Story Geometry

Host Ben Hess breaks down the business of writing into three categories - number one - patronage and support, number two - publishing, whether traditional or self, large press or small, and number three - distribution & promotion. Authors and teachers Steve Almond, Greg Glazner, Tanya Chernov provide perspective and insights. Greg Glazner closes the episode with a hilarious, touching reading of a personal essay.

    •    Steve Almond - http://stevealmondjoy.com
    •    Greg Glazner - http://www.gregglazner.com
    •    Gary Ferguson - http://wildwords.net
    •    Tanya Chernov - http://www.tanyachernov.com
    •    Pam Houston - http://pamhouston.net
    •    Season One Partner, Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
    •    Episode Sponsor - Talking Book - http://talkingbook.pub
    •    Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - @BenHess

Story Geometry Ep7 - Business of Writing, Volume II

Steve Almond: Well you know for me, I have like forty different 1099s at the end of the year. ... I just try to hustle. it's a freelance hustle and that's not for everybody…. 

Ben Hess: Welcome to Story Geometry, THE podcast about the craft & community of writing with insights from leading published authors of our day, like writer, teacher, and journalist Steve Almond. I’m your host, aspiring novelist and filmmaker, Ben Hess. This is episode 7, our volume two of the oft-dreaded but oh-so-necessary exploration of the Business of Writing.

Through ongoing research and interviews with Steve, Pam Houston, and many others, I’m breaking down this nutty, evolving business into three high level categories:

Coming up we’re going to explore these three areas from the diverse experiences of poet, writer, teacher and musician Greg Glazner, creative nonfiction writer, teacher, and memoirist Gary Ferguson, publishing trials and tribulations with poet and memoirist Tanya Chernov, and of course, there’s much more from Steve Almond. As if that’s not enough, I’m thrilled to announce a new sponsor, Spoken Word Inc, more about them soon ... so stay with us. 

Do the holiday shopping blues have you down? Are you surfing and scrolling in vain to find THE gift for the seasoned or aspiring writer in your life? Look no further - simply visit writing x writers dot org to see a mouth-watering array of 2016 literary workshops, adventures and conferences. This is the online home of my literary partner Writing By Writers, and they’d love to have you join them for their 3rd Annual Generative Workshop in Boulder, Colorado, April 8-10th. Whether a new student or alumni, save $100 off tuition by using code GEOMETRY when you register for the workshop before December 25th! 

Steve: Every artist in history has had to find a patron. Unless you're just born into wealth and then your inheritance is your patron. 

Ben: Again, Steve Almond. We chatted outside on a gorgeous Fall day in Tomales Bay, California as small planes buzzed overhead and a breeze blew in off the water.

Steve: But you've got to find a way to make the work sustainable and you’re most successful when you uncouple artistic creation from financial expectation or I have been.

Ben: Almond’s books include the short fiction collection My Life in Heavy Metal, the creative nonfiction Candyfreak, and the researched, thoughtful book, Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto. You’re dancing between different genres, different forms: Essay. Memoir. Fiction. Short Fiction. … 39:30 how does that work for you …

Steve: It’s tough. …  At this point in my life, like, I've got three kids. My wife's a writer but she's a serious literary writer who I want to have time to pursue that without the pressure of having to make money. If she wants to make money and have a job outside the house then she can, but we've got three little kids. We're trying to really be present in their lives. I'm always also working on or either have just failed at writing a novel or just I'm preparing to fail at a novel. That's my white whale. I'm doing that as well and I'm trying to make money and I'm trying to be good husband I'm trying to be a good dad and I'm trying to be a good teacher and you know. It's pretty busy and I'm trying to steal enough time or earn enough time you know doing the money work, and other stuff too, you know, write some good short stories, and kind’ve re-enter that world of fiction, where things are run through that artistic unconscious and your imaginative combine. 

Ben: In case you’re not aware but as you can probably hear, Steve’s an audio pro. He co-hosts the wonderful, honest Dear Sugar advice podcast with writer Cheryl Strayed in partnership with WBUR in Boston. 

And yes, this provides Steve another one of those 1099s, those freelance income streams. I opened my chat with Steve asking about the origins of his latest book:

Steve: The genesis of Against Football was this. I well …  I've been thinking about being a     sports fan. And what that means. Why it has such a hold on me, my own masculine identity, what's happening in the culture at large, our attraction to violence and just, sports has gotten so much bigger and bigger and bigger. …. As a human being, a dude in America at this time trying to figure out, how and why, you know our culture is going haywire. Sports is a part of it.

Ben: And you chose to go with a traditional publisher?

Steve: The traditional publisher wrote me and said would you want to write a book about football?I read your piece in the New York Times. And I said yeah. You know, often times that's what happens. I’m a former journalist, still in the journalism and that's partly how I pay the bills, so I'm used to somebody saying,’ I'm interested in this, would you like to do it?’ Now if I had it to do over again, honestly I think maybe I should have under my own steam figured out that this was a book that I wanted to work, on but I'm not very organized in my career.

Ben: As I’m earlier in my literary life, here’s what I wonder … can a freelancer, an artist, a writer have an organized career? Or is planning and organizing the proverbial fool’s errand? Teacher, musician, poet, and novelist Greg Glazner also spoke about the challenges of income and freelance work while pursuing publication of his first novel, Opening the World. This after publishing two books of award winning poetry with WW Norton, From the Iron Chair and Singularity.

Ben: You excerpted parts of Opening the World in different publications in it I guess is couple of years now. Can you give an update on where where you stand with the novel in terms of its kind of publication journey?

Greg Glazner: The novel’s completed. At least until somebody tells me I have to work on it again. You know. Um, a couple of that editors have expressed pretty enthusiastic interest in it. I mean it's been out there for a while and you know with enthusiastic interest and three dollars and fifty cents you can get a cup of coffee. So … it's not under contract. It is on the desk of somebody interested in it and we're going to have to see you know. So just on the objective stuff that's where it stands … currently in limbo.

Ben: Right now you're balancing teaching at UC Davis, you’re a musician, you're writing. Are you … carving out that time. So what has worked for you or or has something worked for you consistently?

Greg: I've had different streams on this you know. For for several years there after my college closed, I didn't have enough work. I've plenty of time to write, I needed time to make money,. And now I have I have a full time work and so I'm back to the question that you just raised where I do carve the time out for writing. I've always done that I've often taught a pretty heavy load and still and still found time to time to write, so the way I do it is simple. There crunch times when I can't write, you know when I just have to do my work. But when it's not a crunch time. I say alright, I write. Tuesday Thursday Friday mornings from eight A.M. to eleven AM. That's my writing time. … But I recommend that strongly that that um if you let the day just be what it is, everything else has a way of taking over. 

Ben: Isn’t that always case? I’ve found over the years I use time much more efficiently when traveling - limited time in a given country or city forces productivity! Also, deadlines are crucial to drive toward, to force the creaky cogs of creativity along the track. We’ve heard from both Steve and Greg about issues with pursuing the patronage of their writing, I also asked Greg … And given that we're in twenty fifteen, e-readers, self publishing have you thought about just taking it back and thinking, ah I’m just going to do it myself?

Greg: I have thought about that or or go to a really indie style publisher is another another possibility. Just kind of taking my time with this. I don't see any pressing reason to decide right now, you know? It's at ... it's at a good press right now and I agree with the spirit of your comment that the literary world is going indie in a big way I mean that's where it's going there's there's there's a new press every five minutes that's just started up and some of those small presses are great. I'm not currently thinking about the routes that you mentioned, I'm just going to let this go for a while and just see where it goes.    

Ben: I admire Greg’s patience, his long view of the process. I’m far too impatient I fear. And Steve offered added perspective …

Steve: What I     caution people to do, is to think about what they want out of a publishing experience. Since you do now have a choice. If you want the imprimatur of a New York publisher, …. [I want] their editing and their having selected me, and I got it. I then you have to - to the extent that your talent and patience allows it - make that happen. Don't self publish and pretend that the world's going to suddenly be aware of you... Just because you can press print on a machine and a book comes out doesn't make you quote unquote, a great writer or an author. It makes you somebody who can use technology to produce something, right? So. So I really caution people on this, to think about what is your intention with this project?

You know, when you publish a book with a publisher it's an arranged marriage between an artist and a corporation. And no matter how benign those corporations are - and they are very benign, they're in the business of publishing books, good on them, they're still a corporation. They still have a commercial motive and the artist has their own agenda and their own motive and in the felicitous circumstances those two collaborate and everybody's happy and it's a good marriage. But my experience was that many of the marriages were, you know, kind of like short lived and not that happy.

Ben: Before we spiral any deeper and darker, a brief pause to say you’re listening to Story Geometry, Episode 7, The Business of Writing, Volume II, I’m your host Ben Hess. Back in Episode 4 you heard from my Spring chat with creative nonfiction writer and memoirist Gary Ferguson. We talked about alternative forms of distribution, and he said:

Gary Ferguson: I do think that people are always going to be hungry for story and those who produce good stories and figure out the system by which to get them into the hands of the people who need them and want them, will, will survive in one form or another; I think audiobooks is another area that’s exploding right now ...

Ben: Now perhaps Gary pierced into Story Geometry’s future because today’s episode is brought to you by our inaugural sponsor ... Spoken Word Inc, the Independent Audiobook Publisher. Spoken Word will produce your audiobook and get it pumping through the largest distribution network available to authors anywhere. Audiobooks like the wildly praised F 250 by New Jersey poet and novelist Bud Smith. With Spoken Word Inc authors call the creative shots and receive the highest share of royalties. That means more control of your work and more money in your pocket. Go to Spoken word inc dot com and turn your story into your audiobook. Coming up, a first person tale from poet and memoirist Tanya Chernov in the  traditional publication trenches, more thoughts from Steve Almond, and a delightful reading from Greg Glazner .. all when our program continues. 

Tanya Chernov: Hi I’m Tanya Chernov, I’m a writer living in Seattle, Washington. I’ve written two books, the first is a memoir called A Real Emotional Girl, and the second is anthology of poems on illness and loss called The Burden of Light, and I’m working on a novel right now. 22:11 I got my MFA from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, Whidbey Writers Workshop. It’s on Whidbey Island just off the coast of Seattle, a pretty beautiful spot. 

Ben: Tanya and I chatted via Skype and for you loyal Story Geometricians, you may remember that she was mentioned in our first look at the Business of Writing, back in Episode 4. Here’s her agent, Gordon Warnock, with Fuse Literary Agency:

Gordon: Well, I sold a few projects early on - a cookbook, a business book and various other things like that.The first one that really stuck out in my mind though, called A Real Emotional Girl by Tanya Chernov and it's one of my favorite projects that I've worked on. When it came to me it needed a bit of work but I could tell the language was just amazing and so I worked with her to edit for about a year.

Ben: So I wanted to get your perspective from the author’s point of view but first of all congratulations. When I first reached out to you, ironically it was your wedding week, like the middle of chaos so …

Tanya: Thank you! It was yes, I started a new job the next week .. so it’s  been crazy.

Ben: Over what period of time, from getting introduced to Gordon to the actual sale of the book. What was the duration of time and how was that revision process for you?

Tanya: We revised together for about a year. Then it took two years of pitching before we got an offer. I think we broke the agency record for the most number of rejections. To Gordon’s credit, he kept trying. There aren’t alot of agents out there who would do that. Some of them, you know, maybe after 5 rejections will move along. I think we had something like, close to 60. [Ben: WOW]  Yeah, and we kept getting these wonderful, very kind, encouraging rejections which were terribly heartbreaking … Gordon was kind enough to pass along some of these notes saying ‘the book was incredible, you’re incredible … but we’re not going to take it.’ 

Ben: After all that time, all the revisions, all those rejections when ... tell me about the moment you got the phone call, that Gordon tells you there’s interest and an actual offer?

Tanya: You know this was 2011, the self publishing landscape was quite different than it is now. So for me, as a literary author, as someone who hopes to publish many books in her career, I felt that self-publishing would be sort of a career kiss of death. So I had decided and Gordon and I had talked about it together, that I would go ahead and put this manuscript in a drawer for a while and maybe go on to write some other things and come back to it if I needed to. So we had really at least I had let it go … Then he calls on my 30th birthday and says we have an offer and I was …

Ben: That’s quite a birthday present.

Tanya: It is quite a birthday present! It felt … triumphant and very satisfying and you know I just felt a lot of appreciation to my father for having planted that seed in my brain that you can do this. You can write books. And then another, then a second offer came in and for a short time the book went to auction and there was a little battle over the book and that was quite fun …

Ben: What a perfect result after such an incredible journey … given all this, what advice would you give unpublished writers?

Tanya: I would like to say, for writers out today, maybe 20% of your writing career is the actual writing. Sitting butt in chair, in front of the computer, pen and paper. The other 80% is promotion, curation, and education. Um. I think that’s the reality of this industry ...40:40 This is a long, a hopefully long career and you’ve got to pace yourself and live with what you’re doing so you’ve got to navigate this new world and figure out what works for you and don’t feel pressured to do everything.

Ben: Promotion, curation, and education. [Yes.] Words of wisdom. It’s a little .. it’s interesting to hear the breakdown, the 20 / 80 breakdown … it’s um probably quite accurate but also quite discouraging.

Tanya: It’s hard and that’s why you have to uh really have a conversation with yourself about what you’re in this thing for. Do you write because you want to make money? Well, might wanna try something else .. If you’re writing because you want to get published, OK great, let’s figure out how to do that. If you’re writing because you love to write and you have this undying compulsion to do so, then understand that and come at it from that place. Just having that foundation will really help drive how your career manifests. 

Ben: Or as Steve Almond said ….

Steve: You know my dad said to me years ago, you know, “sorry kid time really is money and he's right. So I say to a lot of, you know, younger writers. You do have to face that you want to make it sustainable. And you know you have to do a self inventory of what your needs are and that changes over the years. 

Ben: Not only has Steve seemingly conducted his own self-inventory around his intentions with writing and publishing, he’s also pushing the boundaries on distribution and promotion. 

Steve: I wanted the experience, since the technology existed, of making a book that was a weird little idiosyncratic book, that would move into the world in a much more personal way. And that rather than it being a commodity that would rent space in a bookstore or on Amazon, it would be an artifact that would commemorate a human gathering like, I read last night …. 

Ryan Horner: And definitely, It is my pleasure to introduce: Steve Almond.

Steve: I’m going to read alot from these crazy little drug dealer books of mine, which I’m happy to sell to you. They’re not available on the internet, they’re just through me in cash like a drug dealer. Now I’m gonna read from Letters from People Who Hate Me, which Pam had mentioned is a book full of letters from people who do hate me. 

Ben: Just in case you’re offended my naughty language, I suggest skipping ahead a mere 49 seconds … for the rest of you, well,in true Story Geometry spirit .. turn it up! Here’s Steve …

Steve: Steve, you are such a pussie … And that is from Brian Holmes. Brian, a couple of things:

First the word pussy is spelled p u s s y not p u s s i e which I think would lead most people to conclude that I suffer from an excess of puss. I do not … so I read from these little books and people go “that was funny” or “I enjoyed that” or that was meaningful, I like that guy's writing. And then they can walk up and hand me money. And I, the artist, will hand them a book and it just cuts out the middleman and it cuts out … and it forces people in a way to recognize that books matter. And they can move into the world in all sorts of different ways. 

Lidia Yuknavitch was saying you know we've got to find new ways of telling stories and it's also true that you know you got to get outside of the standard box of what's acceptable. And if the book is personal and idiosyncratic then it makes sense for it to move into the world in a way that's more personal and idiosyncratic. And that the artist who labors to produce that book deserves some money. Because I got to support myself. I don't like the feeling of hawking them because it's a little humiliating but I like that     it's sending the message to people that this is possible. It's possible to put art into the world in this way.

Ben: Before Steve’s reading and having not met him before, I did feel he was hawking his small books, those ‘drug deal books.’ And I felt … not embarrassed exactly but discouraged. With the thought that after several book deals, countless columns and assignments, teaching gigs, and a podcast, this is the path he’s on. And that I’m not even close to that level of output and storytelling. But I love his unabashed honesty of ‘here are some things I wrote that are affordable and only available in person.” 

Ben: I want to close our somewhat heavy discussion on the Business of Writing with a walk on the lighter side. Here’s a reading of Greg Glazner’s essay Foul Ball which is included in the new anthology Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction. As you’ll hear, it prompted quite a bit of reaction and laughter from the faculty and student   at the recent Tomales Bay Writing By Writers conference. This is in large part due to the care Greg took to construct the retelling of a real event ... the structure, the pace, the humor. And also because of his personal, self-effacing delivery. This one seems so well written for the spoken word, I just had to share to share it, with much appreciation to Greg for the permission.

Greg: 16:28 through 30:15 Don’t look at me funny after I read this, OK? You’re gonna see what I mean … 

We climbed into Pam’s car on a cloudless May afternoon headed to a Sacramento Rivercats baseball game, and I was thinking about the word ‘community.’ I have no idea why. Pam’s new novel was out and she’s just gotten back to our part-time California home after an Oregon reading so this was our first outing together in a while. 

29:55

and the haiku came flooding forth:

spring’s full blossom in 

older foul ball poet dude

proud swell, belonging

[laughter and applause]

Ben: We’ll have another look at the Business of Writing in the new year but first, coming up in the next episode, Filling Your Toolbox. here’s award-winning author and teacher Pam Houston talking craft outside on a fall evening on Writing By Writer's inaugural Literary Adventure - kayaking in the San Juan Islands. 

Pam Houston: A couple things about dialogue in prose in fiction and in literary non-fiction ... Well the first thing to say about it is is … We were just talking about the second person in the way it invites the reader into the story, dialogue does the same thing. And this is why I encourage people who are afraid of it to try and write it.

Ben: Of course, visit Writing by writers dot org to see where their 2016 adventures, workshops, and conferences could take you! Thanks so much for listening to the Business of Writing, Volume II, I’m your host and editor, @BenHess on Twitter and Instagram. Warm thanks to Steve Almond, Greg Glazner, Tanya Chernov, and Gary Ferguson for candidly sharing their insights, challenges, and perspectives. Don’t forget to visit today’s sponsor SpokenWordInc dot com to explore audio book magic. Our theme music is from Mark Hodgkin and additional tracks are from Greg Glazner’s band, The Responders. Be sure to rate and review Story Geometry in iTunes, send feedback via StoryGeometry.org, and sign up for future Writing By Writers events and conferences at Writing X Writers .org - psst, use that promo code GEOMETRY for the 2016 Boulder Generative workshop before December 25th. Thanks so much for listening.

In an exploration of how place, setting, and location inform our writing, we travel around the United States, from the Deep South with National Book Award finalist Dorothy Allison and award winning novelist Josh Weil and then up to New York City with New York Times Bestselling writer Tom Barbash before heading west to California with all three. There’s also a surprise reading from Pam Houston’s forthcoming memoir, working title The Ranch: A Love Story.

Links:

    •    Josh Weil - http://www.joshweil.com
    •    Dorothy Allison - http://www.dorothyallison.net/
    •    Tom Barbash - Tom's Facebook
    •    Pam Houston - http://pamhouston.net
    •    Season One Partner, Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
    •    Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - http://ben-hess.com

Ben Hess: Welcome to Story Geometry, I’m your host, aspiring novelist, filmmaker, and Southerner Ben Hess.

Dorothy Allison: The South is my nation. I tell people that the three things that are most telling about me is I’m  Southerner. I was raised poor. And I'm a lesbian. And if you do not understand those three things you don't understand me and my work.

Ben: This is THE podcast with insights on the craft and community of writing from leading published authors of our day including National Book Award finalist Dorothy Allison Today’s episode is #6 Location, Location, Location and presented in partnership with literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. If you want to hone your craft, why not sign up for a 2016 workshop in Boulder, Colorado or Methow Valley Washington? And do it TODAY! Simply visit writingxwriters.org for all the details.

Alright adjust those ear buds, turn up the car radio and buckle those seat belts as we’re about to travel around the country:

And there might just be a surprise reading at the end of the episode from the Queen of Frequent Flier Miles herself, award winning writer and teacher Pam Houston, so stay tuned ...

Ben: I sat down with novelist Josh Weil in Tomales Bay, California and talked about his recent novel The Great Glass Sea and the novella collection New Valley. Thinking about New Valley and Appalachia and both your origin and story setting - if you had been brought up here, in Marin County or some other part of the U.S. do you think you could have written that kind of story or do you feel like the location of youth and upbringing really informed that early writing especially?

Josh Weil: By that kind of story, do you mean something set in Appalachia? Or..

Ben: That and the despair, the loneliness, the relationships. [Laughter] 

Josh: I think the despair, loneliness and relationships is all me so I think I would I have written that. It would have been a very different story set in Marin then it would be set in Appalachia. The location is very important to me I find that I need to have my hands firmly around the physical world of where I'm writing in order to get the story to feel real for me and Appalachia in particular, I didn't grow up there, I was born there and moved away when I was very young - um and didn't get back until I was 19 and my dad and brother and I  built a cabin on some land that my dad had down there and then that became really, for my young adult life, the closest thing I had to home. I spent a lot of time there a lot of time alone down there, writing down there um and getting to know the community.

Ben: Dorothy Allison grew up immersed in the life and community of the rural south she’s depicted so eloquently. We chatted after breakfast in a dining hall after breakfast in Tomales Bay, California …. Did you write Bastard Out of Carolina while living in New York. Or where were you living at that time?

Dorothy: I started the manuscript the became Bastard Out of Carolina ... I think I wrote some of the earliest pieces when I lived in Tallahassee Florida. But I moved north .. I always tell people I moved north one woman at a time, one city at a time, and I relocated slowly up the East Coast. So that the decade that it took me to write Bastard was a decade in which I was moving north. I finished it. I actually didn't finish it until I moved to San Francisco. I left New York for San Francisco. And I left in part to become a real writer, to stop working constantly at so many one jobs to make money but also I had been a feminist activist and I was so engaged in political activism that it was very hard to steal time to write. So I moved to San Francisco to be poor and finish a book. And I did, too.

Ben: Sure did. Finished a book that became a National Book Award finalist and launched a career! I love this testament to persistence - a decade to write the novel - and determination to carve out a life where she could focus on her writing. Tom Barbash author of the award winning collection, Stay Up with Me, the novel The Last Good Chance, and the nonfiction bestseller On Top of the World did the same when starting his career … 

Tom Barbash: I began in nonfiction but what I like to say about it is that when I was a reporter my job I was in Upstate New York and I was stationed in Oswego County, I worked for the Syracuse Post Standard and my job everyday with to look for stories and my second part of my job was go out and listen to people and who different whose lives are different and I've been a city kid, I grew up in New York City & I was living in a rural county. And it seems, I didn't know it at the time, but it was a perfect education for a fiction writer. I needed to listen well ….

Ben: Have you noticed how rarely we actively listen? It’s something I pay close attention to as both a video producer and also doing these interviews. Like Tom, I think it informs writing tremendously: character’s speech patterns, traits, and their frame on the world. Here’s more from Tom:

Tom: I needed a ferret out stories and it was great and I got a lot of my first short stories and I got my first novel out of that experience or I drew on those as I begin to write fiction. Um and made the transition I started to be really interested in the way other people thought and spoke and beginning that if that notion of with stories of writing from another perspective, A perspective that was different than mine and find that I could do it was very exciting to me and I did that, you know, in a few feature articles and then then I started to realize that that I want to write stories and um anyway and I started to. 

Ben: Living in New York, is that a recommended rite of passage for a writer, aspiring writer, aspiring artist to kind of get that off your bucket list and get it out of your system or is it you know it is a something you would go back to if you do it all over again? 

Dorothy: I think it's pitifully hard these days. New York City real estate is the most expensive in the world. But I do think that the productive thing is to actually go into a territory or landscape that is alien from your place of birth. Because then you look back. And the narratives that you will form. Some ways it becomes romantic. A lot a lot of my thinking about the South has a tendency to move toward the romantic. It's just good that I'm such a pragmatic realist. Otherwise I'd write tripe. All the time. But you need. You need to see it from the outside to see it at all and that does help moving to an urban center after growing up in the rural south is very productive.

Ben: Speaking of the rural south, here’s Josh Weil:

Josh: My best friend was a guy who is now dead but he was in his 80s uh lived kind of a few hills over and I'd walk down and visit him -bring some fresh asparagus and he'd give me some moonshine ... 

Ben: To be clear Josh was in his 20s at the time … and asparagus for moonshine … LOVE this!

Josh: We'd hang out and uh just talking with him I became uh I really fell in love with that part of the world. maybe it's because I was born there there is something that speaks to me about it so so that the novella, my first book, grew very clearly grew out of that place and uh in fact, I'm thinking about writing something that is set back there again and I've been living out in California for 3 years and I feel so disconnected from it that although I have a 6-month old baby uh and luckily my wife is very generous and understanding uh we're trying to figure out ways for me to get back there even just for a couple weeks at a time. So I can reconnect with the place in order to write about it. 

Ben: Quick pause to say. I’m Ben Hess, this is Story Geometry, today’s theme is Location, Location, Location. After the break you’ll hear more from Dorothy Allison about her Southern heritage, her new novel, and a reading from Pam Houston so stay tuned.

Story Geometry’s partner Writing By Writers is kicking 2016 off with more workshops and conferences in Colorado, Washington state, and California. Currently scheduled faculty include science and adventure writer Craig Childs, Pulitzer Prize finalist Luis Alberto Urrea, novelist and poet Ron Carlson, novelist and memoirist Andre Dubus III, and novelist and anti-memoirist Lidia Yukanavnitch. How to signup, you ask? Simply visit writing x writers .org.

Ben: We’re back talking Location, Location, Location,  and here’s more from my chat with Dorothy Allison on her Southern roots …

Ben: You've now made a life out here in California but you're still considered a Southern writer. And that is inherent in all of your work or most of your work and I just wanted to have you speak a little bit about the South and what that's meant. 

Dorothy: it's very but it's very hard to claim respect. And in some way claiming respect as a Southerner is the hardest ... You know we are disreputable people. Now there are days when I claim that disrepute. And I'm proud of it. [LAUGHTER]

Ben: Well I remember too, makin’ the conscious effort to dampen down my accent.  Because because that stigma of that accent means uneducated, that accent means you don't have the intellect. And there are some wonderful thinkers of course from the south who talk with that thick drawl. But I say I remember specifically thinkin’, I better neutralize and keep it out of my speech.

Dorothy: You learn that very quickly. Although I also learned     the opposite. Particularly when I moved to New York. I learned that if I get really [07:58] Southern on them I could get a whole lot of sympathy and assistance and get lost on the subway system. And somebody for help and if I tried to talk like a New Yorker, they’re like “get away from me bitch.” But if I was like “yeah y'all can help me please.” Ooh a misplaced Southerner. And there is in this country along with the concept that southerners are stupid. There is a kind of romance about the South and southerners that you can use to your advantage when you're a young woman in New York City. I recommend it. Especially if you’re stopped by policeman. 

Ben: Yes! There you go ... NYC words of wisdom from Dorothy. Tom Barbash grew up in the City before moving upstate to start his career. I'm just wondering about setting and location and how likewise that impacts the kind of style of a piece.

Tom: Yeah yeah I would say that my New York City Stories tend to be different than my Upstate New York stories --  different pace, different in vocabulary a little bit, so yeah I think I think setting weighs to go into style as well I would say. And then what I was saying before about the collaboration with your character and and style is that the stories that deviate …  they’re not experimental but they're slightly different form. Like I have a second person story and a epistolary story and those needed to be told that way because of the characters are things that and that's that was my sense that I was trying to do. What I like about experimentation is when it grows out of character and I think it does that way rather than saying I'm going to write this particular type of [10:45] experimental story regardless of the character.I don’t think ... some characters may reject that idea.

Ben: You grew up in New York City and then lived in Upstate and worked in Upstate and then fast forward to being in the Bay Area and beautiful Marin County, I'm wondering. What's your perspective on having lived in both and the energy of both and how that informs your writing? 

Tom: I think they're both great places to be a writer and it is a very good nurturing writing community here and New York, you know, would be an amazing and exciting place to be as a writer. I think the finances in New York -- actually I would say that -- and it's very expensive to live here too. so in some ways you know, you have a writer like Jess Walter, who's made his life in Spokane Washington ...

Ben: Just to confirm - Walter wrote the recent award winning novel Beautiful Ruins, another to add to your list if you haven’t read it  … 

Tom: … he's got this great situation where it's inexpensive, he doesn't have to teach,. These are the best places to be if you want something exciting happening every night you know because there's almost always something kinda cool going on in the literary world and people always move through on book tour and I get to see everybody and I run a reading series at my college and I bring great people in all the time but for getting your work done there are plenty of places and cheaper places and are probably better. 

Ben: We’ve talked about  Dorothy’s distance from the south to inform Bastard Out of Carolina - her upcoming novel is set in Manhattan, and I asked her why New York City:

Dorothy: I was seriously ill two years ago. And at one of the lowest points in the illness when I really I thought I was dying, I was only semi-conscious and moving back and forth from being aware to being in a dream state. And while in a dream state I started dreaming about walking in Manhattan where I lived for some years when I was young and the dream was so intense so visceral … I had lost seventy pounds in four months …

Ben: That’s incredible. And in while you're going through these thoughts and thinking about Manhattan, that became the kernel of the novel. 

Dorothy: Yes. Not only does become the kernel of the novel. It became the place that I went for comfort. When you're in that much pain and that weak it's just so wonderful to go into a dream state. That is deeply satisfying. The odd thing is that it wasn't that specific. Except that I was walking in Manhattan. And I couldn't walk. And I was walking in the Manhattan of my youth. Not today’s Manhattan. Not in the high real estate market New York City now but in the early 70s. In fact the manuscript I'm working on the working title is nineteen seventy one. Because she goes back nineteen seventy one ..

Ben: Mark those calendars, Dorothy says ...

Dorothy: My agent, editor, and I pretty much agree the novel will be out in two years.

Ben: And for another auditory sneak peek, Pam Houston says her writing is almost always begins in landscape, and here she is reading an excerpt from her upcoming memoir, working title The Ranch: A Love Story, about life on her 100 acre ranch at 9000 feet in Colorado. And the William Pam refers to is one of her beloved Wolfhounds.

Pam Houston: The other thing I thought I’d do real quick is read a little, just a couple of paragraphs to get a feel of the memoir, and what I’m talking about is actually depression. And it’s cure at the ranch is the context of this ..

Time to move.  On this point, all selves are in agreement.  Put the smart wool on, lace your boots, don your barn coat.  Cut the apples, cut the carrots, feed the equines from your hands.  Cut the string that holds the bale of grass hay together, two flakes for the mini-donkeys, six for the horses, everything that is left for the sheep.  Top off the horse water, top off the sheep water, double check the heaters in the troughs.  Listen to the reassuring thump of cold boots soles on frozen ground, the comforting crunch of equine teeth grinding hay, the other-worldy woosh of wing beats overhead-- the bald eagle who winters upriver, back after his one-year hiatus.

 The forecast is calling for wind and possibly snow tonight but right now it is perfectly still and almost 20, too warm for my heavy barn coat. The creek at this time of year, with all the freezing and unfreezing is an ice sculpture, the willows that line it pencil drawings, the mountaintop beyond it already feet deep in snow.

The puppy is charging and leaping to see above what’s left of the tall grass while William, the three- year-old patrols the perimeter.  From here I can see Middle Creek Road, Lime Creek Road, as well as the state highway across the river, and though this represents some fairly large percentage of all the roads in Mineral County, for the hour we’ll be walking not one car will come by.

Out here, on this acreage, I’ve learned not only to hear my own voice, but to recognize what makes my heart leap up and then go towards it: the snowshoe hare—half way through his bi-annual color change that William scares up along the back fence, his big white feet flashing as his still tawny body gains distance.  A coyote, sitting, dignified and still as a church 200 yards across the pasture watching us make our way to the wetland, and then the flash, when William sees him, and he sees that William sees him, his total evaporation into thin air, like a ghost dog, come from some other plane of being.

These are the things that have always healed me, it just took me half a lifetime to really trust them, to understand how infallible they are. Moving through space, preferably outdoor space, preferably outdoor space that maintains some semblance of nature, if not this nature, some other nature.  When I’m happy it’s a carnival out here and when I am sad it to almost too beautiful to bear—but not quite—it is definitely too beautiful to contemplate leaving.  I climb the hill where the homesteader Robert Pinkley—the first man to build a cabin on this land--is buried, and I know well that when I claimed this 120 acres it also claimed me.  We are each other’s mutual saviors. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Warm thanks to Dorothy Allison, Josh Weil, Tom Barbash, and for sharing thoughts on location and place that informs their amazing writing and to Pam Houston for sharing an excerpt from her upcoming memoir.

I produced and edited today’s episode, won’t you say hi on Twitter or Instagram @BenHess. Our theme music is from Mark Hodgkin and the opening track was from The Responders featuring poet, writer, and teacher Greg Glazner on guitar and vocals.

Be sure to rate and review Story Geometry in iTunes -- we need more reviews and ratings, please do this for us - send feedback via StoryGeometry.org, and sign up for future Writing By Writers events and conferences at Writing X Writers .org. 

Thanks for listening.

This episode is an excerpt of a live, free-flowing panel discussion at the recent Writing by Writers Conference in Tomales Bay, California between poet, novelist, and National Book Award finalist Dorothy Allison, memoirist, journalist, fiction writer, and teacher Steve Almond, and award winning writer, teacher, and Writing by Writers co-founder Pam Houston.

Links:

• Dorothy Allison - http://www.dorothyallison.net/
• Steve Almond - http://stevealmondjoy.com
• Pam Houston - http://pamhouston.net
• Faculty Intros by UC Davis, Masters in Creative Writing students - http://english.ucdavis.edu/graduate/masters-creative-writing

Season One Partner, Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org

Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - http://ben-hess.com

Episode 005 - Pissing People Off

Pam Houston: This panel is called How Hard Should We Be Trying to Piss People Off [laughter].

Ben Hess: Welcome to Story Geometry, the podcast with insights on the craft and community of writing from leading published authors of our day. I’m your host, as yet unpublished novelist and screenwriter, Ben Hess. Today’s episode is #5, Pissing People Off, and has a different format. 

You’re about to hear a lightly edited panel discussion from the recent Writing By Writers Conference in Tomales Bay. The panel features poet, novelist, and National Book Award finalist Dorothy Allison, memoirist, journalist, fiction writer, and teacher Steve Almond, and award winning writer, teacher, and Writing by Writers co-founder Pam Houston. Given the temperament and sensibilities of these three, rest assured you will hear a range of profanity so turn it up and enjoy … or bust out the ear buds as needed. And of course, visit writingxwriters.org to book your spot in their 2016 workshops in Methow Valley, Washington or Boulder, Colorado. 

I’m also thrilled to include in this episode genuine, heartfelt introductions for each panelist from several University of California at Davis graduate students, where Pam teaches. Let’s kick things off with student Christina Turner:

Christina T: Dorothy Allison doesn’t give a fuck. 

I mean that statement in the best way possible. And I will revise it: Dorothy Allison doesn’t give a fuck about shit that doesn’t matter. She doesn’t give a fuck about posturing, about pretending, impressing people or making them like her, about anything less than the honest to god truth. That is what makes it so exciting, so liberating, for many of us to experience her writing and her teaching. 

It’s also the sort of thing that will make you learn, like Dorothy does, to give a fuck about all the right things: a compelling voice, emotional integrity, and above, for God’s sake, a good story. 

Her first novel, Bastard out of Carolina, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and more importantly, it made possible for many people here to even envision the writing and the living that they are doing now. It broke open the possibility for countless women and men to tell the truth about their experiences. 

It is a revolutionary thing for a women to give a fuck about the right things. As Dorothy wrote, “two or three things I know for sure and one is I’d rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.” It is my great pleasure to introduce to you this evening Dorothy Allison. 

Dorothy Allison: Did I set out to piss people off? You know, I think I did. [large laughter]

This morning in workshop, one of the stories which was beautifully written was an account of a woman, a very successful executive dealing with the sexism of the men she has to work for and it just took me back to my early 20s when I got a job at the Social Security Administration … oh, gawd .. It was the alternative to working waitress and there was gonna be ya know health insurance and all this crap. But the first thing is, they told me about the dress code. So I had to go buy a series of suits. Of pantsuits. Um, showed up in my pantsuit and they sent home to put on a skirt. How can you not respond with moral rage? I mean they weren’t paying me enough to pay for suits and skirts. And they certainly weren’t making it possible for me to be sane and follow the rules that were profoundly contemptible and sexist. Maddening. 

And I started writing nasty stories. But the definition of nasty is personal. Some of the stories I wrote didn't seem nasty to me. And it would be shocking if I would goto a reading or send something out for publication, and the response would be this wave of “Oh my god, you can’t say that!” And why not, everybody has a pussy. If they don't have a dick, they have a pussy. It’s just how life is. [laughter] 

As far as I can tell, everyone wants to play with their natural organs, right? And if I’m gonna write stories about it, isn’t this part of the revolution of light, of justice, and moral authority? I was claiming a kind of moral authority. Um early feminists did that. It was part of our territory honey, ha HA

But it still always shocked me. um When I was being my most  understandable conciliatory … when I thought I was being a good citizen, and they thought I was being a demon from hell, it’s always kind of … it’s the things I thought were the most banal that would upset them the most. That I want every little girl to learn to kill, they didn’t take that seriously. I did. They should’ve been pissed off about that. um … oh yeah … I think the thing that changed my work was when I stopped giving a fuck. It seemed to me … you need to know I began as a write with the small press movement. And I began as a writer working as a day job at the social security administration and then being a receptionist at a photo studio. And living in a collective. Which I have to say was kind’ve fun. The collective … especially the pool table where we used to do pot luck dinners. But was also kinda miserable and grungy. And if I’m going to live a miserable and grungy life without health insurance, there has to be some recompense. And the recompense I could claim a level of authority by which I was telling the truth. Telling the truth justified everything. And the fact that it pissed people off .. on some basic level, I didn’t care. 

The guy that showed up and fired a shotgun into our our front door did give me pause. [laughter] But we moved, immediately. [laughter] Actually left town and moved to another town. which I recommend if someone shoots your front door down. And I went on telling stories. And when I published Bastard out of Carolina, it startled me that people were so angry at the mother in that book. She was not the one I was angry at when I was writing. I understood her. I thought I put enough there. That people would understand her thought processes and what she was doing. That by leaving her child, she was saving her life. 

But instead everywhere I went, all over the country people were pissed off at this MOTHER. This nasty mother. Who didn’t kill her husband but instead took him away from her daughter. And it was educational. It seems to me I am always in process. I am always becoming .. I think I am becoming the person I am meant to be. But it is a LONG process. And sometimes I have to make peace with pissing myself off. Or feeling vulnerable. Or feeling naked. Or getting those letters from people who hate you. That’s … I'd like to pretend it doesn't affect me. But it does affect me. You’ve got those sleepless nights, you don’t know what you’re doing, what’re doing is worth the process to accomplish it. So that I’m always getting stronger. Seems to me the essential muscle I’ve got to develop is that I don't pay much to attention to the people who get too pissed off. 

Family? I’ll deal with family. They can yell at me, I’ll stand in the room. I think that’s … that’s family. But if you’re not family, I’m not standing around while you yell at me.

Ben: I grew up in the south, just an hour or so down I 85 from Dorothy’s Greenville, and I’ve been blown away at her magical combination of dialogue, description, and character that converges to create a south I could never write but one that I recognize immediately. For our next panelist, here’s graduate student Ryan Horner:

Ryan Horner: Steve Almond is a generous writer, the kind of writer who leads his readers from alongside them, who lets the reader do the heavy pulling so that they might then take ownership for the heavy emotional rewards. 

A few days ago, determined to learn more about the man than from what I’d heard in interviews online, I picked up Against Football and found an intelligent and sincere voice, like a wise elder who knows wisdom isn’t what we youngsters believe it to be. Then last night a friend lent me a collection of his short fiction so that I could read a few before bed… and I promptly spent half the night in the bathroom, sitting on the tile floor reading by cellphone light, until suddenly it was nearly 3 a.m. and my butt was numb and my eyes had been dry but now they were wet and I had to try for sleep. But first, before sleep, I had to deal with the things I’d learned about myself from his stories.  

In my brief but intense exposure to Steve Almond’s writing there is one thing I’ve learned for sure: he cares deeply, unabashedly about how his reader lives in the world, sure, but also about how he does. He cares about how the bad guys are ruining the world, sure, but especially about how the good guys are. Steve… I promise I’ll buy the book instead of just borrowing it indefinitely. It is my pleasure to introduce: Steve Almond.

Steve Almond: That’s like the world’s best book report ever. [Laughter] When I was in graduate school, I was writing very timid work for any number of reasons mostly having to do with the fact that people grow up with a kind of omerta. Maybe various forms of omerta. Codes of silence. First one is within your family. And that one lasts forever.  And the attendant anxieties of breaking that silence. And then there’s a whole other set of omerta’s in your peer group. Maybe in your Socio economic class. Ethnicity.  Culture, your place in the culture. Things that you’re not allowed to say uh because they’re too painful or disruptive. 

And then interestingly when you’re asked to be a writer, assign yourself the task of being a writer, part of what your intention is is to break some of those silences. And the inevitable result of that is people get disturbed by it. You’re really uh part of your job is to deal with unbearable feelings uh uh and disrupt. Um. And so naturally if you’re doing your job then people are going to be disrupted. And you know that’s easy to say but hard to experience because you love some of those people and you feel loyalty to them. And you want to be liked and loved and it’s upsetting when people are suddenly angry with you and they’re not your family, friends, or ex-lovers or current lovers. Or hoped for future lovers.

One thing I remember very clearly in grad school, that I was writing these stories that were very timid and safe and were not really dealing with unbearable emotion and I remember I read Bastard Out of Carolina by that lady over there and then I got very interested in her work cause I thought that novel was beautiful and painful and really sharp edged. And I searched around and found more of her books including this one … remember that one? … which is called The Women Who Hate Me which is a compilation of Dorothy’s poems, uh early poems. And it was kind’ve liberating for me to uh read, especially the title poem but also the other poems.

Because it hadn’t occurred to me was that part of what was hiding in my little hidey hole wasn’t just my disappointment and guilt and so forth but also that I was aggrieved and full of rage. Some of it misplaced and fucked up and my shit to work out. And some of it well placed and necessary. In other words that anger is sometimes a necessary form of self assertion. And that’s what that poem was to me. I also read and was instructed by Pam’s story especially How to Talk to a Hunter, which is not in the same style but has a kind’ve undercurrent of rage and indignation at men and their relentless bad behavior. Um in fact, and years later when I’d gotten a little braver as a writer I wrote kind’ve a response to that story My Life in Heavy Metal which I think is the man’s version of that story. Which was full of rage but in the form of self-loathing expressed as destructive behavior to the women around this character. Totally un biographical, autobiographical of course. 

That’s the central thing uh that I would say is that I don’t attend  to piss people off. I intend to tell the truth about the things that matter to me and as a logical and necessary by product of that, it ends up pissing people off. And I think that uh sometimes that’s actually good news. My homage to Dorothy’s wonderful poems is this crazy little book called Letters from People Who Hate Me. Which is in fact full of letters from people who hate me for various reasons. Shockingly.

But it’s only by way of saying that um sometimes that … it’s never your intended effect. That’s demagoguery. That’s provocation. And it’s dogma. And it’s easy. Because in the end I think the place you’re uh trying to end up and what you’re moving through is doubt and uncertainty. If you’re being honest. But um it is part of the tradition of writers and artists that there is a prophetic role in what they do. That’s why I was such a big fan of Vonnegut. There was a kind’ve moral rage that drove his books. That’s why I was drawn to writing and in the end it was a response to that omerta that we mentioned at the beginning. That part of being a writer is breaking certain kinds of codes of silence that absolutely need to be broken. 

Ben: I just love the transparency in Steve’s writing and how he talks about the craft. 

Let’s get to our third panelist, Pam Houston. Here’s graduate student Becky Mandelbaum followed by a free flowing, inciteful conversation amongst our three panelists.  

Becky M: The first time I read “How to Talk to a Hunter,” I was 19 and in a fiction writing workshop at the University of Kansas. When I finished reading it, I sat dumbstruck. The next day, the professor provided our class an abbreviated biography: “Pam Houston is a badass,” he said. “She raises these big fucking dogs on a ranch in Colorado.”

As it turns out, anyone with Internet access can figure out that Pam raises big fucking dogs on a ranch in Colorado. Dogs who, I might add, deserve every ounce of the incredible life she shares with them. The internet will also tell you that Pam is the author of five books, that her stories have been selected for the Best American series, the O Henry Awards, and the Best American short stories of the century. That she is generous with her time, teaching both at the Institute for American Indian Arts and at UC Davis. 

What the Internet can’t tell you is what it’s like to be around Pam—in a classroom, at a conference, on a trail in the mountains. Because when Pam talks, it’s impossible not listen, to hold your breath and lean just a little bit closer. It seems that nothing is impervious to this pull. When she goes out in the world, the world cannot help but step toward her, be it in the form of bear or elk or over-zealous grad student. 

The internet will also not tell you that Pam is as generous as she is smart, as smart as she is funny, and as funny as she is kind. That she will share her last piece of chocolate coconut candy, or hold her dog Livie’s paw the entire night before a surgery, or sing the entire length of One Tin Soldier just to prove that she fucking can. 

If you need proof of Pam’s talent you need only to pick up one of her books. And if you need proof of her heart—which is always on, always searching the world’s dark waters like a lighthouse—then you need only to speak to one of the many people (or animals) who know her as a teacher, a mentor, a friend. 

Please help me in welcoming Pam Houston.

Pam Houston: There’s a wonderful thing that happens to some women around 50. It's like you come out of a cloud of some kind. It's like you come out of a cloud, it must be hormonally assisted. But you don't care what men think anymore. Or you don’t care more what they think than other people think. You know, you don't give them a special power and it’s kind’ve a miraculous power that you give them until then. To decide if you’re OK or if you can say or do a certain thing. Or whether in fact you even exist at all. 

I’ve never said these words before …I really haven’t … I’ve never, I’ve never thought, I’ve never thought exactly in these terms although I’ve been writing this a little bit in this memoir I’m working on. 

No one would look at my life-- my hunting, guiding, bear-chasing, river guiding … I was the first licensed female hunting guide in Alaska. I mean no one would look at my life and say, “Oh that little woman was kept down by her man.” Like no one would ever say that. But it was more about the power I gave men to … to give me an existence. God, I hate to say that. But it’s true. Something like If a man didn't look at me in a particular war, I didn't exist. That’s the best way I can say it. Even though I was going about my life, I was writing my books. I was, you know, on Fresh Air. You know, and yet, in some way I didn’t exactly exist. I only know that now. I never would’ve known that at the time or said it. I only know it now. 

And and so a lot of what I did up until now was trying not to make anyone mad at me. Which does not mean I’m not proud of the books I wrote. I spent a lot of time trying not to piss people off. And those people had lots of faces and they weren’t just the men. It was, it was my my editor. I was always trying not to piss my editor off though I loved her very much. And she was very much like a mother to me.  This was Carol Houghsmith for those of you who know who she was. 

It was my readers. You know Cowboys Are My Weakness now, when I look back on it, seems like a book I wrote about all my dumb boyfriends. It seems like a book I wrote when I knew absolutely nothing about anything. And I didn’t even know how to take responsibility for my own actions. Though I think it’s got some nice sentences in it. [laughter] I, I, I’m you know I have great affection for that girl, and I’m embarrassed by her world view.  But you know she was 27 so what kind of worldview could she have? But, but when I look back on that book and I remember the rage it caused. I got letters and letters.  

Letters from feminists, from self identified feminists who said I set feminism back 50 years. Can you imagine the power that I had? That I could set feminism back 50 years?

Dorothy: I knew you had talent.

Pam:

So, so I guess I’d say the difference between me right now and then is that back then I was working really hard not to piss anyone off and pissing them off anyway. And now I’m more inclined to try and piss people off though that’s not my first goal in any way. But it’s something I’m now allowed to do because I no longer feel that my existence is … that someone else is in charge of my existence I guess is what I mean. 

So I have written a few things lately that have pissed people off and I guess I’ll say that the difference between those things and the old things is that I knew they would. You know I knew they would when I wrote them and that was OK with me. One was an essay for anthology called Selfish, Shallow, and Self Absorbed that was about my decision not to have children and my belief that that decision does not necessarily mean I’m selfish or more selfish than a woman who had children or irrevocably fucked up by my childhood. And that pissed a lot of people off. And I expected it to. And the letters came, and I sort’ve greeted them with pleasure. I did. And then I wrote this essay called

Corn Maze exploring the Line between fiction and nonfiction, which I absolutely knew would piss people off. And where I said the the thing you know that’s very obvious to most of the people in this room which is that language can't necessarily represent reality. To pretend that it does, that’s it’s a simple thing in what we call creative nonfiction is an outrageous assumption.

And then the third thing I wrote, I wrote more recently which is this essay, What Has Irony Done for Us Lately? which opens with a kind of .. the the notion that perhaps academic stance of irony, condescension, hollow chuckle as the only possible response to all the outrageous things happening in the world might not be the most useful stance.

So so those are the three things I’ve written lately that I … and I came from a different place, and that place .. that’s why I opened with that terrible confession … that place … I only feel I can stand in that place now. That place where I have something to say about the world. You know I have something to say on Twitter, something to say on Facebook. I was called recently on Twitter in the same tweet a um a liberal, cunt, moon beam. [laughter]

Which is so great. Like it’s so great. Like they don’t know you’re a fiction writer when they send you a tweet like that, like they don’t understand the gift they’ve given you. [laughter] When they call you a liberal, a cunt, and a moon beam all in one tweet. But anyway, that’s an aside. I always used to say, and this is why I wrote much more fiction than non fiction when I was young - one reason, I didn’t understand nonfiction when I was young at all, and I’m only beginning to understand it now - I used to say you know it's so much more powerful to tell a story. Than to stand in a place and say how I think. It’s so much more powerful to tell a story. And a big part of me still believes that but this ability to stand in a place and say what I think and say it publicly and say it in writing and say it in this thing we’ve all agreed to call nonfiction is um new and um and and brought about by a lot of years on the planet and a lot of years of paying attention and a lot of years of therapy and I also think a significant hormonal decrease. [laughter] It is so different from how I used to feel I have to believe it’s chemically assisted. 

Dorothy: Boy! Nice.

Steve: Alright … yeah. [laughter] 

Pam: And what about your hormones?

Steve: Some of what my work concerns itself with are really huge instances of that. Like the fact that the central narrative in our country, the central thing that binds most people in this country that is, inhabits them emotionally, psychologically, even spiritually. The biggest thing, it is not religion, it is not politics, it is sport, and specifically football. And as a card carrying fan of football for four decades, I finally had this moment where I’m like, “Gee, if I’m gonna run around all over the place saying you know we are in big trouble, you know, and our way in moving through the world is almost decadent and pornographically violent, and we’re out of control and no one is taking more responsibility, then I better take more responsibility for being a football fan, trying to understand what it’s about, and learn more about that sport and our attachment to it. Not just what it does for us, but to us. 

Well the problem with Against Football as a book is not that … it didn’t piss off enough people because nobody wants to read … nobody who needs to read it wants to read it, um, you know, forget it. I don’t blame’em. The part of me that’s still a drooling worshipper at that particular hyper masculinity and patriarchal prerogative doesn’t want to read a fucking book telling me how corrupt that arrangement is and how it’s corrupted the academic mission of this country and corrupted … and spins this absurd racsist fantasy about how poor kids, especially poor kids of color should be empowerd. Could become people who are worth actually giving a shit about. That’s some angry prophetic shit. But it’s also true to me. And important to say especially as a counter-narrative to what’s generally out there. Because we just fully approve of the the fact that this craze, hyper violent, brain damaged causing super misogynistic game, that is uh also full of deep racial pathology and um kind’ve a particular American decadence is our central thing that we share. And it’s supposed to feel like the All-American game. There’s a wonderul group of people here but you could multiply it by a hundred thousand times and that’s who’s thinking about football as deeply as you’re thinking about literature. 

Right? Or maybe it’s more than a hundred thousand times but … so I think … the reason that I bring that up is that I come at this from a particularly male perspective saying, how have I been … how have I been or do I continue to be complicit in the series of very bad decisions that have been enabled from insulating themselves from their actual moral duties in the world. And how have I done that. That’s what Heavy Metal is an attempt to reckon with. I was the bad hunter in that story, or my proxy as fictional character and that’s my attempt to reckon with, “How did I behave so badly? What made me behave in that way when I was in my 20s? Um, I mean I get a little bit of hate mail, but I wish I got more. I wish it was deeper and more profound.

Pam comment.

Steve [cont'd]: Well, well as I found out when I left BC and I’ve written things that have gotten into the right wing world and the responses are actually very profound statements. They’re unreliable narrators but they’re telling a fascinating story about their own rage and desperation and … kind’ve impotent rage. And that to me is kinda deep. I’ll try and read one of those tomorrow night because I do feel .. I wouldn’t have put the book out as a kind’ve gag. I feel that it’s absolutely essential that when we you know, much of this country is driven by, it’s not an immoral rage, it’s a misguided moral rage, it’s a form of loneliness, a sense of emotional and psychological fear and displacement that’s always been a part of the American experience. We are, I feel, sort’ve at a proto-fascist point with a certain segment of the population. The way they are willing to dehumanize and demonize anything that violates their sense of basically prerogative and pre-eminence. And that’s real. You know, I don’t think there are other developed worlds, developed countries that are as profoundly violent, that have as much, as many people with guns, as violent a popular culture. That’s something that’s our country, that we’re up to, so part of my effort to write about that rage is to engage with them, and say they actually have more political power than those of us who think that maybe Bernie Sanders maybe is going to usher in an era of actual  general liberal humanist agenda, you know, politics or governance. It can’t hurt, right?

So I guess what I’m getting at is that rage is an appropriate response, a certain kind’ve morally grounded rage is an appropriate response to the circumstances that we find, we find ourselves in and also more importantly, our own complicity. You know, if I wrote Against Football, as someone who just always hated it, didn’t get it, didn’t consume it, I think it would be a very accusatory, scolding book. What I was trying to write about is how you walk away from something that you really love, because you know that it’s wrong to still be there, right?

Pam: I want to just talk about complicity for a second … I know what I supposed to talk about is this memoir that I’m trying really hard to write that’s really kicking my ass, because is all around this question of pissing people off or not. I … this book that I’m writing, which is the story of the ranch where I live. Or the story of the ranch where I live and um how it has made me a person, created my personhood, and how it’s sort’ve the great love story of my life, in a certain way. It, um, I’m writing it because my publisher wanted me to. So on the one hand, I’m I’m being the biggest um good girl that I’ve ever been at this moment. They really wanted me to write this, that’s never happened to me before. I’ve always written something and they said, “Oh we wish it was more this way,” and I’ve said too “well too bad.” I’ve always been the bad kid, a little bit. I’m a good sport on tour but a bad sport in the writing because I won’t ever take it in the way they sort’ve try to push it. But this time I thought, “They let me try to do everything I want including Contents May Have Shifted which was really um a formal experiment, and other things that they don’t love in general and and so they were really good sports about that so I’ll do the right thing, I’ll pay that back by writing this memoir. And I had this idea about this memoir, I had this idea of what they wanted which isn’t fair at all to them. My idea, not fair at all to them. The idea was, you know, girl from New Jersey comes out, buys a 120 acre ranch at 9000 feet, freezes pipes, hilarity ensues. [laughter] Like, like, “Oh that wacky Pam, what was she thinking.” [laughter] “Oh that wacky Pam from New Jersey.” So already, before I tried to write I was in this state of the deepest self-loathing, right, I’m like the worst sell-out ever, and I can’t possibly meet their ridiculous goal, which isn’t even their goal, it’s it’s just another way for me to hate myself in the process. 

So about two years go by, and I haven’t really written anything because I’ve gotten myself stuck there and and then I was uh lucky in in the way that the world is lucky when one of my colleagues at Davis said a sentence to me, which was “Do you expect me to go to this department and ask them to hire a poet who celebrates nature unironically?”

And that sentence, that sentence ate at me and ate at me for six months, I kept thinking about it and oddly enough, the way these things work, it became my inroad to this book. It became the way I could suddenly understand this book. This book was gonna be my environmental book I said, this book was gonna be about the ranch but it’s going to be me writing about the thing that most concerns me of all the things that could concern me, which are many, all the things that could be keeping us up at night these days. The one that’s so heartbreaking for me is not that even “we’re all going to die’ because of global warming but that the earth is. Because the earth has always been my place of safety, and salvation, and my teacher, my healer. So it’s not even so much that I’m going to die, it’s that we’re taking, we’re taking all this beauty out with us. And to me that is at the center of my rage and fear and sorrow.

And so I thought OK, this book is going to more than just wacky Pam freezes pipes, this book is gonna be you know this environmental tome, and I’m going to do something good for the world. And then, the next step, is that I realized this is all about self-implication which at first felt awful and then it felt better. But in the awful moment of course, like there are a lot of people who are destroying the earth faster than I am, but I’m destroying it pretty fast. I’m flying all over the frickin place, you know, and I have 325 pounds of dog in my life, and they just can’t fit in a Prius. So so that self-implication, while at first seemed like terrible news, of course turned out to be the good news, because that’s the only place to write anything from is that place of self-implication. And from there you know it makes this idea that I’m big enough now to say things about the world possible in a certain way, as long as the first stone, the first slap is across my own face. Right?

Dorothy: This is an interesting word, self-implication, kind’ve fascinating. I realize when I think about my life … who here has seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show? Cool, you’ll understand this: you know the part where Frankenfurter brings out his body builder? Puts his arm across him and says, ‘Look at this?” And the girl, my favorite girl, goes up to him and says, “pretty nice!” And Rocky grabs the guy and says, “I didn’t make him for you.” [laughter]

For years and years and years, I loved that scene and then I realized, I’m Frankenfurter. When I write, I realize that I have - this is self-implication - I have a guiding impulse toward my own objects of lust. They’re not boys. What’s more …

Steve: Mine either … [laughter]

Dorothy: They’re not even girls. The women in my life who genuinely excite me tend to be dangerous. If not literally dangerous, they look dangerous. And they move through the world … Oh, honey, just think of all those images from the 50s. Uh, think of motorcycling riding, leather jacketed, carrying knives, wearing boots, kickass bitches. Those are the women I wanted and wanted desperately. They were my objects of lust. And while for most of my life, that would be the .. those were the people I was actually courting.

Now being a writer, courting means you’re attempting to put on the page something attractive to your objects of lust. Well my objects of lust didn’t give a shit what I anybody thought of them. Therefore I had to write in such a way that I was a heroic outlaw figure. So that I would be, let’s be frank, sexually attractive to the women I was desperate to fuck and who I wanted to fuck me. This is how me and Frankfurter move through the world. [laughter]

But that means my objects of lust got more and more complicated. Not only did they have to ride motorcycles and be outlaw figures. They had to be well read [laughter]. As time went on, they had to speak several languages [laughter]. They had to have had a wild, misspent youth. Exceeding my own wild, misspent youth. I couldn’t compete with’em, they had to be so far .. they had to be my role model, they had to be my passionate objects.

Now I hit menopause. Let me just say that lesbian menopause is not pretty. [laughter]

Steve: Duly noted. [laughter]

Dorothy: You need this information. Go to your coffee shop, it’ll help. But that meant that my objects of lust kind’ve receded. I was no longer actively flirting with them. Remember this is like a reversal, because in my flirting with them i actually didn’t give a shit what anyone else thought about what I writing. So that a lot of the essays in Skin that are um very very frank about sex and sexual violence and my own fascinations with violence and a lot of detail. Let me just say when the postmistress in Monte Rio brought me my mail, she gave me a look and said “Did you name your dildo after your dog or your dog after your dildo?” and I’m like “She, she read that in my book.” [laughter]

And to be the outlaw woman of my imagination, I’ve got to look her in the eye and say, “I just don’t even remember anymore.” I wasn’t looking to piss people off, I was looking to attract people I found most valid, most resonant, my objects of lust, sometimes lust, but also objects of admiration. The people I thought were really important, powerful, glorified. I did want to be an outlaw, I did worship the outlaw model. In a radical, lesbian, feminist, provocative manner. But then as my hormones receded, I don’t think that essential thing has ever gone away. I’m actually no longer in the market for adventure the way I used to be, she said, speaking in code. [laughter]

But there still seems to be a really strong streak in me that that’s my role, that’s my model for valid, important strong work. And that I need to live up to that model. My own totemic outlaw figures, and I’ve known some serious bitches. And living up to that standard, people who send me letters and tell me I’m gonna burn in hell, I’m like, “Oh yeah, probably.” That’s not going to stop me or get in the way, and in fact, let’s be terribly, painfully honest, there is a glory in pissing people off.

APPLAUSE 

Ben Closing:

Thanks so much for listening to a special live panel edition of Story Geometry and warmest of thanks to Dorothy Allison, Steve Almond, and Pam Houston for sharing such genuine, insightful thoughts and perspective on Writing to Piss People Off. Our theme music is from Mark Hodgkin. And also shout out to Kim Rogers who took such fantastic notes during the panel which helped served as the transcript for this podcast episode.  Be sure to rate and review Story Geometry in iTunes, send feedback via StoryGeometry.org, and sign up for future Writing By Writers events and conferences at Writing X Writers .org. I’m your host and editor, @BenHess on Twitter. Thanks so much for listening.

So you’ve slaved over your stories, essays, book proposal, or fiction manuscript … and now what? Ben Hess explores the business of writing with nonfiction agent Gordon Warnock, independent editor and writer Jay Schaefer, in addition to award-winning writers and teachers Gary Ferguson and Pam Houston.

• Gordon Warnock, Fuse Literary Agency - http://www.fuseliterary.com/about-fuse/
• Jay Schaefer - http://www.jay-schaefer-books.com/
• Gary Ferguson - http://wildwords.net
• Pam Houston - http://pamhouston.net
• Alan Heathcock - http://alanheathcock.com

Season One Partner, Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org

Produced & Hosted By: Ben Hess - http://ben-hess.com

Story Geometry Ep4 - Business of Writing, Volume I

Ben Hess: Welcome to Story Geometry, the podcast with insights on the craft and community of writing. I’m your host, Ben Hess, and this is Episode Four, our first look at the Business of Writing. 

Gordon Warnock: We don't get caught up in all the rhetoric of the self-publishing versus first traditional publishing order. This is legitimate and that's a dinosaur model or whatever. That's that's all nonsense. 

Ben: This is nonfiction literary agent Gordon Warnock, partner in the Sacramento based Fuse Literary Agency. We chatted at a Manuscript Bootcamp held by my Season One partner, literary nonprofit Writing By Writers. 

Gordon: I can represent the types of books that I identify with and that I can enjoy reading and really put a lot of my effort into and the books that I read on a regular basis and know. 

And so that's one of the great things about the business it's not about getting an agent, it's about getting the right agent for your specific work and when that happens when you find a match, it’s amazing. 

Ben: I was wondering about your first major sale and who that was and if you could go back in time and tell us about that … 

Gordon: Well, I sold a few projects early on - a cookbook, a business book and various other things like that.The first one that really stuck out in my mind though, it came a little while -- called A Real Emotional Girl by Tanya Chernov and it's one of my favorite projects that I've worked on. This debut memoir that was gorgeous and literary and very striking and it took the author about, well it was 11 years from when she started writing the book to when it got published. When it came to me it needed a bit of work but I could tell the language was just amazing and so I worked with her to edit for about a year on that.

Ben: I can only imagine how much relief Tonya felt to have Gordon in her camp …

Gordon: Once we had that all good to go and then I sent it and got these glowing rejections of: “this is amazing but I can't get passed our editorial board” or you know “marketing doesn't think that this is a big enough book” and so forth and so with getting those reactions over the next two years it was um -- it was a tough situation. I ended up meeting with the author face to face - she lives in Seattle and and I was in town for a conference that weekend and so I went up a little bit early and talked to her and it basically we had the talk quote-unquote: 

Ben: What a roller coaster. It’s like getting a taste of the promised published land … only to have delay after delay. 

Gordon: It's like okay this coming to its end and I'm going to work on it for maybe a few more weeks and then we're going to scrap it and maybe try something else [00:08:45] and at that conference that weekend I ended up meeting the editor who bought the book … the editor fell in love with it, she was really ultimately the best possible person for that book.

Ben: After all that effort how did how did it feel … when the conference is happening and you get this glowing approval from this editor? 

Gordon: Well, it never gets old. I mean that's one of those things where the ups and downs are experienced just as well as the authors do. We feel rejections like the authors do - we actually get rejected a lot more than the authors do because we pitch multiple projects for multiple authors and so we're used to being told no a lot. And when we're told yes it feels just as good … 

Ben: Now to be clear, Tonya had short pieces published before … some poetry and an essay. But for Emotional Girl to take as long as it did to sell .. 

Gordon: I have donated so much time into that specific book and -- you know tweaked every little thing in the manuscript and just made it as good as it can possibly be and then went through the rigorous pitching process and meeting people face to face and the emails and phones and all the rest of that I spent so many hours on that. And then when I finally went, it was just like this big relief and I knew it was you know this was something that when I first saw it, in it's rough stage, I knew it had to be a book and then for that to finally happened was glorious. It was amazing.

Ben: What a dream, right? To have an agent fighting for your book, week after week, month after month? I’m not there yet: the hard copy of my Work in Progress novel mocks me from the corner of my office and my hard drive slowly fills with short fiction and essay drafts. I save stories with FINAL in the file name, only to replace them days or weeks later after another read or new comments. More tinkering on pace or plot or description. The age old question - while continuing to improve our craft to yield a more captivating story, whether fiction or nonfiction, poetry or prose - how does an unpublished writer not only get an agent but the right agent, as Gordon says?

Gordon: There's this whole ecosystem of writing and publishing and writers of all different levels and types and we need all of that. We need to cultivate everyone's art and everyone's voice and giving them an outlet other it's my arena with some traditional publishing and major publishing or self publishing or independent publishing or university publishing or anything other outlets that are out there and that expands to conferences as well where you have like the big major Pitchfest where you go and you're among 500 of your closest friends and you were sitting down for three minutes at a time talking to probably a dozen agents over you know, the course of the day or two. And then on the opposite end of the spectrum you have those like a like a Writing by Writers and a few of the others that I'm doing later in the year that are more craft focused and they're going to take the time to meet with each individual person and talk about their specific needs and where they need to go with their own work to grow as writers and it's less of an industry focus, it’s less of a ‘this is your big chance and these next few minutes will make or break your career’ which is nonsense … it's more hands-on and my consultations here first of all they’re longer - they're longer there like 20 minutes of instead of three minutes and we're talking about their samples and what needs to be done and with ways they can improve as a writer, and it’s not ‘OK try and convince me to take me on as a writer.’

Gordon: ... it's more hands-on and my consultations here first of all they’re longer - they're longer there like 20 minutes of instead of three minutes and we're talking about their samples and what needs to be done and with ways they can improve as a writer, and it’s not ‘OK try and convince me to take me on as a writer.’

Ben: Maybe this is a novice question but just for clarity is that typically the path where if you get an editor on board then they can champion it internally with with marketing with editorial board or is it someone else in the publishing house that you're trying to pitch and ultimately get a green light?

Gordon: For most major publishers that agents work with the decision is by committee where yes you pitch it to and acquisitions editor and they're going to be the advocate for the book from the moment they receive the manuscript to you know throughout the life of the book. …. it does take enthusiasm from an acquisition editor and at some of the independent press it sometimes that's enough but at the big corporate houses, you need to convince literally every other department - from foreign rights to audio to everyone else who could have a hand in the life of this book at a certain extent they will have to sign off on it as a good decision and they'll do calculations and you all sorts of things before they end up signing the book.

Ben: Or said less diplomatically …

Jay: Publishing has always been in disarray, it's a stupid business from a business model perspective. 

Ben: This is Jay Schaefer, former New Yorker, former attorney and former editorial director at Chronicle Books where he launched their mystery and literary lists. Jay’s now a San Francisco based independent editor and writer. 

Jay: [cont’d] It had a lot of people of worried that the novel was dead in the 1950s so, stories of the demise of publishing and have been going on for a half a century if not longer. What’s happened today is that there are fewer publishers but more opportunities for people to publish with self publishing having been become respectable and the rise of more self-publishers. I’ll remain cautiously pessimistic about the future of publishing. It had a lot of people of worried that the novel was dead in the 1950s so, stories of the demise of publishing and have been going on for a half a century if not longer. What’s happened today is that there are fewer publishers but more opportunities for people to publish with self publishing having been become respectable and the rise of more self-publishers. I’ll remain cautiously pessimistic about the future of publishing.

Ben: I love that phrase "cautiously pessimistic". … So to dovetail off that, we were coming out of the Hachette and Amazon battle. What's your perspective on ….

Jay: I think Amazon has done done wonderful things, the Internet has done wonderful things to make books available anywhere to anyone who wants them. Publishing has always had bad guys. When I started at Chronicle Books, Chronicle in particular was aimed at independent bookstores and the theory at Chronicle was get the books into the stores and they'll sell themselves and a lot of publishing were hand selling the clerks and bookstores to the customers and when Barnes and Noble came along they were the bad guys because they were the big chain stores that were driving out the independents. Zoom ahead 20 years and now Barnes & Noble is the good guy and everyone's rooting for Barnes and Noble and Amazon is perceived by many to be the bad guy.

Jay: [cont’d] So access to the books has changed the face of publishing and that's a tremendous thing. I'm not so keen on the demise of independent bookstores. I think that the issue now is it's easy to publish, it's hard to find an audience for your book. I think that the problem for self-publishers in particular is they can get a good looking version of their book out there either in print or print on demand and/ or E-book but how are they going to bring readers to it? So that's become the big issues today and unfortunately, publishers don't do as much to promote the books as people would think. Even if you go with a big publisher, a lot of the responsibility, for promoting the book falls to the author. So the people who are in the toughest shape are writers who just like to write and not become publishers or not become promotion machines for their book.

Ben: But in the five and half centuries since Gutenberg introduced mechanical movable type with his printing press, when have writers ever been able to just write? We’ve always scraped and scrapped and struggled financially to create, publish, and distribute our stories. Even geniuses of the craft such as Oscar Wilde and Herman Melville died destitute and disillusioned. Contemporary naturalist, creative nonfiction writer, and memoirist Gary Ferguson knows the game quite well having published 23 books. TWENTY THREE! We chatted on a spring morning in Boulder, Colorado:

Of the many wonderful things I gleaned from The Carry Home, when you write about the past and even present day, professional writing is a hustle - there's query letters, there’s pitches. You wrote about being at different campsites and traveling around the country and having to pop by the mail and mail things off. Just that ongoing treadmill of pursuit of work. I'm just wondering, as a professional writer, is that the game? Is that what you'd advise aspiring writers to kind've focus on ... the business side of it, or is it more about the creativity and the craft?

Gary Ferguson: You really have to pay attention to both, because you have to have something worth selling. But to imagine for a moment that what you produce creatively and artistically doesn't find itself subjected to the same rules of commerce that everything else does is to delude yourself. So think there's some peace going in knowing there's going to be that sort of hustle. The other, I guess, good news is that if you believe in the story you've written and you think that other people would find a way into it, and would be perhaps served by it, then you go through the hustle, you go through the marketing, all the other stuff, the social media in order to allow that to happen. You know, I mean it's the belief in what you've done that keeps the energy going for the selling of it. 

Ben: You seem to have rolled with the times and adapted to our self-promotional social media era, and I’m just wondering what your perspective is on today’s technology and these different avenues that people are using to share and to promote.

Gary: I think there are so many options out there that yes, we are all overwhelmed, and so that has resulted in a tendency for each person who has anything to sell to shout and I really don’t like that particular approach.  However, the equivalent of word of mouth that used to happen to sell a lot of books happens now in a social media context; Facebook is our word of mouth.  So I think it’s a kind of a double edge sword, there is a lot to be gained from being literate with the social media and there is also the temptation of spending so much of your time on social media talking about what you’ve done that you no longer create anything to have something to talk about.

Ben: You mentioned Facebook by name? Are there other services you’ve found beneficial either creatively or businesswise?

Gary: Right now for me, it’s Facebook and Twitter.  I’m sure that there are a lot of other options that other authors are exploring.  Certainly to go into a virtual community like Goodreads has been a great thing.  Amazon is continuing to push, Amazon actually owns Goodreads now.  But Amazon continues to offer new ways for people to come together around books and share words to them. Book clubs tend to exist not only in real life, real time real place but virtually as well.  And so for every negative and overwhelming aspect of that social media I continue to think that there are advantages. It’s a matter of learning to separate the wheat from the chaff and we are all struggling to do that at this point.

Ben: What is your perspective on the traditional publishing world versus the self publishing world and speak a little bit about the eReaders versus traditional books … we’re in a shift, and I’m wondering your comments on that … shift we’re living through.

Gary: Financially for authors eBook deals are much less, I almost said fair, but I’ll say lucrative, most authors make about a third, a quarter to a third, as much as they make on an actual book, on an eBook which is odd because there is no cost of production for an eBook. But nonetheless I do think that people are always going to be hungry for story and those who produce good stories and figure out the system by which to get them into the hands of the people who need them and want them, will, will survive in one form or another; I think audiobooks is another area that’s exploding right now and so you know as an author I can really get upset and overly anxious about these shifts and these changes and authors aren’t particularly good at being ahead of the curve technologically, but the other option is do I still believe in the stories that I’m writing, do I still believe there are people who need and want them, and if so, then I sort of owe my profession and I owe my readers the willingness and the ability to figure these systems of delivery.

Pam Houston: I just tend not to think about the economics.  

Ben: Writing By Writers Co-Founder, Teacher, and award-winning writer Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted.

Pam: I mean for me there is one, there is one equation and it’s I write a book and I want it to be good enough that it sells enough copies that I’m allowed to write another book and I don’t think about whether I’m making $0.79 or a $1.29, I honestly don’t think about any of that.  You know my books in the world go out there, they get me invited to teach at shamani [ph] they allowed for the creation of Writing By Writers, they got me hired at UC Davis so that the reason I’ve health insurance, you know, I don’t think about the nickels and dimes of it ever.  I just don’t.  It’s not useful to me to think that way.

So, for me and eBooks I’ve never actually read one, I’ve held one of those machines in my hand but not for it more than half a second.  I’m not interested in them but if they make it so people are reading that who wouldn’t read otherwise or they’re reading better stuff because they don’t have to settle for what’s in the grocery store, well, that’s okay with me, you know, I do know that many people download my books on eReaders, I’ve signed eReaders for people with the silver pen … I’m not anti-e reader. I thought I might get used to it because I have some back trouble and I’m always hauling 15 pounds of books but I haven’t. I’ve just decided the back trouble is worth being able to read words on paper instead of words on the screen. So I’m not interested in them, but I’m not against them.

Ben: I wrapped each interview with a question intended to elicit a rapid fire, stream of consciousness response. Where do you like to write?

Pam: I like writing in airports. I know that sounds crazy, but it was the first thing that came to me.  There is this idea that you are anonymous and that there is nothing else pressing on you.  So ideal writing situation, plane gets cancelled for six hours.

Ben: Editor Jay Schafer?

Jay: A quiet place, I am unable to write or a edit with any music or noise or -- and I cannot work in cafes or restaurants so, any place that is really quiet good for me. Geographically, I love Point Reyes I have been coming here for years before the conference and some uh place overlooking the hills where it's quiet sounds good to me.

Ben: Gordon Warnock?

Gordon: I like working outdoors, really and it's one of those things that if I can have connection to wi-fi or even cell reception then I can work pretty much anywhere [00:32:45]  and that's the nature of the business these days. I don't need to go to an office in New York to be able to be a literary agent - I just like being out in nature, too so I'll usually -- if I'm home I'll work out on the patio or the deck or what have you.

Ben: Award winning fiction writer with his short story collection, VOLT,  Alan Heathcock.

Alan: I own a 1967 Roadrunner Travel Trailer and I write in it.

Ben: And Gary Ferguson?

Gary: On the creek bank behind my house.

Ben: And I’ve struggled with this as I’m often in front of a screen for hours and hours a day, either writing, editing video or audio or retouching photos. And I’m alone. So I typically write in the company of strangers, at coffee shops or libraries with headphones on, an alternative rock Pandora channel screaming and the room’s ambient energy rooting me on.

That’s our first Story Geometry look at the Business of Writing. The episode was produced and edited by yours truly, Ben Hess, @BenHess on Twitter. Our theme music is from Mark Hodgkin and special thanks to Gordon Warnock,  Jay Schaefer, Gary Ferguson, Alan Heathcock, and Pam Houston for their perspectives on the Business of Writing.

Reminder to explore all the amazing upcoming Writing By Writers events and workshops on writing x writers dot org 

And lets help others find this show! Thanks for rating and reviewing the show in iTunes and sharing with at least one literary friend and we are good. Until then, may story ideas flow and bloom into a draft and then manuscript ready to sell! Thanks for listening.

Aspiring novelist Ben Hess explores writing from the deep end of loss, grief, and uncertainty with teachers and authors Tom Barbash, Gary Ferguson, Alan Heathcock, Pam Houston, and Josh Weil.

• Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
• Tom Barbash - https://www.facebook.com/Tom-Barbash-1403861426501638/timeline/
• Pam Houston - http://pamhouston.net
• Alan Heathcock - http://alanheathcock.com
• Gary Ferguson - http://wildwords.net
• Josh Weil - http://www.joshweil.com
• NPR Fresh Air - Terry Gross interview with memoirist Mary Karr

Story Geometry Ep3 - The Deep End

Ben Hess: Welcome to Story Geometry, the podcast plotting insights on the craft and community of writing and storytelling from leading published authors of our day with a razor sharp #2 pencil. I’m your host, aspiring novelist Ben Hess, and this is Episode Three - The Deep End. My partner in literary exploration throughout Season One is Writing By Writers founded by award winning teacher and writer Pam Houston and nonprofit executive Karen Nelson. They’d love to have you stop by and explore their 2016 workshops and adventures - visit writing x writers dot org. So it’s mid September now, which historically signifies a change in season from Summer to Fall, and the beginning of another school year. But in recent times, the 11th casts a haunting shadow on the calendar

Tom Barbash: When 9/11 happened … this firm Cantor Fitzgerald ... lost over 658 members, you know, people would had worked there - this company of a thousand people and it was sorta epicenter of the tragedy.

BH: This is Tom Barbash, author of the award-winning collection Stay Up With Me, the novel The Last Good Chance and the New York Times bestseller,  On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, & 9/11: A Story of Loss & Renewal. Tom was thrown into the literary deep end days after 9/11 while navigating personal grief and loss.

TB: The chairman, Howard Lutnick of Cantor Fitzgerald -- sort’ve the New York Stock Exchange for bonds – he was on my tennis team and a friend of mine, I actually knew him before college from tennis tournaments … I was away traveling in Spain and he was on television crying, he was the sort’ve the face of the tragedy … 

Female News Anchor: Cantor Fitzgerald sort’ve symbolizes the devastation of the terrorist attack. 

Howard Lutnick (news excerpt): We have to make our company … be able to take care … of my 700 families. 

TB: Originally we were going to write something together and then he was too caught up in saving the company and doing whatever you need to do to work around the clock, to just kind of stay afloat and I ended up with this incredible responsibility of writing the story about grief, a story about this company trying to reboot within 48 hours to stay viable and then the media crush around them which which was a sort of story in which they got vilified and then sorta pulled out of that and it was quite surreal and um with a short deadline so it sort of reporting around the clock writing around the clock and I lost four friends in the tragedy and was going to funerals so I was sort of being a friend and being a writer secondarily and then off then I had to really start to kick it in. 

BH: While Tom grappled with the daunting task of feverishly reporting and writing a personal account of the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, naturalist and creative nonfiction writer Gary Ferguson used writing to navigate the grief of losing his wife Jane in a canoeing accident. The result is his memoir The Carry Home: Lessons from the American Wilderness. We chatted on a spring morning in stunning Boulder, Colorado. 

You write so eloquently about your grief and what you went through, at what stage of the process did you realize you were going to write, or were you writing pieces of this all along the journey?

Gary Ferguson: Well, the first I’d say almost two years after the accident I journaled and that was really a self-indulgent exercise to pour out onto the page all the emotional upheaval that was going on, the sadness, the sense of betrayal, all of that, came down in journal fashion. After a couple of years I asked myself the question quite blatantly literally, is this a story, the story of how nature can inform people’s lives and actually inform the difficult process of healing after a major loss, is that a story that other people would benefit from, is it a story that Jane would want to tell, and I decided it was, at that point then there comes a great shift when you’re telling for public consumption.

BH: Was there any kind of issue about publication or concerned about moving the book from idea to actual book? 

GF: Normally I would run out an idea with my agent, I had a time to see if she thought it was marketable.  This was not that way.  I was going to write this book no matter what.  And so I spent the next six years writing the book assuming that ultimately it would see publication because it would draw out something that was worthwhile, and as difficult as it was, it pushed me in a way, from a craft perspective alone, not only emotionally, but it pushed me in a craft perspective way that I think I’m going to lean on and use for every book that follows.

BH: While Gary painstakingly, eloquently crafted his memoir, Tom was under very different constraints:

TB: It’s called the terrible word, given what happened on 9/11 but in the business they call it a crash book meaning you you do it quickly.

BH: So feeling pressure of writing about this massive event, Tom leaned on his training as a journalist to craft story, just as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ernest Hemingway did before.

TB: I came in having a background as a journalist but also being a novelist and that helped me a lot. … I jumped right into page 175, you know, of a pretty sad dramatic novel and I there are lots of moving pieces in the same way I had just moved from from a novel with lots of moving pieces, I could see it … 

BH: Tom’s referring to his novel The Last Good Chance that he had just finished in August 2001 which had prompted the celebratory trip to Spain. But with On Top of the World ...

TB: I could see the story of my friend as a character, I can see you know with his interesting past: his parents who died in high school and his freshman year and college how he dealt with tragedy ... there were all these sorts of things I could I could see the story and so I just tried to power on in and make it as good a book as could.

BH: Writing By Writers co-founder and award-winning writer and teacher Pam Houston has also written extensively for magazines and newspapers, including dozens for the New York Times. She uses keen, personal observation as the foundation of her articles, short stories, and books. 

Pam Houston: All my books have been largely autobiographical.  It’s just what I do. It’s the way that I make work. I go out in the world then I pay really strict attention and I write down the things that I notice and then I combined them and recombine them and those turned into my stories and my novels, that’s how it’s always been.

BH: We chatted more about Pam’s writing, teaching, and her novel Contents May Have Shifted in her Davis, California home:

PH: There is almost always a character at the center of the work who resembles me a lot, that’s just how it happens.  And so, when I was writing Contents which I understood to be a kind of collage of all these little glimmering objects I had picked up from moving through the world for a period of years and going to lots of different countries and trying to do sort of an investigation of the ways different people keep faith kind of, I didn’t know whether my publisher would want to call it a novel or a memoir, there is a certain amount of pressure for us all to write memoirs here in this moment of memoir love, this literary moment where memoirs are so popular ...

BH: Pausing for a brief side note - I just heard an excellent chat on writing memoirs specifically. Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air interviewed Mary Karr whose memoirs include The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit. I’ll have a link to that interview in our show notes. Here’s more from Pam:

PH: But on the other hand my publisher knows that I tend to shape stories and in that shaping they start to not resemble exactly what really happened and so usually my books are called fiction. So, I really didn’t know.  I wrote the whole book without knowing what we would call it, whether we would call it a memoir or a novel.  And in the end we decided to call it a novel more because of the climate that the book was born into than anything else.

BH: I find this terrifying and daunting. Beyond being thrown into the deep end of a pool, this strikes me as a 1 mile open water swim with no training. I’ve found in that, with my attempts at longer form prose, I need more guidance, more direction.

Pam contributed an essay, Corn Maze, to Jill Talbot’s book Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction, and I asked about her perspective on these rigid lines of genre: of fiction vs non-fiction.

PH: My belief system on the subject is what Corn Maze is about and that’s that we are in this lifelong unrequited love affair with language.  Because of its unrequited nature, because it won’t just sit still and mean for us, and meaning is always shifting, meaning occurs at the junction of code and context, we know that, the linguist taught us that, so even if I write a sentence right now it’s going to mean something different in an hour and it’s going to mean something different in five years and it might be unintelligible in a 100 years.  So the idea that we can make language represent reality in any kind of complete or consistent way just is simply not true. 

You know, if something really funny happens on the way home by the time you get home and tell your loved ones about it it’s already better, like you’ve already made it better, and everybody knows that.  And the same thing is happening for a writer when a writer is crafting words, if not more so.  So that is not to say we just throw the baby out with the bathwater, like that’s not to say oh, well, we shouldn’t or there aren’t certain genres in which we should actually try, you know, if I’m writing a travel piece about Italy I should try to represent Italy as accurately as I can because someone is going to decide whether they want to go to Italy or not.

However, to pretend, as some people are doing right now, that it’s one way or the other, that language can absolutely represent reality and if it didn’t for you in a particular incident you would lie, that’s much too simplified for me. 

BH: But now you are working on a memoir?

PH: I am. 

PH: So with any self-proclaimed memoir like early in the process you know that’s what you’re doing or that’s the intent so if, I don’t know, 80% to 85% of the previous work has been autobiographical then in writing this project where does the other 15% to 20%...

PH: Go?

BH: come from and originate from?

PH: Yeah, well, that’s an interesting question and I, you know, I would be able to say more about that when I have something closer to a solid draft.  But so far I’m honestly seeing how much I can stick to what really happened, like I’m doing it as an intellectual exercise in a certain way or you know an emotional exercise, both, I’m doing it as a writing exercise, you know, given all this stuff I’ve said and given Corn Maze and given how I have joked and been serious about all this through the years, I thought well what if I really tried, what if I really tried to make language represent reality, like what if I didn’t think it was okay to shape the truth in ways I’ve had before and so far I think I have although I wouldn’t want anybody to hold me to that exactly, you know I’d have to really go look at the manuscript.  But I’ve been sort of dutiful about trying to the best of my knowledge to get everything exactly just to see what would happen if I did, because I’ve never tried that before and I thought it might be interesting to see what happened.  And if I don’t know something for sure I say it right in the text, you know, or I say maybe it was like this, maybe it was like this.

BH: Right, right.

PH: And you know ironically I’m trying to do this like right at the moment where my memory is completely failing, you know, because I’m 53, so that’s also sort of funny.  When I could have remembered I didn’t.  But we’ll see how it goes.

BH: My mind buzzing around thoughts of language’s limitations, I spoke with Writing By Writers Faculty Josh Weil, author of the New York Times Editor’s Choice novel, The Great Glass Sea, and collection of novellas, The New Valley, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  We chatted near Tomales Bay, north of San Francisco, as a small plane buzzed overhead.

You dedicate Great Glass Sea to your brother and the story features this incredible complex fraternal love between two brothers and I'm wondering as an only child and as a parent of two I- I I'm baffled by siblings but also intrigued by siblings what is it about family for you that that helps inform your writing?

Josh Weil: Family is very important to me. My brother in particular has been very important to me um all my life. I mean I write a lot about uh father son relationships as well um and about romantic relationships as well um but my brother uh he he's five years older than I am, in the novel they're twins. Like most everything I write it comes from a kernel of something in my life but then by the time it reaches the published page it so wildly different um so luckily he understands that … [laughter] 

JW: It's a a pretty uh uh it's a dark and difficult look at fraternal relationships um but uh my brother is five years older than I am and my parents got divorced when I was 5 um and he in some ways took on the role of the father figure - although my dad is a great dad um and  I have a great relationship with him he wasn't around on the day to day basis when I was growing up so my brother took that that role on a little bit. And then um and then that just morphed into a close friendship as we got older and there was a point in both of our lives uh when we were the most important person in each other lives um and what I wanted to deal with in that book was for me a very painful and difficult growth process and necessary process part of being an adult um was shifting from that young adult slash childhood relationship with my brother into one that included all the complexities of wives and children and other people when all of the sudden  you're not the most important person in your siblings life, as it should be. It’d be a problem if it kinda were.

BH: Similar to Josh, family is a strong influence in Alan Heathcock’s fiction. Specifically that rite of passage from that somewhat carefree adult days to the murky unkowns of parenting. Alan teaches in the Boise State MFA Creative Writing program, and his recent collection of short stories, VOLT, was a “Best Book” selection from a literary who’s who: GQ, Publishers Weekly, and Salon. 

Alan Heathcock: Your preoccupations as human being change when you become a parent because you become aware of the world that your children are walking around then, and it’s a constant thing, a constant interrogation of the world. I’m thinking about today, and what’s happening today with my children in the street we live in but then I think about the world at large. That couple with the fact that as you get older you begin to understand that the world is completely made by people; I mean we have weather and things like that too but in terms of how the world is run and what gets made and how we feel about ourselves, the stories that are told, it’s all people and it’s all stories,

BH: Yes, stories have this unique power to unite, to bond us … 

AH: and a recognition that it’s my job to create the world that I want for my children to live into, and to also teach them that it’s their world and it’s their responsibility to put their story into the world as well.  And I don’t mean that in any metaphysical way, I mean that in an actual literal way that the world is designed, you know, from religion to politics to commerce, all around, all of it is determined by stories, so my stories are completely informed by the fact that I have three children who I love dearly and I want the world to represent itself in a way where they can go into it with compassion and empathy and give love, feel love, and I know that sounds corny but I mean it.

BH: We’re going to wrap up soon. These are intended to be kind of stream of consciousness in terms of answers, so just a quick rapid fire … what writer dead or alive would you like to have a meal with? 

AH: Cormac McCarthy.

BH: Here’s Gary Ferguson:

GF: John Steinbeck.

BH: And Josh Weil?

JW: What writer, dead or alive, would I like to have a meal with? Um, psh, probably W. G. Sebald

BH: Tom Barbash.

TB: Oh, that's a good one. I suppose Chekhov whose life is so varied and amazing and was such a beautiful human being. … Yeah I’d have a lot to say to him I think.

BH: and Pam Houston.

PH: I don’t see how - I’m not that quick.  That seems like such an important question.  If it was alive it would be Alice Munroe.  And if were dead it would be Eudora Welty.

BH: And which writer, dead or alive, would YOU like to have a meal with? Let us know via Facebook.com/StoryGeometry, use the hashtag StoryGeo, I’m @BenHess Twitter or via email, [email protected]. That does it for Episode Three: The Deep End and a special thank you to Tom Barbash, Gary Ferguson, Alan Heathcock and Josh Weil on sharing their perspectives on the craft of writing.

I, Ben Hess produced and edited the episode, and wholeheartedly approve endorse all comments herein. Our theme music is from the lovely Brit Mark Hodgkin, markhodgkin.com and our logo was designed by Thatcher Warrick Hess. As always, thanks to Writing by Writers, that’s writing x writers dot org where you can explore a myriad of 2016 workshop opportunities to further your own craft. We’ve just launched Story Geometry and need your subscriptions, reviews, and ratings in iTunes. And if you’re standing, you may want to sit down - Episode Four’s going to give a taste on the business side of writing featuring editor Jay Schaefer, agent Gordon Warnock, and more with award winning writers Tom Barbash, Pam Houston, and Josh Weil. Until then, take a leap into the literary waters and yell Story Geometry on the way in. Thanks for listening.

Aspiring novelist and screenwriter Ben Hess explores the life of professional writers and how they balance their own writing with income pursuits, primarily teaching. Writers and teachers Interviewed include Pam Houston, Gary Ferguson, and Alan Heathcock.

Links:

• Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
• Pam Houston - http://pamhouston.net
• Alan Heathcock - http://alanheathcock.com
• Gary Ferguson - http://wildwords.net
• Produced & Hosted By @BenHess - http://twitter.com/benhess

Story Geometry Ep2 - The Writing & Teaching Life

Ben Hess: Welcome to Story Geometry, the podcast where I snatch words of wisdom on the craft and community of writing from leading published authors of our day and plot them out meticulously on graph paper. I’m your host Ben Hess, today’s theme is The Writing & Teaching Life. 

Pam Houston: For me, stories are really physical things, you know, they have a shape, they have a depth, they are really 3D in my mind when I’m writing them.

BH:  That’s award winning writer and teacher, Pam Houston. She’s also co-founder of the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers which I am thrilled to have as my partner in examining the shape, craft, and community of writing throughout all of Season One.  Visit Writing x Writers dot org for all the details and reserve your spot today. 

PH: I think of geometric figures in relation to the story to help me understand the story structure.  Sometimes the structures are more complicated; [INT page 13] and sometimes it’s quite simple like I think about stories as like two intersecting triangles or a rhombus or a parallelogram. 

BH: And yes, Pam’s literature as 3D led to the Story Geometry name. Pam’s written two linked story collections, Cowboys are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat and the novels Sight Hound and, her latest, Contents May Have Shifted. They are not to be missed! Pam’s a Professor of English at the University of California, Davis and also teaches in The Institute of American Indian Arts low residency MFA program. As an aspiring novelist and screenwriter, I sat down with Pam in Davis, California for a candid talk about several of her passions: writing, teaching, travel, the outdoors and big dogs.

Do you consider yourself a writer or a teacher or both, and what’s the mix there?

PH: Definitely both and unquestionably both, you know I used to say like if someone put a gun to my head and asked me to choose one, you know, which luckily won’t happen, I think I would choose teaching, you know, which is shocking to a lot of my writer friends though they definitely have a symbiotic relationship.  You know I can’t imagine choosing one, but if I had to give one up you know I think it would be the writing. For me it works very, very well together. ...  I hate/love writing and it – I don’t know how to be in the world without that way to process the world, I’ve been doing it since before I can remember and I’m proud of the books I have written and I definitely think of other authors, authors I love, let’s just say Toni Morrison for instance that I know that the world would be radically impoverished if she had only been a teacher and not a writer too.  

BH: Let’s pause there for a second. Think about your favorite author. Now POOF, let’s imagine they never wrote. The book you’ve loved so much all these years vanished into the ether. Imagine your world without their work, their art. Without its power and impact on you and thousands or millions of readers. Yeah it’s a dark, discouraging place.

PH: I do think writing is a sort of strange, self-obsessed way to spend your life, and very insular and insulating and, you know, the books have a life in the world but you have a life in your head, you know, and between you and the page and that can be beautiful and powerful but I’m a person who wants to engage with other people and other landscapes and other – I don’t, I’m not happy sitting in my room, I’m not Emily Dickinson you know I’m not.

BH: I think we all agree: writing is a lonely, solitary exercise. But any writing is infused with life, vitality, and connection. A protagonist propelled into action, managing obstacles large and small, on a quest for something or someone. 

Gary Ferguson’s written 23 creative non-fiction books and his latest is a personal memoir, The Carry Home: Lessons from the American Wilderness, where he suddenly, unexpectedly found himself on an incredibly personal, cathartic quest. We chatted on a spring morning in stunning Boulder, Colorado. 

I’m wondering, do you consider yourself first and foremost an environmentalist, or an activist, or a writer, a teacher?

Gary Ferguson: I spent the first half of my writing career writing about the tracks that humans have left in nature.  And so from an environmental perspective it was a string of eulogies for lost places.  I found that necessary work but ultimately I was doing so much of it that it was leading to burn out and so now I’m much more interested in writing about the tracks that nature leaves in us. And so if that makes me a conservationist, environmentalist, fine, I’m afraid to go too deep into labels of any kind.  But I do believe that our relationship with the natural world is part and parcel of our relationship to each other, you know, and I look forward to the day when we continue to move toward seeing ourselves as a part of nature instead of apart from it.

BH: Writing By Writers: a relatively new conference here on the circuit there’s so many aspiring writers out there and so many folks who are desperate to learn more about the craft, and just curious what you see for this kind of conference moving forward.

GF: Well, Writing By Writers is one of the very best experiences I’ve had as an instructor because of the quality of fellow instructors but mostly because of the quality and enthusiasm of the students as well. Pam puts a level of rigor in how she creates the learning opportunities for her students that doesn’t exists in too many places.  So if you are a writer looking for a quality experience this is one of them, Writing By Writers … and beyond that if you are really serious as a writer I’m also on the faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop, which is an MFA program in Tacoma, Washington through Pacific Lutheran.

BH: Gary’s work with Rainier reminded me of something else Pam and I talked about:

PH: There are some amazing writers who don’t teach well and so it’s an interesting challenge to find the faculty and you seemed to have done – you and Karen have done an amazing job of pulling together time and time again this great mix of faculty, and I assume that’s through your relationships over the years?

PH: Yeah, I have had the fortune to be invited to so many, you know, writers conferences because I do have a reputation as someone who’ll show up someone who will engage, someone who won’t hide in a room, someone who is a good teacher, who is a you know a caring teacher like and a sensitive teacher, I’m sensitive to the manuscript, to what the manuscript wants to be.  So as a result of that through the years, though the last 25 years I have been invited to no shortage of writers conferences, basically you name it, you know Squaw Valley, Aspen, Bread Loaf, Port Townsend, you know I’ve been to basically all of them, and because of that, because of my years of doing that I have a very good sense of which writers are the best teachers, which writers will truly engage with the students, which writers will hold up in their room, which writers are as you say breathtaking writers who don’t know how to translate that into the classroom.

BH: Just to be clear, in addition to Gary, we’re talking about some incredible literary talent: Dorothy Allison, Robert Boswell, Ron Carlson, Kwame Dawes, Andre Dubus, Alan Heathcock, Fenton Johnson, BK Loren, Antonia Nelson, Ben Percy, and Carl Phillips. This group’s equivalent to the starting lineup of an All-Star game. 

PH: We’re always trying to balance our faculty in terms of course a genre, first and foremost, getting a good mix,. a mixture of a aesthetics, mixture of a cultural background, mixture of male and female, you know all that different things we try to juggle, and also you know when I put a conference together we’re looking at chemistry, chemistry between writers, and between their works, sometimes because I’ve seen them together somewhere before but more often because I just think, wow, you know, he should really meet her because their work is.  

BH: Brief aside for a share - back in 2003 I’d just met Writing By Writers co-founder and non-profit executive Karen Nelson through a cycling event. We accidentally, fortuitously discovered a mutual love for fiction and story. Which led to my reluctant share several weeks later of some short fiction I’d written. And Karen was honest and constructive - “You can clearly write. But you need to work on structure, on the craft.” 

Despite initial impatience, I’ve found this pursuit to be a lifelong journey … and another reason why I wanted to create this Story Geometry podcast. Here’s more from Pam Houston: 

PH: So, that’s a lot of the fun of this for us is creating mini communities of published writers who are going to be willing to have a conversation because these workshops turn out to be a three or four or five day conversation that the students get to participate and that is more or less driven by the faculty, and we never know what that conversations is going to be but it’s probably one of the great joys of doing this work is seeing what that conversation is each time.

BH: The award winning author of Volt: A Collection of Stories, Alan Heathcock also teaches, he’s in the Creative Writing program at Boise State. We also chatted in Boulder, Colorado, in the Spring of 2015. 

I wanted to ask you about teaching. Many of your colleagues teach. Many writers teach. What is it about the teaching craft that you enjoy or is it the steady income and logistics that come with teaching that you prefer, or a combination of the two?

Alan Heathcock: it’s not the money; there are lots of different ways to make money and the money is not a big factor in, at least for me.  

BH: As Alan I continued to talk several Writing By Writers students filed past on their way to more words of wisdom. 

AH: I mean I suppose there is two things, one is, the dollar being a rider itself is very lonesome, you sit by yourself all day and that’s just the nature of the job.  And finding other people to engage with is important just for one’s sanity.

BH: Most of us are not funded writers. We’re attempting to scratch and steal time from day jobs, from family, from our social life. All to sit in a quiet place and create. And if we’re diligent and persistent over weeks and months, we just might create several drafts of a story or a poem or manuscript that we feel is ready for another set of eyes, like I’d shared with Karen. How powerful if those belong to Pam or Gary or Alan. 

AH: I love the engagement of talking about stories with somebody else, I love the challenge of meeting somebody and trying to help enable depending on the student sometimes it’s instruct, sometimes it’s just enabling giving them permission to find their way into their own story the most potent way … I get something from that, there is a great reward in seeing that happen because it’s you’re liberating people and that feels wonderful and powerful.  And I also just believe passionately in the power of story, and there is something evangelical about it too and like spreading the good news about the power of story and having people hold that in their lives in a particular way that I believe.

BH: Brief pause to say, hallelujah! “I also just believe in the power of story.” YES!

Every year, approximately 3500 of us pursue further study of the craft through traditional and low residency MFA programs. And then there’s thousands more of us - slaving away diligently on our own, with friends at writing meetups, or through private workshops like Writing By Writers. So I asked Pam … For a 20 something aspiring writer or someone in their 60s or whatever, is the MFA necessary, do you recommended an MFA or does it really depend on the individual?

PH: I think it really depends on the individual.  There are many, many writers who write wonderful books, who have not gotten an MFA.  

BH: These include Jonathan Franzen, Susan Orlean, Emily St. John Mandel, and Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few. 

PH: The MFA works very well for people who don’t have a lot self discipline, people who need deadlines. Another really good thing about an MFA is the community that it builds, you know, if you go to a high residency MFA program you know a regular old fashion MFA program, you and your cohort, your 12 other writers basically eat, sleep, breath, talk, writing for two years and you will never have that situation again in your life.  You’ll never have that opportunity where writing becomes the whole world.

BH: But for working adults who’ve decided at mid-career to build more foundation for their creative pursuits, a full-time MFA just isn’t feasible. 

PH: Of course what’s quite popular these days are low residency MFAs that don’t have the same sense of community though I teach in one of those too and I have to say there is community built even though a lot of it happens at long distances over the Internet, but when those people get together once or twice a year they really do from a different kind of community then the high res program, but in certain ways I think the low residency programs tend to be even more about writing you know than the high residency programs where University politics get involved and the lead department agenda gets involved, you know, so I think there is really positive things about both.

BH: You’ll hear in the background Pam’s two gigantic Irish Wolfhounds for the first time. They’ve been so good during our chat. 

PH: Could you cobble together a great education in writing going to conferences and residencies and other kinds of situations?  Of course you could.  And could you become a forest ranger and take seven great novels up to the top of the mountain with you and write a book while you’re there?  Of course you could.  You know there is no formula.  And everyone is different, you know, depending on what they need.

BH: Which reminds me of Alan’s short stories in Volt:

Over what period of time were all those stories written?  Is it a few year period or a decade, or somewhere in between?

AH: I started my first MFA program in 1995 and the book came out in 2011, so over that entire period of time I was writing stories and pushing into all this material, so a significant amount of time.

BH: And that 16 year stretch represents an amazing dedication to craft, the pursuit of impact, the power of storytelling that I’m working toward. … Alan Heathcock, thanks so much.

Thanks again to Gary Ferguson and Alan Heathcock for taking time away from their writing and teaching to reflect about their work.

Episode Two was produced and edited by yours truly, Ben Hess. Original music from a Manchester United fan, Mark Hodgkin, but don’t hold that against him. You can visit his audio magic at Mark - markhodgkin dot com. And our logo was designed by Thatcher Warrick Hess. 

As always, thanks to Pam Houston & Karen Nelson of Writing by Writers, that’s writing x writers dot org where you can explore a myriad of workshop opportunities to further your own craft.

Like an author desperate for feedback, I’d love constructive or positive thoughts on what you’ve heard so far with Story Geometry. The best way to do this is an iTunes rating -- 5 stars is fantastic of course -- and also a brief Tweet size review along with your rating is even better. 

You can also visit Facebook dot com slash Story Geometry, send your “To MFA or not to MFA” thoughts via email - hello AT story geometry dot org, and hit me up @BenHess on Twitter. We’re also using the hashtag StoryGeo for all of your social media channels.

Episode Three’s a doozy: you’ll hear from real, live Writing by Writers students in addition to more from Pam, Alan, and Gary. And set a calendar reminder for future episodes with secrets from a rock star line-up including: New York Times bestselling author Tom Barbash, GrubStreet National Book Prize winner Josh Weil, National Book Award Winner Mark Doty, National Book Award finalist Dorothy Allison, and award-winning writer and teacher Lydia Yuknavitch, among several others. 

Until then, may smoke billow from your tired keyboard as you create the intersecting parallograms of your story. Thanks for listening.

Aspiring novelist and screenwriter Ben Hess spent time at the April 2015 Writing By Writers Boulder Generative Workshop and gained insights on the origin of stories, on getting going using Pam Houston’s glimmer technique. The words of wisdom came from award winning writers and teachers Pam, Gary Ferguson, and Alan Heathcock.

• Writing By Writers - http://writingxwriters.org
• Pam Houston - http://pamhouston.net
• Alan Heathcock - http://alanheathcock.com
• Gary Ferguson - http://wildwords.net
• Produced & Hosted By: @BenHess - http://twitter.com/benhess

Ben Hess

Welcome to the premiere episode of Story Geometry. As an aspiring novelist and screenwriter, my goal with this podcast is to glean insights on the craft and community of writing from leading professional, published writers of our day. My hunch is that their words of wisdom will help you too, wherever you are in your writing career. I’m your host, Ben Hess, and today’s theme is Origins.

I’m beyond thrilled to partner with the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers throughout all of this Season One. Their workshops and writing adventures are fantastic and not to be missed - visit writing x writers dot org for all the details and reserve your spot today.

Pam Houston

I … I like writing, I mean I hate/love writing is really what I mean to say and I came down on like which is not at all true.

BH

Writing by Writers Co-Founder, award winning writer and teacher Pam Houston.

PH

I hate slash love writing and it – I don’t know how to be in the world without that way to process the world, I’ve been doing it since before I can remember and I’m proud of the books I have written.

BH

Pam’s the author of the linked short story collections Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat and novels Sight Hound and Contents May Have Shifted. If you haven’t read any of her work yet, pause my voice, record a voice memo reminder, jot a note on the back of that receipt in your pocket, or add her to your Goodreads list … Got it? All set?

I also hate slash love writing, as there’s just no way around it; writing’s a solitary sport. Hours and hours and HOURS of sculpting, molding, shaping, wrestling language into plot, dialogue, exposition, and description all to create the most powerful, impactful story you can. And typically without pay. This is the craft, the struggle we’re going to explore throughout this series, under the assumption that those hours of work are distributed over several days or weeks or months due to other responsibilities, other commitments, including travel.

PH

I spent a decade going to Bhutan and Tibet and lots of places in Asia, and so this like that’s been really important to the writing, it’s also been really important to my understanding of the world and the planet.

BH

Pam’s Contents May Have Shifted is a very personal novel featuring 144 vignettes capturing the wildly chaotic stress, joy, and challenges of travel to such places as Bhutan, Newfoundland, Patagonia, Tibet, Tunisia, and Iceland. We chatted in her Davis, California living room surrounded by over 200 pounds of canine love; Pam’s two Irish Wolfhounds Livie and William.

So with all this travel, adventure, stewardship of craft, how does a girl from New Jersey become such an explorer, such a writer?

PH

Well, a lot - if you were from New Jersey you would know that that’s what people from New Jersey do.  They try to leave.  You know my parents weren’t great travellers.  My parents often get a hard time in my telling about them but one thing I can say for them that was unequivocally positive is they were travellers, they didn’t travel far because they didn’t imagine travelling far but honestly like every time we had $10 or 10 minutes we were in the car usually driving south down the 95, you know, toward a beach and they – my dad loved travelling, after my mother died my dad lived for about another 15 years and he did a lot of travelling, he went to Italy and you know places he had only dreamed about but we were roadtrippers, we were all about new destinations and we were as happy as we ever were as a family travelling.

BH

I also grew up road-tripping with my parents during summers, over Thanksgiving, and the December holiday season. Which is where, as only child, I read, And read. This was, of course, pre-internet. Pre-Walkman even. Though I do remember rocking out to a large ghetto blaster cassette tape deck - yes we actually called them ghetto blasters - I’d be sprawled out in the backseat reading, letting the power of story take me away from the oppressive southern humidity. As the miles and hours slid by, I’d imagine myself solving mysteries with Frank and Joe Hardy or The Three Investigators or Encyclopedia Brown.

PH

It’s so much the shape of my life, like, all these trips and all these explorations into the other, you know, for a while that was the West you know because I grew up in the East and the other was the West and I couldn’t have been more smitten and engaged and excited about the otherness of the West and then when I sort of became a Westerner the other became Alaska and then after that it kind of became Asia, because that was really other in all kinds of new ways.

BH

Through this travel, Pam framed a method to capture these amazing experiences into her writing which she often teaches in her workshops. Here she is presenting to me and 40 other aspiring writers at the rustic Colorado Chautauqua Lodge in Boulder.

PH

My work is deeply engaged with what I call the physical world. Sometimes that’s the outdoors - often it but not always - but for me all writing begins in the physical world. It, it … I don’t sit around like some writers do and imagine worlds in my head or imagine problems. Stories never come to me as a what if. There’s never a what if in my mind. Um, the way I get my stories is … that … is is is by noticing. Is by noticing things that actually take place, things that actually happen out in the physical world. So I always think that my first job as a writer is to pay very strict attention. And writing down what I call glimmers. 

Which are moments. Scenes. Lines of dialogue. Images. Uh, mini-stories. And, and I really just collect. I collect them. And I don’t … I try not to think about which ones go together or what they or how they’re going to work. Um I just keep a collection of them and then there reaches a kind of critical mass, and it’s time to start a story. Or start an essay. Or not. Or they just stay in a folder called Glimmers in my computer. So I have all these glimmers and and I I honestly don’t worry too much about are they getting used or are they not getting used or am I going to remember. I mean that’s what the computer’s for … to be our memory. And and then when it’s time to write something like instead of sitting down and trying to write a first sentence, I just go into the files and start looking at the glimmers.

BH

Many of us don’t have these incredible global experiences to pull from, but even then, our own neighborhoods, our own hometowns can give us a start.

Alan Heathcock

My parents and all of my family besides my particular family are from small towns, small Mid-Western towns …

BH

Award winning fiction writer and teacher, Alan Heathcock.

AH

… and I spent a significant amount of time in small towns. I started off as a writer writing about the South side of Chicago where I’m from, Hazel Crest.

BH

Alan and I talked about his collection of short stories, VOLT, outside on a chilly morning at the Chautauqua. VOLT was a “Best Book” selection from numerous newspapers and magazines, including GQ, Publishers Weekly, and Salon, and was named as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, as well as a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize.

AH

And the very first workshop, I workshop a story someone told me, man why are you writing about this stuff, you should write about something you know about and because I’m a Caucasian man, they are like you don’t know about this place. I found I was able to write a story that would speak to kind of a homogeneity of what small towns in America look like, like I would not – I could write it in a way that it would not have to be regional when I have this town Krafton, and I never say where it is…

BH

No, right, you don’t.

AH

…and that’s very much intentional because I’m not really interested in writing about place, meaning…

BH

A specific place.

AH

…like Indiana versus Ohio versus Iowa, versus Louisiana.

BH

Right, right.

AH

Matter of fact, one of the first stories I published, I had said in the story that it was from Indiana, and I remember getting hate mail from Indiana. I’m like, wait a second … [BEN: Lesson Learned.] …I just need to put it somewhere, and I’m like, I’m not even trying to say anything about Indiana.  So I started writing about just Krafton, and pulling it out ...  

BH

This reminds me of Stephen King’s Castle Rock, Kurt Vonnegut’s Illium, or my beloved Bayport, hometown of The Hardy Boys.

AH

… and it allowed me to make a commentary about maybe America, but certainly just the human interaction which is the thing that I’m most interested in. Now that I find there is a common thread, and I know this now that I’ve travelled all around the country, have travelled the 49 out of 50 states with the book, and everywhere I go there are people who say, you know, this story is in this place and they try to guess where it’s at, and I had someone who was on Martha’s Vineyard saying hey, you took some stuff here, didn’t you? [BEN: LAUGHTER]  And I found it fascinating to know all parts of the country that people have claimed it, and if you read reviews of the book too they are trying to claim it for different, because I live in Idaho it’s a Western town, because I grew up in the Mid-West, it’s Mid-Western, because it has some temperament of southern literature that it’s southern, so I like that.  I like that.

BH

Clearly, if our story’s primary location is relatable and identifiable, like Krafton, we’re well on our way to seducing the reader, to drawing them in.

Writer, speaker, and naturalist Gary Ferguson also paints location with lush description. His latest book The Carry Home: Lessons from the American Wilderness is a lyrical, powerful memoir.

Gary Ferguson

The Carry Home is sort of a double entendre, I carried Jane’s ashes literally home in our old ’79 Chevy Van … but the Carry term also refers to the portaging that’s done around un-runnable places for canoers, which was appropriate to this book as well since she died in a canoeing accident. The Carry Home was my title, one of only probably out of 23 books that have – that’s actually made it to the jacket, so I’m very proud of that. …. Lessons from the American Wilderness was a suggestion the editor made and yes, I have to agree, it’s appropriate because a lot of what I’ve learned how to draw out beauty, community, mystery have come to me in the times I’ve been in the wilderness.

BH

As titles are quite important and we often labor over them let me stop Gary there for a brief aside about our name, Story Geometry. It originated late at night over a California pinot with Pam and and Writing By Writers Co-Founder Karen Nelson. As we talked, I was reminded of this:

PH

I … I love geometry; as a kid it was the, sort of the last math that I loved, when I went on my English bent after that, and for me stories are really physical things, you know, they have a shape, they have a depth, they are really 3D in my mind when I’m writing them.

BH

Unlike Pam, I didn’t get along with geometry all that well.

PH

I think of geometric figures in relation to the story to help me understand the story structure.  Sometimes the structures are more complicated; and sometimes it’s quite simple like I think about stories as like two intersecting triangles or a rhombus or um, uh, a parallelogram. I think of geometric figures in relation to the story to help me understand the story structure.  Sometimes the structures are more complicated; [INT page 13] and sometimes it’s quite simple like I think about stories as like two intersecting triangles or a rhombus or um, uh, a parallelogram. I don’t ever think about plot.  I don’t even really ever think about characters until many revisions down the road, you know, I’m thinking about form, I’m thinking about what is the shape of the story, if this story were a sculpture what would it look like, what would its geometry be.

BH

Thus, this series just had to be called Story Geometry. Not a title I would’ve ever considered on my own, which is another testament to the power of community. Speaking of - to help prompt consistency of my own sputtering fiction and scripts - I joined a virtual community of writers I met while producing this podcast at the Writing By Writers workshop in Boulder.

Despite the varied time zones, we’ve been damn diligent about meeting on Google Hangout and providing feedback on each other’s work. Thanks Meghan, Jenn, and Melissa … and um, I’m not going to submit next week. This podcast thing takes TIME !!

As Gary Ferguson and I continued our chat, several Writing By Writers students filed past.

I want to talk to you first of all about your boyhood, and in reading the book your boyhood seemed chaotic and full of escape to me, and I’m wondering what you read as a boy during that time, if you remember what you were reading back then?

GF

I actually do.  I went down to the River Park branch library about seven blocks from my house on Mississauga Avenue, and went into those old dusty, musty stacks and first pulled out I’d say a number of Sigurd Olson books, the writer and conservationist from Wisconsin, who went on all these great canoe adventures.  From there I went into other writers, men and women, from the Northwoods; eventually as I got a little older high school, freshman and high school, I discovered John Steinbeck and the ‘The Grapes of Wrath’, and the power of landscape in story.

BH

I also escaped into stories throughout boyhood, not just on road trips. Primarily fiction. And I remember some Multiple Sclerosis Read-a-Thon summer contest sponsored by my local library. I asked family members to sign up and donate a certain amount per book read. Much to the dismay of my supporters, I read over 70 books that summer.

GF

And so, yeah, there was a lot of escape, there were some tough circumstances that I grew up in with my mom and climbing trees and going out into the nature was a great relief that allowed me to sort of feel like I was a part of something that wasn’t judging me, there was great peace and calm that came from it and it went from there.

BH

I am curious you wrote about your mom’s [death] – and caring for her at the end, and despite all the pain that she had caused [you] as a boy I just wonder how you came to a place where you could be there for her?

GF

That’s a great question.  I don’t know, that was probably an act of grace.  I came to understand my mom’s own circumstances when she was young, having been orphaned when she was 13 and I think probably had some abuse issues that she was wrestling with, at one point I discovered that she had – when her father died after her - and then her mother shortly after had been sort of put up for adoption and one of the uncles came in and took her brother after they had made a pact to stay together and never be separated, took her brother who was named Junior and looked right at my mom and said well we can’t use her, and so she was sort of in this limbo for quite a while until an aunt took her in, and so she had her own sense of pain and disruption and chaos and need for control and for some reason by understanding her own path I was able to sort of forgive her at least to some degree what she unfortunately chose to lay on me.

BH

In The Carry Home you mentioned beauty, community and mystery as the three elements of story and I’m just wondering when did you hit on those, kind of those three core pieces of storytelling?  Was that something from decades ago or was that kind of more recent discovery or how would you define the breakdown?

GF

Well, back in the late 1980s I was doing a book called Spirits of the Wild which required me to shift through probably 1,500, 1,600 stories from every continent on the planet about how different aspects of nature came to be, fanciful tales, but as I was reviewing those, those many, many, many tales after several hundred it dawned on me that these storytellers, some of them from a couple of thousand years ago were repeatedly suggesting that if we as humans want to live well in the world, we had to keep a relationship with three qualities, and they were those, beauty, community and mystery. And likewise that the problems that humans have, the stuckness that we sometimes get into is probably due to us having lost our relationship, especially when it came to grief and tragedy and moving through difficult periods in our lives.

BH

fiction versus non-fiction versus memoir, and do you ever see yourself writing fiction or do you read fiction?

GF

I read fiction all the time.  I dabble a little bit in it but I’ve never gotten serious enough to try to – to approach it.  Like Pam, I tend to draw the fodder for my creations from actual experience.  I’m not necessarily wired in a way that makes it easy for me to just imagine entire worlds as fiction writers must do, based on their own lives and experience, of course, but nonetheless I like to go out, have great encounters with people, of all backgrounds, all sorts of people, and then from those, you know, build my framework for my stories.  So I think I’ll always be inclined to write creative non-fiction.

BH

What advice would you give those of us not yet published or just starting out?

GF

For those people who are writing, that the act of storytelling is one of the great services they can do for themselves, as well as for any anyone they run across and they share their stories with. [20:06] Story is how we make sense of the world, story is how we grow, story is how we share who we are with the rest of the world, and for those writers who are here and those writers who are out there plucking away on their lonesome – even if they only share their work with the family, they are still anchoring a great part of who they are and they are building relationship with the world and that’s really I think the task of life.

BH

“Story is how we make sense of the world, story is how we grow, story is how we share who we are with the rest of the world.”

I can’t think of a better way to end today’s episode which was produced and edited by yours truly, Ben Hess. Our theme music is from composer and sound designer Mark Hodgkin and our logo was designed by myself and Thatcher Warrick Hess with help from fiverr. 

Special thanks to Pam Houston & Karen Nelson of Writing by Writers and all the attendees of the April 2015 Workshop in glorious Boulder, Colorado; Reminder: explore the  amazing events and workshops coming up on writing x writers dot org.

And warm thank yous to both Gary Ferguson and Alan Heathcock for sitting down and sharing more about their work and process.

Story Geometry is indeed BRAND NEW and we need your button pushes! The shares, the likes, the tags, the emails, the - ahem, 5 star iTunes ratings would be lovely. Everything is greatly appreciated as we get this show out into the world. Visit Facebook dot com slash Story Geometry, drop a verse of doggerel to hello AT story geometry dot org, and if so inclined I’m @BenHess on Twitter and we’re using the hashtag #StoryGeo so you can tag us that way to promote the show.  

You won’t want to miss our next episode about The Writing & Teaching Life featuring more insights from Pam, Gary, and Alan and be on the lookout for future words of storytelling wisdom from New York Times bestselling author Tom Barbash, GrubStreet National Book Prize winner Josh Weil, National Book Award Winner Mark Doty, National Book Award finalist Dorothy Allison, and writer, teacher, and self proclaimed “very good swimmer” Lydia Yuknavitch, among several others.

And a closing extra-special Premiere Episode thanks for the audio production support and advice these past months to: David Boyer, Fred Drews, Whitney Henry-Lester, Edel Howlin, Trey Kay, Cristina Maldanado, Roman Mars, Stjohn McKay, Carl Olson, Walter Petrichyn, Matthew Price, Phil Turner, Benjamen Walker, Helen Zaltzman, Sue Zizza, and I’m sure there are several other wonderful, new audio friends I’ve left out. Thank you, thank you! Until next time, may your fingers dance across the keyboard as you discover the arc and circumference of YOUR story.