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Episode 210: Stephanie Gorton Looks to the Past with 'Citizen Reporters'
133 Plays5 years ago
Stephanie Gorton, author of Citizen Reporters: S.S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America, talks about the sacrifice of writing a book, reading fiction and nonfiction, and what it was like midwifing other people's books into the world before writing her own.
This episode is sponsored by Scrivener, made by writers for writers, and Casualty of Words, a near-daily writing podcast for people in a hurry.
Be sure to follow the show on social media @CNFPod.
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Transcript
Introduction to Scrivener and the Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
AC and efforts creative nonfiction podcast is sponsored by Scrivner Scrivner was created by writers for writers It brings all the tools you need to craft your first draft together in one handy app Scrivner won't tell you how to write
00:00:19
Speaker
It simply provides everything you need to start writing and keep writing. I'm using it for my Casualty of Words podcast and the book, which I will eventually turn into an e-book and you can do it all with Scrivener. So whether you plot everything out first or plunge in, write and restructure later, Scrivener works your way. I try to read pretty continuously fiction and nonfiction is that I definitely find that
00:00:49
Speaker
important and kind of feeds into keeping me wanting to do this. I see how other people have pulled it off so ingeniously and I think I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna keep this up as a practice because it can be so exciting when it works.
00:01:08
Speaker
What is up CNFers? This is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. The show where I talk to badass writers and filmmakers, sometimes we try, about the art and craft of telling true stories. I'm Brendan O'Mara. Hey, welcome to it. Be sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you get your podcasts and keep the conversation going on social media at CNF Pod across the big three. You dig? You dug?
00:01:38
Speaker
Good. Today's guest is Stephanie Gordon. She's the author of Citizen Reporters, SS McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the magazine that rewrote America. We'll get to her in a moment to talk about the sacrifices she made, midwifing books through writing her own until she was able to write her own, and what she learned from the process of writing and researching this magnificent book.
Project Updates and Subscription Encouragement
00:02:06
Speaker
A little update here on the CNF pod audio mag on isolation. I'm in the process of editing the essays that made the cut and we'll be sending those back to the writers to record. It is happening. I'm stoked to put it together. It's gonna take some serious sweat.
00:02:25
Speaker
But what the hell else am I gonna do? Why not throw myself into yet another portal to another dimension and see what comes out the wormhole? The newsletter has been coming off hot on the presses lately. Coming off the presses hot? I don't know. Shoot, this isn't a good advertisement for my own newsletter. Damn. Ugh. Anyway,
00:02:54
Speaker
You're going to want to subscribe, right, by heading over to friendlittlemera.com to subscribe to it, reading recommendations, writing tips, and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. All subscribers.
00:03:09
Speaker
are entered in raffles to win books. I get a lot of books and what kind of guy would I be if I hoarded them all? So as long as you stay on the list, yeah you, you're perpetually entered in the raffle. First of the month, no spam, can't beat it. Now, I don't know about you.
Personal Anecdotes: Pandemic Challenges and Camping
00:03:30
Speaker
but I've put on some serious pandemic poundage as I've had to dial in my meal plan quite a bit and up the exercise, which is something I feel confident I can do. But maybe I just gotta cut back on those craft brews. My wife and I try to, when we're really humming, we try to adopt an or mentality. You can have beer or ice cream. You can have beer or a chocolate bar.
00:04:00
Speaker
Not and. And there's been a whole lot of and. Especially coming off the birthday weekend, which is great because calories don't count on a birthday. Nothing counts. It's all good. And we had a wonderful, wonderful time. It was freaking cool. We camped at Soda Creek near Bend on the scenic Cascade Byway under the shadow of the South Sister. Got up at 4.30 one morning to watch the sunrise. It was like 30 degrees.
00:04:29
Speaker
And it was great. Watch the sunrise and shine on that volcano along the Ring of Fire. Pretty cool stuff. Saw a deer out in the field and it looked at me like, what is that?
00:04:43
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no matter. So we did some brewery hopping in Bend, had a killer vegan pizza, had the chutes brewing. It was one of those pizzas where it wasn't like the vegan thing on the menu was an afterthought. It was actually made with some care. And apparently one of the sous chefs was vegan, so he knew what was up.
00:05:03
Speaker
And he did it and it was delicious. And then we replicated that pizza when we got home that weekend and it was also delicious.
Gifts and Podcast Promotion
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Speaker
Anyway, wife got me a ton of cool Metallica swag, a Metallica journal, a vinyl master of puppets, a cool pin to go on my master of puppets billabong jacket that I got when I was in Maui, and a bandana.
00:05:30
Speaker
Gotta be a black bandana with all the Metallica shit all over it and I wear it when I'm working out and it's cool and I'm badass. That's what you think of when you think of me, right? A certifiable badass. One last thing. Two last things. A few last things. Speaking of the birthday. Thanks a lot for birthday wishes because they went out on the first of the month and that's the first
00:05:59
Speaker
That's my birthday July 1st and a lot of you replied back and it was really nice. It was really super sweet to hear the great birthday wishes. I deeply appreciate it. It was really cool and thoughtful and lit my day up. Totally made me feel good. But I should also mention that
00:06:16
Speaker
This podcast is also brought to you by Casually of Words, my writing podcast for people in a hurry. It's just me talking like this about writing as I plod through the rewrites of the thing I'm doing. Episodes are under three minutes. It might just be the snack you need to help with your work. And speaking of work, if you're gonna get in better shape, you'll hire a personal trainer, right? It's worth it. If you want your essay or book to have some abs, not just a six pack, maybe you want that eight pack.
00:06:45
Speaker
the coveted eight pack that Lego Batman has. I'd love to help you get you and your work where you need to go. So if you're ready to level up your work, I'd be honored to help email me, Brendan O'Mara, Brendan at BrendanO'Mara.com. And we'll start a dialogue to get you where you need to go.
00:07:06
Speaker
So, okay, enough about me, enough rambling.
Interview with Stephanie Gordon: Writing and Lovecraft
00:07:09
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Here's my conversation with Stephanie Gordon. You know what to do. In the Lovecraft. The Decronomicon, right? Decronomicon, yeah. Like, how did you come across that as a story? And, yeah, how did you come across that?
00:07:33
Speaker
is your providence is what's, what's sort of great is that there aren't that many degrees of separation between yourself and any person or enterprise you're kind of interested in after you've lived here for a few years. And it's this is now my seventh year here, which is kind of unbelievable. You just sort of start start seeing people again and again, it's really, you know, maybe less like a city and more like a
00:08:00
Speaker
like a very large neighborhood or a borough would be really in a metropolis. So I saw that this was going on. I thought it would make for a good story. And the people who were organizing it were very open to talking and to giving me access to different events. I had kind of a soft spot for the whole, and maybe I should say I was more curious about what the whole thing was
00:08:30
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was I have a brother who's always been a Lovecraft reader and into weird fiction. And I just sort of thought, well, I haven't seen him in a long time. And maybe this is a way to be among his people and try to find out more about what he sees in Lovecraft and in Lovecraftian and other worlds.
00:08:55
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And sure enough, that's kind of what I found. There's a whole set of, a whole community around these stories and that community has made up this, you know, the series of events and rituals and celebrations.
Exploration of Lovecraftian Festivals and Literary Pitching
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And they're very upfront about the dark side of Lovecraft, about his bigotry, about his narrow-mindedness. At the same time,
00:09:24
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you know, they kind of embrace and definitely celebrated that otherworldly aspect and took over the town in a way that was really, really fun. Providence has, you know, it's not like a wealthy city by any means. There are quite a few decaying buildings and empty parking lots right downtown. And to have a festival purely focused on the weird take over the city for a few days was really pretty special.
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And, you know, being somebody who's maybe not a natural party goer, my next best thing is, well, I should write about it. I should, like, you know, insinuate myself in there or make it my job to be there. And it was one of those pure strokes of luck where I sent some cold pitches around and the New Yorker page turner blog was running pieces like that at the time.
00:10:23
Speaker
And that's how it worked out. Now, did you have access to this subculture before you started pitching or did you kind, what was the workflow there? Not at all. Not at all. I saw that it was happening. And, you know, it's a literary event happening in the town where I live. So it was on my radar. But I had to do quite some research to
00:10:52
Speaker
to familiarize myself with who Lovecraft was, the important elements of his work, why he was so important to this community of people. And fortunately, at the time, one of the libraries here was having an exhibit of his letters. So I could go and dig through his handwritten letters to other writers.
00:11:18
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He was an incredibly voluminous letter writer and really creative, obviously. I mean, I don't know why he even said that. So there was a lot to learn both before I started writing the piece and before the convention happens, you know, you don't want to show up and only have clueless questions on your notebook. And you also want to, you know, hopefully,
00:11:44
Speaker
be able to instill in the people you're interviewing a sense of affinity that you're, you know, even if you're not one of them, even if you didn't travel from across the country or across the world to come to this convention, you're there for the celebration as much as they are. And when you were cold pitching, how did you go about finding the right person to pitch this story to and make sure that it was a fit for page turner, but also for that particular editor?
00:12:14
Speaker
I had no familiarity with the editor or with the editor I pitched to. And I had read Page Turner for some time. And I noticed a piece a couple weeks earlier that I thought structurally was a good comparison. So I tried to highlight in my pitch, you know, this thing is happening. And I do realize that, like,
00:12:37
Speaker
you know, an event or topic is not a story. So I made sure in my pitch to say this thing is happening. And my story would follow the similar lines to this article that you ran pretty recently, just to show that I knew who I was pitching
00:12:56
Speaker
and could give them an idea of what to expect, of what the narrative would look like. And there's really nothing admirable about how I found the person to pitch to. I think I did some Googling and I figured out what the Conde Nast email format was like and fired it off to a handful of people guessing at their email addresses, having no idea if it was really reaching them. Yeah.
00:13:22
Speaker
I did that too. I pitched a feature and I kind of guessed around to what David Remnick's email would be and I did. I actually hit that bullseye. The story was of course rejected, but I actually got to the man and for some reason he read the pitch. I don't know why. I think it must have been 4,000 a month, if not more.
Transition to Writing and MFA Insights
00:13:47
Speaker
But yeah, it's funny how sometimes these rejections can be kind of like a crowning achievement in a lot of ways. Exactly. Yeah, that's so true. I liked what you said a few moments ago when we were first talking that, you know, you were in publishing and then you, you know, you moved to writing. What was that transition like for you? And maybe did you feel like when you were sort of in book publishing, that was what maybe Julia Cameron might call a shadow career, like you really wanted to be on the field versus in the dugout.
00:14:16
Speaker
That's interesting. I didn't come to it from that approach. I spent maybe a decade working in book publishing, generally working for smaller independent presses, acquiring and editing both fiction and nonfiction.
00:14:31
Speaker
I worked for a company called Canongate Books in the UK. And then once I moved to New York, I was with an academic journal and then with the Overlook Press and then with a more digital focus company called Open Road. And since working in-house and alongside of continually freelance doing developmental editing for other writers,
00:14:57
Speaker
The move to writing came from, I had been doing this for some time and loved it. But I had this kind of, I think I was having one of those periodic crises, you know, and to me around the age of 30, it wasn't so much, you know, what is the rest of my life going to look like, you know, relationship wise? Am I going to have kids or not? I was sort of very, very much not focused on the things that maybe I should have been focused on there.
00:15:27
Speaker
I thought, you know, ever since I was a kid, I thought writing would be part of my life, that I would be somebody who like documented stuff and learned and wrote things down. And instead, I am this kind of midwife to other people's writings, sort of sometimes feeling like a gigantic, like all consuming filter for other people's words. And it was a line of work that I loved and really enjoyed.
00:15:54
Speaker
But there was a sense of that I had let down my younger self and ought to find a way to make writing, at least in some way, a part of my life. I didn't necessarily see it as a profession. I think I'd seen how so many writers made it work and how rare it was for it to be, you know, your bread and butter.
00:16:16
Speaker
So I had worked with two people who would come through the creative nonfiction MFA program at Goucher College in Baltimore. One writer, Kerry Hagan, who wrote this fabulous true crime book called We Has Got Him about the first ransom kidnapping in America. And then a colleague, Kelsey Osgood, whose memoir I thought was really pretty stunning. And we were friends.
00:16:46
Speaker
And the way that they spoke about this program made me think, you know, I should do that. I would really enjoy that. As you know, it's a low residency MFA program and is very community focused. It seemed to be set apart from how you would typically think of an MFA program in that rather than coming out of it with this kind of fraught rivalry with the other writers around you,
00:17:15
Speaker
People went back year after year just to see one another and, you know, that people were doing writing swaps and supporting each other long after the end of the program. And the faculty were really pretty amazing. So that's what brought me, Goucher was the only program that I applied to. I also loved the fact that it was low residency and I could figure out a way to make a living around graduate school. That was important.
00:17:44
Speaker
Nice. And when you proclaim that you at least had an awareness that not making writing your bread and butter, do you think that having that sort of proclamation about your writing has given you a more healthy relationship with it in a sense that you're not maybe not as bitter and resentful as you potentially could if you were really hanging your shingle on it?
00:18:16
Speaker
I have friends and people I met through Goucher whose writing is their bread and butter. Generally, they're journalists, and I think you are made of tough stuff. I think I just recognized that after so many years working in book publishing, I had grown used to a different rhythm of work.
00:18:42
Speaker
felt I was trained differently and wasn't comfortable jumping fields entirely. So I definitely like I find research and writing for book projects a pure joy. And there have been a few times when different genres have been suggested to me, you know, write a short form piece, write a kind of, you know, spin off piece from from a smaller story in your book,
00:19:11
Speaker
or even an op-ed about the state of journalism then and now, things that I find extremely uncomfortable and have really opened my eyes to what a challenging field it is to express yourself on the page in a really concise, shorter form, and then turn around the next day and do it all over again. My work takes months, if not years, to come together. And that is, I find like such a,
00:19:41
Speaker
such a luxury. And that very young Stephanie who always thought that maybe there would be a career in writing or what were you reading at the time, at that time, and what was inspiring you to be like, yeah, you know what, this is like, if I'm not going to let my older self down, this is what this is kind of the stuff that I feel like getting into. Right. You know, it's very much the stuff, this stuff for many writers, I think comes along in
00:20:10
Speaker
in childhood as much as you don't want to admit it and think, oh, no, once I was independent of my own person, I willfully put myself on this path. And of course, on the surface, that is what happened. But I grew up in a household that was just full of books. And both of my parents are pretty immersed in history. And we grew up
00:20:37
Speaker
going to museums constantly, every vacation revolved around an archeological site. There was just this sense that the stories of the past were like the big thing and could explain so much about what we saw around us now. So that was a big influence and also instilled probably a hunger for understanding and a curiosity to research the past.
Themes in 'Citizen Reporters' and Media Gatekeeping
00:21:05
Speaker
I have to give them much of the credit.
00:21:09
Speaker
And I like when you wrote in the, it's probably the prologue of your recent book too, that you wrote, I often wondered what makes a writer write knowing their work will likely be lost to the years. And what was your headspace around that sentence? I'm glad you asked that, because there's a part that hasn't gotten much airtime, maybe a facet that hasn't gotten much attention.
00:21:37
Speaker
which is really my own fault as I talk about this book. But the whole business of storytelling is such a strange, strange thing. And I was in such a position of privilege to start in as like, in turn, assistant, very traditional, moving up the rungs of the terribly paid world of book publishing.
00:22:02
Speaker
And you spend so much time just reading, reading, reading unsolicited submissions. You know, I have spent months where most of my time is just reading work that receives a rejection letter. It's dispiriting. And it's also just sort of stunning to think people are still doing this because they have to, and they're putting themselves out there.
00:22:29
Speaker
So that I think found its way into the book in that the creative collaboration I found between Samuel McClure and Ida Tarbell also relied on this, you know, this sense where she wanted to be there so badly and needed to make herself self-sufficient and wanted to make writing her profession.
00:22:56
Speaker
And in a way, this open the both of them up to this almost exploitative and definitely codependent working relationship. And that's how stories emerge into the world. Or at least that's how the dysfunctional system of the way the media works has evolved so far. So I think that definitely came from a deep experience and a deep kind of like,
00:23:26
Speaker
I wonder if this will ever change, and if the system of gatekeeping, of assessment, of people trying and trying to make themselves heard, and that mysterious process where, you know, what voices actually make it, was something I was thinking about a lot. There was a point to, in the book, I think it, there was this poem
00:23:55
Speaker
that you cited, I think it was called The Cynic, it was written in town talk. Yes. It just like it harkens so bad to today with social media. And I was just like, oh my God, I can't believe this thing, this withering editorial is about potentially disastrous self-absorption of a new generation. I was like, all right, 100 years later, here we are, even more self-absorbed than we ever were. Right. Yeah, to think like the
00:24:23
Speaker
the fact that the handheld camera hitting the market, and becoming like a dashboard accessory for young people made others like kind of wring their hands and think, oh, you know, the young the youth are so self absorbed, they're only taking pictures of themselves like posing attitude denising, I think was the word they use. Yeah, I couldn't believe that.
00:24:46
Speaker
Yeah, that must have been just so wild when you came across that and be like, holy, holy shit. They're basically talking about selfies in the early 1900s or whenever this thing was actually written. Yeah. And I, you know, I was talking about it with a friend who's a photographer and she was sort of saying, yeah, the camera has been this kind of like object of suspicion since the, since the beginning. And somehow it has never really been able to shake off this, this.
00:25:14
Speaker
status of being like, not quite art and not quite above board. Yeah, and it was funny like yesterday, because the weather's been nice out here of late. And I was just in my ways to take a break from the screens of the day. And I was going outside and I have this nice little apple tree in the yard. And I was like, Oh, I'm gonna
00:25:38
Speaker
I'll go out and read in the shade. That's kind of like one of my favorite things to do. And one of the first things that came to my mind was, oh, is this like an Instagrammable thing? I'm like, what the hell is wrong with you?
00:25:53
Speaker
like why am I going to take a picture of like the tree in my shadow and say like this is where I'm reading right now and just like the insidious idea that these things have to be somehow be Instagrammable or tweetable or shareable in some way I was like I was just so like beleaguered by this notion that I could that this idea came into my head that in order for this moment to exist I must put it digitally out into the ether it was really disturbing
00:26:22
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I you know, sometimes I wonder how you know, what the world would be like if like some mysterious entity could could like collect everybody's like tweets that they never tweeted like the you know, the 140 character expressions where they they were like, I would really like to put that out there right now. Or that expresses how I really feel, but it becomes a whole unsaid catalog. And then there's
00:26:50
Speaker
you know, the stuff that is said, which you could scroll through all day long and never reach the end of it. So, you know, I've really tried to dial back on social media generally, and I think the past few months, especially COVID, have kind of cemented that as a habit, just because there aren't that many even minutes in a day, never mind hours, with,
00:27:19
Speaker
childcare being unavailable, and, you know, two people who are trying to do jobs from the same room. That's one thing that just has to has to fall by the wayside.
Reality of Writing Life vs. Romanticism
00:27:33
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I think I think when you do when you do, I personally would have loved to see your picture reading from under the apple tree. I think it's just nice to see what you're
00:27:44
Speaker
what your friends and your contacts are doing. I kind of appreciate that other people are invested in it.
00:27:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's such an odd thing. Some things that kind of grate on me are these really romantic versions of what it means to live a riding life. They kind of just irritate being great at me. When you're really in it, it's an ugly slog. It's not this picturesque thing seen through a filter with a desk overlooking some valley. It's often just you're in the grind of the cave
00:28:21
Speaker
And it's ugly and boring, and it's a slog above all else. And I don't see that enough. And to put something out there that seems almost, I don't know, curated in a way that's not true, those things kind of grate at me. And I was like, if I took a picture of this tree and me reading under it, it seemed like I'd be feeding into this thing. I've come to loathe. Right, right. It's funny, though, at the same time, when you do find yourself
00:28:49
Speaker
reading a beautifully produced hardcover book in natural dappled light. And you're like, this is such a grammable moment. You think I've grasped one of those brass rings of life. I just fell into this moment. I didn't even do it on purpose. I have to set it down right now. It happened to me too, guys.
00:29:09
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I've taken to the least just the last couple of weeks of in the evening, especially I've really come to put my phone in this little basket that I have where my car keys are. And I only have it there for phone calls or maybe a text if I'm really expecting a text. And I found that it's almost like when Frodo takes the ring off and Lord of the Rings and it's just like all of a sudden his weight is lifted.
00:29:36
Speaker
It's really bizarre when you really untether yourself from it that yeah, there is a phantom limb element of it. But at the same time, when you kind of take a deep breath, it's like, Oh, this feels I feel lighter, I feel a whole lot better. Yeah, yeah. And then your brain starts casting around for like, Oh, what what other thing can I consume? And then often you end up, you know, reading something you wouldn't have, you know, maybe absorbed if you were just scrolling through it. Yeah.
00:30:05
Speaker
And with respect to the writing and the reading that you do, what books have you turned to that might have maybe informed a citizen reporter or just informed the kind of writing you like to do? What do you turn to for that kind of inspiration?
00:30:26
Speaker
there. I try to read pretty continuously fiction and nonfiction is that I definitely find that important and kind of feeds into keeping me wanting to do this. I see how other people have pulled it off so ingeniously. And I think I'm going to keep this up as a practice because it can be so exciting when it works. Citizen reporters came out of
00:30:55
Speaker
you know, finding, coming across these characters again and again in other books that I really enjoyed, but not finding a book that was solely about them.
Inspiration and Research for 'Citizen Reporters'
00:31:05
Speaker
And one of, I think, the clearest inspiration or the most immediate ancestor is the kind of majestic tome, The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin, which is a presidential history of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.
00:31:24
Speaker
but the Muckrakers and McClure's magazine specifically are an important subplot. I also found other narrative histories that I kind of gobbled down and had these like short and tantalizing mentions of the characters in the book came along in works by Jill Lepore and Eric Larson. So writers of history with very different approaches
00:31:53
Speaker
and popular books that, you know, millions of people read. And I was kind of one of those general interest readers who thought, I really, like, I want this book that's only about this group of journalists and what they did. And not only, you know, one story that they focused on, whether it was a murder or an invention or a political campaign, but the full range, the reporting,
00:32:23
Speaker
what was happening in fiction at the time. And maybe that can give a new lens onto what was happening in those years, which have been expertly covered by many, many other historians. And that's kind of what got me inspired toward this specific subject. At the beginning, I was working on the ensemble cast of the magazine staff. And then as I worked longer and longer,
00:32:52
Speaker
having four or five major characters and that web of relationships, I wasn't finding a way to manage it. That felt right. And that felt like I was really invested in all of them and could convince a reader to be that way. It was the tension between McClure and Tarbell that really got me. And Tarbell is a, maybe I should call her like the surrogate main character or the hero of the story.
00:33:21
Speaker
she's the one who ends up taking over. And that really governed the shape of the book from discovering the topic and other works to figuring out who would be the characters through which the story could be told. So when you're living among
00:33:44
Speaker
these dead people that you're able to write about. What was it like for you and what was that feeling to come across the fact that you've seen them as gold coins and other stories, but nothing cohesive on their own? What was that moment of discovery like for you when you realized that you could be the one to put your finger on that story above and ahead of other people?
00:34:13
Speaker
I wonder, I imagine a lot of people have had to put the thought out of their heads as they pursue a project. But as a writer and especially one who's not in a formal field, I do not have a PhD. You do have to spend a lot of your time just blocking out the thought that you're not
00:34:39
Speaker
qualified to do this. And there are like rich and wonderful singular biographies of the core of Tarbell, absolutely. There's a great book by the journalist Steve Weinberg called Taking on the Trust, which focuses even more narrowly on Tarbell's series on Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller.
00:35:06
Speaker
My interest was driven towards this creative collaboration that they had and the wider cultural circle. I hadn't seen that brought together in a story and these characters hadn't gotten some attention for a while, you know, at least a solid decade. I did feel, you know, I had to convince myself
00:35:30
Speaker
and an agent, eventually an editor, but that there was a place there's a place for the story. And that it could be maybe it was an advantage that it wasn't scholarly history. Maybe it was a good thing that this was, you know, one general interest, slightly obsessive researcher, speaking to like minded readers.
00:35:56
Speaker
When there's a lot of biography written about these main characters and even memoirs, what becomes the challenge for you to filter and curate that material so it doesn't just feel like you're regurgitating what's already been written? So you're writing something that feels wholly new and original, even though it's coming from a well of material that's already been written, if that makes any sense at all.
00:36:21
Speaker
No, that's really important. And the key thing for me is drawing as much as possible from primary sources and being really stringent about starting from the primary sources.
Biographical Writing and Ethical Journalism
00:36:31
Speaker
Secondary sources need to be covered and need to be included. But you don't want your book to be derivative or to lack a narrative voice of its own.
00:36:46
Speaker
I don't think I discovered anything groundbreaking in the archives. There are probably some small stories where my analysis of what happens doesn't necessarily line up with what other historians have put together. But starting from the characters' voices as they are in their own written records, their memoirs, the drafts of their memoirs, their letters,
00:37:12
Speaker
the private reminiscences that friends have put together about them, that was the backbone for sure. And I love how you wrote about Tarbell that her ambition from a young age had been to achieve independence and a thriving intellectual life and nothing she experiences since, or experienced since, I might be a typo on my part, since taking her vow of spinsterhood at 14 prompted her to seriously
00:37:41
Speaker
re-think that choice. I love this, that she basically took this vow of writing hood, if you will. There was nothing that was going to get in her way. What was that like coming across her and meeting her and spending time with her and the fact that she had the singular vision from such a young age? I worked on the project for a little over five years, about a part of six years.
00:38:11
Speaker
And encountering, you know, trying to evoke Ida Tarbell was one of the biggest challenges. She's just this almost at first seemed like this incredibly rare and probably too good to be true character whose voice is just so cohesive from her teenage years, from her letters when she's very young, all the way through.
00:38:35
Speaker
She's also, she's one of those people who never, she never took fame seriously. She was never in it for public attention. She was extremely absorbed in the work for its own sake. And because of that, because her vision was so trained on the reporting and the writing she was doing for, for McClure's magazine, she ended up
00:38:57
Speaker
making a kind of moral occupation of it, of saying, no, I will not write out unsubstantiated claims. If a source tells me one thing, I will try my hardest to confirm it elsewhere. I'm not going to accept gifts or even a glass of milk from my sources. She invented that. That was not the norm in the mainstream journalism at the time.
00:39:26
Speaker
So discovering Tarbel was really like this kind of experience to me of someone who you think, she's interesting. Sure, she did some important stuff. It's probably going to be dry when I start digging into it. And then instead, it's this wellspring of voice and freshness and stories that you don't want to put down.
00:39:55
Speaker
absolutely had her complications. She was against women's suffrage for much of her career. And that, I found, made things more interesting. There was nothing expected about how her opinions on that front played out. It was a hard-won effort to convince her. And it was only after women did achieve the right to vote that she came around to thinking, oh, sure, it's self-evident. They should have the right. They're the right to vote. So there is not
00:40:25
Speaker
a neat little box that Ida Tarbell can fit into in the historical record. But there's what she created within the field of journalism. There's her unusualness in refusing, rejecting a family life and sticking to that and making her career the focus of her life. And then there's her kind of ability to shift and change her mind.
00:40:55
Speaker
and be different people over the course of her life.
00:41:00
Speaker
And then there's, of course, the charismatic publisher and editor of McClure, the namesake of the magazine, who wrote, I can imagine why your people should think that I would remain poor. The reason why so many think me egotistic is this. I talk of my plans in a straightforward way, and I do things with assurance and success that they imagine to be conceit.
McClure and Tarbell: Publishing Innovations
00:41:24
Speaker
Don't fear. I'll get what I want, and you may depend on it.
00:41:30
Speaker
What a voice, right? What a guy, right. And he, you know, McClure came from nothing from dirt floor house in rural Ireland. And, and I, you know, starved through his first winters in Indiana once his widowed mother immigrated there with her four sons. It's just this story where you think so much was set against him. There was
00:41:57
Speaker
no reading material in their house apart from, you know, Bible pilgrims progress and his stepfather's agricultural catalogs eventually. But he made this myth of himself from the point he left home, he started working his way through a college education. And he realized that he had, he really had a way of speaking about himself that was that was very convincing to others. So he married way above his station and
00:42:27
Speaker
After scrambling together, a living is like a bicycling instructor and freelancer and editorial assistant. He goes down and starts a literary syndicate in New York City and eventually launches his own magazine. But a big part of this was he was constantly telling his own story as a rags to riches story way before he attained any riches at all.
00:42:55
Speaker
It worked. He was this outsider who broke into a world that was already kind of like a fossilized elite media world of a handful of renowned New York magazines, Harpers, Scribners in the Century, and one kind of patrician Boston magazine, The Atlantic Monthly. And he just barged on in there with McClure's, you know, had this editorial vision for picking out
00:43:23
Speaker
exceptional writers. He called it finding great wine without the labels. He would read constantly. And that's how he ended up recruiting Ida Tarbell and Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Arthur Conan Doyle. There was just this incredible roster of names that he put in his magazine from a very early point. And then he also put a very
00:43:49
Speaker
low price on his magazine so that it would be appealing to a huge readership. And that was the bedrock for his success. But way before he achieved it, he was talking about it. He was a master of spin. There was something very Gatsby-esque about his rise and fall, wasn't there? Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that came not just from his
00:44:20
Speaker
his career and his editorial eye, but from the way he told his own personal story and would kind of trot out his wife and children as evidence of him making good and being a solid gentleman. They moved to a pretty grand house north of the city and he would go to Europe at least once a year
00:44:48
Speaker
He was very conscious of having the kind of accoutrement that would broadcast to the world. I'm somebody to be reckoned with. And I like to, of course, those are your two figurehead characters, but there's also somebody like a Lincoln Steffens who said like, care like hell, sit around the bars and drink and pose and pretend all you want to. But in reality, deep down underneath, care like hell. I love that. I love that sentiment.
00:45:18
Speaker
Yes. And he, you know, that McClure's was really just a small episode in his larger career. So I zoom in on it because McClure's is my, is my topic. But Stefan's is a really fascinating character. And, you know, I think it's, I hope that readers who take a liking to him from reading the book can go and look at everything else that he wrote and did. Because he, yeah,
00:45:44
Speaker
He also, although he came from maybe a much more typical background for a journalist at that time from this very wealthy California family, educated at Berkeley and then in Europe, and then finally and kind of grudgingly took up a day job because his family money was cut off. He really, he made something so great out of it. And you don't run across that story all that often.
00:46:14
Speaker
Was he the one that McClure said when he ran across him later in life that he was like, ah, my friend, the enemy? Is that him or is that someone else? Yes, I think that was him. Yeah, and they had such an interesting relationship. They were both small, statured men, not five and a half feet. They looked each other right in the eye, and they constantly sniped at each other. So Lincoln Steffens would say of McClure, all dictators have short necks or something like that.
00:46:43
Speaker
And McClure really enjoyed ragging on Stephan's and telling him his articles were unacceptable. And they would have these kind of ferocious tussles. As McClure, for all his editorial vision, also had this expression of never originate if you can imitate. He really wanted his magazine to sell. And if another magazine was selling many copies with a particular story,
00:47:11
Speaker
say a series about Abraham Lincoln or about the great corporate trusts, he would say, well, we have to do the same thing and commission a series on exactly the same topic. And it worked for him. Whereas Stephen's, I think, was much more, would have been more of an original, of a radical, love to put forth theories that maybe leaned on the academic or the analytical side in his work.
00:47:39
Speaker
And that was not what McClure was in it for at all. And I know that Ida, her big thing, her favorite thing to dive into was to write these great narrative histories of the dead. She didn't like necessarily living in the present, say, covering Rockefeller, even though there was a bone to pick there. I wonder if, with respect to her story on Lincoln, which really kind of put her on the map,
00:48:09
Speaker
I wonder if maybe you saw a lot of you in her and the fact that you wrote this kind of history. You're looking back from this century to last century and she was often in early 20th century looking back on the 19th. So did you see that kind of parallel between you and her and the taste that you two shared?
00:48:30
Speaker
I did not see a lot of parallels between myself and Ida Tarbell. I think she, I love the way how bluntly she put it, that she wanted to write about the dead, that she liked dead people, that she preferred to research them and go through their legal records and go to their home state and interview their relatives and their friends and their old teachers.
00:48:58
Speaker
But you kind of get the sense that she was pushed to really against her limits and pushed to develop as a journalist because she had to write about a living subject eventually. And it exhausted her. She was supposed to write three articles on Standard Oil. She ended up writing 19. She talks about the kind of bitter feeling that she got of having to pursue Rockefeller
00:49:26
Speaker
deal with the fact that he was avoiding her, the necessity of writing a profile of him regardless and having to kind of sneak around just to be in the same geographical location as him and take a few notes, which he ended up going to his local church near Cleveland and observing him through the service. She was very open about the fact that it gave her a bad feeling, that she did not enjoy it. She didn't relish it.
00:49:55
Speaker
But the work she produced was groundbreaking. So I think following that trajectory, you can kind of take a lesson from it that for somebody whose life was so much about the work, she was glad that she had done it, even if she didn't actually enjoy doing it.
00:50:20
Speaker
I like too that they cite these, one with Thomas Jefferson, there's the famous quote that he loves, he wants a country with newspapers, and everyone espouses that. But then 20 years later, you cite that he also said, nothing can now be believed, which is seen in a newspaper. Keep itself become suspicious by being put into the polluted vehicle. And almost the same was true with Roosevelt. He was built up by the media and then equally criticized by it.
00:50:50
Speaker
You know, we see how these people in power, they use it and then one point they try to undercut it. Yeah, exactly. And there's there's I think there's this delusion that maybe people on the up and up politically have that they are on top of the press or that they they have kind of instinctive sway over the press. And the press is not its own entity. And it never it has never worked out for anybody.
00:51:20
Speaker
But the parallels can be so strongly felt today that there's also that Oscar Wilde epigraph of administration rules for four years, but journalism reigns forever and ever in paraphrasing. But I thought that was illustrative also that a president will never
00:51:47
Speaker
I wonder if they would ever be able to sustain a congenial or even civilized relationship with the press at this point in our culture, at this point in time.
Journalism in the Digital Age and Athlete Narratives
00:51:59
Speaker
And certainly not the situation we're looking at now. Yeah.
00:52:05
Speaker
There was a point, too, in the book where you cite, I don't know if it was an essay, but it was something called The Fettered Clam. And I like this, and I will read this short little passage. It's like the comic or something of the metaphor made sense in a way. Suddenly, readers were hyper-aware that in the magazines they devoured daily, events were not merely reported but mediated into a narrative.
00:52:31
Speaker
filtered through a reporter's mind like brackish water through a bivalve. And it got me thinking like these days, especially with social media and the way that prominent people, athletes, celebrities, you name it, these people that used to
00:52:48
Speaker
rely on Esquire or GQ or you name it for their coverage. Now they can kind of control the narrative themselves. So it's all the more harder and challenging to write about these people. And it's like, if you're in that position of power, why would you even want to trust a reporter to write your story when things could be slightly filtered and shaped in a way that's not entirely flattering? Yeah, you know, and you definitely see that, you know,
00:53:17
Speaker
Looking at how magazines have fared from the Gilded Age, which was maybe the golden age of the magazine, and then after the upswing of radio and television when magazines really suffered, then maybe in the 60s and 70s when Esquire and Rolling Stone and other magazines really came back. And there was this hunger again for long form magazine writing.
00:53:44
Speaker
And now they're also, you know, I for one don't think they're going to be back anytime soon. You know, you do see that waxing and waning of do I need the gatekeeper to post this for me or can I just post it directly myself? And there are, you know, maybe fewer and fewer gatekeepers who are trusted, but also I feel like
00:54:14
Speaker
readers and listeners and viewers are much more informed and selective. Maybe that's completely naive of me. But that there are different ways to access those stories and that you can find the voices that you trust and that ask the questions that you would ask. And that at least is one huge advantage of the communication revolution.
00:54:43
Speaker
Yeah, and what kind of sucks these days, too, is you're seeing this all the time with documentaries, especially featuring, say, athletes. I know it takes place with other people, but I'll just use athletes as an example. I didn't get to watch it because I don't have ESPN, but the last dance, this whole Michael Jordan, Chicago Bulls, 10-part thing. It's like as great as I heard it was,
00:55:09
Speaker
you know, Michael Jordan was like an executive producer on this thing. So of course, it's like, yeah, so it's so Tom Brady's got a big thing coming out, I think in 2021, of course, and he had this Tom versus time thing on Facebook a couple years ago. And so it was like he was sort of a, you know, nothing, you know, nothing creatively, at least got through him. Maybe they'll throw a little unflattering thing in here or there. But it's not going to be this
00:55:38
Speaker
turning a great documentarian loose or a great reporter loose to let them find anything. It's still going to be funneled through them. It's about them and yet they still have the levers of the ultimate dispersal of it, of the message. Right. Right. You think about, you know, that where investigative journalism is happening now and there are a lot of people doing that good work.
00:56:05
Speaker
But it probably, you know, I always think of places like Vice or ProPublica or, you know, podcasts that are going in and, and reporting on people and stories that the administration right now would prefer to keep hidden. I'm thinking of the Pulitzer winning episode of This American Life. So there, you know, you have to you do have to seek out seek out that work and maybe it's a
00:56:33
Speaker
Maybe it's more of a self-selecting audience who really wants that right now. I'm watching The Last Dance very, very slowly through this season. I've heard it's great. And it's fun, yeah, yeah. But it kind of makes sense now that you say it, that Michael Jordan's an executive producer. There are so many just stunning shots of him like flying across the court, flying through the air.
00:57:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, being upwards of 20 years removed from that run that they made in the late 90s. You kind of forget a different era of ball, but also you start to forget how brilliant he was and that team around him was. It was pretty spectacular to kind of live through it. I was in high school and all that was happening. Yeah, same.
00:57:26
Speaker
With respect to writing the book, I don't think a lot of people – not that they don't like to talk about it, they just don't get a chance to.
Writing Challenges and Discipline
00:57:37
Speaker
Sometimes the sacrifice that goes into writing a book, researching a book, you had – I suspect during the heavy drafting of this book, you basically had a newborn.
00:57:49
Speaker
you know, toddlers. So it was like, what, what sacrifices did you have to make to fulfill and manifest the dream of this book, you know, and thread it into your life so you could get it get the work done? Yeah, you know, coming out of this, there you really, it really came out of this thinking, I could have done this under two conditions, like one left totally alone that you know, then you actually have to have the space.
00:58:15
Speaker
in the time or with somebody who is like actively involved in making it happen for you, which, you know, I would be my husband for sure. I started this, you know, I don't think this book took so long to come together, Brendan, and it, you know, it started out
00:58:41
Speaker
where my husband and I weren't even living in the same place. And then yes, by the time it was finished, we were very much living in the same place and had a child. I also went through periods of working full-time for a nonprofit, working part-time as a freelance writer, editor, workshop teacher.
00:59:07
Speaker
And what helped was being able, before the baby came along, to get up and work from five to seven each morning. And I didn't necessarily get a ton of work done during each one of those stretches, but just showing up definitely made things move forward. I think the writer Ann Patchett has a, I remember reading a very reassuring interview with her where she said, you'd be amazed at how much can happen in just one hour a day.
00:59:37
Speaker
And it's true. That doesn't go for the research. The research took some travel and that was logistically kind of challenging. But you have to do it. There's no way around it. And now, you know, I would be really interested in hearing how people are doing it now in the age of COVID. We're going to archives and traveling for research.
00:59:59
Speaker
is really constrained. I'm working on something where I've ended up going through a lot of archival documents digitally, and it's possible, but it changes the whole nature of the work. And I'm definitely finding it less fun. I will say that some of my circumstances, and I didn't have to work a full-time job through the whole drafting and publishing of the book.
01:00:27
Speaker
When I was at, I think I was, I'm not sure how far I was into my pregnancy when I left my full-time job, threw myself into finishing the book because there was a contract for it and it advanced at that point. And then by the time the baby was born, I sent it to a freelance developmental editor for a few weeks. So, and stepping away from it at that point,
01:00:52
Speaker
being completely absorbed in something completely different was very good for the book. When I got back to it, it just seemed like an alien form. I was like, who did this? And you can really attack it with fresh eyes. That said, my eyes were not fresh because I was waking up every couple of hours through the night. And the intervals in which I could work were just really short. So now that the book is out,
01:01:20
Speaker
I'm very much in the situation that everyone who's published a book is in, which is that you think this is like an artifact of, you know, what I could do at this point in my life. And there's a whole host of improvements and edits and transformations I would make if I were still working on it now. But all in all, you know, I would say to anybody who's thinking, well, there's no way I could do a book project and have a kid at the same time.
01:01:48
Speaker
You can, they go together, you need support. What would you identify as something, a big lesson or two you learned from the whole scope of Citizen Reporters that you're eager to apply to your next one to maybe make that book as rich, richer, or even the process more seamless and a little less hair graying, if you will?
01:02:15
Speaker
I, you know, I honestly think taking the time that it takes that, you know, yeah, it's sort of discouraging to think back and think, wow, you know, a better part of five or six years went into this thing. And, you know, now it's out and now I need to figure out what I do for the rest of my life.
01:02:43
Speaker
But I kind of come back to where I was when I first started writing seriously, which is that writing is going to be a part of my life. It's not going to be necessarily what puts food on the table. But in order to do these books right, to do them painstakingly, to do the amount of research that I think is necessary to make them stand the test of time, there's really no way to rush it or to
01:03:13
Speaker
I guess I haven't found a way to optimize. I'm trying to be more organized this time around, in terms of how I'm keeping my notes. But there's, at the end of the day, you know, I really am committed to a major element of my work being the fact that it doesn't skip over anything.
01:03:36
Speaker
Yeah, we're in such a life hack culture that optimizing in and of itself is just a word that is just so fraught with stress. And if you're not fully optimized, you just feels like you're shitting your life away or something.
01:03:51
Speaker
It just, it's like, you know what? It's going to take as long as it's going to take. Your career is going to, it's going to slow down and speed up at its own pace. There's no way you can sort of life hack your way to some Xanadu of publication bliss. It's just, it's just going to happen than when it's going to happen at its own pace. And you have to surrender to that. Yes, exactly. Exactly. I really, you know, I think I was always someone who wanted to cut out
01:04:19
Speaker
a stage in the process. He's like, really, do you need that many drafts? Just get it out there. But it was really, I think, the one level of self-knowledge that I can say I've come to in middle age is my first drafts are so bad. And in a way, I hope listeners understand that conversation is a first draft and that I know you're going to edit this, but that
01:04:49
Speaker
really, like my work work is heavily revised and edited and goes through many, many drafts. So and it's necessary. That's, that's all part of it. So I think that you have to accept it's just you're gonna look at it and think, no, and do it all over again. And hopefully be be okay with it. I think you've done some level of justice to the story by the end.
01:05:18
Speaker
Right, and I think Seth Godin, who's a hero of mine, and one of a great blog post that he wrote of late, and it's something he's harped on for years, is that really what separates a pro writer or any of the writers who actually get worked on in Amateurs,
01:05:37
Speaker
is that the pro, for lack of a better term, we'll just use that. They are the most comfortable writing bad words and bad sentences. They're okay with that shitty first draft, as Anne Lamott would say. And even you saying, my first draft is awful. Me, my, geez, up through the 10th draft are quite bad.
01:05:55
Speaker
And it's okay to go through dozens of drafts too. It's not just four, as John McPhee might say. So it's like just being comfortable with bad work because the bad eventually gets good. But that's kind of what separates the pros from the amateurs. Right. Right, I think. And maybe just older people who depend on the words going out there to keep money coming back from maybe when the stakes are lower earlier on.
01:06:25
Speaker
Absolutely. Well, very nice. Uh, like Stephanie, I want to be mindful of your time. Uh, the, your book is wonderful. I, I went through it a lot, uh, breathe, you know, just breeze through it. I had a whole lot of fun getting to know McClure Tarbell and Stefan's and all the other, all the other jokers in, in, uh, in between those covers. So it was a whole lot of fun, a great book. Um, where can people get more familiar with you and your work, uh, find the book and maybe find you online if they're to get more familiar with your work.
01:06:54
Speaker
Sure. So I vote a website. This is my first name, last name, Stephanie Gordon.com. And I am on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, though really sporadically. But I kind of encourage anyone to just get in touch directly via the website if they're so interested. And Brendan, thank you so much. Thanks for reading the book. Thanks for having me on the podcast. Course pleasure was all mine.
01:07:28
Speaker
Damn, that was a good time, a toe-tapping good time. Thanks to Scrivener for sponsoring the show along with Casualty of Words, the writing podcast for people in a hurry who subscribe to it.
01:07:41
Speaker
Thanks to Stephanie! Go pick up a copy of Citizen Reporters, and if you like the show and episodes like this one, share it with your network and consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts. We're nine away from a hundred, and it must be, because if you can't do the interview, see ya!