06/14/2018: Welcome author Todd Petersen!

In this week’s show, host Dr Lynn Vartan site down with acclaimed author and SUU Faculty member Todd Petersen to talk about his new book “It Needs to Look Like We Tried” and share musical selections to go along with his novel!

Transcript

[00:00:03] Hey everyone this is Lynn Vartan and you are listening to the APEX Hour on SUU Thunder ninety one point one. In this show you get more personal time with the guests who visit Southern Utah University from all over. Learning more about their stories and opinions beyond their presentations on stage. We will also give you some new music to listen to and to turn you on to new genres. You can find us here every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. or on the web at suu.edu/apex But for now, Welcome to this week's show here thunder ninety one point one.

[00:00:47] OK. Well we are here in the studio again and it's summertime at SUU and I'm so happy to be here and I am joined with one of our visionary faculty members. Welcome to the studio Dr. Todd Petersen visionary that's perfect for the radio. Well it's perfect for you. I find you to be very very inspiring and we've collaborated some together and had some great times in the past and we're here to talk about you and your work and your book that just came out this year right. Absolutely. This is going to be so much fun. Radio is the coolest I know. I love it. And for those of you listening this is KSUU thunder ninety one point one. And also we record all of our broadcasts for our podcast which is the apex hour and that's subscribe-able on iTunes or Google Play or wherever you find your podcasts. So definitely check it out subscribe. Leave us a comment. We love to get the feedback so. OK.

[00:01:48] Well I'd like to start today by Dr. Petersen. Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get from there to here. I know you've been in Cedar for a while but cedar is not your home town.

[00:02:02] No it's not. I'm a Portland kid. I wasn't born there but I got there pretty soon after her raised up in Portland long before it was the dream of the 90s to move there. I kind of traverse the 70s and 80s it was in high school. At that point in time so that's kind of how I picked up that vibe and I spent a lot of time go to school I went to college and the Pacific Northwest I worked for the YMCA for years and the Pacific Northwest between Oregon and up in the Seattle area in Puget Sound fell in love with those places and then it was a few years after college that I thought about being a writer and maybe being a college professor as well. That's great. Your degrees are all all Northwest started in Northwest. As a student that's why I do the fun classes on campus now we work on the screen studies program. And then I took a look at the film industry particularly in the late 80s early 90s and went Oh yeah I want to do something else right. So as a film major then and then what I decided I liked best about filmmaking was the storytelling part and what felt more in control and maybe more true to me at the time was the writing. So when I was in an undergrad I wrote one full length and one short film original screenplays and I thought that was the way I was going to go but incrementally I got more and more interested in fiction writing. I see. Not just doing the script which sometimes you finish the script in it it's incomplete you still need a production on the other and then right. I wanted to see the storytelling all the way through. So it was in the early 90s and I got really interested in writing. And my favorite story to tell about writing and that's sometimes interesting I think when you think about college is it didn't come from college classes. I was out of school trying to figure out how to maybe work in advertising or something up with those phone skills to use. But in the interim I was getting my portfolio ready. I was cleaning banks now at night. I was calling to banks on Crown Hill in Seattle which is an old neighborhood. And when I was done cleaning the bank I noticed there was a typewriter in a hole with a paper in the drive thru window. So I would clean the bank as quickly as I could and then I would spend an hour or so writing and then I moved to the next bank and then duplicate the same process so it was probably like unethical and illegal like stealing the bags paper and stuff. But I would write at night in these really really quiet environments they were all like Edward Hopper paintings with this weird light. And it was really that was the starting point I said I need to figure out a way to do this not sort of semi on the sly in a bank that was supposed to be cleaning that is an incredible story. And then I just went back to graduate school. And that gets us to here

[00:04:44] Oh my gosh that's an amazing story. I do. Later in the show I want to ask you a little bit about your process and if you've maintained that kind of desire for a quiet night time writing and we'll get to that later. I didn't know that you spent so much time working with the YMCA. What was that like.

[00:05:02] It was my first passion when I was. It's about a 15 year old daughter who's trying to figure out where they go get a job and 15 years old was when my mom said you can't sit around a house all summer. Right. So I asked around and I had some friends who were working at the summer camp. They went to when they were little kids. And I said that sounds like it's awesome and they said their volunteer positions. So it was about nineteen eighty five that I started doing that and I went there and I fell in love. I wasn't that kind of person I wasn't a big camp kid when I went. This is amazing and so much better than staying in the city and being bored Yeah. So I just started going every summer during high school and then it carried forward in college. And they kept giving me more responsibilities. And by the end of my time working seasonally with the YMCA I got a job offer to be the environmental education director for the San Diego Y at two facilities one up in the mountain the one right on the beach. And I had this kind of like semi epiphany that I turned the job down and decided to go to graduate school instead. Sometimes I wonder you would have got to live on the beach. But that was that was a key moment where I had to say no I think my passion lies down a different road. And then a year from that point I was in graduate school and on my way to come to SUU. That's amazing. But that's one of the reasons I do experience learning now is I had that experience before school started and later they saw that stuff on my resume and said hey could you help us. Because I know you've had some experience doing this.

[00:06:37] That's a perfect segue. Can you tell us a little bit about your position here at SUU. Well I'm the director of Project based learning which a lot of students know is the thing that gets them to an edge projects which is our kind of big disruptive innovation. I think in education and it's not so unique anymore because we're learning like the Cal State system the Sunni system the whole province of Ontario now has experience learning requirements for higher ed. So we've been doing it for eight years and we love the fact that we sort of got all the learning out of the way early and all those other systems. They're still trying to figure it out. But yeah exponential learning is key it's the best way I've found to learn classroom learning is weird for me. I am much more of a doer and I want to learn by trying things out and making mistakes and having somebody coach me and school kind of doesn't traditionally work that way. But that's different. Music right. Music is such a different kind of learning. It's kind of experiential by nature. I mean you know we have a format in our studies where you always have individual private lessons so it's got that really strong mentorship and highly individualized curriculum because every single person is different in their process. So the arts are really a model for this kind of stuff and it always have been.

[00:07:57] Yeah. And I love that. Well that reminds me I was digging into your Web site which by the way is amazing and so we want to make sure everybody knows about that it's Todd Peterson dot org. And Todd with two d's and then Peterson with all E's P E T E R S E N. And Todd Peterson .org.

[00:08:20] So you can find out more about Todd there but I had not read your teaching philosophy which is on there and I just it was amazing. You sort of distilled down to in- not too many words exactly what you- this concept of how you made the transition into experiential learning. And these five mantras and I don't know if you I can tell you what they are and I know you have them up there too but these mantras for teaching that you use those kind of icons for now become unnecessary. That's fascinating. Can you tell me a little bit about that.

[00:08:58] This is a little bit of a throwback to like the dowdy jangan a bunch of stuff I studied in college. But I think in higher ed in particular one of the most important things that you can do as a teacher is learn to get out of the way. Right. Students are at this point where I've learned so much. I want to really try things and I think as long as a teacher stands in the way of people trying some stuff out then it's still mostly about the teacher. And it's not really about the student and the students work but you also don't want to be so invisible and gone that you're not really doing anything. So it's kind of striking that balance. I kind of think about like bass players right. Like in a band like you don't want to be too out front but really the bass player is controlling everything. Yeah they just don't seem like they are because I just go out front. Exactly. So the idea is not to be necessary and I think that's important to come unnecessary over time as you have a relationship with students by the time they're done. That should just be waving goodbye and you should be waving goodbye to because you're there in front now you're not in front right. Teach them to teach them selves.

[00:10:06] I love it. How about the one that says give everyone a reason to be in the room. I kind of love that but I'd love to hear you talk about that a bit more.

[00:10:18] This is something I think I'm developing because we talk a lot now in this online world about being in the room sometimes it's not even about physical work where your attention is and to be in the room means there's something valuable that has to be going on in the room that keeps you from checking your phone and seeing somebody like that picture of your kids on Instagram or any of the things that take us outside of the space or something vital has to be happening that can't happen anywhere else. And that's a lot of what I'm thinking about so I mean if you reading a book does that mean I read a book. So now I have to be in the room like I think it means people have to come expecting to contribute expecting to be part of what's going on. Maybe like a really good dinner party where everybody brings something but they're not there because it's time for class they're there because something's happening that's important. And I don't know if I always do that I mean I do the experience only but I still have my foot in the door back from the English department doing work with her screen studies program and I always try to make sure that that happens and you can't fade. But that's important. Now keep on laughing because I've got this crazy Eddie Van Halen picture here I'm teaching philosophy. Well I forgot I did that.

[00:11:33] Let's we're going to get in the next segment we'll take a little musical break here but we're going to really get deep into you as a as an author and as a writer you've already mentioned that you started in screenplays and I know you've written poetry and storytelling is kind of your maybe home base for where I mean you you have all this background and this passion as a storyteller. So I'm really looking forward to getting into that. But we have some music to play and those of you who listen to that program know that we always try to turn you on two different things and they're all different genres and all different meanings behind things. And one of the things I was talking with Todd about before he came on the show was well cause I know he's really into music too. And I said what what kind of music do you want to hear. And he you have a playlist that you designed to go along with your most recent book.

[00:12:30] That is that. That's correct. Yeah. The great blog large hearted boy does this for all kinds of books and all kinds of writers I mean they've done some really great people. Bret Easton Ellis and Jasmine Ward I think and some other you know kind of top tier writers so it was really fun to be included but it's so interesting to think about a thing you made and think about it in terms of the music that might fit with it. Sometimes you see ViSalus it's like a soundtrack. Yeah sometimes it's about setting the mood. Sometimes people do the music they listen to while they were writing and I did a combination of both. I talked a little bit about how I use Bill Frisell as kind of my background to set my own mood. But a lot of the songs in the playlist actually are featured in the book.

[00:13:14] Oh cool so at various times a character who's kind of a dweeb is listening to Panama by Van Halen and he's listening to old Utu records and you know just a bunch of kind of standard classic things but then there's other songs that are commentary like there's a Mr. Rogers song in there because one of the characters says it rightly so that Mr. Rogers is the greatest person who's ever lived. And so I tried to have those songs function in that way there either in it or they're commenting on the stuff that happens in the book.

[00:13:46] Well that says to set the stage maybe let's start with that. Bill Frisell piece and it's lookout for hope. So what about that choice in the play list and how does that piece move you.

[00:13:59] Well I love them. I love the song itself and Frizell has recorded all kinds of versions with all kinds of organizations sometimes he's done it on a more bluegrass side and sometimes he's done it more on a jazz side sometimes away like an avant garde side but it's a really really traditional song with a lot of good kind of folk melody to it but it's got great rhythms but for me and Bill Frisell it's about the tone he generates with his guitars are cool.

[00:14:29] Well I don't know if I have the version that's your favorite but well let's take a look at look out for hope. This is Bill Frisell band and that's the name of the album. And look out for hope is the title track and we'll have a listen here on the apex hour KSUU hundred ninety one point one.

[00:19:30] He y welcome back everyone. We're going to do a little fade out there because we don't want to lose out on the conversation here in the room. Welcome back to the apex hour.

[00:19:39] This is Lynn Vartan you're listening to KSUU you thunder ninety one point one and I am here in the studio with Dr. Todd Petersen. Welcome back. Good to be here. Well we were just talking about all different things like websites and comic book writers that you like and all kinds of cool stuff and I'd like to get into your writing. This is one of the things that I'm really excited about and excited for you about. This is a really exciting time in your career it seems.

[00:20:10] It really is. And I'm not sure I was ready for it because I was used to just daily is really how to be someone with a book out means that you kind of have to keep your head out in the world. Yeah and see what's going on and what people are thinking about it but also to be hooked up with other people for whom their creative work is out there as well. Because you don't just sit the thing out individually it goes out into a whole ecosystem of other things books and websites and social media and other and other people there's other people my press and it's so cool to be in that constellation instead of working alone.

[00:20:46] So what you mean by being out there in the world you're having your ear to the ground is actually sort of pooling those creative resources together and like you said it's a very solitary kind of work. Yeah.

[00:21:00] So when you're one of our other faculty here Elaine Vickers said the smartest thing recently about there being a difference between being a writer and being an author and writer is that really solitary thing where I'm just as a writer you know you kind of just go into a room. Yeah and new you mix some things up and work out the language but when you're an author you're a person who's selling a book right. And it's the best kind of selling because everybody loves to find a book that's right for them. And so once you get in that relationship it's now a relationship that automatically demands readers and all the other people that are out there. So it's not an alone thing. Right. And it can be a really weird transition because a lot of people who choose to be writers enjoy that solitary creative endeavor but it's inherently collaborative once you become an author. And I think that that's the thing that's new for me and it's really really exciting. And it's a big shift has it scared you or just mostly been exciting at times. It's really nerve wracking because I don't know that that's anything that school me ready for. Right. Again that's one of the things we're trying to do with experiential learning is get that feeling for what happens when you mix something and you have to put it out there and you have to talk about it right. It seems like it would be easy but once people start asking you about a book like the word question like What's your book about. You know I just sort of freeze up I'm like it's about all the words on the two hundred and twenty two pages that are in it. But that's never a good answer. Right. So you start you just start having to learn about how to say a made a thing and I need to be out there in the world interacting with people and then I need to start interacting with the people who are interacting with it and I and that's the fun new exhilarating and slightly scary part of all this.

[00:22:40] Well let's talk about that treacherous question. The new book is called and what a great title "it needs to look like we've tried".

[00:22:47] It really does need to look that way.

[00:22:49] Well yeah that could be like the banner for life on earth right now it seems. But tell me what is the book about.

[00:22:56] I'll go start big and go little. Yeah in a big sense. It's about how our lives are interconnected and a lot of times a novel will take a character and want to focus all the way through. All right. One idea let's see what happens to this character. I took a little bit of a different approach and I wanted to say what if we took the motion from one character moving through one story and let it just kind of start reappearing in other stories. And so something happens in the first chapter and then that chapter seems like it resolves itself in something new picks up and then in the next chapter you go home wait a minute. Back in the first chapter. Isn't this some of the stuff that started their search to daisy chain and connect. As we go all the way through and so when you get to the end of the book you're kind of back with the same characters from the beginning so it comes around. You know there's all kinds of musical analogies for this but it comes around kind of like a cannon maybe yeah. And the stuff that was in the beginning happens in the end so it's really a circular structure rather than a linear structure for a book that's really pretty nerdy what it's really about. At least the librarians have said so it's about failure. It's about people who screw up. It's about people who make a call and about something they're going to do and then it doesn't work and they have to go to Plan B. And it's about people really who are trying their hardest to do the right thing. Yeah and how oftentimes were thwarted. Yeah when we try to do the right thing. And so what I wanted to take that idea was do it in all from all these different perspectives. And recently when I was in L.A. I had my dissertation director who teaches at Cal Arts now was able to be there with me and he threw a term into the mix that I love and I wish I would have known about it when we first started. He said they're starting to call these kinds of books mosaic novels. So it again instead of this big throughline like a great big interstate highway that's like in war and peace that just drives you the mosaic novel was built at all these little pieces that build up into one big sort of overall effect. And so that's really what it's about but it's about people who blew it. So how did you get interested in this particular through line. I mean failure or trying and not achieving I mean that seems perhaps daunting or I don't know a little bit unnerving to really expose yourself to the more it started a lot with a kind of formal study of creativity. Oh and one of the things you hear over and over again when people talk about creativity in general because as far as experiential learning goes I'm over the creativity center. I really wanted to know what the foundations of that were. And a lot of it is about failure about how you have to try things out. You have to kind of watch it fail. You've got to study that failure and then go back and try another version of it. And so I mean there's so many antecedents for this like practicing an instrument or become good at sports you know or any of these kinds of things that people become good at. You don't just do this over and over again. It's a circle that goes around and around and around and I thought I'd love to see if I could try some stories about what that meant. Because failure is automatically loaded is a negative word but when you go into the creativity side they start saying things like fail faster. All right. You need to get. You need to do whatever you're going to do in your process to get to the failure sooner rather than keeping it from happening. And this may sound like trouble for a teacher. I think schoolteacher's is to do it the wrong way. School teaches us to be afraid of failure. And so what people do in the classroom is maybe risk as much as they need. So there's never any big triumphs because nobody is really putting it on the line right because they're worried about getting an F in the class and losing a scholarship etc. etc.. I wish there was a way that we could valorize failure and that's a lot about what this book was about. For me it was an exercise to say because I think the book is still hopeful and that's why the results long look out for hope and hope can be cheesy. And I wanted to try to write this in a way that hope wouldn't be cheesy that it would be like hope hope is that thing that's like I know I might be growing up but I think I'll probably get somewhere with it anyway and I think maybe it will be you know OK that's a little Bob Marley in there but everything is going to be all right. Yeah but maybe not right now. Yeah and if people can read a story like that and then learn to think about failure that way maybe we'll all be braver.

[00:27:24] I think that's just an amazing concept. I mean as a musician we definitely know that. I mean when we're practicing wrong notes or mistakes are completely inevitable. I mean that's the only way you know that you need to do more. It's from those mistakes and then also just in our day to day life I find that when I when I find myself most fearful is when I don't want to make a mistake and let down my family or my parents or my This or my that you know. And so then you don't take chances as much whereas if you can have that feeling and some of the most free times in my life where I've just taken chances to do whatever and just know well if it's not the best thing I can just get myself out of it or figure it out. So I think you've really hit on something that's absolutely essential and perhaps missing from society right now.

[00:28:15] I worry so much that that myself my family my students they'll all think that their failures are unrecoverable and that's the trick to everything it's not. Now when you take a step back and you look at what happened and you say what just went down. Yeah. And if you're really smart about being able to analyze what what what went quote unquote wrong then maybe you'll get to that point of saying OK I learned something really important. My wife's uncle said once actually he came down here and gave a talk. It was really cool a few years ago he says you're going to learn more from one spectacular failure than from 100 mediocre successes. Yeah and if we could get that mantra going I mean everybody would be unstoppable.

[00:28:57] In your writing of this book. It needs to look like we tried. Did you come across it or have you implemented any tools in your day to day life as a teacher or as a parent as a friend to combat this or is it just being willing to talk about it. Have you. Have you found any magic pills so to speak.

[00:29:22] I wish there was a video inherit now because I'm just looking at the ceiling figuring out how to say this the right way around my house. I think that everybody is really sick of me talking about failure because I've tried to open the floodgates on this and talk about how valuable failure is and how important it is to iterate the things that we try. So I may have sort of used up all of my energy pills for talking about failure at home. But mostly it's about to open the conversation and to show some stories of people for whom the failure did not kill them. Right. But what I've been able to implement personally. May and maybe I'm doing it a higher percentage of the time but not perfectly. Is the is the let myself address imperfection. I lie and say I mean there's that old joke of like let's leave an error in here. So the gods won't be angry. I think that that is really important wisdom to say when you're striving for perfection is just not going to be there right. Never will be. And it's OK to go after that it's OK to have high standards with your work as a professional. But you got to just go look it might be a waste of everybody's time to look for perfection. You should be moving on to other awesome things right. Right. And a guy that I really like Quest Love drummer for The Roots has been saying that as well. It's like hey sometimes you're really great nights and sometimes you don't have really good nights. You can really dwell on neither their successes or your failures because guess what you're going to go to the club and do another night. Yeah. Move onto the next performance.

[00:30:54] That's so so so true. Well speaking of music that is a great segue to the next song from the playlist by the Talking Heads. Yes burning down the house which I mean that's a failure in and of itself. But talk about why Burning Down The House made it to the play.

[00:31:16] There's a storyline in the middle where something terrible happens. I won't tell you because spoilers. But after the super terrible thing happens the narrator who's been watching the whole thing unfold is finally packed up all the trucks and is driving away from the scene of this terrible terrible thing. It was really tragic. Everybody was really depressed about what happened. And he was in one of these rental cars and he turned on the Sirius radio. And he was going through channels. And he'd gotten into a station that he liked and he was listening to the song and the next song that came on was the talking heads burning down the house. And when he because his song kind of comes in with his guitar thing before the really cool drum part that everybody will get to hear just this little da da da da da da da when it comes he's like I have to get out of traffic because I'm going to start crying. So he's like get out of traffic he goes over all the lanes and pulls over and all these cars are going past him and he just lets the song play.

[00:32:16] That's great. Well OK. We're talking about the book. It needs the look like we tried. And the author is Todd Petersen. And here from the pages of the book is Burning Down the House by talking heads KSUU thunder ninety one point one.

[00:36:16] OK. Welcome back to the apex hour. This is Lynn Vartan. SUU Thunder ninety one point one. We are in the studio talking about this awesome book written by one of our faculty members Dr. Todd Petersen is the author and the book is titled It needs to look like we tried. Brand new this year. And that song you were listening to was burning down the house by the Talking Heads and you were telling me during the break that that there were other lyrics in that song that have to do with the book about TVs and things.

[00:36:49] That the line about you don't know what to expect staring into the TV set. I should have it in front of me. But that that whole idea worse in such a mediated culture right now and the talking heads really anticipated what that was going to mean like I don't even know if we even know anymore what the TV's supposed to be telling us about what's going on. So I wanted to just let that song for people who knew what was going on kind of unlock some other levels of being able to think because the whole center part of the book is about television reality television and how maybe reality television is a little bit. Well obviously it's more fake that it is real and how we might be in a partner time in our culture you know having a reality television star as a president not understanding anymore what's real and what's not real and what's what's a media event and what's not a media event.

[00:37:44] It's hard to tell. I mean my sister and I famously watched some reality TV together. I'm the one saying how can they do that. She just always just rolls her eyes story lines story line you know.

[00:37:57] The section that comes from is a whole chapter called unscripted not perfect.

[00:38:01] That's perfect. Well can you tell me a little bit for those who may not be aware of your style or her maybe listening and going like I want to check out this book. Tell me a little bit about how you perceive your style as a writer.

[00:38:15] Oh I it's it's so silly to say this but I'll blame it on you because I'm being interviewed. I think it's funny. That was one of the things I was shooting for. Other people have said that too. They say your satire and your wit comes right through. Oh that's great because it's always a weird thing to say I'm very funny. It's like saying that you're pretty or that you know you should listen to my band because we're really good. But the quotes say I'm sorry to say it but that's what we're shooting for. I wanted to deal with some pretty significant and serious things that happened to people but for me I like to use humor all the time I mean I use it in meetings to just say hey everything's get a little tense right here maybe if we laugh a little bit it can help.

[00:39:00] I've been in meetings with you when you do that.

[00:39:03] I should have at least a metre so I can know when to dilute in and when to pull it off. But one of my undergraduate professors said in a book once if you can't see the funny side of something you probably aren't seeing all the sides of it. And which means you're seeing it in an incomplete way. So I was shooting for funny. And my agent said it in a way that cracked me up he said when he was working with me on what the next book needs to be. He says I want to do that stuff. It's kind of dark weird a little bit violent and with some criminality but not necessarily the police. So I guess that's sort of an objective sense of what I was doing. I'm a really big fan of the Coen brothers really top to bottom everything that they do. And I really owe a lot to them because I've always liked their work and when I'm shooting to try to imitate something. It's that sense of a sort of weird ludicrous stuff that happens in Fargo for example purrfect or even some of the commentary stuff like they do in Hail Caesar which is really kind of ridiculous movie but it's also really very accurately about what the studio system in Hollywood was like and so that's what I was trying to do. And unduplicated what's going on in for example educational television for children in the center section of that so I try to be funny and I try. I try to think a lot about quirky and weird details. I'm a really big fan of the photographer Diane Arbus OK who's got these really interesting portraits of people who maybe aren't at the center of the population they're kind of off to either side in some cases. There are people with disabilities in some case there are just poor folks who come strolling together but she always did these portraits with dignity of these kind of strange and quirky individuals instead of really focusing on how grotesque they are. She really focused on how human they were. Even though the pictures themselves look weird and that's something I try to do in the work as well to say here's regular stuff going on but it might look a little bit weirder and less than normal than we think normal.

[00:41:10] And what's the photographer's name again.

[00:41:11] Diane Arbus The SUU Library has a very wonderful book of her photographs. And you might have to race me because I might want to go check it.

[00:41:24] Cool well to construct a story of this complexity. How how does the organizational process work. I mean especially with it being this kind of mosaic novel as you were saying is there a process to the organization. Can you let us in a little bit about how that process unfolds.

[00:41:46] My my process is a little bit wacky compared to what sometimes you learn in a creative writing class. You'll hear this kind of mystic talk about don't talk about your writing because you'll let your creative secret sacred fire. And I'm the opposite of that. I like to spitball. I like to brainstorm ideas with other people. And so one of my coconspirators are real close coconspirators my wife she's really sharp. She is an audio book addict I think she has like the you've listened to more audio books than anyone bad from audible. Oh that's all. From all the work so I like to say hey what if we did this or what if I did that and what if this is were going on. And you know all these kinds of things and then we end up talking it through. And she's got a really great sense and a good way of challenging me saying no that would just really be terrible don't ever do that or I just heard that in another book so don't do it now. And so we go back and forth and then once I feel like it's kind of cool hearing that's when I move into that kind of more private writing section. But I find that if I'm not writing moves too slowly to have these ideas and it's not as associative but so I like to let's start with a conversation and for that I need other people and then they'll give me their input and their ideas and then I feel like it's the creativity moving outside my head out into the world and then I can sort of gather it back up and then go sit down and try to write a coherent story out of that school. There's a lot of other things I'm sure I'm sure that are happening you know a little bit underneath the surface layer but that's really how I approach things and then and then there's all these processes too when you move from Reinert author where I got input back from my editor I didn't put back from my agent my agent had me rewrite like a third of it. Oh wow. To sort of get things tightened and to make some more connections so each one of those interactions with other people was another way of collaborating all the way up to collaborating with my publicist saying OK now that this book is done let's figure out how to create lines of connection with other people. So that's the process kind of from from the small personal to the public.

[00:43:56] And going back to those days cleaning the banks and writing on the paper where you were describing a really beautiful scene with a certain kind of light in the middle of the night and all that is is that what you see now in your writing or is it more a catchword catch can.

[00:44:14] I still say it's the ideal. I'm I mean I love an environment that's picturesque and just so. But being a father who's busy at work too. Now that doesn't happen anymore and so I guess I've tried to train myself to be able to function in the chaos while I was trying to figure out what to do I read an article about Wynton Marsalis Oh yeah. An interviewer had gone into his apartment in New York and it was full of people teenagers people coming and going from sports and they said that Wynton was in a corner composing on the piano. In the middle of all that yes someone asked him how he did that and he just looked at him and said I have to. And so that that works really great. Some of the purity that I get right now is because my wife years ago bought me a set of really nice Boey Bose noise canceling headphones. Oh yeah. And the first time I flipped that switch on and the whole world went oh yeah. I'm like oh this is great. I can write. So a lot of times it's now just setting an audio stage for myself and then and then working. And this isn't to say that I hate the people around me. Of course they're wonderful but part of kind of gaining that that place to work is to have a space that feels controlled and in balance. And then from there I think the work can come from. But if I had to if I could buy a bank I'd buy a bank.

[00:45:39] That's awesome. Do you have specific times of day that are more tend to be more fertile for you for writing?

[00:45:48] When I need to write new stuff or stuff that maybe more lyrical or more about the language I like to do it when I'm almost when I'm really sleepy. I think that the century that's up around that kind of says don't say stuff that's stupid or weird that century kind of gets a little tired and then talking wow and I can get around that that kind of thinking some of the stuff that I have to do that's organizational I have to do and I am sharp and awake like I can't copy it. Yeah when I'm sleepy. Right. Mistakes will happen. So I kind of look for those times knowing hey I'm going to do this thing that's going to be a little bit maybe psychedelic art. I've I've awakened myself back up from sleep to go right to try to capture that mental state when I do it. It's a little bit like method acting but maybe not maybe I should.

[00:46:37] It sounds pretty much like it. That's great. Well thank you for sharing that. I have one more song from the playlist that I'd love to play and that is by Huey Lewis and the news and it's called Do you believe in love. Can you tell us a little bit about the significance of that song in the playlist.

[00:46:56] There is a section of the book when a character says Do you believe in love to another character. And it came from that think there was such an innocence to pop music in the 80s where they could get away with that. And I have to say I'm not sure that I love the song but I love the chorus of the song and I love that it represents this whole time at least in my memory alive you know being in high school and whatever where the question Do you believe in love is not cheesy is not stupid and it's not ironic. And so when I decided to let that section of the book Fly I just wanted to fully embrace that Huey Lewis moment and I for people who don't know the song you're in for it. This is this is right out of the 80s. Well here we go Huey Lewis and the news. Do you believe in love.

[00:51:06] OK Welcome back to the apex hour. This is Lynn Vartan this is KSUU Thunder ninety one point one. And this week on the apex hour we're visited in the studio by Dr. Todd Petersen our own faculty member and also author who has a brand new book out. The book's title is it needs to look like we tried described as dark comic a little bit of criminality some fun but also failure.

[00:51:35] That's right. And no police.

[00:51:37] And no police. If you're interested in Todd's work you can definitely check out his Web site again it's a great Web site with all kinds of interesting things including the Superfriends initiative. I need to get Superfriends of you. Oh I'm going to work on that. Tell our audience what that means.

[00:51:54] A few years ago I decided to just start drawing some people on campus as if they were superheroes.

[00:51:59] Oh my God I love it.

[00:52:00] So the big thrill was I was up at the state capitol when I finished the one of President Wyatt as Captain America. And anybody who knows him knows how much he loves American history and I revealed that on my iPad to him and you could see that he was so thrilled and wanted to maintain some decorum because like all the legislatures legislators were there. So I've worked through some friends and some family to do that. But it's really fun. And I called it the the Superfriends initiative and I really need to pick that up it's a fun thing.

[00:52:30] Well it's really fun and it's on the Web site. And again the website is toddpetersen.org And again the newest book is titled. It needs to look like we tried. Well we have one last question that we always ask on the show it's kind of become a crowd favorite and that is what's turning you on this week and it could be anything could be movie it could be TV could be anything you like but we really love to give our listeners a little insight into what's turning you on these days.

[00:53:08] Well I won't talk about this really nice artichoke dip that I've been really into lately. I'll skip over to a book I just finished it's called Creative quest and it's by Quest Love the drummer for The Roots D.J. foody. And I had no idea that he was even a writer of books and he's done more than one and this is his most recent exploration of creativity how it works. And his best sort of case studies about creativity as it's happened I mean in some case he's talking about working with the Angelot and in some cases he's talking about Joseph Brodsky's graduation address to college students saying go out and get bored because it's the only way that you'll ever do anything interesting is to feel boredom and try to escape it. Oh that's such a great book. It's it's not. It's deep but it's not heavy grey and you get a real chance to see how close Love's mind works. And plus he talks all about roots albums hip hop record production and she's working for people for all the 20 years or more that he's been a musician. He also talks about gang which I didn't know much about. And it was really cool. So I would recommend that it's a great read. And I think it will be energizing for people who do creative things.

[00:54:25] It's been on my list for a while. Again that's Quest Love and the title one more time.

[00:54:30] Creative quest creative Quest. Awesome. Well Todd thank you so much for spending the time and joining me today on the apex hour it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you.

[00:54:47] Thank you.

[00:54:48] All right well we'll be back in a couple of weeks and this podcast will show up don't forget to subscribe. Leave us a little message or some kind of reviews so we can get more people turned on. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the apex hour here on KSUU ninety one point one. Come find us again next Thursday at 3:00 p.m. for more conversations with the visiting guests at Southern Utah University and new music to discover for your next playlist. And in the meantime we would love to see you at our events on campus, to find out more. Check out suu.edu/apex. Until next week this is Lynn Vartan saying goodbye from the apex right here thunder ninety one point one.