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Hashtag #CNF Episode 6—Brian Mockenhaupt
158 Plays12 years ago
Brian Mockenhaupt, an intrepid and elite reporter of the living, turns his eye to those long gone. And as we near the 150th anniversary of that bloodiest battle at Gettysburg, Mockenhaupt, through his deft skill as an information gatherer, writes a compelling story about friendship, love, and loss in the most famous battle of the Civil War and its putrid wake for those left behind. It culminates with President Lincoln presiding over a newly created memorial to the felled Union soldiers, a speech where he turns the volume down so we may hear the ghosts of Gettysburg.
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Transcript
Introduction to CNF and Guest Introduction
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to hashtag CNF, a conversation about reading and writing with authors in the genre of creative nonfiction. I'm Brendan O'Mara.
Discussing 'Three Days in Gettysburg' by Brian Mockinhop
00:00:30
Speaker
Oh, we've got a good one for you today.
00:00:33
Speaker
We've got our first returning guest in Brian Mockinhop. This time around, we're celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg with Mockinhop's byliner original, Three Days in Gettysburg. It's a wrenching tale of love and loss, a true glimpse at when the war front hits home. Yeah, how did you arrive at the story? I was talking with my byliner editor who had written a past story about Marines in Afghanistan for them.
00:01:03
Speaker
and we're talking about doing a story for the anniversary of, 150th anniversary of Gettysburg.
Research Techniques and Challenges
00:01:10
Speaker
And she had mentioned something that she had come across looking online about this story about Jenny Wade and she was baking bread for soldiers and maybe she had this boyfriend and there's just these little scraps of information. Used that as a starting point and it turned into this several week long
00:01:33
Speaker
sort of search and exploration of newspaper archives and genealogy department and the library and just digging into the far corners of the internet and reading journals and letters initially to find out if there was enough there to support sort of a full narrative treatment because the one thing that
00:02:01
Speaker
I know you look at Gettysburg, and it's one of the most written about events in American history. There's been thousands of things written about it. And so you looked at that and think, well, how could I add anything to that? And especially if it's a medium form, a medium length narrative piece needs some great compelling characters that aren't the generals, that aren't the people that you read about all the time, that it'll give people
00:02:30
Speaker
a way in that they can accompany these characters into this massive, overwhelmingly complex and detailed event. So as I did the research, it sort of bore out what we originally thought it might be.
00:02:55
Speaker
was that even though there's a lot of myth surrounding the stories of Jenny Wade, who was the only civilian killed at Gettysburg, and Jack Skelly, who was her sweetheart, and Wesley Culp, who had lived in Gettysburg when he was younger, but then had moved to Virginia and joined the Confederacy and come back to fight at Gettysburg.
Unique Perspectives on Gettysburg
00:03:19
Speaker
even though there's a lot of, I wouldn't say mistruths, but there's sort of been turned into legend, you find out that there's actually a lot of truth to those stories. And that was pretty exciting, was finding all these little scraps of information and different elements in building this mosaic and getting this picture, this picture of their lives. And so I use that as,
00:03:49
Speaker
the vehicle through which to tell the larger story because obviously I didn't want to just focus on these minor characters but instead use them as a touch point to kind of hold the reader's hand going through it because otherwise you can get lost in this sea of Gettysburg and so much of what's written is about the generals and you know this colonel was moving his regiment here and then this general was
00:04:20
Speaker
uh... was was was planning that the band and it's all like those uh... the map you see and that those colored bars and that there's the red bars moving against the blue bar and it becomes no it's more like a strategic look at the battle and there's been so many amazing histories that take you off and down to the foot soldiers experience uh... what it was like for them but uh... this was this was an attempt of looking at it in a little bit of a different way um... and especially
00:04:49
Speaker
looking at the civilian experience, which I just found fascinating, because what I had read of Gettysburg before was more about things that are familiar to a lot of us, just from sort of the school history book, reading of it with Pickett's Charge and Little Round Top, which are all amazing, compelling events, but I didn't realize that the civilians in Gettysburg were so deeply involved in the battle.
00:05:19
Speaker
Right, and how refreshing was that to develop and to see the civilian accounts, given that there's just a lot of weight given to the military strategy of the event? That must have just been refreshing and exciting for you as someone digging through these trolls of archives. There's so much weight given to the military side of it that I didn't know that civilians had really been involved in the battle at all.
00:05:47
Speaker
One of the things from a research point of view that really helped with that is that even a short time after the battle, within weeks and months and in soon years, people recognized it as an iconic event. They thought this was enormously important. Even a couple days after the battle, there was a newspaper account that I had found that the writer was saying,
00:06:12
Speaker
If the union had lost here, you could have a rebel flag flying over Baltimore and Washington, D.C. at that moment. Whether that's true or not, there's huge debate with that about the overall importance of Gettysburg and what would have happened if the union had lost Gettysburg. But people still recognized it was a really profound event that had happened. And because of that, so many of the civilians wrote
00:06:41
Speaker
accounts of it later on, or they were interviewed by newspapers and magazines, or they wrote small books, or they had wrote down their recollections for their family, and that was later published. So they had this really amazing collection of accounts of what was happening, not just on the battlefield, but what it was like for people in town in the week leading up to the battle.
Enriching the Narrative with Personal Accounts
00:07:04
Speaker
and then the day before and then the Union comes marching in and there's a rebel infantry in the streets and people are hiding in their cellars and you get all these really exquisite small moments from the battle of people talking about caring for wounded Union or Confederate soldiers or feeding them.
00:07:27
Speaker
or worried about just trying to hide their animals, trying to hide a horse that's not taken by the Confederate cavalry. And there's just a stunning breadth of information that's out there. And so researching the story, it was really refreshing and kind of elates and concerns because I wasn't sure how much
00:07:57
Speaker
how much information was going to be out there and how much detail I'll be able to find. And it's a pretty stunning amount. There's not that much available, relatively speaking, on Jenny Wade and Jack Scali and Lester Culp. So I really relied on the overall experiences of civilians as kind of sort of a stand-in for that, that if I can't get deep into
00:08:24
Speaker
the details and experiences of these main characters, I can supplement it by painting a portrait and explaining what was the general experience of civilians. I can be talking about what was happening in the town, happening to all these people. And then for the specifics that I do have, zoom into letters that are being written or a specific moment when
00:08:49
Speaker
say the first time that the Rebel cavalry comes into town, about a week before the battle, when Jenny Wade sees her younger brother being led off, sort of under arrest by some Confederates, and she's screaming at the Confederates, screaming at neighbors, who she was kind of blaming for letting her brother get captured. So that's a great little moment, and I'm able to put that against
00:09:19
Speaker
more broadly what was happening in town because I could consult all of these different sources of information on it. So I think it helped, I think it also helped me have the confidence to feel like I was on the right path, that I was getting sort of as true a possible of an accounting of what was happening. That's always strange too. I've never been in that position writing a story that's relying completely on historical sources.
Crafting New Perspectives on Historical Events
00:09:49
Speaker
And some of it is primary sources. It's a diary that was written on the night of a certain event a couple hours after it happened. So there are some really great sources available. But it makes you a little bit wary as a writer when you're looking back on something that was so distant and not wanting to be in any way just using conjecture and filling in the blanks.
00:10:17
Speaker
In giving a sense, and you kind of approached this already, but giving a sense of what it was like to approach a subject like Gettysburg, and the pressure on you, the writer, of finding something new to add to that lexicon. Yeah, it's tough because so much has been written, and written about really well by really smart people, and written about,
00:10:47
Speaker
more enlightened, more nuanced and deeper ways than I'd ever be capable of. You know, and so my role here, you know, I've written things in the past that it's more news based or you're shedding new information, you know, new light on something for the first time in no way was that the case here. This is honestly, it's sort of entertainment.
00:11:15
Speaker
giving people an engaging read and hopefully presenting it in a way that caused them to step back and ponder something, how it relates to life today and just what events were more like at that time in the country's history. But to do that, mostly just trying to find a good, engaging storyline to tell them it's something that's
00:11:43
Speaker
of appropriate sort of depth that I'm able to bite off and tell this story. And, you know, in this case, I guess it was about 20,000, 20,000 words. So it's daunting when you look at, literally, you go to the library and there are rows of shelves. The library, the Boer and Gettysburg. So in that way, it's kind of a treat to get
00:12:13
Speaker
turned on to a subject like Jenny Wade and Jack Sculley that's known to people because of the Jenny Wade Museum, which is the actual house where it was her sister's house that her sister was renting the north side of this little brick duplex. But it's now been turned into a museum. And so every year, thousands of people go there to visit it. And the story of Wes Culp, who was
00:12:43
Speaker
you know, a rebel soldier who had come from Gettysburg and was back fighting very near the land of his grandfather. It was called Culp's Hill, one of the, one of the pivotal battles of the Gettysburg fight happened on Culp's Hill, named for, you know, West Culp's family. So people know that, but they don't know, I think, a lot of the details of how everything unfolded. So it was great to be able to
00:13:12
Speaker
maybe
Bringing Historical Characters to Life
00:13:13
Speaker
not shed new light because nothing is out there really that hasn't been written about before. But to tell people a story in a way that they might not have, they might not have heard before. But as a reporter, it's a strange, sort of a strange position to be in because I'm accustomed talking to, you know, live sources that they might tell me something that they have not shared with
00:13:42
Speaker
other people. Maybe they've never been written about it all or unable to uncover parts of the story that no one has heard before. With a piece like this, everything is already out there. You're just looking at historical documents. I guess the only thing that might happen is you spend enough time digging and get very, very lucky and you might come across
00:14:13
Speaker
maybe a diary or letters that a family member had that they had never shown to anyone. But that's it. You know, for the most part, it just, it is a repackaging of already known information. So as a journalist, it was kind of a strange experience to be working solely with previously published information.
00:14:37
Speaker
Yeah, that kind of leads to the next question I have for you, which is, what's the challenge in elevating long-dead characters whose material has already been documented? It's just there for you to sort of pan for gold. So what's the challenge of bringing these people to life that you can no longer speak with? Well, one of the challenges is you want to be able to build some scenes, if possible.
00:15:07
Speaker
A lot of this is impossible. On your list of the most hopeful things, there's going to be possibly some really good physical descriptions of the people. There's going to be some intimate thoughts that they're relaying in a letter or in a diary. So without conjecture and without guessing, you can give readers a sense of
00:15:32
Speaker
what these fellas' motivations were. Maybe there'd be some dialogue. There'd be some really compelling scenes and moments that they were involved in. But that's a pretty tall order for some of this. And, of course, for some of the people involved in the battle, a lot has been written about them. And they kept journals, you know, if you're talking about the generals,
00:15:59
Speaker
that's up so well, so well-documented. There's so much material out there that you can find more of that. But I wasn't writing what I wanted to write about some of these lesser-known characters. So when I did come across some of those elements, it was like you mentioned painting for gold. It was like finding a little golden nugget. It was really exciting. There were some books that had some previously unpublished letters between Jack Scali and Jenny Wade.
00:16:28
Speaker
that they had exchanged in a month, in a couple years, a month before the Battle of Gettysburg. And it was just, it was, I mean, I found that being a little kid. My feet were kicking excitement as I was reading some of these details. It was becoming a complete, you know, like little, you know, history nerd on this stuff.
00:16:57
Speaker
And I think that's what, for me, I thought would make some of this work is finding the little details to support it and to fill in those gaps that, of course, are going to exist because there's plenty that I can't know. But I think for the reader, I needed to try, you know, to the extent
00:17:26
Speaker
possible to present cohesive full pictures of what was happening. So they, on their own, as they're reading it, that their minds could fill in some of those blanks, you know, using some of those other details that might have been happening in town or at the time to carry that through where the information maybe isn't necessarily available as it directly applies to those
00:17:57
Speaker
for those couple main characters. And there are several authors that have done a tremendous job of building narrative stories off of archival research. And just off the top of my head, I'm thinking of Laura Hillenbrandt, Seabiscuit, or anything that Eric Larson does.
Balancing Research with Storytelling
00:18:15
Speaker
And even our mutual friend, Kerry Hagan, with We Has Got Them, everything was purely archival. So now that you've done
00:18:26
Speaker
pure archival research to build a story and you've also made a name for yourself as just a very good reporter speaking with living sources. What's your preference and where do you see yourself going forward to fashion texts and stories? Well you know I was way out of my league on this and hats off to the people that you mentioned.
00:18:54
Speaker
because as impressive as their work was to me before, that was without really realizing what went into it. And so I made a small effort to try to do this kind of work with, you know, hopefully succeeding, at least in part, in telling an engaging story. But I could tell in the process of doing it, and in retrospect, I didn't have
00:19:22
Speaker
sort of the experience and skills to make it everything it could be. But I was opened up to this world and this kind of writing that I hadn't really been involved in before, and it was really fascinating. And I think I will keep that as a really important tool for other kinds of writing. I'm just diving into history and using archival research, which I hadn't done much of at all before, but then also these history pieces.
00:19:53
Speaker
was kind of a surprise to me to see just how personally engaged I could get in the reporting process. And I never would have thought of it like that before as a reporting process. But it was this wonderful sort of hybrid experience of
00:20:15
Speaker
reporting, but it doesn't involve taking up a phone. I did talk to some historians and talk to some, you know, actual living people about this in large part to get turned on to the right, the right archival sources that I should be exploring. But just spending weeks on end with my nose buried in books and looking around on internet directories and stuff, it was
00:20:45
Speaker
it was a lot more engaging and kind of thrilling than I thought it would be. And so even though I'll never be one of the people that does it incredibly well, it was exciting for me to know that it opened up sort of a whole new area of doing historical narrative.
Understanding the Present Through Historical Narratives
00:21:08
Speaker
Just an incredible amount of fun. But I think one of the nice things about that is one of my
00:21:14
Speaker
thoughts in the back of my mind as I was going through writing this Gettysburg story, it allows me as a writer, a whole new venue for telling stories that can expand the way that leaders understand the world around them. Because with all the other stories that benefit current, if it's a story about a reader's contemporaries, then of course,
00:21:42
Speaker
That provides all sorts of wonderful opportunities for them to think differently about the world around them because they're reading about other people's experiences, putting themselves in the position of someone who's out in the world, having a very different set of life challenges and moments, experiences than they are. But it's really cool when you can do that spanning, you know, 50, 100 and let's get 150 years.
00:22:12
Speaker
Now that you can tell the story of these civilians in Gettysburg and maybe have readers say, just really stopping to think about that, what would that be like? Because fortunately, we live in a country that hasn't experienced war and foreign aggression to any large extent on our soil for 150 years.
Praise for Brian's Archival Narrative
00:22:33
Speaker
And these are people that they can relate to and so much as people who are
00:22:40
Speaker
living in this town, um, worrying about someone who's, you know, off fighting, but they're raising children, running businesses and stuff. And then this really, really, uh, unbelievable overwhelming event kind of descends upon them.
00:22:58
Speaker
Well, the name of the piece again is Three Days in Gettysburg. It is published by Byliner. And Brian, as always, it's a pleasure to speak to you about writing and reporting. And great job on this, your debut effort into an archival report, archivally reported piece, if you will. Oh, Brandon, thanks very much. It's great talking to you about it.