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Episode 343: Kristina R. Gaddy
307 Plays2 years ago
Kristina R. Gaddy is the author of Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History.
Social: @CNFPod
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Shoutout
00:00:00
Speaker
AC and Fers, shout out to Athletic Brewing. That dry January time of year is fast approaching and you might want to give it a go. Delicious stuff at Athletic Brewing. Shout out to Free Wave, my favorite hazy IPA by them. I'm a brand ambassador and get no money and they are not an official sponsor of the show. This is just me trying to spread the love.
00:00:21
Speaker
visit athleticbrewing.com and use the promo code BRENDAN for a discount. I get points towards merch and free beer, but no money.
Listener Engagement Offers
00:00:36
Speaker
I haven't done this in a while but I'm happy to bring it back into the fold since I have a teensy bit more time on my hands. If you leave a review on Apple Podcasts, I will give you a complimentary edit of a piece of your writing up to 2,000 words.
00:00:56
Speaker
Once your reviewer posts, usually takes about 24 hours, send me a screenshot of that review to Creative Nonfiction Podcast at gmail.com and I'll reach back out to you and we'll get started.
Brendan's Passion for Storytelling
00:01:10
Speaker
Who knows, if you like the experience, you might even want me to help you with something more ambitious.
00:01:17
Speaker
I love the nuance that we're able to get into in book length projects. And I've always had a hard time with kind of the shaving off of edges to make things easy or simple for people to digest.
Introduction to Christina R. Gaddy and Her Work
00:01:42
Speaker
ACNFers, it's CNFpod, the creative non-fiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. How's it going? Look who's back on the podcast. It's Christina R. Gaddy. She's got a new book out. Well, it's called Well of Souls. Uncovering the banjo's hidden history, it is published by Norton.
00:02:07
Speaker
It's a great read, and it's not so much a nuts and bolts origin story of a musical instrument we associate with Deliverance and Mumford and Sons. It's a mystical instrument vital to the perseverance and endurance of enslaved Africans and African-Americans who get into its CNF-ers. And Christina was excited to come on this show because other interviews she's done. Gotta talk about more about the
00:02:35
Speaker
actual content of the book whereas she knew we'd be talking about the writing of the book and so on. Which got me thinking if I'm letting guests down by not getting more into the content of the book itself. I mean I still read these things cover to cover and I use just a sliver of what's in my notes but it makes me wonder
00:02:59
Speaker
show notes to this episode and a billion others are at BrendanOmera.com. There you can also sign up to my up to 11 rage against the algorithm newsletter. And what better time to rage against the algorithm than right now? What with the shit show happening at Twitter, right? The fact that you can say that Twitter has turned into more of a shit show should give you all the ammunition you need to log out of your Twitter accounts.
00:03:25
Speaker
you know squat on those handles so no one steals them and just sink into the the luscious world of newsletters
00:03:33
Speaker
is where it's at, seeing efforts. I'm not one to hang out on social media, obviously. I even logged out of my Twitter accounts, just because. But I am one to put a lot of effort into my kick-ass newsletter that I hope entertains, I hope gives you value, and I hope invites you to a monthly 40-minute happy hour, because who has money for those extra Zoom accounts? Come on, and sticks it to the algorithm, like right up the algorithm's keister. If that's your thing, sign up, first of the month, no spam, as far as I can tell, can't beat it.
00:04:05
Speaker
One other thing of housekeeping matters. Also, why don't you consider heading over to patreon.com slash CNF pod helps keep the lights on at CNF pod HQ. The show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. And I got the thinking that maybe I'd move the CNF and happy hour from like the newsletter crew to patreon.
00:04:24
Speaker
But I'm thinking that maybe for certain tiers, I'll have more of a virtual writing group where, you guessed it, we write in community. You know, we don't chit-chat, we actually just get into it and we just kind of, we just write. You know, just for a little bit. Could be 40 minutes, because, you know, 40 minutes. Or it could be an hour. I have to figure out some logistical things about that, but we'll see. We will see. See and efforts.
00:04:52
Speaker
It is time.
Christina's Growth as an Author
00:04:54
Speaker
It is that time now that we get into this conversation with Christina R. Gaddy at KGads. What was that? KGADZ on Instagram.
00:05:11
Speaker
Yeah, kegads. We talk about what she learned between her first book, Flowers in the Gutter, from her previous visit of this podcast, that helped her write this book, Well of Souls. And we talk about the late Phillip Girard, who we both knew but she studied under directly, going to the game tape of books. We talk some structure, creative choices in Well of Souls that she made, et cetera. Hey, you know the drill, right?
00:05:41
Speaker
Right? Riff. What lessons did you learn having finished flowers and then parlaying that into this history? What were those lessons that maybe made this one easier or maybe not altogether?
00:06:11
Speaker
That is such a good question, Brendan. I think the biggest thing was that Flowers was really written kind of like an adventure novel. So it was close third person on these young people and their experiences. And there was definitely some stuff that they basically, maybe even in their lifetimes, would never know just because of how history works and the machinations of the Nazi Party and stuff like that.
00:06:41
Speaker
I had to find a way to include that information for the reader, but not kind of take the reader out of these intense scenes with the young people. And so, so much of that book is scenes and is writing from their perspective. And that lesson of doing that and making that, at the very least, the entry point
00:07:10
Speaker
into complicated history was super important for Well of Souls because you know I was having this discussion last night with some people of you know this the history can be really important but if it's not accessible to the reader because of the style in which it's written you know people are then not going to read it and they're not going to know about it so you know to bring in that kind of
00:07:37
Speaker
scene building, world building, and in this case still including the history that we know now and kind of some contemporary perspective on it was important in the actual body of the text, but to really think about how to write it in a way that is what kind of the storytelling that appeals to readers and
00:08:06
Speaker
you know, to bring up, um, a Philip Girard who passed away recently. I remember, you know, learning from him how important that idea of scene building and really putting the readers in a place and a time was. Um, and so I don't, I'm not sure that I thought of that as much in flowers because it felt very natural to do, uh, but definitely was thinking about that with Well of Souls.
00:08:35
Speaker
Yeah, and let's just take a little detour there since you brought up Phillip. He passed away by the time this runs about two weeks ago. It was just one of those gut punches, because he was one of the good guys who really put, he just was so into whatever you were working to help you get there. I never had him as a mentor directly, but I've been in touch with him ever since I finished at Goucher. He's been on this show twice. It was always someone I wanted to have on.
00:09:05
Speaker
yearly just because he always he was just such a joy to talk to and dropped like quotable wisdom on almost every sentence he ever uttered and I just want to get a sense of what that loss means to you.
00:09:18
Speaker
It's so sad because it was unexpected. I had seen him earlier in 2020, both at AWP, the Writers' Conference in Philadelphia, and seeing him, it was always immediately picking up where you left off.
00:09:37
Speaker
obviously that was, you know, 2022. So I hadn't seen him for a number of years before that. And it was just immediately into talking about writing, writing projects, what's going on, what he was working on, what I'm working on, but then also just like immediately getting into kind of nitty gritty stuff about like,
00:09:58
Speaker
What does it mean to be kind of broadly a documentarian and how are we manipulating the information that we take in as we disperse it to readers or viewers?
00:10:13
Speaker
And, and that was always just so, so exciting, which is like, he was always bursting with, with knowledge and wisdom and wanting to share it and talk about it, and not ever in kind of a, you know, didactic way, but in a very like collaborative way of here's what I'm thinking,
The Role of Research in Writing
00:10:31
Speaker
what are you, you know,
00:10:32
Speaker
And that was always wonderful. And then I saw him again at Goucher had a celebration of 25 years of the MFA program. And he gave a speech there. And, you know, it was clear that he was still just like in the middle of working on projects and researching. And I talked to him, you know, I asked a question after the lecture of kind of
00:10:56
Speaker
we have this attitude that like everything's online now and surely we can just research everything online but you know we all know that that's not true and if he could talk more about that and you know he was still a guy that was like driving to western North Carolina to interview people about a piece but not just like oh I'm setting up an interview and I'm gonna go there it it was still the kind of almost young person's game of
00:11:21
Speaker
I'm going to go up and talk to this person, they're going to recommend I go talk to somebody else, so I'm going to drive over there, and then it's going to turn out that somebody's having some sort of reunion event that I can go to, and then all of a sudden talk to 15 sources that I would have never been able to find otherwise.
00:11:39
Speaker
So I, you know, loved seeing that even kind of as an established writer and teacher that he was still out there on the ground doing it, which I think is, should be very inspirational to all writers. But yeah, he was always so supportive and so, yeah, kind. I did have him as a mentor and I could still, you know, if there was like a fellowship or something I was applying for where I needed a letter of recommendation.
00:12:07
Speaker
I never hesitated to reach out to him and say, hey, Philip, here's what I'm working on. Would you mind doing this? And he would do it. And he was just that guy.
00:12:18
Speaker
super excited about Well of Souls coming out. And it's just, you know, that I think the loss is definitely there. But the the shock to have it all of a sudden, you know, not having that person within this community to support younger writers and to kind of further develop the nonfiction world is, yeah, it's sad.
00:12:42
Speaker
Yeah, in one of the poll quotes that I had found from our first talk, I had just had a bunch, like the way I used to do show notes, I would do a few like tweetable poll quotes and I just had a whole bunch there in the show notes and I just looked at them and one was just like, I don't have hobbies, I have passions. And you could just like picture him saying that. I could picture him saying that, yes. And I would say another thing that I learned from him that was really important was
00:13:09
Speaker
He very bluntly said, you have to take days off. You can't do this all the time. He's like, you have to have at least one day a week where you, in his case it was,
00:13:28
Speaker
spending time outdoors, spending time with his dog. He was basically just like not sitting at my desk and working. And I think, you know, we're so programmed into a hustle mindset and, and, you know, as writers to thinking like, Oh, we got to produce, we got to produce, but to make sure that we have that time to kind of
00:13:49
Speaker
unwind a little bit and maybe have a rejuvenation of thoughts and ideas simply by not being at our desks and working. And it gets me thinking about books and book writing of late as I'm ramping up for another thing.
00:14:11
Speaker
seeing people, you know, online, just trying their best to hustle their books and peddle their books. And it's always going to find, like, it's never going to find as big an audience as you want. And so much work goes into it. And you get like a little blip of time in the sun before, you know, eventually the sun sets on the time that you're promoting the thing. And it's just like, oh, my God, like, why do we do this for such
00:14:40
Speaker
A little spark, a little blip. All that work for this week or two in the sun and then it kind of fades away. So, Christina, why do we do this? Why do we write books? I mean, because we're crazy, it's probably the real answer. They're just bumper stickers on the car in the end when you think about it.
00:15:02
Speaker
Well, you know, I've had people be like, oh my gosh, like the I mean, including, you know, my editor of basically being like the research in this, like, what? And, you know, my answer is like the short answer is I'm a crazy person. Long answer is much longer. But to me, one thing about books as opposed to shorter form
00:15:26
Speaker
And when I say shorter form, I even mean, you know, things that are, you know, like say 5,000 words long, is I love the nuance that we're able to get into in book length projects. And I've always had a hard time
00:15:45
Speaker
with kind of the shaving off of edges to make things easy or simple for people to digest. And that's not to say that, you know, you don't have to, you know, you're going into a museum exhibit and you have to have a certain amount of text on the wall and that's all there can be. And you got to get that idea across quickly or, you know, a newspaper article, you got however many inches to get this story across. And that's what people are there for. But we also lose a lot when we're not
00:16:15
Speaker
able to go into that kind of detail about the subject matter in general. And I always have a tendency to overwrite. So even if it's like, oh, you're writing something short, it's going to be 1,500 words. It's going to be a lot longer, and then I'm going to have to cut it down.
00:16:36
Speaker
And a lot of that does come from scene building too, though, of if you want to kind of really evoke, you know, especially with time, with history, a time and a place.
Challenges in Structuring a Book
00:16:47
Speaker
But I would say even if you're writing about something contemporary, you know, like a story that you're reporting in Arizona, you know, not everybody's going to be in Arizona, they're not going to know what the kind of people, culture,
00:16:59
Speaker
is like there and books really you know long-form books really give you the opportunity to do that and investigate it you know in a in a thorough way
00:17:13
Speaker
And some people might totally argue that like, you don't need to do that. You can do it a lot shorter. But I just, I, I absolutely love, you know, putting things in these, these long forms. And it's, it's come to the point now where I've, I have a hard time sometimes envisioning, you know, something as a shorter
00:17:36
Speaker
as a shorter entity, whatever it is. And I'm thinking book, it's always like book length. And sometimes that's to your own creative detriment. I was talking to another friend and we were talking about how all of a sudden, you know, once you've written a book, sometimes you just get into this like, oh, that has to be a book, you know, and she's an essayist. So it was like, oh, I have to write an essay collection.
00:18:03
Speaker
with this theme, rather than just thinking, oh, I should just write a couple of essays on that theme, or I should just write one essay on that theme. It's like thinking in those large chunks. And sometimes that can be really helpful. I think sometimes it can be a little limiting, but
00:18:17
Speaker
I just, yeah, the book has become the thing that I'm enamored with and keep thinking about doing. And I'm also like, if you're going to put a lot of work into something, you might as well have something, you know, hard, you know, hard back to show for it when you're done. Because a lot of other things do feel really fleeting. But even if you're, you know, hustling hard,
00:18:43
Speaker
to get people to share your book that's come out. It'll be there as a hardback and some other things. You're like, oh, yeah, I wrote that, you know, whatever 10 years ago. Not that you've forgotten about it because you probably won't ever really forget about it, but it fades into the background.
00:19:04
Speaker
What were the unique challenges that Well of Souls presented for you in terms of research and then trying to, you know, string together something that felt wholly cohesive for you? The thing that I struggled most with was the structure of the book. I knew kind of broadly what I wanted to talk about and the big ideas behind the book. And, you know, so the period of history that I wanted to explore
00:19:33
Speaker
which is like 1687 to 1865.
00:19:37
Speaker
with these kind of early accounts of the banjo and the cultural context of the banjo was a part of within the African-American community. But I also, again, with the comparison of Flowers in the Gutter, which was, that was so contained. That was 1932 to 1945. It was three characters. It was all in the same place.
00:20:03
Speaker
So the scope was really limited and that was, you know, basically abundantly clear from the beginning that I was going to tell it kind of in media rest, which was have, you know, an exciting scene right at the height of their resistance and then go back to the beginning and be like, how did we get here? And then get to the end where it gets really intense again. Your classic narrative arc, if you will, and
00:20:29
Speaker
With Well of Souls, it was like, that is just not, that's not possible at all because each, you know, each account of the banjo is a different person, it's a different time, it's a different place. There are these recurring themes and recurring questions that I'm exploring, but there's not one person that can lead us through this story. There's not one instrument that can lead us through this story. And I struggled for a long time in kind of,
00:20:58
Speaker
What are the groupings that get the reader through the ideas? And I was just thinking a lot at the time, and I still think a lot about it now. It's just kind of what is it that propels a reader through a piece of writing? What is it that keeps them going? And with something like Flowers, it's very much entrenched in
00:21:22
Speaker
the action, what's gonna happen next, what's gonna happen next. With a lot of nonfiction, we're talking about ideas that are kind of bigger than that action. And so it's those ideas that have to keep the reader moving forward. And how do we do that in a way where they don't get lost or they're not getting too much information or they're getting the information in the right sequence. So it took me a long time to figure that out and I went through
00:21:52
Speaker
I didn't write out many iterations but I kind of storyboarded in a way lots of different ways of organizing the material and ended up settling on something that was chronological anyway because I do think you know chronology is our friend as they say and so starting kind of at the earliest and moving forward but
00:22:18
Speaker
you know, thinking about the themes and the topics and kind of having those recur and repeat over the course of the chapters and also then like really limiting the scope in each chapter to be
00:22:35
Speaker
a person, their account of the banjo, which is in a time and a place and really, you know, almost doing like little vignettes. And when I was first talking about this structure with my agent, he said, Oh, so it's like a collection of essays. And I was like, No, because it's, you know, it's a, it
00:22:56
Speaker
you that propels you through the whole thing it's you know it's it's a whole entity it's not just like oh you could read about this guy in this time and place and this guy in this time and place and skip over what's in between that they actually in fact build on each other and so that when i finally figured out that that's what it was that
00:23:15
Speaker
also then helped inform some of the research and the actual accounts that would go into the book because I had this structure of these questions that I wanted to answer. And I had a few where it was like, ooh, that one's kind of thin. That one's not really going to answer that question. So I should find another account that really builds on what
00:23:40
Speaker
has come before it and helps answer questions later. And I've definitely become a structured nerd in the process of trying to figure that out and trying to think about how other books are structured and you know kind of to what end they look like that.
00:24:00
Speaker
In a recent conversation I had with the writer JB McKinnon, we were talking about structure in writing and he felt, and rightfully so, it was so beautifully put, that oftentimes we, especially when we look at stylists.
00:24:15
Speaker
to which are you know there's an appeal there's a car wreck on the side of the road appeal like oh that looks that looks kind of cool what they're doing even it's kind of gruesome but it's but he's just like we sometimes put an over emphasis on beautiful language versus beautiful structure
00:24:32
Speaker
And and he's just like I'm going for like the stuff that you really have to kind of dig to see the elegance But it's not just these little sort of zesty pops of flavor of beautiful language It's just like look at the look though like beautiful contour of a beautifully designed car And it doesn't hit you over the head, but it's very pleasing to look at Yeah, and I think structure is so much that way which is when I think that's kind of also why I got this fascination with it because I realized that
00:25:02
Speaker
Well, I'll also say it helped to read Jane Allison's Meander Spiral Explode, which I will sing to High Heaven about how amazing that book is. But, you know, just that thought of
00:25:19
Speaker
you know, most of the time a structure is not going to kind of be on the surface like beautiful languages, which, you know, beautiful language, great, very good, compelling, you know, prose, absolutely. But that structure can really inform how we digest a book, especially a nonfiction book, the material that's there. And it's not something that we necessarily easily see.
00:25:48
Speaker
So I do think it's something that we experience as readers like we just kind of absorb it. And if it's done well we absorb it nicely and it's pleasing to us, even if we can't directly tell you why, but it's also one of those things of, I think it was in 2021.
00:26:07
Speaker
where I was like, okay, I'm going to slow down. I'm going to read books a little bit slower this year because I have a tendency to be a very fast reader, sometimes at the expense of really enjoying the book and absorbing it. And so in that slowing down process,
00:26:28
Speaker
I don't even know if you can get the structure then of many books. So it's almost like, okay, you get to the end and you're like, yeah, there's an interesting structure here, but what is it? And then having to go back and look at it again. And that happened this summer. I was reading Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. People have talked about the structure in this
00:26:58
Speaker
loose way of everything's in these crots and there's no chapter divisions, it's all kind of free flowing, but there are these weird breaks in it. And I got to the end of that and I was like, there is an interesting structure here and I do not know what it is. So then I went back through it and tried to figure out, okay, what are each of these crots about and how do they move and how do they relate to each other and relate to time.
00:27:26
Speaker
and the topic that Nelson's writing about. And it was just so fascinating and so illuminating. And when I did that, there's a total new appreciation. And then I think another interesting thing is,
00:27:42
Speaker
you know, how much of that is a conscious decision by the writer and how much is, you know, something that kind of happens naturally with the material. And so I've also started thinking about that where, you know, if somebody came to me and said, you know, something about the structure of Well of Souls, I could be like,
00:28:06
Speaker
Maybe, maybe, I don't know, maybe they'll see a structure that I don't see. I would think I would be able to say, oh yeah, I did that intentionally, but there might be something that somebody sees and I would say, I don't know, maybe I didn't know that I did that. But yeah, so being able to, I think it allows us as readers, as critical readers to kind of explore more deeply the thought process behind the writing. And again, what it seeks to accomplish
00:28:36
Speaker
Yeah, one thing, I wish I was a faster reader with the comprehension of reading slower in so much because it would be nice to be able to, like a head coach, a head football coach, like looking at game film.
00:28:53
Speaker
you know just like watch a bunch of plays rewind watch a bunch of plays rewind and even still in the end you know you're only watching it for like a couple hours same with like watching a movie it's like i really want to break this movie down and in the end the movie's two hours long and you're done and you've digested it but like with a book you know for me it takes me you know and it usually takes me like a week to read a book and it's just like if i needed to reread a book it would be it just takes so much time but
00:29:20
Speaker
I guess that's okay, but it would be nice to be able to, as Roy Peter Clark would say, like X-ray read, really get into like the game tape of this, rewind it, be like, all right, where are the moving parts? What were the choices? And maybe how can you break it down? How can you model a piece of writing that you're working on to be like, look like this, but with a slightly different slant, like through your own sensibility? I really enjoy that kind of game tape review, but I just wish you could do it faster.
00:29:49
Speaker
I totally agree because I think it's a little on that productivity thing of like, we're like, oh gosh, I have to read this book. And there's so many amazing books out there that you read in general. And then you come across a book and you're like, oh, I want to read that again. And one thing I found is reading it again.
00:30:12
Speaker
you know, like a year later or like having it on the shelf for another time to come back to with, you know, a new perspective can be helpful. And yeah, it's so funny because we're like, yeah, of course, we want people to, as writers, we want people to appreciate books and, you know, think about them.
00:30:35
Speaker
a lot. And then we're like, oh, we just gotta burn through them and get what we get and then go to the next one. So yeah, it's basically always one of my goals is like, slow down, take it in more, think about it.
00:30:53
Speaker
Yeah, well it's like, you know, George Saunders has been teaching the same Russian short stories for like 30 or 40 years and like he's still like learning new things every time he picks up the new, like, you know, an old Chekhov story he's read and it's just like, well, I guess you never totally fully grasp the text in front of you and you just got to spend time with it. People study Great Gatsby for years or
00:31:15
Speaker
You fill in your famous author, you know, there are books that just sort of stand the test of time. They are static in a sense, but we sort of evolve around them. And then as we evolve and grow and mature and age, you know, the meanings of those words will often, you know, will often change and then like certain scenes elevate when we're like 20 and then they recede them when we're 30. Like, oh wow, that one means more and so forth until we die.
00:31:41
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I read Saunders a swim in the pond in the rain as well. That was so fascinating to do like, okay, read the first page of a, you know, in his case, a short story, and just think about like, kind of what are the expectations that are being set for this. And I actually adapted that for an openings writing workshop for nonfiction writers of Oh, wow.
00:32:07
Speaker
Yeah, like read the beginning of an essay, read the first paragraphs or the first page of an essay and think about like what are the expectations that the writer is setting up? Because I think that idea that we're really putting forward a lot of what's gonna happen consciously or unconsciously in the first part of a story is super important. And even just that like,
00:32:36
Speaker
Then that kind of like slow, meticulous reading of something. I was really glad to, you know, somebody recommended that book to me of like, oh, you're a writer, you should read this. Actually, it was my dad. He was the one who was like, period, you should read that. And then, you know, but then thinking about all of those concepts that Saunders talks about in the book in terms of
00:32:59
Speaker
nonfiction. That's been that's been a fun thing that I've been doing recently too is reading craft books that are for fiction and thinking about how we can translate them into nonfiction craft lessons because there's not that many good nonfiction craft books out there actually as compared to fiction.
00:33:20
Speaker
I'm just going to jump in here for a little aside. I know Christina just said there aren't any good writing books that focus solely on non-fiction, but I've got a few. Good Proves by Tracy Kidder in The Late Dick Todd. Writing for Story by John Franklin.
00:33:37
Speaker
Creative Nonfiction, Researching and Creating Stories of Real Life by the late Philip Girard, Artful Journalism by Walt Harrington, and The Art of Creative Nonfiction by Lee Gutkind.
00:33:51
Speaker
Just a couple, check them out. They do focus solely on non-fiction, so they are out there. Maybe there can be more, but there's a few for you. Yeah, yeah, and it's like that degree of granularity of really analyzing attacks is really, really good, and you're like, all right.
00:34:14
Speaker
At the same time, if you're in a generative phase but you're trying to think so analytically, I sometimes wonder what the balance is between being unbridled in those early drafts just so you can get stuff down versus being like, okay, I'm writing my first paragraph. What are the expectations I'm setting for this essay?
00:34:32
Speaker
I'm sure for some people that and that would gum up the works and it's just like you have to somehow flip one switch on and one switch off to be able to get to a certain point and then you can start asking critical questions in the rewrites but if you put the if you sequence the questions in the wrong order you could be just in this sort of boot loop where you know the you know you're like god damn it I need a new phone it won't turn on but it keeps shutting down and
00:35:02
Speaker
I think, I mean, I've definitely found that true personally and I had an idea for an essay and I was like, oh, I think this structure would be really cool. And so then I fitted into that structure and, you know, sent it out to some places, got rejected, and then I started thinking about it and I was like, I think I was too beholden
00:35:27
Speaker
to the structure. And I wasn't thinking enough about the kind of core questions that that are at the heart of the essay and that the, the, the trying to be like, oh, but then I, you know, if I did this here, then I gotta, you know,
00:35:43
Speaker
basically revisit that same thing down here, but revisiting that I hadn't actually tied it, you know, again to that kind of core question. And so I totally agree that it's, I think it can always be helpful to think of like, is there a structure that would, you know, suit what I'm writing?
00:36:03
Speaker
if in the process of creating, we're thinking too hard about some of those things, then we might just get stuck or might not go as deep as we need to. And we can, you know, you can always come back and add things or take things out, cut things down, move things around. But if you can't get it out to begin with, there can definitely, we definitely lose something.
00:36:27
Speaker
Where do you have the most fun or feel most alive? Be it maybe that initial generative phase or once you have like a bunch of shit there, you're like, okay, here I can work with this, I can add, take stuff away. You know, where in that process are you like, okay, I feel really locked in?
00:36:43
Speaker
Oh, definitely the generative phase where you're able to just like put down all of the things that come into your mind that you want and you're thinking, Oh, that would be cool. That would be cool. We should, you know, describe that or put this in.
00:36:59
Speaker
And I've come to appreciate editing more, but I do find it, I find that, I find editing hard just, you know, it's been, it's basically been a skill I feel like I've had to learn. Whereas the kind of just like,
00:37:15
Speaker
writing and getting it out is just, it's the most fun. I think just as a basic point, the most fun.
Art and Narrative in 'Well of Souls'
00:37:26
Speaker
And it also feels, you know, the most kind of creative writerly to me as well.
00:37:32
Speaker
We were talking a moment ago about certain things that kind of tie a long thing together, be it thematic or particular, I don't know, thread that goes through it. And I would say in Well of Souls something that is very important and integral to the entire reading experience and certainly I imagine to the writing and the research.
00:37:53
Speaker
are the paintings you come across. So speak to the paintings and maybe what you would have done had you not had these paintings to draw from. I think if I hadn't had the paintings to draw from, I probably couldn't have written the book. But that was also an interesting thing because, and I feel like this was something that a mentor told me once about
00:38:21
Speaker
how we in nonfiction use images, whether they be photographs or paintings, and relying on them as a source of information, not just as an illustration. And so a lot of times we think like, oh, you just you have that
00:38:42
Speaker
picture in your book and you don't have to kind of acknowledge it or talk about it or discuss it. And for me, those really became primary sources of not only thinking about the time in which they were created, the person who created them, the place where they were created.
00:39:02
Speaker
but also kind of what that person imbued into the work of art, just like somebody does when they write a letter or do a diary entry, kind of analyzing it in that same
00:39:19
Speaker
And I also had that experience where my agent was reading the book proposal very early on. And I do this intense description, which is actually how I open the book, an intense description of
00:39:34
Speaker
this watercolor scene from South Carolina in about 1785. And he was basically like, you don't need that. You're going to have an illustration of that in the book. Why would you want to have that image there? Or why would you want to describe that image so fully?
00:39:52
Speaker
And to me, I was like, well, I'm pointing out, I mean, on the one hand, I was like, you know, if I want the person to see it in their mind, whether or not they can, you know, see the image, I want them to experience it as if they are looking at it without having to see it. But the other thing is, is just like you would do with an interview, a diary, a letter, even a newspaper article, you know,
00:40:22
Speaker
any primary source that you're using, you are pointing out to the reader what is significant about that primary source and basically where it fits into the story that you're telling. And I felt that these pieces of art were very much the same of I'm relating
00:40:43
Speaker
to you, the reader, what it is that is interesting, different, significant about this piece of art and how it relates to, you know, the other themes and topics that I'm talking about. And I think we could, you know, do the same for photographs. And in fact, you know, there are, like Sadia Hartman, you know, these nonfiction writers who are doing that of like,
00:41:11
Speaker
exploring or Maria Stepanova's in memory of memory is another great book where she describes these photographs from her family, but doesn't actually include them in, you know, there's no illustration of them in the book. She's just describing them to us, you know, and again to a certain purpose to a certain end.
00:41:31
Speaker
And I think that's something that maybe is worth exploring a little bit more for nonfiction writers of not just saying like, oh, here's this photo, you know, of me and my family or, you know, this historical figure and just leaving it at that. But what is what is that image saying on a deeper level?
00:41:54
Speaker
You know, there's a point actually in the code of the book where you cite Scott did like and he says, you know, that there's essentially something mystical about the banjo. And, you know, maybe can you unpack that and and tell us maybe what is, you know, sort of translate the mysticism of the banjo. Yeah. And I think so somebody, you know, I get the question of like, why did you write a book about the banjo? And the real answer
00:42:22
Speaker
the simple answer is I found out about the banjos role, not only in African-American music and dance, but how that, that we knew, but how that music and dance was part of a spiritual practice had really been downplayed over the centuries. And so, I found out, okay, so the banjo is really central to these religious practices, whether it be Vodou in,
00:42:51
Speaker
Haiti or Obea in Jamaica or Winty in Suriname or African-American diasporic practices in religious practices in North America. But it was really the idea that the banjo itself kind of as a structure mimicked a very important
00:43:17
Speaker
religious symbology. And thinking about that, thinking about how an object could be representative of religion and spiritual practice was, you know, to me as a
00:43:35
Speaker
white person, like basically totally mind-blowing because I don't think we, you know, we know that in certain religious practices that objects can have a significance, like relics, like rosaries, but we don't think of that as something that a person would have in their own home often, right? Like if it's a relic, it's at a church, a rosary is something personal that people would have.
00:44:03
Speaker
But the idea that individuals could have these objects and that, you know, the objects could then also be used in these religious services and that the banjo was one of these objects was just that was totally the mind blowing part that I was like, this is this is what I would like to communicate to people of
00:44:22
Speaker
Not only how closely the banjo was tied to those religious practices, but that it's it as itself was a device that could be used to conjure spirits, which is actually not that you know I thought it was kind of crazy in the beginning when I started like thinking that and I was like oh gosh people are gonna think I'm
00:44:38
Speaker
and that job. But the reality is that that's the same way that drums function in Vodou is that they are musical instruments that how they are played and the music that they're played with are able to conjure spirits and communicate with gods and with ancestors. And so, okay, yeah, the banjo was a part of that too. Of course it would have been, had a similar function to Vodou drums.
00:45:08
Speaker
I always love when I stumble across the title of a book or an essay over the course of the reading. And I'm like, okay, here's the title. All right, where am I going to find it in the book? And Well of Souls is on, at least in my galley, page 150. So a little more than halfway through the book is where, you know, where you drop that in where, you know, you say the, I might pronounce this wrong, the Banza or Banza.
00:45:35
Speaker
played at funerals where the dead and spirits were honored. It wasn't just a typical musical instrument. It was a well of souls, a ritual object constructed as a cosmogram. And it was just one of those things where I just noticed, I'm like, oh, there it is. And yeah, and it was like, at what point did you realize that maybe it was the title of the book all along, or were you kind of, in a sense, holding on to it for the right moment?
00:46:02
Speaker
It was definitely the title of the book all along and it did come from something that Scott did like said about Banjo being a well of souls and I had heard that quote from him way before I dove into this history and knew about this kind of ritual structure as I call it. And he meant it pretty metaphorically of there's so many unnamed lives that have gone into making the Banjo unnamed
00:46:32
Speaker
hands that the banjo has passed through and of course its creation would not exist without slavery and the destruction and trauma that slavery caused and so for him it was this metaphorical kind of sorrow and oppression represented by this instrument
00:46:55
Speaker
So I had heard that and I had had that phrase in my head. And then basically learning that there's not a good reason for the banjo from a player's perspective or an instrument builder's perspective to be constructed in the way in which it is constructed. And that that really was more reflective of this religious practice than it was of being a great instrument to play.
00:47:22
Speaker
And that basically you have these vessels, especially in Vodou, reading a lot about that, that you have a place where spirits can reside. I was like, oh, there it is. Scott said this thing about Well of Souls, and he did not
00:47:41
Speaker
necessarily understand it to be literal, but in these cases it was literal. And it just, it's those amazing moments of, you know, research and putting things together that I also, coming back to your earlier question about book writing, that I feel like we can get into in books that
00:48:05
Speaker
may not happen in shorter form things just because of the limitations of words where I would be like that idea of Scott saying well of souls and then thinking oh my gosh it's a literal well of souls and then you know there was other occasions where I have
00:48:23
Speaker
One guy, you know, I'd already been thinking about including Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the classical pianist in the book, because he did a piece of classical music called Le Benjo. And then finding a guy in Suriname who had transcribed black music
00:48:42
Speaker
saying that he was thinking about, you know, Louis Moreau got Chalk's music as he was transcribing this. And I was like, I can't, you can't, as we say, you can't make this shit up. Like, it was just crazy to me sometimes these connections that happened. And there's, you know, a little bit of mystical feeling in that sometimes of what? How is that? Is that possible? Did that person actually say that? Did they think that thing?
00:49:07
Speaker
And then there it is, you know, so...
Cultural Sensitivity in Historical Writing
00:49:10
Speaker
And given that the story is so much, you know, the banjo is obviously on the cover, but it really, to me, struck me as a real story of perseverance and endurance of enslaved Africans and enslaved African Americans. And given that, and given that you're a white woman of Northern European descent, you know, how did you wrestle with the question of like, am I the right person to be telling this story?
00:49:37
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that was always a question basically from the beginning because again, I didn't set out to write this book. It's funny, I've quoted you actually a couple of times in our last conversation, you said, do you chain smoke writing projects?
00:49:57
Speaker
And I have now had to realize that yes, yes, in fact, I do. And it was, I was waiting, you know, for the edits to come back for flowers in the gutter and like literally had a moment of idle time where I should have been doing other things, but I wasn't. And I was like, you know, I'm just like totally fascinated by this diorama that we had just come across. And so I start digging into it and
00:50:27
Speaker
I'm like, whoa, there's like information I'm finding out here that I know other people don't know. This is crazy. I just start going farther and farther and farther down the rabbit hole.
00:50:41
Speaker
of trying to find out more information. Coming across this stuff that I really was, I know that other banjo scholars don't know this information, people involved in banjo research. I know that if other scholars have used it within the context of their field, they haven't been making these other connections that I'm seeing.
00:51:10
Speaker
For a while, I thought, oh, I'm just going to share this information within the banjo community, if you will, of people who are really interested in the early history of the instrument.
00:51:25
Speaker
In fact, that was what I did. I shared it in this limited group of 80 or so people who are super banjo nerds. It was one of the people in that group that was basically like, Christina, you're telling a story here that's bigger than just the banjo. It's more important. You have to share this somehow. Aren't you going to write a book about this? I was like, I don't even know how I would do that.
00:51:54
Speaker
And it was in that realization of
00:51:59
Speaker
there's information here that it's not, you know, it's not, it needs to be shared. And also the realization as I kind of write at the end of the book, which is a lot of the distortions of not only the history of the banjo, but the history of enslavement and resistance of the enslaved has been
00:52:27
Speaker
distorted by not only the initial white observers, but by white, both historians, but also, you know, just white lay people, if you will, in that, in the period since then. And
00:52:51
Speaker
I definitely continually thought about, okay, I'm writing about a culture that's on my own. There's going to be things that I'm going to miss no matter how much reading I do, no matter how much research I do. There's going to be things that just
00:53:11
Speaker
pass me right by. But that being said, if white people are the ones responsible for distorting and messing up this history, then to say, oh, it's on African Americans or people of African descent to correct this
00:53:31
Speaker
is also pretty, that's a pretty messed up task to take. And so if I have the ability and the privilege, quite frankly, of being able to look at these sources
00:53:49
Speaker
uh, parse them out and disseminate them to a wider public, then I really, I should be doing that kind of again, you know, in this case of like telling a story that that hasn't been told and that needs to be told and in a way that it is accessible to all audiences and not just
00:54:14
Speaker
somebody who has the ability to go into an archive and read historical documents or somebody that, you know, I mean, even some academic books that are written about important subjects, they just don't have the kind of distribution and accessibility that they honestly should have to be
00:54:38
Speaker
accessible to the people that they are, in fact, writing about or the communities that they're writing about. And so that was how I kind of, in the end, came to say, okay, yes, I am going to write this book. But it wasn't before I had a lot of internal thinking about it and conversations with others as well.
00:55:01
Speaker
I think in the coda too, you very much sort of kick open the door and you invite people to be like, to use the chain smoking metaphor, like this one could be like the first cigarette in a sense that lights the next one and you're like very much in favor of inviting that kind of inquiry.
00:55:20
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And that was the other thing that I wanted want and I still want to do and say is that, you know, to me, and I don't know if it comes from not being an academic historian, but I am not like the this book is the end all be all of this history. And I've said it's done. It is very much
00:55:41
Speaker
Now there's this foundation that's been laid. Let's figure out what else we can find out. And it's been fun because I've had, you know,
00:55:52
Speaker
I've had a couple of people who are like, oh, hey, I'm in France, you know, like if I can help in any French archives, like, you know, let me know or another guy I met who's, he's Mexican American, but his, lives in California and his girlfriend is Puerto Rican. And he's like, oh yeah, sometimes like we go visit her family in Puerto Rico and I don't have anything to do. So I just go hang out in the, you know, like Puerto Rican archives. And so if I find anything on any banjos in there, music and dance,
00:56:22
Speaker
I'll send it to you. And I'm like, yes, this is what I want is I want it to be this kind of open, open, you know, a thing where it's it's like I had that experience of once my eyes were open, I kind of started seeing things everywhere. And for other people to do the same of if
00:56:38
Speaker
if their eyes are open to the potential of this history, that they'll be able to see it as well. And, you know, it'll be much bigger than just, you know, me having written a book that's about the banjo, that's not about the banjo, but other people thinking about all of these things as it relates to, you know, contemporary life today and their histories and their family stories.
00:57:06
Speaker
When I'm reading a book and I come across a decision, I'm like, oh, there was a decision the writer made. And I'm like, oh, cool. I want to talk about that decision. In this book, you have the interludes and, of course, the coda at the end. And I'm like, OK, that's a choice. So what was the as you were writing this, what was the purpose of you after
00:57:30
Speaker
X amount of pages to come to kind of swoop in and in these interludes and you know the coda is the coda it's at the end but it's like these interludes are important for you to come back in so I was wondering like yeah how did that manifest
00:57:44
Speaker
Yeah, I had originally wanted there to be interspersed throughout the historical chapters, kind of much more of that reflection, the kind of contemporary reflection on what had happened, what was going on at the historical time. And I had written maybe the first
00:58:10
Speaker
third or something like of the book like that and you know handed handed that those pages into my editor and she was like yeah I just don't think that that's working I think there's too much kind of
00:58:23
Speaker
you know, back and forth and basically the reader is going to get disoriented if we do that. So I made the decision, okay, we got to pull those then out of these historical chapters and really just focus on those as these historical time periods.
00:58:41
Speaker
And it also wasn't going to work because of COVID, I had thought that I was going to get to go kind of explore contemporary traditions in a lot of the places that I write about and that that might inform kind of the historical writing as well. COVID did not happen. But so I still knew that there needed to be kind of explanations and
00:59:08
Speaker
some contemporary reflection on the history. And there's only so much of that. One of the things that I really didn't want to do in the book was take people out of the time and the place. And I will say that's something that I learned from my editor on Flowers in the Gutter of like
00:59:29
Speaker
put people there and leave them there and they'll be happy. Yeah. Yeah. And like, so like even just saying like, you know, something like so and so, you know, some of these, you know, contemporary scholars like reflection on something that that draw, you know, that draws people out of this experience that they're having.
00:59:48
Speaker
So I really didn't want to do that in the historic chapters, but I knew that there would be times where I would have to say, you know, this is what, you know, I just told you about this thing. This is what scholars
01:00:05
Speaker
researchers have said is going on or this is when we when we're talking about this thing that keeps occurring in all of these different religious dances from Suriname through the Caribbean to North America to New York we're seeing the same thing why are we seeing it right and
01:00:26
Speaker
a lot of that research of why we're seeing it is stuff that's been done, you know, in the late 20th into the 21st century. And so I can't just like, you know, I can't leave it out. And I can't put it in those chapters. And so I need a place where it can sit. And that became
01:00:47
Speaker
the interludes of just allowing my, you know, myself and my voice to explain to the reader, kind of what's been going on, and adding a spot where if you've just been kind of absorbed in the historic time periods, and I haven't, you know, you haven't gotten what I'm trying to do with like pointing certain things out or
01:01:13
Speaker
making certain things clear as much as I could in this historical writing, then I have this opportunity in the interlude to say, okay, here's what just happened. Here's what questions we've answered. But wait, there's still more questions that we have. And then we can go into the next section and do more. And then again, come back to the interlude and say, here's what just happened. Wait, but there's more. And we can go into that section.
01:01:40
Speaker
In terms of scope, what we were talking about earlier, Flowers in the Gutter had a very tight window for you, and that's often really nice in non-fiction to have that. This one could have been far more sweeping, but you kind of cut the timeline off right around Civil War, right before Civil War. Was there ever any discussion about taking the banjo beyond the Civil War? Do you want it to really cleave it at that point?
Inclusion of Sensitive Topics
01:02:11
Speaker
I actually wanted to cleave it earlier, and that was next. I did not want to write about the kind of popular music craze of blackface minstrelsy that starts in the 1830s and really dominates the musical culture of the United States through the 1860s. And it's ugly. It is hard.
01:02:36
Speaker
hard to write about because it's ugly. It's also hard to write about because it's just really complicated in terms of figuring out what's truth and what these guys just made up about themselves, which I kind of discuss in the book. But I just didn't, and I didn't know, I hadn't been doing research on that. I was just like, I don't, that was not originally part of what I wanted to write.
01:03:00
Speaker
But again, my editor was like, you can't just kind of like talk about how the banjo was central to African American culture and then not at all discuss how it became associated with white culture. Which I was like, oh, yeah, I mean, I understand that that's true, but I still don't want to do it.
01:03:21
Speaker
It was kind of, but it did, at the same time, it did make sense because that is the period in which it's rising in popularity within white culture, but declining in popularity within black culture. And I was able to kind of tell both of those trajectories at the same time by continuing the book through 1865. I did in the book proposal
01:03:47
Speaker
phase of sending it out to editors. There was at least one editor who wanted it to kind of be the big sweeping book on the history of the banjo and say, you know, let's go from 1687 to Mumford and Sons. And it was very funny to me because I was like, I
01:04:09
Speaker
I don't deny that maybe somebody needs to write that book, but I was like, that's not this book. This book is about this hidden history that I want to tell about the instrument's earliest history and its African-American origins. So my editor at Norton never
01:04:30
Speaker
you know, wanted it to go beyond that early period, because she very much understood that that was what I was trying to talk about. And I will say that on the kind of side of exploring the instruments, history in the hands of African Americans beyond 1865,
01:04:56
Speaker
Laurent Dubois' book, The Banjo, America's African Instrument, does do a very good job of exploring kind of the banjo in ragtime and jazz and even in the folk revival as it relates to African Americans.
01:05:12
Speaker
Very nice. Well, Christina, there's one thing I like to ask as I bring these conversations down for a landing is, hopefully you saw it in the notes, from the booking confirmation, is that I like to ask for a recommendation for the listeners of some kind or another. It can be anything, something fun or something professional or both. I leave that up to you. So what might you recommend for the listeners out there?
Book Recommendation
01:05:34
Speaker
I just finished reading a fabulous book that I picked up at AWP in Philly. And one of the things that I love about that conference is being able to go up to small presses or university presses and basically say,
01:06:02
Speaker
what do you recommend? Because the editors are there and they will just be like, this is a book I worked on and I really love it. Or you tell them what you're interested in.
01:06:14
Speaker
And so, one of those books was a collection of essays called Dark Tourist by Hassan Thynka Sirancina. She is a Sri Lankan-American writer. It's by Ohio State University Press. And these essays were just absolutely amazing to me and
01:06:39
Speaker
while they are personal essays they bring in like deep history and cultural analysis and just do it in this absolutely amazing way where you're learning something about history but you're also you know she's also relating it to her life
01:07:02
Speaker
as an immigrant in the United States, as a queer woman. It was one of those things where I just picked it up because somebody recommended it and brought it along while I was traveling because it's not a terribly thick book, not a terribly big book to pack.
01:07:21
Speaker
And as I was reading it, it was just like, wow, these are amazing. And I usually say like, I know when a book is really good because it starts inspiring thoughts and ideas in my own head. And this was one that definitely, definitely started doing that. So it was a, it was a really fabulous book and a surprise, pleasant surprise.
01:07:43
Speaker
Oh, fantastic. Well, Christine, I'm so glad we got to do this again. Thank you so much for carving out the time to do it and for just chain smoking, great work. Thank you, Brendan, and thank you for this podcast and the opportunity. I was saying, a lot of people ask me about the content of the book, but I was like, I'm excited about being on Brendan's show because we're going to get to talk about the writing of the book and that's going to be so much fun. And it has been.
01:08:14
Speaker
Thanks to Christina R. Gaddy and to you the listener. I make this show for you, so hopefully you're finding some entertainment and inspiration as the show continues to do its thing. Trucking along. 10th birthday is coming up in early spring. Can you believe that? Maybe the show will get a shiny new bicycle. Parting shot. Parting shot. I can't remember if I already riffed on this idea.
01:08:38
Speaker
or if it was a tweet i was thinking of writing before realizing that twitter is not where i want to be wasting my words by the way be sure to reach against the algorithm with my up to eleven newsletter brennan america okay here's the notion
01:08:53
Speaker
that's a
01:09:13
Speaker
It's hard for me to say each story, each book. You're basically in a deep grave. And in order to get out, you need to report and research the shit out of your topic for you to reach the surface. You can't write your way out of it, no matter how hard you try. And what spurned this notion was my conversation with the writer J.B. McKinnon from a couple episodes ago, when he said, we put too much of a high premium on beautiful language versus beautiful structure.
01:09:41
Speaker
It's like the gold flakes that some bakers put on things and you're like, oh that's pretty, that's a nice little flourish, but does it taste good? The structure is what tastes good and the flourish is nice in so much as, or only so far as the cupcake tastes.
01:09:59
Speaker
Am I mixing metaphors in here? I think so. There was a grave and now we're talking baking. Anyway, also when I read a magazine story or I read one that I admire and I wonder how the hell this thing is so damn good, I remind myself it's not the writing. That usually takes care of itself. It's the reporting and the research. When you speak to a billion people for a story, you're bursting with material. When you talk to 10 people about the same event,
01:10:25
Speaker
Think of the variations of phrasing of the memory.
01:10:32
Speaker
and you get to pick the best one. Not only, not just one because you only spoke to one person, you're getting such a, you're getting such a different view of a thing, and then as the reporter who's done that kind of legwork, he can pick the best things, and all of a sudden you're like, how did they get that quote? Well, it's probably because they talked to like 15 people about one thing, you're like, damn, someone's gonna say something really good,
01:11:01
Speaker
And the writing gets easier too. The writing doesn't have to carry so much weight. You've elevated the floor of a piece of writing with titanic research and reporting. You know, that way the words can stand tall atop a firm foundation of work. Like I've tried writing myself out of a reporting hole. The story got killed. That was like 10 years ago and it was awful and terrible and I'm so glad it was killed.
01:11:27
Speaker
But I have a better sense that when I feel that pang of anxiety about a piece of writing a story or book, it's probably because I haven't spoken to enough people. Then the thing starts to coalesce and it almost writes itself.
01:11:42
Speaker
I don't have to try that hard, and y'all know that when Brendan tries too hard, we all suffer. Am I right? All right. That's it. Stay wild, CNFers, and if you can't do, interview. See ya.
01:12:19
Speaker
you