Charlie Bleecker

My Dad works at a crappy job, drinks too much, and his only friend is his brother. I always thought he led an unfulfilled life. But I had an epiphany:

@tinyrevver Haven’t listened yet but I heard it’s very bingeable: thetelepathytapes.com

I am driving across the country this week! I would love your recommendations for good podcasts to binge. Looking for something not personal growth-related (I am set on that front lol.) I want to hear good stories/POVs that surprise me.

“I think this is a pattern that holds for many women—professional productivity comes after and often gets a boost from the experience of mothering our growing children.” -Megan Marshall (Pulitzer Prize winning biographer)

“When I teach memoir, one of my ten commandments for students is: Write from a place of love. Meaning, you need to love all your characters equally, even the monsters. Meaning, your motivation for telling your story must be love, rather than revenge or loathing or desire. Work written from any place other than love reads as superficial and enervated.” -Joanna Rakoff

@DylanoA4 I think that’s the tagline for Coraline.

@alexgmichael @camilomoresala Uhhh yes please!

@camilomoresala @BleeckerCharlie Come make an East Coast appearance

If you’d like to be friends my availability is Monday-Friday, 9am-2pm.

@alexgmichael Honestly this message is a comforting relief. Also, since we’ll be meeting in person for a few days in April, that will fulfill our friendship quota for at least a year.

@BleeckerCharlie I will send you a Calendly link to book time re: friendship

@charliedbecker You will marvel at how different they are, though if you had another girl you would do the same thing. The best is when they start to actually play with each other.

Baby boy Becker is here. I had just got the hang of having a little girl. I’d love to hear advice or anecdotes on raising a boy.

Basic rules of good behavior for the memoirist (from Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction): -Say difficult things. Including difficult facts. -Be harder on yourself than you are on others. Inevitably you will not portray others just as they would like to be portrayed. But you can at least remember that the game is rigged: only you are playing voluntarily. -Try to accept the fact that you are, in company with everyone else, in part a comic figure. -Stick to the facts.

"The good and honest memoir is neither revenge nor self-justification, neither self-celebration nor self-abnegation. It is a record of learning." -Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

@camilomoresala I love the writer-editor dynamic of the authors!

@BleeckerCharlie We are reading the same book right now :)

"Much overstuffed prose reflects a desire to bully, to impress, or to hide." -Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction

NANNY WANTED: We are seeking a nanny who loves to hang out with kids and speaks to them like they’re people. About Us: We are a frantic couple with two children—sometimes adorable, sometimes not—aged 3 and 4, located in coastal North Carolina. Our family values are as follows: 1. We return the grocery carts 2. We look people in the eyes 3. We tell the truth 4. We cheer each other on 5. We do hard things Both of us work from home so at least one of us will be around if you need a bathroom break or have a question or if we hear a kid crying for more than sixty seconds. Because we are so high-strung it would be nice if you balanced that with a more calm, less-reactive demeanor, but if you’re high energy that’s fine, too, as long as you’re not annoying. Job Responsibilities: 1. Keep the kids busy, entertained, or focused. Our daughter will be mostly content as long as you let her cover you in stuffed animals and blankets and read her books. It is our son who needs a more hands-on approach, and that means games, imaginative play, and physical work. You can let him make some decisions but not all. He needs rules, parameters of play, and instruction. 2. Keep the kids—namely George—away from our office doors. We have often had wonderfully well-meaning nannies who sit in the living room and gently coax my son with light, unspecific suggestions to “come play.” That doesn’t work. The reason he is banging on our doors is because he’s bored—see Job Responsibility #1. 3. Acknowledge—and don’t dismiss—the kids’ statements. If George says he doesn’t like something, don’t respond with, “Sure you do.” Even if it is something you have all decided to do, like playing in the driveway with sidewalk chalk, you can still say something like, “You don’t like this? Okay, I get that, but we already decided we were going to do this, so let’s play here for five minutes and then we can do something else.” Requirements: - No baby talk. Only human talk. - Be on time. We are expecting you. We are waiting for you. We have a countdown until you arrive. Five minutes late is not on time. - Do not complain about being tired or overworked. - I’m fairly easy to talk to but please don’t tell me about your social life if it involves you getting drunk. One time I asked a nanny if she got a new phone and she told me that yes, she did, because over the weekend she dropped it in the bar’s toilet. Another time I asked how she got that bruise on her knee. I regretted it as soon as I asked. - I don’t know what the deal is with this generation but ghosting us is not cool. I have been left hanging after I’ve sent texts like, Are you available next Saturday? …. Are you still available to babysit? …. Did you get a chance to look at your schedule yet? Once, we had a nanny who was with our family for over two years (she had an entire page of pictures in my daughter’s baby book) and on the last time I saw her she told me, unprompted, that if anything were to happen to me and my husband, she would want to take our kids as her own. She left our house and never responded to my texts after that. I should admit here that my husband tells me that I ghost nannies all the time—because I don’t ask them to come back—but I have never ignored a question in a text. Perhaps my approach is still cowardly. Perhaps I should send a text that it’s not a good fit. Perhaps I should list the reasons why, like, for example, my son just doesn’t respond well to you—which is usually the case. Compensation: We typically pay $20 an hour but if you’re good, and you keep the kids engaged and occupied and you get their snacks and lunches ready and clean up before you leave, we’re happy to pay $25 an hour. References: I don’t need any. I know that if I call the people on your list they will tell me you’re great, and I have yet to figure out the right questions to ask to find out what I need to know. Anticipated Start Date: How about this Saturday 8:30am-12:30pm??

If I can’t think of an example to include with my idea then I can’t write the idea. Without the example the idea is unconvincing at best, and potentially boring, generic, or manipulative at worst. For example, when recalling a relationship that lasted eight years, I remembered that when he got drunk he was mean to me, but it was so long ago that I can’t remember anything he actually did or said. If I decided to keep that in without an example (“He was a mean drunk”) I'd lose the reader's trust because I have stated my opinion without anything to back it up.

@charliedbecker DO ITTTTTT.

I realized about a month ago that all my life, when I’ve daydreamt about the future, the version of me “who’s made it” is basically a talk show host, in a space somewhere between like late night and long form interview. So I’m going to start a show.

When you think you’ve written a stellar final draft and then you send it to your editor.

@aliviaduran @1WriteofPassage Thanks so much, Alivia!

Write Unsparingly About Yourself with @BleeckerCharlie x @1WriteofPassage was amazing. "You cannot control the takeaway for the reader. If you try and control the takeaway, then you are not treating your audience like a genius."

@alexgmichael Got it. When I thought about breaking up with my boyfriend the first time.

@alexgmichael The once or twice thought of thinking about starting to consider something…almost like it’s not even your thought, but someone else’s fleeting idea that somehow passed through your brain. …I’m sure I’ve had this before.

It's been a couple months since my dog passed, and my house looks roughly the same. His food bowls still sit in the kitchen next to the refrigerator. His bed, with the gray blanket that smells like him, is still tucked into the corner of my office. His giant woven basket of toys still lies in the corner of the living room. There have been one or two times that I have thought about thinking about starting to consider getting rid of this stuff. That's as far as I've gotten. Today I watched the music video for the song Shampoo Bottles by Peach Pit. I always thought it was about a breakup. And it is - but it turns out it's also about all kinds of loss, including that of a pet, which is executed both hilariously and poignantly in the video when a guy finds a person on Craigslist to act like the dog he just lost. All of this is to say that the video - particularly the lyrics below - fucking wrecked me. "I'm sitting with your stuff alone / Man, why can't I just let it go?"

@mvarghoose lol seriously!