“If Thoreau drank more whiskey and lived in the desert, he’d write like this.”
And thus, Writers Drinking Whiskey presents author, humorist, father, desert rat, and blues harmonicaist Michael Branch. On tap, we’ve got a Nevada Manhattan recipe, tale of a drunk Mary Kay lady, an important public safety announcement on what to do if approached by the vicious but adorable jackalope, and the best doggone writing tips you’re ever going to hear (along with a healthy dose on the power of humility).
And for our algo overlords (or “algolords”, as I like to say):
Think of “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books” but made for dads telling stories of their youth while chugging beer or for moms sneaking sangria out of coffee cups during soccer practice (or people who are single and drunk and loving it). Other corollaries include: “What Should I Read Next?” revamped to “What Should I Drink Next?” and “Smart PodCast Trashy Books” rebranded “Trashy Podcast Great Books.” For your social media consideration, imagine #booktube and #booktok meeting their long-lost mother and learning that she is warm and insightful but has a naughty side a country mile wide and once you’ve seen it, you can never unsee it.
Come one, come all–your literary happy hour is open for business and you never know who you might meet inside.
Slouched along the bar this episode:
Mike Branch is a writer, humorist, environmentalist, father, and desert rat who lives with his wife and two young daughters in the western Great Basin Desert. His work includes ten published books, one of which is the Pulitzer Prize-nominated John Muir’s Last Journey: South to the Amazon and East to Africa (Island Press). His recent books include: Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness (Shambhala / Roost Books, 2016), Rants from the Hill: On Packrats, Bobcats, Wildfires, Curmudgeons, a Drunken Mary Kay Lady, and Other Encounters with the Wild in the High Desert (Shambhala / Roost Books, 2017), ‘The Best Read Naturalist’: Nature Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (co-edited with Clinton Mohs, University of Virginia Press, 2017), How to Cuss in Western (Shambhala / Roost Books, 2018), and On the Trail of the Jackalope (Pegasus Books, 2022).
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Some people run from their demons; others sit down and have cocktails with theirs.”
William R. Hincy is a man who does and writes about the latter. Having become a writer after deciding it was the only sensible thing for a problem drinker to do, Hincy aspires to connect with readers by eschewing stock plots and generic formulas in favor of exploring characters who no longer create messes but have instead become the mess. This unflinching but empathetic eye and devil-may-care attitude helped him earn an American Fiction Award and be named a finalist for multiple International Book Awards for his anthology of short fiction, Without Expiration. His other full-length works include But the Ripping Apart, a novel about hoarding from whence the opening quote of this bio originates, and A Fire for Christmas, a satirical collection of stories set during the coronavirus pandemic (winner of the International Book Award and two American Fiction Awards).
William R. Hincy now hosts the popular podcast Writers Drinking Whiskey and lives outside Los Angeles with his wife and kids, having found solace in the notion that the only things sacred are self and whiskey-winged interludes.
Links:
Mike website: https://michaelbranchwriter.com/
Raising Wild Cocktail recipe: https://www.forewordreviews.com/articles/article/michael-branchs-raising-wild-cocktail/
High West Bourye: https://highwest.com/collections/all-products/products/high-west-bourye
Two Bitch whiskey: https://www.twobitchspirits.com/
Chapel tavern: https://www.chapeltavern.com/
Death and taxes bar: https://www.deathandtaxesreno.com/
Jackalope trailer video: https://vimeo.com/679257267
Hair donation for kids: https://childrenhairlossneeds.org/
Chapters:
00:00:00 Start
00:00:37 Introducing author Michael Branch
00:02:13 Michael Branch’s author journey
00:03:32 Rye Manhattan cocktail recipe
00:11:06 Best place for cocktails in Reno NV (travel advice)
00:12:26 Rants from the Hill
00:37:25 Jackalope jackalope I saw a jackalope!
00:41:07 Did Jackalopes cause cancer?
00:45:17 Jackalope hunts
00:53:02 The moment the liquor kicked in
00:59:04 THE jackalope question
01:06:25 Writing process
01:20:20 Core of Mike’s writing
01:34:33 Writing advice you wished you’d learned earlier
01:36:23 Dealing with failure
01:49:55 Shots rapid fire fun
02:00:54 Author Reading
02:14:26 Last Call life hack
#podcast #author #booktube
Hello everybody welcome to another edition of writers drinking whiskey the show R James Joyce would say I that’s some methin gibberish and incoherent stuff lad I don’t know what you’re doing with your life um I’m Irish please forgive that that horrible Irish accent um I am of course your host William R hensy and I am honored thrilled today to have author Michael Branch with me at The Whiskey Bar Mike welcome to the bar hey this uh this is a legendary podcast the the few the proud the the drinkers who write and the writers who drink I’m happy to be with you thanks for the invitation very good um and I’ll give you the brief introduction here say um and then I’ll I’ll let you take it and fill in anything that important that I missed but so you’ve got um 10 books published including the Pitzer prize nominated John M’s last journey South to the Amazon East Africa your most recent book was on the trail the Jackalope and you know finally some hard science on Our Mysterious you know horned B bunny friend um and then there you know and what I love um is the quote um and I forget which book it was for maybe it was for Jackal Loup but it’s the perfect quote for an author to be on this show is if the if Theo drank more whiskey and lived in the desert he’d write like this so yeah I was deeply honored the greatest review Line of all time so that is that is any number of panning reviews when you get just a moment like that very good yeah that was a great one I was really happy to see that I hope someone says something similar just just the whiskey part like if if himy way drank just a little too much he would write like this and I like oh there I am I’m inent I mention so often in my books that I have actually had people write in through my website and say hey I really love your work but I know you’re a father and I’m really concerned about you and I wonder if maybe you need some help and I sort of have to explain well even non-fiction has a narrator and my narrator drinks more than I do so it’s okay I swear but you wouldn’t know you wouldn’t know it from the books right right I I might start getting comment sections on this on this show going and we’re a little concerned maybe you need to cut back the show a little here awesome so I wonder then um I kind of if I tried to get the Highlights that I’d gotten off your website but is there um anything ice ice I can’t even speak now anything else you’d like to mention um you know just kind of your author journey lead leading up till today yeah the the slip on Ice says that you’re thinking more about our cocktail than about this conversation all no no that’s that’s a fine introduction my writing is creative non-fiction has an environmental emphasis and I’m also a humor writer so a lot of the work that I do has to do with the Great Basin Desert where I live in Nevada um and I’m really interested in the relationship between people in Landscapes especially as those relationships can be mediated by their families I write a lot about my family and my kids which is a little unusual for an environmental writer and so yeah I’m interested in humor work I’m interested in place-based non-fiction um and I’m interested in writing about family too so that’s kind of a shortcut into what I’ve been up to and I also do a lot of popular science writing so the Jackalope book has lots of folklore and methology uh but it also has lots of science lots of nerdy stuff that I try to sneak in on people so yeah that’s the kind of stuff that that interests me and uh I’m looking forward to chatting over a drink here awesome very cool and so that leads to the most important question of the show which is what are we drinking all right well um I have already sent you a recipe that I know you’re going to post that I’ll tell a quick story about but then I’m going to make a different drink but um my book called braising wild I was once being interviewed and the last question that the interviewer asked was if your book was a cocktail what would it be and it caused me to write this sort of you know tongue-and-cheek literary recipe for a raisin wild cocktail which was published by forward reviews and people are still out there drinking it um so you can post that for your listeners um but that’s more of a summer cocktail so what I’m about to mix is ay Manhattan which sounds like a pretty straight ahead fair but it is the gift that keeps on giving so shall I go ahead then and prepare this drink absolutely okay so first of all you’ll want one of these you can’t tell from the distance but this is chilled and needs to be coldness is a big part of this um so what we’re going to do here if you want to use a conventional [ __ ] that’s acceptable but I recommend a shot glass with one of the Three Stooges that tends to work better I find the whiskey we’re going to mix a lot of people make Manhattans with bourbon but my palette tends more to the spicy than the suite but because I just wrote a book on jackalopes I’m going to be using this High West bourbon uh this is the art on artwork on this whiskey comes from a mid 18th century European scientist who was in fact documenting a horn rabbit in his natural history book in the medieval and Renaissance periods U leus cornutus the rabbit with the crown it was thought to be an actual independent species so this booze is uh from The High West Distillery and it is from Park City Utah which is a dry area and I love the irony that people from dry counties tend to make great booze the same is true of in lynberg if you want to make great booze for other people to get bu make sure you stay sober so the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to take a cocktail mixer we’ve got some ice here a great sound isn’t it one of the great sounds in the natural world it is okay so we’ve got ice in our [ __ ] I mean in our mixer now we’re going to take our Three Stooges shot glass and put in 2 OZ of buai and by the way the reason this whiskey is called buai It’s a combination of bourbon and rye and uh because this was a whisky that the distillers in Park City at High West knew was going to be a hybrid whiskey that was why they wanted to choose the Jackalope as their icon very cool hybrid animal to represent a hybrid whiskey so I’ve just put two shots of this delicious highr West buai whiskey into my mixer now I’m going to put in a little less than an ounce I don’t have much of a sweet tooth if you do use a full ounce this is dubonet um it’s a sweet vermouth a mid 19th Century Paris vermouth but I’m uh kind of a my little dropper here which makes this look super elicit which makes it even more fun I’m going put that as well and then we’re going to have a quick shake the Acoustics of cocktails are so important all right all right 4 in chilled glass you have just a little bit of a sort of russet mudded color and then before we begin a cocktail Cherry I like these Peninsula cocktail cherries but uh the key thing here is just don’t ever use a Marino Cherry it’s just an Abomination don’t ever do that tart cherry is fine H tart cherry or sour cherry is fine but never a marcino so in this goes with a pocket knife and unlike an old fashion which when you’re done mixing it you should just walk away for a minute and let that drink think about itself before you sip it this is a drink that won’t wait it has to be consumed chilly so that’s arai Manhattan Nevada style and I’d like to toast to you Bill and thanks again for having me with you what are you drinking over there on your end very good I will share but I have to toast you because we just said it so let’s take a drink of that while we’re cheers there there we go wait wrong side oh there we go yeah this is at that’s desperate yeah oh it was good so right um what I got um because I I think you had mentioned you were gonna make the you sent me the cool recipe for the drink and he mentioned you would probably make a r Manhattan so I wanted though to honor the hybrid Jackalope so we were in um my wife and I were in Las Vegas this past weekend and we wandered into the store with an easy name but I keep forgetting it there it is spirits and spice and everything nice of course is the is the tagline as you would expect and uh the guy there um that was helping us it’s one of these stories with a bunch of whiskies where you get to taste them and then you take the bottles home they individually bottle them um and the guy’s name was river which is a unique name but then also to contradict it being a unique name is also my niece’s name so I remember but we had a great time he just kept having me taste so many I don’t even know how much money we spent I just you know my wife was like it’s fine just keep and I’m like okay well it’s fine I’m I’m I’m going um but they had this if I can hold it here it’s a two [ __ ] Bourbon and they also have these these cool little pores here this one with the horse head which is my Chinese zodiac but I think the two dogs with the horse essentially makes this a Jackalope yeah absolutely yeah I mean that’s good old school animal hybridity right out of the gate you got the right idea right so I just have a little bit a little bit of this on the Rocks nice I like that you left I like that you left Las Vegas saying I don’t know how much money we spent I think you’re not the first person to experience that emotion as you leave oh sure yeah well you know neither of us gamble so we I actually we’ve gone we didn’t go for like 10 years we’re in La so it’s just you know three and a half hour drive from here yeah um and but we didn’t go for a good like 10 years and then this year we’ve gone um a few times there was couple shows my wife want to see things so we’ve gone I don’t think we spent a dollar gambling yeah so it’s just eating and then booze like that’s where right and it’s a good town for both I’m up here in Northern Nevada where the culture is completely different um but I don’t gamble either but I like it when I can go someplace and have great food and booze that’s subsidized by gamblers that works out great for me exactly um and so actually that was going to be my next question I like to ask where everybody is and where is the best place to get a drink there oh that’s a great great question well um for 16 years I lived with my family in a really remote area of the desert out north of Reno Nevada on the California line where the elevation the terrible roads the weather it was a challenge to get to town for a drink but for the last couple years we’ve been in town here in Reno although we live right on the edge of the national forest so I’m up on the forest every day with my dog huckle here and uh so we’re kind of living in the BBS now but we’re right up against Wilderness so we have a weirdly civilized life but not too civilized but there’s um increasingly Reno is a great great both beer and cocktail town and hands down my favorite place to get a great cocktail in Reno Nevada is a place called Chapel Tavern and uh you can imagine the devotion that those of us have when we go to Chapel I will be doing again tomorrow afternoon um so that’s my very favorite death and taxes also a good cocktail shop here um so it is now possible as it was not when I moved here in the 90s to get a great drink but Chapel Tavern in Reno Nevada ask for Sean and tell them that Mike Branch sent you awesome very good I have to remember that I haven’t been to to Areno yet I’ll have to make a trip up there one of these days one of the things um and I’ll we’ll get to Jackalope too because I’ve some questions on that honory jackalopes but um one of the things I thought was super fun and you’ve kind of mentioned your love of it already but you had a um uh I’m just gonna say the name I can’t think of how to how to place it um rants on the hill which I think was um and you can tell my extensive research right like I looked at your websites like I’ve studied like I think anyone watching this show knows there’s like I I spend a lot of time as all authors do just studying studying things um but it consisted of six to nine essays it says on life and parenting in the high desert um I think it was worded more eloquently on your website but you know this is me talking so it’s it’s coming out how it comes out um so I wonder if maybe you could kind of set us up maybe give us the the background on that and maybe we could we could you know dive into those essays a little bit yeah sure well you know like I said we had this wild experience my wife and I of raising our two daughters for 16 years out in this really remote area of the high desert so we run 50 acres with a half mile long driveway um 6,000 ft you know nothing but wildfires and earthquakes and blizzards uh you know just really hard intense wild living and we were one lot off of BLM which is public lands all the way to California so essentially you know in the desert Wilderness and part of what really fascinated me about that experience was that I started to see connections between my relationship to Wild places and my relationship to my kids and I started to kind of see a wildness in my kids and in the experience of parenting that seemed really new to me and conversely my kids were starting to kind of change my relationship to Nature and a lot of my humor work actually came out of that because you know nothing can explode adult pretensions faster than a kid right a kid can second so you know I had spent a long time developing this elaborate self-image of myself as an environmentalist and a Wilderness guy and all this stuff you know and then my kids would say like Dad why do you say you believe this but you do this and it’s like okay you know it all falls apart and so the humor kind of came in reconciling that Gap but anyway I started to get really fascinated with how my experience of the high desert was being so profoundly influenced by my experience in parent in particular the way they both enforced an incredible humility like being in the desert and being a parent are two things that remind you constantly of your weakness and your inexperience and your vulnerability and so I started to kind of explore that and so High Country news which is a magazine out here in the west um asked me if I wanted to start doing these essays as a monthly Series so for about six and a half years I wrote a monthly essay it was always about life on what I called ranting Hills so these were called rants from the hill and all 60 however many of these essays were these short often comic essays about living in the high desert and about raising kids in the high desert and a couple of books eventually came out of those uh but it was really a cool experience to have that occasion every month to sort of meditate maybe on something new I had learned about my high desert environment but also to be able to keep poking fun at myself for how much I didn’t know um and how much my kids were teaching me so that was kind of where the series came from uh and it really helped to shape my my sense of myself and relationship to the desert and my kids it was a it was a cool experience right yeah it sounds like it you know and it always reminds me too and maybe because I have the four kids I actually not as as a isolated desert but I grew up in High Desert grew up in Palmdale California which anyone that kind of knows the landscape with LA if if you think of the Rose Bowl and they show the mountains behind it all the time that’s the San Gabriel mountains on the other side is high desert and Palmdale Lancaster it’s where where I was rear that’s that’s where I grew up um and uh and it’s it’s grown a lot especially since I was a kid but you do that sense of humility and kind of learning from like oh you’re out in the desert and then you just go out a little bit you realize oh I don’t have water like how quickly like you’re like oh I need to set back like I can’t keep going this way I need to be back because it’s 110 and yeah um I’m going to melt right here so I think it’s interesting you mentioned that too I think um I’ve mentioned on on the show before but one of the the things I really pride myself on isn’t the right term one of the things I Aspire for is intellectual humility and I think humility in all things but especially intellectual I always try to like because the more you learn right the more you learned about your environment the more you realize the less you know and so it’s like it’s it’s a weird inverse behavior and that when you do you start going like okay like whatever the political thing is whatever it is that people get very up and they they know all the right answers but then you start going oh [ __ ] I don’t know the right answers yeah yeah to I totally agree with you and I love that metaphor of like you know an island of knowledge and a sea of ignorance and the bigger you make that Island the more contact it has with that sea of ignorance like the smarter you get the more you realize how little you know and I love that feeling I mean to me that’s really important to writing it’s really important to engaging with environment but also with family but yeah you’re totally right and the part of the desert you’re from you don’t need to be told you get it is you know people talk about well you look at the stars at night and you think about how small you are you look out over the ocean you know and it seems so vast and the desert is like that too um that sense of you know this is the Sage Brush ocean here right but right but there’s also that sense that I don’t know I mean one way to put it I guess would be I think as a species we got ourselves in a heap of trouble by subscribing to the idea that we control the natural world and that that is that is an arrogant assumption that has caused us a ton of problems so what I like about being in the high desert is it doesn’t care about me in the slightest there’s nothing nurturing about that environment for for a big mammal like me and so I like just being reminded of the fact that you know Nature has agency it has a will of its own it’s here for its own reasons not just to serve my purposes and I just think you know humility can be a superpower if we really if we really took it seriously especially in our relationship to Nature and to the people we love started from the assumption that we don’t know rather than that we do I you know I think it might result in some different assumptions some different behaviors and you know I don’t mean to sound like pedantic about it but I I just think as a species we need a lot more of it yeah no I agree and it’s funny because it really hits with parenting too right like you like I know everyone I know that hasn’t had kids yet I’m gonna do this with my kids I’ll never do that you know like your kids like my kids have kids now so I I get the like laugh at them cuz I can see it like I would never do that D you’re awful I would do this and then you watch them I’m like all right well yeah God bless you I don’t give them that I told you so because then I I’ll just be like I’ll be humbled again some way and I know it so I’m just like whatever this is planing out I can enjoy the humor in this but I can keep my mouth shut in this instance yeah no you get it every every day when you step into parenting you know that you’re in for a eyes that will show you your limitations I mean that’s part of what’s so challenging about it and also so rewarding is just it’s so rare to have that feeling like yeah I really nailed that you know the minute you think that it’s about to go off the rail that is sad that is exactly how it is every single time I’ve gotten that like oh I’ve got this like things are going really well you’re pumping the air and then suddenly like everything’s off the off the rails like well whatever I wonder is there a was there a favorite rant from the hill was there a certain essay that that sticks out in your mind a little more than the others you know not really so much but I I do think that the process of doing that series taught me a lot one of the things it taught me was I I had no experience in journalism where people are super deadline driven and I had always kind of done my writing it was done when I felt like it was done but now I have this gig where you know there was a deadline for an essay every month and a couple things were great about that one is it really taught me to be more disciplined as a writer not to subscribe to some idea of romantic inspiration it’s like no you got to have a bunch of ideas ready because it’s time to crank this out um the second thing that was really cool about that series for me was I got to do a lot of Natural History writing I got to write a lot about the high desert which I love and yet blend it with humor and so my subsequent books which do a lot of environmental writing and a lot of humor writing together that move of trying to braid those two strands is a little bit tough and so I had a lot of practice doing it with that series and then the third thing that was cool that I didn’t see coming was you know for the first year or two I just wrote about stuff that happened to me like oh you know here’s the time I glad down this mountain or here’s the time there was a bobcat in the yard or here’s the time I built a treehouse with my kids but then you know as I got into the third fourth fifth year I started to reverse that order and say what’s a cool experience I can go have that would be really fun to write about so I still wrote about stuff that was happening spontaneously but increasingly it would be like man I’ve always wanted to to take my daughters and try rolling down this giant sand dun so I would go do it and then i’ write about it you know so I’d come out of it with an essay which was fun but also with a life experience and that kind of like Paradigm Shift has been helpful to me ever since don’t just write about what happens use your writing to put yourself in a position to have cool experiences that you might not otherwise have so I learned a ton from that I I don’t have a particular favorite I just like that I learned to practice blending essentially popular science writing with humor writing and that emerged as a kind of voice for me that’s been really comfortable since sure yeah no and I I I love that thought of it too that be proactive about it versus passive right like you know you can do that in all life but I think as writers we don’t always think of we don’t think of it right you can think of it like I don’t want to be proactive all my life I need to like proactive but I think our writing a lot of times yeah we if if this is what happened you don’t get to trigger it from happening or trigger it to happen so I that’s that’s important yeah yeah so sometimes when I’m talking with writers who are starting out and trying to CFT a concept for a book idea you know instead of just focusing on the idea I’ll often say stuff like well where where will you have to travel to to do this and do you want to go there who will you have to talk to and are those the kind of people you want to talk to what kind of research will you have to do and does that really interest you because you know you take on a book project you’re going to be immersed in it sometimes for years it needs to be something that’s going to take you intellectually spiritually geographically interpersonally to places that you really want to go so I I think that’s important you know especially in a world where you know nobody’s figured out how to sell a book in America America so if you’re going to write one you need to write it because you want to because you you’re invested and you care about it so yeah it was it was a neat experience right sure sure um what what do you think it is I mean and maybe you you already covered it um with how that the desert makes you kind of feel you know humble and things but is there anything else about the the desert in particular that that speaks to you so profoundly yeah for sure I mean part of it is that to go go into the this landscape of the Great Basin Desert the highest coldest biggest desert in North America and the least inhabited one you know you’re going back in time essentially because you know these these landscapes in central Nevada where I spend a lot of my time you know some of these places have a population density of you know one one and a half two people per square mile that would have met the standard for Wilderness in 1890 for unsettled Frontier so there’s idea right like the march of civilization across the continent but when you double back and go not to the West that is California and Oregon and Washington but to The Inter Mountain West to the high desert West I mean there’s nobody out there so part of that is that opportunity for Solitude is so different and I don’t necessarily mean it in like a super fuzzy thorian way like go out there and have epiphanies although that can happen too it’s mainly just a cool experience to feel like you’re the speck in the landscape um I also really like the way the desert sort of hides in plain site it’s actually a landscape with tons of biodiversity but we don’t really see that in part because so many desert animals are nocturnal um and there’s just a lot of amazing species and Landscapes that are really highly specific to this environment that you can’t see anywhere else and uh so yeah we talked about that feeling of openness of vulner ility of humility but I also really like the the idea that you know it it sounds it does sound thorian but like if you want to escape the vices of over civilization and imagine what a landscape looked like a hundred or a thousand years ago there aren’t that many places in North America to do it anymore and this is one of them so I I really value that that it’s so easy to get the noise of the world in your head um that you need a place to be able to go wherever you live to to get that out a little bit and and this is a great place to do that it’s it’s really helped you know I’m well pretty tight and it’s really helped me to be in a landscape that unwinds you so much right right well you know it reminded me when I was I think I was about 19 well no probably a little probably mid 20s I became obsessed with Hawks um and I’m I’m living in P deal and I just get this sudden like very rabid like I need to go watch every Hawk Raptors every hog Eagle Falcon and that go find I need to go look at them and then take pictures right yeah and because the desert there you need to either be out early preferably get out early because they’re going to be out having breakfast Nature’s out having breakfast and then it’s gone for the day I mean until the evening and they come out for dinner right I mean and so even though I was I’ve never was a morning person I started waking up Before Dawn so I could be out right at dawn and go see especially during the winter because then you get the wintering animals and you know back you know back East the Midwest you get a lot of places with the beautiful fall colors right we don’t get it we don’t get it in LA we don’t get it in the high desert really just the leaves fall and you the um the Joshua trees are still a Joshua Tree it is how it is but you get that sense of the seasons passing through the behavior of the wildlife around you and you have to take time out to go see it they don’t present themselves to you you have to kind of go out and be still you know I found actually watching them I was like oh see and they fly away I was like oh you know if I stay here that’s probably gonna come back in like a half hour I don’t need to go look anymore I can stay here and just observe and and watch this landscape that seems unchanging was in fact changing a little subtle ways all of the time if you just look out for it so I grew later in life because I’m growing up oh the desert is horrible you know fale I hate it here you know every other kid this just ruining my life and then later in life GRE to really appreciate like how beautiful it was and how how rich it was and just in a different way that was a little more special actually that you have to um it’s easy to love a waterfall yeah yeah I love I love way you put that and I also really love your idea bill of the idea that you know watching animals is not only a way of making ourselves more attentive and calmer and more focused but also that it’s a kind of clock right you know we’re used to this clock uh we’re used to the clock of the Sun every day but there’s this larger clock that’s always working a clock of the year of the weather of the movement of stars but especially the movement of animals I mean that’s one of the ways that we really Mark time in the desert is who’s here you know what what non-human beings are here what are they doing and I also really like your idea bill that you know you think there’s not much happening here until you start to really pay attention and you had asked about you know which of the rants I liked best you know one one that uh covered a concept that was really fun for me is I had an experience about oh probably almost 15 years ago now and I hurt my back I was laid up for a few months and I was really frustrated with that because I’m a big Walker and my wife said okay well when you’re able to walk again you know what do you want to do and uh I said just I just want to walk and walk and walk so I came up with this arbitrary idea that and it it is purely arbitrary that I would walk a th000 miles that year within a 10 m radius of my house and what was interesting about that experiment was you know you would think like a big epic hikes and stuff but a th000 miles a year is less than three miles a day so it it didn’t really require epic hikes but it did require getting out there all the time so so if I had a long day work and I came home and I didn’t have my three miles in then I hiked in the dark or By Moonlight or I snowshoed or you know whatever and what I discovered was and I’ve been doing that now for a long time so I’ve walked like 25,000 miles within 10 miles of my house and people say like oh my it’s so repetitive you’re just doing the same thing over and over again you’re seeing the same thing and I always say no I’m learning to see how different it is each time so I’m getting a more into knowledge of the landscape for sure you know I know you know here’s the place where prorn anope are going to show up or here’s the place where Great Horn Owl is going to Nest but mainly what strikes me is the differences that you can essentially you know I guess it’s like the heraclitis thing you can’t bathe in the same river twice right I I cover this same ground and yet depending on the day the year the season and also how I I changed right how my day went how my year is going sure right you know I I just love that idea of a ritual of repetition I mean after all we would not say about our family right wake up and say oh [ __ ] I’ve seen them every morning for the last why would I want to wake up and talk to them again you know because you build increased intimacy and that Bond becomes more meaningful over time so so that experiment um John mure once took this famous walk from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico and called it my Thousand Mile Walk to the gulf and I’d always been inspired by that when I was younger oh I want to go walk a thousand miles but I always assumed it would be here to someplace a thousand miles away and then I realized no I I want to walk thousands and tens of thousands of miles but I want to do it right here on my home landscape and I want to see it in all weathers in all conditions and all times of the day and year and what I discovered was it it really honed my ability to see things and and the idea that I would ever be bored out there just seems insane now to me um but but that was cool experience to write about too that ritual of going back onto the land in this um really kind of ritualistic way and going to the same place and learning how to see it differently sure sure that reminds me too we had um John Lane who put us in contact who’s um I I’ll link his episode up up with our show but is already out by the time this is going but by the time recording is his has already been released um had talked about that I think he walked within a one mile radius of his house he had done that for I think it was a year um if I remembering right and so I think that’s powerful I I tend to do that I really like um mountain biking and so but what I’ve started to do is I go ride almost the same course I do sometimes I like to increase my stamina sometimes to go a little longer but I kind of like to go the same places and you just keep see things and there’s like that ritual to it and things and so I kind of go and people are like oh don’t you get bored and I have some friends I’ll ride with occasionally and I’ll go when they want and go somewhere I’ll go out and ride with them and that’ll be fun but it is when when you first started talking about that it reminded me of well you don’t say that about like your wife right I mean maybe maybe some people well you’re not saying Merry long saying that um but like you realize and I think uh my wife Claire and I been married um I shouldn’t stammer on this 13 years how old’s my son 13 years we’ve been married 13 years this year um and uh I think it was probably last year maybe two years ago that then I really started to appreciate that daily ritual of it like I appreciated her I I love her to death but I started to appreciate like oh you really started just seeing this person and yeah she’s actually she’s a little different it’s the same person but that does change and like it’s interesting kind of seeing that and kind of end up you really see it with kids because um i’ I’ve told all of them it’s like you love this baby and that baby leaves you that person’s gone and that’s a toddler and you love that toddler and this series of people you love that leave you and they leave you with a new person you love but you never get that person back you know um but it’s it’s beautiful to see that change and with kids it’s really easy to see the change just so um apparent right the size everything language everything but with with your loved ones like your wife and things it’s slower your brother sister is a lot slower but it’s still happening things are still happening just pay pay a little attention to it yeah that’s a beautiful way you put that about kids because there’s a kind of exhilaration in watching them move through those phases but also there’s a kind of melancholy right that sure okay that that kid at that age will never come back and because I’ve written a lot about my kids a lot of times people read my books and then when I do gigs they’ll come up and talk to me and they imagine my girls the ages they were when I wrote about them right sure and they’ll you know it’s hard for the readers even sometimes to say she’s how old you know because sure picking up a scorpion for the first time or you know building a tree house or whatever but yeah you’re right and I think I’ve been married 23 years and I love it and I think the longer you do something like that I think you’re right the more and this comes back to humility in some ways right the more it’s not the spectacular stuff that’s most important it’s it’s the daily stuff it’s that ritual of repetition that just becomes richer and richer over time so yeah I love the way you put that so I wonder then um with with all of this talk um about The Melancholy of you know kind of the kids and things maybe it would be a beautiful time for some blues harmonica yeah okay I play a little I will say that this is an instrument that is meant to be played with other people so kind of an obnoxious thing to do but a guy I play with a lot keeps saying don’t forget you have a tiny atomic bomb in your pocket so I’ll play a little bit I guess just to give you a [Music] sense so maybe then we can transition over to Jackalope um so on the trail to Jackalope um so maybe you could give us kind of the the background kind of the lay of the land and we could we could chat about it a bit yeah sure so that’s my most recent book it’s called on the trail of the Jackalope and you know most people in the west are familiar with the Jackalope this iconic hoax right the rabbit that has the antlers or the horns and um so you know I I have been seeing jackalopes all over the place in the form of you know beers and whiskies and bunker stickers and you know here’s here’s a t-shirt for the book and you know I sort of wondered like well where did this weird thing come from and I was at my local brew pub and I saw a woman lift a pine of hazy IPA and on her shoulder she had a Jackalope tattoo and I said okay this is G too far I gotta try to figure this out and so I went on this quest to understand this iconic Western American Myth of the horn rapbit and it just ended up becoming this incredible journey so part of the book is about where the actual Jackalope hoax comes from and I traveled and interviewed all these people and that’s a really cool story uh part of it is about the dissemination of that myth like how has this stuck around for almost a hundred years when a lot of other equally fantastic stories have vanished then there’s a lot in the book about the Jackalope in the Arts in film and music and painting and visual art and then the big reveal the big pivot in the book is um the last third of the book when I reveal that horn rabbits actually exist in nature and they are rabbits that get these weird growths on their head that are caused by a papiloma virus and I make the connection between the way these weird rabbits have virus induced growth fact that people in both settler and indigenous cultures around the world have been representing horn rabbits in their art and in their natural history for centuries you know I even found like three Buddhist sutras where the Buddha used the uses the horn rabbit as a teaching tool these are thousands of years old and I was like Wow horn rabbits are in cultures from around the world where does that come from and you know long story short is these virus stricken rabbits essentially are horn rabbits and then I do the nerdy stuff in the back part of the book um where I Trac that to show readers how it was the study of actual horn rabbits that led eventually to the development of the HPV the human papiloma virus vaccine which is the safest most effective anti-cancer therapy we’ve ever created and it wouldn’t exist without horned rabbits so you can see how this is kind of in my wheelhouse right it starts out with all the all the American West stuff but then pivots into the sort of natural history and popular science stuff and by the end of the book when I’m making my own jackalo mount my Taxidermy mount for the first time and I suck at it and grossed out by it and everything else um you know I’ve had this journey where I’ve traveled all over the country interviewing everybody from taxidermist to cryptozoologist to epidemiologists and virologists and I sort of told this Jackalope story in this full art from the really silly wacky stuff all the way to real horn rabbits in nature and how they’re saving millions of lives through the HPV vaccine so it was a book book that took me to a lot of places I didn’t expect to go I learned a lot and it really you know it changed my thinking about what kind of stuff I want to do going forward it was it was a real eye opener for me I wonder though in your research were you able to confirm that the Jackalope in in fact like they caused cancer so that they could get the credit for curing it well you know that is something you hear a lot when I was on a book tour last year you know a lot of people would tell me their Jackalope stories you know a lot of people said you know you you’re just making the Jackalope out like a savior you know like a a mythical magical animal that swoops in and saves lives but you know this is a vicious animal it has attacked people many many times and a lot of people have been killed and maimed by jackalopes um not to mention the fact that yeah many of these uh you know viral induced cancers you know may have been caused by evil jackalopes there you know there are good jackalopes and bad jackalopes but sure some some subspecies that are absolutely you know demonic and so the whole cute bunny thing is a misconception you know it really depends on the subspecies but yeah that that there is a prevailing theory that jackalopes caused cancer just to cure it so that they could get the credit and then people wouldn’t be as likely to hunt them because you know they would value the contribution that they had made to medicine so yeah I’m I’m glad you’ve heard that because it’s important that that narrative be out there also right right we want to make sure everyone gets the complete story here yeah yeah no it’s all about information you know we want to provide people with information right um which is very funny you know the next thing I was going to ask is this the jackob very dangerous what do we do if we encounter one in the wild yeah well you know I mean there’s lots of myths about jackalopes and um you know some are true and some are um you know a lot of people say that there was a you know a saber-tooth Jackalope that weighed about 150 lbs that used to attack wagon trains and homesteads that’s now extinct you know there’s scientific arguments about whether that’s true but then there’s stuff that we do know like well how fast can a jackal op run obviously 90 miles an hour because you it’s a hybrid of a pronghorn and a jack rabbit a pronghorn can run 60 a jack rabbit can run 30 60 plus 30 so you know that that kind of stuff is pretty clear that’s how the math would work yeah how do you attract Jack opes bill there’s only one way with whiskey you very good that’s absolutely you know among the the jackob stories that everybody agrees on jackalopes can only be attracted with whiskey uh Jackalope milk is a powerful afrodesia but it’s really dangerous to try to milk a Jackalope even though the Doe’s do sleep on their backs but they’re really vicious um and you know Jackalope is the only animal in the natural world that can ventril wise it can know essentially throw its voice so going back to the 19th century Cowboys would tell stories about you know you sit around the campfire and sing and you would hear this voice come in from the sage harmonizing with you and that’s the Jackalope of course but there’s still all this misinformation like people say oh you know the Jackalope harmonizes with the base part and that’s not true it’s always the Treble part of the song so there’s wor [ __ ] out there but yeah it can be vicious and in fact you know punchers on the frontier used to wear lengths of stove pipe on their legs so that if the Jackalope you know attacked their lower legs that you know they had that that armor protection jackalopes are so rare because they only M during lightning storms you know so when the bolts start crashing they kind of Cort erotically on their back Paws and what they get worked up so you know but but like I say mixed in with science about the Jackalope is you know all this misinformation so that’s part of what interested me too is how do you you know how do you disentangle those things sure very good I wonder um was there and maybe it was with within there I wonder if there was a favorite um pokes or myth or something about the Jackal Loup that you came across that you know maybe surprised you or uh caught your attention a little more than the others I I think my favorite thing is how many people especially when I was on I did 60 or so readings last year around the west and people would always come up and tell me their Jackal loupe stories and in that world of Jackal loupe narratives my favorite kind of sub genre is the Jackal loupe hunt story I had so many people come up and say oh man I got to tell you about this when I was 13 my grandfather took me out on the Prairie and he swore that we were going to track jackalopes and he made me get down on my hands and knees and he showed me little tracks and he taught me what to listen for and everybody’s story was different but everybody had a story about somebody who had messed with them before they knew better sure and and the cool thing about it was people never felt uh exploited or made fun of they always told those stories with so much warmth and Nostalgia it was like you know that was such a cool experience and then I got to cross over into the community of people who understand the joke and then I did it for my niece or my nephew or my grandkid so I love the idea of the Jackalope hunt because this tradition of having ritual hunts for animals that exist only in the imagination actually exist around the world and they often are rights of Passage for young people like we’re going to mess with you one last time before we welcome you into the adult community so I think the hoaxes that were built around Hunts especially within families you know that that stuff was really gold I I had a Blas you know when you travel with a book typically you’re telling people your stories but when I traveled with the Jackalope book everybody was telling me their stories and that made it so fun yeah that does sound fun you know what are reminding me of um we and and any kids out there I hope you’re not watching this show of of writers drinking whiskey here but close your ears but um we my son held on to Santa Claus for a while and I think like all kids they held on a little longer because they think won’t get presents anymore like if they tell you they don’t believe anymore and so uh what we started doing with the kids when they’re like 12 13 what whatever age is we would go okay Santa Claus isn’t real and then we’ start giving them a budget okay so for Christmas here’s your budget and you you don’t get them yet we’re GNA wrap them they’re gonna go into the tree but you can help you know be Santa that night take the tree things out and so we kind of make a new tradition out of it but when we were telling him last year it kind of reminded me of that because then all the other kids kind of learned and were like okay Dad I I believe and he had never said that so like okay I don’t I don’t know if he still believes a little or not so that let’s have the conversation and that was part of it was that yes this is a myth that we’re we’re telling you but there’s things you can learn from it and then now you’re part of the club you get to come in so it’s almost like that jackob hunt right it’s like oh you have these these myth these things that aren’t tangibly real but there’s other things around other and I think sometimes like we’ve talked about it since but I’m like sometimes just that magic of being able to believe in something you can’t see it doesn’t make ready sense because that will have practical impact in your life later yeah man you you crushed it that’s exactly what interests me so much about this is that idea that you know we have to be able to have a world that’s rich enough that the imagination is part of it and not just what we see in front of us every day love the Santa Claus example by the way because right um no adult would say oh you’re lying to these kids these little kids are you need to get in there right now and tell them the truth about the scientific facts about Santa Claus nobody would say that right because we understand we want to let our kids exist in a world of magic and Imagination for as long as they can so part of what’s cool to me about the Jackalope is it kind of extends like that Santa Vibe into adulthood because jackalopes occupy that Lial zone between the real and the imaginary they’re they’re a hoax and yet they they exist in our imagination and part of the reason people love them and that they’ve been so widely disseminated in the culture is that they keep that part of our that that childlike part of our imagination alive and and actually you know one chapter in the book is called the necessary monster and it’s a term I borrow from Argentinian writer Jorge bores whom I love and you know or said hey it’s not an accident that every culture in the world has monsters every indigenous or settler culture it has their Bigfoot or their Loch Ness monster or their whatever it has something that’s just beyond the edge of the known and he said because as a species we’re evolved to need that feeling of uncertainty of wildness of excitement of magic that exists beyond the known world and if we roll up out of bed every morning and say the world is nothing more than what we see before our eyes then something that kids have naturally has been lost to us so you know to me this book is less about horn rabbits and more about human imagination and the need for the human imagination to you know to uh create a world that is wild enough that things we aren’t sure of might actually exist right and and just one quick story I went to Douglas Wyoming this little town out on the Prairie where the first jackalo taxad Mount was made back in the 1930s and I interviewed all these people including the you know the mayor of the town when I was interviewing the mayor his wife told me this story about how she had grown up in this little town in Wyoming and how uh you know they had this tradition they would put out oats for the Jackalope in the same way You’ put out cookies for Santa Claus and she said I remember and by the way as she’s telling me this story she’s knitting Jackal up booties for her newly born granddaughter she says Mike I remember the day that a friend of mine at school told me the Jackalope wasn’t real and and I said I don’t believe you and I I rushed home and asked my grandmother and my grandmother you know had to tell me that the Jackalope was a myth and she said I cried that was one of the hardest days of my life that was a great moment for me as a humorist because I had come into this project like okay you know jackal’s going to low hanging fruit for a humor writer let’s go and then I realized people have these relationships to this thing that are really rich and really different and that I have to bring that humility as a writer and open my heart and open my ears and what does this really mean to different people so throughout the book no matter who I interview whether it’s a peer prize winning writer or a Nobel prize-winning scientist where it’s like a hunter or an oil patch rough neck at a bar in rural Wyoming the last question I asked everybody in my interviews or conversations in bars sometimes is uh why do you think people love jackalopes so over the course of the book you get this accretion this layering of answers to that question and what’s really cool is everybody loves jackalopes but for very different reasons so yeah you I mean you’ve hit it man in talking about the way the imagination is real to kids and the way we have to find a way as grown-ups to at least have an analog of that in our lives so we don’t just become people who can’t see beyond what’s in front of our eyes right right well and I think because when you do you just kind of become a cog right like if you can’t see the possibility you you stop seeing possibilities because you think you know your Island gets smaller right you used that metaphor earlier that that Island actually gets smaller because you start going well we know so much and the ignorance is spreading out you know further and further so I I love listening so like the stories like my wife and I will do this anytime we go on a long drive um we actually did our anniversary was um I guess about a month ago now um and we went up to Central Coast California the Cambria area um if you’re familiar and uh that’s where she actually proposed to me because she’s insane um maybe you maybe just were taken too long I know maybe maybe well actually you know the the true story behind it is she was afraid of how I would do it because I was making jokes that I was going to like put because she loved chicken wings and hot dogs back in the day and I was like I’m gonna put it on the chicken wing you know she like oh so she was like oh I was afraid of how you were gonna do it and let me just say though because I was joking I was never going to do any of those things she took a ring and put it into some salsa that our friend’s wife used to make us like a Pico de style salsa and uh PR is her name so the last day we’re in Cambria we’re eating the salsa we we’re going to you know get ready to leave soon and there’s a ring in there and I’m eating around it and she’s like do you notice there’s a ring there I’m like oh yeah I think you know prya must have dropped her ring in that but I know who made it so it’s not like the cook and I’m like oh fre made a Sal she must have dropped her ring I’m gonna make sure I bring it back to her and she’s like uh that’s the man’s ring I’m like oh maybe it’s Na’s you know her husband my my buddy and she’s just like so what’s your answer I’m like what are you talking about I’m just going to give it back to finally as she looked at me expectantly I’m like oh this is something different so she was afraid of me proposing with hot dogs or buffalo wings complete with with bouty guy humor along with what I would say with those things and uh instead she ends up doing it with the salsa um so aside aside here we were we were driving up to camber which good three and a half hour drive four hour drive um see and super beautiful obviously but um we listening to the Unsolved Mysteries podcast the whole way and uh and I’ve loved it since I was a kid and they had a podcast I think the podcast is dark now but um so it had like ghost and things the missing person Etc but um I always love listening to those stories so I’m like I don’t know if Bigfoot exists or not I don’t know if um ghost you know whatever it is but people had they’ve experienced something and some people are hoaxy and they’re pulling your chain there’s a lot of people though I don’t think all of them are hoaxy and so something happened and that’s meaningful and why is it bad for to listen just to hear them out I don’t need to have the answer I don’t care if Bigfoot’s an ape he’s an alien he’s the gigant Opus whatever they’re saying it’s interesting to hear people’s reaction to it and then tell the story and and if they’re hoaxers and they tell a great story well I’m a fiction writer I’m kind of focusing you so yeah I mean couple of quick thoughts on that one that really sticks with me is a friend of mine um Robert Michael pile a great ecologist and nature writer and he wrote a book called where Bigfoot walks and you know Bigfoot you picture like you know middle-aged white dudes on the weekend out there with headl like the whole thing is absurd right but you know Bob he makes this argument that what we need to have is wild places that are so wild that our imagination can tell us it’s possible and I really love that idea right like well let’s forget about whether there’s a you know Relic homed in Washington state or whatever and instead say let’s preserve Forest wild enough that we could still wonder and that’s how I feel about the Jackalope right is like you know when I look out over the Great Basin it’s so wild and outrageous I think anything seems possible and I love that anything seems possible feeling so I think that I think that’s cool I think you’re right we got to we got to keep our minds open to that stuff and also by the way you know there have been lots of animals that existed only in mythology usually in indigenous folklore and then white scientists would say oh you know that’s all this native and then later these animals would be discovered and described by science there’s even a term for them which is ethn knowns in other words they’re they’re known ethnographically but not scientifically and one example is you know this incredible freshwater stingray that has a 10 foot disc and Native people had stories about this for you know decades and white scientists were like look if there was a stingray with a 10 foot disc Living In this River I think we would know it turned out to be real so you know that kind of stuff has happened or the caamp the L Fin fish that was supposed to be extinct for 66 million years and then somebody caught one like I just love that idea that you know why are we so sure of ourselves you know why can’t you know we we don’t have to always take a position on things being one way or the other and that’s what I love about the Jackalope it just refuses to be one thing or another anything that’s hybrid and mythology is full of hybrid creatures they’re always testing those boundaries trying to keep the boundary between the real and the imaginative permeable like it is in a kids universe so yeah I don’t know I think this stuff is fascinating yeah yeah no I’m I’m completely there with you um I did wonder so you had mentioned and if I State this incorrectly you correct me um so you had mentioned that there was the the doctor that was studying the um real life rabbits that get the horns because of a virus um and that would ended up being the HP um HPV vaccine and Etc um were they studying them you know was it just um contemporary contemporaneously like that they happen to be studying while jackalo you know mythology and kind of um hysteria was well not hysteria is probably too strong for for what was going on but you get my drift was was it just kind of happening in two camps or were those doctors were they inspired at all by you know listening to the stories of the jackalo you know know that is that’s just such a great question and I spent a long time trying to answer it the the biologist Richard SCH who was the first person to work on horn rabbits in the 1930s I I’ve interviewed his surviving children I’ve read all his scientific articles I’ve read his personal correspondence there’s no indication that he was ever aware of the Jackalope as a mythological phenomenon he only knew about the horn rabbits that the herck brothers who were the two Ralph and Doug herck were these two teenagers in rural Wyoming who made the first jackalo hoax Mount they swore both of them till the day they died that their hoax Mount had not been inspired by real horn rabbits so you have both of these people essentially saying we didn’t know but I don’t know I mean I still I still to this day don’t know and the other thing that’s very cool about this bill is that the herck brothers swore that they made their first jackalo hoax Mount that is Taxidermy Mount where they took a rabbit and put deer antlers on it um and by the way this was in the Great Depression they were teenagers they came up with this idea because they were taking a correspondence course in Taxidermy they sold that first hoax mount for 10 bucks to the guy who owned the only hotel in the little town of Douglas he put it up over the bar every Jackal Loup bumper sticker t-shirt shot glass you know you have ever seen in your life came from that first Jackalope that those two teenagers made in 19s but the cool thing is they swore that they did it in 1932 and I know from the scientific record that Richard chop who was at the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton started studying horn rabbits in 1932 so you’ve asked the perfect question there’s not there’s not a real answer but there is this beautiful Cosmic Serendipity to the idea that the hoax horn rabbit that became the jackalo that’s iconic and popular culture and the real virus stricken horn rabbit that led to the HPV vaccine were essentially both their Genesis is in 1932 in different places with different people but I love to think about that relationship so that’s a great question but we we don’t know the answer right well that’s awesome you know it it strikes me that you know there’s always these these weird things right like you think about something and then like the common one people get right like you think about someone and they call you right like or nowadays they probably text you right or whatever it might be but there there’s these weird connections you find all the time just go why do that happen at the same time if they didn’t know and maybe they didn’t maybe they maybe they did but maybe they didn’t why does that happen so serendipitously like that what’s the you know just there’s the old concept of that Universal um unconsciousness you know this floating or Consciousness like floating around out there and yeah who knows but uh but is fascinating and that’s coming back to humility too right how can we be so sure and uh my friend Rick Bass the Montana writer it puts this in a very cool way and he essentially says you know the universe is full of magic we’ve just learned to call it coincidence and I really like that right like yeah okay we can find a way to explain it away but there are things that happen that just don’t want to make themselves subject to our normal explanations and and it’s again it’s less that I’m interested in arguing about you know what exists and what doesn’t it’s just that I would like to argue for the idea that things we can imagine are real in a way and if we don’t use our imaginations our Capac capacity to expand what’s real to us is atrophy and so I mean like I’m not out there hunting Bigfoot but I think it’s just good for us to live in a world where adults who indulge in the imagination which is another way of saying writers artists musicians right you know there’s a there’s a place for that because it expands our sense of the possible and everybody needs that to get through their day right right well and because truly we have no idea what’s possible right we we like to we like to think we do as a society you know scientific Community this community that Community we really have no no idea like you can’t go past the speed of light and then they go well you know you worked space and you did this we don’t know you know so we we there’s no reason to have it’s okay to have borders conceptually but you also need to have the the conceptual ability to erase those borders and look at life without that um so I think I think that’s beautiful erasing the borders that’s a great way to put it I love that you know and I I’ve done a lot of work on early natural history and you go back and everybody’s like oh well you know swallows disappear during part of the Year obviously they fly to the moon or no they don’t fly to the at the bottom of the ocean and we look at that down you know Thomas Jefferson said he thought mammoths still existed in the interior of the United States you look at this stuff and you go what what was the matter with these dumb asses they didn’t know anything you know as if people aren’t going to look back at us in 50 or these these people are so unbelievably ignorant you know like there were people denying climate change in 2023 what how is that possible so yeah I mean I think again that’s where humility comes back in is to think that you know when we judge the past for its ignorance to pause for a moment and imagine how we ourselves might be judged and to think about how little we know I don’t know I just find I don’t maybe there’s some perversity to this but I just find it exciting to think about how little we know and you know deadening to think of how much we think we know I don’t are we gonna have a second drink what’s the pacing here absolutely let’s do a second drink and then we can you know go into some writer talk but by the name of the show I’m legally mandated to have some writing talk so I’m GNA go with a favorite panel question of anyone that’s ever done some you know writing interview in all of history what is your writing process like oh God I know this question no shade on you bill this question is so tiring that I actually made a video parodying it so if anybody wants to Google I watched that video I’ll link it up I watched the video before this partially why I wanted to ask you the question on the trail of the Jackalope official book trailer you will see me in a satirical send up of an interview about my writing process but but it is but it’s an important question it’s an important question and it’s really really important for Young Writers and you know I think that so many people when they’re starting out as writers they ask more experienced writers like what should my writing process be and you know that’s the wrong question it really is that individual writers have to figure out what works for them so like when I’m when I’m mentoring writers I’ll ask questions like when you write do you like to have your desk messy or clean do you write inside or out do you need to be alone or do you like to write around other people like at a coffee shop do you have music or not if you have music does it have words or not like I ask a million questions to help people realize oh yeah I I’m already making a bunch of decisions about what works for me how can I craft that into something that makes me self-aware about my process so I’m going to For Your Entertainment pleasure Bill I’m gonna tell you three mini narratives about writers who have unusual writing processes and I hope that if there’s anybody out there who’s watching this because they’re trying to pick up tips will take this to Heart okay so I’m gonna I’m going to give you these three scenarios okay scenario number one these are true stories by the way I can’t give you the names of these people scenario number one this guy is a really well-known American novelist a lot of his novels have been made into Hollywood feature films I’m hanging out with this guy on a hike and I ask him this question about his writing process cuz I was young I was trying to learn and he said well it’s simple really you know it’s just it’s pretty standard I I get up in the morning you know I get a cup of coffee I go into my writing Den I sit down in my chair I put on my seat belt and I kind of paused and I said you you do what and he said yeah I put on my seat belt then I get my stabbing stick I said you’re what he said yeah put on the seat Bel get my stabing stick like he’s he’s acting like you know what what’s wrong with you and I said well what’s your stabbing stick he says well you know across from my desk my whole wall is a corkboard and that’s where I keep all my notes you know for my book projects and I was like oh yeah okay you got your notes on the corkboard I get that but what’s the stabbing stick he’s like well I gotta have a stabbing stick because of my seat belt I’m like what the hell is this guy talking about and he said if I take off my seat belt I’ll get out of my chair and then I won’t write so I got to have a seat belt but how am I going to reach my notes if I don’t have a stabbing stick so the point is like this guy’s cranking out killer novels with this weird ass approach but you know in conversation with me was like what what aren’t you getting about this is so obvious okay Second Story have another friend also a novelist okay and she is the kind of person who as she writes she has a tendency to self-correct she edits she finds herself editing herself by the sentence and it Blow breaks her flow and her momentum as a writer so what she does is she composes on a manual typewriter old school bangy bang bang not even electron because she doesn’t want to be able to go back and erase anything with a manual typewriter she has no choice once she’s written something it can’t be erased it can’t be edited so she composes on a manual typewriter which is about as primitive as you can imagine and then she has like a state-of-the-art scanner that she takes these typewritten pages and puts into to create a document that can then later be edited but by the time she does that it’s a different stage and it doesn’t interfere with her composition process okay sure third story there’s a guy who is a nature writer and his stuff is all environmental and it’s all about the west and it’s all about the desert and the Sierra Foothills and when he gets stuck on his writing he packs up all his notes and all his books into a giant suitcase and he packs up a bunch of beer and whiskey into a giant cooler and then he takes the whiskey and beer and the suitcase full of notes and he goes and checks into a casino hotel on the highest floor he can get on so he’s looking out at the mountains but he’s in the casino and then he just essentially stays up for three or four days straight and does his nature writing while he drinks in a casino hotel bedroom okay now here’s the point for you novice writers out there like all three of those sound like terrible crazy ideas and secondly they’re all three so different from each other but the take-home is these are people who have figured out how to handle their writing process for themselves so if you write best you know in a headstand then write in a headstand and don’t let anybody tell you how to do it so I I hope the anecdotes were entertaining but I I really have taken that to heart because like I talk to my my literary Heroes like how do you do it and one person’s like oh I write everything down in a journal somebody else say I’ve never kept a journal in my life I speak into my phone while I’m driving my car I talk to my wife I you know I I talk to a neighborhood writing group I mean everybody has a different approach you’ve got to figure out what works for you and the only way that can happen is if you experiment so you know be be willing to be weird until you figure it out that’s my advice right that’s we should we should end there because that’s really all all I have be willing to be weird and it’ll all work out well I think uh I love the antidotes by the way because they also all make sense may we actually think of it like oh well no he can’t get up he has a seat belt on like and actors are famous being weird right oh this actor goes in I thinking Phoenix is the latest like weird actor they they’ve been talking about that that goes in and he’s just in character for you know three weeks at a time yeah but writers we tend to not want to be weird and we’ll shy away from that weirdness but sometimes you need you need a little weird um I I’ve changed my writing process based on the the book I’m writing like the work I’m working on because I’m like this needs something a little different um I need to kind of shift so I think you know experimenting and just doing what works for you um acknowledging this doesn’t work for me I’m not gonna do that you know um I always hear people and I forget I was at a conference once in a on a panel they’re like oh you know um do you write every morning and write 1,500 words or whatever it is you know um and I think it was based off of I think it was the Stephen King writing book and I’m like look I’ve got four kids I’ve worked studi jobs I got a wife I got like right I other things going on we have dogs up the Wazoo here the idea that I can wake up every day and then write, 1500 words that sounds lovely but I would never ever write anything if that’s what I was hoping for to happen every day so um I’ve had to what what I used to do and I didn’t learn this from Einstein I I realized he did it later I heard the antidote later is that he got really good when I think he was at the postal service or something he got good at his job and then he spent all of his free time just working on his you know theories and stuff and so that’s actually what I did for a long time so got really good at whatever I needed to do to where I could do that within a couple hours I had six hours then to kind of fill where everyone else would fill that chatting and stuff I would chat with people I have friends at work but I didn’t get too I wouldn’t go that far I just looked like I was working really hard for eight hours but six of those hours were for me because I got so good at what I was doing that I could you know I can make the man happy to too you’ve hit on something super important bill which is not only that developing your own sense of your writing process is very idiosyncratic and specific to you but also when you internalize that kind of advice I I mean I just think what you just said was so important because when you internalize somebody else’s advice like write for two hours every morning or whatever well some of us don’t have lives that are built for that or we don’t have sensibilities that are built for that and then we end up feeling like oh you know we’re not going to be able to do this because I’ll never be a writer because I didn’t write 1500 words this morning because of my kids or whatever and it’s like I I just think that’s so dangerous because it puts people in a position where it looks like you’re trying to help them but you’re actually giving them a prescription and if they can’t fill that prescription they feel like theyve failed and so you know that’s why the stories that I offer are so outrageous because my point is you know if you say uh you know I hang out with my kids and then I go to sleep and I sleep for three hours and then I wake up in the middle of the night and I write for 90 minutes and then I go back to sleep and I wake up and go to work whatever man you know figure out what will work for you you and and I’ve found that my writing process has changed over time too as I’ve learned more about myself as the project changes and also you know just uh as the demands of my family life change as my physiology changes right you know we make adjustments but um but I I really I don’t mean to be like Evangelical about this but I part ofes me about the writing process question is that when writers answer that they appear to be offering a prescription do what I do and it’ll work and that’s wor [ __ ] you know so that’s why I now answer it with this set of anecdotes to show like no don’t don’t do what I do figure out what it’s going to work for you and and then follow that path until you have confidence in your process so yeah it’s it’s it’s a it’s a trial and error method but it’s a lot more intellectually honest than just taking somebody else’s prescription sure sure absolutely well and and the truth of the matter is like my writing process it’s a lot like foreplay interrupted by a jackhammer so it’s like you’re starting to get in the mood you’re titilated you’re feeling good and then all hell breaks loose you know there’s hammering destruction just and before you know it there’s just debris Landscapes altered and you’re like what the [ __ ] just happened here right you have no idea and then like kind of a mixture of like raw humiliation unrequitted desire I I kind of start sifting through and you know apologizing the whole time I try to sift through and just sculpt it into something that if not pleasurable is kind of meaningful for for the both of us you know that’s that’s my writing process I’ve been kicked off of so many panels that’s the greatest gloss I’ve ever heard on the writing process we now add your anecdote to this list so we got to Ja Jack where am I at here oh here we go I’m back back on track right um I knew you could thank you for that as I joke there’s that moment what what’s fun for me actually when I’m editing the show is uh I had on um Ray mcmanis is a poet from South Carolina um that uh Daniel Cross Turner that put me and John laye and the whole six degrees of of Separation here um and uh I I was editing his show yesterday working through I’m not quite done but there’s a moment where you can see the the liquor hit both of us and then from there I’m like this is internet gold like this is so good from this moment on you know like um th this is perfect so I’m feeling that right now I’m like oh the liquor is hit like this this is about this is the Brilliance of the concept man is like for people like you know I do a lot of interviews you just have this you kind of fall into a certain kind of Rhythm and you say the same kind of stuff and now I’m sort of like sure man ask me anything I’m ready this is great right the writing process it’s all horeshit don’t have a process it’s ridiculous don’t listen to anybody I do Wonder um generally so the the other question that gets bandied about all the time is what was your inspiration for this what was your inspiration for that and sometimes that might be interesting there might be a situation where the inspir the inspiration is interesting but I I wonder a little bit more when I talk with people where’s the like the molten core like what makes you a writer like where is that I must now turn you know stories into words that I’m sharing with everyone what’s kind of that um you know what causes those eruptions of of writing these these 10 plus books and all these essays yeah no it’s a meaningful question I mean I just think that so much of our way of understanding the world is conditioned by data like we have information all the time but that information has to be translated into story so especially like when I’m doing science writing you know we got all these a some environmental scientists out there who are discovering all these incredible things but then on the other end on the receiving end most of us are just regular like Schmo trying to get through our day and how we think about the world and what decisions we make aren’t necessarily impacted by you know what somebody writes in some science article so we need filmmakers and musicians and artists and writers to bridge that Gap and help to translate or interpret that stuff so that it can be presented in a way that is Meaningful to people I mean narrative is our oldest technology as a species you know we as I mean think think about human beings as animals we suck at almost everything right we’re not fast we can’t fly we don’t swim very well we can’t hide we don’t have sharp claws we’re relatively weak we you know we’re not very good at very many things but the two things we awesome at are bipedalism and narrative right walking upright and telling stories th those are the things that really make us special as a species so we’re hardwired for narrative so as a writer you know part of what inspires me is how can I take all this geekery that I myself am really interested in this environmental geekery and translate that stuff into stories that might actually change somebody’s way of thinking or maybe even a lucky break change the choices they make about how they live their life and I don’t mean that my work is is you know pantic and pical but I still hope I’m having an impact on people right so I don’t know you know I mean I think it’s it’s good in a way and I joke before like nobody can sell a book in America I think it’s kind of good in a way that writers can’t make any money generally speaking because it just puts us in a position where we’re automatically motivated by other things so then you have to really reflect like well you know this isn’t anybody’s day job with very few exceptions so why am I really doing this you know do do I need people to hear what I have to say about myself do I want to educate people do I want to change things but you know you don’t do it because it’s lucrative and so you have to focus on more important things and I I like that actually the way that stringency demands more of us as artists um so yeah I mean what inspires me the belief that storytelling changes how we think of each other in the world the belief that we have to work together toward a more mature understanding of the relationship between our species in the natural world and then finally and this is the one that like gets me in trouble the most uh the belief that we have got to laugh I mean humor is a survival strategy and all the time you hear like you really cared about I don’t care what it is if you really cared about this that or the other thing you’d never joke about it I think that’s horeshit you know there’s no culture contemporary or ancient settler or indigenous that we know of in the world that has ever not had humor we eat differently we marry differently we bury our dead differently we do everything differently we all have humor and it’s because I believe as a species we’re a to need that to survive and so I feel like as a writer part of what motivates me is if I can make people laugh if I can lighten their burden even for a minute or two you know life is hard you know it’s hard on a lot of people and uh I just think the idea that the real work the serious work and humor work are opposite of each other it’s a very recent idea and it’s a dumb idea you know if you asked Milton or Shakespeare or Cervantes or take your pick uh they would say of course you know humor is a way to do real work to do important work um the idea that humor work and serious work are the opposite of each other is about 150 years old the victorians invented it right along with sexual repression you can’t trust these people so um so that’s part of what motivates me as a writer is like life is hard and if I can find a way to communicate something meaningful and still lift people up a little little bit instead of just saying here’s what you’re doing wrong or the world is burning down um you know writing as a Act of radical empathy that somehow even if we’re laughing together we’re laughing about a form of suffering that we both understand that that human connection is what keeps me doing this there’s a lot I love about that but one of the things that they really love about that is you’ll hear stories of soldiers and foxholes right making jok you’ll hear people like you know civilians and caught in the middle of a war still finding and it it it is there’s not that much exceptional about us like you mentioned like we’re not that fast we’re not physically there’s nothing really well besides walking up right right there nothing too big going on here and we so we used to go oh our brains are so big and then you find out all these other species have bigger brains well then our brains that our brains to body weight well then Dolphins brain to body weight so it’s like I don’t know that we’re actually that much smarter it’s this Confluence of things and maybe part of that Confluence of things is you know by bipedalism and then having some having you know or opposable thumbs which which helps you know build things but maybe it’s humor maybe it’s narrative structure maybe these things that like we put down are actually the things that are that cause us to strive and to be so I what I always fear CU like I think it’s it’s it’s silly to deny climate change because it’s the history of the earth like the climate’s changed on us like people you can debate if it’s cars it’s it’s this or that the climate changes it’s clearly changing let’s just agree that it’s changing right but what do what do you do you know with that like what do you do with the like we just argue over it or you know we we have this generation of people that feel crumbled and depressed by it to where they can’t do anything and the world’s just going to end tomorrow and it’s like but you know with a little bit of humor a little bit of light and that you might actually do more about it than just feeling you know um throwing oil on paintings or whatever it might be like you might do real things you know about it we might make real changes right if there’s this much we can actually control about the environment which is probably very true right like I always think of it they’ll go oh climate change is just the sun okay that’s fine if we can only control 0.5% of it doesn’t that make that 0.5% even more important you know um and instead of feeling depressed and hating humans which seems like a very modern thing too you know it’s like humans are so bad you know um we we watched this show not to go completely on the raner but we watched the show at the sphere in in Vegas while we were there um and you was there I think the week before I think they’re coming back but they had um it’s called Postcards From Earth um and it was it was pretty cool being in there it’s almost feels like a magic motion ride um which tends to make me sick but it’s so big and sprawling that you don’t get that real motion sickness of it um and so it is pretty on inspiring it feels like when you’re Soaring Over Africa that you’re really there you know and that that’s neat you know Technologic achievement and and wonderful but the story was almost nonsensical um with it and it was very human hating because it’s like oh and we poisoned the Earth and so the humans in the story leave they blast off and they this Rocky ships everywhere which they must have ored and just mined the Earth to make these rocket ships but they didn’t they didn’t bother talking about that part they blast off in rocket ships and then they just go to new planets and they have this uh this magical seed basically that terraforms the planet in like five minutes you know and it was like so but it was like all the humans left and we only would visit Earth because we were so bad to it and it’s like that really the message you wanted to send like if you if you really want people to care about the climate and the environment you really want to just send the message that you’re awful and you can only solve this by blasting off to another planet that you can magically terraform into a new Earth in like 5 Seconds anyway anyway so um but The Narrative of it the story can be very powerful but you see them falling a death or death ears all the time when we get into this um the sadness of it right think there’s a Melancholy and it’s like no we gota gotta laugh it’s always okay like laugh people laugh you know there’s a death in the family whatever happens you’ll see people laugh and that’s not because they don’t care that the person died it’s because that’s a natural part of this experience it’s extremely extremely important part so um it’s a survival mechanism I mean whether we’re talking about the Earth or somebody in our family it’s a survival mechanism and I don’t know I just I feel like in the environmental writing community in particular there’s so much anger and so much grief and those are really legitimate emotions and we need our writing to be able to Express those emotions and share them with readers but I you know I ask people like well just think to your own life how long do you want to be angry how long do you want to be sad and most people would say I get mad I get depressed but I really don’t want it to last I want to still deal with problems but I don’t want to be in that particular paralysis that hole you know and so yeah I mean and weirdly increasingly I mean we’re writers right but increasingly there’s even a bunch of social science research that’s showing that it’s more effective to communicate with people about climate change through a standup routine than it is through election sure dude you what do you think is funny about climate change right and so I think for those of us who are humorists we’re always on the defensive because the attack is always if you really careed if you really took this seriously how could you joke about that this isn’t funny it happened to my my uncle whatever you know it’s like I I reject that I think that humor is a survival mechanism and when we laugh together it’s a way of saying to each other we’re going to get through this together and we can still absorb content through humor I mean a good intellectually challenging stand-up routine to use that example should make us question our beliefs it should make us think about other people’s perspectives it should make us a little uncomfortable but we’re laughing as we listen to stuff that we would never listen to in the form of somebody just scolding us and so yeah I think I think you’re right on Bill and everything that you’ve said about that that you know just because we laugh together the funeral example I love you know doesn’t mean that that’s a sign of disrespect it’s a sign of bonding and survival and especially as an environmental writer increasingly I’m like how can we keep talking about all this hard stuff that depresses everybody and do it in a way that we can survive you know and make things better not worse lift people up not push them down sure sure well and I always think of it um and and i’ I’ve told people this and you know we’ve had some deaths in the family and things recently but I’m like there’s no reason to ever give up hope either it just ends right like I hope this person kind of makes it through or they don’t but there’s no reason to give it up early you don’t give the ghost up early like you can hope that’s okay you know um that’s important but keep keep that up and then you know okay we’re all gonna die hope is gonna end you know with that death let it end with that death don’t let it end early because then you you’re living kind of a a half life you know from there imation right we got to be able to project some understanding beyond the limits of our everyday life so I don’t know for me humor helps to cross those boundaries yeah yeah no and I think that’s lovely I I think that all the time the um and and I’ll ask you the same question here um but one of the the questions I I’ve takeen to asking people on the show is what’s the piece of writing advice you wish someone had given you right because I I started with what’s what’s a piece of writing advice and it’s read right kind of General things that are not not bad but and important in their way but um what’s the piece you wish you had you had and the piece I had you actually said it already which was don’t worry so much about the money worry about you know touching Hearts worry about what what’s actually matters to you um because there’s kind of a weird dichotomy to the world there’s the you know if if your life exists just to resource hog that’s a very vapid very sad place to be like all I want is money I just want this I just want to F things if your ex if your life exists to touch people’s hearts to affect Hearts then that’ll be meaningful and so there’s I think there’s that just that constant War that’s been going on between people that you know artists you know and regular people that are I just want to touch Hearts I want to do this versus people that want a resource grab if you’re a resource grab person and you’re trying to write well you know good luck to you because that is a tiny fraction that’s making that you know wild money you know if if if you want to be a writer you really need to be in that other camp and then maybe you get lucky and you you make some money or whatever U and maybe you make big money bunch of things get turned into movies and you know yada yada yada but um it’s not that rewarding like they reward is hey someone like one of uh and I I love book reviews one of them I showed to my son because one of his friends mentioned he didn’t like his art my son um is 12 um and he loves drawing he he’s always been and always been really dedicated to it and one of his friends didn’t say anything bad about it just rated him the lowest of the group and so he was kind of depressed I’m like you know let’s go look and uh I went to to Amazon whatever pulled up like the one star reviews and I forget it was like the story didn’t have proper structure like it just I was like this guy’s an idiot horrible and he was laughing you know and there’s you know I’ve I’ve been lucky enough to win some awards and mostly have nice reviews but there’s the few really bad ones I just showed them and so he’s laughing he felt better about it but I’m like I laugh and I feel better about it too that’s fine people can have that um one of the more touching ones though was someone that said I don’t know that the characters in this book would read this book and I don’t want to sound like a masochist but I know I will read this book again because it makes me it made me think so much about my own life and about my decisions you so I watched all these horrible people making bad decisions you know read about all these horrible people making bad decisions and made me think about that and it touched me and the way phras I was like oh that’s someone I actually connected with in this weird virtual you know um virtual way and that’s that’s why you do it I don’t you know the other the other the other way you do it man you’re probably you know you’re probably G to be living a sad existence trying to wake up and do the 4 amm author’s club or whatever it is is you’re doing if you’re just trying to make money off of it um if that’s the whole goal is resource grabbing you’re probably not having the the best day all the time you’re probably not going to stick with it yeah no I totally agree you know when I teach creative non-fiction writing Workshops the first thing I do is I tell everybody to take out their phones and look at the New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction and it’s going to be half books that are ghost written that are about rock stars or sports stars or actors and actresses it’s going to be 25% books people who worked in the White House who have like tell alls that are political and it’s going to be 25% howto books you know improve your sex life how to sleep how to exercise whatever it’s like well you know that’s that’s what drives the machine in New York and you know it’s it’s just very very difficult for people who want to write about other things um you know the way the structure of Agents is work the way the structure of New York publishing works um you know there there are niches that are really overdeveloped for certain kinds of stuff and then there are a lot of people who write in areas that you know are difficult to break through but but the main thing is you just cannot continue as a writer if you’re operating on incentives and motivations that are provided not only by people outside your control but largely by people in New York it just drives me nuts as a western writer especially you know I call it the view from the Hudson like you know the publishing industry is centered in New York and for these people the West is New Jersey they don’t get anything about us or our or what we do so anyway I really like the way you put that that uh writing is not a resource grab if that’s what you’re interested in uh you know you you’ve chosen the wrong field I mean there’s a few people as in music or Sports who are going to make it but you know saying that you’re in writing for the money is like saying I’m going to go to college so I can play in the NBA like yeah okay couple people will and everybody else won’t and what did what did you do with college in the meantime so yeah I think you know that the difficulty of of the commercial aspect of our business actually even though it’s very disheartening it it it has the advantage of driving us back over and over again to like well why am I doing this and if you can’t answer that question for yourself then you got to find something else to do like um you know my reasons for doing this go Way Beyond what my New York agent thinks about what I’m doing and it’s important to keep re-evaluating your priorities as a writer so and yeah your stories about you know getting crushed in reviews yeah you you’re not a writer till you’ve been you know totally slapped To The Ground by agents or editors or reviewers that’s just that’s part of is Shar sure I used to I I’ve gotten rid of it now but you know back in the day um and the younger viewers may not even know this but used to send physical manuscripts right I send a physical story to this you know uh literature Pub and that one and you’d get them back because you send a self- addressed stamped envelope with it and I had the stack you know that I kept for a while that was just the motivated okay and it’s like some of them some of those same stories got published elsewhere but you get that stack of rejection and you can look at that and like contextualize have some humility have some drive from okay like you know I’m also gonna take this the opposite that okay now I’m gonna work harder I’m gonna like you know prove to all these people they rejected me that they made a mistake um I think sometimes a little harder virtually you know like it’s a little little sadder to get the the virtual one because you don’t get that that physical tangible aspect of it was yeah gave me something to you know to stack up I used to show my older kids my uh Randon and Cassie my daughters I would show them that you know and they would worry like like how many times I failed every one of those I tried to get into a you know a magazine they rejected me yeah so you can look at it however you want I try to have a healthy healthy relationship with failure and I just look at it like okay that’s failure I tried to do that I failed that’s okay there it is I don’t think there’s anybody who can make it as a writer and by make it I don’t mean succeed financially I mean continue doing the work which to me is success I can’t imagine anybody who can make it as a writer who can’t be slapped to the ground a thousand times and say I’m gonna get back up and right because it’s what I do it’s just uh you know and but I think sharing that with your kids bill is so cool because so many younger people have this idea like here’s the idea of success if you don’t make it right away You’re a failure and you know you get a a in your case you know you get a piece of short fiction rejected 10 times and then it lands that’s not failure if you get it rejected 30 times 50 times and then it lands that’s not failure that’s success that’s how this works but it’s it’s a weird business that we’re in because writing is so personal so intimate and then to succeed with it and again by succeed I mean continue doing it to succeed with it you have to have such thick skin when most of us went into this because we have such thin skin right so it’s really a difficult thing to hold that two minds of like I’m gonna keep all of my intimacy and vulnerability present in my work because that’s what makes it Shine right but then when it gets slapped to the ground I’m going to go well whatever I’m gonna keep working on it send it to somebody else you don’t get it you know like it’s that that balance of humility and use the word Drive William you know I think Drive is is a great way to put it that you know we we have to be humble and recursive and self-focused but we also just have to say like I ain’t giving up on this piece you know I’m not giving up on this thing and there’s nothing more satisfying know everybody always think thinks like oh you send something to the New Yorker and they take it it’s the best day of your life the best day of your life is when you send something to 30 people who told you you were dumbass and rejected it and then you placed it and you were like no it was always good enough and I didn’t have the right person or I needed to make some adjustments to it but you know um without sounding too old school about it you know that idea of enduring some blows on your way to getting where you want to be um and no ever arrives right it doesn’t matter how old you are in chronological years or in experience you never arrive you still take it hard when you’re rejected you still have to reconceive things and find ways to move forward and it still feels great when as you say Bill you know it’s like Oh see it landed after all sure well and I think um you mentioned it there that I think it’s a beautiful way to look at it is you are not a failure you just fail right so I tried to do something I failed at that thing I tried to do that doesn’t make me a failure but make what makes me a failure is not trying anything right right I think you could push I totally agree with that bill and I think you can push it even further you know and I know this is going to sound like egotistical and self-righteous when clearly it’s just defensive you know and insecure but you know you can also look back and go you know who failed the editor who did take that piece sure they failed because they didn’t recognize that they had something of value and it ended up Landing somewhere else and doing well and you know I don’t mean it in like a vindictive or Revenge oriented way it’s really it’s a great experience as a writer when you submit something get crushed and then submit it elsewhere and have it do well because it reminds you it really was never about the pieace it was about the fit of the Peace with that editor that venue that moment and that you can’t you know that’s one of the main pieces of advice I have for younger writers is you know do not internalize rejection don’t think that when somebody doesn’t want a piece of yours that it means something you know fatal or enduring about your capabilities it just means that that person you know like got to fight with her teenager that morning or isn’t getting along with or like had a crappy lunch or just published a piece that was too similar to your topic or is overwhelmed with work or there’s a million things that are behind that curtain that we can’t see but we tend to and Social Psychology shows us this that when we succeed we give ourselves too much credit and when we fail we give ourselves too much blame the fact is we’re buffeted by all kinds of forces that are beyond our control and the one thing you can control is your work you do your work you do it in a way that you have conviction and that you believe in and then the rest of it is going to be whatever it’s going to be but if you start reverse engineering that and trying to figure out how to make your work satisfy all of these things that are Beyond human kin you know forget it you you’ll lose your voice as a writer and you also are less likely to figure out where you’re going it’s better to have the satisfaction of doing work that you’re proud of and you know deal with the externalities as they come sure sure that makes perfect sense um and before we put about you know it reminds me so my my day job for the last you know 15ish years I’m a director for a medical device company in quality regulatory department and what I preach on with everyone is that your process isn’t bad just because you had one bad outcome to it you might have a great process everything working we don’t need to go start changing things because you had one bad product come out of a million right like you keep doing the work keep doing the right thing yeah occasionally you might have something that comes out the way you don’t want but the mistake is overcorrecting all the time is the taking every rejection is you got to start you I’m gonna write a new genre or whatever I’m GNA do is you got to you got to keep with it just make sure that try to believe in that process you know that we we mocked and then talked about at length but keep you with what you believe in what you’re doing you’re believing in that you know be mindful of it you can always you know tweak adjust but don’t adjust just because of one you know negative outcome to it you know because there’s always G to be negative outcomes we you know I think that’s lovely you mentioned it is that we always give ourselves too much credit and too much blame so in trying to get that real heads is very hard um because the world’s all about us at all times of course all of this talk about failure I feel like I need a shot so maybe then we can transition to our shots portion of the show here um now the shots start now we start now we start the shot so there just rapid fire questions you can drink or not you know it’s completely up to you if you want drink for one um I’ll have to pour myself another you know two [ __ ] bourbon here but um to drink with you but we’ll we’ll answer them and we’ll we’ll go through these and then we’ll get to the uh to whatever you’re going to read us today be direct and efficient very good um okay so first question worst question you’ve ever been asked in an interview and what should I have asked instead why did you make your daughters live in a Wilderness setting where they could not hang around with other children and what you should have asked asked instead is what were the benefits to your children of growing up in a Wilderness adjacent environment very good very good turning that around have you ever witnessed any anything inexplicable every day because I’m a parent sure sure I you know it’s funny that when I ask that to parents you get a different answer people that don’t have kids yet you really think oh yeah and sometimes you’ll get the big foot or the UFO story but you get parents you’re like oh [ __ ] yeah the whole thing’s unexplicable like totally yeah totally I remember when I was about to have my first kid and I was reading all these books on like how to be a parent and my buddies who had already had kids noticed that I was doing this and they were like you’re the dumbest son of a [ __ ] who ever lived like what in the world makes you think that you can read a book you just it’s just a sign of your absolute ignorance and that turned out to be exactly right yeah yeah I it was very funny because now you read the book now everyone would just be like doing this on their phone is we were uh I think it was I forget what holiday was we were up with my parents and my daughter was there with my granddaughter Ellie and uh Ellie loves to grab everything you know so we joke we have the two grandkids we have Ellie and we have Juju and we call Ellie run a mck and JuJu wre Havoc so it’s run ack and wreak havoc when they’re gone and uh she like she saw a caterpillar and she’s gonna she goes and grabs a caterpillar you know and she got a little Splinter like just a little splinter in her hand and U Cassie was having a hard time getting it out and I was like oh you know what maybe just gra you know grab like a Band-Aid or something that’s sticky you know some tape put it on there and just pull it and probably just come right out goes oh and my wife’s like oh yeah I think that would work and my wife’s a nurse I think that would work well I think that would work and you look over and you see my daughter Cassie just her phone oh yes Google says that should she didn’t say Google she goes yeah they say that should work and I’m like okay I guess well the Google machine got it so I guess you’re good um men with p tals nature’s candy are too hot to handle oh uh I think archaic and dispossessed it’s it’s been over this has been over for many many years I haven’t cut my in 30 years but it won’t get any longer than this but my as my children often remind me like uh the whole hiy thing is dead and gone buddy you are you’re just a walking statue so I’m choos I’m choosing the I notic you got your I don’t know how long mine’s that but I appreciate it oh yeah yeah oh let’s see I don’t know how mine’s uh but uh yeah no you’re you’re nowhere you’re nowhere you need to cut that off tonight send me a picture tomorrow morning I’m old man I an excuse you’re young you you you really got to clean up your act man yeah yeah well you know the true story behind it is is um my son and I went and got our haircut right before all the lockdowns and stuff and we’re in California we had pretty severe lockdowns with covid right yeah so like literally like the week before um and we didn’t do it on purpose we just needed a haircut so we we we go to the barber we get our haircut it was he would usually shave it at that point um and mine would be very short and uh so then you know we’re in the lockdowns and the hair’s growing and I’m like okay we need a haircut my wife’s like you know I don’t want you guys to go get to the barberette okay fine I have a razor blade because I’ve shaved it before just because I don’t like to deal with it so and then my son used to be weird about going to the barber so I’d shave his hair and just shave my hair and we’re done with it you know yeah and so I’m like okay I’ll shave it and it was getting a little longer she yeah I kind of like it long it gets curly actually when it starts to get long I like that you know you can keep it so I’m like okay so I’ll keep it and I was like you know what then I’ll keep it until I can donate it so I just wait so if I’m going to stick with it so I’ll let it you know grow out I didn’t realized that was I at first I thought it was six inches it turns out it’s eight inches before you can donate it and so at this point you’re pot committed right like I just got this this hair growing on me and uh and my wife’s doing the same because she’s done it before her and all of her daughters have have donated before um I forget the I’ll try to link it up with the show but it’s it’s a um they donate it to a cancer uh place that gives it to cancer patients and it’s for free so there’s a very particular one she likes to give it to um because they give it to the patients for free so um I was like okay I’ll let it go I’ll let it go until you know when we get there so eight inches come and by the time it hit eight inches I was just used to it I just throw it like most morning like almost at all times besides the show cuz I shower before because I want to be like you know clean and beautiful for you it’s just in a ponytail goodness I think I made clear to you that I wouldn’t talk with you otherwise right I mean there was a lot of pretty nasty it just comeon sense awesome so it’ll be actually at some point um this year well the the last part of that story actually was that we had a wedding to go to a friend supposed to get wedding or to get married and that’s supposed to have happened like probably a year ago at this point so my wife was finally like okay you don’t have to wait for the wedding anymore Becca well we can go cut our hair if you want that’s fine um so when I cut it I was I was gonna do a nice send off to my hair for the show and everything when it comes but um and we’ll see if it if it ever happens again it is one of those things once it gets to a certain length it’s just as easy as if it’s short besides my this freaking thing is Curly and crazy I I don’t know what the hell do myself wait you wait till you can contribute like 25 inches that’ll be good I was doing a couple of wigs you know finish the sentence a Bigfoot chupacabra and Jackalope walk into a bar the bartender says uh which one of you is horny love that very see you can see the humorist there I applaud you sir all right James Joyce it was all just a lar to see how much time people have spend reading this nonsense right yeah oh absolutely yeah most overrated writer in the history of literature yeah doesn’t of sense and uh you know the fact that they have ulses day over there is just a sign that people will take any excuse to drink very you know what I I was just reading this week um and to to unveil the court curtain here for anyone watching um that comment comes because I have a a a agenda I made out a little guest letter I made out before I started the show because I I’m asking all these people to come on before I’ve ever recorded anything and one of the things was think of it like heway andjoy voice at the bar just less pompous and um incoherent incoherent and so you made a joke about that and I just read this past week that there’s people there’s a book club for Finnegan’s wake and they’ve been going through one page of finin wake per day for per week for 25 years and they’re just about to finish and I’m like man he has trolled you guys like you don’t really Unthinkable I mean nobody should read Finnegan’s way I mean the the concept of your podcast needs to be applied to some things outside of your podcast like nobody should sit down and read a single page of Finnegan’s way without drinking a bunch of whiskey first there’s no chance will make a lick of sense right all right oh ranting about Joyce aside last question for our shots here if you were a mythological creature what would you be you know I hate to just be predictable but I would obviously be a Jackalope I mean it’s the coolest most charismatic most iconic most hilarious most vicious most kind most beautiful little weird hybrid creature that the American West ever created so I I dream of being a jackal up my my aspiration as an artist is to eventually be become a jackal so yeah I know I know that’s not a surprising answer but it’s heartfelt right right very good but it was a bit of gotcha journalism there are you admitting then that the the jackalopes myth mythological yeah yeah well right sure you know it just just depends how you look at it some people you like you who can’t hold their liquor they have a couple of drinks and suddenly they don’t know the difference between reality and the imagination so that’s on you Bab very true it is on me I awesome well thanks for that so that maybe then we can get to uh whatever you’d like to read for us today okay won’t you tell me how long you would like me to read and I’ll pick something that’ll fit the bill so I think generally um two five minutes kind of kind of in that range is kind of best um if you want to read a little longer I’m fine with all of it I’m just going by what kind of fits the show the best um and it could be shorter I mean that’s usually like poets will read it a little shorter but I think something like two to five minute range would be perfect okay um well I don’t have any essays that are super short but I’ll read you a really fun one that’s about eight minutes would that work okay absolutely okay that’s on the short end for my stuff so I’m choosing this one in part because it’s short in part because it conveys a sense of the Great Bas in desert and in part because we’ve talked a lot about humor and uh you know unlike most of my writing which does try to either educate people about natural history or communicate something important about how they might rethink their lives this one is just fun um and I’ve had so much fun with you tonight bill that it seems like a good place to end to just share a piece that um I get this this is like uh I don’t know you know if I were on the road this would be Freebird like everybody puts their lighters up and asks me to read this particular piece and this is a called a visit from the Mary Kay lady and it’s from my book rant from the hill which has the subtitle on packrats Bobcats wildfires kudin a drunken Mary K lady and other encounters with the wild in the high desert so this is a that will give you a sense of the human inhabitants of the landscape that live in and editors hate about my work that I always bury the lead I never start where I should start I always start somewhere else and then go sideways so you writers will will feel the pivot when I move sideways so I’ll share this with you as a way of wrapping up a really wonderful conversation uh with Bill and uh as a way of expressing my gratitude for how much fun I’ve had in this conversation so this is called a visit from the Mary Kay lady and it is Gospel truth it’s unfortunate that we English speakers have relatively few words for mud a substance that varies so greatly by location and conditions it would be handier to have a hundred terms for it as the indigenous Nordic Sami people do for snow if a word like ginormous can make it into the Oxford English Dictionary you’d think they could spare an extra word or two to distinguish one person’s Home mud from anothers out here here in Silver Hills Nevada our mud is less a description of the ground than it is a full season a marker of identity and a way of life lacking a 100 helpful synonyms for mud I think instead of stories that suggest what’s so special about the thick deep slippery slippery Gunk that we silver Hillbillies call gumbo when hiking during mud season in Spring the gumbo becomes so heavy on our boots that we often find it easier to shuffle along like CrossCountry skiers than to lift our heavy feet off the ground when driving on even the slightest slope it makes little difference whether you put your foot on the gas or the break since even while breaking you simply slide along without resistance like a capsule gliding through space our gumbo also has the unique quality of sticking to itself Gathering so so thickly on truck tires that it’s limited only by the wheel wells which Shear it off with each Revolution as neat as a spindle turning on a lathe in early spring the road to our house is sometimes so thick with gumbo that it becomes impassible even to high clearance four-wheel drive vehicles when that happens we have two choices park at the paved Road and slog several miles through the muck or wait until till evening when the mud freezes up making it viscous enough that it becomes possible to Pilot perilously across it in more than a decade out here I have never completed a full mud season without sliding off the road and our family now runs the gumbo pool five bucks buys you a guess as to the first date on which one of us neighbors included will end up in the ditch but the best thing about mud season in Silver Hills is the gumbo L which my young daughters Hannah and Caroline absolutely love here’s how it works when the spring the first dozen truck trips down our road leave shallow wheel ruts those ruts deepen a little each day and by midseason are so deep that it’s risky to try to avoid them since a slide into the ruts results in a jaw rattling drop that’s hard on spines as well as transm instead the trick is to get squarely into these twin Tire Canyons from the start after which the impressive depth of the channels unfailingly prevents the vehicle from sliding off the road in fact the ruts are so deep that you can drive our road without ever placing your hands on the steering wheel instead you simply slide along secure in the Deep tracks that guide your rig even around hairpin in turns no true silver hillbilly would ever be caught with their hands on the wheel while running the gumbo L and in fact it’s common practice to lace your fingers behind your head while gunning your truck along through the muddy slots and here’s the pivot one morning during the height of mud season I was sitting at my writing desk and looking out the window which is about all I ever do at my writing desk when I saw a spectacle so astonishing and surreal that I grabbed my birding binoculars to scope it out there in the Twin tubes of the benox was a pink Cadillac fishtailing wildly up our driveway now understand that in all my years on ranting Hill I had never seen a two-wheel drive vehicle out here during mud season that our driveway is an unbroken half mile long sheet of hazardous gumbo and that the only pink things I’ve ever seen around here are rock pen stemon Longleaf flocks and my kids pacifiers I instantly sprinted for the door booted up and headed out to see what would become of whomever was crazy enough to Brave Silver Hills gumbo in a caddy from the crest of the null beneath ranting Hill I witnessed an utterly indelible image the pink Cadillac had gone sideways our driveway slid down a small hill and lodged firmly at top a charred Juniper stump where it rested with its rear end up in the air and its Wheels spinning madly shotgunning mud everywhere covering my face with my forearm to deflect the gumbo strafing I worked my way down to the car which had music blaring from behind its tinted windows I wrapped on the driver’s side window and waited for a reply eventually the power window rolled down and Loretta Lynn came blasting out well slow Jin Fizz Works Mighty fast when you drink it by the picture and not by the glass in the driver’s seat was a middle-aged woman who looked uncannily like Loretta only frosted blonde she held in her hand a highball glass from which she had apparently managed to spill not one drink of her cocktail rather than turning the music down she instead held her P pointer finger up as if to say hold on a second then took a sip of her drink and gunned the engine again your tires aren’t on the ground I shouted over the cranking Tunes revving engine and splattering mud what’s that hun she yelled back your tires I scream pointing helpfully toward the part of her car that was three feet off the ground she took another sip of her cocktail leaned slowly out the window grained her neck backward and then began to laugh reaching out to give me a fist bump as if she had just slapped in the game-winning RBI she then turned off the ignition and in the silence that followed said in a grally voice I’m the Mary Kay lady want a drink if she looked like Loretta Lyn she sounded more like Tom weights though it was 11: in the morning I felt obliged not to let her drink alone and so I promptly agreed she spread her knees reached down between her ankles and pulled a thermos and a second highball glass from beneath the driver’s seat pouring me a tall one of something that tasted suspiciously like straight JY I came to invite you to a party she said but I for got the invitation I don’t want to get my heels muddy she continued pulling out her phone so let’s just have a drink she made a quick call described roughly where she was and instructed someone on the other end of the line to bring blush we passed the next half hour pleasantly she turning the Loretta back on and passing fresh drinks through the window me standing up to my ankles in gumbo and receiving what I’m guessing were excellent tips about skin care just as we polished off the thermos a large man wearing a huge hat came riding up our driveway on a ginormous Horse He dismounted with a wide smile climbed down the hill shook my hand firmly then lifted the Mary Kay lady out through the window of the caddy drink still in hand gently folding her over his broad shoulder like a sack of grain clambering up the slope he placed her on the horse whose name it turned out was blush he then slid the pointed toe of his boot into the sturup and swung himself up behind her encircling her waist with his arms and the two of them rode off together laughing I could see her clear plastic heels tapping blood his flanks as the big man hollered back at me thanks Chief see you after mud season it took a few weeks for the gumbo to firm up enough for a tow truck to get in and winch out the abandoned car during which I had the great pleasure of sitting at my writing desk looking out at that beautiful pink wreck stranded down there among the Gooseberry and rabbit brush to commemorate the visit from the Mary Kay lady whose name I never learned I did what I think any eccentric reclusive writer would have done I composed a ha coup light pink Cadillac High centered on an old stump Wheels spinning breathing and there’s a little story from the back country of Nevada and thank you so much bill for having me on the show it’s been a rare pleasure awesome thank you so much for coming on like I I there’s too much of that story that I that I like it top to bottom and the fact that that really happened so what what I’ve explained this to people before that on the East Coast people go oh what happens in Florida right it’s kind of a joke Florida and I would explain like you know pale Lancaster We’re like the Florida of like la like California like whatever weird thing happens like there was literally one of the people that were that was a Power Ranger killed his buddy with his samurai sword in their apartment so that and that’s Palmdale like somehow the Power Ranger ends up in Palmdale has a samurai sword and kills someone and goes to jail for murder P yeah yeah and I I could see a drunken Mary Kay lady that would not spill her drink like she may have in fact like been my neighbor like absolutely she she probably you know immigrated to my neighborhood from yours she probably did um awesome thanks so much for that and so I like to say on the show it’s last call you don’t have to go home but you’ll have to restart the video what I like my very last question I I like to ask everybody is if there’s one piece of not writing advice it’s life advice anything you’ve learned over the years small big what have you life hack whatever fancy trm people you’re using what’s the one thing you would impart upon uh the people watching today that would make their life just a little bit better my my first impulse is to say don’t take other people’s advice that’s probably you know maybe I should just leave it at that you know don’t people’s advice figure it out for yourself yeah yeah I I love it I love it bottom of my my second drink so I think that you know I’m almost out of advice I have like a tiny bit it’s very close a very close layer too I don’t know if you can even see that keep the wrong way clck there we go click no but I I do mean it seriously in terms of our conversation about writing process and about not defining your success by publication or by money um you know to be an artist of any kind whether it’s writing or in any other medium you have to be selfmotivated and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a drive to try to succeed in whatever whatever success means to you but you cannot judge your um What You Do by externalities to the point where you get too discourage just remember there’s always a difference between creativity and productivity so productivity is here’s a list of all the fancy stuff I’ve done that’s not the same thing as being creative being creative is doing the work for your own reasons and finding satisfaction in it and uh if you do that then you really can’t lose because if you succeed in some external way good for you and if you don’t then that wasn’t your primary motivation to begin with and you haven’t sold your soul and you still know how to do your work so um don’t give up it’s rough don’t give up right sure no that’s lovely um and thank you so much for coming on it’s a complete honor I had a had a great time it’s um you know I mentioned to you um earlier in in in a section we’re going to cut because it was just making a new drink you know section um but every one of these shows I feel the better for um and I really mean that genuinely I think everyone has something to offer and it’s even though it’s virtual it’s really special for me to like get like you get two hours of someone’s time and we’re just here you know we’re just you know and partially maybe because it’s virtual and there’s no one even around us buzzing around you know no Crazy Mary Kay ladies you know buzzing by for for us to focus and I I um I cherish every one of them I I truly appreciate it and thank you so much for for being here my pleasure I feel the same way about you Bill it’s been so fun to connect and um really fun that you found me through my friend John Lane the writer John Lane whose episode is already up um and I just want to say that I probably would not be a writer without John Lane he’s been not only a friend but a mentor to me um he’s just an amazing writer and an amazing person so if you’re listen listening to this episode and you haven’t yet listened to the earlier episode in which bill has a conversation with John I definitely recommend John Lane’s work to you and also I recommend Bill’s podcast and his conversation with John to you and it’s been super fun and uh let’s hope we can get together again sometime so do I have anything wait I need to do a final cheer so I have to have at least a little bit I’m G I didn’t pour this on camera I’m gon to pour the little horsey guy okay wait I’m I’m out of I gotta do it too hold on okay okay no problem take your time every interview should be as lubricated as this one was Cheers Cheers
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Believe or not, you have one of the best channels on YouTube.
Believe or not, you have one of the best channels on YouTube.
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Hilarious duo! Can't get enough of their witty banter.
Mike and William are a riot together. More please!
This video brightened my day. Thanks for the laughs!
I need a sequel to this! Too funny!"
Best. Bar joke. Ever. 😂
Brilliant mix of humor and writing insights.
My new favorite YouTube duo!
I'm officially a fan after watching this!
Can't stop replaying this. So good!
Who knew authors could be this funny? Loved it!