Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
It is hard to find good memoir written by and about people who are not famous. And yet, these are some of the best memoirs to read. They are so much more relatable than celebrity memoirs. This is what inspired me to create Definitely Not Famous, a podcast where I interview memoirists about their stories. My goal with this podcast is to elevate the stories of everyday people who truly are More Extra than Ordinary.
What do Don Quixote, Sailing Alone Around the World, and King Lear have in common with surfing? My next guest, RC Shaw, aka Ryan, writes about his adventures in a quirky and entertaining way, similar to Bill Bryson, except with a definite Nova Scotia twist. Welcome to Definitely Not Famous. I'm Rebecca Hogue, your show host. In this podcast, I seek out memoir authors who are not celebrities, at least not yet, and interview them about their books. I'm looking for stories that are more extra than ordinary.
My guest today is Ryan Shaw, who writes under the pen name RC Shaw. He's the author of two books, Louisbourg or Bust and Captain Solitude. Both are about bikepacking and surfing adventures along the shores of Nova Scotia. Ryan's day job is as a school librarian. When he publishes books, he was a high school English teacher.
Writing memoir requires authors to be vulnerable, and Ryan shared some questionable decisions in his books. That got me wondering, how awkward would it feel to know that his students were reading his books? So my first book, Louisbourg bust that's when i was more in the high school english classroom so a couple students did read it back then i think maybe one or two students have read captain solitude but i don't uh i definitely don't foist it on them but a couple of them have sought it out and given it a read or it's more of like their parents might be reading it so not many students have read it yeah i haven't I definitely haven't assigned it. That's the thing. I was writing memoir, writing, I guess, like a true nonfiction story about my own life. I want to be as honest as possible and open as possible, but also consider my career, my job as a teacher and a librarian and in a school community. But I have to let that go because I want to be honest. I want to tell the true story no matter what. And I just hope it won't get me in hot water. But the other option is just to sand down all the edges and make it really PG, which I also don't want to do.
Yeah, it's not too awkward. I don't mind. I'm trying to be way more open with my life and the things that I'm into.
Ryan's adventures involved what is known as free camping, that is, finding a place to sleep that doesn't cost money. I have some experience with this from an around-the-world bike trip. It was something that I always found challenging, so I asked Ryan about his experience with free camping. I found it was an easy way to get out of the spotlight. If you have a strategy,
you don't know where you're going to be at the end of the night if it's one of those days. For me, at a certain point in the day I'd always be just my antenna would be up for camping spots and then so I just keep going until I thought okay this looks right or this this dead-end road might be interesting to check out and then beaches are helpful too because if you can haul your stuff down the beach a little bit and then just turn into the forest there you can pretty easily disappear, in the book I have very varying degrees of success of finding places to set up a hammock tent or even sleep but I always the way I did it was just I'd make a decision and I go for it and then I just I'm really quiet and try to, make as little impact on the area around me as possible, get everything set up, and then go to sleep.
Channeling Joshua Slocum's legendary solo voyage, Ryan seeks out solitude on his journey. In the book, he explores the emotional highs and lows of seeking solitude, balancing isolation with a need for connection. I'm much more of a connection person myself, and I can relate to his yes philosophy. This was an interesting little balance between solitude because I was really trying to channel Joshua Slocum and he in his sailing journey was alone for three years really. Off and on he came on land here and there. So I was trying to feel that solitude as well. So I wasn't always searching out social opportunities. But then sometimes after a day or two of being alone, when I'd be just wanting to meet someone. I was on and off with wanting to meet people and being open to that. But yeah, like a lot of the times it was just lucky, meet someone on the beach and then strike up a conversation. And then that maybe led to an invitation to do something. And I always would say yes, if I was invited to go and do something. And yeah, so it really does. I think if you were looking for a super social experience, bike camping is awesome because you can just stop and talk to people anytime.
And you're not flying past in a car, so you can linger, you can zip back, or stumble on something, you can stay for a while.
Ryan's adventures come with quirky twists. I asked Ryan about his meeting psychic mediums during his Captain Solitude journey, hoping to connect with the ghost of Joshua Slocum. Exciting part of my journey in Captain Solitude was getting to connect with some psychic mediums along the way. If you've never heard of him, what you want to know first of all is that he is a Canadian and he's not American. That's a little myth that is easily bustable and any surfer or sorry sailor who knows Slocum knows that already. But even still, he considered himself what he called a naturalized Yankee. He moved away from Nova Scotia where he grew up and he left when he 16 years old, and he lived in the United States for the rest of that time. Even he would have said he was an American. You want to know that he's Canadian, that's specifically Nova Scotian, and then you want to know that he was the first person to sail alone around the world. That had never been done before. So there had been some circumnavigations, Magellan, Drake, and other sailors who were sailing with big crews.
But Slocum was the very first person to do it from 1895 to 1898 in a boat that he pretty much rebuilt himself. And so it's like this amazing story of self-determination, willpower, and then like skill, because he knew sailing so well that he was confident enough to do it. And it took him three years and two months. I would say Slocum, and then the reason why he's still well known is that he wrote B classic sailing story, Sailing Alone Around the World. So you can pick up his book and join him on the journey. When a friend of mine passed me that book a few years before I decided to go chasing after his ghost. And I looked at it, I was like, wait a minute, this is an incredible story. And this guy's from Nova Scotia, like he starts the first line, he's on the cold mountain, in cold North Mountain near Digby Neck. And so I just got curious. I read the book and then started to read his biographies and every single biography ended with the same kind of big question marks. Like he disappeared about a decade after he wrote the book, disappeared in the Caribbean. No one knows how he died. The end.
So I was like, that can't be the end. That became a huge hook for me. Okay, maybe I can figure this mystery out.
Our conversation moved on to writing craft. When writing Captain Solitude, Ryan decided to try something different, writing the entire first draft by hand, something that I would not even consider doing.
This one, I wanted to try something different. I wanted to write it by hand. So rather than typing it and interacting with a computer on my first draft. So I did write the whole first draft longhand. And that, again, I was really trying to do what Slocum did with his book. He wrote it in 1899. So obviously, he had no screen and no tech and not even a typewriter. So he wrote that with a pen. So that was how I wrote the first draft. Then typing it up took way longer than I expected. I thought i'd be able to type it up in a few weeks it took more like two months of typing hard but that became like draft 1.5 i felt like it because i would make some i would definitely structure paragraphs a little bit differently i would catch some things in my messy first draft and that's the other thing i should say about the first draft is i wanted to write it by moving forward and really not looking back too much so get it all out get it all out in a messy first draft and then tidied up later on and that that allowed me to make sure that I could get the chapters written and just keep the momentum going because I was also trying to channel that feeling of being on a bike trip which you would know well where after a few days once you get in the groove you get that momentum and every day you're on the bike again and moving so that's how I wanted it to feel while I was writing it and I didn't want to put the brakes on too much.
So then craft wise after that it was once I did have a publishing deal I got paired up with a really good editor so he and I worked together on the manuscript and I wanted him to be as honest as possible and brutally so with parts of it so when I got the feedback he liked a lot of it but there's there's parts that he had major suggestions for.
So I had to do a significant amount of rewriting, but I was up for it because 95% of his comments I said, yeah, he's got it. He's a professional. So I'm going to go and say yes to all these things and try it out. And I think that helped me feel better about the book in its published form for sure.
Dialogue and memoir is a special challenge. I'm still trying to figure it out myself. It can make memoir feel alive, but capturing it is not easy. Every author approaches it differently. So I asked Ryan about his approach to dialogue in his books. I was taking a lot of notes as I was traveling. I was able to write down some parts of dialogue verbatim. If people I was speaking with or like snippets of phrases that they said, I was quickly writing those down afterwards, almost in a creepy way. But I tried to keep them I tried to jot as much as I could but the other side is I did have a voice recorder and so about three or four different folks along the road I knew I think I need to ask them would they be willing to sit with me and let us record our conversation so I did have some recorded conversation obviously that makes creating dialogue easy.
Much easier. Then it's just a bit of, not omitting, but like trimming out some certain parts of it. But yeah, I tried my best to be as true and honest and as close to exactly what was said as possible. I think one approach is maybe just if you don't use quotation marks and you paraphrase, that's one way to go. But I really wanted there to be dialogue in the story. And And so I did my very best to capture it as honestly as I could. But it's not easy. It's definitely not easy to bring dialogue alive from a conversation on the page. But I think it's possible. So that was a big challenge for sure.
Sometimes we'll see that a disclaimer or in a foreword, just a mention of some of this dialogue has been reconstructed to the best of my abilities. But we when we're studying that we always study books like the perfect storm or where there's an event that happened where no one survived but the author has construct the dialogue the best they can based on talking to multiple people and reading as much as they can and then working up a dialogue that is believable but reading the perfect storm because you read the first few pages is that this dialogue is ultimately made up by the author. I think you can get away with anything as long as you tell your reader that up front and they know what you're doing.
One of the challenges writers face, especially new writers, is figuring out what the title of the book should be. Ryan reveals how collaboration with his editor helped him move from his original title to the one that ultimately stuck. Captain Solitude. For Captain Solitude, the original title was Slocum Don't Surf. So that was like a play on Apocalypse Now. And that one where I had written it on my surfboard, it was my totem. I was carrying it with me as a title. And I kept it for a while until I was partnered up with James Langer, my editor. And he said it's a good title, but it has a negative connotation. There's like a negative grammar to it in a way. And I thought, oh, that's an interesting point. and i think a wise thing to do as an editor is just to say even if you think the title is really good just take a day or take a couple days and brainstorm me a list of titles come up with a handful of other titles to challenge the one you have and if it's still standing at the end then you know you have a good title but that that sent me down set me on a chase for a few other titles and then when i landed on captain solitude and i thought i thought it was stronger i liked it and And then I mentioned to James, and he's like, yeah, you got your title. So there you go. And if your original one's still there, then you know it's strong. I would also say publishers.
Publishers can flip the script on you for a title for sure and because they understand the marketing side of things a lot more than i think the writer does writer can the author can stay pretty strong on a title and push back but i found it was good to work with the publisher and it dislodged a new title for me that i ended up liking better i'm always curious about the stories that aren't told in the book, that is the stories that are left out. Ryan takes us behind the scenes of his editing process, sharing the tough decisions about which stories he cut and how those choices shaped the tone of his memoir. There was one surf session that I had down right off Yarmouth, so right down the very bottom of the province, and I went out to the famous lighthouse there and got to paddle out and surf right next to the lighthouse i met some people it wasn't an overly like dramatic.
Surf it was very small but it was beautiful and i had i wrote it up and then i just i felt like that chapter was a little too long so that so i decided to trim it back and see what it felt like without it because i had written some surf scenes in the previous chapters and so i i cut that one, nothing too oh yeah there yeah one thing does come up at the end of at the end of one chapter near the end of the book i ended up taking an offer to stay in in a man named danny leblanc he's the guy who took me sailing he offered for me to stay in his old trailer where he was living while his house that had semi burnt down was being fixed but now he was back in his house so I said for sure I definitely want to stay in your trailer and then when I got to the trailer it looked like it had been ransacked.
Like it was really sketchy, a little bit scary, but I had already committed. And at that stage, I would have slept anywhere except for in the hammock tent. The exposure was adding up. So I ended up bunking in this trailer that was quite eerie and quite scary. And there were like wasps in there. And I wrote it all up. And then my wife was reading it. And she said, this chapter ends in a really dark note. Are you sure you want to go there with this chapter? Because it was already about death and about meditating on death. And so as I do when I'm editing, if I'll try something, I'll cut something out and then let it breathe for a few days and then reread it and say, am I missing that?
And if I'm not, if I'm not missing it, then I'm thinking I'm going to leave that on the cutting room floor. So, yeah, that was one that I ended up cutting the horror scene.
Publishing a book is its own adventure and ryan has successfully published two books using small press publishers ryan walks us through pitching his memoir crafting a proposal and the iterations needed before getting a book deal in mfa program at king's we learn how to create a book proposal for a non-fiction book or manuscript. And I did that for my first book, Lewis Berger Bust.
And it was really great to have that submission package almost all ready. And so I kept my original. Then I knew that once I had my manuscript for Captain Solitude done, that the next stage right away would be to make my proposal. And I knew which chapters were probably my strongest or the ones I wanted to include. And so I wrote a solid proposal, edited it, spent a lot of time making it as enticing as possible. And then I had a couple little contacts here and there but I wanted to work with a new publisher I just was curious to see what it would be like to work with another publisher so that ended up being Goose Lane and Goose Lane from Fredericton New Brunswick a really great east coast publisher, and I'm really glad that they took a chance although when they had it when they had my proposal they came back to me with a lot of questions and then I thought okay they've engaged with me but it was definitely not a yes for sure green light it was more like it was more like it felt like more of a rejection waiting to happen which maybe was their strategy just to see if I'd be willing to listen to their feedback and make some changes and so yeah I rewrote my proposal a.
Sent it back to them. And after a couple of months, they said, okay, let's do this. And then, so I was there, yeah, with Goose Lane. And then, yeah, it was a great partnership. They partnered me up with an excellent editor. Then down the line, the copy editing was fantastic. And then the book design was really fun and interesting. So I had a great experience with Goose Lane.
Before Captain Solitude, Ryan's journey began with Lewis Berger Bust. He reflects on how that project took shape, the unique surf culture he had to navigate, including the unwritten rules, and what it meant to earn the trust of the East Coast surfing community. That one was published by Potterfield Press, which is also an East Coast Canadian press, a little bit smaller than Goose Lane in terms of its reach and a little bit more regional.
But also they had the person who runs it, his name, Leslie Choice, and he's a surfer and he lives pretty close to me so i really wanted his stamp of approval on the project because he's like an og surfer in the east coast scene and if you're writing about surfing you have to have the you have to have the blessing of the gray-bearded gods so to speak other otherwise you're going to step on some toes and because the whole thing with surfing is if it was like fight club you're not if you're not supposed to talk about it so with surfing this is the like the old way that surfing was looked at is you can't name a spot you can't be specific where these places are that's gone out the window and all the old timers are rolling over in their graves even if they're still alive because now it's just like anybody pops up with a camera and posts a photo and name spots so the old ways of being really cagey and protective of spots is has changed. But yeah, Pottersfield was my first publisher, and they were also great. I'm looking for.
Each new publishing experience, or I'm working on a third book, and yeah, I'd love to have Goose Lane again, but we'll see. But also, it's fun to work with different companies to see how they do things.
I'm always surprised at the timelines associated with traditional publishing. Ryan gives us a behind-the-scenes look at timelines, contrasting the whirlwind of his first book with the more measured pace of his second. First manuscript? That one was shorter than the second one. So it was pretty much, it was actually about eight months, which is really short. Yeah, because Potashield had a slot in their fall catalog that when I got the deal in March that they wanted to get it out in October, November. So basically everything got accelerated.
And the editing i did my very best and i had a good editor to work with but that was the one thing i felt a little bit rushed whereas with beckon one is more like about a year and a half, from more definitely more common it does move slowly but you're i found that my editor would honor deadlines and if he told me that he would have these chapters read, by a certain date, then he would do that. And I didn't really have to chase him too much, which was great. But there's lots of things that can drag the process for sure. But I find once the publisher knows where your book is slotted into which season... Then the whole timeline falls into place and yeah, you come to deadlines and things get a little heated on deadlines. But I find they try to move things along as quickly as they can to make sure that they get your book into that season.
Ryan's next project feels like something epic, definitely more extra than ordinary. A walking journey along the East Coast Trail of Newfoundland with his dog, a surfboard, and a copy of Kang Lear. He shares his vision for blending travel, Canadian history, and literature into an adventure that pushes the boundaries of memoir. It was never meant to be a trilogy of travel stories in Nova Scotia involving surfing, but now it's become that because I've always looked at the map, and if you look at the map of Eastern Canada from a surfer's vantage point, The coastline that's exposed to the open Atlantic, it's the whole coastline of Nova Scotia from basically Yarmouth to Cape Breton Island. But then if you take your gaze a little bit north, northeast, Juverland. And so Newfoundland is like the last part of the puzzle for the surfable coastline of Atlantic Canada. And I thought maybe that's my chance to be the first chronicler of the surfable coastline of Atlantic Canada. I've got to go to Newfoundland. And so that's my idea is to go to Newfoundland next summer. But instead of biking, I'm planning to walk. I've done two big stories with bikes. So I'm going to walk and I'm going to bring a dog. So it's my dog. Not just a random dog. My dog does not surf.
We'll see. You might get a chance. But yeah, so a different, I guess a different mode of transportation, but a similar goal, which is finding new surf spots, uncovering local lore and history, and then hopefully telling an interesting story along the way. The mystery is St. Pierre-Miquelon. These two little islands up the south coast of Newfoundland are actually still French protectorates. So they're not Canada. They're France. and most a lot of people know a little bit about them and but then every now and again i'll mention it to someone and they don't they have no no idea so i just think there's an interesting story there if i could get from let's say saint john's to those islands um and surf it and explore along the way but i've been reading a lot about canadian history so i want to see if i can weave some canadian history in this story but make it i'm not going to say spicy but definitely more interesting because I think that history is going by the waist size, not.
Talked about as much. So I think there's an interesting history there. But also, and this is the curveball, I want to, I've been obsessed with King Lear, Shakespeare's play, for my whole life. And I want to bring that along and read it and have an interchange with Lear and with Shakespeare along the way. So there you go. There's no real, the plan is to walk from one place to another while carrying King Lear and a surfboard and my dog and then get to France.
Planning an epic hike sounds like a fun idea, until you start thinking about the logistics. Ryan talks about the physical and practical challenges of his next adventure on Newfoundland's East Coast Trail, from packing light to figuring out how to carry a surfboard through rugged terrain. I've been to Newfoundland, but I haven't, I've never walked the East Coast Trail, which is this amazing hiking trail down the Avalon Peninsula. And I've certainly never done it with my dog because I didn't have a dog before so now that I have a dog and a map and a title I'm ready to go the more I think about it the more the hardship of it I'm like are you am I sure about trying this and I just know I want to try it but it's way less predictable to me than a bike trip because if you get a little injury it can I think it magnifies when you're walking rather than you can bike through some stuff that you might not be able to walk through as much and then carrying a load you've carried loads on bikes it's annoying to be overloaded on a bike but you can still do it whereas i think if you're overloaded while hiking it it may be debilitating that's where i want to pack as light as possible but then i want to bring a surfboard which is totally against the idea of ultralight hiking like how do i do that with the surfboard so these are problems i'm wrestling with right now.
Disconnecting from technology feels almost shakespearean in its drama ryan explains why he plans to hike without a phone or communication device embracing isolation as a central theme for his next book i'm glad that his family have convinced him to carry at least a little tech, The other thing that I know I will not have is a communication device. That's a bit of a hitch too for me. I don't know why I'm so strict about that, but I want to make sure that I don't have a phone or a way to communicate just so that I can totally drop out of the tech sphere. Although this time I will have a beacon so that my family can, if something like a panic beacon.
After two non-fiction books and planning a third ryan is already thinking of a new challenge fiction he'll be stepping into the unknown and shares what excites him about making that leap i've written two books of non-fiction and i definitely want to write one more but i think after that i want to move into fiction i'm writing some short stories along the way but I think after this next non-fiction book, potentially give myself the challenge of a novel. And to me, that's scary because it's like jumping off a cliff into darkness that I'm not so used to. I'm curious about writers who in their career have done that, maybe started with non-fiction and then moved to fiction after that. So I've found a few of those along the way. I'm just seeing how they make that transition. It's definitely possible.
Ryan is such a great storyteller. His nonfiction often reads like fiction. I expect that his foray into fiction will prove to be very interesting. I'm also looking forward to reading about his Newfoundland King Lear adventures. Thank you, Ryan, for sharing your stories with us. I'm sure everyone listening will agree. Ryan is definitely more extra than ordinary. Thanks for listening to Definitely Not Famous. This podcast is brought to you by Rebecca Hogue, the host and the producer for the show. To support the show, please consider purchasing the books using the affiliate links in the show notes. Alternatively, you can support the show using Patreon or PayPal links available on the show notes website, definitelynotfamous.com. I'm looking for more authors to talk to. If you have read a great memoir and want me to interview the author, please complete the listeners form on the website. If you're an author and you'd like to be a guest on this podcast, please complete the author guest form on the website.