Nate DiMeo: On the Power of Writing Short Stories

Nate DiMeo is the creator and host of “The Memory Palace,” a Peabody Award finalist and among the first group of podcasts preserved by the Library of Congress. He was previously the artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he has performed stories from “The Memory Palace” live with music, pictures, and animation all over the United States and Canada, as well as in England, Ireland, and Australia. DiMeo is the co-author of Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America , a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Prior to producing “The Memory Palace,” DiMeo spent a decade in public radio and could be heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, or Marketplace. He has written for NBC’s “Parks and Recreation” and ABC’s “The Astronaut Wives Club.” Follow him on X (Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram.

In this interview, Nate discusses how he turned his podcast of 15 years into his new collection of short historical stories, The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past, his advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Nate DiMeo
Literary agent: Richard Abate, 3Arts
Book title: The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past
Publisher: Random House
Release date: November 19, 2024
Genre/category: History/Literary Essays
Previous titles: Co-Author of Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America
Elevator pitch: For 15 years in his pioneering podcast, The Memory Palace, Nate DiMeo has turned to the past to make sense of the way we live today, finding beauty and meaning in history’s dustier corners, holding things up to the light and weaving facts, keen insight, wit, and poignant observation into unforgettable tales. Now, his unique historical stories are brought to the page for the first in an enchanting collection along with gorgeous illustrations and found photographs.

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What prompted you to write this book?

There’s a particular type of reading experience I treasured as a kid that I’ve missed as an adult: There were these books I would pour over again and again—The Book of Lists, Where the Sidewalk Ends, a stack of faded paperbacks collecting old Ripley’s Believe it or Not stories—filled with short, transporting pieces, beguiling illustrations that you could get lost in for an afternoon and turn to again and again. I wanted to try to create one of those books that would bring that particular magic into adulthood, a collection of the types of stories I’ve been writing for the past 15 years for “The Memory Palace” podcast—short historical stories that tap into the tools of fiction and poetry to draw out meaning and wonder from the raw-material of the past, woven together with illustrations and artifacts and found photographs in a way that might bring back that treasured feeling. A “kid’s book” with adult concerns.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

I’ve been toting around this idea for over a decade. Since the earliest days of my podcast, I would get occasional invitations to lunch with a book editor or agent. They liked my show. They liked the writing. They liked the platform. They wondered if I had a book in me and I would pitch them a collection. They would ask me if I had a short story that I would like to go long on instead, or perhaps one of those stories that seems short, but that really explains America. In short, they longed for the next Seabiscuit or Cod or the like. And, I got it; those books are pretty great. But short is what I do. I believe in the power of short—of the brief, punchy tale, of extracting wonder from tiny things. It took me a long time to find a publisher who believed in the potential of a collection.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

I had always worried a little bit (it my hum-drum writer’s insecurity) about whether the stories from my podcast would hold up on the page. That they wouldn’t collapse without the music or my voice holding it up. So, it was heartening and kind of thrilling to see it all come together on the page. That the stories themselves did work well, but moreover, that there were whole new creative avenues to explore in collecting them—putting this one next to that one, switching the order around, pairing one or another with the perfect picture, or conjuring up some idea for an illustration and then sending DeHaan off to her drawing board and having her come back with something better than I’d even imagined.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

In my earliest conversations with Random House, they asked whether there was a way I could take people behind the scenes a bit at The Memory Palace. Was there a way to kind of pull back the curtain and discuss how I came to this story or that. Every idea we kicked around fell flat. They all felt a bit like DVD commentary to me. But eventually I hit upon trying to write a series of memoir-based stories that would use the techniques of The Memory Palace and apply them to my own life. I’d never written about myself. The biggest surprise in the writing process was finding that idea actually worked. That there was a certain power in turning my usual lens to my own past and eventually it grew into something that, in a way, feels like the heart of the book and an odd sort of key to unlocking the rest of the stories.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

Over the course of the past 15 years I have found, again and again, that it is personally useful to write these stories. That taking the time out of my life, every couple of weeks, to dive into the past and try to connect with that wonderful, peculiar, imaginative pleasure of conjuring a sense of a different time, made me feel more connected to my own time. It kind of snapped me into presence. Made me aware of the fleeting nature of time. It sounds corny, but writing these stories is about as close as I come to a spiritual practice. It makes me feel a little more centered, a little more aware, makes me look at the world with a bit more wonder, with my eyes and my heart a bit more open. I’d like readers to find a bit of the same in this book too. I want it to work like one of those beloved books you might have pulled down from your childhood bookshelf again and again: You can open it anywhere and lose yourself for a bit, change your day, and maybe see your present moment in a new way for a moment.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

I spent much too much of my life not quite understanding that the people who I admired—writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, athletes, whomever—were real people. It took me forever (far too long) to realize that a filmmaker was simply someone who made a film; a novelist wasn’t some elevated being, they were a person who’d written a novel. If you want to be a writer, just write. If you want to be a great writer, keep writing.