An Interview by Nonfiction Editor Lindsay Milgroom

Redivider: Your essay provides advice on memoir-writing. What advice can you offer new writers?

Jeff Porter: Be an oddball one day a week. Avoid Facebook, that warehouse of banalities. Meet strange people. Keep away from Starbucks. The challenge with memoir-writing is turning the vapid American self into a compelling literary presence. A good writer can get half way there with a captivating style. But that’s never quite enough. There’s no ignoring the fact that memoirs are about human density, how to feel, see, and articulate the multiple layers of life and time that are hardly ever reducible to simple relationships or to chronology. Out of fashion for three decades, density is back.

RR: How do you write nonfiction and keep yourself “safe” from the audience?

JP: I’m thinking of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, who was a carved-from-wood smart ass. As long as the words came out of the “dummy’s” mouth, Edgar Bergen could be as politically incorrect or as critical as he chose. He enjoyed a license to rant. Bergen smiled humbly on stage while his dummy cracked wise. An able writer learns how to extend her voice beyond the limits of sincerity. On some level we’re all ventriloquists when writing.

RR: How is writing for film different than writing for a book?

JP: Technically speaking, film can project twenty-four images in one second. How many words in that brief duration? Maybe one or two. Writing for film is all about abbreviation and compression, about producing just enough linguistic signage to ground the visual info in some notion of character and plot. How many words does Clint Eastwood’s character speak in ninety minutes of sun-baked stalking in Pale Rider? Less than a thousand (though I’ve never counted). That’s about ten words per/minute. Such ratios would scare any writer, would make the minimalist Hemmingway look like a David Foster Wallace. Writers of books, on the other hand, hover over each phrase and sentence like the ghost of Flaubert, refining, perfecting, stretching. It’s the lingering effect, a unique by-product of literacy. Movies hate to linger, the one exception being Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, which may contain more words per/minute than any other movie (though I’ve never counted). If the book is an expansive art, film writing is subtractive. The one rewards invention, the other penalizes it.  I recently met, by the way, a Washington curator who tallied every sequin in Dorothy’s ruby slippers.

RR: When did you know writing would be your life?

JP: Honestly, I never thought of becoming a writer. What I find most compelling about writing is the craft itself, which is why I like working with film and sound-the cutting, layering, mixing. In that respect I’m kind of medieval. I would love to hang an old wrought-iron sign outside of my office.

RR: You compiled “Idiosyncrasy is Good,” an interview-style radio essay. Would your work process have varied if you had compiled this for a written essay, instead of for the radio?

JP: Most likely I would have lollygagged over the writing longer were it for print, at least until the text had a figurative life of its own. Also, I would have historicized the subject of radio art, would have critiqued Ira Glass’ abuse of quirkiness, and would have talked about alternative notions of “voice” within a much larger aural context. But radio usually doesn’t permit that kind of latitude, which is maybe why the tradition of the listener has lost so much bandwidth. Not only is radio obsessed with time management but (like TV) it is guilty of formulaic thinking. I recently observed the news director conduct All Things Considered at NPR in Washington, DC. We were in the control room surrounded by monitors, mixers, and fancy things with blinking lights. What made the biggest impression on me were two oversized digital clocks running backwards. Every commentary, report, feature, news brief, interview, and voice id was managed by the second, with no margin for error. Late in the broadcast, the assistant director couldn’t find a sound clip in his playlist that was to be cued next. The digital clock ticked down silently. Fifteen seconds and counting. Robert Siegel and Michele Norris starred down at their copy helplessly. A hefty fellow, the AD scrambled from one computer to the next, sweat forming in beads above his eye brows, mumbling in a language only Walter Murch would know. I was sure the space-time continuum would collapse.

RR: Who are the top three writers you’d like to have coffee with?

JP: Werner Herzog, Joan Didion, and W. G. Sebald (were he alive).