NPR – C-VILLE Weekly

Stories of how failures lead to successes

As consumers, we’re inundated by success. Hit records, blockbuster movies, the latest app.

Creators, on the other hand, are surrounded by failures. They churn out ideas—some brilliant, some bad—and create until something sticks.

How do they find the guts to fail their way to success? Three accomplished local artists are opening up in The Art of Failure, from The Makers Series co-hosted by Christ Episcopal Church, The Garage and New City Arts Initiative.

For musician Devon Sproule, failure is an invitation to stop scrambling so quickly.

“Trying to be successful in the music business is like trying to climb a never-ending ladder,” she says an e-mail. “You’re so busy trying to get to the next rung that it’s really hard to remember to stop and appreciate the view. There are people ahead of you that you assume have a better view, and there are people behind you that want yours. And the whole dang ladder is really rickety.”

She describes the summer of 2007 as a turning point, when she got sick—right before her appearance on the English TV show Later… with Jools Holland. “So even though this show introduced my music to a shitload of people, for the next few years, I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened if I’d been at 100 percent,” she says. “Who knows, maybe my ladder-climbing would have accelerated even more, like it did for those annoyingly cute guys in Vampire Weekend, who also played that night.”

Author, editor and preacher David Zahl sees failure as the gateway to grace.

“The first five years of my own serious creative endeavor was one massive lesson in the pointlessness of trying to ‘get it right,’” he writes. “Failure is seldom something you can go around—you have to go through, even when every fiber of your being is saying not to.”

He describes hosting a conference in Pensacola, Florida, in the early years of his organization, Mockingbird. “We had planned for 200 people to register but only 24 could be bothered. It was super embarrassing, and we almost canceled ahead of time. I wasn’t even there, ’cause my wife had just had a baby. I remember thinking, ‘Maybe it’s time to throw in the towel on this entire project.’”

But that single “failed” conference led to the start of Mockingbird’s quarterly magazine, ongoing video production and best-selling publication.

“Contrary to my default psychology and much to my relief, [failure] has never proved to be the end of the world,” he writes.

Writer, reporter and co-host of NPR’s “Invisibilia,” Lulu Miller’s commitment to art requires falling off that ladder—a lot.

“The first draft of my first radio story was such a mess it was met with the words, ‘You could never make it in a newsroom,’” she writes. “I still remember the tears falling onto the script.”

Now, she seeks to understand why things fail. She draws a parallel to parkour, the sport of running, jumping and climbing around obstacles. “I want to try to become that fluid, that artful, that beautiful as I recalibrate a story to the edits and life thrown my way,” says Miller. “I want to be that reactive, that responsive to failure. I’m not there yet, but, man, am I trying. Every day.”

The gifts of failure are not reserved exclusively for artists. “All of us will make mistakes,” Miller says. “In life. In craft. In policy. If we can open our ears to hear why people are angry, bored, confused, not moved, then we can hear the path to making ourselves, our town and our work better. As if the negative imprint of failure is the blueprint for how to succeed.”

Lulu Miller on the fulfillment of making ‘Invisibilia’

When Lulu Miller was a kid growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, in the 1980s, she’d peel away from her family to write. She’d take reams of computer paper—the kind that’s one long, continuous accordion sheet with tearaway perforations on the sides—from her dad’s printer and write for hours. It felt like sledding, she says, like she could go wherever.

“It was a super happy feeling, making stories up about whatever,” so that desire to tell stories and be a writer “locked in very early,” Miller says.

Miller, who earned an MFA in fiction from UVA in 2013, and now resides mostly in Charlottesville, still writes fiction (she recently published her first story, “Me and Jane,” in Catapult magazine). But as co-host of NPR’s popular “Invisibilia” podcast, which launched in January 2015 and for two seasons has explored “the invisible forces that control human behavior—ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions,” Miller and her co-hosts, Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin, tell stories that aren’t made up at all. They tell true stories, most of them stranger than fiction, such as the one about Daniel Kish, a blind man who uses echolocation to see (yes, see); and the story of Martin Pistorius, a man who was locked in his body, his brain fully functional but he had no ability to communicate, for 12 years before he was freed; and the tale of a woman who has never experienced fear.

Stories like these are the ones that pulled Miller to radio in 2005.

After studying history in college (“I felt like I needed to know more things,” Miller says) and moving to New York to write, Miller found herself working for a woodworker and listening to public radio—which, for the record, she hated when she was a kid—to “Radiolab” and “This American Life.” The way that radio transported her from her seat on the train and into the story unfolding in her earbuds was a force she couldn’t escape.

For Miller, there was nothing quite like it, and she had to be part of it. So she interned at “Radiolab,” at first answering phones and e-mails and burning CDs, eventually helping “Radiolab” co-host Robert Krulwich edit the “Detective Stories” episode before conducting an interview of her own about an elderly man who had begun having musical hallucinations. “They were very vivid and very real, and he eventually realized it was his subconscious keeping him company because everyone in his life was dying,” Miller recalls. “He ended up crying.”

She’s often amazed at the things people reveal about themselves in an interview. It’s a reminder that when you’re vulnerable, “when you do show your worst side, that can be an act of humanity, because it shows everyone that everybody else is so deeply imperfect,” Miller says. “That can be such a gift, because sometimes people put up such a front.”

It’s her job to break through that front, and she has some favored methods for doing it; for getting Kish’s mom to talk about how she was called reckless by other parents for letting her blind son live his life as any other kid, taking horrible falls off of bicycles and running into poles, for example.

“Really listen,” Miller says. “Really show you’re with them. Sometimes people are almost shocked when they’re very closely listened to.” Once the person is a bit more relaxed, she says she starts poking and prodding gently.

“The range of people and their take on the world, that’s what never ceases to amaze me,” Miller says.

She recalls interviewing a woman who snuck into a mental hospital in the 1970s. Miller says she asked what the place looked like, what it smelled like, asked for physical details, and the woman responded with, “‘Oh, the smell. The smell was like this sour mop that, no matter how much you mopped, it still smelled like that.’ Her voice changed,” Miller recalls, “and it went from this story she’d told a million times to the disgust of that mop. And she started talking more slowly—you could tell she was remembering new information. And then I asked something like, ‘What did that smell mean to you?’ and she paused and said, ‘It’s the smell of neglect.’”

Miller likes to think of her job in terms of a scene in 1991’s The Addams Family, in which Gomez and Uncle Fester go into the library, Gomez pulls a book, and the bookshelf turns and there’s a secret passageway behind it. “I sometimes think that I’m [rooting] around in people’s memories, trying to pull the right book, where suddenly you gain entrance to this other wash of memories.”

Reporting for radio is “this profession where you still get to be an explorer and go into all these spaces where you wouldn’t otherwise have access,” Miller says, adding that she loves working through these stories with the “Invisibilia” team that is currently planning season 3, which will focus on how we interact with reality. She might have traded her dad’s computer paper for a microphone, but she’s still sledding. Microphone in hand and a world of subjects before her, she can go wherever and take her listeners along for the ride.