Writer Bob Cowser knows how to write from life in real time. He knows when to take notes and when to just listen closely. And he knows how to do the research on the tough topics of life. His non-fiction work spans some of the loveliest publications in America, as well as three books, all of which trained him to look for the details that serve the story. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write from life in real time.
Marion: Today my guest is writer and author, Bob Cowser, author of three non-fiction works, including Dream Season and Green Fields, Crime, Punishment and a Boyhood Between. Both highly acclaimed works. His work spans the American literary magazines River Teeth, Fourth Genre, The Pinch, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Brevity, and Creative Nonfiction. He’s the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Full disclosure. Bob is a professor of English at St. Lawrence University, my alma mater, where I also serve on the Board of Trustees, but first and foremost, we’ve been writing colleagues for a long time. I’ve read all his work and my work appears in a collection he edited. So let’s talk writing. Hi, Bob. How are you?
Bob: I’m well. How are you?
Marion: I’m good. Thank you. And I’m delighted to have this opportunity. I’m a huge fan of yours and I’ve learned a lot from your work. So, let’s help people by talking about that work.
Bob: Let’s do that. And I want to say likewise. I’m really excited and I’m a fan of yours and follow your work and of course recruited you for that anthology you spoke of. So I think this should be a lot of fun.
Marion: I think it will be fun. And I talk to academics all the time. I live in an area of many colleges and of course have many friends on the St. Lawrence University faculty. So the question comes up all the time about mass market publishing and the difference between that and academic publishing along with the required academic publishing needed to be a professor. Is there some expectation of English professors that you will also break into the mass market?
Bob: No. I never felt that. Of course academics have to respect academic publishing, university press publishing, et cetera. And so when I was still in sort of in the process of getting tenured and promoted, there wasn’t any expectation that publishing I would do would be mass market, but it certainly was something I wanted to do because I wanted the respect and the broader readership and so on. But no, there wasn’t an actual expectation, even though I was a creative writer as opposed to a critical writer.
Marion: Yeah. I always wondered about that because the pressure would be enormous, but you’ve published in some of the loveliest journals in existence. But I wonder about with the demands on your teaching load, the writing, editing, locating a place for one’s voice, sending out, getting rejected, getting accepted, all that takes so much time. So how did you go about choosing some of these to pursue? I think a lot of people listening to this would like to know because you must do it with some efficiency given the limited amount of time you have for sending stuff out.
Bob: Yeah. Well I can tell two quick anecdotes about my publishing career. When I was in graduate school at the University of Nebraska, the university published a very respected literary journal called The Prairie Schooner. This was back when everything was print. And they had a lending library basically. They had a wall with a rack of every important literary magazine published in America at that time because all the journals traded with one another. And I just went and sat down during my off time when I wasn’t either teaching or taking graduate classes and just page through. I’m a non-fiction writer almost exclusively, and so in the mid ’90’s, not even every magazine published essays at that point. So I just sort of identified ones that seemed to publish that would have welcomed my work. A lot of times it’s these crazy coincidences, but Lee, the editor, published creative nonfiction, gave a lecture at Nebraska while I was there and said something along the lines of, “People shouldn’t try to write memoir until they’re 30 years old. They don’t have anything to say.”
Maybe he even said 40 years old. And at the time I was 25. And I tell this story in class a lot of times because I want to give my students agency. It’s a habit of mind. It’s not about age or experience. It’s about your kind of relationship to the experiences that you have had. And some people, I meet them all the time in my classes, are just oriented toward their experience in this particular way. They’re sort of born to do this kind of thinking and writing. So, anyway, because I met him, had a few days before put an essay in the mail to him in Pittsburgh. And I think because he met me, because he said that, and we had an exchange about it in this small little lecture that he gave, when he got back his readers had put my essay on top of his yes pile.
And he immediately wrote me and said, “I’m going to eat my words. I’m going to publish this essay and congratulations.” That was huge. I was 26, maybe 27.
Marion: Yeah. Yeah.
Bob: So it’s about sometimes just being in the right place at the right time and really going for it with your work and sort of believing in what you’re doing and that was huge. And then the story of my first book was there was a conference at Harvard called Harvard conference on the book, I think. And I went to a lecture by a publisher named Morgan Entrekin at Grove-
Marion: I know him.
Bob: Atlantic called-
Marion: Oh yeah.
Bob: Yeah, yeah. He’s a real Maverick publisher, like lots of great stories about him. But the thing about him is he’ll take a chance on a writer that he believes in.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: And he gave a lecture called from idea to book. And that’s kind of where I was. I had thought about, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to play semi-pro football as a college professor and write about it.” So I went to his lecture and he said several really pointed things, but one of them was, “if your book has a subculture, people will buy in. If you’re exploring sort of an aspect of American life that people don’t know very much about, that book has legs and it has a chance.”
Marion: Such good advice.
Bob: Yeah. Yeah. Again, I had to go to Boston and I had to get the hotel room. I had to attend the right panel, but I did and at the end of it, he had the name of six literary agents that had told him beforehand that they were willing to accept book proposals from people who attended the conference. And I had 35 pages of the book written. I sent it to Suzanne Gluck at William Morris. And I heard back from her the next afternoon by phone, through her assistant. It was so bang, bang, bang. I couldn’t even believe it. And then I was in the predicament of having promised a book I now had to write. You know what I mean.
Marion: That’s a hell of a predicament.
Bob: Yeah. I don’t know that I would do that again. That-
Marion: Well let’s talk about that book.
Bob: Sure. Yeah.
Marion: That book Dream Season is the first thing I read of yours. And so let’s set it up a bit. You’ve just given us a little bit about it, but the subtitle is A Professor Joins America’s Oldest Semi-pro Football Team. It’s crazy what you did and it’s well-published, Grove Press. So give us a little bit of back story about like what you did, why you did it, and when in the name of the good Lord’s did you start taking notes along the way?
Bob: Well, I come from a small town in Tennessee where to be anybody you had to play football. So I did. But I was also the son of two college professors and one of them a writer. And so that was always part of my makeup as well. And so I obviously chose wisely and became a college professor rather than a linebacker. I’d gone to Nebraska, which is another school that can’t decide whether it’s an academic institution or a football team. And I was young-ish still. I was, I think, 30 years old. I was 28 when I arrived at St. Lawrence.
But the other thing was everything has to fall into place. One of the best bits of advice I ever got about nonfiction writing was from William Kittredge. He told this audience that I was in, that, “They won’t pay you to juggle one orange.” Meaning I think that my story with football wasn’t enough, but the fact that this team was more than 100 years old, this team in Watertown. And that they had been the subject of the Frederick Exley book as well. Those coincidences, those things kind of lining up or falling into place all had to happen.
Marion: So this is Watertown, New York and it had been the subject of a book by the really, people have a cultish following for Frederick Exley.
Bob: Definitely.
Marion: And you’re a professor at the time and you say to someone in your family, “I think I’m going to go try out for America’s oldest semi-pro football team.” Is that what you’re saying?
Bob: Yeah. I said to my now ex-wife, “Hey, I think I’m going to go and do this.” You talked about the pressure of publishing and I was new in the career, had a baby who was a year old. I really sort of at that point, I thought, anyway, had milked my childhood for all it was worth in my earlier writing and that book would come out later. And I wasn’t anybody yet. There was no reason anybody would be interested in it, or that’s what I thought. And so this was a gimmick.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: As with any, I think with any project, I really wanted to see if I could do it as well.
Marion: Both play football and write?
Bob: Yeah. Right. I always say I’m a second string football player, but a first string writer or something like that, or maybe third string football player, second string writer. So I went down the season before I played and watched a game and thought, “This is not going to kill me physically.” So I spent the intervening time back in the weight room again trying to remember what it felt like to be physically ready to play semi-pro football, which is not pro football. What I would say is the players weren’t as talented as the guys that you see on Sunday, but they were as big.
Marion: Yeah.
Bob: So-
Marion: Yeah. It’s a little frightening.
Bob: Yeah. There were a lot of big men, big, big, nasty, hairy men and me, the little professor. Not that I’m little, but I walked into the locker room the first day and I smelled that smell of like moldy shoulder pads and the fear and anxiety returned like full. But I knew what I said to myself. You asked when I started taking notes. I had a little handheld recorder. I’d been teaching non-fiction writing so I’d read Gay Talese on how to not interview someone and what he calls hanging out access. And I knew that if I went around like interviewing my teammates and coaches all the time that that would get very old and they would always notice-
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: My difference.
Marion: Yep.
Bob: And so I learned to listen very carefully. And then in my car on the drive home, which was 60 miles, record snippets into a voice recorder. I think the dialogue is really important to the book-
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: Because at first they were like, “Oh yeah. He’s writing a book.” By the end of the season I was just a guy on the team.
Marion: Yeah.
Bob: That’s kind of one of the things that surprised me both to them and to myself was that I kind of slipped into that world for a while.
Marion: Well, absolutely. And this book is not about football. For me, what lives on the page and percolates into the soul of the reader here is how we fit our childhood dreams into our sort of quote, unquote, real lives. We have those childhood dreams. We have those things we’d like to go back and challenge ourselves to do again. But the integration there of what you learn about you and what you do is fascinating. So you were writing that in real time, which is hard. Taking down notes as you say. Driving the 60 miles back and forth. And life can kind of become art and art becomes copy and you can edit copy, but you can’t edit life. So there are some potholes in writing in real time. Can you just give us a couple of them, the things that you sort of stepped into that you would advise other writers to be careful of?
Bob: Yeah. I can tell you that again, I mean, I had promised a book I had not written and I was paid for it-
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: Which is lovely and not always the case in my publishing life. But I had, again, a sabbatical, blessed sabbatical for the fall term. So I was going to write from September to December and then I had to turn in a manuscript. And editing was not what I had thought it would be. I think I was thinking of like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Maxwell Perkins. My editor was 10 years younger than I was.
Marion: Right. Let’s explain that. Maxwell Perkins was the famous editor for many people, but certainly most famously perhaps, F Scott Fitzgerald.
Bob: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Marion: Yeah. So you had no Maxwell Perkins, you had someone 10 years younger than you who had 49 books that season and-
Bob: Yeah. Right, right.
Marion: Yeah.
Bob: I wrote a half, maybe half the manuscript and was having this crisis of faith. Like no one was looking at it, no one was telling me that it was going to be all right. I had no idea what I had in my hands. And so I called up Entrekin in a kind of fit of self-doubt, which I have those every day.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: And I finally broke down and called him and I said, “Look. I’m kind of at sea out here.” And he said, “Hey. I saw what you sold us. I got faith in you. Now go write this book.” And it almost felt like a football coach sending you back in.
Marion: Oh good.
Bob: There’s no SOS, there’s no-
Marion: Yeah.
Bob: Reinforcements. You are the writer.
Marion: Yeah.
Bob: And so that was a big lesson. I felt kind of stupid and I’d send it into them in December. I didn’t know if they wouldn’t send the whole thing back and say, “Start over again.”
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: But I’ll tell you what, I accept all compliments, but some of it’s fluff for promotion and things like that. But when the copy editor that they sent the book to, he sent me the copy, all his red lines and-
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Bob: I still have it. And if I could figure out a way to put it on my wall I would. He just sent this one post-it note and it said, “Damn fine book. It was a pleasure.” And I thought, “That one you can believe in.”
Marion: Oh, that’s gorgeous.
Bob: Like nobody asked him to do that. That wasn’t part of the paycheck. And so writers, it’s hard to find like support that you can actually bank on and put your stock in.
Marion: Yeah.
Bob: And I think that was the end of that very long, lonely sabbatical, just typing, which is not easy.
Marion: Well, the book went on to be one of The New York Times Book Review’s editor’s choice of the year and paper back row selection was listed among the Chronicle of Higher Education’s best ever college sports books. And then you got these amazing reviews. I mean, the Sports Illustrated review, which I remember. Steve Rushin, the senior writer for Sports Illustrated said, “The professor is a madman. I wouldn’t have had the nerve or needs to write this book or the vocabulary. Thank goodness then for Bob, a rarity who can write and play defensive line.”
And he goes on and it’s pretty wonderful. And I’m delighted for that because you’re right. Ultimately it comes down to you alone at the desk. And while you can reach out to your editor once or twice and maybe get a, “Come on. Go back in the game.” It’s not easy. But what I find fascinating is how you then moved on from there. And you go again into that place of childhood for your next book. And I thought about how there’s a similarity between Greenfields and the first book in that, for me, it comes from a place of childhood and how to put away the things we thought then and then have to integrate them later on to varying degrees of success.
So, there’s that pull in Green Fields that I think all of us have is to reconsider something dramatic that happened in our childhoods. So give us a sense of where Green Fields: Crime, Punishment, and a Boyhood Between started for you. And then I’ve got some questions about how you wrote it.
Bob: Well, it started as there was a final essay in a collection that I wrote as my dissertation about when I was out in Nebraska there was an execution in, and Lincoln is the state capitol. I’d never lived in a capitol city before. So I’d never had that kind of proximity to an execution. All the machinery of it, the machinery and that kind of thing were brand new to me and it reminded me of this case that I had grown up with where a classmate of mine was abducted around Labor Day of our third grade year and murdered, found dead in a little country lane. My mind did this kind of rhyming thing. And as it turned out, the execution I witnessed in Nebraska was ’98 and then the execution of the man convicted of that murder was 2000.
And so one of the crucial things that I figured out as a teacher of nonfiction writing that I sort of knew intuitively as a writer of non-fiction was that the events that you describe are important in that you need to recreate them in the same way that you would if you’re a fiction writer.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: As Vivian Gornick asks, “are the worlds created vivid, living, and real?” But what you’re miming is not the events themselves, but the act of your mind apprehending, often in memory, all those events.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: And reconsidering them, ordering them for yourself. And so that’s what I did in that essay in very short, truncated way. And then I realized as I exited that book that probably there was a heck of a lot more in that story than I had plumbed yet.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: And so I wanted the book to be about the 30 years in between.
Marion: Right.
Bob: And really also myself as a representative American because Americans went from a moratorium on the death penalty in the ’70’s to 100 people a year in Texas in the mid ’90’s when I was writing the book. So-
Marion: Right.
Bob: I wanted to try to describe how that cultural shift happened as well.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: Yeah.
Marion: It’s a great background. So, what you might not remember Bob is we had a conversation before you started this book. And I remember saying to you, “Oh dear God. Don’t do this. You’re going to go down a rabbit hole.” And it’s because I was teaching at that time and I’ve had enough students who had a crime in their lives when they were children who go down the research rabbit hole and we never hear from them again.
Bob: Right.
Marion: Because it’s incredibly seductive to go in, despite the heinous aspect of the murder, but to go in and reconsider these memories and those formative experiences with violence, with people not doing their jobs or not getting the job done or getting the job done, it’s just a place to go down. I’m so glad you didn’t take my advice, but let’s talk about that research because you’ve got to do only so much. And then you’ve got to come out and you’ve got to write the book, much like you had to write the first book. So when did you know that you had what you needed and how did you stop that research process? Because it’s going to help a lot of people who are listening to this to know how much you need and when to stop.
Bob: Oh, man. That’s a good question. You know it’s funny regarding you telling me to stop. When I was at the Vermont Studio Center, I read from the first chapter because all the visiting readers or writers gave readings. And a woman from Egypt, a writer from Egypt came and I was sitting, there’s a basement sort of social room where there’s a piano and people have glass of wine after the readings and things like that. And she came and actually sat at my feet and looked up at me and said, “Don’t write this book. This book is going to ruin your life.”
Marion: Oh.
Bob: And sometimes I think about that moment. I have no real qualms about how my life has turned out since then. I think it’s just people sense that this is heavy material and you may pay a price for. You can’t unsee what you see. So I’ve seen the death scene photos. That kind of thing. There’s actually a beautiful story about my mother that she asked the day that I saw them, because I went and read 4,000 pages of trial transcripts. And the amazing thing was that I heard the voices of the people in the trial because the court stenographer had done such a wonderful job of capturing the accents of these people in Tennessee, many of whom were illiterate, at least uneducated.
And the one that jumps out at me is when they’re trying to establish the credibility of a witness. And he says, “Now sir, can you read?” And the man says, “I can sign a check.” That’s what he needed for his life. And-
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: Being in that, it was like, maybe it’s something a mercenary, but I knew what I needed for my story. And it’s a forest for the trees kind of thing. Like I knew the story that I was telling-
I’m teaching a Graham Greene seminar at St. Lawrence right now. And someone said of him, “There’s a sliver of ice in the heart of every writer.” And I don’t know that I’m willing to sign up for that, but what it does come down to is this detail serving my story or am I getting so wrapped up in the issue itself that I’ve lost sight of the story I’m telling? And then see-
Marion: That’s a beautiful thing to think about.
Bob: Yeah. And it’s delicate too-
Marion: Yeah.
Bob: Because you-
Marion: It’s a good place-
Bob: Yeah.
Marion: That’s a good line of discernment. Yeah. Right?
Bob: Yeah, yeah.
Marion: Who’s this serving? Your ego or your soul is another way to go through life. It’s a question I was taught years ago. What is it going to serve if you do that? Your ego or your soul?
Bob: Yeah.
Marion: What is it going to serve here? My just general curiosity or the story.
Bob: You know it’s-
Marion: Yeah. Wow. I love that.
Bob: The other classroom I’m teaching at St. Lawrence is a history of American War films. And we just watched two by Oliver Stone — “Platoon” and “Born on the Fourth of July,” when he’s telling Ron Kovic’s story, he has that necessary detachment from the experiences. And you can get it from your own experiences, but it’s much more difficult. So when he’s Dick, takes up Ron Kovic’s life, he seems to have a kind of aesthetic distance that allows the film just to be better.
And that’s something you learn, I think, with experiences is to make the difficult choice to kill your darlings, literally in some cases, in order that your story does the things we expect literature to do. And when you’re writing about your life, that’s the difficult thing is, are you settling a score here or are you making art? Because often the choice you make is dictated by your awareness of kind of that line of discernment, as you say.
Marion: I love that. Are you settling a score here? Yeah. It’s a great question. And I wonder when we, with that being one of the tools that we absolutely have to have in our toolbox. One of the other things that I always wonder about what we have on us when we write, what we bring to the reporting, what we bring to the writing, has to do with where we’ve been. And you were raised in rural Tennessee, as you said. You got your Ph.D in creative writing from the University of Nebraska. You’ve lived in the North country, which a lot of people don’t know is the extreme Northern New York area that has its very own culture, very specific to the area.
And we talk a lot about like Southern writers and the regional impact of language and style on them. But we’re mostly talking about fiction writers. That sort of Gothic sense that southerners seem to have. We just don’t have this conversation that much with non-fiction writers. So my question for you is how are you informed by where you’ve been? Did you pick up that discernment as a kid in rural Tennessee? Did you pick up that eye at a Ph.D program? What do you think you got along the way from where you were?
Bob: That’s such a good question. I grew up in rural Tennessee, but I was the child of two English professor parents. So I knew a lot of-
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: People who had that eye and they were prime noticers. That’s what my father was. He could tell you every single plant we walked past. I still can’t do that. And some of that’s generational, but they just were prime noticers. And the way that they used language. My father, like just around the house, like I used to laugh when I was younger that everything had either its proper Latin name. There were no nicknames for body parts in my family. It was totally clinical and every color was exact. Like something was, “Have you seen my magenta blazer?” And I laughed about it, but I also, by osmosis, became that person.
So even though it was rural Tennessee, he’s from rural Texas. You learn so much by what you read and by great teachers-
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: That I had who were exacting and who wouldn’t let you get away with something lazy, some cliche at any level. I think more than anything, it was like the lines of poetry or the lines in fiction or in essays that I loved, I just was absolutely determined to figure out how they did that to me. And so I wanted to understand-
Marion: Yes.
Bob: How it worked because I wanted to repeat it for myself, I wanted to participate. So I think a lot of it was like, “Whoa. Okay.” Maybe not when I was a college freshman, but by the time I was leaving college, I was trying to figure out how these little machines worked.
Marion: It’s a wonderful pursuit. And it’s very tempting since you teach to ask you for a reading list, but let’s be more specific. I know, and you just told us, you’re teaching Graham Greene this semester. I know you love the book The End of the Affair.
Bob: I do.
Marion: I love that book. And because I was going to interview you, I went and got my copy and-
Bob: Ah.
Marion: I was delighted to notice how old my copy is. How many times it’s been read. You can practically see it in the pages. But I had actually tucked Greene’s obit into the book-
Bob: Oh wow.
Marion: When he died and his obit ran in the Times. And there it is on my shelf with the obit folded carefully, tucked inside. A real act of love and appreciation. I know what the book does for me. What is the value of that book for you? Why is it that you love that book so?
Bob: I’m such an intense romantic.
Marion: Yeah.
Bob: Like if I were a woman, I wouldn’t sign up to be in a love affair with Bendrix, but I am Bendrix, he is me. His nasty competitions and his slavish routines with language and the way that he loves her.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: And then the other thing was, I directed the program St. Lawrence’s program in London and then lived there with a woman for many years after that, on and off. And the sort of Englishness of that book too. She actually lived across-
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: The cemetery from the Doubters Chapel where Sarah’s funeral is set in the novel. And when we were watching the film together, I said, “I recognize that gasworks.” And my partner said to me, “That’s just across the street.”
And I said, You’re kidding?” I made her get up and go walk out there with me. Harold Pinter’s buried there.
Marion: Sure.
Bob: So there’s just the intense arch romanticism of the book. I think I saw a Ralph Fiennes’ movie maybe before I read the novel. So I always see Ralph Fiennes sitting at the typewriter saying, “I hate you God for making me believe in you.” I love it. I love it.
Marion: It’s a killer. I do remember the first time I read it and I remember the 74 times after that I’ve read it. It continues to inform me about decision-making and love and the triangulation of faith and love and commitment. So, I want to get to what you’re doing now before I let you go. I know your mom died recently and I’m-
Bob: She did.
Marion: Very sorry about that.
Bob: Well, thank you.
Marion: And I know you talked to me almost immediately about how you’re thinking of writing something from there. So ,keeping in mind that these are writers who are listening in, what are you thinking of doing with it and what are your obstacles? What are you sort of sharpening your pen to do?
Bob: You know, I feel like Roland Barthes said when his mother died, “Well, me dying won’t kill anybody now.” And so my entire emotional landscape has changed. And that’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world, but I approached this subject with great gravity and respect because it’s so important. So getting this wrong will not be an option is one thing. There’s that T. S. Eliot line in East Coker where he says, “All we have on our side is all these shabby instruments, meaning language, which is used up and all the subjects have been written about by writers that are greater than you are. So what are you going to do?” I read that to my students now. And he says he’s like 52 when he’s writing the poem and I just turned 50.
So I get that. They tell you to shrug off sort of the anxiety of influence, but come on. It’s your mother, it’s Roland Barthes, it’s William Maxwell. So in that first sort of drafting of material, I just wanted to assemble the memories about her that were most poignant for me. In my mother’s case, she was brilliant academic, but didn’t achieve the things that my father did almost definitely because she was a woman. And in her mind it was his fault, but probably blame could be spread more broadly across the patriarchy. But here I am, this very privileged white man. So I have trepidation about wanting to talk about those things and not being quite sure how I can do it.
Because I became her champion. I was supposed to do the things that she had been prevented from doing. We never talked about that, but it became very clear. I think even to my siblings.
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Bob: So, she definitely enjoyed the modest successes that I had. And I definitely wanted to lay them at her feet. Something beautiful William Maxwell says in this interview at the end of his life. I think the interviewer says, “What would you tell your mother if you had another chance to speak to her?” And he said, “I would give her my books and say, “I made these for you.” Yeah.
Marion: William Maxwell, who told us whose advice to me set me off forever, advice to all of us, but that I read and took very personally. William Maxwell who was a long time fiction editor of The New Yorker, a fabulous writer, and apparently a great friend to writers who said, “All you need to do to recreate your childhood is to remember the sound of your screen doors slamming.” And what that sets off right for us, what we have to do, what we can do with that. Yeah. I love him. And his advice on how to write from life in real time.
Bob: Yeah, me too.
Marion: His advice is perfect. It’s just perfect. Well, there’s so much there for you. I’m fascinated, of course, with the idea of the inheritance that you came by through your mother’s both disappointments and success. How we find our way into a story that’s complicated and not merely appropriate somebody else’s life, which is what your fear is here. The cultural appropriation of the female psyche you’re not going to do. You’re not going to try to recreate the female gaze here. But what we would be interested in is that inheritance, that idea of what to have that bestowed upon you. Ooh, complicated. Interesting. I can’t wait to read it. So, thank you so much.
Bob: Oh, my pleasure.
Marion: See, now you just have to write it, Bob.
Bob: That’s what I say to people every day. I send them out of my office. I’ll just be like, “Just go write it.” And they give me the same look I’m giving you now.
Marion: Right. Well thank you.
Bob: Thank you.
Marion: Thank you so much for coming along today. It is a pleasure.
Bob: My pleasure.
Marion: That’s Bob Cowser. His books, Green Fields and Dream Season are available wherever books are sold. HIs non-fiction is widely available, including this piece in Brevity. I’m Marion and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. Subscribe wherever podcasts are available. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach.com and take a class with me. And thanks for listening.
