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Episode 74—Madeleine Blais says Reality is Compelling Enough
128 Plays7 years ago
Welcome back to another episode of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with the world’s best artists about creating works of nonfiction to try and tease out the origins, habits, and routines so that you can apply their skills of mastery to your own work: narrative journalists, New York Times bestselling authors, award-winning filmmakers and, yes, even a Pulitzer Prize winner. Today’s guest is an extra special one: Madeleine Blais, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing while at the Miami Herald for her story Zepp’s Last Stand. I took her memoir class back in 2003 at UMass Amherst and we always managed to stay in touch over the years. She’s a friend and a treasured mentor to me, so I’m delighted to speak with her about her career and her latest book To the New Owners: A Martha’s Vineyard Memoir. Maddy is also the author of Uphill Walkers: Portrait of a Family, In These Girls Hope is a Muscle, which was named one of Sports Illustrated’s 100 best sports books of the 20th century, The Heart is an Instrument: Portraits in Journalism. And her piece that would eventually become the book for In These Girls, is the lead piece in “The Stories We Tell,” an anthology showcasing the best women journalists. We talk about her early career and a pivotal moment that pointed her toward feature writing vs. hard news, how she likes to cut against the grain when vetting stories, judging for the Pulitzer Prize, and many of the influential books that helped form her self-guided apprenticeship. Why wait any longer? Here’s the brilliant Madeleine Blais. Like the show? Please leave a nice review on iTunes! Thanks for listening.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
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Speaker
AC and efforts. Do you have a nice Halloween? Thanks to Zero Trick or Treaters for the third year in a row, Mr. Goodbar unleashed caloric hell on your host. Welcome back to another episode of the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak with the world's best artists about creating works of nonfiction to try and tease out the habits, origins, and routines so that you can apply their skills of mastery to your own work.
Meet Madeline Blaze and 'To the New Owners'
00:00:30
Speaker
And today's guest is an extra special one, Madeline Blaze, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for her story, Zeps Last Stand. I took her memoir class back in 2003 at UMass Amherst, and we always managed to stay in touch over the years. She's a friend and a treasured mentor, so I'm delighted to speak with her about her career and her latest book, To the New Owners, a Martha's Vineyard Memoir.
00:00:59
Speaker
Maddie is also the author of Uphill Walker's Portrait of a Family. In These Girls Hope is a Muscle, which Sports Illustrated named one of the 100 best sports books of the 20th century. And The Heart is an Instrument, Portraits in Journalism.
00:01:17
Speaker
And her piece that would eventually become the book for In These Girls is the lead piece in The Stories We Tell, the new anthology published by The Sager Group showcasing the best women journalists.
Blaze's Career Shift and Influences
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Speaker
We talk about Maddie's early career and a pivotal moment that pointed her towards feature writing versus hard news.
00:01:38
Speaker
how she likes to cut against the grain when vetting stories, judging for the Pulitzer Prize, and many of the influential books that helped form her self-guided apprenticeship. So why wait any longer? Here's the brilliant Madeline Blaze. Thanks for listening. I guess we should begin at the beginning. I was indeed always bookish, although I want to say that I really didn't learn to read until the middle of the first grade. But once I made that breakthrough, all bets were off.
00:02:09
Speaker
But in my childhood, I grew up in a very small rural town. But I had the great fortune of my house being literally across the street from the public library. So I had access to many books at a very young age and two days a week, Tuesdays and Fridays. So most writers are being as readers. I don't think there's such a thing as a writer who doesn't begin as a reader. So I was lucky at a very young age to have
00:02:36
Speaker
reading be something that I had, I could emphasize in my life very readily. And I, I do think about what caused me to decide to go into journalism rather than to try to be more of a just a writer on my own. But it was sort of, it's hard to think of journalism as a practical, practical choice, maybe especially these days. But it seemed more practical. I could get a job at a newspaper, go through the apprenticeship of what it is to work for a paper.
00:03:06
Speaker
and supposedly be paid at least some kind of modest salary and maybe even get insurance, health insurance, and ideally a week off every year. So I went that route because it seemed like the more, I don't know, the less fanciful route. But I have always been drawn to true stories. I think even a great novel is a kind of true story and a great poem has true stories in it. So I don't see that as sort of
00:03:35
Speaker
genre-bound, but I do like, I remember as a kid reading some biographies and liking them, and I also recalled that I was never really big on certain kinds of allegories, especially as they involved animals talking. Growing up in a rural town, I had never heard an animal talk, and I guess I just wasn't whimsical enough to think that they could. So I was a much more
00:04:06
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fact-based kid in some ways, I felt that the world as it is is so rich and so interesting to kind of read and think about that I didn't need to posit fantasy worlds to be compelled.
Great Journalism Beyond the Headlines
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Reality was compelling enough. As a little kid, I used to dream that Life magazine would come to my town and find something worth writing about, which is
00:04:34
Speaker
kind of an odd fantasy. But nothing ever happened that was worth writing about, so that didn't occur. Yeah, that kind of underscores a point that some of the greatest journalism, at least that I read, is about the people who aren't making the big headlines, so to speak. The best stories come from the people who's
00:04:59
Speaker
What was it? When I was talking to Patsy Simms, as you said, like basically the only time they're ever written about in a newspaper is their birth and death notices. Like those people tend to have the most interesting stories. So like having Life magazine, this big magazine, sort of parachute into your little town and maybe write something about – you guys sort of underscores what's great about the best literary and narrative journalism.
00:05:24
Speaker
I agree that to me the best stories are usually about people who are unsung or maybe they were at one point quite prominent and then they recede from the news and you go back to them. They could be prominent because they accomplished something or because they were part of a news event. But time has passed and people aren't as, maybe they're not thronging them the way they were.
Finding Her Narrative Style
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in a in a in uphill walkers I think I'd emailed you about this point because uh when I had my sort of It'll be gotten trip through the hard news world of that three-day trip I had at the daily on not daily hamper. Oh the
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Speaker
daily gazette and Schenectady, New York, my three-day bench that went totally sour. I could never articulate why it just turned my stomach and I couldn't do it. You had this great passage in Uphill Lockers that I'm just going to read real quick, and it really echoed how I was feeling that time. It was where these children's, in your book, these children's, their father had
00:06:25
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had been shot or killed at this point. And you're like, you're like, I returned to the paper with an empty notebook and with the hard-earned realization that although I probably didn't mind interviewing people after a tragedy, I did not want to talk to them as one unfolded, a distinction that might seem trifling but which led the way for me to combine my efforts to feature stories rather than breaking news. And that just, I was just like, that's it? That's it? Like you identified
00:06:52
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basically the kind of writer I am, but also the kind of writer you were. At that point, was that kind of a turn for you when you realized that like, all right, this is the kind of writer I am and I have to sort of pivot and go in that direction? It was a big pivot because up until that point, I was pretty young at that point, but the real, it seemed like the thrust of journalism and what was going to really help you make a name for yourself was covering hard news.
00:07:20
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So in the bigger the event, and the more public it was, the more prominent you would be in some ways, but just because you could borrow from that fame or whatever. But I coming to the realization that I wanted to cover smaller stories or stories that other people were ignoring, because it fit much more into something about my personal style was was in fact, a huge breakthrough.
Overlooked Stories and Going Against the Grain
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I was going to say that the image I sometimes share with my students in the journalism classes I teach here at the University of Massachusetts is the one from the movie, All the President's Men, where there's an aerial shot of, I guess it's probably the beltway around Washington and some circling highway. And you see all this traffic moving in one direction, and you see a car all alone moving in the opposite direction. And then the camera zooms in, and you find out that it's Woodworking Bernstein.
00:08:19
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So what I'm trying to say is that in general, I like the stories that make me feel like I'm going in the opposite direction of other people or of the main widely agreed upon narrative of what's important to write about.
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And I know for personally that when I, I had this like super sort of hyper inadequacy when I realized I couldn't do the hard news that a lot of other people could do with ease. Like when they hear the police scanner, they want to get in their car and speed to the accident. When I was just like, I would rather let them, let the victims be able to sort of stew in that for a little bit and then come back to them a week later
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months later or something. Was it like a switch went off and you were just totally okay with that or did you have a sense of like maybe you weren't as good a reporter as other people were? I think I was okay with it but not entirely because a few years after the passage that you shared, the events described in that passage, I remember I was at a newspaper in New Jersey and we were
00:09:31
Speaker
not far away, or an hour or so away from where the Democratic Convention was going to be held at Madison Square Garden, which I could not wait to go to. And because we were so close to the action, a lot of the reporters in the paper were groomed to go. It was a cheap day for the paper. They didn't have to spend a fortune getting offended out of town. But anyway, I got to the convention, saw thousands of people
00:09:57
Speaker
and recognized that I did not know how to tell a story about it. I did not know how to take something that big and find a story that I particularly had a gift for telling. And so I spun my wheels for about three or four days. And finally, on the final day of the convention, I said to my editor, would it be all right if I went back and wrote a story after everyone leaves, just about what it's like during the cleanup? And he said, fine.
00:10:28
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I don't think he had much faith that I'd come up with anything good, because I hadn't all week. But when I finally got there at 10 at night, and I saw the electricians taking away all the telephones, and I saw the people picking up the debris, and I saw the cops allowing the bums and the whores, as they said, to come back. They had been banished for that week. And I saw people taking up their spots, their normal spots outside the garden. People who were street people who had not, as I say, fiddled out in view.
00:10:56
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I found I felt a great deal of passion for what I was writing about. And I wrote a piece that began to end with the ending. And I just described that sense of the place coming, coming apart disappearing. And I realized that I had a story that I wanted to tell, I had a point of view, and I was able to run with it. And that actually helped me also get to my
00:11:20
Speaker
of what I wanted to tell in terms of stories, which that was a perfect example of covering the party after it was over. It seemed like a perfectly fine time to cover a party in the aftermath. Yeah, it's like what Gaye Thalese, him saying, like, I want to write about the tuba player pulling up the rear of the parade.
Influences of Classic Literary Journalism
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Speaker
It's kind of that instance where that's the kind of, that's the most interesting part, even though it's not the bandleader, but that's probably where the cool story is.
00:11:49
Speaker
Well, absolutely. And I'm sure that people have mentioned Sinatra has a cold in which Thales tried to interview Sinatra, who was really cranky because he had a cold, which of course, if you're a singer and a performer and you have a cold, it's probably 10 times worse than for a normal person. So Thales just talked to everyone around him and created all these scenes based on his interactions with those people. And it's one of the classics of literary journalism that gets taught over and over.
00:12:18
Speaker
And he deserves a shout out for that to say the least. Another example also is Jimmy Breslin. When he went down to Dallas to cover the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, or actually, he went to Washington. And so he was, instead of covering the funeral itself, he went to the graveyard and interviewed the person who was
00:12:41
Speaker
being paid the hourly wage to dig the grave for the president. That's right. It's been a while since I read that, but yeah, I remember that piece. Yeah. Classic. Yeah. And so that's another example of what we're talking about here.
Path to the Miami Herald
00:12:54
Speaker
So how did how did you end up at the Miami Herald from, you know, you're at the paper in Jersey. Where were the next dots that connected you to Miami? Well, when I was at the paper, I was at the paper in New Jersey and I decided, which
00:13:11
Speaker
It was sort of crazy to leave the paper without a job lined up. And it was, I had done, at that point I was nearing my late twenties. I'd done a ton of features and I just wasn't sure where I was headed in terms of my writing. And I decided I would try to freelance, which is pretty ludicrous. So I was able to put together an income.
00:13:36
Speaker
which means I could pay my $90 a month for my car, an orange VW Dasher. I was lucky enough to have a low rent in a house in Arlington, Virginia for a while that was owned by a friend, a friend who worked at the Washington Post owned it. And she rented out rooms to pay her mortgage. And I had college loans, but I took care of them slowly but surely. And at any rate, I put myself through this fierce personal apprenticeship of reading a lot. And at the same time,
00:14:07
Speaker
I ended up visiting a friend of mine who had moved to Miami to get a job at the Miami News, his friend who later became my husband. And believe it surely I was kind of in Miami quite a bit and Washington DC. I remember thinking only a starving freelancer could pull this off because I was willing to do things kind of on a thin thread.
00:14:30
Speaker
And so I got to live in Miami before it became the world class city it is today. It was sort of in a lot of turmoil. And eventually I started doing a lot of work for the Miami Herald's Tropic magazine and moved to Miami and was offered a job there. So I ended up in Miami that way. It was kind of over the course of a couple of years of commuting back and forth and then moving there.
00:14:57
Speaker
What year was that when you finally took up residence in Miami?
Refining Writing through Reading
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Speaker
Well, I'd say it was around late 70s. I know the Miami Herald offered me the full-time job in 79. And I remember the editor calling me, Larry Bloom, who's still around, and he wanted to offer me the job. He said, you have to understand that these jobs really come available every 10 years or so. So you might want to consider that as part of your thought process here.
00:15:26
Speaker
And he was right. It was the job that didn't come to the elbow very often. So I took it and of course never looked back. It was a wonderful interview.
00:15:37
Speaker
And you said that you were kind of giving yourself sort of a self-education by sort of expanding your reading probably into these other forms of longer feature writing and stuff that really helped your writing gain a next level of elevation. So what were some of the people and pieces you were reading to help just further strengthen the type of feature writing you were doing? Okay, I have an odd answer here.
00:16:07
Speaker
I think in my 20s, I was so consumed by journalism daily, weekly, monthly, that I was reading a lot of magazines and newspapers and articles. And during that self-administered apprenticeship, I decided to reacquaint myself with reading and literature. And I started reading or rereading, as the case may be, great novels.
00:16:34
Speaker
and looking at what the writers did in those books. And I started also trying to read more in the field of literary journalism because that was, when I went to college right after that, I went to Columbia School of Journalism. And I remember we didn't have a course in literary journalism at that time because it wasn't really codified into a genre. And the way I heard about books,
00:17:00
Speaker
was through classmates who were better read than I, and they would refer to like George Orwell, you know, down and out in London and Paris, or homage to Catalonia, or they would refer to James Agee, let us now praise famous men. And they would also, some of them for some reason knew some of his essays that had been in a Fortune magazine, I believe it was. And so I ended up with a kind of an ad hoc reading list that I created.
00:17:29
Speaker
I should say that, though, when In Cool Blood came out, which was in the late 60s, I read it pretty much hot off the presses. I didn't read it in serial form in The New Yorker. I read it as a book. And I remember thinking that it was a huge breakthrough for me because I could see that the kind of literature I wanted to write could indeed be fact-based.
Authenticity in Storytelling
00:17:52
Speaker
Now, the story truth is that we have found out in the fullness of time that it's quite possible
00:17:57
Speaker
or more than possible, seems proven that Truman Capote piped some of the scenes in that book. And therefore its legacy has been undercut considerably. But at the time I took it at face value and I felt that you could be a person covering the world and write that kind of book and that you could do so with complete integrity.
00:18:24
Speaker
In the early 80s, I remember being quite taken with a series in the New Yorker that became a book by Susan Sheehan, Is There No Place on Earth for Somebody Like Me, which was a portrait of a woman who'd been kind of, oh God, gosh, revolving door in and out of a place called Creedmoor, a mental institution, mental hospital in the psychiatric institution in New York. And she, the author,
00:18:52
Speaker
just did a beautiful job of, that felt to me totally authentic and was, of capturing what this woman had to say. This woman who people dismissed as crazy, who in fact was heartbreaking and she made sense. If you were enough of, if you paid enough attention, she made total sense. And I remember taking that thought from reading that book into certain stories that I wrote.
00:19:19
Speaker
where people said, well, this is a senseless event. And I keep saying to myself, even to this day, if you pay enough attention, you may find the series of events make total sense.
00:19:31
Speaker
Yeah, and to pay enough attention, you have to really cultivate a sense of patience too and be willing to hang out and put in the time, not knowing if it's actually going to come together in the end. I wonder how long did it take you to realize that sometimes things do take a long time and then, yeah, sometimes they don't come together.
Patience and Story Unfolding
00:19:54
Speaker
Well, I try to tell myself that nothing is ever wasted. So if I start on something that really is flat or not going anywhere, I'm just not getting, doors are shutting in my face, I still try to say, well, at least something's going to come out of this eventually. And it'll be a little sad story file on my computer that never gets open because there's no reason to really open it. But I think you all, it's best to, as Emily Dickinson,
00:20:21
Speaker
courses from Amherst, Massachusetts, once wrote about about dwelling and possibility. So I think as a journalist as writer, you're dwelling in possibility in terms of what you're doing at every moment, it's it's fought with hope, as we say, you have to be looking at either blank sheet of paper in the old days or blank screen, and you're trying to make something out of nothing. And you just have to
00:20:48
Speaker
continually try to instill in yourself the faith that this will turn out to be something.
Deconstructing Great Works
00:20:54
Speaker
And with these with a lot of these great writers you were reading and contemporary and even some of the older stuff and for folks that are looking to
00:21:08
Speaker
break into some bigger magazine writing, bigger feature writing, the type of stuff that you were doing and really just purely masterful at. What did that deconstruction or what does that look like to make it manageable that you can sort of
00:21:26
Speaker
Do that type of work. The work itself, the final product, sometimes can look so overwhelmingly beautiful that you forget that it is a piece by piece kind of piece of work and craftsmanship. Where do you start when you look to deconstruct great work so that maybe you can do the same thing? It's funny. There's a great line from Yates, something about, you may labor to be beautiful, but no one should notice it.
00:21:56
Speaker
And people notice that all your stitching and unstitching has been for naught. So if you read something that seems like it's beautifully done, at first you're right. You can't tell how the person did it, that you shouldn't be able to in a way. It's only after revisiting it and looking at various chess moves that they made that you begin to kind of analyze what might have happened to help create this material or what might have led the writer to that scene.
00:22:24
Speaker
Catherine boo and the beautiful forever's that right name of it the book set in India and also her wonderful essay the marriage here and In the case of some of my Catherine boo what you really get a sense of if you want to know her trick I think she's a world-class person. She's a little class at hanging out.
00:22:46
Speaker
and just being patient and letting the moments kind of unfold.
Natural Feature Writing
00:22:52
Speaker
So she's not lunging after a quick quote or anything like that. So with this kind of work, with literary journalism, there has to be some sense that the process will unfold in its own time, and you have to be willing to hang out.
00:22:53
Speaker
I
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Story: 'Zepp's Last Stand'
00:23:10
Speaker
And so you get to the Herald in 1979, and then how did you come to the story that would eventually become a Zepp's Last Stand? Oh, the story of Zepp's Last Stand occurred partly because Zepp, to that point, was an old man living in Deerfield Beach, Florida.
00:23:38
Speaker
felt all his life. He'd had a story to tell that he'd been wrong. And now that he was retired, and with nothing else much to do, especially since his, it was his third wife had died, maybe it was, I forget, he'd been married several times. His life had died. And he was, he was actually feeling quite grief stricken about that. And part of the way he
00:23:59
Speaker
just constructed meeting in his days is that he would show up at various newspapers throughout South Florida. And back in those days, there were lots of them. There was not just the papers in Fort Lauderdale and Miami and Palm Beach, but also lots of smaller papers. And he would just waltz into the newsroom, an old man with a briefcase and say that he had a story to tell. And usually
00:24:25
Speaker
at these papers, people would be reasonably polite, especially if they weren't at that moment in a huge deadline crunch. And they would find somebody pretty young and green to be polite to him and listen to his story. And then he would go his merry way because people weren't picking up on it. But somehow my editor at a comic magazine at the Miami Herald, Larry Bloom, connected with a zap in the story and suggested that I
00:24:53
Speaker
contact them. So I was probably the first reporter that had actually called him and I went and talked to him and got the details of his, of the story that had been bothering him for all these years, which is he believed that he had been unfairly, dishonorably discharged during World War I. He'd been a soldier. He said he, during the midst of the war, he tried to become a CO. They wouldn't let him, they put him in Leavenworth and he felt quite disgraced by that. He ended up having a
00:25:23
Speaker
fairly more, I think, more than prosperous life in Cleveland, Ohio. He was the executive director, if I recall correctly, of the community chest, which is a little bit like the United Fund, or maybe even a precursor to it. So he had a prominent job in town. He would basically was a fundraiser and he knew how to convince people of how to give him money, that them go into the community chest to be given out to other people.
00:25:49
Speaker
He said, I love one of his quotes. He said he was really good, particularly at flattering the ladies. And he said, I use the oil can profusely, which I never forgot. At any rate, he had one story to tell really, which was this terrible injustice. And that was what my article was about. It was about how he was able through a fluke to get a hearing at the Pentagon, get them to reopen his case.
00:26:18
Speaker
He'd already had a hearing in the early 50s, 1950s, we're now talking, 1979, in the early 50s where he had been, his dishonorable discharge had been upgraded to a general discharge, but he felt he should have an honorable discharge. So he wanted to take his case to Washington through a mistake. He was given a hearing, the Pentagon went through with it.
Impact of Winning the Pulitzer Prize
00:26:44
Speaker
He took an overnight train, Amtrak train to Washington, D.C.,
00:26:48
Speaker
got off the train, met with an amnesty international attorney at six or six thirty in the morning in an empty coffee shop and then proceeded to the hearing which was at nine or nine thirty at the Pentagon on the subway and presented his case. He presented the same case I had heard him present many times because I'd interviewed him over several occasions and he had the same same information, the same
00:27:16
Speaker
tearful pause, the same itch in his voice, the exact same story they told over and over. And the fellows at the Pentagon, who included four WW2 veterans and one Korean War veteran, listened politely and said they'd get back in touch with them. And when they finally did, they told him that he was very displeased. Four out of five had given him, had voted to give him the upgrade.
00:27:45
Speaker
He was really mad at the one person who hadn't and was all set to go to Washington and kick him to the high heavens or something, which was a somewhat belligerent attitude for a CO. In other words, this was a very contradictory man. And when he was a person, you just, you look at him, you see an older person, a much older person, you know, towards the end of his life, but there's a story he once told, he's burning to tell it, and indeed,
00:28:13
Speaker
And indeed, that's what I covered. I was going to just say that recently at the university, I'm teaching a course in sports literature and asked the class to read The Boys on the Boat, which is about Seattle, as you know, in the Olympics. And the class has learned that the author really would not have had this book if the main character, Joe,
00:28:39
Speaker
if his daughter hadn't said, you know, my father is quite old. He has a great story to tell when you talk to him. He likes another book that you wrote. And so the author spent a couple of months with this person during his end days really with Joe. And then through that series of interviews built on it and wrote this really incredible book. And so that's just another example of somebody that you would just see maybe walking down the street, a mild mannered person, no reason to suspect that there's this depth there.
00:29:09
Speaker
necessarily. However, if you're a writer, a feature writer, or a person who does long form, you start to suspect a lot of depth in a lot of people. It's just a matter of making yourself available to see if you can help them access the material. And of course, Zepp's last stand won you the Pulitzer Prize. So I've never spoken to you about that moment. What was that like for you and how did that change your life?
00:29:40
Speaker
Well, as I always say, it's a handy credential. So what's going on in a resume? And I'll also say that you're only as good as your next story. So as great as it was to win a Pulitzer, you still have to pull your weight. It does something you can really best on in this world. But it was a great honor, and it was a surprise.
00:30:04
Speaker
I found out that day. And the reason I found out was in these days, you know, I judged the cultures the past couple of years, and I judged in criticism and in feature writing, which was great honor and fun to do. And they really people don't leak the the the they're usually in any category three top choices.
00:30:28
Speaker
They actually seem like they don't get leaked at all. But back then, it was just leaked central. No one was keeping their mouth shut. But somehow, I did not know. And I got a phone call from a friend at another paper saying, congratulations. And I thought it was a joke. But she worked at a paper that year was winning several Pulitzer's. So she kind of knew what was on the list. And so that's how I first learned, maybe an hour or two before the actual announcement.
00:30:58
Speaker
Wow, that's incredible. In your recent judging of the award, what are you noticing these days coming out of today's reporting versus the reporting you were doing back then?
Trends in Feature Writing
00:31:14
Speaker
Well, a couple of things. I mean, feature writing remains, of course, so dear to my heart. So I'll talk about that category first again. But what you find these days is that there are amazing
00:31:27
Speaker
A.V. components to stories. And, you know, almost many films are made. These A.V. things are practically mini-movies. Oh, like Gene Weingarten's piece. That's... Oh, with the... Yeah. So, yeah. And Gene Weingarten, I should say, he did use it for Pearls Before Breakfast. I think that was the name of the piece, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think. Gene was one of my editors at Tropic magazine, too. I maybe should make it clear that at a certain point, Tropic magazine
00:31:58
Speaker
just seemed to be a publication that was, even though it was part of a newspaper, it had enormous energy. People like the novelist Carl Hyacen worked there, Dave Berry, pretty much discovered by Tropic Magazine, and other writers, Joel Auchenbach, Tom Schroeder. Is Capuzzo there too? Mike Capuzzo?
00:32:21
Speaker
Like Capuzzo, I don't know if he, he was at the Miami Herald. And I'm not sure if he was at Tropic, he probably did stories for Tropic. Yeah, anyway, the Herald, it's easy to think that the past is always better than the present, and that's not a healthy attitude to take, but the Herald in those days does deserve credit for having somehow, just in general, having been just a great paper.
00:32:51
Speaker
Yeah, so you're saying that there were a lot of these now like AV components to these features. Yeah. When I judged it two years ago, I was amazed by the number of entries. And a lot of them were really good. A lot were solid, but they weren't going to necessarily be amongst the finalists. But you know how, I mean, they say that the class is at Harvard.
00:33:15
Speaker
You could get rid of the entire, you know, new freshman class, first year class and substitute yet another one or another one or another one. There are that many good people out there. And at the top of the feature writing category, I can't remember how many entries there were, but it was quite a few. I mean, it was hundreds. But at the top, I would say the top 10 to 20% are really, maybe at least 10% are
00:33:44
Speaker
Excellent. And how you then narrow it down is pretty hard. Yeah. Yeah, because it could go to, it could, it just becomes a matter of taste and really could go to anybody. At that level, at the highest level, it's, it is, you know, you'll find that there are many pieces that don't make the top three that are deserving. But what's kind of fun is that you keep those pieces in mind, you find out that they've won other awards.
00:34:11
Speaker
So you know that they're out there, they're being honored, and that's good. Yeah, so they're getting theirs. Yeah. And so at what point did you feel confident in writing, you know, having been a consumer of memoir for a
Memoirs that Shaped Blaze's Journey
00:34:27
Speaker
while? At what point did you feel confident that you wanted to write your own? Okay, that's another good question. Let me begin by saying that the first
00:34:39
Speaker
memoir I remember reading is a diary of Anne Frank when I was in eighth grade and I loved it. A teacher at my public school gave us an exercise where we were supposed to write an essay about the Nuremberg trials and and each is an eight sentence essay and each sentence was supposed to
00:35:04
Speaker
embody a rhetorical concept. It's supposed to be a complex sentence, a complex compound sentence. And one sentence was supposed to be, I gotta say this right, an exploitation. And so the final sentence of my eighth sentence composition was, the argument built up, let's bring these people to justice, you know, they were terrible. The final sentence was a pure eighth grade girl sentence. Let not Anne Frank's diary be in vain.
00:35:35
Speaker
So there I was, in love with that book, in love with her voice, I could not believe, I was reading it not because of the sense of history that was reading down that story so much as reading it for the portrait of a young adolescent girl, how her family makes her cranky, how she wants to write in her diary, how she wants to be with this boy, this and that. And the next book I remember reading
00:36:03
Speaker
shortly after that, at my public library, a book, I got ahold of a book called Man Child and the Promised Land, which was a book by a man who had grown up in Harlem. And he was talking about the hardship of that and some of the good points too. But a lot about drugs and violence and stuff of that material of that nature. And I remember reading that now that was totally different than my rule
00:36:32
Speaker
white town. But also, I just remember thinking this is just amazing to have somebody share their life to this degree. And so I was hooked, I'd say eighth or ninth grade on memoir. And then as time went on, when I was doing my first reading apprenticeship, some books came out and that I was, I came out kind of during that time, perhaps right before it, but I read Frank Conroy's Stop Time. I read
00:37:02
Speaker
Jeffrey Wolf's Duke of Deception and Frederick Exley's Fan's Notes, as well as Memoirs of the Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy. So I started reading these books that were memoirs, not just novels and not just nonfiction, but that particular form. And I realized I just had an affinity for reading it, if nothing else. I remember I was given a book to review
00:37:32
Speaker
at one point by the Herald called Home Before Dark by Susan Cheever, which was a book about her father, John Cheever. And it was almost like she took a preemptive strike against future biographers, which was great, and wrote about her father, who was a complicated person, which is usually sometimes a euphemism for someone who's unappealing. He was very appealing, but he also had a lot of struggles. And she was able to give kind of a loving, full,
00:38:00
Speaker
and I'd say forthright portrait of him, and I remember being quite taken with that. At what point did you come across a movable feast and this boy's life? This boy's life, I think, when did that come out? I have it right in front. I think that came out in like the late 70s. It came out after, I believe it came out after the Duke of Deception. I know at a movable feast in
00:38:27
Speaker
And this was two books that I teach a great deal in my memoir class here at UMass. A Movable Feast, I think that came out in the late 60s. I'd have to leave the phone to jump up to look at my bookshelf, because this is old fashioned, I'm on a landline right now. I read that pretty much when it came out. And what I loved about
00:38:57
Speaker
a movable feast, and I don't love everything Hemingway ever wrote. And I know he is somewhat defrocked because he was, you know, a racist, he was a misogynist, and I think he was, you know, adverse to, obviously, to any kind of sexuality that wasn't his, which was a kind of overblown male sexuality.
00:39:28
Speaker
So it's easy to maybe discount because we live in a much more polyglot world. But if you read A Movable Feast, you can read it for a number of reasons, but not the least of which is a lot of his advice about writing is spot on. And so if you take that advice to heart, you're going to, I think, make your own work better. Yeah.
00:39:55
Speaker
Yeah, I've come across, there's, I think in the opening chapter there, like he's saying something that was kind of, he's basically taking
The Role of Place in Memoir Writing
00:40:04
Speaker
a sketch of this woman, he's like internalizing her and it's just like, well now, I mean you could read this two ways, he was kind of saying like, well now you're mine essentially, but really what he's doing is just,
00:40:15
Speaker
He's taking in everything so that he can just distill it into the best way on the page and that hunger is good discipline too. I've taken new meaning out of that one. Before when I first read that scene, it was just like, oh yeah, he seems to think that having an empty stomach really sharpens his vision, which I just called BS on because when I'm hungry, I can't focus on anything else.
00:40:39
Speaker
But then it was like that hunger, that was his ambition. And that's kind of what it came to after I read it a few times. You're like, nah, it's not about food. It's about that singular vision to be the greatest or to be the best he can be. And I agree with what you're saying completely. Another thought he shares is something about, I don't have the exact words in front of me, but that
00:41:04
Speaker
And at the end of a given day, you should stop writing when you know what the next sentence will be. So when you come back the next morning, you can just hit the ground running, which is a really, and also the, uh, when he talks about writing one true sentence, uh, and how as a writer, sometimes you'll realize that something you wrote does seem to be to use your expression BS free. You know, it seems like you really wrote something you try and certainly,
00:41:31
Speaker
can see that in great writers that you read when you see a sentence that just
00:41:36
Speaker
that does what it's supposed to do. Yeah, and you've simulated this boy's life in A Moveable Feast is like real formative books that really translated into your memoir of place to the new owners and just having taken your class, you know, 14 years ago and then reading this, I got the sense of how important those books were to you then and then as you wrote this book here,
00:42:06
Speaker
that importance of place, no matter where that place is. And yeah, so as well, how did you come to the story and how important was place as you were looking to craft this, your latest book, which is beautiful?
Writing 'To the New Owners'
00:42:20
Speaker
To the new owners is a, really, it's a memoir of a place on one level. And the place is Martha's Vineyard and a modest house that
00:42:33
Speaker
existed on a, I would say an immodest piece of land in the sense the land was beautiful on a pond that led to the Atlantic Ocean. And I wanted to write about that house because it was land were about to be sold. And I wanted to capture the years of life that had been lived on that little piece of property. But at the same time, the book is really a memoir about the family I married into.
00:43:01
Speaker
as much as about the house. So kind of a tribute to them as well as to the island of Martha's Vineyard, which is a very lovely island. It also is complicated. And I tried to capture some of that in what I wrote. But the two memoirs, the Hemingway memoir, the Tobias Wolf memoir come up because at one point during the many summers we spent there,
00:43:29
Speaker
for various reasons, that Catherine Graham, the, at that point, retired publisher, or maybe about to be retired publisher for the Washington Post, whom I ran into at a memorial service for a mentor of mine, knew that I was going to be on the island with my husband and family for a couple weeks in the summer. And she said, please give me a call.
00:43:50
Speaker
And I've kind of taken it back, thinking, did she really mean it? And I guess, you know, if Katherine Graham says you should call her, at least you should call her, whether she meant it or not. That'd be, you know, kind of discourteous not to call. So we, I did call and it turned out that we ended up having a once a year meal over the course of
00:44:12
Speaker
the summer of 889 until her death right before the summer of 2001. And earlier that summer we had spoken and we had made plans to get together. So, but during the beginning of those years, she was working on her own memoir. She worked on it for a long time, I think six, seven or eight years. And finally it got to the point where I didn't know if it was ever going to come out and you don't want to
00:44:38
Speaker
you know, push somebody, especially someone of her prominence, just to ask how things are going. Writers really can get very touchy about that. Because when you're working, you're so away from the world, you know, having that be a casual social question, like, how is your writing going? It's just hard to answer that in a jovial manner. Right? But anyway, at one point when we were invited to our house for lunch or dinner, I wanted to bring a hostess gift, which
00:45:05
Speaker
Truthfully, it was very hard to think of what you could bring to Mrs. Graham because she had her menu all planned. You weren't going to contribute to the meal. She had a French chef, which of course made the food beautiful. She also, she had world-class visitors, international people that, like the King of Jordan, I guess once visited and gave her beautiful pottery, which I complimented. And she said, ah, that was from the King of Jordan. And once I saw something else, it was from Princess Diana.
00:45:32
Speaker
And once I was there, and her cousin came, who was then a senator from Florida, and there was some talk, he might be president, so I remembered, note to self, if you can go to Mrs. Graham's with presidential buzz, that's the best hostess kept. Well, I couldn't do, supply any of those. So what I did was I picked about four or five memoirs, but the two that stand out in my memory were the Hemingway and the Tobias Swift to give her saying, and I gave her a note saying that,
00:46:00
Speaker
in my opinion, that one of the really wonderful things about writing memoir is that it's a genre that you can read in as you are working on your own memoir pieces. I know a lot of writers who work in a genre like for instance, thriller writing, who won't read other people's thrillers, because they're so afraid that they might pick up on something and use it unconsciously that they shouldn't be using because it's not really theirs.
00:46:26
Speaker
Whereas in memoir, it would take a kind of a very weird person to plagiarize someone else's life story. So it's not as likely to happen. But at any rate, the book to the new owners was partly a book of memory.
Emotional Depth in Blaze's Memoir
00:46:45
Speaker
And as Tobias Loh says, you tell the best story memory can tell. So I was trying to write about what a place map that would no longer be in my life
00:46:55
Speaker
And I tried also of course to bring perspective to it. It had been an enormous privilege to be able to go to that island for two weeks every summer. And I wanted to write what I wrote as a way of expressing gratitude, not anything else.
00:47:11
Speaker
Yeah, and you say like, you know, mining those deep wells of memory, but you also had these great log books over the years. And as you were going through the research of this book, what was it like for you to really dig deep into those log books and relive a lot of that stuff? Well, what I should say is that a lot of people who have read the book have taken that away as one of the big takeaways has been
00:47:40
Speaker
our family should start keeping a log. We had purchased from a place called AGA Careas and Fun in Maine ships logs. So they were, um, Oh gosh, the exact dimensions are in the book, but let's say 11 inches by 12 inches or something. They're bigger than a regular little notebook. And they had a extremely, extremely good paper in them.
00:48:06
Speaker
they still do, they're still available to be purchased. And you could personalize the title on each of these logs, which was kind of fun. We ended up with eight of them over the years. And what happened was that at first, people were a little reluctant to write in them. But we made it clear that you could put drivel, you could put a recipe, you could put instructions about how to keep
00:48:29
Speaker
fresh flowers alive in a vase, which is to say you put an aspirin in the water. You could complain about a snake that you saw on the property or the ticks or the poison ivy or how hard it was to get to the island and any delays at the steamship authority. Or you could write something more meaningful and deep and
00:48:52
Speaker
or you could draw. And so as the years went by, these laws became so important to ourselves and our company that people would come to the house and before they'd even unpack their suitcases or put the groceries in the icebox, they'd be lunging at these laws and just going through them over and over to remember what they had written before or what someone else had written or drawn or whatever. And I had those eight logs as part of my
00:49:22
Speaker
research, research that I could rely on to help give a sense of that place over the years and of time passing. Yeah. And was this a hard book for you to write? Well, it was hard because all books are kind of hard to write, but it was also, I was really happy to be writing it because I felt if I couldn't, I felt that
00:49:46
Speaker
when the new owners bought the property that of course they knew they were getting a beautiful spot. But they couldn't, how could they, can't hold them responsible for this, how could they understand what they, what I felt they were buying, which is the entire emotional weight of the time that I'd spent there and that my family had and that my extended family had and our guests had. And I didn't want that to be lost, to just simply be something that gets, find a way, you know, by, um,
00:50:14
Speaker
a deed that registered the property office in town. I wanted that meaning to stay alive. And I think that the opportunity to keep something that important to me alive made the book in many ways fun to write.
00:50:33
Speaker
And was it – had you always intended to write about this, or was it the selling of the property that really catapulted you to want to seize the memories that they – you know, you were thinking that they were buying by taking the property, you know, if that makes any sense. I think it was both. I think I'd always – I had written a little bit about the property and the people in years past.
00:50:59
Speaker
But really the impulse to finally write what I wrote came about when the sale of the house was quite clearly inevitable.
Reflections on Selling Property and Future Plans
00:51:13
Speaker
And I had such mixed feelings about it. I always say mixed feelings equal material. So anybody out there who's listening, if you have mixed feelings about something, that's what you should be looking at as your subject matter. That's great. Quite frequently.
00:51:29
Speaker
Well, I know you gotta get going, so I should probably, I'll be respectful of your time here. I wish we could talk for another two hours, but maybe another time. Brendan, you are great. I'm really glad that we have worked together in the past. I met you first in 2003 in a memoir class at UMass, and later I know you went on to Goucher College and you got your MFA there when it was under the directorship of the truly amazing Patsy Sims.
00:51:59
Speaker
and also that you have yourself written a beautiful book that speaks in Saratoga, which is a work of literary non-fiction. So I'm expecting your baseball memoir sometime pretty soon. I hope so. I've been letting it gestate for a while. Walter read it last summer to some chagrin, but that can be a conversation for another time, but it will see. I think it'll see the light of day soon, I hope.
00:52:28
Speaker
I hope so too. I really do. Well, fantastic. Well, thank you and thanks so much for the time, Maddie, and we'll certainly be in touch. Okay, thank you so much, Brendan. Great, and thank you. Bye. That is a wrap. Thank you to Maddie for the time and the beautiful insights into the craft of literary journalism and memoir.
00:52:54
Speaker
If you've made it this far, you'll probably dig the show. And if you dig the show, I ask that you leave a nice review on iTunes. Also, you can find show notes to this episode and all the others at BrendanOmara.com, where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter that gives you my book picks for the month and what you may have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. You know, say hi on Twitter, Matt Brendan Omara.
00:53:23
Speaker
That's gonna do it. Have a CNF and good week, friends.