Recognizing and Writing Glimmers, with Pam Houston

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. Episode 8. On today's show, an interview with the wonderfully talented Pam Houston. We'll be talking about glimmers, what they are, and how they can fuel our writing.

So welcome back to Inside Creative Writing. I want to take just a minute before we get into the podcast today and thank you yet again. The podcast has been consistently in the top five literature podcasts at iTunes and also the top ten in the arts category at iTunes. And that's just so much fun for me to see this show be accepted the way it is and really great fun to hear back from all of you.

So I just appreciate that you're out there listening. Another warning before we jump into today's show. It's going to go just a little bit long and we may find that that's just going to be the case when we've got interviews on the show. They're just going to run a little bit longer. And I think that you'll find that you're glad that they do. There's some great information when we get to talk to these great authors.

A couple of things before we get into the interview today. You'll find more information at the show's website. That's where you'll find the show notes for this particular episode. You'll also find links there to find out more about Pam's books and links to her website, Twitter account, Facebook, all that good stuff. You're also going to find there a video from a reading that she did recently at UC Berkeley. That's really a fascinating way to spend some time with Pam Houston.

Now, as we go through the show, as you listen to the interview today, you might begin to think that what we're talking about is only applicable to either creative nonfiction writers or fiction writers that stay very close to autobiography. What I want you to do is stick around after the interview. And we're going to spend a few minutes talking about how we can use the specific techniques that Pam and I talk about to inform our fiction as well. We'll kind of be talking about how to bridge some of that over.

So stay tuned to that. Either way, you're going to find the interview fascinating and really informative of your writing. Now, I want you to be familiar with Pam's writing before we get into the interview, especially since her approach in the new book that we're going to be talking about is so unique. And I want you to get a taste of it.

Introduction to Glimmers

So before the interview, we're going to drop in on a recent reading she did at UC Berkeley for just a few minutes. This is Delta 55. The plane is gradually but perceptibly descending. It is barely light outside and we aren't due at Orly until nearly noon. There is an odd ticking noise coming from the wing outside my window. I come fully awake and realize we are listing strenuously to the right.

I glance at my seatmate on the aisle. Her name is Rebecca. She is a 26-year-old bank teller from Cincinnati who has never flown before, who has saved for five years to take her dream trip to Paris. I spent most of dinner telling her how much safer airplanes are than car travel, how the 777 has a minimum of three fail-safes on each of its major systems, how even if one of the engines fell clean off the fuselage, it is designed to tumble backwards up and over the wing so it doesn't tear the wing from the plane.

Now, in spite of all my reassurances, we seem to be heading shoulder first into the North Atlantic. Ladies and gentlemen, the pilot says, as many of you are probably aware, we are descending, preparing to make an unscheduled landing into Reykjavik, Iceland. Approximately 35 minutes ago, we experienced an explosion in our number two engine, and that engine is now inoperable. The ticking sound you hear is the wind running through it, spinning the blades backwards, much like a household fan. You can probably also tell that we are tacking toward Iceland as we would in a sailboat, as our current engine configuration will not give us full power in a straight line.

Now Rebecca is awake and looking at me wild-eyed. The man likes a metaphor, I say and offer a small smile. The light out the window has strengthened, and I can see whitecaps on an angry gray sea. I always kind of wanted to go to Iceland, I say, but by now Rebecca is no longer looking at me. She has her eyes closed tightly, has given herself, I imagine, to prayer. We will be landing in approximately 15 minutes, the captain says.

Please give your undivided attention to the flight attendants as they instruct you in landing in the brace position. I like that he did not say crash. I like that he's a language guy. The ocean is getting quite a bit closer. No sign of Iceland out my window, and I hope that Reykjavik airport does not turn out to be a metaphor for fucked. Just when it seems that our wheels have to be skimming the water, land and runway lights appear, and then more of them.

So many lights it is hard to count them, a sea of spinning red and blue. Every ambulance and firetruck in Iceland seems to have come out to greet us. Holy cow, I say, just before the wheels hit the foam and the foam splashes up and covers all the windows, throwing the cabin in a half light exactly like waking up in a tent after a snowstorm. And then everyone is cheering as the plane glides to a jerky, sticky stop. Much later, in an upstairs blank space of terminal, as we are being fed rice with some kind of yellow chickeny goo all over it by something resembling the Icelandic Red Cross, the crew tells us the reason for the emergency equipment. When the number two engine exploded, it spit jet fuel all over the fuselage.

We were a Molotov cocktail hurtling through space, is the way the literary pilot puts it. There was no way to be certain that the friction of the tires on the runway wouldn't make a spark and ignite us, turn us into a 90 mile per hour ball of flame. My guest today is Pam Houston. She's the author of two collections of linked short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, the novels Sight Hound and Contents May Have Shifted, and a collection of essays called A Little More About Me, all published by W. W. Norton.

Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She's the winner of the Western States Book Award, the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction, and the Evil Companions Literary Award, and multiple teaching awards. She's the director of creative writing at UC Davis. She teaches in the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA program and at writers' conferences around the country and around the world. And today, she's here with us on Inside Creative Writing.

Pam Houston's Writing Process

Pam Houston, thanks so much for taking some time to talk with us this morning. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you, Brett. Yeah. What I'd like to do is talk a little bit about your latest book. It's called Contents May Have Shifted, and you really take an interesting approach with it.

Can you tell us a little bit about the book and how it came together the way it did for you? Yeah, I sure can. Contents May Have Shifted was born at the Wisconsin Book Festival, as a matter of fact. I was asked to come to Wisconsin and be part of an evening called Unveiled, where four writers were asked to read work that was completely untested and untried. And I was on tour for my book before that, Sight Hound.

And so I wasn't really writing very much right then. And so my work was going to be very untested and untried. So I got on the plane to Wisconsin, and I started the way I always start anything new. You know, this was with no idea that it was going to be a novel, but just a piece of something to read, basically. And I said to myself, what things out in the world lately have glimmered at me? This is how I always begin.

I don't ever begin with a character or a theme or an idea or even a plot, nothing like that. For me, it's always about scanning back through the recent past and saying, okay, what out there really grabbed my attention and said, hey, writer, over here, over here, pay attention. So I wrote these little glimmers, is what I call them to myself, just these little moments. And because I had been on tour, there were glimmers from all over the place. There was one from Juneau. There was one from Gulfport, Louisiana.

There was one from Davis, where I teach, and Creede, Colorado, where I live, and Tampa, Florida, where I had just been. And so I just wrote these little self-contained moments. And I do things in 12s. I always have. I don't know why.

And so I wrote 12 of these little glimmers from 12 different places. And then I spent the next 36 hours polishing them up, you know, didn't put any pressure on them to hang together, though, of course, they did because they were all filtered through my consciousness on a given day. So they bore some, at least, associative relationship to each other. And I organized them in a way that made a kind of a ghost of a narrative arc.

So, you know, you sort of started somewhere and you got somewhere. And then I read them with some other writers that I really admire at the Wisconsin Book Festival. And one of those writers was Richard Bausch, who has always been kind of a mentor figure for me, not personally, but his work. And he I hope of the protagonist's progress as she moves through all these different worlds.

So that's basically how it happened. It was an assignment from Richard Bausch based on an assignment from the Wisconsin Book Festival. But in fact, it's how I've written all my books. It's just a kind of extreme version of what I do naturally.

Okay, yeah, interesting. So what I want to ask you about that kind of concept for the book, if you think of kind of a continuum of books where on one side you've got character arcs that are really blatant or really obvious and the reader has to do very little work to draw out the theme or the meaning. And to the other side of the continuum, you've got books that really ask the readers to do a lot of the work, you know, in bringing out those themes and arcs. I think it's safe to say that Contents May Have Shifted is pretty far to the side of asking readers to do quite a bit of that heavy lifting. Would you agree with that? I think so in a certain way.

I think in other ways it's kind of user-friendly, but yes, I know what you mean and I would agree. So what do you think are the advantages and maybe some of the disadvantages of that kind of approach? Well, you know, when I write, I think of myself as a reader. You know, like what do I like to be? What do I like to have asked of me, you know, as a reader? And, you know, the thing I resent most as a reader is being, you know, condescended to or handheld or having the emotional context, you know, constantly updated for me, you know?

You know, I like to stand in the blank space that a book leaves me to stand. And I also like, I mean, my favorite writer is Toni Morrison. I mean, on a different day, I might, you know, she would always be in the top five. And one reason is because of the way she asks the reader to wait. Like she sets up a relationship of trust with the reader. She says, okay, you don't know what's going on right now, but if you stay with me, I'm going to tell you everything you need to know.

And for me, that's, you know, that's what I tell students who resist her. You know, I say, well, this is, if you just wait, she's going to tell you. You just have to trust her.

And so for me, the blank space that I invite the reader into has always been about, you know, asking the reader to participate fully in a book that I'm writing because I believe they become more invested when they're allowed to. You know, now that it has to be a certain reader who's willing to do that. You know, some readers, I mean, all you have to do is read my Amazon reviews to find out that a lot of readers really didn't want that opportunity and seemed really angry with me for asking them to make those logical and chronological connections.

But it's also true that for me, like I've always, I mean, one reason I wrote the book that way, in a way, this book is kind of my ode to my love of poetry, you know, and to the poets who have really informed me as a writer. I love poetry and I'm not a poet. You know, every so often I write the first stanza of a poem and then I come to my senses and turn it into a sentence, you know? It's the first sentence of a story. Right.

But I revere poetry. I mean, I would go that far. And so one reason I revere poetry is because I believe that as a reader, I feel associative connection at possibly a deeper level, you know, than I feel logical or chronological connection. I'm sort of suspicious of logic and I'm kind of suspicious of even time as a concept and chronology.

But I'm not suspicious at all, and maybe I should be, but I'm not suspicious at all of these associative leaps that a poet like, say, Larry Levis, makes all the time. Sure, sure. And so this book is about that. It's me saying, oh, I want to play in that swimming pool too, you know, but I'm not a poet.

So for me, you know, my hope is that the reader would have perhaps a deeper experience than if I had written, if I had done what I did in other books, which was kind of assemble my materials the same way, but then organize everything better for the reader, you know? Like If You Take a Story of Mine, like The Best Girlfriend You Never Had from Waltha and the Cat, which is a story that got anthologized a bunch. It's the same as contents may have shifted. It's all a series of little tiny glimmers put together, but it doesn't look that way because they're not titled, they're not separated on the page. They're just separated by double, double spaces.

But if you look at that story, you can see that story was the other time that I didn't take my glimmers and smooth the edges to make it look more linear. Okay, yeah, interesting. You know, and I want to back up. I don't want to make it sound like reading the book is a chore or anything for the reader. I mean, you know, each individual story is just incredibly compelling and engaging.

Understanding Glimmers

So it really does give the reader to enjoy it on that level, but also to allow them to really, I think, sink further in. So you've mentioned glimmers a few times, and this is a concept that really fascinates me. I had the pleasure of seeing you and Cheryl Strayed speak together here in Corvallis, and you talked a little bit about glimmers that night. Can you tell us a little bit about glimmers and how they're related to your writing? Sure. Well, first I would like to say that the word glimmer, I have never been quite happy with, though I did make it up and I do say it every time I speak in public.

It's just because it suggests a kind of prettiness that is often not the nature of the thing that is attracting my attention, right? Sure. But for me, you know, I am not a person who imagines plot. I don't think I probably have a very good imagination, though I am very empathic. You know, so I have an empathic imagination, but I don't imagine worlds, I don't imagine scenarios, I don't imagine lives that are not my own. You know, that's not where my work comes from.

From me, my work comes from myself as a noticer. You know, I am, you know, a therapist would say hypervigilant. You know, I notice everything that's happening around me all the time. And, you know, Henry James said a writer should strive to be the sort of person on whom nothing is lost. And I've got that down. I've got that skill down.

So for me, it's about paying really strict attention not only to what's going on in the world around me, and I don't mean in a big way. I mean in the tiny, the tiny particulars of what's going on in whatever particular moment and landscape I'm in. But it's also about recognizing when that thing, you know, the orca diving below the surface of the water or the Tibetan sky burial or the conversation overheard in a parking lot at an airport, you know, when that thing has resonance for me, like when it's speaking to me beyond simply, oh, this is a thing of interest. Like when I feel that feeling of resonance, which means that this little mini scene, whatever it is, is going to help me to tell a story that I need to tell, that somehow that external landscape is going to reflect the internal landscape of me. You know, it's going to be a useful, you know, metaphor, essentially. It's going to be, it's going to be an outward expression of something inward, that recognition when we see ourselves in a certain way in the world.

So whether, whether that's just the light coming through the trees, right. Or, you know, the way the, the water looks late in the afternoon on the surface of a river, you know, whatever it is, I don't mean it has to be literal, you know, I didn't mean you feel that resonance. And that resonance, I collect the things that resonate and put them in a file, literally, and worry about what I'm going to do with them later. You know, like, it's just like, okay, here's a valuable piece of raw material. You know, in a way I'm a collagist, right? Like, like, okay, here's my box of stuff that I've collected.

And now I'm going to go in there and stick several of them in the same space and see how they work together. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And that's pretty much my project as a writer. I mean, that pretty much sums up the whole thing. And even the stories like, say, Selway, you know, which is a river story.

There's a put in and there's a takeout, you know, like it couldn't be more linear. You know, you put in on the river, you travel down river, the boat flips, some things happen. You take off the river. Even those stories were written this way. They were written by me saying, okay, but remember that moment when the ring-tailed cat came into camp? Or remember that moment when you heard the helicopter?

You know? So even those stories that seem of mine, that seem completely linear on the page, were written not in order, not even with a sense of logic, but with me saying, okay, what glimmered at me on that Selway trip? Hmm, yeah, yeah. You mentioned, you know, kind of collecting these glimmer moments. I guess we'll keep using that word since if you haven't come up with Put whatever I'm doing and do what I call a glimmer dump. I have to just sit there quietly on the plane with my little book and my little blank book and write down everything lately, you know?

And because flying is the most consistent thing about my life. Like if I had children and I went to drop them off at soccer practice, you know, I might do it in the car at soccer practice. But because flying is the most consistent thing in my life, it just always means that I'm gonna get caught up, you know, every two weeks at worst, and sometimes, you know, every couple of days.

So that's how I keep track. Okay, so do you think that, this question may be a little abstract, but do you think that glimmers come kind of bundled with a meaning or a purpose? Or, I mean, in other words, are we to dig out the meaning inherent within that, or is it an opportunity for us to kind of imbue something with a meaning? That's a very good question. I think they come both ways and also everywhere on the continuum between. I mean, and I don't know if the reason for that is because sometimes I'm just dense and the meaning they come with takes several drafts and several recombinations with other glimmers for me to realize it, you know?

Or if really, eventually, I figure out sort of what meaning to burden the glimmer with, you know what I mean? But I choose the word burden carefully because, I mean, intentionally, because for me, it's much better if it's going the other way. You know, I love to say, you know, well, the glimmer knows more than I do, and I believe that. You know, I believe that the concrete physical world or the metaphor or the glimmer or whatever you want to call it knows more than me. You know, I'm just lucky if I recognize that it matters to me. And then I have to bring it to the page, and often I have to let it sit there for years, literally, before I know what to do with it, you know?

And even when I know what to do with it, which is to say, even when I see, oh, this glimmer that I've been saving for decades actually belongs in this story that I happen to be writing today, like, even then, I still might not know why, you know? I just feel that it goes, you know? And then it has to sit on the page with its companion glimmers for months before I even know then what it means. And sometimes, even after the story is done, you know, like, I have a sense that it's right, but I don't know why.

So my favorite scenario is when I don't, I mean, the three questions that I don't ever let into my reading room, my writing room, I'm sorry, my writing room, are what does it mean, where is it going, how does it end? You know, those are three questions that are constantly over my shoulder, but I'm like, shut up, shut up! Because I want to stay, you know, it's a very productive and dangerous and frightening space, what my friend, the poet Chris Merrill calls the forest of the not knowing, you know?

But I like it in there, you know? I like being in the forest of the not knowing because no good piece of writing of mine ever came without some time done in the forest of the not knowing. So I like it in there, you know? And I want to be surprised, and I want the slow reveal of why. And if a glimmer comes too obviously packed and, you know, evident in its meaning, I'm very suspicious of it. And in that case, my hope is that there's an under meaning that I haven't seen yet.

Right, right. Wow. So when you sit down to write these glimmers, do you stick, I mean, is the goal to capture the moment as close to reality as you can, or do you allow yourself to kind of drift off into fiction if the experience kind of draws you that direction? Generally speaking, the drifting off into fiction happens a little later in, you know, subsequent drafts.

But not in every case. I mean, when I say that I trust the glimmer more than myself, what I mean by that is, like, don't get in its way. Just be sure you capture the thing as it actually happened. And it can always drift and nearly always does, you know, later.

But, you know, the human animal being what it is, you know, if you see something really great on your way home from work, or if you had a really funny exchange with one of your colleagues, like, by the time you get home and tell somebody about it, it's already a little better, you know? That's true. That's who we are.

So I would like to say no the first time. I mean, I would be being true to what I say my method is if I told you, no, the first time I write it, it is just how it was because I'm afraid of losing whatever it was that made it resonate in the first place if I'm already fictionalizing it. But if you actually looked at my practice, I think I would probably have to admit that even then I'm canting it and improving it and dramatizing it, you know, even at that first writing. Often. Not always.

So the glimmers in, at least the ones in Contents May Have Shifted, are pretty biographical then. In fact, you've debated, it sounds like, from other times I've heard you speak, about releasing it as even a memoir, is that right? Yeah, I mean, what I really thought about it, I mean, the form that my editor read it in, you know, could not have in good conscience be called a memoir in the world we live, you know, in this current post-Oprah, Jim Fry world, you know, because I was well aware of a lot of the shifts that I had made. You know, the title speaks to that, obviously.

But, I mean, hopefully the title speaks to several things at once, but that's one of the shifts, you know, implied in the title. If they had said, they being the editorial, publicity units, you know, if they had said, you know, we really want this to be a memoir, I would have had to go back in and undo some of that work of, you know, of fictionalizing. But the deeper truth, you know, is that this is my story and these things all happened to me in some form that would be recognizable as the form that, you know, you read on the page. And these are places I have been and, you know, but, for instance, just to give you one example, my editor felt that there were too many girlfriends, you know, in the book, that Pam had too many girlfriends. And, you know, that is what I, that's the definition of a good problem, you know?

But in the book, you know, she was right. And I didn't mind that about the draft that we were talking about because to me, like, the girlfriends form a kind of chorus. Like, they're the chorus, you know, as Pam goes through these different changes.

But I heard her, you know, I heard what she said. And so I ended up combining, like, several of the women. For instance, like, Pam's women friends that were in the glimmers based on real friends of mine had to be merged, you know? Like, I had to create these sort of uber friends.

So there were now, like, whatever, like, let's say there's eight girlfriends. You know, there used to be 12 or 16. So, like, so, so we're already out of the realm of memoir, you know? Like, you can't start merging people and call it a memoir.

So, like, that was just one example of something that, that made it fiction. But, you know, as, as you may know, I speak a lot about this ground between fiction and memoir, which I think is very rich and full of terrific books and some really great thinkers and ideas. And so for me, like, that territory, like my, my whole writing project from the first thing I ever published and before is about really noticing, you know, what it is to be alive at this moment on this planet and trying to capture some portion of it, you know, in language.

So, so my work's always going to be autobiographical to a certain degree because of how it's made, you know, just quite simply. You know, it, it, you know, who knows? I might one day want to try something completely different, but, but the reason that we, being my editor and I decided to call myself Pam in the book, to call the character that is roughly based on me, that is, that is heavily based on me, Pam, is to sort of announce that, is to say, okay, this is what it is, you know, we're here in the middle, you know, that's where we are. We're here in the, in this middle realm of autobiographical fiction or, you know, some people say lyric memoir, by which they might mean that, or they might mean something else.

But, you know, we're here in the mid-range and, and, you know, if that makes you angry, then that's interesting, you know, and, and it does, it does make people angry. You know, some people like it. I, I, my very first night I read from the book when the night it came out, there was a woman in the audience and she said, but I wanted it to be you, you know? And I said, well, it is, you know. And she said, no, I wanted but hopefully this will lead to a conversation about why you're mad at me, you know. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, my goodness. Yeah, it sounds like there's a lot going on there that you'd have to get into. So I've got one more question for you this morning, and I like to call it the time travel question.

So if I were to give you a time machine this afternoon and you could go back to visit the Pam Houston, the pre-published Pam Houston, what advice would you have for that Pam Houston? I would say you're going to do so many things over the course of your artistic life to try to either please or impress certain people. And that will sometimes seem exciting and sometimes seem torturous and sometimes seem terribly depressing.

But the good news is that it's all just part of the work that is eventually yours to do and part of this conversation that we're all having together. And growing into a sort of confidence in your own process and your own artistic vision is a great way to spend a life. Wow, fantastic.

All right, well, with that, thank you so much for your time this morning, Pam. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk with you, and it's been a glimmer moment for me. I can say that.

Applying Glimmers in Fiction

All right, thank you so much. All right, thank you. So I don't know about you, but I'm already deciding when my own time for glimmer dumping is going to be. I want to spend just a few minutes talking about something Pam and I didn't really have a time to get into, and that is, how can glimmers be used if we are writing about characters that are not based on ourselves? And the answer comes, at least for me, when I actually think back about something that Al Heathcock and I talked about a few weeks ago on this show. I hope you've had a chance to listen to that podcast.

He talked about being an empathic writer. He talked about how we should experience the world the way our character does so that we can write from their perspective, asking ourselves, what would they notice about this setting? How would they see things differently depending on their mood, their experiences, their desires in the story?

Now think about the story that we heard Pam read before the interview. There's a moment in there as she's really at risk of dying. I mean, where this plane's going down into Reykjavik, and she doesn't know if she's going to make it. And yet she stops to notice the pilot's language, the specific words that he's using. And she says that she likes that that pilot is a language guy. The fact that she notices those specific things in that really pressurized environment.

And I don't mean pressurized as in a plane. I just mean pressurized as in there's so much tension in that moment. The fact that that's what she notices is the language tells us more about her as a character than almost anything else she could have done in that moment. It's really powerful. The glimmers that people have and that your characters have are immensely telling about who that character is, about what they hold valuable, about how they see the world.

So here are two reasons I think it's so valuable for us to be paying attention to glimmers, whether our writing is at all autobiographical or not. Pam already covered the reasons to pay attention to them if we're writing creative nonfiction or fiction that is close to our own experiences. But what if we're writing characters that aren't different versions of us? Well, here's the first reason I think they're powerful. First, we get practice writing them. The more we recognize and develop our own glimmers, the more we can recognize and develop those moments and those kind of moments for our characters.

And two, I think glimmer moments can be lifted in a way out of our lives and placed into the life of a fictional character, sometimes with modification, certainly, but sometimes without any. If you're trying to capture an emotion or a moment or an insight that you would share with that character. And the third reason I want to talk about is, you know, both Pam and Alan mentioned that a primary skill that they value as writers is simply the ability to pay attention to the world around them. Alan said, for example, I'm never not a writer. He's always looking for those moments. By paying attention to our own glimmer moments and learning how to effectively get them down on the page.

I think we're learning how to capture the world around us in its essence. And that is going to translate whether we're writing about basically other versions of ourselves or about completely fictional characters. That's going to be a skill that we need.

Weekly Writing Challenge

So we've already gone on long enough with today's podcast, so we're going to stop there and hopefully look forward to some further discussion online. I hope you'll take the opportunity to pop online and start to leave some comments on the episode pages so we can get some discussion going there as well. Our weekly challenge this week, as you might have guessed, is going to be to write a glimmer.

Now, don't ask yourself if it can be used in whatever it is you're working on right now or not. This week, I just want you to see the world as trying to get your attention in some way, whether that's big or very, very small and write about how it did that. Just get that moment on paper. I'm going to give you just a real quick example of a glimmer moment I had this week, and it's very subtle. It's very small.

But I was walking across campus here in Corvallis at Oregon State University. Beautiful day, typical day around here this time of year. And as I was walking across campus, suddenly these three Japanese students, these girls, were walking across the campus and they were just singing together. They were singing this song in Japanese, and it was just stunningly beautiful. And there was something about that moment of seeing these girls singing this song I wasn't familiar with in a language I wasn't familiar with that was just, I mean, I just wanted to to stop, you know, and stop them and just say, oh, would you just sing to me for a while? This is there's something magical about this moment.

And it glimmered for me. I don't know what it means. I don't know if it ever makes it into a story, but it's something that jolted me out of kind of my everyday experience. That's a glimmer moment for me. And that's the one I'm going to try to get out and get down on paper today as our weekly challenge.

So just pay attention to what glimmers for you in the world and write about that this week. Our wise word this week comes again from a listener. I love getting your voices on the show.

So I want to thank Jamie for sharing this with us via our message line. Hi, Brad. My name is Jamie and I am from North of Boston. My Twitter handle is at Suddenly Jamie and my home on the web is SuddenlyMarketing. com. And I have a quote that I wanted to share with you for the wise word segment.

It's an Ernest Hemingway quote and it goes like this. Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the $10 words. I know them all right, but there are older and simpler and better words. And those are the ones I use.

Thanks. Keep up the great work. Love it. And thanks so much, Jamie, for sharing that with us. That might generate a little bit of discussion depending on how people feel about it.

But I think it's really, really gets to a key part of a key aspect of effective writing. And again, you know, I want to take a few minutes and talk about these wise words, but that's not the point. We're just going to let it stand on its own and kind of let you process that however you will.

So thanks again, Jamie, for sharing that. If you've got a wise word that you'd like to get on the show, call our message line. It's and you could be on an upcoming show.

Now, before we close up today, I actually have to bring up something that I kind of hate to bring up. And that is that success has its side effects. And the show is beginning to cost a little bit to produce. And now I don't want to go down the road of including advertising on the show because, well, first, I know that it kind of bugs the listener. I mean, I've been a podcast listener as well, and it's just kind of annoying.

But it also takes additional time for me in producing the podcast and arranging the advertising. It's just a road I don't want to have to go down. So what I want to do is try the basically the public broadcasting model here.

So if you can give something to the show to help us keep it going, then give something. It doesn't have to be much at all. A few bucks here and there is all it's going to take.

So I hope you'll check the website at the show's website and just look for that little donate button at the top right-hand corner. I don't want this to be a guilt thing at all. I freely admit that I listen to plenty of content that I should probably be kicking in a few bucks for now and then, and I don't always do it.

But if you're so moved, if you're enjoying the show and you wouldn't mind throwing a couple of bucks our way to pay a few of the bills that are starting to be associated with it, that would be really appreciated. Next week, I'm still a little up in the air about what we're going to do. I've got two things that I'm working on. One is I'm working on an interview and it just may or may not come together by then. We're trying to get our schedules to sync up.

So in case that doesn't happen, we're going to be talking about something called defamiliarization. It may be a topic that you're very familiar with. It's one of the most powerful writing But I hope that you're off to do the same.

Let's get some words on paper this week, and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the show's website. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. We'll be back next week, but until then, join the conversation at the show's website.