How to Write the Book You Want to Read, with Taylor Brorby

TAYLOR BRORBY KNOWS  about writing into a space that does not exist. An author and activist, his new book, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, covers a space that is rarely, if ever, covered. He is here on The Qwerty Podcast to talk about how to write the book you want to read, and so much more.

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Marion: Today my guest is author, essayist, poet and activist Taylor Brorby. He’s the author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and published by Liveright, a division of W.W. Norton. He’s also the author of Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action & Civil Disobedience, and he’s the co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Huffington Post, Lit Hub, Orion magazine, The Arkansas International, Southern Humanities Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and numerous anthologies. He’s a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press. Is an honor to welcome you to QWERTY. Hi, Taylor.

Taylor: Thanks so much for having me, Marion.

Marion: Well, I’m delighted. I have kind of been chasing after you since that first remarkable review of Boys and Oil that I read, and many more reviews to follow. And while the great adage is to write the book you want to read, you seem to have written the book that simply did not exist and there’s a difference. And while all memoir writers are correct in believing that their take on any universal makes it unique, your book, Boys and Oil, is a book for which perhaps there’s not even a designated bookshelf in the bookstore. So let’s talk about writing into a space that doesn’t exist.

Specifically just to give the listeners a bit of a background, you explore issues related to environment and sexuality around being queer. So did you identify the need for this book? Did you write the book and then discovered that publishing would give you permission to invent this space? My audience is writers, and they’re told time and time again to provide comps for their books: Books that compare to the one they proposed to write and publish. So explain about getting permission or finding permission or writing in any way. Basically, how did this space get made?

Taylor: It got made out of laziness, Marion, I mean…

Marion: Not what I expected you to say.

Taylor: …by which, all I do is I study bookshelves for a living. I mean, how riveting is that? I sort of go, “Why does this book exist?” It’s sort of this cosmic symbol from the universe to say, “Well dummy, maybe it’s up to you to write that.” Now, of course we’re talking about a memoir here, so it’s coming out of my life, but it still holds true. I mean, many times while I’m doing my dog and pony show around the country, I’ll say, “Name a famous North Dakota writer.” Long silence. There’s a huge bookshelf that needs to be filled with that literature. So there’s this type of permission to your question there. I’m not someone living in Brooklyn who’s drinking spritzers and talking about myself and saying, “Oh my God, there’s a writer every five feet here,” or something.

I mean the prairie is huge and it’s sparsely populated with writers, which does create a sense of loneliness. And I went into a space where I had to admit, I know there are more people like me in this part of the world who are probably feeling lonely and probably feeling alone in who they are or how they feel. That’s the best permission to write a book that a writer can have because it’s coming out of a sense of service. It’s not in fact about me. It’s not that I think my life is so remarkable. I mean, all I do, Marion, is listen to NPR and classical music, and other people do that too. But it’s by sharing how common my life is that I think it allows other people to feel seen in their family tensions, in the extractive economies they might be living by, in being a first generation college student. I hope what my book does is that it just reminds us that all of our stories are important, and if we tell them really well, they can help other people feel less alone.

Marion: Yes, yes, yes, yes. So let’s dig in a bit more into that landscape because I think we can agree that our literary West is in desperate need of truth telling. That the romance we injected into the West is unreal. The racial scrubbing we did is inhuman, the whole “expansion at all costs” mentality is insufferable and unsupportable. We’ve romanced it. And while you’re still young, you did grow up with some of these same romantic influences about the American West that we all know. So talk to me a bit about finding your own west and writing from that place please.

Taylor: I think I had to grow up or had to have grown up in the most incredible location you can in this country. I grew up nine miles south of where Sakakawea met Lewis and Clark, which is perhaps one of the most incredible moments in this country’s history in terms of the expansion, the settler colonial narrative. I grew up downstream from where Sitting Bull surrendered his rifle, which was the subjugation of Native Nations to the United States government. I grew up an hour north of where George Armstrong Custer last lived before he went west and had the worst day of his life at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

How couldn’t I write a big story? And part of it is upon closer examination, knowing that my family, though poor peasant farmers who were this ethnic group known as Germans from Russia, they benefited from the genocide of Native Americans. A story that is still too taboo to talk about in certain circles where I come from that people that look like me, that is to say one half German from Russia, one half Norwegian, we benefited from the destruction of brown-skinned people. What does that mean in terms of stories of reclamation, of acknowledgement of where we’re going. And part of it, the myth of the West is so hyper-focused on individualism and masculinity.

I think we see stories of loneliness, of addiction, of broken people. It’s part of my own story of feeling very alone when you’re in a culture where the expectation is you have to be tough, you have to be self-reliant, no one’s going to come and help you. What does that conversation shift to if we start to become more sensitive and caring and attentive, not only to the people we live around, but to the places we call home? I think that’s part of what I hope I’ve been trying to do in my work with Boys and Oil, but also my life as an out gay man who knows the American West very well.

Marion: Yeah, it’s such a generous amount of things you bring to this to let us in. And you also have to layer in, as you referred before, to the extractive economy. You have to layer in the fact… Well, you refer to it as a fossil fuel heritage in this beautiful book. And writers are told to write what they know, but what you know is actually what you have to reframe utterly. So talk a little bit more about how the landscapes we grow up on shape us, but how you resisted all this inaccuracy with your queerness. There’s a triangulation there between the fossil fuel and the inaccuracy and your queerness that is just breathtaking.

Taylor: Well, thank you. I mean, I think I grew up in a culture of being gaslit. Every lake, I’m told growing up as a child in North Dakota, freezes. That’s simply not true. The closest lake I grew up to, a manmade reservoir, Nelson Lake, which cooled the coal-fired turbine engines of the power plant where my mother worked the entirety of her career never freezes. It’s January right now in North Dakota, all lakes should be frozen. Marion, you and I could take a vacation to Nelson Lake and sit in it right now and it would be bathtub warm. Steam snails into the air from this lake. And I think if you grow up just with that basic fact, you know to be suspicious of what you’re told. That the way people make their money might in fact be rooted to unmaking the world and you start to see things.

It’s maybe perhaps why I’ve written the book I’ve written is you have a very queer lens through which you view the world. That is to sort of say, is this how it really works? Is this the way it should be? And what are the stories we’re not living into by admitting these other stories, which may be our lies or maybe ways of being hoodwinked as a culture?

Marion: Yes. Be suspicious, ask the questions, and also be vulnerable. I would say vulnerability is the portal or maybe the linchpin to writing good memoir. And it’s hard for me to zero in on my absolutely favorite expression of your vulnerability, but I’m going to choose one. It appears on page 219 of your 335-page book, Boys and Oil, and portrays what you call your first summer fling at the age of 26. You’re in a tourist town of a little over 100-year round residence as you tell us when you meet a man and quote, “Let him lead because I didn’t know how to be coy with men, how to be flirtatious in a fractured land.”

There’s an awful lot going on in that sentence that skillfully combines your two main themes: gayness and this fractured land of ours. But the admission of being unable to be coy, of letting someone else lead, of having the summer fling in a fractured land brought my whole heart to the page. So: vulnerability. Give us a little lesson here. I know you’re a teacher, and if you would, just talk about the importance of vulnerability and how to do it, please.

Taylor: I think when we’re writing well, we’re being as open as possible. It doesn’t mean that we’re giving every reader everything of who we are, but as I often say to my students, graduate students and undergrads, “Give me the gossip, because I love the gossip.”

Marion: I may get a tattoo, that’s it. I’ve resisted till now, but you may have pushed me over the edge.

Taylor: I think it is part of what I’m trying to do in my memoir. I’m not always trying to say, here’s how rough my life has been or here’s how hard it’s been, or woe is me. I want moments of humor and surprise. And also knowing that in that sentence you read back to me, a level of risk that I bet most of your listeners, most people in America can relate to because they’ve probably felt in public at different times, “I shouldn’t act too much this way. I shouldn’t be too loud. I shouldn’t be too large in the space I’m taking up.” And in the culture of western North Dakota, the American West, and I think we’re seeing America writ large right now. Being openly gay in certain spaces is incredibly dangerous. It can put your life in harm’s way.

I grew up with very genial grandfathers who everybody knew in my small town. Very kind funny men. But there’s a difference when you’ve proven, “Well, I’ve married a woman, I’ve had multiple children, I fit into the mold.” If you are too rambunctious as a man in western North Dakota, too witty, too loud, too funny, people get suspicious of you. And so to see someone at a bar be coy, a male be coy with another male, you have to have a sense of the environment in which you’re in and say, “Are other people watching us? Is this person actually who I think he is? What if I misread the situation? Does that put me in harm’s way?” And I tried my level best to combine that all in as few sentences as possible to create that emotional landscape for readers.

Marion: What did the first draft of that look like? Was it many sentences?

Taylor: I think the first draft of that… My goodness, thinking back to the first draft, there’s so many drafts of this book to think I knew I wanted to tell this story from my life because it’s so rare for us to get, first of all, any queer characters in the American West. If I were to quiz your viewership, name a famous piece of gay writing from the American West, they probably instantly say Brokeback Mountain.

Marion: That’s it. Begins and ends.

Taylor: Exactly. A 30-page short story. And then there’d be a long silence there. And I thought it’s related to why I wanted to write this book is my life isn’t fiction. I wanted a true story out there. I wanted in this book a story of a summer fling because so many people in my life talk about through summer flings, or “Oh, I dated a guy for a summer, I dated a girl for a summer,” and yada yada yada.

And we don’t have many stories about queer romances in the American West that just happened over a summer. So I thought maybe by writing this, it would get us into a space of saying, my life isn’t so different from yours in what I want, what I desire, what I’m after, but the outcome of that particular life can be because two men holding hands in Medora, North Dakota is not going to go unnoticed without commentary. I think that first draft was very hard because I had to ask myself, “Do I actually want to put this out in the world?” Sometimes by sharing stories from small places, it can actually increase risk and danger for people who live there.

Marion: Yes. And you write about risk and danger. You write about getting beat up when you leave a bar one night. When your queerness is revealed to your family, it makes it impossible for you to stay where you are. Your beloved grandpa dies. There’s a lot of anguish portrayed in your work, but it’s not a sad book. It’s not that. But let’s talk about experiencing anguish and then writing about anguish. I mean, not to be too pedestrian. One is internal and one is external. And somewhere in between we have to turn those feelings into language that are not self-indulgent, cliche, or too cool to the touch. So how? How do you, when you’re teaching, when you’re writing, what tips have you got about going from that place of anguish to expressing anguish?

Taylor: It takes a lot of time and reflection and processing. And that can come through therapy, it can come through long walks. It can come through meditation and yoga and exercise and all of these different ways we have to hold our inner landscapes. I often talk with my students, writing can be therapeutic, but it is certainly not therapy. And if you are turning a piece into me, let’s say a memoir piece, are you ready for me to take it as a serious piece of literature? Because the conditions then are very different. I want snappy dialogue, I want sentences that sing. I want effective metaphors, things like this. Are you still emotionally raw to the event from which you’re writing about that if I drill down hard on how you’ve written about it, it will do harm to you? Then I would say it’s too soon to do it, or you might have to do it privately for several years.

The scene where I get outed by an aunt of mine, it took me a decade to write that in terms of what ended up in the book. Because earlier drafts, I was too forgiving of my parents. Then other drafts, I was too bitter and angry at my parents and I thought, you have to give the readers evidence to recreate what you felt in that moment, but allow them to feel it. You can’t tell them how to feel. You should be angry for what happened there. You should be sad. They won’t trust you. And so part of it, what I tend to think about in my own writing or what I talk about with students is how are you creating scenes, building evidence to allow the readers to feel the sensations you felt, whether happy, sad, or otherwise in what you’ve written? But that can take a while. It can take a lifetime. I mean, there are stories I held back from putting in this book because they weren’t ready to be written in the way that would be ready for a public to read them.

Marion: Yeah, that makes sense. That makes absolute sense. It’s so helpful. The cost, the timing, what do you want from the editor, even the professor to whom you’re handing it in, are you ready for that? And it gets at something I want to talk about a little bit about the consequences. Let’s talk about memoir. I work with writers all day long and one of the things I talk a lot about with them is being ready to respond. I teach a class in writing opinion pieces, specifically the op-ed for newspapers. And I tell writers not to wait until the next act of gun violence or a Me Too moment or whatever. Get ready, be ready with the piece so that you can put a new top on it that signals to the reader why they’re reading this today.

You’re a tremendously responsive writer. You work through fracking, through the politics of oil, the diabetes crisis, queerness. You literally put yourself on the page, you got arrested at the Dakota Access Pipeline and you write quote, “that as the handcuffs were slapped on you, instead of being brave, you felt alone.” And so what’s the cost of being so responsive?

Taylor: You definitely need to have good friends. You can’t do all of this alone. I almost feel like I do these acts or show up despite myself. I’m feeling that way more and more. I sort of look around and go in these troubled times, where are our public intellectuals? Where are the Howard Zinns and the Edward Saids and Susan Sontags that are demanding more of us and the culture that we live in? And I don’t yet feel ancient, but at 36, I’m starting to feel more and more, “Maybe you’re trying to grow into a role, Taylor, where you have to speak up or you have to pull back the curtain about issues you know.” It’s not that I think I have any answers, it’s that I come from a particular place where so many American issues are bound up together that I think by sharing those stories and showing up, and at the end of the day that good old-fashioned thing of trying to be brave is the important thing to do.

The Rockefellers aren’t necessarily biting the hands that fed them in the way that we need them to be doing it. So maybe a trailer park gay boy from Center, North Dakota needs to get arrested over an oil pipeline. I don’t know. I think part of it too, Marion, is, I mean, that I’ve got four nephews who are increasingly getting bigger than I am as they age. And when I got arrested at that time, the Missouri River, a Duke University study had confirmed it was radioactive. And my nephews are dependent on the Missouri River for drinking water. And I thought, I’ve been trying my level best publishing op-eds, doing a fracking anthology, traveling around trying to whip people into a fury about the environmental costs of this. And I thought someday they’re going to be my age. And they might say, “Uncle Taylor, why didn’t you do everything you could to stop this?” And for me, that meant putting my body in harm’s way so I could at least look at them soberly and say, “I tried.”

And I would never prescribe that to other people, but I think literature has woken me up so often in my life that that’s our work. That’s what I’m trying to do. I want people to be infuriated. I want them to feel less alone. I want them to be passionate about what their loves and hobbies are and literature can do that. So I think I’m just this stubborn Norwegian at the end of the day, who just wants the world to be better than it currently is. So I guess someone has to show up.

Marion: I think someone does have to show up. I think that you showed up apparently fairly well-trained. And I would argue that right after reading well, writing poetry is a tremendous primer or primer, however you want to pronounce it, for writing. The precision of wordplay required in poetry, the idea of a meter, the smaller compact space of it. You were very well stocked when you sat down to write this book. It’s so apparent to me. So what do you think? Did your poetry beget some of this?

Taylor: Oh, I don’t know how I couldn’t. That whole opening to tell my little life story, it’s such a large story. We have to go back 350 million years to when North Dakota was the shallow sea. And that opening sort of almost creation story prologue about the death of these trilobites that we now call natural gas and oil is all constructed with “S” sounds or “C” sounds like conscience, that sound like “Ss.” And in poetry, “S” sounds, we call that semblance and they sound sloshy like sea water slapping against the shore. And I wanted to create a watery world because my world at one point was watery. And I thought poetry gives us vehicles in which tension and lines can shift dramatically where things can end abruptly. The choreography of poetry taught me how to demand that of my sentences over a 300-page book. I wanted to create that texture and movement like a Martha Graham dance performance in a longer book. And so poetry is like a well-defined muscle. And I was trying to build a well-defined muscle across an entire book. So poetry was bedrock for me.

Marion: That’s beautiful. And yes, it works. Absolutely. That’s exactly the environment that we literally submerge ourselves in as we enter this book. So as we wrap this up, which I really genuinely wish we didn’t have to do, but you got to get back to the work and me too. I ask this of every memoir writer I interview, what are we doing when we ask a memoir writer to go back into trauma? Are we asking them to relive it, reanimate it, experiencing that trauma all over again? Or are we asking them to stand here coolly away from it and have a look or something in between? What do you think the process is of writing from those hardest spots of life?

Taylor: I can really only speak what it’s been like for me and I’ve been working on writing about being diabetic, which is also who I am in another level of this. And thinking so often that when I’m coming to the page for memoir and if trauma is involved, to echo what I said earlier, my task is to recreate what I’m feeling, have felt, or will feel in the future for the reader to build, if not empathy, sympathy, and to say, “How dare someone have to live like this?” Or, “I’ve never thought about it in that way and that’s changed my perspective.” And so I would say for me as a writer, I need to subjugate myself to a place where it is not about me. It is that the story I know to be true from my life is in service of electrifying another mind into a new way of understanding their own life, their existence, or maybe the community in which they live. And I think that’s what great memoir writing can do, should do. And we need more of it.

Marion: It’s perfect. That’s just a perfect answer, Taylor. Thank you. Thank you so much. It’s been a joy speaking with you.

Taylor: Thank you so much for having me. It’s my pleasure.

Marion: The writer is Taylor Brorby. See more on him at taylor brorby dot com. His book is Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, published by Liveright, a division of W.W. Norton. Get it wherever books are sold.

I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jaquelin Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey.

Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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