. I'm sure there were stupid questions. But oddly enough, so we wrote back and forth a couple times. And then years later, I interviewed him as a journalist for some magazines. And I interviewed him for that 930 Club book project. So I know him now.
00:13:08
Speaker
And I had to reach out to him for the 930 Club Book Project a couple of years ago. And we had an interview set up, and I called him at the assigned time. And he was like, hang on a second. I want to read you something. And he started reading a letter. It's like, dear Ian, I know you must get tons of fan mail, but I just had to reach out to tell you how much I admire you and how much your work is inspiring.
00:13:35
Speaker
It was my 16-year-old words. He was reading back to me. That's amazing. Feel my whole face turn red. And I covered my ears. I was like, shut up. Why do you have this? Be quiet. And he continued to read the letter. And he said, oh, I have a friend who's been helping me archive some of my things. And I came across three of your letters. And I scanned them for you. And I'm going to send them to you.
00:13:58
Speaker
And he was like, he was like, don't be embarrassed. You were a really sweet kid. You still are. It was just, it was, it was so weird. And then when he sent me the PDFs of my letters, you know, bubbly handwriting, misspelled vegetarianism, and happy faces. It was just a, you know, a portal to my teen self.
00:14:24
Speaker
that was actually quite a gift. It was really cool. What was that like to not only that he had hung on to that letter, but that he recognized who you were? When you reflect on that, what does that mean that he was able to do that for you and read that back to you? It was really special. I think he hangs on to everything. He's a hoarder, so I'm not special.
00:14:54
Speaker
But he recognized you, nonetheless. Slash punk documentarian. But really nice that he sent those to me and kind of gave me that window into my 16-year-old self. You know, because I don't have my diaries from back then. I have my zines. But to see where I was at the time. And it's also funny because
00:15:19
Speaker
Essentially, I'm kind of the same person. You know, I was talking about vegetarianism and straight edge and all of these things that were swirling around in the air at the time and I'm still vegetarian. I'm still straight edge. Just a little more worldly now, I guess. But yeah, the essence of me was there.
00:15:41
Speaker
Yeah, and it's funny that your writing has such an edge to it, and that to hear you say you're so straight edge. I think anybody who's read your work would be like, oh, there is a rawness and really a punkness to a lot of your work. And to hear you say you're straight edge seems to cut against that. So it's like, do you try to lead a more, not refined, but a straight edge type life so you can be crazy on the page?
00:16:10
Speaker
I know. I don't know. You know, I always wanted to be Hunter S. Thompson without the drugs. That was my ideal when I was in college because I loved his writing and his adventures and the freedom that evoked it in reading it. But I've never really been interested in the whole like drug culture. So maybe that's my way of
00:16:36
Speaker
you know, embracing both sides of me. So you mentioned Hunter Thompson again. He's got his own brand of that Gonzo journalism. So who were some other influential, let's say, it can be fiction, but also let's, you know, nonfiction writers. Like who were some of those like, they gave you like a key and they're like, Oh, you can do that. They
Influences and Freelance Writing Insights
00:16:59
Speaker
unlock something. Like I didn't know that was possible. Yeah. Who were some of those other writers?
00:17:04
Speaker
You know, I love Jack Kerouac. I loved all the beats. A lot of male writers early on, you know, I wasn't aware of a lot of women writers until later. And then I got into Annie Dillard and Joan Didion and people like that, Bell Hooks. But I loved the freedom that the beats showed on the page to me. I was like, wow, you can just
00:17:32
Speaker
you know, you can just be rambly and, and do the stream of conscious stuff and, and write about your really personal experiences without sensor. You know, I think something about that empowered me, but then I also love stories about poor and marginalized people. I love a tree grows in Brooklyn. That's one of the few books that I've returned to, to read again and again, Mary Carr, Michelle T.
00:18:03
Speaker
I just like people who write about being on the fringes. Do you consider yourself more of a freelancer? Yeah, I'm definitely freelance. I've written for the LA Weekly, New York Times, narratively. I've gotten the opportunity to do some long form stuff for them, which is really fun. I'd like to do more of that. But yeah, I'm definitely freelance, self-employed.
00:18:28
Speaker
independent contractor. Right. I know what that's like. What's great about it and what's painfully frustrating about it too. Yeah, it has its pros and cons. I worked in the corporate world for a few years after college and I wasn't cut out for that either. I can't do the office culture thing, the eight to five thing, the long commute thing in LA.
00:18:56
Speaker
What, with your time in the corporate world there, do you remember a particular moment where you're like, this is it, I can't do this anymore, I need to get back to my zine roots?
Transition to Teaching and Community Building
00:19:10
Speaker
I don't know if it was a moment or just like a gradual, you know, building of hatred. A slow erosion. But yeah, that's when I applied to grad school, actually.
00:19:22
Speaker
When I went to grad school, when I applied to grad school, my book had already been out five or six years. My first book, my memoir, I'd done a book tour, I'd sold foreign rights, had been optioned for film a couple of times. And I was freelance writing and I just really didn't know where to go from there. I was invited in as a guest teacher or visiting author a couple of times to UCLA. And the teacher who invited me in said, why aren't you teaching?
00:19:51
Speaker
He thought that I would be good at it. And I said, I don't know. I don't know how to do that. Um, so I applied to their program to teach and they were like, Oh, it's nice that you have a book out, but it'd be better if you had an MFA. So then I really started and I'd never really thought about the MFA. Um, so I started looking into that. I had a friend who taught teaches women's studies here at Cal State, Long Beach.
00:20:17
Speaker
She has a PhD and she really held my hand through the whole that I found the whole application process to be really intimidating I didn't want to take the GRE I wanted teaching experience. So I needed a TA ship I Needed some financial help. I just would be welded by the whole thing and she really walked me through that process and I applied to programs that were basically based on a writing sample and
00:20:45
Speaker
and in places where I thought I could live and where I would get the teaching experience. And I ultimately ended up going to UNCW, which is in North Carolina, which meant quitting my corporate job and my husband and I picking up and moving 3000 miles back to the East Coast and living in a small town in North Carolina. But yeah, so it was a huge shift for us. A huge
00:21:14
Speaker
change, a huge cut and pay, and a huge learning experience for me because I had no idea. You know, I was a little older than the rest of the students that I was in school with. So it's 10 years since my undergrad degree. I'd published a book. I was married. I don't drink.
00:21:37
Speaker
I had a very lively literary community here in LA. I hosted literary events, so I've made tons of friends with writers of all genres here and felt very supported and connected to a community. So moving to this small town to really just focus on writing for three years was
00:21:59
Speaker
really weird. How important was it for you to like it's like this kind of theme of these tribes you're able to to build that like how important was it for you to to forge those little those little tribes where wherever you were like you know you had the the punk scene in the zine and then in LA you you know you forge these little you know the these literary events and groups and so forth so like what what inside you is like
00:22:25
Speaker
It seems like you're really driven to do that as a service to other people, but also probably as a service to yourself in a lot of ways. Yeah, that's my lifeline. I mean, who are we without each other? I don't know. I've just always been that way. And then I've also been disconnected from my family since a young age. I was disowned when I was 18, and I mean, there's been a lot of healing that's happened since then, and I'm back in touch with them.
00:22:55
Speaker
had to sort of forge my own family out in the world. And I think punk rock is part of that. I think my literary scene is part of that. And then, yeah, when we moved to North Carolina, grad school was really beneficial in a lot of ways, but I didn't necessarily feel like academia was my people.
00:23:19
Speaker
My husband and I opened a bookstore. Don't open a bookstore during grad school, first of all. But we opened an independent bookstore called Rebel Books, where we reached out to the community, had open mics, poetry nights, cooking demonstrations. We sold all kinds of anarchists and LGBTQ literature and stuff that was hard to find otherwise in that town.
00:23:45
Speaker
And it was short lived. It was only open for a year. But I think through that we really found our people. What did you learn most from that experience? Oh, I learned that I love to read books. I love to write books, but I don't really give a shit about selling books. I'm a terrible business person, basically. But the beauty of that whole experience was that we found our community. It drew.
Persistence in the Writing Industry
00:24:14
Speaker
like-minded people to us. We had critical mass bike rides. We had vegan cookbook authors come to do cookbook demonstrations. We had Band Books Week produced in conjunction with the ACLU and the state. It helped us to meet our tribe again.
00:24:35
Speaker
And you say your work has been New York Times, Playboy, Vice. How are you able to break into such iconic publications? What's your submission process like and then how do you deal with the inevitable rejection? Because sometimes you can pitch a place like New York Times 20, 30, 40 times and not get in.
00:25:02
Speaker
So how did you manifest that and process that whole process? Yeah. I guess just getting into journalism at such a young age, I got used to the idea of rejection. So it really has to roll off your back. And I always have a lot of projects going on at once. So it's not like I pitch an outlet and sit there waiting, hopefully, for the next
00:25:29
Speaker
few weeks, you know, I have editing projects, I'm teaching, I may be working on another story, I may be, you know, coaching someone through writing their memoirs. So I've always had a lot of different things going on and been able to shift gears pretty quickly. But yeah, just never giving up. I'm speechless.
00:25:53
Speaker
What's the most, that's a wide swath of the writing genre, you know, some coaching and editing and the writing. So what is the, where do you get the most satisfaction among all those? I like it all because they all, I feel like they all activate different parts of my brain, but coaching is something new in my life. It just kind of evolved out of teaching.
00:26:22
Speaker
So many classes I've had students come to me afterward and want to work with me one-on-one. And I never really knew that that was a thing until a couple years ago. And I live in LA, the land of life coaches. So it's something that I've made fun of for a long time. And now here I am, a coach. I'm in no way a life coach. I'm just playing. Don't do what I did.
00:26:49
Speaker
But yeah, that just sort of naturally evolved and I love working one-on-one with people and holding their hands through big projects. I want to be that person for them that I didn't have or that I wish I'd had. So there's a lot of satisfaction in that for me. And I love teaching. I love the whole energy of the classroom and bouncing ideas off of one another and spontaneity and just really watching writers develop. It gives me a lot of joy.
00:27:17
Speaker
Do you have or did you have an influential teacher or mentor that you're able to kind of model yourself after? All of my grad school teachers brought something different to the table and looking back I learned so much from every one of them. I don't know that they specifically mentored me
00:27:42
Speaker
individually, but just watching the way they taught and how they presented the material and met me where I was. I wasn't a particularly educated grad student. Like I said, I'd been out of undergrad for 10 years. I had a degree in film and communications. Most of my peers were 23-year-olds who just finished degrees in literature. I didn't even know how to talk about writing.
00:28:08
Speaker
You know, I just felt like I didn't have the bookie. I knew I liked to read, but I wasn't able to explain, you know, why I liked or didn't like something. I just felt like I didn't even have that vocabulary. So I'm really actually grateful that my professors were gentle and patient with me. I learned a lot just from watching.
00:28:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's real intimidating, like coming into a place where people have this sometimes a pretentious literacy about them where they can talk about Chaucer and all the big capital English lit writers. And then you're coming in, like you clearly have, you know, you had written a book, had some journalistic experience, so you had some actual like working writer experience. So you came at it from a different way.
00:29:02
Speaker
not knowing how to talk about or not having the vocabulary. What was that like for you and how did you start to learn that language yourself so you could be as fluent in that language as they were?
Teaching Memoirs and Writing Perspectives
00:29:18
Speaker
Yeah, it was really scary. It was intimidating. And my first workshops, I never spoke out. I never talked in a workshop. I didn't know how to have a literary discussion.
00:29:31
Speaker
I think over time, you know, I watched and learned and listened. And at first I felt like, wow, everyone knows so much more than I do. And, you know, I have nothing to contribute to this conversation. And I think really just like returning to writers that I loved initially, like Michelle T and Dorothy Allison and Mary Carr, I think going back to read them reminded me that maybe I do have something to bring to the table. It's not going to be the same.
00:29:59
Speaker
is this person next to me. And sometimes that person across the room is just really trying to impress the teacher. And it might not be like, you know, real valid analysis anyway. Um, so it took a little while for me to get more confident in, in my uniqueness and trust what I had to bring to the table might be
00:30:25
Speaker
Interesting to write and it's into like what Roy Peter Clark calls like x-ray reading You know is it really getting into the bones of a text? How do you how do you balance? trying to read enough volume you know enough books per year with that degree of
00:30:49
Speaker
Oh geez, blanket on the word, but that degree of in-depth reading. There's a balance, because you can't just fly through it. Eventually you kind of have to take your time with those sentences. So how do you balance the speed to read, but also to slow down so you can get underneath at all?
00:31:10
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I feel really fortunate because I teach memoir and I feel like that's given me an excuse to buy a lot of memoirs and read a lot of memoirs now. I mean, otherwise I feel like I don't have a ton of pleasure reading time. Not that reading is without pleasure, but a lot of times I'm buying books and reading them with an eye toward
00:31:35
Speaker
what could I use this for? Or what's in here that I could share with students? Oh, these are great examples of telescoping. Make a note to use in class. These are great examples of compression. This is a great example of a well fleshed out scene, whatever it may be. So I am reading memoirs, especially with a more critical eye than I ever did before grad school. And now that I'm a teacher, there's a greater purpose
00:32:05
Speaker
Who are some writers and memoirists that just knock you back in your chair? Like I said, Michelle T, Mary Carr, Dorothy Allison, I just taught a class last night and I brought these four memoirs in to show. So we've got Cheryl Strayed, Wild. Yeah Cheryl Strayed, Wild, Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Greeley, fellow UNCW alum,
00:32:34
Speaker
Nothing Left to Burn by Jay Varner. A friend of mine, Jillian Lauren, wrote this book, Everything You Ever Wanted. I used my friend's book, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints by Ditto Montiel, a bunch in memoir classes. It's a really sort of experimental structure and poetic voice. Yeah, so I'm always changing it up, but I inhale memoirs.
Debunking Writing Clichés
00:33:00
Speaker
And so and now getting to the the piece that I read from you that made me want to reach out to you was This great little blog post which probably was maybe 300 words long
00:33:13
Speaker
in the neighborhood, it's called Never Call Yourself a Writer and Other Rules for Writing. It's such a great seesaw piece, and we'll put it in the show notes and everything so everyone can read it. It's such a fun piece to read, and I wonder, where did that piece come from? Okay, well, part of it came from being a bewildered grad student and all the advice that you get. And actually, one of the lines there, you know,
00:33:43
Speaker
Directly ripped from my life before I went off to grad school. Someone told me don't go to grad school. You'll lose your voice You have such a great voice and you're gonna get that MFA voice. I didn't even know what that was at the time and looking back, you know, like Being a first-generation college student who's like scrambled my way into college That was such a stunning thing to hear, you know, it was that was kind of scary so I used that in the piece and now that I teach memoir I
00:34:12
Speaker
and work with a lot of writers. I just hear all kinds of, there's all kinds of crazy advice out there, and most of it is contradictory. And I've had students come to me and ask me, am I too old? Is it too late? One teacher told me to do this, or my friend said I should do that. And I just realized how overwhelming all of this information is. There's really no one right way to do your art.
00:34:42
Speaker
I started that piece maybe six months ago and I just wrote a couple lines, just wrote a couple of contradictory ideas that I'd been hearing that have been floating around. And then I went back to it. Every couple months I'd think about it and just add a couple things and add a couple things. So it wasn't written all in one sitting, it was written in teeny tiny pieces over a period of time because I'd be like, oh yeah, that's something that people always say too. Oh, that's great. And I'd add to that.
00:35:12
Speaker
You know, I'd always wanted to be published in Brevity too. I'd been rejected by Brevity before. So I was really excited. I was really excited. I sent this initially to be considered for the craft essays. And the editor wrote me back, Julie, Julia, she was really sweet, wrote me back and said, this isn't right for craft essays, but I think it'd be great on the blog. Send it to Dinty Moore with a photo and a bio. And so I sent it to him and I didn't hear back.
00:35:42
Speaker
And then I heard back from him the morning that it was published. So I really didn't know that it was going to be published until it was. And looking back at it this morning, it got a lot of play, a lot of comments too. I think it had like 36 comments, which I think is kind of a lot of people.
00:36:08
Speaker
because it seesaws between, yeah, do this, but then this, and it's basically, yeah, it's so, so people are like picking, they're seeing themselves in some part of those clauses. And they're like, yes, like, thank you for saying this. And it resonated. Yeah. Dinti sent me a, an analytics screenshot at the end of the week after, or maybe it was the next day after it ran. And, you know, it was, it was this,
00:36:38
Speaker
graph and he said, see that big blue line on the end? That's you. You've gotten 3,000 hits in two days or something. He's like, I knew it was good, but I guess you really hit a nerve. Now you're on the hashtag CNF podcast. I know. Look at me now. It's great to me how many people also didn't get it and took it literally as real writing advice. I've had a couple
00:37:07
Speaker
There were a couple comments on there and I've seen on Facebook, some people were like, what? How dare you tell people not to go to grad school? They'll lose their voice. And I'm like, it was satire.
00:37:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's um ultimately what it really is is it's a permission slip for people It's like you just remove all the worry like this find yourself in here and take the leap and the last clause of our independent clause or dependent whatever whatever you call it I I feel grammar I but I can't sometimes
00:37:44
Speaker
But it's just at the very end. It's just just right and that's basically that's what it is. That's what it boils down to is It's like the 16 year old Shauna who just started the zine she all you just wrote and that's what this piece is It's giving those people permission to dance with that fear and to just put something down because you can't be a writer unless you at least you're willing to write bad stuff you have to write the bad stuff until
00:38:09
Speaker
and then it will hopefully become good over time, but you gotta at least be willing to put out bad stuff first.
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah, thank you. I hope so. Yeah, just right. I guess that's the only true line in the whole piece. Right. I guess you could read this and deduce what bad advice you hear or have been told, but what might be some of the most frequent bad advice you hear if you feel comfortable.
00:38:44
Speaker
diagnosing certain advices particularly harmful. Well some people advise showing your memoir drafts to your family before publishing and I don't think that's a good idea. I didn't but I was also very naive at the time about the whole process but I don't I just don't think it's a good idea to show your family your early work period whether it's a memoir or short story or whatever
00:39:13
Speaker
unless you come from this huge literary family and maybe they'll have some good advice. But I find that that just becomes an excuse to not write. I could never show so and so this, you know, or so and so will never approve this. And, you know, that's just if you want to keep yourself from writing, then keep coming up with those excuses.
00:39:38
Speaker
but maybe just untold excuses like that. And that's usually just fear of just, you know, of, you know, you have this idea in your head and then there's a fear that you can't translate what's in your head down, down into your computer or into a notebook. So it's, yeah, it's like, it's like what you're saying. Like you're just putting a, it's easy to say no, if you put that roadblock in front of you. Yeah.
00:40:06
Speaker
And then maybe not so much prescribed advice, but also I think the cliches are dangerous. This idea of the drunken writer, or you have to be high to really tap into some inner voice. These societal cliches, I think, are unfortunate because you don't. It's just not true. You don't necessarily
00:40:34
Speaker
need an MFA and you don't need to be a drunk to be a good writer. I mean, there's millions of examples of people who've done it their own way, so. So when you're in the throes of an essay or a feature article or column, whatever it may be, what tends to be your morning routine or how you start warming up the muscles if you are, in fact, a morning person, but what would you say your routine is as you start to get going?
Kenney's Creative Routine
00:41:04
Speaker
Yeah, I'm totally an early bird. I never sleep past 5.30 or 6 for some reason. I think it's just genetic. And I like to get my body moving. I live in LA. I'll go to a yoga class or take a long walk or take a bike ride and something about getting the blood moving I think gets the blood moving through my brain too. Get some caffeine, some tea. I don't drink coffee but get some
00:41:33
Speaker
nice black tea going and then hit the computer as soon as I'm done exercising. And that's where I can get lost in time and that's where the magic happens. I can really just focus and immerse myself in words and forget about other things. I mean, there are other things, deadlines and things pulling me, but I like to just, I like having a deadline.
00:42:01
Speaker
that coaches me as well. I mean, I guess coming from a journalism background, there's nothing like a deadline to get my ass moving. Yeah. Yeah. And what are you still learning and discovering about writing and reading?
00:42:18
Speaker
that there's always more to learn. God, I mean, I haven't read most of the classics. I don't have enough reading time. And my audio books are a miracle. My eyes are so tired at the end of the day from, you know, teaching online classes or reading student papers or answering emails that I love now to just plug in and close my eyes and put my earbuds in and listen to a book too. That's just another way to
00:42:47
Speaker
get lost in story without using my eyes. It's a little bit different absorption process, I guess, but I love that as a relaxation tool. It's a way of reading without reading. It's nice like that. Yeah. I don't know. There's just so many
00:43:10
Speaker
more books to be read. It's all time. Fantastic. Well, I think on that note, Shawna, I'll let you get out of here. This was really wonderful and fun to speak to you about your approach. Cool. Thanks, Brendan. Oh, you're welcome. And take care, and we'll be in touch.
00:43:30
Speaker
Big ups, big thanks to Shauna for taking the time to speak with little old me. Hey, if you got something out of this podcast, subscribe on the Apple Podcast app or Google Play Music, leave a review, share this with a buddy. Thanks again. Let the riff take you out.