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Episode 240: Scott Eden Pans for, Finds Gold in his Atavist Story 'The Gilded Age'
139 Plays4 years ago
Investigative journalist Scott Eden returns to the podcast to talk about his Atavist story "The Gilded Age."
This is a new and exciting partnership with The Atavist Magazine where we at CNF Pod HQ will feature The Atavist's featured writer and featured story for that month.
Check out this story and others at magazine.atavist.com and subscribe to read blockbuster journalism, beautifully told, beautifully designed.
Follow @atavist, @CNFPod and @BrendanOMeara.
Show notes are at brendanomeara.com. Patreon is here. Check it out!
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Transcript
Introduction of New Interview Feature
00:00:04
Speaker
Okay, my guess is that some of you are new to this jam. The OGCNF-ers are like, B.O., what's the deal? Why are we seeing a new interview today and not just on your usual Fridays?
00:00:18
Speaker
Here's the deal. Here at CNF Pot HQ, we've partnered with the Atavus magazine to bring you one extra interview per month where I interview the Atavus featured writer and featured piece. Well, I don't interview the featured piece, but we talk about the featured piece for that month.
Collaboration with Atavus Magazine
00:00:36
Speaker
Each month I'll be joined by Sayward Darby, editor-in-chief of The Adivus and Jonah Ogles, who's an articles editor there, or both, who knows, to tease out the new piece and then I'll be interviewing that journalist and unpacking the goodies, no spoilers, to give you in the CNF pod feed something extra and to give Adivus readers something extra. To deepen the experience of having read one of these blockbuster pieces of journalism
00:01:04
Speaker
that the Anovis churns out each and every month. All that said, for those who don't know, I'm Brendan O'Mara. You can head over to BrendanO'Mara.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter, keep the conversation going on social media
00:01:21
Speaker
at Brendan O'Mara or at CNF Pod Across the Big Three. I hope you'll consider subscribing to the Show Wherever You podcast because in addition to these monthly Adivus jam sessions, we talk to the best of the best in this little genre of creative non-fiction. So what is it?
00:01:41
Speaker
This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories, and we do things a little different around here. You could say things get a bit heavy. Let's do this. You know, this is exciting. This is like really, really freaking cool. I've got my good friend, you know, Sayward Darby
Sayward Darby on Podcast Collaboration
00:02:06
Speaker
here. How's it going, Sayward? Hi, I'm doing well. How are you?
00:02:10
Speaker
very good very good now say word has been on this podcast twice before you better go check them out why not she's wicked snot as i like to say as we used to say back in uh the suburbs of boston where i grew up she's the editor in chief of the adivis magazine which publishes killer blockbuster pieces once a month so i figured why not produce an extra pod a month and partner with sayward and the adivis to promote that month's piece and that month's journalist
Exploring Scott's Miami Gold Traders Story
00:02:39
Speaker
So before we get to that interview, it's going to be with Scott even as it were, he's been on this podcast before. But I'd like to say, as say we're to, can you tell me a little bit about Scott's piece and kind of tease it out a little bit.
00:02:54
Speaker
Definitely. This piece is a big one. It's about 25,000 words, which is long. But as another editor said to me the other day, it doesn't read like a 25,000-word piece because it's a really smooth read. And the basics are that
00:03:11
Speaker
There were three friends who worked at a gold trading firm in Miami who got wind of a supplier of recently mined gold straight out of the jungles of Peru and could really change their fortunes frankly from a business standpoint.
00:03:27
Speaker
The only problem was that he was a known criminal who had been in prison, had been linked to narcotics trafficking, although unclear whether or not those links existed, but he was somebody who was known to launder money and engage in other illegal activities. So these guys decided to lie about it to their employer so that they could get him on the hook as a supplier.
00:03:51
Speaker
And that led to a boom year in which they made a lot of money off of the sky and his gold. Problem being that gold was illegal gold. It was coming from places where people are not supposed to get gold out of the ground in the rainforests of Peru. Needless to say, some bad stuff happens. Things do not turn out well for everyone. And the nice thing about Scots
00:04:16
Speaker
piece is that that's one plot line and there's actually another plot line which is a bit of a surprise to the reader I think in a good way. That is about the history of this region where the the mining takes place and about a murder that happened in that region of an environmental activist and Scott
00:04:34
Speaker
you know through the piece there are these two storylines that are kind of circling around each other and the question is how are they going to converge and they do in a really interesting way. Yeah and it is such an ambitious big story and I wonder if maybe you can give us a little insight into what that moment was like when you read Scott's initial pitch of this story.
00:04:53
Speaker
I knew Scott's work. I was a fan of his reporting and writing. I have read his work at ESPN and elsewhere, and I knew that he had been finalist for a National Magazine Award, and other editors I know had spoken really highly of him. And when I got the pitch, I was very excited about it, immediately forwarded it to our articles editor, Jonah Ogles, and said, I think this sounds really promising.
00:05:18
Speaker
And I think the thing that I really liked about it was it had these ingredients of being a crime story and a little bit of a legal thriller in its own way. But at the same time, it was really ethically grounded. You know, Scott wanted to make sure that it wasn't just the story of, you know, friends getting in trouble to get rich.
00:05:35
Speaker
It's also about the consequences of that and who's affected by that kind of behavior specifically in the gold trade. And so that's always important to me is kind of the standing that a writer is bringing to a piece. Not just do they have a grasp on the facts and what access do they have, obviously to sources and materials and whatnot, but also what is the point of view that they're bringing to this? And I felt really strongly that it would be a good fit for the activist.
00:06:03
Speaker
I don't want to give too much away, but speaking with Scott, because of COVID and the COVID-related shuffling of prisoners, Scott got to meet and interview a key figure of his very late in the drafting process of this piece. So what was that like when that was kind of dropped in your lap?
COVID Impact on Reporting
00:06:25
Speaker
Yeah, I mean COVID actually comes up more than once in this piece, you know, it was two years in the making this story and from the time of pitching to, you know, the time of publication, more or less, and COVID
00:06:38
Speaker
I guess unsurprisingly, when it's a pandemic that's affecting hundreds of millions of people around the world, but it actually affected more than one person in our story. And in the case of the key figure you mean, this person had been in prison and was released under a program to, the goal of which is to reduce the spread of COVID in federal prisons.
00:07:01
Speaker
And so in early January, so just a few weeks ago, Scott was able to, he had communicated extensively with this person, but was finally able to meet this person in person, which was great. And as you'll see, he sets a really, really moving scene of meeting this person and sharing with him
00:07:20
Speaker
of what he's learned in the course of his reporting. And this person is able to react to it and reflect on it. And I actually think it brings the story together really well. And so, you know, I'm certainly glad this person is healthy and have all sorts of thoughts on what should be happening in prisons with regard to COVID. But, you know, strictly from a story standpoint, I think that it wound up kind of being this key ingredient we didn't expect. And so I'm glad it's there.
00:07:48
Speaker
Nice. Well, this is all such great stuff. So I'm going to say first, check out Sayward's book, Sisters in Hate. We talked about it a few months ago. Sadly, topical again. And second, Sayward, just thanks for thanks for stopping by and unpacking a little bit of and teasing a little bit of Scott's work.
00:08:11
Speaker
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to next time. Fantastic. Well, all right.
Developing the Gold Smuggling Narrative
00:08:16
Speaker
Well, without further ado, here is my conversation with Scott Edin. So how did you arrive at this piece? Yeah, it's been a long time coming. I arrived at it.
00:08:41
Speaker
In a kind of traditional way, like one story leads to another, you're working on one story and you develop sources for it. And they tell you about another story that's intriguing. So I was working out for a piece that eventually was published by ESPN. It was about the series of stories that I was doing about Cuban baseball players and how they get smuggled out of Cuba and into the United States in order to play Major League Baseball.
00:09:08
Speaker
And that was kind of a Miami focused story. So I just, I introduced myself to develop sources among like the Miami criminal defense lawyer scene because there were just a lot of lawyers involved in this particular case about Cuban baseball players getting smuggled. So I suddenly had like a big source list of Miami defense attorneys, which is an interesting group
00:09:35
Speaker
Yeah, interesting pool of sources to have. And one of the lawyers told me about a case she was working on, which had to do with illegal gold mining and gold smuggling and money laundering. And I just started this was back in 2017. And the case had just broken at that point. And I sort of just put that, you know, this idea in the Manila folder in my kind of file of idea file and
00:10:03
Speaker
You know, didn't really have a chance to get around to it for another couple of years. But then, you know, I thought it would be a great home for this story idea would be the activist proposed it to him. They gave it the green light and really started the reporting on it in earnest, not until the middle of or the toward the end of 2019.
00:10:26
Speaker
I love that the genesis of this story just kind of spurred off of another piece you were working on. And it was one of those things where you're doing this other thing, but the fact that you're doing the legwork, you're out there, you know, boot leather reporting, and then you just hear about these other things as a result of this other thing you're working on. And you just kind of tuck that in your back pocket. And you're like, that sounds cool. Now's not the time, but I'm gonna circle back to that.
00:10:55
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I do wish that I would have hit it hard in 2017. I'm kind of, you know, I don't know if it's a regret, but yeah, it just so happened that I couldn't really get around to it for another year and a half, which kind of stinks. Because of the Miami Herald did a great series on the same case that came out in 2018.
00:11:20
Speaker
So, I mean, it was a big case. Got a lot of coverage locally there in Miami and then in the gold business itself, you know, it was kind of a big deal. You're right. One story leads to another. I think all reporters have like just an ongoing, you know, idea file.
00:11:36
Speaker
and some you get to and some you do not. So I guess I should be happy that I even got to this one. So when, essentially, the Miami Herald kind of gets the jump in a sense on it and does their own thing. And then, so what becomes the challenge for you to then, a few years later, to bring what you can bring to it, make it new and fresh so it doesn't feel like you're just regurgitating something that was already done?
00:12:05
Speaker
Right. I mean, so they did the great, you know, a series of stories that kind of, you know, about this case, but it kind of branched out just sort of very broadly also into the whole idea of dirty gold. They did a bunch of different stories about that sort of broad subject, one of which was focused on this case. And at that time, you know, they
00:12:25
Speaker
They really used the court documents that were available to base their story on and a lot of great reporting around that. So I guess the thing that I wanted to do was dive deeper into the narrative of what happened by finding essentially a main character to kind of hang the story on and tell the story through.
00:12:49
Speaker
And I was able to do that by getting in touch with one of the defendants in the case, a guy by the name of Renato Rodriguez, who was one of these basically salesmen who worked for an American.
00:13:06
Speaker
kind of a sprawling gold precious metals company that had its headquarters in Dallas. But they had offices all over the country that basically they bought scrap precious metals, old jewelry from pawn shops. And then they would amalgamate this kind of scrap metal, recycle it, and then resell it to another company. So these guys opened up an office
00:13:35
Speaker
in Miami, based in Miami, wherein they would start importing gold from South America. That was their brief. That was their job. That was what they were hired for. And Renato was one of the guys who was involved in that, one of the main fellows. But he eventually, along with two of his very good friends and close colleagues,
00:13:59
Speaker
went to jail for money laundering, prosecuted in federal and federal court in Miami. And he became, I had started a prison correspondence with him, and he became sort of the main character of the story. And I felt like that would be one way to differentiate a story from others that had already been published.
00:14:24
Speaker
So what are the mechanics behind creating or developing that kind of correspondence with somebody in prison?
Challenges of Reporting During COVID
00:14:33
Speaker
Is it snail mail? Is it email? Do you work through – do you find out who the attorney is? I'm like, how does that work? Renato's attorney was in fact that criminal defense attorney that I had come to know through the Cuban baseball smuggling case.
00:14:48
Speaker
So yeah, she sort of put me in touch with him. He's in prison. He's in a federal prison camp, which is slightly different than even a minimum security place. So all prisoners, though, have access to something called Core Links, which is the prison email system. They have to pay for it. It's a private company, actually, who runs it. But that's how we communicate. And through just regular mail, just regular letters.
00:15:18
Speaker
I, of course, tried to get a prison interview with him, but for some strange reason, it was very difficult actually to arrange a media interview with him. Not really because of anything nefarious or...
00:15:34
Speaker
you know, any kind of problem on the Bureau of Prisons side, although it was just sort of red tape, you know, and also he kept moving from one prison to another. And so I never got to interview him in a prison setting. And then COVID hit.
00:15:49
Speaker
And when that hit, all visitors were shut down across all the prison system. So we had, I was forced to sort of, we were forced to do the interview basically almost entirely through correspondence, which is the first time that I've ever done anything like that.
00:16:05
Speaker
COVID had, you know, it's sort of like, it's all COVID related. COVID had thrown such a wrench into everything, including the reporting of the story because of COVID and the federal program to sort of ease outbreaks in prisons. He got released into home detention. He's got to wear an ankle bracelet. Renato does. So he was released from prison and is now at home. He has to live at home. He's got an ankle bracelet. He can't go anywhere except to do a job.
00:16:33
Speaker
It's almost like an early probation, but anyway, he was in Miami. He got released right before Christmas, just this past December. And I had never seen him before. We had only been communicating, like we said, via email and letters. So I flew to Miami. This is another unique thing about this story. It never happened where I'm actually, you know,
00:16:57
Speaker
going to interview a main source for the first time in person on the verge of public, after having essentially written the thing.
00:17:08
Speaker
So, yeah, I went to Miami and met him and that became, you know, there's actually two endings to the story and this became like the first ending of the story. You know, it's kind of an ending and then an epilogue, I guess you could call it. You know, this is such a strange, COVID produced such a strange, you know, like I said, everything's effed up, but it really produced strange things happening in this particular story.
00:17:31
Speaker
Well, let's just say, was it exciting to get this access or this experience, or given the timeline you were in the drafting of the piece, was it like,
00:17:43
Speaker
this is overwhelming and complicating what I've already done, all the work I've already done. What was the mindset around this? Well, the mindset was that it was essential. I felt like I couldn't publish this without meeting Renato in person, so I felt like I had to do it.
00:18:06
Speaker
And we both, Sayward and I both believed that whatever conversation I had, because I kind of wanted to confront him again with all that had happened and see his reaction, all that he had done, all that he had gone to prison for. I wanted to kind of confront him with that stuff and just see how he reacted. We always felt like whatever happened in that conversation, it would produce material that would be
00:18:34
Speaker
well served to put at the end of the story. And that's exactly what happened. So as an investigative reporter, and I suspect anybody listening to this who is an investigative reporter, they'll find this question boring, but I'm not in there. I suspect there are a lot of people who might, you know, want to be doing the kind of in depth stuff you're doing, but maybe don't know like how to play those various long games to develop relationships.
00:18:59
Speaker
So what's the process by which that you as an investigative reporter start to engender trust to get people to speak on the record about often very sensitive subjects?
00:19:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it depends on the story. I guess just with Renato, he wanted to have his story told. So that was one of his main... He was just motivated to do it. It didn't really take much convincing to get him to speak to him. But I think it's persistence. You just keep going at it. I mean, you keep asking people and asking people.
00:19:36
Speaker
And, you know, I think too, just being open and not being aggressive, you don't, in stories like this, I don't think it's not, it's kind of counterproductive to come at people with like a big list of questions.
00:19:52
Speaker
right at the start. I think it's better to start in just a really open way. I want to hear your story. That's it. Start at the beginning. Start, so you were born when? When? You really just start at the absolute beginning and not coming in with a big lot of questions and really assuring the person that you just want to hear their story. There's no agenda at this point. It's so early in the process that
00:20:21
Speaker
You're kind of in this very open information gathering phase where you're just trying to learn what the story is. And the only way you can do that is to ask people to tell their stories. Yeah, it sounds like you just have to be incredibly patient when it comes to this. Yeah, I mean, and of course, some people will say no. It doesn't matter how open you are, how much you try or how persistent, you know, and then you have to respect that too.
00:20:48
Speaker
I wish that Renato and his co-defend, there were two other guys, Juan Garanda and Sam Barrage, they chose, they said no, and I could not get convinced them. But that's totally their, obviously their right to say no. So sometimes that open thing does not work.
00:21:08
Speaker
And when you had access to Renato, is that when you felt confident that you could pitch this story someplace that you had enough meat on the bone to run with so long as you had at least access to one of those principle three? Yeah, I think that was, without that, there would have been no story for sure. I mean, that's the only way to really tell it in this kind of, in the way that an activist would watch the story to be told.
00:21:38
Speaker
which is incredibly detailed and kind of filmic and with those kinds of details that you can only get if you're, even if it is by correspondence, if you're talking to someone in great depth about what happened to them.
00:21:53
Speaker
And I think a lot of people, certainly in the freelance world, in pitching to whoever or wherever, they're always kind of interested in the mechanics of pitching and what that might look like. So what did your pitch for this particular story sound like, look like, to get the people on the other end of it being like, oh, awesome. I really want to know more. Tell me more. I'm not even sure I'm particularly good at pitching sometimes.
00:22:22
Speaker
Sometimes it can be a little long, I think. The kind of conventional wisdom that you should really keep the pitch super short, tight, and you don't want to waste editor's times, which is true. I think I'm actually bad at that.
00:22:34
Speaker
But I guess with the pitch, you know, you want to start almost writing what you think the story will be and you write it in the, you know, you write a lead, you know, essentially. And it's the same mechanics there. If I'm running the lead to the story itself, you want to keep the reader, you want to intrigue the reader immediately and get them into the story. It's the same thing with the pitch. You start it identically. Now, of course, that means that even for pitching, you've got to do actually quite a bit of reporting already. I mean,
00:23:03
Speaker
Some percentage of the reporting of for the story needs to be already done in order to pitch well Which is you know, its own hassle time is money and so you have to spit, you know in your there's no guarantee that the pitch will be assigned so there's you know, it's the financial issue is You know, there are financial issues with doing that. So I mean I
00:23:26
Speaker
But nonetheless, I mean that the pitch has to be almost, you know, there has to be quite a bit of reporting that goes into it, or you're not going to be able to write that lead that intrigues the editor into assigning the story.
00:23:40
Speaker
Now, this piece took you to Peru. So what was that experience like? And what about your repatorial instincts told you that like, yeah, this story, I need to
On-Site Reporting in Peru
00:23:56
Speaker
be there. I need to go to the source of the gold, so to speak. Right. I mean, I just felt it was important to lay eyes on all of the
00:24:06
Speaker
places that these guys went in, even just in Lima, and where, you know, their main, sort of the main character on the Peru side is this guy named Peter Ferrari, who's this sort of incredibly flamboyant character.
00:24:24
Speaker
who is kind of a gold tycoon in Peru, an illegal gold tycoon who purchased most of his gold, although not all of it, from a rainforest region.
00:24:37
Speaker
and the Peruvian Amazon. So I just felt like I needed to lay eyes on all of those places. The guys from Miami, they actually never went into the rainforests. One of them would go, went to like this jungle, the jungle kind of capital of that region, but they never really went into the jungles. But I felt like I needed to just even see the mining myself.
00:25:01
Speaker
and see what was going to talk to people there. And ultimately the idea was to kind of weave two narratives together. The story of these guys in Miami, these Americans in Miami buying the gold from Peru and from this rainforest region where the mining is almost all of it is illegal because it's in protected rainforest areas.
00:25:25
Speaker
Yeah, that was something I wanted to ask you about given the structure of it, because you have the one thread that kind of follows the three guys, Renato being at the spearhead of it, given the access you had. And then there's this other element of it of a guy with a timber concession that essentially abutted an illegal gold mining operation, which leads to a lot of contention. So how did you arrive at that in your reporting?
00:25:54
Speaker
I was always in my mind to weave two narratives together. The story of the Miami guys, the story of the business, how gold comes to be introduced into the global financial system, the global economy, and tell the story of how these guys got in way over their heads, dealing with Peter Ferrari, this illegal gold mining tycoon slash
00:26:19
Speaker
Narco trafficker, money launderer. I wanted to tell that story, but then I wanted to weave in a narrative of the rainforest mining region, which is called Madre de Dios, Mother of God in Spanish. That's the name of this region.
00:26:35
Speaker
And then within that kind of province in Peru, there's a place called La Pampa. And that is like there was this sprawling illegal mining area where camps were just totally deforested. Mining camps were set up in the kind of buffer zone of a gigantic national preserve there, where it's totally legal to do any kind of extractive.
00:27:01
Speaker
work at all, whether logging or mining. But I wanted to tell a story of that place and how these guys and how the global financial system that wants and craves gold impacts a place like that. And so I was always sort of in my mind to find a story to tell that I could pair with that story of the American guys and the American kind of global gold business really.
00:27:31
Speaker
And it is such a nasty process by which the gold is extracted, not only from the ground, but once it's in that kind of slurry, mercury is poured into it. And I think somewhere embedded in the symbolism of that is mercury makes you go mad and this business makes people go mad. So it's just like this very symbolic chemical that is used to extract this element that
00:27:58
Speaker
is so coveted by the first world that it really drives people mad and it is just such an ugly process.
00:28:10
Speaker
So been so much coverage to have this destruction of the rainforest by gold mining, not just in Peru, but Columbia, Brazil. I mean, it's the gold comes millions of years ago, you know, the Andes as they erode the river, you know, water has taken the.
00:28:30
Speaker
gold that was in the mountains down into these rainforest regions. They're loaded with gold and these pristine rainforests. So yeah, I mean, it's not just mercury, but the way that they go about it, which is, you know, the first they have to clear cut the rainforest. Then they use this kind of method of placer mining work, which is, you know, they use like suction dredges to sort of
00:28:59
Speaker
high pressure hoses to kind of liquefy the forest floor. And then they take that slurry, as you say, and then they come up with sort of this gruel, and then they dump the mercury in there, and the mercury kind of collects with the gold and weighs it down, and that's how they get the mercury out. But then they just dump it, and it goes into the water table.
00:29:19
Speaker
And that's bad just for the people who live there and fish there. And so there's, you know, they had to declare a state of emergency in modern ideas because people's mercury levels were so high. So it just poisons, you know, the food chain combined with the deforestation. And again, I wanted to lay eyes on that. So I went to La Pampa and sort of went with a Peruvian military,
00:29:48
Speaker
a platoon, as they did an interdiction, as they call it, against some of the illegal miners who were in La Pampa, and they kind of go in, chase the guys away. I mean, it was just insane, the destruction. I mean, it was just a desecration. I mean, it really was kind of terrifying to see it, because we associate rainforests with kind of like these, you know,
00:30:11
Speaker
You know, it's, it's the, they're the world's, you know, the world's, the earth's lungs, you know, so we, without the Amazon, you know, we're toast. So to see it, where it's been like this total kind of desert desertification over the rainforest was
00:30:31
Speaker
It was kind of terrifying in that way, because you know, my God, we need this place. We can't be knocking it down and clear cutting it. And then there was just trash everywhere. It was like a vision of the collapse of our own civilization to see this place. And I wanted to keep it. And once I saw it, I felt like it was important to communicate the kind of shock of that
00:30:58
Speaker
Yeah. So, yeah, while you're there, you know, what is, you know, what is the feeling under which or the threats that you felt by being present? Right. I mean, that is only there's only the real danger that one time when we we actually did my photographer and I and the journalist, a journalist there, by the way, by the name of Manuel Caio Quispe, who was sort of my guide
00:31:25
Speaker
our guide through meeting people in La Pampa in modern ideas. But there's really only one time when I felt threatened, and that's when we went and laid eyes on an actual working, illegal mind.
00:31:38
Speaker
which was taking place in a place called an Agua Hall, which is a protected area of the rainforest because it's basically a grove of these kinds of palm trees that are native to Amazonia. And it's totally illegal to do any kind of mining in an Agua Hall. And we went to one and saw some mining and they were not pleased that we showed up.
00:32:07
Speaker
and eventually kind of chased us out of there, although it's a bit too dramatic for what happened. But, you know, there was a machete brandished and some words and, you know, tranquillo, we said, as we kind of backed out of there. And then, you know, but then there are these stories, though, and it's not just stories. They're in La Pampa. There have been mass graves discovered. There are
00:32:36
Speaker
Yeah, what they call the guardians, which is a group of people who have almost like bandits. Some say that they are former Peruvian soldiers who have kind of become mercenaries and they used to protect
00:32:54
Speaker
the cocaine, coca, you know, plantations in the in the north of Peru, in the northern parts of Peru, but saw that, you know, this was a kind of gold boom happened, illegal gold boom happening in modern India. So they kind of migrated, you know, down to the gold fields and offered their services, protection services to the illegal gold miners. But then they became like this, like kind of like an enforcement cartel and
00:33:23
Speaker
You know, there's like, you know, any intruders that come into the legal minds, you know, sometimes they disappear or rival factions, you know, are fighting each other. So, you know, it's a violence place for sure. You know, like I said, the masquerades have been discovered.
00:33:44
Speaker
And in this piece, of course, there are lots of names and moving parts.
Narrative Techniques and Discoveries
00:33:51
Speaker
So for you as you're starting to synthesize your drafts, your early drafts, and even your later drafts, what becomes the challenge for you to structure it and keep all these things straight so we have this nice, this beautiful piece that you were able to write?
00:34:08
Speaker
I mean, yeah, outlining. A lot of outlining. And you know, the draft that I turned in actually, you know.
00:34:16
Speaker
say where we help helped me actually redo, you know, reorder some things. But yeah, it takes a lot of thinking beforehand, you know, actually, some some storylines were had to be cut out the streamline, streamline it a bit more. You know, it was actually originally had about one or two other storylines in here that were related to the two main storylines, but it was just too much. So we had to pair that down.
00:34:43
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of organizational tools that I use. One is to create a timeline. And I kind of work from the timelines where I actually, I just dump everything that I think might be important into this timeline. And then by doing that, you can kind of read through that and then start circling the most kind of dramatic points
00:35:11
Speaker
in the timeline, then you know that those are going to be sort of your scenes and you can kind of have in your mind how everything is connecting by seeing it in this timeline. And then that becomes really the bones for the story and keeping everything straight. And do you set that up just in like a word doc or? Yeah, just a basic word doc with the date and kind of in bold and then what happened on that date.
00:35:41
Speaker
underneath it. Nice. And the ending, not to give anything away, but the final passage of this book, of this story, was one of the greater final passages I've read in a long time. It's just such a hammer.
00:35:58
Speaker
that just rings, it just has such a ring to it. And yeah, I wonder, you know, at what point in the process of your drafting, do you actually come across what you know will be a good ending? And then you are starting to write towards that, like a lighthouse in the distance. Sometimes the ending is not clear to me at all when I start writing the story.
00:36:27
Speaker
But in this one, actually, it was much different. I think I knew that this was gonna be the only one I heard. So the ending is a sort of an anecdote that one of the main characters told me. So I don't want to give too much away. Yeah.
00:36:42
Speaker
But it was an anecdote that I heard in an interview when I was interviewing this main character in Peru. And when the guy was telling it to me, I was like, well, I think that might be the ending of the story. That's the first time that that's ever happened. Like in an interview thinking, oh boy, this might be a good ending.
00:36:59
Speaker
I love when that happens like when you're just your own internal sort of story antenna comes up you're like oh yeah like from the millions of words I've read and the millions words I've written like that has the ring of something I can be writing towards and building towards it's just always nice when that happens. Well it's the first time that that's happened.
00:37:19
Speaker
and maybe the last, but yes, it was very strange. In that way, it was strange to me. I'm like, what? But it worked. Maybe sometimes that doesn't work out, but this did.
00:37:31
Speaker
Yeah, I've always, I've been thinking about beginnings and endings a lot lately. And sometimes I feel like, you know, at the beginning of a story, if you can somehow figure out what the end is going to be before you're done, it's like, okay, that gives you juice to get to the end. And then as you get close to the end, you want to be thinking more about the beginning. So you can kind of tie the circle up and you can actually like, I don't know, plant a few clues along the way. So it actually, as you get to the end, you're like, Oh, this is what I can be backfilling to feed the ending in a way, if that makes any sense.
00:38:00
Speaker
Oh, for sure. Yeah, I mean, you want to set up themes that you then explore, of course, in the story, and then hopefully kind of twist where there's that kind of turn of the screw that goes just a little bit more, that's kind of a surprising way that you're kind of working with these ideas and themes. I think that's what the ending kind of hopefully does, sort of surprises with
00:38:26
Speaker
You've laid out all of these themes for the reader, but then the ending kind of twists it and takes it further somehow. With the beginnings too, you want to set up things that will then echo throughout the story in interesting and surprising ways.
00:38:45
Speaker
Well Scott, it's amazing what you're able to do. I think it's somewhere around 25,000 words and it's just an incredible piece that just keeps you asking questions and you keep going back for the answers and it just delivers on every beat. So I just want to commend you on the work and thanks for hopping on the show to unpack it a bit. Always fun to be here. I'm glad you liked it.
00:39:15
Speaker
And that was pretty cool, right? Whether you read that piece and then listen to the interview or the other way around, I hope you dug that experience. You know, thanks to Scott Eaton for the time and the incredible work he's doing. The type of reporting and type of writing he's doing, it's rare. And to be able to look into that brain and how he synthesizes these things is pretty special stuff. I deeply admire him.
00:39:43
Speaker
His new pieces, his new piece lives at magazine.atavist.com. Go check that out. Settle in. It's long, but doesn't read long. If you follow me. That last passage, man. Man, I love a hammer. And that's a hammer.
00:40:02
Speaker
Here in the outro, I usually have some sort of parting shot, but I think for these pods, I might spare you. I don't know yet. I used to put these at the beginning of the show and was, ha ha, you gotta listen to me before you get to the interview, or you gotta hit the skip button a few times. I would feel it every time. In my chest, I would feel these palpitations and the skipped beats, and I was like, ah, someone is skipping through the intro.
00:40:32
Speaker
But in an act of podcasting and benevolence, I've moved my riff to the end of the show and it's usually where I just kind of talk about my work, my writing, what I'm up to and how I think whatever the hell it is I'm doing might offer you some juice to get the work done.
00:40:48
Speaker
It's not self-congratulatory, but it's kind of bloggy and with the hope that maybe when you see the bullshit I'm undergoing, maybe you're like, hmm, my bullshit isn't so bad or my bullshit is validated and I don't feel so alone.
00:41:04
Speaker
That's where this comes from. Well, anyway, you can check out that in future episodes. If you'd like, I'd be honored and thrilled if you subscribed wherever you podcast. It's a creative nonfiction podcast, or Brendan O'Mara, too. I also have a micro podcast called Casualty of Words. It's a writing podcast for people in a hurry. Episodes are usually two to three minutes at the most.
00:41:26
Speaker
You can become a member at the patreon community patreon.com slash CNF pod where I share transcripts coaching the 1k MFA and Grant you exclusive access to the audio literary magazine
00:41:42
Speaker
first one came out earlier this year well late last year on the theme isolation is the first one next one is coming out in june and the deadline for submissions is march thirty-first the theme is summer go to brendan omero dot com the featured
00:41:57
Speaker
post is the submission guidelines consider doing that and if you're a member it'll help put money in the war chest so hopefully we can start paying writers down the road and keep producing a dynamite issue upwards of four times a year next year we're looking to do do it twice here after that three and then four going onward but it starts with building a bigger more robust community through patreon to help subsidize
00:42:24
Speaker
So for as little as 75 cents an episode to four bucks a month grants you access to the magazine transcripts and some other stuff too if you're that I just routinely publish on on there just willy-nilly Right not a bad deal, man
00:42:43
Speaker
But I got to say, this was a whole lot of fun. I think we're going to have a good time with the Atavus crew. And of course, we're just going to keep this train moving here at CNF Pod HQ. So in the meantime, that's going to do it. That is going to do it. So this is how we sign off, all right? Stay cool, CNFers. Stay cool forever. See ya.