What I particularly loved about Paul’s book is how hyper-local it is to a specific time and place. We can all learn how to best drill down on the specifics of a story by reading Paul’s latest book.
Thanks to Bay Path University and HippoCamp2020 for the support (use that CNFPOD2020 coupon code for $40 off your registration!).
In this conversation we talk about the challenge of finding a voice, how even after 30 years, Alexander is still trying to find it.
And, you know, the Dalai Lama.
We talk about how his time as an army officer influenced his writing, how to surrender to the story, and how he came to know the Dalai Lama.
I hope you’ll subscribe to the show if you already don’t. I do my best to make the best show for you. If you dig the show, consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts. I’ll read it on the air as a way of saying thank you.
You can follow the show’s various social media channels. @CNFPod on IG, Twitter, and Facebook. Always nice to connect.
That reminds me. We all need editors. We all need editing. We all need accountability. If you’ve got an essay or a book that needs coaching I’d be honored and thrilled to serve you and your work. Email me brendan @ brendanomeara.com and let’s start a conversation because the world needs your work. We need you to show up and I want to help.
One of the many things that struck me about this conversation I had with Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, was what she said about confronting what was tough about relationship with her mother.
She said:
One of the great gifts of writing memoir or creative nonfiction, to do it well you have to kind of loosen the grip on your own narrative and you have to really do your best to understand what was driving other people in your story.
You have to take people in your life, people who likely affected you in some capacity, and approach it with empathy and understanding. By and large, these people we write about aren’t monsters. They were adults trying to get by.
We’re all just trying to get by and some of us are better at getting by than others.
Thanks to Bay Path University’s MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing for the support.
Also, if you want a $40 discount on your HippoCamp2020 registration fee, enter the promo code CNFPOD2020 at checkout. It’s the best money you’ll spend on a conference this year. In fact, I’ll be using that coupon code myself!
We all need editors. We all need editing. We all need accountability. If you’ve got an essay or a book that needs coaching I’d be honored and thrilled to serve you and your work. Email me brendan @ brendanomeara.com and let’s start a conversation because the world needs your work. We need you to show up and I want to help.
We met at HippoCamp 2019 and got to talking about a lot of the themes that you’ve come to love from this little podcast. Jeanette Hurt was also with us at the bar. Actually, I was with them since they’ve been creative partners for years and they co-talked a talk about earning money while you sleep. Passive Writer is the book they co-authored about it. Good stuff.
They were really sweet and attended my train wreck of a presentation. More on that another time.
Make sure you sign up for Damon’s newsletter, after mine 😉 and follow him on Twitter @browndamon.
In this conversation we talk about her capacity to carry her past, carry her tragedies with her and how she channelled that into something positive for her and her family.
As a heads up, this podcast is unedited. I did not have the time to grind on the edit. Nor will next week’s episode. But after that, I swear I’ll find the time to edit. I didn’t think you’d mind. 😉
Be sure to subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your pods and to subscribe to my monthly newsletter. Social media is @CNFPod, though, as many of you know, I’ve scaled back quite a bit on this.
You might be wondering, what the riff? Why isn’t there an interview in this slot right now?
Well, this happens, at times, when people cancel on me or miss their appointment and my scrambling to fill the time slot comes up empty. In the creative vaccum that is the time in and around Christmas and New Years, it’s often a losing battle.
My advice to you is, maybe check out some of the interviews that have accumulated in your feed. There’s no shortage. A new interview will be here next week with Kristina Gaddy, and we’ve got exciting ones coming down the pipeline with Tim O’Brien, Pamela Coloff and Rachel Aviv, just to name a few.
Also, in my effort to better serve you, the listener, I’d love to know what I could be doing to better address your needs as a creator in this genre. Do you like the origin questions? Do you like the tactical stuff? Would you like things to stay the same? Am I hitting the right beats that make you energized about your own work? This podcast is for you. I make this for you. Without you there is no CNF. I want to make a show worth sharing and it’s only worth sharing if you are able to add those valuable insights to your cart and check out better for it. So please email the show creativenonfictionpodcast at gmail . com or brendan at brendanomeara . com with your insights. It doesn’t have to be long, but as the show enters its eighth year, I want to make sure I haven’t lost touch with the people who matter most: you.
But this is also a time for me to share a great quote from Charles Bukowski about writing and it goes to the heart of what I think it means to be a writer and an artist.
He writes,
Too many writers write for the wrong reasons. They want to get famous or they want to get rich or they want to get laid by the girls with bluebells in their hair. When everything works best, it’s not because you chose writing but because writing chose you. It’s when you’re mad with it, it’s when it’s stuffed in your ears, your nostrils, under your fingernails. It’s when there’s no hope but that.
He goes on … then says:
It was cancer madness. And it was never work or planned or part of a school. It was. That’s all. We work too hard. We try too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been looking right at us, aching to kick out the closed womb. It’s all free, we needn’t be told. Classes? Classes are for asses. Writing a poem is as easy as beating your meat or drinking a bottle of beer.
So, as we approach this new year, maybe we don’t need to overthink it. We don’t need permission from anyone. We don’t need another online class from a “master” who, by the way, didn’t need an online class to do the work she’s so famous for. If we approach the work with generosity and rigor, and put our best word forward every time, then that’s the victory.
When four guys in northern california got together and started playing heavy metal music, sure, they had dreams of going out on the road, but it always about the music in that garage. Those guys, give or take because one got booted out of the band and one died in a bus crash, made it because they had always made it.
We make it in this business when we decide. There’s no arrival. Malcolm Gladwell is jealous of Michael Lewis.
So, we make it when we decided to arrive. I hope you decide right now to own it. Own the title. Own your shitty work. It won’t be shitty for long.
I wish you the best arrival in 2020 and beyond. Let’s get after it this year.
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.
Be sure to subscribe to the show and keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod or @BrendanOMeara. I love to hear what resonates with you, so please reach out and certainly share across your networks.
This is a nice, tight thirty-minute interview. If you want a little more background on Sonja, check out Episode 56. It’s that special kind of memoir that has some journalistic components, something you might find in books by Leslie Jamison or Meredith May.
We dig into what brought Sonja to this story and how she rediscovered a long dormant devotion to Catholicism. The book doesn’t read like some icky treatise on becoming born again. It’s not evangelical in the least. It’s a person on a journey, a literal and figurative journey. And in the hands of a writer like Sonja,
