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Episode 126—Glenn Stout on Shotgunning Ledes, Creative Chain Smoking, and ‘The Pats’
125 Plays6 years ago
"I never try to write a valentine. I always try to tell the story straight," says Glenn Stout, who makes his third visit to the podcast. Buckle up, CNFers, I’m Brendan O’Meara and this is my podcast, the show where I speak to the best writers and filmmakers, producers and podcasters about the art and craft of telling true stories. I try and extract habits and routines around the work so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, steam on Spotify, find the show and do it up. If you dig the show, if there’s a tasty nugget you know will help a fellow CNFer, pass it along to one person. Share it with you dozen Twitter followers, or your 300 Twitter followers and if you have a moment, consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. Head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter where I give out reading recommendations, writing tips, and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month. No spam. Can’t beat it. So it’s Glenn Stout this week author, at last count, of 3,000 books, go look it up. His latests is the most comprehensive history of the New England Patriots to date titled The Pats: An Illustrated History of the New England Patriots. He put this book together with his long time collaborator Richard Johnson, who handled much of the curating of the art you’ll find in this gorgeous book. So Glenn came back for his third trip to the show. We talk about shotgunning ledes, chain smoking book projects, rationing out energy and, of course the Patriots, my home team, being a New England boy. Thanks to out sponsors in Goucher College's MFA in Nonfiction and Creative Nonfiction Magazine. Glenn is @glennstout on Twitter. Go buy the book for the Pats fan in your life. I’m @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod on Twitter. You can follow along on Facebook @CNFPodHost/The Creative Nonfiction Podcast. I’m also @brendanomeara on Instagram if you like rando pics, drawings, and audiograms. Is that it? I think that’s it. Happy Thanksgiving, gobble gobble mofos. And remember, if you can’t do, interview, see ya!
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction. The Goucher MFA is a two-year, low residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere, while on-campus residencies allow you
00:00:15
Speaker
to hone your craft with accomplishmenters who have pulled surprises and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, faculty, and alumni. Which has published 140 books and counting, you'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey.
00:00:38
Speaker
visit goucher.edu forward slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA program for nonfiction.
00:00:53
Speaker
Alright, let's go!
Podcast Overview
00:00:57
Speaker
Yes! Buckle up CNFers, I'm Brendan O'Mara, hey! And this is my podcast, the show where I speak to the best writers and filmmakers
00:01:08
Speaker
producers and podcasters about the art and craft of telling true stories. I try to extract some habits and routines around the work so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. Hey, subscribe on the Apple podcasting thing. Stream it on that Spotify device.
00:01:30
Speaker
Find the show and do it up. If you dig the show, if there's a tasty nugget, you know we'll help a fellow CNF or pass it along. Just one person, that's all it takes. Share it with your dozen Twitter followers or your 300 Twitter followers, and if you have a moment, consider leaving a review on the Apple podcast of thing. Used to be iTunes.
00:01:52
Speaker
Head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter where I give out reading recommendations, writing tips, and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month, no spam, can't beat it.
00:02:09
Speaker
So it's Glenn Stout this week, author at last count of close to 3 million books. Go look it up. His latest is the most comprehensive history of the New England Patriots to date.
00:02:25
Speaker
titled The Pats and Illustrated History of the New England Patriots.
Book Festival Experience
00:02:30
Speaker
He puts this book together with his longtime collaborator, Richard Johnson, who handled much of the curating of the art you'll find in this gorgeous book. But we'll get to that this past weekend.
00:02:42
Speaker
I had the distinct pleasure of going up to the Portland Book Festival and met a couple guests of the show. Sometimes I forget that I don't actually see these wonderful people in person at all. We tend to have these nice conversations that are far from superficial, so sometimes I forget that I actually have never met them before. I had a nice morning with Elizabeth Rush, who's been on the show twice, most recently to promote her book Rising.
00:03:10
Speaker
I also got to shake Eli Sazla's hand, but there was no time for extended talk there. As they were at last count, a billion people, close to it, give or take, waiting for him to sign their books. It was cool being around actual human beings at a gigantic book expo. I even ran into a listener of the show, just a random person. It's the first time that's ever happened. Must be doing something right,
00:03:38
Speaker
Today's podcast is brought to you by Creative Nonfiction Magazine. For nearly 25 years, Creative Nonfiction has been fuel for nonfiction writers and storytellers, publishing a lively blend of exceptional, long and short-form nonfiction narratives and interviews, as well as columns that examine the craft, style, trends, and ethics of writing true stories. In short, Creative Nonfiction is true stories, well told.
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I like that.
00:04:10
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So Glenn came back for his third trip to the show.
Interview with Glenn Stout
00:04:13
Speaker
We talk about shotgunning leads, chain-smoking book projects, rationing out energy, and, of course, the Patriots, my home team, being a New England boy. This is the last show before Thanksgiving, and I am sure as hell thankful that Glenn came by the show. Here we go, folks. Enjoy the incomparable Glenn Stout.
Creative Chain Smoking Discussion
00:04:45
Speaker
You know, I can't complain, you know, I'm you know, we're gearing up to do this and You know, I'll be doing like a New England book tour over about a 10-day period Lots of radio interviews to go along with that And then you know, I'm already working on the next one so You know, that's how that's how you make it work. You just dovetail one into the other and
00:05:12
Speaker
Right, right. Austin Kalyan has a great reference or a metaphor for that, calling it a creative chain smoking. As soon as the one cigarette extinguishes itself, you just use the butt of that to ignite the next one. And so you keep that momentum going. Yeah, I tell people that if you want to make this sustainable, like doing books, by the time one book appears, you already have to
00:05:40
Speaker
Ideally, you should already be under contract for the next one. I think a lot of writers get in trouble because it's like, okay, I've written this and now I'm going to wait a year for it to come out. And then I'm going to do, you know, promotion and whatever. And then I'll start to work on the next one. Well, you know, the proposal and then if that works, then the time to research, then the time to write.
00:06:07
Speaker
And then you have a book that if that works out, you have a book coming out every three years. Whereas if you string them together, if you chain smoke them, you got a book coming out every year, year and a half, maybe two years. And that makes book writing sustainable as a, as a way to live because you're hopefully, if you're getting decent advances,
00:06:34
Speaker
it's sustainable enough. It can carry you from year to year to year, always supplemented by other things that come down the pike. Yeah. But, uh, but that's the approach that I've taken, um, you know, and knock on wood, you know, so far so good.
00:06:49
Speaker
Yeah, it feels like just yesterday we were talking about the Babe Ruth book. And so that was just two years ago, roughly. And so yeah, you're able to, you know, parlay that, you know, you were probably already working on the Pat's book when the, when Babe Ruth went to print. So I actually wasn't, I was working on something else, but I was working on another book and, and, uh, that's done now and will come out in the spring.
00:07:17
Speaker
Uh, it's a book I did with somebody else, so I'm not sure if I'll have a cover credit or not. I really don't care. Um, but it's, uh, not quite an as told to, but sort of. Um, so I was working on that as soon as Babe Ruth was done. And, uh, you know, that took a, took a while to get published because of some business reasons with the, with the original publisher, it got delayed.
00:07:46
Speaker
Um, but the Patriots book actually, it was a year ago, February that I was approached, uh, first approach to write that. So that was, you know, what, uh, 18 months ago, 19 months ago. Wow. That's when I was first approached to write the Patriots book and, uh, probably didn't start it until the contract was worked out, which was like April.
00:08:15
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end of April, beginning of May, and then I turned it in three days after the Super Bowl last year. Oh, wow. Geez, talk about a hustle there. Damn. It was a hustle. There's no question about it, both metaphorically and literally. Yeah.
00:08:34
Speaker
Well, a while ago I was reading a prominent guitarist, and whenever he would get into a funk of some kind or another, he'd realize, oh, I've gone several days without picking up my guitar and playing. And he's like, then when I played it,
00:08:51
Speaker
things like things clicked back into place. He's like, Oh, this is part of me. I need to be doing this to nourish myself on some level. And do you ever feel that way? If you get yourself, if you stray too far away from, from, from writing or writing anything that you're like, Oh, this is, I need to get back on track and be writing, writing something just because I need to do this. Not really, because I feel as if at some level,
00:09:21
Speaker
I'm engaged with writing even when I'm not writing myself. I might be engaged editorially, working with somebody else. Sometimes things that just come down the pike, like I ended up, I had no plans to do this. I ended up writing a personal essay about three weeks ago that might land somewhere.
00:09:48
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, because I'm always engaged, I didn't have to start from scratch when I did it. But even if I'm working with somebody else looking at something they've done, giving advice on that or or more directly working with them on it, I feel like I'm always engaged. So when I go to my work, it isn't this abrupt gear shift. I mean, even today, and I'm not making this up,
00:10:17
Speaker
I've already dealt with four different people with their stuff. Now this is kind of a unique day, but I had an hour and a half conversation with somebody, I had a big email exchange with somebody else, I had a phone call, and then I had somebody else ask me, hey, can you look at something tomorrow? So I'm kind of constantly, and then you throw the reading I do for the sports writing book on top of that,
00:10:45
Speaker
which is all always done with some kind of critical eye. And it never really goes away. It's I kind of describe it as the hard drive is already is kind of always purring in the background. Yeah. And so it isn't this abrupt gear shift, which again, I think is the problem. If you don't string projects together, starting and stopping and starting and stopping.
00:11:13
Speaker
The hardest thing is to start again. And that's really difficult. And that takes a lot of time if you start and stop and then have to start and stop. If you've always got something going, I mean, one of the things I tell writers who are working on books is don't stop doing your other work. Don't think, oh, I'm doing a book now. I can't do anything else. I think you actually need to do
00:11:44
Speaker
other things. One, it keeps you from being too myopic. Two, it keeps you from being bored with yourself. And three, it just keeps things going. Because, for example, the book I'm working on now, I'm in the research mode on it. I won't write probably until February or March. I've been doing research on it now intensely for about
00:12:12
Speaker
three or four months, even though it's a project that has been in the works for about 10 years. But I can't take the risk that when I'm ready to write that I got to spend two months just getting started. And if I keep engaged even with other people's work, that should be an easier, not easy, but an easier transition to make when I'm actually ready to write myself.
00:12:42
Speaker
How have you been able to keep all those things straight? The editorial work that you do, the editing work and the coaching and balancing that with your own writing. It's a lot of balls in the air. How do you keep that straight so you're getting things done and not getting overwhelmed? Well, I mean, you try to partition it a little bit. If I'm doing a project of my own,
00:13:11
Speaker
that takes a lot of time. Instead of saying, hey, I'll get back to you on your project or your concern tomorrow, I might say, let's do that on Saturday because I don't want to break up what I'm doing right now. Or let's do that at four o'clock this afternoon when I'm done with my thing. But it's also, it's just a matter of having
00:13:40
Speaker
been doing it for so long, in so many ways is that it just never goes away. And it's become normalized. Yeah, in my life. I mean, I tell people, you know, that's the hardest thing is, is to make writing such a part of your life that every time you approach the keyboard, it's not like it's something brand new. It's like you're just jumping back into the stream. You've been in the water before.
00:14:07
Speaker
So you don't have that shutter of jumping in the water and it's too cold and all of a sudden you don't know what to do, you're kind of frozen, you're shaking. It's just, wow, I have to really, I have all this stuff to think about. You've already been thinking about them. Those are constantly in your brain anyway, how to put words together, how words work together, how to create stories, you know, how to break them down, options to take all this stuff,
00:14:37
Speaker
So that, uh, you know, it, it's sort of the same thing with me because, you know, I have been doing this for almost 30 years. Um, well over 30 years since I did my first story, but even full time, almost 30 years now. So, you know, it's, it's just part of the air and, uh, and has been for, for a really, really long
Writing Habits and Continuity
00:15:01
Speaker
time. I mean, that's, I think, you know, that's how I've gotten.
00:15:06
Speaker
so many titles done is that it never really goes away. I've never been without something to do. So I haven't had to stop. If I ever really have to stop, you know, that could be pretty interesting. But I mean, even in the Patriots book, you know, it's funny because I actually did have to stop because of a health issue with a member of my family, where in the midst of it, I'd take two months off and just deal with something else entirely.
00:15:36
Speaker
Uh, normally that would have scared me to death. Uh, but. Because it never really goes away. Uh, it didn't scare me to death. I was pretty sure I'd just be able to, to get back in the water and I was able to get back in the water.
00:15:52
Speaker
You said something that really resonates with me, and I think it resonates with a lot of other people, too. I'm thinking about Mary Pallone off the top of my head, too, when you said doing other work that's just off to the side of a major book project to appease boredom with yourself and even just hatred of your own voice of going over the same thing over and over again and just getting so bored.
00:16:18
Speaker
I think she experienced that during both the monopolist and the Kevin show. So she's always got these side projects or a side work that keeps her, it just keeps things a little bit fresh. So at what point did you come to that realization that in the midst of a big book project that you in fact did need to have other assignments going so you did not get bored with yourself? When I had bills to pay, I mean first it was out of necessity because
00:16:48
Speaker
You were doing projects that, you know, that maybe couldn't be fully sustainable for your life. So you have to take on other things just to, you know, to pay the rent and everything. But then you start to realize that that does serve sort of a formal purpose, that it does keep things from getting stale. It keeps you excited about work.
00:17:11
Speaker
Um, I mean, the book I'm working on now, uh, you know, is a book that I, the ideas of which I had 10 years ago and first pitched it 10 years ago. And it's never really gone away. So, which is a reason why I, why I returned to it. And, uh, this time it worked and, you know, I've got a contract and I'm moving on with it, but, um, you know, but I never really let that go away.
00:17:40
Speaker
And, um, you know, I think the worst thing you can do as a book writer, particularly people who are doing like their first book. As I see this all the time is they get the first book contract and the first thing they do is either quit their job or, you know, move or something like that. And I kind of think that's the last thing you want to do.
00:18:03
Speaker
because what you've done right there is you've put yourself in a different headspace where you may have never been before, where you don't have the day job to go to, or all of a sudden you've fixed up this fantasy office in your attic because this is where I'm going to write the book rather than using that corner of the bedroom, maybe, where you've done all your work to that point and you've been successful in and you've been comfortable in,
00:18:33
Speaker
And so the first thing you're going to do when you get a book contract is change everything in your life. Yeah. Thinking that that's going to clear space for it. When in many ways, I think it can, it can, it can do the opposite. It can create problems for you. You know, we all are creatures of habit and whether that's the space that you, the physical space you occupy when you write or what it's, you need to be comfortable in that. And, um,
00:19:03
Speaker
So that's kind of the last thing to do, I think, is to change things up. You know, you might you might pare back on some things. You might take a period of book leave or something like that if that's an opportunity you have. I mean, a lot of print outlets and whatnot will allow you to do that if you've got a book project and that can be really, really helpful. But other than that, don't change.
00:19:34
Speaker
everything about the process. Yeah. You know, at least that's, that's the approach that I've taken. Now maybe other people, it works entirely differently. I don't know. I just kind of advocate against it because too often I have encountered people who allowed the prospect of doing a book to change everything. And it didn't work for them.
00:19:58
Speaker
Uh, you know, every seems like every couple of months there's the story in somebody writes in medium about how, you know, getting a book contract ruined their life. And it's almost always because they changed everything and thought, oh, well, now I'm an author. I have to do things different from how I did it the last 10 years when I was just a scrappy freelancer. No, keep doing what you did as a scrappy freelancer.
00:20:23
Speaker
Um, being an author is somebody's recognizing that what you did is a scrappy freelancer is, uh, is actually a value. And you've been doing something really right to get to that stage.
00:20:35
Speaker
Yeah, the quiting the job and building an office space and everything. I think a lot of people, they want to believe in that romantic ideal of, I am wholly supported by this notion of book writing. And then they dive into that.
00:20:55
Speaker
fueled by kind of this backlog of shame that they haven't been able to fully sustain themselves, say, on book writing. And then there's that element of, you know, I found talking to people that there is some shame that they might have a day job that might not even be related to their writing or writing field, and then they have to sprinkle in their art around
00:21:20
Speaker
that day job and they want to believe that their writing can fully and solely support them. So maybe it stems from that, that they have this moment to be fully supported. But pulling up anchor, you're out there. Well, we self-sabotage ourselves already in so many ways. Don't give self-sabotage another opportunity. It's there anyway. It's lurking all the time.
00:21:49
Speaker
So I try to keep other avenues of self-sabotage to a minimum as much as I can. Given the intense editorial and coaching eye that you give so many of the people who seek you out for coaching and counsel for their work,
00:22:15
Speaker
How do you keep from, or how do you ration your headspace and energy so you can still go to your own work and attack, say, the pats with as fresh an eye as possible, given that you've parceled out a lot of your editorial eye to other people? I think it's just a matter of that I've done it for a long time. When I was focused more on just editorial stuff,
00:22:44
Speaker
some time period where I didn't do a lot of my own work. But once that got normalized, I kind of, you know, said, Hey, I'm going to keep my finger in this other pie, I don't want it to go away. Because that's the other thing, you never know what's going to happen in this business. So it never makes sense to turn your back away totally from something. And even when you're working editorially with people, you're often working on
Balancing Editorial and Personal Projects
00:23:12
Speaker
multiple stories at the same time with people. So you're compartmentalizing and partitioning off your attention, your focus on multiple projects anyway. So your own project is kind of one of these other projects. I mean, in the, in sort of the more physical sense, I mean, I do editorial work then during the week and I would do my stuff on the weekend. Boom, right there.
00:23:41
Speaker
When I was more involved just doing editorial stuff and I started doing my own work, my own work would start to come in on the weekend because I got to a certain point where I could do the editorial work during the week. And the end result of that is you don't have weekends, but that's the balance you make. When you're doing this, it's not always fair to the people around you.
00:24:08
Speaker
but it's not a nine to five job and um... sometimes you have to do that i mean i've been on vacations where you know i get up at four in the morning and work for eight hours and then you know we vacation from noon until the rest of the day yeah that's just you know sometimes how it happens deadlines are deadlines and uh... death death sits among it for a reason you know and you don't want to you don't want to push past that so um...
00:24:37
Speaker
It's just I try to take a really practical approach to this. In terms of just getting things done, I try not to get hung up on the more ethereal aspects of it. But if you do take a really practical approach and just stay at it every day, you create the room then for
00:25:07
Speaker
you to have other concerns about it rather than just filling in time or rather than just getting done a project. That creates room by being really practical. That creates room for the aesthetic portion of it to come in. You've got to allow that space to grow. And the best way to do that is to be really practical and, you know, ass in chair, sit down and trust that when you do that,
00:25:37
Speaker
that all those other things you want to have come out of this experience, that those will happen.
00:25:44
Speaker
And looking at dedications of a lot of books and acknowledgements, oftentimes a glenced out always pops up here and there. And everyone just credits the critical eye and the coaching that you're able to give so many people. I'm thinking of Bryn Jonathan Butler right off the top of my head. He dedicated his last book to me. Yeah, that was very incredibly generous of him. And I'm just really lucky that
00:26:12
Speaker
people whose work I really respect like hearing from me. And I really enjoy that kind of interaction that that helps me keep all these issues, all the issues we deal with about writing. That helps me keep those on the surface and allow me to reflect when I'm working on my own projects on some of the things that I've told other people.
00:26:38
Speaker
um... you know there's nothing like telling somebody else how to do something to underscore to yourself how you should be doing it and to point out to yourself when you're not and then you better get on the stick and take your own lessons to heart otherwise you know you're just bloating uh... you know and and you know they don't and sometimes i think they don't even realize how much i've taken from them okay right it's not a
00:27:08
Speaker
It's not a one-way street. It might look that way sometimes, but I'm getting as much or more out of it, I think, than they are. It's really, really useful to have so many people to bounce this stuff around with. Right. Why do you think people do revere the attention that you're able to give them?
00:27:39
Speaker
Well, I don't think it's necessarily me. It's like you just, you know, this is an isolating thing to do. Yeah. You know, nobody watches you write a book. When I was my daughter was younger and somebody asked her what daddy did for a living. She said he talks on the phone because she never saw me do this. Nobody's ever seen me do this. And that could be a really, really isolating thing. So I think it's helpful for people to talk to someone
00:28:09
Speaker
who's done this and done it a lot of different ways and a lot of different kinds of projects. I mean, I've done survey histories like the Patriots book about sports teams. I've done biographies. I've done as told to's. I've done personal essays. I've done feature writing. I've done oral histories. You know, I've worked in a lot of these different fields.
00:28:35
Speaker
And I think it's just useful for people to know that there's somebody who's done this before, that their issues, their concerns, their problems aren't theirs alone, that this is normal.
00:28:53
Speaker
And that over time, I've learned that, you know, the more you kind of discuss some of these things, um, you, you can find your, you can work your way out of corners. There are specific things you can do to get out of a corner. I mean, I was talking to a writer the other day and you know, and she was telling me, she's working on something she didn't really want to work on. She wasn't really that into it, but she's got it done. But she's like, I just can't get the lead done.
00:29:21
Speaker
And I said, well, I said, you have a lot of books around, right? And she's like, yeah. I said, you have a lot of collections of like feature writing and everything. And she's like, yeah. I said, go through and shotgun, like 30 leads, just go through and read 30 leads. And then I said, find one you like and model your lead on that.
00:29:42
Speaker
And by modeling, that's more of a structural thing. It's not a plagiarizing thing. It's a structural thing. Maybe you have a lead that starts with a beautiful image, one that would work for your story. Maybe you have a lead that starts with an image or with a sound or something like that. And then it's followed up with almost a nut graph statement. And then that's followed up with an expository paragraph. That's just a structure. Start with that.
00:30:11
Speaker
You find one, model it after that. Your story will depart from that. It's not plagiarizing. You don't have to reinvent every portion of your book every time. Your subject matter and your approach to it
00:30:30
Speaker
What you bring to the table as a human being is unique enough So it's okay to go to another piece of work to see how somebody else did it and maybe to model a little bit of what you do after Their structure or their entry point or their transition It's gonna depart. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's not plagiarizing everybody whether they realize it or not every time you do a lead and
00:30:58
Speaker
Every lead you read feeds into that lead. Every time you do a transition, every transition you read into your life feeds into that. But when you get stuck, you can almost formally
00:31:11
Speaker
go and look at that aspect of other people's work to see how they did it to spark something in yourself. She'll probably come back and do a lead that has nothing to do with those 20 or 30 she read, but it might be a lead that she wouldn't have gotten to had she not taken that approach. That's just a very practical way to look at it.
00:31:35
Speaker
I love the term like shotgunning leads. Just look at their flip through, just bam, read 200 words. How did they start this thing? How are they hitting that little ignite button to get the grill fired up? Exactly, exactly.
00:31:54
Speaker
You're not going to find people doing it the same way all the time, because we're all looking for something new, but just shotgunning those might
00:32:06
Speaker
get you to an entry point that you wouldn't have thought of before. It might be precisely like somebody else's entry point. It might be something different because you read this lead and that lead and that lead and all of a sudden those three kind of combine in your head and give you a pathway into your story. Yeah.
00:32:26
Speaker
And earlier in our conversation, you said that you were approached to do the Pat's book. And so what is the story behind the story here of how this book came to be?
Collaborative Writing with Richard Johnson
00:32:39
Speaker
Sure. Well, I've done now, this is the fifth kind of survey history of a sports team I've done with my partner, Richard Johnson. Richard Johnson is the curator of the Sports Museum in New England. And the way we do these books is
00:32:55
Speaker
Essentially, I do the writing, which is my strength. And Richard finds all the photographs and illustrations, does all the captioning, and handles the guest essayists, which we have in every book. We always try to get some other voices in there because you don't want to hear the same voice for a couple of hundred thousand words. That can get real boring.
00:33:22
Speaker
So, you know, the first one we did was in the late 90s. It was called Red Sox Century. Then we followed up with Yankees Century. Then we followed up with books on the Cubs and the Dodgers. And that kind of exhausted the baseball end of it. And we hadn't done one of these for a number of years, but
00:33:45
Speaker
You know, they were all pretty successful and our editor at Houghton Mifflin, Susan Canavan, who I've worked with for about 20 years. She's also the editor that's in charge of the best American sports writing. Uh, she just called us up and, uh, we can, we, they'd been considering doing an update of the Cubs book in the wake of the Cubs world series win and decided not to do that because the field was too crowded.
00:34:14
Speaker
And, um, she just called me up and kind of told me, we've decided to pass on that. It's just fields too crowded. And then she says, would you guys want to write about Patriots? And, uh, having no other work at the time, uh, and always enjoy working with Richard, uh, it was like, sure. And, uh, over the course of a day or two, we cobbled together the outline of a proposal we didn't have to do.
00:34:41
Speaker
a thorough proposal like you often have to do because she knows our work. Not that these books use a template, but they're very similar. That's a chronological structure. It's a survey history, so it's built primarily out of the written material that's the newspapers and the reporting that's done on a day-by-day basis over the course of with the Patriots, almost a 60-year period.
00:35:10
Speaker
so we know how to put these together. And she trusted that we knew how to put another one together and hadn't done it for a while. I always think of these as they're real fire hoses because the books are not just heavily illustrated, a coffee table book with a few words, but they're full narratives and often
00:35:33
Speaker
the most complete narrative well in every case i think of these books we've done together uh... the most complete narrative that's ever been done on the subject you know people will write about time periods with the team or a particular championship team or particular players very few people try to tell a big story about an entire team how do you do that well having done it before we kind of know how to do that so so anyway that got worked out into like uh...
00:36:02
Speaker
end of April we finally had a contract and we got started on it and like I said turned in the book you know three days after turned in the final chapter three days after the Super Bowl I did have to take a somewhat different approach to it in that almost from the beginning I had to write and research simultaneously which means after spending about a month
00:36:26
Speaker
just reading background material. And in those early stages, that's really the only time I'll read other books on a subject. And I only do that to sort of get the basic structure and timeline down. And then within that basic structure and timeline, you know, make sure that I know the key moments or that I can infer the key moments
00:36:52
Speaker
And then I try to answer three questions, which is why did they win when they won? Why did they lose when they lost? I think those are things that that readers are interested in. And then thirdly, is there a narrative in that larger story, whether it's the Red Sox from
00:37:12
Speaker
when they started all the way through to, you know, Red Sox century was done and came out in 2000. And so it covered their first hundred years. Is there a larger story within that? Well, with the Red Sox, there was. It was one of early success and then a long period of trying to achieve success again. Why didn't that happen? With the Patriots, you almost have two books, two teams. You have an early period of
00:37:43
Speaker
almost ineptitude, struggle and ineptitude. And then in more recent years, you have this, you know, kind of unfettered success. Okay, what story does that tell? How did one turn into the other? And then after I have that basic outline, and by that I mean, we're talking a page and a half.
00:38:05
Speaker
where I have got the chapters. I know what chapters are going to be because I want chapters to either end on a high note, end when you touch bottom, or an important transition. So, parsed out their story into, I think, 60 chapters, and then, boom, went in from the beginning using primary resource materials, which is generally speaking, newspapers.
00:38:35
Speaker
Not just the easy newspaper to get to, but you try to use the newspapers that aren't available online because everybody knows those stories. So you go to newspapers that you can only get on microfilm and material that isn't readily available and start telling that story. And also being aware that as you're telling this story, you're going to stumble across things that haven't been written about before. You're going to have
00:39:03
Speaker
reach conclusions that haven't appeared in other books. You're going to have ideas about why things happened that haven't been brought out before, that weren't brought out by the day-to-day writing at the time, contemporary writing at the time. But when you step back 20, 30 years later, you can see things more clearly sometimes than the people writing the daily beat stories could see at the time. You can see the longer narrative taking place.
00:39:33
Speaker
What I love about projects of this nature and talking to people about them is that element of surprise in the research. There are these times where you're like, oh, you know the big beats in the story and the big historical moments, but it's through that 30 year, 40 year remove that all of a sudden with that long wide angle lens that you're able to
00:39:59
Speaker
And then there is that element of surprise. So what surprised you the most in your research of this book? Well, there were a lot of small stories and a lot of kind of not so small stories.
00:40:16
Speaker
Like the book starts out, I actually start the book with the championship game between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts in 1958, which was kind of, you know, it went into overtime, sudden death. It was kind of the game that made the NFL. When David Halberstam passed away, he was working on a book on that game, because that was the first time that the public's
00:40:41
Speaker
imagination was captured by professional football. You had this classic game played, you know, played for the championship. And I started it there. And one of the first things that surprised me, because that that that's where people realize there was a lot of money to be made in pro football. And that sparked the beginning of the AFL, which sparks the Patriots becoming. But one of the things I discovered in doing that was
00:41:08
Speaker
And I've known that before the Patriots existed that New England was partial to the New York Giants. This was Giants territory in New England. But what I didn't know was that championship game was blacked out in New York.
00:41:25
Speaker
because of television. So in New York City, you couldn't see this great championship game. So what did people do? Well, they drove north into New England, looking for bars, looking for motels with free TV to see this game. And I just thought that was a wonderful place to start. So that's kind of that that fits
00:41:49
Speaker
the Patriots story into a larger continuum, into a larger story of how pro football became important in this country. And then on a smaller level, like there's a story that I just love. And I think that's going to be an excerpt that's going to be published about the Patriots played in the 1963 AFL championship game against the San Diego Chargers. They got absolutely blown out 51 to 10.
00:42:17
Speaker
even though they played San Diego two really close games during the regular season. Well, come to find out a couple of things. One is, through my research, I wasn't the first person to write this, but I'm the first one to put it in this context. That Chargers team was the first NFL team to be on steroids for a full season.
00:42:40
Speaker
Their trainer put them on steroids in training camp, and they took steroids all year long. No big surprise then that in the last two games of the season, that San Diego played, including the championship game, they score 100 points. They're not tired. Everybody else is tired. And then I find another thing just a couple days before the game appeared,
00:43:06
Speaker
Will McDonough, the Boston Globe reporter, does a story with Mike Hollivack, the coach of the Patriots, where Hollivack reveals his entire game plan, even to the point where there's this special play, and we know that this guy on San Diego is tipping coverage every play, and here's what we're going to do. Well, that story appears
00:43:32
Speaker
And, you know, Sid Gilman was the coach of San Diego. He already had a few, you know, a few tricks up his sleeve. He certainly heard about that story and any hesitation he had about the tricks he had up his sleeve already, those were taken away.
00:43:50
Speaker
Now, that story doesn't appear anywhere else. So in some sense, you can blame Will McDonough for the Patriots losing their first shot at winning a championship in the 1963 AFL championship. McDonoughgate. Yeah, McDonoughgate, exactly. And there's more. It was like some Patriots players were behind a much forgotten incident where the black players in the AFL
00:44:17
Speaker
after they got to New Orleans to play in an all-star game, blanched at their treatment in New Orleans. And the game was transferred at the last minute to another city. Some Patriot players were behind that. That's one of the first times that an entire league kind of like had to respond to that kind of charge.
00:44:41
Speaker
There's a gambling scandal in 1967 that's taking place with the Patriots simultaneous to the Red Sox reaching the World Series in 1967. That's been long overlooked. And then you get into things even in specific plays. There's the famous Ben Dreeth game where the Patriots lost to the Oakland Raiders because this referee Ben Dreeth
00:45:08
Speaker
supposedly calls this phantom roughing the passer call. Well, now you can actually go back and look at all this film. Things have popped up on YouTube. And guess what? It probably was roughing the passer. But if you really want to know what cost them that game, you can go back to the end of the second quarter when they called this crazy play for Russ Francis, their tight end, to throw a pass.
00:45:39
Speaker
Russ Francis was not a quarterback. You know, Russ Francis panics, gets too much air under the ball and it's intercepted. Had the Patriots scored on that drive,
00:45:51
Speaker
then what happened at the end of the game wouldn't matter. So that's the kind of deep dive you kind of go into that. Now, in Patriots lore, that is still known as the Ben Dreeth game. In reality, it should probably be known as the Russ Francis game. You know, so it's, you know, I did the same thing in the Red Sox book with the famous pesky holds the ball, Enos slaughters mad dash.
00:46:21
Speaker
There's more to that story than Johnny Pesky didn't hold the ball. That really never happened. He just got the blame. That's the kind of turning the commonly accepted story on its head that I really look out for and I really enjoy writing about. And I think that's the kind of thing that has made these books, these big histories,
00:46:47
Speaker
you know, so successful. You know, other people aren't doing books like these. This is the first big narrative history of the Patriots that's ever been done. So well, someone did one in the 70s, Larry Fox, the team was only 15 years old. No one's really done it since then. There's been a lot of anecdotal histories, which are just, you know, stories of Patriots players and funny things that happened and, and things like that. But nobody's ever done that big step back.
00:47:15
Speaker
and looked at the whole sweep of their history and try to see if there's a narrative there. It's not just saying what happened on this play, what happened on this play, or what happened with this season, what happened in this season. It's you look for the narrative that tells a larger story.
00:47:34
Speaker
over the course of the book, that narrative, I think, starts to come out, or those different narratives start to come out more and more. So you're not just reading an encapsulation of what happened in this game, what happened in this game. That's boring. Nobody wants to read it. Those are encyclopedias.
Uncovering Patriots History
00:47:51
Speaker
I have no interest in encyclopedia. I do have interest in stories. I do have interest in doing research and finding something new and presenting it into a way that
00:48:04
Speaker
Even if you're somebody who has followed the Red Sox for years for your whole life or the Patriots for your whole life, you'll pick up a book like this and you'll go over and over again. I didn't know that. I never thought about it this way. Wow, he's got a point.
00:48:24
Speaker
And speaking of the broader narrative, early in the book, you write to understand Patriots history, you have to understand Billy Sullivan. And yeah, he's a big name in New England from where I grew up for sure in a Sullivan stadium and everything. I can still feel the aluminum benches under my ass. I think everybody who ever sat in those aluminum benches still has a lack of feeling in their
00:48:48
Speaker
in their nether regions because of how cold they were but I mean you're right I mean Billy Sullivan you know father of the Patriots deserves a lot of credit for starting the team deserves some credit for sticking with them for so long but you know you can really you crack his code a little bit which I did by really getting into you know his background his family history where he grew up which was in Lowell and his big concern his whole life was he didn't want to be a non-entity
00:49:18
Speaker
He wanted to be somebody. Well, he saw his way of being somebody as not just starting the Patriots, but he wanted to build a stadium because he thought that building a stadium would open up all sorts of development opportunities and he could take advantage of those and he could be a big deal. Well, as much of the story of the Patriots, their first 15 or 20 years is all about the stadium trying to get one built, finally building one.
00:49:48
Speaker
not a very good one, how that hamstrung the franchise. And that was all about Billy Sullivan not wanting to be a non-entity. Whether the Patriots won or lost during those years really wasn't at the forefront. It was Billy trying to fulfill his dreams for himself. You know, I'm certainly not the only one that's ever said that, but I think, you know, what I hope is clear in this book
00:50:16
Speaker
is the degree to which that was the driving force behind the Patriots for their first couple of decades.
00:50:26
Speaker
Which, and as they, you know, they had the stadium and what really, uh, essentially bankrupted them and led to started transitioning into the era we're more familiar with was them of all things. And I didn't know this either was speaking of surprises was, you know, the Michael Jackson tour and everything in and around that. Right. They, they decided to sponsor the Michael Jackson victory tour.
00:50:53
Speaker
and they overpaid for it dramatically and it essentially bankrupted the team. Now that's a story that I knew from when it took place, but you've got this funny thing going on with the Patriots where, you know, there were very few people who were admittedly Patriot fans until the Patriots started winning. Even in New England, you might follow the Patriots, but you always knew they were going to lose.
00:51:20
Speaker
You probably had a backup team you really cheered for. But in the last 15 or 20 years, they've been incredibly successful. Now you have all these people who are Patriot fans. And the thing is, they don't know the early history. They don't know anything about it. So this will introduce to them some stories that somebody my age might already know and be somewhat familiar with. But if you're a Patriots fan,
00:51:48
Speaker
and you're under the age of 30 or 35, much of this book is just going to be jaw-dropping eye-opening because their story is kind of crazy. If anything crazy could happen, it would happen to the Patriots. You would have your star wide receiver try to
00:52:09
Speaker
You know, stab his wife just before you go to the Super Bowl. You know, you would have, you know, just this insane stuff happen. I mean, you know, even going back to the sixties, you had one game that was decided because, you know, they were playing Dallas and Dallas had an AFL team at the time and Dallas was going in for the winning touchdown and a fan came in, set himself in place.
00:52:35
Speaker
in the defensive backfield correctly read the play, moved into the into the right place and batted down a pass that would have been a touchdown. Yeah, you know, who else does this happen to? And, you know, you have the famous incident where the prisoner on work release, you know, use the snow plow, which was actually a snow brush to clear the field so the Patriots could kick a field goal. You know, that stuff just didn't happen to other teams.
00:53:05
Speaker
But it happened to the Patriots over and over again. You had a number of times where Sullivan Stadium was disrupted by riots, where you had hundreds of people just doing really bad things, throwing beer, throwing up in the aisles, peeing all over the place.
00:53:46
Speaker
maybe a pressure tank wasn't big enough, or maybe it was because the unions got into a battle with the team and made certain that those outlet pipes weren't big enough. I mean, this stuff didn't happen to other teams. It all happened to the Patriots. And so it's very entertaining at the same time that it's hopefully edifying and teaches you something and tells you things you didn't know. It's also pretty funny.
00:53:53
Speaker
to the point that they were banned from Monday Night Football.
00:54:13
Speaker
Uh, because a lot of funny stuff happened to this team. And given the recent success, uh, you know, eight to almost 20 years of sustained relative brilliance in the NFL, it's how conscious were you not to make this a lot of Tory book on the Patriots? Well, I never tried to write a Valentine. I always try to tell the story straight.
00:54:36
Speaker
I think that even fans of a team, and this lesson was brought home to me when we did the Red Sox book, and even in some writing I'd done about the Red Sox previous to that, is that fans appreciate being treated like adults. And if all you're going to say is, Ra-Ra, aren't they great? Isn't this wonderful? That's not very interesting. That's pretty boring.
00:55:00
Speaker
That's not going to sustain a narrative of you know over 150,000 words. You're not going to read that nobody Hey, there's a reason that Valentine cards is only two pages. You know happy Valentine's Day, and I love you That's it. You know nobody sends a Valentine. That's you know 150,000 words long So so I don't worry about that. I just think they want to be told what actually happened and when there's criticism to be leveled when there's
00:55:31
Speaker
uh... you know an uncomfortable truth to be spoken uh... you speak it and you write about it and you try to put it in context and you try to say what it means and particularly in a sport right now football which i think is conflicted in so many ways uh... for so many reasons you can't just ignore you know this stuff you can't pretend that concussions don't exist
00:55:57
Speaker
You can't pretend that the political aspect of NFL protests, that that just doesn't exist. It doesn't matter. Of course it matters. People are paying attention to it. That's what people are talking about in the bar. So you just approach it clear eyed, forthrightly.
Straightforward Storytelling in Sports
00:56:18
Speaker
I reached some conclusions. You might not agree with my conclusions, but I underpin
00:56:25
Speaker
everything with the facts of what actually happened. And the truth is rarely neat and tidy. Everybody wants to think that their team is morally superior to every other team that's ever been done. We're smarter, we're better. All our players are choir boys. Well, that's not the case. And I think Heart of Hearts, fans realize that and actually enjoy being told that
00:56:52
Speaker
I think it makes their experience a little richer, quite frankly, because they might cheer at the end when they win the Super Bowl, but they're not cheering every minute of every game. They're bitching and moaning about this guy and that guy and that decision and that decision and why they should have drafted this guy and why they drafted him instead, all this stuff. So you have to write about all that.
00:57:17
Speaker
And speaking of things that I found particularly interesting in terms of surprise was the shrewdness and you can also say business savvy of Robert Kraft in the early 90s when he wanted to make a bid for the team but instead maybe allowed himself to get outbid.
00:57:37
Speaker
but he bought the stadium and owned the lease on the stadium knowing that maybe in 10 or 15 years, and it turned out to be less than that, he could buy the team, he'd have the lease, and then he could build his new stadium. That was a really, really savvy, long play by him. He knew that if he had the land, that a sale would have to go through him at some point because the lease extended to 2000. So he either had to
00:58:06
Speaker
pay you had to pay him off at the very least. But we know what's interesting in the what I bring to that story is that you know, this is the same approach the craft had taken in his business with the paper product company where they even own the paper mills. He wanted to own the entire chain. And he'd been a part owner of the Boston lobsters in the team world team tennis
00:58:32
Speaker
And that experience taught him, I think they played at BU and he owned the team, but he didn't own the venue. So he didn't get the concessions. He didn't get the parking. He gave away all this income and he decided he would never do that again. That if he was going to own a team again, he was going to own where they played because he wanted that revenue to come his way. Uh, you know, so it wasn't, uh, uh,
00:59:01
Speaker
It wasn't an accident that he ended up buying Sullivan Stadium and sitting on it for a few years. He knew that when the time came, they'd have to come through him. And if he could get the team, then he would own everything and he would be able to get all that revenue stream. So everybody knows that Kraft built the new stadium.
00:59:24
Speaker
The the genesis of that goes back to his early years in business and his early years with the Boston lobsters And I like the designation you make too in the book that really the the Patriots story is kind of divided and Basically just too unequal half sort of like before tuna and after tuna being Bill Parcells changed everything. I mean it was the first time I think you know, they'd had some success under Chuck Chuck Fairbanks and
00:59:55
Speaker
Um, but then that kind of all blew up because, you know, your coach is trying to coach another team, take a college job while you're trying to make the super bowl and that. So, so that kind of ended badly. But when parcels came here, it came to new England. It changed everything. It was like, for the first time, the Patriots had.
01:00:15
Speaker
you know, somebody at the top who was accomplished, who was proficient. And also, I think equally important, somebody who could be the face of the franchise. You know, no other coach they'd had could really be the face of the franchise. You know, Parcells blotted out the sun. And, you know, and he was good. And he won. And from that moment onward, I think expectations for the Patriots were
01:00:45
Speaker
were somewhat different, even though Parcells, since he was a Patriots coach, ended up leaving under strange circumstances himself. But that really did change everything. After Parcells, there was kind of no turning back. You couldn't be that goofy Boston Patriots anymore. You had to be something else. Expectations changed entirely.
01:01:09
Speaker
and uh... before i let you get out of here glenn there's a there there's a passage i i want to read that just eight goes to i think how much uh... like fun you had doing some of the the writing of this i always got a sense of pulsing energy of of fun and oftentimes some irreverence here and it was it was really fun to read and i think it was probably fun for you to write and this is at the start of chapter seven close shaves and you say
01:01:38
Speaker
Pick your metaphor, train wreck, car crash, nightmare, cataclysm, act of God. Whatever phrase you choose, it was wicked awful. For every member of the Patriots organization, their fans, and even those who covered the team, the next few years were a careening disaster, both on the field and off, a scorched earth of incompetence and ineptitude, a catastrophe unlike any other to befall an NFL franchise.
01:02:02
Speaker
Well, I was being kind of kind there too. I'm glad you point out that because people think you do a book like this and it's limited in some respects because of the kind of book it is. But no matter what kind of book I'm writing, you can get lost in a couple of things. One is the research. You want to do justice with your research that you actually get the real story.
01:02:32
Speaker
And then as a writer along the way, you want to write good sentences. You want to make it entertaining and not boring. You want to push yourself a little as a writer, try to do different things. You know, I always tell everybody who hasn't written a book, who's like a feature writer that they should because you learn really quick
01:02:59
Speaker
When you're writing a book what your tricks are that you go to over and over and those tricks you use maybe in every feature story when you put them all in a book and Readers see them pop up in every chapter all of a sudden They're not so so enjoyable anymore. So you have to you you get pushed into playing around with leads you get pushed into playing around with transitions and
01:03:27
Speaker
you learned how to end chapters, you learned how to sense endings, things like that. Even if it's, quote unquote, just a football book, you know, you can still as a writer, try to, you know, nothing infuriates me more than, you know, books about anything that are just lazy, where the writer
01:03:50
Speaker
is just putting words on the page. It isn't really bothering to try to do much with it. I hate books that are just anecdotes, like a history of this. It's just a bunch of stories from guys telling stories about this. Those are like popcorn. Great. No nutritional value. Richard and I talk about this. We try to deliver a full meal. You got a couple of courses here.
01:04:17
Speaker
This is something that you're not going to pick up and put down an hour later and never look at again. These are books that you keep next to your chair, you put underneath the coffee table or underneath the couch, you pull them out during those infernal timeouts at the end of the game, or during the blowout.
01:04:38
Speaker
And you keep it around and you refer to it over and over and over again. Because if we do our job well, it's like anything else. You hope people don't just read it once, but that they find it enjoyable enough to return to over and over and to say to the people they know, hey, you got to read this. You got to check this out. You're doing your reader a service. You're asking them to spend time. So I always try to get them to spend as much time as possible.
01:05:06
Speaker
All right, one more question for you, Glenn. I know for me, in terms of writing, a big weakness I have, and you know this, is I have a tendency sometimes to overwrite or be too funny or too clever. And that's something I always have to scale back and rewrite and let the story be king. What do you, in your writing process, especially in the rougher drafts, what do you feel like you struggle with that you need to dial back in later rewrites?
01:05:37
Speaker
Well, particularly a book like this is you're kind of you're kind of at the behest of what takes place during games. You have to get some game description. You can't give too much because that's just and then this happened next. But you have to give enough and you have to pick your spots for it. You have to pick out the plays that matter, the events that matter.
01:06:05
Speaker
And sometimes I find that I'll maybe go on a little too much about something that's inconsequential and not enough about something that really matters. And that was pointed out to me right at the end of this book, because we had such an incredibly tight deadline. I mean, the book had to be turned in. The last chapter had to be turned in three days after the Super Bowl. And then you had this amazing postseason and this amazing Super Bowl.
01:06:34
Speaker
How are you going to do that? And how am I going to tell the story of that game at all? Not only do it in two days and write half that chapter, because until that last game, I didn't know how much weight to give to the playoff games either. And I essentially just distilled the Super Bowl down to about five or six plays that told you everything you needed to know about it.
01:07:00
Speaker
And I think I give you enough of those five or six plays. Because let's face it, you can always go to the tape now if you want. You can go to YouTube and you can look it up. But I try to, when I'm doing that, is to only write about those plays and things that happen that really caused an emotional response from the fans. When Brady didn't catch that pass that was thrown to him. And then Fools catches one.
01:07:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, everybody in New England was, I think, you know, was like, yes, yes, yes. Oh, and then and then you also kind of went, oh, this isn't going well. And why did the Patriots feel that they had to try this crazy play now? This doesn't look good. You know, I try to kind of occupy that emotional space that fans were in and try to inject some of that emotion into that description. So it's not just
01:08:00
Speaker
He handed off to the fullback who plunged ahead for four yards. You know, that's the thing. And then, you know, that's the big thing is just to not get stodgy with it. And if you're trying to be more entertaining as a writer to pick your spots, you don't have to do cartwheels all the time. When you do a cartwheel, stick it. But you don't have to do it all the time.
01:08:31
Speaker
but you gotta pick your spots and it has to work. And if it doesn't work, well, maybe it's not the place for it here. You can't make it work at a place where it doesn't matter. So I think that's the challenge with something like this. And we'll see if it works. I mean, I think it does. I hope it does. Because everybody else,
01:09:01
Speaker
So everybody thinks, oh, you must be a huge fan of the Patriots. Well, no, I'm not. I'm a huge fan of the research. I'm a huge fan of the writing. I'm a huge fan of the readers going to spend $35 on a book. I want them to feel like they got a deal. Yeah. You know, I want them to feel like they got something for their money. And geez, you know, I really got a deal. This was worth every penny. You know, that's something that I think we owe readers.
01:09:30
Speaker
No matter what, particularly now where you can get so much for free, we're asking you to put your money out before you've read it.
Conclusion and Gratitude
01:09:40
Speaker
And that's a challenge.
01:09:42
Speaker
Yeah, I can attest, I got my, you know, my uncorrected proof several, probably a couple months ago, and I received a hard finished copy. And it is, it is truly gorgeous. The writing is, is incredible and engaging. And then the art along with it, it's going to be, I think it's going to be on 1000s and 1000s of people's coffee tables in New England and elsewhere. It's, it's truly a great package and a great
01:10:09
Speaker
It is a deal for $35 to have this chunk of history visually and textually engaging as well. Yeah, well, we hope so. I mean, working with Richard Johnson, who does all the illustrations, it's like we're a band that's been playing together a while. And he's a perfect partner for what I do and what he does. I think it comes together really well.
01:10:38
Speaker
I'm a little tired. I don't know if I'll approach another project like this for a while because it is like putting a fire hose to your mouth and turn it on the faucet on full for as long as it takes and it takes a lot out of you. But we'll see. I just hope people, you know, that they feel they got their money's worth and that they know a little bit more than when they started. Oh, for sure.
01:10:59
Speaker
Awesome. Glenn, as always, thank you for hopping on the show, talking craft, and of course your latest and greatest book. Thanks for the time, and we'll keep in touch as we do. Yeah, thanks, Brendan. This was a lot of fun, as usual.
01:11:20
Speaker
Well, like I said in the intro, this was the last show before Thanksgiving. Thank you for listening. Thanks for subscribing. Thanks for all that you do. This is my little thing. I've made this for you guys. I made it for myself. And I'm thankful you're along on this little journey into the CNF and realm of telling true stories. Thank you to Glenn for coming by for the third time.
01:11:47
Speaker
the first big fish of the show on episode 14 and he came back for episode 20 so this has been been great to get him for episode 126. Glen is at Glen Stout on Twitter and I believe his website is glenstout.net. Go buy the book for the Patriots fan in your life
01:12:10
Speaker
There's got to be someone out there. They're kind of like the Yankees now. Also, thanks to our sponsors, Goucher Colleges, MFA in Nonfiction, and Creative Nonfiction Magazine. Go check out the links in the show notes to learn more about the program and the magazine to subscribe. Yeah, I dig it.
01:12:35
Speaker
I'm at Brendan O'Mara and at cnfpod on Twitter. You can follow along on Facebook at cnfpodhost is the user handle but it's also just search the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. I'm also at Brendan O'Mara on Instagram if you like rando pics, drawings, and audiograms. The newsletter over at brendanomara.com is a fun bit of goodness you receive on the first of the month.
01:13:00
Speaker
reading recommendations, podcast news, shows, writing tips, you name it. I'd be thrilled if you signed up. Unsubscribe at any time, but know that I take everything personally. Is that it? I think that's it. Happy Thanksgiving. Gobble gobble, mofos. And remember, if you can't do interview, see ya.