Episode 210: More Anything? More Everything!

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• Pop Culture Critic Chuck Klosterman Shifts Gears With 'Raised In Captivity'

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  Chuck Klosterman is the pop culture critic known for best-selling books like “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs” and his award-winning memoir about growing up in North Dakota, “Fargo Rock City.”

  His latest book is called, “Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction.”

  “Fictional nonfiction is fiction,” Klosterman told WPR’s “BETA.” “It almost seems consciously confusing and it probably is. But if you think about it, if you turned it around and it was called nonfictional fiction, it would still be fiction.

  “Typically, in these situations, they just put ‘stories’ at the bottom of the book. And I was like, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ So I sort of came up with this inside joke to myself which, of course, is a questionable move to make. I’ll say this though. There is one aspect of it, I suppose, that might be reflective of something that has meaning. This is not a criticism of other fiction writers but I typically don’t like the way fiction is written. I tend to read almost exclusively nonfiction, partially for the practicality of it.”

  “I think the bigger thing is nonfiction is written in this straightforward way where the principal goal is to communicate ideas. And very often in fiction, particularly modern literary fiction, the emphasis is on the structure of the prose and sort of the experience that’s supposed to be edifying is the unpacking of that. This is written like nonfiction. So these are untrue stories but I wrote them the exact same way I would have written stories if I had been told about a real event.“

  Klosterman explained that in a creative writing workshop, you would be told to start with the character, then move to plot mechanics, and from that comes the idea.

  “I kind of work in reverse. I start with the idea, the characters are character types. Their job is to sort of exist within this created reality, the plot is less important than the concept.”

  Many of the 34 stories in “Raised in Captivity” read like a combination of episodes of “The Twilight Zone” and thought experiments.

  Was that what he was aiming for?

  “That’s definitely where I ended up. If someone asked me, ‘What are these stories like?’ I think comparing it to ‘The Twilight Zone’ or ‘Black Mirror’ would be the most sensible thing,” he said. “Was I going for it? I’m not sure because I didn’t have total clarity of like how it was supposed to be as a whole when I started. But, you know, much like ‘The Twilight Zone,’ where you watch an episode and if we were talking about the original ‘Twilight Zone,’ for example, we’d remember, ‘Oh, you know, William Shatner was in this episode or Burgess Meredith.’

  “Or we might remember certain stories but what we’d really be talking about is kind of the world that was built for every episode, the idea that like it’s set in reality with one thing different,” he said. “Or the idea of time has shifted or something like that. That is what these stories are like to me.”

  Klosterman has wanted to write this kind of book for probably five years.

  “Any time I had a strange premise or an interesting bit of dialogue I thought or overheard or whatever, the idea of a certain kind of character. I would put it into the ‘Notes’ app of my phone. So I had hundreds and hundreds of these,” he said.

  After compiling all of these various notes, Klosterman arrived at what seemed at the time like a brilliant decision. He would write 100 stories, each of which would be exactly 1,000 words long. So with this idea in mind, he wrote a few 1,000-word stories. But then he started to realize a few things.

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  Klosterman also took a suitably unusual approach to the “About the Author” photo on the dust jacket.

  Instead of the standard head-and-shoulders shot, he went to the Center for Medical Imaging in Hillsboro, Oregon to have an X-ray taken of his head.

  The “BETA” team’s theory was he did this because he wanted to convey the idea that he is giving the reader exclusive, inside access to the way that his mind works without having to deal with any pesky paywalls. This photo would give the reader a literal idea of what being Chuck Klosterman is actually like.

  “Maybe that’s 1 percent of it,” he said. “Maybe 4 percent of it is that the title ‘Raised in Captivity,’ I’m really talking about my brain, which I feel was raised in captivity. I don’t feel like I necessarily have agency over how I think and feel. I don’t think anyone does,” Klosterman said. “I think that in a mediated culture like we have, it’s very difficult to know how you think or feel about anything. Ninety-five percent of it though was that we had the cover art for the book and the back cover, which were both these kind of illustrations of skeletons.

  “And I thought, ‘Well, what if my author photo was my actual skull?’ And I’ve got to say it is more complicated to get an X-ray of your skull for no reason than you might think. You’ve got to go to your doctor, explain that you want this, she has to recommend you to like the imaging center,” he continued. “They had a lot of questions when I showed up like because they kept saying, ‘It’s well, like, there’s nothing on here about what we’re looking for. And, in fact, it seems to suggest that you can tell us what you want to have X-rayed’ … This had never happened to them before that someone came in for just an X-ray for aesthetics.”

  The title story of “Raised in Captivity” is about a man flying first class who discovers that there is a puma in the lavatory.

  “So he goes back and he talks to the rich guy sitting next to him. And to me, it’s sort of about the confusion over class when you move from one class to another. So often when people talk about socioeconomics and class, we operate almost as if a person exists in one tier of society and that is who they are forever,” he said. “But people are always shifting this. You know, I was born probably technically, I guess, lower class. I lived a big part of my life middle class. Now I’m sure, according to the IRS or whatever, I’m kind of living in the upper class or whatever. So I do feel like I have a sense of how the economics of your reality do shape who you are and that’s kind of what the story is about. Now to the person who reads it, it’ll be like, ‘This is just weird.’ But, hopefully, it’s weird in a way that’s entertaining.”

  “Raised in Captivity” is the first book Klosterman has written since he moved to Portland, Oregon. This raises the question of whether there was something about moving from New York to the Pacific Northwest that played a part in him writing such a different kind of book.

  “When I lived in New York, I was probably over-stimulated. You can’t really live in New York and not constantly be encountering different people, different ideas,” he said. “You know, the world is almost changing in front of you and with you. But now, there are many days where the only people I talk to are my wife, my kids and maybe my kids’ teacher or maybe somebody who works at a diner or something. I’m much more inside my mind. There’s more time where I’m by myself. It’s odd because I’ve written a bunch of memoirs. But this feels like the most personal book I’ve done because I really feel like it’s about my interior life, where so many of the other books I wrote were about my exterior life.”

• Television Writer, Producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach On The Toxic Culture Behind Many TV Shows

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  Javier Grillo-Marxuach is a television writer, producer and showrunner. He’s also the author of two books of essays about his experiences working in TV — “Shoot That One” and “Shoot This One.”

  “Shoot That One” includes an essay called “The 11 Laws of Showrunning (The Mean Version)” in which Grillo-Marxuach takes on the toxic culture that runs rampant behind the scenes of many TV shows.

  “A showrunner is not just a head writer, a showrunner is the CEO of a corporation with 150 employees and a multimillion-dollar budget,” Grillo-Marxuach told WPR’s “BETA.” “And it has a job which is to turn in anywhere from 10 to 22 artisanally created pieces of art. A showrunner needs to be the benign leader of that organization.

  “And what a lot of showrunners mistakenly believe is that by being given a series that the world has validated their ‘process’ you know. And to a lot of showrunners, that means whatever pain I have to drag myself through, whatever psychosis I have to relive, whatever trauma of my childhood I have to revisit on myself, I get to revisit on others so that they may suffer as I have and that’s how the show’s going to get made.”

  “I keep getting asked the question and it’s a really interesting question because as a Latino, I also get this a lot,” he said. “It’s like, when is it going to be over? When will there be enough representation? And my answer is always this: There will have been enough representation when a female writer or a person-of-color writer doesn’t remember a time when they felt unrepresented.”

  Grillo-Marxuach worked as a writer and producer on the ABC TV series, “Lost,” for the show’s first two seasons. The show was about a group of plane crash survivors who find themselves stranded in the South Pacific.

  “Lost” was a breakout hit, averaging 16 million viewers during its first year. The show had six seasons.

  The New York Times TV critic Bill Carter wrote “Lost” has “perhaps the most compelling continuing story line in television history.”

  “One of the reasons that the show turned out the way it did is that there wasn’t a lot of time to second-guess anything on it,” Grillo-Marxuach said. “It was a massive leap of faith in J.J. (Abrams, co-creator and director of the pilot) and in Damon (Lindelof, co-creator and showrunner) that ABC ordered the pilot because they quite literally ordered it off of an outline.”

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  Grillo-Marxuach said there was tension during the mad scramble because ABC expected a story-of-the-week show but the writers and producers knew that they wanted it to be serialized.

  “So for me, part of the pride I feel on that is that we were able to take a very traditional model of network storytelling and turn it on its head completely,” he said.

  Grillo-Marxuach was part of a “Lost” writers think tank that also included Paul Dini, Christian Taylor, and Jennifer Johnson. The four writers created very detailed backstories for the characters.

  “And we realized that it’s hard to come up with a number of compelling stories that are going to carry the equal dramatic weight while being serialized and all that,” Grillo-Marxuach recalled. “We came up with this idea, ‘Hey! The pilot has flashbacks, why don’t we do flashbacks in the series?’ And it was one of those things where like literally minds exploded and we took all of that detail that we had built up over months of brainstorming and made it part of the series.”

  Grillo-Marxuach realized the huge cultural impact of “Lost” on a visit to the dog park after he struck up a friendship with a man and his dog that was dying of acute canine leukemia.

  “His dog was just a sack of bones, he literally was like a bag of brown fur holding a bunch of bones,” Grillo-Marxuach said.

  One day, they were sitting together on a bench, petting the man’s dog.

  “We’re talking about the dog and I’m like, ‘Look, I’m really sorry.’ And he goes like, ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, too’ And I said, ‘You know, he’s not just a great dog. He has a great owner.’ And then the guy broke down and then I cried. And then we cried,” Grillo-Marxuach recalled.

  “And there was this awkward moment where we’re sitting across this bench from each other. And all we know from each other is that, you know, he has a dying dog and I’m very sympathetic to his cause. So out of this awkward moment, he says, ‘What do you do for a living?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I’m one of the writers of ‘Lost.” And literally his eyes saucered out and he shouts. He goes like, ‘Oh my God! Can you tell me what’s happening on that island?’”

  After “Lost,” Grillo-Marxuach worked as a co-executive producer for the supernatural drama “Medium” starring Patricia Arquette and then he created and executive produced his own TV series called “The Middleman.”

  The titular “Middleman” is a fixer of “exotic problems,” including mad scientists, hostile aliens and a super-intelligent ape. The series aired on ABC Family (now known as Freeform) in 2008.

  “I remember saying things to them like, ‘Guys, the pilot features a gorilla with a machine gun.’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, we know.’ And I’m like, ‘It’s not a metaphorical gorilla. It’s a real gorilla in a tracksuit with a machine gun.’ And they’re like, ‘We know.’ And I’m like, ‘Are you sure you want to make this show?’ And they’re like, ‘Yup.’ And I’m like, ‘Wow, I found my network,’” Grillo-Marxuach said.

  “I just wanted to create a show that had an airframe that could support every absurd thing that we could imagine within the rubric of, ‘This is the guy who takes care of keeping reality normal,’” Grillo-Marxuach said. “People always say, ‘Aren’t you sad that it got canceled after 12 episodes?’ I’m shocked we got to make the thing in the first place.”

  Grillo-Marxuach’s current projects include a prequel series to Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s 1982 dark fantasy film, “The Dark Crystal.” It’s called “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance” and will premiere on Friday, Aug. 30 on Netflix.

• Novelist Juliet Escoria Taps Personal Pain With Debut 'Juliet The Maniac'

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  Juliet Escoria’s debut novel is called “Juliet the Maniac.” It’s about a 14-year-old honors student named Juliet whose life is derailed by drug use, self-harm and bipolar disorder. These are all issues Juliet herself has struggled with in real life. Which raises the question of why she decided to write this book as a novel rather than a memoir?

  “I get that question a lot and it’s strange because I didn’t think of it as anything but a novel,” Escoria told WPR’s “BETA.”

  Escoria admits that her preference of reading novels over memoirs may have played a part. She also said her inclinations as a writer align better with the creative freedoms novels provide versus the confines of the truth in nonfiction.

  “Mostly it was so that I wouldn’t be stuck to the truth and I could make things up if I wanted to illustrate something,” she said. “I feel like memoir has some sort of lesson to it and I was not interested in explaining what this means to me now.”

  Escoria’s ability to transfer dark teenage mindsets and hallucinogenic experiences to the page is impressive, especially given that her own memories of the account can sometimes be unreliable narrators.

  “We all have stories that we tell other people about ourselves and we tell ourselves about ourselves,” she said. “It’s almost like are you remembering that event or are you remembering the retelling of that event so many times?”

  On the flip side, the unique nature of some of her experiences can make those memories difficult to forget.

  “It was also just very hard to forget how strange the whole situation was,” she said. “Just being completely overcome by something you don’t understand at all and seems like it’s coming from nowhere, but it’s from inside your own head.”

  Escoria’s structure of “Juliet the Maniac” tailors well with the book’s themes. She eschews chapters in favor of shorter, sporadic episodes and the book is peppered with image elements including patient logs, letters, handmade drawings, newspaper clippings and letters from an adult Juliet.

  “One thing that I just think is odd is that there’s not more pictures in books in general,” she said. “It doesn’t seem like it would be out of the question in terms of technology and we are such a visual way we process the world with social media and the internet and that type of thing, so why not.”

  Escoria said employing those “found materials” into the novel seemed instinctual and can give the reader an alternative perspective to the character. Additionally, Escoria curated a music soundtrack to pair with certain reading passages.

  One particular song is Sparks’ “Angst in My Pants.” Escoria said it really fits the mania she was feeling when she was her character’s age. It was a mix-state mania, where there are many depressive symptoms colliding with the positive and she felt that song captured that state well.

  “It just feels kind of jittery and uncomfortable, but also there’s a happiness there too,” she said. “So, I like that song because it sounds sort of happy and energetic, but also discomforting too.”

  Escoria’s prose is sharp and doesn’t slow even when offering vivid detail. She remarks that she’s well aware of the reader experience as she’s crafting her drafts and loves the musicality a sentence can have.

  “I do really like doing description,” she said. “You know, it’s kind of weighing how important it is that I’m describing versus page space.”

  Like her main character, Escoria hit a turning point in her life. She said getting sober helped a lot. She spent her fair share of time in church basements and got better at asking for and accepting help.

  “I think that therapy is a skill and you don’t know that skill when you first start it, which is often when people need therapy to be effective the most, when they’re at that crisis mode,” she said.

  Even though it took a long time and a lot of hard work in therapy, Escoria said she feels grateful to have gone through these struggles with bipolar disorder and addiction because it has given her a greater appreciation of things she might otherwise not have had.

  “Just being able to enjoy simple things like maybe the way that the sky looks on a particular day or spending time with my friends,” she said.