Speaker 1: You would never mix up your peanut butter with watermelon,
or even Taylor Swift with the piano. Guys, then again
you might, Well, that's what this is all about. Arrow
dot net a R r oe dot Net seventeen different
podcasts to choose from for your driving or just being
at work, entertainment. Hello and good morning everybody.
Speaker 2: Hi, it's Rusty Austin.
Speaker 1: Rusty Austin. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2: Pretty good so far.
Speaker 1: I'll I'll tell you what. Man, You caught my attention
so quickly with the name of this book, and the
reason why is because I love to read about animal totems.
And the thing is is that when you look up
the pelican, what it means is it's an opportunity to
forgive either yourself or someone else and release any built
up guilt or resentment. It is time to free yourself.
And it's like, oh my god, Rusty just jumped into
this story.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: What made you step into the pelican? Because I mean
to me, when I'm at the ocean and I see
a pelican, my world stops. I will sit there and
watch that until it disappears in the horizon.
Speaker 3: The one thing that really got me interested in pelicans.
Was watching a feeding frenzy. I don't know if you've
ever seen one, but a flock of about thirty or
forty pelicans will hover I don't know, maybe forty fifty
feet above the water and then they all dive at once.
After school, it says, the most amazing thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: Wow. Wow. And the way that you're able to add
in the animal facts and right away what happens is
I start thinking about my neighbors across the street, Gary,
Ca and Hannah, and it's these facts that they dig
because all of a sudden, then they'll go back into
the storyline and they have a cleaner, more and more
valuable touch with what's going on with the story.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I try to do that with all the animals.
Speaker 3: Give some kind of fact about where they live, or
what they eat, or or how they will, you know,
what their behaviors and like that. So that's a big
important part of my books.
Speaker 1: It's also a part of your book is that you've
got that poetic edge to it as a writer, because
I mean, that's my first book was supposed to be
a book of poetry. Ah didn't happen. It went a
completely different direction. How were you able to put that
poetry give it kind of a discipline.
Speaker 3: Well, what happened was I was just I was putting
these poems up on Facebook, just as a lark.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And at the time I was doing that, there was
a book that came out called Go to f To
Sleep that went viral on Facebook and sold a million copies.
And so my friends called me and said, you know,
you should put all those poems on a book. And
the way I write the poems is I try to
make them like less than twelve to fifteen words and
you know, three to five lines. So I start out
with something longer and then just haunt it down and
hand it down until I get the very essence, the
very you know, the little at least I can get
away with.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Don't you think though, that poetry is kind of personal?
And sometimes I love my teachers, Missus Keith and Missus Knight,
but they kind of force fed poetry to us as
as students in school, elementary school. But when I pick
up a book like this, I'm going, oh my god,
I love what he's done here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I tend to break a lot of rules when I write, Like,
for example, in my trolls. I don't use any comments
hardly at all. Nice But like I said, these poems
are basically what I start with, something longer and just
haunt them down and hand them down until I can
get the very essence of it. And they all rhyme,
but most of them don't.
Speaker 1: Well see, And I've always told people that you because
they would sit there and complain about how twitter you
can only have so many elements in it, and I'm going, well,
you didn't write a piece of poetry, didit that comes
with rules too, or a piece of music, because I
mean that editing part is what we do.
Speaker 3: Yes, you have to just haunt it down and haunt
it down and hold it down, like I said, until
you get to the very essence of it, and then
that is more powerful.
Speaker 1: Now have you along your writing journey, have you ever
had somebody such as my wife, that goes and she'll
look at the writing and say, don't erase the words
that you don't agree with. Leave them in there so
she can see what I left in there and get
her own interpretation, even when I thought it was a mistake.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've come across that time and again, so it's
not something unusual.
Speaker 1: Now, how is it that you made your way into
being a YA author? And I'm gonna tell you right now,
the YA fans and followers are through the roof crazy
and they love to be I mean, they are so
loyal and you're you're delivering a book here that delivers
directly to where they are as readers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's just something that I like. I'm not
good at writing long form, so I write short stories
and short poems.
Speaker 2: And that's what I do best. So that's kind of
what I gravitate.
Speaker 1: To the illustrations in the book. Who we got to
talk about this because I because there's a lot of
people that are artists. I don't know how to write,
but I can draw. Then you're in You're part of
that creative team as well.
Speaker 3: Yes, And just just to bring up another point, all
my books have would do it yourself section for the
writers and artists at the end. But the art I
just briefly, I'll back up, backtrack the art for the
an Awesome Bird the Pelican. What happened was I was
on this website called donors Choose, which is like a
gofund me for teachers, and one of my local teachers
was looking to buy poetry books for I think they
were seventh and eighth graders at the time, and so
I contact her through the website and said, can I
come in and read my book The Unicorn Has One Horn? Yeah,
she had me come in and the kids were just
so excited about it. Then the idea occurred to me
to have them do all the illustrations for the Pelican book,
and so she was on board with it, and she
got she had a more for an hour or two
every Friday afternoon. So it took a good four months
to get it all done. But over one hundred kids
have pictures.
Speaker 2: In the book.
Speaker 3: And what happened was I have that's right. I think
I have forty four poems, and so I had to
kind of go through and select forty four pictures for
each poem. But then for the rest of the kids,
I just went ahead and did a whole section of
their picture. So every kid that grew got a picture
in the book, which made him very happy.
Speaker 1: Please do not move. There's more with Russy Austin coming
up next. This man loves to write about his animals.
The latest is about a pelican. We are back with
author and poet Rusty Austin. Ten fifteen years from now,
you could put this in a gallery and travel around
the country and say, this is a moment in American history,
and time itself did not stand still, because it still
affects us today.
Speaker 3: That is true and funny. You should mention that because
I actually framed a bunch of the pictures that the
kids drew and put them up around the house because
they did well. They were different. That did crayons and watercolors,
and this one kid Andres does a line drawing with
a pen. You don't even use a pencil. It's the
most amazing thing I've ever Seena.
Speaker 1: Do you feel about using a pencil? Because my first
book as a kid I wrote in the eleventh grade
was in pencil and I still have it today and dude,
I'm sixty three.
Speaker 3: Now that's amazing. I would say I used a pencil
many years ago. But now it's all hoart processing.
Speaker 1: Yes, do you think that takes away from it? Because
I mean, Julia Cameron is so adamant when it comes
to well in the artist way, you have to use
a pen because it gets the entire body involved. I
get that, but man, I'll tell you what, the computer
and the word processor love it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's so great just to be able to edit
and edit and edit again. And one thing I'm fine
of saying is you never really finished. You just run
out of time.
Speaker 2: That's so true.
Speaker 1: Now in your do it yourself section, I mean that
right there is where journeys began. Has anybody reached out
to you saying, you know, I started because of you.
Speaker 3: I've had I've had several grandparents and actually I'm a grandparent,
so I can appreciate where they're coming from. Uh, that
have reached out to me and said, yes, my kids
love to do it yourself section.
Speaker 2: So what I'll do is I'll give them.
Speaker 3: I'll give them like four lines and a blank page,
and then I'll give them a prompt like I think
the prompt and the in the pucking book is a
tarantula and or ahinocero. So those they were those platypus too.
What kid doesn't like the duck filled platypus? Right, It's
just fun to say it, I mean.
Speaker 1: And you know what's so funny is that I grew
up in the state of Montana believing that we had
the duck billed platypus up here on the Missouri River,
and and and people would say, well, what what do
you mean, No, it doesn't exist. I'm going it does exist.
I swear to God, I've seen it on the Missouri River.
Speaker 3: I love the duck bull platypus. It's such an unusual creature.
Speaker 1: And yet to me, it's like the giraffe. Okay, so
you got a long neck. You're still part of my
friendship team.
Speaker 2: Come on, that's right, we love it.
Speaker 1: And how did you get connected to animals though? I mean,
because I mean animals speak is one thing, but you're
taking it to a completely different level of not only
did I hear the animal, but I'm sharing the animal.
Speaker 3: Well, I grew up in Colorado, and a lot of
the Colorado lifestyle is the outdoor. You know, we can
backpack in crips and hikes and just being outdoors in general.
I'm so you get a really appreciation for nature, which
includes animals, and that's kind of where that came from.
Speaker 1: No, I totally get that. I grew up in the
state of Montana and I live in forest here in
North Carolina right now that we planted seventeen hundred trees
and only because of those early days with my animals
in Montana.
Speaker 3: Exactly right, And that stays with you your whole life when
you grow up in that environment.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, because I mean, in a I would
love to see if a science teacher or a history
teacher is coming up to you to see that. You know,
it's like you're taking animals that people don't speak of
anywhere up Alican and then you do something with it
which then puts it back in our vocabulary.
Speaker 3: Well. Yeah, And what I try to do is when
I'm reading the Internet or out driving around or something,
if I see an unusual animal, I will make a
note of it so that I have it in my
notebook of animals that I need to write about. And
right now I'm working on something called a red shank duke,
which is endemic to Maticascar. A red shank. It's like
a very small monkey with red shanks.
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, it just proves how unique is everything,
because I mean, you put pictures or the story in there,
and kids are be going, oh my god, you're not
gonna believe what I just read. I mean, and to me,
that's the excitement without having to go to the zoo.
Because you're playing around with those that are inside our imagination.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right. And then I wrote a poem about
a Cayman which says the Cayman has a memory that
nickol take to better underwater see her dates. Now, no
kid knows what a nictating membrane is. It's just a
membrane that covers your eye if you're going to keep
the water out. But it's just fun to say nicotating.
Speaker 1: Or Now the question is I would look at the
student if I were doing like a tutor, and I'd say, Okay,
I want you to see if you can spell it.
Let's see how close you can get to it. So,
because my wife was really into that. It's like, if
you're going to teach somebody to read, teach them to
write as well.
Speaker 3: Yes, And it's just so disappointing to me to see
nowadays when people text and their the tyepoles and the
bad grammar and bad punctuation. It just trys me nuts.
But then I'm old, so what kind of say?
Speaker 1: But yet, it was Mark Twain Dude that said in
his one hundredth anniversary of his autobiography, says, go and
be yourself and use your own accent. And so that's
when I stopped using colon's and and and and commas
and quotation marks and stuff, because we're we're sitting there
reading it anyway, don't clog up my picture.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 3: And I rarely use common and when I write short stories.
So and in fact, I would point out that the
guy who won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year
wrote a four hundred page book that was one sentence.
Speaker 1: When you're not using commas, what do you do about
run on sentences? I mean that might be over our
listeners heads, but I mean, can I run on sentence?
Is a run on sentence?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 3: Well, you can use the word and you can actually
you can place. You can every now and again you
can put on a comma which makes sense it really
needs it, I'll put it in, But most of the
time you just don't need it.
Speaker 1: Do you ever challenge yourself when you put in and
or the word that, and go, oh yeah, I just
I just went.
Speaker 2: To the crutch level. I often get to have to
go through and take out that, but just use too
many of them.
Speaker 1: Where do people go to find out more about what
you're doing? Rusty? Because I love where you are.
Speaker 3: I have a website, Rusty Austin dot com, and all
the books are available on that and there's four of them.
Beware the Grizzly Bear, which was the first book I wrote,
the Character's Orange, which is a book of poetry about
food that kids like, The Unicorn has one Horn, and
an Austinberd, the Talking, which is what we're talking about today.
And I'm also right now working on the Two Headed Snake.
Speaker 1: Come on, yeah, wow, do you ever think of a
TV show while you're writing? Or is this a whole
completely different personality.
Speaker 3: It's a whole, completely different personality. Although I will say this,
my thirty five years in reality television taught me a
lot about how to hone everything down and get it
down to the essence of it. Because in reality, you shoot,
you know, four hundred hours of tape for one hour
of TV, and so you really have to just hone
it down and hone it down and holnd it down
till you get to the very, very very core of it.
Speaker 1: So when you were doing those reality shows, did you
kind of just sit there and go and and okay,
get to the point, Okay, where are we going with this?
Speaker 3: We did that a lot of the head that was
mostly a close production producer, So I would get the
tapes and then have to hone them down myself.
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: And that's private time inside a studio. It's like I'm
going in the studio. I'll get out when I get out.
Speaker 3: Yes, Oh, there's so many times. And the other thing
I would never do is if we're working on something,
I would try not to leave until it was done.
Speaker 2: Because if you if you leave your los a threat.
Speaker 1: I'm so with you on that because I totally believe
in that, in the way that if I leave this room,
my personality is going to change, and when I come back,
I'm a completely different person.
Speaker 3: That's exactly right, and that's why I would never leave
glove was done.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, man, you've got to come back to
this show anytime in the future, Rusty. The door is
always going to be open for us.
Speaker 3: You got it, man, Thanks so much for having me on.
Speaker 1: Will you be brilliant today?
Speaker 2: Okay, well I'm working on it. Thanks again.