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.
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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.
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“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.
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.
Crazy story, a story that partly inspired The Great Gatsby, perhaps, maybe.
I hope you check it out.
We dig into lots of great things: How John Updike showed Bob the way, singing a kind of Pennsylvania song, and dealing with a real rotten teacher who made Bob’s life miserable until he got out from under her and made something of himself with mentors who saw his potential in college. It’s a great story.
Keep the conversation going on Twitter @CNFPod. And, if you’re feeling kind, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. I hope I’ve made something worth sharing, so please share it with your own network.
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.
