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Personal News and/or Shoutouts for Pals

Hey CNFers, The Front Runner is officially out. I like to think I don’t ask for much, but now is the time buy a copy or three and, if you read it, you know the drill, need ratings and reviews. I won’t read them because I don’t want to be driven insane, but that’s the world we live in: ratings and reviews. Your call to action to support the book, me, and ye ol’ CNF Pod. If you’re still on the fence, and why would you be, there’s an excerpt of the book over at Lit Hub. Dig it.

Next two events are July 27 at Gratitude Brewing for a live taping of the podcast, 1 p.m. and July 31 at Laurelwood Golf Course from 3-6 p.m.

I also started what’s proving to be a pretty popular venture called Pitch Club. It’s at welcometopitchclub.substack.com and I have a writer audio annotate a pitch. It’s tactical and it’s practical. It’s going to help you get where you want to go.

“What is this genre if not hybridity, and hybridity is constantly mutating.” — Jeff Sharlet

Link to a mostly accurate transcript for Ep. 479.¹

OK, we’ve got Jeff Sharlet, which is pretty stunning when you think about it. I mean, this guy is the author of The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers, among other books. He often covers the far right and far right fundamentalists and what’s he’s been able to document is scary and often unsettling. We don’t dig too much into that, because we just talk about doing this kind of work. It was really a fun and illuminating conversation and I’m pretty fuckin’ stoked.

He teaches writing and creative nonfiction at Dartmouth College. That was where I desperately wanted to go to school. I was set to be their starting shortstop, but I couldn’t get my goddam SATs above remedial and thus I attended good ol’ UMass … back in the late 1990s, if you could funnel a beer in five seconds you got a scholarship #yolo

In this episode, Jeff and I riff about:

His key influences
Treating your book badly as a way of treating it well
Using your outsiderness to your advantage
His love of sportswriting, or interest in sportswriting, despite not following sports
And real toads in imaginary gardens

CNFin’ Snippets

“When I get stuck as a writer, I will read a superhero comic.”

“If you’ve got that built-in clock, that allows you to play with structure, that’s simultaneously grounding you … I think the tension is between the built-in clock and the subjectivity of the writer going off in this other direction.”

“Treat your book badly as a way of treating it well.”

“The lesson being that your outsiderness is you don’t have to do a whole lot of work. In fact, you have to let your outsiderness do that work for you, to sort of open those doors for you, because people recognize that you’re not of that place, and they wonder, who are you? What are you?”

“Yes, you want information, but the work is to get out of the interview, right? What do you want from an interview?: to get through it so you can get to the good stuff, which is the conversation.”

“There’s a way in which the recorder, instead of being an excuse to tune out, can be just zoom into the moment.”

Parting Shot: Playing Seasonal Sports as a Writing Analogy

This parting shot hit me while I was on a run, as many of mine do, that’s why I run with a notebook and pencil and my shame.

Many of us athletes of a certain age, we never specialized in a sport, maybe very late in our careers, but not from the start. For me, in the fall, it was soccer. In the winter, it was either indoor soccer or indoor track, and the spring and summer for me was baseball. Each season brought a different focus and different way of moving the body through space, different skills, different planes of movement. Yes, there was likely one sport that you wanted to be great at, but playing a different sport in a different season didn’t detract from the skills of the other. It actually made you a better athlete, and better athletes, well, better athletes can leverage sport-specific skills better than most.

I bring this up because many of us as writers, we tend to stay in one particular lane, right? We identify as a writer of personal essays, or memoir, or biography, or narrative journalism, and we feel that maybe a word written outside of that is wasted.

I was on a podcast last week and when we were off mic, the host told me how he can’t read a single word of fiction, being a nonfiction guy himself. And while I said I understood his affinity for sticking with nonfiction as his bread and butter, I offered that in reading fiction, we as nonfiction writers can level up our prose and as reporters seeking a greater sense of our sources’ interiority can perhaps be better probing interviewers to ask questions that reach the depths of the human experience. That’s how I like to read fiction.

But I’d challenge you, challenge me, even, to play a different sport now and again. You know I’m more of a nrarative journalist and biographer, the occasional personal essay/humor piece/craft piece, but in the spirit of hanging up the bat and glove for a bit, maybe scribble some short stories, maybe a screen play, a television pilot, maybe poetry (I’d try to write humor poems, which I think is a lane most writers avoid … not ya boi, BO! lol), or maybe it’s fucking around with making videos.

On the surface, maybe you’re thinking you can’t waste a moment on other elements of art and style because you haven’t quite arrived where you want to be with your bread and butter. But I have a feeling that “playing a different sport” from time to time will reinvigorate your energy and level up the thing that’s more “on brand,” you know?

Sometimes the THING is a drag and bums you out. Which probably means you’re putting too much pressure on yourself and burning out. When I ran a couple seasons of indoor track, I did it mainly because I wanted to be a faster runner for baseball. It sucked lining up in the 300 yard dash knowing that I was going to get my ass kicked by actual track athletes. I quit after two years, but I should have stayed on, coulda met some cute sprinter girls from other schools since I wasn’t there to be a high performer. Goddamit, BO, you wasted your time! You wasted your life!

Too many kids specialize from a young age and, I don’t know, that strikes me as a boring and kinda sad.