Interview: Jeff Greenwald of 108 BELOVED OBJECTS at The Marsh Makes it OK to Let Go of Material Things by Holding Onto Their Stories

If you've been spending some of your pandemic downtime attempting to declutter your life and have found yourself struggling to let go of certain items of no discernable value or use, Jeff Greenwald has got just the show for you. On May 29th, the acclaimed travel writer and performer will bring his new show, 108 Beloved Objects, to The Marsh, inviting audiences to rethink how we interact with the material world.

When his travel assignments dried up due to the COVID pandemic, Greenwald used that as an opportunity to embark on an inward journey around his Oakland flat, ultimately picking out 108 objects that evoked personal passages. Greenwald parts with these items and introduces an element of chance by inviting five audience members to pick one object that catches their eye from a grid of 16 images. Whether it's a toy camera or a dolphin tooth necklace, each item has its own fascinating tale to tell, leading to a series of unexpected encounters and surprising destinations that are humorous, thought-provoking and deeply personal. Immediately following the performance Greenwald will be joined by The Marsh Founder/Artistic Director Stephanie Weisman for a Q&A. 108 Beloved Objects will be streamed at 7:30pm (PDT) on Saturday, May 29th. For more information, visit www.themarsh.org/marshstream.

Greenwald's previous solo show Strange Travel Suggestions premiered at the Marsh San Francisco in 2003 and was most recently staged as part of Brian Copeland's "Best of San Francisco Solo" series in 2018. He is the author of eight books, including Shopping for Buddhas and The Size of the World. He recently co-authored The Nine Gifts with Christine Marie Mason, and Out of Nothing with Burning Man co-founder Larry Harvey. Greenwald is also Executive Director of the Ethical Traveler, a non-profit global alliance dedicated to creating positive global change through travel.

I spoke with Greenwald last week from his flat in Oakland, California. This past, essentially homebound year has definitely been a strange one for someone like him who makes his living largely as a travel writer. We talked about how his original impetus to declutter his life led to this new solo show, his thoughts on why we get so attached to certain objects and what their ultimate function might be, and his challenges as a self-professed non-actor to become a successful solo performer. As might be expected for such an inveterate traveler, Greenwald is an inherently interesting interview. He is very comfortable chatting with folks (like me) whom he's never met, readily offers up little bits of insight gleaned from his exposure to so many different cultures, and isn't reticent to gently question some of his interviewer's assumptions. He also has an understated sense of humor that often lies just below the surface of his actual words. The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

108 Beloved Objects is a fascinating and timely idea for a show. What led you to create it?

Well, it was kind of a circular impetus. I had this previous show called Strange Travel Suggestions, where people spun a wheel of fortune and it landed on different themes, like "The Deep Blue Sea" or "Meetings with Remarkable Men & Women," and I would tell a story based on that theme. And for years people were saying, "Is there any way to turn this show into a book?" So I decided to try to do a book that was similar to the way the wheel worked, which is that you could open it anywhere and get a story. The pandemic made that a little easier because just navigating my own flat in Oakland over the months of the pandemic, I would come across these various objects that all evoked different stories in me, and there was sort of a random, wonderful quality in it. So I decided to do a book of 108 beloved objects.

Why did you choose 108 objects? That seems pretty random.

I picked the number 108 because it's a very sacred number in Buddhist and Hindu numerology. I'm not sure exactly why, but for instance it's the number of beads on a prayer mala. And it just so happens that there are 108 stitches on a baseball, but that's neither here nor there.

As a baseball fan, I'm fascinated to learn that fact.

I hope it's accurate. You might want to double check. [Note: I did check it out, and Greenwald was in fact correct.]

So I basically found 108 objects in my flat, and I also picked that number because I'm a little OCD and I need a target number to make things work. The objects I chose for this show are from all areas of my life, you know personal, romantic and travel. They just really run the gamut. Some examples: there's a dolphin tooth necklace from the Solomon Islands, a bamboo toy camera from Fiji, my grandmother's alarm clock.

The other thing about these objects is that in the book itself [also called 108 Beloved Objects], which is coming out this June, the idea is to give all these objects away and find them new homes, so that they acquire new stories with new people. In the book, there'll be an email address people can write to, to request an object. They have to say why they want the object and I'll send it to them just for the cost of shipping. The idea that what I intended to be a book is now coming back around to being another show is kind of wonderfully circular, like the wheel itself.

I do hope to tell some good stories, and that people leave the show feeling they've gotten some insight, not just into my life, but into their own mental processes as well. All of my stories revolve around teachable moments, times where I had an a-ha moment or somehow did something right or wrong in my travels that left a lasting impression on me. I hope people can see themselves reflected in some of these stories and in some of these objects.

Isn't the randomness of your approach kind of terrifying for you as a performer?

Doing anything improvisational is terrifying. I'm especially terrified [with this show] because I haven't performed on a stage of course for more than a year, and I don't really know how it's going to work out on the medium of Zoom. So there's that unknown as well.

I would find that challenging because at least in the theater you can read the room.

That's true. There'll be no response so I won't know if a joke lands at all, I won't see heads nodding in comprehension. I'll just have basically the silent screen in front of me, and that's always disconcerting. I've done a couple of storytelling things on Zoom as part of larger events, and it's difficult to work without feedback, as an actor. No question about it.

And I've been on the other side of that equation as an audience member, where I find myself consciously making an effort to laugh out loud, as though that somehow is going to transmit back to the performer to let them know they have a responsive audience. [laughs]

Maybe it does. You never know how things work in this strange realm of actor and audience.

Like many of the performers at The Marsh, you don't consider yourself an actor.

No, I'm not an actor. I'm a writer and a journalist.

So what originally compelled you to put your stories onstage?

Well, the way my first show evolved was kind of interesting. Stephanie Weisman, the Artistic Director of The Marsh, wanted to have a series of performances about travel, and asked if I would read from my book between those performances. I thought about it and said, "Actually, Stephanie, what I'd really like to do is a show of my own." So I tried to figure out what kind of show I would do and how it could come together. The inspiration was that one of my favorite parts when I do readings in bookstores is the question and answer period, because I don't know what's coming up, and I can always pull a new story out of my hat to tell based on the question.

So the challenge became how can I design a show in which I'm continually asked questions, and the wheel was the answer to that. You know, wherever it lands it would ask me a question [like] - tell me about a meeting with a remarkable woman you've met, tell me a story about the celestial sphere, tell me a story about a strange smell you once encountered. And so with these objects it's sort of the same thing. Each one asks a question about a place or about a person, and I get to answer it randomly without really knowing what I'm going to do or say. There's a spontaneity because you never tell the same story twice, and there's also excitement to it because no two shows are the same.

In putting together a stage show, what is the most challenging part for you?

The most challenging part is just knowing how to be physically present in the story, how to evoke something visually and physically with my body, where I can sort of transport people to the place and situation where these objects first appeared in my life. Because I'm a very cinematic writer, I love to play with images, and I want my storytelling to be the same. So I talk about the fabrics, the things I smelled, the texture of the sidewalk beneath my feet, things that really evoke the time and place in my life that these objects have come to signify.

Not having been trained in acting, I've learned different ways to be present in the story from a lot of people who do act. The most important thing I've learned is that any story you're telling people, they're going to internalize. If you're nervous telling a story, they're going to hear a story about nervousness. If you're confident and excited telling a story, your audience will be confident and excited. That sort of telepathy between the audience and the performer is the most important thing I've learned to work with. And of course that's not present in a Zoom performance, so that's going to be an interesting challenge.

I also received some very valuable lessons in solo performance from the performer Nina Wise. She gave me a list of things to keep in mind during every performance, and by far the most valuable of them was her line "Your interest and delight will delight and interest the audience." Also the notion that as a writer, what I really am primarily is a storyteller. And if I can just take that storytelling impulse back to its most primal form and tell stories verbally, I'm really fulfilling my destiny as a writer and as a raconteur.

Storytelling, we all like to say, evolved around the campfire, and in some ways it's true. I think it predates the written word. So it's very interesting to me as a writer to take those words from the page to the stage, and see if they can have even more of an impact when people get to be part of the spontaneous telling of the story, and hear the intonations and the descriptions, hear the places I might go off track from what I've written in the book.

Like a lot of folks, I've been using some of the copious time I've had at home over the last year or so to divest myself of some of my belongings, and I have to admit I'm not making a lot of progress on that. What do you think it is that keeps us so attached to material things?

I think material things are sort of place markers in our lives. They remind us where we've been and who we were when we were there. But the truth is that, especially in this digital age, once we have a good image or a likeness of the object itself or the souvenir or whatever it might happen to be, all we really need to hold onto is the story. It's the story that gives the object importance, not the other way around. And if we can glean those stories from these objects, we can much more easily let go of them.

Movies like Toy Story really touched on that, where the toys are being left out by the street, but the toys know they each have a story to tell and they don't want their story to come to an end. These objects of mine are not as animated as those in Toy Story, but I think each had a story to tell me, and I studied them long and hard to get that story before I decided to get rid of them.

Originally, of course, this began for me, too, as a clutter-clearing exercise. But you're right - 108 objects, though I thought it would be a lot of objects to divest myself of, is hardly any. I mean, I'd have to get rid of 10,008 objects in order to make a dent in all the things I've acquired over 50-plus years of travel and collecting.

Just hearing you say that, I realize the objects in my home that are most precious to me are the ones I've acquired while traveling.

Is that true? I mean, I wonder if you look at some of the other objects that you didn't acquire while traveling, that are just part of your life, you might find that they are truly embedded in who you are and what your meaning of life is. I found as I was going through my things that it wasn't just the objects I found while traveling. Some of them were very personal items like an old camera that I used in the 70's, or the alarm clock that my grandmother owned.

I think for me there's something about having had to carefully pack the items and then gingerly carry them home on the plane that gives me more of a personal attachment to those things. And some of them, like ceramics, are so huge and fragile that I don't even know how I got them home intact. But obviously I did, cause they're here in my house.

I know what you mean. During my first trip to Europe in 1971, I filled half my backpack with souvenirs, and some of them were ridiculously big, like there was a replica of Michelangelo's statue of Moses that I was bringing back for my parents. It honestly must have weighed about six pounds, and I just threw that in my backpack, and it was nothing to trudge through you know Italy and Germany and Spain and France with this thing in my pack. When I got it home I felt pretty foolish.

But I think part of the importance of souvenirs, for people like you and I, has been sort of like to prove to ourselves we were in a certain place and to try to evoke that memory. I think these days selfies have kind of come to stand in a little more as the souvenirs we bring home, more than material objects. At least in my opinion that's true. In my recent trips, I've brought back very few or no souvenirs from my travel. Just a few well-taken photographs, one or two very small items, and maybe an item of clothing is enough for me. I don't need to fill my apartment any more with knickknacks and relics of places I've been.

I think the best things we bring back from our travels are things that are truly utilitarian, things that can become integrated into our day-to-day life, to the point where they even begin to have new stories attached to them. But there's a lot of objects that are sort of just isolated in time and place. Like I have a little statue of the god Shiva, from India, that I brought back which can only remind me of one certain time and place. A little silver teapot that I brought back from Morocco that reminds me of the afternoon I met the writer Paul Bowles. A commemorative plaque from the first moon landing that I got in 1969 when I was 15 years old that recalls for me the time I was lucky enough to meet and interview Buzz Aldrin for Salon magazine.

These things all just really earmark a certain day or time or hour in my life and it's easy to let them go once I have the stories on paper, or in my mind. Because for me especially, I don't have any heirs, I have no one to leave my things to. And I've seen what happens to our stuff when we're gone. It's gets bulldozed away and put in the dumpster. So I'd just as soon give away as many things as I can before that time comes, rather than you know die surrounded by clutter. [laughs]

So what's the most unusual or just plain useless thing that you still have in your own home right now?

Well, nothing's really useless if it evokes a story. That becomes its use. I think one of the most useless things I have in my house right now is a pair of Latin percussion bongos which I bought years and years ago convinced that I would become adept on the bongos. And you know in my fourplex I've learned that playing the bongos is not a very popular endeavor, so they've just been sitting on the floor by my fireplace, probably for about 15 years.

But a lot of these objects are useless in their own right. I mean, a special ceremonial hat from Indonesia, a ball of cotton wicks from Kathmandu, a pair of ping pong balls signed by the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. All of these objects are sort of useless except for the stories they evoke. And when an object stops evoking stories for you, I think it really is time for you to get rid of it, with no ceremony or panic. Just put it out to the curb and let it sit there until someone else picks it up and gives it a story of their own.

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