John Grogan

Interview by BWG member Carol L. Wright, Winter, 2019

Bethlehem Writers Group: Thank you for joining us, and for serving as our guest judge for our 2019 Bethlehem Writers Roundtable Short Story Award competition. You have said that your initial interest in story-telling was because of your mother’s gifts in that area. Could you tell us more about that?

John Grogan: My mother was one of nine children in a boisterous Irish-Catholic family. She grew up hearing her mother and aunts and uncles telling well-oiled family stories around the kitchen table. Along the way, she just naturally absorbed the rhythm of oral storytelling. By the time I came along, my mom was the one holding court during meals. Although she never went to college or took a writing course, she had a natural sense of story, and what makes a good one: a sympathetic protagonist facing an unavoidable conflict; a series of escalating actions; a narrative arc; tension, drama, and humor; a satisfying climax. I credit her for being my first writing teacher, for imparting her innate sense of a tale well told.

BWG: You grew up in Michigan and began your career as a journalist. How is writing for a newspaper similar to and different from writing stories that are partly or fully fictional?

JG: When I began my newspaper career, I had a double-major in journalism and English/ creative writing. I believed the two should always remain separate. I would write my factual news stories by day and work on fiction at night. Only later when I discovered literary journalism did I see that it is possible to combine the fact gathering of journalism with the creative writing techniques of fiction. My newspaper writing evolved from straight news stories written in “inverted pyramid” style to long-form narrative pieces. This proved a wonderful training ground and springboard for my transition to writing narrative nonfiction books.

BWG: You worked in Florida, then headed north to work for a magazine publisher, then for the Philadelphia Inquirer as a columnist. What made you choose these career shifts?

JG: I was working as a columnist in South Florida and really loving my job. But I had an itch for something more. A new challenge, a new location, a new life. In a career move that baffled just about everyone I knew, I left my newspaper column to move to Emmaus, Pennsylvania with my wife, Jenny, and three children to become editor of Rodale’s Organic Gardening magazine. I learned a lot there, but I also quickly realized I missed daily newspapers and writing. It was a happy day when the Philadelphia Inquirer hired me as a metro columnist. It was while writing three columns a week at the Inquirer that I began rising at 4:30 a.m. to work on the manuscript that would become Marley & Me.

BWG: It was while you were at the Inquirer that you first introduced the world to Marley, your yellow Labrador Retriever that you called “the world’s worst dog.” How did that come about?

JG: Actually I had been telling stories about my maniacal bad-boy Labrador retriever for his entire thirteen-year life. As a writer I knew I had something there with him; these stories made people laugh. But I didn’t quite see the whole, how to tie this series of comical anecdotes together into a cohesive story. It was only after Marley’s death in late 2003 that I suddenly saw the total story. It wasn’t a string of zany anecdotes about an out-of-control dog. It was the story of a young couple starting out in life and trying to figure out what their lives together would be. A few days after Marley’s death I published a column in the Inquirer saying farewell to our beloved pooch and describing the effect he had on Jenny and me as a couple and as parents. That column was the inspiration for Marley & Me. A few weeks later, I had a literary agent, and nine months after that I had a completed manuscript.

BWG: What were the challenges you addressed when expanding from a column-length work to a full-length book?

JG: For me, the biggest challenge in my writing evolution was the change from an objective fact-based journalist to an opinion columnist. Once I was comfortable writing first-person opinionated columns, the jump to writing a memoir was not that hard for me. The thought of a 300-page book is intimidating, but when I pictured it as a series of scenes, each one about the length of a newspaper column, then the process seemed manageable.

BWG: Could you ever have imagined how readers would embrace Marley & Me? It was an international bestseller, published in over thirty languages, on the bestseller list for well over a year, and was number one for twenty-three weeks. I was among those who read it, laughed, and cried. Anyone who has ever loved a dog—even one that is fairly well behaved—could relate to your experience every step of the way.

JG: When I was working on the manuscript, I believed in my topic and my ability to tell it but was convinced Marley & Me would find only a limited audience. After all, it was just a little story about my ordinary life. It was the story of an everyday couple. We weren’t climbing Mount Everest or sailing around the world. When it jumped onto the New York Times bestseller list in its first week out, I quite literally felt punch drunk. I couldn’t quite grasp that this was really happening. Eventually I would figure out that it was the very ordinariness of my story that made it relatable to so many people.

BWG: Did publishing Marley & Me change the way you think of yourself as a writer?

JG: Yes and no. I still think of myself essentially as the same writer, one who does a lot of reporting, focuses on nonfiction, and believes in the power of narrative storytelling. Whether I’m doing that in a daily newspaper, a magazine, or a book, it is essentially the same process for me — gathering information, organizing the “building blocks” of the story, arranging them along a narrative arc (usually in my head, not on paper), and finally, sitting down to write. But I now primarily think of myself as an author, not a journalist. I work from home, or a table at a local library, not in a newsroom, and I don’t have a grouchy boss bugging me for copy. That is one thing I miss from my newspaper days: the deadlines of daily journalism. They were nonnegotiable and did not allow for too much overthinking or writer’s block.

BWG: Then you went on to publish more books about Marley, including several children’s books. Was writing fiction for children a different kind of challenge?

JG: My foray into children’s books was somewhat accidental. As I went around the country giving readings from Marley & Me, which was definitely written for adults, I kept noting children in the audience. They loved all the tales of Marley’s misbehavior, but I knew my book wa

s not appropriate for them. So my publisher and I collaborated on a young reader’s version of Marley & Me. I named it Marley: A Dog Like No Other and it was a shorter, kid-friendly version of my story. That led me to try my hand at fictional picture books, which were a lot of fun but harder for me than I expected. It took me some practice to realize fewer words were better than more, and that the (very talented) artist I was working with could tell much of the story illustratively. The best part of being a children’s author, though, is going into schools and reading to kids. They definitely let you know if you’re not holding their attention!

BWG: Then, after all that publishing success, Marley & Me was made into a feature film starring Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson. How involved were you with making the motion picture? Were there some aspects of it that you didn’t expect?

JG: I was a consultant on the screenplay and had input throughout the process, including on the set as filming took place in

and Pennsylvania. The movie is not exactly my book; some dramatic liberties were taken. But I understood why the changes were necessary, and the process felt collaborative and respectful. Even as it altered some of the facts, I thought the movie did a good job getting to the emotional truths of my story — about marriage, parenting, careers, and of course the challenges of owning a high-spirited hard-to-control dog.

BWG: Many readers know you from your autobiographical work, The Longest Trip Home: A Memoir. It tells about growing up as a Roman Catholic in the 1960s and 70s. It includes the same humor (at times it seems like the subtitle could almost be “the world’s worst Catholic boy”), and heart-warming moments as Marley & Me. What impelled you to write it?

JG: The Longest Trip Home was a story I knew for many years I needed to write, and it remains a project very close to my heart. I grew up in a very loving, warm family, but my parents’ deep devotion to their Catholic faith and their fervent desire to raise their children in that faith defined my childhood and journey into adulthood. The long, often funny, often painful path to that reconciliation of my parents’ beliefs and my own is at the heart of that story. Both my parents are gone now, but I like to think that they live on, at least in some sense, in my words.

BWG: In your memoir, you once again chose to write about personal experiences that are probably not so different than those others have shared. Do you think this is a key to your success?

JG: My books have been published in a number of languages, and when I hear from readers in other countries I’m struck not by the differences but the similarities. No matter if we are from the United States or Russia or Vietnam or Brazil, we all love our families, worry about our children, have conflicts with those we are closest to, fall in love, lose loved ones, experience joy and grief, elation and discouragement. I’ve learned over the years, first as an essayist and columnist and later as a memoirist, that the more I open my personal armor and write honestly about the details of my own life, the more readers seem to connect with me. They can see their own lives, their own journeys and longest trips home, through my own. That connection is a very special and cool thing.

BWG: Can you tell us what you would look for when evaluating short stories?

JG: Writing that makes me want to reread sentences aloud for their sheer beauty. A story that grabs me quickly and holds me. Characters I care about confronting challenges that ultimately will help me better understand the human condition.

BWG: What advice do you have for beginning or emerging writers?

JG: Read a lot. Write every single day. Get out of your home and live fully. See the world (or at least your corner of it), embrace serendipity, say hello to strangers, turn down that side street. Explore. Be open to experience. Take notes, keep a daily journal.

BWG: Thank you again for sharing your thoughts with us, and for being our 2019 Guest Judge.