Episode 491: How Tracy Slater Broke Her Book into Steps – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

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“Writing a book is so overwhelming. So what I do to manage my own anxiety and overwhelm about that is I’m really, really obsessed with breaking everything into little steps so that all I need to do is the next step and then I don’t get overwhelmed.” — Tracy Slater, author of Together in Manzanar

Hey CNFers, it’s the creative nonfiction podcast, the show I speak to primarily writers about the art and craft of telling true stories. I’m Brendan O’meara, let’s try and keep our chins up, OK? OK.

It’s another Super Size Me CNFin’ Double Feature, Ep. 491 with Tracy Slater (@good_shufu). She is the author of Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp. It’s published by Chicago Review Press.

As Tracy and I talk about in this podcast, this book is sadly of the moment. It happened 80-some years ago, this vile incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese AMERICANS, 2/3rds of them were American citizens, rounded up and shipped to American concentration camps. Disgusting and disgraceful, but these are the histories we need to look dead in the eye, these are the histories THIS administration aims to erase so it is the work of historians, and journalists, and storytellers like Tracy to keep these stories alive.

Yes, feel the shame, let it wash over all of us, but learn from it. Shame metabolized into progress, but these are very trying times, CNFers.

So Tracy is here. She’s an American writer from Boston living for a bit in Toronto. Her essays and articles have been published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, among other places. She’s also the author of the memoir The Good Shufu: Finding Love, Self, and Home on the Far Side of the World. In this conversation we talk about:

How she broke up with her first agent
How sadly of the moment Together in Manzanar is
Being a white person writing this story and worrying of blind spots
How she handled the overwhelm of it all
And how the story chooses her

She also thanked me and the podcast in her acknowledgements, which is really sweet and made me feel good. AS you know, CNFers, this podcast often feels pretty uni-directional, so to know it’s “working,” that it’s of use and helpful, that’s validating. You can learn more about tracy at tracyslater.com and follow her on bluesky at tracyslater.bsky.social or on IG at @good_shufu. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for this. Parting shot on Squishy Time, but now here’s Tracy Slater. Riff …

“I thought about it, and I thought, this is the story that I want to research. This is a story that I want to tell. And so I took the leap and severed my relationship with that agent.”

“The story chooses me. It’s some kind of alchemy that I can’t reproduce myself. I’ll come across a story, and it will grab me, and I will fall in love with it. And I can’t make that happen, just like you can’t make yourself fall in love with a person. I’m not giving up on it. I’m even gonna not have an agent and try to find another. It’s gonna be hard, and it’s gonna take a long time.”

“The story and the period of history is more important, and I just have to be humble, and I just have to accept that like I may humiliate myself and say something that I’m so embarrassed about later. Part of it was just accepting that, like I couldn’t be precious about my own blind spots. I had to accept that I might have them. And then also, I sought out a lot of feedback and help from various people in the Japanese American community, who were unbelievably generous and kind with me and helped me steer clear of at least some blind spots or assumptions that I wanted to be careful not to make.”

Tracy’s Rec

Bialetti espresso maker

The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, edited by Floyd Cheung

Parting Shot: Squishy Time

Of late my days have been largely unsatisfying from a work perspective. Such is being an independent, a freelancer type, when you’re not working you’re not getting paid, unlike at a barista gig. Even if the cafe is empty, you’re still earning your wage, plus the employer handles all your withholdings so what is in your paycheck is actually yours to do what you want with it.

Ever since I put The Front Runner to bed, my time has been a bit squishy. Obviously I churn out these podcasts, and Pitch Club, but without the structure of the book and the deadline, it’s very easy for me to get distracted by bullshit and fritter my time away on house chores, walking, grazing in the kitchen, all manner of household appointments that fall to me because I have a flexible schedule: so vet appointments, car appointments, grocery shopping, cooking, mediocre house cleaning, yard work.

And what happens is many of these tasks, speaking nothing of chronic email checking and the all-too-frequent checking of Instagram (especially on days I post something), is that they all bleed together, so instead of these beautifully delineated colors, I have this muddy brownish-green slop. By the time the day is over, I can’t even tell you what I’ve done. Even when I catalog what I’ve done, I’ll look at it and think, “That’s it? What the fuck happened to the time?”

This is where three vital things came into play that helped me have one of my more satisfying days in the studio.

One, actually defining what a good day looks like. As freelancers, that’s often a mix of contract work, creative work, research, outreach, self-promotion, other-promotion, exercise, reading, napping, book work maybe. If there’s no subjective definition of what it means to have a good day, then nothing you do will EVER measure up. You’ll always head to bed with that gnawing feeling of not having done enough or worse, questioning what the hell you even did.

Two, for me, it’s putting the phone out of reach, out of eye sight. It’s like putting a bowl of M&Ms in front of me and saying, don’t eat those, don’t eat those, don’t eat those. Ideally, on my best days, the phone is out of the room, but with the ringer on because if someone calls me that’s important, usually. Or custom text ringtones so I know whether I should get up or not.

Three, time blocking, but a kind of fluid time blocking, and by that I mean, you don’t start your morning and block out your 8-hour day off the bat, unless you have concrete appointments that are easy to box off. Maybe you can forecast the next three hours and you have certain tasks. For me, it’s editing and packaging a podcast. I block out a few consecutive hours for that with 10-minute walk breaks or stretching breaks every hour. But that’s the only focus for those blocks. Nothing else. I have to fight my urge to get up or go snack on peanut butter.

The other day, I blocked off an hour to catalog articles from newspapers.com about a particular era of my central figure’s life and it reminded me how much I love being in the archives, digital or real, and how your people come to life in new and exciting ways. When the hour block was up, I was bummed it was over.

After this day, I was actually satisfied with what I finished. I find it no coincidence that I slept through the night for the first time in months. I don’t expect this to happen all the time, but it was nice.

Time before that had been so squishy, but when I firmed it up, I was left feeling good about the day, good about the way time was spent, and in a way that energized me for the next day in a way I hadn’t felt in quite some time.

None of this is revolutionary or new, but the combo of those three steps helped me take back a bit of what I could control, control I had been ceding to other forces.