Robin Dellabough | How a Values Driven Career Enables you To Build a More Fulfilling Life

Srini Rao

Robin, welcome to the unmistakable creative.

Robin Dellabough

Thank you. It's really great to be here after our collaborations of the past. This is the first time I've been on your podcast.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it is my absolute pleasure to have you here. It's funny, I have referenced your work that you did with me so many times, and I realized people get offended when I give them feedback. I was like, you don't understand. I learned to give feedback from a woman who doesn't sugarcoat shit. She has like no capability of sugarcoating. And, you know, I realized it was like, well, most people aren't thick skinned enough to take that, but we'll get into all of that. You have a notebook out, which we will talk about.

Robin Dellabough

hahahaha

Srini Rao

But I wanted to start by asking you, what is one of the most important things that you learned from one or both of your parents that have influenced and shaped your life and who you've become and what you've done with it?

Robin Dellabough

Oh my goodness, that's a great question. I was thinking a lot about them in anticipation of this conversation. In fact, they were both incredibly creative for one thing. So I was raised in a house full of creative activity and we were all encouraged to be creative in pretty non-traditional ways too. My parents were sort of.

beatniks or bohemians in Greenwich Village when I was born. And my father was an artist, a painter. My mother was a wannabe poet, actually, but she had six children instead, never.

quite gutter poetry career off the ground. But they used to have parties where they would be stomping grapes to make wine and they were into jazz. They had a creativity group called Fortnightly that met every other week with a bunch of people who did various art forms. And so it was just sort of a...

beehive of creative activity that I was growing up in. And also, I think the most important thing in answer to your actual question is they gave me a sense, both of them equally, that I could do anything I wanted to do, that there was nothing that was unavailable to me if I wanted to pursue it.

And so I never had kind of a fear of trying things, trying new things. It was just built into my fiber that if I felt like...

Robin Dellabough

hitchhiking around Europe at 17 and 18, why not? So I did that. If I felt like leaving my college career in Berkeley to go live in a tree house in Hawaii, I did that. And that has sort of been the pattern of my whole life when I do things as long as they're satisfying and fun, and when they stop being satisfying and fun,

curve flattens out, I do something else. And that's been my entire life.

Srini Rao

Wow. So the one thing I wonder is, one in a family of six, what did you learn about navigating human relationships? I mean, that's a big family. I mean, I always feel like with my family, because we're all indeed loud as hell, you know, we're always fighting to be heard, but how does that work in a family of six?

Robin Dellabough

Well, I was lucky because I was the eldest. So it was a little easier for my voice to be heard, I have to admit. I feel badly for my youngest sister who literally could not get a word in edgewise until at least half of us had left home. So I was lucky. And also I...

I somehow had a loud voice even at a young age in terms of not, you know, not actually loud, but in terms of making myself heard and my opinions expressed and they were respected. So I kind of was an outlier among the six kids.

I was treated differently by my parents. I was sort of treated like more of an equal of theirs and more of a kind of parental figure to my five younger brothers and sisters. Even though we were very close in age, there was only 18 months between all six of us. But there was that difference. And ultimately, what I discovered, the reason for that.

I really believe is that it turned out that I didn't have the same father as my younger siblings. I only learned this a couple of years ago through one of those DNA tests. But I was different from a young age and no one could figure out why and it was all very unspoken. But

I was short and my siblings were all sort of Amazons. And I was very bookish and loved to read and curl up on a rainy day. And they were all very, very sporty and athletic. I didn't look a lot like them. I looked a lot like my mother, but I didn't look a lot like my siblings or my father. So I think that was part of it, that on some level.

Robin Dellabough

everyone, my parents and my siblings, recognized that this girl is different. You know, and so I was sort of treated a little bit like an outsider in some ways. But in terms of relationships, you know, I certainly learned to collaborate. That's for sure. I mean, we would put on shows, you know, little plays together in the neighborhood and I would, I remember

Srini Rao

Now.

Robin Dellabough

gathering all my siblings together and telling them we were gonna start a pet cemetery. And I was in charge and I would give them little assignments like find a little dead bug or something. It was a little morbid. And then the other really huge thing I got from my family of origin and having all those siblings was a sense of humor. We did share.

an incredible sense of humor when I was growing up. And as adults, we would, I just remember laughing a lot. My father had a very dark sense of humor, a black sense of humor. He was also a doctor and he would come home with these outrageous stories about patients and we would sort of be moaning and groaning, but also laughing. And it was just great. It was, you know, we had a lot of fun.

as a family. I remember dance parties and we had a monkey that ran around and it was kind of, it was a very boisterous, warm environment and I think I learned both to hold my own as an individual but also navigate how to get along with all kinds of people.

in a big setting and like I said, collaborate, which as we talked about in audience of one, collaboration and creativity just are kissing cousins and I think that it's really great when you have both together and in some ways, I mean, at the simplest, creativity must be a collaboration if you believe that

There's no such thing as creativity without a response or an audience eventually, you know, that creativity, the whole point of it is to communicate with someone else, even though that's not the driving force while you're creating. It's the end goal. It's got to be. Or you're, you know, one hand clapping in a forest or whatever that metaphor is. So.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Learning that your father that raised you wasn't your birth father at such a late stage in life, what does that do for your sense of identity? Is it disruptive? Or how does it change things?

Robin Dellabough

Well, it was pretty dramatic to find out at such a late stage in life. I was 68 when I found out. And I never had the slightest suspicion even anyway. So my first reaction was absolute euphoria because I had always had an affinity for Judaism. And what I found out was that

my biological father was 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, so I'm 50% Ashkenazi Jewish. And I loved finding that out because I had written poems about the Holocaust in my 20s and 30s, and I had no idea why. And I used to have dreams that were related, and I literally had...

like all my best friends were Jewish, and I loved being invited to Jewish holiday dinners, Passover, seders, and I just couldn't figure out why. And so it was very affirming of an intuitive sense I had always had, and of that sense of difference I had as a child. It explained that sense of difference. So on that level, it was a real positive.

On the other hand, it was very painful to find out that all my siblings, who I'm very, very close to, were only half siblings biologically. That was, that, when I first realized that, it was quite a shock. It was almost more of a loss than finding out the father who raised me wasn't my actual father.

That has lessened and decreased as time goes on and I realized that I still have the same relationship with my siblings, just because we had a different father. But in terms of the identity, I mean, I've processed it now for a couple of years. Writing the book of poetry, Double Helix, is how I processed it. And what happened was in writing those poems in real time from the time I first found out

Robin Dellabough

until about a year or two ago, I was writing about it. And what I came to was I hadn't really lost anything. I had gained a sense of identity, but also an appreciation for the father who raised me being still equal as a father. He still, you know, the gifts he gave me didn't just disappear.

the way he raised me didn't go away. I mean, all three of them were dead by the time I found out, my mother and both fathers. So that was very, very difficult. I was frustrated that I couldn't talk to any of them about it and find out if any of them knew, if they didn't know, what was the story there? It was a huge mystery. And that was a difficult part for me too, because

I love narrative. I love finding out what happened to people. And here I was in the middle of my own story without really having the details or the whole plot accessible to me. So that was tough. And then the other thing though was, I think if I had found this out at a...

before I had my own identity as solidified as it was by 68, say if I found out in my 20s, I think it would have been devastating to my sense of identity because I didn't know who I was yet when I was 20 something, you know? At this, you know, so it would have really shaken me to the core and I would have really questioned who the hell am I? But, you know, at this point, I know who I am. I'm very solid.

about who I am. It was more quest, so it didn't really affect my identity in that sense. It was more, as I said, the confirmation of things I had just unconsciously intuitively known about myself. It affirmed where all that came from, you know, and it turned out it was really quite amazing. I got to meet my biological fathers.

Robin Dellabough

to children who he raised and knew were his children, which was fantastic. And so I learned a lot about my biological father, which was, I mean, I was really lucky because many, many people are finding out this kind of thing these days because of all these consumer DNA tests, but many people never track down who the parent was. They just have a not expected parent result, but they can't figure out.

who their parent was. So I was really lucky. And anyway, when I first met them, and after we had talked for a little bit, they basically said, oh my God, dad would have loved you. You're so much more similar to him than we are. Apparently he, really, they actually said that one brother actually said he would have loved you more, which I felt bad about. But apparently my biological father loved to write. He loved to travel. He loved to find food. He loved...

Srini Rao

I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Robin Dellabough

culture, museums, art, and my two new siblings just aren't into any of that. So it was kind of cool to find out some of the things about myself that clearly hadn't come from my father who raised me, came from this guy I never met, but whose DNA I had half of. On the other hand, it was bittersweet because

God, would I love to have known him and been able to talk to him and, you know, and just be able to hug him and smell him and, you know, have that visceral sensory self of him, a sense of him. I do have a photograph, I have a bunch of photographs of him, which again, I was really happy to have. And there was one, I have a cousin. Oh, this was the other crazy part. It turns out I have a first cousin.

who lived a mile away from me in my tiny little village of 5,000 people. And he's been there for years and years and we didn't know we were first cousins until I took the test. So that was incredible. And he had, and then there was another cousin just across the river from me in Nyack. So they, one of them had an actual photo of my mother and my biological father.

when they were engaged before I was born. And that, I mean, I just burst into tears when they gave me that photo. It's the only one anyone knows of, of the two of them together. And they're so young and they're so beautiful and it's really special. I framed it and I have it in my living room and I look at it every single day.

Srini Rao

So your siblings that you grew up with, did they also follow sort of non-traditional career paths like you did, or are many of them on sort of conventional paths?

Robin Dellabough

Um, some did, some didn't. Um, that's a good question too. My one sister is definitely an artist. She's a glassblower and a potter. And, um, she, uh, three of them actually all live in Eugene, Oregon. And she's, she, she makes art the way most people breathe. She can't not make it. Um, she was a graphic designer, um, career wise, and she just retired actually from the university of Oregon.

in the, as a graphic designer. Whoops, sorry about that. Hang on. Whoops. So she definitely has followed that path. One sister started to, she went to Bennington as a fine arts major and sadly just got, it got squashed out of her. It was a very clickish school and if you weren't,

following the New York School of Painting in the 1970s, you were just ostracized. And so she left after two years. And she did filmmaking for a while, but in the end, she wound up having a pretty regular job raising a daughter and being, you know, just not really pursuing her art in too many obvious ways. She's a calligrapher.

And she still does that. Another sister is a musician and also an artist. She actually got a PhD in arts, arts administration, I think, and taught students at the University of Oregon how to put together an art portfolio. And that was kind of her field. She also has a farm and chickens and goats and.

You know, she's a real Renaissance woman. She does a little bit of everything. Her whole life is one big creative act. And then my two brothers, one of them studied to be an architect, but it was right around the recession and he just couldn't get that off the ground. So he became an executive at a company. And then another brother was a builder and built gorgeous houses in LA.

Robin Dellabough

So, and now he's retired. So I guess yes and no. You know, I think that, yeah, so that's that.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

So how in the world do you get from hitchhiking across Europe to grad school in journalism at Berkeley?

Robin Dellabough

in a meandering kind of way. So, you know, in those days, you know, today, so many young people have these plans and they know, like, by the time they're juniors in high school, what they're going to major in and they, you know,

Srini Rao

Obviously.

Robin Dellabough

I remember my kids, I really encouraged them to take a year off after high school before they went to college and they didn't want to do it and I couldn't understand because to me it was so life changing to do that. So I just kept kind of going where the wind blew in a way all through my teens and twenties.

So I hitchhiked around, then I came back and went to Columbia for a while. Then I dropped out of that and went back to France for a while, and then I came back and did a little more at Columbia. And then I decided to go to summer school in Berkeley and stay with a dear friend of mine, mainly because I was trying to break up with a guy who, we just, now I seriously, that was the main reason we just didn't seem to be able to keep.

away from each other as long as we were in the same city. Oh, and also I had been mugged at Knife Point in Manhattan. So I kind of wanted a break from Manhattan. So I went out to Berkeley, stayed with this old family friend in a little cottage in the flats of Berkeley, and just fell in love with the area. I also fell in love with a guy. That didn't hurt. But.

And I was taking summer classes at Berkeley and it turned out I could transfer there. And so I just stayed. And for the first five years, my poor parents kept saying, so when are you coming back East? And finally, after five years, they realized I wasn't coming back East. I was staying in Berkeley. So I went to Berkeley and then once again, I dropped out to go to the tree house in Hawaii.

And then we had a flash flood, so that didn't work out. So I came back and then I finished up my undergrad degree. And then I was in theater for a long time as a stage manager and sometimes an assistant director. I worked at Berkeley Repertory Theater at Berkeley Stage Company and the Blake Street Hawkeyes, which was a performance art group that Whoopi Goldberg joined right after I left.

Srini Rao

Hehehe

Robin Dellabough

before she went to LA and got famous. So, and I loved doing that. It was creative, but it was always, you know, creative. It was supporting other people's creativity. That was sort of a theme. So, and.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

So I am familiar with. We'll talk about that.

Robin Dellabough

Yeah, exactly. So at a certain point after I was in theater for a while, probably three, four, five years, and I was also working at a bookstore and waitressing, and it was a typical 20-somethings life in the 70s and early 80s in Berkeley. It was a lot of fun. And I just didn't think in terms of a career path still. But at a certain point,

Two acquaintances of mine walked into the bookstore where I was working, and one of them had just gotten a master's in journalism, and one had just gotten a master's in English lit. And so I grilled them about both of their programs, because I started thinking maybe I did want to write. It had been kind of a, I had written from the time I was four or five years old, little poems and stories, but it had kind of gone underground for a while.

And it was starting to surface that was really what I wanted to do. You know, I knew I didn't want to be a stage manager the rest of my life. I was good at it, but it wasn't satisfying enough because I did have this streak of creativity that wasn't being expressed. So in the end, I decided journalism school would be more practical and

So I went and it was fabulous. And I never did daily newspaper journalism. I was always interested more in writing about the arts, which I did. And then I wound up graduating and writing for a magazine. And then I got into writing for books, as a ghostwriter editor type person. But again, it was always, and during that time I was also writing poetry just for myself.

Eventually I got into submitting poems to small literary journals, but at the same time I was having children and raising them and doing day jobs to help support the family. And it was always, except for the poems, working to, as I said, further someone else's creativity.

Robin Dellabough

which I enjoyed and again, I think I was good at it. But at a certain point, my mom was dying and we all gathered to kind of say goodbye to her and she liked to read palms. And so we indulged her and she read all of her six children's palms and all of her eight grandchildren's palms. And she kind of had, it was sort of a farewell message from her to each of us. It was very moving.

And I'll never forget, we were on a deck at my sister's house in Eugene. And she had, it was one-on-one, just the two of us. And she said, you need to find your own passion. The window is closing and you need to do it. And I was really struck by that message.

and it would make a great story if I said so the very next month you know I started I quit my job and I started writing. It took a little longer to simmer and actually the thing that finally galvanized or catalyzed me into really taking my poetry seriously in a sustained way you know as opposed to

You know, I do it like in a frenzy of activity for a while and then something would distract me and I would stop, you know, like a mother dying, for example, and having to fly out there for three months. But anyway, what really got me on the path that led me to be able to actually put together a whole book and get it published of my poetry was, believe it or not, working on an audience of one.

with you.

Srini Rao

Yeah, that's well, it's funny you say that because so that it well, you know, it's funny. Yeah. So I remember talking to my sister and I remember telling her I was like, Yeah, so Robin doesn't want to work on another book with me because she was inspired by the message of audience of one and she's like, so that means the book is working. I was like, Yeah, but it worked on the wrong person.

Robin Dellabough

I'm not kidding. I'm dead serious. Uh, cause I... yeah.

Robin Dellabough

Exactly. But really, you know, we're writing about all these reasons to express yourself creatively and, you know, and we finished the book and I thought, God damn, why am I not doing it? So that was the start, you know, and I started not taking on freelance work and I started.

just saying no to a lot of things actually in order to give myself the psychic and chronological time to write poetry. And I started taking workshops and classes and submitting and just taking myself seriously. And it snowballed because once you do that, it's a self-fulfilling positive prophecy.

And that was only in like, I mean we were working on the book mostly in 2016. Oh, and I have to say the other thing that happened that year was my sister, my youngest sister, who's the most creative probably, had breast cancer. And I was spending a lot of time with her. And I think that seeing that sense of, you know, viscerally feeling that sense of mortality.

um, also, uh, kicked me in the butt to, you know, like, if, if you, if you don't do this now, you're never going to do it. So I had that sense of urgency. Um, and, you know, the more I wrote, um, that, you know, I did, I committed to a daily practice, which as we say in the book is so important. Um, I tried to, uh, cut down on any distractions. Um,

I start, oh, this was huge too. And we mentioned it's a good idea in audience of one. So I thought, oh yeah, good idea, wish I had it. So I started a creativity support group in 2017 and it's still going. In fact, we have a meeting tonight and it's been phenomenally successful in terms of, it's all different genres of creativity. And

Robin Dellabough

we've been truly cheerleaders for each other. And so every single one of us, there are seven of us, have achieved more in the last few years than we had in all the years before put together in terms of our creative output, our creative successes. It's just been incredible. I really don't know if I would have pursued this book if it hadn't been for that group.

which is called Mois by the way, which stands for both the French me, cause it's like art, my turn. We're all mothers of children who've grown up. So it's also stands for mothers of invention. And, you know, it's like our turn to do our own creative work and it works. So between that and then...

the discovery of my biological father and needing to process that through poetry, that's how the book really was born, I'd say.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, it's kind of funny. You just kind of basically gave us a giant commercial for my book, even though we're supposed to be here talking about yours. I want to go back to a lot of the things you said earlier, because there's just so much to tear apart and dissect. And, you know, a lot of what you said, particularly about young people and career paths, because I don't know if this was the case when you were a grad student at Berkeley Journalism. Was it the same building that it is now, that building with the wood beams and?

It's that building that's on the north side of campus. I'm not sure if that's... Yeah, so funny story. That is the building that I took one class in my entire time I was at Berkeley. And it was a writing, it was a class on war and literature. And I would be read sort of Catch-22 and a guy named Steve Eisenberg, who was a guest lecturer at Berkeley for that semester taught it. And...

Robin Dellabough

Yes, that's very charming. Yeah.

Srini Rao

I think he had been the editor of some big newspaper in New York and he left after that. I remember walking into a career fair three weeks into Berkeley, which is ridiculous considering I was a freshman, and I talked to a guy at Anderson Consulting, which then became Accenture, and he said, we don't hire English majors. And I never set foot in that building again after that.

And I always think back to that and think, wow, what did I miss out on? But I think it makes a well, that's the thing, right? To your point, I feel like a lot of young people make decisions about their entire lives when they've only lived a fraction of them. And this is something I saw because I did it myself. And even when I went back to talk to my high school AP English teachers class, I think this was right when Unmistakable came out, if I remember correctly.

Robin Dellabough

Yeah, that's so sad.

Srini Rao

All these kids were worried about what they were gonna do with their lives, and I'm thinking to myself, even if you have this whole thing perfectly planned out, nothing's gonna turn out like you thought it would.

Robin Dellabough

Well, that's the joke. That's the irony. You know, it's just ridiculous. I mean, it's OK to have kind of a general sense of... I mean, I personally think thinking about one's values and how to live a life in which you're able to live those values is more effective and constructive than figuring out if you want to be a lawyer or a doctor.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Robin Dellabough

Now, I have to say that is coming out of a position of total privilege on my part. And I would be the last person to say that everyone has the luxury of thinking about their lives that way. Seriously, I mean, it sounds so obnoxious to say that to someone who's just struggling to eat and have a home. But if...

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Robin Dellabough

you have the luxury of making certain choices the way I did. And don't get me wrong, I was self-supporting from the time I left home. I paid my own way in that hitchhiking trip in Europe and I paid for college and I paid for all my adventures. It wasn't that, but I had been raised in a family of privilege and exposed to all those things. Anyway, but so...

Srini Rao

Hmm.

Robin Dellabough

Here's a good example of that. Um, I had a book production company, as you know, called Lark Productions. And, um, for a variety of reasons after it stopped being fun and satisfying, I left not having a clue what I was going to do next. Um, and again, a part of that was, um, uh, because I was married to someone and, and who could support.

us for a short period of time till I figured out what I was going to do. Um, but so I just, I took six months to, um, get over being burned out and to figure out what I wanted to do. And I was working with a life coach actually. And instead of thinking again about jobs or even careers, what, what I wound up doing is, um, coming up with three characteristics or values or

or attitudes that I wanted in any of my work and they were creativity, communication and community. And so I could apply those three things to things that came across my radar in a way that would help me see through the possibly limiting, you know, resume limiting

obstacles to a certain job and go for it anyway. So what happened was I saw that this small Quaker progressive school was looking for a director of admissions. Now, I had no experience or background in admissions work at all. I could go on and on about that. But it immediately lit up my brain

Robin Dellabough

aspects that I was looking for. It was collaborative, it was creative, and it was community. And so based on that, I went for it and I got the job and I had a glorious four years working there. And I wouldn't have been able to do that if I just had this very narrow concept of what I was qualified to do or what I could do to make money.

You know, again, that's my privilege that I have never really done anything just for the sake of the money, because I've been lucky enough not to have to worry about that. And it's not because I'm an heiress, it's because I've been lucky to work in a field or fields that have renumerated me adequately. So, yeah.

So I just, I get frustrated with young people who do have the luxury of choice when they tie themselves into such a narrow range of possibility.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

I really appreciate the fact that you brought up the caveat of the luxury of choice because I think it took me a long time to realize that because even when I went back and I looked at Unmistakable and I talked about this on the show before where I think it was Jonathan Fields who was interviewing me and he'd started asking about parental expectations in Indian culture and if we're honest, Unmistakable was really a challenge to the status quo and all of the advice that I had been given.

Robin Dellabough

Absolutely.

Srini Rao

parents were giving me the advice they gave me based on the context that they grew up in, so their advice was completely logical. It made sense. If your outcomes are binary where it's either poverty or security, then you're going to advise your kids to act accordingly. I want to come back to the parenting thing.

Robin Dellabough

Right.

Robin Dellabough

Right, right, exactly. And it's fear.

Srini Rao

So one thing that is interesting to me about you is that you were creative in an, you know, and started a creative life in an era that predates technology. And, you know, we talked about this in, yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways, in a lot of ways, the technology that we use today to express our creativity. And we talked about this in audience one. We said that the paradox of all of this is the very thing that facilitates so much of it also inhibits it.

Robin Dellabough

I sure did.

Srini Rao

who was a writer and somebody who worked with writers in an area that predates this, what have you seen change for the worse? I mean, I have my own opinions about this, obviously, but I think in a lot of ways, that's the whole idea behind Audience of One in a lot of ways was, it's not about sort of, oh, how many followers can I have on Twitter, but I'm just curious from your perspective, not just from having worked on Audience One with me, but what you see now.

Robin Dellabough

So your question is what I think has changed for the worse in terms of being creative and technology happening. That's true.

Srini Rao

Well, I guess in terms of the way that creative people think about, you know, building careers and what it takes to be successful more than anything else.

Robin Dellabough

Hmm. You know, it's hard for me. Well, hmm. I feel like I would answer that differently, depending on what hat I was wearing. If I was wearing the hat that I have worn as a book packager, producer, collaborator, ghostwriter, I would say it's only helped. And that it's important for.

an author or whoever to have a platform and to have a lot of followers and to engage in all that kind of stuff. But that was me coming at it almost from a business perspective, not a creative perspective. I mean, do I think that helps creativity? No, of course not.

Srini Rao

bright.

Robin Dellabough

If I have my just plain old poet's hat on, I don't think it's, I mean, it hasn't really changed my creative output or life except in a positive way, but this is, and I'm talking about very simple examples of technology such as I remember in my 20s and 30s the way I would track my submissions of

to literary journals was literally on little index cards that I kept in a little metal case, and then I had to print out and mail poems at the post office, et cetera, et cetera. Well, now there's an app that tracks everything I've submitted, all the different journals I've submitted too, so if I can't remember,

If I sent a poem to X, Y, or Z journal, I just check on this app. And so that has streamlined everything. Oh, and of course, I can submit everything electronically. So that's a huge plus. That's a big advantage for a writer. I mean, I also remember printing out books that were

like six pounds of paper to send to the publisher. And now we just email a PDF, you know, it's just, I mean, seriously, that's, it's all time-saving. But if you're talking about, you know, on the level or the arena of social media and TikToks and all that kind of stuff, I'm just not that engaged in it. So I'm not really probably a good person to ask

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Robin Dellabough

I don't care a lot about it, and I don't really need to care a lot about it. You know, I mean, I'm 70 years old, and I'm not going to try to make my little book of poetry a bestseller. I just, I would just be pleased if more than my brothers and sisters read it, you know, seriously. And, and I'm happy to say that, you know, it, it's definitely going to.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I'm going to go.

Robin Dellabough

go to more than my brothers and sisters based on the pre-orders. But I don't have that ambition to have a million followers so that I can then sell a million copies of my poetry book. I'd rather have a hundred readers really get something meaningful out of it than a million people who buy it and don't even read it. You know?

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Robin Dellabough

That's kind of my value system.

Srini Rao

Yeah, you know, it's funny we had a guy named Will Storr here who read a book called Selfie, you know, how we become self-obsessed in what it's doing to us. And I think one of the consequences of building such a self-obsessed society is, to your point, people don't do that for their own fulfillment anymore. It's all about some sort of external outcome. And there's this emphasis on metrics over mastery. Funny enough, I remember when Audience of One came out, my sister called me, she said, how's it doing? And I said, it's not selling as many copies as we hope.

Robin Dellabough

Yeah.

Robin Dellabough

Right.

Srini Rao

an idiot. That's the entire message of the book. She's like, you don't even believe what you wrote. That's why nobody's buying it. And that was that was a really hard lesson for me to go through, particularly after writing a book about it, because at the end of the day, like, you know, Penguin is still a business, you know, they're not immune to the laws of capitalism. And I, you know, I jokingly said, yeah, we call it an audience of one, I'm sure Penguin would be a lot happier if it was reaching an audience of millions. But but yeah, she's brilliant. I mean,

Robin Dellabough

I'm sorry.

Robin Dellabough

right?

Robin Dellabough

Yeah.

Robin Dellabough

audience have a million right. I love your sister though by the way. I think she's great.

Srini Rao

Yeah, she but the it took me a long time to just say, you know what? All right, that's it. I have to embrace the ideas in this book and be OK with the fact that maybe this is what it's going to be. And I remember even Ryan Holiday telling me obstacles the way didn't sell, you know, as many copies that it did until three years after it came out. And then apparently the artist's way was years after publication that it ended up becoming this sort of cult classic.

And so I just kind of thought to myself, all right, well, I have a job to do. And that is to do my work. Speaking of which, uh, I wanted to talk to you about your whole process of working with people mainly because I seem to have inherited, you know, some of Robin's no bullshit way of giving feedback, which I've realized is not the easiest thing in the world for people to take. Like I had people who literally I'm like, at this point I have to pay, basically tell people I was like, look, if I work with you, there's a chance I'm going to make you cry.

Robin Dellabough

Yep.

Robin Dellabough

I'm sorry.

Srini Rao

And the truth is I don't give a shit if I make you cry because I only have one job and that's to make you write something worth reading. And if you're not okay with that, then we shouldn't work together. And I basically realized I'm a terrible coach for writers. Like I can show somebody like how I can guide them on the process. And I'm like, I will tell you if it sucks and you're not going to like that. Like, I'm not going to tell you what you want to hear. I will tell you what you need to hear. And you're particularly good at doing that in a way that, you know, really made me kind of a much better writer.

Robin Dellabough

HAHAHA

Srini Rao

thousand times better than they ever would have been if I hadn't worked with you on them. And there are numerous things, I remember a couple in particular. One was throughout the process of writing Unmistakable, there's one comment that you made over and over and over. Do you remember what it was?

Robin Dellabough

Not quite right.

Srini Rao

how does this relate to the concept of unmistakable to the point where I was like, I'm really beginning to hate this word. That was one, but then the other thing that I noticed, even when you did give feedback, I think I remember the closest thing to a compliment was good and I'm like, all right, cool. But I intentionally chose you because I remember when I met you in Lisa's office, you said, I'm gonna be tough on you. And I told Lisa she's the one. And...

Robin Dellabough

Oh, OK.

Yeah, yeah, okay. Yeah.

Srini Rao

I, to this day, I remember it took me one month before I stopped taking your feedback personally. You might remember we had a call where you sent me an editorial memo for a very well-known author and you're like, this is the feedback I gave to this author. And I'm like, all right, cool. And it took me a long time to separate the fact that, you know, you were giving me feedback on the work from feedback on me. And oh, the other favorite comment was lazy try again. Like, but I realized like when you did that, you didn't.

Robin Dellabough

Yeah.

Srini Rao

You never just gave me the feedback on how to fix it. You made me think for myself. And I wonder, and Brian.

Robin Dellabough

Yeah. Well, that is what writing is. You know, writing is a way of thinking, but getting the thinking down on the page. And so that, you know, that's always what I meant by that. If it was lazy, it's because it hadn't been thought through well enough. But I hope I never made you cry.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Mm-hmm. You never made me cry. I mean, like, I was thick-skinned enough that I was just like, all right, whatever. Granted, I'm probably far, like, I thought you were tough. Apparently I'm ruthless. If you're tough, I'm an asshole. Like, yeah, as it is, I, well, I have no ability to filter, so, yeah, that's-

Robin Dellabough

I have to say it's right. It's a it gets sometimes I fear that, you know, in my poetry workshops where we're supposed to give constructive criticism, I think I do come on too strong sometimes with these very fragile poets. I mean, poets are the most fragile of all writers. And I had to really, really try to hold myself back.

Srini Rao

Ha ha ha!

Robin Dellabough

Even though I want it myself, I want that tough feedback on my work, but I've come to, in my old age, I've acquired this wisdom that not everyone wants that. So I'll actually ask in the workshop, would you like my edits? I don't just send them to someone. So and some people welcome them and some people absolutely don't want to see a single word edited.

Srini Rao

Clearly I didn't learn everything from you, because I'm just like, this is shit, you should try again. Like, that's, you know...

Robin Dellabough

I hope I...

Robin Dellabough

Ha!

Well, it comes back to context again. If you're working on a book together, it has to be up to snuff. If it's a poem that someone's going to just stick in a drawer, mistakes aren't as high. Yeah.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean, and I thought to myself, like, maybe you get one or two chances to do this in a lifetime. So you want to do it right and do it well. And so I was like, all right, you know what? And I remember at a certain point, I was like, all right, this isn't like you're doing the job I hired you to do, which is to help me write the best book I could possibly write. Yeah, and that's one thing I've noticed with a lot of creatives. I mean, like, poets are the most fragile. I mean, I think all creatives are fragile to a degree. No matter how much we say, you know, we're thick skinned, like to this day, I can tell you, I can quote you.

Robin Dellabough

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Robin Dellabough

Right.

Srini Rao

The only review from any of my books I can quote you is from the woman who wrote me a two-star review who said, I hope this guy is a better surfer than he is a writer. And then I remember, even when I met you, remember it was between you and two other coaches, two people who did what you did. One guy hated the book and I was like, clearly this guy won't work. And the other guy was Ryan's writing coach, Ryan Holiday's writing coach, Neils. And I was like, yeah, I don't want my books to sound like his. I love Ryan, but, and I love his books, but I wanted a book that sounded different. I'm Sam.

Robin Dellabough

Yeah.

Robin Dellabough

Yeah, yeah, huh. Well, I think it worked out.

Srini Rao

Yeah, no complaints. Well, let's talk about your book because there's a lot of things in this book that I learned about you that I actually never learned in all the time that we work together in two and a half years. You know, I...

Robin Dellabough

I bet.

Robin Dellabough

Well, it's a very personal book and I, you know, as a professional, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, uh, there wouldn't be any point in revealing any of that.

Srini Rao

Well, I knew that you had kids because we talked about your daughter who was also a novelist. What I didn't know was about the marriages and I always wondered about that. I was like, you know, what is Robin's romantic past? And one of the things that you actually say in the book, let me pull this up here, this quote, this really struck me. Now both marriages and that iconic building have burned into history, but new architecture soars and love still bears witness with new lives alive, alive.

Robin Dellabough

Yeah. Yes.

Robin Dellabough

Yeah.

Srini Rao

And so what age did you actually end up getting divorced? And at what point do you realize, okay, that's kind of it, like I'm done with this. And is there, what happens to you, is there a prospective romantic future now, or is that just off the table?

Robin Dellabough

Uh, well, that's a really personal question, Sreeni. I'm teasing you. I'm teasing you. I'm glad you quoted that particular poem, though, because it, you know, it clearly, it wasn't, it was a poem written way after the split. But looking back at the very beginning of the marriage, that was

Srini Rao

I can take this out Robin if you want. Totally, if you want me to edit that out, I'm not happy, do I really? All right.

Robin Dellabough

quite joyful. And it was, I put it first in that section about the marriage because I thought it summed up the cycle and, you know, similarly to how I processed finding out about my biological father, writing all these poems about my marriage, both before, during, and after helped me process the divorce.

That first poem in that section is where I kind of am now with it, I'd say. So we were married 30 years, and I thought we had a great marriage. And then one day, kind of out of the blue, he said he wanted a break. And long story short, that was his euphemism for really he's out of there. So it was a huge shock. It was like a...

hand grenade had been thrown into my life, really, because I just never saw it coming. And it took me a long time to get over it. For a long time, I thought, and all our friends thought, oh, well, he's just going through a midlife crisis and he'll come back. But finally I realized that wasn't gonna happen. So it's been 10 years actually, which I can't believe.

And so I've done the whole online dating thing, which has been excruciating. And I hate it. I've probably had 150 first dates and maybe 20 second dates and maybe 10 third dates. And it's just hard, you know, cause especially for some in my generation, at first.

Srini Rao

Ha ha.

Robin Dellabough

I still thought it was a big stigma to do online stuff. And then I realized, oh, it really isn't. Even people in their 20s are doing it. Like, they aren't desperate, you know, so it's just the way of the world. So I did get used to that, but, and I didn't start doing it for a while. I then, I've had a few heartbreaks. I reconnected with my, the very boyfriend, I left New York because of, to move to Berkeley when I was 20.

Um, he, his wife had died. We had been in touch off and on during the years. So we reconnected and I, it was like, it was like no time had passed and I was totally crazy about him all over again. And then COVID hit and somehow in the middle of a pandemic, he managed to meet another woman and fall in love with her. So that was heartbreaking. Um, cause I really thought this was going to be it, you know?

Um, and then last, um, last August, September, I went on, I had done all the things people say you should do, like pursue your own interests, you know, at which I have, I go to poetry readings, I hike, I go dancing, um, all things I love to do and I would do it no matter what. So I went on a hiking trip, um, last summer, uh, to Glacier National Park. And it was a group of people about.

six married couples, about six single women, and one guy, single guy. And we hit it off and I really liked him and we had a lot of fun and repartee and blah, blah. And he lived out of state for me, but when we got back, I emailed him and just said, we have some great hikes up here in the Hudson Valley if you want. He said, great. So long story short, we started seeing each other a little bit long distance and we had a great time.

And I really thought again, well, this is a keeper. I mean, I never wanna get married again. And I told him that, but after a while, he just said, I wanna date other women and I don't think I wanna see you anymore. So that was another heartbreak. And that was fairly recently. So I kind of feel like at this point, I'm just kind of...

Robin Dellabough

letting things unfold. I'm not doing the online thing and I'm just, I'm actually going on another hiking trip to Alaska, hiking and kayaking, but I'm not, it's not like I'm expecting to meet anyone. If it happens again, that would be great. I miss having a sort of a witness to my life and witnessing someone else's life, the kind of person you can tell the little things that happen.

in a day or the funny thing you saw, that kind of thing. I miss that a lot. And I loved having it again, brief as it was. But my life is very rich and full as it is. I mean, clearly I still dance and I still hike and I'm writing and I'm still working full time. And I have good friends and I have grandchildren now who I adore. So.

If it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. If it does, that would be great. But I have had a lot of love in my life and I feel blessed to be able to say that.

Srini Rao

30 years is a really long time, and to have that come out of nowhere, to have something that has been such a sort of stable, consistent, predictable force in your life for 30 years, and to have it be pulled out from under you, how do you find a sense of solid ground after something like that?

Robin Dellabough

It was hard. Like I said, it was really hard. I went, I had a really rough couple of years there. It was literally like a hand grenade, especially the unexpectedness. How I did it, I'm pretty resilient, I think, just as, you know, my temperament is resilient. And so...

One thing I did the first couple of years is every time I got really angry thinking about something about him, I had a party. I threw a party.

Srini Rao

I love that.

Robin Dellabough

I really did. So I had more parties in those first two years than I've ever had before. I had an all-women unvalentines party. I had game nights. I had mother-daughter parties. I had dance parties. I gave birthday parties to every single one of my friends. So that helped. Like, get mad, have a party.

Robin Dellabough

I leaned a lot on my sisters and my friends. My three sisters are my best friends. And I, for example, I went on a backpacking trip with one of them right after it happened. And it was very therapeutic to get out into the mountains and just have that perspective that, yeah, my 30 year marriage is over, but I'm a speck on this mountain, that kind of thing.

And they were people, friends and my sisters, they were people I could call and vent to or cry with or they could make me laugh, that kind of thing. So, and then, oh, and I wrote a lot. I wrote a lot of poetry during those first horrible years. So I guess that's how I did it. And I have...

I'd say physical stuff really helped. You know, as I said, just walking my dog or going down to the river. I live on the Hudson River and the river's always been almost a spiritual place for me where I find a lot of solace and comfort. So I did that. I don't think I started dancing yet. I think that was a couple of years later.

Oh, and the other thing I did that I'm so happy I did, and I just kind of stumbled into it is I started, my kids had left home by then. I had this four bedroom house. I needed money. And so I started renting rooms on Airbnb, which I had just had discovered. I was a very early, early adopter. My daughter and I had stayed in an Airbnb when she was looking at grad schools and it had just started.

So I thought, okay, this could be cool. And I was really lucky, because my very first guest was a young violin student. She was getting a master's in violin at a nearby college. And she was so lovely. She became like another daughter. She really didn't. She wound up staying with me for, I think, almost a year. And since then, I've just had another woman who...

Srini Rao

Wow.

Robin Dellabough

went up living with me for four years and I just had lunch with her. She only moved out because she, her boyfriend who lived in Soho was begging her to move in with him. And I finally almost kicked her out. I said, Amy, it's time to, you know, fly out of the nest here, go live with him. And so she did. But again, you know, she came to my daughter's wedding, you know, so that was.

Srini Rao

them.

Robin Dellabough

That was great because I realized, especially having grown up with five brothers and sisters and then having had a family, I like living with people, you know, I really do. Right now I have a young woman who's studying to be a midwife living with me. In fact, she just had to run out to deliver a baby. And so that's been really great.

Srini Rao

Well, I think that makes a perfect place to go into the final topic I want to talk to you. You've alluded to your daughter multiple times throughout our conversation. And I wonder, having lived this kind of a life that has gone anything but according to plan, you know, meandering, but allowed you to live the kind of life you want to live, how did that influence the way that you raised your children and the advice that you gave them about making their way in the world?

Robin Dellabough

Well, as I said before, I tried to instill in them that values were more important than money, that following your creative passions was really important. I tried giving them a lot of freedom to experiment and explore. It backfired with my son. He was very conventional in some ways and very interested in making a lot of money.

and very kind of, he was just very uptight, I guess is the right word. My daughter wound up, for example, unschooling, homeschooling for two years. And that is a direct result of her being exposed to the whole concept through a series of books I was working on.

with a family whose two daughters were homeschooled. And she just got really fascinated by that. So she came to us with a proposal for doing it. And because of my value system and my exes too, we said, go for it. And we encouraged her and it was great. She came up with her own curriculum.

And she, and we were, and because my job, I was working with Seth then, or no, I had Lark by then, was flexible, you know, and I worked right nearby. And so I was able to support her. And she would do things like, well, she worked on a lot of our books actually for her English lessons. She contributed to them starting at like 11 and 12, cause she was always a gifted writer.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Robin Dellabough

And for science, I would have her read the science section of the New York Times once a week and then write a summary of one of the articles. So I learned a lot of science during those years. And then she would go to museums and libraries. She was the assistant to a friend of mine teaching an art class. She just was able to be incredibly self-motivated. And so she learned a tremendous amount and didn't get into the yucky.

middle school mean girls world. And then she decided she did wanna go to high school. So we looked at a whole lot of high schools and she wound up picking one, not the one her brother went to, which was extremely academic and success, heavy and intense and put a lot of pressure on the kids, not the opposite of a holistic education. She picked a school that was the opposite.

and she thrived there and she wound up editing the literary magazine and then she wound up, she didn't want to take any time off but she did travel a lot even when she was younger. I remember putting her on a plane to go to Jamaica to help work out an orphanage and putting her on a plane to go to Alaska to see a friend who she had met on the editorial board of the book she had worked on with us and then she went to

somewhere else on her own. But anyway, she wound up going to Brown because they liked people who were very self-motivated. And she was. So she was able to major in creative writing. She didn't even have to major in English. And she wound up publishing three successful books in the last few years. So I mean, look.

Do I think if she had different parents, she wouldn't have become a successful novelist? No. I think she was wired and born to do that. But do I feel good about being a parent who could encourage her and affirm what she wanted to do? Absolutely. And I would like to think we could take a teeny bit of credit for having the kind of

Robin Dellabough

environment that exposed her to many different things and you know and she saw us reading and writing all the time too of course so but mainly I think it was that we gave her so much freedom to pursue what she wanted to pursue we never said oh you'll never make a living as a writer you have to go be a you know advertising accountant or something so yeah.

Srini Rao

Wow. Well, this has been amazing. It's been really interesting to get to know a whole part of your life that I didn't know much about despite working with you for two years. And it'll be really interesting to hear how you answer this final question given that you were the person who pretty much turned unmistakable into what it was. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Robin Dellabough

Can I, before I answer that, make one suggestion? I don't know if it's okay, and you can say no. Would it be okay if I read one of the poems from the book?

Srini Rao

Yes.

Srini Rao

Oh yes, please go for it.

Robin Dellabough

Do you have a preference of which section?

Srini Rao

No, whatever you want to share.

Robin Dellabough

Okay, let's see. Well, I think either the marriage section or the father section, so let me see which one I think. I think I'll read this one. Let me just find it in this manuscript. I still don't have

Robin Dellabough

the galleys. So this is in the section about my two fathers and my mother.

Robin Dellabough

It's called Undone. If you find out your father was not your father, do you fall off the family tree like a red leaf that turns to ground as if you could unlove all the ancestors whose name you bear, the grandmother who wrote you a lullaby, the white-haired aunt who whispered dreams, the gorgeous uncle who died young? Where do you put their voices before you have nothing new to hear?

Are they still yours? Or must they be undone, unremembered, your second father's paintings unhung?

Robin Dellabough

That's it.

Srini Rao

Whoa.

Robin Dellabough

Now there's a different one I want to read. Damn it. That's the trouble of having a whole book of them. It's hard to choose. Anyway. Because there's one.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Robin Dellabough

I think it's the very last one that sort of.

Yeah, if I could just read this. Yeah. Okay, let me just read this last one. Okay, because this one, it's the last one in the book and it kind of comes, it makes it come full circle. So it's called Family Dinner, 1976. Everyone is still alive talking about death.

Srini Rao

We can do an edit on this. Yeah, if you wanna do that, I'll do an edit on this and then I'll ask you the unmistakable question.

Robin Dellabough

My not father says the first thing we should see every morning is a skull. My mother announces to the table that Robin's always been afraid of dying by 24. My father asks my age now, 24. It feels like a plague. He reminds me to guard against Eagles that prey on babies. His black way of teaching me to be fearless. I can hear how I listened to him.

My laugh the same for 40 years in this fearless afterlife. Grant telling me he is my true father.

Srini Rao

Amazing.

Robin Dellabough

Okay, because Grant was the father who raised me.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, this has been really, really interesting. As I said, you know, I have had a chance to get to know a part of you and a part of your life that I just had no idea about despite having worked with you for two years. So I'm really curious to see how you're going to answer this question given that you played a pivotal role in the Unmistakable book. What do you think it is? Yeah, Will, that's why I'm glad you didn't. Will, I'm glad you didn't because then you could have rehearsed it, which would defeat the purpose.

Robin Dellabough

And you know, you think I would have thought about it and no, you're gonna ask me. I didn't. I completely forgot about it.

Srini Rao

What do you think it is? Yeah, what do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Robin Dellabough

Oh my goodness.

Robin Dellabough

You know, what I think makes someone or something unmistakable is their real, their spiritual nature coming through loud and clear. And you can think of spiritual in that sense as, you know, not necessarily God, um, but the, the still quiet, but, but strong.

deep voice inside us when we stop thinking and doing, that is always there. Quakers call it the light within. It could be nature, it could be a group of people who you love, whatever you wanna call it. But for me, when it's unmistakable, there's that sense of authority and authenticity that I think can only come.

from that place of spiritual life.

Srini Rao

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking time to join us to share your story, your wisdom, and your insights with our listeners. It has been an absolute pleasure to actually get to talk to you in this context. Where can people find out more about you, your work, the book, and everything that you're up to?

Robin Dellabough

Oh no, that's a good question. I don't have, like I said before, I'm not big on social media and websites and stuff. I don't have my own website. All I can say is to order the book, which I would love people to do, it's called Double Helix. It's not on Amazon yet. It will be after May 27th, but for now you can go to Finishing Line Press. It's just finishinglinepress.com.

plug in my name, Robin Dellabough, and my page there will come up with some articles about me and the pre-order link. Oh, I do have a very tiny Instagram account that I do post poems on sometimes. Oh, God, what is it called? I can't even remember what it's called. Isn't that terrible? I think it's just...robindellabough

Srini Rao

I'm going to go ahead and close the video.

Robin Dellabough

at our Dellabough. Yeah, it's just because there's yeah, our Dela on Instagram. I hope that's right. I don't have my phone. I can't even check. Okay, thanks. Thank you.

Srini Rao

Amazing. We'll find it and make sure we link it up in the show notes. All right, and for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.