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Episode 148—Jericho Brown on Discipline, Burpees, and How Poets Are a Special Kind of Nerd

“I don’t have destinations in mind. I always have experiences in mind.” —Jericho Brown (@jerichobrown)

“A poet is a special kind of nerd.” —Jericho Brown

“Everything I am, I am all the way.” —Jericho Brown

Hey, CNFers, I’m Brendan O’Meara and this is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to badass writers, filmmakers, radio producers, and podcasters about the art and craft of telling true stories. I try and chart their journeys through the arts and reveal how they deal self-doubt, anxiety, and still manage to get the work done.

Be sure to go subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Oh, and I’m doing the thing again, that thing that where I offer editorial coaching of up to 2,000 words of your writing in exchange for a review on Apple Podcasts. Post your review. They take up to 24 hours and email me creativenonfictionpodcast at gmail dot com with a screenshot of the review and i’ll reach out and help out with a piece you’re working on up to 2,000 words, a $150 value.

Okay, so I’ve got the amazing, incomparable and, jacked Jericho Brown. Here’s a little bit about Jericho, whose new book, The Tradition, published by Copper Canyon Press:

Jericho Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Writer’s Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, TheNew Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection is The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019). His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University.
jerichobrown.com

If you want to read poetry that knocks the wind out of you, read Jericho.

There are some episodes of this show when I realize I’m dealing with someone who is a damn good talker. Quotes pour out of their mouths. Elena Passarello comes to mind, Dinty Moore, Hope Wabuke, Elizabeth Rush, Bronwen Dickey, and Jericho is right up there, man.

This is one of my all-time favorites as we approach 150 of these things. We talk about his exercise routine, how poets are a special kind of nerd, experiences over destinations, his invented poetry form the Duplex, discipline, and so much more.

You’re gonna want a notebook, man.

Go follow Jericho on Twitter @jerichobrown and keep the conversation going with me @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod on TWitter. IG is @cnfpod and Facebook is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast. Email the show creative nonfiction podcast @ gmail dot com and maybe I’ll read it on the air.

Share this show with a friend. You are the social network. I can tweet out a show all day long, but it comes down to you, friend. Rage against the algorithms.

The End of Job Shaming Part II

By Brendan O’Meara

Oh, and another thing about Day Jobs: They create structure, and they take pressure off your art. [The End of Job Shaming Part I]

Let’s address the first one. Say you work 32-40 hours per week, there’s likely a chance that you’ll have one to two hours before your shift or one to two hours after your shift to do your thing. Then there’s your days off.

Some of my best reporting was done during lunch breaks while landscaping (phone interviews). I often said to myself, well, my heroes in narrative journalism aren’t landscaping and doing reporting calls during lunch in 100-degree heat, but, alas, my path is my path and, you know what, it’s sorta cool.

I think people think that if they had all day to do their art they’d get more done. I don’t know if that’s true. The structure and time constraint enforced by a Day Job puts greater focus on the time you have. There’s a chance you do better, more concentrated work when that time is more precious.

To the second point: If you’re relying on your art to be your breadwinning you will find that something about your art dies with it. It certainly changes tenor. Not to mention that because you’re self-employed you’ll be paying nearly double the taxes, so you’ll have to churn out double the work or somehow find very well paying clients or markets.

See Day Jobs as something that pays you an advance on your work that you don’t have to earn back.

The End of Job Shaming Part I

By Brendan O’Meara

You remember that photo, right? The one of the actor Geoffrey Owens, most famous for his role on The Cosby Show, working the register at Trader Joe’s? The photo taken by someone whose very intent was to shame a working actor for having what she perceived as a low-life job?

This angered me so much, but Owens graciously took the high road. He parlayed this job shaming into many appearances on morning talk shows. He lauded his employer for taking him in, for giving him a steady paycheck while he sought work as an actor. As a result, he ended up getting more acting work. He’s always been a working actor, and sometimes a working actor has to work at a job flexible enough to accommodate his craft. It’s not prestigious, but you wanna know what else isn’t prestigious: missing the rent.

If we’re not getting job shamed by our family or by someone at a party, then we almost certainly do it to ourselves. You think I spent all this money on education and it’s led me to working a crummy retail job because I can’t get enough writing gigs. You think Well, if I was any good at this craft, would I even need a day job? Or you start playing the Competition Olympics and think Well, my heroes, those artists I so deeply admire, they don’t have to stack produce at the supermarket while I fill-in-the-blank.

The fact is, in this day of social media highlights, YOU DON’T KNOW IF THEY’RE STACKING PRODUCE OR NOT. THEY MIGHT BE, BUT THEY’RE NOT BROADCASTING IT.

There are myriad things worth unpacking here and maybe this will be the first of several micropods about Day Jobs and Job Shaming.

I can speak to this because it’s something I have felt so deeply for many, many years.

I’ll leave you with this: Day Jobs are nothing to be ashamed of. Think of it as a way that subsidizes your art. Make what you can in the time you have and stop hating yourself for it.

Start Now

By Brendan O’Meara

This morning I was riffing in my journal and my final passage lamented how much I want to do just in writing. I have so many projects in my head, written down, everywhere, and trust me, they’re all genius.

With so much I want to get to, where do I start? And for that matter, where should you start? The answer is: Start. Pass Go.

We’re not in this for the short gain, the short cut, and the low-hanging fruit. No, we’re in this for the long haul. We want to be 70, 80, 90 years old still churning out art.

Your journal entry on the eve of your eventual death should say something to the effect of, “I can’t wait to keep working on that project.”

Play the long game. You have many ideas and it’s stifling to think of them all. Honestly, most of them are likely garbage and won’t live up to the perfect ideal in your head.

Doesn’t matter. Start now. Life is long. Start now. Keep going. Please.

On Fun

By Brendan O’Meara

A fair question to ask when it comes to your vocation, especially an artistic one, is: What would this look like if this was fun?

It’s so easy to get bogged down in the mire of the work. I hear constantly how one writer complains about their agent and that this and that and the other can’t seem to get their work published.

I mean, whatever happened to doing it just because it’s fun? When you were a kid drawing who knows what, did you run and start an Etsy shop? When you wrote a poem in high school, were considering what market to sell it to?

Our egos are tied to these prestige outlets and prestige outcomes. We want to say were published in fill in the blank, but it doesn’t matter. If you land that piece in fill in the blank, you’re gonna still wake up and feel the exact same, so why not have fun with it?

Turn it loose. Enjoy yourself like you did when you were a kid.

Bowling Pins

By Brendan O’Meara

The best way to not waste the morning is to have your marching orders, so to speak, ready the night before.

I call this “setting up the bowling pins.” By having a secure nighttime routine you ensure that the morning gets off to a focused start.

By setting up your crucial tasks the night before, you enter the following day with purpose. And if you’re like me, without that purpose you’ll flounder and find ways to waste time.

Set up the bowling pins.

Go knock them down.

Tiny Revolution

By Brendan O’Meara

Nowadays our attention is taxed.

Algorithms are designed to lock us into the constant scroll.

I realize this even as I try and write/record a blog post that I hope people will read and enjoy.

But you don’t have to go too far back in time to remember the days when phones were attached to walls with spiraled cords that always got tangled.

The only ping notification was when the phone rang and you had to get up and walk to the wall and pick it up.

Mobile devices are great in so many ways, but I think employing an old-school filter to the smartphone is an act of revolution. Put the ringer on, but put it in a different room. Bring it with you in the car, but leave it in the console as you run your errands.

Once untethered, it no longer becomes the candy fix that it is, a kind of burden lifts.

This is by no means original, but it might be worth a try. You may find you’ll get more work done. Or maybe you’ll simply take pride in your tiny revolution.

Share the Road

By Brendan O’Meara

While driving along Highway 101 I saw a sign with a bicycle on it that said “Share the Road.”

I thought this a nice sentiment because we can all be cars on the road and muscle our way past, even brush by the handlebars of the vulnerable cyclist, or we can share the road.

No matter your craft, social media has turned into, in many ways, a self-promotion machine. You know who those people are who seem to only spout out about themselves, link to their own work, complain about this and that without paying attention to the ecosystem they’re in.

They’re not sharing the road and would do us all a lot of good if we didn’t bully our way into people’s attention, but engage and celebrate those in our circle.

Episode 147—Meredith May on What Cracked Open Her Memoir, Nature as Parent, and Bees, Lots of Bees

Meredith May, author of The Honey bus (Photo Matthew May)

“The pleasure of reading a book is that it’s reciprocal.” —Meredith May (@meredithmaysf)

By Brendan O’Meara

How are you, CNFers? I’m Brendan O’Meara and this is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to badass writers, filmmakers, producers, and podcasters about the art and craft of telling true stories, chart their journey through this crazy world and offer a few tips along the way to help you get the work done.

Be sure to subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts and follow me and the show on Twitter @BrendanOMeara and @cnfpod. You can follow the show on Instagram too where I post some great quote cards and audiograms from the show’s deep bench.

If you’re feeling friendly, please leave a review or a rating on iTunes. I’d love to see it reach 100, but it’ll take you. It’ll take you going that extra mile for you buddy BO. You know I love you for it.

This week I have Meredith May (@meredithmaysf across all the socials). She is the author The Honey Bus: A Memoir of Loss, Courage, and a Girl Saved by Bees. She also wrote I, Who Did Not Die: A Sweeping Story of Loss, Redemption, and Fate.

Okay, so Meredith May is here to talk about her career and her new book. She was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize for a long feature she wrote back around the time of the second Iraq War for the San Francisco Chronicle. We talk about the toxic nature of the competition Olympics, and how writing about someone else in another book cracked open her memoir for her.

Event Horizon

By Brendan O’Meara

The first ever image of a black hole was recently published. It was a cool school portrait. Smile!

It is more than 50 million light years away. It has the mass of 6.5 billion suns.

A few years ago a little chirp picked up by LIGO moved a laser the diameter of a proton that proved the existence of gravitational waves.

If it makes you feel small, it should.

But it should also make you feel lucky. Look at what we’re given. Look at you’ve been able to accomplish.

We’re so small in the cosmic scheme of this universe that we have no excuse to run from our most ambitious visions. Sure, fear is real, but when you realize how tiny we are, why be afraid? Why not start and finish a terrible book? Why not take 1,000 horrible photographs? Why not start a dozen terrible businesses? What do you have to lose?

Let the titanic size of the cosmos set you free. Let it liberate your inhibitions because this is all we’ve got. Nothing matters and everything matters all at the same time.

Please, jump, and create your own event horizon where nobody can escape the great pull of your gravity.

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