The workshop has grown a bit, and some intimacy is lost. We're still feeling our way into the future. Suzy Soule and I are discussing smaller workshops in smaller cities, soon. Weekend set-ups in places like Salt Lake City, Missoula, etc.. That way more people are heard more often.
The workshop I set up in Louisville got screwy by bringing a friend into the mix to use his space. I will prioritize fixing that. Let me know if there's anything I can do.
I'm grateful for the time I had down in the Portland workshop. Sharing the love with all the snowflakes across the country would be good for you and all those up-and-coming writers that you would be giving guidance too.
I love taking walks at dusk so I can peek in the windows of people and try to guess what their lives are like. I write entire worlds that these people inhabit in my head and give them tragedies and pain. Slice of life pieces are like nibbles of candy for my nosey self to use as jumping off points for how the rest of the story goes and now I’m going to find all the pieces I can by this new to me author. Thank you!
Denis Johnson writes about this same spying, as the commuter train brushes past apartment windows. On those dusk walks I always smell vanilla from the dryer vents. Everyone is doing laundry. Everyone is using dryer fabric softener sheets scented with vanilla. It's like walking in a sweet vanilla cloud of domestic life.
I just finished listening to your interview while I was baking and in the middle of a room that smells like pumpkin muffins I smelled those Vogue perfume cards. I love stories like that. Someday I’ll tell you a story for your collection that will live forever on a shelf in your mind you logged under goddamnit Erin...
I always enjoy the fading minutes of the golden hour, walking my dog and smelling the various things people will be enjoying for dinner with friends and family. It was easier when I didn’t live on such a busy street in SF (lots of competing stimuli), but, fun guessing and imagining all the same when I can. Hearing a party going on is always a highlight! Laughter carries ... in more ways than one.
Thank you for this, Erin. This is my license, my motivation to finally be the peeping Tom I was meant to be. A glimpse in a window is a glimpse into a world. Sometimes a partially nude world. And if I ever get caught, I'll tell that officer, hey man, you're stifling my muse. And besides, Chuck Palahniuk calls this crowd seeding.
I just watched your interview. It immediately made me ask my mom for some of her stories and it confirmed a lot of what I knew about her. She had traveled coast to coast ever since she was eighteen to follow lovers and family members who were good people but never fit and I asked her if she had ever driven to any state just for herself and she couldn’t bring herself to answer that she hadn’t (she’s mid 50s) so I encouraged her if she ever could to try it and drag someone with her for once. She wasn’t opposed to the idea. Thanks for that. A fuck ton more crossed my mind but that’s for another day.
Consider reading the first couple pages of 'The Giant's House.' It's the very funny, acerbic voice of a librarian who's talking about oral histories. One of the best first chapters I've ever read.
I love “Working” and was thrilled to get the opportunity to appear in the musical adaptation (which flopped on Broadway in 1978 but has had a long life after). The score is by artists like James Taylor, Micki Grant, and Stephen Schwartz, and a great deal of the monologues and lyrics are verbatim from Terkel’s book- check it out if you don’t know it!
Sort of off topic, but I had the pleasure of befriending James Taylor when I was working at Guitar Center in Boston. He’d come in once a week, and I’d hook him up with a guitar and some headphones. He’d spend an hour or two immersed in the pedal board, just making new sounds. Afterwords, he’d be rather talkative. Never small talk. That guy enjoys a sincere conversation. Eccentric cat, but very cool.
That's a charm of oral histories. The variety of voices. In Los Angeles someone asked my favorite punk band, and I mentioned Darby Crash and the oral history 'Lexicon Devil.' It was my inspiration for using that storytelling form in 'Rant.'
It’s no new concept but I have been writing down one to two lines of dialog from shops, grocery stores, cafes and walks along the streets to this day for so long now that I cannot remember when I started.
It was undergrad when I heard of and first read Studs and thought, “Ask someone about those conversations and learn the context.”
The results have proven more interesting than the lines alone could have offered. Sometimes it even created friendships.
I had the privilege of meeting you about five years ago in NYC. I’d never been to a book event before, so I had no idea what to expect. At the signing, I felt this urge to share a quick story of how your books helped me through a lot of family horror when I was a teenager. How they brought feelings of comfort and safety (Invisible Monsters in particular), and made me feel seen.
Watching the interview of you talking about how those stories give people a chance to connect and share their own really hit me. Probably a super obvious thing but I never thought about it that way. Maybe that’s why what you told me afterwards felt so special.
Sunday morning seems like the perfect place to realise some big truths. Mark knew exactly what he was doing, the bastard.
It's very different from the Rogan Experience, in that Mark is always hidden behind the camera, whereas Rogan is a constant reaction that feeds the performance. That, and Rogan's A/V guy is always in the guest's peripheral vision, and that heightens the sense of audience. Their reaction allows for a different pace. The guest isn't compelled to fill the silence as much. Plus it hampers neural mirroring, where two people mimic each other's energy and gestures.
I'm halfway through the interview. Right after you shared about the dream, your father, the designer and the colour prints. And in the vein of collecting these stories just wanted to share mine.
There are dreams you’ll never remember. Dreams that looks like memories. You never really know it’s a dream because everyone’s too busy acting in your own skull-sized tv show. That cloudy cotton frame everything is wrapped around in dreams, that’s just cheap movie setting. That never happens for real.
Years ago I used to live in London, miles away from my family. This one night, I dreamt of my mother. She’s screaming with swelling veins cracking over her neck. She screams so hard that spits fly off her mouth landing on the furniture. Eyes popping out of their orbits. Then my mother collapses. Mum going timber. She’s sprawled on the floor. Pink starfish on the living room carpet.
Somebody calls an ambulance. Flickering red and blue light on the greying walls of my parents’ house. Then my mother is on a gurney rolled away. My mother is in the hospital with tubings stuck under her skin feeding her vitamins and sugary water.
This is me watching life going by, frame after frame after frame. Screening in my head. This is just a dream. And when I wake up my first thought is I need the bathroom. Then I text my mother to tell her she was playing a chalk outline on the floor of my dreams. "That’s funny," I write. "Isn’t it?
She texts back, "Don’t be daft." And she laughs. I know she’s laughing because she chains up forty little “a” one next to each other. My mother never learnt how to laugh on messages.
Then life goes by, the sun keeps rising and setting for everyone. And the same happens in this odd story of mine.
Except one week after my dream, after my mother laughed in a single vowel, she rings me up. She asks me about the weather. This is Mum and I chatting but not chatting.
When you talk about the weather you always mean something else.
Then there’s silence on the line. Mum not filling the gaps. Behind her I can hear Dad watching tv watching him. And my mother says, “It wasn’t me.” And I say, "What d’you mean?"
“The message I sent you,” my mother says. “That was your dad.”
And my first thought is that Dad doesn’t know how to laugh on messages either.
Mum says they had an argument at my grandma's. One of those family arguments nobody ever tells you about when you’re a thousand miles away. Mum says she screamed with her veins swelling all over her neck. She says she collapsed on the floor. Mum going timber. Unconscious.
From behind the phone, talking to her, Dad says, “God knows what the hell is wrong with you two.”
They had to call an ambulance. She went to hospital.
Then Mum says, “How did you know?” And she starts sobbing. Sobbing because I knew without knowing. Sobbing because the invisible umbilical cord is never cut for good. It stretches over distances. Through country borders, stormy oceans and blossoming trees. Connections are never about miles and double insulated wires.
Behind the phone Dad says, “You two are freaks.”
And I can see her smiling. My eyes close and I can see Mum on the other side of the landline. I don’t know how this is, but I’ve stopped looking for a cause for anything. It’s all random anyway.
Sometimes it’s all about the words we don’t say. Sometimes it’s all about something else.
That's my favorite crowd seeding topic: Unexplained synchronistic stuff. But it takes a long time to build to, otherwise it seems false. Most of us have a bias confirmation tendency toward proof of an afterlife or hidden world, so it's only at the shank of a party that I believe such stories. I liked yours.
Oct 22, 2023·edited Oct 23, 2023Liked by Chuck Palahniuk
Side note: I think I must have watched all of your interviews over the years. I mean all of them, for real. And this Soft White Underbelly one, is by far one of my favourites.
It's deep, and personal. It came from the heart. With stories and anecdotes I had never heard before. All told the Chuck way. I love it.
This one, and the newer Bilyeu interview. When Chuck said "I am always sincere" toward the end of that one, it kicked me in the gut. The balls that takes. I had been working toward not hiding behind sarcasm and irony and cynicism for years and still fight with that.
I told a couple of stories of my intuition working frighteningly well on a first date last night. Not coincidentally, it was later in the night. Then you tell your dream print story today.
My honest, but vague explanation for my experience growing up is "Living in an episode of Jerry Springer and also an episode of COPS." Then we were talking about how boring it would be to write about healthy people in our little offshoot video conference workshop today, and Craig mentioned Jerry Springer.
Between having a nice date last night, your video today, those synchs, and your confirming that not coming to Portland was the right move, this has been a very heavy Sunday. Its nice when the world lets me know Im not fucking up despite contrary evidence.
Ill tell you those intuition stories some time. I was a freaky little fat headed kool aid mouthed barefoot kid.
It was intensely lucid. Not sure if I mentioned it, but I woke up weeping harder than I'd ever cried. It still makes us laugh when I mention how the interior designers (who'd chosen that art) judged my reaction as rage and dislike.
I was in a theater in a lucid dream. An announcement was made over a speaker: Anyone who watches this movie, can grow younger.
Later I looked at my hand. It went from an adult hand to a child’s hand. Then I looked at my reflection in a window of our old house, and I saw myself as a 6 year old. Same early 80s haircut I had then.
Then I found myself, the adult, standing outside the house, looking into the same window the child was staring at, and quickly my 6 year old self walked away.
I waved my arms and yelled out, “come back, I have some things to tell you.”
When I woke, for about five minutes, I felt no aches or pains, or stiffness in my hands from years of painting, like I normally do. It was definitely emotional. Really felt like I time traveled.
While writing 'Rant' I read every book I could find about time travel theories. Of course it's all anecdotal, but a common thread was between sleeping and driving cars. It seems that when people make long car trips they lapse into a delta wave state similar to lucid dreaming. Another reason to keep a notebook in the car.
I used this delta wave state, aka highway hypnosis, as a descriptor in the liminal event I wrote. If I drive on the interstate for more than an hour, and I dont aggressively pass people constantly, my vision gets blurry and my eyes cross. Thankfully for everyone else, I drive like an asshole to keep myself out of that.
Also, Ive read that we have more of whatever brain waves when we first wake in the morning, so I write a crappy poem first thing to try and take advantage of that. It only works when I wake up sleep drunk aka Im still half asleep and feel like shit. But theres something about it that taps straight into the subconscious.
Happy Sunday!
Hey, are you going to Chelsea's castle workshop in the Hollywood Hills?
Nope:) but it sounds lovely......
Love his channel. Glad the chaos is going away for ya.
And I am glad you didn't move to Portland for the workshop.
After totally talking myself into it, I woke up one morning feeling like hell and knew it wasn't the right time.
Hope all is well!
Im good. It was just one of those weird, intuitive things that came with a somatic response.
Hope you get feeling better. Definitely gotta take care of yourself. I think a big long trip would take a lot out of anyone.
I want to go to workshop!
Wait, is that a bad idea? I admit that thought has crossed my mind.
That's my question too
All I know is that my intuition told me to stay put, and from Chuck's reply, its best to sit on that idea for now.
The workshop has grown a bit, and some intimacy is lost. We're still feeling our way into the future. Suzy Soule and I are discussing smaller workshops in smaller cities, soon. Weekend set-ups in places like Salt Lake City, Missoula, etc.. That way more people are heard more often.
The workshop I set up in Louisville got screwy by bringing a friend into the mix to use his space. I will prioritize fixing that. Let me know if there's anything I can do.
I'm grateful for the time I had down in the Portland workshop. Sharing the love with all the snowflakes across the country would be good for you and all those up-and-coming writers that you would be giving guidance too.
I'm eager to do this. Let's talk!
Watched it earlier. The pug story is hilarious and your barn dream anecdote was fascinating.
This was probably one of the most candid interviews of yours I’ve seen. One of the best, too.
I love taking walks at dusk so I can peek in the windows of people and try to guess what their lives are like. I write entire worlds that these people inhabit in my head and give them tragedies and pain. Slice of life pieces are like nibbles of candy for my nosey self to use as jumping off points for how the rest of the story goes and now I’m going to find all the pieces I can by this new to me author. Thank you!
Denis Johnson writes about this same spying, as the commuter train brushes past apartment windows. On those dusk walks I always smell vanilla from the dryer vents. Everyone is doing laundry. Everyone is using dryer fabric softener sheets scented with vanilla. It's like walking in a sweet vanilla cloud of domestic life.
That’s the best flavor of Tide Pod!
I just finished listening to your interview while I was baking and in the middle of a room that smells like pumpkin muffins I smelled those Vogue perfume cards. I love stories like that. Someday I’ll tell you a story for your collection that will live forever on a shelf in your mind you logged under goddamnit Erin...
I always enjoy the fading minutes of the golden hour, walking my dog and smelling the various things people will be enjoying for dinner with friends and family. It was easier when I didn’t live on such a busy street in SF (lots of competing stimuli), but, fun guessing and imagining all the same when I can. Hearing a party going on is always a highlight! Laughter carries ... in more ways than one.
Thank you for this, Erin. This is my license, my motivation to finally be the peeping Tom I was meant to be. A glimpse in a window is a glimpse into a world. Sometimes a partially nude world. And if I ever get caught, I'll tell that officer, hey man, you're stifling my muse. And besides, Chuck Palahniuk calls this crowd seeding.
Haven’t seen it yet. Excited!
I just watched your interview. It immediately made me ask my mom for some of her stories and it confirmed a lot of what I knew about her. She had traveled coast to coast ever since she was eighteen to follow lovers and family members who were good people but never fit and I asked her if she had ever driven to any state just for herself and she couldn’t bring herself to answer that she hadn’t (she’s mid 50s) so I encouraged her if she ever could to try it and drag someone with her for once. She wasn’t opposed to the idea. Thanks for that. A fuck ton more crossed my mind but that’s for another day.
Consider reading the first couple pages of 'The Giant's House.' It's the very funny, acerbic voice of a librarian who's talking about oral histories. One of the best first chapters I've ever read.
This really enhanced my day and my psyche. Will be reading the full book. Thanks.
I just read that book a couple weeks ago. I had never even heard of it until you mentioned it in a comment on here at some point. It's incredible!
The interview is so good Mr. Palahniuk! So exciting. I love that show so much!
Thanks. I'll never have the nerve to watch.
Well, the video got 21k views in a few hours. That’s impressive. We’ll watch it over and over for you, Chuck.
Studs was the best! Working was wonderful. Used to listen to studs on the radio every week here in Chicago. I miss his sensibilities.
I love “Working” and was thrilled to get the opportunity to appear in the musical adaptation (which flopped on Broadway in 1978 but has had a long life after). The score is by artists like James Taylor, Micki Grant, and Stephen Schwartz, and a great deal of the monologues and lyrics are verbatim from Terkel’s book- check it out if you don’t know it!
Sort of off topic, but I had the pleasure of befriending James Taylor when I was working at Guitar Center in Boston. He’d come in once a week, and I’d hook him up with a guitar and some headphones. He’d spend an hour or two immersed in the pedal board, just making new sounds. Afterwords, he’d be rather talkative. Never small talk. That guy enjoys a sincere conversation. Eccentric cat, but very cool.
That's a charm of oral histories. The variety of voices. In Los Angeles someone asked my favorite punk band, and I mentioned Darby Crash and the oral history 'Lexicon Devil.' It was my inspiration for using that storytelling form in 'Rant.'
It’s no new concept but I have been writing down one to two lines of dialog from shops, grocery stores, cafes and walks along the streets to this day for so long now that I cannot remember when I started.
It was undergrad when I heard of and first read Studs and thought, “Ask someone about those conversations and learn the context.”
The results have proven more interesting than the lines alone could have offered. Sometimes it even created friendships.
New Chuck's interviews are always my favourite way to stop the world from spinning for a while.
On it now.
This is a bit surreal because of how ideal this collaboration is, and I’m going to shape the rest of my afternoon around preparing to watch it.
So is the “wrose” in the title of this post an example of when you make intentional mistakes for people to point out?
Fully intentional. And note how it catches your eye. That's how nicely 'burnt tongue' works.
Well plaeyd, Mr. Palahniuk. Well plaeyd.
See! See!
My brain autocorrected it. Had no idea until I read your comment.
I had the privilege of meeting you about five years ago in NYC. I’d never been to a book event before, so I had no idea what to expect. At the signing, I felt this urge to share a quick story of how your books helped me through a lot of family horror when I was a teenager. How they brought feelings of comfort and safety (Invisible Monsters in particular), and made me feel seen.
Watching the interview of you talking about how those stories give people a chance to connect and share their own really hit me. Probably a super obvious thing but I never thought about it that way. Maybe that’s why what you told me afterwards felt so special.
Sunday morning seems like the perfect place to realise some big truths. Mark knew exactly what he was doing, the bastard.
It's very different from the Rogan Experience, in that Mark is always hidden behind the camera, whereas Rogan is a constant reaction that feeds the performance. That, and Rogan's A/V guy is always in the guest's peripheral vision, and that heightens the sense of audience. Their reaction allows for a different pace. The guest isn't compelled to fill the silence as much. Plus it hampers neural mirroring, where two people mimic each other's energy and gestures.
I'm halfway through the interview. Right after you shared about the dream, your father, the designer and the colour prints. And in the vein of collecting these stories just wanted to share mine.
There are dreams you’ll never remember. Dreams that looks like memories. You never really know it’s a dream because everyone’s too busy acting in your own skull-sized tv show. That cloudy cotton frame everything is wrapped around in dreams, that’s just cheap movie setting. That never happens for real.
Years ago I used to live in London, miles away from my family. This one night, I dreamt of my mother. She’s screaming with swelling veins cracking over her neck. She screams so hard that spits fly off her mouth landing on the furniture. Eyes popping out of their orbits. Then my mother collapses. Mum going timber. She’s sprawled on the floor. Pink starfish on the living room carpet.
Somebody calls an ambulance. Flickering red and blue light on the greying walls of my parents’ house. Then my mother is on a gurney rolled away. My mother is in the hospital with tubings stuck under her skin feeding her vitamins and sugary water.
This is me watching life going by, frame after frame after frame. Screening in my head. This is just a dream. And when I wake up my first thought is I need the bathroom. Then I text my mother to tell her she was playing a chalk outline on the floor of my dreams. "That’s funny," I write. "Isn’t it?
She texts back, "Don’t be daft." And she laughs. I know she’s laughing because she chains up forty little “a” one next to each other. My mother never learnt how to laugh on messages.
Then life goes by, the sun keeps rising and setting for everyone. And the same happens in this odd story of mine.
Except one week after my dream, after my mother laughed in a single vowel, she rings me up. She asks me about the weather. This is Mum and I chatting but not chatting.
When you talk about the weather you always mean something else.
Then there’s silence on the line. Mum not filling the gaps. Behind her I can hear Dad watching tv watching him. And my mother says, “It wasn’t me.” And I say, "What d’you mean?"
“The message I sent you,” my mother says. “That was your dad.”
And my first thought is that Dad doesn’t know how to laugh on messages either.
Mum says they had an argument at my grandma's. One of those family arguments nobody ever tells you about when you’re a thousand miles away. Mum says she screamed with her veins swelling all over her neck. She says she collapsed on the floor. Mum going timber. Unconscious.
From behind the phone, talking to her, Dad says, “God knows what the hell is wrong with you two.”
They had to call an ambulance. She went to hospital.
Then Mum says, “How did you know?” And she starts sobbing. Sobbing because I knew without knowing. Sobbing because the invisible umbilical cord is never cut for good. It stretches over distances. Through country borders, stormy oceans and blossoming trees. Connections are never about miles and double insulated wires.
Behind the phone Dad says, “You two are freaks.”
And I can see her smiling. My eyes close and I can see Mum on the other side of the landline. I don’t know how this is, but I’ve stopped looking for a cause for anything. It’s all random anyway.
Sometimes it’s all about the words we don’t say. Sometimes it’s all about something else.
Whatever that is.
That's it. Just wanted to share.
Jumping back to the interview now.
That's my favorite crowd seeding topic: Unexplained synchronistic stuff. But it takes a long time to build to, otherwise it seems false. Most of us have a bias confirmation tendency toward proof of an afterlife or hidden world, so it's only at the shank of a party that I believe such stories. I liked yours.
Agreed.
Read about it in a tarot card book, and it sounds made up.
Place it in a story out of context and it suddenly makes you gasp.
Side note: I think I must have watched all of your interviews over the years. I mean all of them, for real. And this Soft White Underbelly one, is by far one of my favourites.
It's deep, and personal. It came from the heart. With stories and anecdotes I had never heard before. All told the Chuck way. I love it.
You never cease to surprise me. Thanks for this.
You'll always be my mentor at a distance.
This one, and the newer Bilyeu interview. When Chuck said "I am always sincere" toward the end of that one, it kicked me in the gut. The balls that takes. I had been working toward not hiding behind sarcasm and irony and cynicism for years and still fight with that.
If you were to ask my wife, she'd tell you I'm struggling with that too.
That makes two of us, mate.
Cynicism is so much safer. You're either right, or pleasantly surprised, but at this point, I would rather be kind than be correct.
Moved more toward cynical optimism. Plan for the worst, hope for the best.
Are you in England? Not being surrounded by ugly attitudes helps.
I often wonder if my optimism is delusional. Especially in regards to writing.
I'm Glasgow, Scotland, pal.
We eat jokes for breakfast and shit sarcasm at night.
Love it, to be honest. :P
I keep a log of synchronicities. From today:
I told a couple of stories of my intuition working frighteningly well on a first date last night. Not coincidentally, it was later in the night. Then you tell your dream print story today.
My honest, but vague explanation for my experience growing up is "Living in an episode of Jerry Springer and also an episode of COPS." Then we were talking about how boring it would be to write about healthy people in our little offshoot video conference workshop today, and Craig mentioned Jerry Springer.
Between having a nice date last night, your video today, those synchs, and your confirming that not coming to Portland was the right move, this has been a very heavy Sunday. Its nice when the world lets me know Im not fucking up despite contrary evidence.
Ill tell you those intuition stories some time. I was a freaky little fat headed kool aid mouthed barefoot kid.
Story about the art prints was amazing.
Would you consider that dream as Lucid?
It was intensely lucid. Not sure if I mentioned it, but I woke up weeping harder than I'd ever cried. It still makes us laugh when I mention how the interior designers (who'd chosen that art) judged my reaction as rage and dislike.
I was in a theater in a lucid dream. An announcement was made over a speaker: Anyone who watches this movie, can grow younger.
Later I looked at my hand. It went from an adult hand to a child’s hand. Then I looked at my reflection in a window of our old house, and I saw myself as a 6 year old. Same early 80s haircut I had then.
Then I found myself, the adult, standing outside the house, looking into the same window the child was staring at, and quickly my 6 year old self walked away.
I waved my arms and yelled out, “come back, I have some things to tell you.”
When I woke, for about five minutes, I felt no aches or pains, or stiffness in my hands from years of painting, like I normally do. It was definitely emotional. Really felt like I time traveled.
While writing 'Rant' I read every book I could find about time travel theories. Of course it's all anecdotal, but a common thread was between sleeping and driving cars. It seems that when people make long car trips they lapse into a delta wave state similar to lucid dreaming. Another reason to keep a notebook in the car.
I used this delta wave state, aka highway hypnosis, as a descriptor in the liminal event I wrote. If I drive on the interstate for more than an hour, and I dont aggressively pass people constantly, my vision gets blurry and my eyes cross. Thankfully for everyone else, I drive like an asshole to keep myself out of that.
Also, Ive read that we have more of whatever brain waves when we first wake in the morning, so I write a crappy poem first thing to try and take advantage of that. It only works when I wake up sleep drunk aka Im still half asleep and feel like shit. But theres something about it that taps straight into the subconscious.
I wonder if taking a shower creates a similar condition. So many of my best connections/ideas occur in the shower. Cliche or not.
Yeah I have written the outline to a lot of my better stories on the way back from the workshop.