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Episode 304: Bill Donahue
307 Plays3 years ago
Bill Donahue is the writer behind "The Voyagers," a production of The Atavist Magazine.
We also speak to lead editor Jonah Ogles about editing this piece and what makes for a great profile and getting a piece of writing to "that good place."
Social: @CNFPod
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Support: patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction and Writing Coaching
00:00:01
Speaker
Hey, what's going on CNFers? Hey, if you're looking to get into better physical shape, someone to hold you accountable.
00:00:09
Speaker
You often hire a personal trainer, am I right? Likewise, if your writing needs a boost, that little something-something in your corner, consider letting me help you out. Let me explain. If you're working on a book, whoo, that's a big one, essay, a query, or even a book proposal, and I'm nose deep in one of those, and you're ready to level up, email me, Brendan O'Mara. Wait, Brendan O'Mara? No, no, Brendan at BrendanO'Mara.com.
00:00:36
Speaker
and we'll start a dialogue, okay? I'd be honored to help you get where you want to go. That's Brendan at BrendanOmero.com. Aye, aye, aye. Well, in my case, that usually comes down to like me writing about 10,000 words and then the editor saying, well, this is kind of interesting, but let's trim it back to like a thousand, you know?
00:01:04
Speaker
Woah,
Introducing the Podcast and Guest
00:01:05
Speaker
this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara, how's it going? It's that Atavistian time of the month.
00:01:17
Speaker
You know, this time, this month, I welcome Bill Donahue, a writer whose work has appeared in a few rags you might have heard of. The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Magazine, Outside Magazine, Runner's World, you know, no big deal. I haven't heard of him. His latest piece for the Adivis is called The Voyagers, which Bill says. All along, it is a voyage across the Bering Strait.
00:01:44
Speaker
But it's also sort of a voyage across the landscape of the Cold War. Hey, it's a great read. It's a great read. And we dig into some stuff, man. But before that, a little housekeeping, CNFers. I want to remind you to keep the conversation going on Twitter. You can always follow the show at CNFpod or...
00:02:02
Speaker
at Creative Nonfiction Podcast on Instagram. You can also support the podcast by becoming a paid member at patreon.com slash cnfpod. As I say, this show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. Members get transcripts of which I am sorely behind. Is that even a word? Is that very behind? I don't know. Chances to ask questions of guests, future guests, special podcasts in the pipeline, all sorts of great stuff.
00:02:32
Speaker
some coaching, editing, all that kind of thing. But there are freeways to support the show as well. You can leave a kind review or rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Written reviews for our little podcast that could go a long way towards validating it for the way we're seeing effort. We got a nice little flood of written reviews. I read one, I've been reading them as they come in. I read them on the show to give you mad props, the maddest of props.
00:03:00
Speaker
And I'll read another one right now. This one from Hano 7. If you listen, well titled, if you listen to only one podcast for non-fiction authors, this is the one.
00:03:12
Speaker
There are so many options available to debut nonfiction authors to educate themselves on the machinations of the publishing world. I've read some useful guides, attended seminars and writers' conferences, and listened to many podcasts. Brendan O'Mara has been the most useful.
00:03:31
Speaker
As a physician researcher, I write all day, but writing for a lay audience is a different animal, and we can all use a helping hand. I've been surprised how some of the most valuable lessons have come from authors and nonfiction genres very different from mine. Brendan reads his broad audience well, directing interviewees towards general topics, including query writing, getting book deals, and finding your narrative voice. Very highly recommend.
00:04:01
Speaker
podcast. Unbelievable. Very highly recommended podcast. Damn it. Jeez. If I could only read, it might even be an extremely highly recommended podcast. We spare no adverbs here. Show notes in my up to 11 monthly newsletter can be found at BrendanOmera.com. Once a month, no spam. As far as I can tell, he can't beat it.
00:04:21
Speaker
so anyway thank you very much for that review it's incredible and those little things doesn't take very long but they they do a lot of heavy lifting like I said for the way we're seeing effort coming by browsing the podcast shop and be like I don't know who the hell that host is but wow a lot of reviews and that's a pretty damn good
00:04:41
Speaker
catalog of guests, and if they're talking to them, it might be worth my time. And hell, that's what we do. We try to make it worth your time. First things first, right now we're going to hear from lead editor Jonah Ogles about editing Bill's piece, and in general, what it takes for an editor, editor, editor to get a writer to quote that good place.
00:05:04
Speaker
It's kind of a could be a kind of a cool name for a podcast. And not Michael Shore is a good place to brilliant TV show, but that good place how editors can get you there. Are you ready? Let's do this.
00:05:27
Speaker
What
Editing and Writer Collaboration
00:05:28
Speaker
were the electronic synapses doing when you were reading and editing this piece? This piece had a lot going for it. There's a really great adventure narrative at the heart of it, which is
00:05:44
Speaker
you know, this father and his young son want to cross the Bering Strait to defect from the Soviet Union, you know, so crossing from Far Eastern Russia to Alaska. And the Bering Strait is, you know, this terrible
00:06:01
Speaker
in a terrible place just in terms of like climate and topography and geography because it's such a dangerous place for ships even still. So you've got this father and son duo trying to cross that. So, okay, you've checked that box. You know, you've immediately got like this great tension built into the piece. And, you know, that's the type of story you just sort of get out of the way of it and let it go. But then there was this other thing that happened as we edited.
00:06:31
Speaker
the piece, which is it became this story about a father and a son and that relationship and the way it evolved and changed and was tried. So beneath all this great adventure and sort of this surface level tension, which is all really good stuff, there was this really deep emotional resonance to it.
00:06:56
Speaker
that just, you know, as we as we work through the edits that really started to come through and made the piece feel like it had real power behind it. Now, when you were reading this piece and editing it, what did it remind you of structurally and thematically, whether that be other magazine pieces or books or even movies? You know, what did it remind you of anything?
00:07:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Nothing sort of in pop culture stood out, immediately stands out to me. I mean, I think the thing I wanted to do, and I'm sort of
00:07:35
Speaker
revealing what a big fan I am of Bill's writing. But Bill is one of the all-time great profile writers. He's just so good at it. I mean, the guy has made me cry before reading pieces that I've read of his, not necessarily that I've worked on. And so what I was thinking as I was working on the pieces, I was just trying to get
00:08:02
Speaker
push it towards that good place that he can get to as a writer. And it feels a little bit silly to even say that I'm trying to help him do that because I think he basically just does that if you give him enough
00:08:17
Speaker
chances to read a piece. He could probably be very well. He could be edited by just like an AI computer. It's just like pretty good. Try to make it better this time. And in three drafts, he would just turn in something amazing. But that's what was in my mind. It was like, okay, I've got this great writer. I've got this great story. Just how do I
00:08:43
Speaker
What questions do I need to ask in order to get this to be just the best piece it can be?
00:08:50
Speaker
And when you're working with an individual writer, like you could say like I'm bringing the Jonah Ogles playbook to every writer, but I know you don't do that. You treat everybody individually. How long does it take you to feel out each writer and realize this writer might need more nudging? This one just needs a simple keep going, you know, versus other ones that might need more hands on, hands off. How long does it take you to gauge that with each writer?
00:09:19
Speaker
Yeah, it comes pretty quickly after the first revision. Because I can be a fairly clumsy editor and a lot of times my first memo is just like a throw it all at the wall type of demo. Like here's virtually every thought I had while reading this piece. And sometimes
00:09:42
Speaker
sometimes that prompts a conversation, sometimes the writer just says, thanks. When I get the next revision back, that's when I know, okay, this writer is either able to take even sort of slightly confusing comments that I've made and distill them and apply them to the work to make it better or
00:10:04
Speaker
sometimes it just reveals that a piece might have, that there's something sticky about a particular piece. If something that I had flagged is maybe not working is still not working, but a bunch of other things are working or have improved, then I think, okay, maybe this is just the section that's going to give us a lot of trouble. But then there are writers who just
00:10:28
Speaker
seem to have missed it. And that sounds sort of like dismissive or condescending, and I don't mean it to. I think sometimes writers are just too close to a story, you know? And even when you say, hey, here's a bunch of thoughts that I had, that doesn't give them the distance they need to really engage with the piece and work from it.
00:10:56
Speaker
work with it from a more objective distance. And so then that's when I sort of kick in and say, okay,
00:11:04
Speaker
I'm going to give you, maybe I'll give them a structure or maybe I will rewrite the 500 words that I think are most problematic or any number of, or maybe I'll just go to say word and be like, I don't know how to help here. What tricks do you have? And then we start trying other sort of more pointed ways of editing to help provide that distance for them.
00:11:31
Speaker
And when you're saying, yeah, this is missing the mark, and maybe repeatedly a writer keeps missing the mark, what do you do in the event where they're saying, like, no, you're missing the mark? And it's like, maybe they can't see it? Or maybe, I don't know, if that disagreement and that tension
00:11:56
Speaker
You all want to get to the same spot, but maybe there's some friction there that is hard to overcome. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I've had that happen a fair bit. And sometimes, you know, there's some sort of some outside examples of, you know, instances in which the story that the writer wanted to tell is just not a story that the publication I'm working for
00:12:24
Speaker
wants to tell. If Bill had said in this story, hey, I don't want to write anything about the Bering Strait because I'm not interested in the adventure stuff, maybe there would have been some conflict there. But more often what happens when a writer comes to me and says,
00:12:42
Speaker
that they are thinking about the piece in a different way than I am, is that it allows me to see the story in a different light. Because I'm just a reader. A story shows up. I start reading the first sentence with all my own preconceived notions and every other piece of writing that I've ever read in my head. And my brain starts doing its own Jonah Ogle's thing.
00:13:07
Speaker
to each piece it reads. And I hope that it's fairly open-minded still, but I would guess that very quickly my brain starts, okay, this is my adventure narrative, let's start shaping it into that.
00:13:22
Speaker
And, you know, I think an example, Leah Satilly wrote a piece for me and I had sent her some notes and she came back to me and said, yeah, yeah, like that all makes sense, but here's what I'm trying to do. And it seems like that's not really coming across. And that allowed us to really just like sit back and go, oh, oh.
00:13:44
Speaker
there's this whole other thing we can try here. Let's dive back in and sort of approach it from a different way. So I think those, I know writers worry about this a lot when editors aren't, when they feel like an editor is not on the same page, but if it's possible to, it's almost like,
00:14:03
Speaker
like couples therapy, you know? If you could sit down and talk about it non-judgmentally and say, okay, here's what I'm trying to do, and clearly that's not working, so can you help me understand why it's not working? Those conversations, I think,
00:14:20
Speaker
inevitably make a piece much, much better. And in a lot of circumstances, like the Leah Cattilly piece, that became a far better story, because she was able to come to me and say, hey, we're talking past each other a little bit. And I don't mean to suggest that there was any conflict, because Leah and I have a great relationship. We just, I assumed she was trying to do one thing. And she and that's not what she was doing, you know, and that happened.
00:14:49
Speaker
Now you mentioned earlier how great of a profile writer Bill is. Given your experience editing and of course reading, what is it about a profile and a very good profile that really hums for the people out there who really love writing character-driven profile?
00:15:09
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, I think there's, I worry I'm using this word a lot in this interview, maybe even past ones, but there's an emotional resonance to my favorite profiles, you know, where you feel, you feel something for this character, you're beneath their skin, you know, this is why celebrity profiles so often fall flat, you know, because they
00:15:35
Speaker
the subjects themselves are very guarded individuals and very practiced.
00:15:40
Speaker
And so I think for writers, you know, what it takes is spending a lot of time with someone, establishing a rapport and a connection, you know, caring about their subject, and then being able to get that all onto the page in a way that allows readers to sort of walk through that door of an open connection that the writer has established with the subject.
00:16:10
Speaker
Very nice. Well, well, Jonah, this is always great to talk to you and we're going to turn it over to Bill momentarily and dig in further into this piece. So yeah, as always, Jonah, thanks for the time. Thanks for talking shop and we'll do this again soon. My pleasure. You have a good one.
00:16:34
Speaker
Not bad, right? I like that. Always great to talk to Jonah about these kind of things. You
The Minikov Story
00:16:40
Speaker
know, sorry for the sloppy read up at the top of the show. I could very well have maybe re-recorded that to make it a little more polished, but if you've ever gotten a look at me, polish is not a word you would associate with your podcast host. We're about to get into it, man, with good old Bill Donahue.
00:17:02
Speaker
This story that he wrote, incredible stuff, chronicles the lives of Valeri and Oleg Minikov as they escape, you know, Russia, Soviet Union, across, get this, the Bering Strait. I type in the Bering Strait into Google Maps just to get a sense of where they were crossing, and there's that northeastern corner of Russia, and then there's Alaska sticking in, and then there's that little strait there, and wow, that is, that is hell.
00:17:30
Speaker
That is some hellish ocean. They crossed the Bering Strait in what was basically a glorified rowboat. And so, Bill's story dabbles into some history of Ukraine and how Lenin and later Stalin saw Ukraine as essentially a grain silo and also a country that is kind of what we might call less than
00:17:53
Speaker
So, it's great that things have changed on that front. In any case, here's one of the great profile writers you'll ever come across. Mr. Bill Donahue. Tell me a little bit about the Scriven Arts Colony that you founded there in New Hampshire.
00:18:18
Speaker
Okay, well, I live in a very old house. It's not even known how old the house is. It was here in 1796.
00:18:30
Speaker
But anyway, my ancestors bought it in 1905. And I moved up here in 2015. And there's a big barn in the back. And so in the summer, I host cultural events out there, poetry readings, film screenings. I'll have an artist come and talk about their work.
00:18:55
Speaker
Um, so that that's, and it's, it's named after my grandmother, Jane Scriven Cumming. So. Nice. Nice. And what was the impetus for wanting to found that?
00:19:06
Speaker
My grandmother was very much a sort of the life of the party and always gathered people around her. And when I was growing up, she was very much the reigning spirit of this house. And so I wanted to do something kind of to honor her spirit. That was the principle impetus. But, you know, also I just thought that, you know, I live in a town where
00:19:34
Speaker
It's an aging town and there's things going on, but there wasn't this going on. And I thought we could do this and maybe try to bring young people to come and speak. And that would be a way to breathe some life into the town.
00:19:52
Speaker
So as a journalist and reporter and writer of nonfiction, and when you host a common space for poets and filmmakers and stuff, that kind of culture, in what way does that inform the kind of nonfiction storytelling and reporting that you do?
00:20:10
Speaker
I can't say that it directly informs, but I do think that as a writer, you have to kind of inhabit the world of ideas and you always have to be engaged and you have to recognize that things are evolving and you want to keep up with it and sort of be a part of
00:20:33
Speaker
art as an ongoing endeavor. You know, you certainly bring in a wonderful storytelling touch to the nonfiction you do, especially with this piece that you did for the Atavus, which was just a really, a really gripping read that I just kind of, you know, oftentimes when I read things of this length, it takes me a few breaks to, you know, to break it up into sometimes a walk away or whatever. But this, you know, I just found myself reading it straight through, beginning to end. And it was a wonderful story.
00:21:03
Speaker
So I wonder how you arrived at the story of Valerian Oleg. Well, I just happened to be reading an article, a 1988 article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine called The Ice Curtain, and it made a one paragraph mention to their
00:21:21
Speaker
to their expedition. And I was just like, oh my god, this is an incredible story. And right away, I started doing the math. I'm like, OK, Oleg Minikoff was six in 1945. How old would he be now? And maybe he's still alive. And I started Googling and found some guy with that name who in 1969
00:21:49
Speaker
living at this commune, and he was arrested on drug charges. It's like, could that be the same guy? And he lives in California. I made a bunch of calls, emails, whatever, to people who were related to him. And sure enough, his son got back to me and said, yeah, he's still alive. And here's a picture of the compass that they used.
00:22:13
Speaker
to cross the Bering Strait and set that to me as a text. Wow. So as you're looking to track him down, hoping that he's alive, and then you find out he's alive, so what is the process by which you go on the manhunt, if you will, to find him? And then once you do, you know, lobby, you know, the sun, be like, hey, you know, I want to tell this story. Like, how do you ingratiate yourself into their trust? Well, the search...
00:22:42
Speaker
is fairly basic, just a lot of Googling and a little bit of fuzzy logic, but not too much. In this case, Olag Minikoff is a very uncommon name. It so happens that it's also a name of some hockey player. That guy was way, way younger, not the same person.
00:23:05
Speaker
As far as getting access, winning people's trust is definitely a part of journalism. In this case, these people were just overjoyed that I had come along. Here's a guy whose whole life had wanted the story to be told. I was very sweetly ushered in. I didn't have to do a lot of conniving to get access here.
00:23:35
Speaker
Now, in the piece, too, it's got a three-part structure.
Crafting the Cold War Narrative
00:23:40
Speaker
And the first part, which has this really harrowing journey across the Bering Strait and a homemade makeshift kayak, which is incredible just to visualize. But that first part is half of the entire document. Then there are two other parts afterwards. So maybe you can speak to the structure of the piece and how you weighted certain elements of the story.
00:24:03
Speaker
Well, I conceived of this all along as it is a voyage across the Bering Strait, but it's also sort of a voyage across the landscape of the Cold War and what the Cold War did to these two people.
00:24:28
Speaker
In that respect, the voyage is only the first part of it. And in fact, the first section doesn't consist solely of the voyage. It consists of a lot of backstory because they didn't just casually dip their toes in the Bering Strait. I mean, they did that for a very explicit reason. Velary Minikoff was
00:24:54
Speaker
egregiously persecuted in the Soviet Union, going back to, you know, he was a native of Ukraine. Just as right now, Russia regarded that as just their pawn. Specifically, starting with Lenin, they tried to basically use the grain for just
00:25:13
Speaker
just seize the grain from Ukraine and send it around throughout the Soviet Union. And that came down very hard on the various parents because they were farmers, his family, and they were politically under siege, you know, for most of his life. So, yeah, so I mean, the abuse of Ukraine
00:25:44
Speaker
really flared up in, I think it was about 1919 when Lenin decided that he was gonna make Ukraine kind of the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. He said in a letter to one of his cohorts, grain, grain, grain, and they just began seizing the land and the crops of the more prosperous peasants. Among them was the Larry's family.
00:26:12
Speaker
And so really pretty much for his entire adult life, his family was under siege from the communist government. And then additionally from the Nazis as well when they occupied.
00:26:30
Speaker
Ukraine during World War II. And you were talking about in this first part, too, that it had a bit of backstory, too, in some historical context. And sometimes narratives can get bogged down in backstory.
00:26:45
Speaker
So, over the years, in your experience, how have you been able to navigate the amount of backstory that's germane to the forward propulsion of the story and not weigh it down too much despite all the research and reporting you do?
00:27:02
Speaker
Well, in my case, that usually comes down to like me writing about 10,000 words and then the editor saying, well, this is kind of interesting, but let's trim it back to like a thousand. You're like, oh, no. The ratio wasn't that extreme in this case, but all stories are connected to everything connects to everything else. And I do think that the impulse of writers is to
00:27:32
Speaker
to just go down the rabbit hole a little bit. There's always a balance that you have to strike in telling a story. You can't digress so deeply into the backstory that you lose all sight of the front story. And that is where a deaf editor comes in. And in this case, it was, in a lot of cases, in a lot of spots, a matter more of
00:28:01
Speaker
restructuring things, putting things in a different order so that you wouldn't feel drowned in the back.
00:28:10
Speaker
Now you mentioned earlier that this story, as important it was for you to tell, it was also equally important. It was something burning inside of Oleg. So maybe you can speak to that and how important it was for him to really get the story out there, given that he's advanced in age and has Parkinson's Syndrome disease.
00:28:31
Speaker
Yeah, I called him. He's living in a nursing home for veterans in California. You know, I just called him up and he was ready to go, very eager to tell his story. And just verbalizing it, that alone was not easy for him because, you know, his speech is somewhat impaired. At times he doesn't feel great and there's good moments he has in the day and bad moments.
00:29:02
Speaker
But it was absolutely clear to me from the get-go and this never wavered that he wanted to get this out, every piece of it. He took this task very earnestly. Every story you write, the subject of the story has a job and a responsibility
00:29:31
Speaker
And people shoulder that with varying degrees of seriousness. But this guy was very serious about it and exacting. And just in the fact-checking process, there was some very minuscule question about what nightclub he worked at in 1968 in San Francisco.
00:29:56
Speaker
And he told the fact checker, let me think about that and call me back tomorrow. So he just wanted to get it right. And I thought that was awesome. And he was just extremely straightforward. If he didn't know something, he would tell you. If he forgot, he would tell you.
00:30:20
Speaker
I independently checked things he said and everything checked out exactly. He wasn't invested in bragging or somehow spinning it one way or another. He just really wanted to tell the story. I really appreciated it. For me, it was kind of an affirmation of this idea that
00:30:48
Speaker
like ultimately we're made of stories. Each one of us has a story that we want to be told. Perhaps our story in a lot of cases is very foundational. In this case, it started for him when he was three years old and was sitting in Stalin's lap in Siberia.
00:31:10
Speaker
And he never forgot the details of that. And I was reminded, you know, my mom had Parkinson's as well. And so,
00:31:20
Speaker
She died in 2017, but starting in about 2012, she started writing a book about her father, with whom she had a complicated rapport. Her parents got divorced when she was very young. Her father was sort of overbearing. And it was similar in that it was something in her deep past with which she had never quite reconciled.
00:31:43
Speaker
And she wrote, I don't know, let's say 80% of the book. She was professionally a writer. This was a book for family circulation. But in any case, she got to near the end, but she didn't finish it. And it was just starting to look like she wasn't going to finish it, because her disease was coming upon her. And I was like, can I go strike the end for you?
00:32:13
Speaker
And she's like, over my dead body, you're going to do that. And and I came home one day and she was just banging it out. And she she she did write the end and it was amazing. And that was the same sort of flourish that I felt Oleg brought to this. And yeah, how did you navigate reporting and interviewing Oleg about the the relationship he had with his father?
00:32:43
Speaker
It didn't seem hard. The question of his father was just incredibly in the forefront of his mind. Even though his father died in 1967, it was still an unresolved issue for him. He told me he was staying at this hotel when I interviewed him.
00:33:09
Speaker
I interviewed him until late in the evening and then I went to leave the room and he said, turn the TV on because I like to have the TV on because if it's not on, I think about my dad and why I never got him out of the mental institution. So it was right there in the forefront. And I had supporting documents to sort of guide my questioning.
00:33:39
Speaker
But he was not reluctant to speak about this. Right. I understand it was a bit of a challenge to procure those documents too, right? Yeah. So the documents we're talking about, the FBI extensively interviewed and tracked Valeri. They had, I think it was about 400 pages of notes on the minicoves.
00:34:06
Speaker
You know, that was just to sort of logistical hassle with COVID. These documents were lodged at the National Archives. And I just got to run around from them forever. And a bunch of email, you just felt like you were communicating with a brick wall. And then finally, they just said, you know, you can come and get these documents.
00:34:34
Speaker
Then it was just smooth as silk from there. Another set of documents were, we actually got Valeri's psychiatric records. He was in a mental institution with paranoid schizophrenia from 1950 to 1967. I did get those records as well because Oleg signed on. He was next of kin and he was able to help me get access.
00:35:04
Speaker
Yeah, there's a part in the story too you wrote that Valeriy Shirley sensed the distrust swirling around him. He'd survived Stalin's Russia. He was a connoisseur of paranoia, a man who'd come stateside to escape dark suspicion, an ominous innuendo that was descending upon him again and he could only bear so much.
00:35:26
Speaker
And that sent him off the edge, as it were, into the mental institution, which really plagued Oleg, too, for the rest of his life. Well, yeah, what happened was in 1948, the FBI began tracking Valeri.
00:35:49
Speaker
because at that point, well, in 1946, I believe it was, he and Oleg moved out to Mabton, Washington, which is out in the farm country, but it's very close to the Hanford nuclear reactor.
00:36:05
Speaker
They felt that maybe he was trying to steal secrets from Hanford. What I know of is they sent, in August 1948, they sent six FBI agents out there to Mapton to spend four days.
00:36:23
Speaker
They tracked him doing those most quotidian things like going to the movies, going to the store, and they were hiding out in a hayloft, watching at his every move. This helped to drive the guy insane. In 1950, he really went insane. He went berserk. He got thrown into prison. He tried to, well, he did rip
00:36:49
Speaker
the bed out of the floor, try to use it as a battering ram to escape. And he had to be tear gassed into submission. So then they put him in a mental institution. So it's pretty, pretty horrible. When you're writing about someone like Oleg and people of that nature too who let you into their lives and you're essentially trusted to interview them with care and tell their story and you come to care about these people.
Ethical Considerations in Storytelling
00:37:18
Speaker
But you also, as a journalist, have to tell a fair and honest story. So I'm curious how you navigate that when you're with someone who you come to care about, but at the same time, you still have to be as honest and true as possible as well. Well, yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, you know, I found him to be an infinitely likable guy.
00:37:46
Speaker
People were quoted as saying, you know, he's sort of an innocent, he has no guile or animus for anybody or no malice. But you know, he does have some dark stripes on his record. I mean, he went to prison for dealing acid in the 90s.
00:38:13
Speaker
You know, that caused misery in the lives of the people around him. He had an eight-year-old son at the time.
00:38:20
Speaker
So I included that in the story. He stole a car in the 50s when he was a teenager. I don't think that's not a significant thing that he did. But I did try to present a comprehensive picture of him. That is certainly an ethical challenge with journalism.
00:38:44
Speaker
The things that Oleg did were not evil. They were stupid. But there's a big difference, you know? So I didn't see him as a morally complex character.
00:39:04
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's a it's a really wonderful story. Like I said, it's an incredibly gripping read. And so I just, you know, from one writer to another, just I admire it so much and deeply commend you on a job well done. So, yeah, of course, the story is going to be on the out of us any any day now. But but for people who might not be familiar with your work or where can they find you online, Bill?
00:39:31
Speaker
Well, I have a website, just BillDonahue.net, which is D-O-N-A-H-U-E. And I'm on Twitter, BillDonahue13. Do you ever forget to breathe when you're talking sometimes?
Conclusion and Acknowledgements
00:39:50
Speaker
Like when I read some scripts and stuff, sometimes I forget to take a breath.
00:39:56
Speaker
Oh, well, we've come to the end, CNF-ers. Oh man, that was a good one. Always is, usually is, most of the time it is. Thanks to Jonah, to Bill, and of course to the Atavists, who lets us, we get to kind of square dance here once a month, and we dosey doe. Love doing these little things. Nothing like celebrating great work, and nobody does it better than the crew of the Atavists putting together
00:40:22
Speaker
Putting together just incredible things for us to read every single month, right from the designers to the writers, the editing, the copy editing, the fact checking. No one makes these stories in a vacuum and few, if anybody, does it better than they do over at Atavus, am I right? Subscribe to this here little podcast, wherever you podcast, CNFers, and if you have a moment, consider leaving that kind review of Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify.
00:40:47
Speaker
Yeah, we can we'll all we can never never get enough of them and they're amazing amazing And I like I said, I love love to read them at the top of the show to give you a little shout out now, of course consider window shopping at patreon.com slash CNF bond
00:41:04
Speaker
And that's what we're going to do. That's where we're going to cut this sucker off. I usually have a parting shot. Some of you might be familiar with that, who listen to these podcasts. More on the reg. But we're going to have another one coming up Friday on the usual CNF Friday. So we're just going to do a parting shot then. We have two new producers for this podcast. Now, of course, Hank has been the executive producer for a long time. And now we have Kevin.
00:41:27
Speaker
who is a German Shepherd mix. Kevin's a girl. We named her Kevin. Kind of a hat tip to the movie Up. And we also just think it's kind of cute to have a female dog named Kevin. She's a 10 year old German Shepherd mix. She's beautiful. She kind of looks like a deer. She's kind of got the little hip thing that older Germans will have. But she's a lovely little addition to our family. Hank has been shooting daggers.
00:41:54
Speaker
of late but right now they are behind me sharing a bed which is a sign a good sign as we like to say in the podcast industry we don't like to say that in the podcast industry but we do say it here at CNF pot HQ and if there's anything I know about CNF pot HQ is that if you can't do interview see ya