Balcones Prize Winner: Ben Miller

[00:00:04] Speaker A: The Right Mind is a podcast hosted by the Creative Writing Department at Austin Community College, featuring discussions about craft, creativity and what it means to be a writer. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of Austin Community College. The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only. The Austin Community College name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product, or service. Welcome to the Right Mind. I'm Professor Eli Reiter. In today's episode, we are joined by author Ben Miller, whose book Pandemonium Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 2020-2022 won the 2025 Balcones Prize in Nonfiction. Ben Miller is an essayist fiction writer and the creator of hybrid works that combine visuals and text. His first book, Riverbend Chronicle on Lookout Books, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. His writing has been anthologized in Best American Essays and Best American Experimental Writing, and appeared in a wide variety of journals, including the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, New England Review, Salmagundi, Raritan, and One Story. Miller's awards include fellowships from the NEA and the Radcliffe Institute and grants from the South Dakota Arts Council and the Schlesinger Library. His partner is the poet Anne Pearson Weiss. Ben joins ACC Creative Writing Professor Isela Fulton Slaven for a conversation about the winning book, the importance of spaces like ACC that protect creative energy. Writing is possibility and writing when nothing else feels useful. We hope you enjoy. [00:01:52] Speaker B: So welcome Ben Miller. Let's give him a hand. Very exciting. All the way from New York. Thank you for coming to our creative writing class. So we're very excited. Belcone's winner, maybe to start. I know we've had some wonderful conversations even beforehand, but maybe you could tell us just kind of a brief little bit about you. And my question is, when did you decide that you were a writer? [00:02:20] Speaker C: Wow. Well, first of all, we'll do one minor fact correct there. I'm from Staten Island. [00:02:24] Speaker B: Oh, Staten Island, South Dakota, of New York. [00:02:27] Speaker C: Yes, thank you. And you know, and we've lived in Brooklyn and uptown Manhattan, and certainly I grew up in the urban Midwest and I came to New York when I was 22. I didn't know a soul, didn't have a phone, didn't have a credit card, had no health insurance, but I had half of a room in an NYU dorm in grad school. And that's how I sort of got to the east coast. And. And I really loved what I learned. Started learning immediately in New York, walking around. There were other people walking, which was great, which was unlike Davenport, Iowa. And it became like a gigantic educational emporium for me, which it still is, but it was really in urban Iowa where I attached to writing. And I was very young, I would say. I sent my first poem to the New Yorker when I was 11 years old. I was a very isolated child and in quite a family that had been sort of shredded. And so I found that having a spiral notebook and a pen or a pencil, no matter where I was, whether it was in that chaotic house or at the library or at school, was like a little hut or a haven. And spiral notebooks. I got them at Target and it was the Mead brand M E A D. And I would go there and I would get five at a time when they were like a quarter apiece. Fill them up. So it sort of began out of a sense of there's chaos all around me, I've got to navigate out of this swamp. And I had been reading a lot of Emily Dickinson and writers of that era, sort of older writers, but there was something about an E. Cummings and writers like that that sort of wrote short lines but yet had a kind of phantasmagorical imagery that seemed really American in a strange way, given all the turbulence that I was seeing in the community and in my family. And so I started to write these poems and they had really funny subject matter because I was emotionally course, unable to write about what I should really write about. So I would write about a television show. Like I would see the Tony Awards and I would write a poem about the Tony Award winning play, or I would write about a place I'd never been to, like New York. And so I wrote a poem called New York, New York, I Love youe. So that was like one of my first ones. It was all about New York City as I had seen it in magazines, at the free box, at the library, et cetera. And so I like the feeling of writing, first of all. I like what it did for me physically. I like that feeling of possibility that sort of negated the impossibilities of the other parts of my life. And so I just sort of kept holding onto those spiral notebooks and I kept filling the pages with what was on my mind and in my heart and, you know, got to be 13 and 14 and just sort of went on from there. And I mean, I think I'll just sort of amend something really quickly here that I know Yusela wanted me to talk about. So I was really sloshing around with some very vague poems about television shows, et cetera, like I was telling you. But then suddenly things sharpened at a certain point when I had a little. I had came to a crisis point, sort of, and the writing became a lot sharper and much more real and alive to who I was. And so I submitted some poems to a local poetry contest when I was 15. They thought they were written by an adult, put them in the adult contest and won the adult contest. And then I came up to get the prize and I was this kid in like thrift store clothes and. Which were great then they were better than anything that you could get checkered shirts and stuff. And I got this prize and that sort of like, I thought, wow, well, something worked out. I mean, something happened. I didn't really know how I wrote that five page poem, but I knew that I could stand by it and I did. And that got me connected to a local writing group. And almost everyone in the writing group was 60 or older. [00:06:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I love it. [00:06:38] Speaker C: And so I attended that every Thursday, every Thursday night from 7:30 to 9:30, from the time I was 14 to 18. And in school I was tanking. I didn't cut classes or anything, but I had a 1.8 grade point average. I did not cut classes. I mean, I just went and wrote. I couldn't. I couldn't deal with it and I couldn't study at home and stuff. But it ended up that this sort of being in that group of these older people and seeing that they were reinventing their lives at 60 years old, 70 years old, was really inspiring to me. And I was sort of trying to reinvent my life. So I got to the end of high school, I went to see my college counselor. She looked at me, how I was dressed and looked at me and how I looked at my grade point average. And she said, you can't go to college. And so I said, well, what am I supposed to do? And she said, well, get some vocational training. But I was very clumsy. I'd never taken a vocational class and it didn't make any sense. And so this writing group encouraged me to send my writing to a professor of English at Cornell College named Robert Dana in Iowa. And he got the writing and he arranged for me to go to college and gave me a scholarship. So it's the kind of thing of getting around this cumbersome system where the writing that I did outside of school didn't matter inside school. And this sort of figuring out ways to use the writing to make not only things on the page, but a life. And I think it's always been for me to make a life. It's always been for me a way for me to imagine myself living out a day in this world that is so hard to understand and in a sense, subject to so many tyrannies, even here. And so. And one thing, I guess Prudence took me on this beautiful tour of your lovely campus, which, I mean, I was recently on the Pratt campus. I've been Cooper Union, Berklee School of Music. This campus here, you've got so many things available, and none of it is run down, none of it looks trampled. The equipment looks like it works. And kudos to everyone here who's making this institution what it is, because you've got, as much as anyone in New York at any one of those schools has, figuring out what to do with it. Everyone has a problem everywhere, but you've got a lot of great infrastructure here, and it's absolutely amazing. And one of the things that was so struck to me is that I came in prudent, said, well, you know, kids who are in college in high school can take college classes. And it just sort of. And I thought that was so cool and that it was free and everything. And then it connected to this sort of personal aside, to my little journey to try to survived when I was a kid, is that before I was in college, this writing group got really worried that I was never going to be able to go to college. And so one of them arranged for me to take college classes, a writing class at Marycrest College in Davenport, Iowa. I was a senior, and she was terrified they would never have one college class. And I met with a sister. It was the Catholic school, her name was Sister Annette. And I remember meeting with her and I brought my writing and talked, and she told me I could be in the class. Catch was I had to get the approval of the high school. And I went in to see Vice Principal Buis, and he told me I couldn't take the class because I should be studying and doing better in high school. And he had no idea if I was ever going to take another college class. He had no idea if I would even graduate high school. So, I mean, it's always struck me how banal the disasters in the world are. He didn't think he was doing anything wrong. He just saw 1.8 grade point average. He must just not. He must be skipping classes, which I wasn't. Oh, he must be studying at home. He didn't see my home. You couldn't study anything there, asked no questions and just went off data to try to negate that experience for me. And because I was a little headstrong and because I had all these other people in the writing group saying, ben, you're worth something. Ben, you've got to keep trying. You've got to keep going no matter what. I could just sort of find a way to walk out of that office with my back straight and not look back at that man and try to figure out what to do next with the big problem of the next year in my life. So I think that the fact that this place will embrace high school students of all types is just a beautiful thing. And to me personally, it means a lot to hear. It's hard to see where the progress is happening in this world, but to hear that that might be happening here, to me is a kind of huge progress. Because no matter where you come from in the society and who you are, you've got something inside that's worthwhile, but you need to have an arena for it, and you need to have a place where you can unfurl it and people who will be patient with you as you unfurl it. So, anyway, I didn't expect it to be this special really already, but it really has because I adore this place already, and I'm so glad you're connected to it, and I hope you can figure out a way to stay connected to it. And I'm sure if you all do, great things will happen for you. [00:12:08] Speaker B: All I wanted to say, I'm so glad you said that, because I've been telling them that and my experience as well. I know I came from a difficult family as well. And when I was 11, I won a poetry contest at the library. And I was so excited. And I remember my stepfather, who hated me, it's like, oh, well, who cares about a poetry contest? But they took a picture of me and they put my poem up at the entrance. And so, like, my stepfather took my little brother to the library, and my brother's like, oh, there's my sister. And that meant everything to me. So that is really important. And number one, number two, which we talked about in this class, having that community, right, Having other people to say, we don't want Ben to that. And I'm so glad because I've been saying that as well. So I'm so glad that you reiterated that that that is so important for writers. [00:13:14] Speaker C: Well, since we had that Experience when we were young, there's no accident that we're saying the same thing. You sort of are on the same length because. But I would say, too, this gets to the point of. As you begin to formulate and search for your language, basically anything that is good that happened, just grab onto it. Don't look at things that aren't happening and just really grab onto those things. Whether, you know, like you used a word in a way you didn't use before a sentence came out, better just grab onto those affirmative little things, and one after the other, they will occur and they will take you farther down the road. It's really important not to feel like you have to do gigantic things any time in life. Now, when you get older, God, I mean, I hope you stay, you know, 22 forever. But if you do go into the other times, you know, and then the normal aging happens, you know, just. You have to grab onto the affirmative things that happen. And. And because there is a lot of sorrow and sorrow and struggle that goes on. And to get through that, you need to have a discipline of not being pie in the sky, affirmative, no matter what, in, like, a cliche way, but saying, well, I wrote today. That's great. I write tomorrow. That's great. You know, something mounts up, that's great. You know, you connect with. You get a little piece accepted or get a nice rejection letter, which can be just as good as in acceptance. You grab onto those things and then cobble them together to create a kind of aura around yourself that can push away those feelings that I'm not who I'm supposed to be and that I need to be doing more and that I'm failed. [00:14:57] Speaker B: And I think you'd agree, too. Even as a writer, we're so kind of isolated in a sense, like an artist. People are going to see the gallery. People are seeing the reactions. But sometimes we don't. And I know, even with my own work, periodically, you know, I'll read a review of it, you know, like that pops up on Goodreads three years later. Oh, I really related to this. It reminded me of my childhood and how that I love. Right. And I just kind of wondered how you feel about that as well. [00:15:34] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You just sort of try to look out there. I mean, the thing is, like, I was sort of talking about in the preemptory thing, which wasn't recorded, but we'll bring it all in here so no one misses anything. But the fact is that when you're. You really want to take responsibility for Your work. And it's your responsibility to make it as best as you can and to go at it and add it and add it. And you really want it to get over the top with people and have it to affect them. And. And I think the metaphor that we used before was sort of one of those trick birthday candles. You want to make work that someone blows out and they don't like it and keeps lighting up again and again and again. But the way to do that isn't really seeking approval. You need to do things on your own terms, with your own language, ferociously and as purely as possible. And that purely by. I don't mean. I mean limiting it. I mean having as many tributaries coming in so you can mill through it all and figure out, well, what was I actually seeing and hearing and feeling? And when someone looks at something you made, and it could be, we have a sculptor in the room, or it could be a sculpture, it could be a painting, it could be a song. You know, if somebody connects to something you've made, well, that's a beautiful thing. I mean, there was a writer named Arnold Bennett, who was a writer from the old days. He has novels in Modern Library, et cetera. And he carried. He was in England, and he carried around a pound note to give to whoever he saw reading one of his books. And he was one of the most famous people in London. And he never saw anyone reading his books. He died with it in his pocket. And he was famous. So the famous people, I mean, it's like, oh, if I only made fame. You wouldn't even know if you were loved then you've got to love yourself and your work. And you've got to figure out. And I've been. I was at Harvard for a year. I was the only person with a day job that ever got a Radcliffe Fellowship. And I went in with a day job and I was with. Around people that were imminent in their fields. Five of them were in literature, 45 were in other fields. These are people with $50,000 a year expense accounts. I made $35,000 a year before I went there. So there was this class thing going on, which no one really made a point of. But the thing was about that whole thing is that I discovered that all of these people that I would think headed departments and did this, what they would be like, happy. They were not happy. They were stressed out about the same things, like, how do I make my next poem, how do I make my next painting, how do I make a breakthrough in cellular biology? And they were Burdened and beleaguered. And that had to do with how true they were in a way, to what they did. Not that they were sad sacks or anything. It's just a hard. It's really discomforting to try to make things and to try to do things. And living with that discomfort, you're gonna feel like not worthy sometimes. But that's just natural. And that's why you look at these affirmative things, whether it's a goodreads thing or. And I really do always encourage writers, especially to sub. There's lots of places to submit. A lot of times now it's even free. The thing is, you don't take what any editor says, good or bad, as any kind of gospel. But it's really great when you can get it out of your desk and have it be disseminated a little bit. And you work with different editors, you'll see different kinds of styles. And as you get forward, that's a beautiful thing. And it's not like sort of posting it and seeing how many thumbs up you get. It's a different process. It's slow baked. You send it off. Months go by. And I think that's really crucial too, because immediate reactions sometimes are. I don't know how anyone immediately reacts to art. I really don't. And I know so much visual art now is going through Instagram. It's the size of a postage stamp. It's hard. I feel so sorry for so many artists that work in big scale and this and that and the other thing. I feel so sad because you can't see the work the way it was supposed to in the medium it was supposed to. And then it's supposed to get instant responses when I must say not to go on and on. You're like a blowhard. But the fact is that criticizing real good artistic criticism is one of the hardest things to do in the world. Very few people do it well. So any editor's idea about your work is subjective. You need to listen to that, and you need to use it to temper your approach. And maybe they'll be right, but they could be wrong, too. So. And this goes with friends. And friendship is a. It's wonderful to get supportive friends, but it's hard for, I think, friends to look past to just your work as your face. They see your face in front of the work. And you want people to see the work itself as your face when you're submitting. That's your face. It's connected to your face. Your face is behind it. But I think it's really important to have the work, have the impetus of being your face. And when you think about it that way, then, oh, it's great that they take six months to look at it. You know, it's like. And to look at it and put it in with all sorts of other voices and see what the choir see if it, like, hits a different note in the choir. And if it doesn't, you're just in a boat with thousand other people, you know, and there's nothing to be worried about that. And if someone connects to it and says, oh, you've hit upon something here, you know, maybe they'll tell you why they liked it. And then that's something for you to keep in mind. Not to live according to, but just keep in mind. Well, in one way, the work did its job. It connected to one person. And I mean, you know, with the way the world is built on numbers and successes. And I must say, I've never had an agent, not for a day. So an agent won't touch the kind of work that I do. You know, it can't be summarized or chronicled or marketed in the right way that they think they need to do to make money. [00:21:10] Speaker B: And here he is, a winner. [00:21:11] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, but I placed all my books on my own. But it's hard to really get books seen without an agent. That's just fact, fact of the world. So you need to think that. You need to consider the fact that if you come out with a book and it comes out with a small independent press, which should not ask you to pay to do it, which should create an ISBN number with the book, which you should just make sure that there's some iffy operators out there. But if they seem above board and you're going to have some editorial, you're going to get a galley. Even if it's 500 copies, if that book gets out correct, print it directly and it's a beautiful book. If 50 people read that book and love it that you don't know, and they march in front of you one day, you'll probably be in tears by the end of the time. So it's not about numbers really, in terms of connecting to people, it's about connecting to people with the work. I think that's my approach to it. And so, because I'm not trying to sell a movie, I'm not trying to sell merchandise. The book is a product of a type, but it's not conventional merchandise and things like that. And I think as this world gets so torn apart by commerce. It's very important to think about your process and where it's related to that. Now, if you want to be a soap opera writer, that's nothing wrong with that. That's a really hard thing to do. And you can actually make a living writing soap operas. So there's nothing wrong with that, but just choose a genre and know the trade offs. And, and if you're into the literary world, which is the only world I really know, that has to do a lot with making the work as unique as possible, like I was talking about earlier, as irrepressible as possible and giving it lots of chances to succeed. Don't just send it to one press. If you love the book, send it to 10, 20, 30 or 40. I mean, I had an essay one time in Best American Essays. It went out to 35 places before it was accepted. And Louis Menon chose the essay, an imminent critic. So it doesn't mean he loves my work or anything, but it was a valuable piece of work. But I had to have the faith. And in fact, the place that it was finally taken by, I sent it twice. I mean, so this sort of gets you in the thing. Like, I don't know how many of you are in sports or whatever, but I was a track. I was in track in high school and cross country and a little bit in college. I was really bad. I was pretty much last. I got lapped in the two mile. But what I loved about track and sports, if they didn't cut, if the team didn't cut and you were on the team, if you came every day and did the same practice as the elite athletes, you got a lot of respect. And if you never quit, you got a lot of respect. And if you learned how to run into a march window in the rain, in cleats, on cinders, you're learning something. You're putting yourself in a situation where I'm going to keep chugging. My God, my legs feel like there's cement. What does it matter if I'm, you know, if I finish? I'm not going to score points for my team. But it does matter to you that you finish. And that's sort of about the marathon of writing. And, you know, having seen you here today, I won't forget you. I don't do a lot of these things and I'll be hoping for all of you. Whatever you decide to do, whatever you decide to devote your marathon skills to, whether it's art or something else, you might try it and you might divert. That's perfectly Fine. But whatever you do, I hope you have confined that marathon spirit because it's a big element of humanity and dignity in this world, because you're going to run into lots of wind and rain as you try to carve an identity for yourself that is the one you want. It takes a long period of time. [00:25:09] Speaker B: I love that. I love that. Before we go on to the next thing, two things I wanted to say that are really important. That you said that sometimes your best friends and your family don't really appreciate your work because they're seeing. I love what you said. More you instead of the work. And that is true. And I think, you know, all of us as writers. Yeah. [00:25:35] Speaker C: It's important to think. Yeah. Nora Joyce couldn't read more than two pages of Ulysses. She couldn't stand it. [00:25:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:25:41] Speaker C: You know, I mean, Nora Barnacle. Nora Barnacle. I mean. [00:25:44] Speaker B: And so I think that's important not to get. Because I know when I was younger, I would get very hurt that, you know, I'd give it to friends or family, and they're like, oh, that's nice. And that was, like, the worst thing, because I knew they hadn't even really read it. Right. And so I love that that you said that, because that's a really important part of being a writer and the marathon thing. So this is great. But I also wanted to talk a little bit about the Pandemonium, the book that won the Balcones Prize. Do you want to just kind of go into that? [00:26:22] Speaker C: Oh, goodness. I mean, you know, it's so hard. It's like. I guess I have some notes here, and there's a couple things I wanted to cover, too. So I want to make sure we don't run out of time. I need five minutes. There's a special thing that I thought of this morning that I want to tell you all. But anyway, I was in my hotel room, and I actually. [00:26:36] Speaker B: Well, you can do it in any order. [00:26:38] Speaker C: Yeah. No, no, no. I want to save that for them, but just to make sure that we have five minutes. But I guess, I mean, you know, one of the things that. Basically, I'm a portrait artist. I have this hybrid work which combines visuals and text, but they're literally portraits of things that I'm engaging with. So much of my nonfiction is portraits. It's strings of portraits of neighbors, family members, politicians, people that I've either seen operate. They're all people I've seen operate. And what angle that I saw them from, what did. I think was their defining characteristic? And what did that mean, and how did I connect to it or disconnect from it? And so I think on one level, you're looking at pandemonium logs as a series of portraits. Some I went into. I mean, I never really meant to write it. And sometimes some of the most interesting things you write are things you didn't mean to write. In January of 2020, I had worked for three years in an ICU as a clerk for a telehealth ICU unit. In a telehealth ICU unit, basically you have nurses and a clerk sitting in a room surrounded by screens. The doctors are in other countries or another place in America might be in Israel, India, Baltimore, Vermont. And the whole concept came up because there's so many rural hospitals that have 20 beds or less when they get what the nurses call a hot mess, really bad case, car accident, someone tanking. The nurses are good, but it's really hard to know what to do sometimes. And so these telehealth options were offered to these small hospitals, and they signed up for, like, a subscription. And so when they had a case that was really difficult that they wanted to transfer out but needed to stabilize before they transferred out, they would call. And when they called, I would get the call, and they would say, I'm so and so from Owata. Owatonna is a place in Minnesota. I'm Owata Hospital. I'm so and so. You know, I need to admit a patient. So I would take the name, and then I would take the birth date, and I would say, who do you need, a nurse or a doctor? And they would usually say nurse unless it was really bad. And I would give them to the nurse. Nurse would take something and then give them to the doctor. So it was this thing sort of this, like, this control center. And somehow I was in it, and I had to wear scrubs even though I'm not in a hospital. So there's some part of, like, being in a TV show. Weird. Like, I had to wear scrubs and everything. I almost thought about bringing him down here to wear. But I'm out of health care now, finally. And, you know, I mean, I. They're sort of. I keep them just for. Because I live my life in them. But. But anyway, so. So that pandemic started to happen out there after it happened in New York City. We have lots of friends in New York City. My wife and I were living in South Dakota doing research on the urban Midwest for our work. And so I was supporting the work through this job. And so I started to realize how bad it was, even though people in South Dakota were in big denial about it was going to be bad. And the nurses were saying to me, oh, it's just going to be like Ebola. One person in 10 million will get it and we'll do all this preparation. But I could see it was going to be bad. And I thought, well, I'm sort of on train tracks and a train is coming and I can't get off the train tracks and something is going to hit us all and it's going to be terrible. And how am I going to deal with it? I can't help the people. I'm not a clinician. Like the nurses at least could say, give them EPI or put this thing on the respirator. Give them a certain kind of thing on a respirator to keep them alive. A standard doctor could obviously do something. But what was I going to do? And I wanted to feel useful in some way in this disaster. So I decided I'm just going to try to keep a record because what I do is work with words. And that's when I started bringing to shifts index cards. And I didn't have idea of making book at all. It was just to keep me sane between phone calls as this bad stuff happened. And so I just started to like when I had a 15 minute break, I would go back the last 45 minutes. What was important? What did the doctor say that was important, what happened, who got into the hospital, you know, what was happening, with struggles to get these patients stabilized, et cetera. And so I just kept doing that. But after like three weeks and I looked at the coverage of this, all the coverage was in the New York, in New York City and based on the east coast. It was not covering the rural areas in the urban areas that were sprinkled among the rural areas in the Midwest. I thought, this is a story that needs to be told. No one knows about these telehealth icus, what they're facing and what the nurses are facing and stuff like that. So after three weeks I thought, because what I would do is work 12 hours and come up and type up my notes. So it would be like a 13 hour day for three days in a row. So I had the notes typed up and I said, I'm just going to send them to ProPublica Cold and say, I think you have a story someone needs to cover. You're covering this part, but something is going to happen out here. Off the slushpile of ProPublica an editor called me and then started talking to me. And so I would call her every week and tell her what was happening and send her my things. And I'm not an investigative reporter. It really wasn't suitable for ProPublica. But she was encouraging me to continue the portraits. And when I knew that I could connect to that kind of oracle, I knew that I was right, that I had a story. Even though I was not an investigative journalist, even though most of my portraits. My first book, Riverbend Chronicle, consists of portraits that took 20 years to make. So I'm used to slow portraits, but this was different. But I thought this must be something I'm getting here because she told me to continue and so then I can just continue. And then once I got it up, I thought, well, I'm going to try to have to get it out there. And that's sort of how sort of physically it came. I sort of had an instinct of self survival first and like the only thing I could do was use art to live in that environment and to give something to it. And so that made me feel useful and calmed me down a little bit. And then the feedback with the editor told me, well, maybe I have something here that could be in print form. And then I just started sending it to other places that were more into the kind of portraiture that I do. That isn't saying like we have a theme for this essay and we're going to prove this. My book isn't proving anything. It's telling you what people said, what they did and how I was caught in the middle of it and what I said and did in response to what I heard. So it's not anything you can summarize. And I love that about this kind of form because there's a lot of summary forms and there's. And I think I was emailing with you about it that I mean, there was a writer called Studs Terkel who wrote a lot about working life in the 70s and 60s and 50s, and also a writer named Barbara Ehrich. And they wrote about working people's lives. But these, these aren't writers that summarize and weren't writing essays to prove a political point or anything like that. They told you what the people said who were working, they told you how they felt when they were in those workplaces. And I think that kind of open ended nonfiction is really something that this book for me pioneered as a part of my practice. And ever since doing this, I've tried to continue and always have one of those projects going where I'm talking About something where I actually took a lot of. I was taking lots of notes anyway. I just never thought of them worthy of making a book out of. They were just part of my. Like, wind sprints or workouts. But then I realized, wow, this is actually literature itself. And once I finally realized that, then, [00:34:33] Speaker B: yeah, I love this because, you know, we talk about poems or stories that are more personal or this or that. And that is beautiful, and I love that. But periodically. And it may happen to you like it happened to him, that sometimes we're called as writers to be a witness of something. Right. That's so. I mean, look at Solzhenitsyn in Russia. I mean, he was a witness of the horrible things that the Soviets were doing and was put in the Gulag. And maybe you are called to be a witness. You never know in the video. [00:35:11] Speaker C: Witnessing, as we've seen, is absolutely crucial in trying to get the truth out. [00:35:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:35:17] Speaker C: The thing is, what we haven't seen as much is that writing adds something to that. You know, we need accounts of people that are in places where these are happening. What was the person standing next to me doing? How did it actually look? There's things that are always lost in every single art form, visual and otherwise. And writing provides another kind of spiritual, emotional and intellectual level that actually cannot be captured by images. So it's really important that we have writers as well as people. You know, we need both. But we need stories that have the long burn down. Like, this hit me in the body, it hit me in the soul, it hit me in the mind. In what order? How did it hit me coming from where I came from? What did I see? How was I torqued up? So, you know, I mean, I think it's so crucial to think of that in terms of writing and not to put down your phones, but just to say, wow, there's something else I can do, too. And actually, much fewer people are doing that now and are training themselves to do that. And you don't need specialized training. You need to understand how you see and hear and how you notate. And if you do that, then you have everything. [00:36:31] Speaker B: Well, we talked about that the first day, because when I was in my 20s, I went to a psychologist and. And he had been a psychologist, and then he became a priest. And so he was funny. He's like, I won't charge you, but you have to do the work. And his whole thing was like, you're saying, think, feel. When something happens, think, feel, and act. And I told him, then write, because then that you Bring the whole thing. So you. By you saying that, I think is really important as well. [00:37:06] Speaker C: And don't worry if you freeze up, though. Don't worry if you freeze up because it's there. You're just frozen in the moment. You've got it. It's like cryogenically frozen. And so people, I think, often don't do this because I don't know what I think at the moment. I don't know what I feel at the moment. That's actually. Unless you really practice at this, you can't know unless you really get comfortable with taking notes and everything. So if you freeze, it's still there. You need to revisit it. And, I mean, I say that because I actually. The childhood that I had was very ug and during very bad situations in the childhood that I had, my way of coping with, it was a very natural child's reaction. I froze. It took me a long time to understand that everything was still there. I wasn't losing my humanity or anything. I was just trying to survive because I was too overwhelmed. So don't look at documentaries like it has to. I mean, I did this thing on, you know, at the ICU in the moment. But it doesn't always have to be that way. I mean, you can have the experience and go home and write about it six hours later when you're completely by yourself, when your feet are in hot water and you're drinking tea or whatever, write about it then just try to do it soon after. That's all. I would say try to follow up with it soon after, because you will melt after it happens. And then you'll have the thing that happens after people freeze. They sort of fall apart a little bit. But that's fine. You want that on the page. That's part of the reaction to the whole thing. And I mean, I must say, too, that just following up on the book a little bit, it's really important to understand the society has not begun to absorb what happened with the pandemic. It has just started now. One of the analogies I use with the AIDS crisis came into New York city in the 80s. I came to New York in 86 and I was not gay, but it was all around, and my gay brothers and sisters were suffering from it. And the fact is, it was just a scary time for anyone to be young and in the city. There was a lot of death around and there was just a lot of horrible things happening. And people were getting treated terribly because they had that disease, as if they had the plague. So the history of that is pretty well written. There's some really, really great. And the Band Played on is a great book. There's book after book after it. And they're really important books to. And there's really important art from that period that still was going. But one of the interesting things infrastructurally in New York City, far more than 50,000 single people who had rent stabilized apartments died of AIDS. As soon as they died, those apartments became market rate. That's part of what changed and gentrified massive neighborhoods in New York City. And it's one of the. And then no one knew about that tragedy until the late 90s. So there's going to be things we understand. And many of you being younger, had an experience with this, the pandemic that's going to be playing out for a long period of time in your own way, the disruptions, how your family took it, you know, maybe personal losses and things like that. It's natural that it take a long time to play out, but it's good every once in a while to see, like, where you're at with it and think about it, because that's. That's the history that really needs to get written. And that's one reason why I think the American idea of closure, well, we solved civil rights. Close that door and you know, I mean, look where we're at. I mean, you know, it's ridiculous. I mean, no one kept up the, you know, I mean, the institutions use this excuse to say, oh, we've dealt with everything. We know what happened. We still don't even know what happened in the 50s and 60s. I mean, a woman name died recently in New York City named Claudette Colvin. She refused to give up her seat far before Rosa Parks. She lived in the Bronx. No one's even told her story. And that's back in the 50s. And there's all this stuff. And Rosa Parks was. There's so many heroes from that era, so many feminists that did things that were incredible in the 70s and went way, way far out there. So as we think about this, the panda, you don't need to walk around with pandemic face, but it's just part of history that's towing us all in this country in a certain direction. And just to think about it and read about it in your own way and mostly think about how it affected you and how it affected your family or your region. And I think that that's a really important thing to say in terms of the book and you know, I always. Whenever I write, even if it's. If it's a sort of a thing of this documentary nonfiction where I'm just taking notes in the moment, I always try to think, though, in a Emersonian sense about this stuff. Like, what are the really deep themes here? I mean, it's death. I mean, it's not just the pandemic. I mean, it's death with the mortality of us all and how we could all, with an accident, a bad diagnosis, go anywhere, anytime, far away from all the people we love. And so what are the huge themes around the moment and how. I mean, you could write, I think, choose any moment or any hour. If you wrote about it from all the different angles, no matter what was happening in that moment, it wouldn't seem topical in the end. And so it's sort of having topicality to a certain extent, but also try to subvert topicality and not just say, well, because this happened, people will be interested in it. That's not necessarily true. Even if it's a total disaster, like the pandemic or the Holocaust or the couple of genocides that America has been involved in, you've got to see the story and think about it and tell it in the fullest way possible. And then it becomes more like that candle that can't be blown out. [00:42:56] Speaker B: Excellent. Well, good. So now we have a chance of questions. So does anyone want to go first? Two things I want to say. One of the assignments, and we were emailing about this, they wrote about from Pillville, like their weird jobs, which are. Some are great. So if you ask your question, you might say the job if you want to. You don't have to, but does anyone have any questions? [00:43:22] Speaker C: Oh, and then I'll just add a preface here just for anybody who's streaming the Pillville that they're talking about. After I couldn't take the ICU anymore, I was put to work packing laxatives in a pill warehouse by Interstate 90. And it was piecework, and I'd never done that before. And obviously, I had this with me, because you're really going to go crazy if you're looking at laxatives for eight hours. So basically, Pillville, what I wanted to do was share with the class and give them sort of as my kind of gift was, so they would each have a copy of a portion of that book, which I'm formulating now, which was recently published in the Hopkins Review. And I kept a pill catalog while I had that job because I had to add extra things to make it more exciting where I drew laxatives. But anyway, so they all got a section of that, an essay of one day working at the pill packing factory. So anyway, yeah, very good. [00:44:15] Speaker D: Thank you so much for coming and fantastic stuff. So one of the things that in reading some of your work is you use a lot of white space in your work and you take advantage of the page. And I was wondering, how do you conceptualize, or do you conceptualize the placement and how you structure the visuals? How do you approach the conceptualization of that from the starting point? [00:44:39] Speaker C: And you mean white space has a negative space with the hybrid work? Hybrid work, yes. Yeah, yeah. And this is really interesting because if people look at what I call my words straight across the page. What was your name, sir? [00:44:49] Speaker B: Todd. [00:44:50] Speaker C: Todd. Okay, Todd, thanks. That was a great question. So in my documentary fiction and my nonfiction, I really like there to be no negative space. I like it to be like a river, like a flow, where the reader can enter where they need to. And part of it that is, is because I really sort of don't like reading experiences to be mediated past a certain point. I think we have over mediation of reading, and I want readers to have the experience of like, well, there's all those words there. Where should I start? And so wherever you start is fine, you know, and so there's blocks of language in the nonfiction. And I think that has the way to do with. I absorb things all at once and it's all mixed up, you know, in my brain. And once I started to go with that, that natural sort of formulation, I broke through to be able to actually fully tell stories or more fully tell them. So that's sort of my written work that will look more conventional even though it's still blocky with words. But the hybrid work that Todd was talking about is this joy of having negative space where I can use fields of color, blank fields of color, or blank fields of white, to create a tension with the words that are there. And to me, it's sort of like flipping the whole equation. So I'm trying to sort of prismatically reflect into that blankness a kind of meaning through the things that are there. The colors and the shapes and the language and each of these. I've done five full length, book length hybrid projects. They all have different approaches to this. In one of them, it's all black, blank space. And so that's where the. I was walking home from working at a youth center in South Dakota, another not so fun job, because at the youth center they were very much against nutritional guidelines. And basically to get one ounce of protein for the kids, they had to feed them 12 nuggets, 12 chicken nuggets. And so they were feeding these kids this horrible stuff and laughing about it like the cooks and everything. I thought I didn't last there too long, but I was walking by, I was distraught about the malnutrition there and distraught about how the darkness around all these kids. Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where we lived for those 10 years, has a very big immigrant population, very big African population. The Lutheran social services was a big conduit of getting people to Minneapolis from war torn places in Africa. Then they would sometimes come to Sioux Falls where there were jobs and things like that, work at the packing plants and things like that. So many of these kids were from African countries and they were so smart and they actually knew what community was because their communities had just reformed in Sioux Falls. They had their own markets, they had their own family gatherings, and they would talk about them so fondly and this and that and the other thing. Then they would go here and get fed nuggets and they were supposedly moving up. So it was just this terrible tension of these things. And so I was walking home, and I was walking up this road home, and there was a white line in the center of the road. And I thought, what if text was there, like all these thoughts in my mind. What if there were words on the white line in the road? And that gave me the concept of making a book that was sort of written in sort of dotted line speak, you know, the way the dotted lines will spread as there's more lanes, et cetera, and leaving all of the rest of the space dark and blank, as if the reader was journeying with me into a dark space on a road, going on and on and on for about 190 pages. And so it's like the negative space was just a way to free myself from one part of my practice, which wasn't really oppressive, but which I wanted alternatives. And I think that's another thing for writers to think about work in different ways. You don't just have to be one thing. I mean, if poems aren't coming, try to keep a journal. If the journal isn't coming, try to do something else. So depending on the mind you have and what's up there and how crowded it is, try to figure out way different forms to work with this. And I think that's a. And you're allowed to do that. No one will even know you're doing it unless you tell them it doesn't cost any money. But the pen and the paper or the glue and the scissors and all my hybrid projects are made offline with no software. They're made with staples, staplers and things like that because I like those materials and they make me feel free. They make me feel free of screens and things like that. So I guess it's all. All of the things that I've tried in my writing life, Todd, would be about trying to free myself of constraints that are mostly self applied, although there are the societal constraints around them. [00:49:44] Speaker B: So we have a big challenge. We have two minutes. So does anyone want. [00:49:49] Speaker C: Oh, and I have to do my thing at the end. [00:49:51] Speaker B: Oh, well, then do your thing. [00:49:53] Speaker C: Right. So I do my thing. Well, is anyone going to come to the read? Is anyone going to come to the reading? Can we talk after? If anyone has other questions, I'm sorry you had to make. But anyway, it's good to think questions. Anyway, so I was thinking. I was thinking about my life of starting working. My first job as a clerk job was a New York Stock Exchange on the library. Can you imagine it? I wore the same Salvation army suit there until someone told me I smelled. Anyway, I've had a weird job. I have a weird life of clerk jobs and things like that. So I thought like. But I've kept my writing alive. In fact, it seems to be very vital to me. I mean, I like my projects. I want to make more projects. So I was thinking, like, what are the five things that I could tell people if they decide to do this day job thing and write? And there were five keys that I thought. And basically one of the things is always have some. And I'll go over this later if you don't have to write down, but always have something to work on with you, no matter where you are. Have a notebook, have your phone, whatever. Always have something to work on with you. Okay, that fits the space where you're gonna work, the little table where you go to the break room, et cetera. So always have work with you. Now, the second thing would be just be incredibly patient. Anything you do is fine. You've stolen time back for art from the man or woman, whoever they are. Yeah, there we go. So always use, you know, be happy about what you've done, if it's anything. Now the third thing is don't hide the fact that you are a writer from the other people. But don't overplay it. You know, you want to say, yeah, I'm an artist. Yeah, I mean, this isn't my life. But don't crowd them with it, you know, because. Because then they'll get all like tight because, you know, you just want to just say it is and just have a sense of humor about it. And they see you writing, oh, I'm just writing again, you know me, I'm a scribbler. That's what I do. And that's been really key because your co worker relations are big, especially in service jobs, things like that, the kind that I've usually had. And then think about on the way to work, given what you know about the day when you can fit the writing in. Is it a Friday before a holiday long weekend when everyone's going to be gone and you're the one plebe that's there? Bring more work. Is it going to be the busiest day of the week when your boss is going to be asking, do this and that? Bring less work. And so you think about how to fit the types of work into the space you might have during the day. And then the last thing. And I think that this is about momentum. Ride a little bit before you go to work to get some momentum going. So you get the, you sort of prime the pump, as you know, great grandfathers would say. You know, you just sort of get it going a little bit and then that. I really think that those. When I said like, if I had to like go to my grave, what allowed me to keep riding Until I was 62 years old, it would be that because I've been lucky. I've gotten fellowships, I've gotten this and that, but they happen once every seven years and even when they happen, they're not even a year's wage. And the books, I've been lucky. I've gotten a little bit for my books. But you could work at the best case, you could work on a book for five years and make $5,000. So you need to think about how can I keep this going around having to make money in other ways, you know, so that's. I'm not a professor, but I'm thinking of you at this moment as good friends who are interested in something that love things that I do. And that's what I would tell you. And that comes from my heart and that comes from 40 years of experience from New York Stock Exchange to the place where I bartend now, near the Waldorf Astoria, a private club where no one comes in. And I can mostly do my own work. [00:53:46] Speaker B: Very good. Perfect. Thank you so much. This was amazing. And what I love the most is everything that you said are real practical things. Right. Intermits with your heart. So I love that. So thank you again. [00:54:09] Speaker C: Thank you. Thank you for listening out there and in here. Cut.