On the connection between parenthood and creativity

One of my favorite lines in your memoir is towards the end where you wrote, “Did you know that love is beyond language, even though we are forever trying to find language for it?” Which made me wonder what the process was like trying to put into words your feelings around a topic for which language often doesn’t suffice.

I’m excited by stuff that “can’t be put into words,” because it opens up the possibility for magic to happen. Things that can’t be done can only be done through something that feels like magic, and I think that’s cool. Writing feels like it has the potential for magic in that sense, because even though you can’t explain certain things, you can evoke them. You can create the feeling of them, almost like a kind of alchemy where you put words and images and thoughts and ideas in a certain order, and they create something beyond what they mean individually. I felt that love is also a kind of alchemy. And so, what I was trying to do in the book was not only talk about love on the literal level, and sometimes metaphoric or poetic level, but also trying to alchemize words to create the feeling of love.

It’s interesting that you use the word “magic” because that was something that came up when I was reading, the way that you’re able to draw out the magic in these seemingly mundane, everyday moments. Are you the kind of person who writes everything down? When you’re experiencing something, are you like, I’m going to write about this later, or is it all in retrospect?

I’m the kind of person who’s like, I’m going to write about this later, but never does because I sit down and watch three episodes of The Office and then fall asleep [laughs]. One of my cop-outs for that has been to rely on memory, because my theory is that if something holds space in my memory, then there’s something to it. I learned this trick when I was doing a lot of celebrity profiles for glossy magazines. I would record everything and I’d have all the interview questions and audio. But when I sat down to write, I would think about the memories I had. I’d be like, oh, I remember he came in and he was wearing that shirt. I remember the way he looked at the maître d’ when I was sitting at the table. If that sticks in my memory, there must be something to it. So, I just described what I remember with the belief that there’s value there. And then later, part of the process after what some screenwriter friends of mine call the “vomit draft,” where you just have to put everything out that you remember, later you go back in and you go, well, what does that mean? I’ve described the way he looked at the maître d’ when he walked into the restaurant. Why? What does that mean? How does that relate to my overarching theory or thesis about this piece? That’s when all of the surgical connective tissue comes in where you start drawing lines and connections and tying things together and sewing up pieces comes in.

You’re so generous with the personal experiences and emotional revelations that you share. How do you decide what to share and what to keep for yourself?

What I learned doing profiles is I try to only include aspects of the self when they shine light on the subject. Using personal experience to shine light on the subject, I think that’s a valid method. It’s actually quite useful because we do know the self better than we know a lot of things. And so it helps give us insight. Plus it acknowledges to the reader that, yeah, you’re getting a perspective on this person. I don’t believe in objective journalism. I don’t think that’s a real thing. I don’t think that it’s just like I’m writing about this person in some objective journalistic way. What I’m writing is my impressions of this person and my understanding of them. That’s by nature going to be filtered through the self. Including the self allows the reader to feel trust for you. But that said, I try to only include aspects of this self that shine a light on the subject. I think of it like a portrait, actually.

I went to school for theater, and I think a lot about how theatrical lighting works. You’re lighting the subject on stage, and you might have a light above and a light from the side, and you might have some lower lights that shoot upwards. Every single image, anecdote, story, background are all forms of light. They’re shining on the subject to paint the picture that you’re trying to paint of them. So, if I include some story about something that happened to my dad in 1961 or whatever, I’m including it because it shines a particular light on the subject that illuminates something that I’m trying to get the reader to see.

How has your experience in the theater world affected your writing, if at all?

The farther away I get from it, the more I realize it’s central to how I think about things. I didn’t train as a writer, so there’s a lot of stuff that writers are doing that I actually don’t even know about because I never learned it in school. My experience in theater is the main creative earth that I draw sustenance from. What I said about the lighting thing is one of them for sure. Another thing is that, what I came to understand about the way I thought of theater is that your job as an actor is to reach an emotional space or moment on cue. And you’re doing that in service of telling a story. So, if you’re in Macbeth and you see a knife floating in the air, but there isn’t one, but you’re shocked and surprised and confused and a little tantalized by this knife, as an actor, you have to reach that moment of shock and confusion and excitement and fear, and you have to do that right at that page in the script. When we get to 34 minutes into the performance, you’ve got to hit that and you’re doing that to tell this larger story that Shakespeare wrote. When I think about writing, part of my job when I sit down is I’m trying to reach the emotional place that I need to reach in order to put the words together in the way that I want to. And what the reader gets is the record of that. They get the cave painting of the fact that I was there. So, thinking of it that way is probably a pretty actorly way to think about writing.

You talk a lot about your kids in the book, your “adult children,” as you say in your bio. Has being a parent has inspired your creativity in any way?

I don’t even know if “inspired” is the word, because that suggests that it’s outside of the [thing] and they’re pushing some energy into it. It’s like the whole thing. My whole way of being is around the fact that I’m a parent to these kids. In a very logistical sense, it’s how I ended up with writing as the creative pursuit that I was able to do as opposed to playing music, which I did for a long time, or theater, which I studied. I couldn’t leave the house for great periods of time to go on tour. I couldn’t go do Shakespeare in Oregon for a season because I had kids at home. So, writing became the thing that I could do and still be at home. But also when I was writing [the book], I didn’t think they would read this now. My son actually did read this now, which was a surprise to me. My daughter was like, “I’m good.”

[laughs]

I didn’t think either of them were going to read it now. What I thought is that after I died, when they were 40 and 50, they’d be like, “All right, let’s go back and see who this guy was.” And so there’s a sense of writing, I don’t want to use the word legacy because it’s a little heavy-handed, it’s a little metallic, but there’s a sense of wanting to, almost a responsibility to describe life in this moment in its truest sense for the people that will come later and that starts with my kids, but it expands out to all future generations.

So, in that sense, it’s really inspired me. Also what I write in the book about what I learned about love from being a parent shows up in my writing for sure. Writing can be a super self-centered and egoistic exercise. I think it’s always going to be a little bit of that because you’re just yapping uncontrollably on the page, which is a little self-centered. But I also think that what I learned about love from having children and seeing children get born specifically, and just the daily practice of trying to keep children safe, alive, and to nurture their humanity and their capacity to love and show up in the world and be present—the daily practice of that feels like the most important practice I have come across for myself in the world. I carry that into my writing for sure, that this way of trying to nurture life, it’s an overarching thing that I’m trying to do. It’s not that I wouldn’t be doing that if I didn’t have kids. I just think having kids has taught me a lot about how to do that.

Where do you write? Do you have a desk and if so, what does your desk look like?

I do have a desk that I write at. In my current apartment, it’s in a little closet. I call it the “cloffice.” It’s like this half closet, half office that I set up my desk in. I keep it relatively neat, mostly because it’s too small for me not to keep it neat. I’ve also gotten a lot neater as I’ve grown too. When I was younger, I was the classic guy with socks everywhere, just whatever, take-out containers. I’m not like that anymore. I clean my house pretty much every day on some level. At the very least, it’s a useful procrastination tool and cleaning my desk is one of them, so I will wipe my desk down. It’s got books everywhere. I have a couple of glasses of water or tea or coffee that I haven’t finished. I have headphones, a microphone, a computer. I have a little mixer when I have time to make music, which I almost never do. I have Q-tips, because for some reason, Q-tipping my ears is one of my procrastination activities. Also flossing my teeth is another procrastination activity, so I have dental floss usually—

This is at your desk? [laughs]

This is at my desk, Q-tips and dental floss [laughs]. I always keep those things on me. I don’t always write at home. I can be portable. I can write in cafes for sure, especially once I discovered–this is getting really technical—but I have noise-canceling headphones, and they helped me focus. For a long time I was using brown noise playlists to help me focus. I recently discovered 852 megahertz playlists, which is supposed to be some frequency that helps people who have ADHD, which I have. When I throw in the 852 megahertz playlist, it’s a lot of different meditative music, the kind of stuff you might hear in a spa type shit. But all this stuff has this one frequency going through it. And it’s true, it does slow down my brain and it does allow me to focus and get quiet in a way that not a lot of other stuff does.

Do you have any creative rituals?

At the beginning when I wrote the proposal [for the book], I had two pretty discrete creative rituals. One is, the first time I went up north to write the proposal, I stopped at Target and bought a scented candle, which I was like, this will help. I didn’t know why. I didn’t even particularly like the scent, but I got up there and I lit the candle, and then I wrote the proposal with the candle going, and then that became the smell of the book. Whenever I was really challenged, I would light that candle and it would get me in that meditative zone that I was in when I wrote the proposal, and it would pull me away from the scattered unfocused state that I was in.

I also drew tarot cards a lot, especially at the beginning when I was looking for stories. I think of tarot as not necessarily predictive, but just more like things to think about. I’ll get a card, it’ll be the High Priestess, and then I’ll think about the High Priestess, and I’ll read about it, and it’ll be about the link between this side and the other side, and the unity of the shadow and the light. Then that concept will just be in my head as I’m writing. So, as I’m constructing sentences and thinking of metaphors, imagery, this idea of moving back and forth between this realm and the next will be very present for me because I drew that card, and then that’ll just give me something to hold onto as I’m crafting the language.

I’ve been interested in that too lately. I’m not a reader by any means, but I will pull a card every now and then. There are so many archetypes, and even just seeing what the imagery brings up is such an interesting practice.

Alexander Chee talks about this in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

I was going to bring that up!

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I have met him a couple of times, and one time he did an I Ching reading for me, and he was explaining to me that the misconception is that this is about being predictive and I’m going to tell the future, or you’re going to come into money, you’re going to meet a handsome stranger, and it’s not like that. Really for a writer, it’s about stories. It’s about just hearing stories and thinking about stories and thinking about the connections and actually that the story you come up with when you’re presented with these containers, that’s a guide into understanding your thinking and your writing.

Towards the end of your book, you briefly touch on this need you have to write surrounded by the people that you love. Who is your creative community and how did you find them?

Right now, I have two or three co-writing friends, or maybe even four now, who I can just text and be like, do you want to sit and write together? If they’re available, they’ll be like, yeah. Or we’ll do it over Zoom. These are people that I’ve met just living in Oakland over the years. Some are people that I’ve met on dating apps, and it didn’t work out dating-wise, but we remained in touch. I think it takes a long time to build a friendship like that, and we built that.

Some of them aren’t even writers. I have one friend who’s a human rights attorney, but they’re always having to write briefs and having to do all this language production. Sometimes we’ll write together. I have other friends who are writers, poets, just people that I know from around Oakland and just the community. What I like about Oakland is that it’s big enough that there’s a variety of people, but it’s small enough that you can get to know people really well, and you can overlap with people over the years. I like the accountability of a mid-sized city. If you know someone, then they probably know five people that you know. If someone is an asshole, you’re going to find out about it, and everyone’s going to know. If you behave like an asshole, everyone’s going to know. There’s an accountability that comes, almost like a built-in community function, with a city this size that I’ve come to appreciate.