Legendary Maine Humorist: Tim Sample

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, which is sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery. On Radio Maine, we like to explore creativity and the human spirit, and I can't really think of a better person to explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit with than Tim Sample, who is so many creative things. When we asked you for a background, which we didn't really need to ask because we know who Tim Sample is, if anybody who's lived in Maine knows who Tim Sample is, author, illustrator, humorist, friend of stray dogs.

Tim Sample: I mean, that's the most important part.

Lisa Belisle: I think that probably is, actually, also a friend of stray dogs. So you're here today in the studio. There's so many different directions we could go in. I think I want to start with Phil Barter.

Tim Sample: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: Because that is how we got to be connected, because that is the way Maine works.

Tim Sample: Exactly. And it's what I call bank shots, like in pool. You go here, it goes over here, ends up here. Phil was a dear human being, a lovely man and a classic Maine creative entity. He talks about working on the water and then recognizing this gift that he had. He said this many times, he said it to me and I identified with it: when he was in school, he spent more time drawing than he did paying attention to what was going on in school. His mature work, I interviewed him when I worked at CBS News Sunday Morning, and you go over the singing bridge down there in Millbridge, you go off in the Willy Wag and you're off in Sullivan. His son, Matt, was a little kid at the time. I think he just won some kind of a musical contest or something.

But it was just the joyous world of the Barters. I remember all the doors were illustrated, painted, the whole house was walking inside of a Phil Barter painting. And I also interviewed Jamie Wyeth years later out on Higgins. And that was a little bit like that. You just walk around the house and say, oh, I've seen this in a painting. But Phil's approach to the gift that he had for creative expression was so unfeigned. I say naive, but in a very, very good way. Unselfconscious is a better phrase or term, because I've always said self-consciousness is the enemy of creativity. You overthink it, and you're always hearing. I heard Paul McCartney years ago did an interview and they were asking about how he wrote "Yesterday." He said, look, if I could explain everything that went into it, I probably wouldn't have wrote the song.

And Phil, his work is like that. It's joyous, it's evocative, and it's strangely sort of granular Maine without being representative in that. I just got back from Paris, France, I went to the d'Orsay, and that's just, oh man, what a great museum that is. You see these Van Goghs, and I've been to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and it's just expression. And yet he just nails it. And I love that about Phil's work. So yeah, he was a dear friend, and I actually sent him a portfolio of these drawings a few years ago. Of course, he was not in good health. He goes, I said, what do I do with these? I don't know. They're great, but where do they go? I don't know. And it wasn't until much later that I kind of found a connection and moved that along. But Phil represented something elemental about the Maine visual archivist. There are all these painters, Marsden Hartley and all these people that just kind of keep saying, I have to see this, I have to put this down. And the body of work he left behind. I've driven by those blueberry fields in Washington County. And it's like, how could you even say that? Well, get yourself a good Phil Barter painting that goes along the way.

Lisa Belisle: It's very true. I think he absolutely brings forth Maine in a way that's actually also unique. There are a lot of people that represent the landscapes and the seascapes of Maine and do a wonderful job. And Phil just has a very different way of looking at the world. When he paints mountains, they don't look like other people's mountains.

Tim Sample: That's right. Or trees, these round trees. And somehow that looks absolutely normal when he is painting that, and on some quantum plane, they're just like that. I think that creative expression is deeply mysterious and evocative, and that's the way it should be. Part of what I think art teaches us is there's no right way to see, slash represent, the world. I've said for years, I have a son who's almost seven feet tall. He can tell you what's on top of your refrigerator. I know people that are four and a half feet tall. They could probably explain a lot more about your belt buckle. But everybody's got a different perception. And fully embracing that, where the self-consciousness comes in is, I'm doing it right, no, I'm doing it wrong, no, I'm doing it right. That's not the point at all.

In my experience, my favorite art story is the little girl in kindergarten. It's been bounced around for decades, but I love this little analogy. So little Janie is in kindergarten. She's four years old. She's drawing a picture. And the art teacher comes over and says, what are you drawing, Janie? And she says, I'm drawing a picture of God. And the art teacher says, well, that's silly. Nobody knows what God looks like. And she says, well, when I get done. That is truly a touchstone of a sense of centeredness and connection and reverence. What I love about having a gift, if you have a gift for something, in my experience, it's hard to express that without a certain amount of humility, because you didn't make that happen any more than my son did.

I think he's actually more like six-eight or six-nine. He didn't make himself be that height, but he has to deal with it. And it's got pluses and minuses. When he had an office out west, he had a little thing that said, no, I don't play basketball. And then sometimes he said, do you play miniature golf? You get the cards you're dealt, but you have to deal with them. You have to see what you're going to do with them. And to me, if you're approaching it the way I think is a healthy way, it contains a big element of humility. I've been very fortunate to meet and work with some of the great creative people ever. And they're almost without exception very, very humble. I think of humility as the WD-40 of spiritual growth or something.

It's just a little bit of lubricant. And that's why humor is such a powerful thing. My favorite thing in the world, and this happened numerous times, especially when I was living Down East and all this political polarization and cultural polarization. I would do a show to raise money for somebody whose kid had cancer or something like that. And you'd have a whole room full of people in a gymnasium in Perry, Maine or something. And there'd be Trump bumper stickers and Hillary bumper stickers and gay pride bumper stickers and guns, God, guts and glory and all this. And all of them were in the same room laughing at the same thing at the same time. And that to me is a powerful connection with something deeper than the superficial issues that we all deal with. And that's what humor can do.

Lisa Belisle: For you, creativity has taken a lot of different forms. You've been a writer. You are a writer, you're an author. You clearly are a visual artist. You have interviewed people, so that kind of level of creativity, conversational creativity. You've been a public speaker, you've been a comedian, and you also have had your very real struggles with your own life.

Tim Sample: Without a doubt.

Lisa Belisle: You grew up in Boothbay Harbor and you had an undiagnosed

Tim Sample: Learning disability,

Lisa Belisle: learning disability for many years.

Tim Sample: Well, I had a closed head injury when I was 10 years old, could have died from it. It was a very bad brain injury. And I recovered, but ended up having this learning disability, which nobody knew anything about. A, it was Maine, B, it was my family. So nobody talked about anything. And so that was a challenge that created a lot of, for lack of a better term, harmonic discord and dissonance. Not unlike a lot of folks who learn differently, the spectrum disorder. And the thing I have is an autism-spectrum thing. But what I would do is I would score astronomically high on aptitude tests and do poorly in classwork. Well, in 1961, in a little town in Maine, there was only one explanation for that.

You were lazy, or you were acting out and goofing on the teachers. Neither of which was the case. It was a more subtle, more complex problem. But because of that dissonance, by the time I was 15 years old, I was suicidal. I had suicidal ideation. I didn't know what end was up. I dropped out of school. But what saved me, in a way, was real life, because I finally stumbled through high school and went to art school in Portland in 1969, and people say, oh, you seem to be very smart. I said, no, you're confusing me with my brother. He's smart. I'm the dumb one. But you have these definitions of yourself. And I quickly realized that in the world of art. So here I am at what used to be the Portland School of Fine and Applied Art, dear old Pissfa.

But anyway, we would sit around, there'd be 12 of us in a drawing class, and there'd be a model or a bowl of fruit or the dead Pearl Fisher or something, and we would be drawing. And you could walk around that room and everyone could draw. That's why they got to art school and wanted to be in art school. But none of those drawings looked exactly alike. And we would do critiques, but it wasn't, this one's good and that one's bad. It's like, what were we shooting for here, and how were we doing that. And I was at what, 18, 19. And that opened. I said, oh, so this is a world where there's no right answer, but it is a world where what resonates with you, some things you identify with. Some artists, many, many years later, Robert McCloskey from Blueberries for Sal, One Morning in Maine, Time of Wonder, all that stuff was one of my influences that made me want to be an illustrator.

And you could have knocked me over with a feather in 1983, I think it was, or '81, way back in the early eighties. I got a call from Weston Woods down at Weston Woods, and they wanted me to narrate Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man. I mean, that was like, I went down, I did it, won all kinds of prizes. Subsequently, I met Bob, and it turned out Bob was a big fan of mine, and we became great friends for the remainder of his life. And I interviewed him for CBS Sunday Morning. But his books like Make Way for Ducklings obviously, and Lentil. There was a quality of the line on the page that was unlike anything I'd ever seen. It looked like you just took the pencil and drew right on the page. You're looking at it, could not figure it. And I would try to get that technique down, and we'd go on to four books that I had illustrated, it didn't work. So I'm having lunch with Bob and Peggy, this is Father's Day around 1984 or something, and I had done a show at the Grand in Ellsworth. It was then the Hancock County Auditorium. And my wife said, I have a surprise for you. It was Sunday morning. I said, okay. We went out and we stood out on a pier in the middle of nowhere, and this lobster boat comes in to the dock. And I grew up in a shipbuilding family. So I take a line, tie it off, and this woman is piloting a boat, and she shuts down the boat. She jumps off. She said, hi, I'm Sal McCloskey. And I said, for God's sake, from Blueberries for Sal.

We went out, we had lunch with Sal and Bob, and Peggy was still alive. And I had to ask Bob. I said, Bob, there's this thing. He said, oh, he got so excited. He took me in the studio. He said, it took me years to figure this out. He'd get Crayola, and you draw with black Prismacolor on the other end, then you flip it around, you shoot it on the platinum and you reverse it. He told me this technique. And last summer there was a beautiful, Scott Nash from the Illustration Institute did a beautifully curated show of Bob's work. And I spoke. Sure enough, there were the original drawings from Make Way for Ducklings, and they were on Mylar, and it was exactly that. So when I illustrated Saturday Night at Moody's Diner, I used that technique, and I joked with Bob afterwards.

I said, it worked beautifully. The only thing I was a little disappointed, the artwork wasn't as good as yours, but the technique worked. But who would've guessed? That's just synergy. And it comes from people getting excited about expressing their unique individual expression of perception of the world around them. And there's no end to that. It resonates in a positive way, and you can't perceive it without perceiving the underlying mystery. How does this come to be? I look at some drawings that I did years ago and I said, I don't know if I could. I heard Bob Dylan interviewed recently, or it was actually 20 years ago, which is recently for me. He was talking to Ed Bradley at CBS actually. And Ed said, well, what about these lyrics? And Bob Dylan said, I couldn't write those lyrics. Who writes like that, "darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon."

But I wrote it then. And that's the power of creative expression, that is centering, humbling. You have to really be a jerk to think that this is you. It's not, really, but you're responsible for where it goes. So I have all these drawings that I started doing. I sobered up. So many other people in the arts. You've done the show long enough to know, why is it that artists and singers and writers and poets are so often beset by addiction issues? Well, it's not that complicated. In my experience, looking back on it, folks in this kind of line of work are sensitives, and we perceive a lot and we see a lot. And for folks like us, oftentimes reality itself is overwhelming. And the culture I grew up in and the world I grew up in didn't give me a lot of tools to parse reality.

And so what I did was, instead of finding my place in reality, I tried to make it go away, call it a different name, paint it a different color, impose an external narrative. And that never works. That's the fool's errand. At the end of the day, the literature on addiction, a lot of it talks about the fact that the addiction is not the real problem. It's a symptom of a deeper problem. And the deeper problem is an inability to function in reality. And that resonated with me. And I realized my problem wasn't drugs and alcohol, it was reality. It was crushing the life out of me. So I've been sober, it'll be 28 years in September of this year. And reality, as far as I can tell, has not changed one whit. It's exactly the same as it always was, but I sleep better.

I'm more comfortable, because one of the things I realized pretty quickly when I stopped drinking. If you've been drinking and you put down the drink, you get a lot of pain. Somebody said, all right, if I could just quit drinking. I said, yeah, well, if that's all it took, all you'd need is a radiator, a pair of handcuffs, somebody to give you a meal and bathroom breaks. You could live to be 50 years and never take a drink. It wouldn't be much of a life, but you could do it. But the point is, how do you participate? How do you engage? So I had to learn, and I'm still learning. One of the things that people aren't taught about in any formal education, a lot of families and cultures, I think our culture is getting better at it, is there's this bizarre level of codependency that's never examined.

Lisa, it never crossed my mind for decades that if you walked up to me on the street and said, Tim, I have a broken leg, it never crossed my mind that that wasn't, now instantly by virtue of you telling me about it, my problem, my responsibility. And that's crazy, if you think like that. Well, you drink, too, because it's too much information. It's too much responsibility. So I had to learn to parse that out. I wouldn't be where I am in the arts without mentors, wonderful mentors. I'm a big believer in the mentor. Charles Kuralt, Marshall Dodge, Paul Doiron and Stephen King. I mean, I don't know how I ended up getting these folks to help me out and to give me advice and steer me in the right direction. But they have done. And I've had many mentors in the recovery community, and one guy who was quite a bit older than me, he was saying, Tim, you got to stay on your side of the street.

I said, yeah, yeah, yeah. But the problem is I could see what's going on on the other side. And I said, what do I do about that? I love what he said next. He said, it's not always easy, because that's reality. The pat answers and meet God and four easy steps, that's not a good thing for me. But it's not always easy. Then I'm open to, well, how do you do it? He said, I'll give you, see if this works for you. This is something that works for me. I said, I'm all ears. He said, I find if I'm obsessed with it, want to talk about it all the time, think about it all the time, get a posse to support my perspective, it's quite likely none of my business. If I hope I never have to look at it again, and nobody ever finds out about it, and I can keep it to myself, that is an excellent place to start.

And it turned out that was true for me. I had pain and I had confusion and misunderstandings. And rather than look at those things and ask for help with those things and sort my way through, I just walled them off. And I have a very vivid imagination. I would create an alternate storyline with all the same characters, but it came out the way I wanted. Well, that didn't work. So finally, that stopped working. And two or three years into my recovery, it dawned on me. A friend of mine who was also in recovery had a sketch pad and he was drawing. He was an artist, Bill Gilchrist, you might know Bill, but he passed away a few years ago. He was an illustrator and artist. He said, I just realized that when I got into recovery, I had never picked up a pencil or a paintbrush unless somebody was paying me to do a commercial art job.

And that hit me like a ton. I said, yeah, me too. And he said, didn't you used to love to just draw, just for the pure enjoyment? I said, yeah. Why don't you? And I started this series of pen and ink drawings, bought Bristol pads and Micron pens, and I did these in business meetings and recovery groups and airport waiting rooms, and I did some in England. As I traveled around the country doing shows, backstage at shows, I just let this stuff flow. And it ended up being probably 1500 of these very complex and elaborate drawings. It was like automatic writing. I would look at it afterwards and say, oh, that's interesting. Look, that dinosaur was in this other one I did a year ago. But I don't know how that. And it's a lot like the dream state. When you're dreaming at night, your unconscious mind has a whole language, a visual language.

People have repetitive dreams. I've dreamed very vividly. But I'll say to my wife, well, I was in England last night in my dreams, but it wasn't the real England. It was the England of my dreams. She said, oh yeah, I like that. So you have this colorful, complex landscape of images and ideas that bears some resemblance to your perception of the world. But it's not one-to-one conscious, this means that and that means this. That approach doesn't work for me. Trying to find the correct dogma doesn't work. But recognizing, there's a wonderful Paul Simon documentary that's out, In Restless Dreams is the name of the piece. Simon is wrestling with his creative processes, aging, some physical infirmities, but he talks brilliantly and evocatively about trying to, what am I trying to say?

And that to me is very worthwhile exploring, because what I found was that mystery and the unknown and the everlasting story, the never-ending story, is calming for me. It's calming. I had a lot of these, what I thought of as ellipsis moments, whereby I had convinced myself that if I just get this or do that or achieve this goal, then what? I never finished the thought, then what? No more problems. I don't know what, but I was addicted to this idea that if I could just get to some place. And it turned out the place is reality and infinity. The place is the quantum universe. Oh, you don't know what's going on. Hey, welcome. Because nobody does. We're all ad-libbing. But to be able to do that creativity without being harnessed for a commercial entity, or without being tied to a narrative, just expressing it, gave me a connection with that deeper place that is, by its definition, not about this thing or that thing.

It's the state of being, it's consciousness itself. I sat with Charles Kuralt for about an hour on the sixth floor of 524 West 57th Street in New York years ago, and he just gave me about a half hour primer on how to interview. I said, it was like a masterclass, and it was just a handful of things, but the cards that he was showing me was 25 years on the road and all this other kind of stuff. And Marshall Dodge, bless his heart, left us way too soon, 45 years old. When we did Sample and Dodge in 1981, Marshall was 45, I was 30. And Marshall, what a mentor. He said, Tim, you have to remember two things if you want to be a great monologist.

He said, first thing, never ever interrupt them when they're laughing. I said, what? He said, and this is harder to do than you think. He said, if you walk out on the stage and say one line and they want to laugh for 45 minutes, what business is it of yours? It's none of your business. That's what they came for. And if you can discipline yourself that way and wait, they will tell you when they're ready for another line. And at the end of the night, they'll say, you have brilliant comic timing. Well, you don't. It's their comic timing. And I've used that ever since. He also said the most brilliant marketing idea in American marketing history was a seven-ounce Coca-Cola bottle. I said, what are you talking about? He said, you remember those? Yeah, when I was a kid, the little stubby Coca-Cola bottles, Raymond Loewy designed them.

And I said, well, why? He said, they had about one ounce less Coke than you really wanted. And he said, if you think of your show as one of those little Coca-Cola bottles, you go into a town, you do a show, you give one less ounce than what they really want. Next time you come to town, they'll all pack the joint. And that was in the era of the 20-ounce, 30-ounce big, and everybody left half of it sitting. He said, they'll enjoy it, but when you come around again, they'll say, yeah, we already seen him. Brilliant. But that's life experience. That is reality resonating back to me and saying who I am. What are those essential questions? Who am I? What am I here for? What's going on? Who invented this place? Reality will tell you that information. But you have to have enough humility to put down your preconceived notions and say, okay, I'm all ears.

And the net result, it sneaks up on you, is that you feel like, okay, I made my peace with this. I'm okay here. Oh my gosh, I'm going to die. Welcome to the club. So is everybody else, sooner or later. And that sort of thing allows me to be fully myself without wanting to hit the eject button on every chair I sit in and wanting to paint everything a different color and call it a different name. And one of the things is, some things just suck. There's grief and anguish. I have a profoundly mentally ill family member who's a lovely human being. There's nothing I can do, really.

I got involved with NAMI. I read a lot of books. I educated myself, but that's all I could do. I can't make things turn out for other people, much less myself. But there's this weird way in which things turn out right, but right isn't a freestanding external place you go. Do you ever read, there's a little book by C.S. Lewis called The Great Divorce. It's one of his little 80-page, 85-page books, and you can go from hell to heaven, and there's a bus and you can get on the bus. And hell is this foggy dark place. Napoleon lives 10 miles out of town, and the longer you stay there, the further away you get from everybody else. And you can get on the bus and you can go to heaven. And if you want, you can stay in heaven. But these people get to heaven, and the sun is too bright and the grass cuts their feet. That's a sweet little analogy about reality. It cuts your feet. It does. But you get used to it. So anyway, ask me a short question. You'll get a long answer.

Lisa Belisle: I guess that makes me wonder, well, again, I knew this was going to be a very interesting conversation. You have so much wealth of experience in so many different areas. But I do need to ask, what did Charles Kuralt say? As somebody who also spends this time talking with people, what were the main points of how you actually interviewed people?

Tim Sample: This is what Charles said. First of all, Charles Kuralt was a genius and a lovely guy. So 1996, he calls me up. I thought it was a gag. I was living in Bath, Maine, and my assistant picked up the phone and Charles Kuralt's on the phone, and I thought it was Chuck Krueger or somebody just putting on a Charles Kuralt voice, but it wasn't, it was Charles. I'm thinking, I might come up and interview for a book I'm writing, blah, blah, blah. So Charles comes up, and the street in front of my house was all torn up. So I said, I'll tell you what, I'll meet you over at the public library, and there's a gazebo in the middle of the library grounds. And here comes Charles in a red car, looking just like Charles Kuralt with a blue blazer, rumpled like this.

And he's looking at this gazebo. And I realized this is the essence of Charles Kuralt. He's seen every gazebo in America twice, and he genuinely cares about this gazebo. So when I'm sitting up there, it was the 15th anniversary of the show, CBS Sunday Morning, and I felt like I had died and gone to heaven. That was where I met Maya Angelou, I met all these wonderful people. But I was sitting up there, we were doing makeup for the show, and Kuralt had just done an interview with the New York Times or something, and he was just sitting out there, and I said, Charles, can I just talk with you?

And he said, how's it all going? You're doing a great job. And then he said, all right, I'll give you some advice. I'd only been with the network for a month or two. I'd done one or two pieces. He said, Tim, this is how this works. He says, you'll submit something at a futures meeting, here's this idea. And you and Mary Lou will submit this. And if they give it the green light, they spend a lot of money on production. I think they were like a hundred thousand bucks a pop back in those days, where we'd shoot 18 hours of footage and post-production, all this kind of stuff. It was like the NBA. But he said, they're going to approve this idea. And then you're going to get out with the crew on location. And the first thing that is going to be a challenge for you is you're going to find that what exists on site is never exactly what they approved in New York.

So your first big choice is, am I going to take what I find here and try to fit it into a pre-approved mold, or am I just going to shoot the story that exists? And if there is no story, am I going to go find a story when I've got a crew? And he said, I would strongly recommend the latter. And that worked out many, many times. He said, the second thing, and you broke this rule and I let you go ahead and do it. He said, when you interview someone for network television, never ever say word one. Don't even shake their hand or say hello until the cameras are rolling. Let Izzy set them up, do the mic check. Go smoke a cigarette, make a phone call, do something, come back.

And the first time you meet them, the cameras are rolling. And he said, I'll tell you why. Because if you talk about this stuff, they're going to say this wonderful stuff before the cameras are rolling. And you're going to spend half your interview saying, now, before we started, we were talking about this. And I've seen dozens of network interviewers make that mistake. And they say, well, during the break you were saying this. Get it down the first time. And he said, the most important of the three things, well, there were actually four. The third thing is, when you're asking them questions, don't ask them some kind of question you think a news reporter would ask them. They're an interesting person, and this goes back to the gazebo. If they're interesting enough to be on network television in front of millions of people, theoretically you're interested. Ask questions you're interested in.

And then the last and most important thing is, when they start talking, shut up. And if there is a pause, which there inevitably will be, he said, you are a polite person, right? I said, yeah. In a social situation, you'd fill in the blank. You'd prompt somebody. Don't do that. Just let the awkward pause. If it lasts five minutes, fine. And when they start talking, they will say things even they had no idea they would be saying. I interviewed Sister Frances Carr from the Shaker community, and oh boy. I found out a lot about Shakers. What's his name, the documentary filmmaker that did the Civil War, that guy, he had just done one called The Shakers, and the information was wrong. He didn't know about this community. They weren't crazy fans of his. But I was talking to this Sister Frances Carr, and my producer, Mary Lou, was sitting next to me, and she would kick me under the table if I interrupted her or went on too long.

But this one, I was fascinated. I think I asked three questions. The interview took 45 minutes, and when it was over, Mary Lou said, that's the best interview you've ever done. And it was the Kuralt technique. But to have people like that. When I had written Saturday Night at Moody's Diner, it was with Harpswell Press and it had sold quite well, but what I didn't realize when I first got into this business is that corporate entities and publishing houses and labels, they were always changing. CBS went through two corporate buyouts while I was there, Viacom and Westinghouse, all this stuff. So everything's always changing. That's part of the reality I don't like, but you got to get used to it. So I noticed that we weren't selling as many copies. And I looked in the catalog and I was way in the back of the catalog, and I happened to be having lunch with Steve King in Bangor back in the old days when it was a lot less.

I just dropped by and we'd have lunch, and Shirley Sonderegger was sitting in the other part of the office, and I said to Steve, I said, well, I hear these people talking about buying back their rights and selling to another publisher. How does that work? And Steve said, I'll never forget it. He's a very funny guy. He said, how many books have you sold? Well, that's kind of an awkward question to get asked by Stephen King, because whatever the number is, it's not that many. It was what he sold yesterday. So I said, I don't know. He said, Shirley, get that. Let's find Harpswell. Call him up. And she got the number, and we called him up. Hold on, we got it right here. And it was like 38,000 or something, quite a lot. He said, that's a good number. And he just walked me through it. But that's because I asked, and that is the gold standard.

When I was growing up, my dad owned a shipyard, a wooden boat building operation, and he had built minesweepers and Navy tugs during World War II and built custom yachts and trawlers. And the craftsmanship around wood was a religion. If God wanted us to have fiberglass boats, who would've had fiberglass trees? But there was a way of doing it. These were not highly verbal, articulate people, the fishermen, the lobstermen, the boat builders, but the way they did things was cultivated through many, many, many generations. And it was based in reality. I was a sternman on a lobster boat when I was 16 years old for Arnold Rogers. And I think I said in one of my books, Arnold Rogers made the man of few words sound like a chatterbox.

He didn't say anything to me, but there was a way. There's a way to hold the knife. There's a way to coil the rope. There's a way to use the throttle. And he couldn't articulate why. But the short form is, if you don't do it that way, you're more likely to die. It's evolution, it's cultural evolution. So I learned that. Bob Dylan has a great line in a song called "Floater." He says, you got to get up near the teacher if you can, if you want to learn anything. And I learned not to be afraid or intimidated by people who knew things. And again, stepping away from dogma and the idea that there's this exact freestanding right way to do it, that's not what I'm talking about. This is learned experience. And I'll tell people, if you go to the Amazon rainforest and find some tribe that's never had contact with humanity, and they've been chewing the bark of a tree for 300 years to cure headaches, there's a lot you don't know.

But one thing you can be pretty sure of, it probably cures headaches, because why else would they be doing it? So there are ways that people do things that are valuable, but they aren't easily folded into a simple narrative, and they're not the 10 easy ways to do that and the three ways to do that. They require a humility, a kind of the mentor-teacher relationship. And Kuralt also told me, he said, most people would love to spend any amount of time, I'm a prime example, talking about what they love and what they do. And that's why you can be a good interviewer just by asking a really good question and seeing what happens.

Lisa Belisle: In your case, when I received this portfolio that you dropped off at the art gallery to look at it, this was a whole side of you. I've known the name Tim Sample for a very long time, but in your case, I picked up this portfolio and I said, this is not the Tim Sample that I know at all.

Tim Sample: It wasn't a Tim Sample that I knew. That's the exciting part of it. So I started doing these drawings, as I said, as a means of just connecting with that unknown and unknowable and deeply atavistic creative element. I used to always refer to working at CBS News as playing in the NBA. And the reason I use that analogy is, I'm sure that these famous basketball, the Caitlin Clarks of the world, I'm sure she works out vigorously and she practices a hundred times, but when she's on the court playing ball, she's not saying, I think I'll move my left hand two inches to the left. What she's doing is allowing the natural gift, honed by experience, honed by repetition, to express itself. And most people who do that will be as surprised as anybody when they shoot the three-pointer from all the way across the thing.

And that's the way these drawings were for me. I said, I'm not going to do anything. I had a greeting card company. The books that I've illustrated have sold over a million copies. I've done t-shirt designs, all this other kind of stuff, and I'm very, very good at reading a narrative, picking out a spot, doing another. That's not what I was doing here. So Tommy Thompson was my drawing instructor my freshman year at what is now MECA. And I'll never forget what he taught us. So we all sat down, we were drawing the dead Pearl Fisher there at the old Museum of Art, and he said, just draw, and then I'll walk around and then we'll talk the last 20 minutes of the class. First drawing class, and we're all drawing. He said, okay, so as I suspected, what I see here is everyone here is spending about 90% of their time looking at their picture and 10% referencing back to the thing you're drawing. He said, for the remainder of the year, I want you to reverse that percentage.

You're going to spend 90% of your time looking and 10% drawing. And my drawing in a matter of months leaped. Because what he was saying, and what he said later on in following classes, is you cannot represent it if you haven't seen it. The job of a creative person is to see, to apprehend, to feel, and then to give birth to it. But if you haven't seen it, you can't produce it. So these very elaborate images, there are images of the coast of Maine, they're images of frame houses, they're images of dinosaurs and natural birds, but they're all mashed up. One of the things that I noticed two or three years into doing these, somebody said, oh, that would make a good comic book. And I looked at them, I said, no, it wouldn't.

And I said, why? Because the foreground and the background are completely ambiguous. Something that is in the background in the lower corner is the foreground in the upper right hand corner and vice versa. So that's why I think of these as being related to dream images. You can dream vividly, but the laws of physics and the way things work and the way people look. I'm always saying, well, I was in a dream, my mother was in a dream, but it wasn't my mother. So to me, the essence of all my creative expression, whether it's doing 10 comedy albums, I don't know how many television specials I've hosted, but they all have one thing in common. Paradox and irony are, to me, the presence of a power greater than myself. It's like the fabric of the universe. Getting back to that head injury.

So I ended up with this NLD, nonverbal learning disability. And one of the things that is a symptom of that, a classic NLD person, so I was 10 years old, I got a big black spot in the side of my head where a bunch of my brain tissue died. But because I was 10 years old, the neurons, it was still growing. So it rewired in a non-traditional way. What NLD people typically can do, we're very high-verbal, like other autism-spectrum disorders, we can memorize great wads of stuff and tuck it away, and it's always drifting around in there somewhere. But also we have this typical ability to make blazingly fast connections between seemingly disparate things. And if there is a better skill for comedy, I don't know what it is, because the active ingredient in humor and laughter is perspective. The reason you laughed is you thought it was going here and it went there. When people came up to me for years, long before I figured out that I had this disorder, and said, I never thought that was funny.

And then you did that piece on that album or in that show. And every time I see that now I laugh, because I now see that connection. So I was able to make those connections. And to get back to the dark side and the suicidal ideation, I was literally, Lisa, I was in a sophomore geometry class, having flunked algebra twice, but they pushed me on like they used to do in the old days. And Mr. Eaton was frustrated with me. He knew I was smart, and he thought I was just goofing around. No, this was algebra, and I was doodling. And he said, Tim, what's the answer to that equation? There was an equation on the board. I just glanced up and I gave him the correct answer. And he was stunned. And he said, well, how did you get that?

I said, I don't know. He sent me to the principal's office. I didn't know how I got it, but it was a function of NLD. And just the other day, so now I'm 73, my wife is 66, we're getting ready for my daughter's wedding on the 25th of May in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And my wife is making all kinds of decorations for the reception area, and she's figuring out the sides of the walls of the space. And she said, Tim, isn't there an equation about finding the diagonal? And this is what I said: the square of the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. And where do I remember that from? The Wizard of Oz. When I was seven or eight years old, that's what the Scarecrow says when he gets his brain. He goes, oh, the square of the hypotenuse of an isosceles triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides, I have a brain.

And we laughed so hard, and that's why I talk about irony and paradox. So it's paradoxical and ironic that I would have the right answer, but from the Wizard of Oz, when I was eight years old. And that's why I think that life itself is infused with humor. It's full of paradox and irony. And one of the greatest meditative gifts you can learn for spiritual growth is to not take yourself so seriously. This same guy that was telling me about how he deals with codependent issues, one day he said to me, I was maybe two or three years sober and I was having a rough time, professionally and personally. And he said, Tim, this is what you have to remember. You are important. You're just not that important. And I laughed so hard, because that's it. So I tell people now, because I know people that are in early stages of drug and alcohol recovery, and I say, this is the thing, there is no shining path. You have a speaking part in a film that's been going on for endless centuries, and apparently right now has about 8 billion people in it. Do you really think it's realistic that you know what the arc of the story is and how it all comes out? However, if you don't say your part, it's not the same movie if you don't participate and say what's going on.

I feel very grateful. Especially, I knew Bob McCloskey from the time I met him in '83 or somewhere in there when I did the narration. And he called me up and Peggy passed away. There were a lot of changes. He was ill, and he was living in assisted living in Blue Hill, and he got his publicist or the publicist for Viking or somebody. They were going to do the Make Way for Ducklings statue in Boston and the one in Moscow. So Bob calls me up, he's about 88 or something, and he says, they want me to go to Boston and Moscow and do all these. I said, Bob, you have to go. They'll take good care. There was this gal, Reed Thrun, that he was with at the time who was sort of a caretaker and companion. I said, Reed will take good care of you.

He said, you can't pass this up. And you have to call me and tell me how it goes. And he had a little cognitive slippage. I wouldn't say it was dementia. It's like we all do. You get in your seventies and eighties, and it's a mercy sometimes what you forget. So Bob, I didn't hear any more about it. A week later I saw the front page of the Boston Globe. There was Bob and ribbon cutting and the Make Way for Ducklings statue. And then five or six weeks later, I get a call from Bob, and I said, well, how did it go? It was great. But he said, you'll be honest with me about this, right? There's something that kind of really threw me. I said, what was that, Bob? He said, well, I went to these events and there were these grandmothers and these mothers and these daughters, and they all said they grew up with my books.

That can't be right. I said, no, it is right, Bob. It is right. He was such a darling guy. And two years ago, in March, I was approached by a guy on the west coast that had created a musical piece called the McCloskey Suite, and it was a musical score that was meant to be accompanied by narration. And he got in touch with Sal McCloskey and she said, get in touch with Tim Sample. And I flew up from New Mexico and we narrated this piece. And it was really, again, the humor, because he had made a scratch track reading the text, and then the music was written to the scratch track, but he should have done it the other way around, because dramatic narration is not the same. So it didn't pitch.

And I was really trying to do that thing that I shouldn't do, squeeze a round peg in a square hole. And I said, no. We were at seven hours in the studio and I said, this isn't working. And I had another hour or so to go, but it was a long day. And I said, let's do this. Why don't I just do the narration? I know this work very well, and I love this work, and then I'll do it at the proper level and rate with the dramatic pauses and things. And then you take that and go back and redo the music. That's what they ended up doing. And this is the great joy and the surprise. So I'm just in the studio doing this, and I've got the headphones on and I've got an RE20 and I'm reading Time of Wonder.

Now, Bob's illustrations are so spectacular. Another thing Bob said to me one time, he said, people always come up to me and say, I love your books. Who does the drawings? But I had never really encountered that Time of Wonder book without the illustrations. And I'm just reading the book. Wow, what a piece of writing. It's epic poetry. And I'm not sure, I may have cried. I had tears streaming down my face, and I thought of Bob and I had the thought I've often had, periodically throughout my life: how do I get to be here? How do I get to be doing this? How did this ever happen? And feeling a sense of wonder, a sense of joy, a sense of, apparently I'm in the right place at the right time. And understanding the whys and the wherefores, understanding is the caboose, not the engine.

If you're lucky, it comes rolling along 30 or 40 years later. Oh, that's what that was all about. That's what that meant. But participating fully, being emotionally engaged and being true to this gift that you have, that's as close to, you hear these certain religious traditions of the God within. My first higher power for my first couple of years in recovery was the DNA molecule, that my kids gave me a model of. I said, that's everything. It's all in there. And nobody understands it. People talk about a power greater than yourself. And I said, well, if it fits between your ears, it's not a power greater than yourself. If it doesn't include a sense of wonder and mystery. And I'll finish up this part with this. So what's his name that did the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks. So Oliver Sacks had this book, Musicophilia, did you read that one? And what I loved about it was, he takes these very bizarre cases from his own work, but he describes music as being the only medium that contains the seed of the next moment in the moment you're in, in the way that melody goes. And he describes it very eloquently, so that, that's why you have earworms. I could literally, if I stopped and paid attention, I could play you the Beatles in my head. I could play the Beatles version of "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" and the Joe Cocker version. They exist in my head. But that thing about that medium that carries the seed of the next moment in the moment you're in, has become an analogy for reality itself.

It's deeper, richer, more complex, more nuanced than you ever imagined. And rather than being frightening, when you talk about paradox and irony, the very thing that frightened me about reality is where I find the greatest comfort now. And that is that I can't understand it. And somebody asked me one time, well, what do you think about God or your higher power? And I said, I think my relationship to my higher power is the relationship of a man in a hammock to the hammock. It's supporting me, but I don't fully understand the physics or anything else. But it seems pretty comfortable.

Lisa Belisle: Well, Tim, I've really appreciated your taking the time to talk with me today about so many things. And I know that you have a show coming up in Marfa, Texas.

Tim Sample: It's at a gallery in Marfa, Texas called Do Right. And Marfa is this big art town, and this wonderful young, she's not young, everybody seems young to me, but her name is Buck Comstock. And she and her husband, whose name is Camp, own a shop and a gallery in Marfa called Wrong, where the customer is always wrong, and it's clever and witty and funny. And she's got a very good eye for eclectic art, which is kind of what Marfa is all about. So two or three years ago, we were in Marfa, and literally I'd done hundreds and hundreds of these drawings and they were just sitting around in boxes in my basement. But I put together this portfolio that I gave you a copy of, and I just started throwing it around. I sent one to Phil Barter. I sent one here and sent one to people. So we were in Marfa and I brought one of these, and I loved the shop, and I gave it to Buck, and I said, think about these. Well, she said, this looks great. So we were there again in January of this year, and in the meantime, I curated about 350, 400 original pieces, and I brought them with me, and she said, this is way too much for the shop, but you should have a one-man show here in Marfa, and we'll do that. So I'm going to do a book called Resting Comfortably on the Razor's Edge, which contains a selection of these drawings, as well as some of my musings about the sort of psychospiritual, neurocognitive underpinning of that. The book is for the show, but it'll be around.

And what I love, Lisa, is so after 25 years, a lot of these are 2001, 2002, well over 20 years, these drawings have reemerged. And they're sort of saying, hey Tim, hey Tim, what about us? Time for us? And so right now there's a show up in Albuquerque at a small gallery called Gallery 3017 on Monte Vista. And I've got about 30 of these drawings. It's the first time I've shown any of them. So that's got to be up for a month. But my wife is like, yeah, what goes around comes around. You never know. So we'll see what happens. But it's a lot of fun. And that's the thing, I survived leukemia. I had leukemia, treated for it. I've survived drug and alcohol addiction. I've had a lot of dents and dings along the way. And I'm in my seventies. And I'm very aware that there's not an endless number of decades stretching out ahead.

But what fun. And as I said earlier, perspective is the active ingredient in humor. It's the active ingredient in life. And if you can just recognize that what I see at age 73, I couldn't have imagined at age 23, and let that be my guiding principle. I know things and see things today that I couldn't have understood then. And I'm just going to let that be what it is. And I'm fascinated, I'm interested to see how this finishes up. Years ago I was doing a monologue at a show in Connecticut, and a reporter, it was around the time of Saturday Night at Moody's Diner and those seminal albums. This woman was a reporter for the local paper, and she wanted to know if she could interview me at the halftime between the two shows in the green room because she had a deadline or whatever.

I said, sure. So she came backstage and she said, oh, that was great. It was so funny, but you did something I've always heard is unprofessional for a comic. And I said, what? And she said, well, you laughed at your own joke. You told a joke and you laughed at your own joke. And I said, I'm sorry. It was the first time I heard it. And I realized that that is what is exciting about being on that creative gift, that surfing, is that you're just as surprised as anybody else when it goes over that cliff and turns into that waterfall and moves out here. You're following it like everybody else. And that's a great gift to have, that awareness, to be aware enough of that, to not take it for granted and say, whoa, I really have been given something special, and I want to be a good steward of what I've been given and pass it along and share it with people. So it's all rock and roll, Lisa.

Lisa Belisle: Well, thank you for sharing your gift with me today.

Tim Sample: Thank you so much for having me. It's really fun. And putting up with my rambling, because really it's a lot of rambling in a Tim Sample interview.

Lisa Belisle: A lot of wisdom though. That's what I was pulling from this. A lot of wisdom.

Tim Sample: Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you have been listening to or watching Radio Maine, which is sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. And of course, we have very much explored and celebrated creativity and the human spirit today with Tim Sample, who is so many things. But above all, I think we can call him a son of Maine. So thank you so much for coming in and being on Radio Maine today.

Tim Sample: Thank you. Appreciate it. We'll see you around campus, kids.