Listen:

(Full episode transcript below show notes)

Hello writers! If you’re sailing on stormy seas (literally, writerly, mentally, or otherwise), you’re going to want Jarod K. Anderson as your guide. Author, poet, and creator of The CryptoNaturalist podcast, Jarod shares his insights with us this week on his writing process, the impact of mental health on creativity, and his unconventional path to publishing success.

You can ALSO experience this episode as a VIDEO! Jarod was kind enough to let me press “Record” on our conversation, and I’m excited to share that with you here. I’m (obviously) not a video editor, and I’m cranky that the header font didn’t export properly, but… “Done is better than perfect,” right?

Resources & Links:

• Jarod’s website: https://www.jarodkanderson.com/

• Jarod’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cryptonaturalist/

• Pre-order Strange Animals: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/798888/strange-animals-by-jarod-k-anderson/

• Listen to The CryptoNaturalist: https://www.cryptonaturalist.com/

• Speculative Fiction Story Club: YouTube | Live Thursdays on Twitch
• Weekly Create-Alongs: Wednesdays 7-9pm CT on Twitch and YouTube
• Get my “Dear Creators” Emails

Support The Show

I make The Write Now Podcast on my own time & my own dime so that you can enjoy and share it for free. If you’d like to support the work I’m doing, please consider becoming a patron over on Patreon!

Or, if you prefer, you can also support me on Ko-Fi or via PayPal. 🙂 Thank you!

Full Episode Transcript:

Creepy, Cozy, & Wonderfully Weird

[00:00:00] Sarah Rhea Werner: This is the Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 171: Creepy, Cozy, and Wonderfully Weird: an interview with Jarod K. Anderson. And before I throw the theme song at you, I just wanted to let you know that this episode is also available as a video. So if you want to watch us have this original conversation, I recorded it via Zoom and you can watch it out on my YouTube channel, which you can find at YouTube dot com slash Sarah Rhea Werner. That’s S-A-R-A-H-R-H-E-A-W-E-R-N-E-R. All right, let’s get to the conversation.

[Intro Music]

[00:01:00] Sarah Rhea Werner: Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today I have with me just such a wonderful special guest. I get so excited, not only when I get to speak with other writers for the show, but when I speak to other writers whose work just… I admire so deeply, and who have inspired me in so many different ways. So this week I am excited to bring to the microphone Jarod Anderson, who I first Learned about through your podcast, the CryptoNaturalist.

Jarod is a writer of so many genres — audio, drama, poetry, prose… you have a novel coming out… you have a memoir and then, I also kind of count your social media posts as a different form of media. But before we get too far into that, because I will continue rambling,

I’d like to welcome you to the show and, just ask, for a brief introduction to yourself in your own words.

[00:02:10] Jarod Anderson: Hi. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks, Sarah. Good to be here.

[00:02:13] Sarah Rhea Werner: Sorry, I get really excited.

[00:02:15] Jarod Anderson: No worries. I’m one of those sort of lifelong writing nerds. Fifth grade is the thing that often gets pointed to is when I, I really got the bug, had one of those inspirational teachers who she used to send me out into the woods and tell me to sit with a pen and paper and write nature poetry, and…

I was 10 and I, I won a statewide poetry contest with her direction and I was kind of hooked. and she used to have me go and read, nature poems over the, the PA system in my little elementary school, which is mortifying now, but at the time I was, I was very into it.

[00:02:51] Sarah Rhea Werner: That’s really rad. I mean, at the time, like, what an honor.

[00:02:54] Jarod Anderson: Yes. Yeah. And so it was weird. I, I grew up in small town, kind of rural Ohio, and even in like fifth grade, I think I was known as like the poetry kid. And I remember I had to miss football practice once because I had to go to a poetry awards banquet. And so I was always kind of a weird mix of things.

I’ve also been kind of a sci-fi fantasy nerd. I’ve always kinda liked literature. I, I have a master’s in literature. I taught literature for a while at Ohio University. But I have always just loved the nerdiest of nerd books. And a lot of my writing I would do kind of for me,when I was also doing more serious… “serious” air quotes, professional stuff was that I would go off and write speculative fiction. And that led me to doing the CryptoNaturalist podcast as a, as a lover of audiobooks. And when I discovered audio drama, I loved it instantly. And, at the time I was a director at a university doing marketing and PR and fundraising and…

it was one of those moments where I was like, well, there’s nothing stopping me from doing a podcast. So I launched the CryptoNaturalist and I started publishing a lot more nature poetry online, and, was sort of amazed and surprised that, I found an audience and, that has kind of led me to continue.

And these days I, I write full time. …

[00:04:21] Sarah Rhea Werner: I’m thinking about that teacher, before this teacher sent you out into the woods to become this person that you have become — I mean, I don’t wanna give the teacher all this credit; but that was in you before, it was something that your teacher saw before sending you out into the woods, obviously.

But when do you feel like that identity set in? Was it like during one of those sessions, was it more gradual and vague? Yeah. I just feel like that’s such a formative experience.

[00:04:49] Jarod Anderson: It, it really was. And sort of, I, I think it’s unusual that I have such a moment to point to. Yeah, that was like then.

But, you know, neither of my parents went to college and neither of them ever read for fun. We didn’t have books around, really. So until I had access to that, I obviously always loved words. Hmm. Um, and I have much earlier moments of having like an old fashioned tape recorder that sort of looked like a textbook on its side.

And I would get,books on cassette from the library and their big puffy cases. Yes. and so, I would have that read to me even, you know, when my parents weren’t super interested, so I sort of had the, the precursor to audio drama podcasts that I would listen to episodically at night, you know, and this might have been… I don’t know,

19… ’90, ’89 or something is when I really got started. So I had, I had that as the idea of something so magical and comforting and transformative in mind before I then met that teacher in the fifth grade that kind of showed me that like this was an accessible magic. Mm-hmm. This was something that, that I could do too.

[00:06:00] Sarah Rhea Werner: Hmm. An accessible magic. Oh, that’s really beautiful. I mean, you’re a poet and so, you know, I feel like a lot of the things you say are just very eloquent, but that strikes me as something that’s so important. I’m very interested in identity and, I’ve noticed too, something similar, looking back.

I forgot all these things until I found myself also in podcasting and audio drama. I read the morning announcements. I was writing poetry, I was writing plays. I was recording my own audio books, probably illegally because I would check books out from the library and not want to have to give them back, so I would record them on cassette tape for myself.

[00:06:42] Jarod Anderson: It used to be so expensive.

I know.

[00:06:44] Sarah Rhea Werner: Yeah.

[00:06:45] Jarod Anderson: Oh,

[00:06:45] Sarah Rhea Werner: I would re-record over them. It was, they were crusty. Yeah. But yeah. And buying your own, just forget that. it’s just so interesting to see, where a writer comes from and where they end up going.

it sounds like you started writing poetry, then you started the CryptoNaturalist. I mean, do you have a, a genre or a medium that feels most at home to you?

[00:07:08] Jarod Anderson: It’d be hard to pick one. I’d say I probably write poetry the most. It just sort of happens often. Like I, I will find myself writing an observation and then looking at the shape of it and thinking, well, that’s gonna be a poem. You know, I have a document open now that’ll be the fourth poetry collection eventually,

but right now it’s just a madness document. And like, some things are poems and some things are just single spaced paragraphs of concepts I wanna articulate. And sometimes it’s, I have a quarter of a poem. So that happens as just like, those are my little sips throughout the day. Mm-hmm. But also, I mean, I wrote, I don’t know…

I probably finished four novels before I published. and I published a secret novel back in the day with a, pseudonym with a tiny press that I’m glad would be hard to find. Um, and then, I, sold the, the novel that’ll be out in February to,Ballantine books.

And so that’s been the last year editing and reediting and copy editing and on and on and on. And then the year before it was the same process with the, the memoir. Mm-hmm. so yeah, I feel like I’ve really dipped in to quite a few different genres now. And, I think I’m picturing a life for myself in which I just constantly trade back and forth, which really plays very nicely with my attention deficit.

I’ll have an intense passion for one thing and thenby the time it’s done, I am so sick of it I’m glad that I have a foot in other genres and mediums so that I can fully turn to something else.

[00:08:52] Sarah Rhea Werner: I appreciate you saying that so much. I was diagnosed with ADHD in my late thirties and, have also really this year especially learned to appreciate

going in and out of interest with different ways of writing. And there’s some folks who will say like, no, you need to stick with the project until it’s done,

you know, if you’re gonna be a winner. And it’s, I feel like a little more nuanced than that. Yeah. So I appreciate you saying that.

[00:09:19] Jarod Anderson: Well, also it sometimes — you’ll have to tell me if you ever have this, I know you’ve been a marketing professional — but sometimes that part of my brain says like, you’re being a very confusing brand.

in terms of being pragmatic about, being a full-time writer and trying to develop a career in writing, I’m hyper aware that the elevator pitch of me is hard, or is at least, you know, confusing or could be. Now, I think that may be something that I, that I have invented, because I haven’t felt a lot of that pushback.

[00:09:50] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:51] Jarod Anderson: But I just know that like, when I’m looking at the top paragraph on my author website and thinking like, how am I gonna sum this up? Like, what, what do I do?

[00:10:03] Sarah Rhea Werner: Who am I?

[00:10:04] Jarod Anderson: Yeah. Kind of a little of everything, because if, if I’m writing a little author thing for a poetry book, that might be different than what I wanna do for the novel or, same with the nonfiction.

And I just, I’m kind of aware of these different audiences and expectations. That said, I seem to be getting away with it and, and nobody has ever like said this to me outside of my own fear about it.

[00:10:28] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

That’s so interesting though. And you’re absolutely right. I was also in marketing for years —

were you more in-house marketing for the university but it’s really the same message. It’s that, you know, if you have a brand, you need to stick to it. If you have an image, you need to, continue increasing that image.

And that’s… it can be very specific and very strict depending on, who the audience is and all of that.

Did you find that the success that you had with the CryptoNaturalists sort of led you more easily into publishing? Or how do you feel that that went?

[00:11:05] Jarod Anderson: Maybe!

It’s, strange because, I built a pretty good sized, I thought, social media following that I still, that I still keep up with, but the truth of it is, is, you know, sometimes I would mention the podcast and there would be people who followed me for poetry that inevitably would say, I had no idea you had a podcast.

And then I know that there are podcast fans that are sometimes confused when I’m like, here’s something from my poetry collection. So like, I think little silos do kind of happen on their own, people sort of self curating within the bigger tent of things I put out into the world, which is probably perfectly organic and fineand natural.

the story really that, transitioned me into traditional publishing because at first it was, I had people saying to me, hey, we really want to hold physical copies of your poetry.

[00:11:59] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:00] Jarod Anderson: You should put out a poetry collection. and I actually reached out to Jeff VanderMeer, who is one of my favorite

Novelists. Yeah.

[00:12:08] Sarah Rhea Werner: I have the Southern Reach trilogy literally right behind me.

[00:12:11] Jarod Anderson: Yeah. So for weird reasons, probably about raccoons, he and I had chatted before on social media and, As somebody who came from academia, I’m like, all right, poetry, collections. How do you get those published?

Well, you enter a contest, probably from some sort of university press and on and on and on. And I didn’t wanna do any of that. And I said to Jeff, I’m like, is there any reason I shouldn’t self-publish? Because I have kind of a huge personal bias against it —

[00:12:37] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mmm-hmm.

[00:12:37] Jarod Anderson: — Coming from, from academia.

He was like, no, that’s ridiculous. Just put, just put out your poetry and that way you can control it and, like, it won’t hurt you, he said, in terms of like, if you wanna switch to traditional publishing and fiction and nonfiction, it was very generous of him and I thought to myself, okay! You know, Jeff VanderMeer says it’s okay.

You know, my wife Leslie, is a designer, and she did the cover designs for me and I, I published, Field Guide to the Haunted Forest first, and then two followed after that. and those weirdly, bizarrely, started selling enough that They made enough each month to pay our mortgage for three or four years.

[00:13:14] Sarah Rhea Werner: Wow. Wow. From poetry books.

[00:13:19] Jarod Anderson: Yeah. Which is not something I often even say because it sounds bonkers.

[00:13:23] Sarah Rhea Werner: that’s definitely not that’s not an expectation I would set for a poet today, but I had no idea that —

[00:13:31] Jarod Anderson: No.

[00:13:31] Sarah Rhea Werner: — That worked for you. Oh my gosh.

[00:13:33] Jarod Anderson: No. And so this corresponded pretty well with a pretty rough period in mental health where I left my job at a university,

[00:13:41] Sarah Rhea Werner: so it did feel like sort of a strange message from the universe that I should maybe be doing this, where I could set my own schedule and have good days and bad days. Mm-hmm.

[00:13:51] Jarod Anderson: And then, I write about nature and mental health a lot and I was having a lot of conversations through dms on Instagram and

I always answer them. And I was starting to talk shop with a lot of people about mental health, and I realized at some point this had to be a book.

[00:14:10] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:10] Jarod Anderson: Um, I started calling it “the long talk” when I referred to it with my wife Leslie. because, you know. Dms are not necessarily the best way to hash out mental health strategies.

And I’m not a professional.

[00:14:23] Sarah Rhea Werner: I mean, yeah.

[00:14:25] Jarod Anderson: So I said like, you know, these are, it’s like I wanna go on a hike or a camping trip with, with a lot of these people just to kinda share what I have learned in my own trial and error and successes and failures. So it became clear it needed to be a book, and I had written an outline and the first four or five chapters, and then

an editor from Timber Press, which is a Hachette imprint, messaged me and said, Hey, I really love your poetry. Have you ever considered nonfiction? And I was like, well, funny you should ask.

[00:14:55] Sarah Rhea Werner: Wow.

[00:14:56] Jarod Anderson: Yeah. So then I was like, well, here’s an outline and here’s the first five chapters. and he sold Timber on it.

And so signed a contract and that led to ” Something in the Woods Loves You”. Um. Yeah, that guy,

[00:15:09] Sarah Rhea Werner: which I’m holding up now. For those of you listening on audio, I have a beautiful hardback edition that at some point I need to get signed by the author. So.

[00:15:18] Jarod Anderson: Well, one of these days, we’ll overlap in some hu human physical space again,

I’m sure.

[00:15:23] Sarah Rhea Werner: That would be great.

[00:15:23] Jarod Anderson: Uh so, I, I sold that book. I finished it, and, you know, I had the first half of a novel written, which was the novel I eventually sold, Strange Animals. and, you know, I finished that novel and started working with my agent to, um, edit it and send it out.

four publishers ended up wanting it. It was… Viking, Ballantine, Tor, and St. Martin’s.

[00:15:49] Sarah Rhea Werner: No big deal. Holy cow.

[00:15:50] Jarod Anderson: I know.

Yeah. My agent said we’re entering best case scenario territory, which is not a thing I was expecting to hear, but The editor I really wanted to work with, um, guy named Julian Pavier with Ballantine, he did, uh, the Martian and Ready Player One.

[00:16:09] Sarah Rhea Werner: Wow.

[00:16:09] Jarod Anderson: He wanted it and ended up offering like a preempt deal to not go to auction. And I really felt like I was getting away with something, ’cause he was who I wanted to work with anyway. So we took that, edited it, and yeah. Now we’re, we’re out in February, so. Sometimes people are like, Hey, what advice can you give me about how you got into publishing?

And I’m like, I have no idea. Like I don’t know that I have a path you can follow beyond, like, try to write things you actually care about and then try to do it consistently.

[00:16:41] Sarah Rhea Werner: I was about to say, that’s the model that I see for you: writing beautiful, high quality things because you want to, making them public,

and you’re just setting yourself up for success by doing that.

[00:16:53] Jarod Anderson: Yeah. It’s… the main thing I feel like that took me a long time to learn was to get out of my own way.

[00:16:59] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm. Tell me more about that.

[00:17:02] Jarod Anderson: Well. I’m, I’m a perfectionist, so a long time I struggled to ever finish a draft because it couldn’t be perfect in the first pass.

And even though I like, intellectually believed in other people writing imperfect first drafts, not for me, like, I’m not allowed to do that! And so I’d get frustrated and then get a new idea. So, you know, I probably wrote the first half or third of, I don’t know, Eight, 10 books at some different points in my life.

And so it just, um, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it parallels efforts I’ve made in my own mental health struggles that, also kind of helped clear the path for finishing projects and putting myself out there and letting myself, actually explore my passions while setting aside what I thought of as external, expectations for what I “should” be writing.

[00:18:00] Sarah Rhea Werner: Hmm.

[00:18:01] Jarod Anderson: So, when I was a grad student, I was writing dense, literary, “keep up with me if you can” kind of poetry. And now I write what I sometimes call “belligerently accessible” poetry.

[00:18:15] Sarah Rhea Werner: Beautiful.

[00:18:15] Jarod Anderson: The same can probably be said for my prose, you know?

[00:18:18] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

[00:18:18] Jarod Anderson: I used to publish, scholarly work on John Milton.

it’s a pretty far cry from what I do now. so yeah, it was like a personal journey of growth and acceptance of authenticity and vulnerability that’s the real sort of meta story in terms of advice I could give. But then, you know, the actual logistics of getting into publishing, I feel like my story is so strange that it’s hard to give actionable advice sometimes.

[00:18:47] Sarah Rhea Werner: I would love to ask about, if you’re comfortable talking about it, the relationship between mental health and creativity. This is, and I think you said this earlier, one of the big topics that you explore in your social media posts, which also are either openly poetic or border on the poetic.

[00:19:05] Jarod Anderson: it’s weird, right? Because having a painful mind is sometimes a path to a kind of creativity. And yet I also… my skin wants to crawl off my body when I start to think about romanticizing mental health struggles, in terms of how they contribute to, creativity.

So. if anything, I can say I’ve learned to be a lot more flexible, because I’m somebody who really falls for sort of “all or nothing” thinking, like, either I’m a writer and I write every day and I follow a schedule, or I’m not a writer at all and, screw it, maybe I’ll never write again. Getting better at living with my brain and challenges has meant that like there are good days and there are bad days, and there are days when a thousand words counts and that’s a victory. And there are days when 20 minutes in the chair counts —

[00:20:02] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:02] Jarod Anderson: — As, as the victory. and you know, I, for me, and I think it’s hyper individual, have learned that, Consistency is the thing to draw a hard line on, often, but not some kind of benchmark of productivity.

[00:20:19] Sarah Rhea Werner: Oh, yes. tell us more.

[00:20:21] Jarod Anderson: when I’m doing a longer work, I can lose my hold on the pacing,

which is very important to me, partly because I’m usually mostly a pantser.

[00:20:32] Sarah Rhea Werner: Same.

[00:20:32] Jarod Anderson: Yeah. If, if I don’t come to it in some form five days a week at least, it will grow stale. And then I, I know that the catalyst, the startup energy to coming back to it can become its own kind of monster.

[00:20:47] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:48] Jarod Anderson: So, the balance is

being firm with myself on coming to it every day, but then being very kind and gentle with myself on what that looks like.

[00:21:01] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:01] Jarod Anderson: and I don’t know, through tracking and experience and everything, that’s better for my mental health; it’s also better for productivity. Like if I step outside myself, I finish things better, if that’s the attitude.

These days now that sometimes I sell things before they are written and signed contracts, I do have to be a little bit more, I don’t know, diligent or, have a plan and stick to it a little more. but I’m also a lot more, able to plan for my own quirks in a way I might not have been before.

Because I’m better at accepting who I am and what productivity looks like for me. And it isn’t 2000 words a day.

A lot of us have probably read Stephen King’s “On Writing”. It isn’t that.

I think that can become an early, uh, scripture —

[00:21:51] Sarah Rhea Werner: It can.

[00:21:51] Jarod Anderson: — For writers, and I’d say, Be a little bit, leery in terms of making space for how you work.

[00:21:58] Sarah Rhea Werner: what helped you to eventually get to that place of acceptance? you seem to be at a point where you’re okay with, okay, I sat in the chair for 20 minutes.

what helped you get to that point? Is that somewhere you got by yourself? Did you talk with other writers or a therapist or what did that look like?

[00:22:16] Jarod Anderson: I definitely talked with a therapist. I mean, we used to joke about it. Mark, the therapist I talk about in the memoir, two years in or something, he would tease me that on the form I filled out when looking for a therapist,

the main thing I noted was trouble writing. Which is, was only ridiculous because I was there for major depression and like I was making it about, productivity. and the productivity improved. But I was struggling with like suicidal ideation and stuff, like writing productivity was not the main reason I was visiting a therapist.

But if you define your own self worth through your productivity, and if perhaps you’re in a job you don’t like, so your actual self worth has to happen in your off hours, and how well you are, actually, producing your passion, then that can be its own weird wrinkle that gets complicated.

So acceptance, I think, for me, had a lot to do with letting go of the kind of hardcore “all or nothing” thinking. it was making friends with, you know, one time I remember crying in therapy because Mark just walked me through the stages of change and it was just this idea that like, he drew stair steps on a whiteboard and…

the stages of change are often there for talking about addiction, but it was like, Intending to change — Preparing was one step, and then preparing to change, and then taking action, and then maintenance. But then the stair steps had lines like, a sort of cyclical circle of arrows leading back, because that’s how it works.

Like you take a step forward and then you slide back and then… but that’s all part of the process.

[00:24:01] Sarah Rhea Werner: Hmm.

[00:24:01] Jarod Anderson: And he was making the point to me that, if you take morality out of it, that it was data; that each of the attempts to step to a different step was information. Like it wasn’t a failure, it wasn’t a, a permanent record thing,

it was okay, I’ve learned something about how my brain works, how my productivity works, how I need to structure my life, and the setbacks were important in that scientific data sense. And you know, the crying came in the idea of removing morality from it, where taking failure off the table, like that brains and lives are diverse and complicated,

and an effort that teaches you something, anything, is part of the process of progressing toward, where you wanna be, toward a goal. And so, that was a pretty good antidote. It took me a long time to internalize, but thinking in those terms, thinking about data and not morality and my struggles with depression, yes,

But also in my efforts and trial and error, in figuring out my own writing practice. So what didn’t work, clearly, was, Here’s an idea for a novel. I’ve made a Excel sheet with dates on it and benchmarks that are, 1500 words a day, six days a week, and I’d better hit these things; like, it didn’t work.

so, figuring out what did work… and yeah, for me it was the 500 words or 20 minutes… it was, I can skip this and go to poetry this day…

[00:25:44] Sarah Rhea Werner: mm-hmm.

[00:25:44] Jarod Anderson: It was, maybe this is an editing day, maybe I’m gonna skip back two chapters and reread and maybe that’ll prime the pump for new words and maybe it’s just, alright,

I will have polished up these two chapters. it’s just kind of figuring out all those little tricks, that work with my brain and didn’t treat it as an adversary, within my own skull.

[00:26:07] Sarah Rhea Werner: Hmm. Treating it as an adversary is, I feel like something a lot of writers, myself included, struggle with is we see ourselves as our own worst enemy.

We see ourselves as our own competition. We see ourselves as the roadblock standing in our way to health, happiness, and success, when d really, I love this gentler approach of going at it together. And saying, I’m gonna work with my brain instead of against it. I’m going to, I don’t know what the opposite of fighting would be.

Um, hold hands with it. I don’t know, but I really appreciate that outlook.

[00:26:45] Jarod Anderson: Yeah. There was a, I’m gonna butcher it, but there was a saying and Brazilian jiujitsu I liked that was like, a technique that was practiced was slow, but slow was fast.

It was like, don’t try to… doing something slowly focused on the details gets you further than a huge effort that isn’t actually catered for the target goal. that’s a, a labored metaphor I’m shooting for there, but the idea that like gentleness and, almost like realism because of that adversarial thing.

Because the problem I think as writers is we know what it felt like the day it went well, and we know like what we got done that day. And so it’s hard not to like, kick the tires of your own brain and be like, well, where’s that brain? Like what, what’s this? what do I have today?

[00:27:34] Sarah Rhea Werner: Yeah.

[00:27:35] Jarod Anderson: but like, that’s not how it works, for me at least. So then it’s more like, treating the brain like a garden, or like I’m setting the stage for productivity through like, taking care of myself, making this a nice place for my brain to be. there are deadline days, but

not every day needs to be a deadline day. I feel like that’s just really courting burnout or taking something that we like, or a passion, and then trying to beat it into shape in a way that is antithetical to why we started in the first place, you know?

[00:28:12] Sarah Rhea Werner: Yeah. I’m nodding along with you, and I’m sure many listeners are nodding along as well.

you talked a little bit about your process —

what does that look like for you these days?

[00:28:26] Jarod Anderson: Geez, it depends.

[00:28:27] Sarah Rhea Werner: Yeah.

[00:28:28] Jarod Anderson: Right now I am, right now I’m procrastinating, because I have a book due in January about dandelions. Um…

[00:28:38] Sarah Rhea Werner: and this is different from Strange Animals?

[00:28:40] Jarod Anderson: Right. Yeah, Timber Press are doing this series of very illustrated books that’s a single author talking about a single plant.

And they said, do you wanna do one? And I said, yes, dandelions. So, you know, I have a bunch of sketches and I have it broken into sections and I have my madness document full of notes. But it’s not due till January. So now I’m 20,000 words into a new strange novel. and I’m poking at poetry.

So, right now, I am getting this first section of the novel ready to show, my agent, probably next week, and it’s, I don’t know, I’m doing my 500 words or 20 minutes at the computer thing, five days a week. And I have been for a few weeks. and it’s, gone pretty smoothly, which always feels kinda like when Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff and, so long as I don’t look down, I won’t fall,

that kind of thing.

[00:29:36] Sarah Rhea Werner: Eh-hehhh.

[00:29:37] Jarod Anderson: yeah. Uh, so I’m just powering forward on that. But it is a thing I think where my agent wants to see it and then see if we can sell it on, the premise, which is fine. it’s a little scary at this point. but my wife also writes — she had a horror book come out from Quirk last year, that was in the New York Times Top 10 Horror Books of the Year.

It was a novel called Unmothers, and because of that, she sold a novel on an outline. and so I just watched her go through that.

[00:30:09] Sarah Rhea Werner: Oh my gosh.

[00:30:09] Jarod Anderson: And so I’m like, okay. Yeah, I like the idea of pitching a book and then having a deadline when it will be done. Which, you know, all this talk of gentleness, it is also helpful sometimes to have a legal document that says I will have a book done by X date.

[00:30:26] Sarah Rhea Werner: Yeah. [Laughs].

[00:30:27] Jarod Anderson: but I’m also trying to plan ahead for like the… all right. My whole life is gonna be about this Dandelion book pretty soon. If in the background, my agent can be selling this novel based on 20,000 words and an outline, good. That’ll be something I can queue up for when I’m ready to switch from creative nonfiction nature writing back to, contemporary fantasy… the thing we used to call urban fantasy, but it’s not called that anymore.

I mean, it is sort of funny, like urban fantasy… all of my stuff takes place in small town, semi-rural areas. So it is strange to have called it urban fantasies.

[00:31:06] Sarah Rhea Werner: Or like a rural fantasy, suburban fantasy?

[00:31:10] Jarod Anderson: Contemporary fantasy makes sense. I guess it works ’cause it’s like this is the contemporary modern world, but also, you know, monsters.

[00:31:17] Sarah Rhea Werner: Yeah! As there should be.

in talking to other writers, in teaching other writers, do you have a favorite piece of advice that you like to share?

[00:31:27] Jarod Anderson: I just taught, um, a three and a half hour workshop on Nature poetry in North Carolina last week.

[00:31:35] Sarah Rhea Werner: Awesome.

[00:31:36] Jarod Anderson: And that was one of those where I was afraid that I couldn’t fill the time.

And then by the end I was like, shouting things because it went too fast, you know? So it’s like, I know I have things to say about writing. It’s just, hard to come up with succinct advice because that thing was mostly about, poetry and metaphor.

[00:31:55] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:55] Jarod Anderson: And looking at these different spectrums from like,

hyper specific examples to big, broad conclusions or hyper personal, first person stuff to, impersonal, objective, scientific fact.

[00:32:09] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:09] Jarod Anderson: And how a lot of successful poems dip into the far sides of the spectrum that play with that, like, turn that feels like, a nice, variety of tempo or tone where you are playing with like far ends of these narrative spectrums or image spectrums, you know?

So that was a fun thing to talk about with poetry. and I encourage folks to, if you write poetry to try to parse that out in poems you like.

[00:32:36] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mmm.

[00:32:36] Jarod Anderson: Mary Oliver will be like, here is this grasshopper on my palm; what is prayer? And it’s like, ah! You’re zoomed way in to being zoomed way out.

And so that’s a thing I like to do in poetry that I also like to do in prose. where I think, we all have an ear for writing that’s working.

[00:32:56] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

[00:32:56] Jarod Anderson: And one of the things that makes it not work is when we feel kind of, like, in a mire of samey-ness.

[00:33:04] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm.

[00:33:04] Jarod Anderson: And one way to get out of it is you can do sentence length.

You can do the zooming in to zooming out. there are so many ways to think about varying the beat, in poetry and prose. But being explicit about it and throwing some terminology at it and analyzing it is fun to do. Part of the panic on that workshop is like, there’s a bunch of stuff I do not name or label or think about for myself.

And then if somebody asks you to go and discuss it, suddenly you need to almost invent jargon.

[00:33:33] Sarah Rhea Werner: Yeah!

[00:33:34] Jarod Anderson: For your own process. Or how, how are we gonna discuss it? Like, I think when I started trying to make handouts for that workshop, I just wrote “VIBES” really big at the top of the page.

This isn’t helpful. those sorts of things are fun to consider. And then, I don’t know, for me though, like the big bugbear that I’ve had to defeat over and over again is just the whole getting outta my way with perfectionism, with “all or nothing” thinking with short term ruining writing for myself by feeling burnt out or too frustrated or like that

I’ve gotten to the breaking point, and so I have to turn away completely. and then like something I semi jokingly say, it’s like, well, how do I know I’m a writer? Well, I can’t stop. Like, I always come back to it. It’s like one of the big things that, is a thing where I’m like, okay, well this is one way

I definitely know I’m a writer. I’ve been very mad at it many times in my life, and nobody has made me come back to it, and I keep coming back to it.

[00:34:35] Sarah Rhea Werner: I love that. That’s really, really good.

[00:34:37] Jarod Anderson: I know there are some people who are like, oh, it’s my love and it’s cathartic and it’s always such a huge release for me and I think, oh, that must be cool.

[00:34:45] Sarah Rhea Werner: Yeah.

[00:34:46] Jarod Anderson: Like…

[00:34:47] Sarah Rhea Werner: for me it’s a compulsion.

[00:34:48] Jarod Anderson: Yeah. Yeah. Me, me too.

[00:34:49] Sarah Rhea Werner: Is it for you too?

[00:34:50] Jarod Anderson: Yeah. I, I have a great friend though that is like, oh, it’s just a catharsis and something I do to let steam off at the end of the day, and I’m like, huh. Okay. Like. I’m proud of it. I enjoy it in a way, but it’s like a strenuous kind of enjoyment.

[00:35:05] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:06] Jarod Anderson: Or like, it’s the enjoyment of doing a puzzle, and part of the enjoyment is the difficulty in getting through it. So like, no, it’s not a relaxing activity for me.

[00:35:17] Sarah Rhea Werner: No. And it’s not easy.

[00:35:20] Jarod Anderson: No. Those people are out there, though.

[00:35:22] Sarah Rhea Werner: Oh, I know. I, I talk to them all the time and I’m just not on the same literal or figurative page as them, and it’s just.

[00:35:29] Jarod Anderson: No, me either.

[00:35:30] Sarah Rhea Werner: It’s amazing and it’s, it’s wonderful that so many different people write for so many different reasons in so many different ways. But yeah, I write because I can’t not write, I write because I need to understand what it means to like, live, and that’s just, that’s what I need it for.

When you’ve taken those frustrated steps back, I think you even said you had been burned out at one point… other than just being drawn naturally back to writing, was there anything else that like, helped you through that? Anything intentional or unintentional?

[00:36:02] Jarod Anderson: Unintentional? It was, um,

remembering what a fan I am of writing. Getting back to that little kid me, listening to the tape deck, under the blankets with The Hobbit kind of thing, I think getting back to like being a appreciator of the art is often what leads me back. loving it, losing myself to it, and then remembering that accessible magic piece —

[00:36:29] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mmm.

[00:36:29] Jarod Anderson: — Where it’s like, oh, how can I not? How can I not dabble in this? I know that this is a stranger, across a gulf of years and life experiences reaching out and, and giving me something special, like… that’s too shiny of a rock not to pick up off the creek bed, you know? It

[00:36:47] Sarah Rhea Werner: No, that is a fantastic way of putting that. what do you enjoy most about writing? Is it putting together that difficult puzzle?

Is it part of the challenge,

[00:36:58] Jarod Anderson: I feel like I have a very variable brain.

[00:37:00] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mmm.

[00:37:01] Jarod Anderson: my memory is rough sometimes. I think part of that is depression.

and so, you know, it can be kind of a stormy, dynamic, turbulent place to exist in, in any given present. And there’s something wonderful about a piece of writing becoming concrete.

[00:37:23] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm.

[00:37:23] Jarod Anderson: Like becoming that stormy thought and then becoming a thing, a firm thing on the page that I can stand in.

I love that. And also because of that dynamic, you know, I’ve always said, sometimes I don’t actually know what I think about a thing until I attempt to write it down. And so the challenge, the… I don’t know, having a book idea, starting to try to plan and outline it, feeling like it’s impossible and then when it’s no longer impossible, that’s a pretty big rush.

And also feeling like, you’ve built a room onto your brain and, you know, the stormy turbulant seas brain thing for me, partly with the mental health issues and then, you know, I build this like polished room, like a sunroom onto my brain, and it’s like this book or this poem.

And when I go back to it, I recognize myself in it, but it’s also something that stands apart from me. It’s no longer on the stormy sea, it’s like it’s on a rock and I like that. And it’s sort of comforting and life affirming that I see it as like an extension of my own mind, but then it has its own power and inertia, in a cool way.

[00:38:39] Sarah Rhea Werner: I have literally never heard it explained like that, and yet that feels like everything, so. Wow. Thank you for that.

[00:38:47] Jarod Anderson: Sure.

[00:38:49] Sarah Rhea Werner: you’ve given me so much to think about. I’m actually looking forward to like. Th- this is gonna sound terrible. I’m looking forward to getting off of this call with you and going through my notes. That sounds awful. I won’t say it.

[00:38:59] Jarod Anderson: No, it’s cool. No, I, I’m proud of that.

That’s great.

[00:39:03] Sarah Rhea Werner: Yeah. I’ve written down so many really beautiful things from your brain, and I’m so grateful that you have been generous enough to share your wisdom, your insight, your experience with us. If people are interested in connecting with you… we’ve talked a little bit about your, writing on social media, but.

Would you like to direct people to a website, social media, somewhere they can buy your books, et cetera?

[00:39:25] Jarod Anderson: Yeah. I mean, you can find me on Social media as the CryptoNaturalist or Jarod K. Anderson. Jarod K. Anderson dot com is a good place to go for pre-ordering the new novel. I’m definitely supposed to be plugging that.

[00:39:40] Sarah Rhea Werner: I’ll link to it in the show notes for today’s episode. Make sure people get a chance to check that out.

[00:39:43] Jarod Anderson: Yeah. I, I had an early reader tell me that if, cozy creepy was a genre, this would be the defining book for it. So it’s sort of cozy and warm and about found family, but it’s also very

creepy and odd and about monsters, in the Catskill Mountains.

[00:40:01] Sarah Rhea Werner: So all of my favorite things.

[00:40:02] Jarod Anderson: Yeah, if you enjoy that kind of stuff, you might enjoy it. or yeah, Something in the Woods Loves You is pretty much all of my thoughts on, on nature and, and depression. Uh, and I have a handful of collections of poetry out there.

[00:40:16] Sarah Rhea Werner: Something in the Woods Loves You, is… I read it and I felt like I was reading poetry in a very good way. Like it was, it was dense and there was a lot of voice to it, and it was just really evocative. So.

[00:40:29] Jarod Anderson: that was a scary writing challenge.

[00:40:31] Sarah Rhea Werner: I mean, “write a book about nature and mental health” is terrifying as a writer who understands that specificity is how you do writing well. So yeah, that whole memoir was me trying to layer on self-imposed limitations so that I could, make that work. Interesting… could you tell me like just—

[00:40:52] Jarod Anderson: Oh yeah.

[00:40:52] Sarah Rhea Werner: —A little more about that?

[00:40:54] Jarod Anderson: again, like I knew I wanted to talk about nature and depression, and then that was too big and too scary, so I was like, well. there’s a formative year I can focus on, so I’ll break it up into four seasons, and it’s like, okay, still too big.

all right, so each one of those seasons I will focus on five things — animals or trees, plants, that I have a personal connection to. So in terms about solving the puzzle that we mentioned earlier, sometimes you have to build the puzzle — or, every time you have to build the puzzle for yourself.

So that one was maybe the project I’ve been the most hyper aware of building the puzzle, because it was so broad. And I was afraid of certain pitfalls. Like, as somebody who’s dealt with toxic positivity around depression, I definitely didn’t want to write, you know, go touch a tree and you’ll feel better.

[00:41:44] Sarah Rhea Werner: No.

[00:41:44] Jarod Anderson: While also —

[00:41:45] Sarah Rhea Werner: I mean you might,

but.

[00:41:45] Jarod Anderson: Yeah.

Well that’s the thing, while also respecting that I will go touch trees and feel better. so yeah, it was about layering in all of this structure and then working within it. And even though I knew it was arbitrary, I kind of knew the only way to succeed or get through the book was to build this puzzle overlaying all of the things I wanted to say.

[00:42:07] Sarah Rhea Werner: Fascinating. And it’s, it’s always interesting to hear a pantser talk about structure. And I’m, I’m always curious where that comes from, but for you, it sounds like it was just a necessity to create the thing itself.

[00:42:19] Jarod Anderson: Well, with nonfiction, The problem was I ended up with a huge document full of points I wanted to make.

[00:42:27] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm.

[00:42:27] Jarod Anderson: Like, things I thought were important, like tools I wanted to hand to the reader. And so suddenly if, you know, you have a book and you have a huge list of things you wanna get to, there’s no way to not do structure, you know? I left for my pantser self like. I left it at least where it’s like, you know, that story about the squirrel and also work in, um, how society makes arbitrary, hurdles for people struggling with mental illness.

well, all right, there’s still enough wiggle room for me to, to not feel like I am filling out a grocery list when I came to write it, you know?

[00:43:07] Sarah Rhea Werner: Right. Or feel trapped by it.

[00:43:09] Jarod Anderson: Yeah. ’cause that’s no fun.

[00:43:11] Sarah Rhea Werner: No, that’s real.

[00:43:12] Jarod Anderson: Also it doesn’t work. I’ve tried to plot novels before and never works for me.

[00:43:17] Sarah Rhea Werner: Mm-hmm. Nope, nope, nope. Never works for me either.

Well, Jarod, speaking with you has been and is always, whenever I get to do it,

such, such a delight, such a joy. I feel like everything in your work, it comes out when you speak, it comes out in your face. it’s just such a lovely thing to witness. So I just wanna thank you for being here. Thank you for, again, sharing your wisdom and insight and process with us.

I’m very grateful, and I know my listeners are gonna be, too.

[00:43:47] Jarod Anderson: Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And I don’t get to have these conversations enough, so thanks for, uh, giving me the opportunity.

[00:43:54] Sarah Rhea Werner: Oh, I’m, I’m delighted and honored to do so. Wonderful.

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