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Episode 398: Emily Sohn Explores the Complicated Legacy of Virginia Kraft
1.1k Plays1 year ago
Emily Sohn is a freelance journalist and wrote "The Catch," a gripping profile of pioneering sports writer Virginia Kraft for Long Lead.
Emily talks about how she arrived at the story, writing through the research, and the dark night of the soul of a piece of writing.
Newsletter: Rage Against the Algorithm
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Social: @creativenonfiction podcast on IG and Threads
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Promotion
00:00:00
Speaker
Why don't we start this podcast by giving a shout out to Athletic Brewing, my favorite non-alcoholic beer out there. Visit athleticbrewing.com and use the promo code BRENDANO20 at checkout. You get a nice little discount. I don't get any money. I'm just a brand ambassador celebrating one of my favorite things out there, especially when I'm looking to cut back on booze and the shame that always comes from it. Skip the hangover, dude. Skip it.
00:00:29
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, is this a podcast or a therapy session? It depends on how I answer that.
Guest Introduction and Virginia Kraft Profile
00:00:41
Speaker
AC and Ever is this creative non-fiction podcast, the show where I speak to badass people about telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Sorry to disappoint you. It's still me. Emily Son is here to talk about her exciting profile on the late Virginia craft titled The Catch, published by longlead.com.
00:01:05
Speaker
She was a pioneering writer for what used to be Sports Illustrated. Kraft was a trailblazer who covered hunting and fishing, and she was ruthless when it came to her hunting.
00:01:16
Speaker
and her ambition to carve out a space for her self. The story is beautifully designed, and like I said, published by Longlead. It was edited in large part by Glenn Stout. So when we refer to Glenn in this conversation, you'll know it's Mr. Stout. Be sure you're heading over to BrendanAndMara.com for show notes and to sign up for the monthly rage against the Algorithm newsletter. Some people love it, and every month more people
00:01:46
Speaker
Don't. You can follow along on Instagram or threads at Creative Nonfiction Podcast, or not, totally up to you. There's also Patreon.com in case you feel like throwing a few bucks to help with the costs and the like, but I understand if you're unable. You know, that's two bucks or four bucks a month that are
00:02:07
Speaker
I don't know if you pay for like 20 minutes of parking these days. What a racket. Or you know a coffee or just something comforting. I don't know how comforting it is to support a podcast when you could like get a latte.
00:02:24
Speaker
I don't know. I'm just speaking. Am I speaking at a turn? By the way, today as I record this on a Thursday, January 25th, it's Steve Prefontaine's birthday. He would have been 73 years old. I'll offer some book updates in the parting shot.
Emily Son's Journalism Journey
00:02:44
Speaker
For those of you who don't know who he is, I don't know what to say anymore.
00:02:49
Speaker
I'm just writing a book about him. Some of you know, maybe some of you don't. Probably many of you don't. But for now, I've got the wonderful Emily Son. She's... Well, she's a freelancer, based out of Minneapolis, whose stories have appeared in Nat Geo, The New York Times, Outside, Washington Post, basically anywhere a journalist would ever want to publish. Oh, and long lead, huh. Her stories have taken her to Cuba, Turkey,
00:03:21
Speaker
Tofurky. Stockholm. Virginia. Virginia, no. Fiji. I bet she's written in Virginia. One presumes. Australia. And beyond. I love the beyond part.
00:03:35
Speaker
Her website is tidepoolsinc.com with a C, Inc., like incorporated, and she's on social media, at tidepoolsinc, with a K, like peninc, indelibleinc. Okay, do you still listen? Do you still listen to this? I applaud you. So let's get after it, CNFers.
00:04:10
Speaker
kind of like segue into our conversation too because I think that getting underneath the hood and seeing the mechanics of of a piece be it a structural level or even just a scene and how the masters are constructing something that might only be 500 words long but the the heavy lifting that might go into building a 500 word scene can be
Insights from a Narrative Nonfiction Conference
00:04:36
Speaker
daunting. So for you, what have you learned in terms of your x-ray reading and looking under the hood that has helped you become a crafter of these kind of scenes as well?
00:04:49
Speaker
So I went to a narrative nonfiction conference at Berkeley some years ago now. I don't know if they still do this conference, but it was fantastic. And there were like panel discussions, but there was also this opportunity to do, I think, what they call, I think they called the master classes. And I signed up for one with Rebecca Skloot. I loved her book, Could Be a More to Life, Penny Read-A-Lacks. And
00:05:13
Speaker
was just excited to hear her talk. And she did this exercise where she gave us two stories. One was a story she had written, I think, for the New York Times about fish surgery. And then one was a John McPhee story. And she basically just said, like, what's the story? And
00:05:32
Speaker
People were really grappling. It's such a simple question, but nobody could agree on what the story was. Like people for the fish surgery were like, it's the story's fish. It's about these scientists. And she was like, nope. And eventually kind of explained that her story, the narrative that she had created in that article was a single fish surgery. And once she explained it, it made perfect sense. She had a scene at the beginning where this fish was getting
00:06:01
Speaker
Like put under and then there was this brief scene. I mean, I think it was just one or two sentences in the middle of the story where they were mid surgery and then the end of the story of another article, the fish is waking up. And then within that frame, she told this whole really fascinating story about fish surgery in this field of science and.
00:06:22
Speaker
The way that she described that framed for me something that I had already known and heard a million times, but it somehow made sense to me in a whole new way, which is that this story is whatever that through line is in an article. It's like the beginning, the middle, and the end. You've heard that since you were six.
00:06:41
Speaker
Um, but it just brought it alive for me that you could do that in this, in the context of, I think that was just like a 1200, 1500 word story. And it went into all this other, um, it went in all these other directions, included all this information, but her story was this very simple surgery, right? She had gone and watched a fish get operated on. So.
00:07:02
Speaker
That's something I come back to and think about no matter how long of a piece I'm writing. And so for something like this, where it's ended up being really long, I tried to think of what that narrative through line was going to be. What was the beginning? What was the middle? And what was the end? And could you bring the reader through in a way that had a frame that was going to keep them interested in the main story when you were also going to go off in all these other directions along the way?
00:07:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's in an age where we might not necessarily have the access to editors who can spend a lot of time with you. It's like you almost have to seek out these pieces that you admire and unpack them, and they are your mentors.
00:07:48
Speaker
It's right like you kind of learned through that in a in a short piece of that in like 1200 words But it still had it still had story beats it had seen had beginning middle-end and it was dense and I you're like, okay I need to kind of reverse engineer this so I can try to do this in the absence of having you know, the the editorial council that maybe people had a generation ago and
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah. And I mean, the McPhee piece was way more complicated to try to unearth what the storyline was. But then once you found it, it was another similar kind of revelation. And I think we especially
00:08:27
Speaker
you know, early on when you're starting out trying to do these bigger, more ambitious pieces, like overly mystify what it means to write a story. And I think it helps to come back to the really simple basics of like, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and it has a character or two, and it has some tension, and it has some kind of resolution, and it's not that complicated. It's often really formulaic, and then you can do really fun, exciting things within that
00:08:56
Speaker
formula, but really bringing you back to those basics can simplify and I think make it more of a doable approachable kind of task.
00:09:06
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point about making it approachable and feels like it can be doable when you break it down into incremental parts that are approachable and digestible. These people that we admire, like McPhee is like a hero of mine, as he is for a lot of people. And it's just, you know, you wanna be,
00:09:30
Speaker
performing at that level and it can be overwhelming to try to get there but it's like just you know fall back on the basics of you know great reporting, great researching, great interviewing and oftentimes that really greases the skids and the writing in a lot of ways kind of takes care of itself if you do enough of that legwork early on.
00:09:48
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That, and I think just the deep research that goes into a well-read story of journalism, right? I mean, it would be different if we're talking about fiction or something really, really like that. But even then, I think that the research that the dive into some world or subculture is also can be really a compelling part of it.
Discovering Virginia Kraft's Story
00:10:11
Speaker
Bearing that in mind, how did you stumble upon Virginia craft?
00:10:16
Speaker
Well, I wish I could say that I independently discovered her from obscurity, but what actually happened was my friend, Dave Woolman, who's a writer and author and also does a lot of connecting writers with
00:10:32
Speaker
stories and helping place stories. He brought this idea to me. He had read, I don't know where, but he had read some really short thing about her and felt like she seemed really fascinating and deserved a longer story. But he really for a variety of reasons felt strongly that a woman should write the story. So he approached me with it and I think we had a phone call and he sort of talked to me about her and I was
00:11:02
Speaker
you know, you know, writers like get really, we have our obsessions, or we get really hooked on some idea. And he had reached that point with her. And it was new to me. And I just wasn't sure. You know, okay, I'll like, I was busy. I'll look into her, you sound excited, but I'm not sure yet. And just did a little poking around and, and was hooked pretty quickly because
00:11:29
Speaker
There's not a ton out there when you start googling, but what I did find just kept leading to more and more just turns and twists and potential rabbit holes. And I could see that she was like a really complex person who could be really interesting to write about. What ended up being like a real wealth of information as the dominoes started to fall over? In terms of the reporting you mean or finding out more? Yeah.
00:11:56
Speaker
Well, I'll answer that by sort of describing my process, if that's okay. Because I think it was very much a case of layers of an onion. I started with the usual, let me just Google, see what's out there. And there were some things like she lived this really fascinating life where she had 26 years at Sports Illustrated and then
00:12:24
Speaker
like the snap of a finger, she sort of switched into this whole second life and career as a thoroughbred horse breeder and racer. And so, and that happened in the late 1970s, I believe when she made that switch. And so, you know, thinking in terms of the internet age,
00:12:47
Speaker
She, her former life wasn't really online so much, but her second life was, she just died this year. So there were some articles that I could find that were like in horse magazines about her. So I started there. I also subscribed to Sports Illustrated so I could get into the archives and I started really reading. My first step was really just reading her stuff.
00:13:13
Speaker
and trying to understand what she wrote about and how she wrote it. And then I just wanted to, like once I had an assignment, I wanted to just talk to anybody I could find who had known her or overlapped with her. So I started reaching out to family members who I found through kind of obituaries, there were some names in there. And that proved to be really difficult because her family is really not an online
00:13:43
Speaker
They don't really have an online presence. I was using fast people search sites like that to get records of phone numbers and emails, but most of them were bouncing back or phones that had been disconnected.
00:14:00
Speaker
So it just took a while. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Using fast people search and white pages, which I pay for all like, uh, yeah, sometimes cross-referencing those, those, those end up. Yeah. But I know what you mean. Does white pages work better than fast people searches? Not all the time.
00:14:17
Speaker
Not all the time. It's crazy. Like you think they're paying into that thing you would have. It would be like all right. These are stone cold numbers. But sometimes the white pages one doesn't work and then fast people search has an extra one and that ends up being the right one. And it's yeah it's just calling all of them and seeing what seeing what sticks.
00:14:37
Speaker
Yeah, I did finally connect with the trustee of her estate, who was a longtime family friend and friend of one of her kids.
Challenges in Researching Kraft's Life
00:14:47
Speaker
And he was really helpful in just giving me a bunch of stories. And then he gave me numbers and connected me with some other family members. And I think he's in touch with them. So he was able to tell them that I would be calling, which helped a lot. But I'd say the first round, and especially even in my first draft, was
00:15:07
Speaker
I hadn't gotten deep into the layers yet. I started with what was the lowest hanging fruit, so the people I could get on the phone, it was really easy to get journalism people.
00:15:25
Speaker
I pieced together this whole history of women in journalism. A lot of that didn't end up in the final story, but it just helped give me context. And then I think I also talked early on to Michael McCambridge, who wrote a book about the history of Sports Illustrated, which he published in 1997. So I talked to him about that era and what he knew about that time.
00:15:49
Speaker
And then I think your original question, which has taken me a really long time to get to, but was sort of that these periods of discovery. Right. Is that what you originally asked? Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, how you might the low hanging fruit of just searching online and then you might get turned on to something that other people don't necessarily know about and ends up just being this wealth of information.
00:16:13
Speaker
And it could be online too, but just a few people know about it and it just like totally unlocks things for you. Yeah. So I had a few of those and it wasn't until I had really kind of figured out the framework of the story, but Glenn actually has these incredible newspaper.com skills and he was simultaneously like giving me feedback.
00:16:37
Speaker
on drafts and talking through questions and issues that were coming up. And then he was early on was very upfront about, give me rabbit holes. I love rabbit holes. Cause I was feeling like I didn't have enough hours in the day to pursue all of them. So a question would come up and I'd say, can you just like see if you can find anything about this incident or this time in her life. And he'd come back with just this like trove of documents. So there was like this period where
00:17:06
Speaker
he'd be turning up all these articles that were on newspapers.com but weren't digitized. There was a chunk of them that came in that was a bunch of revelations came out of there that we hadn't learned yet. The fact that she wrote under a male pseudonym at Field and Stream before she joined Sports Illustrated, that was mentioned in one of those newspaper articles.
00:17:32
Speaker
I also got a big chunk of them from, I called a woman who had profiled her for a horse magazine and she told me about a library in Kentucky that had all these documents. So I got in touch with them and they sent me a bunch of articles.
00:17:48
Speaker
Every time a group of those would come in and sort of dive in and dig through and build up all these different sections of the story that had started but maybe weren't fully fleshed out yet or that were kind of like shifting the understanding of her approach and who she was and some of the things she did.
Innovative Research Techniques
00:18:09
Speaker
What were some of those newspaper.com hacks, for lack of a better term, that can turn a simple search maybe into something far deeper? So I think some of the things he did were, you know, because it's, it uses, I don't know exactly how it works, but I think it uses AI, doesn't it, to kind of search, but in an image way, as opposed to
00:18:33
Speaker
a digital way. So he was saying sometimes he'll substitute an L for an I or a one because those will look like that they'll look like each other in the image search. So I think he did a lot of things like that.
00:18:53
Speaker
And I should go back because at some point I was so buried in the documents and then suddenly a whole bunch of new book documents would arrive. I don't even know the details of how he came up with a lot of them, but I think there's keys to sort of using those letters and numbers and then also
00:19:14
Speaker
figuring out which terms to search for together. And then later on I discovered Internet Archive, which also has a bunch of, that turned up a bunch of interesting stuff too. So that kind of searching was going on throughout all the writing and editing.
00:19:32
Speaker
Yeah, and how do you keep your or wrap your head around all of this stuff that's coming in from different angles and then getting it into a form where you can metabolize it and turn it into a story? Well, the way that I did it with this one is I had
00:19:51
Speaker
reached a point kind of in those first few layers of the onion where I already felt completely overwhelmed by information. And I felt like if I kept reporting, I was just going to drown in it and find no way out. And so I took, I paused there and I, and I just wrestled with all of it and I put together an initial draft that was
00:20:17
Speaker
It was still 9,000 words long, but it basically just incorporated anything I had turned up by that point that I thought was interesting. I had gone through all my interviews and put in stories and anecdotes and quotes, and I had gone through whatever information I'd had in these various sections I knew I wanted to dive into. So I had written up those into this framework.
00:20:42
Speaker
That made it really useful for me because then as the new documents came in, it was really clear where the information needed to go. So that initial structure essentially is what the final piece is. A few sections kind of moved a little bit, but ultimately the overall format of it stayed the same. You know, like I started then finding out more about
00:21:08
Speaker
her early life, and I was able to fill that in with some of the newspaper articles. For a long time, there was a big mystery about how she got that job at Sports Illustrated. We couldn't find anything about that. And then eventually that came out, I think in one of those batches of newspaper articles. So it just really helped to have some structure to then start filtering the information into.
00:21:39
Speaker
And at what point did your curiosity that was fed by Dave Wolman, you know, and he was he was he was obsessed, thought you were good for it. At what point did you become obsessed and like, oh, I see it now, like, and I'm all in. It was a process. I got excited about it really early and.
00:22:02
Speaker
It wasn't really until I started diving more deeply into both her archive and reporting on the story once I got the assignment that this like excitement turned into an obsession where I really was sorry to anybody I saw over the summer. I mean, all I could talk about was Virginia Crabbe.
00:22:31
Speaker
That's hilarious. When you were drawing up your pitch for the piece, how much legwork had you done ahead of time?
Pitching the Story of Virginia Kraft
00:22:40
Speaker
And how did you shape that into something that you felt confident you could perhaps land somewhere in this instance long lead?
00:22:50
Speaker
Well, the original pitch was really focused on actually what I had read about her, which turned out to not be true, which is that she was the first woman on the original staff of Sports Illustrated. And it turned out that she wasn't the first or only woman on the original staff, but she was unique in that.
00:23:12
Speaker
She was the first woman to go on these really huge adventures and write these long narrative features and do that consistently. So the original pitch was sort of like, here's this fascinating pioneer that nobody's ever heard of and, you know, she's, she was 92 and, you know, let's do this like overlooked hero kind of story.
00:23:37
Speaker
So that was a pretty basic pitch. And in that original pitch, I had read through a lot of her archives and I had landed on this story where she, which I write about in the final piece, but she had spent 10 years traveling around the world covering tens and tens of thousands of miles searching for a jaguar. And she finally finds one and there's this scene of chaos and
00:24:08
Speaker
She hears gunshots and she's worried that somebody shot it. And it's this incredibly gripping story in which, as I was reading it through sort of a modern day lens, I was thinking, oh, I can totally relate to this, looking for this incredible creature that you really want to see and learn more about.
00:24:28
Speaker
Then she finally sees one and she shoots it and kills it. And it was this moment of total sort of surprise and shock and devastation for me as a modern reader, which wasn't her goal at the time. I mean, she just recovered hunting.
00:24:46
Speaker
But I thought that story really crystallized some of the things that made her so interesting and complicated would make a great profile. And so I included that scene in the pitch, that sort of moment, and then the switch to, oh, she kills the jaguar, and here's this complicated profile. And then when Longley expressed interest, they wanted a reporting plan before they'd officially assign it.
00:25:14
Speaker
And they weren't convinced that the Jaguar was the...
00:25:17
Speaker
the place to the you know the story to I knew I wanted to retrace some of her reporting steps and they weren't convinced that the Jaguar was it and we for a while were trying to I was trying to get on a helicopter to go to Alaska and see polar bears because she had done this other crazy story where she went with scientists out onto the sea ice and they were just starting to study polar bears it was like conservation was this whole new concept and polar bears were
00:25:46
Speaker
suddenly realize people realize they were in decline and so she went and did that and wrote about it and then she hired a guy and went and shot and killed a polar rare and I thought that would be sort of an interesting story to then revisit and it became clear that
00:26:02
Speaker
I was not gonna get myself on the helicopter. I couldn't get anybody to, there were no scientists I could find. I contacted a lot of people who would take me out there. And then we finally landed on this fishing trip and this women's tournament she had written about. And so then once we had that and we all agreed that would be a good story to recreate and follow, that's when I got the official assignment. So there was a lot of,
Gender Discrimination and Career Independence
00:26:30
Speaker
There was a lot of research that went into that, a lot of phone calls, a lot of back and forth with long lead to finalize the reporting plan and convince them that they wanted and we're going to invest in that story. But there was through all that, he was like, we really want it. We really, really, we really want it. We just need to find the right kind of trip and agree on it. And then we'll finalize.
00:26:55
Speaker
What was it about Virginia craft that started to maybe complicate your feelings towards her?
00:27:05
Speaker
There were two things for me. I mean, I knew from the get-go that the hunting was something I was going to have to really grapple with because I in no way am a hunter. I find it hard to stomach and especially this kind of trophy hunting where she wasn't just hunting, she was killing elephants and tigers and all these incredible charismatic endangered
00:27:33
Speaker
So that I knew. I found out actually later during the reporting for the story that she had been at Sports Illustrated when there was a big lawsuit. Women at Time Inc. sued the company because of gender discrimination.
00:27:51
Speaker
and they were being paid so much less and they weren't being promoted and they weren't getting opportunities. And she was there at the time and she did not get involved. Like there was no evidence that she spoke up or showed up or signed any of the petitions or supported these other women who were struggling to do what she was doing successfully. And that became the second theme of
00:28:21
Speaker
kind of coming up against, you know, looking potentially for sort of a role model or hero or historic trailblazer and then feeling like here were these two things she did that I maybe disagreed with or what she had done differently.
00:28:37
Speaker
Yeah, that was something, as much of a trailblazer as she was, it was kind of like, it was more, she had her place secured. It fought her own hurdles to get where she was, but it didn't seem like she was really holding the door open for anyone else. It was like she was kind of out for her own ambition and her own goals.
00:29:04
Speaker
if it came to lifting everyone else behind her it didn't seem evident. Yeah Glenn and I had a lot of conversations about this and how to write about it and how to make sense of it and ultimately you know kind of concluded that she
00:29:23
Speaker
to her, her individual approach was very much like, you know, I'm going to do the work. I'm going to do what I want to do. And that is that, you know, that is how I'm helping. And I don't even know if she, if she even thought about that. And, you know, if she felt like she was helping other women or she was going to open this door for other women.
00:29:48
Speaker
And I really spent a lot of time sort of thinking about that and trying to explore that in the story about why she made that choice, maybe why she felt like she had to do it that way. And that to me was really fascinating actually to try to put myself in the context of that era and what that would have been like to be in a world where she had no role models. There were no women doing what she was doing.
00:30:19
Speaker
She had four kids and she was divorced and she was traveling a third of the year and, you know, like to try to kind of balance that questioning of the choice with the empathy for why she would have made it.
00:30:33
Speaker
Yeah, there's – to that point, there was a little passage I highlighted where you wrote that whatever she thought about the lawsuit and women's struggle, Kraft had, it seems, fully embraced her role as a huntress tending to her own pack while stalking her ambitions.
00:30:50
Speaker
This contrast, more than anything else, may have set her up to be overlooked. To make it at SI as a woman in a field of men, she'd had to become a kind of apex predator, determined and willing to take what she wanted. But leaning into an ambitious male persona actually made her harder to recognize as a role model later, especially through a contemporary lens in a world where so much wildlife is now at risk and women are supposed to have power independent of men.
00:31:17
Speaker
That is just such a brilliantly distilled paragraph of her and probably even some of your relationship to her. I mean, that's the crux. That's where you kind of realize that she did what she had to do to make it in a man's world, whether she had to or she felt like she had to.
00:31:41
Speaker
She acted like a man. She took on the most male beat of all in sport hunting, which women didn't really do much of at the time. And she just took that persona on and she wouldn't take no for an answer. She walked in there, she knew what she wanted, and she got it. And then now we're in a position where
00:32:05
Speaker
You know, we don't culturally, I think women help women. There's more support networks, more mentoring, and hunting simultaneously is not a beat you see covered in sports illustrated or major sports magazines anymore. And so it was the sort of double whammy of being left behind by history to some extent because of both of those things. I'm blanking on the author and the book at the moment, but okay.
00:32:35
Speaker
no longer blanking on the name. I went and did some research in the CNF pod archives. And the book is written by Julie Dicaro and it's titled Sidelined, Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America.
Comparing Past and Present in Sports Media
00:32:51
Speaker
And our conversation about that is from episode 253 back on April 16th, 2021. That's a while ago at this point.
00:33:02
Speaker
But anyway, that's what I was referring to. Go check it out, why not? You like to read, so I hear. She was on the podcast maybe a year or two, about maybe two years ago, and it was about women in sports media and how cutthroat it is and how you would think. And she writes about this, how if one woman got a good sideline reporter job that she would
00:33:29
Speaker
maybe try to help others, but it ends up becoming, they become more protective of that role and they're not as willing. Otherwise it might be taken from them because the spots are so rare for a woman to take on those roles in an industry that's dominated by male journalists and male reporters, be it TV or in print. So it was like, I kind of saw a very modern
00:33:58
Speaker
take in Virginia craft that is still like extrapolated into today's moment. Yeah, I think that was Kim Cross who was saying that she has noticed that women help women but until they reach, in this industry in particular, until they reach these higher levels and then there's fewer places for them and it becomes more competitive. And sports journalism is such an interesting space because
00:34:23
Speaker
In journalism in general, women have really made so many inroads. There's way more diversity in journalism than there was even 20 years ago. But sports journalism, it's still something like 17% of sports journalists are women or something crazy.
00:34:43
Speaker
When you look at editors and higher levels, it's just that the numbers are really skewed. So there was this interesting through line of like, let's look at how much it has changed and how much hasn't changed since crafts time. And so it's crazy to think that
00:35:05
Speaker
Even, you know, it's so skewed now, but there was none, like zero. She had no precedent for what she was doing. Yeah, and there's a moment, too, later in the piece where you write, you know, I'm now motivated to make that journey easier for the next generation of women journalists. So it's like, you know, you're more embodying a role of keeping that door open for people coming in behind you.
00:35:34
Speaker
Yeah, it was an unexpected twist for me to the reporting of this story where I wasn't really planning to be in it. And then it really quickly became personal because I couldn't help but reflect on like what she was up against and what she did and sort of how
00:35:55
Speaker
like for me it was this theme of she was one of the first to kind of crack the crack open the barriers that were there and now here I am as a woman able to write about adventure and sports and science and whatever else and like I have the luxury now because of that to to reflect and to think about why didn't she
00:36:25
Speaker
to help other women when she had that opportunity? And could I make a different decision?
00:36:35
Speaker
Yeah, you can almost see her point. I'm just going to lead by example. I'm not asking to be an activist of any kind. I'm just going to do my thing, and then hopefully people will take that as inspiration enough. And it could be that was fine in her day, but I think nowadays it is more incumbent upon people who do have some degree of influence to try to keep those doors open for people who might not
00:37:00
Speaker
You know have a certain measure of privilege or you know if if but it is like it comes back to the the old adage of a rising tide, you know floats all boats and It's it that seems like something that you've taken on and in believing just based on your reading and the way you're talking about it
00:37:19
Speaker
Yeah, and it made me think also a lot about history in the context of like, we never know what we don't know, and we don't know how the culture is going to change.
00:37:33
Speaker
in the future. And so even when we think we're on the right side of things, we might end up not being on the right side of things. Like for her to, I don't think she necessarily, I mean, she actually would have called herself a conservationist. She really loved animals, which I think is also kind of fascinating about her, but she also couldn't have necessarily foreseen the way that
00:38:01
Speaker
we think about animals and how that has changed over time and feminism and you know and and so kind of trying to think about where she was and what she had the culture she had been raised in and then faced in her heyday made me think a lot about okay what what choices are we making now that in 20 40 60 years will seem really um like clueless or
00:38:30
Speaker
We just can't know, but we can try to sort of learn the lessons that they didn't have the luxury of learning six years ago.
00:38:41
Speaker
You can sort of look ahead and think, should somebody ever decide to dissect my life in this way? What will they find? And what will they want them to find? And can you be more mindful about that? And so how did you come to meet our mutual friend, Glenn, and what were some of the conversations you were having just about structuring this piece?
Collaboration with Editor Glenn Stout
00:39:06
Speaker
Glenn was just hired by Longweed as a freelance editor on the piece, so I kind of like got handed over to him once we finalized the assignment. And then we had an initial phone call where we just sort of talked about
00:39:22
Speaker
talked about his approach and I talked about my approach and you know, it's like this collaboration on a story like this requires a lot of trust and communication and time. And so it started there. And then, like I mentioned, I think I filed my first draft, which I, you know, always do, like,
00:39:45
Speaker
For a story like this, I spend something that I don't consider a final draft so much as a starting point. Like I have all this material. I have a basic structure.
00:39:57
Speaker
I feel like I could go this way. I could go that way, but I don't have a sense anymore of how it's going to resonate with a reader. And so, and he was very upfront about send me whenever you're ready, I'm ready to give feedback. And so that was where we started. I said, here's what I have, you know, a million caveats. This is what I want more of. This is where I don't have this or don't have that. But I'm curious to know like, which parts of this are drawing you in and which parts can I just
00:40:26
Speaker
throw away so I don't waste so much time going down that rabbit hole if it seems like it's, I just needed a little bit of feedback. So we started there and then he was really great about, I don't know how he does this, but he would like get back to me the next day, every single time I sent him anything and was always willing to hop on the phone. And so there were drafts going back and forth. There were emails going back and forth about specific
00:40:57
Speaker
issues and bigger themes and so there was just a lot of communication.
00:41:02
Speaker
Over the course of a long piece and an ambitious piece of this nature, there can often be a lot of self-doubt along the way. And even an email that we exchange, you talk about anxiety, doubt, joy, and triumph, and all the things. And for you, how do you ride that roller coaster over the course of this and still manage to get something down that's serviceable that eventually turns into something brilliant?
00:41:31
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, is this a podcast or a therapy session? I will depend on how I answer that. But for the most part, it was if I reproach it like work, you know, like you just are doing a ton of research and getting a lot of information in and structuring and trying to take the feedback.
00:41:51
Speaker
as feedback about making it stronger and not feedback about me as a person. And then that worked for the most part, except the anxieties and doubts were, they were just moments where over the course of months and many, many drafts, you end up reading your own thing so many times.
00:42:20
Speaker
And so you lose track of whether it's even interesting anymore. There was one point where I just thought, does this even make any sense? Is this just boring? Anybody want to read this? I've read it 20 times and I just don't even know anymore.
00:42:40
Speaker
So there were moments like that that were then also like alternating with these moments of euphoria, like, oh, you know, you cracked some secret to her past and it's really exciting. And so it was just the ups and downs that I think everybody goes through. And ultimately having an editor like Glenn, who was really supportive and he was like constantly there and did feedback and did
00:43:09
Speaker
reassurance and everything else along the way. It was just so helpful. When there's always those dark nights of the soul, be it a book or a long article, when you approach those moments, what did you lean on, if you will, to push through and to have a breakthrough where you're like, oh, I can start to see the end now. It's coming to me.
00:43:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, like, for the most part, this story in particular was really captivating throughout the whole thing. So I was definitely, I never lost motivation to keep going or keep believing in it. But I think having the editor reassurance, like, and Long lead was really fantastic. They had a whole team working on the photos the whole time and designing and,
00:44:07
Speaker
Um, you know, at some point we got, uh, JP, who's the top editor to come in and, and, and weigh in and everybody was just kept like giving me positive. Like every time I thought, oh, this is like, nobody's going to read this. Um, someone would say something that kind of was like, like showed that they had gotten something out of like a new person on the team maybe would come in and read it for the first time and have all these.
00:44:35
Speaker
reactions that were like really helpful and insightful and gratifying and so that kind of I think feedback helped. I always love talking about beginnings and endings but also like you know the
00:44:56
Speaker
Even though a lot of the attention is put on beginning and endings, it can be sometimes at the expense of the middle, and the middle can often sag. For you with a long piece of this nature, how did you make sure that the middle didn't sag too much, and it keeps everyone, in this case, scrolling versus turning the page?
00:45:16
Speaker
Yeah, so I think the first draft did drag in places, so that was helpful feedback to get. It was heavy on, as I mentioned, the reporting, because that's what was the easiest part to do and get right away.
00:45:32
Speaker
And it was lighter on the reflection and the narrative. And so I think what really helped was to get that feedback really early on. I wasn't sure I was going to be in the story. And I had these sort of three themes, these three stories, and I was trying to braid them. And I would poke in every now and then. And so the initial round of feedback was,
Reflecting on the Narrative Journey
00:46:01
Speaker
There's just too much reporting kind of like journalism and not enough you and reflection. And that part was intriguing. They wanted more of it. So the second round and the next few rounds, I worked a lot on layering in and adding more of that personal narrative, which became sort of a fourth thread and reflecting and trying to not just present
00:46:29
Speaker
the facts and the journalism, but sort of give a little bit of a reaction to it and an interpretation of it. And I think that helped get things flowing. It added more tension. It added something for, or at least the hope was to add something for the reader to
00:46:49
Speaker
they attached to instead of feeling really distant from this person who kind of lived some decades ago and you weren't sure why you were invested in her. I think that added that push to the story.
00:47:07
Speaker
Yeah, the personal thread, to me, it kind of felt like coming up for air, in a sense, and it kind of recharged when you, it recharged the story in a sense when you dive back into Virginia's life. Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately, like, you know, we were talking about Rebecca Sclude and her beginning, middle and an end. And when I what I what I did at some point in the edits was actually
00:47:34
Speaker
literally write out what that was in my personal narrative. So I was like, okay, in the beginning, I'm approaching this person who I think might be this overlooked hero who is like a role model for my whole career. Am I never heard about her? And then the middle is, oh, no, I'm researching my hero. But turns out there are these things about her that are making me really uncomfortable. And can I
00:48:04
Speaker
Can she actually be a hero when she's so complex? And that's the tension of the middle. And then the end was, okay, I've come to terms with who she is and why I still think it's worth knowing about her. And there's this nuance to what that means for me and how I wanna incorporate knowing about her, but also think about my own career moving forward.
00:48:34
Speaker
Yeah, in what way, what lessons might you have taken away from looking into the past and seeing her life? What are some of the lessons that are echoing that you're maybe excited to carry on with the rest of your career? I think one thing that I really did, I did this in the story, and then I did it a couple of times throughout the reporting was sort of channel her a little bit, where I thought about the way that she
00:49:03
Speaker
I mean, there's this incredible story she tells where she was, it was like 1951. She just graduated from college. She wanted to work in magazines, but she didn't want to write for the fashion magazines. And she literally walked into the office of Field and Stream and asked for a job. And that
00:49:23
Speaker
story is just wild to me that she did that, that she had the guts to do it, that she carried it out and that she had even landed the job. And I kind of came back to that scene a little bit in a couple times in my own like process.
00:49:40
Speaker
like with this fishing tournament to the woman that was running it was trying to talk me out of going and I kept thinking like she well she would not have let anybody talk her out of going to the trip you know so I'm writing about her I'm gonna sort of like channel her and so that was one example where I felt like she
00:50:00
Speaker
influenced me with that level of confidence that she felt like, well, no one's going to stop me from doing what I want to do and telling the stories I want to tell. And, you know, I think that's something women still come up against in journalism and in business.
00:50:20
Speaker
Very nice. Well, Emily, I want to be mindful of your time. And this was wonderful to kind of get some of the backstory of this story, how you went about it and researching it and how it how it sort of has echoed into your kind of the current day, which is, you know, all the more fascinating with these kind of deep dives. And so as I bring these conversations down for a landing, I always like to ask the guests for like a recommendation of some kind. And that's just anything you're excited about that you'd want to share with the listeners.
00:50:46
Speaker
Yeah, I was thinking about recommending a book or two, but in the end, I think I'm actually going to recommend saunas because I live in Minnesota and we are entering the cold. We're in the cold, dark season. And I just love to get in a sauna and take a cold dip and get back in a sauna. I find it really invigorating and I want to recommend it to anyone who hasn't tried it before.
00:51:16
Speaker
Oh, fantastic. Well, this is a lot of fun, Emily, to talk about this story and just about the mechanics of these kind of stories. So just thanks for carving out the time and for hopping on the show. Well, thanks for having me. This was really fun.
00:51:36
Speaker
What a wonderful world. Thanks, Emily. Go check out her story at longlead.com titled The Catch. Virginia Kraft is such a cool, nuanced person that she really locked into. Emily locked into it. Yeah, it's an awesome story.
00:51:58
Speaker
A little book update here, if you care. Otherwise, just zip to the end and you hear the brr-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer-neer
00:52:25
Speaker
Plus, threading about writing isn't writing. Ugh. I find it increasingly irritating when writers post pictures of themselves writing or feel the need to boast about those kind of things. I'll have another social media riv for the February rager, Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter, which you can find at BrendanOmero.com.
00:52:47
Speaker
Yeah, it's something of a revelation I've had around social media. Oh, I know, eye roll. Maybe that's why people keep unsubscribing. Maybe people are sick of my screeds. Maybe people are just sick of me. Okay, let me check my word count for the prefontaine book.
00:53:05
Speaker
115,369 words, nearly 400 pages. And you want to know something that's fucked up. I haven't really tapped my interviews that much from like the reams of paper I have of transcripts and still several that I have not transcribed yet or like cleaned up yet.
00:53:25
Speaker
Because Otter is fucking terrible at transcribing. It does an okay job. It does like a 50% good job. But that other 50% is like, illegible. Like, how did you confuse that word? Why do you keep hearing Bowerman and changing it to environment or several other different words? And every, so if I just,
00:53:53
Speaker
trusted otter, I would have illegible transcripts. I'd be like, what the hell was that talking about? Anyway. Oh, okay. It's funny how the panic shifts, you know, for much of the writing, the early part of the writing, the panic was whether I would have enough original material and richness of story to reach the low end of my contractually obligated word count, which was 85,000 words, you know, without a hundred percent rehashing the past.
00:54:23
Speaker
And now the panic has shifted to getting through the word vomit of my entire timeline. I'm just entering the big year, which is 1972, the Olympic year Munich.
00:54:37
Speaker
I have three major set pieces remaining for the rest of the book, like major ones. Non-negotiable set pieces, mainly being the Olympics, of course. Steve's death, duh. And the rise and fall of professional track, which was kind of a flash in the pan thing that happened in the early to mid 70s. Backdropped first, Steve, really seduced Steve. Drove a dump truck full of money up to his house to join, never does.
00:55:07
Speaker
Spoiler alert, he doesn't. I still have several people that I need to speak with. I'm hiring an outside editor that I need to get a rough draft to by the third week of February. And when he's done with it, that'll give me about six weeks to go through his edits and suggestions before I hand it off to my big book editor, the BBE at HarperCollins.
00:55:30
Speaker
purpose being there is like I want to get it in as good a shape as possible as I hand it off to the the final keeper of the flame and if it's in better shape then we can work on you know strengthening things versus like oh boy this is a
00:55:49
Speaker
This is, oh boy, we're going to avoid your contract. Now, please pay us back, which is why I haven't touched my book advance. Why my wife wouldn't let me touch my book advance because she's still not 100% sure I'll meet my deadline. Going through all my research, I have to be very judicious about what I choose to write about. You know, call it, you know, pre-editing.
00:56:12
Speaker
If I had more time, like, you know, fuck, throw it all in, you know, figure out what sticks, but there's not enough time. I had to scrap some things from 1971, like things I really love, but it's like, dude, you got to get into the Olympic year, which will probably be 10,000 words by itself.
00:56:33
Speaker
then it should be downhill skiing from there, in theory. So I'm also reading John McPhee's latest book, Tabula Rosso, which is basically just a bunch of stories that he never got to in his long life. He's 93 now, crazy. So at this one point, he jumps into a car with a friend's car and he goes, writing sucks, it sucks, stinks, impukes, writing sucks.
00:57:03
Speaker
And you know, sure, there are terrible jobs out there and people dying, people sick. There are people who wish they could be writers, but man, it's not fun.
00:57:14
Speaker
Like, it's not enjoyable. It's like people, many people said this, I've heard Vince Gilligan say this and Greta Gerwig, like, I don't like writing, I like having written. And I think that's really true. And I'm closer to the end of the beginning than the beginning in this process that started about one year ago, you know, one year to report, research, and write a meaty biography.
00:57:40
Speaker
which what you hope is meaty, which could be meatier with more time. But we don't choose these things. They choose us. There's another quote from McPhee in the book, and he says, nothing goes well in a piece of writing until it is in its final stages or done. I think he's right, because when you come to the end, you are so fed up with it that you don't even care anymore. You just want it to be done.
00:58:07
Speaker
And here's something else. This is something I told my father. My father, when he calls, he asked me every time how the book's going. Called me out of the blue, I think a little drunk a couple nights ago. He had attended trivia and he was proud of himself that he got something right. And he was in a good mood, but he was also there to throw shade at my beard and thought I should shave it because I don't look professional. But anyway, also like my wife, she doesn't know a whole lot about the book or the book's progress.
00:58:37
Speaker
And even my BBE, the big book editor, I told them, I'm like, in all seriousness, because I've now started to read this thing from the beginning, and I'm like 200 pages into the reread and rewrite and copy editing myself, I'm not bored. I thought I'd be bored.
00:58:54
Speaker
I find Steve so very alive and we're with him. And sure, most of it takes place on the track, which I was afraid would get really redundant and boring. And it has to take place there because that's just where he lived his life for the most part.
00:59:09
Speaker
and there's so much vitality that I'm feeling that the reader, I think, might be in for an experience worth spending a bunch of bucks on. You know, 40, fuck. Even 35, who has that kind of money? Anyway, I don't know what the price is gonna be, but I do find it upsetting that hardcover books are upwards of that much money. Like, who has that kind of money? Anyway.
00:59:35
Speaker
Anyway, happy birthday, Steve Prefontaine. You would have been 73 years old. And thank you, CNFers. Stay wild, and if you can't do, interview. See ya.
01:00:08
Speaker
you