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Episode 99—David Grann on 'The Killers of the Flower Moon' and Why Every Story is a Struggle
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"I'd rather find the story and excavate it than make it up," says bestselling author and New Yorker staff writer David Grann. The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to the best artists about telling true stories and tease out origins, tactics, and habits so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. Welcome, CNFers, my CNFbuddies, oh, I’m feelin’ good today and boy do I have a treat for you. But first, if you don’t subscribe to the show, go and get it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, Stitcher, and soon Spotify and join our little tribe in this true story corner of the Internet. For Episode 99 I welcome David Grann, a New Yorker staff writer and the best-selling author of The Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. This is the best book I’ve read all year and with good reason. We dig into his approach to writing this book as well as key literary influences and why he ultimately landed on telling true stories. Killers of the Flower Moon, a National Book Award finalist, is now available in paperback. You can find more about David at his website davidgrann.netlify.com and follow him on Twitter @DavidGrann. Big thanks as always to you the listener and to David for taking the time. Hey, wanna help the show? Share this episode with a friend and think about giving it a review on iTunes. If you leave an honest review, send me a screenshot of it and I’ll coach up a piece of your work of up to 2,000 words. Head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly reading list newsletter. I give out my reading recommendations and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. Once a month. No spam. Can’t beat it. Is that it? I think it is. Thanks for listening, CNFers. I’m out.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Are you serious? Hey, I'm Brendan O'Mara and this is my show. Oh yeah, it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the best artists about telling true stories and tease out origins, tactics, and habits so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. Sound good? Let's hit it.
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome CNF-ers, my CNF buddies. Oh, and am I feeling good today? And boy, do I have a treat for you. But first, if you don't subscribe to the show, go and get it. On Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, Stitcher, and soon you Spotify.
Introducing David Gran
00:00:45
Speaker
and join our little tribe in this true story corner of the internet for episode 99. I welcome David Gran, a New Yorker staff writer and the best-selling author of The Killers of the Flower Moon, The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI.
00:01:03
Speaker
not to mention The Lost City of Z. Killers of the Flower Moon is the best with a capital B book I've read all year and with good reason. We dig into his approach to writing this book as well as key literary influences and why he ultimately landed on telling true stories. This is a fun conversation. I think you're gonna dig it. Killers of the Flower Moon
00:01:29
Speaker
A National Book Award finalist is now available in paperback. You can find more about David Grant at his website davidgrant2ends.netlify.com and follow him on Twitter at davidgrant. Without further ado, here's my conversation with the bestselling author, David Grant.
David Gran's Personal Interests
00:01:59
Speaker
commend you. I've been a fan of your work for years and sometimes I like to start with maybe not even necessarily a writing or a craft question in a sense that, you know, what do you like to do to kind of decompress from writing? What are some of those other activities that interest you, that get you away from, you know, what it is, you know, your stock and trade? Yeah. So, well,
00:02:27
Speaker
Having kids is always one's greatest delight in preoccupation. They fulfill my greatest diversion and occupation, and they're wonderful. They bring into my life interests that would not ordinarily have been my interests. They're both very into music, into playing, and composing, and singing. That has brought joys.
00:02:54
Speaker
various little obsessive hobbies that are my diversions. I am a sports nut and spend far too much time listening to
00:03:03
Speaker
NBA and various sports podcasts. That's great. And I could tell one far too much about the NBA than one would find healthy. I suppose some people follow the stock market. I was following the tank-a-thon, which was to see where my Knicks might end up with a pick. Of course, even my Knicks couldn't tank appropriately and don't have too high a draft pick.
Literary Influences and Writing Journey
00:03:27
Speaker
And then for pleasure, I read so much nonfiction for work.
00:03:32
Speaker
I tend to read a lot for pleasure, but that is really fiction. I read a lot of detective fiction, a lot of fun mysteries. I read a lot of Michael Conley, people like that, Pelicanos, and that's kind of what my other diversion.
00:03:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's so important to, especially when you're, a lot of the reporting you do is, it's intense material. So to have those things that are a little more like candy, you know, page turners and even sports is just such a good distraction. It probably allows you to go back to the work that you're known for with more energy and rigor. Yeah. And what I love about sports is, you know, they can argue endlessly and mistakes are so low.
00:04:21
Speaker
And they feel big, but they're so low. I probably follow politics too much too, but when everyone's arguing, the stakes feel so high. With sports, it's kind of a great diversion because in the end, life will survive whether one team wins or loses. Yeah, of course. So have you been a lifelong Knicks fan? I have. It's been my curse, lifelong Mets fan. That's at least had some...
00:04:49
Speaker
I've at least had a few moments of glory over that span of my life, the Knicks. I've never had a single moment of glory, at least since I've been conscious and could kind of talk. And I follow the Giants football, which also has had some moments of glory. I follow football a little less than I used to.
00:05:08
Speaker
Yeah, and I see I grew up in outside of Boston so I'm like a New England everything so that to hear you say that you're a big Giants fan kind of kind of needles me a little bit
00:05:23
Speaker
You're allowed a few moments of defeat when when which we had given your trajectory. Oh my gosh Yeah, yeah, so I still I still have like replays sort of like nightmares of David Tyree and Mario Manningham making those catches Well, yeah, so, you know with I just want to say that catch was all skill not luck as some people
00:05:47
Speaker
Oh, my God. Yeah. So that's that's great that you've got those kind of kind of diversions. And and now when you were when you were younger and sort of coming up being, you know, growing up in New York City and having maybe did you have a particular literary bent like you were always drawn to the written word and hope to maybe take that up as a vocation someday? So, you know, in a kind of a
00:06:14
Speaker
a little bit of weird familial history. And my mom was a publisher and editor. She's actually the first woman editor in chief and publisher of a major publishing house in the US. And so because of that, there were lots of authors around when I was growing up. So I met people like Judy Bloom and Dick Francis and other writers and Scott Berg and
00:06:42
Speaker
So writing was kind of a reading was always kind of part of my life. There was always kind of an attraction and kind of a romance about these writers who I met. Um, you know, Judy Boone's book I read when I was young, obviously, and then as I got older, but so these, um, I think always had a certain attraction. I really didn't become a big reader though, um, until, uh, probably I'm trying to remember, I guess it would be like middle school. I guess we'd refer to it today. I called junior high back then and
00:07:12
Speaker
You know, I started to discover, when I discovered the novels of Bessie Hinton, you know, The Outsiders and Rumblefish, I began to read all of her novels and they just kind of, that was when I really felt like I had that compulsion where I would pick up a book and I need you to know what would happen and I would sneak off into the corner to read it and there'd be other things going on. And then I read another author back then, a guy named Robert Cormier, who wrote The Chocolate War and
00:07:41
Speaker
I Am The Cheese. And I Am The Cheese in particular kind of stuck with me and haunted me. I don't know how many listeners would be familiar with this work, but I Am The Cheese is this great little novel. And it has this kind of incredible twist at the end. And I think that twist always stuck with me. And I think it kind of influenced a lot of the novels I like to read and also my own writing in which I kind of look for surprises. Of course, I'm doing nonfiction, but
00:08:10
Speaker
I think it had an impact on me in the sense that it stayed with me, how you can kind of be, have the ground that you're kind of on suddenly fall out from under you as a reader or the world you're kind of inhabiting.
Nonfiction Storytelling Techniques
00:08:22
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's a characteristic of the nonfiction you've been writing for, you know, made a made a career out of and what becomes the challenge in trying to surprise a reader when you also have to adhere to the facts?
00:08:38
Speaker
Yeah. So I think, and I think a big part of it is the story you choose to write on because obviously some stories are more linear and I report on linear stories too. But I think most of life though, and most stories have a degree of mystery and intrigue about them in the sense that when we wake up in the morning, we don't know what's going to happen. Uh, we don't know what's going to happen next per se. Um, events happen.
00:09:06
Speaker
And often in stories where there are criminal investigation or scientific investigations, the people investigating are searching for the truth while they're, you know, when they begin out or set out on their journeys, they don't know the outcome. And so I think the real trick is simply telling stories chronologically, letting them unfold as they really happened, rather than using the power of hindsight
00:09:37
Speaker
letting the people who are participants within the story see it through their eyes, because, for them, there is mystery and intrigue. And I think it makes stories more compelling, but it's also truer. I mean, it's truer to the story. You're actually getting closer to reality rather than away from it, which is always my goal. I want to get as close to the truth as possible.
00:09:56
Speaker
And the truth is, for individuals, whether they're living in a criminal conspiracy, whether they're trying to make a scientific discovery, whether they're searching for a giant squid, whether they're a baseball player trying to get back to the major, they don't know how their journey is going to end. And so you try to see it through their eyes and what they experience.
Journalism Adventures and Challenges
00:10:13
Speaker
And I think it makes the story richer and, of course, keeps that element of mystery or intrigue, which is inherent in the human condition.
00:10:22
Speaker
What were maybe some of your early goals and visions as a young reader and writer as the stories of Cormier and S.C. Hinton were sticking to your brain in a certain way? What then became your ambitions as you were getting deeper into the world of reading and then maybe wanting to craft stories yourself?
00:10:46
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, obviously, then you start to move on to kind of more often other literature. You know, a lot of the school books stay with me, whether it would would have been Hurston or, you know, James Baldwin. What was interesting about these writers is I grew up in kind of a fairly boring suburb and outside the city, I was born in the city, but then grew up in Connecticut.
00:11:12
Speaker
You know, these are the first kind of works that begin to open your eyes to other perspectives, other experiences of the world. So they began to draw me into worlds that were different than mine, and that would influence me in terms of the reporting I would want to do. Issues of social justice that were often inherent in various, you know, when you're reading, for example, James Baldwin, I think things like that, Orwell. These influenced me as a writer and the kind of writing I would want to do.
00:11:42
Speaker
Early in my life, I had an urge to write, but I didn't know what form that would take. And in trying to learn to write, I kind of wrote in every form possible. So I wrote really bad poetry. I wrote essays. Once I got to college, I tried to write some op-eds, which I was very bad at. I did straight reporting. I wrote some creative fictions. I just wanted to write. I didn't yet know what was the form that best suited me.
00:12:09
Speaker
You know, I'm always impressed by people who have very linear career paths or evolutions. I am too chaotic to have such a linear path. And so for me, it was a lot of trial and experimentation, learning more what I was good at, but all the time trying to write in any which way possible, because obviously that's how you learn to be a writer. And then I eventually kind of went to journalism. It seemed to better fit me.
00:12:36
Speaker
I kind of needed the real world to kind of bolster me and things I saw. I'd rather kind of find the story and excavate it than make it up. And so that became what interested me. But even then, within that form, it was an evolution to get to creative nonfiction. I started out doing more straight journalism. And in some ways it was ill-suited for me because I always tended to tell stories from kind of beginning to end.
00:13:02
Speaker
the way my grandmother used to tell me stories when I was growing up about her family and history and her husband or my grandfather who had fled Russia on foot and raced motorcycles. She'd kind of tell me these incredible stories about him. We always had a beginning, middle, and end, and whenever I would write newspaper stories, I would turn them in and they'd say, this is really good, but we're going to take your last paragraph and make it your second paragraph because the reader needs to know what's coming.
00:13:26
Speaker
Wow. So yeah, that must have been, you know, talk about formative experience being like maybe like sitting at your grandmother's feet as she's telling these stories. Yeah, that, you know, as much as probably any reading that probably stimulated my imagination more than anything. And what was always particularly kind of arresting about the experiences my grandfather at that time, by the time I knew me had had a
00:13:53
Speaker
a stroke. He was very old. He could barely move. I mean, he really didn't talk, but she just kind of sat in a chair and kind of would just kind of look out at the view out the window or sit on the porch and just kind of look at the trees. And so she would tell me these stories that I could kind of see him almost immobile. And of course, these stories were these incredible escapades and adventures. And so kind of seeing him there and then hearing these stories about his youth somehow made those stories extremely powerful to me.
00:14:23
Speaker
Yeah, and do you think that hearing those oral stories, those oral histories from your family, that that in fact influenced your prose style as so it would land well on the ear as well as the eye? Well, it certainly structurally influenced me because again, I always thought of stories as kind of unfolding. And that is just kind of the way human beings tend to tell stories. I mean, we don't tell them
00:14:50
Speaker
from the end backward. I mean, unless you're watching a movie Memento or something, I don't know. You know, some strange, but we tend to kind of narratively structure stories kind of from a beginning, middle and end. So structurally it kind of influenced me. And then I think having stories be accessible has always been something that has appealed to me while I read some more complicated and challenging fiction or, you know, academic papers.
00:15:18
Speaker
The writing that has always kind of drawn me are writers who make the word and the image accessible, maybe because I'm not as smart. But that was the way my grandmother told stories. And so I'm a big believer in bringing people into stories and that as I write them, they really hopefully can be accessible to anyone. And then
00:15:43
Speaker
I'm also a big believer that within that kind of storytelling structure, I mean, whether it's just, you know, you read the Bible, it's very accessible, within those structures you can, and within that voice and kind of oracular tradition or oral storytelling, you could actually deal with really important themes and
00:16:03
Speaker
stories of great moral importance certainly true in Killers of the Flower Moon for example my newest work so I think you can deal with a lot of things but you can you know hopefully reach people who might not otherwise want to read about that kind of story or learn about that subject matter.
00:16:21
Speaker
So you graduate from Connecticut College in 89, you receive a Thomas Watson fellowship and you go to Mexico to conduct research. What brought you there and what kind of experience was that for you? Yeah, it was wonderful. So when I went to college, I was probably a little bit of a screw up in high school and I got to college and I kind of got more serious about studying and I had a teacher who was a Latin Americanist who kind of
00:16:50
Speaker
A little bit again, kind of like we talked a little bit about kind of earlier novels that kind of opened up other worlds. So I had this Latin American teacher who got me very excited about learning about Latin American history, Latin American culture. Obviously, there was a lot of political dynamics going on at that time in Central America when I was in college. There was a lot of conflict, US intervention. And so I began to kind of learn everything I could.
00:17:16
Speaker
decided to learn Spanish in college. I learned French in high school, so I decided to learn Spanish. And I actually studied abroad my junior year in Costa Rica. And then after college, I had this fellowship to Mexico, where I lived with several families of different socioeconomic backgrounds.
00:17:35
Speaker
looking at the change from one-party rule. That was when Mexico was transitioning from one-party rule, but trying to document it as much anthropologically by living with these families, how that kind of was affecting the families. It was a wonderful experience, and it kind of brought me into, again, cultures and places I would never have been otherwise. I also began my first real reporting experience. There was a
00:17:59
Speaker
English language magazine published by La Jornada doesn't exist. I think La Jornada still exists, big newspaper, but the English magazine that they published doesn't exist anymore. And I lived in Pueblo, which was about two hours, I think it was about Southeast or something like that, my geography, Southwest, in any case, outside of the city. And I would, you know, I didn't have experience, so I would do stories on spec, meaning, you know, I would deliver these little stories
00:18:28
Speaker
reporting once a month on some cultural political event in the area of Mexico where I live. I would ride a bus. There was no internet back then, and there was no computers. I had a little typewriter, so I would type it up in a typewriter, and then I would get on a bus and ride it in and then deliver it by hand to the editors, and they would look at it. If they liked it, they would accept it, and they would give me just enough money for my
00:18:50
Speaker
bus ride back home and also to go see a movie that night, which made me very happy. To go see a movie if I got accepted and then ride the bus back. Those were my first real journalism clips. Wow. I've read that a lot of times when you're looking to vet out a story, you're often looking for almost these two sentence news briefs.
00:19:15
Speaker
a sound kind of goes off in your mind like, oh, there might only be 50 words in this little brief, but it probably could balloon to 10, 20, and 100 times that long. So what kind of sound does your brain make when you read those kind of things? And how does your taste vet those little briefs out and say, oh, there's probably more here? Yeah. I mean, usually, there is a question that just kind of goes off. And then that leads to kind of another question
00:19:44
Speaker
that you want to answer and I'll just give a very concrete example. I was reading a news brief in a California paper that was probably just an inch news brief, meaning it was just a paragraph, and it said that the federal prosecutors had swept into several prisons and arrested prisoners while they were in prison for being members of the Aryan Brotherhood and committing
00:20:15
Speaker
various criminal enterprises, murder, drugs, and other associated crimes. And it just was kind of one paragraph. I thought to myself, wait a second, arrested in prison? That's so bizarre. You're already in prison, so you're arrested in prison?
00:20:35
Speaker
And then I thought, and then that led to a second question, which is, okay, you know, prison gangs exist. We all know that, but like, have we ever, how, how do they actually operate? Like if you're, some of these people were in solitary and in super maxis. And so I said, how do you, how do you like, if you're in solitary, even run a prison gang, how do you communicate? Um, how do you take over a prison with guards and, and, um, and other prisoners? Um, how do you even like, what's the money exchange?
00:21:04
Speaker
And so I just thought, I don't think I've read that story. And so I thought, well, that would be really interesting to look at the forensics of a prison gang. Now, then that leads to other challenges of how you actually would be able to tell that story, which is part of the reason it hadn't been told. It's not so easy to get inside a prison gang and get the information and meet prisoners who are members to tell. But that's what began that story. And it grew out of just a brief.
00:21:31
Speaker
That's amazing. So how did that, so how do you then sell that story up the chain to say, okay, yeah, David, like, yes, go, go crazy on this one. Yeah. So, I mean, I think, um, especially at the New Yorker, I, I have great editors. I have an editor named Daniel Zaleski's, I think one of the greatest editors in America. Um, it's kind of this secret edit. So many great writers and
00:22:01
Speaker
And we have very similar instincts and ways of wanting to tell stories. And David Remnick, who's the editor of The New Yorker, you know, has just been terrific. It kind of, you know, when you get to a place, it takes a little while to kind of sort out what are the stories you want to do? What is the magazine looking for? But they have given me great space to kind of pursue
00:22:25
Speaker
My passions, they've kind of, you know, being an editors of magazine is like, you're, it's like kind of like being psychiatrists. You have to kind of figure out what makes each writer tick and cause each writer ticks differently. Um, reporters tick differently what they want to do, what kind of pushes they need to get stories done. Some writers like to be assigned stuff. Some don't, but with me, I think they kind of figured out that I kind of do these somewhat more unusual being stories.
00:22:51
Speaker
And if I'm really obsessed with them, I tend to do a better job. And so when I presented this story, they shared the questions. And the only times they really rejected stories is when they've been right. They'll raise something and I'll be like, yeah, you're right. That's not so good. Maybe they'll bring up some flaw in it or say, oh, well, wait, that was just done everywhere.
00:23:12
Speaker
You know, every once in a while, I'll pitch some crime story that's too gothic. And David says, save that for your gothic tales. But for the most part, you know, they just it's kind of been a wonderful partnership, I would call it. I mean, we really are partners. And so so I would pitch the story that way. Now, of course, it would hinge on whether I could tell the story. You know, how would I be able to tell a story like that? And that began a journey of
00:23:42
Speaker
you know getting prosecutors to help me looking for old court records but then ultimately trying to find a member of the prison gang who would talk to me and so I found out there was a defector from the Aryan brother who had once been one of the top leaders and he had defected after the gang had decided to kill the family of a snitch outside the prison and he thought that had gone went too far he thought that was and so he had defected from the gang and he
00:24:12
Speaker
had probably more death threats upon him than anybody in the prison system. And I discovered there was almost a witness protection for certain prisoners. And he was in that, where he was like a ghost prisoner. He wasn't listed on official prison records. It wasn't disclosed publicly. And he was kept off in isolation. And I had somebody who let me know. It took me for ages to try to find where he was. Somebody in law enforcement eventually helped me.
00:24:39
Speaker
And I contacted the prison to say I wanted to kind of speak with them and they Denied that he was there and then about an hour later I got a call from the law enforcement person who was helping me and They said they think you're a sleeper agent coming in to kill him and they're moving him from the prison and so this person explained to the prison that I was a legitimate reporter and a writer with the New Yorker and the prison
00:25:07
Speaker
understood that, and I was able to send a letter to this prisoner, Michael Thompson, and he agreed to meet me, and he met me in prison. I had to change my clothes. I was led into a special room. He was in a cannibal, lector-like cage, all glassed and walled off. It wasn't like we normally meet prisoners, and you could sit across from them. He was in kind of a bulletproof, weaponproof
00:25:35
Speaker
I guess it's plexiglass. I don't want to make those things up a box and began to interview over over a few days. And that allowed me entryway to tell the story. Wow. And as a from a craft perspective, what do you feel like you you struggle with that you have to wrestle with every time you're either with the in your reporting phase or your writing phase? And what do you what do you struggle with?
00:26:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think every story is a struggle, to be honest. I mean, you know, very rarely do I think they are easy. I know there are writers who David Rednick, who I mentioned, you know, he seems to, you know, it seems easier to him. I think, you know, he's very prolific. I don't know. He edits a magazine, writes his beautifully, perfectly structured pieces. He seems to disappear into his office and come out an hour later with 10,000, you know, immaculate words. For me, it's certainly
00:26:32
Speaker
more of a struggle and a puzzle, I should say. And some of that struggle is not always the right word because part of the attraction is the challenge and the puzzle. I don't like to tell the same story twice. I'm a generalist and I'm always looking for a story that will push me in some ways, either subject-wise to learn about something new, structurally, reporting-wise. And so they always make you nervous or struggle, but it also what makes it intriguing.
00:27:02
Speaker
I think a lot about structure and stories, how to tell them going back to what we're talking about, tell stories that will bring readers in and hold them. The stories I always love to read were the stories that held you in their grip and to try to tell stories in such a way that they will hopefully hold the story in such a grip. And I think the hardest thing for me is writing. It's just on a sentence, a sentence level.
00:27:29
Speaker
Structures are like a puzzle. I can usually figure them out. Writing sentences doesn't come naturally to me, and I always want to be a better writer. So I struggle with that. I struggle with getting the language, the clarity, the essence to hopefully have images that evoke them. And so writing is always a challenge, finding the right voice for a story,
00:27:57
Speaker
And, and, and just making sure that, you know, on a sentence to sentence level, you've said what you want to say and said it as best as you can say it.
Discovery of the Osage Murders
00:28:08
Speaker
And I, and, and I always, you know, I always feel that, Oh, I could have said it better. You know, there's, you know, like,
00:28:17
Speaker
You know, if I had a Philip Roth gene, the writing would have been better. Yeah, so many people have that struggle. And they, or whether it's a fear or a struggle, they just have a, sometimes it's just hard for them to get the words out. Because maybe it's like that Ira Glassian gap between what they are capable of making and what they want to make.
00:28:45
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder how late since you, since you struggle with the writing and you're dancing with that self doubt, how do you process and work in the face of that? Yeah, I mean, you know, there are no shortcuts, the, you just have to just kind of plow through it, which means
00:29:12
Speaker
You know, I spend hours and hours sometimes at a computer and some days it goes well, and some days it doesn't. You know, I have little kind of modest tricks of, you know, I think sometimes just going for a walk can help you. And the trick is there are kind of two parts of your brain that you need for writing, but they get in the way of each other. So one part is getting the words on the page and kind of writing more freely. And the other is the kind of.
00:29:38
Speaker
uh, the, um, editor who's looking at each sentence going, Oh, why'd you put that advert there? You don't need that adjective or, Oh, wait, is that even grammatically correct? Wait, I don't think the comma goes there. And, and so those two things. And so you kind of want to separate those processes as much. And so sometimes if you're getting too hung up or, you know, going for a walk or exercising, um, I find sometimes it just clarifies the brain. You kind of want to be relaxed when you're writing and not be too self-conscious.
00:30:08
Speaker
And then obviously when you're editing and rewriting and revising, you want to be more conscious. Yeah, those are some great points. And I wonder if do you have any routines or systems in place so that you can maybe access the generative part of your brain a bit easier in the event and make things easier for yourself? Well, I'll often, you know, we'll just sometimes read a page from a writer I love. So if I'm
00:30:37
Speaker
you know, sitting at the computer before I sit down. Often I look for certain writers who, you know, who just might offer a little bit of inspiration or fit the kind of style that I'm trying to write in for that piece, you know, for Killers of the Flower Moon, which is kind of a Western setting, you know, I've got a lot of Western writers, but I may just read like a page or a few paragraphs of somebody. And that's something that just kind of gets me into that kind of,
00:31:05
Speaker
Free or state almost, and it gets me going. But again, I think the most important thing is actually accepting that you can't fully control it and there are good days and bad days and you just have to work through them both.
00:31:29
Speaker
Yeah, and I've heard you say it before in other interviews, but I think it would be wonderful to hear you say it again about how you came to the Osage murders and that spark that sent you to the museum in Oklahoma. And then, you know, and from there, how you knew at that moment that you had a compelling story on your hand. I often cold call people as a reporter trying to
00:31:59
Speaker
Look for interesting stories. If I read in the newspaper, you know, a little bit like looking at the briefs. If I come across a name or somebody who seems really smart in the field, I will sometimes just call them up just to have a conversation. Sometimes they're like, what are you doing? And just like, I'm busy. Leave me alone. And then other ones, a lot of kind of chatting and you have wonderful conversations. And, you know, I would say 98% of the time, 99% of the time, you know, it doesn't really lead you anywhere.
00:32:25
Speaker
It's kind of like when you read the newspaper looking for stories, most days you don't find something that will necessarily sit you underway. But you're looking for that 1%. And I had learned that there was a historian at the FBI internally, a guy named John Fox. And I also learned that there was a historian in the CIA internally. The problem with that historian is they don't let you speak to him. But I called the FBI historian. I just said, my name is David Gran, and I
00:32:55
Speaker
write stories on the board of the New Yorker. And just was hoping to talk about the FBI history and just this kind of interest, interest of the cases of the bureau had worked out. And we talked primarily about Colin Telpro, which was the FBI's illegal surveillance of leftist groups in the United States during the 70s. And at one point, he had mentioned just almost the passing of the USAID that in the 1920s, one of the bureau's first cases was
00:33:23
Speaker
looking into a kind of a series of murders of the Osage Indians. And after I got a phone with him, I mostly looked into Callentail Pearl, because that was the bulk of our conversation. But then I kind of thought, well, there seems to have been a lot written about it. And I kind of went back and looked at my notes, and I said, oh, this is Osage case. And I started to try to kind of look into it, but I couldn't really find anything. So I decided to make a trip out to the Osage Nation. And at that point, I wasn't planning on, I didn't even know if I'd write a story, I just thought,
00:33:52
Speaker
It was intriguing enough just to know that there was this case where in the early 20th century, the Osage Indians had become the wealthiest people per capita in the world because of oil, and that they had been then serially murdered. And so I made this trip out to the Osage Nation, and I visited the museum there. And when I was at that museum, I saw this large panoramic photograph on the wall that was taken in 1924.
00:34:22
Speaker
and it showed members of the Osage Nation along with white settlers. And when you look at it, I mean, it's a beautiful, enormous photograph. I didn't even know they had panoramic cameras back then, but it's a panoramic shot. And it looks very innocent. But I noticed that a portion of the photograph was missing. And I asked the museum director, I was meeting for the first time. She would later become a friend. I said, what had happened to that part of the photograph? And she said that it could take the figure so frightening, she decided to remove it.
00:34:49
Speaker
She then pointed to the missing panel, and she said the devil was standing right there. And she then went into the basement and pulled up an image of the missing panel, which showed one of the killers of the Osage. And, you know, I was very struck in that moment that the Osage had removed that picture, not to forget what had happened, but because they can't forget. And yet here were people like me who had no knowledge of this history or had never been taught it, who had completely forgotten it.
00:35:16
Speaker
We had erased it from our conscience. And, for me, that really was the galvanizing moment, when I said, I really need to tell this story if I can. And the project grew out of trying to understand who that figure was. And, of course, it led me to what I would come to realize was one of the most sinister crimes in American history.
00:35:32
Speaker
Yeah, the Sinisters, when I was just sort of thinking, after I had finished the book and I was just thinking back over it, about the conspirators and the devil in this case, and he almost wanted
00:35:50
Speaker
You couldn't be there, but you had to know that at some point they were having some meetings in some remote places, and they were orchestrating this thing. And it just made it all the more evil just to think of the machinations behind this conspiracy, behind this act. It was just almost sickening to think of it.
00:36:13
Speaker
Yeah, well, and one of the things that made them so sinister was that these were deeply intimate crimes. These were inheritance schemes. And so the way the killers would try to steal the Osage's oil money because the Osage were getting rich because of these massive oil deposits under the land. And each Osage had what was called a head right, which was essentially a share in this mineral trust. And a head right could not be bought or sold. It could only be inherited. And so to swindle these head rights,
00:36:44
Speaker
involved these deeply intimate crimes in which the conspirators, the white conspirators would pretend to love you and often even have children with you while systematically plotting to murder you over years. I mean, there was such an intimate betrayal and deception, and it's one of the things that made these crimes deeply sinister.
00:37:04
Speaker
Yeah, their patience and their capacity to be comfortable with the evil they were committing is just all the more chilling as you read it. Ultimately, the head leader behind it, you would say, maybe he was the true psychopath.
00:37:27
Speaker
But there were some others that had a little bit of conscience that kind of broke the case eventually. But it's just all the more chilling to realize how long it played out. And like you said, these crimes of intimacy really is just a real sickening that this even took place less than 100 years ago. Yeah, less than 100 years ago. And there really was, when I began this story, I kind of investigated it as kind of a traditional crime story.
00:37:56
Speaker
thinking it was a story about who did it and this kind of one figure who was in that photograph, who was obviously extraordinarily evil and I think probably by our psychological definitions, probably be a psychopath or sociopath. Um, but it really, as I did more research and made more discoveries and you don't really know where stories will lead you when you begin them and you have to be prepared to go where the evidence takes you.
00:38:24
Speaker
And so I gathered evidence that really demolished my original conception of the book. And by the end, it became a book not about who did it, but who didn't do it. It was really about a culture of killing. And there were so many people who participated in these crimes. And some of them, the thing that made it so disturbing is that rather than there being a singular evil figure, evil lurked in the hearts of so many seemingly ordinary people.
00:38:51
Speaker
Yeah. Oh, and talk about the log book that you came across in your research, which, to use your terms, just really spoke to the banality of evil. Yeah. So I went to an archive in a branch of the National Archives in Fort Worth, Texas. A lot of the federal records from that area of Oklahoma and Indian territory end up in these archives. It's kind of a massive warehouse.
00:39:21
Speaker
looks like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark where they store the covenant at the end. And I was pulling records on something called the guardianship. And for the listeners who are familiar, it was such a prejudice at the time that the US government went so far as to pass legislation requiring many Osage, wealthy Osage, to have white guardians to manage their fortunes. Here you could be this great Osage chief and you could have a white guardian telling you whether you could buy that car or this toothpaste.
00:39:51
Speaker
And the system wasn't abstractly racist. It was literally racist. It was based on the quantum of Osage blood. So if you were a full-blooded Osage, you were deemed, quote unquote, incompetent and given one of these guardians. And, of course, it also created one of the largest state and federally sanctioned criminal enterprises, as many guardians swindled tens of millions of dollars from the Osage. And so when I was at that archives, I was doing some research on the guardianship system.
00:40:17
Speaker
had wanted to check whether a certain age had had a certain guardian. So I pulled a box of guardian records and inside I had found a ledger or looked like a ledger almost or a log book. I had a fabric cover and it covered just a few years in the early 20th century and all it was was a list of the name of the guardian
00:40:44
Speaker
with what they referred to as the Osage Ward, whose fortune they oversaw. So it would have been an Osage. And the only other thing in the book was if an Osage Ward had died, and I put Ward in quotes, because that's the term they used, somebody had written some anonymous bureaucrat. It just went the word dead next to that name. And so when I opened the book and I looked at the name of a guardian, I saw that they had had five Osages whose fortune they had overseen. And next to the first name, it said the word dead.
00:41:13
Speaker
The next to the next name, it said dead. And the next name, it said dead. And the next name, all five had the word dead scribbled next to it. That's a hundred percent mortality rate in just a few years. And I was like, that's crazy. That doesn't make sense. I mean, I was teaching money. Well, so began to look at other names of guardians. And I noticed one had, my memory serves me correctly about 12. Oh, Sage use fortune.
00:41:38
Speaker
they had managed, and there was a 50 percent mortality rate, 50 percent. And, again, it defied any natural death rate, and on and on it went. And I began to realize, looking at that book, that I was looking at the hints of a systematic murder campaign. And it really demolished my notion that this was about a singular evil figure. Instead, there were all these other deaths. Now, some of them may have been my natural causes. It didn't specify
00:42:06
Speaker
But I looked into several of the deaths, and you could find clues and hints of murder. And you realize that this book got at the banality of evil. I mean, it was this very kind of antiseptic, almost forensic book. I kept thinking about the bureaucrat who would simply write in the book the word dead, dead, dead, obviously knowing that none of this is right. And you had to be holding that book and realize, it took me a moment to realize what I was looking at, but again,
00:42:36
Speaker
drove home the breadth of this conspiracy, and that this really was about a culture of killing, and that there were so many people who were complicit.
Impact and Importance of Osage Murders
00:42:46
Speaker
There were doctors who administered poisons. There were morticians who covered up bullet wounds. There were sheriffs, a lawman on the take, or who were guardians. There were many others who were complicit in their silence.
00:43:00
Speaker
Yeah, that's what makes it... The more you think about it, the more chilling it is, because you don't hit the reader over the head with that. You're just left thinking about it. You close a chapter and you really just ruminate on it for a second. You're like, whoa, this is some twisted, evil stuff that happened.
00:43:21
Speaker
You almost want to say it happened hundreds of years ago and we've advanced from it, but my God, this, like we were saying earlier, this happened less than a hundred years ago and it's just such a recent history that's just incredibly embarrassing and all the more, all the more sad that it was just, it was marginalized to this point. Yeah, I think I keep, I always think about one of the killers who was caught, one of the few who was caught.
00:43:50
Speaker
And in testimony, I don't remember the quote exactly now, but he said something to the fact that, you know, we didn't look at this was, it would have been about 1926. He said this, you know, we didn't look at killing an Indian. That's the term he used. We didn't look at killing an Indian.
00:44:05
Speaker
any different today than we did back in the 1700s. Yeah, you had said at one point that uncovering, reporting and telling the story was an attempt to fill in your own ignorance. 100%. Yeah. And I wonder, did this book become weighted with a sense of duty at some point? Well, I mean, you tell different stories and they all
00:44:35
Speaker
hold you in certain ways. But there are obviously some stories you do that have greater moral importance. And this certainly was one of them for me. And when I began reporting the story, photographs became very important to me in telling the story in a way that they had not been in my previous work because I really saw this as a work of documentation, a kind of chasing ghosts and trying to document
00:45:02
Speaker
every which way I could, this missing history or this largely erased history from our conscience. So I began to gather photographs of the victims. And originally, I just had a couple or a few photographs. And over time, the number of those photographs kept growing until they lined a wall in my office. And they were a constant reminder about what this project was about to me. I mean, they always kind of just reminded me.
00:45:33
Speaker
They centered me about what the project was about. Yeah, and the way the photographs are threaded throughout the whole book, it almost, the book in itself kind of unfolds like a documentary film in a way. Did you get that sense as you were packaging it? Yeah, that I really wanted to integrate the photographs in a way. Also, the story is so sometimes hard to believe. I mean, so, I mean, you know,
00:45:58
Speaker
Some of the elements are almost unfathomable. So seeing the photographs of these people and what was kind of remarkable was I was able to find not just photographs of the people, but often photographs of the event. So there was a bombing that killed an Osage woman and her husband and an 18 year old servant who lived in the house. And I was able to find photographs of the house before and after the bombing.
00:46:26
Speaker
And so again, getting at this work of kind of documentation. But yeah, I saw photographs as being as integral, these images as kind of telling the story along with the text.
00:46:37
Speaker
And this is kind of a two-part overwhelm question. How did you keep all the information from all these thousands of documents straight and also like not fold under the pressure of the magnitude of the story as well as if that makes any sense? Yeah, so I mean in terms of keeping it straight, it was definitely a challenge because
00:47:02
Speaker
I've done other projects that involved a lot of research, but the research tend to be a little bit more contained in the sense that my first book, The Lost City of Z, about this British explorer who disappeared in the Amazon with his son, it was like, you got his letters, you got his diaries, you look for letters from the participants. The information was more contained in documents. They didn't fill a whole room.
00:47:32
Speaker
with Killers of the Flower Moon, the information was scattered in so many different places and you kind of had to get them and then kind of somehow bring some coherence to all that material. So I had in my office tens of thousands, I mean probably hundreds of thousands, I didn't write account, thank God, of documents and I had a pretty small office at the time and they basically just went almost to the ceiling and you could barely get to my desk. But what I would do is I would
00:48:02
Speaker
read the documents as they came in. And then I'm not great with filing systems and stuff like that, but I would try to create organized systems on the computer for that information and so that the information was more accessible. So I would read documents, highlight them, and then I would type them into the computer, the interesting, relevant parts, and I would create kind of almost a central database of information. And then I could go into that central database and then break that out into smaller
00:48:31
Speaker
more discrete outlines of information. So if I was wanting to learn about or write about the biography of somebody, I would put all the information, biographical information from all those documents into a separate outline. If I was writing a scene of one of the crimes and how it transpired, I would again go through that other data and then take the data out and make a more discrete organizational outline
00:48:59
Speaker
And then that's what I would work off when I was doing the writing. And it kept me from having to kind of be writing a paragraph and be like, oh, wait a second. Where was that piece of information? And looking at my office going, oh, God, I'll never find that.
00:49:14
Speaker
Then of course, once you realize the weight of that story too, and you said earlier how sometimes the writing part is a struggle and hard, was it all the more challenging because this is such an important story that hadn't been told and had been marginalized? Did that add extra pressure to the actual writing of it? I think, I don't know if that was the case.
00:49:45
Speaker
The hardest part was wanting to get the Osage perspective into the story, which was neglected in so many of the official accounts. So finding the records of the people and the families and the descendants and the oral histories to help me get that perspective in and trying to almost breathe life into these documents, like trying to draw emotion out of them, out of these reports of the crime scene so that it wasn't just a,
00:50:14
Speaker
litany of the dead that you cared about these people. I think it was less the magnitude than just wanting myself and the reader to get to know these people and to care about them, and yet stay completely true to the underlying records. And so for me, that was the biggest challenge because I wasn't a witness to these events. And you know, it's a lot easier when you witness something just to write it up. And when you don't, you have to
00:50:40
Speaker
kind of rely on all these other accounts and try to piece together and verify them. But more than anything was to try to give the emotion and what it was really like for these people. I read a lot about this kind of remarkable woman, Molly Burkhardt, an Osage woman who was born in a lodge in the 1880s and practicing Osage traditions and then was forcibly uprooted from her home at the age of seven to go to a missionary boarding school where she had to learn English.
00:51:10
Speaker
And then within a few decades, she is, you know, living in a mansion and married to a white settler. And so you want to try to understand her perspective. And so sometimes I would do things to do that that really didn't make it into the story, but they just helped me emotionally connect with the people I was writing about. So, for example, one of the things that struck me was this this part that Molly, like so many Native Americans, was just forcibly uprooted from her home at just a very young age and sent to these
00:51:40
Speaker
kind of cold boarding schools where, you know, they, you know, seem like a different universe, a different culture, a different language. And so I found that she had to take, get into a wagon to get there. And it took two days to get there. So she had to camp one night on the prairie. And so I found the old route that she would have taken, the Osage told me how the route was across the prairie. And so one night I
00:52:07
Speaker
drove out along that route. The route eventually disappeared in the period. I couldn't go any further. But I drove out and I camped that evening on the prairie just knowing that is what she did. And none of that made it into the story in the sense of my camping in the prairie. But it was just, again, a way to kind of try to just get closer to these people I was writing about.
00:52:29
Speaker
Yeah, and that emotional connection is all the more important, and I think responsible in your part, in that third part of the book where you track down the descendants. And by doing that, the first two parts, it almost feels like that's ossified a part of history and probably could have stood alone on its own, and it's kind of a whodunit who didn't do it.
00:52:55
Speaker
thing that you were referring to, but by adding that third part with you as the main narrator with the with the descendants, it showed that this thing that happened decades ago still has reverberated and is still very emotionally raw to people two and three generations later. Yeah, for me, that was probably the most powerful part of the research was
00:53:20
Speaker
I tracked down both descendants of the murder victims and descendants of the killers. Many of them still live in the same neighborhood side by side. Their fates are intertwined, and in many ways that's part of the story of America. One of the people I tracked down was Molly Burkhartz, this woman whose family was targeted and lost so many relatives who were murdered during the Osage Rain and Terror. I tracked down Molly's granddaughter, and she took me out to the graveyard where
00:53:50
Speaker
so many of our ancestors were killed, were buried, and she really drove home to me and gave me a sense about how this is still living history and how it still reverberates today and how we're not talking that long ago and how much it just traumatized these families to this day.
Reflection on American History and Injustice
00:54:05
Speaker
Did this project kind of tune your antenna to the fact that if this story was so marginalized, that what other stories out there in our country are equally marginalized and have yet to be told in a similar way that you've done with this one? Well, you certainly realize that. And when you realize that there are other stories like this, many Native Americans in this country have their own kind of
00:54:35
Speaker
versions of the Osage Rain and Terror. Obviously, the particulars are different. They may not have been rich from oil money, but their own trails of tears, their own sagas that were largely neglected from many of the people writing histories. And I think that's true also of many other stories and why it's important to find them and tell them that. I'll say the challenge is often finding them because they have been kind of erased from so many records. And so you need to hopefully
00:55:04
Speaker
find the circumstances or the people who can clue you into them and then set you on their way. But I have no doubt that there are so many stories like this or important stories that need to be told. And at what point did the story of the rise of the FBI enter the story? So, you know, when you begin a story, you know, at least I can't speak for everyone, but when I begin a story, you know, I don't.
00:55:31
Speaker
often know what they're really fully about yet. I mean, obviously you get the broad outline and that's why you begin to look into it. And it's only as you get more into it, you try to find the themes and start to trace, as you're kind of gathering information, you're kind of tracing themes. And you begin to realize that the case track with the modernization of law enforcement in the country, professionalization of law enforcement,
00:56:01
Speaker
the attempts by J. Edgar Hoover to kind of make this bureau, but also use this case to kind of self-mythologize himself and cement his reputation. And so you begin to realize that that is a theme running through. And, you know, it's part of the story. And so you want to weave that through. And then, you know, and then you just keep digging deeper. And, you know, it can sound kind of too grand when you say it, but
00:56:28
Speaker
You start, at least for me, when I was researching the story, I really saw the case really is both about a microcosm of the original sin from which the country was born, this conflict of white settlers with natives, and all playing out in the 20th century. And in many ways, the case also tracks not only with the birth of modern law enforcement, but also the birth of a modern country.
00:56:54
Speaker
The two of the main people I write about is Molly Burkhardt, the associate woman, and one of the investigators who worked for the bureau. And both of them, in many ways, straddled two centuries or two civilizations in the case of Molly, where they were kind of, you know, born in the countryside, Molly in a lodge. And by the 1920s, she's living in a mansion. She has white servants. She's married to a white settler. And Tom White, this FBI agent,
00:57:24
Speaker
And he was born in a log cabin on the Texas frontier, practicing law enforcement when he grew up at a time when justice was meted out by the barrel of a smoking gun. By the time he's working on the OSH cases, he's wearing a suit. He is learning to adopt modern techniques like fingerprinting and handwriting analysis, which was important to the case. And he has to file paperwork, which he can't stand as he's part of this kind of larger bureaucratic organization.
00:57:51
Speaker
Yeah, and I love, too, how as you were doing your research and trying to figure out how to tell the story, that it wasn't until you had read Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, that everything kind of clicked into place for you. And I love how you were just at a certain part deep in the process that you were clearly open to suggestion, however that suggestion was going to reach you.
00:58:21
Speaker
Using that as an example, do you sometimes cherry pick, I've read this novel, that's a cool structure, maybe I'll have a story one day that'll fit that, or is it something that rises more organically through the material? Well, I think there is a happenstance quality. Certainly, I'll read certain writers for this book, writing
00:58:51
Speaker
you know, kind of on a Western landscape. I read a lot of Westerns. I read Willa Cather. I wanted a certain simplicity. So I would sometimes read these writings for inspiration. But the kind of influence and structure or kind of is I think a more is involves more serendipity. I don't think it can be, you know, always plotted out, which is why I think you just kind of need to be to read a lot and be open. And so for the example, that's someone I was researching, Killers and the Platter, who and I
00:59:20
Speaker
was really struggling structurally how to tell the story because the crime spanned so many years and there were so many individuals. I had gotten this kind of cardboard board where I had drawn this kind of homeland-like outline. And it looked like a mad board. I mean, there was just arrows going every which way. There were so many different investigators. Nobody, there was not really one individual who kind of was, could tell you the whole way through the story. Like, in my first book, Lost City of Z, I mean, there's one main protagonist.
00:59:50
Speaker
There were different people showing up at different periods. And I was just overwhelmed. And I couldn't figure out how to make it an intimate story. In other words, how to not just make it kind of a broad cataloging of events, rather than getting closer to the individuals who experienced it. And I was reading Absalom, Absalom, which was just totally by happenstance. I read this story in a New York Times magazine about that novel.
01:00:18
Speaker
I was one of the greatest works of American literature, and I said, oh, I never read that. Well, that's kind of embarrassing. Maybe I'll give it a read. It's not the easiest novel to read. I must confess, and I had to read it twice to kind of fully get it. But it's quite mesmerizing, and its use of language is kind of mesmerizing. But I was reading it, and it had three narrators, and it was kind of told in this oracular tradition. And there was kind of an elliptical quality to that. And I thought, wait a second, three narrators, three narrators?
01:00:47
Speaker
I have a slightly different perspective. And I thought, well, I could tell the story from the perspective of Molly Burkhardt, who is in the center of this conspiracy. I need to anchor the story with her. Now, there's not enough historical records for me to tell the whole story from her point of view. But there's enough for me to be able to tell one portion of it from her perspective, or largely from her perspective. And I could pick one investigator rather than like 28 of them. Tom White was such an interesting individual.
01:01:16
Speaker
And I thought, well, okay, I can tell it from his perspective. And then the other element was, well, how do I bring into the present all these new cases that I'm slowly uncovering that are kind of demolishing the original narrative? The people I'm writing about aren't aware of that, of these latter discoveries. And so I thought, well, I'll have to tell part of it in the present, and I can tell that from my perspective. And I'm really just a cipher to get that information in, but I'll also let you
01:01:45
Speaker
see these Osage, see what happened to the Osage today, meet these descendants. And so that structure, it was really when I thought of that structure and said, okay, I can tell this now, I can tell this.
01:01:57
Speaker
Because of the grim nature and the evil nature of the story, was this hard on you mentally to have to be so deeply immersed in this? And were there ways that you came out of it so you didn't get pulled down into the darkness? Well, I don't think I was... Oh, it's a good question.
01:02:26
Speaker
And I'm always careful about exaggerating, or I think writers, we tend to kind of mythologize ourselves a little bit.
Conclusion and Gratitude
01:02:35
Speaker
And, you know, either our suffering or whatnot. And I always try to be a little bit careful about that. Because for me, the thing I really care about is the story. And obviously, the people who really suffered are these families and the descendants. But there was a certain weight. And I will just say that when I finished
01:02:56
Speaker
and was able to pack up some of the documents in the boxes, there was a certain element of relief that, you know, mostly also just because it took so long and I didn't know if I would ever kind of make my way out of kind of being able to tell the story and get to the end. And so there was relief in that. But I would also say, you know, the book has a lot of evil, but I was also struck by a lot of goodness.
01:03:25
Speaker
And it's probably a story about as close to good and evil as anything I've written about or probably will ever write about again, where you had almost a purity of evil. We talked a little bit about one of those killers, the so-called devil. I don't think I've ever really encountered evil quite like that. But you also had a lot of goodness of people like Molly Burkhart and Tom White. And I got to spend time with them. And I got to spend time with the descendants, who were such lovely people.
01:03:53
Speaker
And so I think that also made it easier telling the story. And nothing has made me happier than going back to Osage territory since the book came out, presenting the book to the Osage, presenting it to so many of the descendants who helped me. I couldn't tell the story without them, sharing it with them. And that has been about as rewarding as any experience I've ever had, and I think I ever will have.
01:04:22
Speaker
Well, wonderful. David, the book's a masterpiece. Like I said, it's the best book I've read all year. It's such a wonderful piece of journalism and writing and storytelling. So I just want to thank you for the work you do. And thank you for carving out an hour of your morning here at a talk shop. This is really a pleasure and an honor. Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. All right, David, take care. All right, thank you. You got it. Ciao.
01:04:53
Speaker
How great was that? Big thanks, as always, to you, the listener, and to David for taking an hour out of his morning to talk shop. Hey, you want to help the show? I know you do. Share this episode with a friend, and think about giving a review on iTunes. You can also share it on your social platform. You dig? If you leave an honest review, send me a screenshot of it, and I'll coach up a piece of your work of up to 2,000 words. Not a bad thing. I didn't give you get.
01:05:23
Speaker
head over to BrendanOmera.com for show notes and to subscribe to my monthly reading list newsletter. I give out my reading recommendations and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast on the first of the month. Once a month. No spam. Can't beat it. Is that it? I think it is. Thanks for listening and seeing Effers. I'm out.