(Please note that this is auto-generated and may not be perfect.)

 

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:00:01) – Welcome to the Manuscript Academy podcast, brought to you by a writer and an agent who both believe that education is key. The beauty is the people you meet along the way and that community makes all the difference. Here at the Manuscript Academy, you can learn the skills, make the connections, and have access to experts all from home. I’m Julie Kingsley. And I’m Jessica Zimmer. Put down your pens, pause your workouts, and enjoy. Hi everyone. We have a very special guest today. Karen Outen is here to talk about her brave new book, Dixon Descending. Karen, please tell us all about your work. It was so much fun to read.

Karen Outen (00:00:43) – Oh. Thank you. Oh, wow. There’s so much to tell. The book is about a man who does the most audacious thing he can imagine, and how he has to live with the consequences. Dixon and Nate decide that they’re going to be the first black American men to summit Mount Everest, and they leave their lives behind, leave their communities.

Karen Outen (00:01:04) – Some of the people in the community are saying, you’re doing what? And they go off on this journey that does not go as planned, and then they have to live with the consequences. So Dixon is the main character, is the person who we see most closely and who is affected, uh, most primarily, I suppose, by what happens on the climb and by what he discovers about himself and what it causes him to do when he returns, how he returns to a life that is upended, as is he. And there are consequences. And he has to learn how to live with his new self.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:01:44) – That’s a beautiful description. I love how there are so many ways to describe one book, but that just really gets to the heart of it, fittingly, since you wrote it.

Karen Outen (00:01:52) – Thank you.

Karen Outen (00:01:53) – The most exciting part about writing the book was really writing about Mount Everest. I loved that part. That was so much fun because it was so totally beyond me. I mean, I, I got altitude sickness once in Santa Fe.

Karen Outen (00:02:08) – I mean, ended up in the emergency room, you know, getting oxygen. So I’m clearly not a mountain climber.

Julie Kingsley (00:02:15) – That was the thing that struck me the most, Karen. And like I, I could not wrap my head around the fact that this project was fiction. And my husband’s a high mountaineer. You know, I was. Yeah. So he he had pulmonary edema and he was like, hauled off a mountain, just like your characters. And I was like, obviously Karen has just, like, hit all the big mountains. And she was it was such a brave book. I mean, like, this is such brave fiction. Like, that was my favorite part of it.

Karen Outen (00:02:44) – Oh, thank you so much. You know, it’s funny because in some ways that was the easiest part to write because it was so beyond me. Well, the whole book was beyond me. I’ve never written from a man’s perspective before. I always have written, you know, with female lead characters.

Karen Outen (00:03:00) – So it was a surprise to me when Dixon showed up and started telling me his story. But the thing about the mountain was that I truly didn’t understand it. I mean, mountain climbers, are you kidding me? And I think it started with the disaster in the 90s that really brought Everest into focus for all of us. That became Into Thin Air and the Everest Imax movie. And I just thought, who does this? And I think it sort of played in my mind the idea that it was so outside of my experience, and I think the thing that was most exciting about researching the book was that there was a moment when I got it, I was talking to some alpinist, you know, real alpinist, and I kind of understood that nobody needs to climb mountains, just like nobody needs to write a novel. But it’s something you must do that you’re called to do, and you’re called not because you want the summit, but in the same way that writers are called, mostly because they have stories to tell.

Karen Outen (00:04:06) – Climbers climb because they want a good experience of the mountain, even though they know a third of the time they’re not going to summit. That’s a whole new take on failure for a writer, right? You know, we want to get that story written. We want it successful. And they’re saying, if that doesn’t happen, it’s okay because there’s the next mountain or this one again. So I learned a lot.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:04:27) – Oh, have you heard of.

Julie Kingsley (00:04:29) – Yeah. Second tier fun. It’s called second tier fun that a lot of outdoor people say, you know, that you do something. I think this this goes along with writing. You do it and it’s really not that fun at times. And then you look back and afterwards and you have a book and you’re like, oh, that was that was great.

Karen Outen (00:04:46) – Right?

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:04:47) – Oh wow. Like the I don’t like to write. I like to have written. Right. Yes.

Julie Kingsley (00:04:52) – Exactly. Which I don’t think we’ve like we haven’t talked about that here, but I think that it’s we all feel that.

Julie Kingsley (00:04:58) – And some days just like mountain climbing are often. Well, when you’re writing.

Karen Outen (00:05:03) – Yeah, yeah. Second year fun.

Karen Outen (00:05:05) – Exactly. And I think one of the things that I heard these climbers say was that, you know, this idea of looking for a good experience of the mountain so that they are paying attention as they go along to each part of it. And what brings them closer to the mountain, closer to themselves, closer to their intentions, so that it really is about, you know, to be trite about it, I guess, enjoying the journey and that that makes the difference for them. So it’s not just summit fever, it’s something larger than that.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:05:39) – That’s beautiful. And I love the way you describe the mountain as this embodied force. Right. It’s it’s something they can listen to. It’s they talk about the mountain as her. It’s, you know, this feminine, powerful spirit. And they say it’s almost as if you have to get the mountain to relent for you to be able to climb.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:05:58) – I thought that was such a beautiful way of them experiencing this, because of course, it’s out of their control.

Karen Outen (00:06:03) – Yeah. Thank you. And I you know, that comes straight from Sir Edmund Hillary when people said to him, oh, you conquered the mountain. And he said, no, I didn’t conquer it. She relented. And I think that one of the things I also learned reading about the Sherpa people who who are serving as guides, is that it’s very much about, you know, we know this mountain is alive. She’s mother goddess of the of the earth. And we ask her, can we climb today? And, you know, the experienced climbers will say on some days when it’s really rough, she doesn’t want us there today. And they’ll they’ll move down, you know, they’ll say, today is not our day. She’s not ready. And they understand this as a living, breathing force. And I imagine you have to if you’re on that mountain. And since it’s a glacier, it is continually moving and moaning and sighing and you hear the ice cracking and you know that you are not with an inanimate object, right?

Karen Outen (00:07:03) – Yeah.

Karen Outen (00:07:04) – I mean.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:07:05) – Technically she doesn’t have to let us up there at all. So.

Karen Outen (00:07:08) – That’s right.

Karen Outen (00:07:08) – That’s right.

Karen Outen (00:07:09) – Yeah, yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:07:10) – Let’s go back in time. Karen, tell us about your publishing journey. How did you find your agent and how did all this get rolling for you?

Karen Outen (00:07:18) – Wow. Oh, gosh. I could go way, way back.

Karen Outen (00:07:21) – So I have been writing for I published my first short story 40 years ago. So I’ve been writing and publishing short stories and and essays and really seriously going about this. But the sort of promised land of publishing a novel had eluded me. There was one close call about 20 years ago, and for this book it spoke to me very clearly, and I believed in it. But it’s been a long journey. I wrote this book over the course of 15 years, so during that time it changed the the portions on Everest were the ones that stayed the same, you know, that were that were sort of constant. But the rest of the story, the stories back here on Earth, transformed tremendously.

Karen Outen (00:08:09) – So there must be about six different versions of that. And it took a long time. There were a couple of times when I thought, okay, I’m ready, and I got agent rejections, and that was heartbreaking. There were a couple of moments where I really, literally was with friends, sort of striking a match and saying, okay, that’s it. I’m lighting this sucker on fire. And my friends would, you know, lean over and sort of blow out the match. Have you thought about this? No, I’m going to burn it. I can’t do it. Where have you thought about this? Um, that. Really? Seriously. So when I finally got the version that I was able to sit with. Because each time I would finish a version, I would sort of read it all aloud to myself and sit for a minute. And, you know, in your gut when something isn’t quite right. And there would always be this moment where I was really quiet at the end and I thought, something’s not there.

Karen Outen (00:09:01) – But finally I got to a place where I thought, it is here, I feel it. And I was really lucky because I had the thing that had kept me going, frankly, was that in the middle of that, wanting to burn it, I got a a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. And that was such a lifeline, such a godsend to get that for this particular book. So when I went to send it out, I had a list of agent names, people I had met at the ceremony or who had contacted me afterwards. And so that was easy. And my agent, Alexa Stark, was just there was just something about her calm and her expertise and her sense of humor. And she read the book the way I wanted someone to read it. She saw in it what I hope someone would say, you know, and I just thought, yeah, this is the one.

Karen Outen (00:09:55) – I love that.

Julie Kingsley (00:09:56) – Story. Yeah. I love how you persevered and how your friends were there for you.

Julie Kingsley (00:10:00) – We talk about that all. The time here. It’s the people around you. They keep you, keep it going.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:10:04) – And everyone wants the writer friends who will reach forward and blow out that match instead of being like, well, I guess it’s your choice.

Karen Outen (00:10:10) – Yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:10:11) – Flinging out the window.

Karen Outen (00:10:12) – Yeah. No, I are an adult. So lucky.

Karen Outen (00:10:15) – Yeah, I’ve been so lucky. And I think having a community of writer friends, even, you know, I have some that are far flung, you know, California, Arizona, North Carolina doesn’t matter. We show up for each other in all of the important ways. And that has made all the difference, really has.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:10:34) – Yeah. How did you find your writer friends?

Karen Outen (00:10:36) – In a couple of ways. One, by seeking out whatever resources were in the community. So in in DC, for instance, there’s this amazing place called the Writer’s Center, actually in Bethesda, Maryland, and there are classes or all kinds of things. And I think one of my first good writer friends I met in a workshop there, and the other way was by being in an MFA program.

Karen Outen (00:11:00) – I went to university of Michigan, and there was a cohort of us who stay in touch and who read each other’s work and who support each other, and that’s been so important for me, really has. Yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:11:13) – We’re wondering, could you read us the first page of Dixon descending?

Karen Outen (00:11:17) – Oh, certainly.

Karen Outen (00:11:17) – I just happened to have it right here.

Karen Outen (00:11:19) – Just right here.

Karen Outen (00:11:21) – March 2011, Mount Everest. This first time, as they hoisted themselves onto the hip of the mountain, they had to simply learn to survive. Survive the landscape, the thin air, the unbelievable cold, the exquisite suffering. Each step of Dixon’s crampons on ice was accompanied by a headache so intense he thought a tiny demon jabbed a pitchfork endlessly inside his ear. His stomach cramped, his tongue swelled against the roof of his dehydrated mouth. He inhaled heavily at 18,000ft and rising. His every breath was hard won a perfect, exhilarating orb of suffering. His brother Nate climbed just in front of him along a narrow path that stretched between ice boulders.

Karen Outen (00:12:07) – Nate looked back at him, panting lightly but smiling, his black goggles gleaming on his face. Rock star like man wearing rare air. Black men on Everest. Dixon repeated it with all black men on Everest, which was to say, freed men because their burdens here were of their own making.

Karen Outen (00:12:27) – So good. Yeah. Thank you.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:12:29) – How many versions of the first page did you have?

Karen Outen (00:12:32) – Oh, my. Well, that’s hard to say because it didn’t start there initially. I didn’t start on the mountain, so probably it was the fourth version or so before I did that I wanted initially I thought about the book A Gesture Life, which is very much about a man who had been who had a traumatic experience in the war, and that was sort of the center of the story. Everything rotated around it. But you got to the center of the story before you understood why he behaved as he did. And as I was as I had friends reading it, they were like, you’re burying the lead.

Karen Outen (00:13:11) – You’ve got to start with Everest. And so that first page probably has tweaked a bit, but it hasn’t been changed substantially since I made that change.

Karen Outen (00:13:23) – Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:13:24) – That’s so interesting. You talk about that structure because in a way your book does kind of spiral around until we get to the Y. Yeah, yeah. Can you talk about how you discovered the Y and how you got to that place?

Karen Outen (00:13:36) – Yeah, that was the thing that maybe took longest to get right the business of structure, because initially Dixon showed up. He appeared to me, I saw him standing in front of his middle school, and clearly something had happened to him. And I realized, okay, so he’s been to Mount Everest and he’s back. What happened? And it was that what happened that drove me. And also what do you do next after you do the most audacious thing you can think of, and it changes your life in ways that you couldn’t fathom. Not just your life on the mountain, but also your life when you get back and the life of people around you.

Karen Outen (00:14:16) – And there wasn’t a lot that I could find about the aftermath of climbing. The closest that I came, really was a couple of years ago, the 50th anniversary of the, um, walk on the moon. And suddenly then there were stories about the astronauts lives after they came back to Earth, and how they many of them fell apart. You didn’t hear any of that in the 60s. It was all triumph. It was all we were heroes. But listening to it now, you hear about what happened to their marriages, what happened to their sense of themselves in space and time. They’d been outside of our universe, floating around, and they had a whole different sense of themselves spatially, of, you know, what’s next? The idea of, well, I’ve done the most outrageous thing I can do, who am I now? And so that aftermath was really important to me and is what started the journey. And as I said, when friends were reading it, they were like, wait a minute, you’re burying this lead.

Karen Outen (00:15:17) – You know, this is really compelling stuff. You’ve got to get us to this mountain faster and help us figure it out. So it was very much about how do I handle the present and the past and bring them together and compelling ways. You know, that’s the age old problem of fiction, right? That back story business.

Julie Kingsley (00:15:36) – I pulled this line. One of the things that I thought you did so well is to, um, build consequence for Dixon in such a way. You did not. You just you just put it out there. And I love this line because it said everything. He missed running missed it achingly. So it might have worked off the tension might have kept him from the nights climbing in his sleep, his legs and arms and motion digging into the mountain. And you know, this idea that, like, once you were this, but now you’re this and that release that you need from this physicality of these athletes are left with this aching. So can you talk to us about stakes and character building and how you went there?

Karen Outen (00:16:17) – Yeah, stakes.

Karen Outen (00:16:18) – Well, I think I was surprised by what the stakes were for me. I was surprised by how much I suffered with these characters. In some ways, there were those moments where I just sort of sat back and thought, oh my God, Dixon, you know, um, I really wanted to bring across the fact that so much had changed in his internal landscape, the his idea of who he was, and that in lots of ways, the idea of descending was from the lofty idea of himself and then figuring out what will the consequences be in his relationships back on Earth. And specifically with these boys he was mentoring and supposed to be a role model for, um, as a school psychologist. So I have this really wonderful extended family, and I have cousins who are like siblings to me. I mean, we spent we traveled as a group when I was growing up, so I spent a lot of time talking to them, talking to other men I knew, and getting a sense of kind of the burdens that black men live with that I wasn’t aware of, and that part of it was about a sense of responsibility.

Karen Outen (00:17:37) – One of the debates that I heard constantly was the debate about, okay, what is my responsibility to men around me, but also to the next generation? Am I going to be the kind of man who says, you help everybody? There’s so many people to help you. You help them until they show you they don’t want to be helped. Or am I going to be a person who says, I will never give up on this person? I will stick with it and to hear from so many different people that that was part of their consciousness. I knew that had to be part of the consequence for for Dixon in his life and the business of who can and cannot be saved became really central to the book on so many levels.

Karen Outen (00:18:20) – Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:18:21) – Can you say more about that? Because it really is in so many parts of the book.

Karen Outen (00:18:25) – Yeah, yeah, I thought that for Dixon, he was the kind of guy who, even though he was in his brother’s shadow because his brother was charming and all of that much of his life came easily, and he was the responsible one.

Karen Outen (00:18:38) – He’s the moral barometer that, you know, they talk about in the family. And I thought some of that had to be shaken. And it begins with discovering some of his own ambition on Everest, because he sort of thinks, oh, I’m doing this for my brother. And then he discovers, no, I’m doing this for myself, and I want to be the one who wins. I want to be number one for once. And that’s shakes a lot of his confidence and changes his idea of how benevolent he imagines he is, I think.

Julie Kingsley (00:19:12) – Yeah, that really struck me. You know, when I don’t want to give away too much. But, you know, there’s that one scene where he has to make some decisions about what to do with his brother, as his brother is on the mountain. And, and, you know, like the ego around the climber, but the ego around the character in the man, and no one wants to go home and say, well, I didn’t do it, you know, like I pulled that adventure because there’s so much stakes within that.

Julie Kingsley (00:19:36) – There’s also, you know, for him, there’s just stakes around him teaching. And I, you know, I have a teaching background and I just thought that was so incredibly interesting. Can you talk to us how you balanced Everest and this kind of, you know, a school mentor, psychologist in the classroom?

Karen Outen (00:19:56) – Frankly, that was kind of the hardest part for me, figuring that out and whittling. Think it down to, okay, what is the core of this? So as I was writing it, several things fell away. One was I had a lot more women in this book, and it was a surprise to discover this is really about these men’s relationship with each other, because there are several different there are sets of brothers, there are friends, there are there are men who are helping each other through hard passages. And so letting the women step back was was a challenge first and then realizing what needed to happen, what the stakes were for him at school, in his school life, and paring back to these two essential relationships he has with these two boys who sort of, I think, encapsulate the business of the good son, the not so good son.

Karen Outen (00:20:54) – There’s in some ways they don’t really echo Dixon and Nate directly in terms of their personalities and and that sort of thing, but definitely in terms of, of the choices we make about who we take on in our lives, who do we allow to enter a particular space? And I think for Dixon, it had been an easy choice to deal with mostly good kids, because that’s what surrounded him and his job was such that he could weed out the more difficult kids. Well, what happens when you can’t do that anymore or when you question yourself? Is that the right thing? Um, there’s that moment when he is on the subway in D.C., and there’s this kid who is clearly a kid on the edge and he thinks, is this somebody who who would have been in my caseload? Should I have helped him? Should I have been of use? So I think he becomes someone who questions everything about his own motives.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:21:52) – I think that’s so interesting, too, because there’s that line between, of course, he wants to protect Marcus, who is so sweet and just trying to do the right things, and he’s trying to get them to be stronger and defend himself.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:22:03) – And, you know, there’s that line of like, we want to do the right thing and support the people we want to protect. But then he goes too far and it’s like, where is the line between aggressively protecting the people we care about and just going too far and hurting people?

Karen Outen (00:22:18) – Yeah, that’s really that’s really interesting. I don’t think I had thought of it that way. But you’re absolutely right. He does go too far. And I think boundaries are part of his issue certainly with with his brother as well. Yeah. Yeah I have to think about that I like that, yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:22:36) – Speaking of the kids, I thought I loved the dialogue. I thought when I, when, you know, I was reading it and then I found myself stopping and reading some of your dialogue out loud, and I was like, wow, wow. This is it’s brave dialogue. It’s jumped off the page. Tell us about or give our listeners, since they’re writers, some tips on writing great dialogue.

Julie Kingsley (00:22:59) – How did you come up with these amazing voices, and how did you keep them so distinct?

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:23:03) – Yeah, Shiloh especially leaps out to be very vivid. And just like, I love how he talks.

Karen Outen (00:23:09) – You know, Shiloh was supposed to be a very minor character who showed up in one scene that was version 3 or 4, and Shiloh would not shut up.

Karen Outen (00:23:20) – I bet he wouldn’t shut up. He wouldn’t go.

Karen Outen (00:23:23) – Away. I mean, I was really stuck for several months because I was trying to write away from him and he just wouldn’t let me. He really insisted on being in the book. And then, you know, a couple of early readers were like, listen, this kid’s voice is drawing me in. You’ve got to listen to him. And I’m not quite sure where he came from. I don’t know that I know him. In fact, I don’t know any of the people in the book. They’re all completely imagined, although my mother has other ideas. She said to me, read your book sometime.

Karen Outen (00:23:55) – I think there’s somebody in here that you know. I didn’t know that with the voices, especially because these were men’s voices and I have so many female friends, even though I have these, you know, cousins, most of my friends, I think, are women. So I had to think, how am I going to capture men’s voices? So I did a couple of things. I talked a lot to cousins and friends who were men and just listen to the cadence, and sometimes I was writing down what they had to say. Um, I also emailed male friends and, you know, just, you know, what are you doing? How are you? And or ask a question, have them tell me a story to see what their voices look like on the page. And that is, I think, the thing that helped me most, listening to them and even stuff like I watched, which is a great series, men of a Certain Age, it’s an old series, but there are a lot of men talking to each other and interacting with each other.

Karen Outen (00:24:49) – So paying attention in that particular way, but especially listening to my friend’s voices on the phone or in conversation in person, listening to men’s voices. Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:25:01) – That’s such a wonderful way to do research.

Karen Outen (00:25:03) – Yeah, it was fun. It was a lot of fun.

Karen Outen (00:25:05) – Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:25:05) – Well, we’d love to give out a copy of your book. Can you give us a code word? And the first person to email it to us will get a copy.

Karen Outen (00:25:12) – Audacious.

Karen Outen (00:25:14) – Audacious I love it.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:25:15) – I love it, too. Okay, so the first person to email Academy at manuscript wishlist.com with audacious in the subject line will get a copy of Dixon Descending. One thing that leaps out to me is when Shiloh lists the five things he knows about his mom. Can you talk about that?

Karen Outen (00:25:30) – Yeah, I.

Karen Outen (00:25:32) – Dreaded Shiloh for so long, but once I found his humanity, he became so compelling to me. Once I understood so much of what was driving him was grief and loss. I thought, oh, I know this kid, I know him, and Dixon’s going to recognize him and understand it.

Karen Outen (00:25:52) – So I needed a moment where Shiloh could become vulnerable in the slightest way. You know, he’s never going to, you know, he even says, we’re never going to be best friends. Don’t go thinking that. He says it in more colorful language than than that. But I needed to see inside of him, and I needed Dixon to see inside of him. And I knew he couldn’t give a lot, but I figured what he gave had to be important to him, and it’s at a moment when he and Dixon are both sharing details about losses, and that’s what he connects to in Dixon. Nothing else. None of the none of the good guy, none of the all of that. It was about the moment of, oh, I see what your vulnerability is. And he can give it for just a minute and then back off.

Julie Kingsley (00:26:39) – Yeah, yeah. I’ve worked with a lot of difficult kids when I was teaching, and, um, it really spoke to me that there’s always a reason.

Karen Outen (00:26:46) – Yeah, there’s.

Julie Kingsley (00:26:47) – Always a reason. Like, like, you know, kids come to you and they’re they’re like, they are in front of you for a reason. I think you really nailed that.

Karen Outen (00:26:53) – Yeah.

Karen Outen (00:26:53) – And at the same time, what I, I wanted was for there not to be anything extraordinary like, oh, it’s the IQ. Oh, it’s lead poisoning. Oh it’s this, oh it’s that. No it’s not any of those. You know, on some level he’s an average, just incorrigible kid. But there is a reason underneath. Yeah, yeah.

Karen Outen (00:27:14) – Well, and that.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:27:14) – Shows his humanity too. If we were just like, oh, it’s this numerical thing. It’s in his blood. It’s this number associated with him. No, he’s a full person.

Karen Outen (00:27:23) – Yeah, yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:27:24) – One thing I love is the family relationships here. It’s this really beautiful, warm family. They’re so supportive. They’re so kind. And there’s this one passage where you say that Dixon would love more than anything to just be home watching TV with his parents and his mom, saying, I know your feet are not on the coffee table.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:27:44) – And one thing that’s so beautiful about that is I think a lot of times it’s something like that that we really miss after the fact. Can you talk more about that?

Karen Outen (00:27:53) – Yeah.

Karen Outen (00:27:54) – You know, I one of the things about having a large entangled family is that losing them is really painful. And over the past, you know, 20 years we’ve been losing more and more. You know, I had 11 aunts and two uncles and I now have one. And we still have family reunions every year. And we get together and we tell stories. And in fact, even growing up, there was sort of an order in which we told stories about the cousins. You knew when your story was coming up, and that it was going to be more embellished than the year before, that kind of thing. But it it is those small moments that you miss about somebody. And I knew that for Dixon, given the family that I envision he had, there would be these little moments like that. And especially because, you know, at some point, you know, he’s 47, 48, you know, you’re thinking about, okay, I’ve shifted up in line, you know, with my parents gone in terms of who is who’s the elder now in the, in the family.

Karen Outen (00:28:56) – Um, so I, I wanted to bring those small moments in.

Karen Outen (00:29:00) – Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:29:00) – And it’s so interesting to, to see Nate through their eyes and saying he wanted you to go have this perspective. He knew you would make it. And I thought that was such a beautiful thing to learn after the fact.

Karen Outen (00:29:16) – After. Yeah, I love Nate.

Karen Outen (00:29:18) – Nate is absolutely the guy you’re probably not supposed to date, but you can’t resist him. And yeah, you know, I think I think we know him. We most of us know him. And he also on some level can’t control how how attracted you are to him. Right. And he’s trying so hard to be a good man. And he can be in lots of ways. But then there’s this lure of, wow, I know I can get away with something, get away with a lot of stuff I discovered while I was writing.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:29:48) – But you also show their compassion to, you know, I, I would think that depending on how Nate was described, we could either hate him or sympathize with him, with the facts being the same.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:29:59) – And. There’s one passage where he talks about how you have to make a woman feel seen, and to me, that was such a brilliant way of showing. Yeah, he’s definitely got an agenda, but he’s also seeing people, which I thought was such a really interesting combination.

Karen Outen (00:30:17) – That’s so interesting. It’s a you know, I there are a couple of things that there’s small moments that I’ve, I have borrowed that I think some of my cousins will will notice. And one of those is that moment right there. I remember my cousin Tony telling me about, you know, how you dance with a woman and you know how you hold your your arms up so that she has to look up and see you because you don’t want you want her to see you and see that you have seen her. And I thought it was, you know, sort of a lesson in seduction, but it also was a lesson in. Oh, right. Because he’s one of these people who always makes you feel seen. And that was kind of kind of it.

Karen Outen (00:31:01) – And I thought that would be who Nate is.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:31:03) – Yeah, yeah. Because even if it’s with an agenda, it’s still a beautiful thing.

Karen Outen (00:31:07) – Yeah, yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:31:09) – I mean, what you’ve done here is, you know, the whole show, not tell that you showed us everything so effectively. Can you talk to us about your revision process? You kind of brushed over all of these different, um, ways that you had to attack this book. But do you have any tips out there for revision?

Karen Outen (00:31:26) – Yes.

Karen Outen (00:31:28) – Oh, revision. You know, I think when I was in the thick of it at near the end, I probably felt more like a writer than I ever have before because I knew I was, you know, I would sit down to sort of throw a tantrum.

Karen Outen (00:31:45) – No, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do it.

Karen Outen (00:31:46) – And then I dig in, you know, um, for revision, there were a couple of different things. There’s so many there. Oh, my gosh, I have so much I could say about revision.

Karen Outen (00:31:56) – The first thing, of course, the the basics of letting it sit for a few minutes and for a few weeks or a month even, and then reading aloud was really important. And when I got tired of doing that myself, I found the speech to text function on word Microsoft Word. So I had it read read to me, which made so much difference. I heard it in ways that I might not have heard it had. I just read it again for the 15th time. So hearing that aloud really helped. And I think sitting down with some questions to myself, saying, okay, what am I trying to accomplish in this chapter? Have I done that? What moves you forward? What stops me? And, you know, part of that was some of those things were questions that I asked my readers. So having readers was essential. And I have had friends who’ve read this several times. I mean, really, they’ve been amazing. And being able to say to them, okay, this is what I’m not sure about when you finish reading it, read these questions.

Karen Outen (00:33:02) – Tell me what you think did this work or did this not so that helped. And then being able to attack what they said to think about and digest it and say, you know, is that something that’s even pointing toward the way I want to go? Is this still the book that I thought it was? Is it going to be? And what new thing have I discovered about this, about what this is really about on the underneath it. So revision was, you know, what happens in layers and layers and keeps going until you’re satisfied. You know, it.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:33:36) – Sounds to me almost like an energetic process of is the mountain okay with me doing this today? Is there a vision okay with me doing this today? It’s publishing okay with me doing this today.

Karen Outen (00:33:47) – Oh, that’s very funny.

Karen Outen (00:33:48) – Yeah, yeah, I think it it was very much is it okay. Is this mountain going to let me do this or is Shiloh going to let me move him today, or is he going to tell me, no, I’m not doing that because he certainly did speak back.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:34:02) – Does he rude to you? I imagine he was a little rude to you.

Karen Outen (00:34:05) – He was. If I did what he wanted him to do, he was fine. But he always sort of looked at me kind of askance, like, okay, lady, what are you up to now? What do you think happened here?

Karen Outen (00:34:16) – Gosh, yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:34:17) – So hiking up Everest, even hiking up to the base camps is a lot. But taking the risk to hike up Everest is very brave. What is the bravest thing you’ve had to do in publishing?

Karen Outen (00:34:30) – Keep going.

Karen Outen (00:34:33) – I mean.

Karen Outen (00:34:34) – Really, the bravest thing is, is to keep going. You know, at one point I. I thought of myself as the most successful, unpublished novelist I knew.

Karen Outen (00:34:43) – Oh, I love that.

Karen Outen (00:34:44) – Only because I kept at it, I guess. And it wasn’t. There was never a I’m going to get this done, you know, as God is my witness, I will write again. I was never it was there was never that if I could have stopped, I would have, but I just couldn’t.

Karen Outen (00:35:00) – And it was. There have been moments that have been excruciating. You know, if you spend your whole adult life striving for something and you don’t get there, you think, okay, have I wasted my life? Because there are so many choices I made based on the writing choices about jobs, about places to live, about not having a bigger career because I wanted to have time to write. And, you know, there have been moments where I’ve worked full time, I’ve taken off 6 or 7 years so that I could work part time and freelance and go to graduate school and then work again. And I’m single. So I’ve got to think about retirement, I’ve got to think about having health benefits, all of that kind of stuff. And teaching adjunct is exciting and wonderful. You don’t get as much time to write, but you’re surrounded by good stuff. But if you’re teaching adjunct, how are you making ends meet? You know, are you planning for the future? Is that going to be the thing that that works for you or not? And there have been plenty of times where working full time, I’ve come home at 6:00, gone to bed at nine, gotten back up and written until two in the morning.

Karen Outen (00:36:07) – I could do that maybe. Well, I could do that in my 30s. I can’t do that now. But, you know, I could do that 3 or 4 nights a week. But there are all these choices you’re making to keep the writing alive. And you get into your 40s, you get into your 50s and you think, is this it? Am I done? Is this going to happen? And it’s hard. It’s really hard sitting with those choices. So the bravest thing is absolutely to keep going. And I’m not even sure quite how it happened, except that I had really, really good writer friends who kept saying, come on and blowing out that match, you know, you.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:36:45) – Know, while you’re talking about this, I was thinking about how you were saying that you had other people read this in their voices, and you could hear how people were absorbing your work that way. Julie. Now, I want to have an event where people have to trade and read each other’s work.

Julie Kingsley (00:36:59) – That’s funny. When I was an adjunct, that’s one of the ways I had people revise, you know? Yeah, it works really well. You can hear it. And, um, another thing that I use is I paid for it. It’s called speech fee. But then you can use, like, Gwyneth Paltrow’s voice or Obama’s voice or Snoop Dogg’s voice, and that’s even almost like a little bit more of a natural rhythm. So that’s just another tip for people.

Karen Outen (00:37:21) – Well, you know, the first workshop I was in when I was in college was led by it was one of those January sessions. I went to Drew University and my professor was Joan Weimer, and we had this wonderful workshop where we would trade work and sort of act it out. And it was the first time you would hear your voice, and it’s so amazing. You hear your work coming out of someone else’s mouth. You hear where they naturally pause, where you didn’t want them to or where they get it right, and the inflection and all of that that is so invaluable as a young writer or even a seasoned writer hearing that.

Karen Outen (00:38:00) – Um, so I yeah, I would applaud that.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:38:03) – One thing that I think is so interesting is that you have so many characters on the ground saying, this is just ego. And that to me feels like a vast oversimplification. What do you think?

Karen Outen (00:38:14) – Oh that’s funny.

Karen Outen (00:38:15) – Well, that was one of the responses I got when I was, I would say to people, especially men. So you know what comes to mind when you think about a man climbing Mount Everest? What do you think of that person? And I heard over and over, oh, that’s all ego. And that just fascinated me that that was the response that I got. And I think I, I think it is a vast oversimplification. You’re right. Because climbing a mountain is something few of us understand. What we do think about is that’s incredibly dangerous. That’s so outside of the norm for what we do, that we sort of write it off and say, well, that’s just crazy. And I think it’s easy to dismiss something like that and think, well, that’s something I’ll never do.

Karen Outen (00:39:03) – So obviously it gets tossed off in that way. Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:39:07) – Well, it’s interesting because I think a lot of people there’s probably a name for this brain process, but I think a lot of people will give something a label and dismiss it and then not look at all of the layers underneath. I admit, I went into this and I’m like, who’s going to climb Everest? That’s so dangerous? And then the closer I got to it, by reading your story, I’m like, oh, okay, I still wouldn’t do it, but at least I can see all the layers of how this could make sense to somebody. And I think there’s so much in our world that you can either dismiss under a label and just kind of categorize it, throw it in a box and forget about it. Or you can see all of the layers underneath. And you did such a beautiful job making so many layers.

Julie Kingsley (00:39:49) – But you had the you had the perfect line, Karen, where you said real climbers are at K2.

Julie Kingsley (00:39:55) – I just laughed because I’ve heard that I was like, this is like. It’s like you’re like you. You teach your research on the psyche of a climber.

Karen Outen (00:40:04) – Well, you know, because I started from the who does this? I mean, it just seemed outrageous when I first heard about the 1996 disaster on Everest and particularly that heartbreaking story of Rob Hall calling home to name the baby that he would never meet, and then dying on Everest, I was infuriated. I thought, you know what, man goes off and does this and leaves his wife and his children. Why would somebody do that?

Julie Kingsley (00:40:31) – They can’t.

Karen Outen (00:40:31) – Help it.

Karen Outen (00:40:32) – They can’t help.

Julie Kingsley (00:40:33) – It. It’s like a writer. It’s exactly like a writer.

Karen Outen (00:40:36) – But I didn’t know that then. I didn’t understand. And that whole who in the world does this just played in my mind. And the more I learned, you know, the first time I saw aluminum ladders strung together over crevasses that are so deep you can’t see the bottom and people climbing over them, I thought, oh, for God’s sakes, what in the world is going on? And so that’s why why it was so surprising to get to this point where I got it.

Karen Outen (00:41:05) – And it was only after talking to real climbers and talking to the alpinist, the ones who are doing it all the time, not because they’ve paid $75,000 to get to the top of the mountain, but because they are drawn to going to mountains and being a part of the experience of the mountain and understanding that there there are going to be things they’ll learn about themselves. They’re going to be things they learn about the mountain, and they’re going to keep going back. And only in that way did I start to get it. And it was very much about getting under those layers and understanding that it’s something more than just as the climber, you know, Steve Swenson said to me, this is not a transactional experience. This is not just pay your money, get to the and get somebody to haul you to the top. This is larger than that. And then I thought, oh, and I end up having a lot of respect for alpinist.

Julie Kingsley (00:41:59) – I think it’s like a religion. Yes. You know, I think that’s where people find their god like or their their best self or their, their purest self is in the climb.

Karen Outen (00:42:11) – Yes, yes.

Karen Outen (00:42:12) – The most interesting thing happened to me about six months ago, I think it was I met a woman whose son died on a climb and that hit me so hard. Um, there was a moment where I thought, who am I to be writing this story about this? When there are people who have suffered through losing someone on a climb? And her attitude was very much, you know, it had happened 20, 25 years ago. And so she said, you know, I’ve come to terms with it. And she did say he died doing what he loved, and he understood the danger. And she spoke about it in ways that other alpinist have spoken about it to me about. This is about not about dying. It’s about being alive and feeling how alive you are feeling. Your vulnerability and your strength in the middle of of this climb. It’s something that few of us extend ourselves to do. I think.

Karen Outen (00:43:10) – That’s true.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:43:11) – On the ground, we can forget how vulnerable we are.

Karen Outen (00:43:14) – Yeah, yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:43:15) – So what tips do you have for writers who are out there trying? Trying again? It doesn’t work the first time. The odds are not as good as 1 in 3. How do they keep going?

Karen Outen (00:43:27) – You really have to have a community. You really have to have friends who are who are writers. You’ll find them. Sometimes it’s that strange person who’s sitting reading on the metro.

Karen Outen (00:43:38) – And you said.

Karen Outen (00:43:39) – What are you reading? And you find out that they’re writers or that they’re their readers. It’s finding out where the book festivals in your area, where are there centers like the Writers Center, where people go to take classes, going to an MFA program and keeping in touch with your peers? You really need that support because it’s it’s a strange thing to do with your life, and you have to come to terms to terms with that, that your life would be so much easier if you did something else, like just go to work and come home, be a good accountant, be a good whatever.

Karen Outen (00:44:09) – So you’ve got to have that built in support. And I think if you’re talking to other writers, you’ll understand how much failure they’re facing also. And that’s one of the the things about being, you know, an older debut novelist. I have met so many people in the last year and a half in this same position who have been writing for 30, 40 years and who are now in their 50s or in their 60s and debut novelists. And it’s not that they’ve just suddenly picked it up, it’s that they kept going somehow. So find the thing that makes it worth it for you, and that may require sitting still and just holding your manuscript in your hands. Some days when you’re too tired to write and letting it sort of waft over you get some cheerleaders in your life. Yeah, it’s so great, I.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:45:00) – I like to say that this is not Olympic gymnastics. You’re not going to run out of time. You don’t have to. Well, to some degree, well, you don’t have to be 18 or 30 under 30 or 40 under 40 to be a good novelist.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:45:15) – And sometimes the more complicated your story, the older you have to be, just in terms of life experience to get all of that nuance in there.

Karen Outen (00:45:22) – Yeah.

Karen Outen (00:45:23) – And it’s it’s so easy to want to just be done. And I had a teacher once who would say to me, you know, if you’re not done, that means the story has more to teach you. And a lot of it is about what are you learning? Because, you know, whatever your issues are in writing will be your issues in writing. And the best part about having an editor who was really dedicated to this was I took it as a master class because even though I sent her the cleanest manuscript I could, there was still a lot of work to do. And understanding what she was looking for, understanding what parts of the work were not working and trying to think about, okay, how does this relate to what I do all the time, you know, am I overwriting here? Am I under explaining, am I doing this sort of thing? And it it may just take time to be able to absorb the failure as a lesson I think.

Karen Outen (00:46:17) – Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:46:18) – Do you have any tips for writers who are trying to pitch their complicated, multilayered work?

Karen Outen (00:46:22) – Yeah, again, it gets back to friends. Can you sum it up in a sentence? And if you’ve had a reader which which I highly recommend, you really should have at least one reader, if not more, before you. You send it out, give them that pitch sentence and see if it sounds like the book that they’ve read. What things are you leaving out? What things are you not? And with a complicated story, it is hard. And I think one of the ways that I knew I wasn’t ready yet with my book was that I couldn’t do that sentence until very late in the process. There were all these times where I thought, okay, I’m done, I’m done. But I couldn’t quite get that sentence together. And I thought that was a really key moment. That said, maybe you’re not sure what it’s about, or maybe you haven’t gotten to the heart of it yet.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:47:12) – That’s so interesting because when I work with clients building their books together, it’s when I can describe it quickly, and I know how I would describe it to editors, that I know that it’s ready.

Karen Outen (00:47:21) – Exactly.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:47:22) – What is it that why does it work that way?

Karen Outen (00:47:24) – Because I think it means that you see it as a whole. You’re seeing not just the piece. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. And then is there a piece? And then there’s that piece, you know, like a little kid telling you a story and you’re following them until they go, and then and then and then you think, wait, wait, where am I? But if you can see it as a whole and presented as here’s the core of the story, even though you know, there are these other pieces and you can give somebody an idea of, yeah, there it branches out, there are consequences. But this is the core of the story. I think that means something about its efficiency.

Karen Outen (00:47:59) – Yeah.

Karen Outen (00:47:59) – Oh that’s.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:48:00) – Lovely. Yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:48:01) – I think you’ve rendered out the fat. That’s what I always said. Just wondered about the fat. And what’s left there is just the perfect product, whatever that is. You know, the piece of bacon.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:48:10) – And also, Karen, we would love to give out a scholarship to our writing community. Would you like to define the parameters, like what qualities they have or what they’re working on?

Karen Outen (00:48:21) – Wow.

Karen Outen (00:48:21) – I think the first thing that comes to mind is a writer who’s been at it for a long time and is growing discouraged, but still hanging in there. So I would think an older writer who has been working diligently at producing something that will appear in the world and just needs a little, a little boost to their confidence to keep writing.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:48:46) – That’s beautiful, I love that. Okay, so just some parameters over what age writing for how long?

Karen Outen (00:48:51) – Oh, okay.

Karen Outen (00:48:52) – Over 40. Writing for at least ten years.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:48:56) – Okay. So if you’re a writer who is over 40 and you’ve been writing for at least ten years and you’d like a community to maybe read your page to you so you can hear it in someone else’s voice and you’d like to attend our events with agents and editors? Send us an email academy at manuscript wish list.com.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:49:12) – Tell us a little bit about you and the first one who fits that will get a scholarship. Karen, thank you so much. This was so lovely.

Karen Outen (00:49:20) – This was wonderful. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:49:22) – It. Yeah, we’re wishing you much success. I hope that you know, all the usual things gets you on NPR and, uh, you know, cover of USA today and The New York Times and, you know, all, all of those wonderful things. I hope they happen for you. You deserve it. Thank you.

Karen Outen (00:49:38) – So much.

Karen Outen (00:49:39) – I really appreciate it.

Karen Outen (00:49:41) – It’s been wonderful.

Julie Kingsley (00:49:42) – We are so glad that you joined us. And as always, we appreciate your feedback. Just head on over to the iTunes store and let us know what you think. And not only helps us make this podcast be the best it can be, but it also affects our ratings within the iTunes platform.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:49:57) – We’d love to hear from you if you’re feeling brave and want to. Submit your page for our First Pages podcast.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:50:03) – You can send it to Academy at Manuscript wishlist. Com with First Pages podcast in the subject line. We’d also just love to hear from you.

Julie Kingsley (00:50:12) – And if you’d like to learn more about the Manuscript Academy and everything we have to offer, just jump on over to Manuscript academy.com.

 

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Jessica Sinsheimer (00:00:01) – Welcome to the Manuscript Academy podcast, brought to you by a writer and an agent who both believe that education is key. The beauty is the people you meet along the way and that community makes all the difference. Here at the Manuscript Academy, you can learn the skills, make the connections, and have access to experts all from home. I’m Julie Kingsley. And I’m Jessica Zimmer. Put down your pens, pause your workouts, and enjoy. Hi everyone. We have a very special guest today. Karen Outen is here to talk about her brave new book, Dixon Descending. Karen, please tell us all about your work. It was so much fun to read.

Karen Outen (00:00:43) – Oh. Thank you. Oh, wow. There’s so much to tell. The book is about a man who does the most audacious thing he can imagine, and how he has to live with the consequences. Dixon and Nate decide that they’re going to be the first black American men to summit Mount Everest, and they leave their lives behind, leave their communities.

Karen Outen (00:01:04) – Some of the people in the community are saying, you’re doing what? And they go off on this journey that does not go as planned, and then they have to live with the consequences. So Dixon is the main character, is the person who we see most closely and who is affected, uh, most primarily, I suppose, by what happens on the climb and by what he discovers about himself and what it causes him to do when he returns, how he returns to a life that is upended, as is he. And there are consequences. And he has to learn how to live with his new self.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:01:44) – That’s a beautiful description. I love how there are so many ways to describe one book, but that just really gets to the heart of it, fittingly, since you wrote it.

Karen Outen (00:01:52) – Thank you.

Karen Outen (00:01:53) – The most exciting part about writing the book was really writing about Mount Everest. I loved that part. That was so much fun because it was so totally beyond me. I mean, I, I got altitude sickness once in Santa Fe.

Karen Outen (00:02:08) – I mean, ended up in the emergency room, you know, getting oxygen. So I’m clearly not a mountain climber.

Julie Kingsley (00:02:15) – That was the thing that struck me the most, Karen. And like I, I could not wrap my head around the fact that this project was fiction. And my husband’s a high mountaineer. You know, I was. Yeah. So he he had pulmonary edema and he was like, hauled off a mountain, just like your characters. And I was like, obviously Karen has just, like, hit all the big mountains. And she was it was such a brave book. I mean, like, this is such brave fiction. Like, that was my favorite part of it.

Karen Outen (00:02:44) – Oh, thank you so much. You know, it’s funny because in some ways that was the easiest part to write because it was so beyond me. Well, the whole book was beyond me. I’ve never written from a man’s perspective before. I always have written, you know, with female lead characters.

Karen Outen (00:03:00) – So it was a surprise to me when Dixon showed up and started telling me his story. But the thing about the mountain was that I truly didn’t understand it. I mean, mountain climbers, are you kidding me? And I think it started with the disaster in the 90s that really brought Everest into focus for all of us. That became Into Thin Air and the Everest Imax movie. And I just thought, who does this? And I think it sort of played in my mind the idea that it was so outside of my experience, and I think the thing that was most exciting about researching the book was that there was a moment when I got it, I was talking to some alpinist, you know, real alpinist, and I kind of understood that nobody needs to climb mountains, just like nobody needs to write a novel. But it’s something you must do that you’re called to do, and you’re called not because you want the summit, but in the same way that writers are called, mostly because they have stories to tell.

Karen Outen (00:04:06) – Climbers climb because they want a good experience of the mountain, even though they know a third of the time they’re not going to summit. That’s a whole new take on failure for a writer, right? You know, we want to get that story written. We want it successful. And they’re saying, if that doesn’t happen, it’s okay because there’s the next mountain or this one again. So I learned a lot.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:04:27) – Oh, have you heard of.

Julie Kingsley (00:04:29) – Yeah. Second tier fun. It’s called second tier fun that a lot of outdoor people say, you know, that you do something. I think this this goes along with writing. You do it and it’s really not that fun at times. And then you look back and afterwards and you have a book and you’re like, oh, that was that was great.

Karen Outen (00:04:46) – Right?

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:04:47) – Oh wow. Like the I don’t like to write. I like to have written. Right. Yes.

Julie Kingsley (00:04:52) – Exactly. Which I don’t think we’ve like we haven’t talked about that here, but I think that it’s we all feel that.

Julie Kingsley (00:04:58) – And some days just like mountain climbing are often. Well, when you’re writing.

Karen Outen (00:05:03) – Yeah, yeah. Second year fun.

Karen Outen (00:05:05) – Exactly. And I think one of the things that I heard these climbers say was that, you know, this idea of looking for a good experience of the mountain so that they are paying attention as they go along to each part of it. And what brings them closer to the mountain, closer to themselves, closer to their intentions, so that it really is about, you know, to be trite about it, I guess, enjoying the journey and that that makes the difference for them. So it’s not just summit fever, it’s something larger than that.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:05:39) – That’s beautiful. And I love the way you describe the mountain as this embodied force. Right. It’s it’s something they can listen to. It’s they talk about the mountain as her. It’s, you know, this feminine, powerful spirit. And they say it’s almost as if you have to get the mountain to relent for you to be able to climb.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:05:58) – I thought that was such a beautiful way of them experiencing this, because of course, it’s out of their control.

Karen Outen (00:06:03) – Yeah. Thank you. And I you know, that comes straight from Sir Edmund Hillary when people said to him, oh, you conquered the mountain. And he said, no, I didn’t conquer it. She relented. And I think that one of the things I also learned reading about the Sherpa people who who are serving as guides, is that it’s very much about, you know, we know this mountain is alive. She’s mother goddess of the of the earth. And we ask her, can we climb today? And, you know, the experienced climbers will say on some days when it’s really rough, she doesn’t want us there today. And they’ll they’ll move down, you know, they’ll say, today is not our day. She’s not ready. And they understand this as a living, breathing force. And I imagine you have to if you’re on that mountain. And since it’s a glacier, it is continually moving and moaning and sighing and you hear the ice cracking and you know that you are not with an inanimate object, right?

Karen Outen (00:07:03) – Yeah.

Karen Outen (00:07:04) – I mean.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:07:05) – Technically she doesn’t have to let us up there at all. So.

Karen Outen (00:07:08) – That’s right.

Karen Outen (00:07:08) – That’s right.

Karen Outen (00:07:09) – Yeah, yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:07:10) – Let’s go back in time. Karen, tell us about your publishing journey. How did you find your agent and how did all this get rolling for you?

Karen Outen (00:07:18) – Wow. Oh, gosh. I could go way, way back.

Karen Outen (00:07:21) – So I have been writing for I published my first short story 40 years ago. So I’ve been writing and publishing short stories and and essays and really seriously going about this. But the sort of promised land of publishing a novel had eluded me. There was one close call about 20 years ago, and for this book it spoke to me very clearly, and I believed in it. But it’s been a long journey. I wrote this book over the course of 15 years, so during that time it changed the the portions on Everest were the ones that stayed the same, you know, that were that were sort of constant. But the rest of the story, the stories back here on Earth, transformed tremendously.

Karen Outen (00:08:09) – So there must be about six different versions of that. And it took a long time. There were a couple of times when I thought, okay, I’m ready, and I got agent rejections, and that was heartbreaking. There were a couple of moments where I really, literally was with friends, sort of striking a match and saying, okay, that’s it. I’m lighting this sucker on fire. And my friends would, you know, lean over and sort of blow out the match. Have you thought about this? No, I’m going to burn it. I can’t do it. Where have you thought about this? Um, that. Really? Seriously. So when I finally got the version that I was able to sit with. Because each time I would finish a version, I would sort of read it all aloud to myself and sit for a minute. And, you know, in your gut when something isn’t quite right. And there would always be this moment where I was really quiet at the end and I thought, something’s not there.

Karen Outen (00:09:01) – But finally I got to a place where I thought, it is here, I feel it. And I was really lucky because I had the thing that had kept me going, frankly, was that in the middle of that, wanting to burn it, I got a a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. And that was such a lifeline, such a godsend to get that for this particular book. So when I went to send it out, I had a list of agent names, people I had met at the ceremony or who had contacted me afterwards. And so that was easy. And my agent, Alexa Stark, was just there was just something about her calm and her expertise and her sense of humor. And she read the book the way I wanted someone to read it. She saw in it what I hope someone would say, you know, and I just thought, yeah, this is the one.

Karen Outen (00:09:55) – I love that.

Julie Kingsley (00:09:56) – Story. Yeah. I love how you persevered and how your friends were there for you.

Julie Kingsley (00:10:00) – We talk about that all. The time here. It’s the people around you. They keep you, keep it going.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:10:04) – And everyone wants the writer friends who will reach forward and blow out that match instead of being like, well, I guess it’s your choice.

Karen Outen (00:10:10) – Yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:10:11) – Flinging out the window.

Karen Outen (00:10:12) – Yeah. No, I are an adult. So lucky.

Karen Outen (00:10:15) – Yeah, I’ve been so lucky. And I think having a community of writer friends, even, you know, I have some that are far flung, you know, California, Arizona, North Carolina doesn’t matter. We show up for each other in all of the important ways. And that has made all the difference, really has.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:10:34) – Yeah. How did you find your writer friends?

Karen Outen (00:10:36) – In a couple of ways. One, by seeking out whatever resources were in the community. So in in DC, for instance, there’s this amazing place called the Writer’s Center, actually in Bethesda, Maryland, and there are classes or all kinds of things. And I think one of my first good writer friends I met in a workshop there, and the other way was by being in an MFA program.

Karen Outen (00:11:00) – I went to university of Michigan, and there was a cohort of us who stay in touch and who read each other’s work and who support each other, and that’s been so important for me, really has. Yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:11:13) – We’re wondering, could you read us the first page of Dixon descending?

Karen Outen (00:11:17) – Oh, certainly.

Karen Outen (00:11:17) – I just happened to have it right here.

Karen Outen (00:11:19) – Just right here.

Karen Outen (00:11:21) – March 2011, Mount Everest. This first time, as they hoisted themselves onto the hip of the mountain, they had to simply learn to survive. Survive the landscape, the thin air, the unbelievable cold, the exquisite suffering. Each step of Dixon’s crampons on ice was accompanied by a headache so intense he thought a tiny demon jabbed a pitchfork endlessly inside his ear. His stomach cramped, his tongue swelled against the roof of his dehydrated mouth. He inhaled heavily at 18,000ft and rising. His every breath was hard won a perfect, exhilarating orb of suffering. His brother Nate climbed just in front of him along a narrow path that stretched between ice boulders.

Karen Outen (00:12:07) – Nate looked back at him, panting lightly but smiling, his black goggles gleaming on his face. Rock star like man wearing rare air. Black men on Everest. Dixon repeated it with all black men on Everest, which was to say, freed men because their burdens here were of their own making.

Karen Outen (00:12:27) – So good. Yeah. Thank you.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:12:29) – How many versions of the first page did you have?

Karen Outen (00:12:32) – Oh, my. Well, that’s hard to say because it didn’t start there initially. I didn’t start on the mountain, so probably it was the fourth version or so before I did that I wanted initially I thought about the book A Gesture Life, which is very much about a man who had been who had a traumatic experience in the war, and that was sort of the center of the story. Everything rotated around it. But you got to the center of the story before you understood why he behaved as he did. And as I was as I had friends reading it, they were like, you’re burying the lead.

Karen Outen (00:13:11) – You’ve got to start with Everest. And so that first page probably has tweaked a bit, but it hasn’t been changed substantially since I made that change.

Karen Outen (00:13:23) – Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:13:24) – That’s so interesting. You talk about that structure because in a way your book does kind of spiral around until we get to the Y. Yeah, yeah. Can you talk about how you discovered the Y and how you got to that place?

Karen Outen (00:13:36) – Yeah, that was the thing that maybe took longest to get right the business of structure, because initially Dixon showed up. He appeared to me, I saw him standing in front of his middle school, and clearly something had happened to him. And I realized, okay, so he’s been to Mount Everest and he’s back. What happened? And it was that what happened that drove me. And also what do you do next after you do the most audacious thing you can think of, and it changes your life in ways that you couldn’t fathom. Not just your life on the mountain, but also your life when you get back and the life of people around you.

Karen Outen (00:14:16) – And there wasn’t a lot that I could find about the aftermath of climbing. The closest that I came, really was a couple of years ago, the 50th anniversary of the, um, walk on the moon. And suddenly then there were stories about the astronauts lives after they came back to Earth, and how they many of them fell apart. You didn’t hear any of that in the 60s. It was all triumph. It was all we were heroes. But listening to it now, you hear about what happened to their marriages, what happened to their sense of themselves in space and time. They’d been outside of our universe, floating around, and they had a whole different sense of themselves spatially, of, you know, what’s next? The idea of, well, I’ve done the most outrageous thing I can do, who am I now? And so that aftermath was really important to me and is what started the journey. And as I said, when friends were reading it, they were like, wait a minute, you’re burying this lead.

Karen Outen (00:15:17) – You know, this is really compelling stuff. You’ve got to get us to this mountain faster and help us figure it out. So it was very much about how do I handle the present and the past and bring them together and compelling ways. You know, that’s the age old problem of fiction, right? That back story business.

Julie Kingsley (00:15:36) – I pulled this line. One of the things that I thought you did so well is to, um, build consequence for Dixon in such a way. You did not. You just you just put it out there. And I love this line because it said everything. He missed running missed it achingly. So it might have worked off the tension might have kept him from the nights climbing in his sleep, his legs and arms and motion digging into the mountain. And you know, this idea that, like, once you were this, but now you’re this and that release that you need from this physicality of these athletes are left with this aching. So can you talk to us about stakes and character building and how you went there?

Karen Outen (00:16:17) – Yeah, stakes.

Karen Outen (00:16:18) – Well, I think I was surprised by what the stakes were for me. I was surprised by how much I suffered with these characters. In some ways, there were those moments where I just sort of sat back and thought, oh my God, Dixon, you know, um, I really wanted to bring across the fact that so much had changed in his internal landscape, the his idea of who he was, and that in lots of ways, the idea of descending was from the lofty idea of himself and then figuring out what will the consequences be in his relationships back on Earth. And specifically with these boys he was mentoring and supposed to be a role model for, um, as a school psychologist. So I have this really wonderful extended family, and I have cousins who are like siblings to me. I mean, we spent we traveled as a group when I was growing up, so I spent a lot of time talking to them, talking to other men I knew, and getting a sense of kind of the burdens that black men live with that I wasn’t aware of, and that part of it was about a sense of responsibility.

Karen Outen (00:17:37) – One of the debates that I heard constantly was the debate about, okay, what is my responsibility to men around me, but also to the next generation? Am I going to be the kind of man who says, you help everybody? There’s so many people to help you. You help them until they show you they don’t want to be helped. Or am I going to be a person who says, I will never give up on this person? I will stick with it and to hear from so many different people that that was part of their consciousness. I knew that had to be part of the consequence for for Dixon in his life and the business of who can and cannot be saved became really central to the book on so many levels.

Karen Outen (00:18:20) – Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:18:21) – Can you say more about that? Because it really is in so many parts of the book.

Karen Outen (00:18:25) – Yeah, yeah, I thought that for Dixon, he was the kind of guy who, even though he was in his brother’s shadow because his brother was charming and all of that much of his life came easily, and he was the responsible one.

Karen Outen (00:18:38) – He’s the moral barometer that, you know, they talk about in the family. And I thought some of that had to be shaken. And it begins with discovering some of his own ambition on Everest, because he sort of thinks, oh, I’m doing this for my brother. And then he discovers, no, I’m doing this for myself, and I want to be the one who wins. I want to be number one for once. And that’s shakes a lot of his confidence and changes his idea of how benevolent he imagines he is, I think.

Julie Kingsley (00:19:12) – Yeah, that really struck me. You know, when I don’t want to give away too much. But, you know, there’s that one scene where he has to make some decisions about what to do with his brother, as his brother is on the mountain. And, and, you know, like the ego around the climber, but the ego around the character in the man, and no one wants to go home and say, well, I didn’t do it, you know, like I pulled that adventure because there’s so much stakes within that.

Julie Kingsley (00:19:36) – There’s also, you know, for him, there’s just stakes around him teaching. And I, you know, I have a teaching background and I just thought that was so incredibly interesting. Can you talk to us how you balanced Everest and this kind of, you know, a school mentor, psychologist in the classroom?

Karen Outen (00:19:56) – Frankly, that was kind of the hardest part for me, figuring that out and whittling. Think it down to, okay, what is the core of this? So as I was writing it, several things fell away. One was I had a lot more women in this book, and it was a surprise to discover this is really about these men’s relationship with each other, because there are several different there are sets of brothers, there are friends, there are there are men who are helping each other through hard passages. And so letting the women step back was was a challenge first and then realizing what needed to happen, what the stakes were for him at school, in his school life, and paring back to these two essential relationships he has with these two boys who sort of, I think, encapsulate the business of the good son, the not so good son.

Karen Outen (00:20:54) – There’s in some ways they don’t really echo Dixon and Nate directly in terms of their personalities and and that sort of thing, but definitely in terms of, of the choices we make about who we take on in our lives, who do we allow to enter a particular space? And I think for Dixon, it had been an easy choice to deal with mostly good kids, because that’s what surrounded him and his job was such that he could weed out the more difficult kids. Well, what happens when you can’t do that anymore or when you question yourself? Is that the right thing? Um, there’s that moment when he is on the subway in D.C., and there’s this kid who is clearly a kid on the edge and he thinks, is this somebody who who would have been in my caseload? Should I have helped him? Should I have been of use? So I think he becomes someone who questions everything about his own motives.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:21:52) – I think that’s so interesting, too, because there’s that line between, of course, he wants to protect Marcus, who is so sweet and just trying to do the right things, and he’s trying to get them to be stronger and defend himself.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:22:03) – And, you know, there’s that line of like, we want to do the right thing and support the people we want to protect. But then he goes too far and it’s like, where is the line between aggressively protecting the people we care about and just going too far and hurting people?

Karen Outen (00:22:18) – Yeah, that’s really that’s really interesting. I don’t think I had thought of it that way. But you’re absolutely right. He does go too far. And I think boundaries are part of his issue certainly with with his brother as well. Yeah. Yeah I have to think about that I like that, yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:22:36) – Speaking of the kids, I thought I loved the dialogue. I thought when I, when, you know, I was reading it and then I found myself stopping and reading some of your dialogue out loud, and I was like, wow, wow. This is it’s brave dialogue. It’s jumped off the page. Tell us about or give our listeners, since they’re writers, some tips on writing great dialogue.

Julie Kingsley (00:22:59) – How did you come up with these amazing voices, and how did you keep them so distinct?

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:23:03) – Yeah, Shiloh especially leaps out to be very vivid. And just like, I love how he talks.

Karen Outen (00:23:09) – You know, Shiloh was supposed to be a very minor character who showed up in one scene that was version 3 or 4, and Shiloh would not shut up.

Karen Outen (00:23:20) – I bet he wouldn’t shut up. He wouldn’t go.

Karen Outen (00:23:23) – Away. I mean, I was really stuck for several months because I was trying to write away from him and he just wouldn’t let me. He really insisted on being in the book. And then, you know, a couple of early readers were like, listen, this kid’s voice is drawing me in. You’ve got to listen to him. And I’m not quite sure where he came from. I don’t know that I know him. In fact, I don’t know any of the people in the book. They’re all completely imagined, although my mother has other ideas. She said to me, read your book sometime.

Karen Outen (00:23:55) – I think there’s somebody in here that you know. I didn’t know that with the voices, especially because these were men’s voices and I have so many female friends, even though I have these, you know, cousins, most of my friends, I think, are women. So I had to think, how am I going to capture men’s voices? So I did a couple of things. I talked a lot to cousins and friends who were men and just listen to the cadence, and sometimes I was writing down what they had to say. Um, I also emailed male friends and, you know, just, you know, what are you doing? How are you? And or ask a question, have them tell me a story to see what their voices look like on the page. And that is, I think, the thing that helped me most, listening to them and even stuff like I watched, which is a great series, men of a Certain Age, it’s an old series, but there are a lot of men talking to each other and interacting with each other.

Karen Outen (00:24:49) – So paying attention in that particular way, but especially listening to my friend’s voices on the phone or in conversation in person, listening to men’s voices. Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:25:01) – That’s such a wonderful way to do research.

Karen Outen (00:25:03) – Yeah, it was fun. It was a lot of fun.

Karen Outen (00:25:05) – Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:25:05) – Well, we’d love to give out a copy of your book. Can you give us a code word? And the first person to email it to us will get a copy.

Karen Outen (00:25:12) – Audacious.

Karen Outen (00:25:14) – Audacious I love it.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:25:15) – I love it, too. Okay, so the first person to email Academy at manuscript wishlist.com with audacious in the subject line will get a copy of Dixon Descending. One thing that leaps out to me is when Shiloh lists the five things he knows about his mom. Can you talk about that?

Karen Outen (00:25:30) – Yeah, I.

Karen Outen (00:25:32) – Dreaded Shiloh for so long, but once I found his humanity, he became so compelling to me. Once I understood so much of what was driving him was grief and loss. I thought, oh, I know this kid, I know him, and Dixon’s going to recognize him and understand it.

Karen Outen (00:25:52) – So I needed a moment where Shiloh could become vulnerable in the slightest way. You know, he’s never going to, you know, he even says, we’re never going to be best friends. Don’t go thinking that. He says it in more colorful language than than that. But I needed to see inside of him, and I needed Dixon to see inside of him. And I knew he couldn’t give a lot, but I figured what he gave had to be important to him, and it’s at a moment when he and Dixon are both sharing details about losses, and that’s what he connects to in Dixon. Nothing else. None of the none of the good guy, none of the all of that. It was about the moment of, oh, I see what your vulnerability is. And he can give it for just a minute and then back off.

Julie Kingsley (00:26:39) – Yeah, yeah. I’ve worked with a lot of difficult kids when I was teaching, and, um, it really spoke to me that there’s always a reason.

Karen Outen (00:26:46) – Yeah, there’s.

Julie Kingsley (00:26:47) – Always a reason. Like, like, you know, kids come to you and they’re they’re like, they are in front of you for a reason. I think you really nailed that.

Karen Outen (00:26:53) – Yeah.

Karen Outen (00:26:53) – And at the same time, what I, I wanted was for there not to be anything extraordinary like, oh, it’s the IQ. Oh, it’s lead poisoning. Oh it’s this, oh it’s that. No it’s not any of those. You know, on some level he’s an average, just incorrigible kid. But there is a reason underneath. Yeah, yeah.

Karen Outen (00:27:14) – Well, and that.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:27:14) – Shows his humanity too. If we were just like, oh, it’s this numerical thing. It’s in his blood. It’s this number associated with him. No, he’s a full person.

Karen Outen (00:27:23) – Yeah, yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:27:24) – One thing I love is the family relationships here. It’s this really beautiful, warm family. They’re so supportive. They’re so kind. And there’s this one passage where you say that Dixon would love more than anything to just be home watching TV with his parents and his mom, saying, I know your feet are not on the coffee table.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:27:44) – And one thing that’s so beautiful about that is I think a lot of times it’s something like that that we really miss after the fact. Can you talk more about that?

Karen Outen (00:27:53) – Yeah.

Karen Outen (00:27:54) – You know, I one of the things about having a large entangled family is that losing them is really painful. And over the past, you know, 20 years we’ve been losing more and more. You know, I had 11 aunts and two uncles and I now have one. And we still have family reunions every year. And we get together and we tell stories. And in fact, even growing up, there was sort of an order in which we told stories about the cousins. You knew when your story was coming up, and that it was going to be more embellished than the year before, that kind of thing. But it it is those small moments that you miss about somebody. And I knew that for Dixon, given the family that I envision he had, there would be these little moments like that. And especially because, you know, at some point, you know, he’s 47, 48, you know, you’re thinking about, okay, I’ve shifted up in line, you know, with my parents gone in terms of who is who’s the elder now in the, in the family.

Karen Outen (00:28:56) – Um, so I, I wanted to bring those small moments in.

Karen Outen (00:29:00) – Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:29:00) – And it’s so interesting to, to see Nate through their eyes and saying he wanted you to go have this perspective. He knew you would make it. And I thought that was such a beautiful thing to learn after the fact.

Karen Outen (00:29:16) – After. Yeah, I love Nate.

Karen Outen (00:29:18) – Nate is absolutely the guy you’re probably not supposed to date, but you can’t resist him. And yeah, you know, I think I think we know him. We most of us know him. And he also on some level can’t control how how attracted you are to him. Right. And he’s trying so hard to be a good man. And he can be in lots of ways. But then there’s this lure of, wow, I know I can get away with something, get away with a lot of stuff I discovered while I was writing.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:29:48) – But you also show their compassion to, you know, I, I would think that depending on how Nate was described, we could either hate him or sympathize with him, with the facts being the same.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:29:59) – And. There’s one passage where he talks about how you have to make a woman feel seen, and to me, that was such a brilliant way of showing. Yeah, he’s definitely got an agenda, but he’s also seeing people, which I thought was such a really interesting combination.

Karen Outen (00:30:17) – That’s so interesting. It’s a you know, I there are a couple of things that there’s small moments that I’ve, I have borrowed that I think some of my cousins will will notice. And one of those is that moment right there. I remember my cousin Tony telling me about, you know, how you dance with a woman and you know how you hold your your arms up so that she has to look up and see you because you don’t want you want her to see you and see that you have seen her. And I thought it was, you know, sort of a lesson in seduction, but it also was a lesson in. Oh, right. Because he’s one of these people who always makes you feel seen. And that was kind of kind of it.

Karen Outen (00:31:01) – And I thought that would be who Nate is.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:31:03) – Yeah, yeah. Because even if it’s with an agenda, it’s still a beautiful thing.

Karen Outen (00:31:07) – Yeah, yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:31:09) – I mean, what you’ve done here is, you know, the whole show, not tell that you showed us everything so effectively. Can you talk to us about your revision process? You kind of brushed over all of these different, um, ways that you had to attack this book. But do you have any tips out there for revision?

Karen Outen (00:31:26) – Yes.

Karen Outen (00:31:28) – Oh, revision. You know, I think when I was in the thick of it at near the end, I probably felt more like a writer than I ever have before because I knew I was, you know, I would sit down to sort of throw a tantrum.

Karen Outen (00:31:45) – No, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do it.

Karen Outen (00:31:46) – And then I dig in, you know, um, for revision, there were a couple of different things. There’s so many there. Oh, my gosh, I have so much I could say about revision.

Karen Outen (00:31:56) – The first thing, of course, the the basics of letting it sit for a few minutes and for a few weeks or a month even, and then reading aloud was really important. And when I got tired of doing that myself, I found the speech to text function on word Microsoft Word. So I had it read read to me, which made so much difference. I heard it in ways that I might not have heard it had. I just read it again for the 15th time. So hearing that aloud really helped. And I think sitting down with some questions to myself, saying, okay, what am I trying to accomplish in this chapter? Have I done that? What moves you forward? What stops me? And, you know, part of that was some of those things were questions that I asked my readers. So having readers was essential. And I have had friends who’ve read this several times. I mean, really, they’ve been amazing. And being able to say to them, okay, this is what I’m not sure about when you finish reading it, read these questions.

Karen Outen (00:33:02) – Tell me what you think did this work or did this not so that helped. And then being able to attack what they said to think about and digest it and say, you know, is that something that’s even pointing toward the way I want to go? Is this still the book that I thought it was? Is it going to be? And what new thing have I discovered about this, about what this is really about on the underneath it. So revision was, you know, what happens in layers and layers and keeps going until you’re satisfied. You know, it.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:33:36) – Sounds to me almost like an energetic process of is the mountain okay with me doing this today? Is there a vision okay with me doing this today? It’s publishing okay with me doing this today.

Karen Outen (00:33:47) – Oh, that’s very funny.

Karen Outen (00:33:48) – Yeah, yeah, I think it it was very much is it okay. Is this mountain going to let me do this or is Shiloh going to let me move him today, or is he going to tell me, no, I’m not doing that because he certainly did speak back.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:34:02) – Does he rude to you? I imagine he was a little rude to you.

Karen Outen (00:34:05) – He was. If I did what he wanted him to do, he was fine. But he always sort of looked at me kind of askance, like, okay, lady, what are you up to now? What do you think happened here?

Karen Outen (00:34:16) – Gosh, yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:34:17) – So hiking up Everest, even hiking up to the base camps is a lot. But taking the risk to hike up Everest is very brave. What is the bravest thing you’ve had to do in publishing?

Karen Outen (00:34:30) – Keep going.

Karen Outen (00:34:33) – I mean.

Karen Outen (00:34:34) – Really, the bravest thing is, is to keep going. You know, at one point I. I thought of myself as the most successful, unpublished novelist I knew.

Karen Outen (00:34:43) – Oh, I love that.

Karen Outen (00:34:44) – Only because I kept at it, I guess. And it wasn’t. There was never a I’m going to get this done, you know, as God is my witness, I will write again. I was never it was there was never that if I could have stopped, I would have, but I just couldn’t.

Karen Outen (00:35:00) – And it was. There have been moments that have been excruciating. You know, if you spend your whole adult life striving for something and you don’t get there, you think, okay, have I wasted my life? Because there are so many choices I made based on the writing choices about jobs, about places to live, about not having a bigger career because I wanted to have time to write. And, you know, there have been moments where I’ve worked full time, I’ve taken off 6 or 7 years so that I could work part time and freelance and go to graduate school and then work again. And I’m single. So I’ve got to think about retirement, I’ve got to think about having health benefits, all of that kind of stuff. And teaching adjunct is exciting and wonderful. You don’t get as much time to write, but you’re surrounded by good stuff. But if you’re teaching adjunct, how are you making ends meet? You know, are you planning for the future? Is that going to be the thing that that works for you or not? And there have been plenty of times where working full time, I’ve come home at 6:00, gone to bed at nine, gotten back up and written until two in the morning.

Karen Outen (00:36:07) – I could do that maybe. Well, I could do that in my 30s. I can’t do that now. But, you know, I could do that 3 or 4 nights a week. But there are all these choices you’re making to keep the writing alive. And you get into your 40s, you get into your 50s and you think, is this it? Am I done? Is this going to happen? And it’s hard. It’s really hard sitting with those choices. So the bravest thing is absolutely to keep going. And I’m not even sure quite how it happened, except that I had really, really good writer friends who kept saying, come on and blowing out that match, you know, you.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:36:45) – Know, while you’re talking about this, I was thinking about how you were saying that you had other people read this in their voices, and you could hear how people were absorbing your work that way. Julie. Now, I want to have an event where people have to trade and read each other’s work.

Julie Kingsley (00:36:59) – That’s funny. When I was an adjunct, that’s one of the ways I had people revise, you know? Yeah, it works really well. You can hear it. And, um, another thing that I use is I paid for it. It’s called speech fee. But then you can use, like, Gwyneth Paltrow’s voice or Obama’s voice or Snoop Dogg’s voice, and that’s even almost like a little bit more of a natural rhythm. So that’s just another tip for people.

Karen Outen (00:37:21) – Well, you know, the first workshop I was in when I was in college was led by it was one of those January sessions. I went to Drew University and my professor was Joan Weimer, and we had this wonderful workshop where we would trade work and sort of act it out. And it was the first time you would hear your voice, and it’s so amazing. You hear your work coming out of someone else’s mouth. You hear where they naturally pause, where you didn’t want them to or where they get it right, and the inflection and all of that that is so invaluable as a young writer or even a seasoned writer hearing that.

Karen Outen (00:38:00) – Um, so I yeah, I would applaud that.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:38:03) – One thing that I think is so interesting is that you have so many characters on the ground saying, this is just ego. And that to me feels like a vast oversimplification. What do you think?

Karen Outen (00:38:14) – Oh that’s funny.

Karen Outen (00:38:15) – Well, that was one of the responses I got when I was, I would say to people, especially men. So you know what comes to mind when you think about a man climbing Mount Everest? What do you think of that person? And I heard over and over, oh, that’s all ego. And that just fascinated me that that was the response that I got. And I think I, I think it is a vast oversimplification. You’re right. Because climbing a mountain is something few of us understand. What we do think about is that’s incredibly dangerous. That’s so outside of the norm for what we do, that we sort of write it off and say, well, that’s just crazy. And I think it’s easy to dismiss something like that and think, well, that’s something I’ll never do.

Karen Outen (00:39:03) – So obviously it gets tossed off in that way. Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:39:07) – Well, it’s interesting because I think a lot of people there’s probably a name for this brain process, but I think a lot of people will give something a label and dismiss it and then not look at all of the layers underneath. I admit, I went into this and I’m like, who’s going to climb Everest? That’s so dangerous? And then the closer I got to it, by reading your story, I’m like, oh, okay, I still wouldn’t do it, but at least I can see all the layers of how this could make sense to somebody. And I think there’s so much in our world that you can either dismiss under a label and just kind of categorize it, throw it in a box and forget about it. Or you can see all of the layers underneath. And you did such a beautiful job making so many layers.

Julie Kingsley (00:39:49) – But you had the you had the perfect line, Karen, where you said real climbers are at K2.

Julie Kingsley (00:39:55) – I just laughed because I’ve heard that I was like, this is like. It’s like you’re like you. You teach your research on the psyche of a climber.

Karen Outen (00:40:04) – Well, you know, because I started from the who does this? I mean, it just seemed outrageous when I first heard about the 1996 disaster on Everest and particularly that heartbreaking story of Rob Hall calling home to name the baby that he would never meet, and then dying on Everest, I was infuriated. I thought, you know what, man goes off and does this and leaves his wife and his children. Why would somebody do that?

Julie Kingsley (00:40:31) – They can’t.

Karen Outen (00:40:31) – Help it.

Karen Outen (00:40:32) – They can’t help.

Julie Kingsley (00:40:33) – It. It’s like a writer. It’s exactly like a writer.

Karen Outen (00:40:36) – But I didn’t know that then. I didn’t understand. And that whole who in the world does this just played in my mind. And the more I learned, you know, the first time I saw aluminum ladders strung together over crevasses that are so deep you can’t see the bottom and people climbing over them, I thought, oh, for God’s sakes, what in the world is going on? And so that’s why why it was so surprising to get to this point where I got it.

Karen Outen (00:41:05) – And it was only after talking to real climbers and talking to the alpinist, the ones who are doing it all the time, not because they’ve paid $75,000 to get to the top of the mountain, but because they are drawn to going to mountains and being a part of the experience of the mountain and understanding that there there are going to be things they’ll learn about themselves. They’re going to be things they learn about the mountain, and they’re going to keep going back. And only in that way did I start to get it. And it was very much about getting under those layers and understanding that it’s something more than just as the climber, you know, Steve Swenson said to me, this is not a transactional experience. This is not just pay your money, get to the and get somebody to haul you to the top. This is larger than that. And then I thought, oh, and I end up having a lot of respect for alpinist.

Julie Kingsley (00:41:59) – I think it’s like a religion. Yes. You know, I think that’s where people find their god like or their their best self or their, their purest self is in the climb.

Karen Outen (00:42:11) – Yes, yes.

Karen Outen (00:42:12) – The most interesting thing happened to me about six months ago, I think it was I met a woman whose son died on a climb and that hit me so hard. Um, there was a moment where I thought, who am I to be writing this story about this? When there are people who have suffered through losing someone on a climb? And her attitude was very much, you know, it had happened 20, 25 years ago. And so she said, you know, I’ve come to terms with it. And she did say he died doing what he loved, and he understood the danger. And she spoke about it in ways that other alpinist have spoken about it to me about. This is about not about dying. It’s about being alive and feeling how alive you are feeling. Your vulnerability and your strength in the middle of of this climb. It’s something that few of us extend ourselves to do. I think.

Karen Outen (00:43:10) – That’s true.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:43:11) – On the ground, we can forget how vulnerable we are.

Karen Outen (00:43:14) – Yeah, yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:43:15) – So what tips do you have for writers who are out there trying? Trying again? It doesn’t work the first time. The odds are not as good as 1 in 3. How do they keep going?

Karen Outen (00:43:27) – You really have to have a community. You really have to have friends who are who are writers. You’ll find them. Sometimes it’s that strange person who’s sitting reading on the metro.

Karen Outen (00:43:38) – And you said.

Karen Outen (00:43:39) – What are you reading? And you find out that they’re writers or that they’re their readers. It’s finding out where the book festivals in your area, where are there centers like the Writers Center, where people go to take classes, going to an MFA program and keeping in touch with your peers? You really need that support because it’s it’s a strange thing to do with your life, and you have to come to terms to terms with that, that your life would be so much easier if you did something else, like just go to work and come home, be a good accountant, be a good whatever.

Karen Outen (00:44:09) – So you’ve got to have that built in support. And I think if you’re talking to other writers, you’ll understand how much failure they’re facing also. And that’s one of the the things about being, you know, an older debut novelist. I have met so many people in the last year and a half in this same position who have been writing for 30, 40 years and who are now in their 50s or in their 60s and debut novelists. And it’s not that they’ve just suddenly picked it up, it’s that they kept going somehow. So find the thing that makes it worth it for you, and that may require sitting still and just holding your manuscript in your hands. Some days when you’re too tired to write and letting it sort of waft over you get some cheerleaders in your life. Yeah, it’s so great, I.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:45:00) – I like to say that this is not Olympic gymnastics. You’re not going to run out of time. You don’t have to. Well, to some degree, well, you don’t have to be 18 or 30 under 30 or 40 under 40 to be a good novelist.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:45:15) – And sometimes the more complicated your story, the older you have to be, just in terms of life experience to get all of that nuance in there.

Karen Outen (00:45:22) – Yeah.

Karen Outen (00:45:23) – And it’s it’s so easy to want to just be done. And I had a teacher once who would say to me, you know, if you’re not done, that means the story has more to teach you. And a lot of it is about what are you learning? Because, you know, whatever your issues are in writing will be your issues in writing. And the best part about having an editor who was really dedicated to this was I took it as a master class because even though I sent her the cleanest manuscript I could, there was still a lot of work to do. And understanding what she was looking for, understanding what parts of the work were not working and trying to think about, okay, how does this relate to what I do all the time, you know, am I overwriting here? Am I under explaining, am I doing this sort of thing? And it it may just take time to be able to absorb the failure as a lesson I think.

Karen Outen (00:46:17) – Yeah.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:46:18) – Do you have any tips for writers who are trying to pitch their complicated, multilayered work?

Karen Outen (00:46:22) – Yeah, again, it gets back to friends. Can you sum it up in a sentence? And if you’ve had a reader which which I highly recommend, you really should have at least one reader, if not more, before you. You send it out, give them that pitch sentence and see if it sounds like the book that they’ve read. What things are you leaving out? What things are you not? And with a complicated story, it is hard. And I think one of the ways that I knew I wasn’t ready yet with my book was that I couldn’t do that sentence until very late in the process. There were all these times where I thought, okay, I’m done, I’m done. But I couldn’t quite get that sentence together. And I thought that was a really key moment. That said, maybe you’re not sure what it’s about, or maybe you haven’t gotten to the heart of it yet.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:47:12) – That’s so interesting because when I work with clients building their books together, it’s when I can describe it quickly, and I know how I would describe it to editors, that I know that it’s ready.

Karen Outen (00:47:21) – Exactly.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:47:22) – What is it that why does it work that way?

Karen Outen (00:47:24) – Because I think it means that you see it as a whole. You’re seeing not just the piece. Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute. And then is there a piece? And then there’s that piece, you know, like a little kid telling you a story and you’re following them until they go, and then and then and then you think, wait, wait, where am I? But if you can see it as a whole and presented as here’s the core of the story, even though you know, there are these other pieces and you can give somebody an idea of, yeah, there it branches out, there are consequences. But this is the core of the story. I think that means something about its efficiency.

Karen Outen (00:47:59) – Yeah.

Karen Outen (00:47:59) – Oh that’s.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:48:00) – Lovely. Yeah.

Julie Kingsley (00:48:01) – I think you’ve rendered out the fat. That’s what I always said. Just wondered about the fat. And what’s left there is just the perfect product, whatever that is. You know, the piece of bacon.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:48:10) – And also, Karen, we would love to give out a scholarship to our writing community. Would you like to define the parameters, like what qualities they have or what they’re working on?

Karen Outen (00:48:21) – Wow.

Karen Outen (00:48:21) – I think the first thing that comes to mind is a writer who’s been at it for a long time and is growing discouraged, but still hanging in there. So I would think an older writer who has been working diligently at producing something that will appear in the world and just needs a little, a little boost to their confidence to keep writing.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:48:46) – That’s beautiful, I love that. Okay, so just some parameters over what age writing for how long?

Karen Outen (00:48:51) – Oh, okay.

Karen Outen (00:48:52) – Over 40. Writing for at least ten years.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:48:56) – Okay. So if you’re a writer who is over 40 and you’ve been writing for at least ten years and you’d like a community to maybe read your page to you so you can hear it in someone else’s voice and you’d like to attend our events with agents and editors? Send us an email academy at manuscript wish list.com.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:49:12) – Tell us a little bit about you and the first one who fits that will get a scholarship. Karen, thank you so much. This was so lovely.

Karen Outen (00:49:20) – This was wonderful. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:49:22) – It. Yeah, we’re wishing you much success. I hope that you know, all the usual things gets you on NPR and, uh, you know, cover of USA today and The New York Times and, you know, all, all of those wonderful things. I hope they happen for you. You deserve it. Thank you.

Karen Outen (00:49:38) – So much.

Karen Outen (00:49:39) – I really appreciate it.

Karen Outen (00:49:41) – It’s been wonderful.

Julie Kingsley (00:49:42) – We are so glad that you joined us. And as always, we appreciate your feedback. Just head on over to the iTunes store and let us know what you think. And not only helps us make this podcast be the best it can be, but it also affects our ratings within the iTunes platform.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:49:57) – We’d love to hear from you if you’re feeling brave and want to. Submit your page for our First Pages podcast.

Jessica Sinsheimer (00:50:03) – You can send it to Academy at Manuscript wishlist. Com with First Pages podcast in the subject line. We’d also just love to hear from you.

Julie Kingsley (00:50:12) – And if you’d like to learn more about the Manuscript Academy and everything we have to offer, just jump on over to Manuscript academy.com.