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Episode 296: Bradford Pearson on Reporting, Ambition, and 'The Eagles of Heart Mountain'
194 Plays3 years ago
Bradford Pearson (@bradfordpearson) is a journalist, editor, and author of The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story Of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America.
Sponsor: West Virginia Wesleyan College's MFA in Creative Writing
Social Media @CNFPod
Show notes and newsletter: brendanomeara.com
Support?: patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction and Dedication
00:00:00
Speaker
This episode is dedicated to Michelle Huell. She's a tier 3 patron. We love it, baby. Hey, it's that time of year you're getting on the treadmill. You might even be hiring a personal trainer for that hot body oars. Soft AF over here in my case, but maybe your writing needs a boost. Maybe it needs to get on that treadmill.
00:00:24
Speaker
That little something something in your corner, you know what I'm saying?
Improving Writing and Journalism Success
00:00:27
Speaker
I'm looking right at you You know who you are if you're working on a book and I say query book proposal and you're ready to level up Consider emailing me Brendan at brendan omero.com and we'll start a dialogue I'd be honored really honored to help you get where you want to go and
00:00:46
Speaker
I always say that the only way you'll be successful in this career is if you're just naturally curious. Like if you lack a sort of curiosity in your day to day life, not even necessarily your professional life, even in your day to day life, I feel like you're probably not going to be a very good journalist.
00:01:08
Speaker
Oh boy, it's the creative non-fiction podcast, a show where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brandon O'Mara, how's it going? bradfordpearson at bradfordpearson on twitter and instagram is the author of the eagles of heart mountain. Must be a story about a gritty football team, right?
The Eagles of Heart Mountain – Book Discussion
00:01:30
Speaker
Well, sorta. Subtitle is A True Story of Football Incarceration in Resistance in World War II America. Okay, that still might not get at the 100% heart of the tragedy of this book. It's about the incarceration of Japanese Americans from 1942 to 1945.
00:01:49
Speaker
Whereupon thousands upon thousands, many of which were naturalized American citizens, were stripped from their homes largely on the west coast and moved inland to often inhospitable lands, namely Heart Mountain in northwest Wyoming, living in horrible conditions and subjected to impossible racism and prejudice.
00:02:11
Speaker
You know, for us football fans out there, we know that watching the gridiron on Saturday or a Sunday provides some relief, some distraction. And so too did the Eagles of Heart Mountain. So you have that to look forward to. Amazing book, amazing conversation with Brad, but let's do a little housekeeping. Okay.
00:02:33
Speaker
I want to remind you, keep the conversation going on Twitter at cnfpod or at Creative Nonfiction Podcast on Instagram. You can also support the podcast by becoming a paid member at patreon.com slash cnfpod. As I say, the show is free, but it sure as hell ain't cheap. Members get transcripts, chances to ask questions of future guests, special podcasts that are in the work, or videos, I don't know, something. Gotta give you something.
00:02:59
Speaker
uh... a little caveat i'm in my social media deprivation chamber still as uh...
Podcast Promotion and Social Media Strategy
00:03:06
Speaker
for for now all of january maybe longer i have been shooting some social media arrows over the wall
00:03:14
Speaker
using Hootsuite, which I don't get any notifications from Twitter, I don't get any pings for mentions or anything, but allows me to at least post about the show. I started doing that this week. I don't feel as icky doing that, and I certainly don't see anything on Twitter that way. It's just a way for me to schedule some posts, and you can see what's going on.
00:03:38
Speaker
So if you're retweeting or mentioning me or the show and I'm not getting back to you or liking or acknowledging it, it's not that I'm being a dick, it's that I'm just taking a big break from it. Not big timing you. I mean, who would I be? Come on, there's no big time.
00:03:57
Speaker
over here at CNF Pod HQ. We're the little podcast that could. How could we big time anybody? Anyway, I greatly appreciate your ambassadorship of the show. But when I don't like a retweet or James Hetfield your tweets, you know who you are. It's because I'm sort of off the grid.
00:04:16
Speaker
free ways to support the show. You can leave a kind review on an Apple podcast or a rating on Spotify. It's a little hard to find on Spotify, but there's a good chunk of you who listen to show on Spotify. It's just a matter of clicking underneath the show and you're gonna be right. And all you have to do is hit the stars. And that's it. You don't have to leave written reviews. It's super easy. You know, all that stuff for the Wayward CNF are out there. And I bet a few of you out there were once Wayward CNFers before you got on the HSS CNF pod.
00:04:47
Speaker
You probably were like, wow, what's this show about? I haven't heard of that. I sure as hell haven't heard of that guy. But he's interviewed Patrick Radden Keith and Mary Carr and Laura Hillenbrand. That's something. I'll check this out. And that's only because of the written reviews and the ratings. So if you can do that, awesome. Right? Yes. Let's do that. Show notes, and of course, my up to 11. World famous, by the way. International.
00:05:14
Speaker
famous thanks Canada can be found at brendanomare.com hey once a month no spam so far as I can tell you can't beat it speaking of things you can't beat support for the creative nonfiction podcast brought to you by West Virginia Wesleyan colleges low residency MFA in creative writing now and it's a 11th year one presumes this affordable program boasts a low student to faculty ratio and a strong sense of community
00:05:40
Speaker
Recent CNF faculty include Brandon Billings Noble, Jeremy Jones, and Sarah Einstein. There are also fiction and poetry tracks with faculty there, Ashley Bryant-Phillips and Jacinda Townsend, as well as Diane Gilliam, Savannah Sipple. So no matter your discipline, man, if you're looking to up your craft or learn a new one, consider West Virginia Wesleyan right in the heart of Appalachia. Visit nfa.wvwc.edu for more information and dates of enrollment.
Bradford Pearson's Journalism Journey
00:06:10
Speaker
All right. So Brad is here and we talk about his unconventional start to his journalism career pro tip. He didn't go to J school, didn't go to a writing program. Many of the best, most prolific, most singularly unique. It's a bit redundant, but stay with me. Some of those writers who are very distinctive, they didn't go to writing programs.
00:06:35
Speaker
Didn't study journalism, didn't go to journalism school, didn't get a master's degree, just do the work. So we talk about reporting and his time editing features at the now defunct Southwest Magazine, which was a famous place for a lot of long form features that paid really, really well. We talk about the privilege both he and I have of having wives that out earn us by a long shot from way downtown.
00:07:06
Speaker
Bang. And the comfort that affords us, something very few people have in journalism. It's good to be transparent about your privilege because there might be others out there who think, my goodness, Brendan, you're just, you're a nonstop crush factory. What with the most popular podcast on the internet and a bucket of overflowing, a bucket overflowing with bylines from all the slicks and the prestige that comes from working at a Gannett newspaper part-time. But let's be honest, CNFers, if it wasn't for my spouse,
00:07:35
Speaker
who feels trapped and suffocated by a well-paying job she hates more than life itself, I wouldn't be here on the mics talking before you. So, did things just get weird? Things might have just got a little weird. I'm sorry about that. Wolf. Will there be a parting shot at the end of the show? I don't know anymore. You'll just have to find out. So in the meantime, strap in for Bradford Pearson.
00:08:10
Speaker
Thanks, I appreciate it. Yeah, that was, you know, sort of when I started working on this project. That was the thing that sort of struck out, you know, stood out to me was that it was, it was one of those things where, you know, you think you have a base level of knowledge about this history when you go into something, and then
00:08:28
Speaker
For me, it was just pretty embarrassing by how little I actually knew about the topic once I really started diving into it. And that, for me, was really important to try to bring to the reader too, because if I knew, as someone who I thought was reasonably well educated on this topic, knew, you know,
00:08:44
Speaker
whatever, like a half of a percent of the stuff that ended up in the book, then an average reader picking the book up off the shelf in the library or listening to a podcast or hearing the audio book, they would probably know even less. So I figured I had an opportunity there to really sort of speak to the history and include as much of the history as the time as I could.
00:09:06
Speaker
At what point did you know how little you knew about it, if that makes any sense? Yeah. Yeah. It was really early on. I first found the story of the Heart Mountain Eagles football team back in 2014. I was working on
00:09:25
Speaker
a totally separate story about Yellowstone. I was in Northwest Wyoming and I went to the interpretive center where the Heart Mountain Camp used to be. There's a small museum there now that's really great. I went in and I went through the museum. Again, I went in thinking that I had a certain amount of knowledge there.
00:09:45
Speaker
And I walked out knowing, being again, really embarrassed by how little I knew on this topic. But then when I was in the museum, that was when I first, there were two little sentences about this Heart Mountain Eagles football team. And that was when I was first introduced to the team. But I would say it was that very first day, years before I ever thought that it would become
00:10:04
Speaker
any sort of project or a book or what have you, it was that very first day that I knew, okay, I know so little about this topic that I really need to catch up if I do want to write about it or work on this in any real capacity. Is that what motivates you or animates you as a journalist when you start stumbling across something like this and you realize how little you know and you're like, oh, I want to dig in here and unpack this more?
00:10:33
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I mean, that for me, whenever high schoolers or college kids or even journalists right out of school ask for any sort of advice, I always say that the only way you'll be successful in this career is if you're just naturally curious. If you lack a sort of curiosity in your day-to-day life, not even necessarily your professional life, even in your day-to-day life,
00:10:56
Speaker
I feel like you're probably not going to be a very good journalist because you just sort of go through life and you don't ask these questions. And that's a fine way to go through life, but if you want this to be your career, you sort of have to
00:11:10
Speaker
have things sort of jump out at you and say, hey, I want to know more about that. And in my career, I've done that from writing standpoint and from an editing standpoint too, and that I really like finding stories, not only to write, but to edit too, that teach me something about humans and our human condition, but also just the reader can walk away with information and walk away, not necessarily just for the story, but with information that can, in a lot of ways, I think make them a better person.
00:11:41
Speaker
So growing up in Hyde Park, were you always a curious kid or was that something that developed a little bit over time?
00:11:52
Speaker
Yeah, I was a curious kid. When the book came out, my mom's probably told this story a million times now, but for my Christmas when I was in second grade, the only thing I asked for was a globe. I always was just intrigued by the world and how the world worked and how this world that we all lived in included so many different kinds of people.
00:12:14
Speaker
And, you know, I remember in second grade, I wrote this story about this spy in Czechoslovakia. And I think I just loved saying the word Czechoslovakia and learning how to spell it and writing it out. But for me, yeah, I think that curiosity started really early on. I loved I loved Globes. I loved geography when I was younger. And that was the thing that sort of got me
00:12:39
Speaker
Not necessarily got me into journalism, but definitely was the thing I was always most interested about. I wasn't that into math or science even. Science, I feel like a lot of kids kind of get into, especially when they're younger, because cool things happen and you get to see explosions or whatever it is. But for me, it was always geography.
00:13:00
Speaker
With this book, especially, I feel like I was really able to sort of nerd out and dive into something that I've enjoyed learning about since I was six, really.
00:13:12
Speaker
Well, you must have been into where in the world is Carmen Sandiego then. Yeah. I was actually going to mention that about 15 seconds ago and then the sentence just sort of dragged in a different direction. But yeah, I mean shows like that and I remember I had these little handheld game, paper games called Brain Quest and I would just burn through those. I used to play this game when I was a little kid, I would sit in my room and I would just close my eyes and spin the globe and wherever my finger landed on, I would
00:13:41
Speaker
go, and my family was lucky enough. We had a set of encyclopedias when I was a kid, and I would always just, whatever country or city or body of water or mountain range that I landed on, I would just go look up what the deal was with that place. Eventually, that led me to, in college, I studied international politics because I thought I wanted to work for the State Department at that point, and then I fell ass backwards into the very lucrative field of journalism.
00:14:11
Speaker
Yeah. And so how do you get that, you know, having that love of geography and storytelling and that curiosity, at what point do you kind of lock into journalism and reporting it in writing as something that you might want to take on as vocation? Yeah. So like I said, I went to college for international politics, but the real reason that I went to the college I went to, which is St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, is that I was a pretty good high school rower.
00:14:41
Speaker
So I got recruited a bunch of places and then St. Joe's brought me in and gave me some money. So I go to St. Joe's and I row for my first two years and then I tear a tendon in my leg. And rowing is sort of a weird sport in that it's really hard to get back into after you get injured.
00:14:59
Speaker
If you play basketball or football, you could just sort of play on the sidelines and warm up and still stay with the team and practice with the team. But when you're in a boat and there's only eight spots in a boat or four spots in a boat, it's really hard to get back into a sport after you've been rehabbing for a long time. So for me, I sort of saw that as a sign that, hey, I'm in college. I have two more years of college.
00:15:23
Speaker
maybe there's some other stuff out here that I can do. And rowing is also a pretty time intensive sport, especially in college. So you have practice in the morning, practice in the afternoon. And all of a sudden, I had just days of my life back. And I was like, well, what other stuff is sort of interesting on college campuses? And I was like, oh, college newspaper seems kind of cool.
00:15:44
Speaker
So, I talked to the editor there one day and he was like, you could start. He's like, we need a women's soccer beat reporter. I was like, okay. And that's sort of where it started. At that point, I was, again, just an international politics major. And after that, I picked up an English minor and just took journalism classes. And that was when I was like, oh, this is kind of fun. I get to be sort of
00:16:10
Speaker
use this curiosity that I've always had and in a way that I can be nosy and ask a lot of questions that I already want to ask. And it's for a purpose as opposed to just people wondering why I'm sort of a strange person asking all of this stuff.
00:16:25
Speaker
But yeah, so that was how it sort of started. And then by junior year, senior year in college, I was working for the newspaper as an editor. And then that was when I really realized that that was what I wanted to do. The initial goal was to go
00:16:40
Speaker
to grad school and study political journalism. And then sort of a very long story, but I ended up, I was working at a Turkish cafe in right outside of DC. Somebody comes into the cafe from a local weekly newspaper and I just say like, hey, do you have any jobs? And they said yes. And then sort of, that was the first job I got, a professional job in journalism.
00:17:07
Speaker
Nice. What could you point to maybe as an early victory that you had as a writer that put a little fuel in your tank and let you know that you weren't completely diluted in your goals and your mission to become a writer and write for a lot of prominent publications?
Transition to Features and Writing Voice
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I started at the Gazette and the Gazette was the newspaper that I first started working at, which used to be this really incredible weekly newspaper that sort of dominated the DC suburbs. And when Jeff Bezos bought the post, the post owned the Gazette and he killed it anyway.
00:17:48
Speaker
One of the great things about working for a smaller weekly newspaper is that the way that the beats were set up there at the Gazette was that I basically just covered a town. I covered Bethesda, Maryland, and you got to cover schools, cops, courts, crime, land use, basically anything that wasn't sports. We had our own separate sports department, so business stuff, human interest.
00:18:13
Speaker
which is an incredible job to get when you are whatever, 22 years old, because it teaches you so many different things that you might be interested in down the road. One of the biggest stories I remember working on was that there were a couple of kids in Bethesda who had come up with this plan to try and kill Barack Obama.
00:18:40
Speaker
And it got some national press at the time, but it was definitely the first story that I ever worked on that I really spent hours and you're staking out people's houses and you're going to fields where kids are blowing up makeshift bombs and stuff. And you're doing all this stuff and you have sources and you have
00:19:00
Speaker
ants calling you in the middle of the night saying that their nephew was a good kid. And you're trying to deal with all this stuff while you're still trying to deal with a story that has really big national security implications. And for me, that was when I was like, I guess at that point I was probably 23, 24 and I was like, okay, this is cool. I like doing the work. And it's super, it's really nerve wracking when you're that young and you have to
00:19:26
Speaker
sort of try to manage and deal with all these different sources and people pulling you in different directions. But it was also a time where I thought to myself, if this is going to be my career, I enjoy being in the mix here and getting all this information and finding all this information and going through court records and going through cell phone records and all these different things that you have to do and that I had to do for that story.
00:19:54
Speaker
Even though I didn't end up really becoming a crime writer or a cops reporter for any real length of my career, I always liked doing that work because it required so much work and sifting through different narratives and sifting through what one person is saying and judging what they want you to believe about their story or want you to believe about the truth. That was one thing that I think back on as a moment where I was like,
00:20:22
Speaker
I like this and people seem to think I'm okay at it.
00:20:26
Speaker
Yeah, and given that there's the feature reporters and then there's the hard news reporters, and it looks like getting your start there with the weekly, it was more of the hard newsy type things. And then of course that parlays into some of the longer work you do. How would you characterize the way you're hardwired as a reporter, given that one can be a bit more
00:20:52
Speaker
And it's sort of combative and you gotta like sometimes really push back, whereas maybe on the feature side of things, sometimes you ask a question and you just kind of really sit back and listen. So, you know, where do you fall in that spectrum mostly? Yeah, I think that now I definitely fall back, especially now after doing the book where you just kind of talk to someone for hours and then days and then weeks and then months about certain topics, and you can just kind of ramble on. But I think that
00:21:21
Speaker
hard news background and the news background that I came from initially really helps cut through that too. Having worked for weekly newspapers and covering daily beats for things, you do develop a repartorial skill where you can also know when to interject and you can know when someone is BSing you pretty early on.
00:21:42
Speaker
Whereas I think that some folks that jump right into features and there's a lot of people that have done it and do a really good job on it, but they're, I don't know, like you could tell that those people were always just good writers and sort of fell into this. Whereas like I wasn't naturally a very good writer and I just always, and to this day sort of lean on my reporting and the facts and all of the detail that I can
00:22:05
Speaker
gather and then hope that I could strain together some pretty sentences along the way. For me, I guess now from a reporting standpoint, I tend to be a little bit more laid back in my reporting, but knowing that I have the skills in my brain somewhere that if I know that someone is leading me astray or I need to interject, I can do so in a way that I could still harken back to my younger reporting days.
00:22:35
Speaker
Yeah, speaking personally, I consider myself a pretty lousy reporter, and I just wish I had more of those skills, maybe better instincts in that regard. And for people who are out there who might feel like they lack a certain degree of teeth when it comes to reporting, what might you say to somebody who wants to be a better reporter and a gatherer of information?
00:23:04
Speaker
Yeah. I think that the thing there is that you just have to be a good listener first. You have to go into a situation where you say, okay, and be completely open and honest with your own level of information and knowledge on a topic, but then also go in. I usually, I come up with some bullet points for things that I want to talk about, but I never really come up with
00:23:27
Speaker
specific questions and I know everyone sort of works on works a little bit differently in this but I just feel like it removes you so much from what we're actually saying and you know it's important to always to let folks talk but if you could find a way to sort of balance that with
00:23:44
Speaker
in your own brain saying like, okay, I need to come back to this note that, you know, this one specific thing that she said or whatever it may be. And it's just, it's like anything, it's like practice. I mean, if you had dropped me today onto a cop's beat after having not done it for a long time, I don't know how good I would be at it. But, you know, again, it just sort of comes down to relying on your own instincts, but then also just being confident
00:24:11
Speaker
Uh, enough to say that and, and sometimes, you know, I have a personality that kind of for better or worse in some situations, um, can be pretty blunt. And I think that that helps me sometimes in reporting and obviously hurts me in other times. Now you said you were naturally not a, not a good writer. And, um, so in, in what way would you characterize that that you weren't naturally good at that? And then how did you overcome it to become, to become very skilled?
00:24:41
Speaker
Oh, thanks. I think that you have to break yourself out of your bad habits. You just have to break yourself out of the habits of trying to write like someone that you're not. I think that for a long time, I tried to write like somebody that I wasn't.
00:24:57
Speaker
And I think that there's a lot of times where people say you should write like you speak and sometimes that works. Like obviously for the book, it was really hard for me to write like I speak because it's a historic narrative that doesn't really give me many opportunities to sort of lean on.
00:25:16
Speaker
The way that I speak naturally, but you know if for me it was just kind of being like beating You know, I remember I came across something recently where that I had written for some sort of journalism Class my senior year of college and it was like I was trying to jam some sort of weird like
00:25:33
Speaker
Moby Dick reference into, and it was just like, and you cringe when you're reading it, but there's times now where I kind of look back and think like, even like a feature that I wrote, you know, four years ago, something I look at, I was like, wow, I really need to beat that part out of me too. So it's from a writing standpoint, for me, it's just, again, just trying to kill off all the stuff that doesn't matter. And I have definitely found that
00:26:00
Speaker
over the course of my writing career that my sentences have started getting shorter. And that is probably good because it means that I'm actually learning how to write a sentence better. And again, I didn't go to journalism school. I don't have an English degree. I don't have a writing degree. So I think that
00:26:17
Speaker
leading, especially early in my career, like leaning on reporting was really important to me because I didn't have that, even I guess just, you know, looking at myself from like an inferiority complex standpoint. Like I didn't have, you know, a degree from Columbia or, you know, other places that my coworkers had gone. So it was just like, all right, if I could just become a really good reporter and I could just report the hell out of this stuff, then eventually I'll be able to have enough facts to string this all together. And, you know, eventually the leads come and eventually the kickers come and
00:26:47
Speaker
the transitions, which are always the hardest part, they eventually come. And you can't get to any of that stuff if you don't have the reporting first. When I read stories that really are really pyrotechnic to me, and not even from a voice point of view, but just from the sheer details that I'm like, how did they get that? And then you realize that for, let's say, a long Wright Thompson piece or something,
00:27:12
Speaker
What you don't see is the 50 people he interviewed for probably upwards of an hour a piece and the 80,000 words of transcripts that he probably has to then write a story that's 10 or 15,000 words.
00:27:27
Speaker
And I'm always thinking, how do they get these great, these evocative details? And it's because when you interview that many people, which we don't see in the final piece, but we know it's going on under the surface. That's how they find this, because they're just so dogged about interviewing people and finding that information out there. And they're panning for gold, and when they find the gold, it's like, holy shit, where did that come from?
00:27:51
Speaker
Yeah, that's exact. I mean, and that's the thing that it's like, you know, I don't think, you know, people in our field know how long these stories take and know how long all these things take. But I think that the average public really doesn't know the resources that go into, I mean, especially like a Wright Thompson piece where you have somebody that's writing 15,000 words on something. You know, I mean, the same goes for like a Pam Coloff piece where Pam when she was at Texas Monthly would write
00:28:17
Speaker
a couple of stories a year, and sometimes you would write one story that was broken up twice over the course of a year. And when you have the resources that allow you to do that, that's what leads, especially in Pam's case, that's what leads to this sort of life changing and society changing journalism that wins awards, but it also saves people's lives.
00:28:39
Speaker
Yeah. And speaking of and speaking of voice to which you were kind of talking about earlier about just trying to essentially find your voice through surrendering to story. And that's like leaning on your reporting and then you don't have to be as voice forward as like Chuck Closterman or David Foster Wallace or you know Leslie Jamison you name it.
00:29:01
Speaker
So how did you settle into the groove of your own voice through imitation and then also just through your own sheer repetition?
00:29:12
Speaker
Oh man. Yeah, I think that I had this job. So after the Gazette, my now wife got a job after law school and moved to, we moved to Dallas. We lived in Dallas for eight years. And the first job I had in Dallas was also for like a small weekly newspaper. And there we had to, it was a very, it was a really small weekly newspaper, but it was owned by D magazine, which is the city magazine in Dallas.
00:29:39
Speaker
And I lucked out there and that I was able to, at the small weekly newspaper, we also had a blog and I was able to sort of just hit like just right all the time. And I would be reporting out, you know, five or six stories a week for that newspaper. And then I was also just blogging about like every little thing that came across that we had that dealt with the community that I covered, which is the park cities in Dallas. So that blog allowed me to sort of
00:30:07
Speaker
fine tune the way that I wrote sentences and the tone and the style. And then I eventually moved over to Dee and worked for their, I was their online staff writer for a little while and then moved back and was an editor for front of book.
00:30:25
Speaker
For me, it was kind of like working on these smaller pieces, whether it's front of book pieces, blog pieces, things like that, where you can kind of tinker on a daily basis with what your voice is. And then when you get an opportunity to write a feature, you sort of try and take those little bits that you've learned and then for the first time in your life, apply them over
00:30:46
Speaker
3,000 words or 4,000 words, and sometimes it crumbles under that weight of that amount of words, but sometimes you could find these ways to put a paragraph in that, you know,
00:30:57
Speaker
really reflects who you are. And eventually, you just sort of build on those little paragraphs that you think are good and are who you are as a writer and aren't just the work of your editor coming in on the back end. Because there are a lot of writers too out there who, a lot of famous writers who are just not very good and just have always had great editors that can prop them up, which kudos to them for
00:31:28
Speaker
figuring out how that, how that side of the business works. But yeah, for me, it was, you know, it was just, you know, it was just repetition. I mean, every time I do, you know, maybe six stories a week, but then I would also write like 75 blog posts a month. So it's just,
00:31:43
Speaker
You know, and again, like a blog is a little bit lighter and it was, you know, 2011, 2012. So blogs were still kind of firing on all cylinders and it just, you know, you get a little, you get a little bit of an audience and you get people in the comments section and it gives you confidence to be able to sort of try to put those pieces together in a bigger way.
00:32:03
Speaker
Now I got spit out of undergrad mid 2000s or 2004 and that's right when everything in newspapers and everything was really start it was just in this watershed moment and really hard to get out. Let's just say the the paths of like the mentors and professors that really were paved in the 70s and 80s were just not there anymore.
00:32:29
Speaker
And it was just like, yeah, we're trying to follow that playbook and it's just an obsolete playbook. And I wonder for you, because I think we're roughly the same age. I might be a little bit older. Yeah, I was six. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So I'm like probably two years older. And so how in the face of that landscape, you know,
00:32:48
Speaker
How were you able to carve your own path through this, through hitting your head up against that wall and also gaining the requisite traction that you've obviously garnered over the years?
00:33:01
Speaker
Yeah. When I think about the other kids that were in my journalism classes at St. Joe's, a couple of them started out in the newspaper path and all of them are out of the business now. I think for me, enough can't just be said about being lucky. I do work hard and I do always say yes and I pick up stuff that people don't want to do, whether that's covering a zoning meeting that runs until 1130 at night or doing what you just have to do to get
00:33:31
Speaker
the bigger stories and to get the confidence in your editors to say like, yeah, we'll put Brad on this project team or we'll do this or we'll do that. I think that for me, you know, and honestly, you know, like I said, my wife's an attorney. So for me, I never had to be the breadwinner in our family. I had a nice book contract. But before that, it was, you know, I was making under probably what an average journalist makes even.
00:33:59
Speaker
And enough can't be said for the stability that comes with having a spouse who also works really hard and has a pretty well-paying job. So there's the anxiety that I think a lot of journalists
00:34:15
Speaker
have in this field right now is a rightful anxiety that fortunately for me, I know financially I've had this safety net of my wife and I can't discount how much that has really helped me in terms of lean times where I'm not getting a story or I'm in between jobs or whatever that may be to be able to sort of lean on my wife. Again, I can't say enough about how much she's helped my career in that way.
00:34:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's important to underscore. I'm the same way. My wife, she has the benefits. She's the breadwinner by a long shot. And it definitely takes the pressure off of what I do for a living.
00:35:03
Speaker
What I do for a living, I don't think I'd be able to live on my own by myself as a part-time newspaper editor and then as freelancing in the holes. Maybe the situation would pressure me into figuring things out. Of course, you would have to to try to survive.
00:35:22
Speaker
But I know that I don't have a lot of those pressures and that's my immense and impossible privilege that I have and I recognize. And it's sad that as journalists this thing that is so important to this country that it is often almost like a boutique industry because you almost can't afford to live on this thing that is supposed to be the foundational cornerstone of democracy.
00:35:52
Speaker
I know it wasn't until I think last year when I got like one, you know, whatever, one solid chunk of my book advance that I actually made more than half of my wife. And that was like, that was a watershed moment in our relationship when I made more than 50% of what she makes.
00:36:14
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I am. I'm well under 50 percent of what my wife makes and maybe if like similarly if you know I'm trying to work on landing a landing a book deal for something and like maybe that will like get the 50 percent mark. Yeah. Maybe if we're lucky.
00:36:32
Speaker
I'll be back under it again this upcoming year because the book advances. I've stopped getting those checks. I'll be back under 50% for this upcoming year.
00:36:46
Speaker
Now I before Southwest magazine was was shuttered it was definitely one of those places where people loved people that you know we know in our circles who went there you could write you know these great features and get paid well to do it and then of course a you know it closed down a couple years ago and you're the former features editor for Southwest so you know what was that experience like to be able to
Southwest Magazine Experience and Challenges in Journalism
00:37:11
Speaker
bring that story to the airplanes, to the air. Yeah, that was the best job I ever had. So I went there after I worked at D for a few years and the editorial I had when I worked there was a guy named J.K. Nickel and J.K. now is the
00:37:28
Speaker
features editor, features director at Texas Monthly. And JK is our age and he's just incredible. He is super diligent and just works every story down to the sentence and word level and is just an incredible, and I made this in the best way, like an incredibly neurotic editor.
00:37:49
Speaker
So when JK hired me, he was like, hey, let's just try to make this magazine as good as it could possibly be. And it was always a good magazine. But somehow we just caught lightning for a couple of years there where JK and I just had a very similar sensibility in terms of the kinds of writers we like to work with, the kinds of stories we wanted to tell. And I still remember I was sort of, you know, I was weighing an offer from Southwest and from another publication.
00:38:18
Speaker
And JK texted me and was like, Hey, let's try to make this as good as we can. And then both of us can go work at California Sunday magazine. And I was like, I was like, all right, that's a good sales pitch. Okay, I'll come work at Southwest. And it was, Southwest was incredibly rare in that we're the only in fight magazine that didn't have like constant oversight from the airline.
00:38:42
Speaker
And that allowed us to sort of just do whatever we wanted. Like as long as we didn't curse in the magazine, as long as we didn't have nudity or whatever it was, the airline really was pretty hands off with us. We weren't airline employees, so we worked for like a separate company that just had the contract to do the magazine. So every month we would just kind of try to make the issue a little bit weirder than the month before.
00:39:07
Speaker
I'm reminded, we did a whole issue just on the topic of light and we had Tony Rehagen just write all these stories about light in different ways, every way you could possibly interpret the word light. He wrote this huge feature well full of that. JK signed off on a feature that I wrote where I'd found this guy, I'd become obsessed with this man online who just had a webcam that was on his front lawn and people would
00:39:31
Speaker
watch it from all over the world all the time. And I was like, hey, I think this is kind of interesting. And he's like, all right. So I just went up and spent a few days with this guy in Colorado and just watched his lawn, watch his grass grow. And the thing was about this magazine was that we had, at the time Southwest, the Plains had really bad internet.
00:39:51
Speaker
and didn't have TVs in the seats. So we had a real, like a truly captive audience in that no one was distracted on their phones because the internet sucked and there was no in-flight entertainment.
00:40:06
Speaker
So many people, it was the most read inflight magazine in the world because no one else had anything else they could do on the planes, which gave us this freedom to just say, look, these people are here anyway. A lot of inflights had a quota of the number of celebrity covers that they had to have or celebrities in the magazine, and we had nothing like that.
00:40:31
Speaker
We did a whole issue where every single story was about Mexico. Even the entire front of book, feature well, back interview because Southwest was starting roots to Mexico where it's like, well, let's see if we can pull this off. And we did that. It was the best, the best, best job. And we just had like a really good team that for a few years just sort of fired on all cylinders. And again, Southwest was great in that they just kind of let us run with it. We would only have to show them
00:41:00
Speaker
the issue like a day before it went to print. Like we would get all the way through production and everything and then we would go present the magazine at their offices in Dallas and they'd be like, all right, see you again next month. And we were like, we'd walk out and be like, well, I guess we got away with it for one more month.
00:41:20
Speaker
The lesson is, if you want a good in-flight magazine these days, just cut the Wi-Fi. Just no more Wi-Fi. Cut the Wi-Fi. Yeah. COVID doesn't help either. That was what really killed the magazine was that nobody wanted to touch in-flight magazines at the very beginning of COVID because nobody had any idea what was going on. That was when Southwest, that's when the magazine got killed was that first spring.
00:41:43
Speaker
Nowadays, given that you've written a lot of magazine pieces, you've got this book under your belt, what is your relation to ambition in this part of your career? Oh, wow. That's a really great question.
00:42:00
Speaker
So right now, basically what I do following the book is that I'm a contributing editor at Philadelphia magazine. So I edit features and packages there sort of on a monthly contract basis, which is fun because I had stopped, you know, when I was writing the book, I wasn't really doing much writing or, and I definitely wasn't doing, excuse me, I wasn't doing much editing. And so I really like using that part of my brain again. But from an ambition standpoint, the thing that
00:42:27
Speaker
writing this book, The Eagles of Heart Mountain, really changed for me, was saying, so I never really wanted to write a book. I wasn't one of those reporters who started out when they were young and said, oh, eventually I'll work my way up to a book. I had no ambition to write a book. I just ended up, the story of The Heart Mountain Eagles fell into my lap.
00:42:48
Speaker
And then that led to the book. So, so it wasn't like this book does never, I'm very proud of it. And I'm glad that an honor that the families allowed me to tell this story, but I never felt like it was the one like big thing that I could like check off and be like, all right, well, now I can sort of, you know, do whatever I want, because I've reached all my goals. So for me, I've kind of had to look at now that the book is done, like,
00:43:10
Speaker
what kind of stories am I looking for? And the things that interest me now are more things sort of along the lines of the book. And that's finding ways to use my skills to tell stories that can tell the stories of people who deserve to have those stories told. Folks like incarcerated Japanese Americans or people
00:43:33
Speaker
the underhoused or whatever that is, it's sort of real mind how I think about the stories that I look for and the kinds of stories that I want to write. So whether that's another book or whether that's features coming down the line, how can I use the skills that I've acquired in the years of a journalist and then the years writing this book
00:43:54
Speaker
using that skill set and applying it to something that I think will either help a group of people or help the reading public understand a group of people or understand a topic better than they had maybe before they read what I wrote.
00:44:10
Speaker
Now, as you see the landmark and you start to learn more about what happened in Wyoming and Heart Mountain and Northwest Wyoming, about the incarceration of Japanese Americans and
00:44:28
Speaker
these concentration camps, what became the lead domino for you as you were starting to then put your reporting skills to test to curate the information that you needed to start this project and start this book?
In-depth Research on Eagles and Japanese American Incarceration
00:44:44
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, the very first, so I found the story by find, I mean, I read a couple of sentences on a museum display about this great team
00:44:54
Speaker
And that happened 2014 and I didn't really start picking it up or thinking about it again until after Donald Trump was elected. And I think that at the time I was working at Southwest and as much freedom as we had, we couldn't become an overtly political machine.
00:45:09
Speaker
either. So I started thinking about how to use my skill sets to sort of push back a little bit against some of the policies that I didn't necessarily agree with in that administration and some of the ways that they talked about other people in this country and then around the world. So that was when I started working more about this book. I started thinking, okay, maybe now is the time to sort of
00:45:33
Speaker
use these skills and start digging into the subject. And so I started reading about the camp. I reached out to folks at the Heart Mountain Foundation and they hooked me up with somebody who had copies of every single edition of the Heart Mountain Sentinel, which was a weekly newspaper that ran in the camp.
00:45:53
Speaker
So I would get those. I got a CD of those in the mail and every night when I would come home from working at Southwest, after my wife went to bed, I would sit up and I would just read these old newspapers and start to figure out who these players were on this Heart Mountain football team and who the top players were, who were the people that
00:46:12
Speaker
I would want to speak with for a book, and I just started creating this huge spreadsheet that sort of ranked the players by how often they were mentioned, how good they were, because I knew that I would want the top players to be the characters in the book.
00:46:28
Speaker
After I had worked on that, as any reporter knows, once you start Googling people and you see an obituary, you go right to the bottom to see who the survivors are, to see if there's anyone you might be able to reach out to, to speak about this person's life. For me, one of the two main characters in the book was a young man named Babe Nomura, and I found his daughter and his wife, daughter, and son are all still alive.
00:46:53
Speaker
Um, and I found his daughter and I found her email address on some old dead LinkedIn page and I just emailed her out of the blue and said, Hey, uh, you don't know who I am. You don't have to respond to this, but I've been reading about your dad and I think he's incredible. And I'd like to, to speak with you, uh, about this topic. I don't know what this is going to be. I don't know if it's going to be a magazine story. I don't know if it's going to be a book. I have no idea. Um, but, and Jan, to her, her credit
00:47:20
Speaker
you know, responded back to me and we hopped on the phone and spoke for two hours at the end of it. She's like, you know what, I think, she's like, you know, I've had lots of people approach me over the years, but for something that I like about you. And I think that you'd be the right person to tell my dad's story. So that really, little did I know, it wasn't until years later, after the book came out, I was talking to Jan one day, she's like, oh, I was like, I still don't understand like why
00:47:45
Speaker
like what I did that you said, you know, okay, like you can do this. And she's like, Oh, well, I checked you out. She's like, I called the airline and I called like all these other people before I ever talked to you to make sure that you were legit. And I was like, really? It's just so funny to think like the work that we do that there's other people like other people have these same skills and can do the exact same thing. So, but yeah, so that was really the first domino and then Jan,
00:48:13
Speaker
that sort of cracked open the story of Babe and then she, incredibly graciously, she reached out to some of the other players and their families and said like, I think Brad's legit and I think that he would do a good job with this. So that was how I was able to get in contact with some of the other players and their families too.
00:48:34
Speaker
Now since you grew up in Hyde Park, which is FDR territory, and FDR figures mightily in this book, but not as flattering as a lot of people have grown to know him over the years, given the executive order, I believe 9066 is
00:48:53
Speaker
Correct. Yeah. That which rounded up the Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans on the soil and to the concentration camps more inland. Given where you grew up and what you reported on in this book, how has your relationship to FDR maybe changed over your reporting too?
00:49:18
Speaker
Yeah. Like you mentioned, I grew up in Hyde Park, New York, which is FDR's hometown. I went to Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School. Our middle school was built with New Deal funds that FDR had himself earmarked for the middle school. He went over the architectural plans. It's the only town in America that has three National Park Service sites and they're all Roosevelt based. It's kind of a hard
00:49:47
Speaker
thing to escape if you grew up in Hyde Park, New York. In that time, you grow fond of this person because you're presented with this picture of who he is. We used to go to the FDR Museum all the time as elementary school students, middle schoolers, high schoolers. I knew that going into this project that FDR was going to come out bad on the other side, and I was prepared for that.
00:50:14
Speaker
And I think that in some ways I overcorrected and had to sort of edit myself back in that I was kind of so disgusted by some of his naked political dealings during the incarceration of Japanese Americans that it's really, to say it's a black mark is pretty kind of minimalizes it, I think, because he ruined tens of thousands of people's lives. People died
00:50:40
Speaker
thousand miles away from their homes where they should have died. People were killed in camp. People lost their entire lives due to the recklessness and the racism that trickled its way up to the White House. It wasn't Roosevelt's idea to this camp, but he did sign off on them. For me, it's been a little hard to
00:51:04
Speaker
work through that and work through my thoughts on this person because there are a lot of good things that he did as president and a lot of lasting parts of what we think of as, quote, America that I think were incredibly valuable. But when you spend years of your life working on a book about this really, really bad thing that he did, it kind of blots out the sun a bit.
00:51:27
Speaker
One of the greater generational tragedies of this black eye, of the many black eyes in this country's history, is just the generational wealth that the Japanese were unable to parlay into their kids to future generations because
00:51:48
Speaker
they had to sell off their land like pennies on the dollar as you've written for New York Times and in the book here too which allowed a lot of white people to buy up their land and then benefit from their farms and they were just they were naked in their intention about getting you know this one one uh you know when we had some uh Salinas Vegetable Growers Shipper Association uh Austin E
00:52:15
Speaker
Anson said he was just happy they were gone. That way he could take the land from them and then kick them off. It was horrible, horrible stuff. Yeah, it was so clear. Looking back on it, it was so clear how it was just totally motivated not only by racism, but the economics of the time and that it was just
00:52:36
Speaker
Basically, people were trying for years to get Japanese and Japanese Americans out of the United States and off the West Coast. Then, basically, Pearl Harbor was just this culmination of decades of efforts from politicians and ranchers and farmers to get this land back because Japanese farmers came to the West Coast as laborers, as many different ethnicities come to the United States first.
00:53:04
Speaker
And then through just sheer determination and hard work, worked their way up to being landowners and orchard owners and just dominating various industries, the flower industry, peas, berries, orchards in the Pacific Northwest.
00:53:20
Speaker
And that basically once they had done that, the white farmers who had dismissed them and treated them like shit at the beginning were just like, oh, wait, wait, wait, no, actually we want that land back now that you've turned it and made it, you know, arigable and that you clearly have gotten such a profit out of this land that we dismissed and sort of given away.
00:53:40
Speaker
And those interests combined, and again, combined with racism and the event of Pearl Harbor, really just sort of sealed the ethnic Japanese fate on the West Coast. And I think you get to a good point where I was able to write a little bit more about Japanese American life at the end of the war for a series that
00:54:01
Speaker
The New York Times did two summers ago now. One of those was a little bit about the housing struggles that Japanese Americans had after the camps closed. Because like you mentioned, everybody had to sell their houses. If they didn't have a white neighbor who was willing to watch their house for some indeterminate amount of time, they would have to sell it. There were white speculators who would drive through every Japanese neighborhood in the country.
00:54:28
Speaker
on the West Coast, excuse me, and just say like, yeah, I'll sell your house for 500 bucks, or you have a brand new car, I'll give you 20 bucks for it, a new fridge, here's $5. And I think that the Japanese in America and Japanese Americans had established a pretty good financial life for themselves, especially in the cities by the 1940s, and then that was just completely erased
00:54:54
Speaker
I think one study that I've cited in red, it wasn't until the mid-70s that the Japanese in America recovered financially. It's still incredible to think that even in 30 years, they were able to bounce back that much.
00:55:08
Speaker
Yeah. And give us a sense of the the fervor that was drummed up, you know, in the after the attacks of Pearl Harbor. And, you know, I'm thinking specifically of the Hearst columnist Henry Macklemore, who who is just like really one of one of his, you know, kicker lines. Personally, I hate the Japanese and that goes for all of them. And it's just like the blatant racism and everything. And the fervor that that drums up in the country and public opinion. I mean, it leads to, you know, what you write about.
00:55:38
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, and that's the thing where it was like, understandably and rightfully, we think of Pearl Harbor as this event that led to the camps, which is true. If it wasn't for Pearl Harbor, I don't think these camps would have existed. But before that,
00:55:55
Speaker
for decades there was this racism, but then in between Pearl Harbor and when the camps opened in the spring of 1942, basically everything sort of right after Pearl Harbor, there was a lot of newspaper columns and speeches from people like Eleanor Roosevelt who said, look at Japanese and Japanese Americans are our neighbors. They've been our friends for years. Don't think of these men, women, and children as any different than you did on December 6th, 1941.
00:56:23
Speaker
And unfortunately, a few voices, like you said, Macklemore and Walter Litman and other folks who were really, really well read and respected men and their columns were syndicated and run all across the country just sort of turned. And in the January of 1942, so a month after
00:56:45
Speaker
The tone in newspapers and on radio just really flips and eventually just sort of leads to this real groundswell of hate against Japanese Americans in the United States. It happens really quickly. There was obviously a racism of the times, but in that month between December 7th and the middle of January,
00:57:07
Speaker
everything kind of flips. A lot of the more racist organizations in the United States at that point, like the Native Sons of the Golden West, and even groups that we think of today as respectable fraternal organizations like the American Legion banded together to
00:57:24
Speaker
Fight for the removal of Japanese Americans and those those voices sort of trickled their way up to the War Department or you know the Los Angeles City Mayor the Attorney General of California Earl Warren who eventually rises to the US Supreme Court and
00:57:41
Speaker
And it just becomes this sort of disinformation campaign. The front page of the LA Times runs all of these stories that are just blatantly untrue. In that January, there was a very
00:57:55
Speaker
A Japanese submarine emerged off the coast of California, and in a pell-mell fashion, started lobbing bombs at the shore. It was just a terribly unconcerned attack.
00:58:11
Speaker
And they made it sound like it was that there were hundreds dead. One night, there was what we have come to call the Battle of Los Angeles, which is not a topic that I knew before the book, was there was this huge story in the LA Times about how there had been a Japanese invasion. These planes were bombing and shooting Los Angeles. A bunch of people died. The city went into a full blackout. And years later, it ended up being that there was one stray weather balloon
00:58:39
Speaker
that crossed into the radar. And it was just like all these things just got whipped up into this disinformation campaign against the Japanese Americans. And it's interesting because as I was working on this book, again, sort of the timeline for writing the book and the publishing the book lined up almost exactly with the Trump administration. And whatever I would tell people,
00:59:03
Speaker
that I was working on this book, they would always say, oh, that's so relevant right now. This topic is so unfortunately relevant right now.
00:59:11
Speaker
nod and I would agree, but then they would say every year what they had compared it to would change. They would compare it to family separation at the border or they would compare it to the immigration ban from Muslim countries or they would compare it to kids in the cages. They compare it to anti-Asian violence at the beginning of COVID. Then the night that I have my first book event, which was January 6th, 2021,
00:59:40
Speaker
There's people storming the Capitol as I'm having my first book event with Jason Gay from the Wall Street Journal. I'm thinking to myself, I was like, this is the final comparison. This disinformation that led to people storming the US Capitol, that disinformation about a stolen election, it's the same thing that led to the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans in 1942.
01:00:05
Speaker
and that it was whipped up by politicians, radio, and newspapers. Today, it's TV, but it was the same story. It was just different characters.
01:00:16
Speaker
And then of course at the center of the story as well is this incredibly scrappy football team with Babe Nomura at the helm who is just a terrific athlete.
The Impact of the Eagles on Heart Mountain Community
01:00:28
Speaker
And so maybe you could speak to this football team that was at Heart Mountain and was an incredibly great defensive team and just kind of ground peopled into powder.
01:00:44
Speaker
Yeah, so the Heart Mountain Eagles was a team of young men, young high schoolers, most of them from the Los Angeles area and some from the Southern San Francisco Bay, and basically they sort of came together. The Heart Mountain High School put out a call
01:01:00
Speaker
for anybody, basically anybody who had any sort of athletic ability to come and that they were going to host, they're going to put together a football team. So 40 kids show up to try out for this team. Only three of them had ever played high school football before. And they had 13 games, excuse me, 13 days before the very first game they played. And basically these coaches and with the help of people like Babe, who was the starting running back at Hollywood High School in Los Angeles before the war,
01:01:29
Speaker
just sort of, you know, got this team into shape and figured out ways to beat all these other teams. And so the rest of the teams that they played were from around Wyoming and Southern Montana or majority white teams. I think in the years, the camp's existence, they only played one player in all the games who wasn't white and basically just came up with this sort of offensive and defensive scheme that took their disadvantages and turned them into advantages.
01:01:57
Speaker
At the time, as mostly second-generation Japanese Americans, they were still very undersized compared to the white teams that they played against. In football size, especially today's game, size means a lot. But back then, they were like, all right, well, let's figure out a way that we can use this to our advantage. So they played a really quick game.
01:02:18
Speaker
They would spread their backs out, they threw the ball a lot more than football was used to at the time, and basically just ran these teams ragged across the field. Every game, the average, they were outweighed by about 30 to 50 pounds per player in every game they ever played, which I just thought was incredible. Even back then, football players weren't as big as we think of them they are now.
01:02:47
Speaker
And yeah, they just sort of, I won't give away the ending, but they really dominated football in the state of Wyoming for the years that the camp existed. And despite that, because of the color of their skin and the reason that they were at this camp, there's actually very little written in the white press about the Eagles and most of the gamers and most of the information I ended up having to get from the, like I said earlier, the Hartman and Sentinel, which was the camp newspaper.
01:03:16
Speaker
And given the circumstances that this team came together under, what would you say that that team, the Eagles, symbolized at Heart Mountain?
01:03:28
Speaker
Yeah, the thing is that they were an escape. For the 11,000 people that lived at Heart Mountain from 1942 to 1945, there really wasn't much. Most of them grew up in Los Angeles and they got dropped into one of the most inhospitable parts of the lower 48 states. It would get to negative 30 in the winter and get up to 100 degrees in the summer. They lived basically in shacks, families all in one room, there was no privacy.
01:03:56
Speaker
In the winter, no one wanted to go to the latrine in the middle of the night, so they would sort of pee in a bucket in the corner, which is just incredibly dehumanizing. So for this team to come along and to give these 11,000 people something else to do with their lives was kind of incalculable in terms of what their legacy was for the people who were in that camp. You know, 11,000 people in the camp, there were some games where 5,000 of them would line the football field.
01:04:22
Speaker
which is bigger than any stadium, any arena that any of these players or any of these young men had ever even been in in their lives. It was more people than had ever been on that piece of land in human history. That part of Wyoming had never been permanently settled before. So you have this team that is really just
01:04:42
Speaker
beating the hell out of all these white teams from across Wyoming and Montana. And the entire camp gets behind them. The newspaper runs four or five stories every week about the team. They run gamers and columns and box scores and scouting reports of the upcoming teams. They really just become the thing in Heart Mountain
01:05:06
Speaker
whenever there's a game that week. And I think that that, again, the folks who are a little bit older at Heart Mountain, so people in their 30s and 40s worked really hard to try to give the teenagers and the kids something to do and some sort of semblance of their normal life. And I think that this football team really, really took those efforts and really took off with them.
01:05:31
Speaker
Well, I want to be mindful of your time, Brad. And there's so many amazing things that we could unpack from this book. It's just so layered and textured. But as we bring this conversation to a close, I always like to ask guests for a recommendation of some kind. That can be anything. And I extend that to you as we bring this airliner down for a landing. What would you recommend for listeners out there?
01:05:57
Speaker
Oh, man. I'll give two things and they're totally very, very different. The one thing is like a story thing, like a work thing. The one thing that I found really helpful when I was writing The Eagles of Heart Mountain was that I also read a lot of really bad books about the topic.
01:06:17
Speaker
Um, because I did, I did on purpose because I wanted to see the mistakes that they made and I didn't want to fall back on them. Like I did. I didn't want to repeat those mistakes that these people had made. And some of them were like purposely bad books, you know, trolly conservative books about the Japanese incarceration. But some of them were just books that I didn't particularly like as much. And you know, kind of famous books or big books on the topic. And I thought like, well, why don't I like this book? What about this don't I like and how can I
01:06:47
Speaker
Not do that in my own book so for me It was really helpful and I found that in the same way and that sometimes if you're coming to a story or coming to a feature a Little bit later than somebody else or someone else has already worked on something I know a lot of people say to not read what other people write but I like doing it because it really helps me sort of say I
01:07:07
Speaker
What did this person do that I think I can do better? How can I improve on this? How can I take this same set of facts and tell the story in a way that I think will respond with readers? So that's sort of my craft recommendation.
01:07:22
Speaker
But the thing that when as I knew you're going to ask this question, the thing that I think about that I recommend all the time now, I have two little kids and I just love the show Bluey, which is a cartoon from Australia that is just I think it's the best show. My kids have stopped watching it, but I have kept watching it.
01:07:42
Speaker
because I think it's a really sincere, funny show. Each episode is like eight minutes. It feels like a weird adult swim length show. It's just a really endearing portrait of this family of cattle dogs, which is that live as humans. I just love it. I love it with all my heart and I recommend it to anybody whether they ask for a recommendation or not.
01:08:11
Speaker
Um, it's on Disney plus and I just, I can't speak highly enough of it. I was going to give some sort of highbrow answer about a short story collection that I've been reading, but I figured that a children's, uh, cartoon is, is a good recommendation as well. Oh, I love it. Awesome. Well, Brad, where can people find you online and get more familiar with you and your work?
01:08:31
Speaker
So, Twitter is probably a good place to get familiar with my work and learn if you like me or not, and then you can block me or mute me. And that's just at Bradford Pearson. I have a website, bradfordpearson.com. And then the book itself, The Eagles of Heart Mountain is available pretty much everywhere. It's in every Barnes and Noble in the country. If you use Amazon, it's there, but then also lots of local booksellers.
01:08:54
Speaker
have it as well. And then I'm trying to think, I'm supposed to do my very first in-person book event, which is a crazy thing to say 13 months after my book came out. I'm supposed to be at the Savannah Book Festival next month. So if anyone happens to be in Savannah and is listening to this and wants to come say hi, that would be the coolest thing ever because I've never done a live book event.
01:09:18
Speaker
Oh, amazing. Well, thanks for carving out the time, Brad, and talking shop. This is great. And thanks so much for the work you do. Thank you, Brandon. I really appreciate the podcast, and I appreciate you having me on it. Thank you.
01:09:40
Speaker
As I am wont to say, that was a toe-tapping good time. As much as I bemoaned Twitter, I would never know who Brad was or that he even had this amazing book if it wasn't for Twitter. Many guests on this show are a result of Twitter. People in my orbit and people I follow, but mainly like people in my orbit who like and are helping share information about other people's book.
01:10:06
Speaker
That's how it gets on my radar. And then I'm like, hey, do you want to talk? And then they're like, who the fuck are you? And I'm like, well, I interview good. And they're like, whatever, man. Can you move books? And I'm like, yeah. And then they're like, how many downloads you get? And I lie. And we have that conversation. And then they're on the show.
01:10:24
Speaker
Just to be frank, that never happened with Brad, but I reached out to Brad, and he was like, hell yeah. He didn't ask about downloads. Only a few weirdos asked for downloads, and I must be like, oh, come on. Like, that matters. But for some people, it does.
01:10:40
Speaker
So and so, I'm not gonna say his name, but yeah. You know who you are. Yeah, and I lied to you. Thanks to Brad. Thanks to West Virginia Wesleyan College's MFA in creative writing. And thanks to you, the listener. I'm sorry, things got a little weird at the top of the show, but maybe that's what's gonna happen in 2022. I don't know.
01:11:01
Speaker
So, I'm just gonna get on outta here. I'm gonna bounce. So, I hope you're okay with that C and F-ers. Remember, from the bottom of my heart, if you can do interviews, see ya.