Story-maker, writer, radio personality, woodworker and Brattleboro treasure Tom Bodett invites us into the story of his life in words -- and near death -- in the utterly straightforward and completely captivating way only he can. Tom's 'way with words' has fueled a fascinating life and career that has led him lately to open a woodworking school and gallery in the heart of Brattleboro, Vermont. The podcast begins with Tom's framing of the piece to follow through the lens of 'Words' for the Brattleboro Words Project. From growing up in a large family in Michigan a bit of a rebellious youth, to his hilarious seventh-grade efforts at poetry and a school assembly where becoming the object of hilarity opens new doors in his mind. A catastrophic accident leads him to hit the road to settle in wild-wild 1970s Alaska where he builds buildings and his writing career with a first piece in the Anchorage Daily News. He moves on to radio KBBI in Alaska where a chance piece on his dog's castration gains quick notice for its style and humor and starts submitting personal essays on a regular basis. Within four months he's a contributor on National Public Radio. In 10 months he has a book contract. He describes signing with Motel 6 and how his mother's adage and seven little words 'We'll leave the light on for you," ignited his 30+ year relationship as spokesperson for that company. He talks about how various genres of writing and spoken words have impacted him in different ways and how he has struggled with the identity of 'writer.' Being a panelist on NPR’s 'Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me!' builds confidence in his ability to go 'out without a net.' He says it wasn’t until he was invited to appear on The Moth in front of a live audience at the Flynn Theater in Burlington, Vermont, that he found his a true calling with storytelling. In stark and moving terms, he reflects on the importance of honesty and courage in any art form, and offers advice to those seeking to 'make it.' He shares how facing his relationship with his father through that first moth story (link shared below in Notes) broke through his own limitations toward a more deeply transparent storytelling and vocal art. He reflects on the human need for narrative, and his ultimate identity as 'story maker.'
This episode was produced and edited by Sally Seymour for the Brattleboro Words Trail and those segments were mastered at Guilford Sound. Angelika Pavlovna edited the Brattleboro Words Trail segments into this podcast. Executive Producer and podcast host is Lissa Weinmann.
Bodett also penned the forward in the Brattleboro Words Project book "Print Town: Brattleboro's Legacy of Words" available at Everyone's Books in Brattleboro. See a short vid and more info on the book at: https://brattleborowords.org/print-town-brattleboros-legacy-of-words-the-book/
LINKS:
Tom Bodett official website:
Hatch Space is the woodworking school and gallery Tom founded in downtown Brattleboro along with renovating/preserving a historic building which has a printshop and other creative maker spaces.
'Inside Passage' Tom’s story on The Moth, performed March 16, 2012:
https://themoth.org/stories/inside-passage
Tom has written seven books and sixteen current audio publications. Writing credits include book reviews for the New York Times and reviews and articles for The Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in TV Guide, Reader’s Digest, Redbook, Harper’s Magazine’s, In a Word, and he was a regular columnist for Mr. Showbiz, a satirical entertainment magazine published by Starwave Corporation. His voice appears in Steven Spielberg’s animated cartoon, Animaniacs, and the feature length Animaniacs video, The Wishing Star, and the Pinky and the Brain series for Warner Brothers Animation. His voice has been featured on Saturday Night Live, National Geographic Explorer and several Ken Burns' documentaries.
Tom Bodett: Maker of Stories
Host, Lissa Weinmann: Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.
Narrator Tom Bodett: I'm Tom Bodett, and I live in dumbest in Vermont, where I have for the last 17 or 18 years. And I'm here to talk about words, what words have done for me, what they mean to me, the power they have had over me.
My family was not a literary family, nobody in my family read. There were six kids. We were just a rabble. My dad was a busy mechanical engineer. Very much an engineer. Heart and soul. And my mom was a, you know, mother of six kids and worked as a bank teller. And, you know, literature did not really exist in the house.
So being in a mob like that, we were always, you know, unconsciously looking for the thing that made us unique. You know, my brother played football and darn it, I was going to play some nails and and how you do. And I found that being a writer of anything and a reader was my thing.
I first began to appreciate the power of words in the seventh grade, I had written a poem for my English class about Thanksgiving and it was terrible. It started with the line 'Thanksgiving, Oh Thanksgiving' and then like the Englishmen are here. And of course, it rhymed Abba Baby, everything rhymed in the seventh grade. It was an early form of rap. I think that's what I'd like to think.
My teacher liked it, and she asked if I would be willing to read that in the all-school Thanksgiving sort of gala at the Auditorium. Oh boy, that was big time. So I told my mom about it. She was very excited for me. So she dressed me up in my older brother's suit, which was as heavy wool scratchy suit. And even though he's my older brother, he was about an inch and a half shorter than me at the time. So this suit, it was like these high water pants and the sleeves came up my wrists. And I walk out on stage in front of like 400 of my crummy friends and associates in this ill fitting suit, sweating buckets into my shoes. And all I had to do is appear and the audience started laughing and of course, the teachers are going up and down the aisle whacking ears and things to quiet everyone. And then I delivered 'Thanksgiving Oh Thanksgiving'.
The Englishmen are here because of course, your voice is going to squeak in a circumstance like that when you're in the middle of your puberty and the place just started, you know, roaring with laughter. They quieted down again, I continued. And each verse of this excruciating six verse poem began with 'Thanksgiving Oh Thanksgiving'. And every time I said it, the audience would roar louder. And before long they, the teachers had completely lost control of the auditorium. People were weeping and holding their guts with laughter. And I realized that that moment that it was easier to be humorous than it was a poet. And I felt a great power over that audience who was absolutely shredding me in that moment. That's when I realized that words have power.
And so I carried my writing habit into high school with me, where I continued writing terrible poetry. It was absolutely awful stuff. Just ooh, I can't even hardly describe it except to say 'Thanksgiving. Ah, Thanksgiving' is a pretty good indicator of this style I was pursuing.
And then I went to college at Michigan State University. I hated college, I was stuck in Michigan. I felt I wanted to be out west. I wanted to be a mountain man. I was reading Jack Kerouac and I was reading Jack London. And I just thought the West was where I needed to be. I had this writing Professor Al Drake, who was also a friend and mentor. I went to him and I told him what I wanted to do. And he just looked at me and he said, 'Yeah, yeah, I think you should.' And so, you know where your writing career is at when your favorite writing professor is encouraging you to drop out of school and do something else. But that was exactly what I needed to do, and that was exactly what I did.
Left school in the middle of spring term and was out in Ashland, Oregon, by early May. By late May, I was in the intensive care unit of Rock Valley Memorial Hospital, burned over 25 percent of my body from an electrical accident that I walked myself into and becoming slowly addicted to morphine and learning how to grapple with pain.
I didn't write, I was not writing at all. I was totally just living. I never wrote another poem in my life. One of the big changes that happened to me because of that accident is I became fearless. Once you survived something like that where you've almost been killed, it's kind of like, well, what else can you show me? You've kind of like been through the worst. So I suddenly found myself able and willing to do incredibly dangerous, stupid things, which I enjoyed immensely.
I had to go back to Michigan for a short time. I drove cabs to make some money. And then before you knew it, I was on my way to Alaska and I made it there within a year and a month of when I had been electrocuted.
Alaska in 1976, it was a wonderland. There was money everywhere. Jobs, young people. Drinking, fighting. Every single job seemed designed to kill you. I just thrived on it, and I did not write a word. I just started doing stuff. I went logging. I went fishing. I worked in canneries. And then after a few years, I got into construction, first as a laborer, then as a carpenter, and then eventually I became a house builder of my own. I was 23 years old. And this was what Alaska was in the 70s. You could be 23 years old and have a contracting company with 20 people working for you because it's Alaska, and that's what you could do. I lied my way into every single job I ever had. Maybe that's where I learned how to write fiction because nobody knew anybody in Alaska. Everybody came from somewhere else. And the joke was, you could walk down the street and somebody at a building site would hold up a hammer and say, Hey, kid, what's this? And you go, That's a hammer. They say, you're hired.
And the first job I did as an independent contractor was I built an airplane hangar at the Petersburg International Airport because the guy said, "Hey, I saw you were building a house over there. Have you ever built an airplane hangar?" I said, "Yes, of course. That's all I used to do before I came up here." And so I became successful building contractor. I made more money and I ever thought I would make, and life was just rolling merrily along and I was not writing anything. I didn't even feel the urge to write. (Musical break)
A few more years on, about probably eight years into my dry spell as we can think of it, I was getting tired of of building. The boom in Alaska was over. And so I was kind of in my mind wondering what other options there might be for me. And it was right about then that I decided to quit smoking. And as I was going through those early things you do when you're trying to stop smoking, you know you're chewing on carrots, you're you know, you're drumming your fingers, you're doing all this stuff. I wrote this little essay about what I was doing, I think just to keep my hands busy. And I read it, and I thought that's not bad, it was funny, and it was kind of cool.
There was a thing in the Anchorage Daily News in their Sunday magazine called 'We Alaska', and so I sent it up to the newspaper and the very next weekend, there I was on Page Two. And so I thought, 'well, my literary career has just peaked.' And I went down and got extra copies for to send my mom and Aunt, Dolly and all of this and one for the scrapbook. And figuring that was it. That was really fun.
And then I get this phone call that very day from a guy I knew who worked at KBI, the local public radio station. And he said, "Hey, I read that thing of yours in the paper. It's pretty funny. Would you ever consider doing something like that for the radio?" And so I said, "Yeah, Joe, I might try that. What could I write about? I mean, what do I, what do I say?" He says "Whatever, he says, like what are you doing tomorrow?" I said, "Well, actually, I'm taking my black Labrador to be castrated in the morning at nine o'clock." And and he said "That that sounds like fun. Why don't you write about that?" And I did.
I took my poor dog down to the vet and he came home without a rudder and I wrote about the whole thing, the whole sorry experience from the dog's point of view, from my point of view, and I recorded it on the radio. That was the first piece that ever aired with these very, you know, insensitive and poorly thought out remarks on my dog. And it was a hit. Everybody loved it. All my friends are calling Bo dad. That was hilarious. And so I did it again, you know, I wrote about halibut, fishing, I went fishing with my buddy. And then I wrote about where the socks in the dryer actually go. And all of this stupid stuff that goes through my head were suddenly material and and I realized that every single thing I did was kind of funny and fun, and it was almost like it changed the entire way I looked at my life.
And my life got immediately more interesting to me because it was overlaid with this sort of scrim of language over my actions. Even something like slipping on the ice and falling became material rather than an unfortunate event. And I began to enjoy my life in a way that I hadn't in many years, probably. And I am guessing since I stopped writing. I feel like I rediscovered the power that language, in words, has: It adds meaning to a life when you are inclined to describe it to someone. It's almost as if I didn't exist until I had to put words on it.
And so I kept doing it every week on KBI and then, very quickly through no effort of my own, they worked their way up through the network and within four months of my first piece of writing in 10 years, I had a piece on the evening news and National Public Radio. And two months after that, I had a book contract from Addison Wesley Publishers in Boston to do a collection of these things. And I was a writer like that. I was writing a personal essay every week for three years, and I had two books of them published. I was a mainstay on All Things Considered, part of their weekly commentator lineup.
Advertising people found me. You may have heard of the Motel Six commercials, which have been, you know, basically the thing that's floated my boat for the last 30 years. Even though I have written hundreds of thousands of words in my lifetime, it turns out that I only needed seven of them, which is "We'll leave the light on for you" because they've they've earned everything else I've done by exponential factors.
I'm reluctant to tell this story to struggling writers because I didn't try very hard, I just fell into it. I'm often asked as anyone who's you know, published or in the public eye is, you know, how do you get started? How can I get my stuff on the radio? How can I get published? And the only thing that I can ever say is write all the time and show it to everybody because you never know quite where the person who's going to make the difference and throw your switch is at. In my case, I found them very quickly. I found, you know, a couple of very influential people heard my work and I would say, number one, my friend Joe Gallagher, KBI. Number two, my friend Corey Flintoff up in Alaska Public Radio. And number three, this producer named Debbie Dane at All Things Considered, who got my reel, listened to it and said, 'We've got to put this guy on the air."
Now, not everyone is going to enjoy that kind of luck, but that is how it happens. You put your stuff out there, you share it with a lot of people. And if it's any good, somebody's going to recognize it and help you out. That's the way it works. (musical interlude)
After writing personal essays for three years, it became very difficult to keep coming up with things that didn't feel contrived. I began to get sick of myself. My life was not as interesting to me anymore because no one I was no longer a house building, hard drinking Alaska construction guy. Now I was a writer. I was spending most of my time in my office, and I was getting boring even to myself.
And so I decided that I would start writing fiction, short stories, and I had an opportunity to do a radio show kind of a Prairie Home Companion kind of a thing called 'The End of the Road,' which we recorded in front of a live audience for two years in Alaska. And the centerpiece of each show, like with Garrison Keillor, was a was a monologue, basically a short story that I would write every week and read. And that freed me up to do a lot of things that I couldn't do anymore with my personal essays because I could just make it up.
And I did that for another three or four years, and I published three books of my fiction. And it was not very good. It was funny, I think. But as far as writing goes, it wasn't very good writing. So I very quickly became disenchanted with fiction writing as well. And I wasn't getting very good reviews in terms of being recognized by my peers, if you will. That wasn't happening. Fact, even my friend Al Drake, my old writing professor was asked by People magazine what he thought of my writing because I had just published my third book. And he said, "Well," he says, "I think he appeals to the kind of people who don't read very much." And he was absolutely right. And I realized that I had a long way to go before that was not going to be true anymore. And it made writing very stressful and it made it no fun anymore.
Even though I restarted my writing with radio, I wouldn't consider that spoken word. I was writing it and I was reading the writing. It wasn't really very good, and it took me many years of writing for radio and reading for radio to get better at that, but it never got all the way better. And I started this long process of not being a writer anymore.
It was very difficult for me to admit that I didn't like writing. My entire ego and identity at that point was wrapped up in it. 'Oh, what do you do, Tom?' ... 'I'm a writer.' Somebody asks me on an airplane, you know, 'What do you do?' Well, on airplanes I actually tell people I drive a road grader because nobody ever has a follow up question for that. But that was who I was, you asked what I did. I'm a writer. And I wanted to stop doing that.
It took forever for me to let go of being a writer to make it complete. I had to replace it with something. And two things happened that helped me with that. Number one, I began making things out of wood again; I started making furniture. I found that very satisfying in a way that writing hadn't been in many years.
And the other thing that happened was not so long ago, I got invited by the Moth Storytelling Project in 2011 to do a story at their main stage event at the Flynn Theater in Burlington. It's about 4500 seats, and I love The Moth. It's true stories told live. No notes. Just a storyteller and a microphone in the middle of the stage. It's like pure story. And I always wanted to try it, but I had this fear of working without a script which had always kept me from doing anything like that.
But in the meantime, I had started working with 'Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!' NPR's weekend news quiz, which is all improv. There's a table there with three panelists and Peter Segal, the host and an announcer and a live audience. And you just go out there. It's like skydiving. You're just working without a net. And over the few years that I'd done that, I realized that I could do that.
Working live in front of an audience was exhilarating, for one thing. And I got the confidence that it was going to be there like, 'don't worry about going out there and not having anything to say. You'll think of something.' It takes a while to get that kind of confidence. And " Wait, Wait' really helped me with that.
And so when The Moth called and asked me if I would be interested in doing a story for them, I said, 'Yes, I would.' And they are wonderful editors and they are gifted directors, so I pitched the story I wanted to tell -- the story of the electrical accident I had had more than 20 years earlier. As I was running through the story with them, telling them about how I, you know, kind of this power pole and then boom. And then this they were going to cut my arm off and then I was fearless and I went to Alaska and couldn't get enough of adventure...
And at some point, as I was telling it, I mentioned this letter that my father had sent me. Shortly after I got out of the hospital. My father was not a expressive character. He wasn't a very good father. I mean, I loved him. We all love our dads, right? But I didn't like him, and he had sent this letter praising me for getting through what I had. And he told me in the letter that I had been as brave as any soldier wounded in battle, which was huge. My dad was a World War Two veteran and a military sort of, you know, worshiper, and him saying that to me was huge.
I recognize now the thing that really changed me about that accident. It wasn't the accident. It was that recognition from my father, but I didn't know it. And it wasn't until I was reading that story back to the producer at The Moth over the phone, and I mentioned that letter. And she let it go by. And then when I was all done, she said, "Let's go back to that letter from your dad. Your voice kind of caught a little bit when you mentioned it." And I said, "Yeah, you know, I had never mentioned it before. I don't know that I've ever told anybody about that letter." It surprised me, too. And she said, "Let's look at that," and we ended up making the story about my relationship with my dad, which is something I had never dealt with, I had never talked about.
My father had recently passed away within months. And I could not have done that any sooner than that moment. I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready for that kind of honesty. I wasn't ready to be that vulnerable. And I told that story on that stage in Burlington. And when I stood there and at one moment in the story, I got emotional enough that I had to sort of stop and gather my throat back together. And I realized that that audience, those 1400 people, were just there for me. Like, I could have probably left the stage and come back and they would have still been waiting for me. I had never felt anything like that in front of a group of people in all my years of performing on stages. There was something primordial happening there. There is something in our DNA that had us in that moment just locked together, this man telling an excruciatingly personal story. And these people connected with it. None of us could look away.
All of a sudden, storytelling became my new drug. My relationship with language changed once again, where I realized that what had been missing in my writing all those years was that honesty. It was that absolute put it all out there and let people see you. That was what was missing when I realized that I couldn't write the kind of work that I love to read from other writers. It wasn't so much a lack of of talent, certainly that was some of it. But it was a lack of honesty. It was a lack of courage. You've got to put it all out there.
There's an unburdening that comes with that when you stop filtering the information you give to other people. It's a joke we use, right? Oh, 'he has no filter.' You shouldn't have a filter when you're creating art because people are going to see through it anyway. But they're not going to see it as clearly. And so it's not going to grab them. That's the kind of writing I was doing previous to that. Oh, I can see there's some, you know, there's maybe some wisdom, some honesty behind all this, but it's actually I can't quite reach it.
If I'm remembered as a writer, I'm not going to be remembered as a very good writer. If I'm remembered as a storyteller, I'm not going to be remembered as someone who did a lot of it because I only started doing it in my 50s. I would like to think of myself as a story maker. I think that that is the common thread between all of it. It's language and we're all story makers. I believe our brains are wired to do it. We think in narratives, our brains force everything into a narrative. And so it's a natural thing for us to do. So what I would like to be remembered as is someone who made some good stories.
This episode of the Bratteboro Words Trail was produced and edited by Sally Seymour. Mastering for the original Brattleboro Words Trail segments was by Guilford Sound and final podcast editing was by Angelika Pavlovna. Executive producer was me, Lissa Weinmann. Don’t forget to visit Tom Bodett’s new enterprise: the Hatch Space woodworking school and gallery located at 22 High Street near the corner of High and Main streets in Downtown Brattleboro. Thanks for listening and we look forward to seeing you next month on the Brattleboro Words Trail Podcast.