Life Stories #13: Steven Rinella

photo: TheMeatEater.com

My guest for this episode of Life Stories, a series of podcast interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, is Steven Rinella, and we’re talking about Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter. Steve’s books draw upon personal experience, but he’s not just setting out to tell his own story:

“You mentioned talking to memoirists, and… I never, ever think of that word. Everything I do turns out to be personal or have memoir elements, but I sit down and think, ‘I’m going to write a book about buffalo,’ or ‘I’m going to write a book about the history of human hunting,’ and in the end it just… I creep in. I don’t have a lot of self-restraint, so I always find my way into things. Honest, starting this book? I wanted to write a treatise on the meaning and history of hunting, and then once I got into it I realized the best way to do this would be to talk about myself… It just comes out.”

The result is a highly personal book in which Steve continues to reflect on his relationship to nature and the food he and his family consume (he’s strictly a sustenance hunter; everything he kills, he eats or prepares for others). During our conversation, we touched upon—among several other topics—the development of Steve’s hunting ethics when he was growing up in Michigan, what his brothers (with whom he’s spent his entire life hunting) think of his work as a writer and television presenter, and his thoughts on when he’ll introduce his own son to hunting. Oh, and what he’d ask Ted Nugent if he ever gets the chance to talk to him…

Listen to Life Stories #13: Steven Rinella (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

3 September 2012 | life stories |

Life Stories #12: Daniel Smith

Tyler Maroney

In this episode of Life Stories, my podcast series of interviews with memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I chat with Daniel Smith about Monkey Mind, his “memoir of anxiety.” Naturally, we plunge right into talking about anxiety—one of the particularly interesting things that came up during our conversation was when he explained that he didn’t become anxious revisiting many of the traumatic experiences that defined his early life; the anxiety he felt tended to be more about the frustrations of writing itself.

We also talked about the therapeutic techniques that have proven successful for him, which focus on a mindful awareness of what’s going on in his head when anxiety strikes, and about the surprising role that Botox plays in alleviating one of his worst physical symptoms.

We discussed the importance of building up new patterns of thought that allow anxiety sufferers to keep things in check, because if you don’t, anxiety is really good at biding its time and waiting for the opening to strike. As it happens, Smith wrote an essay for the New York Times earlier this week along a similar theme, inspired by a comment his brother made, which gets reframed as: “Don’t be an idiot.” Specifically, don’t be “an impractical and unreasonable person, a person who tends to forget all the important lessons, essentially a fool, one who willfully ignores all that he has learned about how to come to his own aid.” He mentions the things that have worked for him, acknowledges alternatives that might work for other people, but, ultimately, “I’m not sure it matters what a person chooses—so long as he chooses and keeps choosing.” It’s a tenaciously optimistic mindset that you can feel in every moment of our conversation.

Listen to Life Stories #12: Daniel Smith (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

15 August 2012 | life stories |