Leigh Newman, NOBODY GETS OUT ALIVE: Stories
[0:01]Hi, this is Ziggy Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast.
[0:05]Moms don't have time to read books, and speaking of books, I have two of my own books
[0:10]coming out this spring and summer.
[0:12]Princess Charming is a picture book, which debuts on April 19th, and bookends.
[0:17]A memoir of love, loss, and literature comes out on July 1st, and it is truly a labor of love.
[0:24]I hope you'll pre-order, order, and join me on tour as I go across the country.
[0:28]You can find out more at zibbyowens.com or bookendsmemoir.com, and you can follow me on Instagram
[0:35]at zibbyowens, because I always post about everything.
[0:38]Enjoy the show!
[0:41]Hey everyone, I need your help.
[0:43]If you love this podcast, you will love my children's book.
[0:47]It's called Princess Charming, and I am really trying to drum up pre-order sales.
[0:51]You might not know this, but before a book comes out is actually a really important time
[0:55]for the whole book's trajectory.
[0:57]So please pre-order Princess Charming, which comes out April 19th today.
[1:03]Just stop what you're doing and go do that, please.
[1:05]When it arrives on April 19th, you can give it to a loved one in your life, a niece,
[1:11]a grandchild, a child, a student, a kid walking by on the street, anybody.
[1:17]But if you could do this, here is my offer.
[1:20]If you email me your receipt showing me that you bought the book online somewhere and
[1:25]pre-ordered it, email info at zibbyowens.com, that's info at zibbyowens.com.
[1:33]I will pick 10 people to do a special giveaway project award to from my new bonfire merch
[1:41]store, which you should also check out, which is the Zibbyowens Media bonfire store, where
[1:46]you can get all sorts of cool t-shirts and tote bags and author sayings and all sorts
[1:51]of great stuff.
[1:52]Or dice a 10 of you are going to get a special care package of your choice from the bonfire
[1:58]store.
[1:59]And I will pick at random from all of you who pre-ordered the book.
[2:02]So if that wasn't clear, go pre-order Princess Charming.
[2:06]Again, it's called Princess Charming.
[2:08]It's my debut picture book.
[2:10]It's really cute and great and it's illustrated by Holly Hadam.
[2:14]And then after you get the receipt, screenshot it or afford it to me at info at zibbyowens.com
[2:21]and you will be entered to win one of 10 exciting care packages.
[2:26]So go off in order.
[2:28]Thank you so much.
[2:29]Bye.
[2:30]Lee Newman is the author of Nobody Get That Alive Stories.
[2:35]Lee is also my business partner.
[2:37]We co-founded Zibbyowens together and I feel this mix of just pride and excitement and
[2:44]just such warm feelings when I talk about Lee and I'm just so thrilled about her book,
[2:49]which is absolutely gorgeous.
[2:51]Okay, here's her official bio.
[2:53]Lee Newman's memoir about growing up in Alaska still points north was a finalist for the
[2:58]National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Pries.
[3:01]Her new collection, Nobody Gets That Alive, includes stories that have appeared in Harper's,
[3:06]the Paris Review, the Best American Short Stories, Tin House, Electric Literature, and
[3:10]McSweeny's Quarterly Concern.
[3:12]In 2020, she was awarded a push-cart prize and to the American Society of Magazine
[3:16]Editors' Fiction Prize, as well as received the Paris Review's Terry Southern Prize
[3:20]for Human Witness, Brett Satora.
[3:24]It says she lives in the woods of Connecticut with two dogs, two chickens, a cat, and a few
[3:28]feral kids, but I also know she lives in New York because I see her often and it doesn't
[3:33]say here, but she used to be at Oprah doing all the books coverage and prior to that,
[3:39]she founded Catapult, or she founded Black Balloon, which became Catapult Publishing.
[3:44]And now is a co-founder with me of Zivey Books.
[3:47]Listen in on our great chat.
[3:49]Welcome, Louise.
[3:50]Thank you so much for coming on Momstone.
[3:51]I have time to read books to discuss and nobody gets out alive for story collection.
[3:55]Thank you, Zivey.
[3:57]This is so funny doing a podcast with you because obviously we work together all the time
[4:01]and this is like in a whole new way.
[4:03]I know, but I can't pretend that we don't know each other.
[4:06]Like, how are you?
[4:07]I know.
[4:08]I know.
[4:09]I know.
[4:10]It's kind of better, though, because I feel like I can tell you real things.
[4:13]I mean, I guess I can tell real things to anyone, but you've known me for a while and
[4:18]like you see me work really hard on this book and it didn't just come out of nowhere.
[4:21]Just like I watched you with all the reiterations of your memoir and one version and another
[4:26]version and the draft and the cover, you know what I mean?
[4:29]Yeah.
[4:30]So it's kind of a special podcast for me when we write LA and you're like, I'm going out
[4:33]to my room.
[4:34]I'm just going to write.
[4:35]I'm going to write the work on stuff.
[4:36]Bye.
[4:37]It's true.
[4:38]And now it's like a book.
[4:39]I mean, I couldn't have been.
[4:40]But yeah.
[4:41]I know.
[4:42]I am one of those people that it's like, I can be public and have a great time with
[4:45]a friend.
[4:46]But then the time, like, my whole body goes into shutdown mode.
[4:50]Yeah.
[4:51]And that like, I need those three hours in the morning where I don't touch people and
[4:54]I just write.
[4:55]But it's amazing at night too.
[4:56]Yeah.
[4:57]It's, I mean, it's, you can tell and you're such, I mean, obviously I know you're an amazing
[5:01]editor, which is why you're the editor in Jesus in the Vex.
[5:03]You know, I trust you more than anyone on the entire planet to edit, but you're such
[5:09]a good writer.
[5:10]Oh my God.
[5:11]That Alcon, an oral history, like short, not short search.
[5:15]It's not even a short search.
[5:16]I know.
[5:17]I know.
[5:18]I know.
[5:19]I'm like, this is a novel.
[5:20]I just read like a whole novel in here.
[5:21]And I wanted more.
[5:22]I cannot believe they let me do that.
[5:23]Honestly, I'm surprised that someone didn't say, that's not a short.
[5:25]Yeah.
[5:26]Because it started.
[5:27]So I'll just explain what it is because of people, but it's five parts, right?
[5:31]And it's a road trip of five different people from different perspectives.
[5:36]And when I really started to do it was like, I'm really fascinated by the Alcon because
[5:40]it's this huge, long historic highway that goes between Alaska and the lower 48, I drove
[5:46]it with my dad a long time ago.
[5:48]And we had a really good time actually.
[5:50]We were driving this big truck and we had, it was the opposite of this trip or these people
[5:54]are suffering.
[5:55]It was like, but I did like, there were weird moments on that trip where you'd realize
[5:59]if we don't get gas, you know, we're going to end up a band on the side of the road
[6:03]because there's just not any more gas for like 250 miles, you know?
[6:08]I grew up in Alaska in the bush, you know, like I grew up in where in a different time
[6:12]to where like, you'd be in a plane and we would fly into the middle of these remote areas.
[6:17]And there was, there was no cell phones and there was no satellite phones.
[6:21]There was just nothing.
[6:22]So if you got in trouble, like you could set off a beacon and we did get in trouble like
[6:27]on quite a few occasions, or you just had to figure your way out of that situation.
[6:33]But I had not spent a lot of time in a car.
[6:37]There's no roads in Alaska.
[6:38]So driving the Alkan was like actually kind of a new experience for me because I'm not
[6:42]used to being in a car in areas where there's not like human habitation.
[6:46]I know that's just a strange thing to say.
[6:48]So when I started writing the story, I knew I wanted to have a lot of like female people
[6:53]because I feel like a lot of times when we're talking about the wilderness or we're talking
[6:57]about the frontier of Alaska or the frontier of the West, it's a male narrative.
[7:02]It's a cowboy narrative and I wanted it to be about women because I am one and that's
[7:08]my experience.
[7:09]And it's the experience of a lot of girls who grew up with me in Alaska.
[7:13]And so I started with them with a mother with two kids and then I had two best friends
[7:18]and every 20 pages I would switch until ended up being like an 80 page story.
[7:22]Yeah.
[7:23]And I don't really know how that happened.
[7:24]But it did.
[7:25]But so good.
[7:26]Thank you.
[7:27]And also having read your memoir, still points north, when you see literally like taking
[7:33]off to like getting salmon and you know, flying in a plane just with your dad and doing
[7:37]all these, I would say outdoorsy, but that to means it in a lot of ways.
[7:41]No, that's all right.
[7:42]And you're going to call the outdoorsy lifestyle.
[7:45]And then to see this, like I was, I'm glad you said that about your dad because I'm
[7:49]like, is this something that happened to me?
[7:51]Like, oh, yeah, no, no, it's totally fiction.
[7:54]Yeah, I actually, I, I did write that memoir and I'm glad I wrote it.
[7:57]Like I don't have any regrets.
[7:59]And I really liked the seven or eight years I spent basically, I mean, just writing
[8:03]nonfiction, right?
[8:04]Like I wrote the memoir.
[8:05]I worked at Oprah and I wrote like essays every week.
[8:08]And I wrote things in the New York Times and it was like, validated.
[8:11]It made me feel like a writer and it actually was their advantage as to both kinds of writing.
[8:15]But I think I like finished writing for nonfiction.
[8:18]Like I wrote one essay for this book that's going to come out, I think next week with Oprah.
[8:22]But fiction is like, you can make things up.
[8:25]You know what I mean?
[8:26]Like you don't have to worry about telling the truth.
[8:29]And with nonfiction writing that can be a lot of pressure, I'm sure you felt like that
[8:32]memoir.
[8:33]Like how do I make this moment true?
[8:34]What happens if I get it wrong?
[8:36]Why can't I just make this story more exciting?
[8:38]But actually in fiction, I was like, oh my God, I'm free.
[8:41]You know what I mean?
[8:42]I need a moment here.
[8:43]And I don't have one of my own personal life.
[8:46]So I'm going to make it up and I'm allowed, you know, and for me that was like, wow,
[8:51]you know, like I really enjoyed it.
[8:54]See, I feel like that's also intimidating.
[8:56]Like you can just make it up, it could be anything in the world.
[8:59]You could make up anything.
[9:00]Yeah, it is for if you have the confines of like your actual life story, then you can like
[9:04]pick it and, you know, it's like decorating a house versus building one from scratch.
[9:08]I totally agree.
[9:09]I think that's why nonfiction was easier for me at first.
[9:12]Like yeah, this is not my first try at fiction.
[9:14]Like no, I wrote a story collection that a lot of the stories had been published, but
[9:19]it didn't feel like a book to me, so I never even submitted that anywhere.
[9:24]And then I wrote a novel that was truly awful.
[9:26]I did.
[9:27]I can't help it.
[9:28]I had like two kids and I was writing a novel.
[9:30]I think the writing was good, but the story was not together.
[9:34]And so like when I went into memoir, it was a relief.
[9:37]Like there's some guardrails here, yes, you know what I mean?
[9:40]And I don't have to come up with the plot.
[9:42]And there is even now in fiction times, you're like, anything could happen.
[9:46]Oh my God.
[9:48]Anything could happen.
[9:49]How do I narrow it down, right?
[9:51]So I think one trick I've learned is that, and I'm not sure if I really know this or not,
[9:57]it's like coming to be right the second I've never thought about it before, is it?
[10:00]if you, the guardrails of the story are what you create
[10:02]in those first like seven or eight pages, right?
[10:05]And so like, if you're running a story about a trip up
[10:08]the, this remote highway through Canada
[10:10]with a mother and daughter,
[10:12]then maybe a Martian will not come in to that story.
[10:15]Right.
[10:15]Do you know what I mean?
[10:16]Like anything could happen.
[10:18]And I guess maybe a UFO could come into it,
[10:20]but probably not.
[10:21]Probably I'm just going to stick with a mother and daughter.
[10:23]So I think that's how you keep it from becoming
[10:26]paralyzing and overwhelming, or at least that's how I'm
[10:29]going to, even within the frame of no realm of no UFOs,
[10:33]no vampires, I would probably say, you know,
[10:36]in a road trip story too, no car crashes.
[10:40]Because it's like that's too obvious or something
[10:42]or in also it's too unwieldy.
[10:44]What do I do with a car crash?
[10:45]Right.
[10:46]You know, like, do people die?
[10:47]I don't know why that feels harder to deal with
[10:50]than just people having their regular drama of, you know,
[10:53]in this case, the mother is overwhelmed by child
[10:56]with special needs and a little bit.
[10:58]I want to say a little bit abusive, maybe not, you know?
[11:01]And these two friends who are also traveling to best friends,
[11:06]I actually really wanted to write about best friends
[11:09]because that was my favorite.
[11:10]And certainly that's the longest narrators
[11:12]in that long story because I just remember how and love
[11:17]I have been with my friends.
[11:19]And, you know, in your twenties, I mean,
[11:22]I do know that you know because I read your memoir.
[11:25]And even in my grade school or like in high school,
[11:28]I had this friend Katie Maddie.
[11:29]I just, I was in love with her, you know?
[11:31]Everything she said was funny.
[11:33]I mean, we used to laugh so hard.
[11:34]I still have friends like that.
[11:35]My best friend Elizabeth, I literally,
[11:38]I get hurt laughing when I'm with her.
[11:40]And I always know that I'm in love with someone
[11:43]when I laugh at everything they say.
[11:44]And it takes a while, like we'll be friends for a year
[11:46]and then all of a sudden on just everything they said,
[11:48]you could say something like,
[11:49]let's put some coffee in the coffee machine.
[11:51]I'm like, oh my God, to be, you know?
[11:53]Like, it's just how I understand love.
[11:56]And I do feel like a lot of times I see it as, you know,
[11:58]that like love should only be romantic
[12:01]or love should only be sexual
[12:02]or love should only be about marriage.
[12:05]And I mean, there are so many,
[12:07]obviously stories about marriage in this collection.
[12:09]Okay, I would say that's 90% of the book.
[12:12]And maybe that's why I carved out this space
[12:14]to talk about female friendship when you're,
[12:17]you know, 21 years old and like the world is so huge
[12:20]and you don't know what you're doing.
[12:22]You know, those girls to me felt like, you know,
[12:25]we're gonna go to Alaska and they had no idea
[12:26]what they were doing.
[12:27]Yeah.
[12:28]It was so funny though.
[12:30]And when they were at the, when they were at the restaurant
[12:32]and one of those said, what did she say?
[12:34]Like are these clams fresh?
[12:35]And the waitress is like, oh, okay.
[12:37]No, I know what I'm dealing with here.
[12:38]Oh, yeah.
[12:39]That's true.
[12:40]Cause there's like, no, the first thing
[12:42]when you go to remote Alaska or Canada,
[12:43]it's like, they're gonna give you nest cafe.
[12:46]I don't know what that is.
[12:47]I also hear that happens in Africa
[12:49]and like other places I've traveled in Asia,
[12:50]like the coffee is nest cafe, instant crystals.
[12:54]It's gonna be powdered milk.
[12:55]You know what I mean?
[12:56]Everything is canned.
[12:57]You know, and there's like these certain foods.
[12:59]You just know, oh, okay, I'm home.
[13:02]You know?
[13:02]Well, I still found the ending,
[13:04]like I would not have predicted the ending of the story.
[13:07]Yeah.
[13:08]It seriously felt like a whole novel in, in, of itself.
[13:10]And I found myself relating to all the different people
[13:14]in the story.
[13:15]Well, I'm almost like, I mean,
[13:17]the mother is really struggling.
[13:18]And I think for any moms who are struggling with anything,
[13:21]you reach that breaking point, right?
[13:23]Right.
[13:23]I need to get, we have to get to school at a time.
[13:26]Like, oh, yeah.
[13:26]Oh, yeah.
[13:27]Like, I couldn't physically still pick you up.
[13:28]So I'm going to just like grab you
[13:30]and like we've got to get out of the house.
[13:31]And I feel like for many parents,
[13:34]you're always sort of on that line of like losing it.
[13:38]And we're going to just like snap yourself
[13:41]because it's so out of your control, right?
[13:43]Like your kid's behavior,
[13:45]kid and sometimes just, you know,
[13:46]you just, they don't do what you want them to do.
[13:49]Well, listen, I'm telling you
[13:50]that I have one of the most haunting moments of my entire life
[13:54]was in skiing.
[13:56]And my son was like, my older son is such a sweetheart.
[13:59]Like he's the sweetest boy in the world.
[14:00]And as a, and he was a very easy child.
[14:02]Like when he was like, I mean, his son, brother was not.
[14:05]His brother drove me to insanity.
[14:06]And I love that kid,
[14:07]but pushed me right to the edge of like,
[14:09]personality sort of like that.
[14:11]But my older son was such a sweetheart.
[14:13]And we were skiing and we somehow got on something
[14:15]that was difficult.
[14:16]And he was maybe three or four.
[14:17]And it's very steep and it was icy.
[14:20]And I was like, well, I mean, I grew up in Alaska, right?
[14:23]Like everything was life or death.
[14:24]Like, and I said, well, we have to ski down it.
[14:27]And he was like, well, I just want to take off my skis.
[14:30]And I literally say, I lost my crap on a level.
[14:33]I was like, there's no such thing as taking off their skis.
[14:36]You cannot walk down this mountain
[14:38]and I cannot leave you here.
[14:39]And I went on and on.
[14:41]And I was like, when those crazy people,
[14:43]I feel like I should have been arrested
[14:44]for talking this kid.
[14:45]And of course, he made perfect sense.
[14:47]He was afraid.
[14:48]Take off the skis, walk down.
[14:49]I couldn't envision a reality
[14:53]where like, you could just take off your skis
[14:55]and walk down a mountain.
[14:56]Everything to me was like, and so I've actually
[14:58]apologized like once a year, I'll be like,
[15:00]remember that time I yelled at you, my worst king?
[15:02]I'm so sorry.
[15:04]I was so wrong.
[15:06]He thinks it's funny now.
[15:07]And it was.
[15:08]But I remember being unable to make a good choice
[15:14]because I was so blinded by my frustration and my fear
[15:17]and my past and I just wasn't in reality, I don't think.
[15:24]And I think that's for her too.
[15:25]I mean, this mother has like economic pressure.
[15:28]She's got no money.
[15:29]She's there like, her kid has all these problems.
[15:31]It's a 70s like no one's diagnosed them.
[15:34]And he's really problematic.
[15:36]And I mean, some of that stuff actually is,
[15:40]like there's always this intersection
[15:41]between fiction and on fiction.
[15:43]Like how did I know about I waited tables?
[15:46]That's how I knew from the waitress, right?
[15:48]And the road trip, yes, I took a road trip
[15:50]with my dad on the Elcan.
[15:51]But most of the pressure that I would think of from the road,
[15:55]our road trip was like a happy, like, oh, let's stop
[15:58]and have a burger.
[16:00]But I used to take these crazy road trips with my mother
[16:03]because she was really into driving like, she'd be like,
[16:06]I woke up this morning.
[16:07]I thought we should go to the Grand T-tons.
[16:09]We lived in Volton, I was like, yeah.
[16:12]She would drive all the way to the T-tons.
[16:14]We would get out and look at the T-tons.
[16:16]And then we would get back in the car and drive all the way home.
[16:18]Oh, my gosh.
[16:18]I know.
[16:19]I'm not into road trips for that reason.
[16:21]My kids this morning literally, my daughter
[16:23]said to me on the way to school.
[16:24]She was like, what's a joy ride?
[16:26]And I was like, well, a joy ride is like,
[16:28]when you go in the car for no reason, just to have fun.
[16:30]And she was like, like, you know what?
[16:32]Is that where people used to do that?
[16:34]Like on Sunday, afternoon, you'd be like,
[16:35]let's go for a drive and look at the country.
[16:38]No.
[16:38]I don't know.
[16:39]Everyone's like, do not have a distance.
[16:41]It's like, the Lou her mind.
[16:42]Like then why would you be in the car?
[16:44]I have trouble taking a walk without a destination.
[16:46]I'm like, I will organize an errand.
[16:47]I'll be like, OK, let's go for a walk.
[16:49]We'll walk the dog because I have all these dogs.
[16:51]And I'll stop at the dry cleaner.
[16:53]I mean, and I'll pick up some thing at the pharmacy.
[16:55]And then I'll come back home.
[16:56]That's a walk to me when I, you know, if not, it's a hike.
[17:00]I will go on a hike.
[17:01]That's a different thing.
[17:02]But the hike has a top of the mountain, right?
[17:04]Like that's a goal oriented thing.
[17:06]Like you get up there, and which is the top,
[17:07]and you go back down.
[17:08]It's not just like an amble.
[17:09]Yeah.
[17:10]Like just keep going for a walk seems like, I know.
[17:12]Where would you go?
[17:13]How long would you go?
[17:14]No, like it's like weathering heights.
[17:16]Yeah, no, I have a landmark in mind.
[17:18]Yeah.
[17:18]And then as I go, I'm like, OK, I'm here.
[17:20]So that's kind of why you're a writer.
[17:22]Because I do think when you're writing,
[17:24]you want to think that you can amble all over the page.
[17:26]But like, I mean, so one of the things
[17:28]I really think is super important in a short story,
[17:31]or even in that long story, is pressure on the story
[17:35]so that you want to turn pages, that you care.
[17:37]Yep.
[17:37]Like it was a serious goal for me, you know,
[17:40]the three things I wanted of our books,
[17:42]we publish in any book I publish,
[17:44]because I want for myself.
[17:46]I want there to be Beatles sentences in language.
[17:49]And I want there to be a story, like a reason, like,
[17:53]do they get to the restaurant?
[17:54]Do they run out of gas?
[17:56]Do they pick up those two girl hitchhikers?
[17:59]Or in every case?
[18:00]And that's a question of like really plot and story.
[18:03]Like people don't like real story telling.
[18:06]And then like I wanted to have a lot of heart.
[18:08]Or that's what I call heart.
[18:10]It's not a great word.
[18:11]It's not very literary word.
[18:13]But I want there to be like emotional stakes.
[18:15]Like I want someone to feel sad.
[18:17]I want them to laugh.
[18:18]Or both, actually what I want is both.
[18:20]Like I'm really going for a kind of humor, which is
[18:22]you're laughing, you're laughing, and you're laughing,
[18:24]and then you're devastated.
[18:26]You know, I think that's like the best story.
[18:29]Well, no, there's not, I mean, I like all the babies.
[18:32]I don't know all the babies.
[18:34]But I mean, the one that's gotten the most public attention
[18:37]is the story, how palace.
[18:39]And that was one that, you know, it won this Paris review
[18:41]prize.
[18:42]And I think it was in best American short stories.
[18:45]And it was in, I mean, it's embarrassing how much once,
[18:48]you know, it's like my little baby, you know,
[18:50]I'm able to get prodigy story that went off with that.
[18:52]And he said, ha ha ha, I'm going to Harvard or something,
[18:55]you know, like, but that little story, you know,
[18:57]won all these prizes.
[18:59]And I think I can't tell you how hard I worked on that story.
[19:03]I worked on that story for, I want to say like six or seven
[19:07]years, and many of the versions of the story are have zero.
[19:11]I mean, it's not even the same.
[19:13]People, the only thing is the same about that story
[19:16]with how palace is the dog that there's this, you know,
[19:20]like crazy lab, redore, and it's wrecking everything
[19:23]in this woman's yard, but there were different women.
[19:26]There were neighbors involved.
[19:27]I mean, there are still neighbors involved with the dog.
[19:30]But when I finally cracked it open, it was because I found
[19:32]that it was like this old woman who had this dog.
[19:35]And then it was funny.
[19:36]She wasn't funny old lady.
[19:38]She had had five husbands, you know, like she was like
[19:41]serving mousse hot dogs to people wanted to buy her house.
[19:45]And you were laughing.
[19:46]And then I don't even think I realized how sad it was
[19:48]until the end.
[19:49]And then I wrote the sad ending.
[19:50]And everyone keeps saying when they say, oh, that ending is
[19:53]such a surprise without, that was a surprise to me too.
[19:56]You know, but I think most of like really funny writing.
[20:00]And like when I read David Ciderus and I laugh so hard,
[20:03]but then it's also really sad.
[20:06]You know, like they thought he was speech impediment
[20:08]just because he's, you know what I mean?
[20:09]Like they really, you know, his school was awful to him
[20:12]and it was hard like, you know,
[20:13]or he had that really like thought provoking essay
[20:18]about the pedophile who lived in his French town
[20:21]where you're like laughing and they're like,
[20:22]roast, you know, that's so upsetting.
[20:25]So I do think I have veered into that territory.
[20:28]Interesting.
[20:29]Yeah. Well, it's like we were talking about yesterday
[20:31]in terms of like a book, books to acquire
[20:33]and short stories and editing and whatever.
[20:35]And you're like, no, no, no.
[20:36]Short story is a whole nother thing.
[20:38]Yeah. It is the hardest thing to edit.
[20:40]You have to be so careful with the words and the plot
[20:43]and you don't have as much space and you have to be so careful.
[20:48]And I just love that.
[20:49]Right. Like the attention you have to,
[20:51]and then how you can just like keep doing it over and over again
[20:54]with the stories in this collection.
[20:55]Well, I do feel like it's a little bit like music, right?
[20:57]So you figure out the form
[20:59]and in that, you know, in a good story,
[21:01]I like to, I usually like, well, I'm just like,
[21:03]I like to start, I always start with like a really,
[21:05]like I, I always start with a sentence.
[21:07]So like, and it's got to be a sense to me that goes,
[21:10]oh, there's, it's not a sentence about character
[21:12]or what's happening.
[21:14]I'm trying to find the story nobody goes out alive,
[21:15]but I don't even know what page that's on.
[21:18]This opening sentence is my brother and I didn't go up religious.
[21:22]Yeah. Nobody gets out alive is getting past them,
[21:24]mastodon took planning.
[21:26]Right. Getting past the mastodon took planning.
[21:28]Well, I already have a mastodon, right?
[21:30]I have a wooly mammoth in the first sentence.
[21:31]Well, there's a lot of places to go with that.
[21:33]Yeah. Do you know what I mean?
[21:34]Like a mastodon is interesting to me.
[21:36]I don't even know what a mastodon is.
[21:37]Well, an embarrassing.
[21:38]No, that's actually something that is surfacing.
[21:41]Like part of that story was talking about like global warming
[21:44]in Alaska and it is true.
[21:47]All of these dinosaur bones are surfacing around the snow
[21:49]and you can literally pick them up.
[21:50]You don't have to dig for them or anything
[21:52]because the ice is melting.
[21:54]And throughout the collection,
[21:55]I was at each story a little bit talking about global warming
[21:59]and like what's happened with oil culture
[22:01]just because the landscape has so radically altered.
[22:04]Like when I grew up in Alaska,
[22:06]like there was no such thing as spring.
[22:08]We called the breakup, like we lived on a lake
[22:11]and the ice would break up and it would go out to sea.
[22:13]I really do want to write a novel called the breakup.
[22:16]Yeah. Yeah.
[22:17]I mean, it's a little bit of an obvious metaphor, right?
[22:19]Like it was not a marriage that broke up.
[22:21]But and it still does that.
[22:23]It's just that it would be like,
[22:24]when it would last sometimes till the end of May,
[22:26]the beginning of June.
[22:28]And now comes so much easier.
[22:30]Like I was at the Arctic Circle two years ago
[22:32]and the breakup was happening in like April.
[22:35]Where was that?
[22:36]You know, my brother was like,
[22:37]don't bring your, you know, ski pants, like it's warm out.
[22:41]There's no snow on the ground and I was bewildered.
[22:45]In the same thing with the summers,
[22:46]like the summers are really hot now.
[22:48]There was, you know, that same summer
[22:50]I think it was like 90 degrees.
[22:51]That never, never happened.
[22:54]And we certainly just,
[22:55]the one thing that I totally freaks me out
[22:57]is that we just did not have fall.
[22:59]Like there'd be like three days in August.
[23:02]All the leaves would fall.
[23:03]There's very few leafy trees.
[23:04]But when those leafy trees that we had in our yard,
[23:06]they would literally fall off in about two days.
[23:09]And that was the end of fall.
[23:10]And all of a sudden it was when our snow started falling.
[23:13]And now there's a real fall.
[23:14]And it's really pretty.
[23:16]You know, you go hiking.
[23:18]It's like vibrated and red leaves and mushrooms.
[23:21]And it's like, that's actually September is
[23:24]a great time to go to Alaska because the tourists are gone.
[23:27]You can go hiking and you can go fly fishing.
[23:30]And if you're, you know, it's a beautiful time
[23:33]to look at the landscape.
[23:34]And it always freaks me out a little bit.
[23:36]That's, that's what I did write about that
[23:37]the fact that we have a fall.
[23:39]And it lasts weeks now.
[23:41]It's just so crazy to me that this is how you grew up.
[23:43]And yet here you are just like bouncing around New York City.
[23:46]And me too, I find it very weird.
[23:48]You know, it's like you,
[23:49]like if you were wearing like hot, you know,
[23:51]like an Alaskan type outfit.
[23:53]Right.
[23:53]Imagine like, you know, with the boots and, you know,
[23:57]flat, you would know that like you came from somewhere else.
[24:00]I know.
[24:01]But you look like everybody else.
[24:02]Do you know what I mean?
[24:02]I looked at when I came to New York.
[24:03]I said, oh, look, I mean, you didn't know me
[24:05]when I first came to New York.
[24:07]I mean, I was a rub.
[24:08]I still am a rub at heart.
[24:09]I feel like people look at me even no matter what.
[24:12]I've got the clothes.
[24:13]I know how to, I know how to handle myself.
[24:16]And I mean that in the best of ways
[24:17]that I will always be a rub.
[24:19]And I actually like that about myself.
[24:21]You know, I don't want to change that much.
[24:23]But I really didn't know like I was so bewildered
[24:26]on how to dress and what to do.
[24:27]I did not understand anything.
[24:30]It's like my first five years here.
[24:32]And I remember like I tried to get a job
[24:35]and this woman who was at the publishing house.
[24:37]I was soon to be fired because I was the world's worst assistant.
[24:40]But one of the very successful assistants
[24:42]was like, we're all going to chat me this weekend.
[24:43]I didn't know what she was talking about.
[24:46]I was like, buying clothes at like the Salvation Army
[24:49]are like random chain stores, like strawberries.
[24:51]And like, you know, just putting it all on.
[24:55]And I know like, I didn't know what to do.
[24:58]And it's okay.
[24:59]Like I kind of embraced that like part of me, you know?
[25:01]Wait, so go explain you.
[25:03]So you grew up alternating somewhat.
[25:06]Your mom and Baltimore are your dad in Alaska.
[25:07]Right.
[25:08]You went to Stanford.
[25:09]But how did you get, what's the quick version
[25:13]of your life story here?
[25:14]Well, I really lived in Alaska toes about eight or nine.
[25:17]And then my mom, you know, my mom and dad divorced.
[25:20]And my mom, I got on a crazy road trip
[25:21]drove me out of Alaska to Baltimore.
[25:25]But that road trip was even crazy.
[25:26]I like, we went to Mexico and everything.
[25:27]She just loves to drive.
[25:28]She always says like, I should have been a trucker.
[25:30]I'm like, get me out of the car.
[25:32]Have you read my other trucker?
[25:33]No, but I gotta read that.
[25:34]Oh my God, I'm going to give it to you.
[25:35]Okay.
[25:35]Anyway, you're going to love it.
[25:36]Okay.
[25:37]So from that point on, I would live every three months
[25:40]with my mom and then go to my dad
[25:42]and then go back to my mom and go back to my dad
[25:43]and, you know, school was arranged.
[25:45]So I mostly went to high school in Baltimore.
[25:47]But when I was with my dad, my dad was like,
[25:49]oh my God, you're here.
[25:51]And you've had to be living in that, you know,
[25:53]what he would call like the east coast elites.
[25:55]And I love him, but it was like not the east coast elites.
[25:58]And he'd be like tossing me into an airplane
[26:00]and we were going caribou hunting
[26:02]and we were going fishing and remote areas.
[26:04]And we were going rafting down these crazy rivers.
[26:07]And we were like, he'd be like,
[26:08]I remember one summer he's like, I bought this cabin.
[26:11]And it's true, like we lived really off grid.
[26:13]Like we had a cabin in the middle of the wilderness.
[26:15]And he was like, and now we're gonna build it.
[26:17]We're gonna build a sauna.
[26:19]I was, and we would just go into the lake
[26:21]and collect rocks.
[26:23]And there's this thing called Viscuene.
[26:25]It's plastic sheeting.
[26:26]And we made this big kind of pyramid of plastic sheeting.
[26:29]And we found an old barrel stove from an abandoned hunters cabin.
[26:32]And we set that up.
[26:33]And we literally just made this sauna.
[26:36]And in Alaskan saunas, you go sit under this Viscuene
[26:40]and you pour hot water on yourself
[26:43]it's actually really amazing.
[26:45]But it's not like the saunas
[26:46]that you're gonna see in civilized Norway
[26:48]or like with the people with the beading sticks.
[26:50]But we lived that kind of life.
[26:52]And I think he was really, really committed
[26:53]to me not forgetting how I grow up
[26:56]and not becoming this kind of person
[26:58]that could not handle herself.
[27:02]I learned how to shoot a gun at a very young age,
[27:04]like five or six.
[27:06]I thought that I learned how when I was eight or nine,
[27:08]but my dad was like, no, because the bears
[27:11]were a very real thing, you know,
[27:14]like I've never had to kill a bear, thank God.
[27:17]And I've never been attacked by a bear.
[27:19]And your first impulse when you have a bears,
[27:21]of course not to shoot it.
[27:22]You don't want to kill an animal,
[27:23]but you want to back out of there,
[27:25]which I've done many times, many, many times,
[27:28]been like, oh, hello Mr. Grizzly.
[27:30]You were also on this river with me.
[27:32]I will just now be backing away and quite frankly
[27:35]against all like what they're saying
[27:36]that you're supposed to do.
[27:37]I have run my butt off.
[27:39]I have just been like, oh my God,
[27:42]that feeling never changes when you run into a giant brownie
[27:45]fishing and it looks at you and says, oh, hello,
[27:48]you just run.
[27:49]I have run so many times that I'm truly embarrassed
[27:52]and I don't know why I'm alive.
[27:53]But I think there's times like we had a bunch of situations
[27:56]where like I'd be left alone at camp
[27:58]or you know, especially behind our cab
[28:00]and there was just so many brown bears,
[28:03]even just to get to the outhouse,
[28:04]you know, you'd walk through these raspberry bushes.
[28:06]And I was always singing, I love to sing Christmas care.
[28:09]I love Christmas in general.
[28:10]I'm not, and I'd love to sing Christmas carols,
[28:13]but as a kid, I would sing Christmas carols
[28:15]or like, show tunes from Avita.
[28:18]I love the Avita record.
[28:20]I know Kenny Rogers, just so that they would know
[28:23]that you're coming.
[28:23]So you wouldn't like go through the bushes
[28:25]and then run into them because they don't really want
[28:27]to be involved with you.
[28:29]And that's also also really changed.
[28:31]You know, when I was little,
[28:32]when we were living in so many remote areas,
[28:34]the bears were not aware of you as a food source.
[28:39]They did not want much to do with you.
[28:40]And if they did, it was like,
[28:42]I remember one time we woke up
[28:43]and like this black bear was kind of just like,
[28:46]pawing at our tent.
[28:48]And I can't believe this is true.
[28:50]I'm gonna tell you through.
[28:51]My dad now we're like,
[28:52]oh, let's go back to sleep.
[28:53]We literally went down to sleep away.
[28:57]We were really tired.
[28:58]It was really early in the morning.
[28:59]We knew he was there and he was going,
[29:01]oh, oh, oh, oh, that's what this sound like.
[29:03]And it's not like we were last,
[29:04]lastly fair, but we actually love to sleep.
[29:06]You know that about me.
[29:07]I got about a 10, I wake up at eight.
[29:09]And my dad's the same way.
[29:10]I mean, it's 730.
[29:11]He's like, whoa, that was a big day.
[29:13]And I know in the morning,
[29:15]I think it must have been five in the morning.
[29:17]We were like, well, I'm too tired to deal with that.
[29:19]And it's not that bad.
[29:21]But now, so the last,
[29:23]I did this article on this guy, Dick Prenneke,
[29:27]who built this,
[29:27]is he the famous guy on NPR.
[29:29]He did this alone in the wilderness documentary
[29:31]of belt betting his own cabin.
[29:33]And I hiked out in Satan's cabin
[29:34]and I was alone in the wilderness.
[29:36]And there were bears everywhere there.
[29:39]But they have learned what people are.
[29:42]And they love things like toothpaste.
[29:45]They do.
[29:45]It's food to them.
[29:46]It's got sugar in it, you know?
[29:47]They know what tin foil is.
[29:49]So you have to be so much more careful about,
[29:52]you know, we would just sort of like tie our food up
[29:53]in a tree.
[29:54]I'm embarrassed that we traveled like this,
[29:56]but where we would open up a float
[29:58]and our plan is kind of dump our salmon in there.
[30:00]and it cooled off in the water.
[30:03]I mean, nowadays I feel like a bear would be like,
[30:06]you know, thank you.
[30:06]I'm gonna just eat your plane.
[30:08]I'm gonna eat all that salmon too.
[30:10]You know, because, you know, it's easier for me
[30:13]to, you know, some humans have put so much garbage
[30:16]and they have so much more access to, you know,
[30:19]like many people in Alaska helicopters now
[30:22]and they can get into all these places
[30:23]that you can't with a small plane.
[30:26]And also tourists, I think there's just so much more tourists
[30:29]that are coming up, which is, you know,
[30:30]that's good for the state, that's good.
[30:32]But, and there's also just more roads.
[30:34]Like, people go hunting on the road now.
[30:37]They like just drive, they get out of their car,
[30:40]they put on a fast and they go caribalding.
[30:42]And there's not that many caribald left.
[30:44]And the caribou see the people coming and they're like,
[30:45]we're running away from you now.
[30:47]Yeah, you know what I mean?
[30:48]Like, thank you.
[30:49]Bye, thank you.
[30:49]I'm here.
[30:50]It's really hard to, you know,
[30:52]when I grow up, you always hunted a caribou
[30:54]and you ate that for winter.
[30:56]And it wasn't, I mean, I'm not like a bloodthirsty,
[30:59]like, Hunter, like I would never,
[31:01]I would only hunt things that you would eat.
[31:03]But we grew up where you'd go out and you're playing,
[31:05]you'd get out, you'd walk to the caribou
[31:06]and you'd kill a caribou.
[31:08]And they did not really know who you were.
[31:09]And there was like, hundreds of them, it's like cows.
[31:12]It's like, and we would process that meat
[31:15]and make hot dogs out of it and hamburgers.
[31:17]We had a big freezer and we ate it all winter.
[31:20]And, you know, that wasn't weird.
[31:22]That was like normal life.
[31:24]Now I feel like that's changed.
[31:27]I mean, my dad doesn't do that anymore.
[31:28]And I certainly don't do it.
[31:30]I'm also, I'm gonna tell you,
[31:32]I'm not really into hunting.
[31:34]I'm not good at it and I'm not committed.
[31:37]But we also used to go duck hunting.
[31:38]We shot all around ducks and that still goes on.
[31:41]And we ate all our own food.
[31:43]And my dad was always like, you know,
[31:45]this was long before this like new movement
[31:46]that I now in New York, I guess people are like,
[31:48]it's eat the whole animal, but we did.
[31:51]Like, we ate everything on the animal
[31:53]and then we saved the skin
[31:54]and we dried the skin and we made a carpet out of it.
[31:57]Or we made a hat.
[31:59]Oh my gosh.
[32:00]Oh, it's amazing.
[32:04]Yeah.
[32:04]I mean, I've made my kids plucked ducks with me.
[32:06]I want them to understand how to like,
[32:08]that the food just doesn't come to you out of nowhere.
[32:11]Right.
[32:12]And if they want to be like one,
[32:14]one of my sons is probably gonna be a vegetarian.
[32:16]I can, that's been heading towards me.
[32:17]And I'm okay with that.
[32:18]I support him.
[32:19]He's like, right now he's pretty much a vegetarian
[32:21]except for he bacon and okay, fine, whatever.
[32:24]I'm like, you're not really vegetarian.
[32:26]I understand that, right?
[32:26]Cause you eat bacon, but whatever.
[32:28]That's the little lie we live with.
[32:30]But I do want them to understand what food is
[32:32]and that it doesn't just like spit out of a, out of a.
[32:37]Whole foods.
[32:38]Yeah, right.
[32:40]Yeah, you know, white men's.
[32:42]Yeah, you know, and it was scary for them
[32:44]to like take the feathers off the duck
[32:47]and then clean it and then eat it and you know, do that.
[32:51]Even like, and we did that with grandpa to him.
[32:53]And he was like, it is a little scary
[32:54]and you know that I think about it.
[32:56]But I remember him having, we'd have huge fights.
[32:59]Especially with my teenage years
[33:01]when I was like, you're a killer.
[33:02]You're an animal killer.
[33:03]And I told, I became a vegetarian for like five years.
[33:06]Oh God, poor man was pulling out his hair.
[33:08]And I would sit outside and say,
[33:10]well, you have to pluck the ducks.
[33:11]You know, you're the youngest person in the family.
[33:13]That's, that person does that.
[33:15]And I would just sit out there
[33:16]with duck after duck hating everybody.
[33:18]You know, when you think in the garage,
[33:20]I mean, I was like, shucking corn.
[33:22]So we had to say, well, it's the same thing.
[33:25]You're like, nobody loves me.
[33:26]I have to do all the hard work around here.
[33:28]And my dad's a killer of birds.
[33:30]Oh my gosh.
[33:33]Wait, but still, how did you get from that lifestyle?
[33:37]Okay. So then when I went, yeah, okay.
[33:38]So my dad had a rule when I was time to go to college.
[33:40]I mean, there's, you can go to college in Alaska.
[33:43]One of my brothers and his masters in Fairbanks.
[33:45]But my dad has kind of like these rules,
[33:47]which I think a lot of dads, you know, do or parents do.
[33:51]and he was like, you are not,
[33:53]you need to go to a big college
[33:54]and you need to go someplace else in the world.
[33:58]Like it cannot really be on the East Coast.
[34:00]Like like the environment that your mother had
[34:02]and it cannot be Alaska.
[34:04]So I chose California.
[34:05]I applied to every school in California.
[34:07]There's not a single one I did not apply to.
[34:08]And I'm also nervous and I was nervous
[34:10]about getting into college.
[34:12]And it, you know, it all worked out really well
[34:14]for me to my astonishment.
[34:15]I mean, literally I, and I remember my guidance
[34:17]comes laughed at me when I tell her what I was doing.
[34:20]She was like, what are you doing?
[34:23]I was like, I'm just going to do it.
[34:24]What do I have to lose?
[34:25]And when I got to California,
[34:27]I met all these people from New York City.
[34:30]And they were a lot of them I've gone to like these
[34:32]all different kinds of high schools, you know,
[34:34]and they were also smart and funny.
[34:36]And they also really liked things like writing and theater,
[34:39]which I loved.
[34:41]And there were not very many people at my college
[34:43]that liked the humanities that, you know,
[34:45]it's a very small group.
[34:47]I didn't know that either.
[34:48]I actually did not know what I was doing with colleges.
[34:50]It never occurred to me to like research
[34:52]like what the college was known for.
[34:54]But my college apparently was known for being a doctor
[34:57]and being a senator and like being a business person
[35:01]and being into tech.
[35:02]It was the huge, you know, Silicon Valley tech thing.
[35:05]And I'm not going to single one of those things.
[35:08]And so I kind of bonded with all these people.
[35:10]And then I would go home during the summers to Alaska
[35:13]and hunt and fish and hike and work
[35:15]like Garcia's restaurant as a waitress.
[35:18]Or I'd always have like 95 jobs
[35:20]and a big truck that I drove around.
[35:23]And my friends would all go to New York City
[35:25]and they would do like internships.
[35:27]Now I didn't even know you're supposed to do an internship.
[35:30]Like in every, I don't know where I was.
[35:31]I seem to have missed the memo
[35:32]where you figure things out in general.
[35:35]But and then they would come home
[35:36]and they'd have all these great parties
[35:38]and they would all be kissing each other
[35:40]and, you know, going to some place
[35:42]called the Dublin house on the Upper West Side.
[35:44]And one of them had a big apartment in New York City
[35:47]and they was all these pictures
[35:48]and all these shenanigans.
[35:49]And I was like, I was like one day
[35:52]I'm going to get to go to New York
[35:53]and have fun with all of these amazing people.
[35:56]And so when I graduated, I went to New York.
[35:58]And not a single one of those people came to New York.
[36:01]I was like alone here in one friend
[36:04]in the whole city, Rohan Sippy, that's it.
[36:06]And he wasn't from New York at all.
[36:08]He was from India and Detroit.
[36:10]So we just kind of, I don't know.
[36:12]I mean, I did want to be a writer
[36:14]and I thought, oh, writers go to New York.
[36:17]And I don't think that's true anymore.
[36:18]I think I could have just gone to Alaska or gone to Seattle,
[36:22]stayed in California with the rest of my, you know, class.
[36:26]And it would have been fine.
[36:27]It would have been a writer.
[36:28]But I literally knew nothing about writing.
[36:31]I did not know any writers.
[36:34]Okay.
[36:34]Like, and even the writing classes they had in the college
[36:37]were like, I had like two or three teachers
[36:41]and they didn't really engage with you
[36:42]because they just, it's different now, right?
[36:45]Like, you had to sleep out for the class
[36:47]and there'd be a 12 people.
[36:48]And honestly, I'm going to be honest.
[36:49]My writing was not that good.
[36:51]And so I don't think they were like,
[36:52]I don't really believe you, but I don't think any of them thought,
[36:55]oh, let's take Leeney and under her wing
[36:56]and make her my prodigy.
[36:57]I think they were like, that was nice to hear.
[36:58]Thank you so much.
[36:59]You don't know how to write his story.
[37:00]Go on with you.
[37:01]And I would write in these impassioned emails.
[37:02]And they'd be like, thanks, you know,
[37:05]like they didn't say like come or I'll introduce you.
[37:08]I didn't know that the parent,
[37:09]what I didn't know what literary magazines were.
[37:11]I knew nothing and maybe that's a good thing.
[37:13]It took me a long time to figure it out longer than it should have.
[37:16]But I just came here and, you know,
[37:19]I worked at Reader's Digest, like in the research,
[37:22]not even the real Reader's Digest.
[37:24]Like the part where they just make books
[37:26]on like how to garden.
[37:27]I just did whatever I could that was related to words.
[37:30]I would take any job and it worked in an antique store,
[37:33]you know, and then somehow you ended up at Oprah.
[37:35]Yeah, yeah, worked really hard.
[37:38]That's one thing.
[37:39]I think that was different.
[37:40]I think that actually, you know, my work ethic is crazy.
[37:43]You know that, I know your work ethic.
[37:45]I worked really, and I learned, you know,
[37:47]I learned how to magazine at it.
[37:49]And I learned how to internet at it.
[37:51]And I learned how to, you know,
[37:52]I think even what I'm talking about with writing stories
[37:56]or with those three qualities I want out of an experience.
[38:00]And I guess the fourth quality for me too
[38:03]was writing about a world like Alaska
[38:07]that so fully realized it's like you went there
[38:10]and you come back as a reader.
[38:12]You know, I really wanted that feeling.
[38:14]And many people write without setting
[38:16]and they're very good writers, right?
[38:18]They're writing about ideas or, but for me,
[38:20]it's like I want the full world, you know,
[38:24]and I want to get just like every sentence should be loaded
[38:27]with smells and with trees and with details
[38:30]and things just unique to that place.
[38:33]And a lot of that was like that learning process of,
[38:36]you know, learning how to do your job
[38:38]and then learning how to do your job as a writer, you know.
[38:41]I don't know.
[38:42]It's amazing.
[38:43]And then you went from Oprah, you started catapults?
[38:45]Yeah.
[38:46]And now here we are.
[38:47]It's so crazy.
[38:48]I know.
[38:48]It is so awesome.
[38:50]Yeah, I think also maybe when you grow up differently
[38:55]because like I think about it, right?
[38:56]So I was trying to be writer and I thought,
[38:58]oh, you go work at a big company and you worked there,
[39:01]but actually that did not work for me very well.
[39:03]You know what I mean?
[39:04]I think I am totally comfortable with just being like,
[39:07]I mean, I know, I know I'm comfortable because I've done it.
[39:09]I usually worry extensively before I do it,
[39:13]but yet I've done it over and over again
[39:15]while being a situation and I'll have learned a lot
[39:17]and then I'm done and I quit.
[39:18]And they're like, where are you going?
[39:19]Where's your new job?
[39:20]And I'm like, I don't know.
[39:22]And then I, you know, starting companies from scratch.
[39:25]No, don't leave.
[39:25]No, I'm not going to go home.
[39:26]I'm just turning your company.
[39:27]We're just turning our journey.
[39:29]But you and I are making this together.
[39:30]It's not working for a big company where you're like,
[39:33]okay, I was an associate that are
[39:34]and now I'm going to be a senior editor
[39:36]and then I'm going to be editor-in-chief.
[39:37]And I've had those conversations.
[39:39]Like it over they sat me down and said,
[39:40]do you want to be editor-in-chief one day?
[39:42]And I was like, absolutely not.
[39:44]Thank you so much for thinking of me.
[39:45]I really appreciate it.
[39:46]I'm so grateful.
[39:48]I would kind of love to do it,
[39:49]but I'm not ready to run a big department
[39:51]and talk to these people.
[39:52]And there's a lot of things that go into that
[39:55]that involve like emailing and presentations.
[39:58]And you know, I don't know how to PowerPoint.
[40:00]works. You know, like I'm, but when it's your own company, there's all kinds of freedoms and ways
[40:05]to interpret things and you keep it's so imaginative, right? Like we're imagining what we want
[40:12]out of a, out of a, for our readers, right? Like, and what we want for ourselves. And we want,
[40:19]what we want for our team. And it's like, it is very creative. I don't feel like I have to like
[40:23]learn all these skills that I don't want to learn in order to be able to survive and not get fired
[40:28]and say things, I don't want to, I don't mean in order to not get fired, which is, I feel like that
[40:33]happens. You know, I want to tell the truth kindly, but I don't want to say things I don't mean.
[40:40]Yeah. You need to make up all the rules. That's pretty cool. That's true. That's true.
[40:44]That's true. And we get a lot of help from the people that we, you know. Yeah. Okay. Last question.
[40:50]And I feel like I've only scratched the surface of the real life. I would love to figure it like, listen to the
[40:54]well, we'll have to do like a part two is I think for aspiring authors. Yeah. I think you have to fall
[41:00]in love with the form that you're writing in. So I think I actually think a way to like drill it
[41:05]down and make it so it doesn't take you to like, it took me too long to become a writer. I can say that
[41:10]right away. I did not read enough. And I did not study enough to figure out how to be. I mean,
[41:16]I was reading, but I wasn't reading in the right way. So for example, when I read decided to write
[41:20]this book, I read every book of short stories that have been published pretty much ever. I have
[41:25]hundreds and hundreds of books. And as I was writing it, I only read short stories. And that way,
[41:30]the form, even though it has millions of ways of things kind of got into my consciousness, the way
[41:36]if you were writing music, you'd say, am I going to write a symphony? Or am I going to write a
[41:39]menu at? Or am I going to write, you know, an opus? What I'm actually I'm not in. Yeah. And so that
[41:47]kind of got into my thing. And I thought about the stories that I did read. And I would call,
[41:52]I called them mother stories. And I would go back and look at those stories. And then it would
[41:57]help me come out with it. And I'm writing a novel now. And that's exactly what I'm doing.
[42:02]I'm reading and buying every novel. I like stagger into bookstores, collect novels. And I read them
[42:07]and it really is kind of saying, oh, there are similar traces. All these novels are so different.
[42:13]But what's the kind of one that I find that does have story, that does have hard and does have
[42:18]language? It's not enough for me to write up an idea book. And some people can. They're just,
[42:23]you know, it's like existential. And I want there to be like a beginning middle end. I want that
[42:28]for myself. And so I'm just studying how people do it. And then and then how would I do it?
[42:34]So I feel like if you want to, if you're an aspiring writer and say anything with memoir,
[42:38]I did not read enough memoirs when I wrote my memoir. And I would have done things differently
[42:42]as I feel like you just got to like gorge and not be afraid. Because I know I used to be afraid
[42:48]that if I was reading other things by other people, it would affect my voice. But that's not true.
[42:54]You have your own voice. And it will come through, you know what I mean? And so if I just like
[43:00]with the more I absorb information about what other people are doing, the better I'm able to make
[43:04]the choices I want to make to create the book I want to make. Because I'm literally learning from
[43:08]the masters, right? Yes. You know? Amazing. I'm so excited for nobody gets out alive. It's so good.
[43:17]You're so good writer. It's really amazing. And I can't wait for this to be a smash hit.
[43:23]Use a writer joke. I can't wait for your book. Oh my god.
[43:28]Okay. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[43:34]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at zebioens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read
[43:38]Books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zebioens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and
[43:43]meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound
[43:48]for the Sound Editing. And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this
[43:52]fantastic intro and out trim music.