Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 440: How to be a Truffle Pig with Kate McQueen
0 Playsin 1 day
Kate McQueen is the editorial director for the Pollen Initiative and a literary journalist whose work is featured this month for The Atavist Magazine.
The story chronicles the story of Carl von Ossietzky, a German journalist imprisoned for his dissent at the start of Hitler's rise to power. A cohort of fellow journalists sought a means to break him out. How did they do it?
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Recommended
Transcript
Power of Narrative Conference Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
ah Black Friday deal. This podcast is 100% free. Spread the news, man. Oh, hey. CNF is gonna hold a little placeholder here for the 2025 Power of Narrative Conference held on the final weekend of March. but Let's look up the website. Let's do that.
00:00:24
Speaker
people people people Okay, website is combeyond.bu.edu u and yeah is toggle around, find a menu, do something, and you can learn more about the Power of Narrative Conference.
00:00:41
Speaker
I've struck up a promotional partnership exchange of sorts, and there will be a discount for enrollment for podcast listeners coming soon. I went to this conference several years ago, and if you're a journalist, even a fake one like me, it's pretty awesome. And by fake one, I mean I'm just like a shitty journalist.
New Atavist Story Release
00:01:01
Speaker
Also, it's that Atavistian time of the month. Already? i feel It feels like Mira Potassum was just on, but no, it is a new a new one. I know. So if you'd like to read the story first, visit magazine.adivis.com and consider subscribing. I don't get any kickbacks, so you know my recommendation is true, bro. You kind of need to go, you know, you need to be a truffle pig and go find all of those great little concrete details. um And your story actually can only be as good as the details you find.
Introduction to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:01:40
Speaker
Oh hey seeing efforts, it's that five dollar bill you found in those jeans that don't fit you anymore. Hey and it's also the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the tales they tell. Hmm, we've got Kate McQueen this week and her activist story takes us to Nazi Germany. Yay!
00:02:01
Speaker
But she tells the story about the journalist Karl Von Osiecke. who was imprisoned for being critical of the new administration, you know who, and Germany's rearmament. Then a cohort of journalists and colleagues got creative and figured the best way to break Karl out from captivity, or out of captivity,
00:02:23
Speaker
would be to get him nominated, oh I don't know, for the Nobel Peace Prize. And if he won, how could Hitler and his goons possibly keep Karl behind bars, especially when Nazi Germany still tried to curry favor with the more upstanding democracies of the time?
00:02:40
Speaker
The story unspools from there. Pretty great. Show notes to this episode and more at brenthedomare.com. Hey, there you can read, snappy blog post. Yeah, the blog is back, baby. Screw sub stack and fuck social media. And sign up for the monthly rage against the algorithm newsletter. Book recommendations, book raffles, uh-huh. CNF and happy hour, vegan celebration roasts, you name it.
00:03:03
Speaker
First of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it. Hey, you know what? I do this, I do this shit for you. If you have feedback about the podcast or the newsletter, I aim to serve. So by all means, email the show, creativenonfictionpodcastatgmail.com. And I'll try to improve forever a work in progress. Batting lead off is Jonah Ogle's lead editor of this piece, so we dig into his side of the table a bit.
00:03:32
Speaker
parting shot, turning in my book, false summits, feeling more sad happy than happy sad, and maybe that's just sadness. Here's Jonah Riff.
00:03:53
Speaker
For you, at what point do you start to notice you nott nut not your eyes glazing over, but you're just you've been in it so long that it's no longer fresh and you're having a hard time seeing things anew? Yeah, you can almost track it along with the number of revisions that have been done, you know like just which equates to like the number of times that I've actually read. and read the story because your your brain, you do a first pass on the story and you flag a bunch of like major issue, you know, like the big stuff. The stuff jumps out at you when you read it the first time and then you start addressing them. And on subsequent revisions, you're still focused on those. And then you start, mean maybe this is just me or maybe it's how everybody's brain works. but
00:04:46
Speaker
if there's a paragraph that I haven't really had to mess with because it wasn't the problem. I think I just start reading that a little bit faster. You know you you get to graph and you're like, oh yeah, that's that but that one's fine. yeah and And so you just plow through it to get to the next thing and make sure that's working. And there may be an issue there or or something that that doesn't quite line up with the ah stuff that you've been working on before or after that.
00:05:19
Speaker
if we if I've done like two or really like it the third like heavy round of editing that's when I'd start to lose sight of what's happening in the story and an example of this one story is I sent the this I sent it to say word and she came back with the question, so why exactly was he worthy of the Peace Prize? Which I was like, oh my gosh, of course. like It's not like that required a rewrite or anything. It required the addition of like three sentences in three different spots. But I had just kind of lost track of that part of it as we tried to
00:06:09
Speaker
get everything else clicking in the story. Yeah and those degree ah when when you're paying attention to so many other things and then you get those get those fixed then you start noticing things elsewhere and it becomes this like editorial whack-a-mole in a way things just pop up and eventually you do have to just be done with it but it's almost like you can almost never stop tinkering because things pop up here as you address another thing because your attention was elsewhere. And then now that that's been solved, your attention now can catch something else. And it's almost like, oh my gosh, like if it weren't for the deadline, we could just keep going around the drain on these things. Yes. Yes. I mean, I don't I don't remember who said it, but there's some famous quote about art isn't finished. It's abandoned.
00:06:59
Speaker
and ah And I think that applies to long-form journalism like this. And thank God for the deadline because you're right. like the right And certainly writers could tweak endlessly and and editors could could as well. So luckily we have this moment where we just have to publish and you say, okay, it's you know this is as good as we can make it in the time that we have. But that's ah that's one of the reasons why it's so important that there are so many different eyes on it. I do think there's a balance to strike there because i I've gone through phases in in my career in magazines where with larger staffs where you have so many people reading it, making comments and saying, I'm confused by this or this line doesn't land for me. And I think you can reach a point where you start to sort of cut into the
00:07:57
Speaker
I don't know if it's the muscle is is the right metaphor I'm looking for, but the piece starts to lose a little bit of that life and energy that comes from... you know a writer a writer having written the thing in kind of a pseudo flow state or whatever writers get into as they're working on it. So I think you do want to be careful about how many cooks are in the kitchen, you know the adding adding stuff and taking things away. But for the most part,
00:08:28
Speaker
It's really good that I read a story and get it as good as I can make it, and then Sayward reads the story, and then we have really good fact checkers who are reading the story with a totally different mindset than ours, than the editing mindset, and a copy editor who's who's reading it with his own way of looking at the story and and making sense of it.
00:08:53
Speaker
And that that it's protects all of us, you know, it it makes the story better. It it finds weak points. And we have a really good, really good working relationships that at the activist and, you know, there are times where a Fact check or the copy editor or me or say word will have an issue with one particular thing But no one else does and we stand out you know like that It's it's helpful to have the group of us to be able to bounce bounce the story back and forth Yeah, you bringing up the too many cooks in the kitchen it kind of reminds me of ah TV shows where they're getting too many notes from studio executives and and everything you hear in horror stories of about getting all those notes and it dilutes everything to this this mush this gray mush that doesn't have any of any creative pyrotechnics, it just it it regresses to the mean, which is never a good creative space. Yeah. yeah Well, and you hear like bands talk about this as well. you know like i I remember listening to an interview with Krung Ben.
00:10:11
Speaker
Um, and they were talking about how like the third take of the song is kind of the sweet spot because it's still fresh. There's still energy to it. And if you, but if they keep recording it and they do 10 takes all of a sudden, like they're making predictable choices, you know, they're, they're settling into.
00:10:35
Speaker
like they're just They're just taking it easy on themselves you know and playing playing what they played on the previous five takes because it sounded really good. and It's not a perfect analogy for the writing process or editing process, but I do think there's something there that the more the more times you do it, the you start to lose some of that. I don't know if it's resonance or power, but something that sort of animates a story. a lot of A lot of people I've been talking to, I feel like there's been an uptick of people that I've spoken with on the show who have been really leaning into fiction as a means of yeah refreshing and turning over the leaves for themselves and getting creative. and a you know You're someone who loves a good ah you know thriller novel and stuff of that nature.
00:11:22
Speaker
And now what are some ah some good works of fiction that can really help a writer of nonfiction you know just be be more skilled at what they do with the the verifiable facts? Well, there's i mean my I'm fairly omnivorous when ah when it comes to my reading habits or I try to be because I think I remember a long time ago being told that if you want to be a writer, you need to be a reader to do it, you know, just read as much as you possibly can. ah And as it turned out, I really didn't want to be a writer, but I did like being a reader. so
00:12:02
Speaker
ah You know, I think you can pick up tricks from any any genre of fiction and any writer, but, you know, I like I often when I need a palate cleanser, I usually go back to either Elmore Leonard, who I just think is an absolute master of characterization and dialogue. You know, his ear is just kind of unrivaled.
00:12:32
Speaker
Uh, and also John McCarray, you know, I'll pick up basically any book he he's written, you know, like the the Patricia Highsmith books are great. She's, she's known as a master for a reason. Dennis Lehane, his, his novels are really good. I, I always, I always go into his novels thinking that I'm going to get like a ah real thriller and they are, but they're really like,
00:13:03
Speaker
they're really intimate novels like his characters you really really get to know them and that that's huge and one of the most common notes i give to writers is that i'm just not close enough to this person yet you know like i i feel like i'm maybe watching them do a couple of of physical things in the world as the plot moves forward, but I don't feel like I'm in their head or, or sometimes I say like on their shoulder, you know, but I want to hear what they're hearing, hear what they're thinking, see what they're seeing, feel all, you know, like all the senses I want to be lighting up in my brain as I'm with this character. And, and Lahain is really, I think really good at that.
00:13:57
Speaker
And with non-fiction and in reporting, ah what are what are some telling characteristics that just help you get to know a character more and immerse yourself more with ah you know a real-life character, like taking ah ah Carl Van, am I pronouncing, Von, his last name? Osinski. Osinski, yes. so Yeah. yeah as yeah so like so Someone like him, who's the central figure of ah Kate McQueen's story. ah it's ah yeah what are What are some of those things that get you on his shoulder and immerse you with him? the The things I usually highlight in a story for writers are moments where
00:14:41
Speaker
emotions are running high. you it can It can be anger, it can be grief, it can be excitement, yeah sadness, you know whatever whatever it is. If there's a moment where where they are going through it, yeah that's that's when I want to spend a little more time with those writers. And I think like podcasters, are and I've heard them talk about like good tape, you know, and I think it's the same thing. And in a lot of that is just, I need more words here, you know, and sometimes the writer is able
00:15:22
Speaker
you know to talk to a source and and draw draw out more of their feelings about that. But in a story like this, where our our source our sources are no longer living, or you know the the characters are not, um we have to look at what we can get in the documentation.
00:15:43
Speaker
and the writer has to do some of that like literary work and and put themselves in that person's shoes and as fairly and accurately as they can try to help translate to readers how this character might have been feeling in this particular situation. And we we did that yeah This was an interesting one because Karl Wojcicki, if I'm saying that right, you know goes to is sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis, and he writes letters, but they're they're going through censors. So the the letters aren't all that revealing, so he almost like disappears in the story, which is a strange thing because it's all about him.
00:16:32
Speaker
And so, and all the attention shifts in the narrative to Walter, who's, I forget her first name. Uh, this is one of the things about editing a story when you refer to someone by their last name for like a month and a half, you forget their first name. The woman Jonah is referring to her name is Hilda Walter. But Walter became the character that we had to get closer to and we had her letters.
00:17:00
Speaker
as well, and we had people's recollections of interacting with her. And so we did lean on Kate, you know, to just help her. We wanted Walter to feel more alive and more three-dimensional as a character. And a lot of a lot of that's just like devoting more words to it, you know, and and you you do the best you can with the sourcing you have.
00:17:22
Speaker
And early in the story, you know, Kate writes, and this is ah something that Ositsky, you know, ah echoes, is that journalists, he believed, ought to hold a mirror up to the times and be the conscious of the day.
00:17:38
Speaker
But when you've got a sort of a rising right-wing authoritarian government, this can be quite literally life-threatening. So I don't know, maybe you can just speak to the the courage that they the the people central to this story ah had and expressed at a time when Hitler was on the rise.
00:17:59
Speaker
Yeah. i mean it was and Kate and I never really talked about this, but Seyward and I did about how strange it was to be editing this story at this particular moment in American history. you know We assigned it and we sort of knew there could be some resonance with current events.
00:18:20
Speaker
But we kind of when we scheduled it for November, we thought, well, with a little luck, hey it'll lose all that. you know and and it didn't i know you know this is Really, the whole story is about the courage that it took for for Asitsky to make the decision he did to A, public publish stories that he knew the government was going to be unhappy with and that the government was one that would take action as a result, and B, not leave Germany when he could have. you know he He was made aware that he was on an arrest list
00:19:05
Speaker
and said he would stay a little longer and you know then is arrested before he can leave and and sent to the camps and has to leave behind his wife and his, I think she was 12 year old daughter at the time of his arrest. I mean, I can't imagine doing that. you know like i don't I don't know that I would have the courage that he had, but it's it's ah It's obviously very important that that ah that some people do, you know that that people are are willing to to continue important reporting and report the facts, even if it doesn't align with sort of the power structure around them.
00:19:55
Speaker
All right, well, Jonah, it's always so cool to get your side of the table and how you're thinking
Meet Kate McQueen
00:20:00
Speaker
about these things. So just ah thank you so much for your time, and then we'll kick it over to Kate now. Thanks for having me, Brandon.
00:20:12
Speaker
nice. All right, we've got Kate McQueen. Okay, and she was kind of nervous to come on the show, which is kind of charming. But she did a wonderful job, brought great energy, you would never know she was nervous. I know what it's like to feel nervous when you're used to doing interviews, and then you become What the interviewee?
00:20:37
Speaker
But he's talked about how research is like being a truffle pig, which to me was like the single greatest symbol or metaphor I've ever heard on the show. She's fluent in German.
00:20:49
Speaker
And she's over in Europe right now researching a book that draws much of its inspiration and content from this out of his story. ah For her day job, she's the editorial director of the pollen initiative and much of her work involves championing or bringing prison journalism to the forum. By that, I mean she empowers inmates to be journalists within the walls of the prison. It's wild. And we touch on that a little bit, but I plan on having Kate back in 2025 to talk about it in greater detail. She specializes in literary journalism, yay, with narratives on crime and justice.
00:21:29
Speaker
She has a PhD in literature from Stanford University, so she's like wicked smack kid, and a master's in journalism from the University of Illinois Urbana, Champaign. Now she's just showing off. Her work has appeared in Alta Journal, Next City, and now The Atavist. Why wait? Here is Kate McQueen. hu
00:21:56
Speaker
Yeah, it's, uh, it's maybe helpful for me to explain a little bit about my split personality first. So oh I do have one foot, um, kind of in academia or or have for a long time, um, as a researcher and as a critic and slowly have put my foot in the world of journalism and as well. Um, and now mainly I work in prison journalism, which is probably a story for a different time.
00:22:21
Speaker
And it will be a story for a different time, because once Kate and I were off mic, we agreed that she has to come back and talk about the prison journalism ah that she does. and well Well, there's gonna be a little more chat about it, but there's gonna be a more specific chat about it, ah probably in 2025. Okay, all right, back to Kate. But um my PhD is in German Studies,
00:22:49
Speaker
And my primary area of focus as a critic is the early 20th century German language press. I came to him partially through um more general research I've done ah in in that area. The German press it might sound very niche, but it's actually quite fascinating since so you know the modern press did did grow out of democracy as a political system and to a certain extent influenced its rise. But you know and in a country like Germany, we had ah a very weakened democracy and ultimately a dictatorship takeover. So the question about what happens to the press in that kind of situation is super interesting. And Germany can offer us a lot of interesting interesting stories about what happens to journalism and and to a free press when you have a weakened democratic system.
00:23:40
Speaker
Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. And are you seeing just through your research and of of course your reporting and writing of the story that it's something of a crystal ball that ah looking into the future and like seeing certain structures and especially here in America, ah certain things are and under threat. I don't know if I would say crystal ball necessarily, but um obviously there's always a lot of interesting things you can learn from history. You know, the the germ German democratic system was very young in the 1920s and so they were under a lot of different pressures than we are in the US, but I'm sure a lot of people read the story and feel um a certain kind of affinity towards these exiled German journalists who are trying to figure out how they can sort of um still maintain um their homeland and their country and their language and keep a connection to a place where they no longer really feel that they have a lot of say in anymore.
00:24:38
Speaker
Yeah, there's something to be said and what's kind of cool about ah almost like ah these journalists superheroes and like trying to trying to free, you know, one of their own who is you just savagely tortured really in in, you know, in this in a concentration camp, essentially. But yeah, so what for you, what was the ah the appeal in trying to to flesh yeah these people out who are try and yeah desperately advocating for one of their own on on the inside?
00:25:04
Speaker
I just really admired them. You know, it's easy to admire Karl Thanosiecki and he did ah later ultimately become a ah pretty well-known figure in in German contemporary history for his sacrifice, I guess you could say, um his willingness to stay in Germany, even when the writing was on the wall and and everyone else around him, and probably he did too, knew that things were going to go south. You know, his willingness to stay and say, I'm going to share the fate of the of the country that I'm going to fight for.
00:25:33
Speaker
I was very noble, but I also found something very noble in those who left and still wanted to try and make a difference um by doing everything they possibly could, really moving heaven and earth to save this man's life. Yeah. When I see a journalist of that nature, be it in the past or contemporary and how how brave they are, I deeply admire that because i I feel like I'm kind of a wimp when it comes to comes to that kind of thing. and i And i I wonder for you, like what what do you see in them and what do you find so admirable and like do you see some of yourself in them or do you see something you wish you ah you had more of in them? Well, I definitely see something I wish more of us had and more of us were willing to plug into. I admired, I especially admired the two women at the center of the story, um Hilda Walter and Hedvig Krunika and the
00:26:26
Speaker
just the creativity with which they they tried everything they could to move the needle and make a difference. And when one thing didn't work, they just tried another thing, you know, and they they just kept going. So that I think is also just really interesting to see unfold in the story is how resourceful they were.
00:26:46
Speaker
with your reporting and your research, what was just then an early, you know when you start when you started pulling back the layers and everything, like when when did the story really start to kind of take root or really kind of bloom for you? Well, a lot of the um things that I find interesting about the German press and probably aren't interesting to a general audience. It's a lot of people often sitting around probably in their armchairs. um talking about situations and there's not a lot of action. But this story, you know, once i I sort of began to realize all the things that were involved for this Nobel Prize campaign, it seemed to me to actually be something that could be plot driven, um a plot driven historical narrative. And so that was when I, my my interest really got peaked and I thought, oh, this might be something that a publication even like the Adivis might be interested in. You know, journalists often
00:27:41
Speaker
so As you probably know, the work we do is not super action-driven. you know it's a It's a lot of sitting down and thinking and trying to piece things together. Take us to what you're thinking and metabolizing of material. To what extent do you just pour most of your attention into that side of the coin?
00:28:02
Speaker
With a story like this, that um I mean, I guess you could call it reported. It's it's a lot of archival research. It's primarily archival research. You just have to sit down and read a whole bunch of stuff and build the story world for yourself first. Maybe that is helpful. I guess ultimately it can also sometimes be distracting because you can get distracted by you know atmosphere and larger context. But I think for me, that was how how this really started to to take shape was thinking about the the entire world that these people were in. So they're milieu, and you know what was Berlin like? And what were these early camps like? What was Paris like? And trying to understand the sort of pressure cooker that that they they were all under.
00:28:51
Speaker
Oftentimes we when we talk about world building, yeah we often think of, you know, fantasy and novels that take us to a different time or whatever. And ah we don't often talk about the world building that goes inside of a nonfiction story and and cultural context and and just that, the ecosystem through which these characters are navigating.
Crafting Historical Narratives
00:29:12
Speaker
So just ah what was the the world you were trying to build for this story?
00:29:18
Speaker
Well, a big part of it was trying to imagine the way in which these cities changed um when the governments of their countries changed. And a lot of those changes were really abrupt and pretty dramatic. Part of the problem too with it with a historical narrative is, ah especially in the German context, because so much of Germany was destroyed in the war, um is that most of these spaces don't really exist anymore.
00:29:48
Speaker
So you don't even have um the possibility of going and observing in person ah what the space could be like. So an example of that is the concentration camp Esterbegne, the last camp that Ozayevsky was held in. um it's It's not really there anymore. There's a little bit of the moors. um there's There's a very nice memorial, but the camp itself is gone.
00:30:16
Speaker
It can be nice and I went and visited and thought maybe that would be something I could lean on, but it turned out that actually photographs were much more useful to me. ah Pretty much this entire um project getting grew out of the archive and imagination.
00:30:31
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, because you don't have the benefit of you know interviewing principal figures to to give you some. like well What do you what do you remember? What is the the context of of this and and have them provide a reflection on it so that that ah is its own kind of challenge. So just just in your research, how did how did you still try to make it feel alive when you have to pull all those details from archives, from letters?
00:31:02
Speaker
Yeah, that was one of the biggest challenges with this piece because not only are there no people around to talk to and very few spaces to visit that are still sort of intact, um a lot of Berlin was just utterly destroyed in the war. And so a lot of the archival material that could have been useful is gone. Most of the characters in this story ah were um refugees. And so, you know, they fled Germany with very little, then they fled France with very little.
00:31:32
Speaker
um came to the US s probably with not much more than a suitcase. So they didn't carry their letters or their photographs and and these sorts of things with them. So the archives that still exist that are relatively robust are primarily collections that they had the foresight to store with the university or with some other institution in a neutral space before they left.
00:32:00
Speaker
So for example, one of the collections that Hilda Walter put together of her work, her PR work, if you will, for the Nobel Prize campaign, she ah left in Amsterdam with the Institute for Social History. And another ah really important collection of letters that I leaned on heavily in this piece was is at the University of London in Rudolf Olden's papers.
00:32:26
Speaker
A moment ago, you were talking about you know how this the story was had the started to have the building blocks of plot-driven historical narrative. And what were some models that that you've read and you've leaned into and loved, and or be it books or magazine stories, that yeah that this story that you're reporting on started to take on the feeling and the energy of? And you're like, oh, I could i can really lean into this thing and these sort of things that kind of inspire me.
00:32:57
Speaker
I think I'm i'm ah inspired most by biographers or writers of history that actually use a bit of criticism in their work like Janet Malcolm or Claudia Roth-Pierpont, um which ended up being a little bit of a ah false model for the activist because they don't really do criticism. So I would say if anything was that I've read that it's kind of close is maybe, you know, David Gran, not that I can say my work is anything like his, but um he's someone who I admire enormously for the way he can tell a historical narrative that moves fast and still has depth, um but that doesn't get too bogged down and in you know the author's thoughts, I guess you could say.
00:33:45
Speaker
When I spoke to him last for his most recent book, The Wager, um we we talked about how he's able to how how he creates suspense in these historical narratives that take place place sometimes centuries ago.
00:34:01
Speaker
And if you want to go back and listen to the two times that David Grant was on the show, one was episode 99, whoa, and episode 366 to dig into how he goes about these historical narratives as well. Really, really, really good stuff.
00:34:21
Speaker
It's great if your letters your letter your letter writers can give you that kind of internal process. I don't know. i I have to go back and listen to that interview with him. I and don't know what his experience is like with that, but the one of the other challenges I had with this piece was that Hilda Walter in particular, but almost all of these journalists were just very much no-nonsense people. you know theyre They were about getting the work done and they didn't really ruminate a lot. We had to go looking very closely to find any kind of emotional kind of texture, I guess you could say.
00:34:59
Speaker
Yeah, and when I spoke with but Jonah, he got the sense that you needed to build up ah Hilda as as ah kind of the the beating heart of the piece, and that's just my phrasing. But like she was the ah the person that you really needed to lean into, because she was really spearheading this effort, as there wasn't just as much at the time left ah left in, say, Carl's own voice.
00:35:24
Speaker
So what was the challenge in you know lifting lifting her up at the center of this piece in this campaign to get the Nobel Prize awarded to Karl? Yeah, I think part of what made her such an admirable person made her a less easy person to write about. So she really was not ego driven. Luckily, one of her but best friends growing up was also a writer and captured a little bit of her and this writer's biography autobiography, excuse me. So I was able to get a bit of detail about her person that way, but she just was very no nonsense and wanted to get the work done and just did not dwell on herself at all. So, you know, the one really key quote in the piece that we were able to find where she talks about how she feels towards the end of the piece, you know, I spent two days reading letters and the
00:36:19
Speaker
Federal Archives in Berlin before I found it. And it was just a little footnote at the end of a letter that she had written to Millie's worker where she talks about being exhausted and and how hard the whole thing has been for her and how much fear she has for for what's going to happen next. So yeah, I think that was probably the biggest struggle with her.
00:36:37
Speaker
In addition to the fact that she didn't leave behind any photographs, um, she didn't leave behind a diary. So we had a hard time even figuring out how to describe her as a person. Like, I don't know if you noticed, but there's no physical description of of her because essentially there's only two photographs that exist of her and they're 30 years apart and being taken. So she was difficult to put put on the page.
00:37:03
Speaker
and A lot of lot of people I talk to, you know it's ah a central tenet of everything is is is research and reporting. and ah very Very few people seem to have like a really good concrete system of like organizing that research, even going about the research. you know Things get a little messy and haphazard. If you're the ADHD stricken like me, it can get messy real fast.
00:37:25
Speaker
And ah you're you you're someone who is clearly a very skilled researcher. ah how How do you ah go about your research and and organize it in such a way where you're not going to lose sourcing for key details? I don't know if I am the best person at this either. I i keep one long running Google Doc with all of the things that I notice in it. And then later when I go back, I've i've started taking pictures of all the pages I think I want to use.
00:37:55
Speaker
Yeah, I don't have a really great or a very sophisticated system. I have handwritten notes. I have a relatively decent memory, which is you know probably not the best tool for a project like this either. But thankfully, I was able to remember, oh yeah, I got that detail out of this but you know of this book or I remember that it was in a letter to this person if I i didn't you know make a good enough footnote.
00:38:19
Speaker
But when you're when you're sitting down to to write or do you have any ah kind of like a I don't know a routine or a ritual around when you know you're going to be sitting down to write for a few hours du that you'd like to do to like prime the pump. I don't have any rituals. um I have a day job um and i I tend to have a lot of projects going on at the same time. So I don't really feel that I have the luxury at this point of of being too precious about my writing process. I'm in college or something.
00:38:56
Speaker
um yeah what Just trying to free up ah at least an hour at a time. I'm very deadline motivated, so I make sure I set myself deadlines, even though that can also wear you down and wear down your mental health if you are constantly on deadline. but Yeah, I think I kind of need that accountability to write, and when I have it, then things get done. What's the nature of your day job? but I'm the editorial director for ah a nonprofit organization called The Pollen Initiative. We create and support media centers inside of prisons.
00:39:39
Speaker
and And so when you're, a lot of people who listen to the show too, um you know, are working writers or have day jobs that are divorced from the writing they like to do. So I always love being able to peel back a bit or demystify some of the some of the things around um around writing. A lot of people have their have their nine-to-fives and they find their writing time, their research time around that and thread it around. and whatever way possible. So, you know, as you're doing your work with ah the Pollen Initiative and you're doing some research of this nature for a piece for the Atavists, how did you thread your research and your writing around it as best you could?
00:40:20
Speaker
I'm lucky that it is ah mostly a remote position, so I'm actually able to be on the road, i mean made it possible for me to travel to different archives. I also, for the most part, set my own schedule. When I feel like I need to get a certain number of hours done on on a piece of writing, I have the flexibility to do that. and yeah Also, a lot of what I do is um edit and and help support the writing of people who are trying to do journalism inside prisons. and so um I have a very ah nourishing feedback loop between that kind of editorial work and my own writing, I guess you could say. And when you say journalism inside prisons, prisoned is that are the reporters, the inmates in in the prisons?
Empowering Inmates as Journalists
00:41:06
Speaker
That's right. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
00:41:09
Speaker
Well, tell me a little bit about ah just about about that. That seems it seems like the especially the power brokers inside a prison don't want to empower the voice of the people they're overlording. It depends on where you are. I suppose every prison is probably its own its own world in a way. um Some administrations are are pretty supportive. And a lot of wardens nowadays, I think, are beginning to understand that It is easier to administer a space where there is a relatively healthy information ecosystem. So you don't want to be in charge of a space where the best source of information is the rumor mill. So prison newspapers can fill that kind of
00:41:57
Speaker
um function for a prison and people also are a lot easier to work with when they feel that they're being heard and listened to. So I think prison media fills that function too. So yeah, it's it's ah it's an interesting space to try and um cultivate something like a free press.
00:42:21
Speaker
that you You're out of a story must have felt particularly ah like close to the heart because there is this element of trying to get information from inside you know the camps where ah your central figure is and they're trying to get information on him and he's and everything. So in what way did this piece really feel just kind of very close to the work you do now? That's a really great point. And actually, um a lot of my thought partners Inside prison who are currently incarcerated or formerly incarcerated, colleagues of mine have been very insightful for me trying to imagine how some of this worked. um So the question of how um the friends communicated with Carl Fanosiecki while he was in prison was
00:43:07
Speaker
ah question that came up both in my writing and also in editing and um you know unfortunately this is another one of those places where nothing is verifiable so all we can really do is speculate but my my formerly incarcerated colleagues and friends have told me well you know often officers corrections officers are you know motivated to get things in or out of a prison. So maybe that's how it happened. you know Maybe there was ah a form of bribery that took place or you know not everyone has the same ideology who might be a guard in a space. And so they might be more sympathetic towards the people that they're looking over. And in that way, they might be willing to get a message out. So we had a lot of interesting conversations about the ways in which this could have taken place.
00:43:58
Speaker
um Not that any of that went into the piece as it is a you know a fully fact-checked article, but it was really interesting to try and think about ways in which um the constant early concentration camp system could have been ah a lot like an American prison.
00:44:16
Speaker
And when you were getting yeah you got ah your information, you know, you you know you're starting starting to sit down to write. ah How did you go about ah structuring the piece or thinking about the the structure of this piece as you sat down to to
Structuring Dual Storylines
00:44:30
Speaker
write it? Well, I think I always knew that it was going to have two storylines that seemed to make a lot of sense, since we part of what's interesting is to know what happened to him. So one storyline was going to follow Ozejewski through his arrest and um his the whole story of his imprisonment, and then the other storyline would follow you know his friends and their quest to free him. So that part was clear, I think, in editing the way in which the first draft evolved into the last draft was trying to figure out how often we should toggle back and forth between those two storylines. The the final version, the toggling happens quite frequently.
00:45:14
Speaker
um so that we can stay closer to the timeline. Did you kind of write through each timeline separately and then tried to braid them together? I wrote based on reporting buckets of reporting that I needed to do. So if I knew it was going to be something about Sonnenberg, the first prison that um the first Nazi-run prison present that Ozeatsky was at, I would do the research and I would write that piece first. and Then you know maybe I would go and say, okay, I need to figure out what happened in Paris. and So it's been a week just reading about German exiles in Paris and what their lives were like and going through memoirs and you know trying to figure out you know where they all lived in the city. and
00:46:06
Speaker
and write that piece next. So yeah, I think that's how I moved through it. It wasn't chronological necessarily. and It was more to do with how how the research got lumped together. And when you're, you know, in in your writing, in your in your own headspace, I think a lot of a lot of us yeah deal with myriad manifestations of self-doubt and negative self-talk, and we still have to kind of wrestle our way. and ah flop our way through it
Managing Self-Doubt in Writing
00:46:37
Speaker
somehow. And, you know, for you, if that's something you experience, ah how do you, you know, ah ah dance with that fear or dance with that voice so you can, you know, write something that's ultimately as wonderful as this particular piece with the activist? Oh, thank you. Well, i I will say that this was my first try writing historical narrative, plot driven historical narrative and um
00:46:59
Speaker
I'm always looking for ways to stretch myself as a writer, but obviously that's awesome, sometimes a little intimidating. So I was just trying to keep as humble as possible, um take feedback as it came from from Jonah.
00:47:13
Speaker
and not be too precious about my writing. i guess that that that was the i I tried to acknowledge very early on that I'm in a growth period and I'm learning something new and and I think that was really helpful for me.
00:47:31
Speaker
Right. that's ah i know I know for me ah oftentimes ah yeah in the heat of a project that it's just I like clockwork. We'll wake up at two or three in the morning with just all kinds of panicky manifestations and visions and hallucinations about. My myriad ways of inadequacy when it comes to this ah this nature and it and I am only just a freedom a lot of writers deal with that like do you have a degree of ah that that impostory syndrome thing and The self-doubt that just it seems very baked into this kind of work. is Do you wrestle with that at all? Oh, definitely, especially being someone who tries to
00:48:10
Speaker
um and stand with feet in different spaces. um you know There's always always the chance that someone's going to say that you don't belong there. you know Also, I think maybe working with the writers that I do inside prison, I'm just very aware of the fact that everyone is always in a place where they could be growing all the time. So it's good to ah Embrace the fact that you don't know everything and that's that's okay. Yeah, that's what yours for it. I make you better Yeah, but ah right the best version of your piece for that particular publication ah A finished piece is is a great piece
00:48:50
Speaker
ah Early in your Adivis piece, I a like this ah this moment that you cited ah that – basically what Carl said. It's a journalist he believes ought to hold a mirror up to the times and be the conscience of the day. And that's ah that's written in a citation from someone I would think, and I'm presuming, but I'll ask you to expound. is is ah you know you someone who really loves journalism, it sees the value of journalism. And just when you read a ah comment of that nature to and to put it into the piece, you know what's your connection to journalism, journalists, and a to to drop that into the piece? Yeah, that sometimes that's a little bit difficult um when writing about journalism in the past, just because
00:49:37
Speaker
their conception of journalism, I think was quite different from ours. And there were actually many times in the story where I've had to catch myself making assumptions about what I thought I knew about how things worked. And the same thing when we went through editing and fact and fact checking. um You know, sometimes you can ah forget that your perspective is just your perspective and it's ah it's a historical one and and it can be hard to remind yourself that things weren't always the way they are now. And I say that because I think that journalism in the 1920s and Germany looked very, very different than it does now. um they They didn't have the same kind of um
Journalism: Then and Now
00:50:25
Speaker
close attachment to
00:50:27
Speaker
like objective reporting that we we do in the States and in and our and our day and age, um they were much more commentary driven anyway, but I think Karl-Fonoszewski was particularly invested in commentary. So yeah, I think what made him stand out wasn't only just that he was willing to have this,
00:50:53
Speaker
I guess you could say judgment for lack of a better word. He did want to be the conscience of the day, but he was able to do it in a way that was extremely accessible. And I think that was what made him very unique, um that he had a beautiful, but also very accessible writing style. And so people really could hear him when he was saying something on the page. And when you're researching, reporting, or even writing, out what part of the on the continuum of this process, in a yeah be it a book or article, ah do you feel most alive and engaged? I just really love literary gossip. And so I think that those are when I start to get something that that feels juicy to me in that kind of way, that really helps me understand the world that the people lived in and how they
00:51:42
Speaker
thought about things and and sort of the ways in which they could be catty or, um you know, when they capture a detail about someone's mannerisms, that's when I feel ah particularly hooked. And obviously that's not a strength of academic writing. So that's one of the things I love about historical narratives. You kind of need to go, you know, you need to be a truffle pig and go find all of those great little concrete details.
00:52:12
Speaker
um And your story actually can only be as good as the details you find, so. I'm always someone who loves ah yeah getting a sense of the repartorial tools in your bag, the kind of notebooks you like, either or the pens or the pencils, and ah and how you go about curating and gathering that information. like what What are those things that you like at your disposal that you're comfortable with, that are in your satchel as you're heading out there in the field, so to speak?
00:52:41
Speaker
I don't like to write on expensive paper. I always feel that I need cheap paper. So I tend to have like the cheapest lined notebooks. Like those model black notebooks that are like a dollar at state. Yeah, exactly. That sort of thing. um I write on a lot of ah loose pieces of paper, the backs of request slips from libraries. And and i've I tried not to write uh, too much on paper anymore, actually, just because I'm afraid of losing things. So I tend to put things in a Google doc very quickly. Yeah. I like to read on paper though. So I do try and get my sources as many as possible in print. And I like to annotate. I like to highlight, find it easier to find things when I go back. If I forgotten where they are, if they, if I have kind of marked up my paper that way.
00:53:35
Speaker
And when it comes to to your to to your writing and in um and and where you are to date in your career, what is some and some good advice that you've received from from somebody or ah like a cherished mentor or just advice that you've just hard won over you know doing research and and writing for years? I really like Robert Caro's turn every page line. I feel the truth in that every time I go to work on something and I'm getting nervous about the time I've invested and I started to panic that I haven't found what I needed to to make the story good. You know, just knowing that you need to set you just need to sit as long as you can with the sources and turn every page and hopefully you're going to eventually find what you're looking for.
00:54:24
Speaker
How do you know to because he and know as you've expressed, you're someone who works ah operates well when a deadline is nearing and um yeah, Carol's turn every page like it's I love it. That's a guy who operates on a almost geologic time scale when it comes to writing his books.
00:54:41
Speaker
And eventually it's like, yeah, sometimes you feel like, all right, yeah, um i I do want to turn every page. Or like, oh, maybe there's another stone out there to be on, and ah to be overturned. Or ah the real nightmare scenario is not even knowing there's a certain stone to be on so overturned. Like, oh, my God, I didn't even realize that thing existed. and Now there's like thousands of pages over there.
00:55:01
Speaker
ah Eventually, you got to turn that faucet off. So just for you and your experience, at at what point do you feel like, all right, I got to I got to turn this off and I got to move on to the next phase? I tend to do research all the way through until the last draft. So I'm really bad about turning it off. But um I think also knowing that the best writing is done writing um and trying to keep that that idea in mind that there will be another piece. you know This isn't the the sinking ship you're going to go down on. ah So letting go letting go and letting letting it stand even if it's not perfect. um And then you know actually when I was working on my PhD, the thing that um stuck with me the most was
00:55:51
Speaker
when someone told me that the real art is learning what to leave out, not what to put in. So I think that is a ah form of discernment that is really important to cultivate. Yeah, how ah when it came to like this piece in particular, how hard was it to maybe leave something out that was to use ah use a word you used earlier in this conversation as kind of juicy?
00:56:18
Speaker
I got very easily distracted with the atmospheric detail in the story and um was just sort of charmed by the zany, chaotic ah German exile community in Paris, for example. And so I think I went down way too much of a rabbit hole with that um and was delighted by all these people that I met.
00:56:43
Speaker
and um you know saddened and um by the tragic nature of their fate, but also kind of amazed at how resourceful they were. And all of that ended up getting cut from the piece, essentially. I think we we cut out four paragraphs on Paris. Same thing with the Winter Olympics. The the entire um backdrop was very, it was it was messy. Everything kind of went sideways. and So I had a lot of fun reading journalist accounts of all the, all the, um, strange things they witnessed and Garmash Patankarhyan. Um, again, too distracting and didn't, it slowed down the primary action of the story. So we ended up cutting all of that. It was still fun. I don't know. Hopefully I can use it again somewhere else. And maybe that's another important lesson is that, you know, one piece might lead you to two more pieces later on.
00:57:38
Speaker
Oh, for sure. Yeah. And you realize that the, you know, your activist piece is its own self-contained thing. and Yeah. And a lot of that material, it might be more suited in in ah in a book or ah the context of that might, it'll resurface. So there is no, even though things might end up on the floor for a little bit yet, I think you come to an understanding that there is really no wasted work.
Integrating Historical Figures
00:58:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's true. And also not getting, well, listening to your editors and what they have to say. i I was really worried that this story was too highly populated with people that no one knows and that it would be really hard for the reader to keep track of all these people. um But that didn't seem to bother Jonah. So it was good to have another set of eyes on what the story needed and what it didn't.
00:58:29
Speaker
Oh, very nice. but Well, Kate, I want to be mindful of your time. And this is a really a furtive conversation about how you went about doing this doing this piece. And um I like bringing these conversations down for a landing by just asking ah the guests for ah just a ah ah recommendation for the listeners. And that can just be anything you're excited about, like a pair of certain brand of coffee or a brand of socks or fanny pack.
00:58:52
Speaker
You know, it's ah it's totally totally totally up to you. So if there's anything you'd like to recommend to the listeners out there, I'd i'd i'd love to hear it, as as will they. ah Well, in the in the vein of literary gossip, i I think probably the books that I enjoy reading the most are by memoirists who don't have a filter. And and if people are interested in in this period, um I can recommend Arthur Kessler. um He wrote many volumes of memoir over his very long, bright early life. He was a Hungarian.
00:59:26
Speaker
Journalist but who wrote it in German um and then after the war in English and his stuff is pretty widely available But he's a great read. Hmm Very nice and it sounds like you're fluent in German. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah, and did you ah Did you study like in in the in the States and study Germany or did you grow up? You know speaking German as well. How did that come to pass? I I came about it purely through school. um I was a philosophy and German major and in college as an undergrad and then had the opportunity to study overseas for a while. So I ended up getting a PhD in German studies. Yeah, I've just always been really fascinated by by the ways in which German thinkers have both
01:00:19
Speaker
um made our world better and made it a lot worse. It's the place of extremes. yeah Yeah, no doubt. Well, fantastic. Well, okay, this was wonderful to to have this conversation and to talk about your work. So just thank you for the time and thanks for coming on the show to talk about your Adamus piece. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
01:00:43
Speaker
You gotta go back, Kate. Awesome. That was so great. Thanks to Jonah and Kate. She has a pretty sparse website, katejoymcqueen.com. If you want to go check that out, I would. You can always follow the show on Instagram, that creative nonfiction podcast.
01:00:59
Speaker
Or head to BrendanOmeri.com to sign up for the up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter. All right, so this past Monday, I drove down Sunday night and got a hotel in Reading, California, about a five hour drive from me and Eugene.
01:01:20
Speaker
Meet a guy. Met a guy. Had some great prefontaine family photos. Since they didn't have cooperation from the primary gatekeeper, that's what we'll call her, these photos were money to get. When you talk about gas, hotel, food,
01:01:38
Speaker
these photos cost me between three and four hundred dollars to obtain. Will it be worth it? I don't know. That morning, that Monday morning, I added my ah dedication, my epigraph, my acknowledgements, my epilogue in to the main manuscript that had been reviewed for two weeks with the copy edits read the book two more fucking times is that what does that make 15 times that you've ever read this god forsaken book i hate it i mean are you supposed to say that i don't i don't think so yeah it makes me sound ungrateful it passed the legal review so that's something uh i got a book cover and i've seen what the interior design is going to look like it's starting to look like a book
01:02:25
Speaker
You know, not just a ah word doc. I don't know if I'll share any images of the book cover or not. ah Writers constantly hawking. Their shit is exhausting. And I'm not sure I want to contribute to that space. You know, it's nothing I can do to make the the book more attractive or sell better. It's just gonna... It's a it's an it's a living organism unto itself. there I can just put it out there, this little baby bird, and say,
01:02:53
Speaker
Fly and Maybe and maybe I'll share with the newsletter crew in the patreon crew those are people who seem to be in on the joke They have a hard time imagine imagining anyone giving a shit me like maybe Kelsey or Dale, but I don't know okay. I'm a bit sad There's no fanfare. It just ends Like a few months ago my agent was asking me if I cracked the mystery around Steve Prefontaine's death and I said no and she was like, oh. Like she was so disappointed. Like you could tell, you could feel the best seller potential of the book just drain out of the room in her estimation. You know how you can just pick up on energy? Yeah, there was serious, ugh.
01:03:39
Speaker
I thought you could, ah you didn't, and you, why, oh, hmm.
01:03:45
Speaker
I guess you disappoint so many people along the way when you're writing a book that when you finally turn it in, you don't really feel that good. It's like the capstone on a long chain of many disappointments. I disappointed myself the most for not cracking the mystery, for not making 300 more interviews, for not subscribing to that extra newspaper archive when my back was really up against the deadline wall.
01:04:09
Speaker
Did I waste a lot of time? Yeah, I think so. Did I complain that I wouldn't have enough time? Sure, that was part of wasting it. Did I work as hard as I possibly could? I don't know, maybe. Probably probably not. Did I blow it? Most likely. I'll likely never get this opportunity again. It just sucks that I had the best editor in the world. The world. The the best circumstances to write a book in the world.
01:04:36
Speaker
And it's likely gonna be a dud and perhaps my final crack at something of this scale. I mean, what the fuck is wrong with me? i See, i' I'm very sorry. a Debilitating ADHD, of which I need to get medicated for. Jesus Christ. The Adderall I was on at one point a few years ago made me feel like a fucking hummingbird. um I think my heart was beating as fast as a hummingbird. And I had next to no appetite, which meant I wasn't such a chubby, fat fuck. I'm just a sad, broken, dude maybe this is how you feel after finishing a book I guess that's why I'll be starting research on a new one next week because I just I will sit for a few more days with the darkness
01:05:21
Speaker
And then I got to get out of the darkness. It's been 14 years since I last published a book. like Back then, in 2010, 2011, when I was 30, 31, I felt more hopeful, naturally. Yeah, more runway ahead of you, in theory. Now, 44 going on to 45 by the time this book comes out.
01:05:40
Speaker
I'm just this ungrateful husk, an insufferable waste of your time. The analytics bear it out. I'm gonna go for a walk. That's what I'm gonna do. Then I'm gonna lift some weights and hope not to injure this brittle, broken body.
01:06:00
Speaker
For those of you writing a book, this is what you might have to look forward to when you turn it in. Fuck all of us. And if you can't do interviews, see ya.