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Episode 257: From the Backside to the Vatican with Joe Drape
139 Plays4 years ago
Joe Drape is a sports writer for The New York Times and the author of The Saint Makers, among other books.
He's @joedrape on Twitter and you can keep the conversation going @CNFPod.
Head over to patreon.com/cnfpod to support the show and get access to the audio magazine!
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
What I like about bringing you this podcast week after week is that I get to deliver some of the best advice from the best in the game about how they go about the work. So take Joe Drake. He's the author of The Saint Makers, Inside the Catholic Church, and How a War Hero Inspired a Journey of Faith, and several other books, including Our Boys and American Pharaoh, Sports Writer for the New York Times, and he knows a thing or two about doing the work.
00:00:31
Speaker
squishy throwing out. Which is another way of saying. Just tell the story and try to stay out of your way of the story.
Guest Introduction: Joe Drake
00:00:40
Speaker
Hey, I'm Brendan O'Mara and this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
00:00:52
Speaker
All right here we go again. This is a show where I talk to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. Joe Drake makes his triumphant return to the podcast after nearly four
Reflections and Announcements
00:01:08
Speaker
years. Kind of crazy to talk a little shop and his new book The Saint Makers and a little bit of horse racing. Of course that's what we do.
00:01:18
Speaker
Speaking of that, my book, Six Weeks in Saratoga, that's right, CNFers. Actually, right thing sometimes. It turns 10 in six weeks. Six weeks. That's just coincidence. But it turns 10 years old. Haven't published a book since. I was looking at the Amazon reviews. It's not pretty. It's not good.
00:01:41
Speaker
Moving on, I want to give a shout out to Donna Tallarico and her amazing Hippo Camp 2021. It's happening this year. It was canceled last year because of, you know, the thing. And now it's happening.
00:01:57
Speaker
The best conference of its kind is back in registration and is open on May 15th. The conference takes place in Lancaster, Pennsylvania from August 13th to the 15th. I can't recommend it enough.
Community and Engagement
00:02:10
Speaker
All nonfiction, all creative nonfiction. It's the best of its kind. It's awesome. It's amazing. I plan on presenting again and I swear I'll do a better job this year.
00:02:20
Speaker
I promise. My speaker reviews from my presentation from the Hippocamp 2019 were about as good as my Amazon reviews from my book. So I've got something to prove. That's just me, baby. Scrappy, rough around the edges, the gutter punk of CNF. Head over to hippocampismag.com slash conference for more information.
00:02:43
Speaker
Another thing, I've selected the summer essays for issue two of the audio mag, so if you want to listen to it, you're going to have to be a patron at the Patreon community, patreon.com slash cnfpod. Almost 700 people downloaded issue one of the magazine, but only 13 will get issue two as of this podcast.
00:03:05
Speaker
Yeah, I know. So if you want to enjoy more essays and support the not-cheap production of this podcast and the magazine itself, go to patreon.com slash cnfpod.
00:03:16
Speaker
And you can always keep the conversation going on social media at cnfpod and head over to brendanomare.com for show notes to this episode and 250 some odd others to sign up for that monthly newsletter. We had a great CNF and happy hour this past Wednesday with a few folks. So if you're on the newsletter list, you can get that exclusive invite. I gave away books to everyone who showed up.
00:03:40
Speaker
Not my book, not my Amazon gutter book, but books I got from being the gutter punk of CNF.
00:03:47
Speaker
Yeah, for my collection. I just got, you know, I have books here. I don't need to keep them. As I see it, books are kind of meant to transfer. And I want to give people that kind of joy that I got from reading them. So anyway, Joe Drapes is
Joe Drake's Inspirations and Writing
00:04:02
Speaker
here. You're going to dig this one. Stay tuned for my parting shot at the end of the show. And I guess this is what we're going to do. Here we go.
00:04:21
Speaker
Perfect. Well, that's something that's always kind of fun. So what, you know, what are you what are you reading these days? And what's kind of inspiring you and, you know, what's going going in what that you're synthesizing and enjoying these days. You know, I picked up an old favorite author of mine. He's not that old. He's still alive and very vital. Richard Russo, and he has a book called Chances Are and it's one of his latest ones.
00:04:47
Speaker
And Richard Russo wrote Nobody's Fool and Empire Falls that maybe some listeners will remember from HBO adaptations with Paul Newman. And he's a just crack storyteller. They're simple stories set in a small town or a small community, does great characters. Sully is the character Paul Newman played.
00:05:13
Speaker
And so he was a degenerate gambler who spent many days in the drug tent, but he was a guy everybody in town liked. So, you know, there's family sag as it's just sort of a, you know, somewhere on that Dickens, Irving, Patrick Conroy plane of writers, just good solid story telling. Nice.
00:05:35
Speaker
Nice. I remember when I was talking to Andre Dubuis III a while ago, several years ago, and he was solicited advice from Richard Russo about writing his memoir, Townie. And Russo told him, he's just like, if you have a bone to pick, don't write a memoir. But otherwise, just write the story as best you can. And that's what it came from.
00:05:58
Speaker
that in the sense that, you know, Debuse didn't have a bone to pick, but he did have a really rich, true story to tell about growing up in, you know, Haverhill, Massachusetts, which was just kind of an old mill town. And it was just kind of great to hear that's such great memoir advice, to not have a bone to pick, to pursue something, a very close personal story. No, that is good, very good advice. You know, memoirs are a very tricky thing. And in the saint makers, there's a thread of that in there. And it was hard
00:06:28
Speaker
It was more about examining what I thought about faith in the Catholic Church and the state of affairs in both those worlds.
Father Emil Capon's Story
00:06:40
Speaker
And it helped me discover, I didn't have a bone to pick with it, but I had basically decided to live with it, to live with it and not accept it. And it was a discovery process. And this was a different kind of book, not only because it was out of sports,
00:06:59
Speaker
But it was much more voicing. It was much more what I thought about things. And that was fun to do.
00:07:05
Speaker
Yeah, that's certainly something I wanted to piggyback on in a sense that so many of your books are, of course, the backdrop is sports, even if they're about other things that are more indicative of an emblematic of the human condition. Yet this was certainly outside that purview. So as a journalist, primarily a sports writer, what was it like reporting on something on faith in the Catholic Church and something that is inherently very close to the bone for you?
00:07:36
Speaker
It was great. It was liberating. I'll tell you the backstory of how this even happened. Yeah, please. All dots get connected and God moves in mysterious ways and every other aphorism is out there. In 2008, I was in Smith Center, Kansas, writing our boys about this undefeated little team, high school football team, whose only two rules were love one another and get better each day.
00:08:04
Speaker
And I kept coming across the story of this priest named Father Emil Capon. And people down there, very aware, very proud of him, prayed to him. And, you know, Father Capon was a man of the country, a farmer, sons of farmer, a son of a farmer who had a vocation and went to the priesthood early, but really kind of found his legs as a chaplain in the army.
00:08:33
Speaker
And, you know, he, in fact, is the most decorated chaplain in the history of America. Won a Silver Star in the World War II. And, you know, in 2013, Obama gave him the Medal of Honor after he basically saved thousands of soldiers in a Korean prisoner war camp and gave his life doing so. So, you know, Father Kapana kept coming across this story.
00:08:59
Speaker
And I got a little curious about it and just wouldn't Google it every now and then, or put a Google alert on, see what was going on. At the same time, there was a movement from that part of Kansas to make him a saint. And, you know, I'm parochial educated Jesuit high school, and I wasn't really sure how you became a saint. I didn't, had no idea if there was a mechanism to it. So I was curious about that. And, you know, I, I'm not,
00:09:28
Speaker
terribly devout, but I've always been curious about why people do what they do and how they pray and how they think and how they find spirituality. So, you know, that had an interest and then it just kind of laid dormant in me till 2015 and I was having a lunch with an editor who had done my Black Maestro book and he said, is there anything outside sports you wanted?
00:09:55
Speaker
And it just rolled off my tongue. I said, you know, there's this priest in Kansas. They're trying to make him a saint. He's got an extraordinary life. I'd like to go down that. And, you know, again, that's what we all do is we recognize stories that interest us because you cannot move forward if you are not interested. So, you know, it makes kind of sense. I'm Catholic. I had some indoctrination into faith.
Writing Process and Challenges
00:10:24
Speaker
Uh, I'm from the Midwest from Kansas city. Uh, it was dear to me home there. Uh, never been a huge military guy, but thought, Hey, I'd like to learn a little bit about this. And especially the Korean war, which I discovered, you know, it's called the forgotten war for a reason. Uh, it was short. It was brutal. And really the rest of America didn't pay attention because it was on the heels of world war two.
00:10:51
Speaker
So, you know, I had those elements. I had a biography, a great biography. I had sort of this making the sausage detective story about, you know, what is the history of St. Hood? How has it evolved? Then American Feral won the triple crown. So I set that back aside. They said, do this book first. I did that book first. And by the time I returned to St. Makers, it was 2017 and I was two thirds there.
00:11:19
Speaker
but I was missing something and it dawned on me what I was missing was, you know, the element of my faith and what I believed and how this had either moved me or changed me or involved me and you know, how to pray and what, where, where my faith was at this point. So that became the third part and that took me, you know, a good year to unlock and these are all things that, you know,
00:11:46
Speaker
Nobody feels sorry for me. It was a fascinating process, but you know, it's, it's, I guess satisfying looking back on things like this and talking with somebody like you and other writers and journalists who, you know, there's always hurdles you have to overcome and mostly they're your own.
00:12:05
Speaker
So what was that experience like having to confront your own faith and I imagine a conflicted relationship to it as the missing piece to get this book sort of over the goal line, if you will? I knew something was missing, but to fall on the sports metaphor, I had the yips when it became to praying. It's like I couldn't make the throw to first base. I couldn't get the three foot putt.
00:12:35
Speaker
And I didn't know what that was. I mean, I still had a face. I still went to the rituals of the Catholic church. My son was in Catholic parochial school and I was an engineer in high school. So I was around it, but I knew something. So, you know, I did like we do when we report a story, right? I just went, why? And I started reading all kinds of, you know, Christian thinkers, philosophers, went back to Thomas Mertz.
00:13:03
Speaker
I listened to a podcast that Gary Busey was on, and he was really moving of all things. And the thing that I remember is, he said, you know, hell is for people who have a religion. Spiritualism is for people who've already been to hell. So, you know, my antenna was just up for things. But it finally took, you know, there's a somewhat famous Jesuit writer, Father Jim Martin, who
00:13:33
Speaker
said Mass at my parish, and we've traveled in the same circles indirectly. So I just called him up for lunch and for, you know, the non Catholics out there. The Jesuits are sort of the highest educated, free thinking. They go against the grain order of the Catholic Church. Pope Francis is a Jesuit, for example. And so, you know, we went out, we were talking. I told him my dilemma that I was missing something here and I needed some help. And he said, you pray.
00:14:03
Speaker
And I was like, yeah, I pray. And he goes, well, how do you pray? I said, you know, our fathers, they all married, the usual stuff. He goes, what do you pray for? And I said, you know, gratitude, graciousness. And he kind of stopped and he said, you have a 16 year old son, right? I was like, yeah. And he said, when he's troubled or afraid of something, don't you want him to come to you and talk it out with you? And I was like, yeah. And he goes, well, you know, that's what God is. And that's how you should approach prayer.
00:14:31
Speaker
And then he said something that just kind of made me feel like a sixth grader all over again. He goes, have you ever thought of praying to Father Capon? And I never had dawned on me to pray to him at that point. Here, I'd spent eight, nine years of my life thinking about him, cataloging him, chronicling him, trying to get to the bottom of him, but never once had I said, hey, Father Capon, help me here.
00:14:57
Speaker
In a conversation I was having nine years ago with Tom French, a Pulitzer Prize winner for the Tampa Bay Times, and he was always big on serial narratives and everything for that paper when they would do that kind of thing. And when we were working together for something, he always said with certain things like religion or other things that you're writing about, it's very important to
00:15:25
Speaker
dial down the volume of it because the subject matter itself is very high volume. You don't need to trump it up. So when you were writing about, you know, the Catholic Church, the Catholic faith in religion here, was that always on your mind as something like, okay, I have to make sure that I'm not turning the volume too high up on the language because the subject matter should carry the day? Not particularly. And I know what Tom's saying, and it is a quick aside.
00:15:54
Speaker
My new editor, new to the New York Times, is Mike Wilson, who was the editor that ushered in Tom and a bunch of other Pulitzer Prize winners. And he's thoughtful about this. You know, what I tried to do is just tell my story, okay?
00:16:14
Speaker
The Father Kippon story told itself that's where I mostly stayed out of the way. His life was remarkable enough that I didn't need to goose it or downplay it. If you just play it straight ahead, you've got a winner there.
00:16:29
Speaker
The church story, I had to, it had to be a little bit journalistic because I had to first, you know, realize that not everybody was going to be Catholic on it. So I had to hit the broad strokes of what a saint is. Basically, a saint is the Catholic Church's superhero. And then you kind of explain how it started and how it is evolved. So that was pretty straightforward right there. And, you know, you had to get your characters, your mule to carry the pack through these things.
00:16:59
Speaker
And, you know, I found them. I had to be an essayist. I had to say that after all these years in the Catholic Church, this is what I think and why and where I agree with them and where I don't disagree with them. And, you know, again, I work hard and I think I'm finally discovering or I'm finally comfortable that I have a voice that's very much Midwest. It just tell the story and, you know, try to stay out of your way of the story.
00:17:29
Speaker
And, you know, sometimes you kind of have to prod yourself a little bit. Well, this is your story. So, you know, you need to say what you want to say here. So, you know, all those things go through. When you're looking at, and I know what Tom's talked about, when you're looking through a straight journalism prism, you really do have to just tone everything down. It can't be loud. And, you know, good stories in any journalism
00:17:56
Speaker
And yeah, this is something as a younger writer, I thought is you always want to be wax eloquent. You want to do, be dramatic and melodramatic. Yeah. But the best stories with the most impact, the knockout punch is you just lay down the facts. You say, you know, one fact after another. And I mean, you can write it and there's a way to tell the narrative of it. But, uh, you know, I worked with Walt McDonald on it.
00:18:24
Speaker
two series actually that were nominated for Pulitzer's. As we were fact checking like the first 8,000 word, if it's squishy, throw it out. So, you know, if you have any doubt, there's no doubt, you get it out of the copy because, and as he explained to me, he goes, you know, we have enough here.
00:18:43
Speaker
Okay. We don't want to undo. We don't want to put the Django to crash the Django just because we really fell in love with this, but we're not a hundred percent sure of it. So that was great advice. And I can follow that all the time now.
00:19:00
Speaker
Yeah, and the, the Father Capon section, especially as you recreate and rebuild the part where they're prisoners of war was really riveting storytelling and I, and I really have to commend you on that because that was just
00:19:17
Speaker
It reminded me of Laura Hillenbrand, Unbroken, what you were able to unpack and unfurl. So for that section, how much of a challenge was it, or what was the process by which you were able to sort of synthesize those story blocks to really just pull us along? Well, again, I had an embarrassment of riches of material. And that reporting, reporting, reporting is everything on every story. And I had told the guy who
00:19:47
Speaker
basically launched Father Capon's cause to same hood was a country priest named Father Jim Hotsey. And he had basically gathered 8,672 pages of sermons, testimony, interviews from people created from people who you served with, both in the army and in the prison awards. It was just,
00:20:15
Speaker
treasure trail. It was too much stuff. It was a bit of rich riches. So that was the first thing is I said, wow, this is great stuff. And then the second is you're the only one who knows what you left out and you always kind of got to remind yourself that.
00:20:33
Speaker
So you try to keep it simple. You keep it to the characters who advance the story, the set pieces. It's a lot like writing. Those things are a lot like writing movies. Think of any movie that you like. The first act is, here's what's going on. Here's the conflict. The second act is, all these things happen to him and he keeps going on. And the third act needs to be familiar but inevitable.
Transition from Journalism to Book Writing
00:21:03
Speaker
You just try to tell it like a three act story. I mean, I knew he was going to die at the end. I knew he was heroic in the middle. And then I set up who he was in the beginning that made him make these choices in act two and three. So that's kind of what you do. And just try to, again, I keep going back to keeping it simple. Don't get out of the way of the story. You.
00:21:28
Speaker
I guess if you were diagramming sentences and Brendan, I like doing these with you because you made me think about things I've never articulated. But if you're diagramming sentences like they made me do in parochial school, the equivalent to that to what we do is diagram the story. What is the story? Figure that out first and foremost. And then all choices and decisions are made to serve the story.
00:21:57
Speaker
I also liked how – in terms of the structure of the entire book, you had choices to make. You could have teased out the Capon thing from beginning to end and braided everything else in between that story.
00:22:12
Speaker
But his story kind of resolves itself in a way, you know, in the first third, well, before the first half is over, I'd say, and then it, you know, dives into some other things afterward. You know, what was the creative choice for you in terms of how you were going to sort of deploy Father Capon in this book? You know, and again, those are things that are done by feel. I'm not a great outliner. I can outline a couple chapters ahead, but I can't.
00:22:41
Speaker
you know, say this chapter's this, and this chapter's that, and this chapter's this. You know, I knew early on I had to get, and I say this as a laugh line, you know, we're sports writers, so we leave all the boring stuff out. And so, but I had some exposition. I had to establish Sainthood, the church, and this guy early on. And my vehicle choice of that was Father Hotsey,
00:23:10
Speaker
and his effort to push this all the way to the Vatican. And, you know, it's so, it was definitely, it is a Don Quixote effort. I mean, the average time between a candidate's death and actual canonization is 181 years. Father Hotsey and me, we're going to be long dead, whatever he gets canonized. But I'm just, he was a great character who could explain to me,
00:23:39
Speaker
what the process was and why he was invested in the process so you know that was the first one and so if I have this first act of this guy saying this is what I've dedicated my life work to and why then I got to give the case study of who's the guy that he's uh that he's devoted to and yeah you know I had to burn some very good stuff halfway through the book right and uh
00:24:09
Speaker
But that was the choice to make. And I figured that if I told it well, that people would keep reading because they'd want to know what next. Now they were invested and they were invested enough to say, okay, here's the problem with Sainthood, the modern problems. It's expensive and it's political. And the fact that he's an American priest doesn't work to his advantage.
00:24:34
Speaker
And that gave me the leeway to say, here's the problem with the Catholic Church as a Catholic. They're hierarchical, male-dominated and not as inclusive as they should be. And so, gratefully, I think, and I think I played it right, the last part wasn't long. It was, I'd say, a decent essay size.
00:25:04
Speaker
So, you know again looking back because you asked me that's what I'm telling you But I think I am at least I'm a very instinctual Writer when it comes down to right and I think last time you and I talked I think you were surprised that I Don't write as I go that I have to be done and then I kind of speed right just because I'm a daily journalist Unless there's a gun to my head. I won't talk procrastinate
00:25:33
Speaker
And so I find I make all these choices like in real time while I'm sitting there with the page.
00:25:43
Speaker
And to your point about the sainthood being expensive and political, I love the line that you had in there where the Italians had the home field advantage, basically, because they're most represented. I love that line. Yeah, 10,000 saints, roughly, and they have more than half of them. And, you know, that'll continue to be the way that that'll never reverse.
00:26:05
Speaker
So with like Laura, Laura Hillenbrand, she's reports on Seabiscuit and she comes across Louis Zamparini, Glenn Stout, he's writing about Trudy Eterly, comes across Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid as a result, you know, his latest book. And so you're doing Our Boys and then you come across Father Capone and approaching this story. So I love this notion, this idea of a journalist doing one story and then finding something else that's cool and just putting a pin in it and be like, Oh, I'm going to come back to that.
00:26:35
Speaker
No, and that's that's what you do. And honestly, I'm in the greatest position. And, you know, people say, why don't you quit your job and just write books? A, it's not that easy. But B, I like flexing different muscles. And if I'm out there, I mean, all seven of my books resulted from basically my work as a journalist, you know, I found a lot of stories, I mean, three of them were stories that were in the times in some fashion that I did first. And, you know, you
00:27:04
Speaker
you know what you're interested in and what moves you and things linger with you and you say hey this is this is a good book and a good story and but also you need to have a bunch of different things going on you need to challenge yourself in different ways you need to flex different muscles and you know book writing to me appeals to me because I
00:27:32
Speaker
operate within the strictures of the New York Times, and it's a great place. I'm very happy. You know, I admire the place. It's got history and everything like that. But there is a New York Times story. You tell a story a certain way when it's going to appear in the New York Times, and you're going to have three or four editors looking at it afterwards. And again, I'm not complaining about that. It's just that is our quality control.
00:28:02
Speaker
at that place. Okay, they're really smart people. And most of the time, 99% of the time, they have suggestions that make it better. And that's fine, too. But the thing about stepping out and doing books myself is, you know, I get to tell choose what stories I want to tell, and how I want to tell it. And that's really invigorating. And, you know, yes, there's book editors, but the book editors have bought into your idea in the first place, and then they just want to help you land the plane.
00:28:33
Speaker
There's not a lens or prison that they think the story should be told to. So, you know, it's kind of an interesting economy that I've been able to toggle back and forth from, and I feel fortunate I've been able to.
Journalism Insights and Advice
00:28:49
Speaker
And to that point, we were emailing a few weeks ago, and you were working on a story about this football program in Georgia, I believe. And you were trying to strike that great swath to make it a New York Times story.
00:29:06
Speaker
You have limited space and you're trying to make it accessible to a general reader, not just someone who knows the X's and O's and everything. And you were just trying to find the right way to shoehorn all your reporting into this thing. And maybe you can speak to that of just trying to shape the things in such a way that it can appeal to people, even though it pains you to probably throw a lot of stuff off onto the ground.
00:29:32
Speaker
Yeah, and that one is in particular because, and just a brief overview of Valdosta's, the winningest high school football team in America. It's a very polarizing black-white dichotomy. They have some racial tensions there, but add on to that, they have probably the most famous high school football coach in America, a guy named Rush Probst, who was on MTV's Two of Days, who was one of like the first reality stars.
00:30:01
Speaker
And he wins everywhere and he gets fired everywhere because of ethical violations. It was very rich with all kinds of different things there. And my main character was a guy named Nub Nelson, who was the touchdown club executive director. And Nub is named Nub because he only got one arm. And he is just, you know, a fabulous character, a fabulous guy. And, you know,
00:30:29
Speaker
He's the guy that walks through town and talks to everybody and half of them love him and half of them hate him But he doesn't care either way And so the balance there was okay. How do you do this all this important, you know Textual societal, you know, new york times Gives us a lens and a commentary of what's going on out there in the time in the post george floyd uh world and you know
00:30:58
Speaker
ethical violations of over industrialized high school sports. But also just tell a hell of a story about a guy named Nub and his mission to clean it up. And, you know, that's, that's where you have to balance that voice. I mean, I'd write it one way and I did get edited there. I mean, I wrote it as Mike said to me, he goes, you know, you wrote it sort of rollicking. And by the time
00:31:27
Speaker
Everybody's boxed to it. It's rollicking but it's less rollicking if you know what I mean, I mean, you know You got to get to the nutcraft in 300 words on a New York Times story. I mean you Have that all-encompassing quote I mean basically if you read any New York Times story if you go to 400 words You should know everything you need to know and then you either choose to read on or not. So that's very much beaten down beaten into us and so
00:31:57
Speaker
You can't get as descriptive. You need one detail instead of painting the scene. I just had so much material there and I had to shoehorn it all into our style.
00:32:12
Speaker
Yeah, it's amazing the range that I see in your work, too, with a piece of that nature. Then your books. Some are just straight third-person. Of course, St. Makers is kind of a braided journalism and memoir. And then there's
00:32:28
Speaker
A lot of the, you know, some of the more opinion reported opinion pieces that you might do on horse racing. It's a, it's really the palette you're able to paint with and do it, do it all with, you know, with a plumb, in my opinion, it's a, it's, it's really great to see that sort of writerly palette and see you exercise it in so many different ways. It's a, that must be kind of fun for you to have that kind of range. Well, thank you. I take it.
00:32:55
Speaker
So I get, you know, I've been doing this a long time, Brandon. I mean, this is my 38th year. I've been at the Times 22 years. You know, it's something I think I've discussed with you before. I started on the news side and I think that's incredibly invaluable to be a news reporter before you choose to be as styles or sports or whatever you want to do, because you got to crawl before you can walk.
00:33:25
Speaker
And news teaches you real quick what the basics are and what a story is. It gives you a news for story. And in my case, I was able to hone that, just being, end everything from night cops to a metro, to a national correspondent. And my interest in sports long predated that. And when, in my case, the Atlanta paper,
00:33:52
Speaker
and they got the Olympics and so they were looking for somebody to lead the Olympic coverage who had news chops but knew and liked sports and had you know was fluent in sports so that's when my cross filter knew. I always say I always like to say you know I'm always looking at young writers and other writers and when I tell people to put their clips together I say you got to be like a
00:34:18
Speaker
baseball pitcher with four pitches. We want to see a fastball curve, a change up, a hard slider. You know, you just can't be one thing, especially when you're trying to get those first gigs.
00:34:30
Speaker
And what do you tell people these days about, you know, forging a path in journalism, given that the traditional paths that I would say, like, were how you came up going kind of like, you know, cops, you know, general assignment, you know, national correspondent, then the bigger markets, it seemed like that was a well worn path, you know, 30 or so years ago, 30, 20 years ago, it seems a lot different now. You know, what do you tell people these days from from your vantage point in your experience? You know, and that's a good point. And
00:35:01
Speaker
It's different, and this is mainly my perspective because I had a direct path, and it was a hard path in the sense that I didn't get to the times until I was like 38, and that was usually the deal. You had worked somewhere for a long time. And now I have colleagues in their early 20s, mid 20s, they've come from blogs, they write opinions,
00:35:29
Speaker
social media, they come from all kinds of different walks of life and writing. But one thing that I believe is the thing is, right, you have to learn and you have to have samples. You have to have, nobody can ask you, you're great. They're going to say, show me six things you're proud of. And unless you don't, unless you are doing a hundred to get to those six or doing as many as you can,
00:35:57
Speaker
You're not gonna you're not gonna get in the stream and I do get folks cause they go to the suburban paper go to your You're interested in arts go to Roger either offer to do reviews and if they don't pay it first don't worry about me just need to keep And showing some product you need some product to take into the world so
00:36:26
Speaker
You know, it's people come from all over. It's just really sort of amazing to me. I mean, John Brecht is a colleague of mine who's really younger than me and who won a Pulitzer. He managed to Costco into his late 20s and early 30s. And, you know, he just kept writing on the side. So there are ways to do it. It's just write and find it out.
00:36:52
Speaker
That's good to hear, but what's dismaying about the state of doing journalism has been certainly long-form journalism that it almost feels like a boutique thing, the way writing short stories is. It's something of a hobby instead of a vocation, which is
00:37:11
Speaker
unsettling for me and for a lot of people, because I'm someone who's had a lot of menial day jobs to subsidize the journalism I want to do, deeply hoping that the journalism will support me. But to this day, and I'm 40, it never has. And so it almost feels like the long form stuff that you want to do, it's almost like, well, I almost have to chalk it up to being
00:37:35
Speaker
a short story writer and if I can land something great, but it's definitely not something that's going to like put wind in my sails for, you know, indefinitely, if that makes any sense. Oh, I hear you. And it's tougher on your generation because when I was coming up and I freelance, what, five, eight years. And the same thing, there was good paying gigs that were low maintenance. There was
00:38:01
Speaker
churn things that you did day rates for the New York Times, just going to cover a game in Shreveport when I was living in Dallas. And then the meaningful stuff you had to cut out and make time on your own. And they didn't do very well, but at least I had more magazines and those kinds of places to go and they paid better. Now, you know, I just flew back from Kentucky and you go to the newsstand now and you think, wow,
00:38:29
Speaker
There's not a lot of magazines. They're very thin and they're really expensive. So, you know, you've lost some of your platforms there. The online platforms, they're a good outlet. But again, that's so competitive and there's only a few of them. And I don't even know what those guys pay anymore. But yeah, I see your frustration is that I'm killing myself for nothing. I'm going to keep killing myself for nothing is basically what you're saying.
Writing about Powerful Figures
00:38:59
Speaker
I don't know what to tell you, Brendan, either reconcile it or do something else.
00:39:05
Speaker
Right. Seeing that you just got back from Kentucky, I love the piece that you had on Sheik Mo and the human rights violations with him and his daughters and everything, the fact that he had the Kentucky Derby favorite and essential quality. And so he had that sort of spotlight on him. And given what he's accused of and everything,
00:39:35
Speaker
Glad that Essential Quality was only able to finish fourth by a nose, but that was an illuminating column that I read from you and I had no idea. I imagine with someone as powerful as Sheik Mo that sometimes it can be hard to write about someone as powerful as that. Maybe that's just me, but I don't know if maybe you felt that at all, writing about him in such a way. First of all,
00:40:04
Speaker
Kind of to back up to what I said, my news notes serve me there. I saw this stuff pop up on him. I didn't know he had the favorite. I love horse racing just personally, but I also love it for the material it produces. It's the gift that keeps on giving. And you have Sheikh Mohammed, but okay, the UN had condemned him. It's been a thing in Britain and Europe about these human rights violations.
00:40:32
Speaker
You know, when the UN says, show us proof of life of your daughter. That's pretty big news. Okay. In Kentucky, I know that world enough and I know they didn't want to talk about it. And that sort of became the point of my stories. A, he has the favor. B, he's in terrible light in the world's human rights courts. And C, he's dumped billions into Kentucky, especially to win this race.
00:41:00
Speaker
And you know, he isn't fast. He's a large landowner there. He's a big employer there. You know, he spent a billion dollars at the Keeneland sales over 40 years. So yeah, it's hard to get those people to talk to you, but it's sometimes, and I do say this is sometimes the best thing is when they won't talk to you. Okay. They just declined comment. Then you've got to keep going the other way around. So
00:41:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it can be daunting if you think about it, but at the other time, you got to think, well, you know, this is news. This is valid. I'm going to do the best I can. I'm going to offer everybody an opportunity. I called the UAE and I called her. Going to momentarily punch in UAE, United Arab Emirates, Dubai. A lot of horse racing there. And just wanted to clear that up. Okay. Back to Joe.
00:41:55
Speaker
in our embassy here and they chose not to speak. So on to the next story.
Storytelling in Horse Racing
00:42:02
Speaker
Yeah. And speaking of, you know, horse racing being such a great, uh, factory of story, you know, you had the great, uh, piece about, uh, Karmush and, and, you know, that generational tie between, you know, father and son jockeys and everything. It's always, it's those things, like you said, like horse racing is really a sport from a pure story standpoint.
00:42:25
Speaker
It just constantly gives and gives and gives. It does. It's a very democratic sport. I mean, you have uneducated people living on the backside who are colorful and want to talk. You have billionaires who want to talk. You have men, women. And the great thing about it is all you got to do is show up in the morning and people will talk to you. It's not like
00:42:53
Speaker
Now you go to a major league locker room in any sport and the athletes can spend, and this is well pre-pandemic, now you don't even do that. Now they just zoom in for five or 10 minutes post game. But, you know, pre-pandemic and maybe someday post, you've had 80 reporters inside a little locker room where the players are hiding for most of it, except the 10 minutes that the league mandatory is.
00:43:22
Speaker
And you have people shouting questions at them. And it's very, you know, it's a very superficial way to cover things. And I'm not dissing any of my colleagues. It's terrible ways to work. And, you know, I had this embarrassment of riches that I can just show up in the morning and find and talk to anybody who's there.
00:43:45
Speaker
That's what's great about horse racing is that it's mainstream enough where it's on enough people's radar, at least with a triple crown, maybe Breeders Cup, and certainly in our circles, then we start getting into Saratoga and everything, and that's big, big deal. But we can go up on the backside and talk to basically the Bill Belichick of the sport, or whoever that is, maybe it's Fletcher or Bafford or Chad Brown or whoever.
00:44:09
Speaker
or, you know, go up to the LeBron James or the sport. We can go up to John Velasquez and anybody on the backside with barely more than just a handshake. Like, you just can't get that kind of access anywhere else, but on the backside, it's right there for you. Oh, yeah. That is it. And that tells you everything about it. And yeah, it is mainstream enough that these five weeks in the spring, especially, this is their light to shine right here, okay?
00:44:37
Speaker
This is, this is when they get a rub elbows with the big boys. And to do that, they need that access the other, what, 47 weeks a year, because they want to be noticed. All right. They want to take advantage of their star turn. So, uh, that serves, it serves both of our needs that way. And plus, you know, it's an interesting group of people. I know you've spent many of that on there and you know,
00:45:07
Speaker
If you can't find an interesting conversation with at least a laugh every minute and a half at the track, you're not trying. You should just stay away from there. It just is a place populated by characters, by friendly people, by people united by this interest in these four-legged athletes and the going-ons around them. It's a really common language.
00:45:37
Speaker
Absolutely. And before we were on, Mike, you were kind of asking what I was working on. I kind of drew a blank. But there's a – I always like looking back 10 years. That's always like a ripe time to always look for a story, just 10-year anniversary of filling the blank.
00:45:55
Speaker
And so 10 years ago, of course, you know, Shackleford finishes fourth in the Derby and he's, you know, kind of but wins everyone's heart because he's just one of those people's horses. This is a workhorse. And that night I was covering the Derby for this website, Kentucky Confidential, but I was the bourbon underworld rider. So I was covering the nightlife. But after that Derby, I was actually at Dale Romans' house who trained the horse.
00:46:21
Speaker
And it was kind of a real touching scene. They were all watching the replay and just rooting for Shaq every single time he's going down the home stretch. And so, but two weeks later, he wins the Preakness and becomes one of those people's horses. And so I'm kind of writing, I pitched a Pollock report, sort of a reported column about it and they're on the,
00:46:39
Speaker
they're interested, so I just have to sell them a little more on it. But it's one of those things where it's a horse like Shackleford, that big white blaze, the way he digs down in the homestretch, bears out a little bit, but he's just one of those doesn't give up kind of horses in it. So that's kind of what I'm working on. And sometimes you just see the human element in a horse and you just really latch on to them. And honestly, that's what you have to do.
00:47:07
Speaker
Brendan, we're covering a two minute race. Okay. I don't know how you get, I don't know how you get 900 words out of a two minute race. And, uh, I try to focus on the people and all try to focus on the people and you see it through their eyes and you tell the story through theirs and where you sometimes you just tell it through the fans and the betters eyes. Uh, you know, what, what's unfolding, what's good about it and what's bad about it.
00:47:34
Speaker
Yeah. Or you just go up to somebody like Dale Romans and you go, there you go. There's your 900 words. Well, Joe, I want to be mindful of your time.
Mystery Book Recommendations
00:47:44
Speaker
So as we sort of bring this airliner down for a landing, I always like to kind of close these things out with asking the guests for a recommendation of any kind. And that can be a cool kind of coffee or a book or a movie. It's dealer's choice. So what would you recommend for the listeners out there?
00:48:03
Speaker
This time of year, I love because I go to lighter reading and I've been a lifelong fan of mysteries and, you know, serials. And I've really been into the last couple of years, I guess it's called Cinder and War. And it's these books and series, usually a sheriff or a detective in a small town or in a fictional town.
00:48:26
Speaker
And the two guys that I'm really into, and I can't wait for their books to hit my, hit my house to get them, is Ace Atkins. And he's got a former Texas Ranger who's a sheriff of a town in, little small town in Mississippi that has, you know, Gulf Coast gambling and Dixie mob and all kinds of things. And a guy named Brian Panovich, who has a,
00:48:53
Speaker
sheriff in the mountains of North Georgia with a real complicated family history. In fact, his daddy was the legendary moonshiner, and his brother helped turn that over into drug trade. And it's all about what happens up on this bull mountain up there. So they're really just good quick reads. I love them. They're really well written, I mean, don't think.
00:49:22
Speaker
just because it's that commercial fiction like that, that they can't turn phrases and get into people's heads. So that's what I recommend for your listeners. Fantastic. Well, Joe, always a pleasure to talk to you about craft and horse racing and this whole rigmarole that we've been in for years. It's always a pleasure. So thank you so much for the time and as always, thanks for the work.
00:49:44
Speaker
Hey Brendan, thanks for doing this. Thank you for having me. And this is as your listeners know, this is a contribution of which I am one of your listeners is a contribution to all of us.
00:50:04
Speaker
pretty slick stuff thank you to joe for coming back to the podcast and thank you for you for listening thanks to you for listening i appreciate it you know i do be sure to maybe consider leaving your review on apple podcast haven't had one in ages i'd love to be able to read it on air to give you some
00:50:23
Speaker
Some some props for doing that and I you know to incentivize you to do it If you leave a review on Apple podcast
Reflections and Lessons Learned
00:50:30
Speaker
take a screenshot email that to me I'll coach up a piece of your work for up to 2,000 words give you a little teaser about what it's like to work with me on something more expansive And that's my way of showing a little love if you have time to read leave a nice review Just email that to me at a creative nonfiction podcast at gmail.com and we'll start that dialogue
00:50:54
Speaker
Yeah. So Joe, pretty great. We go back several years at this point. He blurbed my hapless Saratoga book 10 years ago, and here we are, still buds, still talking shop, still talking horses.
00:51:08
Speaker
Check out the great work he does for the New York Times and pick up a number, any number of his books. Saint Makers is definitely a pivot for him, but still great reporting, great storytelling that you would come to expect from someone like Joe.
00:51:25
Speaker
And again, can't stress enough about going to Patreon page. Sign up and receive the next audio magazine. It's a lot of work and I want to put dollar bills in the pockets of writers. The show and the magazine are a lot of work and trust me when I say this is no cash cow.
00:51:42
Speaker
Podcasters, by and large, don't make any money. So those of us, or those of you who stepped up to the Patreon plate, are superheroes already. They get the heaviest of fistbumps. And don't worry, I'm all that stuff now. That second bunderda nearly killed me, but I'm here.
00:52:03
Speaker
I got a thing or two to say about regret. It's not too much of a bummer. The last two weeks, this parting shot has been a grade A bummer. But this, I was thinking, I was actually talking a joke, kind of triggered a little thing in my brain. And one regret I have, a big one, is not transferring from UMass my sophomore year to play baseball somewhere else. And I was burned out and I just quit. But, yeah, that was a big one.
00:52:29
Speaker
Uh, but I also regret when I was about 33, 34. Uh, excuse me.
00:52:35
Speaker
You can tell this is a scintillating story. I quit a job at a newspaper after only three days due to just toxic levels of anxiety. I got hired at the Schenectady Daily Gazette, so kind of a midsize paper there in upstate New York. A beat reporter for this old sort of haggard town of Amsterdam in upstate New York. Old mill town, very depressed.
00:53:01
Speaker
And I'm a sports guy, features guy, and this is going to be my first real sort of hard news gig. And I somehow BS'd my wife through my interview and they hired me. Thank you Judy Patrick for taking that gamble on me. And Miles. Miles is the other editor. I don't know how I remember this. But...
00:53:22
Speaker
I was having like near panic attacks daily at the thought of having to cover, you know, crime scenes and fires and floods and murders and cops, things I've never done before. And I didn't eat for three whole days. And then I said, I can't do this. And they were like, okay.
00:53:41
Speaker
And I wish I had stuck it out and worked through the growing pains because as you know, I'm a pretty shitty reporter and the skills I would have learned would have been invaluable. I kicked myself to this day because I could be way better at it. And had I stuck that out.
00:53:57
Speaker
pay was pretty decent, too, at $14 an hour. I make $18 an hour now as the opinion page editor for a newspaper, for a Connecticut newspaper. But I'm only part-time, so it's not really that much, though. I'm one of those dudes who just lives and regrets, bathes in it.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:54:16
Speaker
and after talking to joe i realized i could have been on that joe trajectory to something good maybe even great and now i feel like i've wasted the last 10 years and i should probably seek counseling but in the meantime stay cool cnfers stay cool forever see ya
00:55:09
Speaker
you