Stories of Art and Science: An Interview with Lee Gutkind

Hello and welcome to the latest

installment of Being Human from the

University of Pittsburgh.

The series is devoted to exploring

the humanities, their connections to

other disciplines, and their value

in the public world.

I'm Dan Kubis, associate director of

the Humanities Center at Pitt.

My guest today is Lee Gutkind,

writer and founder of the journal

Creative Nonfiction.

Gutkind was born and raised in

Pittsburgh and served for many years

as a professor in the writing

program at Pitt.

He's best known as a pioneer in the

literary genre creative nonfiction,

which he describes as true stories

well told.

For Gutkind, creative nonfiction is

about bringing the art and power of

story to real life events.

This is clear in his own writing,

which starts with Lee embedding

himself in worlds ranging from

health care to professional baseball

and then bringing them to life with

his dynamic writing style.

The result is an exciting and

important body of work featuring

books like Many Sleepless Nights,

The World of Organ Transplantation,

The Veterinarian's Touch, Profiles

of Life Among the Animals, and

Almost Human: Making Robots Think.

The interview you're about to hear

was conducted as part of a summer

science writing workshop at the

University of Pittsburgh.

Lee's participation was particularly

fitting because so much of his work

is focused on the human interest of

science and science policy.

The workshop was conducted by

Lillian Chong, a professor in the

chemistry department at Pitt.

It featured four undergraduate

students studying in various

scientific disciplines, exploring

connections between their scientific

research and the written word.

I began our conversation by asking

Lee to comment on the students'

readings of their work, and you can

link to this work in the description

of this podcast.

So, Lee Gutkind, thanks so much for

joining us.

I used to be here all the time.

Yeah, that's right.

So, welcome back.

I thought I would start maybe

just by asking you.

You've done so much science writing

and writing about medicine.

And I hope we can talk about some of

that a little bit later on.

But we just heard these four

writers doing science writing.

They're writing in different forms,

and asking different kinds of

questions and having different

explorations.

What are your thoughts on what we

just heard?

Wasn't it terrific?

I mean, honestly.

Each

writer did something different, and

I found it quite everything.

Quite compelling.

And what is also really interesting,

I've been doing this a long time,

and it's not easy to

organize a writing

workshop, and it's not easy to

do it quickly.

And, Lillian, wow.

I mean, it's really quite a job that

you do. Yes.

The thing about creative nonfiction,

which is what I do, and

that's kind of what was represented

in almost everything that

we heard today, is that it's a

combination of style or story

and substance, which is information.

But Lillian didn't tell you one

thing. She didn't give you

the total context of

this writing workshop she took.

It was style, and it was substance.

And it was called practicing

creative nonfiction

and yoga.

And that's where we met.

And so I don't

know which was the style and which

was the substance, Lillian. But it

was fun, and

we could participate and learn

simultaneously.

Well, I mentioned

I kind of would hope to ask you a

little bit about science writing.

And I want to start maybe by

referencing a

book that you edited that was

actually a special edition of the

journal Creative Nonfiction, and it

was published as a book called

A View From the Divide.

And the divide being humanities

and science.

Oh my god, that was such a long time

ago.

I did my research, I guess.

I hate it when people do research.

We're in for a long 45 minutes,

then, because I'm going

way back.

Okay. Well, remind me.

All right. Well, I have a quote for

you because the first-- yeah.

The first

piece there is from a poet named

Alison Deming.

And she has this quote that I

thought was really great, that I

wanted to just kind of like read to

you and get your thoughts on

it. And she's comparing here

science and poetry, I thought, in an

interesting way. And she writes

that-- she says, "Both the

evolutionary biologist and the poet

participate in the inherent tendency

of nature to give rise to

pattern and form." And so

I just wanted to suggest that to you

and see if you can reflect on what

we just heard or your own work or

whatever that idea of pattern and

form somehow connecting

writing, on the one hand, science

on the other.

Can I say that I'm

always hesitant.

I hope you don't mind this, but

I'm always hesitant about talking

about science

and writing alone.

Because if you tell

a good story or write a good

story, it could be science.

It could be chemistry.

It could also be baseball

and politics and policy.

And

so the

story writing world

is open to almost

anyone who has any

interest whatsoever.

And when he or she wants

to share that interest with

the general public, with a large

body of people.

And each

creative nonfiction essay

we write, just like each

poem or short story,

does have a structure

and a form.

We

don't just sit down and write.

Well, maybe we sit down

and write.

And that's always so exciting to

sit down and write and to

allow the words and the ideas,

whether it's a poem or a story

or an essay, to allow

the words and the ideas to explode

on the display or on the page.

But in addition

to that, once those

words explode,

a writer needs to kind of look

at the structure and the form

of what he or she is doing.

And that's kind of exciting

because we look at our

work in two different ways.

We look at our work as if we're the

reader and we are the

recipients of this

explosion of words.

But then, we need to look at our

work with a writer's

eye, almost as if

we're architects or

engineers.

And we're looking at

a building or a bridge,

and an architect or an engineer

will look at a building and a bridge

and see how pedestrians use

it and see how people appreciate

it, that is, from the point

of view of the writer, but that

architect or engineer will

also see the blueprints,

see the superstructure,

see how it is always-- how

it is all put together.

And so we're looking

at things two different ways.

We're looking at

how it is presented to the world

and then how the writer puts

it together and makes it look

like it should be presented

to the world.

I'm not sure if that answers your

question, but it deals

with form, and it deals with

structure, and it deals with the way

in which writers need to learn

how to

reflect

upon what they do.

Yeah, I mean, it does.

And that's really interesting. I

wonder if I could just kind of like

take another

step forward, I hope, in a way

that's interesting to you and ask.

Because you've written at least one

novel and

worked in a variety of different

forms, mostly nonfiction.

But I wonder if when you're talking

about working with a substance,

in your experience, how

do you think or how do you

incorporate thinking about the genre

that you're writing in?

Are you thinking, "I'm going to

approach this through a novelistic

perspective," or are you thinking,

"I'm going to approach this from a

nonfiction perspective?"

And how does that-- maybe when

does it enter into your process of

trying to kind of bring the

substance to life in a certain way,

if it does at all? Maybe it doesn't.

And you just get done with it, and

you look back on it and reflect

then.

I once asked Diane Ackerman,

who is

formerly-- or who is both

poet and

a nonfiction writer.

She wrote maybe her most significant

book, well, the Zookeeper's Wife or

Natural History of the Senses.

I went to ask her how she

decided whether she was going to

write poetry or prose.

And she said,

"I sit down and wait till

it comes out, and then

it is what it is."

And I'm a nonfiction

writer, so I

think that I want to tell

true stories.

And frankly, I have a very

difficult-- yes, I've written a

novel, but the novel was

so true that

if I look back at it now, yes,

I changed some names.

And yes, I made

some stuff up.

I exaggerated a bit.

But there is--

but it's very close

to what happened to me when I was

very young, growing up in

Pittsburgh.

And if you look back

in time, this world of creative

nonfiction was

a blank world.

It was a nowhere world 25

years ago. 25 years ago,

if you wanted to write something

that was autobiographical,

you wrote an autobiographical

novel. And if you look at some of

the greatest novels

that-- my favorite all-time

book-- does anybody here know On

the Road?

On the Road, Jack Kerouac.

You ever hear of Jack Kerouac, On

the Road? Okay.

Well, I've

only read Jack Kerouac, this

book maybe 12 times.

And it's

so incredibly autobiographical.

And Kerouac, in the forties, when

he started writing it and then

publishing it in the fifties,

he could not have written nonfiction

like that.

So no one even cared

about or heard about this

nonfiction, this creative

nonfiction, this narrative

nonfiction.

So I

think about telling

the truth, writing the truth as

much as I can when I sit

and I write. But

I don't say I'm writing nonfiction.

I'm just writing the truest stories

I can.

And what do we want to do here?

We want to write stories

that connect with readers.

We want to impact readers.

We want to change readers' minds,

whether we're writing poetry or

fiction, or nonfiction.

We want to connect with them.

We want to take their damn breath

away. We want them to

listen to what we say,

and we want them to be inspired

and change, perhaps the way in which

they think or how they look at

people or events

or their whole world.

That's what we try to do as writers.

I love creative nonfiction.

It is my genre.

I helped start it, and I helped

build it. But whatever

we do,

we have a bunch of very powerful

dictators around the world these

days, political leaders,

but never.

I'm absolutely convinced

that the strongest,

the most influential people who

have ever lived have been writers.

Writers change the world,

not people who are presidents or

dictators.

Writers change the world.

The books stay with us forever and

ever, whether it's poetry or

fiction, or nonfiction.

Yeah. Well,

maybe I can

ask you a little bit about-- you

said a little bit about creative

nonfiction and the

ability of someone like Kerouac in

the forties and fifties to write in

a genre like that versus your

ability and people's ability now

that it's more of a recognized

genre. Maybe

I want to ask you a little bit about

that.

If I look back, it's interesting

you mentioned On the Road because

your first book seems to owe-- Bike

Fever. Right? You were writing about

motorcycling and riding around.

And it seems now that you mentioned

that the inspiration

is clear.

That's something you enjoyed.

But looking back to that book,

it was the early seventies, I don't

know if-- I'm not sure

when you started using the phrase

creative nonfiction, but

it seems like you were doing it like

that's what that book is.

When I hear you talk about creative

nonfiction now, you talk a lot about

having seen and information and seen

and information and kind of mixing

those things up.

I see that in Bike Fever,

but I think that's maybe before

creative nonfiction existed as a

genre. So can you talk a little bit

about that? Like, how did it grow?

Is it something that you that you

thought of labeling

after you had already done it?

I don't know, just talk a little bit

about the growth of that as a thing.

There were the new journalists

and the new journalists like

Gay Talese or

Tom Wolfe or

Joan Didion that

were around in the

1960s.

And they had this weird idea

that you could use literary

techniques, dialogue, description,

your imagination.

The first person to

write nonfiction, to write

journalism.

And this was disallowed

by journalists back then.

You couldn't.

Journalists back then couldn't

tell their readers what they

thought.

They could only try to be-- and

this is so silly.

They could only try to be objective.

They couldn't be objective then.

And of course, nobody cares about

being objective now.

But

the new journalists, Tom Wolfe--

Tom Wolfe died last month.

He was in his mid-eighties, and he

became quite famous for

writing novels.

His big novel was The Bonfire of the

Vanities.

But before

that, he wrote some really

impactful books

about

the world, about contemporary

culture.

And

he used every possible

technique

he could use,

including making up noises

and sounds

in his work.

Here's the name of his-- here's

the name of his-- the title of

his first book.

Okay?

I wrote this book, Bike Fever,

that Dan's talking about. And it's

about my travels

in the hippie world as

I drove back

and forth across the United States

on a two-wheeled machine, on a

motorcycle.

But ten years before, there's Tom

Wolfe, and he got really fascinated

by the car designing,

car customizing culture

in Los Angeles

in the middle sixties.

And he spent lots and lots of time

hanging out with those people.

And

he thought they were artists,

sculptors, and they were in many

respects.

And so here's this title: There

Goes

(VAROOM! VAROOM!) That Kandy Kolored (THPHHHHHH!) tangerine-flake

streamline baby (Rahghhhh!) around the bend (BRUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM......).

And

that is the title of his first

essay of his first book.

And he made up words, and

he screamed and yelled in capital

letters to his readers.

And he taught us, in the sixties,

he taught us.

And he inspired me.

Well, in the sixties, I was only ten

years old.

That's a lie. So that's

what we're not supposed to do in

creative nonfiction.

But he woke

us up. He woke up journalists

by telling us we could scream

and yell, and we could make some

noise, and we could attract

attention with our words.

And then Gay Talese, also

in the sixties.

It was then that we

had to be very careful,

and we would see things

that we weren't allowed

to report.

Talese saw this incredible

confrontation between this

guy you might have heard of

named Frank Sinatra and

a young screenwriter

in the billiard room of

a fancy

private club in Los Angeles,

in Hollywood.

And they had a big fight.

And Sinatra was mean

and nasty and ripped this

guy apart.

And usually the last thing

a writer would have done-- and

Talese

was there.

And Talese whipped out his notebook

and started writing everything down.

And in the end, he

recreated this scene

showing what a dirty, rotten

rat Frank Sinatra

really was.

And

showing, not telling, what

a rat Sinatra was.

And it appeared

in a

22,000

word article in

Esquire magazine entitled

Frank Sinatra has a Cold

because what Talese was doing was

following Frank Sinatra around

because he had come out to

interview him, and

Sinatra would not talk to

him, even though he had promised

Talese he could interview him,

and he wouldn't talk to him

because he had a cold.

And so Talese decided that

he was going to run, watch

Sinatra from place

to place for the next two months,

and then write this piece about

what Frank Sinatra was like when

he had a cold.

Okay?

And as it turned out, the

real truth of it is

that Sinatra

was a rotten human being when he

didn't have a cold, and he was worse

when he had a cold.

Those two guys broke things

open for people like me

and excited

me to no end that

you could

be a writer.

You have to understand that a while

ago,

there was a dean

here at the University of

Pittsburgh.

We once had a

journalism department, and it was

decided that

there would be no more journalism.

And the dean said - this is a long

time ago - "Journalism.

It's like plumbing."

Okay?

It was very formulaic.

And lots of people thought that.

But Talese

and Wolfe, and Norman Mailer

later, and Joan

Didion around that same

time. And another guy named Truman

Capote, who wrote this incredible

book called In Cold Blood.

They woke us up.

They woke people like me up.

And we

began writing

as thinking

that nonfiction can be an art

as much as poetry and drama

and fiction.

And that was not thought of before.

Now, the term creative

nonfiction.

People called it all kinds of

different things: literary

journalism,

narrative journalism.

There were many debates about what

it should be called.

But finally, this term creative

nonfiction, which I liked, and

I can't say I made it up.

I can't say I didn't make it up.

I just haven't the slightest idea.

Many of us started using at

the same time, and this term

creative nonfiction became accepted

when the

National Endowment for the Arts

decided that they would include

nonfiction

in their creative writing

fellowships.

They gave $25,000

to 200 writers across

the United States, poets

and fiction writers.

And finally, they decided to

give it to nonfiction writers as

well. And they needed to decide

what the name would be.

And many of us fought over what

we should call it.

And the NEA finally decided

we're going to call it creative

nonfiction.

And it was the best thing to happen

because what

also happened with creative

nonfiction that was really important

and interesting

is that what made it so

popular and so successful

is not that journalists

started writing this stuff,

but poets

and fiction writers started

to cross genres

and write creative nonfiction.

Philip Roth, John

Updike, Diane

Akerman, Mary Karr.

Poets and fiction writers

decided that maybe they could

experiment with this form

and make an impact different than

the impact they were making with

their work.

And so that happened

again in the late seventies,

the early eighties, and

all of this excited a cadre

of people like me to

experiment with this work and

make it as respected as drama

and poetry and fiction.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things that

you-- I'm thinking back to

another collection of yours.

You have a collection of personal

essays called Forever Fat.

Good, interesting title.

I recommend it. It's a great

collection.

In the beginning of it, you talk a

little bit about

the history of the genre, and it's

about your earning the label

of the godfather.

It's also an interesting story.

But you talk

there about all of the--

okay. So, on the one hand, creative

nonfiction writing

autobiographically, there are

a number of critics and people who

talk about it just being

navel-gazing. That kind of thing.

But there are a number of people

who do. You mentioned John Edgar

Wideman in

Brothers and Keepers, another

Pittsburgh writer. You just went

through a very big list of people

who were able to do-- who

were able to do what you say is work

through the personal and get to

something universal.

Right? And I wonder if you can talk

a little bit about that in your own

work. I think a lot of the writing

that I've read of yours that's

how I would describe what happens

there. You write in Many Sleepless

Nights about organ transplantation.

There's something about-- is a very

particular kind of medical procedure

that you're kind of starting with

there. And you embedded yourself

in that world for a number of years

to write it.

But there is something universal and

something human that

I see when I read that book.

Can you talk a little bit about that

and how you think about that in

your work?

How do you get to that?

How do you, as a writer, get from

that personal to the universal?

You mentioned embedding.

Well, we call ourselves

immersionists.

And there's the subject.

So I'll show you.

She did that in her

essay.

She gave us some style,

that is to say, her personal story,

which

she lived.

And also,

she, in many ways, embedded herself

in this subject

that she used to braid

between

her story and her information.

And

what most writers

are doing now, even fiction writers,

but most writers are doing now,

are trying to become part

of the story, not necessarily

in a first-person manner but

trying to find a way

into

the realism of the

experience and

science, by the way, and

medicine. These are great.

I mean, if you're going to do

something-- we started out talking

about science.

And science is so challenging

and interesting to be able

to mix this style

and substance and

to do this embedding

or immersion work.

For a long time, scientists

have been hiding behind their

research and their work.

And in fact, today,

even in many

science-oriented departments

like chemistry or physics or

wherever, if you write a popular

book, it's not going to help you

get tenure.

It's not going to help you.

Your

colleagues don't want you.

Well, I won't say they don't want

you to be popular, but they still

want to be more popular than you.

It's very difficult

to

break this bond.

But slowly but surely, I mean,

you're here because you're

interested in how to connect

science with the real world.

And scientists are incredibly

mysterious people.

They hide behind their

test tubes and their research and

their computer screens.

I remember I did this book.

I embedded myself

at the Robotics Institute at

Carnegie Mellon off and on

for six years.

And it was really difficult

to do because,

I mean, when I embedded,

when I spent time in the organ

transplant world-- I'll get back to

robotics in a second.

When I spent time in the organ

transplant world, I

mean, people were living and dying

every day. It was wonderful

from a writers point of view.

And I mean life

and death. What else do you want to

talk about? That's why medicine is

so exciting.

We all connect with medicine.

We all have doctors we hate.

And so that's

really exciting.

And we can all make

this connection, no matter what

it is.

What is wrong with us?

We can make many connections.

If we're not having heart problems,

our mom is

having heart problems, or whatever.

We make this connection.

And so there's great drama

in an organ transplantation.

In organ transplantation,

and especially

in the early days, all

kinds of mysteries, a person would

come to the transplant

center here.

They had no choice.

I mean, it's not like-- this was

the only place to come for many

years for a liver transplant,

for example, and even for a lung

transplant.

And they would come here and

wait. And sometimes I followed

people who had waited, who came here

on the verge of death, who somehow

struggled to live for two or

two and a half or three years,

waiting for the right kind of organ

that fit them

to come to be

available.

So

the suspense and the intrigue

and the drama and

this life and death, up and down

cycle, it's terrific for medicine.

But the scientists, unless

the scientist is dying from

heart disease or something like

that,

it's a little bit different.