‘You have to be loving’: An editor and essayist on the storyteller’s craft
In personal essays as in news reports, Monitor writers look for the humanity that lies at the heart of the story. A veteran editor of The Home Forum who’s now a regular contributor joins our podcast to talk about his deeply creative take on that work.
What’s the key to telling stories that grip readers and don’t let go?
“Finding the humanity,” says Owen Thomas. “It’s everywhere. You just have to open your eyes to it.” Owen edited The Home Forum section for the Monitor, and nurtured its contributing essayists, for decades before his recent retirement. Now he writes for the section’s new editor, Husna Haq.
“You have to be ready to capture [the humanity], too,” Owen says on our “Why We Wrote This” podcast. He stays armed with a set of 3-by-5 cards for notes. Some of his work draws on fresh observations, some of it on poignant remembrance.
Owen recently wrote about being a middle school stagehand, watching an eighth grade actor pluck victory from potential embarrassment. (It’s worth reading.) “I’m sure nothing else [ever] fazed her,” he says of the young star.
“I think the key for me and for anyone writing an essay is to be true to your experience, ” Owen says. “You have to be honest. I think you have to be loving. And I think to be truly honest is to be loving.”
“You have to look deep into what you are and what you’ve experienced,” he says. “It’s amazing what you’ll find.”
Episode transcript
Owen Thomas: The key for me and for anyone writing an essay is to be true to your experience. I mean, you have to be honest. I think you have to be loving.
And I think to be truly honest is to be loving.
Clay Collins: That’s Owen Thomas, a now retired Monitor editor whose portfolio, across more than four decades, included The Home Forum and Features sections. He’s now a contributing essayist.
Welcome to “Why We Wrote This,” a podcast about Monitor journalism.
Owen joined us last in October 2022 to talk about The Home Forum and about the late John Gould, a superstar storyteller, on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of Mr. Gould’s first Monitor essay.
That show won Owen and me some attention at a [New England Newspaper & Press Association] awards banquet late last month, and there, over mixed green salads – with monumentally chunky cucumber slices, as I recall – I asked Owen to come back on the show. And here we are. Welcome back, Owen.
Thomas: Thanks, Clay. Good to be here.
Collins: So as with Mr. Gould, so with Mr. Thomas, good storytelling is engaging to readers. And one of the performance metrics we watch at the Monitor in the interest of being data informed is depth of read. You recently wrote a nice little piece on an act of improvisation you witnessed as a middle school stagehand.
And it was widely read, but it was also really deeply read. So what went into pulling readers through?
Thomas: Clay, I wish I knew. I’m reminded of … you know, Hollywood makes a lot of movies. They make a lot of bad movies. If they knew how to make a good movie every time, they certainly would.
Collins: Hmm.
Thomas: That’s what I offer on that [laughs]. Probably part of it certainly is that I enjoyed writing it, and I hope that was communicated.
It was, uh, an incident that I sort of rediscovered in a way, and I looked at it at a different way than I saw it at first. At first I was, you know, saved from a fate worse than death, you know, being embarrassed in front of the entire school. But it turns out it was really … I think it was a gift to that actor who improvised so quickly and so well.
I’m sure nothing else fazed her.
Collins: Well certainly everyone can relate to the notion of middle school nervousness, maybe especially middle school boys. But hitting on elements of universality in that way feels like a great way to get readers to see something of themselves in an essay.
There are a lot of new underrepresented perspectives making their way into creative nonfiction now, and [into] other kinds of writing. And that’s a very good thing, and a long time coming. Does it make every essayist’s work a little more niche?
Thomas: It’s tougher now, I think, because publishers especially are playing catch up with all those perspectives that have been ignored up to now. It’s pretty obvious I’m a white guy. And so, you know, they’ve had more than their share of the stage for a long time. So, it may be a little tougher to get in if you’re not niche.
Collins: Mhmm. But universality still exists.
Thomas: I think so, and I think the key for me and for anyone writing an essay is to be true to your experience. I mean, you have to be honest. I think you have to be loving.
And I think to be truly honest is to be loving. And … you can’t put on a personality or a character that you aren’t. But you have to look deep into what you are and what you’ve experienced. It’s amazing what you’ll find.
Collins: Hmm. So you’re on the writing side now, after a lot of years on the editing side. Your editor’s from another generation, she’s had very different cultural influences. So, how do you take editing – and how do you take rejection?
Thomas: OK, editing. Uh, these Millennials have to save me from myself a little bit. I think every generation has this problem that they wander across landmines, that they didn’t know were there or they don’t think should be there at all.
In terms of rejection, that is tough, but, uh, I resolved, when I decided to do writing, to be the kind of writer that I’d want to have as an editor. And rule No. 1 for me is no whining.
So there’s no accounting for taste sometimes. And I did get a piece that I really liked – that I thought was funny – that got some initial interest and then the editor decided she didn’t want it. And so, uh, I just bowed out quickly. You cannot persuade somebody to like something that they don’t like.
Collins: That’s interesting. Say a little bit more, if you would, about … the role of writer versus that of editor.
Thomas: Well, there’s a great metaphor that I came up with, and it’s that there are drivers and there are pedestrians, just as there are editors and there are writers. And when you’re a driver, you can’t believe the imbecility of the pedestrians you encounter. And when you’re a pedestrian, you can’t believe the audacity of the drivers you encounter.
And it’s the same with writing and editing. It’s sort of like parents and children, as a matter of fact. When you’re a kid, you’re sort of complaining about what your parents did or didn’t do for you. And, when I became a parent myself, my immediate response was, well, “what do they expect?” So it goes with writers and editors as well.
Collins: You’ve got a forthcoming piece about sharing tea, I understand, and I have pre-read a really fun essay that you wrote about harvesting stuff from the curb and dragging it home. At that banquet that we started out talking about you mentioned a pipe … from a pipe organ. And I think your wife, Maggie, made a face when you were talking about that.
But life really does give an observant writer a lot to work with, doesn’t it?
Thomas: Yes, it does, and I was surprised by that piece. It started out one way, and then went a completely different way. And when I look at the character that’s at the center of that piece, I say, wow, he’s sort of weird. But it’s me.
And this is something that I tell everyone. When I was Home Forum editor, I used to say, you know, everyone has a Home Forum essay in them, but they have to look closely at their own experience and not try to borrow somebody else’s.
They can’t say, “well, what would an essayist make of this particular thing?” or “what would a journalist say?” They have to be completely honest about who they are and how they responded to something, and that leads to success.
Collins: Say more about why you thought the weird character at the center of the harvesting junk story was someone that readers would relate to in some way.
Thomas: Part of it is just finding cool stuff.
Peter Ford said something once that really stuck with me. Peter Ford is now the international editor of the Monitor. He’s been with the paper for a long, long time. And I’ve worked with him. He wrote a Home Forum essay, in fact.
[H]e said that he feels that he has not done his job if he hasn’t succeeded in having the reader feel how he felt about a piece, about a subject, and specifically if he hadn’t gotten them to love the subject as much as he does. So I think that’s in the back of my mind, too, is I love this stuff and I want you to love it too and you know, take it or leave it, this is what I got. I hope you love it.
Collins: Peter Ford makes me think of international coverage. Peter’s been on the show before, too, talking about how to make that work. The world seems quite dark at times, and now is one of those times, but humanity always does seem to poke its gentle tendrils through, and finding that really is part of the essayist’s art, isn’t it?
Thomas: Finding the humanity – it’s everywhere. You just have to open your eyes to it. You have to be ready to capture it, too. One of the things I do is take notes. I have 3x5 cards clipped together in my pocket at all times. And you never know when inspiration is going to strike, when you’re going to see the humanity of something. You have to be alert to it, and you have to capture it as it goes whooping by, because otherwise, you’re going to lose it.
Collins: Who do you like reading, and why?
Thomas: Gosh, I read all kinds of things. I read a lot of history. I’m reading “Undaunted Courage” at the moment. I read a lot of World War II history. For entertainment, I’d have to think. There’s not a lot. I do enjoy John Gould, but I don’t pick up his books frequently.
My wife reads stuff to me. We have tea together, and in fact, we’ve gone through several books that way, including, I’m embarrassed to say, young adult novels written by a friend of ours, which was very comforting during the pandemic because you know there’s not going to be anything horrible happening.
Collins: Just in terms of knowing where to go next, how and where do you look for subject matter? And it’s not, sometimes it’s looking for things, but certainly not looking away either.
Thomas: Well, every once in a while it’s an idea that won’t leave me alone. And I’m wondering, why am I thinking about that incident or that idea? So, frequently, and that’s when I often, you know, write it down, but it’s knocking at the door of my consciousness and I say, OK, I’m going to take a look at this.
And it often leads in unexpected ways. Like that story about being a seventh grade stagehand and witnessing somebody doing an astonishing bit of improv. An eighth grader, mind you, who showed great presence of mind. And I’m wondering, why am I thinking about that now? And as I examined it, I realized there was a lot more there.
And, it bloomed into an essay.
And also, something Francis Bacon said: One of his famous quotes is that “…reading makes a full man, conversation makes a ready man, but writing makes an exact man.”
Collins: Well, thank you, Owen, for being an exact man, for your continued contributions to the Monitor over the years, and for your storytelling.
Thomas: Thanks, Clay. That was fun.
Collins: And thank you to our listeners. You can find more, including our show notes, with a link to the essay we just talked about, at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus. Jingnan Peng is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineer was Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by the Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2024.
