We talk about her approach to writing the book, revisiting old essays, dealing with the flood of rejections and the art of the crafty complaint.
We brought up her 100 rejections in a year manifesto, something she said at HippoCamp 2019, something she took from Lisa Romeo.
Amy talks about drawing inspiration from David Sedaris, Malcolm Gladwell, and the mystery genre.
Make sure you’re subscribed to the podcast (wherever!) and, more importantly, the monthly newsletter. You can subscribe at the form at the bottom of this post. You can subscribe by this link. Or you can put your name in the task bar at the very top of this web page. It’s that easy.
Thanks for listening, CNFers. It means the world to me. Seriously.
We talk a lot about his eleven months in Antarctica and the grind that was. We learn about how he got into this line of work, of being a freelancer, and helping the penguins when they were in peril.
I hope I’ve made something worth sharing. I’ll be taking an indefinite leave of social media starting in 2020, so feel free to follow @CNFPod, but if I don’t respond, you know why. I’m not being rude. In fact, I want to keep in touch via email or via the newsletter. The newsletter is where it’s at, so please subscribe to that and the podcast. Duh.
Lindsay always wanted to write a book and he wrote a fine one here.
Support the show by linking up to it on your social platforms, engaging with the show on Twitter, IG or Facebook, and consider leaving a review or rating on Apple Podcasts. We’re real close to 100. Let’s get there and see what happens.
“Time is doing so much work.” — Elisa Gabbert (@egabbert)
Here we are again, friend. Elisa Gabbert is here to talk about how she comes up with her ideas for essays and not being afraid to cast a book aside because there’s so little time to waste time not finding a mind-blowing book.
You can pre-order her new book, which comes out in August 2020. We don’t talk about what it is, but you can still pre-order the thing. The Unreality of Memory.
We talk about her essay collection The Word Pretty, quite a bit, and how she goes about the work while having a full-time job in a non-writing field. It’s good stuff.
In any case, Steven and I randomly met in November 2018 in line at a talk during the Portland Book Festival. We were in line to hear Elizabeth Rush give a talk. He heard my voice from this thing and here we are.
You see? You never know where your next podcast guest might come from.
This episode was nice in that Kevin Robbins says, among lots of other things, that, “I’m still trying to figure out why the greats are great.”
It’s ephemeral. You can’t put a finger on it. And so here we are.
Kevin was on the show three years ago. Check it out. There’s tremendous skill and restraint evident in Kevin’s work. Understating things is difficult because you want to look like Simone Biles during a floor routine, which is to stay WTF??!!
Kevin’s latest book is The Last Stand of Payne Stewart: The Year Golf Changed Forever. You don’t have to like or know golf to love this book. Kevin draws out what made Stewart human, which is what we all want, right? We want to know that we have the capacity to improve and be better, not optimized in this world of hyper productivity, but better.
He writes about the skate culture he grew up around, “Nailing an ollie is essential for doing more advanced tricks, so if you can’t learn it you’re stuck. Luckily for me, it was easy to ask for help in a community like that one. … There’s a sense that when one person succeeds, the whole community wins together.”
And so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that maybe the best way to get over these toxic feelings is to feel buoyed by what is possible, that it isn’t zero sum.
Somebody else’s success does not really take away from your own. Yes, there are limited bylines, I should be using their success to push myself to be better. Right? So that doesn’t mean that I haven’t silenced the occasional person on Twitter who is winning at all things all the time and I need a break.
It isn’t that somebody else had a win and you lost. It should be, ‘Oh, that person had a win, so that means I can too, so long as I work hard and maybe have a little luck on my side.’
And it echoes back to the skate culture: If you learn a new trick, we all win. So if you get that coveted by-line in The New York, we win as a result.
Whether it’s David Foster Wallace talking about fun or Chase Jarvis telling you to create without judgement, there’s often a sense that writing, and even art, must be earnest and painful.
Speaking from experience, the more loose I am, the lighter I approach the work, the better it is. And that’s something echoed in the work of Christopher McDougall too.
“I sort of learned a lesson in life that if anything is unpleasant, you’re going to postpone it, you’re just not going to do it. And so it’s like for exercise for dieting, any time you don’t want to do, you will find a reason not to do it. And so I think even though you know, all those aspects, with nutrition and exercise and everything, you gotta negotiate a happy compromise. So you got to figure out what’s the thing that makes it fun, and then do that thing. And so what I realized is that as long as the sun is up, I am not getting shit done. I’m not going to be at my desk. And so I get up in the morning and just blast out the door and just busy myself with stuff all during sunlight hours and then around five or six, I’m physically tired. I’m winding down. I eat some good food and then I’m ready to sit down like seven o’clock at night and just busted out till midnight, one o’clock in the morning.
You caught that, right? What the thing that makes it fun? Sure, some topics are heavy and not always fun. I’m thinking Eli Saslow writing Rising Out of Hatred. Not fun.
But there must be moments of joy, otherwise, why do it? And you can hear it in Chris’ voice that the work is fun and that’s the key to unlocking your potential. Play and fun.
As always, thanks for listening. Be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts and leave a kind rating on Apple Podcasts. Newsletter and show notes are at brendanomeara.com and please keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod.
“Like all writing is re-writing. All reporting is re-reporting.” —Christopher McDougall (@chrismcdougall)
This was a thrill. This was a blast. I know you’re going to love this too. Christopher McDougall, the bestselling author of Born to Run, Natural Born Heroes, and Running with Sherman is here to talk about his books, but also the speed bumps of his career.
How did he get his start? Where were the hiccups, and how did getting fired from a pretty steady gig in Philly turn him loose to write the book that effectively changed his life? Yeah, it’s all here, baby.
Keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod and @BrendanOMeara. Instagram has been a little lax of late, but that’s @cnfpod. It’s all a mess, man!
Hope you’ve been enjoying the CNF Snacks that I’ve been putting out on Monday. Creating without Judgement and Be a Fan are the first installments. The tapas of CNF Pod.
Thanks to Bay Path University for the support and for Riverteeth’s promotional support.
“At the end of the day, you need to get paid for you work because it is work. And one assignment is not going to change your resume.” —AC Shilton (@ACShilton)
“Somebody else’s success doesn’t limit your own.” —AC Shilton
AC Shilton steps onto the @CNFPod main stage this week, dropping freelance bombs like Ian Frisch and Seyward Darby, just to name a couple.
You know what to do, subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Leave a kind review on Apple Podcasts and link up to the show on social media.
Keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod and on IG @cnfpod. It’s a lousy place to promote a show, but it’s a great place to have a dialogue and talk about what resonated with you.
