In this quiet and poignant personal essay, Sandra Beasley recounts her experience at a writing retreat in Homer, Alaska. The author and poet reflects on allergies, grief, her family’s history, and—especially—her mother: her anxieties, their complex relationship, and how she’d put aside a passion for painting so that she could focus on parenting.
At every turn, my mother made art a valid thing for me to pursue, and so I did. But because I was around to pursue my art, she didn’t get to pursue hers for years and years.
A voice in my head often whispers that the refrigerator is running low, and our shelves are running empty. That to prove you’ve done the best possible job of loving someone else, you have to turn yourself inside out. That you should make a show of having no love left for yourself. This voice says there can be a mother-artist or a daughter-artist, but not both.
Except the sunsets are so long in Alaska, in this month of the summer solstice. A person could spend hours watching the skies turn pink and then purple, cook and eat dinner, put the dishes away and come back—and the sunset would still be there. I want my mother to see this abundance. I am trying to figure out a way to bring it home to her.
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Brendan O’Meara’s Creative Nonfiction Podcast digs deep into all aspects of storytelling, taking us behind the scenes with authors to learn more about how stories get made. Here, we’ve got an excerpt ofEpisode 420, in which he speaks with author and journalist Rebecca Renner about the process of writing her book, Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades.
In writing, there’s a tendency to overthink, maybe even overprepare, trying to ensure conditions are just right before beginning a draft. It’s overwhelming to the point of paralysis. That’s when it pays to write before you’re ready. Or, in the case of author and journalist Rebecca Renner, “Just put words on paper.” Renner talks about the surprises she encountered after getting into a writing flow state and the critical role of a thoughtful editor.
This excerpt has been edited for clarity and concision. Subscribe to The Creative Nonfiction Podcast wherever you get your podcasts to hear this conversation in full.
Rebecca: I was writing this during the deep part of the pandemic. And I don’t think any of it came easily because we were all going through turmoil, and I just could not write. And my editor and my agent were like, “Just put words on the paper.” And they just kept harping on me to do that. And I kept saying, “Once I start, I’m not going to be able to stop.” I overwrite, and I’m very verbose. I was correct: I couldn’t stop. I ended up with junk that did not belong in the story. But I also ended up with surprising elements I don’t think I would have encountered if I hadn’t just let my brain open up and get into that flow state where I finally stopped criticizing myself to the point of paralysis.
I’m very lucky that I had an editor who helped me find those diamonds in the rough. Because I don’t think it would have been as good of a book without her.
Brendan: Maybe expand a little bit about that relationship between you and your editor, and how that dynamic helped shape Gator Country. There was one passage I had highlighted, where you write, “writing a book is itself an adventure, no matter how much you plan, you must be open to the unexpected, the outlandish, because that is where the story lives.”
Rebecca: The thing that I said about my editor sort of goes with that. So I’m glad you brought that up. I sang her praises. And this is in the acknowledgments on the very last page, “This book isn’t exactly what I pitched her, it is so much better. Like I did while investigating the story, she put aside her expectations and let herself see the astonishing even when I didn’t, it takes a lot of talent and a lot of hard work, and I thank her.”
But I do think that some editors might have been rigid and dead set on the exact book that they had been pitched and unable to see that the reality of the story was not the same. I had done all my due diligence in researching before I pitched the story and the proposal is pretty long. My editor said it’s one of the best proposals she’s ever gotten. And so it really takes some introspection and I want to say a made-up word like “outro-spection,” being able to remove the sunglasses you’re wearing and see the world as it really is to be able to come upon the story in a way that is not exactly how you pitched it. Even though you’ve done all that work. I really do think that the editing stage is where a lot of the art comes in.
I really do think that the editing stage is where a lot of the art comes in.
Rebecca Renner
There’s an essay that I have gone back to several times. I used to teach it. It’s called “Revisioning ‘The Great Gatsby’” [Susan Bell]. And the writer looks at the various stages of editing that famous book. But one of the things that I go back to is how the writer describes revision as a process of seeing the manuscript, the story in a new way. And so I think we really did that. We had to figure out not what the story was, but what it was supposed to be, and get it to be the best version of itself.
I’ve worked with so many editors from being a journalist that I like to say that I really know what good editing looks like. The best editors will make this very small change, like putting a sentence in a different place, and it’ll change everything. And it’s just gentle, subtle. But it’s also illuminating when you’re working with an editor of that caliber. There’ll be little, tiny shifts that make it come alive. And then, of course, there are parts where she was like, “This doesn’t make any sense and needs punctuation,” or “Can you rewrite this part to have it sound like all the rest of it?” So it wasn’t all perfect. It was definitely a collaborative effort. And I really like working with editors like that.
Brendan: What you were saying a while ago, you were just urged to write, just get stuff down on the page. It’s really important to do that, because that early draft, that rough draft, or maybe the zero draft, as Roy Peter Clark might call it, it’s terraforming the world or making the map. And there are always going to be gaps in that cartography, and you’ve got to feel like “Okay, here’s a dark spot in the map. How do we fill this in?” But sometimes you don’t know that gap is there until you start and it reveals what else you need to do. Unless you have—for lack of a better term—the courage to start and write before you’re ready, that stuff has a tendency to always be in the shadows, and you need to write your way through it.
Rebecca: I’ve actually been reading The Creative Act by Rick Rubin. And I feel like some people think that book is a little woo woo. I did when I first started reading it, but I really like how he talks about being open to the possibilities of the creative act and the potential there, being able to get into the flow state and stopping yourself from self-criticism and over-analyzing, getting yourself to open up. That has been one of the most important things to do in my creative process because I have to remind myself that I have all the things I need; it’s all there. And then I don’t have to keep going out and getting more details or over-report things, which I have a problem doing, or even in fiction that I just have to believe that I have the story and that I have to get it down. Then I’ll see the lacunae.
Listen to the full episode here.
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Disillusioned and drained after dancing for a living became too much, Laura Killingbeck packed up her bike and bought a one-way ticket to Alaska. Cycling and the outdoors brought her true solitude. In those she encountered, she found generosity, kindness, and what she needed most: human connection and community.
By then I’d stripped in a half dozen clubs, and dancing on stage seemed like a great deal: I got paid to wear glitter and twirl around! Each night was an absurd festival of human desire, raw and unfiltered. It was more interesting than working as a waitress; more bluntly educational than many of my college classes. I planned to use my earnings to become a mountaineer and then build a small homestead. At night when I glued on my eyelashes in the dressing room mirror, I saw myself as a subversive beatnik success story.
After a few days, I crossed the Canadian border and continued into the Yukon. The trees here were smaller and windswept, and the forest seemed to go on forever in all directions. Bears ambled by on the roadside, and I sang to them as I passed. Days turned into weeks, the Yukon became British Columbia, and slowly I dissolved into the joy of flow. Every pedal stroke became part of the rhythm of breath and motion. Every thought and feeling became transient, like the sky. I cried a lot as I rode, often from gratitude, and these tears seemed to cleanse me from the inside out. It didn’t matter what I looked like out here or what anyone thought of me. I was free to fall apart, and inside that dissolution, for fleeting moments, I felt whole.
My body was useful in a way that finally made sense. In that moment I understood: Joy was its own form of power.
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There’s little to be said about wholesale members’ club Costco than hasn’t been said already. (Including in our own pages.) Or so I thought. Simon Wu adds to that prodigious canon by organizing a family vacation to Costco Travel’s most popular and well-reviewed destination: the Mayan Riviera. The result: an essay as thoughtful and selective as a trip to Costco isn’t.
Here, however, in the Yucatan sun, stripped of this architecture, the Costco psychology (“Everything Is a Good Deal”) merges with the all-inclusive hotel psychology (“Everything Is Paid For”) in a sinister marriage of value and engorgement. This nexus of ensuring what you Paid For Is a Good Deal creates a relentless compulsion to feast: when the price of an experience has been prepaid, the value you derive from it is based on your ability to consume. Thus, you need to consume a lot to get your money’s worth. Sometimes consuming so much, for so little, is tiring. Sometimes constantly optimizing the best deal gets in the way of relaxing, particularly after the third or fourth all-you-can-eat meal. Or so I think. It is definitely fun the first few days. My parents treat the Paradisus like what it is: a buffet.
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Mary H.K. Choi is searingly honest in her portrayal of coming to terms with an autism diagnosis at the age of 43—not holding back in exposing what she finds uncomfortable. A moving account of finally feeling allowed to make things easier on yourself.
Some fixes revealed themselves quickly. Others required more trial and error. For most of my adult life, I dressed with great, highly strung care. But even when I put an outfit together, I’d sometimes leave whatever occasion early to take it off or not go to the event altogether because I knew I’d be uncomfortable. People with autism are known to have issues with textures, tags, and seams, and I began wearing a tissue-thin, very soft turtleneck or an undershirt as a barrier to textiles that I found objectionable. Turns out there are also silhouettes I adore aesthetically that I cannot abide proprioceptively. Any trench-coat-length garment that tugs when I sit. Poplin. Too-full skirts that create a sense of vagueness behind me. Brocade. Stiff jeans. Leg-of-mutton sleeves that bunch at my armpits. Accepting this took more self-persuasion, but once I did, I ransacked my style archive and parted ways with half of my wardrobe.
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Yesterday, the journalism world received the sad news that D Magazine writer and editor Zac Crain had died. His colleagues sent him off with a loving and affecting collection of memories; I’m using this space to celebrate his 2017 piece about Erykah Badu, a once-in-a-generation artist who, like Crain, is woven deeply into the city she lives in. As a profile, it’s a writearound like few others, though you leave with the satisfaction of knowing that when they finally did talk, it was well worth the wait.
There she is, in front of her house that overlooks White Rock Lake, sitting at a card table with her girls, passing out cups of water to runners and bikers on a hot summer day. She’s at Beauty Bar on a Thursday night, sitting in with DJ Sober at his Big Bang party, or visiting the kids at the Dallas International School. She’s stranded at DFW Airport during an ice storm, in a fur and “Badu in Japan” hoodie. You never really know when you’ll find her, and that’s the point.
Maybe you were there when she performed an aerial ring routine with the Lone Star Circus. Maybe you were at the Bad Boy Family Reunion show at the American Airlines Center, when she showed up unannounced and took over the stage near the end. Or maybe you happened to be at Dealey Plaza the day she filmed her video for “Window Seat,” slowly disrobing until she stood where JFK had been shot, naked, in and out in one take, here and gone so quickly you could hardly believe what you’d just seen.
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Nondisclosure agreements were once largely confined to the corporate world—they provided a way to prevent company secrets from getting into the wrong hands. Now NDAs are everywhere. Read this juicy story from Reeves Weideman to understand just how much these legal documents have become a part of many people’s everyday existence. We’re talking celebrities, yes, but as one of Weideman’s sources puts it, NDAs are also pro forma for “small-market newscasters, or hedge bros, [or] a medium-tier meteorologist”:
While NDAs were originally reserved for executives or employees with access to proprietary technical or financial information, the paperwork has flowed down the org chart. “They used to be confined to pretty rarefied worlds, and now you see companies imposing these on janitors,” Jodi Short, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said. This spring, I found job listings that required an NDA to work as a forklift driver in Virginia, an e-commerce associate at Island Beach Gear on the Jersey shore, and a “meat cutter” at a biltong shop in suburban Charlotte, North Carolina. The NDA is now a part of many job hunts—some companies require it in order to come in for an interview—and a meme went around TikTok that the document could be used to explain any gaps in your résumé: “Sorry, I signed an NDA.”
The next frontier for companies was to extend the web of secrecy to their customers. This year, a plastic surgeon in Seattle was found to have made more than 10,000 patients sign an NDA before their procedures that prohibited them from posting a “negative review,” which was defined as anything less than four stars. Julie Macfarlane, an emerita professor of law in Ontario and the co-founder of Can’t Buy My Silence, an organization that advocates for the regulation of NDAs, told me companies often use them to keep the public from learning about bad things they have done. “The first case in which a parent was compensated because of the impact of tainted baby formula was years before anyone knew about it,” Macfarlane said.
But even this consumer-facing use has expanded. Companies now deploy NDAs to conceal their own generosity. In April, I spoke to a man I’ll call Paul, a pseudonym he requested I use to avoid jeopardizing his status as a member of Marriott’s Ambassador Elite program. Paul is 37, works in real estate in Hong Kong, and travels a lot. He achieved his Ambassador Elite status by spending a hundred nights in Marriott hotels last year. Over Easter, when Paul checked in to the Royalton Chic Cancún, a Marriott on the beach, the receptionist greeted him with good news: a free upgrade! But there was a catch. The receptionist slid a piece of paper across the desk. Paul would need to promise not to brag about his upgrade at the pool bar. The NDA didn’t look very legal. It was half a page long, and the last words, in bold below the signature line, were “Please, have an amazing vacation.”
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