Show notes
Why stick to any one genre? Our guest this week is Catherine Newman: memoirist, middle grade novelist, etiquette columnist and now the author of How to Be a Person: 65 Highly Useful, Super-Important Things to Learn Before You’re Grown-Up. While she’s at it, she writes a cooking blog, co-authored a book on crafts for kids and edits ChopChop, a kids cooking magazine. And she pens frequent funny essays for everything from O to the New York Times to the Cup of Jo website. In other words, she’s putting a pastiche of writing together and making it work with an insouciant disregard for any and all advice about self-branding or owning an niche or sticking to one topic or identity.In fact, I’d argue that “insouciant disregard” might just BE her brand. This episode also includes the immortal words “I’ve never had to kill anything during the podcast before,” uttered by Jess—so that’s a reason to listen right there. But there are plenty of others—this is a real nitty gritty episode on building a career and getting things done.#AmReadingKJ: Henna Artist by Alka JoshiRecipes for a Beautiful Life by Rebecca BarryJess: Sure Shot by Sarina BowenAnimal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara KingsolverMissing You by Harlan CobenCatherine: Know My Name by Chanel MillerSea Wife by Amity GaigeThe Chicken Sisters by KJ Dell’AntoniaThanks to everyone who supports the podcast financially. To join that team, click the button below:But it’s all good. The pod is free as it always has and always will be. This shownotes email is free, too, so please—forward it to a friend, and if you haven’t already, join our email list and be on top of it every time there’s a new episode.Find more about Jess here, Sarina here and about KJ here.KJ Dell'Antonia 0:00 Hey writers KJ here. Usually I write down what I'm going to tell you in our pre episode, promotional blurb, whatever you want to call this, and I will say right away that of course we are, as always sponsored by our friends at Author Accelerator, who we love. This week, instead of writing down some great reasons why we love them I just wanted to take a minute to read to you from the email that I got from Jenny Nash this week. This is her weekly email that goes out to anyone who's on the Author Accelerator list, or read every single one of those and I cannot say that about almost any other weekly email I get, there a couple. Anyway, Jenny writes, "I was speaking with a writer this week who could see the light at the end of the tunnel on her novel. She was almost done and she was terrified. She could feel herself panicking and turning to other shiny new ideas. Anything that wasn't this almost done idea. Being done would mean that her work could be rejected. Being done would mean that her work could be judged. Being done would mean that her limitations and weaknesses as a writer would be on display for everyone to see. Being done would mean that whatever she had on the page was as good as she was able to do. Even if it wasn't anywhere close to the perfect story in her mind. Being done would mean that she would be exposed." I could really, really relate to that. And I think I'm not the only one. A lot of us start to let things go the minute we get anywhere close to the finish line, because the finish line is scary. And if that's the place where you are maybe now is the moment when you want to reach out and see about working with a writing coach. You might not need much a few weeks, a little bit of a push, a little bit of help, just to take that thing that you're working on, and get it through to not the almost best you can do (which you know allows a lot of room for imagining other things) but the actual best you could do and then make a real decision about what it is you'd like to do with it. If you're game for that, you should head over to authoraccelerator.com and click your way through to all the great places because we love them and there's also a lot of other good stuff there. While I'm here I also want to say that this episode includes a couple of small swear words here and there and also some weird commentary on vaginas. Because this is one of our dearest friends we're interviewing this week and we got a little bit weird. So letting you know that so if you have tiny ears around that you are concerned about? Honestly, it's no big on this one. I don't think that it will bother you, but I wanted to give you a heads up. Alright. Enjoy it. This is a great episode. Is it recording?Jess Lahey 2:51 Now it's recording. KJ Dell'Antonia 2:53 This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone trying to remember what I'm supposed to be doing.Jess Lahey 2:57 Alright, let's start over.KJ Dell'Antonia 2:58 Awkward pause. I'm gonna rustle some papers. Okay, now one, two, three.Hey, I'm KJ Dell'Antonia. And this is #AmWriting. The podcast about writing all things, from fiction, to nonfiction, pitches, proposals, emails, essays. This is the podcast about sitting down and getting your writing work done. Jess Lahey 3:27 I'm Jess Lahey, I'm the author of The Gift of Failure and the forthcoming book The Addiction Inoculation, Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence, who the subtitles are always so tricky, and you can find my work on the old interwebs at The Atlantic and the New York Times and The Washington Post and lots of other places.KJ Dell'Antonia 3:58 I am KJ Dell'Antonia, the author of the novel The Chicken Sisters coming out on July 1 of this year, which is 2020. For those of you listening in the future, when I hope things are not what they are now, but that is not what we are going to talk about today. We have a guest, our guest is Catherine Newman, who we've actually been trying to record with Catherine since like since like our 10th episode. But wait, I want to tell you about Catherine, she is a memoirist, a middle grade novelist, and etiquette columnist and now the author of How to Be a Person: 66 Highly Useful, Super Important Things to Learn Before You're Grown Up.Jess Lahey 4:57 It's actually 65, but I think that we should invent a 66 while we're here.KJ Dell'Antonia 5:22 Okay, no, I wasn't done. I wasn't done - because while she's at it, Catherine writes a cooking blog, she co-authored a book on crafts for kids, and she edits Chop Chop, a kid's cooking magazine, which I didn't even know till I just recently read her bio because I never read the bios of my friends because I'm supposed to know all this stuff, but I didn't. And she pens frequent funny essays for everything from O to The New York Times to The Cup of Joe website. In other words, she's putting a pastiche of writing together and making it work with an insouciance disregard for any and all advice about self branding, or owning a niche, or sticking to one topic or an identity, and in fact, I would argue that insouciance disregard might just be Catherine Newman's brand.Catherine Newman 6:10 Oh, my God, that's it. I just feel like that's the mic drop. I'm so happy. I also feel like you just fully explained all the problems I have. It's my insouciance disregard.Well, I loved your intro. My intro really would have been you know, this is Catherine Newman for me is the writer that, not only a person I adore and know personally, but as a writer she's the one who always figures out the new way to say the thing I have been feeling and yet felt so cliched that I never wrote it down. She always has some new amazing way to state it and then I'm like, 'Oh my gosh, how has no one ever said it that way before?' and it's so true and perfect and beautiful. And you know, for a lot of writers that write about parenting and this whole racket that we call life, often if they have a favorite piece, I often will say let me guess was it by Catherine Newman because her pieces just rank as people's favorites.Jess Lahey 8:00 We love your stuff. But you guys, you and KJ have a much longer relationship than you and I do, Catherine. So KJ, tell them where you guys met.KJ Dell'Antonia 8:09 I don't know where we met. I know that Catherine wrote for me at Motherlode but it must have been Wonder Time. The late great that says that it's not the greatest like the more I say the name now that it's gone, the dumber it sounds, but it really was. Yeah, okay. Soft sigh of regret. And while we're having soft sighs of regret for demises of magazines, I hear Family Circle just tanked. I mean, I know that was like in the fall, but... Catherine Newman 8:49 I know I always feel like I'm there on that tiny little island of sinking magazines.Jess Lahey 8:57 I'm just about to send out an email today saying Hi, want me to write anything? Anything you got - I'll write that thing.KJ Dell'Antonia 9:40 Great. Okay, so here we are, finally, at last.So okay. 65 (not 66) Highly Useful, Super Important Things to Learn Before You're Grown Up. Why that after a resume that includes two parenting memoirs, one crafting book, and one middle grade novel that was my middle grader at the time absolute total favorite, he even reviewed it for Parenting magazine. Yeah, he still looks back on that with fondness because he has a hard time finding books that he likes. Anyway. And so from there you thought I know, the best thing and the easiest thing for me to market next would clearly be a book of useful things to learn before you're grown up. I don't think that's really how you did it.Catherine Newman 10:37 Yeah, no, no, I know. Isn't that crazy? Really, the dirty truth is that I pitched it as a much worse book. I wanted a book, I went to the library to look for a book, I don't know if you ever end up writing this way where it's like, oh, this thing doesn't exist that I assumed existed. But I went to the library to get a book for Bertie, because I wanted her to do more helpful stuff in the house, but she didn't know how to do it. And she didn't want to be taught how to do it by anybody. So this is, second child has been wanting to do it by herself since she was two. And it's really hard with a person like that, who doesn't want to be shown how to do something and then you ask them like, 'Hey, can you clean the bathroom?' And she's like, 'I don't know how to do that.' But then if you try to show her she's pissed. So for Bertie it worked, so I went to the library to get I assumed like DK had made one of those like photo illustrated guides to chores, you know...KJ Dell'Antonia 11:52 I might need that, there are things I don't really know how to do. Truth. Catherine Newman 11:57 So I went to get that book from the library, like I walked in confidently, talked to the librarian and they were like, 'Yeah, we don't have a book like that.' So I was working with Story at the time (the publisher)and who I love and my editor there is an old person from Family Fun who I used to write all this fun stuff with. KJ Dell'Antonia 12:22 That was also a fun place to write.Catherine Newman 12:25 Oh my God, so fun. So she and I had worked on a piece that I think killed me called Chores Fun. So I pitched her the book Chores Fun and I wanted it to be photo illustrated, step by step, DK style. And she was interested, but needless to say that got higher up over there and they were like, 'No...'KJ Dell'Antonia 12:50 And me, I want that book. I would buy 500 copies of that book. Catherine Newman 12:58 So they then said, you know, can you expand it so it's not just that? And so the other thing I really had wanted to write was, I want to say etiquette, but I don't mean in the like uptight, sort of like how to talk to the Queen of England sons, just the like how to communicate sense of etiquette, like how to be a person who needs to communicate with other people. I had wanted to write a book about that, too. And so we sort of merged those. And the book for me is primarily that but then we broke it down a little so it seems like it's many more topics than communicating and like cleaning a bathroom. So there's some stuff about cooking, and some stuff about money, and some stuff about just general skills like you know, changing batteries and that's how it came to be. And so I have found both of my kids with galleys of the book open to learn whatever it is they need to do. Bernie has used the book to tie a necktie and swears it works. And when I had asked them to clean all the bathrooms at Thanksgiving, I went in and the book was like, propped up on the counter in the bathroom.Jess Lahey 14:16 Oh my gosh, that's so brilliant. KJ Dell'Antonia 14:17 I had not thought of that. We've been cleaning bathrooms like crazy around here and yeah, I discovered that one child claimed to have been taught to wipe the toilet with a Clorox wipe and then flush it. And when I tell you that we're on septic I can also tell you that that ended extremely badly with men in the basement and saws. Oh, God, yeah, that's not how to clean a toilet. And I really didn't tell her that either.Catherine Newman 14:47 No, I can imagine.KJ Dell'Antonia 14:49 Anyway, I have now taught this skill, but I feel that it needs refreshing so I'm gonna prop that up. Jess Lahey 14:57 I'm gonna do the same thing. There's that forgetting of things that technically they should know. And as we've talked about a bajillion times for me - that one was laundry and we solved that with the dry erase markers on the washer and dryer with all of the instructions and the bathroom one seems to be the next frontier that we have to handle around here.KJ Dell'Antonia 15:22 Well, the truth is that in this moment, any of us who did have someone who sometimes cleaned for us whether that was frequent or infrequent, don't have that. Anyway, most of us are, even if there's stuff that maybe we didn't have to do before, or we were teaching our kids to do it but they didn't necessarily have to do it I could kind of poke at it and that was fine because the person who really could do it was gonna be there in two weeks. So now it's like yeah, this is how you clean the toilet. Jess Lahey 16:17 Here's the nice thing about this book also is that there are so many times when you show a kid how to do it and you're being a little overly controlling or they're like no one else does that, no one cleans behind the toilet seat, Mom, you can show them a book and say, 'Look, this is how an arbiter of how these things should be done is actually doing things. KJ Dell'Antonia 16:55 So what has it been, like getting out there to share this book that is, in many ways, so different than from what you've done before?Catherine Newman 17:18 I could ask you the same. You know, it's funny. The funny thing for me is that my first two books were so intimate that actually, it was really like trial by fire in terms of publishing. So when people would blur together sort of criticizing the book with criticizing me as a parent or even just me as a person, because the memoir genre kind of invites that and it was really little nerve racking, honestly. And so then after that there was fiction, which is so delightful because it's fiction. And there was a book I did with my friend Nicole, that craft book, which is so delightful, because a) it's a craft book, so no one's gonna, like take my character apart over it and b) it was with a friend. So you know, it's like how I used to love co-teaching when I was teaching, like it's so dreamy to have a partner in something because you're not stranded. So this is none of those.…
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