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Summer 2008 Issue
$3.95 [ buy ] |
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Early in my career, lusting as I was to become a literary light in the nonfiction world, I realized that I desperately needed the services of a mentor. I imagined sort of a cross between an Oxford don, a Jesuit spiritual adviser, and Dr. Phil—an uber-mentor in my mind’s eye. I pictured this person in very specific terms. He (not she, please—the idea of a female mentor seemed too fraught with the possibility of messy emotional complications) would be ferociously smart, of course, but he would impart his wisdom in a user-friendly manner that would leave me feeling warm-and-fuzzy. From behind his massive mahogany (or possibly teak) desk, surrounded by shelves groaning with the weight of his manuscripts, he would take it upon himself to steer me from idiocy to greatness.
After writing professionally for nearly 20 years, I’m sorry to say that I have yet to meet this fellow.
Instead, I wound up with Bob.
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After finally coming around to his point of view . . . after seeing my own work mangled in the very same manner I had once mangled the work of my freelancers – I was forced to change my opinion about Bob's insanity.
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The impact of Bob Shacochis on my writing career is a bit like that of a terrorist attack from an Al Qaeda sleeper cell: explosive and devastating, but triggered by an incredibly long fuse. The full force of Bob’s creative munitions failed to detonate until I’d been at the writing game for a decade and half, first as a staff writer at TIME, later as a senior editor at Outside. Those were hard, mean, frustrating years for me. Years in which I stumbled and careened from one debacle to the next, wallowing in mediocrity, awash in confusion, beset by the aggrieved conviction that if my uber-mentor would just have the decency to show up, clock in, and get down to business, things could start falling into place. Whoever that person was, he never bothered to materialize—a dereliction of duty which eventually convinced me that if I truly wanted a mentor to help me figure out the hard stuff, I would have to go out and recruit that target on my own.
This proved to be difficult, mainly because colleagues at the publications where I worked—the sort of whip-smart folks who seemed to offer the most mentor-worthy material—displayed, at best, a passing interest in my development. Their apathy, I now realize, had little to do with the shallowness of their commitment to helping others, and was instead a completely appropriate reaction to the grotesqueness and absurdity of my own desperation, which was a reflection of my belief that excellence was a gift imparted by someone else, instead of a quality cultivated from within.
During my second year at TIME, where I started out as a fact-checker, I asked editor Priscilla Painton (by this point, I was frustrated enough that I was willing to adjust my standards and consider a woman for the job) if it would be OK for me to sit in her office for a week and basically listen to her answer the phone. Priscilla, obviously one of the most talented people at the magazine (she was eventually promoted to deputy managing editor, the highest-ranking woman in the history of the magazine, before becoming editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster’s adult trade imprint) shot me a look normally reserved for the neighbor’s cat when it meanders through the front door and vomits on your couch. We later became friends, but she never quite recovered, I think, from her astonishment over meeting someone who had failed to grasp the rudiments of journalistic pedagogy: the act of teaching oneself is indispensable to the process of becoming a writer.
Before I knew it, 15 years had somehow slipped past and I was forced to conclude that along with a wife, a family, a fat 401K, and a number of other achievements that have eluded my grasp, perhaps a mentor simply wasn’t in the cards for me. At which point, having decided to abandon the search, I found exactly what I was looking for.
Well, sort of.
I’m not sure I can pinpoint when, exactly, Bob Shacochis became my mentor—a confusion exacerbated by Bob’s insistence that he is not my mentor but that we are simply colleagues and friends. This is an asinine assertion because, among other flaws, it implies a parity of talents and achievements belied by the fact that while he is a National Book Award-winning author who has mastered both fiction and nonfiction, I am—and will continue to remain for the indefinite future—a struggling, dirt-bag hack.
I first met Bob when I was at Outside, but we began to form a meaningful connection only after I quit my job and started lurking around the patch of turf he occupies in a remote corner of northern New Mexico. Bob allegedly maintains a wife and a home somewhere in Florida, but most of his year is spent on a 5-acre meadow surrounded by a dense ponderosa forest in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Here, in an adobe cabin at the end of a nearly impassable dirt road, he spends his days banging out novels, nonfiction books, essays and magazine articles.
Our relationship got off the ground tentatively, a hesitation stemming from the fact that I had decided, fairly early on, to write Bob off as incandescently brilliant and fantastically gifted but also insane. There was, I hasten to add, an overwhelming body of evidence to support this conclusion. Whenever I would make the hour-long drive from my home in Santa Fe to pay a visit to his lair, I would find Bob in a state of high indignation. Clad in the wooly demeanor of a bear emerging from a long and profoundly troubled hibernation, he was always ornery, invariably profane, and often apt to fire a blast of buckshot—sometimes rhetorically, occasionally with a Winchester 12-gauge Double X magnum—into the branches of his apple tree. But it was the ferocity of his anger that most took me aback.
As I huddled in front of the fireplace with his dogs while the winter storms sought to bury his cabin under a mountain of snow, or sat on the patio on warm summer nights as the starlight filtered through his strings of Tibetan prayer flags, I slowly came to fathom the depth and the vitality of his contempt for the current state of American magazine journalism. He hated the endlessly expanding power of publishers and marketers, corporate owners and advertisers, of course—and rightly so. But he reserved a special loathing for editors of magazines whom he viewed as hypocritical liars and self-righteous nincompoops, the corrupt custodians of America’s tradition of literary nonfiction (Harper’s, The New Yorker and The Atlantic being the exceptions). As for the quality of the reporting and writing overseen by these bureaucrats of the Fourth Estate, he regarded the bulk of it as a cultural disgrace.
Having only recently ceased being a magazine editor myself, I reacted defensively to these criticisms, and thus it took some time for me to recognize that Bob was almost entirely right about all of this. After finally coming around to his point of view—a perspective I fully embraced, to my shame, only after seeing my own work mangled in the very same manner I had once mangled the work of my freelancers—I was forced to change my opinion about Bob’s sanity. At which point our friendship started to change and his imprint began to leave its mark.
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