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Episode 323: Leigh Baldwin and Sean Williams
280 Plays2 years ago
Leigh Baldwin and Sean Williams co-wrote and co-reported "Follow the Leader" for the July issue of The Atavist Magazine.
We also hear from lead editor Jonah Ogles.
Social: @CNFPod
Sponsor: Athletic Greens
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Theme
00:00:00
Speaker
ACN efforts, just this little thing here. Guidelines for issue four of the audio magazine on the theme codes are at brendanamara.com. Go check out the submission guidelines and consider submitting an essay. And yes, I am still working on issue three. And that's coming. So stay tuned. Oh yeah, there is a darling graveyard in this story. It's huge.
00:00:31
Speaker
Oh, hey CNN4S. Hey, it's the creative non-fiction podcast, the show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Are you okay? How's it going? We've got three, count them, three dudes on the show today. Who doesn't want more dudes?
00:00:53
Speaker
First we talked to Jonah Ogles, editor at the Atavus magazine, and then we talked to Lee Baldwin and Sean Williams about their piece, Follow the Leader, for this month's Atavus feature. Get this, here's the deck from it. In the waning days of the Iron Curtain, Rainier Sontag helped fuel the neo-Nazi movement that still plagues Germany today. He was also a communist spy, and he was working for Vladimir Putin.
00:01:24
Speaker
Right? I mean, okay. Yeah, so Lee Baldwin is at
00:01:29
Speaker
Lee B.A. number one on Twitter, L-E-I-G-H-B-A numeral one, and Sean Williams is S. Williams Journo on Twitter. They collaborated on this piece, gripping as all Atavist pieces tend to be, and topical, which not all Atavist stories tend to be. Show notes and the up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter at BrendanOmero.com.
00:01:56
Speaker
Keep the conversation going on Twitter at cnfpod and if you link up to the show I'll give you digital fistbumps or maybe even a James Hetfield gif. Jif? Gif? I don't know. I think it's Jif. My wife and I had a discussion about this and we tried to get to the bottom of it. I think it's Jif. Or is it Gif? I don't know. I forget. You'll know.
Compelling Story Pitch and Political Context
00:02:18
Speaker
Today is my birthday. The anniversary of my birth.
00:02:24
Speaker
So if you care, maybe you can gift wrap a kind review on Apple Podcasts as those go a long way towards validating this enterprise for the way we're seeing effort. So anyway, do you like this? I've tightened up the intro a bit, because this is going to be it, man. This is it. 42 years old and I'm still getting there. True fans, stay till the end for my parting shot about what to do in the universe is telling you to quit.
00:02:52
Speaker
But for now, here's Jonah Ogles to lead things off for this Atavistian episode of the podcast, number 323.
00:03:11
Speaker
The tease of this piece, it says, in the waning days of the Iron Curtain, Rainier Sontag helped fuel the neo-Nazi movement that still plagues Germany today. He was also a communist spy and he was working for Vladimir Putin.
00:03:27
Speaker
It's a hell of a deck, isn't it? When you're distilling the story like that, it's like, wow, there's a lot going on here. This was one of those pitches that we got that just checked every box.
00:03:53
Speaker
had twists and turns and a sort of sadly timely hook to it, which is rare for us. But yeah, Lee and Sean, they just really had the goods when it came to
00:04:10
Speaker
source material, this unbelievable story that almost no one has heard of and is totally unaware of this guy of Sontag and also Putin's efforts in that phase of his career also seem like a little bit of a dark spot in history.
00:04:33
Speaker
Given that, to me there are like two somewhat timely elements to it. There's just the fact that the craving ambition of Putin is kind of first and foremost, but also this idea of how far-right extremism is, as much as you want to believe that it's gone, is very much prevalent, even though this takes place in Germany.
00:04:59
Speaker
It has the feeling like we're seeing it here in the United States. These things that we didn't think were of the of the discourse. They are fine now. The rocks been kicked over and the cockroaches are out and it's very much alive. And I felt that that pulse throughout this whole piece. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it is. It's if you took the dates out of it, you know, you could you could set this
00:05:27
Speaker
in various places in history, various points in time where all of these factors sort of come together to create the right conditions for people with this really hateful ideology to basically exploit
00:05:50
Speaker
the conditions for their own personal gratification and glory. It's a dark piece. And what becomes the challenge on your end when you're working with not one, but two reporters? Yeah, it's a different thing. It really is. And I would actually love to hear
00:06:21
Speaker
I'll be excited to hear what these guys say about what it's like for writers. Because for an editor, this is not the first dual byline piece that I've worked on. It's a little bit harder, I think, because I could say, let's say I'm working on a story with you, I can say, hey, I really need you to draw out this character for me.
00:06:50
Speaker
you know, and then your job would be to do it and come back to me. But when there are two writers, they sort of each are bringing a different thing to the story. You know, one person may be better versed in, you know, maybe the documents and one person might have a little more experience like writing deep scenery of the type that we like. And so, you know, it requires
00:07:20
Speaker
sort of more, I think more patience and sort of more back and forth between all parties to make sure everything is sort of coming together. And that necessarily means that like
00:07:35
Speaker
there's another person with their own schedule and their own timing and everything. So in my experience, these pieces tend to move along a little bit more slowly than other pieces, but the benefit you have is that you have three sets of eyes looking at it and sort of finding weaknesses and trying to push it forward.
Collaboration and Writing Challenges
00:08:01
Speaker
You have an idea of what it looks like for it to come together, and you have your back and forth with the writers. When it starts, when it's not coming together, what's the process by which, or the thought process by which, you really start to hammer it home, okay, this is how we're gonna start tying these threads together in a better way so we can stick to landing.
00:08:23
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I do think that in stories that are written by two people, somebody has to take the lead. And at some point, somebody has to say, OK, I'm the enforcer on this.
00:08:37
Speaker
you know, and here is the deadline, and here's what you're gonna do, and here's what you're gonna do. The same thing happens on any project in which multiple people are involved, you know. And certainly in the past, when I was at outside, I was a fact checker on a handful of stories that had two writers. And we would reach a point where, you know,
00:09:08
Speaker
I think the easy thing to slip into is a writer can sort of be like, oh, well, that's Jonah's thing to deal with over there. And so what do I care if he's not doing it on time? But somebody has to care that it's getting done on time. I would guess that
00:09:30
Speaker
stories with two bylines end up being stories where the editor has to take a larger role in sort of getting things done and making sure that the writers are not just waiting for the other one to do something. And to Sean and Lee's credit, communication with the two of them, they were always really responsive
00:10:00
Speaker
You know, they were, it was actually pretty seamless. It was about as seamless as it can be with two writers working on something, or at least in my experience, they were really good at it. And it turned out they were in like, I didn't even realize this. I assumed they were sort of like buddies who lived down the street from each other, but they're in fact living in two different countries. And I never would have known because they were really on top of answering emails and hitting deadlines and everything like that.
00:10:31
Speaker
You're bringing up your experience fact-checking with outside. That brings up a point I wanted to underscore with this piece of fact-checking, given that it's international in nature and I'm going to dig into that with them as well. But I want to get your sense of if you're a writer doing a story of this nature, a reporter,
00:10:54
Speaker
You know, what can reporters do to make the fact-checking easier on the editor, but as well as, you know, you guys do hire out fact-checkers. You know, what's a good way for people who might not be as well-versed in helping that side of the table along? What do you like to see reporters do with the information they give you and maybe how they source a draft?
00:11:21
Speaker
Yeah, this is a great question and I'm really glad you've asked it because I have strong opinions about it. The answer is actually really easy. It's just annotation and it's just as thorough an annotation as you can give them. If you're a writer listening to this, I would urge you, I don't think you necessarily need to do this when you start pre-reporting a pitch.
00:11:46
Speaker
But once you have an assignment in hand, when do you start putting words down on the page? And this may not be practical, you know, as you're just like trying to get the first sentence down or the first section down. But once you have a draft that's ready to go, just start annotating it and make them as detailed as you possibly can. So if you have a transcript and there's a quote
00:12:12
Speaker
just go ahead and put the minute and second timestamp in there. And if you are quoting from a book, put the page number in there. Because A, you are less likely to make mistakes as a writer when you do that. And we do notice those things. I've had stories that have just fallen apart in fact check.
00:12:37
Speaker
And then I've had stories that just sail through. And the ones that sail through are because it's annotated. And there aren't many changes needed because as the writer was annotating, they just kept double checking themselves. And oops, I got this quote a little bit wrong. Or, oh, hey, that's not what this says.
00:12:58
Speaker
So, yeah, annotating early and as thoroughly as possible just makes a fact checker's life so much easier, you know, even if they get, and that's what these guys, you know, these guys did a pretty good job of that because they had a lot of source material, hundreds of pages of historical documents. And if you don't have an annotated draft, a fact checker is sitting there reading
00:13:24
Speaker
you know, first they read a story, then they read hundreds of pages of documents. And maybe on the first round, they're sort of able to line up what refers to what. But usually it takes, or at least when I was a fact checker, I would have to read through everything just to get familiar with it and then read it all again in order to find the actual material that I was looking for. So when you annotate,
00:13:54
Speaker
You just, you remove that from the equation. You just give fact checkers the ability to make sure that you got the right facts from the source material. But then it gives them time to sort of step back and be a good fact checker and look into this other stuff. You know, look into sources that maybe the writer didn't refer to in their reporting and say,
00:14:24
Speaker
Are we characterizing the rise of Neo-Naziism in West Germany properly? Let me read this good thing about it. And that will only make a piece better when you have a fact checker who has the time and energy to do that extra leg work for a piece.
00:14:44
Speaker
Yeah. And then I suspect that at the very, at the very, very end, when you're ready to like send it to the press, as it were, that's when it's like, OK, now we can sort of we can remove all the annotations. So then it becomes reader friendly. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So what what what I do when I have drafts that are already annotated and I'm editing those, you know, it
00:15:10
Speaker
As an editor, I do try to be careful. Even if I remove a line, I try to not remove the annotation.
00:15:17
Speaker
because that line may go back in or the information contained within it might end up back in the story. So I do think it helps to have an editor who's sort of fact checker aware, I guess. But yeah, what I do is I get the story ready for fact check and I send it off to them. And then for the activist, and I think most places, then I just
00:15:42
Speaker
I just remove all of them. Once they have the fact check copy, it's off and running and I don't need to worry about that anymore because I guess some places may choose to do a lot of annotations and we've done things like that in the past. But yeah, from a reader's standpoint, this isn't an academic
00:16:03
Speaker
journal, though it's sort of source-like one. This is a true story, but we want it to be sort of immersive and to suck readers in. And I think 200 footnotes probably get in the way of that.
00:16:21
Speaker
Yeah, even the, I used to really, I guess like, you know, probably a good solid 10 years ago, I used to really admire the footnotes of David Foster Wallace or Chuck Closterman and anyone else who did that.
00:16:39
Speaker
over the years I'm just like if I see a footnote I'm like oh god I please just if it's not good enough to be into the main body of text I don't care what funny aside you think is happening it takes me totally out of the piece like I hate them now yeah yeah totally I mean Chris Kai's it outside
00:16:58
Speaker
one time gave me a note in a story I was editing, even about parentheses. He was like, a parentheses is a signal to me that the writer and editor haven't figured out where to put this piece of information yet. And that's a good, I think it's impossible sometimes to avoid. So I don't think it's like a hard and fast truth.
00:17:25
Speaker
It's really good practice for me as an editor to identify, let's say, a footnote where a writer's making an aside like that or a parenthetical and just say, okay, here's a thing that isn't contained within the flow of the story. How do I get it in the flow of the story? And that sometimes I can't do it or I don't have time to do it or I don't feel like I have time right then.
00:17:56
Speaker
But it can be a really good practice for, I would think, just about anybody. It's just like a mental exercise of like, okay, why am I setting this off? Why can't I just get this into the story somewhere and how do I do that?
00:18:13
Speaker
Very nice. Well, as always, these are always wonderful conversations that we get to have as a preamble to the main writers of the piece. So Jonah, thanks as always for the conversation. We're going to kick this over to Sean and Lee in just a moment. Thanks for having me, Brendan. Always a good time talking with you.
00:18:37
Speaker
Lots to chew on there, right? I don't want to give away too much, but I'm definitely going to be talking to some fact checkers on this show. Okay, so that is literally giving it all away. Never mind. Before I bring Sean and Lee into the fold, let's do our little, I think it's our penultimate mid-roll ad for athletic greens, okay?
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00:20:37
Speaker
So here's Lee and Sean. Sean is based out of Berlin, Germany. And Lee is based out of London, England. I'm based out of Eugene, Oregon, United States. So if I sound a little groggy, it's because it was 6 a.m. Brendan Standard Time and we fired up these microphones.
00:20:59
Speaker
Lee is the editor of source material, source-material.org, source material for those in the know. He was founded in 2017 to investigate the vested interests that impede the democratic process. A small team of experienced reporters, we use in-depth journalism to uncover stories that hold the powerful to account. Yeah, there's like four people on that staff and damn. Need a fifth, need a fifth anyway.
00:21:28
Speaker
Sean Williams is a British reporter and photographer based in Berlin, Germany, as we already established. His subjects range from human rights and conflict to sport, culture, and tech. His work is published at titles including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Rolling Stone, GQ, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, Wire, The Economist, The Guardian. You may have heard of them.
00:21:51
Speaker
Sean is also co-creator and co-host of the Underworld podcast, a weekly show investigating global organized crime with journalist Danny Gold.
00:22:04
Speaker
Well, I, well, why wait? Why, who wouldn't want to hear these guys talk about their story? Follow the leader for the activist and hear me bumble along like an idiot. Cause that's what I do. And that's what you've come to know. I gotta stay on brand. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not particularly bright. You know this. So here we go. Here's my conversation with Sean and Lee. All right.
00:22:31
Speaker
So why don't we start off just by giving me a sense of how you guys arrived at this story? Maybe I should start off that because I think I came to it first. So I run a small nonprofit newsroom called Source Material in London. And while just rooting around, looking at things, I came across an old story from 2015 by a German outfit called Collect Peace about Putin's early years when he was a KGB officer in Dresden.
00:23:01
Speaker
in East Germany. And there were a couple of lines in the piece that were sort of buried a long way down about the fact that one of the agents he recruited, or that was recruited on his behalf, was a neo-Nazi called Reiner Zontag. And I found that fascinating. And no one else seemed to have really noticed because it was a long piece focusing mostly on other aspects of Putin's life, which were also very interesting.
00:23:25
Speaker
They sort of got lost. And when I mentioned it to people, no one seemed to know. And everyone said, wow, that's amazing. So I became slightly obsessed. Didn't have the opportunity to do anything until I got to go to Dresden and spend a few days in the city archives digging through all the court records from the case surrounding Zontag's eventual shooting in 1991.
00:23:50
Speaker
And what I stumbled upon was a mine of massive forensic detail so we could reconstruct second by second almost the moments of his death. There were forensic photos of his body. There were witness statements from all angles of the scene. And there was a wealth of background material. And so the next step was to get the Stasi archive, Stasi, East Germany's secret police. And their archive, since the collapse of communism, has been open to the public.
00:24:20
Speaker
So we applied to get Zontag's file and we had to get various privacy exemptions because he hadn't quite been dead the requisite 30 years at the time that this started. But eventually they let us have them. But that whole process took six months. So it was a very, very slow thing. And then by that time we were deep into the pandemic and other things were getting in the way. And I sort of put the story on the back burner.
00:24:46
Speaker
And then Source Material did a story for a news organization called Tortoise in London. And that week it happened that Sean did a story for them about East German Neo-Nazis. And I happened across Sean and thought, wow, this could be the perfect person to help this story that's been sitting there gathering dust finally make it to fruition.
00:25:08
Speaker
So I got on the phone and gave Sean a bath. I just spent a few days down in Chemnitz, a little town, a little city in the south, east of Germany. And I'd also done a story for GQ the summer before about how Corona protests were wrapped up in left and right politics and it was kind of a crazy situation.
00:25:26
Speaker
And I was thinking, okay, maybe I could do something a little nicer about Germany for once. Don't have to speak to a bunch of neo-Nazis or hear stories about fights and things going on in all parts of the country. And then Lee called me and thought, yeah, why not? Let's just jump into neo-nazism again. That could be a beat for a while. Yeah. And then it all kind of kicked off with this story.
00:25:55
Speaker
Yeah, speaking of neo-naziism as a beat, I just had Leah Sotillion, a great freelancer, over here in the States, and she has a new book out, When the Moon Turns to Blood, which details a lot of far-right extremism, and she's been covering a lot of far-right extremism here in the States.
00:26:17
Speaker
And also, Sayward Darby, who's the editor-in-chief of The Atavist, she had a book about far-right women and sisters in hate and how they prop up the movement. They're often not as well publicized, but the women are every bit as complicit as a lot of the more men at the stage or front and center.
00:26:39
Speaker
So it's one of those things where it's a really dark beat to cover. So, you know, for you guys who have covered quite a bit of it extensively, you know, how is it that you don't get, you know, pulled into the mud of it all? Yeah, I mean... That is bleak. I mean, there is brevity in it in a certain strange kind of way. I mean,
00:27:06
Speaker
you have to kind of see the progress that's been made in some ways. I mean with this country it has a really the darkest past of all I guess and what the story that we did for the activist shows that this was kind of something that was being manipulated and jumped on by all kinds of different forces all through the Cold War but
00:27:26
Speaker
Now it's a different matter. There is a far right of course. We've spoken to many wild members of its scene, but it's small. And I think we're making progress. That's what I'd like to believe. I think we're basically on an upward trajectory. I mean, we can't go any worse than back in those days.
00:27:50
Speaker
Yeah, maybe some very general fuzzy sense of things getting better. Yeah, that'll keep me going. Just about. I think for me, there was a sense that the characters were so fascinating. So you have this character, Rainer Sontag. And I think we mentioned this in the piece, that when you see the rare bits of footage of him or all the photos of him, he's always got this slight smirk on his face. And even when he's trying to give a really serious Nazi propaganda speech,
00:28:20
Speaker
and is zeig heiling with fervor. He can't stop breaking out into laughter. And so all these characters are a mess of contradictions. The main Nazi leader in West Germany to whom Sontag attached himself, a guy called Michel Koonin, in 1986 came out of gay. And that split the Nazi movement and the neo-Nazi movement in West Germany down the middle. And suddenly it was divided into,
00:28:47
Speaker
Well, almost the gay Nazis and the straight Nazis, the ones who supported Kuhn and Still, and the ones who didn't. All this microcosms of strange politics were really, really fascinating. And I think those just storylines keep you focused rather than being dragged down into a swamp of far-right misery and pessimism.
Personal Contradictions in Extremism
00:29:08
Speaker
Yeah, there's another guy called Ingo and he's a reformed far right guy in Berlin that we spoke to and he said back in the day when Sontag was kind of attaching himself to these guys, Kunin's group, that they liked the fact that he would go around beating up people. That was great. They really liked that he rolled his sleeves up and used his fists, but they didn't like that he had a past in the sex industry. For them, that was a little bit beyond the pale. They didn't mind marching up and down the street with swastikas on their arm, but
00:29:37
Speaker
Yeah, working outside a brothel on the door was a stretch. And Lee, you had said something earlier about how you stumbled across him, was you just found a few lines buried in a piece. And so often, a lot of these long-form stories often come from people who are just reading other stories, and you notice this little thing, you're like, wow, that little cast-off line, there's so much more there.
00:30:05
Speaker
And for you guys, when you're trying to drum up material to write about, it's like, where do you go about finding your ideas in pan for gold? So hopefully you'll find that one little sentence that'll send you off on an 9,000 word feature that you might be able to pitch to a place like The Atavist.
00:30:24
Speaker
I think it's a lot of buried leads. There's loads of stories like the one in Corrective that kicked this one off where there are just mad little details buried in the middle of it. I mean, yeah, just read a lot. You're going to pick up tons and tons of information just by reading random snippets on any kind of topic. I mean, there's another story that I'm doing for outside magazine right now. And it came from just watching a 10 minute YouTube video.
00:30:54
Speaker
of a guy kind of in a really niche sport but he was trying to say stuff and the presenter wasn't really letting him say what he wanted and you could tell that this was an interesting character and I think that's the same as this story in a way
00:31:09
Speaker
in that this little snippet of information about Zontag is, I think it's like six or seven pairs down the piece, really kind of not really explored in any huge detail. But in German kind of naming sort of laws in stories as well, there are a couple of people in it, Georg S and Klaus Z.
00:31:33
Speaker
but they wouldn't name them and we were pretty adamant that we were going to find out who these guys were and luckily we ended up doing so and Klaus Z becomes Klaus Zukul who was pretty much the sort of source that blew the whole story wide open. So yeah they start with a grain of sand and pretty soon afterwards they end up being something huge and at least in the first part of research barely manageable but getting it down to
00:32:02
Speaker
to a few strands and a few scenes and structuring, then that becomes the task, because there were, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of names that we found cropping up on the Stasi files. We had a witness list from Sontag's killing. We had loads of other people popping up in the woodwork from the neo-Nazi scene. People still swimming around that world today.
00:32:30
Speaker
narrowing that down became a pretty epic task. I mean, getting the information down in the first place from one of these garbled files was big enough, but yeah, there were a lot of dead ends in this one. Yes, and I find when you stumble across one of these little nuggets, a couple of lines, and then you sort of go through an informal testing process of bouncing it off people and seeing what they think. And for me, the key test was telling people
00:32:59
Speaker
colleagues, for example, in London saying, did you know Putin recruited a neo-Nazi agent? And they say, wow. But then the real test I think that we passed was when I told German journalists, people who are really experienced and steeped in German history and politics. And it still was jaw-dropping to them. And most people in Germany had no idea about this too. And the fact that it had shock value
00:33:23
Speaker
and was so fascinating, not just to people outside Germany, but to Germans too, I think really gave me the idea that this was something worth pursuing. Yeah, and Sean, you were saying just a moment ago that a lot of the sources and the reporting that there were a lot of dead ends.
00:33:42
Speaker
So when there are a lot of dead ends and there's a lot of things to comb through, how do you just keep persevering and trying to find more of those things that are going to nourish the piece you're working on?
00:33:56
Speaker
I guess it's keeping things clear at all times and not just in the sense that you have a clear direction of, you know, in your head of what you want a story to be, but literally physically keeping all of your notes as clear and as well-ordered as possible because, I mean, I think we were counting up the number of Stasi files that we went through in this piece and it's, I mean, it's high hundreds, you know, including all the court docs and they're all
00:34:23
Speaker
in very officious German that we spent pretty much a whole week together in Berlin just sitting in an Airbnb that Lee had rented and going over and translating.
00:34:37
Speaker
When you have that much information and there are all these dozens and dozens of potential witnesses and contacts and sources and so on, if you've just got a bunch of garbled notes or you don't have everything written down and kind of streamlined as much as you can, you're dead in the water. And it was tough enough as it was.
00:34:58
Speaker
There were a few people that led nowhere. I went down to Langen, which is one of the main places that the Nazis tried to establish themselves in the 80s, knocked on a bunch of doors. I found someone who was a former leader of the movement there and got told in no uncertain terms to go away.
00:35:18
Speaker
that was just one of a few trips that sort of led nowhere. But it all kind of builds a picture a little bit more clear in your head of where you want to focus your attention because I think in the end we realized that there were a few characters, there were a few protagonists that we really wanted to zero in on. And because we were able to get access to a certain amount of people,
00:35:44
Speaker
that became sort of clearer as we went down the rabbit hole of talking to all these different sources. Klaus being the sort of main example, me and Lee went down to meet him around sort of Dresden way. And yeah, he's an interesting guy with a truly photographic memory. It's incredible. So yeah, finding those
00:36:08
Speaker
I mean, obviously the story was always going to be about Sontag and Putin and Kunin, the other leader of the Nazi movement at the time. But there are a few other guys that sort of cropped up that I didn't expect to speak to. And they turned out to be pretty amazing sources. Klaus Bean, candidate number one.
00:36:28
Speaker
And what was it about Sontag that made him such a prime target for the Stasi in Putin? I don't think he was necessarily a prime target. And that's the interesting thing. It's one of these sort of accidents of history. One of the things that's fascinating about the story is that Putin has a history of instrumentalizing the European far right as president of Russia with his links to whether it's the Lega in Italy or
00:36:58
Speaker
or the fire right in France, for example, to whom Russia has lent money. And it's interesting to see that that goes right back to his experience in the 1980s. Now, you don't want to take it too far. You don't want to pretend that one particular episode explains everything about Putin, but certainly the parallel is fascinating. The thing about Zontag is I think he was a nobody.
00:37:24
Speaker
And they just took a punt on him. East Germany wanted to get rid of him anyway because he was a criminal and an undesirable. And it was the type of person who they were quite happy to kick out of the country to the west. And they didn't know what was going to happen to him. He went west and odds on, he was just going to make a new life there and break contact. But he didn't break contact. And probably more by accident than design, he attached himself to the leading neo-Nazi of the time and became a very important figure. And then again, it was the sort of accidents of history
00:37:54
Speaker
The parallel that's fascinating, and I think particularly for Germans I've spoken to, is the parallel with Horst Bessel, who was, like Sontag, a thug. He was a thug in Hitler's essay in the 1930s. He was a nobody, and he got killed. And the Nazis turned him into a martyr and wrote a famous marching song after him, about him. And that became the anthem for the Third Reich, almost.
00:38:24
Speaker
Something very similar happened to Sontag. He was a thug with a background in petty crime and in the red light district. And he wasn't an ideological Nazi. Michal Kunin, whom he worked for, was an intellectual. Although his ideas were abhorrent, he had some very sophisticated thinking about national socialism. Sontag had none of that. He was an ordinary street drawer. But when he got shot in the head,
00:38:49
Speaker
by these brothel owners who he took on and ended up lying in the pool of blood. The propagandists in the Nazi movement spotted an opportunity and they made him a hero. And just like horse vessel in the 1930s, they wrote a marching song about him.
00:39:03
Speaker
They had a procession after his death through Dresden and it was the biggest Nazi march in Germany since 1945. And he became this hero of the movement. You can still feel the echoes of that and what's happened with the German far-right in the 30 years since. What strikes me about this piece too is that very much like in the states where a lot of some of these
Far-right Extremism and Putin's Influence
00:39:29
Speaker
far-right things that we don't necessarily
00:39:33
Speaker
Oh, I don't know. A lot of people don't necessarily agree with, find pretty ugly and abhorrent, are very much alive and well, even though it's not what you would call socially acceptable. But be it a Trump coming into office and kicking over the rock and exposing and empowering,
00:39:54
Speaker
a lot of these ideas. But given Germany's history, you would think, oh, Nazism, neo-Nazism, this would not be acceptable. And yet, it's still persisting some 50 years after World War II, and I imagine it still has its roots there. And I imagine it's still very much alive. It just made me realize that a lot of these things that we wish would die, they very much have a life of their own.
00:40:24
Speaker
Well, I mean straight after the war, of course, East Germany is essentially a vassal of the Soviet Union and it's supposedly a socialist work as paradise. That radicalism to the far left kind of led many people to follow Nazism
00:40:39
Speaker
not because they were necessarily anti-Semitic, although obviously they were, they were Nazis, but they were going against the state. It was an act of rebellion against the East German communists. So you would have this weird, kind of total paradoxical situation where young guys were
00:41:04
Speaker
wearing swastikas and Heil Hitler, not because they necessarily believed in any of it, because they actually thought it was an anti-authoritarian concept, which is obviously completely bonkers. And that's when, I mean, in the 80s, when some of the people involved in the East German government were bringing this stuff up and saying, look, their skin is running riot all over our main cities.
00:41:27
Speaker
I think it's in the story that we spoke to a guy called Ben Wagner, who was a police commissioner at the time, and he said he brought up a report about far-right violence, and they were like, nah, it doesn't exist, mate. There's no such thing as fascism in an anti-fascist state.
00:41:42
Speaker
And actually, that's something that has caused a lot of issues that are still rippling through the former East today, because there's been, in Chemnitz, where I was doing this story that Lee saw before we hooked up, there were many people that brought up the issue of far-right violence before the war came down in Berlin, and they were just told, no, sorry, it can't exist by definition.
00:42:07
Speaker
So this is a weird country of paradoxes. Germany is an extremely young democracy. It's been through all these crazy times in the 20th century. So it's not surprising that people run to extremes here. But given the history, that might seem completely insane to anyone outside the country. But there's actually a sort of weird logic to it.
00:42:32
Speaker
Yeah, and you mentioned, too, how even in the 80s, you know, Putin is working to try to throw upheaval in the West. And then even today, in France and elsewhere, certainly through cyber tactics, certainly affected elections in the United States.
00:42:58
Speaker
So where do you since you guys have been immersed sort of in in the reporting on on him and what the story and I suspect others as well, you know, where did where did he develop this this playbook of disruption? For me, I think it's extreme pragmatism. It's quite interesting if you go back to the 60s, the communist spy agencies, the KGB and the Stasi in East Germany,
00:43:26
Speaker
had a history of stoking far-right movements, Nazism, spraying graffiti on Jewish gravestones, for example, or when Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi war criminal, went on trial in Jerusalem, they sent fake letters purporting to be from former Nazis trying to stir up trouble around that as a way of attacking West Germany's democracy. By the time it gets to the 80s,
00:43:52
Speaker
The East Germans are more worried about Western neo-nazism spreading East because it was a protest movement against the communist regime. So they were less probably trying to stir up trouble in the East with Sontag than just using him as a way of keeping an eye on Nazis. But the interesting is the extreme pragmatism in that they have no moral compunction about dealing with neo-Nazis and about instrumentalizing them. That has to be said at this point that Western intelligence
00:44:20
Speaker
The West German intelligence services also have a lot of agents that were Nazis and have also right up to the modern day had a very complicated and controversial history. So there's a pragmatism on both sides, but I think you can see that that's the common thread that really links the Putin policy then to the Putin policy today.
00:44:44
Speaker
Yeah, and I was speaking to Anton Shikosov, who's an academic who's written about Russia and the far right today, and he said that Putin wasn't really an ideological communist at all, but he was a statist, right? Everything was done in service to the Soviet Empire, later the Russian state.
00:45:04
Speaker
I guess now he runs the country like a king and that sort of implicates him in this sowing of chaos all over the West just to shake things up and destabilize them because Russia is not.
00:45:24
Speaker
a very strong force economically in many respects. So you have to sort of use this asymmetrical warfare to get one over on your enemies.
00:45:35
Speaker
If that means employing neo-Nazis and fascists to cause obvious trouble in wherever you want them to do so, then that's what you're going to do. There was a moment too, I think it was later in the piece, how the neo-Nazis were – they would form like multi-political parties, like very small factions to almost create this like guerrilla movement where you couldn't
00:46:00
Speaker
necessarily zero in on one party. It was just so splintered that that was the way they were like gaining the traction they wanted. So like, I don't know. What did you make of that when you stumbled across that and you're reporting about that real like splintered way to create a cohesive movement? One of the major challenges that West Germany and Unified Germany subsequently
00:46:25
Speaker
have had since the Second World War is what to do about the small but powerful far-right movements in the country. And at what point do you ban them and push them underground? And at what point do you let reasonably extremist right-wing movements flourish out in the open where you can at least keep an eye on it? And of course, there are weighted democratic questions. At what point can you ban in a democracy a democratic political party? So it's really, really difficult.
00:46:54
Speaker
And the Nazis were very sophisticated and very aware of the constitutional restrictions, and their strategy was to create a sort of whack-a-mole with the states, where they just had a spare movement going every time another one was banned. The thing about Reiner Zontag, though, when he went back to East Germany, one of the reasons that he was successful there is that he wasn't a political animal, he wasn't sophisticated, he wasn't very interested in setting up political parties.
00:47:22
Speaker
And neither were the East Germans, because they'd lived for, you know, getting on for half a century in this one party state. And they were very cynical about political parties. And the last thing they wanted to do, having gleefully ripped up their party cards when the Berlin Wall came down,
00:47:38
Speaker
was join a new political party. Reiner Zontag, although he did help set up new political parties, all these sprinter parties with strange names, the band of Saxon werewolves, for example, or also more prosaic ones like the National Alternative or Deutschel Teneteser. He was involved in setting up those parties, but they weren't really the main thing. He was a rabble-rouser.
00:48:00
Speaker
And there were a lot of young people who suddenly had no future in a country which until a few months previously had guaranteed you a job for life. And now there was unemployment, there was uncertainty, there was deprivation, the economy was flat lining. And you had these very deprived urban areas, concrete wastelands going on for miles in Dresden.
00:48:28
Speaker
And Zontag was a father figure to them. He was a rabble riser. A lot of his followers, they were mostly aged 14 to 21, really young kids who saw a father figure in him. And he was able to incite them to violence quite easily.
00:48:43
Speaker
And given the state of journalism and reporters being often maligned and under attack, certainly in the States, we hear people calling enemy of the people, the famous line from the French Revolution.
Journalism's Role and Media Literacy
00:49:02
Speaker
All that. And Lee, your mission with source material is to really bring journalism to light, do the hard investigative work that holds people to account, to do what it's supposed to do. Given how journalism is so, like I said, kind of under attack and it's very hard to do this job and do it well,
00:49:27
Speaker
Where is the juice for the two of you in keeping that flame alive and just how important it is to you in the world today? To go back maybe to the earlier question about how is it possible to write about Nazis without being sucked in and getting miserable about it.
00:49:50
Speaker
One of the things about Putin's policy now is that he very much enjoys and Russia very much enjoys playing the extremes in the democratic West off against each other, you know, in the run up to elections using
00:50:06
Speaker
Twitter troll farm to set up, I don't know, a gay rights protest and a far right protest on the same block and then watch the sparks fly as they sort of munch popcorn and people and tear each other apart. Writing about Nazis and understanding them is sort of an act of not taking a side in the culture war, which has Putin laughing all the way to the Kremlin. But to play a part in journalism that
00:50:31
Speaker
that unifies that has a democratic role and without being too grandiose about it as part of that democratic middle and the path of the democratic consensus where we don't so much, we don't try and condemn people who voted for Trump or, you know, Nazis or in the UK, Brexiteers or their opponents, but we try to understand them and get under the skin and see what makes them pick.
00:50:55
Speaker
There's so much disinformation pouring into people's ears and eyes at the moment with regards to Ukraine, and I think that Russia's done a pretty decent job of muddying the waters to the extent that in Germany right now, the conversation is not about Russia pounding shopping malls and killing civilians, but it's actually about whether Stepan Bandera is an historical far-right fascist figure, should make us think twice about supporting Ukrainians today,
00:51:24
Speaker
And that's really the kind of misinformation and sowing of discord stuff. I don't know, I hope that good journalism can sift through. You know, at least with this story working with Sayward and Jonah at the Atavist, nothing's gonna slip by those guys. Everything is nailed down in the story and you can see
00:51:52
Speaker
straight up that Vladimir Putin has been you know funding back in the far right going as far back as when he was a
00:51:59
Speaker
fresh-faced KGB officer, that's beyond doubt. At least having that out in the public is helping maybe to break down some of the BS around him that some people in Europe like to talk about. Well, that might be a little too optimistic perhaps at the moment, but yeah, if we can add to that conversation, then that's really all we can hope to do, and it's quite edifying to do that.
00:52:26
Speaker
What is, or how can people, especially just readers and citizens, but even journalists who have to comb through a whole lot of information.
00:52:42
Speaker
and might not be realizing that maybe they're being fed misinformation. How can journalists and even consumers of news be just more literate when it comes to, okay, what's credible information versus what isn't?
00:52:57
Speaker
Good question. Maybe switch off the TV and read stuff will be a good start. Certainly social media, right? Yeah, probably close down Twitter and definitely don't get anything from Instagram, God or TikTok.
00:53:15
Speaker
I would take the time to read stuff and there's only so much you can get the wall pulled over your eyes if you read a few good sources of newspapers and magazines. It's not just the fact that you have to interact with it, whereas TV you can sit back with your mouth open and take in the information and you can certainly just scroll until you're half dead on Twitter.
00:53:41
Speaker
Yeah, I probably don't have any scientific answers for you, but switch off the TV and pick up a newspaper would be a good start. My view is that journalists are the losers game. We're never going to win the battle. It's almost
00:53:59
Speaker
like catching drugs cheats in sport. The cheats are always a couple of years ahead of the enforcement authorities. And it's a bit like that with fake news. All we can do is keep banging away. And I don't think the tradition and model of journalism is broken. I think we need to just stick to that clodding, sometimes prosaic pursuit of the facts and keep banging them out there. And that's all we can really do at the end of the day.
00:54:27
Speaker
And also, from a journalist's perspective, stories have always engaged people more than anything else, and that's why so much of fake news has been effective at sort of bypassing people's credulity sometimes. And I hope that stories like this, something longer, something a bit narrative with protagonists that people can
00:54:50
Speaker
identify or understand a little better, people are always going to connect to stories. So always try to think about that when writing stuff that might be a bit murky or involve some pretty unpleasant characters.
00:55:05
Speaker
And speaking of facts, when I was talking with Jonah yesterday, we got to talking just about the nature of fact-checking and especially with a piece of this nature which has so many documents and the interviews you guys were doing and just how to just keep track of
00:55:28
Speaker
of everything and make sure that everything is well annotated for yourselves and the fact checker as well. So for you guys when you're collaborating on a piece of this nature, how are you keeping things straight and making sure that everything is attributable as you are composing these drafts?
00:55:49
Speaker
Did we keep things straight and easily? I'm not sure we managed to do it so well, but we tried. The honest answer is I've been doing investigations for a very long time now, and it's hard because you're trying to write something coherent. So you're moving pieces of information around all the time, trying to construct them into a coherent narrative. And then it's really hard to keep track of footnotes, references, cross references.
00:56:17
Speaker
And so however well you try to keep track of it as you go along, there's always a fairly horrible process at the end where you're racking your brains thinking, I know I read this somewhere, but where did I get this from? Or which interview did this fact come? And you've got hundreds and hundreds of pages of, say, for example, we have these Stasi files. They're all scans. You can't find the words in them with
00:56:40
Speaker
control left because they're not easily machine readable. So you just have to hunt through these hundreds of pages until you find the obscure facts that you're looking for. And the fact process was extremely time consuming. But I found over the years that there aren't really any shortcuts for that type of thing, sadly.
00:57:00
Speaker
because fact-checking isn't exactly the fun part of the reporting. Yeah, and I think it's sort of a double-edged sword when you work in as a pair, right? Because in one way you can divvy up the work and you can take your own turf and kind of trust the other guy that they're going to know what they're doing and that's their part of the story that they have the expertry on. But when it comes to the fact-checking and you're kind of cross-referencing things that one of you might have found or the other one might have found,
00:57:28
Speaker
then it can sort of tie you in knots in some cases. Certainly, there were certainly parts of the story that I sort of took over and there were parts of the story that Lee had complete control over. And when it came to putting everything together, it works really, really well in sort of pretty much every way. But when it comes to that back end and putting all the notes into coherent spots and making sure everything's clear, that can become an extra challenge, I think.
00:57:58
Speaker
And this segues beautifully into one of the last things I wanted to talk about with you guys was this nature of collaboration on a story of this nature, which is so, so big. And it's just undoubtedly a challenge when you're composing it because everyone has their own working styles, their own writing styles. But in the end, you need to put something that's altogether cohesive.
00:58:23
Speaker
So what was the overall experience like and how did you riff off of each other so you had a common vision? I think what was apparent from the outset is that Sean and I had a very similar vision of what we wanted to do. We saw a story that was full of wonderful narratives and wonderful drama. And that was because of the source document. So we had these source documents from the court case, which had incredible forensic detail of Zontag's death.
00:58:52
Speaker
But we also had years and years of Stasi documents where the secret police are invading every aspect of his life, sending agents to hang around in the corridor outside his house, spying on him when he's drinking in the pub, getting his school reports from his teachers, talking to his colleagues. In a way, that was one of the, I found that harder than writing about the Nazis, incidentally, because when you first get your hands on these Stasi documents, it's fascinating and you sort of feel like,
00:59:23
Speaker
Howard Carter blowing the dust off the sarcophagus and he dives in. And very quickly you become aware of how banal it is, but how invasive it is. I found it quite uncomfortable having this voyeuristic position, taking a look into all the private, most private banal details of someone's life. But what we had from those documents was this very compelling narrative. And I think we both very quickly had the same vision of how we wanted it to go. The real challenge was that we had
00:59:51
Speaker
extreme detail on various episodes of Zontag's life but then we had some quite big gaps and so there was this asymmetry that we had to correct and the hardest challenges of the story were filling in those dead years where he was doing something or other in West Germany and we weren't exactly sure what and those were the that was the biggest thing we had. Yeah I found the
01:00:12
Speaker
It's kind of such a strange feeling reading through those sassy surveillance files because on one level they're terrifying that they had all of these informants and they were able to build this big huge terrifying panopticon apparatus that was just spying on every single citizen in the country. Also, it's like there's so much pathos in it. I mean, it's actually hilarious in some spots, like some of the just,
01:00:38
Speaker
utter drudgery of this, of these sad informants like hiding in bushes next to this random guy's house or sitting around on the steps waiting for him to walk down the stairs so they can tell their handler that he walked down the stairs and the light was on. I hope that comes through in the piece because it's, you know, if anyone's seen The Lives of Others, the great German film from many years ago, it's pretty much a documentary. I mean, this thing was insane.
01:01:05
Speaker
And another thing about working as a pair, it made interviews with some of these ex-officials and spies and other people. I would recommend, as a human experience, double team interviewing a former Stasi agent in a Greek restaurant outside of German city while drinking beer and schnapps. That's a good, fun, journalistic experience. I guess we were lucky because we hadn't worked on a piece before and it came together really nicely.
01:01:35
Speaker
And yeah, I think that we were able to really find our own, I don't know, find our own individual pace within this pairing that we had.
01:01:50
Speaker
Yeah, in watching the show Top Chef, I don't know if you guys have heard of it, but back here it's this competitive cooking show, and once they get down to about eight contestants, there's this thing called Restaurant Wars, where it's four on four. And oftentimes, quite literally, too many cooks in the kitchen.
01:02:12
Speaker
and some and someone ultimately has to be the executive chef and oftentimes there are executive chefs by nature and then they have to take on more sous chef roles and all this and as as a result there's a lot of friction and ego and and I imagine that that
Editorial Dynamics and Writing Process
01:02:28
Speaker
that can happen if there are journalists collaborating on a piece, too. Like, I want to be, maybe I should be the point person on this. And that way there's not too many voices when you're, say, collaborating with Jonah. And it sounds like you guys had a really good chemistry with this, but is that a worry sometimes that it can be, there can be friction there, as it were, to piggyback on the metaphor, too many cooks in the kitchen?
01:02:59
Speaker
There's always friction, but it has to be constructive friction. And I hope that that's what we had in the end. I think Sean and I, I don't think we ever had any any disagreement about the way we wanted the story to look. But the reason there's an editorial process there is because it is an adversarial process. Reporters always have a slightly different vision of them, editors of what the story ought to look like.
01:03:24
Speaker
And that adversarial process, that sort of constructive tension makes the story better, and it's the editor's job to kill the reporter's darlings, and they did slaughter them. They absolutely, absolutely massacred them, but we're very happy in the end for them to do so, because that's what makes for tighter, better reporting at the end of the day.
01:03:49
Speaker
I love hearing about the slaughter of darlings. It's always great. Oh, yeah, there is a darling graveyard in this story. It's huge. Very nice. Well, as I like to bring these conversations down for a landing, I always like to ask guests for a recommendation of some kind. And the bonus of this one is that we get to get two from each of you guys. So like I said, these recommendations to be anything.
01:04:14
Speaker
And I wonder, maybe Sean, we can start with you. What might you recommend out there for the listeners, professional or personal or whatever?
01:04:24
Speaker
Well if you got space for a very quick two I would say that through doing this reporting on Cold War Germany I got obsessed for quite a while with Len Dayton novels and I was presently to stick these kind of really cheesy Len Dayton-ish lines into the story as if we were writing sort of a Berlin game or any of his other novels so I would say anyone wanting to
01:04:48
Speaker
a fun, really incredibly witty, inspired novel. You should read Len Dayton. And secondly, I found with this and other recent projects that I've done increasingly relying on listening to my stories. So whether that's getting a friend or
01:05:08
Speaker
my long-suffering partner to read it and record her reading the story and so I can take the dog for a walk and listen to it. You really pick up on structural stuff a bit more. I find that that's a lot easier at picking apart structure which is like for me it's awful than reading it on a screen or reading it on a piece of paper even.
01:05:31
Speaker
I don't know how good those text-to-speech programs are, but they certainly aren't as good as a friend of yours reading it off a piece of paper onto their phone. So yeah, that's my recommendation. Nice. Very nice. How about you, Lee? Well, if Sean's got a couple of recommendations, maybe I can think of a couple.
01:05:52
Speaker
Delving into the Germany of the 1980s, a lot of my research was punctuated by the soundtrack of Germany in the 1980s. Glitty German bands like Saelfab and Deutschem other kind of the Poinschaft, these sort of really seminal bands of the 1980s I enjoyed listening to while we were doing the story.
01:06:13
Speaker
Another thing I'd recommend was a wonderful book that I read quite late in the reporting process, but that we did actually quote in the piece Stasi Land by Anna Funder, who was an Australian journalist that spent a lot of time in former East Germany after the fall of the war. And it's a book about the Stasi, but through the eyes of ordinary people, ordinary human stories, and about their experience of living under
01:06:38
Speaker
the most oppressive surveillance regime that's ever existed. So very much very nice. Yeah. And speaking of German music, I see I'm more of a metal guy and Ramstein's do Haas like from the from the 1990s.
01:06:57
Speaker
That riff, that main riff in Duhast is so savage. I just, I can't get enough of that riff. It is just so big. I can't imagine what that must be like live. I don't know, maybe you guys have seen them, but I haven't, but when you speak of music and of German influence and, I think of them and oh my God, those guys are just lethal. They're insane. I mean, I've never seen them live, but they do all the pyro stuff, right? Where he's like,
01:07:26
Speaker
Shooting flames out of his mouth and they've got all these like crazy. Yeah, I don't know like fireworks and stuff going off It's pretty insane live experience I mean, I try to get these around Stein a couple of years back and they sold out in like 30 seconds So Germans are still all over that But if we can get people listening to German new wave stuff from the 80s after this part then that that is a win because that stuff is awesome and
01:07:50
Speaker
Awesome. I love it. Very nice. Well, this piece was incredible, guys. It was a lot of fun for me to read. And I suspect a lot of people have already been digging into it. So this conversation, I think, is only going to enrich in the experience that people have had with the piece and to get your insights into it. So I got to just commend you on an incredible job. And thanks so much for coming on the show and talking shop. Thanks, Brendan. It's a pleasure. Thanks very much.
01:08:26
Speaker
That was great. So many good nuggets in there. Big thanks to Lee, who is atleeba1 on Twitter, and Sean at S. Williams Journal on Twitter. Check out their work on their websites. Maybe consider subscribing to The Adivus. Hey, that's kind of why we do this thing here, how we feature The Adivus.
01:08:46
Speaker
here I don't get any kickbacks from subscriptions that are a result of maybe you getting inspired by hearing them on this show so you know my recommendation is without bias or incentive other than getting you to read some killer stories impeccably designed impeccably reported impeccably edited
01:09:05
Speaker
So go to magazine.adivis.com. For 25 bucks, you're gonna get 12 blockbuster stories a year for so far like a little more than two bucks. A story. You're gonna get these basically nonfiction novellas every single month. Unbelievable. I teased at the top of the show my parting shot about the universe sending me signals that it's time to quit. And what do we do in the face of that?
Reflections and Listener Feedback
01:09:31
Speaker
All right, let's buckle up.
01:09:35
Speaker
Here's this exchange I have with an editor for a content marketing company. I'm gonna, like, redact certain details just to protect people I care about. I could tell this editor wasn't happy with what I had submitted. You know, sometimes you get notes from editors and they're terse. Hers were especially terse. And I was just like, okay, here we go. You never work with someone before. Sometimes you have to feel each other out. But she was clearly pissed that she had to even edit my piece.
01:10:05
Speaker
So anyway, after a while, I wrote back just saying like, listen, I understand. Anyway, here we go. I said, I'm merely writing because I got the sense you were frustrated with what I turned in regarding the piece. I understand that I forgot to highlight certain SEO keywords on the first draft in my haste to turn the piece in a day ahead of deadline that slipped my mind.
01:10:30
Speaker
Also, I suspect you were displeased with the amount of copyedits and the glut in the quotes. I found myself leaving in much of those filler words to write up to the word count. Ideally, I'd be cutting down to a word count as a result. Some of those verbal fillers were left in. I'll be sure to remedy this next time.
01:10:51
Speaker
And one last thing, if you were displeased and I didn't pass the audition, I hope you'll grant, rejected, a hall pass for recommending me. Any fault or lackluster work lies solely on my shoulders. So she wrote back,
01:11:07
Speaker
To be honest, I was not blown away by your efforts on the assignment. If you're trying to write up to a word count, you've missed the point. I'm looking for good content, not just filler words. My feeling is that for something like this, if you're having trouble reaching a minimum word count, you're not asking good questions.
01:11:22
Speaker
Plus, I had to make too many edits to get a client ready. That did not help cement the good impression. Anyway, that said, it doesn't necessarily mean I'll never give you another shot. As for your final point, I don't know why you would think redacted would need a hall pass because I wasn't entirely pleased. You stand or fail on your own merits.
01:11:46
Speaker
Since this company provided the questions, I was supposed to ask the client. I wrote back that I didn't want to color outside the lines of what they provided, so I didn't necessarily ask more questions.
01:12:01
Speaker
that really pissed me off because of all things, asking questions and interviewing and getting people comfortable speaking is what makes me good at this. Or if I'm any good at this, it's because of that. And so to have that called into question, especially when they provide the list of questions that they want you asked, that the client wants to ask, so it's not journalism, it's journalism adjacent, obviously. So anyway, that really kind of rubbed me the wrong way.
01:12:26
Speaker
And also, because Redacted vouched for me, I said, I don't want you to hold that against her. But that was it. I wasn't saying, like, she should be at fault. I'm just saying, like, she vouched for me and you didn't like me at all. So if she's going to recommend someone else to you, don't hold that against her or whatever.
01:12:49
Speaker
I don't like this person. So as far as I'm concerned, I don't really want to work with her again anyway. I mean like fuck that shit. She seemed like an asshole to begin, right from the start. Still waiting for my check. We'll see if that comes in the mail. Sounds like an editor who doesn't like to edit. But anyway, I took her feedback for what it was, such as it was, and learned from it. So that's number one. I'll try to get better from it. Hopefully we never work together again. I don't care how big the check is.
01:13:18
Speaker
Number two, not getting this feature writing job at my own newspaper that I work for, for the reason that we're looking for someone with more story ideas and more excitement for the position.
01:13:31
Speaker
The day after I interviewed, okay, so I wore a shirt and tie to the interview, and I know these people. I could have worn a sweatshirt and t-shirt like I normally wear to work anyway. But I was like, all right, I'm interviewing for a new position, shirt and tie for the team's interview. And they looked like they both came from the gym. They just had hoodies on. They looked like they just woke up and were like, okay, so who's taking this? Who's taking what seriously now?
01:13:56
Speaker
following day I literally sent them an email saying my brain is like fireworks with ideas and I'm eager to show what I can do with this new position you know and didn't get any reply whatsoever but does that sound like someone who has no ideas and little excitement for the job so
01:14:15
Speaker
I call maximum bullshit on that, so okay, there's number two. And three, I put yet another coat of paint on the book proposal for this biography I've been telling you about.
01:14:29
Speaker
I feel like I've just been fumbling the ball, you know, butt fumbling, running right into the back of my line and no forward progress. Like a competent and skilled writer, like a Howard Bryant, he would stick this landing. But my agent's like, oh, you're just missing the mark. You know, why now? What's new? Why is it relevant today? And I'm just trying like hell to answer those questions. Otherwise, it's a hard sell.
01:15:00
Speaker
And I'm not David Moranis or Howard Bryant. I have no name recognition. I'm not Neil Bascom. I'm not anyone. And I'm not saying that to beat myself down, but that's just objectively true. I have no name recognition, so I have to go above and beyond to really prove why. Jane Levy says, oh yeah, I feel like writing this. And we're like, okay, go for it, Jane. Here's some money. Go do your thing. Go Jane Levy this thing.
01:15:27
Speaker
And meanwhile, you know, Brendan O'Meara, who the fuck is that? So these three strikes had made me feel pretty down in the dumps of late, because they've really come in quick succession, too. So it really feels like the universe is saying, like, go make donuts. You always talk about making donuts. Why don't you go start your little donut food cart?
01:15:51
Speaker
and I'll leave the writing to the pros and here I am today is my 42nd birthday and at this point you're sort of are who you are which isn't to say there isn't room for improvement but if you don't have that nasty snap on your curveball at age 20 you're not exactly gonna find it at age 40 so what do you do well when I boil it down
01:16:16
Speaker
And here's the thing, it's just, I love to write, and that's all I can do. And even this week when I've been holding patty ones at Book Proposal and just getting deluged by bullshit.
01:16:28
Speaker
You know, I sat down and I wrote this essay about, you know, my mom losing her, you know, her memories, all about gone, and how she tried to cook, this is about 20 years ago, a 30-minute meal from Rachael Ray, how she was like, she was very skeptical that you could actually cook it in 30 minutes. So I just wrote this, you know, about a thousand-word essay about my mom trying to cook this meal in 30 minutes or less, and how we kind of connect over Rachael Ray.
01:16:57
Speaker
And so that was really, I loved being in that. And I don't know what the hell will happen with that essay. It might land somewhere. It might not. It likely won't. But in that moment, it was great. And I love writing features. I like writing essays. I like writing about middle school and baseball.
01:17:17
Speaker
And so it all comes down to that. You know, I'm not as bad as that shitty-ass content editor says I am. I'm also not as good as I think I am, most likely. But I do love to sink into a story and tell the truest possible thing with my own spin on language that elicits a certain mood that makes me feel like the guitar is in tune. So when I strum those strings, it's just like, ah, that sounds nice to my ear.
01:17:45
Speaker
So yeah, I'm in a slump of sorts and I'm getting some of the worst feedback and signals of my life all in about like condensed into this couple week period ahead of a birthday that makes me question my place in the world and wonder what the point of it all is.
01:18:01
Speaker
As hard as it is to write in this moment and write in this headspace, it's often some of the most fertile and raw visceral ground to write from. You know, pain, dismissal, irrelevance. And if you can persevere in the face of that, something good must take root. I have to believe that on some level.
01:18:25
Speaker
And I'll say one more thing. Shout out to Christopher Alden who replied to this month's newsletter which just went out today, July 1st. And he sent me this beautiful clip from the singer Harry Chapin of Cats in the Cradle fame. And it's just a 90 second clip basically. It's just a good tired versus bad tired. And I won't be able to get the details but I will link up to it.
01:18:47
Speaker
And it's about Chapin's grandfather as a painter, and he didn't like make it as a painter. And it was just really poignant, but he went about, it's about kind of just going about the work and loving the work. It's kind of about what I just riffed about a few minutes ago.
01:19:03
Speaker
I'll link up to it in these show notes so you get a chance to look at it, and I'll be sure to link up to it in next month's newsletter as well, because I think it speaks to a lot of us doing this thing. So I just want to say thanks to Christopher for sharing that, and just stay wild. See you in efforts. If you can't do Interview, see ya.