“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.” — Leslie Jamison (@lsjamison on Twitter)
In this episode we riff on how she had to let language to the work for her and not let the language be this shiny veneer without substance, the bounded infinity of nonfiction, and much, much more.
Keep the conversation going on Twitter by tagging me and the show @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod. Digital fistbumps for those who do it. I hope I’ve made something worth sharing with your people, so please link up to the show and encourage your CNFin’ buds to subscribe!
“Every piece of writing is going to be hard in some way, and you just have to know that, and sit with it and keep going forward, and you will have a breakthrough at some point if you don’t give up.” —Kate Hopper
By Brendan O’Meara
Hey, there, CNFers, Kate Hopper (@MNKateHopper) joins me to talk about her True Story essay “Stumbling into Joy.” In case you couldn’t tell from the title of this episode, she learns to play the bass guitar in her forties. It’s pretty rad.
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“I think that very often when anybody is writing a book, they lose track of the fact that the book can be whatever you want.” —Chuck Klosterman
“Nonfiction is closer to bowling. It can be perfect.” —Chuck Klosterman
Hey, CNFers, look who came over to CNF Pod HQ! It’s Chuck Klosterman, one my favorite authors for how he’s able to turn a phrase, dollop profanity, and be the mind I wish I had.
Chuck’s latest book is Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction, and we take a dive into what makes this collection of short stories — his first collection of short stories of his eleven books.
Keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod. Let me know what you think. Tweet out what you love. I’ll tweet back horns and skulls.
I hope you have as much fun listening to this as I did conducting the interview and later editing it for production.
Be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you get our podcasts. If you leave a review of the show, I’ll coach up a piece of your writing of up to 2,000 words. Write the review, take a screenshot when it posts, email me the screenshot, and I’ll reach back out and get going.
“If I had tried to line together four or five of these [short chapters], it might feel cumulatively too dense or heavy.”
“That’s such a nice thing about writing, isn’t it? It’s exciting for me because I don’t know where the piece is going to go and beyond that I don’t know who it’s going to connect with if it will at all. Sometimes it doesn’t. But when it does, it’s sort of amazing.”
“I don’t really have a plan. I follow the leads of memory and curiosity and go with it.”
“They haven’t tried to kill me, but they haven’t thrown me a party either.”
“The thing that makes an essay work and seem like a miracle is the thing that makes it seem so painful as well.”
Sonja Livingston stopped by The Creative Nonfiction Podcast to talk about her award-winning memoir “Ghostbread.” She was also gracious enough to read from three short chapters. It’s about family and growing up in poverty.
“[My family] hasn’t tried to kill me, but they haven’t thrown me a party either,” Sonja says.
This episode is layered and a bit experimental. I hope it adds a little extra somethin’-somethin’ to the usual interview. If you dig it, let me know on Twitter @BrendanOMeara and I’ll invite others to try something similar.
Sonja talks a lot about her routine and how getting outside helps her write. Also she adds that writing personal essay can feel like a miracle, but can also be very painful. Maybe it’s that in order to write great art, there must be a little bit of blood on the page.
“I think it really gets at the heart of whatever people perceive themselves to be, as part of a natural system or not.”
“The emotional charge came to light for me. Before [Eulogy for an Owl] was a creative nonfiction, research-based thing that didn’t have any pow to it, didn’t have a story behind it, it was just a fascination for me.”
“It needs to rise like bread, first, before you can take it any further, or let it cool before you frost it.”
“I know not to throw away writing.”
“Writing is a little bit more like quilt making where you keep these other parts and less materializing from thin air.”
“I’m one of those writers who has spurts and dry spells.”
“Other different art forms can inform our writing.”
“I tend to look at my pieces like a box of puppies that need to find homes.”
Great day and a sad day.
Great that I get to share this episode with Mary Heather Noble (@MH_Noble on Twitter). Sad because I had to delete Episodes 1 through 8 from the #CNF archive for storage reasons.
That will likely be the case from now on. Every new episode will kick out the oldest one.
If people want older episodes, I’m working on transcripts (ugh) and possibly putting old episodes on CDs. I admire those folks and podcasts with the budgets to keep all their work up indefinitely, but with no ad revenue or subscription service, I can’t keep pace. It already costs me quite a bit as is.
That said…
I welcome Mary Heather Noble, an environmental writer who won Creative Nonfiction’s editor’s prize in Issue 61’s “Learning from Nature” edition. Her essay “Eulogy for an Owl” is a magnificent piece of writing and particularly profound for me it talks about moving out west and the latent guilt of leaving bitter family behind.
Just so you know, the misses and I are totally down with the move, but we receive(d) our fair share of guilt trips, which is particularly maddening, but that’s neither here nor there. We’re here to talk about Mary Heather’s work and her approach.
Housekeeping: Share this episode with someone you think will get value from it, subscribe, leave a 5-star review in your directory of choice. Makes me feel good and will help the podcast reach more people.
“I only write when I have something that I really need to figure out.”
“My job is to get the essay to its platonic ideal.”
“I took a personal crisis and made a publication out of it.”
“I wanted to make the magic happen.”
“So much of writing is rhythm.”
Jennifer Niesslein, formerly a co-editor and co-founder of Brain, Child, and currently editor and founder of Full Grown People, joined me on Episode 41 to talk about the art of editing.
Her essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, the Brevity blog, Virginia Quarterly, and The Nervous Breakdown.
Kim Kankiewicz won best essay for Creative Nonfiction’s Issue 32 contest.
By Brendan O’Meara
“You write in isolation and a rejection doesn’t give you a lot of feedback.”—Kim Kankiewicz (@kimprobable)
“What I have to process is my own thoughts and experiences; does that matter to anybody else? The reason I write is to make connections with other people.” —Kim Kankiewicz
Here we are again, picking them off one by one.
Kim Kankiewicz’ essay “Rumors of Lost Stars” won Creative Nonfiction’s best essay contest for Issue 32’s theme of “Joy”. It’s an essay about communal acceptance, overreaching, and then personal acceptance and redemption. She threads this around the mythology of three stars. The parallels between the myths and her story make this essay sing.
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“Different writers are different things to us at different times.” —Sybil Baker (@SybilBaker).
“I think most writers would agree that writing is an act of discovery. We’re asking questions and trying to discover something.” —Sybil Baker
Sybil Baker, author of Immigration Essays(C&R Press, 2017) came by #CNF HQ to talk about her new book of essays dealing travel and displacement. And like Paul Lisicky (from Episode 27), she preaches the importance of preserving play in a piece of writing.
We recorded this back in October, so if you expect riffs on immigration courtesy of the Establishment, you’ll find this episode conveniently devoid of such banter.
Sybil talks a lot about travel and how you don’t have to log miles to see things in different ways.
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Google Play Music (badges are in the margins or below the post) and share it with a friend or two who may enjoy the conversation.
Thanks for listening!
Also, Sybil joined me to talk fiction on my side gig over at SpareMin, a micropodcast app that records phone calls. My show is The Book Show. Have a listen:
