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Episode 342: Remembering Philip Gerard
302 Plays2 years ago
Philip Gerard was a beloved writer and instructor. He was the author of several books including The Art of Creative Research, The Last Battleground, and Cape Fear Rising.
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Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Remembering Matt Tullis and Philip Girard
00:00:00
Speaker
A few weeks ago, we lost Matt Tullis, a wonderful writer of narrative nonfiction and a teacher of long-form journalism, podcast host of Gangray, the podcast. When he was working on what would become his memoir, Running with Ghosts, he attended an MFA program out of Wilmington, North Carolina, spearheaded by Philip Girard.
00:00:26
Speaker
And that's significant because it's with a heavy heart that I have heard through my own MFA grapevine from Goucher College that Philip passed away earlier this week.
00:00:38
Speaker
Philip is someone who has always been one of those dudes I could call on. If I had a question on writing, dating all the way back to 2008 when I wrapped up my MFA, you know, and right through 2017 and 2019 when he was one of the best guests on this very podcast.
00:00:58
Speaker
I never had him as an actual mentor in grad school, but he was always someone whose brain I liked picking. He never discounted you on wisdom and encouragement, giving just very short platitudes as if you were too busy. And my goodness, the life this guy led, it's no wonder. I mean, he could have very well said, I'm too busy. I'm sailing. I'm in a band. I'm writing a novel. I'm writing a book of narrative nonfiction. Hell, I might even be writing a new nonfiction craft book.
00:01:27
Speaker
Now,
Shock of Philip Girard's Passing
00:01:28
Speaker
originally, since I was traveling this past week driving back to Oregon from New Jersey, I wasn't gonna publish an episode of this podcast this week. I was just gonna take the week off. And then I checked my email for the first time in a week, which is always a disaster and a nightmare, to find the news on Philip's passing from Leslie Rubinkowski, the director of the Creative Nonfiction Program.
00:01:50
Speaker
at Goucher College. The subject line read Philip Girard. So here I am thinking, oh, maybe he has a new book and Leslie is bringing it to my attention to maybe interview him. Not so. Naturally, I went back to the few times we spoke on Mike and emails we exchanged. Thankfully, some of my emails with him survived my haphazard email purges over the years.
00:02:17
Speaker
But I also went back and read some poll quotes from his first trip to the podcast way back.
00:02:24
Speaker
on episode 38. Here's a sample of some of those quotes I lifted from his first visit to the podcast. This was 2017, if you can believe it. So long ago, and this is when his book, The Art of Creative Research, had come out. You've gotta be daring. You've got to have the unshakable belief that, you know what? Someone's gonna publish a book someday, it might as well be me. I don't really have hobbies, I have passions.
00:02:52
Speaker
If I do this enough days in a row, probably I'm gonna get there. I found that if I hang with them long enough, they would often tell me something interesting. I began realizing there was a significant amount of work that wasn't on the page, but if you did it, it would be on the page. My problem is I'm interested in everything. At a certain point, the journey is over, and you know it.
00:03:16
Speaker
While at summer residencies at Goucher College, he'd kick up his feet with epic cowboy boots, by the way. He'd throw his feet up on the table, and he'd rest his acoustic guitar, put him across his chest or his stomach, and just jam. At the ready was a glass of whiskey and a turn of phrase whipping the air like an open flame. He had a wonderful voice, and he was so into what
Fiction vs Nonfiction: Philip's Approach
00:03:39
Speaker
you were working on.
00:03:41
Speaker
He seemed to have it all figured out. I think he did have it figured out. He lived, man, and through the living brought it back so we could read about it. He wrote fiction, did nonfiction, of course, wrote craft. He wasn't concerned about being put in a box. He wanted to be in all the boxes. Back in 2008, I wrote him an email because he knew
00:04:04
Speaker
Because I knew he delved into fiction and nonfiction. At the time, I had a question about what direction to take with an idea, specifically how he makes his decision to either write something as fiction or nonfiction.
00:04:19
Speaker
And in true Brendan fashion, it amounted to nothing, but Philip was generous as ever. September 18th, 2008. Dear Brendan, thanks for your note. I began as a fiction writer and undergrad, I guess partly because I wasn't thinking of nonfiction as a very artistic genre. I published a few stories and then worked for a while as a small-town newspaper reporter.
00:04:42
Speaker
where I learned how to find out things. But I still mainly wanted to write books, so I set off to find a place where I could learn to do that and wound up at Arizona getting an MFA. They had no non-fiction track, almost nobody did in those days, so I continued to do fiction.
00:04:57
Speaker
I did the book Creative Nonfiction because I was invited to write a proposal for it, specifically because they wanted a storyteller, someone who worked in narrative, to do it. Investigating the genre really opened it up for me. I had an excuse to call every smart nonfiction writer I wanted and ask them questions.
00:05:15
Speaker
Now, I make a decision in the early phase of a project about whether it will be fiction or non-fiction, partly based on a very simple criterion. Does the fact that it happened matter? Or is the interest in something else? So I chose to write a novel about Paul Revere because I wasn't interested so much in the fact but in who he was, a private life that left few tracks and needed to be imagined.
00:05:40
Speaker
Secret Soldiers was non-fiction because otherwise it would have been, it would have seemed too far-fetched. Those guys really were brave and they are missing from all standard accounts of the war in Europe. Some shorter non-fiction is assignment driven. Once I decide which it has to be, I'm in either my fiction head or my fact head as I write and I pretty much know where the lines are.
00:06:03
Speaker
Hope this helped. I think all writers eventually write beyond their starter genre. And who they are and what they need at certain times of their lives obviously plays a part. Good luck in your writing and best to the gophers. That's Goucher College. All best, Philip. Now the art of creative research, a field guide for writers, is one of the best books and I recommend it the most probably of all the books that I
00:06:26
Speaker
tell people they should get. It's charged with tips and tricks, but foremost, it's Phillips infecting energy for the entire process of writing a book, be it nonfiction or fiction or an article.
Philip Girard's Passion for Writing
00:06:42
Speaker
He embodied what it meant to live a life in words. Take this passage from the start of this book.
00:06:49
Speaker
I love getting in my car in the pre-dawn darkness, watching the dashboard glow blue and silver and red as I turn the ignition. Feel the neighborhood stillness all around me. They're all asleep, my neighbors, and I'm awake and stealing away on an adventure.
00:07:06
Speaker
I back out of the driveway slowly and roll up the street, the GPS beaming on the dashboard toward a destination 200 miles away where I will talk to a stranger, an old moonshiner, who in his wild youth drove fast cars down twisting midnight roads on the adventure of his life and hope that he will tell me what he knows and I need to know some clue that will help me make sense of the history of half a million restless people.
00:07:32
Speaker
and their descendants and i don't even know what that is it's the not knowing that always gets me the surprise waiting at the end of the road i mean i love that i mean how great is that just like pulls you along and just like oh man i want to get out there i want to get out there and do it that's kind of what he did he just made you want to get out there and do that kind of work do the kind of work that i think we all
00:07:58
Speaker
that we all aspire to do in this little community. And he goes on a few sentences later. I love the feeling of excitement tinged with anxiety, the anticipation of a new encounter, of knowing that by day's end I will be rocketing back home along country roads with the goods in my notebook, my digital recorder, my camera, to be unpacked and mulled over and formed into words that will create an experience in the imaginations of strangers
00:08:26
Speaker
sometimes in the indeterminate future, maybe with a little luck. If I'm good enough to make it happen, and I love it that sometimes I am good enough to make it happen.
00:08:39
Speaker
Philip was something of a Renaissance man. He did it. He did so much, but it never was at the expense of anything else. Everything he did fed the furnace, and it burned hot and bright. To me, he kind of had the perfect writing career. He wasn't famous famous, but he wrote abundantly and across many genres.
00:09:02
Speaker
He's one of a legion of writers you wish was famous because his skill deserved it, for one. And he could have reached and inspired more people the same way he inspired
Supportive Figure in Writing Community
00:09:12
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and inspires me to this day. He lifted others up, man. He celebrated other writers. He made writers believe they too could make a go of it. When you speak of being a good citizen of a writing community, it's people like Phillip who inspire you to suit up and find the stories and bring them back.
00:09:32
Speaker
I once heard the author, Jeff Perlman, recount when he asked the author, Mitch Albom, author of Tuesdays with Maury, for a blurb. And Mitch's representative said something to the effect of, Mitch doesn't do blurbs. And when I hear things like that, I think of people like Philip Girard, who would never have said such a thing. I don't think, even if Philip had a book as popular as Tuesdays with Maury, I don't think Philip would ever say, I don't do blurbs.
00:10:01
Speaker
And I'll miss the great conversations I've had with Philip over the years, over email, and certainly on this podcast. So appended to this remembrance are the two interviews I had with Philip. One from 2017, when the art of creative research came out, and the other from 2019, when his Civil War book, The Last Battleground, came out.
00:10:23
Speaker
And I guess I'll leave you with one more little passage from the prologue of the art of creative research. Yeah, he writes, at highway rest stops, I can't help but wonder where everyone else has come from and where they are bound. The chic couple in the red convertible sports car, the rowdy family with all the wild kids pouring out of the camper, the pensive loner hurrying back from the restroom with his hands jammed tight in his windbreaker pockets.
00:10:51
Speaker
I want to get in all their cars with them and go someplace else anywhere but here and find out why. Where are they going? What's waiting at the end of the road? Sometimes.
00:11:16
Speaker
Okay, most of the time, I find myself daydreaming. Like, what would it be like if I had a million dollars?
00:11:29
Speaker
Okay, so if I had a million dollars, I'd buy all my writer friends, or aspiring writer friends, a copy of The Art of Creative Research by Philip Girard. What a great read, and so, so valuable. As it doesn't just apply to nonfiction writing, it applies to fiction and poetry on that believable, authentic level.
00:11:56
Speaker
Naturally it was my great great pleasure to speak with Philip about the book but also about his journey as a writer and what a journey. He's the author of several books of fiction and non-fiction including the novels Cape Fear Rising and the patron saint of dreams. Non-fiction books like Secret Soldiers and Down the Wild Cape Fear
00:12:18
Speaker
and books on writing, like the art of creative research and creative non-fiction research and crafting stories from real life. He also teaches full time at University of Wilmington, North Carolina, and also in a couple different MFA programs. And he's putting out a music album. So if there's a more interesting man in the world, show me, because I think we corralled him for episode 38. And also, you know the drill.
00:12:48
Speaker
Share this, subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music, like the hashtag CNF Podcast on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, and let's stay connected and keep encouraging each other. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Philip Girard.
00:13:06
Speaker
oftentimes like to start asking people about is, especially for someone like you who writes so much, writes about writing so much, fiction, nonfiction, teaches a lot. So how do you unplug from that? What are some of your hobbies that you're into that gets you away from a lot of the writing life that allows you to come back to it fresh?
Philip's Passion for Music and Sailing
00:13:29
Speaker
Well, as I tell my wife, Jill, I don't really have hobbies, but I have passions. And I got a guitar back here. I love music. I did my first album last year and toured it this summer. The first thing we did when we moved into the house was build a music room onto it. So I've got basically a music studio with a keyboard and pedal steel and all guitar hangers and what have you.
00:13:50
Speaker
That's it. The dogs were currently locked out of the office because otherwise they would take over the conversation, especially my Australian Shepherd Daisy Duke. She's my pal. So we go in the morning and run at the park. And then sailing. Sailing has always been my passion.
00:14:06
Speaker
Now that I'm no longer sure of the department, I did some repairs in the boat this year. I'm hoping to get out and have a nice spring sailing season. So those things, you know, and then I tend to compartmentalize. So when I'm not working, I'm really not working. I mean, I know. Otherwise you're just on, you know, and.
00:14:22
Speaker
You never get away from it. And there's always one more call to make one more email to answer, one more note to take. And so when I'm on, I'm on. But when I'm off duty, the lights go out. Yeah. How do you make that delineation? Is that something that's very concrete for you? These are the weeks or months out of the year that the switch goes off? Or is it more fluid?
00:14:43
Speaker
than that. It's really project driven. So now in addition to the Civil War book that I told you about I'm doing, I'm also doing a new edition of Creative Nonfiction. So I've been editing that and I'm in the process of turning music into a kind of a memoir. I did a magazine piece on the making of the album, American Anthem.
00:15:01
Speaker
last year and that was sort of the intro to, because it started with a list that I made when I was a kid. I put down 10 things I expected to achieve in my life and one of them writing a book, falling in love, going to Alaska, you know the usual stuff. And the last one on the list was making an album because I was just so, I thought that would be a dream. And in the old days you couldn't do that. You'd have to get with Atlantic Records or somebody and they'd have to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in you.
00:15:27
Speaker
Nowadays, though, I found a local producer in town, does great albums, fully professional, full studio and the whole thing. And, you know, I'm a member of ASCAP now, we're selling stuff online, downloads, I'm doing concerts. And so I'm writing about that as the kind of culmination of a life in music that started when I was, you know, just
00:15:45
Speaker
12 or 13 years old. Wow. How is picking up and becoming proficient with the guitar and I assume singing too. Do you sing? Oh yeah. I do my best. Yeah. How has that informed your creativity at this stage in your writing career?
00:16:09
Speaker
It's really a great, going into the studio was a great process because it was like the graduate course in music. It was taking 15 songs completely apart, rewriting sections of them, writing bridges for them, doing new instrumentation, changing keys, changing tempo, and then teaching other people some of the parts because I had to have bass players and drummers and other keyboard players, and I did a lot of the instruments, but breaking it all down, putting it back together again in a really intense way,
00:16:36
Speaker
And in a place where, you know, if you're doing a live performance, kind of like doing a reading, if you make a mistake, if you bumble something, it gets lost in the ambience of the moment. And if people have a good time, who cares? If you grab a note into a microphone in a studio, it's a crab note and it doesn't go away. If you're off key, you're off key and it doesn't go away. So what you really wind up doing is concentrating in a really intensive way. And I found it very much like
00:17:04
Speaker
kind of going into the zone I'm riding. Or if I'm really into the zone and there's a knock on the door because you know you'll need something. It's like being really literally being woken out of that dream that John Gardner used to talk about.
00:17:15
Speaker
And so that's what the studio was like. And I would come out of it both completely exhausted after maybe a two or three hour session, but also completely refreshed in a way that I expect people get from meditation maybe.
Writing and Music: Creative Processes Compared
00:17:27
Speaker
So the analog for the creative process has been several things. One is working with a producer was very much like working with a great editor.
00:17:35
Speaker
who's constantly coaxing more out of you, constantly helping you to find the truth in a line of the verse of your song, when you were falling for a lazy rhyme, because you hear on the radio a million times and he's pushing, no, no, that's not quite, we don't have it quite there. Or you put in vocals and then decide, no, no, that sounds too flowery, take it out again. We don't need that harmony. And it's very much like a good editor who's really trying to bring out the best in your work on your own terms,
00:18:04
Speaker
rather than imposing their will on you. But the other thing was the intensity of the process was there's just no cheating. I said in the studio before, and this guy is old school, Jeff Reed, my producer's old school, and he's like, we're gonna have good mics, and that's it. We're not gonna put in all kind of fancy, what he calls magic dust, you know, these effects. We'll put a little reverb in your headphones so it sounds live, because of course the studio is an anechoic chamber, and it doesn't sound natural. All the sound just sort of dies. But you get the truth.
00:18:34
Speaker
And it's very much like looking at a first draft and saying, okay, I'm not going to look for what I intended to be here. I'm not going to look for what I hope is here. I'm not going to look for stuff that strokes my ego. I'm going to look at what I actually wrote and how good it is.
00:18:49
Speaker
be as brutally honest as I can be and so it's I think it's a great thing and in fact I'm putting together a songwriting class for the MFA program here at Wilmington just because I think it was so valuable to me and the other thing I do with my music I take a very large project like the Civil War project for example and I try to distill it down into a song or a couple of songs that really get at
00:19:14
Speaker
the thematic spirit of what I'm trying to do and kind of capture the DNA of the project. And of course in songwriting you're really limited. I mean you've got a few bars, you've got two or three minutes and you kind of have to do it all. And so you really get back to what's essential. You really do sort of find that essential mother lode of what you're really into and then you can
00:19:37
Speaker
kind of relax out of that when you go back into prose and you're writing an essay or a novel or whatever and you can take it in all the directions you want to. But until you really get what it is at the essence, you're not going to do that. So I think that things are extremely go hand in hand and are extremely useful back and forth.
00:19:53
Speaker
Yeah, that's an incredibly neat way that they can piggyback off one another. In a lot of ways, the process is the same, but it's exercising a different muscle. So you're coming at both works fresh, even though you're working out a very similar congruent creative muscle, but you're not fatiguing your mind in a way that you might be if you were just solely dedicated to prose or solely dedicated to music.
00:20:21
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's really key. I tell all my writing students, you know, get out of your own head once in a while and do something. So why, you know, a lot of writers paint, not because they're great painters, because most of them are terrible painters, but it does give them something that they have to do with their eye and their hand and not especially their mind. They just have to look and pay attention and then try to create something out of that. And it's a very different set of muscles, as you say.
00:20:47
Speaker
but you come back from it refreshed, and you get kind of a bank shot. It comes back into your own work in ways you don't expect, but it really is refreshing. The other thing is nobody expects me to be any good as a musician. It's kind of like a fish riding a bicycle. They get to walk out of the stage like, whoa, you want to perform with him in a concert we did with the woman who had produced the rock bottom remainders. And we were doing the rehearsal, and he said, oh my god, a writer who can sing? What's that all about?
00:21:16
Speaker
So the thing is you don't have to be great at it. You can really just be an enthusiastic amateur and it works. So the pressure is off in a way and it leads to you able to make all the discoveries that come with messing something up or failing at something until you get it right. And that's a great lesson for a writer.
00:21:38
Speaker
You talked about reaching a sense of flow and you go into the cave and you come out tired, but you also come out refreshed.
Importance of Dedicated Creative Spaces
00:21:48
Speaker
How do you nurture that and get into that flow state, whether it be writing or music? How do you cultivate that feeling and ride that wave when you're able to get there? Well, for me, it starts with defining a place.
00:22:07
Speaker
In every house I've lived in since I was a graduate student, I defined a space for writing, and at one point it was the kitchen table. At one point it was a little desk in my bedroom. I now, for the last many years, have had my – I always buy a house that has an extra room to turn into a study. I built one at my last house. Same with the music room. So I come in here and close the door. The books are all around me. My research stuff is here. The computer is here, typewriter, whatever I need.
00:22:35
Speaker
I'm here for one reason and I've got the habit now that my body and mind kind of know that's what I'm doing here. So when I'm in here, I don't grade papers. I don't do lots of social media or anything. I'll check in with friends once in a while, but mainly when I'm here, I'm here to get into the zone and to write. And so I typically, I do a lot of planning in my life just because when your life gets busier, if you just let things sort of happen, everything, everything will hijack your time away from you.
00:23:04
Speaker
And so I put things on my calendar, I'm writing for these hours and if it doesn't go well, it doesn't go well. But if I do this enough days in a row, probably I'm going to get there. And if I've got particular projects like I'm revising something, I pretty much set out here's the chunk I'm doing today, here's the chunk I'm doing tomorrow. And so I kind of know I don't have to do all that today, I'm doing this part of it.
00:23:27
Speaker
The pressure is off in a way. I've got a limited world to work with and I can just dive into it and get lost and do whatever it takes. It might be a question sometimes of taking one paragraph apart or one scene apart and putting it back together or doing one bit of research on one fact.
00:23:43
Speaker
that has been really elusive to find and so you're on the phone, you're on the internet, what have you. But at the end of the day, you say, okay, I got that work done, check that off the list and now I can go have a beer, play with my dog, whatever you want to do. So I find that planning kind of makes a difference because life is going to interrupt. Yesterday my wife's car broke down so I left my writing desk to go find her and pick her up and get her car towed.
00:24:08
Speaker
But I'll get that time back. I'll say, well, OK, I lost two hours, but I'll buy it back over here. And so I'm always constantly making these sort of strange psychological deals with myself.
00:24:18
Speaker
And, but it, um, you know, closing the door, the only person allowed in the writing room with me is my dog Daisy Duke. About every half hour, 45 minutes, she'll get up and put her head on my leg. Like, come on, it's time to go out. I don't have a door that goes out onto the deck here. She'd go out in the backyard and we can go take a walk around and look at the pond or whatever, uh, the back marsh here. So it's a matter of,
00:24:43
Speaker
You know, kind of there are habits that we have that kind of psych us into what we're supposed to be doing. Even when I'm on stage, I've got a little rug and it's my stage. So if I set that up in somebody's living room or on a concert stage, I've got this little five-body rug. That's my performance space. If I might have 20 musicians around me, I might have just mute myself and my guitar, but that's my stage, wherever it is. And so when I enroll it, we're playing and that's what it's there for. So they're little,
00:25:10
Speaker
kind of little tricks that you do and just ways you create a habit and then you can go in and just relax into the work. And I wonder when you were a kid, like eight years old or so, what did you want to be when you grew up?
00:25:26
Speaker
That's a good question because I think back on it. I didn't want to be what my dad was and I wasn't sure what my dad was. All I know is he would put on a suit in the morning. He would either drive in or go to the stop to get picked up by the carpool, go into an office, the DuPont company, where he worked for I think about 46 years.
00:25:43
Speaker
And it was a great job, great benefits, and the whole thing, but I never quite understood what he did, and I went to work with him a number of times. At one point, I remember he was working with IBM computers back in the day when they were the size of this room, essentially. He actually took me inside the old UNIVAC computer. They were decommissioning. But I knew I didn't want to just do that kind of office work.
00:26:07
Speaker
There was nothing real about any profession in those days. I think I just thought I wanted to have a kind of an adventure in my life and I wasn't sure what form that would take. In college, I played a lot of music and I thought, gee, the thing to do would be to kind of be a session man and get in with the studios. But I wasn't good enough and I figured that out. I didn't want to be 50 years old and playing the holiday and hoping that I got enough tips to make it through the week.
00:26:29
Speaker
So I kept with the music, but I kept on looking for things. And I started teaching accidentally. I was called into a classroom. On a Friday afternoon, the director of COP at Arizona called me up and said, would you like to teach a couple of sessions of freshman COP? We have a TA who quit. And I said, what do I have to be there? It was Monday morning. I think it was 8 o'clock. So I had basically 48 hours. And I walked into the classroom. I thought, you know,
00:26:54
Speaker
I kind of belong here. I can do this. And I really like the give and take. I like being in a room where people wanted to talk about writing and wanted to be smart about it. And especially if you're kind of living that solitary writing life where you spend a lot of time all by yourself in a little room, you know, staring at a keyboard and a screen. It's great to then go into a room full of people.
00:27:16
Speaker
smart people that really honor what you do and talk about it and discuss it and argue about it and you know all of that. So I kind of got to where I am as a teacher in a very sort of roundabout accident in a way. I figured I would end up being a journalist which I'd been before I went back to get my MFA and but I've continued to do that as a magazine journalist but not sort of hardcore daily deadline journalism.
00:27:41
Speaker
When you walked into that classroom, what was that feeling like when you looked at all those faces looking back at you at 8 a.m. on a Monday morning? Well, I had gone to a friend of mine who was an older TA who had been teaching before he came to the Graduate Program. And I said, do you have any advice? And he said, yes. He said two things. Before you walk into that classroom, check your fly and know the first thing that's going to come out of your mouth.
00:28:08
Speaker
So I had a plan and I tended in those days to over plan and mostly abandon my plan about halfway through but I always knew if things got slow I had something to fall back on.
00:28:22
Speaker
What I also realized was when you walk into a classroom, for better or for worse, people assume you belong at the head of the class. You belong at the head of the seminar table or whatever it is. And they don't know, are you a TA? Are you a tenor? Are you not? Are you a visitor? Are you an instructor? They really don't understand rank and they shouldn't. They don't have to. But they kind of grant you that initial authority and it's up to you to keep it. And so I was always of the position that every class was going to be about a lesson.
00:28:50
Speaker
whether it's a workshop or a freshman comp class or whatever, I always had something particular in mind that I wanted to aim toward. And if we got toward other things, great. But I didn't have like 56 things to do. I usually had one thing. I wanted to talk about beginnings or endings or I wanted to talk about imagery or I wanted to talk about how you take a dry fact like a statistic from a budget and turn it into an interesting, dramatic moment in a piece. Some particular thing and then all the stuff around that would sort of coalesce like
00:29:19
Speaker
almost like crystallizing around it. And you have this constellation of things. But if the core would be that, and I still do student manuscript workshops that way, or I've got something very particular I'm after, and I want to get to that, whatever else we do.
00:29:33
Speaker
How did you not maybe get intimidated by the big block of time that you had when you had to say one thing of focus? You're like, I'm working on beginnings today, but I've got 60 minutes. That can seem a little bit overwhelming. So how did you approach that as a young teacher and then as you've honed that over the years?
00:29:57
Speaker
Well, it's a good question. And I sort of do it the way I do an interview. When I go to interview someone, I never think of it as a list of questions. I think of it as a conversation. I think of it as I'm going to approach somebody who probably up to that moment is a stranger, doesn't know me. I don't know them. And I'm hoping that if we talk long enough, they'll tell me something that I really want to know and I can really use. And then in talking to me, they will feel some sense of fulfillment that they got to articulate something that's on their mind.
00:30:27
Speaker
So I want it to be a transaction. I don't want to just kind of suck all the knowledge out of their head. Thank you very much. Now you've bared your soul. But when I do it, I do in fact have a list of things that if there's usually in an interview one big thing I want to get to and then there are probably other things that if we have time, I'd like to ding them on that and maybe go off in a different direction. And certainly as they're talking, I'm alert to what it is they're trying to tell me.
00:30:54
Speaker
so that even if I thought the interview was about X, it might turn out to be about Y. And if they say something really interesting, I have to be listening in a way that can help me take the interview in that direction. So I've always got fallback stuff. And I've always been of the opinion when you start an interview, it almost doesn't matter what anybody says. What matters is you start talking and that you talk in some way that
00:31:19
Speaker
that helps you figure out who each other are. You know, it turns out I've done some research on language and it turns out scientists have actually studied this. And some very large percentage of human conversation that they study is about absolutely nothing. It's what they call social grooming. It's just people talking about the weather, talking about having a nice day, talking about whatever trivial gossip is going on in their lives. And it's simply a way of saying we're connected, you're my friend, we're acquaintances, we're neighbors, what have you.
00:31:46
Speaker
And an interview in a class both have been in common, I think. In a class, I would go in and say, okay, we want to get to the beginning. But I also know that they've got some other concerns that are going to come up. And as the conversation goes on, I'm happy to let the conversation roam around a while and go off on certain tangents, and especially if we can provoke questions.
00:32:05
Speaker
Because I always want to be addressing what is on their mind and what my students think they need to talk about. But then I'll be circling on back to that first thing. And very often you find out that the way to talk about beginnings is to start with an ending. Or the way to talk about character is to talk about the situation that character is in. Or to talk about how you make a dry fact out of a budget. You say, well, what exactly is a budget? Let's look at the budget as a dramatic thing that expresses hope and intention and a belief about how the future is going to unfold.
00:32:36
Speaker
And so we back off from it and create a paradigm of context and then move to the other question later. So the question, the one question always contains a kind of constellation of other questions and other concerns. And so there's always a few things in your back pocket to get to.
00:32:51
Speaker
And when you bring up the social grooming and a lot of those conversational things that are a lot of kind of like routine type conversations that aren't very interesting on the surface. But what we ultimately want to do is get to what's very engaging and interesting and kinetic about somebody's life. So how do you penetrate that social grooming and get to the
00:33:19
Speaker
get to the meat that makes for interesting and gripping narrative. There are a lot of ways to do it. One way is just to keep talking. I found out long ago as a young, I don't even think they used the word then, but I always felt I was a cub reporter because I went into the journalist with no training at all. But I would talk to people and I found that if I just hung out with them long enough, they would eventually tell me something interesting, often something that they didn't mean to tell me.
Techniques for Deeper Interview Stories
00:33:43
Speaker
Not because it was a big expose, but often because
00:33:46
Speaker
They either didn't think I cared about it or they'd forgotten about it until the moment when I came up in the conversation or something triggered it and something else we talked about. So that was one thing. Another thing is, you know, where, where are you? If you're in a sterile environment and sometimes you have to sometimes an airport lounge meeting between planes, that's all you're going to get.
00:34:05
Speaker
But if you can be in someone's home where they have a picture of their family or a diploma or souvenir from some trip or whatever it is, every object in everybody's house has its own story and getting them to tell the story of why that object is on their shelf or why that painting is on their wall or where that Persian carpet came from or what have you, those things often lead to really intimate moments, story moments where people are telling you all about themselves. When I interviewed
00:34:33
Speaker
World War II soldiers from my book, Secret Soldiers, one of the last questions I always asked them was, did you bring anything home from the war? And I tried, as often as I could, I interviewed them at their home, or in many cases at their studios, because many were artists, and they would all, you know, they would all light up and say, oh yeah, I forgot, I got this thing up in my closet, and they would go bring home a rifle, or they would, one guy brought down a box of ammunition, German machine gun ammunition, in fact, he gave me a round.
00:35:00
Speaker
Another guy went upstairs and I heard him clattering around and he comes flying down the stairs and he's beaming and he's dressed in his Class A Army uniform from 1945 when he was mustered out and he said, look, it still fits. And it was delightful that those moments you see people as they actually are, and I've had so many people after an hour's conversation or spending half a day with them, you would end up with somebody in tears or with gales of laughter or with, you know, some
00:35:29
Speaker
you've just reached through and you know that whatever was artificial between you is gone and there's lots of hugging and lots of handshaking and a real encounter is taking place, one that you both feel good about. Yeah, when you get to that point, sometimes you forget that you're still in the process of trying to craft a story too. So it's almost like you have to remind yourself and remind them that there's still this other thing going on.
00:35:59
Speaker
that you do intend to write about them, whether it be fiction or non-fiction. Non-fiction is the one that can be really bruising if you're not careful. So how do you navigate that? Because when you have these conversations, there's an intimacy and a friendship that develops over time.
00:36:18
Speaker
But you're still ultimately, I hate to use the term, but like kind of using them for a story, even though you're getting to a very friendly, intimate level with them. It is a transaction. And luckily, I guess for me, I'm not in the business of doing exposé books or exposé pieces where I'm trying to nail somebody for stealing the money or whatever. But it is true that people's private stories are really precious. And so, for example, the World War II soldiers
00:36:47
Speaker
They were telling me very intimate details about life, not just in the Army, but afterwards. They were telling me many things that they had never even told their wives. I had one guy breaking down at a kitchen table at the end of the interview and he was in tears. He told me that his last job as a combat engineer after they disbanded the secret unit was to be the bulldozer driver who was pushing bodies into mass graves that concentrated camps.
00:37:14
Speaker
He had never told his wife this. She came into the room and said, what did you do? What have you done? And she had been hovering all through the interview in the next room. And he had sort of banished her to talk to me privately. And he finally said it's OK. And he was sobbing. But she said, and then he told her what he just told me. And she said, now I know why he hasn't slept the night through since the war. And they'd been married, I think, 60 years at that point or thereabouts.
00:37:44
Speaker
You get at these moments like that, and there are things that never make it into a book or a piece. Where I can, I try to run things by somebody to say, especially if I'm not sure that they said a certain thing, or if I'm not sure about a fact, I'll say, here's what I'm doing.
00:38:00
Speaker
doing it. I want it to be accurate. So is this right? I'll either read it back to them. In some cases, I'll show them copies of it. I'm not a hard news journalist. And so showing the copy of my news story isn't really that taboo. When you're writing a book, you can negotiate that. But I like to think that they know that I'm not doing a hatchet job. And I'm going to be honest and as fair and just as humane as I can be.
00:38:26
Speaker
And that's hard sometimes. One of the things I hate doing is describing people who are still alive. I'm going to read it because almost nobody is ever happy with the way you describe them, unless you say, you know, she's beautiful, he's an Adonis, you know. I was talking about, I was writing about a friend of mine one time, and I said he had a Brooklyn accent, and he was upset. He said, I don't have a Brooklyn accent, it's Manhattan, you don't. I didn't know. I did to New York like one time.
00:38:56
Speaker
And people get upset when you say, oh, they're overweight or they're bald. They never get upset when you say they stole the money. It's always, you know. My hair's not really thinning. Yeah, when I was writing about my dad and tools of ignorance, I said he had a keg of a torso with ski pole legs. And he took issue. He's like, I'll have you know that a lot of people have told me I have great legs. I'm like, dad, I don't.
00:39:27
Speaker
I'm like, that's not the issue here. I'm much more comfortable writing about historical figures because then you can really pull out the stops and you're going by photographs and descriptions of people that wrote at the time, but they're not going to call you up and get mad. Yeah. When you were coming up and developing as a writer, who did you imitate on your way to finding your own voice?
Literary Influences and Craftsmanship
00:39:55
Speaker
I remember as a kid in high school, I think I was maybe a sophomore in high school, and I stayed up and watched the late show. The late show was a story called The Adventures of a Young Man, and it was based on Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. And Paul Newman actually played the battler, the punch drunk boxer, and there were lots of other stars in it. And I saw that it was based on those stories. I'd never heard of Hemingway. I walked into the university bookstore of my hometown in New York, Delaware, the next day, bought the Nick Adams stories, went home, read all of them,
00:40:24
Speaker
I thought, holy cow, these are real. And then I went out and pretty much bought every other thing Hemingway had ever written and began to read that. And then I branched off. And I thought, OK, what I can do here is there was clarity and there was a realness. It wasn't like reading Henry James or Silas Martin or all these things we read in high school, which felt like they belonged to England in some bygone era.
00:40:52
Speaker
And then I began, I discovered Joseph Heller, I discovered Ken Kesey, writers like that. And then later on, there were writers I met at Bredlof like Tim O'Brien, John Gardner, Ron Hansen. They were all just terrific writers. And so I began looking at a couple of things, one of what they wrote about, and then I began looking at how they crafted sentences. So if you look at a guy like Tim O'Brien, I mean, God,
00:41:17
Speaker
His sentences are almost like he's punching at you sometimes. They're beautiful, but they're just such a power there. I've known Tim now many years, and I see just how relentlessly is it revising his work. When he was bringing out the new edition of the things they carried,
00:41:38
Speaker
he decided that he'd use the word weird too many times. He went back through and edited the whole book again. This is 20 years after it came out or what have you. So the lesson that I learned was that this stuff doesn't happen by accident. Hemingway always talked about the drafting and taking things out. Of course, he had Ezra Pound looking over his shoulder to help him. But I began realizing that there was a significant amount of work that wasn't on the page, but that if he did it,
00:42:06
Speaker
it would be on the page because of what Hemingway is saying, the less is more, what you did off the page shows up. And I think that's really true. It's kind of the analogy, I guess the sports would be in those spring training games when all you're doing is feeling one ground right after another, hitting the cutoff man 200 times in a row, the pitcher's practicing the bunt, they're practicing the suicide squeeze from third. And then like five months later in the playoff game, somebody executes a bunt and it's perfect.
00:42:36
Speaker
That was because they did it 400 times down in Florida before they ever set a foot on a major league baseball field. The analogy with writing is the same thing. I learned it from those guys that if you look at early drafts of S. Scott Fitzgerald or other writers who are meant to be, you're taught are so elegant and so perfect, you realize how clumsy they were.
Mastery Through Repetition
00:42:57
Speaker
I pulled, when I was in Chicago at the library, I pulled out a bunch of Ernest Hemingway's earliest stories when he was a high school kid.
00:43:04
Speaker
And they read like, um, dangerous Dan McGrew. I mean, they're, you know, he, he jerked his hog leg and, you know, and, and the, and the, and it's the other guy thudding to the ground and going, Oh my God, I've been shot. I mean, is that, it wasn't, I, not quoting, but that was the kind of stuff it was. That was just the worst kind of men's pulp fiction. And he had written through that and gotten to something else. And that's what I was trying to do, you know, to get past the lurid, get past the purple to get past.
00:43:32
Speaker
all that stuff that you have to do while you're learning and get to the thing that's clean and powerful and that actually says exactly what you're trying to say.
00:43:42
Speaker
Yeah, you allude to that a lot in your latest book when you spoke with Walt Harrington when he was writing his book on the craftsman about how you do these dovetails over and over and over again. It just becomes internalized and it becomes a part of the muscle memory, but then it allows you to reach another level when that stuff becomes automatic. You know, just that fundamental stuff. I think that's exactly where you're kind of getting at through that repetition of the most basic fundamentals.
00:44:11
Speaker
you're able to retire in higher levels of mastery and craft that separates the good from the great. Yeah, and it begins with really simple things that you don't think of as being part of the art, like something as dumb as common usage or punctuation. I had a woman in a class some years back and she was a professional public relations person and she said, I have a confession to make.
00:44:35
Speaker
All these years, I've never known where columns belong, so I just look at my page and I kind of sprinkle them in like pepper, she said, so that they look sort of where they belong, but I'm never sure. And it caused her tremendous anxiety. Everything she wrote and sent out, she didn't know whether it was correct or whatever. And I sat her down and in five minutes said, well, here's some basic, the five rules that I use, and they pretty much cover about everything you're gonna need. And she said, that's it, that's all.
00:45:02
Speaker
And once she had those, and that was like doing the dovetails, you know, the commas are automatic, you don't even have to think about it. And then you can think about the stuff you really care about, and not whether the comma belongs there. And I think that's a lot of, I always say, every day of my life, I thank God for the Catholic nuns, of heading a school, they had diagramming sentences, which is a wonderfully visual way of knowing language and knowing syntax and knowing how you actually craft a sentence in a scene.
00:45:32
Speaker
and just drilling certain things into you. It's like the times tables. You don't have to sit and think, now, what is three times three again? And work it out in your head. You just want to know, because now you can do something else. It might be designing a new room in your house or whatever, and you're taking measurements. So you just have to know certain things and practice, practice, practice. All the great guitar solos in history come out of somebody knowing how to do a pentatonic scale on a minor scale and whatever other scales there are, and they're just mixing up the numbers.
00:46:02
Speaker
You work with a wide spectrum of students, mid-career, early career, pre-career, you name it. And on that spectrum, there are a lot of different goals, I imagine. Some people want books or magazine, careers, freelance, this, that, and the other. And at some point in there,
00:46:25
Speaker
A writer has to sort of navigate between delusion and belief in oneself. And how did you approach that line? And how do you help people through that, between that delusion that you need to push through the dark times?
00:46:47
Speaker
balanced with the belief that you have to keep going and maybe even push through something like those ugly drafts that Hemingway had. He had to have a belief, but he was, at that point, deluded. That's a great way of putting it. The first part of that is that you actually have to press people to say, what are your intentions for this? What is your goal? I say, look, when I do book reviews,
00:47:13
Speaker
I love reading the books, I love writing the reviews, but I don't want to spend my life editing them and going over the line edits again and again and again. I'll send it in. They can edit it any way they want to preserve the essential dignity of what I'm trying to say. I don't want them to change it, but if they need to cut a paragraph or space, so be it. I've got other things I need to be doing. I'm doing that because they give me a paycheck and maybe I like the notoriety of being in a certain publication. If I'm writing a book that I really love,
00:47:42
Speaker
then I'm doing that's a work of love and if I make money great if I don't great if I'm writing something more commercial then yeah I want there to be a paycheck attached I've done lots of script work and other kinds of work so that's the first thing then then you're navigating the two things that I think are essential to being a writer of any kind and one is you've got to be daring you've got to have that unshakable belief that you know what somebody's gonna publish a book someday it may as well be me somebody's gonna get into that magazine it may as well be me
00:48:11
Speaker
Not that it's easy, but if you said you wanted to be a dancer or a trombone player in a jazz quartet or a painter or any number of things, people would line up to tell you how impossible that is and all the better ways you could spend your life being a lawyer or something. But then you also have to have a kind of humility because it's the humility that helps you to learn. I can't tell you how many of the people I went to MFA school with
00:48:35
Speaker
who came in really good. I mean, they were already publishing and so forth. But they never really got any better. They never got beyond what they were already doing because they were already pretty good. Some of them are already very good. And they didn't stop and think, well, how do I get better? And I always thought, I suck at this. When I started, what a view was, and I'm trying to write fiction. And so everybody that could teach me anything, I was all ears. I wanted to know. And so I just had that attitude toward it.
00:49:04
Speaker
But I also had that kind of unshakable conviction that persistence being the guy who will keep on, as I tell my students, you went to the party, but there's writers all over America that stayed in their writing rooms tonight and they're working on their novel. What are you doing? And like, OK, maybe I shouldn't go to that party. At some point, you do have to have a work ethic and a resilience and a way of picking yourself up off the deck.
00:49:31
Speaker
My favorite conversation with John Gardner at Breadloaf in 1982 was the last year he was there before he was killed tragically. We were working together and he was looking at my stuff and he goes, I think you've got the soul of a novelist. I think you can do this. And I thought, oh man, he must be responding to my brilliant ideas and my lovely prose. And he said, no, I said, you've got the mentality of a peasant who will go out in the fields every day for 12 hours and just work and work and work and you also
00:50:03
Speaker
of the work. Well, talk about demystifying. Yeah, demystifying. But at the same time, it must have put a lot of gas in your tank to hear that from him at that time. Yeah, it did. And I always think, too, another paradigm
00:50:23
Speaker
that seems to apply. I met a guy named Jimmy Lai. We were doing a video shoot in Hong Kong years ago when the Brits were handing Hong Kong over to the Chinese. And we met Jimmy Lai, who lived on Victoria Peak, which is maybe the most exclusive address in the world. And he didn't just have an apartment. He had like a compound. You have ostriches walking around and ocelots and pens or whatever.
00:50:44
Speaker
And the most gorgeous view of Victoria Harbor, he was rumored at that point to be the richest man in Asia. Well, he had come to Hong Kong, I think he was five or six years old, as a refugee from mainland China, an orphan. And I think he either stole or somebody gave him a couple of t-shirts and he ended up selling them and using the money to buy more. And then he ended up having a t-shirt stand and then pretty soon he had several, then pretty soon he had a shop. And then pretty soon he was actually making t-shirts and pretty soon he had factories in China, which we visited.
00:51:14
Speaker
And I said, what's your business model? Who is your mentor? Who are you trying to emulate? And he said, well, I was a kid, and I knew nothing. And I knew I knew nothing. And if I set out to be the best, I knew I could never be that. So he said, what I cautiously set out to do as a kid was every day learn one thing that I could do the next day better. And then the day after that, another thing. And the day after that, another thing. And if I did enough of those days in a row, I would get better at this.
00:51:44
Speaker
And so over the years, yeah, he had gotten really, really a lot better at it. And I think that his satisfaction came not from the money per se, but from being successful in the model of how he ended up doing things. And I always think about that if you could just get a little bit better works in music wonderfully. You can do one thing you couldn't do yesterday, then tomorrow you do one more thing and pretty soon you look around and say, I'm pretty good at this.
Small Improvements Lead to Mastery
00:52:08
Speaker
Yeah, a friend of mine who I just anytime I sort of doubt the utility of social networks like I met this guy on Twitter and he's and then I kind of like brings me back to it because otherwise I would have never met this guy. His name is Joe Ferrero and he's a high school teacher, baseball coach and he has this thing of being one percent better every day. You know, do that one little thing and you know for me like I get a little
00:52:34
Speaker
notification from dictionary dot com on my phone every morning and it's the word of the day so i write down that word every day and i just
00:52:41
Speaker
That's one little thing. It makes the vocabulary a little better. And you come across cool words you never would ever come across, or reading a page out of Brian Garner's Modern American Usage, like just sharpening that saw just a little bit. I mean, you don't have to tackle the whole thing every day, but if you read a page or something out of it, like you said, that small incremental gain, you get a little bit better. And after five years, 10 years, you're gonna be pretty damn good if you just do that little bite every day.
00:53:11
Speaker
Well, sure, just imagine if you read one short poem every day, that means 365 poems. That means you've written, you know, that's probably five books of poetry you would read every year just by reading one short poem a day. Yeah, I think about all that. I also think that it's a great thing for a writer to, for anybody really, but for a writer in particular to get out of your comfort zone. And, you know, my kind of guiding ethic over the past few years has been I do projects that are interesting.
00:53:39
Speaker
And they're often interesting because it's something that I have never attempted. I remember the first time I was asked to do a video script. I'm like, yeah, that'd be great. And then I had to go back to my office and say, what the hell? What's that even about? And I had the entire wrong format and everything, but then I worked my way through it and ended up doing like 11
00:54:00
Speaker
And same thing, I did a radio piece. I was like, how do you write a radio drama? Nobody even does that anymore. There's not even models out there. And when they called me to do the Civil War series for the magazine, I said, you got me mixed up with somebody. You want me to write about the Civil War for four whole years during the Sesquicentennial. But I've got friends that are great Civil War stories, and I rattled off a few names. And they said, no, no.
00:54:27
Speaker
We want somebody who's ignorant, essentially. We want somebody to report something that they know nothing about and find out about it fresh. And I said, well, I'm your guy because I know nothing about the Civil War, except there was one, you know, happened sometime back. And so it put me in a position of having to go out and get, there's a huge learning curve because the stuff that I found, you know, new and exciting was stuff that anybody who'd actually looked at the Civil War already knew about.
00:54:55
Speaker
So I had to go several levels beyond that and start finding stories that had somehow gotten lost along the way.
00:55:03
Speaker
Brian Koppelman, who's this screenwriter, wrote rounders, among other things, show billions right now. He has this great quote. It's, what unifies every part of my journey is I always lead with my curiosity, obsession, or fascination. And when I was reading and finishing the art of creative research, that struck me as this, that must be what really drives so much of your work.
00:55:32
Speaker
Like, what triggers your need to pursue a story with that sense? And I feel like that compliment quote kind of sums up your approach to a lot of your work. Yeah, curiosity is just so huge.
00:55:48
Speaker
I'm always completely at a loss when I have students or I meet friends or people who just are not that interested in stuff. My problem is I'm interested in everything. If I pass a work site and there's a guy using a saw or a jackhammer, I'm like, how do you do that? I want to sit and watch it for an hour. Everybody I see, if we rest up, I want to interview them like, where are you going? Where are you coming from? What's up with the dog?
00:56:15
Speaker
And I think that's it's a good thing that then you've got to choose among things that you're interested in and so What I tend to do is I I scuffle around in the dirt a bit with new ideas and say okay Well, that's interesting and then I think I start making notes and I'll do a little software search I'll go on the internet see what's going on, you know at certain sites with it and I'll start I'll try to make myself drill down like why do you care about this and
00:56:39
Speaker
You know, when I did my novel, Cape Fear Rising, which is about a racial master here in Wilmington. I mean, yes, as a humane individual, I care about racial discrimination and especially a racial massacre. But then the story got more interesting to me when the whole thing was focused around a newspaper editor, a black newspaper editor named Alex Manley. So it was about a writer.
00:56:59
Speaker
And that was interesting, but then it got really interesting when it turned out it was really a kind of a coup d'etat. It was a failure of democracy. An election people didn't like and they overturned it by force of arms and nobody was ever called on the carpet about it. And I thought, okay, that's like three layers in. Now I've gotten to this thing that has to do with democracy and the rule of law. And I really, really care about that. You know, I think that that's where we're seeing a lot of stuff now where that's being challenged.
00:57:24
Speaker
And so once I figured out my story is about the failure of democracy. My story is about people who want to pretend we didn't fight the Civil War and they want to go back to the way it was. And so a lot of it is figuring out why you're interested. And sometimes it takes writing the whole project till you get there. Other times it's now I'm kind of getting this. I'm writing about music now and I've always loved music and I get it, but now I'm forced to sort of
00:57:52
Speaker
come to terms with why? Why does it matter? And it matters for a lot of really good reasons. It matters as a way of connecting, you know, you walk into a room or a campsite or a town hall or, you know, anywhere with a guitar and all of a sudden you've got 50 friends. And that that's interesting. But also the idea that
00:58:11
Speaker
You get to a certain age and everybody's telling you, well, for now on, it's downhill. You're going to have health issues. You know, your best days are behind you. And I don't really want to believe that, don't accept that. And so doing something new and bringing to fruition kind of the dream that a nine year old kid had or something all of a sudden becomes a way of rejuvenating your life and a kind of
00:58:32
Speaker
a different paradigm for viewing what you're going to do from here forward. So yeah, I think it's figuring out where that passion lies and not just saying, hey, that's really cool because pretty much everything's really cool. You look at them. Yeah, if someone gets interested in everything, which is great because all the ideas are out there and you can never say that there's a thing as writer's block, just look at the world.
00:58:57
Speaker
How do you finish things? If you're interested in everything, it's easy to get caught up in a new idea. So how do you tell people and how do you yourself, who's written so much and so extensively over many genres, how do you finish things before jumping to another project?
00:59:14
Speaker
It's tough because I generally have several things open at the same time, but I find that's good because there are times when you get to a point where you need a hiatus for something, you need to let something cool on the windowsill for a day or a week or a month before you go back to it. But I do, I've got a very disciplined work ethic and probably once again, this is Sister Marie Jones and Sister Marie Michael and Sister Marie Bernadette, all the old Franciscan nuns and they were finished what you start.
00:59:44
Speaker
So part of it, I think, comes in, if you choose a project wisely and you do sort of that initial research and pay some attention to why you're doing it, then you know that it will sustain you over the long haul. What you don't want to do is get 40 pages into something. You go, well, now what? What is this? I have no idea where to go next. And so a little bit of after the initial enthusiasm to step back a minute before you commit and say, OK, where is this going to come out? What's what am I looking at? What structure might it have?
01:00:12
Speaker
Even what genre am I going to be working in? I think you have to do that. And then, I'm a great one for putting things on a calendar. I mentioned that book, Cape Fear Rising. I took a year to research it and I basically wrote on my paper calendar, begin research on a certain day and research, start writing novel on another day, finish novel. And I pretty much stayed by my calendar so that I could look at it and see whether I was on pace to finish. And a recognition that
01:00:41
Speaker
How you end a thing really goes back to how you began it. What's the promise you made? What's the contract you made with the reader? What is the thing that's finally going? If you promised your reader we're going to take a road trip to LA, well, LA clearly is the ending point. And if you go somewhere else, it better be much more interesting than the LA destination that you promised. So part of it is just good old fashioned work ethic and getting things done. And some of it is innately my personality.
01:01:08
Speaker
As a writer, you have two conflicting things. One is, especially in the long form, you have to be willing to live with a mess. It's one reason I like a room to work in because I like to leave stuff spread out all over the place if I'm working. I don't have to put everything away at the end of the day, I just close the door and it's all here waiting where I left off. But I also like periodically to shelve everything, clean up the office, put paid to that and move on to something else. Mark Twain wrote something one time about
01:01:36
Speaker
the process after he finished the novel and about how, you know, he'd finish it, take the pages out, and then the maid would come in and tidy up and dust and get rid of all the garbage that had been accumulating, and that that was both a really happy day and a really sad day for him. But I find it, and it's both, but it's also the day when you think, okay, now I'm kind of clearing my palate for what comes next.
01:02:01
Speaker
And you write that to be a good writer, you have to be an accomplished daydreamer. And I really love that line because I think it just speaks to the creative spirit and just having
01:02:14
Speaker
letting your impulses kind of, or letting those dreams sort of guide, just guide your vision. And I wonder if, even from a young age, if you were always a daydreamer and that helped sort of inform the path that you went on as you got older.
01:02:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, definitely daydreaming is a big part of everything. I can remember one of the things my dad liked to do as a kid was to take us on weekends to visit historic sites. So we'd go to Gettysburg or Fort McHenry or to Valley Forge or the Daniel Boone Homestead or the Amish country. And I remember those long car trips this back in the day before air conditioned cars. And so he rolled down the window and I just remember staring out the window for hours as we did these trips and just enjoying it, just
01:03:02
Speaker
you know, looking at the farms, who lives there, what's going on, what's the story with that, and kind of making up stories in your head. And to some extent, I still do that. I mean, I guess to a very much extent. You know, I take the dog to the park most mornings, and we run her, and then we take a long walk together along the paths. And I'm not doing anything in particular. I'm just letting my mind wander, just letting whatever, you know, thought or image or impression comes into my mind.
01:03:27
Speaker
And often if I find myself stuck in a project, what I want to do is simply go sit up back and stare at the back marsh, take a walk, get on the bike and go, you know, do whatever. And you realize that kind of all the crap gets flushed out of your head. And, and also new ideas just start to percolate and what if start to take shape and ideas of how to maybe solve a problem just sort of pop up.
01:03:50
Speaker
like this little screen pop-ups, but you weren't really consciously thinking about it. And I think the advice the nuns always gave us again, they always said, you know, don't stay up late studying, close the books at your regular bedtime, whatever the exam is, and get up the next morning and take the exam, you'll be better off. And they're right.
01:04:08
Speaker
You know, the kind of all-nighter, and I guess, again, it's been borne out by scientists studying creativity. Apparently, it's really a bad idea to pull the all-nighter. Apparently, you are better off getting a good night's sleep and tackling it in the morning, partly because you're fresh and partly because you're, you know, your subconscious is actually continuing to work while you're asleep. And so you wake up and suddenly an image or idea
01:04:29
Speaker
is there that you never would have had otherwise. And you're not going to get it when you're all ragged out with 48 cups of coffee. Well, so much of the growth happens in the dead time. I think you probably noticed this while playing an instrument. It's just you hammer away for however long, and then you feel like you're not getting anywhere. And then the next day or two days later, you pick it up and you feel
01:04:55
Speaker
more proficient already and like, but what happened, you didn't even pick up the thing and the 12 to 24 hours and it just, it's starting to come to you. So it's in that dead space where you're, where you're passive, you're like passively subconsciously learning while letting, you know, just on a different level. So you're resting, but you're also, something is happening underneath the skin. Yeah. It's almost like it has to soak into your muscles somehow. Yeah.
01:05:22
Speaker
It has to have that time to do it in the same way that if you do a hard workout, it's never the next day you feel bad. It's two days later that you feel all the effects of that. And so, yeah, I think that's really important. And it's not dead time. I think that there's a whole lot we don't know about how we learn to do what we learn to do and how the mind works and how the body works. And we don't even know why we sleep.
01:05:47
Speaker
So I guess I have a generalized faith that if it's time to go for a walk or it's time to take a nap, you know, time to put the headphones on and listen to a Gordon Bach, you know, or CD and just kind of let that flow over me, then it's time to do that. And good things will come out of it if I'm patient and I don't press.
01:06:04
Speaker
And it's one of the reasons I love if I'm doing a project where I can actually go somewhere, like we did in the Civil War project, I went to battlefield after battlefield, you know, the crater up in Petersburg or Gettysburg or the Fort Fisher down here. And for no particular reason, it's not like I'm taking notes on, you know, this particular position or trying to figure out where that regiment was. It's just kind of being there. You know, I remember walking the field of Gettysburg in dawn and
01:06:31
Speaker
you know, as the mystic sort of smoking up off of a field and it's just a feeling that infuses you and you start to understand at a very different level stuff that isn't, it's not informational in a traditional way, it's informational maybe in a kind of metaphysical or existential or emotional way.
01:06:50
Speaker
And that's just sort of from being there. It's in the air. It's from the effect of feeling the steps in your feet as you walk battle road up by Lexington and Concord and you realize how much you're actually climbing hills and coming down hills the whole time. And all that is really, for me, part of the excitement of research where you're just opening yourself to the world saying, okay, let me just let the world flow through me for a while. Let me just pay attention and be really present
01:07:18
Speaker
and just see where that gets see what what comes up as a result of that like when you were loading that so revolutionary era musket and then you put yourself in in those shoes of uh... farm militia farmer and then loading this musket is taking for taking a long time the mule kick in your shoulder but then capturing this disciplined uniformed army marching at you it's just like well they talk about talk about pressure
01:07:45
Speaker
and facing that and like you probably couldn't quite have understood that as well as you did until you immerse yourself and put your boots on the ground. It always in history books a lot of things look really quaint to us you know we look at an old movie with Errol Flynn sword fighting and go that's really kind of neat you know then you realize
01:08:06
Speaker
that for, you know, 300 years the sword was whatever a gentleman carried because there were no police and they were at a moment's notice ready to kill somebody who tried to take their purse away from them or whatever. And in the case of the musket that we were always taught at school, these things were sort of unreliable and they couldn't hit much. I'm here to tell you, man, they can hit a lot. They punch a hole in the size of your thumb and then you put the bayonet and you think, oh yeah, bayonet is sort of an abstraction. You see them in these old paintings or whatever.
01:08:38
Speaker
This will go right through me and the next guy behind me. It makes it real in a way that it just isn't sometimes. When you're looking at books and even the greatest video or audio, it just doesn't bring it home completely. I still remember climbing up on Jacob's ladder on the side of a ship in the Cape Fear River and I'd seen those ships for years and years.
01:09:01
Speaker
But having to actually step across that little gap between the rail of the tugboat and the Jacob's ladder, hang on and climb up a couple of decks to get inside while this thing is swinging against us. And the hull is really hot, you know, it's just such a, and then it's vibrating and it's moving fast in the water. And it's really, really big. It's like grabbing a building that's going by and you know, you're, you just sort of jerked off your, uh, your, your arms are hanging on and your legs are there and you're dangling.
01:09:29
Speaker
And you never think about a ship again the same way, you just realize these are gigantic man-made moving objects. They're on a scale that you just can't get from a video. Yeah. And it's funny, it's hard to believe, but 11 years ago, in a writer's chronicle, you wrote a piece, you know, The Art of Creative Research.
01:09:50
Speaker
which I have the hard copy. I've had it all these years. And then I subsequently use that as a bookmark when I bought your creative non-fiction book about researching and crafting stories of real life.
Adventure in Research
01:10:03
Speaker
And now this new book, Art of Creative Research, came out and it's just great to see
01:10:10
Speaker
see this obsession unfolding and I wonder where your obsession with research comes from. You don't write about it this extensively unless it really just kind of gnaws at you and you love it and you just totally geek out on this stuff. So I wonder where does that come from?
01:10:29
Speaker
I think I always have had an innate curiosity. That's part of it. And I've always wanted, I always had as my heroes, the great explorers of history, you know, the Captain Cooks and the Vasco the Gammas and the Lewis and Clark's and all the people, you know, Joshua Slocum sailing alone around the world. You know, those guys always excited me. And when I had out of college, I was very lucky to get a job at a very small newspaper, weekly newspaper.
01:10:57
Speaker
And actually my ignorance, again, I think was helpful. I didn't have any J school training. I didn't even had even taken a journalism class. I didn't know the first thing about interviewing. I didn't know about three sources and all that kind of stuff. But I did have colleagues who were pretty good and they taught me things. But what I really loved was they gave me this magical thing called a press pass.
01:11:18
Speaker
And so if I went to an accident, the police would actually lift up that tape and let me near it. If I went to a show, they would let me backstage. If I, you know, I went to the rodeo and I said, frame of bulls, you know, the guy went to the circus and got to perform at it. And I was like, holy cow, this is like my ticket into all that secret world behind the scenes. And I think I always think a really great nonfiction book in particular, but a novel does it too, probably.
01:11:45
Speaker
lets the reader into the secret backstage world, whatever it is, and says, here's some cool stuff that you don't know, and it's just so cool, you gotta come with me and I'll show you. And I always felt like all those people standing out front of the theater didn't get to go back into the dressing room and talk to the star. All those people who were at the circus for the matinee performance, they didn't get to see the elephants raising the big top if I am the way I did. And all that stuff,
01:12:15
Speaker
is really, really, to me, exciting. And I think I always tell my wife that my dog has one job in life. It's to make me feel nine years old. And that's sort of what research does for me. I always have this reaction, how cool is that? Before I have a real professional and start saying, well, now let's talk about how you do that and what it means. But I always start with how cool is that? That's kind of the place that gets me going.
01:12:43
Speaker
And so part of this innate curiosity, and it was getting that early glimpse that you can go behind the scenes. And even at a press pass, mostly, if you just ask in a nice way, nine times out of 10, my experience has been, they'll say, OK, come with me, and off you go. Do you see a lack of rigor among a lot of writers these days not willing to do this type of footwork and legwork?
01:13:12
Speaker
We'll put it this way. You can always tell when a writer is doing one or the other. Newspapers, for example, even on a little weekly paper, I was not really ever expected to be in the office except when I was actually writing a story. Nowadays, on a daily newspaper, mid-size, daily, you're probably going to be in the office all day because you're probably going to have to do six or seven little stories every day. They're going to be telephone quotes. They're not going to be being able to go to a place and do the really
01:13:40
Speaker
in-depth serious thing you're going to do. I think a lot of people who are writing in various genres and books are relying way too much on the internet.
01:13:51
Speaker
which is a really problematic resource. On the one hand, it's magic. It can tell you things you need to know. It can point you in directions. But boy, you really got to backcheck those sources and you got to pull the wiring and see where it leads because very often it leads to a feedback loop where you basically have something that's wrong. It's just being endlessly repeated and augmented in this sort of, well, essentially a feedback loop. So I think that's an issue.
01:14:18
Speaker
I actually have probably more trouble with the lack of really good editorial oversight. I read book after book that just has such sloppiness in it. And I think, you know, wasn't anybody paying attention to this? The editor's not serving the writer by, you know, letting some of the stuff get in. And also the editor's not serving the writer by asking questions like, wait a minute, how do you know this? You need to explain this better. Where did this come from? You know, there's got to be an element of that.
01:14:45
Speaker
One of the surprising things you find out when you write books is that unlike magazines, book publishers have no fact checkers. They just expect that whatever you're giving them, if you call it nonfiction, you know, until there's a lawsuit or until somebody outs you on a talk show or something, then it must be right. So I think the attention to facts and accuracy and to kind of the real truthfulness of what happened, what somebody said,
01:15:11
Speaker
how it played out in history. Those things have never been more important than they are right now. They have been like for the last four weeks. It's just so crucial to say actually it does matter if
01:15:23
Speaker
There was this thing that happened. If there was no massacre in Bowling Green, that changes everything. It did not happen.
Writing as a Side Hustle
01:15:30
Speaker
You can't then craft national policy on something that's actually a lie. You actually have got it. And it also dishonors all those real people who have found themselves the victim of violence of one kind or another. It just wipes that down, and it equates everything to a rhetorical exercise. And people are flesh and blood. They're not rhetorical exercise.
01:15:52
Speaker
Something that I love that your book assumes is that a lot of other people have
01:15:59
Speaker
another job of sorts whether that's being a student or another just a full-time job and then you can kind of write these stories as a side hustle or something supplementary like you know you say like make sure you get your time off from work or have these vacation days or or if you're going to an interesting place you know be sure to kind of had dig around for stories while you're there anyway and i wonder like uh... how did you come to that in this book is uh...
01:16:27
Speaker
as a way of giving people permission to create things even if it's not their primary vocation or if it's just another part of who they are like it's not you're not like Tracy kid or just just writing books or something like that there are these other facets to your life.
Professional Writing: Time and Expertise Needed
01:16:47
Speaker
Sure and part of that comes from watching students over the years do these really remarkable projects and knowing that
01:16:54
Speaker
You know, some of them are going to make it as writers and want to. Others, you know, they really don't want to. They want to be a biologist or whatever. But in the meantime, they really have this cool essay they want to write about, you know, conifers or something. And so you have to, again, judge what their intentions are. But you're realizing that
01:17:11
Speaker
any profession that is outside the mainstream that has to do with the arts that has to do with anything daring or unusual takes a while to get your legs under you unless you're very very lucky and right out of the box you know you hit a home run but typically even when it looks like people are overnight sensation you don't see all the groundwork that they've done over the years to get there so part of it is a recognition that you may be starting on something that may take you a while to get to
01:17:38
Speaker
But I've worked so much over the years with architects and doctors and lawyers and people who are working for public service in the State Department realm or something. They do have day jobs and they love their day jobs, but they also have a well of expertise that comes from their day job. Paul Austin, who I work with, is a wonderful writer. He's also an emergency room surgeon and a doctor.
01:18:01
Speaker
And he's not going to stop being a doctor because he loves it. But he's also really keen to write stories about what it means to be a doctor. And I think in many ways, those kinds of writers, to me, are the most interesting because they bring something to the work that is a whole separate expertise than just
Importance of Interview Skills
01:18:20
Speaker
writing. And I say just writing, writing is a whole expertise on its own. But it does bring something to the party that makes a very interesting mind to spend time with.
01:18:31
Speaker
And you spend a lot of time in the book talking about the art of the interview and cultivating that experience. And I wonder, did you spend a lot of time there because you noticed a weakness among a lot of people that you want to see strengthen? And maybe as sort of a follow-up to that too, was that something that you saw as a weakness in your own research and reporting that you were looking to
01:19:00
Speaker
over the course of hundreds upon hundreds of these interactions? Yeah, I mean my wife Jill would laugh whenever I say this, but I'm essentially an introvert.
01:19:11
Speaker
I remember being a reporter and the thing I hated the most always, and I still hate it, is making a cold call, dialing the number of some stranger who you want to talk to. And when they pick up the other end of the line, you have about 10 seconds to figure out how to make yourself appear to them as someone they want to talk to so that they'll sit on the line. And it always felt to me like calling up girls in high school and their father answers.
01:19:40
Speaker
There's never a good outcome. So part of it is that at some point you just have to knock on that closed door, you have to call that person up. I think it's much easier now when you can actually tickle somebody with an email.
01:19:53
Speaker
Facebook message or something and just say hey you don't know me but I'd love to talk to you because that can set the stage for kind of a soft entry into something and they can get back to you at their leisure and then you can set up a time and that's a little easier than just the cold call but sometimes you just have to go to
Listening Without Judgment
01:20:09
Speaker
a place and walk into a room or knock on a door or go into an office and say hi hi I'm here to talk to mr. Smith or mrs. Jones and
01:20:17
Speaker
They don't know I'm coming but I'd love to speak to them if they're here. So part of it is that I think it's a hard thing to do for many of us and therefore you need to recognize right up front that it's a really important thing to learn how to do. Because when you think about it, what's happening is these people are all your teachers. They know stuff.
01:20:36
Speaker
very interesting stuff, often stuff that only they know because it's private or personal or because they have a specialized expertise and they are going to teach you what they know. They're going to tell you about it. So it's useful for that. It's also, I think, really important that we learn how to have conversations again.
01:20:56
Speaker
I love being in a room with smart people, you know, whether it's a classroom or around a dinner table or, you know, my favorite bar and where people are talking about ideas and they're sharing work and they're, you know, talking about a play or a movie they've seen, or they're talking politics, but not just us or against them. They're talking about political nuance, mixing in history and what have you. And I think as a culture, and maybe the internet age has hastened this, but it feels like we often don't know how to have conversations.
01:21:23
Speaker
And so learning how to interview is essentially learning how to have a conversation, which begins with respecting the person you're talking to. You're not there to judge them. And I think in human interaction, that's really hard to do. I remember sitting with that old moonshiner, who was the best cursor I ever met my whole life. And he wouldn't let me record him, so most of it is so idiomatic I've lost it. But he was also fiercely racist. He was, you know, Obama. Oh, god, the stuff he said about Obama and Hillary and the rest.
01:21:53
Speaker
And yet, I wasn't there to talk to him about that. I was there to talk to him about how he made good corn whiskey, which he really knew how to do. And I tasted some of his corn whiskey, so I know. And he was funny. He told jokes. And so even though he's not the kind of guy that I would typically hang out with and maybe count him among my intimate friends, I'm really glad I met him. I probably seen him again. He invited me back to make a batch of moonshine. And the interviewer has to say, I'm not judging you. We're talking.
01:22:24
Speaker
I want you to have your complete say, and I'll push you to explain what you are saying, and I'll maybe goad you a little bit. Maybe I'll ask you questions that are difficult to answer. Maybe I'll just let you talk and tell your story, but I'm going to hear it first before I do anything else.
01:22:40
Speaker
I'm not going to shut you down and judge you. And I think that is a huge lesson, kind of a life lesson for our civics lesson here. But I think every writer has to figure that out because you won't learn if you're constantly judging it through a narrow lens. And you may be right to judge. I mean, as a human being,
01:22:57
Speaker
you might be right to say that person is sexist or racist or that person is crude or what have you but that's got no place in what you're doing in the interview which doesn't mean by the way that you can't call them on certain things and ask them about it you know and you say this some people hear that as racist but you say to them you know you can push you don't have to just sort of be namby-pamby about it but you do have to learn how to have a difficult sometimes
01:23:22
Speaker
enlightening conversation with a person.
Managing Interview Nerves
01:23:24
Speaker
And I think that is a skill that requires a lifetime. And I still think about the interviews that didn't go well, the ones that looked great, how to do better next time. Each time I go into a room, I always feel that kind of flutter of anticipation, that little bit of anxiety. Same as I feel, by the way, walking into a classroom, especially the beginning of the semester. And I always felt that if I didn't feel that little flutter anymore, I'd probably have to stop doing it.
01:23:48
Speaker
That flutter and that sense of nerves is something I feel before I speak to anybody, and it doesn't matter who they are, so even how long I've known them. There's an instance in your book, the artist says Ellsworth Kelly, am I getting that right? Ellsworth Kelly, yeah, wonderful.
01:24:06
Speaker
Yeah, and you were parked in your car outside on the curb for 15 minutes because you were nervous about approaching him and talking to him about this, and you write about that in the book. How do you dance with that fear and dance with those nerves and overcome it and use it? How do you deal with that? Because that's something I think a lot of people wrestle with.
01:24:35
Speaker
Well, it helps to set up a habit or routine and say, every time I do an interview, here's what I do. Here's how I prepare. Here's what I wear. Here's the first thing I say. Here's the last thing I say. And to create a framework for yourself. I mean, with the newspaper, the great advantage of that was to say, hi, I'm here from the weekly post. And people say, OK, you're not Philip. You're this guy, you're a reporter. And I'm really talking to the newspaper. So if you have an institutional affiliation, that kind of breaks that ice.
01:25:03
Speaker
So instead of that, I sort of decide, when I go to interview somebody, I'm not Philip Girard. I'm like Philip Girard, Incorporated. I'm working for the project, you know, how every movie creates its own corporation. So this is for the project, you know, Secret Soldiers, Incorporated or whatever. And then I have a certain set of things I do in the same way that I come in and close the door and start writing, you know, and I'm writing during the day.
01:25:29
Speaker
If I'm interviewing, I change all my batteries if I'm going to record anything. I make sure I've got fresh notebooks. I take more pens than I'll ever need because if one of them runs out of egg breaks, if I have to give it to somebody along the way or give it to my interview subject or whatever, I want to have an extra pen to pull out of my pocket. I do dumb things like that that are kind of like getting suited up for the game. Putting your pads on or whatever.
01:25:55
Speaker
And again, I think of the first thing I'm going to say, I say, when I walk in, what am I going to say? And typically it's easy, it's like, hi, so glad you could see me, it's very gracious of you to make time. It's just some kind of polite thing. And sometimes it's not, sometimes it's different, but I always sort of know, you know, I kind of envision when I get there, what it's going to be like.
01:26:16
Speaker
And often it's not. Often the people that you're most intimidated by turn out to be the easiest people. Bill Blass, I think I heard about in the book. So famous, so guarded by so many layers of people who are there to insulate him from people that want things from him, which is thousands of people in those days. And walking in and finding the most gracious, easygoing guy in the world and sitting down and feeling like he was the uncle I'd known for 25 years.
01:26:47
Speaker
And so there's that. But then I think you fall back on your training. The naval avigators have it right. They say you don't rise to the occasion. You think you will. What you'll do is default to the level of your training. And so I say, OK, I've done this before. What did I do right and wrong? OK, let's make sure I do that right this time. And here's how it usually works. And then I do another exercise. I always think, what's the worst that can happen?
01:27:16
Speaker
If this turns out to be a total fiasco, what will that look like? They'll throw you out. They'll throw a drink in your face. They'll scream at you. I haven't had all those done, but I've had people scream at me. I've had people shut the door of my face, slam it, in fact.
01:27:33
Speaker
But if you're envisioning it ahead of time, then when it happens, you go, well, that happened. That was on the menu, so what's plan B, and then you move on. And it doesn't happen that much. Typically, you get a qualified success of some kind, and especially if
01:27:50
Speaker
You always say, hey, when I get home and look at my notes, I know I'm going to have done some dumb thing and left something out. Can I call you or email you or text you? Or how would you prefer I get in touch with you? And most people say, oh yeah, sure, here's my number or whatever. Or don't call me on Tuesday, I'll be away. But on Wednesday, I'll be back. Or you know, they'll have their own thing. But it does leave the door open and takes the pressure off so you get home and realize, oh my god, I forgot to ask that crucial fact. How do I call them again and explain that? Well, they're ready for your call.
01:28:19
Speaker
They're not surprised when you call the guy, well, hey, good to see you again. What's going on? And you say, that's just one thing I wanted to clarify. And then it becomes a really easy kind of conversation. So again, it's those little tricks that just trick you into having the courage to do what you want to do. I mean, you really do want to talk to them. And usually three minutes into any interview, I'm loving and I'm having a great time. We're laughing and talking and sharing and all the rest of it. But that knock on the door, that first phone call, that first moment when you see them
01:28:50
Speaker
You got to get past that and you got to remind yourself that in the past you did get past that. My mother taught me a trick when I was a teenager and I'd be going through one trial after another.
01:29:02
Speaker
And she sat me down one minute and she said, okay, what you have to do is imagine this is over and you're looking back on it. You failed that exam or that girl dumped you or you lost the big game or whatever it was. Or maybe you won the big game. What's it going to mean to you? How do you feel about it? And what are you doing in your life at the moment you're looking back on it? And it really helped me get perspective on a lot of things. So that if you're in a really bad moment, you think, well, okay, tomorrow morning I'll be doing something different. I'll be over here with this other person and it'll all be okay.
01:29:32
Speaker
you know eventually we'll get where we're hiking and there'll be a shelter and a campfire and I'll get warm and have a meal you know whatever the case may be and interviews are like that if you know if you're in excruciating silence and it's like pulling teeth and you know you're you're pitching every kind of subject you can imagine and all you're getting is yeah no maybe you just party it goes out of your body for a minute goes well
01:29:59
Speaker
Waiting in hope for me is a bottle of single malt scotch and a beautiful wife and a dog. My kid. So that's where I'm going. I'm done here.
Debating Recorders in Interviews
01:30:09
Speaker
And with recording, a lot of people are, I think, they're kind of polarized on voice recorders, digital recorders, tape recorders. I know John McPhee is notoriously against them, his whole career, because he thinks they distort. But I kind of see them as a catch-all and a guard against
01:30:32
Speaker
bad penmanship, especially with me, that's for sure. And you defend them with Rager in the book.
01:30:44
Speaker
Yeah. How did, how did you come to that and how did, have you wrestled with that in the past? Like wanting to be like, say like Tom French, who just uses Greg shorthand or just your own, your own shorthand or whatever. Um, like, how did you come to using, uh, and defending the recorder? And I'll say I'm on, I'm on board with it. Cause I, I just know, I know myself and I know I need it. And I wonder how you came to that.
01:31:08
Speaker
Well, I'll say about Tom French. He's a terrific interviewer and I know that his shorthand is really accurate because I've seen him do an interview and then heard him read back the transcript from his notes. But he came to terms with that because he really was after accuracy and his interviews tend to be pretty dynamic, pretty much in motion, where he's hanging around the zoo all day and you can't keep a tape recorder going for 10 hours a day for how many months he was there.
01:31:36
Speaker
I think it's important, I think accuracy is really important, and I think one of the problems is, one of the first places where those little tricky fictional things enter the work, if you're doing non-fiction, is you hear the quote the way you wanted to hear it. It's a little bit more dressed up, it's a little bit cooler, and it's not like you're saying to yourself, I'm going to falsify this or distort it, but you do have a tendency
01:32:05
Speaker
in the same way when we come home and tell our husband and wife, partner, what went on today. I was at the motor vehicle. You would believe what this guy said. Well, it's not accurate when you're reporting what that guy said. You're reporting how you heard what he said. Yeah, and if there are like potholes in that street of what you're hearing, you tend to fill it in with the tar of your own vocabulary. Yeah, I think that's true.
01:32:30
Speaker
And I will say, when I hear that argument, and John McPhee is old school, I have a feeling if you came of age when tape recorders were very clunky things, weighed five pounds, and they were the elephant in the room, and he did a lot of dynamic work and looking for a ship or being in a birch bark canoe or whatever, I think it probably was extremely difficult. Also, when you're doing immersion work where you're with somebody day after day for months on end, I think it's very hard to just sort of
01:32:59
Speaker
Grab a tape recorder to say well today We're recording although there may be a place where you work that in for a more formal kind of interview about certain things But I think often want to hear writers say well, I don't I don't interview it kind of distorts the process Sometimes what I'm hearing is they're kind of too lazy to do it And I get it transcription is just one of the most thankless things until it's not until at the moment I remember transcribing
01:33:26
Speaker
this guy, this veteran I interviewed, and we were at a coffee shop, which was not my first choice. But we were down at the Holiday Inn outside of Miami. And all of a sudden, in the kitchen, they were doing some work in here, like some kind of a tool. And he literally dove under the booth. And I hear this on the tape, and I'm remembering, yes. And then he launches into a story about being on the line during the Battle of the Bulge.
01:33:50
Speaker
And the way the Germans used to use the tracer bullets to get GIs to stick their heads up, and then the next machine gun would go low and saw them off. And it was a really big emotional moment in the transcript. And I was able to say, oh, wow. Not only did I get him, but I got this noise in the background, which was the trigger for it. And it really helped me understand it. And then there are other times, if you just write down and you know something,
01:34:15
Speaker
You don't get the context. I always show my students a clip from that movie of my cousin Vinnie. I don't know if you know it. What's his name? Rob Machio is in the police station and the guys sing. And then you killed the clerk and he goes, I shot the clerk? I shot the clerk. And they read it back and forth. I shot the clerk. I shot the clerk.
01:34:36
Speaker
And what's missing is you don't have the tape recording of it and the audio is everything because it tells you, was somebody being ironic? Were they being funny? Were they being serious? Were they being earnest? Were they lying to you? You can pick all that up in the tone and by the way, you'll hear all those things you didn't hear. You'll hear the bird song in the background. You'll hear the waitress calling an order and you'll hear
01:35:00
Speaker
somebody else at the next table talking about their marriage breakup or something. All these things that may or may not be part of your project if you're a novelist, they may fit in beautifully if you're working on non-fiction maybe or maybe not, but they do give you a much more three-dimensional picture than just the scribbles in your notebook. So when, and I don't always use it, sometimes people will not let me use it, but when I can I try to.
01:35:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think I read an interview with John Krakauer. It's in the New New Journalism by Boynton. I think he views it. You have your recorder, but think of all these tools like a photographer having different lenses. It's just another aspect that you can use. Using a recorder,
01:35:48
Speaker
It doesn't make sense a lot of the time, but for instance, when I was following a horse trainer around a shed row for like an hour as he's cooling out a horse, it helped to have a recorder and just following him around as he's talking and talking and talking. But you can't be writing everything down. So it's kind of like that. You want to have it there in case you need it. And it's just, why not have every tool in your Batman utility belt? Exactly. And it means that if the tape recorder is running,
01:36:17
Speaker
then you don't necessarily have to take notes over all that. You can be looking around and kind of thinking about other things and taking notes about what they look like, the ambiance of the place, something else happening in the background, all the things that are going to be invisible of all you're doing is scribbling down kind of a transcript of what they say. So yeah, I think that's a good way to think about it. I'm trying to make that clear in the book that there are tools and
01:36:40
Speaker
Every job is going to require a different tool belt. Sometimes you're going to need a camera. Now we have smartphones. They've got pretty much everything built into them. So why not use what's built into them? You already have a camera. Instead of writing down the historical mark, we'll just take a picture of it. Do the things that help you. And always imagine that later on, especially in a long project, it might be
01:37:04
Speaker
six months before you open that interview again or look at those photographs or those notes on the place because in the meantime you've been busy out in the field doing other things and at that point you're gonna think oh man why wish my memory were just so much better than it is and
01:37:18
Speaker
It's like our driving. We all think we're better drivers than we are. Well, we sure all think our memories are so much better than they are. Our memories are like, you know, come on. They're really not that reliable. They're really reliable when you're in an emotional situation, usually for the first time. You're going to get the best, most serious impression. But if you interview 20 different people, it's hard keeping straight who said what in your memory. That's why you have notebooks and tape recorders and photographs and the rest of it.
01:37:46
Speaker
I was having just a couple more things and I'll let you get going, Philip, because you're being very, very generous with your time. I'm enjoying this. I appreciate it. Great, great. I am too. It's been a boatload of fun. I was speaking with a former ballerina a few months ago and I was like, I'm sort of obsessed with
01:38:07
Speaker
people who have this singular focus on a craft. And ballerinas are so singularly devoted, bodybuilders too. I'm kind of obsessed with those people who have this monkish devotion. And I was talking to her because so many of them
01:38:24
Speaker
there are so many dancers and like, how do you stand out? How do you make it? And she said, the ones who make it, they know who they are as an artist. He's like, they just, it's hard to define, but they just, they know who they are and they lean into those strengths. And those are the ones that tend to make it. And I was just so taken with that. And I wonder like, how did you as an artist like come to your,
01:38:49
Speaker
How did you learn to know who you were and then sort of lean into those strengths and develop as the artist and writer that you have become after years and years of that practice? I think that's a great question. I love that quote. I think that knowing who you are is probably why great lawyers are great lawyers and great architects are great architects.
01:39:14
Speaker
That is, they put aside all the other things, the expectations of other people, and the conventional ways of kind of getting approval, and they really know in their own mind when they will have succeeded. I think for me, it was incremental.
Understanding Artistic Identity
01:39:29
Speaker
The first part of that was learning. As I said, oh, I like to be the guy going behind the scenes. Okay, that's interesting. I didn't know that about myself. I just wrote a piece about being on the road when I was a kid in college.
01:39:43
Speaker
I would go on the road every summer, just take a few hundred dollars, stuff it in my pocket against emergencies and a backpack and a guitar and hitchhiker around the country. And I wrote about how that really taught me a lot about who I was. It taught me that I could be patient, but I wasn't, so I had to cultivate patience because there was a lot of waiting time. It taught me that I had a quick temper and that was not going to get me anywhere with anybody and I better get rid of that fast. I learned that I could
01:40:08
Speaker
put up with a lot of hardship. I didn't mind being really hot. I didn't mind baking in the sun and being rained on and all the rest of it. I could take that. I was in pretty good shape. I had stamina. I didn't mind if I went a day without food, as long as I had water. So I started to learn what my strengths were physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually, whatever. I figured out who the people were that I most liked to be around, who I trusted, because I didn't trust people innately. But once I trusted them, I trusted them all the way.
01:40:35
Speaker
I started kind of figuring out and maybe getting this thing that you don't even know until you have it, which is a kind of a confidence that you can go into a room full of strangers and you're going to be who you are. You're just not going to take on the coloration of the room, which most people do, frankly. I think they join a profession, they join a group, they join whatever, and they want to blend in. It's the most human thing in the world.
01:41:00
Speaker
But you you can blend in but also remain who you are So that's part of it learning as a writer then what I wanted to do and one of the things I want to do very early almost write books and So I said I'm gonna go somewhere where I can learn to do that because I thought the book was Was the kind of big thing was a way my mind worked It was the one place that was big enough where I could go in a lot of different directions and bring it all back The folk kind of organized it, but it wouldn't just be a short sort of short take and then out
01:41:28
Speaker
And again, I think who you are maybe, I don't know if it changes, but it certainly sharpens as you get older and you start figuring out what you're interested in. And I long ago figured out I was very interested in writing about community. Whether it's in novels, non-fiction, what have you, the community of soldiers together in the war, the community on Hatteras Island, in that novel, the community here in Wilmington disrupted by the racial violence.
01:41:54
Speaker
And I think part of the reason that I figured that out was at one point, and I do this periodically, now I lay my work out literally on a table and say, what am I writing about? And how is it connected? And I just do a little kind of thought experiment and I say, oh, I guess I didn't realize I'm so focused on this. Looks like I'm obsessed, in fact, with this idea. I've always been very, very interested in the nature of heroism, especially when it's ordinary people you don't expect to do something extraordinary in a moment of crisis I wrote about
01:42:23
Speaker
Two boys who were shipwrecking a sailboat going into Charleston Harbor in the middle of the night, swam from the jetty into Sullivan's Island, were found at 11 o'clock the next morning, having been in the water for, I think at that point, almost 12 hours, and they were still alive. They were just dying as they were found. And the coroner decided those boys could not have been in the water for 11 or 12 hours. They must have made the island
01:42:50
Speaker
rested and then gone back into the water searching for the one boy's father and the other boy's brother. And I thought if that's the case, and I wrote about this, what amazing heroism in the middle of the night for two boys, nobody would ever know the difference if they didn't do this. But if they in fact did that, which is what the coroner suggested that must have happened, then you got something that's extraordinary that goes to probably the biggest obsession I have, which is the mystery of human personality.
01:43:18
Speaker
who people are, why they do the things that they do, and how do you get to the bottom of a personality? You know, we're all so many different people during the course of the day. My students see me as a teacher, you know, to my wife, I'm a husband, to my dog, I'm the guy that gives the treats and takes it in the car, you know, and different people see you as different things. So how do you maintain an integrity and what's the key to doing that? So those are some of the things that I became obsessed with, and of course,
01:43:45
Speaker
One of the byproducts of having to figure out why you're writing about the things you're writing about is to say, well, who does that make me if that's what I care about? Who does that make me if I'm looking in the window seeing me watching this movie or reading that book or doing this hobby or whatever it is? What judgment would I make about myself and about my priorities and about my character and all the rest of it? And so you're constantly kind of moving to the outside and not constantly, but every so often you're moving from the outside and looking in.
01:44:15
Speaker
I always tell my students go to a place outside of your own house or apartment or look at it from a different perspective. If your neighbor lets you go up into their second floor and look over into your backyard or go across the street and look at your apartment house and your lighted window.
01:44:34
Speaker
You know, imagine what people are seeing when they're seeing you, and if that's who you want to be great, but if it's not who you want to be, then maybe you have to think about who you want to be and how to get there. And all that's mixed up in what you write, how you write about, and how well you write about. And what would you say is the biggest takeaway?
Engaging with the World for Writing Material
01:44:52
Speaker
You want readers and writers, whether they be poets, novelists, or non-fiction writers, what do you want them to take away from this book?
01:45:03
Speaker
I guess at the most basic level, what I would like is for somebody to read that book and say, well, I'm going to do it and just go out, interview somebody, go out to a place they haven't been before and write about it, go out and take notes watching someone do something interesting, just something that puts them out in the world, paying attention the way a writer pays attention and gives them that kind of the relief from the endless introspection.
01:45:27
Speaker
It's what I, when I teach research class here, basically what I do is I send all my students into the field. They have assignments and then they come and report back what they found and share their ideas and their methods. And then they go out again and do some more. And that's what I want. Okay, get out of the office, get out of the classroom. You know, go out there into the world, wherever the world is, and do something you haven't done before. Talk to somebody you haven't met before. Go to a place you haven't seen before and experience it and really be present for it.
01:45:54
Speaker
And you don't have to go far to get out of your own head. I think a lot of people think you might have to go to some exotic place, but jeez, you call them backyard narratives, because there are so many stories that are quite literally in your backyard. Oh, yeah, I think that's really important. And it also takes away an excuse, those people that say, well, I'd love to do a story, but I can't afford to do a John Krakauer do and go to Nepal and climb a mountain.
01:46:22
Speaker
So I guess I can't, but you can, you know, I can go out in my backyard right now and 50 feet from the house, there's a great white heron still thinking the marsh. You know, there's a great blue heron, the white ibis. There's a great horned owl that I heard last night across the way. So I could do a gigantic bird story without ever going off my front porch or back porch.
01:46:46
Speaker
Every ecological story in the world is contained in the salt marsh that backs up to my house. It has to do with everything from what the Army Corps is doing, which takes you to the connection with the Army Corps in South Dakota and whatever. It's all here. All the threads come right back to your door, and you just have to decide how far down that thread you want to go. But it takes away the excuse. There's literally in your backyard, literally on your front porch, down the street at the local coffee shop, wherever it is. There's something interesting.
01:47:14
Speaker
that's worth a story. And the fault is with you, not with the world if you can't find it. Yeah. I was going to end there, but I have one more. I can't let you get away with it. Because you were talking about the sequential nature of one door opens another, each domino knocks over another one.
01:47:35
Speaker
and you write about this too is it's really easy to get bogged down in the research and there's kind of progressive productive procrastination in that because you can just keep leaning into finding more information finding more information at what point do you say like enough's enough it's time to get writing and start powering through this you've done the work now it's time to do the next level of work
Balancing Research and Writing
01:48:01
Speaker
Yeah, I always think of it like a steeple chase. You know, all these riders are out in the woods, they've been chasing whenever all day, and then they're racing home. And the way they're doing it is by looking at the church steeple, which is the only thing they can see sticking up out of the village.
01:48:13
Speaker
And so they're racing toward it, and they're all taking a different path. They're going over hedges and through water and what have you. But if you can't look up and see the steeple, then you're sunk. And so every so often in my work, I try to look up and see the steeple and find out, OK, I went down this path. It's really cool and interesting. And I've spent five days on it. What's it got to do? Where's the steeple? Can I see it from here? So periodically, I check that.
01:48:38
Speaker
And then there's a point, you know, I'm a firm believer in setting deadlines for yourself. And so when I put down on my calendar, start writing the novel, start writing the book, that means you, you know, your research clock just ran out. Now that doesn't mean you're not going to maybe go back and do some supplemental research if you can, but really your budget just ran out for that. You know, now you're off the clock. If you do it, it's all on you. Now you're supposed to be writing. So that's another way to do it. And then I think there is a point at which,
01:49:07
Speaker
It comes to me in various ways at different projects. I'm thinking John Steinbeck always used to say that, you know, the journey, you said a journey out, the journey might be to go to California and back, but at a certain point, the journey's over and you know it. And if you continue on your preset, you know, itinerary, you're just going through the motions. And I think there's a point at which I almost feel like a sprung thinking.
01:49:31
Speaker
The journey is over. The research journey, which is a drama, which usually leads to some kind of climactic discoveries and things that just blow your mind and then propels you to the next phase. There's a moment when you think, you know, this is done. For me, it was with secret soldiers riding back in the car from Florida and suddenly just being overwhelmed with
01:49:52
Speaker
this emotion that I wasn't gonna see these guys again. I'd written about guys that were, the youngest was 74, the oldest was 96, I think, at that point. And I thought, I'm never gonna see these guys again. And I was, and then I said, the other part of that was, well, I'd better go home and start writing then. Because I want them to see this before they die. And in fact, as soon as the book came out, virtually within weeks, I started getting one card and phone call after another from widows and sons and daughters saying, you know, so and so has passed away, but he got to read your book.
01:50:21
Speaker
It was almost like many of them were waiting for somebody to know their story. So I always think there's a clock on a book. Commercially, somebody else might do it before you, but really more important is you've kind of got to where you really know it. It's time to write it. Stop fussing around when you find yourself endlessly sharpening your pencils and re-writing the stuff on your desk and time to dust that bookshelf. No, no, it's not. It's time to sit down.
01:50:48
Speaker
Awesome. Well, Philip, thank you so much for carving out some time to talk shop. This was a whole lot of fun. This has been great. I really appreciate it. Thanks so much, Brendan. You're welcome. We'll be in touch. Take care, Philip. OK. Bye-bye.
01:51:01
Speaker
Hey, what's this? An outro? Yeah, that's right. Thanks for listening, everybody. If you made it this far, all I ask for you is to share the episode, subscribe on iTunes, or Google Play Music, like the hashtag ZNF Podcast page, and follow me on Twitter. That's actually a lot of stuff, and if you could do a
01:51:47
Speaker
quarter of it, I'd be happy.
01:51:52
Speaker
Hey CNF-ers! Riff. Alright, well here we go again CNF-ers. This is CNF, the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, where I talk to badass artists about the craft of telling true stories. Today's guest is a repeat offender, first coming on the show for episode 38.
01:52:16
Speaker
Now it's episode 152. Welcome Philip Girard, author of The Last Battleground, The Civil War Comes to North Carolina, published by University of North Carolina Press, and the novel, Cape Fear Rising, published by Blair, which is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The book, the novel, that is. They kind of piggyback off each other.
01:52:41
Speaker
Always a pleasure having Phillip on the show. He's very insightful and one of the most interesting people I know. When I look at a life well-lived, I think of him. He's a man of many passions and he lives it, man. He really, really lives it.
01:52:58
Speaker
you know that several weeks ago i finished that significant draft of the baseball book had several beers in its honor delicious delicious sweet sweet beer got my edits back from my brilliant editor and woof
01:53:15
Speaker
While some progress was made, while I harbored hope I was near the end, I am dreadfully in the messy middle. I'm treading water in the middle of a choppy ocean. I'm getting hit in the face with white caps. And what's that? That's a great white shark that symbolizes the terror of having to dive deeper and ask my dad painful questions that he will no doubt hate me for. Kill me now, Jaws. Kill me now. I mean, it's all good.
01:53:44
Speaker
I hate it when people complain about writing. I've been that person. I hate myself for it. There's plenty of worse things out there. Complaining is this weird kind of commiserating thing, but it really doesn't do anybody any good. And I'm not complaining. I want to be clear. I'm just a bit scared is all. It's all tough, and maybe it needs to be a novel and not a memoir, but that feels cheap to me.
01:54:12
Speaker
I don't know.
01:54:38
Speaker
Reviews. Reviews are nice, man. And they just contribute to the overall packaging of the show. I have no idea if they elevate things, make it more visible. But what I do know is if someone stumbled across it and they see a lot of nice reviews, I don't know. They might download it. They might subscribe. They might join us, man. If you have a spare moment, please consider leaving one. Like this one by Winter Monk, titled Writer and Listener.
01:55:06
Speaker
I like this podcast so much, I'm a writer, and like another reviewer, I live in an isolated space, place.
01:55:15
Speaker
Some ways it's great, others it's lonely. This podcast helps with the lonely part and makes the great more great. These interviews are always absorbing, wide raging, thought provoking. Thank you, Brendan, for making this happen. That is freaking awesome. Thank you so, so much. This podcast was founded to appease my own loneliness and to grapple with my toxic resentments and jealousies. Leave a review and I just might read it on air.
01:55:45
Speaker
to give you cosmic fist bumps. Who doesn't like that? So like I said before, Philip Girard is here again. Check him out at PhilipGirard.com or check him out on Facebook. He's written several books, including one of my all-time faves titled, The Art of Creative Research, a Field Guide for Writers. I don't keep a lot of books, but I do keep this one.
01:56:08
Speaker
His latest book collection is just a bunch of great stories of Civil War vignettes that take place in and around North Carolina. It's a fantastic book that puts you on the scene in all its terribleness, sometimes funniness, sometimes heartwarmingness, but often gruesome. So join me in welcoming back to the show Mr. Philip Girard.
01:56:47
Speaker
What brings me to the page is the sense that there's something that's going to be discovered down the road. That there's this great unknown. It's kind of like beginning a road trip out toward unfamiliar country. You don't know exactly what you're going to find, but whatever it's going to be, it's going to be really exciting. And somehow or other, you'll make it work.
01:57:05
Speaker
And for that reason, it's also terrifying, I should add, is that there and decided to go on a project in the case of the Civil War book, The Last Battleground. I mean, that began as a conversation with a magazine editor who said, you want to do a piece in the Civil War, like a narrative piece. And I said, well, I don't nothing about the Civil War. I'm maybe the only white guy in the South who's not an expert in Civil War, you know. And she said, well, that's kind of we want somebody who's sort of ignorant of it. And I thought that was sort of funny, but true, because I always think that
01:57:33
Speaker
for a writer, ignorance and curiosity together really are the magic combination. And if you can go out there and figure out what you don't know and then really try to find out what you don't know and get excited by it, then something's going to come together. So I think about that, you know, things that I really want to know about. When I'm in a project like The Last Battleground, what I'm doing in that book that was reported twice, the first time I did it as a series of magazine pieces, there were 50 of them.
01:57:58
Speaker
And I was sort of breakneck because I had no lead up time. I was sort of diving right in with about a month to get the first thing going. So instead of being able to spend a leisurely year or two getting set to go. So that turned out to be both a mixed blessing in a way, because it wasn't my ideal way of starting a project.
01:58:16
Speaker
But on the other hand, as I was doing things and publishing them and they were sort of going live in the magazine on the website as I was working on the next one, all kinds of people contacted me with primary sources that were not available anywhere. I mean, these were shoeboxes full of old letters from some great grandfather who served in the Confederate Army or what have you. And one was a trove of love letters, which was perfect, you know.
01:58:38
Speaker
So that supplemental reading kind of came out of the blue. That was the world being kind to my project and developing a brand new archive along the way. So that was great. I read all the kind of Civil War experts, the people that I think were relevant to the things I was doing.
01:58:55
Speaker
writing about whether it was, you know, the songs and music of the Civil War or prison camps or the railroads or what have you. But I wasn't really looking at much creative work because I sort of wanted to do this as if I were reporting the war as it was happening outside, you know, going out there and pretending that I really was discovering for the first time but trying to report back to some, you know, purported audience that didn't know what was going on and I'd be the the finder who was going out there in the field with the regimental surgeon
01:59:24
Speaker
or with the guy racing into the darkness on a hand car to try to find out what happened to his captured son and meeting a train head on, or the nurses at New Bern who were Sisters of Mercy. I was going into all those places figuratively. And in a real way, imaginatively through all those primary documents, I must have read thousands of letters and diary excerpts and things that give you such a sense of immersion in it.
01:59:50
Speaker
that the story sort of becomes a retelling of their stories. The structure doesn't really enter into it much, although because of the nature of the first the series and the book being a series of individual stories that are knitted together through lots of kind of congruencies that they share, I didn't begin writing any of them until I kind of knew what my jumping off point was going to be.
02:00:13
Speaker
You know, and it's an old kind of journalism trick, get your lead first and then be able to build off of that. And discovering what the lead was, wasn't always easy. You know, sometimes it was very obvious, but other times not so obvious. Other times it was something that came much later in the process of trying to go through my notes. I would realize, oh no, the heart of the story lies here. It doesn't lie on the obvious thing. So there were discoveries all along the way. And I think I learned as much about, you know, reporting and researching.
02:00:42
Speaker
as I did about anything else I do in that book, certainly as much as I learned about the Civil War. So it was an education for me. Because there are so many, dozens and dozens of these very illustrative and evocative stories, did you find it a challenge that it was, because it wasn't this one continuous narrative following one set of characters, that it was hard to start and restart constantly throughout the whole process?
02:01:08
Speaker
Oh, it was like writing a little novel each month when I was doing the series. And then I had the leisure to spend another, I guess it was almost two years, re-reporting things. And I'd go back in because what would happen, having done it for four years, I knew things at the end of that time about the first pieces I'd done that I did not know. Then I discovered connections among family members or among geographical things that had happened or through lines that had not been apparent until I had written for a year and a half or something. And so I was able to go back.
02:01:38
Speaker
and have the leisure to reorder things, to rereport things that I needed to find out more about and just to sort of play up some of those connections that were going on. So that was, that's actually a really great luxury for a writer to have going from a serial medium into a book medium to be able to take something and say, okay, I got to be better at this. I learned a lot. And now to try to make this thing cohere,
02:02:02
Speaker
I can kind of look at what I have and start seeing connections that might not have been obvious before. And so one of the things we try to do in the book was to make sure that the rhythm of it wasn't such that there was a whole bunch of long pieces, then shorter pieces, that it wasn't all like grim, grim, grim, and then comic relief, that there was some mixture of tempo and texture going on in the book, which I think was true of the war, by the way. I think it mimics the war. There was a sort of stop, start nature of it.
02:02:31
Speaker
It would be terrible during the spring when things got going, really terrible during the summer. And then by fall when the snow started falling and the northern reaches of Virginia and the mountains, things would slow down. And in winter camp, they'd be playing baseball and wrestling and cleaning their rifles, waiting for the warm weather. So there was a sort of stop and start seasonal nature to the war itself, which we try to capture in the book. But mainly it came down to personal stories and never losing sight of the fact that
02:03:00
Speaker
these people really did not know how things were going to turn out in their lives. And they were on for the true and terrible suspense of that for the four years that the war lasted.
02:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, like speaking of that, what was illuminating for me in reading it was how you had people that were in their regiments, but then they would like basically go home for the weekend and help on the farm and then go back to the battles. Lucky not get captured instead up to a post and shot. Yeah, there was a lot of them flowing. One of the things that I learned early on was just about every fact
02:03:36
Speaker
that everybody reported to be as true in any book or source. You could find five other sources that would contradict it. Something as simple as how many men reported for duty on a given day. Well, that was a fluid thing because some of them were in sick bay. Some of them were deserted. Some had just not been counted because they didn't come back till after lunch. You know, some of them had been visiting their cousin over the next company over and you never, you know, something as simple as how many people were there who got wounded or killed, what their names were, how they spelled those names.
02:04:05
Speaker
You know, those things are up for grabs, let alone the more interesting questions of motive and the more complicated ways that people moved around. It's the astonishing thing to me was, one of them at least, was that this war lasted only four years. We've been in Afghanistan, what 17 now going on 18.
02:04:25
Speaker
They had no mechanized vehicles. I mean, the US government had quickly consolidated railroads and gotten people moving around that way. In the South, not so much. I mean, they had some railroads, but they were pretty well broken down by about 1863 or early 1864. So people walked. I mean, they walked where they were going, and they covered thousands of miles. And they were often, if you were a regimental chaplain or a doctor or an officer, you might be going back and forth
02:04:53
Speaker
you know, like a ping pong ball all over the place from Northern Virginia back to South Carolina, North Carolina. And it's incredible just how much movement there was in a day when you did not have modern transportation. So, you know, those those two things, the being suspicious of every single fact somebody said they knew for sure, which is a great lesson for any nonfiction writer. And then realizing with some astonishment that we think of ourselves as being quite a mobile society, but
02:05:21
Speaker
Boy, they were really putting on some miles. And also given that the North had such a technological and often technical advantage, in the course of your research, how surprised were you that the war lasted as long as it did? It was something of a surprise, but if you look at generalship and leadership and political will, I think that was the difference.
02:05:49
Speaker
I mean, the United States Army was superbly trained by McClellan, who was their first general in chief. And yet he was timid and really didn't believe that they should go to war with the South at all. He was constantly hedging. He was constantly asking for more troops. And in the end, he ran against Lincoln for president. And the idea was that if he won, he would make a separate peace with the South and they would keep slavery. So his heart really wasn't in it at the beginning. And that accounts for an awful lot.
02:06:17
Speaker
the fire eating kind of battlefield generals that the Confederates had at the beginning of the war, people like Stonewall Jackson, even Joe Johnston, who ended up being part of the final chapter of the war. I mean, they were superb battlefield commanders. They weren't much on strategy. I mean, the whole war would have been very different had they fought it the way George Washington fought the revolution, which was always stay out of reach. Keep your army in being and don't care who has what city, just keep the army in being.
02:06:46
Speaker
that would have been a very different strategy and would have led the stalemate, which would have been then some kind of negotiated piece. But the other side of all the traveling was there was a terrific range of geography involved. I mean, all the way out to Texas and Tennessee and Kentucky, down south Louisiana, as far south as Florida, as far north as Gettysburg and places like that. So the geographical scale of this war was pretty immense for the day.
02:07:15
Speaker
And that accounts for partly why they did so much traveling, but also why it took so long to get some kind of a decision in the issue.
02:07:25
Speaker
In the course of your arranging of this, what was that process like for you as you were looking to iron out the helicopter view of this book? How it was going to look as it all stitched together? Sure. The short answer is read everything out loud. This was the actual policy of the magazine that published everything. They sit around once a month and each editor reads out loud everything that that editor is going to put in his or her section of the magazine.
02:07:52
Speaker
And if they come upon clunkiness or unmusicalness, they get rid of it, or they send it back to be edited or what have you. So that was very much on my mind with this book. And I was walking around the house a lot, sort of talking out loud to myself. But actually what I was doing was reading drafts of things. And it helped to remember something we often forget about history, which is that it has a soundtrack. And the way the 1860s sounded was very different from the way
02:08:21
Speaker
our time sounds. I mean there weren't all the noises of engines and airplanes and cars going by and highways but there was a lot of the kind of creakiness of harness and wagons going by and the rumble of all that and the noise the ships made and so forth but the tremendous noise of the war was another thing and right along with that something we I've never seen portrayed in pretty much any movie or
02:08:50
Speaker
documentary about the Civil War, which is just how much music was going on. I mean, they use music for everything. It was entertainment, but it was also a way to get the troops up and about. The Reveley was actually much more complicated than a bugle call. It involved drummers and horn players and all the rest of it. And they used it for command and control. They would literally have bands playing regiments into action on the battlefield.
02:09:14
Speaker
And sometimes you'd have the opposing bands playing a real battle of the bands while the men were actually fighting right in front of them. And I mean, one of the most tearing audio images I have in my mind, if that's a word, was when Pickett's men had gone off and charged across that field, and it was really a whole lot of North Carolinians were among them.
02:09:36
Speaker
when they came back all bloody and you know so many of them were dead and the ones who could make it back were kind of limping back all bloody and broken and the regiment was completely destroyed, the division was destroyed. There was a band under the trees playing near my god to thee as they filtered back across the battlefield and I think man you know you can't make that up and it's just so heartbreaking.
02:09:57
Speaker
And, of course, in camp they were singing every manner of body song. They were taking favorite songs and writing hugely dirty lyrics to it. So, it helped. One of the things I did was continually listen to a lot of players, Jay Unger and others who do Civil War era songs. And, you know, Weeping Sad and Lonely or LaRena or The Girl I Left Behind Me. And realizing what those songs meant when you were hearing them either on a battlefield or just after a battle or before a battle.
02:10:26
Speaker
or sitting around a parlor mourning some dead son or brother who never came home and trying to really live into the soundscape of that era. And I think and I hope that's reflected in the words that I chose to portray it. And I think it's sort of, it's almost soaked in that
02:10:44
Speaker
Yeah, and helping with that soaking in this material is that you employing the present tense to tell this because it gives us this immediacy that happened 150 plus years ago. So how conscious were you early in the process to make that decision to use that to bring us into these stories?
02:11:04
Speaker
Yeah, that was one of the first decisions. Present tense is not something that comes all that naturally to me. And I usually think of the past tense as being the default tense from writing most stories because it feels like the present tense, the story, even though it's past and for technical reasons, it's a lot easier to handle when you're looking at time completed before the action and so forth. But the idea was that this was really brand new, that I wasn't coming into this with the settled hindsight of historians. I spent their career studying this.
02:11:34
Speaker
And a lot of this was brand new to me and puzzled me and dazzled me and shocked me and, you know, depressed me and elated me and all those things. And the idea was to try to capture that immediacy. So that was an early conversation with the editors about just how we would do it. You know, that was a rule. Another rule was we were going to use North Carolina as a way of seeing the entire war. That was going to be our lens. So one way or another, every story.
02:11:59
Speaker
is related to North Carolina, even if it happens in Gettysburg or Florida or wherever else, because that was our way of distilling this gigantic, complicated, sprawling saga into something we get our arms around. And the other thing was that we didn't care much about generals. I mean, they're in there. You can't really get away from them, but they're in there in a minimal way. And this isn't really about
02:12:23
Speaker
setting out sand tables and showing which regiment attacked whom on what day and so forth. This is really about trying to figure out from the individual's point of view what the war meant and try to capture the personal side of it. What was so great about reading this book too was the fact that you do, you work almost quite literally on the ground. You're not looking at these big picture thematic things. You're actually like smelling the rotting corpses on Cemetery Ridge in Gettysburg.
02:12:52
Speaker
and hearing the bone saw, you know, it's, you're like, really put there and immersed in it. And like, how conscious of you were that to really bring us bring us on to the ground and and, and really ground the story instead of having this big helicopter view of it? Well, I was very conscious of that. And I always think when I'm writing a scene is, you know, what what are people feeling like, not just in a sense of their their
02:13:19
Speaker
their emotional feelings, but what are they actually touching? What does the ground under them feel like to them? Are they wet? Are they dry? Are they comfortable? Are they too hot, too cold? And so I hung out with reenactors, and they demonstrated how they did a banded charge. They showed how they loaded their weapons. I got to feel the fabric of the cloth that they wore and see the shoes they wore. I actually handled the surgical implements that were a doctor who specialized in historical medicine
02:13:50
Speaker
And he brought out his kit and I was able to handle the bone saw, went to a museum where they actually have an amputated bone of a leg that was taken off at the battlefield at Aversboro. So I really kind of got down and dirty. And whenever I could, I went to the place where things happened and walked the ground, you know, whether it was Gettysburg or going over to the cemetery outside of Salisbury Prison, where all those soldiers were buried in mass graves for Fisher climbing up on the parapets where the final assault was made.
02:14:20
Speaker
you know, and really, you know, feeling it in your legs, feeling, breathing the air, feeling the temperature of the air, being there in the rain or the sun or what have you, letting the story really inhabit you in a way that you just don't get sitting in an office looking at papers.
02:14:36
Speaker
You really get a sense of that. And I wonder for you, when you were, say, had the bone saw in your hand, what was that experience like for you to have such a visceral connection to this implement that is just such a sort of gruesome part of the four-year conflict?
02:15:00
Speaker
it is it's a special feeling it's a privileged feeling it is it's a little bit a little bit of a chill you know you you handle a bone saw and you know it's because of its age has been one that has probably taken off you know hundreds of limbs in its day uh the same as when you handle any kind of an old artifact and you realize that that this was a real part of a saga you know something happened with this and you know uh i don't
02:15:26
Speaker
I'm not a great believer in the occult, but I do feel that sometimes there is the kind of aura of what happened or what a thing was used for or where a thing happened that you can't help but feel, and maybe I just have an overactive imagination. But walking in the ground at Gettysburg in the early morning, watching the mist rise off of Cemetery Ridge, you sort of feel the presence of those ghosts there. You sort of feel like you get a different understanding.
02:15:55
Speaker
of what it was like to walk across that field that day. And I did that up at Kinston at the battlefield up there with a guy who specializes in recovering artifacts, and he's still finding them after all these years. And he was showing me how he could tell where a line of men stood, and it was that they had dropped bullets. These were unfired bullets.
02:16:18
Speaker
because they were standing there in the sleet, scared to death. They were firing up at an intense cannonade that was setting, you know, canister shot, which is like gigantic shotgun shells at them. And as they, as these slippery, you know, pellets came out of their hands, they would drop them. And you couldn't use them without getting down on all fours and hunting around for them in the mud, then cleaning them off. And by that time, you're dead. So you can tell where each regiment stood by the line of dropped mini balls. And it's something that never occurred to me before.
02:16:47
Speaker
And in that sense, it captures just the fear and the weather and the absolute rigidity of the line. These guys stood there all the while, you know, getting raked. And so that that brings things home to you in a different way than reading about or looking at those charts, which show battles of some kind of a chess game, you know, where the blue is here and the gray is there and they're always in neat.
02:17:12
Speaker
regiments and so forth. It wasn't that way. It was pretty much chaotic from the moment the first bullet was fired and people were mostly scared to death and they mostly did it anyway. And you write early in the book that to understand the long march of events in North Carolina from secession to surrender is to understand the Civil War. And so in what way did the North Carolina fully represent the totality of the war?
02:17:40
Speaker
In North Carolina, it turned out to be the perfect state if you were going to pick one. For one thing, it was a home front for a long time, but also a battleground. Part of it was occupied almost the entire war of the coast. It was never invaded from the north. It was invaded from the west, the east, and the south. Yet at the beginning of the war, the white population, which was about 600 and so of the 900,000 who lived here, were evenly divided. In 50-50, in fact, they voted against having a secession convention the first time around.
02:18:08
Speaker
And the other third, of course, was enslaved African-Americans and so-called free people of color, 30,000 or so of them. And so fully two thirds of the population was not for this war, not for secession, not for the Confederacy. So it begins as divided as the nation was. It is the place where the great surrender of the war happened. 90,000 men surrendered from Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina at the end of the war. So it becomes the place where
02:18:37
Speaker
real final political end of the war happens, not Appomattox, which was weeks into the past by that point. It of course propelled Andrew Johnson to the presidency who was a Raleigh native, so he was a North Carolinian. And you start looking at the tendrils of this and you realize it represents the division, it represents the sacrifice and the loss, it fielded regiments for both armies,
02:19:01
Speaker
It fielded black regiments. You know, freed slaves were in the US colored troops as they were called in those days. And then they came back and liberated their former homeland. You know, they were raiding the plantations along the Neustro River. They came down and participated in the final assault on Fort Fisher. One of them captured his old master on the battlefield and led him away gleefully to the Holy Land. You know, so it pretty much anything you want from that war from,
02:19:28
Speaker
the infrastructure of it, the railroads of it, the medical part of it, the logistics of it. And even Sherman, his great march happened in the Carolinas. He always said that everybody was infatuated with the march to the sea, but it was child's play compared with the other, the other being the 450 mile march from Savannah to Goldsboro and then to the surrender. So, you know, it became, especially in the months that closed the war,
02:19:54
Speaker
the place where everything that mattered was happening. The Confederate government in exile was here, Sherman was here, the last great fort guarding the last seaport was here and falling. And the whole impetus for the African-American troops, the USCT colored troops were here. So it becomes this place where the whole thing collapses on one state and it happened to be North Carolina because of geography.
02:20:21
Speaker
Were you surprised that there wasn't more unrest among the soldiers, given that they were fighting a war for the exempt slave owners, essentially, who were exempt from having to be in the army, and that basically they were fighting for someone else's capacity to own hundreds of slaves on their plantations? Were you surprised about that?
02:20:50
Speaker
Yeah, very early on, Governor Zebulun Vance, who was this towering, mythical governor who had been the colonel of the 26th North Carolina, the most storied regiment in the army, wiped out at Gettysburg. He is made governor by acclimation, practically, doesn't even campaign. And the first words out of his mouth, practically, after the Confederate government exempt slave owners is, he says, this war is a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. And there began a real frosty,
02:21:19
Speaker
rivalry between North Carolina and the government in Richmond. And in many respects, the North Carolina troops were always just as much at war with the Confederacy as they were with the US Army. And that continued throughout the war. And yes, the desertion rate rose, especially in the first flush of war, everybody was like, yeah, yeah, we're going to go off. It'll be over in six weeks, as they always say, home by Christmas, the typical cliche. And when that became clear that that wasn't going to happen,
02:21:49
Speaker
You start getting letters from farmwives and they're not only writing to their husbands, they're writing to the governor, which is why we have their letters because they've been preserved in the archives. And they're saying, send my husband home. The crops are rotting and my children are sick. We need him.
02:22:04
Speaker
Home Guard, which, by the way, nobody ever had a good word to say about any of the contemporaneous sources. They're bothering me, you know, they're trying to take away my land and so forth. And so as the war went on, more and more of the North Carolina troops were deserting from the Army of Northern Virginia to such an extent that, you know, Lee was completely up in arms about it. And his generals were constantly sending him memos saying, what are we going to do about these guys? And by late 1863,
02:22:33
Speaker
A lot of the Western counties in North Carolina had so many deserters that even the Provo Marshal wouldn't go in there, because these were armed groups of deserters who were not going to be taken back to the army. And they basically stayed out there for the duration of the war. So yeah, there was a lot of that going on. There were a lot of guys who were conscripted, did their duty, and at the same time moved heaven and earth to keep their younger brothers or sons out of the war. So yeah, there was not this sort of
02:23:03
Speaker
monolithic, let's go fight for the Confederacy feeling. There's a lot of people in there with very mixed motives, a lot of conscripts, a lot of desertion. And at the end of the war, it became a real slaughter as they began executing deserters in such numbers. They would either find them or as men would come back from their visit home, they would execute them anyway as a warning to others. And all this did was actually increase the desertion rate. So it was a problem, yeah.
02:23:32
Speaker
Jason, there was the one guy, what was it? Scape Gallows was his nickname. He survived the hanging and then he had to go fight again. He also went about hunting down everybody who had done him wrong. There was the other thing that I had not realized.
02:23:51
Speaker
was the war in the Western mountains was very much like what it had been during the revolution when the revolution in the South was the revolutionary war was fought mainly by Americans fighting other Americans, Tories versus Patriots, very few British troops actually involved. And that became the case
02:24:08
Speaker
in the mountains, you had all these sort of malicious home guards, self-styled unionist mobs and whatever. And depending on what county you're in and who your relatives were, you might be burned out by unionists or Confederates, you might be assassinated. It was a real dirty kind of feuding warfare. And I suspect in what seems to be true from the record is an awful lot of it was settling old feuds.
02:24:32
Speaker
Now there's a war on, we get to shoot the people we've always wanted to shoot under cover of their confederates and we're a unionist or vice versa. Over the course of you assembling all these stories, who were some of the characters that you were just really entertained and surprised that you stumbled across over the course of your research? Well, I loved Abraham Galloway. He's getting more famous now because historians are finally paying attention to him.
02:25:02
Speaker
But he's this illiterate guy. He's born a slave on the lower Cape Fear, lives in Smithville, which is now Southport. Escapes goes up to Philadelphia, becomes part of the Underground Railroad and the anti-slavery movement. He starts doing all kinds of very clandestine work on behalf of the Underground Railroad, going as far as Canada. When the war breaks out, he comes back to North Carolina. He becomes like the fixer, the go-to guy at the Freedmen's Colony at Roanoke Island, where they were congregating all the liberated black slaves.
02:25:32
Speaker
And basically tells the Union Army, you can't enlist these people unless you give them my terms. And that included things like educating their children while they were gone, feeding their wives and the families while they were gone, making sure they got paid as much as the white soldiers got paid. And the crucial one, which was never actually observed in the event was that if these black troops were captured, they would be treated as prisoners of war and not as escaped slaves. And of course, the Confederacy's policy was
02:26:00
Speaker
shoot the white officers that are commanding black troops and send the black troops to slavery. And so that they were, but that was out of the control of the Union Army to do. So that was someone, Rose Greenhouse, who was a spy for the Confederacy was the society matron living, you know, a few blocks from the White House in Washington. And it has this incredible saga where she's
02:26:23
Speaker
captured by Alan Pinkerton, the famous detective who's literally standing. He's got two of his guys boosting him up to her window on a rainy night, watching her have a tryst with a union officer, and him giving her plans, which turned out to be the plans for the what becomes known as the Battle of First Manassas Bull Run. And she is credited with helping that bring off that first grade Confederate victory. She's captured by Pinkerton,
02:26:50
Speaker
They put her in jail. They can't figure out what to do with her. They finally have to let her out. And even while she's in jail, first under house arrest and later in the capital prison, which was apparently a real hellhole, she's still busy sending out coded notes to her compatriots and giving away information. So finally, they let her go. They send her back south. And so she's no longer able to be a spy successfully because they know who she is. She goes to Europe, writes a book there about her captivity.
02:27:20
Speaker
sells it, and brings back the gold that she made from her royalties on a fast blockade runner. And then at the mouth of the Cape Fear River on a dark and rainy night, they run aground. And she insists on being set ashore, even though the weather's worsening, because she does not want to go back to prison. They think the US Naval blockade is coming down on them. And so she goes into a boat, but she's got this bag of gold chained to her, and she's wearing a heavy dress.
02:27:49
Speaker
The boat capsizes and they rescue everybody in the boat with her as she washes the shore for Fisher. And one of the women commented at her funeral, what a sad thing it was. Nobody grieved for her because she died in a place where no one knew her name. I liked Julius Lineback, the musician. There's this great Moravian brass band out in the Salem area. And he comes to realize he's working as a bookkeeper at one of the mills out there and he decides
02:28:19
Speaker
that everybody's getting conscripted. And he says in his diary, I didn't want to shoot anybody or get shot at. And so I can contrive this plan to enlist as a musician. So they get the whole band to enlist. His brother becomes their arranger, and they become the most famous band in the whole Confederate army. And in fact, they're General Lee's favorite band. They're actually let out of the regiment to come back and play for Governor Vance's inaugural. And at the end of the war, they're all captured.
02:28:46
Speaker
And most of them lose their instruments. They come back home. But the one thing that they bring back home is the sheet music, all the arrangements. So they were the only Confederate band to do so. And now it's all at the Moravian Music Society. So if you ever hear a reenactor band playing those old Confederate songs, you know, the Bonnie Blue Flag or what have you, they're all those arrangements. That's the only ones that are left.
02:29:08
Speaker
And so they actually contributed something amazing to the archive and how they kept that through their capture, captivity and subsequent repatriation is a small miracle in itself, but they did. You know, they were musicians and they weren't going to let their songbooks go. So those are some of the favorite characters. And I just love the fact that most of the ones I like were not all that connected to the fighting. You know, they were doing something. Thomas Fanning Wood was a surgeon.
02:29:39
Speaker
And to start with, he's just a guy working in a pharmacy. He witnesses his first shooting when a bunch of University of North Carolina ruffians come down and have a fight with a proprietor. And a gun fight erupts right in the middle of this pharmacy, and the proprietor is so badly wounded, he has to become the pharmacist for a while, and from there becomes interested in medicine. And by the time he enlists as a private soldier,
02:30:05
Speaker
The only way he gets to a hospital to study medicine is by coming down with fever because he drank money water out of a wheel run. And that gets him into a hospital where a doctor sees his potential and trains him up. And pretty soon he's right there in the battlefield, sawing off arms and legs with the best of him. Also the kind of unlikely trajectories of some of these people that started out in very obscure ways and then wound up being important way beyond maybe what they'd ever expected.
02:30:31
Speaker
When there was the conjoined twins? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was wild, too. And then when you really start unpacking the relationship and the fact that they both had separate families and all this, in a way, your imagination starts working and you're like, whoa, this is kind of weird. Well, it was the scandal of the day when Cheng and Engbacher settled. They were so tired of touring and they were so worn out by it. And they were men of great dignity.
02:30:59
Speaker
And they decided they wanted to be in a place where they'd be treated that way. And they were invited to come to North Carolina by someone they met while they were on tour. They came, they loved it. They bought a house, subsequently bought another bigger place. Then they bought a farm and built two houses on it so that they could each have their family for three days. And the deal was three days at one, then they get on a buggy and they go three days at the other. And the family stayed, but the guys moved. And so at any given time,
02:31:27
Speaker
you always had in the marriage bed, you always had three people. Right, right. And one of the other of their wives and they had a huge number of children. But they had, when they moved south and declared their allegiance to the Confederacy, you know, they were slave owners and their wealth was tied up in slaves. Another thing that I think most people don't realize is that at the start of the Civil War, most, the greatest economic asset in the US was slaves. There wasn't railroads or factories or farmland
02:31:56
Speaker
shipping, it was slaves. And so their wealth was tied up in slaves. And they were ruined by the war to such an extent that they had to go back on tour after the war. It really broke their health. And what I love is they had both been tested by many doctors over the years, and they had the same pulse, same heart rate. And as the war ended and they had to go back on tour, that changed. And they no longer had the same heart rate and the same pulse.
02:32:25
Speaker
They were growing physically different in ways that were sort of dangerous. And then when one of them had a stroke, the other one lies there thinking, you know, he's dead, now what do I do? It's a very tragic, strange, and heartbreaking personal story that comes out of the war. When did you, over the course of your research, stumble upon Nat Ramer as one of the first war correspondents, who was actually a soldier too?
02:32:54
Speaker
What I loved about that was that being a writer, of course, I was very interested in how the war was written. And my students are always fond of saying, well, just look it up, see what's in the newspaper
Confederate Correspondents
02:33:04
Speaker
about it. And I'm always saying, but yeah, that may not be the best, most accurate record. The papers were reporting that Atlanta had fallen two weeks before it did. They were reporting that Sherman had been assassinated. There's all kind of wild stuff that shows up in the newspapers.
02:33:20
Speaker
And what I loved about him, and he was like, most of the Confederate correspondents were actually in the army. And they were writing letters back home to their local newspapers or to some trusted person to be published in a local way. And his were then copied by other newspapers. But one of the things he was very careful to do was to enumerate the casualties, who was wounded and killed where and, you know, what their prognosis was and send all that home in a time when
02:33:47
Speaker
And it astonished me to figure this out, but there was no official notification of next of kin for anybody in either army. If your son was died or missing an action or wounded, there was nobody to send any notice back home to let them know that that had happened. And if you were lucky enough that a friend happened to be on furlough going home and could tell the news to your family, that was great. But so one of the things Raymer was doing was this amazing service, especially in the Confederate army when there were very few correspondence.
Simplicity in Writing About the Deceased
02:34:15
Speaker
With writing a book of this nature, do you find that this type of book that you find that you like dealing in dead people versus writing stories with live people? Well, one thing is they don't sue you very regularly. I think to some extent it is less complicated because whatever record you have is what you have. They're not going to do anything new.
02:34:44
Speaker
And so, you know, you're not going to write something and then feel regret that they've changed and now they've got a second act in their life. You can't, you know, take cognizance of. And you're not personally involved except in the way that emotionally, you know, their story moves you, but you're not, there's not a real time element. You know, everything has been settled. Whatever is going to happen has already happened. And that gives you a kind of tranquility, I guess I'd call it, in writing about them.
Complexities of Historical Writing
02:35:15
Speaker
that you can ponder it at your leisure. It's not like covering a murder trial like Truman Capote covering the trial in Kansas, where there's an outcome and so much depends on it. What will it be? And in real time, there are all kinds of emotional questions and legal questions coming up. When you're writing historically, you have the sense that the issues have been settled and yet probably don't understand what that settlement exactly was or what it meant.
02:35:43
Speaker
And so one of the jobs is to bring a new eye to this stuff and say what exactly happened there. And a lot of the conventional wisdom turns out not to really hold true. A lot of it seems to be a simplification. And just learning the fact that North Carolina was so divided, and it wasn't the only state that was divided, you know, it was West Virginia for a reason.
02:36:04
Speaker
It takes the kind of black and whiteness out of it. And you realize so much of it occurs in that middle ground of nuance where people's motives were complicated and their actions were complicated and difficult to sort out. And anybody who thinks that they can give you the clear eyed view of exactly what was happening in any given day is putting you on. You know, there's a lot that will never quite be known. I mean, I think there's still bodies at Gettysburg that will come to light.
02:36:30
Speaker
some farmer will be digging something to put a new foundation in and find them because there were so many that were never recovered of the thousands who fell. So there's still a lot of archives that are almost literally buried from that war and we'll learn more about them in the years to come.
Organizing Research for Historical Writing
02:36:47
Speaker
Given the amount of research you did for this book and the entire series, how are you going about organizing the research and organizing the notes so you could access it and have a full complement of tools to write these stories?
02:37:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. I typically, and for this project, certainly kept both an electronic file cabinet and a real file cabinet where I have a drawer with folders level, you know, that are labeled for every person or every event that I was writing about. And as I would find stuff, I would, you know, if I have photocopies of it, I put it in the hard copy. If I had electronic copies or facsimiles or links or what have you, I'd put them in the electronic file.
02:37:31
Speaker
And then when I was writing, I would be able to pull out all that stuff and then also cross reference because it would turn out that when you're writing about Gettysburg, that was a touchstone for so much of what happened. So many of the people I wrote about in other regards wound up there. And so, you know, you can you can kind of cross reference and check things. But yeah, keeping it straight, I always tell my students here, if you can't find it, you don't have it. I don't care. You know, you get this great document if you put it away somewhere and you can't find it.
02:37:59
Speaker
then it may as well be in the wind because you don't have it. So that level of organization and the challenge of it certainly was one of the big challenges of doing that project. And it did help that I started it off as a series so that I was doing kind of one at a time and accumulating them and then had the leisure to go back and reorder and recombine and so forth. Had I started the other way, it might have been a little more difficult.
02:38:25
Speaker
And what was the – and this could apply to any project. What kind of daily routine or daily rituals do you employ to work on these projects and thread them in around all the teaching you do as well? Well, I'm very good at compartmentalizing for the most part. So if it's a teaching day, I'm generally not writing.
02:38:45
Speaker
And on my writing days, I'm not answering my email from students or from other entities. What I'm trying to do is to say, I've got this time, and I actually literally would schedule it out on my electronic calendar and say, okay, on this day from three to seven, you're writing, or on this day, you're visiting this battlefield and taking notes. And I wouldn't start writing about anything until I had done two things, until I had accumulated a lot of material that I thought was really gonna be
02:39:13
Speaker
the meat of it that I could use. Not that I might have everything yet, but that I had enough to get started, and that I had my way into the material. You know, that I could write about railroads because I could write about one man who was killed in a bizarre railroad accident, who happened to be the pivotal railroad guy in the Confederacy at that point. But he was on that hand car racing in the dark across a bridge, meeting a locomotive head on in the dark because he was trying to find out about his son. So ultimately, it was a father.
02:39:42
Speaker
trying to figure out what was happening to his son. And that was my way into railroads. And the same was true for many other of the stories. I didn't just want to have a generic, you know, kind of overview. So even writing about Schengen and Bunker, the Siamese twins were so famous, I think I started out that by writing about the descendants of Paul Revere. You know, two of them died, one of Gettysburg, and I think one the other was at Antietam, if I'm not mistaken. So that
02:40:12
Speaker
to kind of get the idea that yeah, famous people and the descendants of famous people were involved in this too. And sometimes you get notoriety for being the first guy killed, even though you're obscure. And sometimes you get notoriety because you're already coming from an illustrious family and then you meet this tragic heroic end. And that becomes part of the story. So once I had a bulk of material, once I had a way into the story that I thought was going to stand up, it was not the typical way. And then I would start writing about that.
02:40:41
Speaker
typically try to let it sit, come back to it, let it sit, come back to it so that it wasn't just done in one big rush and then shipped off. And of course with the leisure of making into a book, I had the agonizing process of going to do it all over again and find out all the places where I felt like I'd followed short
Emotional Weight of Historical Research
02:40:59
Speaker
and see what I could do about those.
02:41:01
Speaker
When you feel overwhelmed or maybe unfocused, what are you doing to maybe get yourself back on track and make sure that you don't get too swamped in the glut of material you have? Yeah, I mean, I work in a little office here, or I close the door when I start to work. The only one allowed in here with me is my dog, Daisy Duke. She's an Australian Shepherd.
02:41:25
Speaker
And when she's had enough and wants to go out, she'll come nuzzle my leg and we'll go out. I have a little door off the office under the back deck and into the backyard, which fronts on Whiskey Creek. And we'll go out there and play around for a while and just kind of clear the air, clear my head. And that I find is good. And then, you know, I guess staying focused is sometimes putting it away and saying, you know, this is just, I'm overwhelmed today. And one of the things, by the way, that ambushed me a bit on this project was, especially as time went on,
02:41:56
Speaker
especially going back over it and turning into a book with the whole thing before me, was that I came away feeling a real kind of emotional attachment and almost a kind of a grief about this. I mean, in certain ways, it really weighed on me. And I had to come to terms with that. And that was something I had not expected, you know, you expect that when you're writing about, say, a school shooting or something, you know, current, but writing about something that happened 150 years ago, you don't expect
02:42:23
Speaker
to really feel kind of an emotionally heavy heart over the whole thing and yet I would read these stories and sometimes it would break my heart and I would just find myself like
Missed Opportunities Post-Civil War
02:42:32
Speaker
okay I need a break from this I need to go do something fun and go into the music room and play the guitar for a while or you know call up a friend or go for a walk in the park with a dog or something.
02:42:42
Speaker
Yeah, you wrote in the afterword about that kind of grief that the war should have settled the matter of equality once and for all, but it didn't. So that probably played a significant part.
02:43:00
Speaker
a large phenomenon like the Civil War, from a point of view of a writer, you're trying to be analytical and intellectual about how you're understanding it. You're also getting caught up in the emotion of it. And one of the things that keeps on happening is you keep seeing decision points. When this person could have decided to do A or B or C, and they did D, and that made the difference. And you see little decision points where someone decides to enlist or not, and that changes their fate, but maybe it doesn't change the world's fate so much.
02:43:29
Speaker
But after the war, in the surrender, you see this amazing thing happening with Joe Johnston, this crusty Confederate general, often called the best battlefield commander of his age, and General William Tecumseh Sherman, who's nobody's idea of a sentimental fool. He said of the burning of Columbia, I didn't order it, but I have no regrets about it because it shortened the war, basically. But they become friends.
02:43:54
Speaker
And they actually craft. And it's Sherman's idea, you know, with Ulysses Grant's backing to be humane and to treat his foe with the kind of humanity that will allow them to go back to their lives and not to be full of recriminations and to try to keep the world from getting any worse than it already is. And they actually become fast friends although they never met until the surrender. So you see that and then you see what happens with reconstruction when you have this wonderful plan to actually give some of that
02:44:22
Speaker
plantation land to the Black slaves who worked here for so many generations. And that's all scuttled by Andrew Johnson and his administration. And so they missed this opportunity to change the entire future of race relations in America. You know, the stuff we're dealing with now would not be the same thing if you had, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Black families with legacy wealth because they owned land in the South after the Civil War.
Impact of Post-Civil War Decisions
02:44:51
Speaker
But instead, they're let out of bondage, but they're completely penniless, completely broke with no infrastructure, not even any family bonds, because often the families have been broken up in the course of commerce of selling slaves. So you see missed opportunities. You see people doing this thing instead of that thing. And that's sometimes the most heartbreaking, that there was an opportunity to do something and they missed it. You know, it was easy to say, yes, Arafetti never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
02:45:18
Speaker
And see that again and again with especially the Confederate government. But you see it, you see a lot of it everywhere. And then every so often you just see people step up. You know, I love the Sisters of Mercy. You know, they're arriving at Beaufort at this old beat up hotel that's been looted. And there's this, you know, crusty old, you know, Union Sergeant who's in charge of the hospital and he's worthless. And they just go in and they remind me the nuns they went to school with.
02:45:45
Speaker
They just took charge. They booted him out. They demanded from the general that they be in charge. He said fine. They demanded that if they didn't get their supplies, they were going to walk. They got all their supplies. And they turned this hellhole into a place of healing and hope, you know, and without being sentimental. The men were, you know, long after the war, writing about these wonderful women had done for them, how they not only saved their lives, but had given them back, you know, their manhood, their humanity. And it was soldiers of both armies.
02:46:16
Speaker
They even got thanked by Robert E. Lee at the end of the war for their service. So, I mean, there were people who stepped up and did things which just warmed the heart. And you think, that's real bravery. And then there were those missed opportunities. So, it's those decision points. And when you step back from a phenomenon, as opposed to when you're right in the middle of it, you can see those decision points a little more clearly. And you can see how things might have been different had this happened instead of that, had this choice been made and not the other thing.
02:46:43
Speaker
And of course, The Last Battleground is a prequel of some sort to the novel, You Roke, Fear Rising.
Blending Fiction with History
02:46:51
Speaker
I'm interested, you were someone who writes novels and narrative non-fiction, also craft books, but I wonder what is the mental discussions you're having with yourself and maybe outwardly with colleagues about, all right, this story, it might be better told as a narrative non-fiction piece, but this one and specifically Cape Fear Rising, this one needed to be a historical novel.
02:47:17
Speaker
Yeah, Cape Fear Rising was interesting. I was doing mostly fiction in those days. So my first kind of instinct was to go do it by fiction. And I had several ways I was going to do it. One was to write the trial of Alfred Moore Waddell. Alfred Moore Waddell was the white supremacy leader who led the thousand man or so mob that burned the daily record, the African-American newspaper and led what essentially turned into a killing spree.
02:47:42
Speaker
that killed an untold number of black citizens and overthrew the government. He became mayor. I couldn't make that work. I couldn't make that structure work. And then I thought, well, I want to write as a nonfiction book, and it'll be like me coming to Wilmington, finding all this stuff out. And that just started to seem too much like about me. So I thought, you know, what I'm going to do is I'm going to have someone who represents the kind of person I might have been back then, although I made this person deliberately
02:48:09
Speaker
I made him a drunk. I made him someone who was a failure. I didn't want him to come in with a moral high ground. I want him to be in a place where he had his last chance and that would consist of going along with the program or speaking out and taking a moral stand against it. And so from the very beginning, I set a couple of rules for myself. One of which was any public event, if there was a speech, if there was a massacre, if there was a demonstration of a Gatling gun on the river, which happened to scare the bejesus out of black citizens.
02:48:37
Speaker
And then I would write that as historically accurate as I could, as if I were writing it as nonfiction. And I would use the viewpoint characters. There were 70 or so, as I'm recalling, were involved in it. And I couldn't use all those people in a novel. So I tried to pick the ones who seemed at the center of things on both sides. And then I wanted characters who would represent those people who left behind no voice, the housekeeper, you know, the working person.
02:49:02
Speaker
of the itinerant black preacher who was preaching a more firebrand version of liberation that perhaps was polite in those days, but who left no name in the record and tried to give characters a voice that would, or make characters that would give them a voice. But I was very true to the history of it. And in the 25 years it's been in print, I've never had any historian question any of, you know, the outline of events as I've presented them. The biggest outcry was that I used the names of real people
02:49:32
Speaker
as historical characters, much in the same way as I would argue Jeff Shara or Michael Shara used Robert E. Lee's name in his book about the Battle of Gettysburg, the novel, The Killer Angels. I mean, there's a great tradition in historical novel writing for doing that. But that was my ethic to try to present it as accurately as I could and to really bring readers into the idea that it's not just a presentation of these actions,
Roots of White Supremacy in Southern History
02:49:58
Speaker
a real moral question at the center of it that has to do with storytelling and writing and how you tell the truth. And oddly enough, in this day and age, what the role of a journalist is, because he's a newspaper reporter, Sam Jenks, my character. And I thought, after it came out in 1994, and I thought, well, OK, even though it was not much admitted around here, it's out now, and the story's out, and certain things happen because of it, I never dreamed that 25 years later, I would see
02:50:27
Speaker
you know, white supremacist Nazis with torches and guns marching in the streets of Charlottesville, or a Klan rally in North Carolina celebrating the election of a certain president, or the kind of hate that's been directed toward people of color of all kinds, the vilification of reporters. I mean, this, so the book turns out to be extremely relevant. It's almost as if it could be happening yesterday.
02:50:52
Speaker
Yeah, that echoes the similar grief that you wrote about at the end of The Last Battleground, too, that these things that you thought were put to bed in our dusty and artifacts of another era are every bit as sort of prescient in what we consider an enlightened time. Yeah, and there's a line in the book that the priest, Father Denon, who was a real character and a real feisty fighter for right injustice, he says, if you don't tell the story in its truth, you'll relive it over and over again. Don't you see that?
02:51:22
Speaker
And I think that's kind of it. I think there's a little bit of a mythology that, oh, white supremacy is sort of a fringe thing that happened. And it's just a few people, but really the people in the South who fought the Civil War were noble and honorable. And really, if you unpack it, you realize that, no, white supremacy is foundational to the entire economy of the South. It's the whole plantation economy. And even if you didn't own slaves, you basically were subscribing to that ethic
02:51:51
Speaker
Even the religions were subscribing to it. Every major Christian religion, except for the Catholics, pretty much split over the issue of slavery before the war. So since you've never really addressed that, we've never really gotten to the bottom of it as a foundational thing, it simply goes underground, but it remains a very virulent kind of infection that is still very much present in our society. And now, because it's been given permission again,
02:52:21
Speaker
It's almost like measles coming up because people are afraid to get vaccinations because of some oakum they read on the internet. The whole doctrine of white supremacy is now out in the open because it's being given political cover by the Republican Party. And I think that's dangerous. And I think it goes to show that we're still fighting the Civil War in some important sense.
Challenges of Writing Sensitive Historical Novels
02:52:41
Speaker
And 1898 was maybe the last big battle of the Civil War. There are still some other ones that are being fought.
02:52:49
Speaker
And what has to be said, too, is that when you wrote this book, it threatened your tenure at the University of Wilmington, too. I was naive. I was an untenured assistant professor, and I found out the story, and I couldn't believe nobody had ever told it, especially as a novel.
02:53:08
Speaker
since the turn of the century when Charles Chestnut had written a book called The Marrow of Tradition, which is a good novel, but somewhat different and actually not as accurate, I think, as mine turned out to be in terms of the events that happened. But I did not really, I thought, okay, this happened at that point almost 100 years ago. It was like 96 years old, the story.
02:53:28
Speaker
And I didn't really anticipate the kind of backlash and reaction I would get. And, you know, it turns out that the board of trustees at our university, there were a number of the descendants of those families on it, and they were going to deny my tenure. And Owen Keenan, who's also descendant of one of the people involved in it, he was the one who stood up for me. And as after the chancellor had been sort of argued down,
02:53:53
Speaker
He was the one that said, no, you can't do this. You've got the grant and tenure on the merits. And I didn't know this for, I've been here 30 years. I found this out like last year. So it's sort of like growing up and then finding out, oh, by the way, but you were adopted, those aren't your real parents. I mean, it's kind of a soul-shaking thing to realize that, because you have tenures up or out, they either promote you or they fire you. And so to realize that was the abyss I was dancing on. And that was how the leadership of the university
02:54:23
Speaker
kind of reviled me at that point. It sure gives you pause and then you find yourself kind of rewinding everything saying, well, okay, this other decision, I didn't get that. Or when I asked for this and I was up for that job and didn't get it, what was it play? Was it simply coincidence? Was it irrelevant? Or was there any connection?
02:54:42
Speaker
So how do you think it had you known that your career down there might have been threatened? Do you think that would have changed your approach to writing the book or writing it at all? I like to think not. I mean, I think knowing enough about myself, I think it might have made me dig in harder, but it also might have made me do some things preemptively.
02:55:07
Speaker
to make it clear that I understood this and kind of put people on notice that I was going to be paying attention to this. I was the sort of babe in the woods. I was young and tenured and new to this and happy to have this job, everything. But I'd like to think that I just would have been stubborn enough to do it. I think in some ways it helped being a newcomer, getting a story without all the gloss of the gauzy family memories or the
02:55:34
Speaker
the folklore and mythology that has grown up around it in various communities. And maybe it was also liberating not to be aware of the ways in which this might play out because I didn't have to keep on second guessing myself as I wrote. I just wrote the best book I could with the best information I could find over a year of research and trusted that that would be enough.
02:55:59
Speaker
And I want to read this great quote that you gave in a recent interview you did.
Driven by Curiosity and Truth
02:56:05
Speaker
You said, so my advice is to be curious about things that matter. Research relentlessly to dispel your own ignorance, find out the truth as best you can, then write to discover what you have learned. Write what is in your heart. If you can, find someone who believes in you to stand by you, a loved one, a friend, an editor.
02:56:23
Speaker
Remember, if you're not possessed by the story, if you're not losing sleep over it, if you can't feel the heat of the fire in your pen, you're not doing it right. That is just such a powerful paragraph. Can you just elaborate on that and speak to where that comes from for you? Sure. I find myself writing not just this book, but any project based on things that I lie away thinking about at night.
02:56:52
Speaker
And then when you're writing about real people in nonfiction or writing in a historical novel in which you have real people, you do second guess yourself. You're thinking, have I been fair? Have I really presented this in a way that honors the, you know, the objective reality that I know from the documents I've seen or whatever other evidence I've seen? And of course, it's more, it's most urgent when you're writing about living people because you know what you write may have an effect on their lives. And so you're always sort of tossing and turning a little bit about that.
02:57:21
Speaker
But in the end, you figure out, you know, you kind of wrestle with your conscience, you go back, you look at the thing, you edit, what have you. The, you know, the matter of the fire in your panel, I really feel, you know, when I started in Cape Fear Rising, I was so possessed by
Connection to Historical Settings Through Dreams
02:57:37
Speaker
that story. I was dreaming at night. And I wrote about this in another essay, but it was about, I'd have the same dream, and the dream would be, I'd be walking the streets of Wilmington, but it would be an older Wilmington lit by, like, gas lamps.
02:57:49
Speaker
Nobody'd be on the street but me. I'd come to this corner store, you know, with a kind of corner entrance to it, and there'd be a little light showing out of the door, and I'd kind of push the door open and walk in, and there'd be a back room that was half-opened, and light coming from there, this little kind of sliver of light from the half-opened door. And I would go in there and realize that all these guys in black suits were sitting around a table talking, and what they were doing was plotting.
02:58:14
Speaker
And I realized that they were doing that and also they could not see me. And so I became a kind of a eavesdropper. I would just stand there and listen to them. And and so I was imagining the thing so deeply. It was actually in my dreams at night, you know, over and over again. And I began to really feel like I understood. And of course, I would walk the city. I would go down to the place where things happen and walk time myself. How did it take to get from this place to that place where things happened? You know, I'd go out there in different weathers.
02:58:42
Speaker
and really let the thing inhabit me and, you know, at a certain point you realize, you know, this thing has got me and I've got it and we're going to finish it because I can't let it go and it hasn't let me go yet, you know. But you really do feel that. I felt that as I got into the Civil War series almost at the very beginning. I was writing about what was called the power of the, there was parading off to war and they were talking about the flags and the regiments
02:59:12
Speaker
and about the sheer naivete. And the regiment I wrote about was actually a company of 180 young boys from Guilford, North Carolina. And they came back and there were something, I think at the end of the war, there were 13 of them that had not been killed or seriously wounded out of 180. And yet they're marching off with these glorious flags. And I just, I got it from that very first thing. I got it. This is what was happening. Lives are going to go out there and forever be altered.
02:59:41
Speaker
And from that on, it became a kind of historical detective story going out there to report this thing and just see where it would lead you and to start looking into the great mystery of why these people did what they did. Well, they're amazing books. Philip, thank you so much for your time. And where can people maybe find you online and get more familiar with your work if they're not already familiar with it?
03:00:05
Speaker
They can go to philipjorod.com. They can go to my Facebook page. They can go to Blair, which published Cape Fear Rising, just B-L-A-I-R. They have their own website and Facebook page.
Explore More: Author's Website and Works
03:00:17
Speaker
And they can go to UNC, University of North Carolina Press. And there's actually a neat little trailer that's up now on the Blair website for Cape Fear Rising that features some historical photos and a song that I wrote and perform in the video.
03:00:31
Speaker
that has to do with the events of 1898. Awesome. I'll be sure to include all that in the show notes and also link up to it so people can dig in more. But this is great. Thanks for coming back on the show, Phil. A ton of fun getting to hear your approach to all this stuff. And I deeply appreciate the time. Hey, my pleasure. And thanks so much for your patience while I got my technical issues working out. It was well worth the wait. I really appreciate it.
03:01:00
Speaker
Always good times, right? You want to hear progress, go check out episode 38 and then listen to this one. That's the power of investment, baby. Investment in your technology. Anyway, thanks to Philip for coming back on the show. He needs to be a once a year guest. At least once a year.
03:01:17
Speaker
Be sure to share this episode and others with your fellow CNF-ers. And be sure to keep the conversation going on Twitter at Brendan O'Mara and at CNFpod. Tagging those will let me be able to see it and then jump into the fire with you. We are in the fire, baby.
03:01:37
Speaker
Also, consider leaving review of the show and I might just read it on the air. We're all in this mess together, so I just hope you consider that. I'm thinking that's it. I think that's gotta be it. So, until next week, remember, if you can do interview, see ya!
03:02:18
Speaker
you