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Episode 170: Leslie Jamison — Make It Scream, Make It Burn, and the Bounded Infinity of Nonfiction
167 Plays5 years ago
"Essays took on this energy for me in part because they're unofficial and in part because they brought me in contact with the world that felt really generative," says Leslie Jamison.
Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison is the occasion. It is published by Little, Brown.
Leslie is the bestselling author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering. We dig into a lot of great stuff about her process and how she came to nonfiction from a background in fiction.
Keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod and Instagram @cnfpod and Facebook @cnfpodcast.
Thanks to Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction, Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction and River Teeth for the support.
I hope you enjoy what we made for you.
Recommended
Transcript
Leslie's Innate Passion for Storytelling
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It felt less like there was a certain point at which I decided that I wanted to be a storyteller and more that that was it was like sweating or breathing like it was what my mind and heart and body wanted to do.
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
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Hey, CNFers. I'm Brendan O'Mearan. This is CNF, my creative nonfiction podcast. Today's guest is none other than Leslie Jameson, author of Make It Scream, Make It Burn, published by Little Brown. But before we get to that, here's a word from our two flagship sponsors.
Podcast Sponsorships and MFA Programs
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Speaker
Creative Nonfiction Podcast, CNF.
00:00:38
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greatest podcast in the world is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts and Nonfiction. Goucher MFA is a two-year low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere while on-campus residencies allow you to hone your craft with accomplished mentors who have Pulitzer Prizes and best-selling books to their names.
00:00:58
Speaker
Program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni which has published 140 books and counting. You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit Goucher.edu slash non-fiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published and Goucher's MFA for creative. Non-fiction or just non-fiction?
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Speaker
CNF is also brought to you by Bay Path University. Discover your story 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,
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Speaker
filled with positive reinforcement and a commitment. 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, and it is obvious that their years of experience as writers and teachers have made it faculty that I doubt can be beat anywhere."
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Don't just take her word for it. Apply now at baypath.edu slash MFA. Classes begin January 21st, so get on it. Well, that's right. How's it going? Let's riff.
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Speaker
Yep. That's right. That's right. Yep.
Engagement and Subscription Details
00:02:30
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This is CNF, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, where I talk to badass writers, filmmakers, and audio producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. I am your host, Brendan O'Mara. Hey. Find the show wherever you get your podcasts, and please subscribe. I hope I've made something worth sharing, so please link up to the show on social media. Keep the conversation going on Twitter, at cnfpod, Instagram, at cnfpod.
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all
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digital devil horns and skulls and fist bumps, the whole thing. Head over to brendanomero.com for show notes and to sign up for the monthly newsletter where I send out a bunch of cool reading recommendations, podcasts you might have missed, and a bunch of cool links I think you'll enjoy and get value out of.
Dedication to Crafting Quality Content
00:03:22
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It's one of the most fun I have putting things out there, so I hope you dig it. Once a month, no spam. Can't boot it.
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the happy to jump in the fire with you
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As some of you may or may not know, I'm pretty obsessed with Chef's Table on Netflix and what it illustrates to the core. Sure, some of the chefs are self-destructive, but I deeply admire the commitment they take to the craft. All the best ones share it, and I'm sure some of the ones that aren't as mainstream share it too.
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I got, it got me thinking about what it would look like to commit to anything on that level.
Influences on Leslie's Writing Path
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The constant adjusting, the tweaking. How would a podcast look if you really drill down on it? Really get tight with the edit. You see these chefs tinker on a bread recipe over and over and over again.
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What would that look like for you? I suspect many of you aren't that dedicated and we wonder why we fail. I mean like some of you are dedicated, but like that dedicated. You know, tilt the words, italicize it. Maybe we're not trying hard enough. As hard as I try, as overdrawn and overwhelmed and burned out as I am, I know I'm not trying as hard as I could.
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Not really. So, I don't know, something to chew on, some cud to chew on, or some bubble-icious, whatever's less gross. Anyway, Leslie Jamison is here. She's the best-selling author of the empathy exams and the recovering, and most recently, make it scream, make it burn. Well, let's say, let's make it riff. Here's Leslie Jamison.
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How did you know that writing and reading was something that you would end up taking up as a vocation? I think that ever since I was a little girl, I've loved stories. I've loved stories from both sides. I was totally, totally that kid curled up in the corner of the couch with
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a book and a box of cookies and just disappearing into everything that I read. And then I think from a very early age, like even before I could actually write, I was coming up with stories and I have two older brothers and I would make them write my stories down when I came up with them but couldn't write them down myself.
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Sometimes, you know, sometimes my princesses would die early if my brother said someplace else they needed to be. But I think that impulse to to put stories out into the world was there from very early on. And so it was it felt less like there was a certain point at which I decided that I wanted to be a storyteller and more that that was it was like sweating or breathing. Like it was what my mind and heart and body
00:06:19
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wanted to do. And the only question was like, how do you actually be a grown up with this as your
Early Writing Struggles and Breakthroughs
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job? Right. And who along the way there, especially early on, was encouraging you to kind of pick up that torch? My family was always really supportive of my desire to be a writer and my love for writing my I remember my
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I would go and stay with my aunt sometimes for like a week in the summer. She's a writer as well. And she would, like, she would give me just a big stack of books and some food and disappear. And I remember she did this thing for me when I was little. She did it twice where she, there's this thing called Poliwag Press. Like obviously it meant a lot to me because I still remember what it was called.
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where you could send off pages of writing and illustrations, and then they would bind them into a book. And she did that for me so that these two little stories that I wrote, I still remember what they're called. One was called Hamsters Start to Play, and the other was called Family Vacation. So my aunt gave me the gift of recognizing that I wanted to tell stories and saying, look, you can do this. And they can even become these physical objects that other people can read, and you can hold in your hand,
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So I remember those as feeling really magical and just really exciting that that could happen. And then I had different, I had teachers along the way were incredible. I mean, probably the most important teacher for me I had in my early twenties, that was Charlie D'Ambrogio, who's just an incredible writer of fiction and nonfiction, but he was my teacher in a fiction class.
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He really, really changed the way that I think about writing and changed the way that I thought about what I wanted my own writing to do. And he was one of the first people who who read something that I wrote and thought like this, you know, she's got this voice, you know, and and helped me believe that there was something in it that was singular.
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What were the early growing pains that you can point to when you were maybe trying to forge that voice that was, you know, so maybe recognizable, trying to elevate your work to something that can be, you know, artistic and readable in that way? Yeah, it's a great question. I think a lot of my
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growing pains when I was kind of like a teenager, late teenager, early 20s, like so I'm thinking about like high school and college and like the early years of grad school, I went to grad school quite young. So that era of like intense feverish ambition, I think I was so devoted to the idea of writing beautiful prose
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that I sort of let the beauty part of it spin out and sometimes I remember I wrote a lot of poetry in college and I remember at a certain point really feeling a bit lost because I didn't know what I was trying to say. I only knew that I wanted to say it in a beautiful way and
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So I think there was almost like I got lost in a sort of garden maze, like the thickets of the prose itself, and really needed to connect in some deeper level with the stories that I wanted to tell. And I remember when I went to graduate school, I went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, which was completely like a dream come true. And as ever, dreams come true in sort of strange ways.
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I applied to a bunch of grad schools and I only got into one and it was, you know, Iowa. And I say that in part to say that it's like, I think even people whose trajectories, you know, have a lot of luck and good fortune in them, like, if you're writing, it's like your trajectory, I think is going to be littered with like way more rejection and acceptance no matter what. And so it's like, right, there were all those grad school rejections, like there were all the
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trips to the post office in Iowa City where I'm sending, you know, I have a big stack of 15 Menil envelopes that I'm sending out to 15 different literary magazines, which I guess doesn't even happen anymore. But I remember that post office line. And you know, it's just like rejection after rejection after rejection. But I think even at Iowa, I was really like in the thrall of that idea of writing beautifully. And it's not to say I no longer
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love that as a reader or want that for my own writing but it almost has to be a byproduct of trying to come at the truth and if you come at the truth with enough nuance and precision like the wrong language will kind of burn off like almost like something super heated and we'll just leave you with the prose that you need um which i think is what gives it that quality of kind of song or beauty
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that part that you saying like spinning out on the trying to write things beautiful I remember having a similar experience going into the grad school program I went to and I had to it took me a long time to kind of unlearn that and get back to actually kind of the core of
Transition from Fiction to Essays
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who
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I am as a writer, but it's like I wonder if how long, let's say, it took you to maybe kind of unlearn that sort of desire or maybe too intentionally beautiful writing to get to what you're sort of really capable of if you just kind of eschewed that sort of external veneer of beautiful writing to get to the truth. Most of my writing life has proceeded
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less of an arc of like constant progression and more, more of like sort of muddling along or like trundling along and then having some piece or some section of a book or something where I felt like I had some kind of breakthrough and got to some new place. And so I think there was definitely one of those like breakthrough moments happened right at the end of my
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MFA days in Iowa, where I wrote this one short story. It was the last short story that I wrote. It's the last short story that I turned in for workshop. And it was coming off of two years spent writing these stories that were really polished. And, you know, some of them were ambitious or experimental, but none of them really had found like
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that beating heart of emotional urgency. And this last story, even though it pains me to say it, was a breakup story. It was about a breakup. It was kind of rising up out of a breakup in my own life. And I simultaneously had this real sense of shame and trepidation about it. I didn't think this was the stuff Great Literature was made of, but I also had a lot of intensity that I was bringing to it. And I think it was really that story where my language found
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some kind of footing, but it wasn't because I was trying to do something different with the language. It was because I was writing from the space of urgency and that was driving the prose like to this place of not just intensity, but also real precision and specificity. And I was, I had work that I needed it to do. Like I had
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emotional contours that I wanted it to articulate. And I think it was that sense of putting the language to work in that particular story that like allowed me to find some kind of voice that I hadn't found before. And then I felt like I followed that voice into my first novel. And I think similarly in nonfiction, you know, I had one essay that I wrote actually also at the end of my time in grad school, even though I hadn't really been writing essays, I did take one class where I wrote some essays and
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I remember writing this one essay that was so different from anything I'd ever written before. It had some personal material in it. It wasn't really narrative. It also had a lot of literary criticism and some cultural history. And it was thinking about sentimentality and my own relationship to artificial sweeteners and the kind of shame of too muchness, of craving too much, wanting too much sweetness. I was really excited by that approach of
00:15:06
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bringing together these multiple kinds of inquiry. And again, I think my language found a new sort of footing in that essay, but not because I was trying to do something in particular with language, but because I needed language to do this work for the questions that I was asking and for the kind of braids that I was trying to bring together.
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And so you go to Iowa, you primarily identify as a fiction writer, and your first book, of course, is a novel. But I think a lot of people, if they hear your name, they associate you with the essay writing you've done and the journalism you've done. So how did you start to learn to get comfortable on the nonfiction canvas versus the fiction canvas? Yeah.
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was briefly alluding to, there was an essay class that I took at Iowa in the nonfiction program that was exciting to me. And it was exciting to me because it felt like an experiment. It wasn't a genre that I had a lot of ambitions pinned on. It wasn't a genre that I felt like I had any experience in. I was sort of able to come at essays as this very curious, excited,
00:16:24
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amateur. And I mean, I was like an amateur at everything, you know, so I was an amateur, I was an amateur at everything. But I think with essays, it, there was something that felt very free about them from the beginning. And I think some of that was intrinsic to the form like the, the essay is a really capacious, generous form. And it's a very heterogeneous form, like not only can it
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take a lot of different shapes, but a single essay can hold a lot of different kinds of threads. And I think that was intrinsically exciting to me. But then I also think the fact that it felt new to me was made it that much more exciting and that I had from years of fiction workshops. When I wrote fiction, I felt like I had a chorus of voices in my ear judging what I was doing or telling me, I don't really buy this character. I don't really buy this ending or just all that sort of internalized
00:17:22
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workshop advice, and I didn't really have that with nonfiction, so it also felt a little freer in that sense. So over the years, I would sometimes return to essay writing just as a kind of secret project on the side of my fiction. After my first novel, which was published in 2010, I
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was working on it, trying to work on a second novel that was really quite frustrating to me or I was frustrating it or something. It was a historical novel and I just, I found it really hard to find a pulse. And so I think I really started to turn to essays because I found in essays this pulse that was missing in that project. And again, maybe part of that had to do with this connection between me and the genre, but part of it had to do with the fact that
Revision Process and Writing Routine
00:18:13
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You know, sometimes I describe it as like my mistress genre, that it was sort of outside the bounds of my official relationship with fiction. And there was something that felt kind of thrilling or transgressive about these little projects that were happening on the side. I remember one essay that I wrote that became part of the empathy exams, my first collection called The Immortal Horizon. That was about this ultra marathon in Tennessee. I remember going to the ultra marathon where my brother was running and
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just writing everything down, interviewing people about why they were doing it, interviewing the guy who created the race about why he'd created it and just feeling so charged up and so alive. Like I just got to get to go out into the world and puzzle over something and write down everything I see and ask people questions. And all of that just felt very enlivening and really exciting. And so I think that essays took on this kind of energy for me in part because they were
00:19:09
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unofficial and in part because they brought me into contact with the world in this way that felt really generative. Hey, it's me, your CNF and buddy Brendan. Listen, we all need editing. We all need fresh eyes. You need someone who can objectively look at your work and coach it along. Whether that's developmental editing or even copy editing, hiring a great editor is one of the best investments you can make in your book and your writing.
00:19:39
Speaker
So if you want to take your book to the next level, consider working with me. I'd be thrilled and honored to help email Brendan at Brendan O'Mara.com. If you want to take that leap together and now back to the greatest podcast in the world.
00:19:55
Speaker
Part of the excitement for you was of course that it was this kind of new form and so in that honeymoon period or afterwards when it starts to kind of where it starts to dull and then the work starts to get hard, how did you wrestle with that moment of trying to continually push through that dip to get to the other side and to really maybe realize yourself as a non-fiction writer once the work started getting hard of course?
00:20:25
Speaker
That's a great question. I think, for me, part of it with essays is that the revision process is often as creatively exciting as the drafting process, just in different ways. So that if the drafting process doesn't always feel like a honeymoon, but sometimes can have that energy of really tapping into the energy of a project or a question or a narrative.
00:20:52
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And then, you know, at a certain point you start to hit some obstacles. You're not sure how to structure the thing. You're not sure what meanings to extract from it. That I think for me, I do a lot of bringing a draft as far as I can bring it and then like letting go of it for a little while so that I don't feel so exhausted by it and thwarted by it and oversaturated by it. And then coming back to it and really letting myself
00:21:22
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pretty robustly and rigorously imagine what revision could look like. And the taking time away is an important part of like thinking about revision is something exciting rather than just laborious or burdensome. But it's like in the revision process, I feel like I often get to meetings that feel much more interesting and nuanced and layered to me. So it kind of breathes this second wind into the sales of the whole endeavor. And so I think I could
00:21:52
Speaker
Part of it is like, you know, if every project or every essay involves like a kind of honeymoon period and then a stalemating or a souring, it's like sometimes the way to get past that stalemate is just the time away. Sometimes the way past that stalemate for me is giving essays to readers who can help me return to them with,
00:22:19
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both a sense of like renewed excitement about what's happening there because they're coming to it with fresher eyes than I am, but also a different sense of what might be happening, which can kind of make it come alive for me again or come alive in a different way. So time and space and other people are always that I sort of get over the like curdling of that initial honeymoon bliss. Where in the process would you say you feel most alive or most engaged?
00:22:47
Speaker
I mean, definitely something that happens in the drafting process that is pretty electric. Um, and you know, I, I, it's a very sacred thing to me because it doesn't happen that often. Like the moments in my life where I lose time in some way, where I lose track of time, or I sort of feel like I have disappeared or, you know, like where I'm not just like so acutely aware.
00:23:15
Speaker
Um, and that can definitely happen when I'm drafting a piece like where I, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm just in the flow or in the vein of it. Um, but I can also get really excited by, you know, and when I hear myself speak, I should also say like, for me writing, isn't just like a process of unmitigated excitement where I'm like, I was excited by that phase of the process. The process, like I totally also have moments of utter frustration or what I think of as like snack moments where I'm just like sitting and staring at
00:23:45
Speaker
the last sentence I've written thinking like, I want to snack, you know, I should get up and get a snack. And it's usually because I don't know what I want to say next. I don't know what the next move is. I don't know how to say the thing that I'm trying to say, or I'm nervous that I'm gonna fuck it up or not say it right. And all of those things translate either to like, I should check Twitter or I should get a snack. And, you know, but I've learned to
00:24:09
Speaker
in seeing what they are and seeing that there are moments of uncertainty, I can sort of honor them as part of the process too. But I was going to say, I also can get really excited by certain kinds of revision and particularly like, I'll often make a kind of map of the first draft of a piece and then either physically kind of cut it up and rearrange things or just let myself write out another structure or another possible arrangement and that kind of reconfiguring
00:24:38
Speaker
can sometimes feel so exciting too, because it's almost like you can release the material from the prison of its wrong first structure, even if that wrong first structure was a necessary part of getting it drafted out to begin with, but you can sort of release it from the strictures of a structure that isn't quite right for it and let yourself just burrow into the best material or just burrow into the material that matters or create a different kind of urgency by flipping something from the end to the beginning and those kinds of
00:25:08
Speaker
Structural adjustments in service of a certain sort of liberation can be really exciting to me too And you kind of alluded to that at some that's sometimes you do you have that moment of excitement where you're getting into a like a really nice flow state with your with your work and How do you have a sort of a ritual or a routine by which you kind of check in with yourself? So you can you can freely engage with who you are on the page you know between like the job and the toddler and
00:25:37
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um, work travel and just
Embracing Journalism and Nonfiction Risks
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Speaker
all that stuff. It's like, it's like just having carved out like two hours where I can write feels, I feel like the rush of, of having them and it can work in a couple of different ways. Cause sometimes you feel a lot of pressure around it. Like, okay, I mean, I've arranged so many variables just to have these two hours to write. Like, I hope I really generate some amazing story about being on beds or something, you know, like, but, um, I think, I think that
00:26:07
Speaker
more than that pressure or straitjacketed feeling of like scarcity. Thus, I have to have to make it count like is a sense of like, gratitude to have the time at all. And so I sort of forced myself to plug in and I have really gotten attached to a lot of rhythms of like riding on the road in small pockets of time. So writing an airplane gates has like a certain kind of charge for me of like, I'm just gonna like
00:26:36
Speaker
plunge into these 20 minutes or 40 minutes and just do everything I can with them. I almost feeling like a secret agent at like a 62 or whatever. And sometimes waking up, one of my favorite ways and places to write is like hotel rooms on the road, wake up at like five in the morning, drink my curried coffee. And just feel again, like I'm sort of on my own planet or in my own space.
00:27:04
Speaker
I guess it's less that I have one kind of ritual that I need and more that I sort of take the temperature of what my life is in a given era and say, what are the pockets that feel like they can hold writing in this era? Oh, that's great. Yeah, it's kind of like you're a secret agent. You're just kind of like very chameleonic with the way you just kind of blend into whatever background you have and be like, all right, this is where I'm going to steal that time.
00:27:31
Speaker
Yeah, totally, totally. I was talking to a friend recently who's a writer who found herself in this
00:27:39
Speaker
sort of absurd gathering of performance artists. And she said that, you know, initially she was just feeling a tremendous amount of social awkwardness. And then something kicked in that was like writer brain where she was like, I'm just going to notice everything and write it all down. And like, I totally knew what she meant about like writer brain kicking in where you sort of feel like it's almost like the Terminator goggles or something like that, where you start seeing everything noticed.
00:28:05
Speaker
everything, getting kind of excited by everything. And I think that can, it's not that when I'm in the airplane gate, I'm always just like writing about the people around me, but that sense of sort of locking into some sort of writer self in the middle of another space or a public space is like, it's a cool thing when it's good work when you can get it.
00:28:26
Speaker
What was that moment like when you kind of discovered journalism and the way you can infuse maybe some of your own personal experience into it but ultimately you're kind of falling back on maybe doing a long longish kind of profile. And what was that like for you just you kind of alluded to with the ultra marathon piece you did where you were interviewing a lot of people and that felt really great to dive into their lives. So I wonder what that moment was like for you as someone who wouldn't
00:28:53
Speaker
probably don't classify yourself as a trained reporter or journalist, but it's something you have taken on the last, you know, probably 10 years or so. Yeah, I mean, again, maybe there's a little bit of the amateur energy that I was talking about earlier, where the fact that I haven't ever been trained gives me a little bit of a sense of that thrill of sort of just jumping into a really cold pool or something like that.
00:29:23
Speaker
exactly what it's gonna feel like. And I say that not to like embrace and ethos of journalistic response irresponsibility, because I actually do, I mean, I take it really seriously, and I approach it really seriously, and believe very fully and submit very completely to, like, fact checking processes, and like, you know, kind of structures of how to encounter subjects and being transparent with subjects. And like, you know, so it's not it's not that I'm like, oh, I just
00:29:52
Speaker
dive headlong into a vocation that I know nothing about and it's great, but more that I think the risk of it and the unknownness of it, they were sources of energy early on. And certainly that feeling of gaining traction by virtue of encountering the world and writing it down, that was very powerful to me.
00:30:21
Speaker
you know, that ultra marathon piece or profile that I wrote that sort of emerged from that piece of an ultra marathoner who ended up in prison in West Virginia. And what it meant for this man whose whole life had been defined by emotion, like the motion of escapism when he was a crack addict, or the motion of running when he was an ultra marathoner, what it meant for him to be kind of confined in one place. Like all like, there was a kind of
Ethics and Complexity in Nonfiction Storytelling
00:30:51
Speaker
just deep curiosity and attention that felt like part of the process of those pieces that was really, you know, nonfiction might seem more finite than fiction because you have to stick to what actually happened. But there was something that felt really infinite about turning to nonfiction to me because it was like
00:31:12
Speaker
I don't know, I guess it was like the bounded infinity of the world rather than the like infinite infinity of what you could imagine. And there was something about that bounded infinity that was really exciting to me. Yeah, it kind of pulled out a little phrase that you used in a maximum exposure in your latest collection about Annie, the photographer. And it was just something because she doesn't use a zoom lens. So you wrote like for a close up, she has to get close.
00:31:41
Speaker
And so, in a sense, she's created some sort of a barrier where she can't, you know, she has a kind of boundary under which she creates her art. And in a way, nonfiction is that way too, because you have to, you can't make it up, you gotta stick to the facts. And within those parameters is where you can get wildly creative. And I think, do you get particularly sort of charged by the fact that you do have these boundaries and it's within those lines that you can use whatever color you want?
00:32:12
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think sometimes I talk about the fact-checking process as something akin to formal constraints in a poem that, you know, getting fact-checked doesn't always feel like, oh, me and this fact-checker are writing a poem together. But, um, but it can actually, to come up against, to come up against some sort of edge can sharpen your ideas into focus in a new way or ask you to just get more precise with it can be quite useful and
00:32:42
Speaker
So I do think that there's something about like coming up against those bounded edges and then doing what you can within them that I find generative in the ways that, you know, not all poetry, but much poetry is sort of enabled or charged up by
00:33:01
Speaker
by its boundaries and its constraints rather than being sort of shut down or closed by them. You allude in the collection too and I'm blanking on the exact piece. It's in, but you cite Janet Malcolm's piece of where she says, you know, a journalist is a kind of confidence man.
00:33:20
Speaker
So how do you wrestle with what she poses in her, the journalist and the murderer, of course, and how you approach your more journalistic pieces with, you know, with always that little Janet Malcolm bird on your shoulder? Yeah. Oh my God. I'm trying, right now I'm just trying to picture what the Janet Malcolm bird would look like, like a little pair of glasses and like a serious gaze. I, yeah, so I think that I cite
00:33:50
Speaker
that Janet Malcolm idea in an essay called We Tell Ourself Stories in Order to Live Again, which is obviously also in conversation with Joan Didion and some of her ideas, but it's a piece about reincarnation, a piece about a set of children who have past life memories and the ways that their families have constructed narratives around these past life memories, the work that a child psychologist is doing to kind of explain and make sense of these memories.
00:34:20
Speaker
And I was very aware as I was writing that piece that probably the piece I was gonna end up writing wasn't exactly what the families would wanna read. It wasn't exactly the story that these families would tell about themselves. And it wasn't exactly the story that this child psychologist who was researching them would tell about them or about himself or his work. And so I kept feeling this sort of guilt like I wasn't telling the story about them that they would have told about themselves.
00:34:51
Speaker
And I think I even like, I could hear myself in my interviews when I played them over again to transcribe them sort of like articulating in a disguised way like versions of this anxiety inside the interviews as they were happening. But I think part of how I have reconciled myself to that inevitability, because I don't see that inevitability with the same level of cynicism that Janet Malcolm does, I think. I mean, I think she's being deliberately sort of
00:35:20
Speaker
like polemical or provocative there. But I also think I don't, because I don't see the act of seeing around somebody as intrinsically cruel or antagonistic. I think it's not only inevitable, but productive that a journalist or a writer isn't going to tell the story about another person than that other person were told about themselves. Like there's something that we're able to see from the outside that is different and not just lesser than what you can see from sort of inhabiting a self.
00:35:50
Speaker
And I think, so I ended up feeling like I didn't owe my subjects, you know, my attempt to replicate or approximate the story they would have told about themselves. But what I did owe them was the dignity of complexity on the page. Like I owed it to them to let them surprise me. Like I owed it to them to let them be
00:36:12
Speaker
more complicated than a simple thesis statement in my head. I owed it to them to get to be lots of different things on the page rather than just being one thing. And does that guarantee that all your subjects are going to like what you write about them? Not at all. But I do think that holding that ethos of complexity and letting every figure hold
00:36:35
Speaker
aspects of self that point in multiple directions. I think that's the standard that I end up trying to hold myself to.
Organic Theme Development in Her Book
00:36:44
Speaker
Were you always writing towards this book or did you feel that it kind of revealed itself to you as you were pursuing various assignments and whims? I was not always writing toward it in an explicit sense. I didn't sit down one day and say,
00:37:03
Speaker
I'm gonna write a book about obsession, or I'm gonna write a book about longing, and here, the 14 essays that are gonna comprise it. It was more about following pieces, whether they were brought to me by editors, or my own curiosity, or my own experience, but writing pieces that I felt really connected to, that I felt a really strong sense of urgency toward in some way. And then at a certain point,
00:37:32
Speaker
starting to recognize these subterranean thematic channels of connection between them, that a lot of these pieces did seem to be about hungering for things you couldn't ever quite reach or couldn't ever quite touch, whether that was a whale that people called the loneliest whale in the world, or a past life you might have lived, or a digital life you were constructing online, or a family you were trying to make art about but couldn't capture in their entirety, or, you know,
00:38:00
Speaker
an absent father or an absent lover, like all of these kinds of like elusiveness started to really, I started to really feel them as connected tissue between these projects that I've been working on. And that's, that's what's more exciting to me than a kind of predetermined thematic agenda, which I think can start to feel a little bit stale or repetitive. And here, if you sort of follow your fascinations and let the connections reveal themselves,
00:38:29
Speaker
I think hopefully at least you end up with a collection that feels multiple and feels diverse and feels kind of rangy, but still has that sense of something, something in the guiding preoccupations feels continuous and that's exciting to you. And then when you start to think about, well, how do I arrange the pieces and how do I take these subterranean connections and sort of activate them so that a reader feels like they've had this
00:38:58
Speaker
larger Gestalt experience after reading the whole thing. Yeah, it's almost like what you said earlier about making the language work for you instead of seeking out beautiful language. In a sense, you were just kind of following your taste throughout all of these pieces and then through your taste, the theme did the work for you. It showed up when you wanted it to instead of shoehorning
00:39:23
Speaker
essays into a theme you're hoping to address, like longing. You're like, oh, I want to write about longing. Let me shoehorn everything into this one theme. It seemed to bubble up from what you were interested in over the last however long it took you to compile all these pieces. Yeah, it was about seven years. And yes, I think that's a great way of putting it, that it, you know, letting yourself just sort of push the pause button on the thematic summary for a little bit or hold off on that for a little bit and just
00:39:53
Speaker
and just follow your own interest and then see what seems to be emerging is totally a way to avoid that really cringe-worthy taste of the jammed, the shoe-horned piece. And I know there was a similar process with the empathy exams where I didn't sit down to write a book about empathy. I just started to realize that empathy was through lines
00:40:25
Speaker
writing. And once I did sort of recognize that and I knew that I was working on a collection that was arranged around that interrogation,
00:40:36
Speaker
I would actually rather than being like, okay, now that I know what it's about, it's easier. It actually became harder once I quote unquote, like I knew what it was about because I couldn't feel that thematic over determination asserting itself. So one of the first essays that I wrote with empathy exams after I sort of was conceiving it up as a bit as a collection was this essay called the devil's bait about more gallons disease, this controversial,
00:41:04
Speaker
a skin disorder that a lot of doctors believe is psychosomatic and they kind of discount a lot of patient suffering for that reason. But the first draft of that essay, which was far too long as all of my first drafts are, included the word empathy like 80 times or something insane like that, you know, where it was like, I sort of had to wean myself off of the word empathy or the concept of empathy once I'd arrived at it
00:41:33
Speaker
as a thematic anchor, and so I think it's a kind of act of grace to arrive at those thematic anchors late.
00:41:39
Speaker
And you said, you even allude to it in Make It Scream, Make It Burn, that you often write 10,000 more words than you were assigned and you just kind of alluded to it now that you write long, early. So what is that process for you like when you have to start getting brutal and start leaving, start cutting things and leaving things on the floor and even like good things on the floor? Like how do you, what's that calculus like for you? Oh, brutal, painful.
00:42:09
Speaker
I mean, yeah, it's like, I shouldn't say if every writer writes to be loved. I know that some part of me writes to be loved. And so the anxiety of like leaving something on the cutting room floor, getting rid of something is like the anxiety of like, what if that was the thing that was gonna make somebody love me? Like now I'm not gonna be loved because it might've been that, it could've been that. But that said, I mean, now that I know my process
00:42:38
Speaker
I just know that I write long and that it's really can become tedious or painful for somebody to read something that's too long, like that I'm actively diminishing somebody's experience of the work by writing something longer than it needs to be. And specifically, I know that part of how I think on the page is that I'll
00:43:00
Speaker
I'll write out a given idea like 10 different ways or 10 different times, or I'll keep circling back to the same idea, but I'll say it a slightly different way, or I'll have a slightly different metaphor for it or a slightly different formulation. And there's something I kind of like about each of those formulations, but often the process has to be like locating that the same idea comes up 10 or 15 times and saying,
00:43:23
Speaker
Okay, what is the single best iteration of this idea? Or is there something sort of useful about a couple of different iterations of this idea that I can bring together so that I say it once, but I say it in the best possible way? So it's kind of like identifying repetition, trying to be brutal about repetition. And I think some of what lets me be brutal with myself, and I'm sure there are people who would say I'm not brutal enough, is having readers who aren't me who
00:43:51
Speaker
who I trust and who are honest with me and who can say, you know, I, I really started to struggle with this piece because I felt like it was repeating itself and just and the embarrassment of that, you know, the embarrassment of writing too long and the embarrassment of saying something too many times. It's like, it's the same as a social embarrassment of like,
00:44:12
Speaker
telling a story to somebody at a party and they say, yeah, yeah, I remember you told me that story before, you know, so I feel like there could be something really useful about getting embarrassed when people read your work, like not again, not in a cruel way or something, but just because there actually needs to be something pretty forceful that can make you cut the things you love. And so I think
00:44:37
Speaker
sometimes having some external feedback can help provide that force. And just having the experience over and over again of actually feeling a piece get better for being shorter can
Creating a Cohesive Essay Collection
00:44:49
Speaker
help you. Like, I can't tell you how many times I've had the particular experience of, you know, having to edit a piece to a certain length for a magazine because, you know, whatever, we only have 7,000 words. And thinking in the back of my head, okay, I'll do this version for the magazine, but like,
00:45:05
Speaker
When I run the essay in a collection, the world is going to get the directors cut. But then I actually end up often going with the shorter version because it's almost like I needed to trick myself in order to make the cuts into thinking there was still going to be a longer version out there. But then I ended up realizing that the shorter version was better and stronger and could hold people more fully inside of it.
00:45:29
Speaker
And so it's like I needed some kind of delusion to hang on to in order to be ruthless with the edits. But once I was on the other side of that ruthlessness, I could see why it had been necessary.
00:45:40
Speaker
What becomes the challenge for you when you've got with a collection of essays of this nature where the work spanned seven years and at that point at the beginning you didn't necessarily know they were all gonna come together. So how do you, what was the challenge in trying to link essays that spanned a long period of time so that they do feel like they belong together in this book? Part of it had to do with
Personal Relaxation Recommendations
00:46:07
Speaker
the selection process where this wasn't, you know, by any means like all of the essays I wrote over the last seven years. It was the essays I wrote over the last seven years that specifically felt to me like they had something to say or had a role to play in this particular collection. So I think that part of it was just choosing the pieces that felt like they spoke to some of these ideas. And then the other part was, you know, I revised every single one of these essays
00:46:37
Speaker
for this collection. I mean, some of them only exist in this collection. And some of them I revised much more heavily than others, but often that revision process ended up drawing out certain ideas in the piece that could also connect it to other pieces. So for example, the essay you referenced earlier called Maximum Exposure, which is about this photographer, Annie Appell, who's been photographing the same Mexican family
00:47:04
Speaker
for now almost 30 years on both sides of the US-Mexico border. It's a piece of photography criticism about her work. It's a profile of her as an outsider artist who's received very little institutional support, but it's really a piece about obsession and what it means to be obsessed by the idea of documenting other people's lives.
00:47:29
Speaker
the kind of impossibility of ever doing that completely. And, you know, I really, at a certain point, started to see that part of what was moving to me about Annie's work was the way that she thought of her work as a form of love. She thought of it as a form of attention, and it was a form of attention that was also a form of love.
00:47:52
Speaker
sort of way of thinking about one's practice that in a lot of the circles that I'm in would get seen as like sentimental or embarrassingly earnest, but I loved it. Like I was inspired by it. And so I sort of, I drew out some of the ideas about attention as love and observation as a form of love and also this long-term commitment to an artistic project as akin to love in some way, because you were also showing up for this process that might surprise you or could potentially betray you
00:48:21
Speaker
And it was in connecting the acts of an ongoing art process to love that I started to see the ways that that essay could be a bridge to some of the essays that came later in the collection about romantic love or familial love or long-term relationships and how they
00:48:42
Speaker
surprise you, how they thwart your expectations, how they become something different than what you could have imagined. And so once I was editing towards a collection, it became really, really exciting to see some of those smaller connections emerge.
00:48:59
Speaker
And also as we wind down here, Leslie, kind of a goofy little thing I'm doing at the end of the show is asking guests for that one kind of, a recommendation of sorts that they can kind of unplug from maybe the work they're doing, maybe something you're using to kind of unplug from the wonderful work you're doing and the teaching you're doing, your journalism and essays and fiction. Maybe like, what's a recommendation that you would bestow upon the listeners to be like, you know, this is something I endorse right now.
00:49:27
Speaker
I know exactly what I want to do for my recommendation. There's a New York-specific version of it, but I think it's more general. I think it's possible to find it anywhere. I have been spending a lot of time at these public baths, these Russian baths on 10th Street in the East Village. They're in the basement of an old tenement, and they've been there since the late 1900s.
00:49:53
Speaker
It's a series of really hot sauna rooms with kind of like old clanking, slightly grimy pipes above you, and then a cold plunge pool, you know, with probably the ancient sweat of many Russian men. But there's something I really love about this communal intimacy with anonymous strangers, all of your bodies going through these intensities together. And there's something I also really love about
00:50:19
Speaker
kind of the cycles of getting yourself unbearably hot and then giving yourself the release of the cold water. It fuels like a kind of mythic rebirth over and over again. So I, I recommend the Russian baths on 10th street in particular, but I guess I recommend like public baths in general because they're, you know, they're all over in different, in different forms. There are these amazing Korean spas in LA or there are, you know, versions of, I think that, um, finding that kind of like,
00:50:48
Speaker
solace with strangers. It's really powerful and it's very wordless. And I think in its embodiment, it's also a great counterpoint to what it means to write.
Episode Conclusion and Listener Interaction
00:50:57
Speaker
Oh, that's amazing. Well, Leslie, where can people find you online and get more familiar with your work if they're not already familiar with it? And to learn more about Make It Scream, Make It Burn. Yeah. So my website is just my name, lesliejameson.com. And I'm also on Twitter at LS Jameson.
00:51:16
Speaker
Awesome. Well, this was great. Thank you so much for the time, Leslie. And yeah, best of luck with the book. It was an honor to speak to you about it. And I hope we can do this again down the road at some point. Well, thank you so much for having me. It was really, really a pleasure to meet you.
00:51:34
Speaker
That episode made me scream. Made me burn, baby. Anyway, thanks to Leslie Jamison. She's one of the good ones, am I right? I like that one. I like that one a lot. Make sure you pick up a copy or two of Leslie's new book. It's pretty special. It's published by Little Brown. Thanks to Goucher's MFA in nonfiction, Bay Path University's MFA in creative nonfiction, and River Teeth for the support. Forgot to mention River Teeth at the top of the show. My bad.
00:52:04
Speaker
It won't happen again, I promise.
00:52:06
Speaker
Also, email me, Brendan O'Mara. No, it's brendan at brendanomara.com. Hey, hey. If you want to make a better book with better editing, let's talk. Also, speaking of talking, keep the conversation going on Twitter at cnfpod and all the other ones for that matter. If you're feeling froggy, leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts. We're getting close to 100. I mean, how cool would it be to hit 100? I think we could go.
00:52:34
Speaker
Let's do it again next week, same time, same CNF in place, because I know, if you can do Interview, see ya!