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Episode 174: Bob Batchelor — Humble Beginnings, Breaking Free from Google, and ‘The Bourbon King'
128 Plays5 years ago
"I worked to write this as the longest screenplay possible," says Bob Batchelor, author of The Bourbon King.
Thanks to Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction and to Riverteeth for the support.
Follow the show at @CNFPod.
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Transcript
Introduction to Writing and Podcasting
00:00:00
Speaker
I love to write, and I love to write probably more than anything else, but you gotta shut it down at times because it'll eat you alive.
00:00:13
Speaker
Hey, it's CNF, Creative Nonfiction Podcast, and that, CNF-ers, is Bob Batchelor, author and editor of no fewer than 645 books. Looking over at my fact checker. It's considerably less than 645, but it's a lot, man. And most recently, the bourbon king, the life and crimes of George Arenas, prohibition's evil genius, is why we're here, okay?
00:00:44
Speaker
CNF, greatest podcast in the world, is sponsored by Bay Path University's MFA in creative non-fiction writing. Discover your story, man, with Bay Path University's fully online MFA in creative non-fiction writing.
00:00:58
Speaker
Recent graduate Christine Brooks recalls her experience with Bay Paths MFA faculty is being quote, filled with positive reinforcement and commitment. They have a true passion and love for their work. It shines through with every comment, every edit, and every reading assignment. The instructors are available to answer questions.
00:01:15
Speaker
questions, big and small, and it is obvious that their years of experience as writers and teachers have made a faculty that I doubt can be beat anywhere." End of quote. Don't just take her word for it, man. Apply now at baypath.edu slash MFA. Classes begin January 21st, 1st, 1st.
00:01:36
Speaker
Hey and Riverteeth!
Promoting Platforms and Personal Approach
00:01:37
Speaker
Can't forget Riverteeth, man. A journal of non-fiction narrative. Visit RiverteethJournal.com to submit your work and subscribe to the bi-annual journal. So, looking at my to-do list here, I've got an email, Eliza Gabber, email Cassandra Ken Conroy, email Gunstow, email Kevin Robbins, and Riff!
00:02:10
Speaker
Put a check next to that box, CNFers. I'm Brendan O'Mara, and this is CNF, Creative Nonfiction Podcast, where I speak to badass people about the art and craft of telling true stories so you can get a little bit better at your own work, drip by drip.
00:02:26
Speaker
I'm always a bit weary about how much I should yammer on in the intro. Should this be part of the show where I show my scars a bit? Or do you just want the damn interview? As Tom Petty said, don't bore us, get to the chorus.
00:02:43
Speaker
Here's the thing, I was doing some research for an interview with Baxter Holmes that I plan on doing very soon, and I came across the podcast The Other 51. I don't understand the title, but the host is a sports media guy, and he gets right to the interview. As does Matt Tullis, who's been on the show before and hosts Gangry the Podcast.
00:03:04
Speaker
they waste little time getting to the meat of it you know when you see a the name in lights you're there to listen to that guess you want to dive in and you want to hear that kind of wisdom then there's people like Marc Maron who go on for 10 or 15 minutes in an audio blog form I used to hate that I used to just skip but it's actually turned into my favorite part of the show oddly enough
00:03:27
Speaker
I'm not sure why but it just does and it's that kind of connection I think you actually feel like you know you're hanging out with the guy and so in any case it's really really grown on me so with such a glut of podcasts out there I mean we've been doing this hot mess for nearly eight years now
00:03:47
Speaker
Time and attention is so, so valuable. So do I want to waste your time by doing exactly this? Or do I want to serve you the interview on the double, Chipotle style? Would you like guacamole with that? This is partly, this right here of course, is kind of what makes me weird. And in this day and age, my philosophy, if I have one,
00:04:10
Speaker
is you need to double down on what makes you weird. Hence the heavy metal, hence this intro, hence my paralyzing dread and penchant for jealousy and living in pond scum as a donkey-less shrek if you will.
00:04:24
Speaker
This is the 174th interview, and I'm still figuring it out. After that great sales pitch, subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts, and keep the conversation going on Twitter, at cnfpod and at cn, heh, heh, and at Brendan O'Mara. Instagram is at cnfpod and at Brendan O'Mara, the fifth estate, Facebook. Is that CNF Podcast or the Creative Nonfiction Podcast?
00:04:52
Speaker
Has all my data been mined? You betcha. Head over to bring them to mare.com they hate. For show notes to this show and the other interviews.
00:05:02
Speaker
in the CNF topus, my Monday motivation micro pods, usually just three minutes to give you that little CNF and kick in the pants as you face the crippling reality of another week of basking in the fluorescent glow of drop ceiling light, not speaking from
Introducing Bob Batchelor and His Journey
00:05:19
Speaker
experience. So Bob Batchelor is here, and what a treat to spend some time with him.
00:05:24
Speaker
You're going to love this new book about George Remus. Perhaps the exact inspiration of Jay Gatsby. Some speculation there, but definitely cut from a similar fabric. And prohibition. And his book's The Bourbon King. And you're really going to love Bob.
00:05:42
Speaker
He's got a great story about determination. He really made something of himself when there were people in his life who said he wouldn't amount to anything at all. Certainly didn't think he'd be in the creative fields. He's a great guy, great writer, and I hope you enjoy my conversation with Bob Batchelor.
00:06:07
Speaker
There's no explicit model to follow or a playbook to follow. And I think that was more true probably 15, 20, 30 years ago and even predating that. It felt like people who were writing books and maybe getting published in high profile places were somehow anointed. And it's like, how do you get there? And how did you start to navigate those waters and maybe try to slot yourself into that, alongside those people that you admired?
00:06:37
Speaker
That's a great question because I struggled for a long time. I grew up in a college town, so I had a lot of friends whose parents were professors, usually their dad because I'm a Gen Xer. And at that time, dads were profs and moms were teachers. And, but I didn't come from that side of the track. I came from the wrong side of the track and.
00:07:01
Speaker
I had no role models. I mean, I kind of looked up to some of my friends' dads who had PhDs and they had lives that I really kind of put on a pedestal. But I had a teacher in high school who everybody revered. And I think a lot of people have that there's that teacher in high school that you have to get his or her blessing to kind of then go off and pursue something intelligent. And she never gave me her blessing. And in fact, she just didn't like me.
00:07:31
Speaker
And so I probably took about the four years that I was an undergrad to figure out that the things that she told me about myself weren't true because I didn't have a support system really. I was the first person in my immediate family to go to college. So it was a different circumstance. And so even though I had friends whose parents were highly educated, I didn't navigate that path well myself at all.
00:08:02
Speaker
What was that teacher saying to you specifically that, um, that you tried to sort of disprove over the course of your collegiate career? Yeah, it's pretty crazy. On one hand, she just flat out said to me, um, she used to call me Mr. Bechler just to mess with me. And she said, Mr. Bechler, you are not a creative soul. You better find a job where you can do something else or you're not going to be successful.
00:08:32
Speaker
She disliked me so much. I had for like accelerated English class. She put me in the back of the classroom. Again, just, just to mess with me. I mean, like five rows back, like everybody else in the class was up and active. And, and I was at the back of this classroom, but she had one of those old time, uh, paperback spin catalogs on her in a back of a room, you know, like you'd see in a, in a bookstore. And I was spinning that thing around cause I was bored. She had,
00:09:02
Speaker
made me look bad in front of class and it happened to land on a book and I remember the cover like it was yesterday. It had a basketball on it and it was blue and I looked at it and it said John Updike Rabbit Run. And so basically I stole that book out of her classroom and I read it and it was epiphanic in a way because Updike grew up about 300 miles east of me and I figured
00:09:31
Speaker
This is a lot like my life and what I see around me. And it gave me maybe the first hint that I could become bigger than what people were labeling me as.
00:09:45
Speaker
Yeah, that's amazing how sometimes a book of that nature or a writer of that nature can kind of unlock things and then maybe start to unroll a path before you. And it sounds like this one particular teacher who was just trying to put her boot on your throat and then you found a way, you found an outlet in this and this was like your key. Once you get away from her and that situation, he's like, I can take this and run.
00:10:13
Speaker
Yeah. And luckily I had kind of the exact opposite experience as an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh. I had this history professor who just took me under his wing probably late in my junior year. And I ended up taking probably, I could have majored in him. I took probably six classes from him. His name is James A. Keel, and he was a great historian. He told me,
00:10:41
Speaker
hey, you know, there's not very many people that come through here that I think should be become a historian, but you're one of them. And he pushed me that direction. And maybe I was a little naive at the time, because I didn't realize how difficult it was to actually become a historian, I mean, get employed as a historian at a tenure track position at a university. But I went down that path. And
00:11:10
Speaker
You know, luckily as a master's degree student, I went to Kent State to study under this guy named Lawrence Kaplan, who's one of the top diplomatic historians who ever lived. And he's about to celebrate his 95th birthday next week. And he was another just amazing mentor for me. And that era at Kent State, I finally realized
00:11:37
Speaker
that I was smart and I wasn't just this poor kid from Western PA who didn't have a network and didn't have really much to offer. But it took me until graduate school to really come into my own. What do you think that particular professor and teacher and mentor recognized in you so early on?
Balancing Identities and Influences
00:11:58
Speaker
I'd like to think there was a glimmer of the writing there and ability to synthesize some of the history that we were learning.
00:12:06
Speaker
Against my peers, I was probably more excited in his classes. So I worked harder. I was more willing to speak in class, more willing to kind of go out on a, on a ledge whenever he would pose questions. And I can tell you now as a professor, those students are few and far between. And when you see them, you want to help them if you can, because the world's a tough place. And if you have a little bit of a position as a professor to help a kid out,
00:12:36
Speaker
I think, you know, he knew Western Pennsylvania. He knew the kind of place I was from. I had told him about my upbringing. So I think he was just a good guy and wanted to help me out. And speaking of your upbringing, what did your parents do? Wow. My mom worked three jobs basically my whole life just to keep us afloat. Yeah, that's about the stretch of it. It was pretty bad.
00:13:05
Speaker
Let's just say in the summer, it was okay. In the winter, there was no heat. And I used to sleep with an electric blanket. And to this day, I pull the covers up over my ear because if you left your ear out, it might get frozen in the middle of the night. So it was a fairly rough upbringing. There was a lot of love in the family. I have a good extended family.
00:13:29
Speaker
I had good friends who kind of took me in when I needed it, but it wasn't a traditional family life. That's for sure. There was just my mom and my brothers really didn't have any male
00:13:43
Speaker
role model. Yeah, that's tough. And I know that some of the people I speak to as well who have sort of rough around the edges upbringings that sometimes stories and books are ways that they turn to for escape. And that's where they kind of get that bug. Was that true for you at all? That books kind of provided you some sort of refuge? It's kind of crazy. I had
00:14:11
Speaker
At that time, you know, I had an uncle who was maybe eight or 10 years older than me. I had people in my life who kind of recognize maybe that I was smart. I played sports. I mean, I was kind of the typical high school jock hero, but it wasn't the person who I actually was. Like it was a big act. The real person that I was, was this kind of quiet intellectual.
00:14:38
Speaker
But you couldn't do that. You know, I'm a prototype Gen X'er. And where I grew up, if you were that nerdy, bookie kid, you got a good chance of getting beat up by older kids. And until I became, you know, kind of into my own, when my size, I was, I'm big enough that people wouldn't beat me up. You know, I was kind of a, had to hide that side. So for me,
00:15:04
Speaker
I learned, I actually taught myself to read so that I could read Marvel comic books. And it's pretty amazing. 40 years later, I wrote a biography of Stan Lee and got to meet Stan Lee and talk with him and meet a lot of people associated with Stan Lee. And it just all started, I mean, back to when I was four years old, teaching myself to read so that I could read these words. Then I went in, I got into history, you know,
00:15:30
Speaker
probably reading the kids versions of the Odyssey and the Iliad and young adult versions of Jefferson and Washington. I mean, this is an errand which great white men were still pretty put up on a pedestal. And I liked that biographical stuff. So for me, yeah, books were definitely a way to get away, get out. Sports and books, I mean,
00:16:00
Speaker
one thing I could do and excel at and people would be excited. The other at that time I kind of had to hide.
Reflections and Career Development
00:16:06
Speaker
You've written so extensively on various characters, whether it's, you know, Updike, Gatsby, here we go, Remus in your latest book, you know, and Stan Lee. Have you found through your body of work that you are certain themes and certain maybe archetypes sort of bubble to the surface that you don't even realize until you see the body of work and you're like, wow, I tend to gravitate towards X. Yeah, definitely.
00:16:36
Speaker
really, I don't know, I'm proud of the body of work. I mean, I've done some things that that I think are pretty special. I've written a bunch of books that I really just wanted to write and went out and found publishers for them. And when I look at the whole body of work, I mean, it's really around 20th century American culture. And
00:17:01
Speaker
I don't like the pop culture label all that much because in academe, it's looked down on so much. I mean, it's okay for a film scholar to write a film book and they just call themselves a film scholar. But if you call yourself a pop culture scholar in that world of academe, it's really kind of a black mark. So, you know, for me, it's 20th century American culture and
00:17:31
Speaker
It is about the kind of influences on me that meant something. And so maybe, you know, when you ask me about the body of work, I mean, I think this is really my biography unfolded in the books that I write.
00:17:50
Speaker
I like that. I think across a lot of when a lot of people, if they take a step back and remove and take a helicopter view of their work in a sense, even if they're writing about other people, just like you said, it almost becomes a biography of yourself reflected through these other subject matters and in people. Exactly. When I read John Updike, I know for a fact that he speaks a very specific Pennsylvanian language. And so I know
00:18:20
Speaker
And I can't prove it, but I just think it, that when I read John Updike, he is singing the song of Pennsylvania to me in a way that I think you have to have lived and grown up in the state to understand. That's special to me. And so, you know, what I owe John Updike, I could never repay. I never met him. I've met, luckily I've met a lot of members of his family. I've met his children. Um,
00:18:48
Speaker
I know a lot of people who knew Updike, but that book to me was more than just a critical biography. It was almost a love tale that I was sending, a love story from me, this little kid from nowhere, Pennsylvania, to somebody who changed my life without ever knowing it.
00:19:08
Speaker
And there's something – I haven't read Updike extensively, but what I admire about his body of work is that he seemed to be a very fearless writer and that he wrote nonfiction, he wrote a ton of fiction, he wrote poetry.
00:19:23
Speaker
He just loved language, and that's something I just kind of admire about the guy, that there is a certain amount of courage to constantly put out that kind of work. And I imagine someone like yourself who swam in all of that research, that's really admirable that you could, I don't know, have that kind of artistic agency and courage and just follow your taste. Yeah, I think that Updike was a master of words, and he loved language.
00:19:53
Speaker
And, you know, I hope, you know, and maybe I'm giving away too much, but I, when I approached writing The Bourbon King, I tried to think not what would Updike do, but if you could channel a little Updike, you know, your book would be better because Updike's voice is in my head regardless. So why not try to embrace that wonderfulness of that writing and
00:20:21
Speaker
allow it to influence you. I mean, we're all the products of various things and people and ideas and those who we intersect with in life. And that is a big part of who I am. And so I wanted to bring that, because you're right, Updike was fearless. If you read his nonfiction, it seems as if he
00:20:45
Speaker
has a PhD or more in whatever. He could write about physics. He could write about modern art in a way that would just profoundly influence the reader, whether that person had spent their whole life studying it or just looking over the article. So that generalist, but knowledgeable, that's kind of what I was shooting for and what I've been trying to do in the last couple books specifically.
00:21:13
Speaker
And as you're sort of taking up the mantle and being under the wing of a very revered and definitely cherished mentor historian in college, there were probably a couple paths in terms of writing before you, either the traditional historian path, maybe even journalism, or even studying history but writing fiction. At what point did you know which sort of genre you wanted to dance in? That's a great question.
00:21:43
Speaker
I still don't know if I have the answer to that because I love journalism. I've done tons of long form. I love magazines, but it's just so hard to make a living in these areas. I was living in Cleveland at one time and I got offered a job at a magazine and I would have loved to take the job. And then maybe about three weeks later, I got a newspaper job offer and I would have loved to take that job.
00:22:11
Speaker
but both jobs paid about five to $7 an hour. And this was late nineties maybe before the dot com boom. And I never felt, I still maybe don't feel like I've had the luxury of choosing. I knew that based on my upbringing and my commitments and you know, my financial life,
00:22:40
Speaker
that I was not probably going to do immersive creative nonfiction, which I love, but I just am not going to be able to jump on the rails and go and, and I gotta have, you know, based on my life, I gotta have a job. And so I tried to wiggle my way into jobs like corporate communications and things like that, where I could make enough money to survive, but then,
00:23:09
Speaker
freelance on the side. I started writing books in my off hours. So, you know, there were years where I would get up at 4 a.m., write for four hours, go to work, work eight to 10 hours, come home, write for another hour on my own projects, and then on the weekends write for six or eight straight hours on Saturday and Sunday. Now, there's an upside to that, which is that you get a lot of work done, but the downside is you're putting in 100-hour weeks
00:23:38
Speaker
And I mean, I couldn't do that now. 25 years ago, I could pull it off, but I can't do that now. And so college teaching became, for me, a way to get out of the corporate grind and also perhaps loosen my schedule up to the point where I could focus more to what I am now, which is really, I'm a writer that teaches.
00:24:04
Speaker
versus say maybe 10 years ago, I was a professor who wrote because I was maybe going a little bit more down the scholarly path, but it wasn't who I am as a person. I'm closer to that now. What were some early victories that you can hang your hat on that put juice in your tank, put fuel in your tank to let you know that you weren't completely deluded in your creative pursuits?
Storytelling and Writing Process
00:24:33
Speaker
That's another great question. Hanging your hat on things. I got really good as a corporate communicator. I became really good at that. But I was also doing pretty well with magazine writing and I used to live in Cleveland. And so I wrote for this business magazine out of Cleveland and I used to get a lot of cover stories. And so I realized like I got a knack for storytelling.
00:25:03
Speaker
And I could bring this into some of the kind of quasi scholarly writing I was doing and make a go of it. And so to me, it was really the focus on storytelling and I was getting enough interest and people were telling me how good the things I was doing were at the time that I just wanted to keep pushing it. And some of the early books that I wrote
00:25:34
Speaker
were, they were kind of quasi-academic, but I was writing them to the best of my ability and getting some response, even though, you know, like the first book I wrote was this history of the 1900s, like just the 1900 to 1910 era. And it allowed me to kind of show off my research abilities, but then write it in a way that, you know, that people were responding to.
00:26:01
Speaker
And that book took off in kind of the quasi-academic, you know, smart library reader market. And from that, it just snowballed. That book sold really well. And the publisher, which is a big kind of quasi-academic publisher, the editor and I there hit it off pretty well. And he would just say to me, what do you want to write next? And so I could start tackling things.
00:26:26
Speaker
And I know John McPhee, who's a hero of mine, and he's got to be 90 or 91 at this point, but he teaches most of the year, and he's done this for decades. He would teach his nine months out of the year, and then usually the summer, and that would be like his fallow writing time, so to speak, and then the summers when he would pursue any of the topics that struck his taste, which led to, I don't know, 40 books or so, and very long New Yorker articles.
00:26:55
Speaker
And so to that point, how do you learn to ration your writing energy and your teaching energy so they might feed each other instead of maybe pirate off of one another? Wow, another great question. So many good questions, Brendan. It's like you're reading the innermost little closets of my mind that I've shut off because I have never wanted to
00:27:24
Speaker
fully contemplate them. So bravo for that. Thank you. Thank you. The the teaching is, you know, so in January, it'll be 15 years that I've been teaching full time. And it's really, I want to say easy for me, but it's not easy. It's I'm good in front of the class. I have a lot of stories from my life as a communicator, and I'm teaching
00:27:54
Speaker
communications. I'm teaching today students who want to go into marketing to be ethical, to be smart about what they're doing, to be conscientious consumers and creators of culture. And so I have a lot of stories about that because I had a pretty successful career in that field. So I say that it's easy for me, but it's not easy at all. I mean, it's built off a long, long hours of hard work and working hard to
00:28:23
Speaker
keep up with the reading across fields and things like that. So the work that I do as a writer, I don't know, it's so important to me that I don't know, I never really take time away from it. I'm always reading for the next thing or I'm always writing or always doing research. I guess I'm lucky that I still, you know, knock on wood, I still have a lot of energy and I write pretty fast.
00:28:54
Speaker
I'm pretty good at research, so I know where to go to find things. I don't know if I have to divvy it up as much as McPhee does. And I have some friends who teach, who they do about the same thing. During the school year, it's their lockdown pretty hard on teaching and grading and all that. But then in the summer, they do most of their work. I don't think I need that kind of division because in my past,
00:29:22
Speaker
I never had the luxury of a division, you know, everything kind of blurred together. So I think the, you know, the one thing that I would tell listeners is that over the years, what I was able, what I've been able to do is really get in touch with my own writing process. And I think people don't want to go down this path. I mean, you really have to analyze yourself, your strengths and weaknesses and be honest. I know what gets me.
00:29:52
Speaker
from one paragraph to the next. And I devised a process about 15 years ago that I use every single time I sit down. And so I've never had writer's block. I never can't write because I am the master of my process. And so when I'm ready to go, it's both barrels, full speed ahead.
00:30:19
Speaker
So what is that process and what were the steps or how you arrived at it, I should say? What is the process and how did you arrive at it? Sure. The history of the process for me was that as a young kind of budding academic, one of the ways that you got training back then, and it probably doesn't even work anymore. I don't think people do this anymore, but you would write small reference book essays.
00:30:49
Speaker
You would write things that were maybe 200 words, 500 words. Then I would start to write, you know, magazines, sidebar pieces that were maybe 800 words front of the magazine kind of stuff. And gradually I worked up to where 1500 to 3000 words became the norm and very manageable. And then from 3000 word cover story to a, you know, five or 8000 word journal article or chapter that becomes really manageable.
00:31:19
Speaker
So as I sat down and started thinking about what keeps people from getting words on the page, I look at it very mathematically. I'm working on a book right now, and I know that each chapter can only be 4,500 words because it's going to be, it's an illustrated history book. I think it's going to really do well in the marketplace, but it's 50,000 words total. It's 300 plus illustrations and images.
00:31:50
Speaker
The chapters are shorter than, say, in the Bourbon King, where it's usually eight to 10,000 word chapters. If I have 4,500 words, I know that basically I'm going to make like four major points. So I break those sections up for, you know, basically with an intro and a concluding piece of each chapter, we're down to, you know, 1,000 word each, if that. And then I start to think, well, if I'm going to make three points within each one of those larger subsections,
00:32:19
Speaker
Now we're down to three, 300 words, maybe a little less there. When I sit down to write, I think, well, I can't just sit down today and write 4,500 words. Maybe I haven't done enough research to get to that point. Are there some things that I haven't figured out yet? But I know that I can write 300 words. And so I start to build it out and I keep, I keep a running total of the words. And as soon as I get a new project, I start writing.
00:32:47
Speaker
Even if the research hasn't even really gotten past like the proposal stage, I start writing right away and then use the technology to, you know, I'll start a chapter. Folder on word and I'll move things around and I'll put like a, I know if I know something's going to be added to chapter three, I'll make a little file, use the technology to help me in this process of like boiling everything down to.
00:33:16
Speaker
its smallest piece and then blasting through those pieces and worrying about tidying it all up later. Because it's daunting to write a 65,000 word novel or a 110,000 word history book when you're competing with David McCullough for the reader's mind space. That's gonna make anybody swallow hard. But if I can boil it down to 200 words,
00:33:44
Speaker
and get my 200 words out and then see where I'm at, get 200 more, 200 more. Yeah, you don't have to do that many times during a day before you've had a really successful day.
00:33:55
Speaker
Yeah, I find that working backwards from a goal and then doing the math over the course of that time span really works. And to see your point of taking these small bytes and these small bytes add up, I find that that really makes it so digestible and approachable. Yeah, it's 65,000 words. It's like, oh, shoot, how am I going to write that? But if you have three months and you divide that by 90 days and so forth,
00:34:21
Speaker
and then maybe even breaking down to maybe a little in the morning and a little at night, that might be 150 words in the morning and then 150 at night and all of a sudden, you're developing some real momentum. Yeah, and for me, it's just been relentless production for a really nice little decade-long sprint here because as an academic,
00:34:48
Speaker
I got really good at putting together, uh, edited volumes where I'd get, you know, I'd actually come up with the whole thing myself, all the contents, but then farm out chapters. So we'd have this cool anthology in which I'd be the editor and maybe I'd get somebody to co-edit it with me, get the publisher, then go back and, you know, so I know this guy, he's a Michael Chabon, uh,
00:35:15
Speaker
scholar, he'd love to write his piece and then so put these things together. And I ended up doing about, I don't know, maybe 15 or 18 of those books in addition to the books I'm writing. And then I got hooked up with a publisher, the publisher who published the Stan Lee book, Roman and Liddefield. They're one of the largest independents. They do trade books, they do mainly scholarly kind of quasi readable scholarly stuff.
00:35:44
Speaker
And I became a book series editor there and we put out five different book series. So one of the book series was contemporary American fiction. Another one was cultural history of television. So I would start to farm out books to other writers and academics in that role. And I would end up not only being the acquiring editor, but then also helping them as the writing process kicked in if they needed help. And then I would always read the book at the end and
00:36:14
Speaker
do a little copy editing. So I ended up putting out about 25 books in those five book series. So when I look back, you know, we're talking earlier about the, the, the mass of work that's come out. It's so much, there's just so much there. And I, and I feel like every piece I've learned more about myself as a writer about voice, about, you know, what's important, what readers might find important, and,
00:36:42
Speaker
You know, one of my buddies was joking with me. He's like, you're probably the most prolific Gen X scholar in the world. Just nobody, not enough people have heard of you yet. So that's kind of his running joke with me. But, you know, I don't know if that's true or not, but I put out the words and I try to help other people put out the words and it gives me a good vibe to know that I'm giving back to the world.
00:37:06
Speaker
Yeah, and one of the things that I always love looking at, especially when I pick up a book like The Bourbon King, and I flip to the back, and I love seeing the amount of research a writer himself or herself has done on their own or as a team. I suspect you did this all on your own. Just the titanic amount of research that goes into creating a narrative of this nature.
00:37:33
Speaker
And to that point, in the age of Google where research can feel almost too easy and even a little lazy with Google, how have you developed your research muscle and maybe found some other ways and creative ways to curate information that allows you to bring a story to life? Yeah, with the Bourbon King, I would love to say that I did this all on my own, but my wife, Suzette, is an amazing
00:38:03
Speaker
researcher. And there were parts of it that, yeah, definitely I did my own. But one of the things that I set out to do with the Bourbon King, because there's a lot, there are a lot of legend about George Remus in the 1920s that people think they know, or, you know, for instance, people would say that George Remus was the, you know, capital, the inspiration for the Great Gatsby. And, you know, that's, that's not true, you know, but
00:38:30
Speaker
Journalists would use it. People in the tri-state area around Cincinnati would use that as kind of a shorthand catch-all. And so doing the research and one of the things we did was walk the areas. And so one of the protagonists in the Remus story is this guy Franklin Dodge that Imogene Remus runs off with. I mean, this is the love triangle in the heart of the book.
00:38:59
Speaker
And we went to Lansing, Michigan and his, because he was from a prominent family, the house is still there. It's a, it's a house museum in Lansing. It's owned by the parks division of the city now. And we went there and we uncovered a lot of archival stuff that had never been used pictures. And we, you know, I stood in his bedroom. So there's a little section in there. It's maybe one sentence I talk about.
00:39:27
Speaker
Dodge's family, there's this musical family they had on the third floor, this giant room that was like the dance room. So when they would have guests, which included very prominent politicians like William Jennings Bryant, Dodge's mom would play piano because she was a concert level pianist and the family would dance up there and they would have holiday parties. And so it gives a little sense of who this guy was and his background. And the readers got to wonder,
00:39:58
Speaker
Why would this upstanding, well-to-do guy turn so dark and essentially become an undercover bootlegger when he's supposed to be a prohibition officer? So we never could have done that if we wouldn't have tracked back and had the wherewithal to go to Lansing and spent some time there and walked in their shoes. So for me with this book, the research was not only
00:40:28
Speaker
on the computer. It was in archives. There are a lot of small, small archival places that we went to, like this house museum. And then I tracked down the court transcripts for not only for Remus's main trial, but all of his insanity hearing trials after that. There's one copy. It's at the Yale Law Library and Charlie Taft, who was another Remus's protagonist, the son of William Howard Taft, who was
00:40:57
Speaker
President and then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Taft donated his copy of the transcripts, which are bound and at Yale. And so I went through them and I got them through Special Collections. Yale was kind enough to send them to Miami University's Special Collections Department. And I spent every spare minute of six or eight months
00:41:24
Speaker
scanning those documents. And there are probably 5,000 to 7,000 pages of court transcripts. So to me, it was pulling together all these resources electronically, which I could do because we have access to so many newspapers, but then also hitting the ground, throwing a little Bob Caro kind of research into it, and then also going to places where people maybe
00:41:50
Speaker
didn't fit all the pieces together in the past when they talked about Remus and so that's how I really tackled it.
00:41:56
Speaker
And when you're at, say, a house museum and you're there and you're getting access to un-Google-able things because you're putting – you know, you're scuffing up your boots on the pavement to get to some of these places, what's a conversation you might be having with the volunteer at the desk? Are you saying – it would be like, you know, what's the – where else can I find information? Who might be the next domino in this chain?
00:42:21
Speaker
Yeah, we joke about that all the time because Suzette is an amazing person and she's much more personable than me. And she usually gets the secret sauce. And so I'll be flying through some paperwork or trying to find those keys in the documents while at the same time she's usually talking to the volunteers or the director who runs the place.
00:42:46
Speaker
And it's almost as if once you're there and you prove like you're serious about what you're doing, then the secret file comes out or the thing that we never show anybody else comes out. And all of a sudden, at the end of the day or the end of days or the end of a week or however long you have, you think back and like, holy mackerel, we have stuff that nobody's seen before, nobody's talked about. We have these little pieces
00:43:15
Speaker
because we were willing to go down this path and we were very good at tag teaming on those instances to really get at the secret files that they don't really want to show you.
00:43:31
Speaker
I love that. I love that you're like a tag team tandem, kind of like you said, to get this information. And then when you get that, this panning for gold, so to speak, and you've got this nugget that no one is seeing or no one's doing the legwork to get that into their notebook or take a picture or scan things, however you approach it and curate this stuff. That's got to be this great electric charge when you come across that kind of stuff.
00:43:57
Speaker
Oh, it is. And it's it's my historian, you know, kind of goosebumps go crazy whenever this happens, because with this story, it's such a big story. I mean, I've done a couple long interviews. I've I've spoken about the book at a dozen different places. And usually people say to me, the first thing they say is, I can't believe I don't know this story. I don't know the George Remus story. The second thing they say
00:44:26
Speaker
is why isn't this on Netflix or on a TV show? The third thing they say is, come on, you're fooling me. You made this up. And I'm like, I didn't make this up. It's a real story. It's just so complex and so deep. And just when you think Remus has run his last con, there's another piece that comes out of nowhere. And so to pull all this information together, I mean, to tell you the truth, maybe my
00:44:56
Speaker
my editor Keith Wallman at Diversion wouldn't want me to tell you this, but I'll tell you anyhow. The book was probably only supposed to be maybe two thirds as long as it is, but I kept coming across so much more information and the story was so much bigger that I just kept writing and I would have these conferences with Keith and I'm like, hey, this story is bigger than even we thought when we started down this path. And so thankfully,
00:45:26
Speaker
diversion was really good about saying, hey, you know, tell the story. And, you know, of course we cut, we cut when we had to, but, you know, thank goodness in this day and age where every page means more money for the publisher, they were willing to go where it needed to go.
00:45:46
Speaker
And what struck me about the book too, just in terms of how it, just the story itself developed in it, you can tell it stems from all that gold that you got from those transcripts from the Yale special sections library. When you can get dialogue into historical narrative nonfiction, that is the stuff that really just makes this thing really pop. That must have been really fun for you to come across
00:46:16
Speaker
in hit like actual dialogue, actual things of back and forth between people that really elevated the story that made it come alive in a lot of ways. Yeah, that's one of the things where I think, I mean, my lifelong devotion, at least, you know, as long as I've known, even in the back of my mind, I want to be a writer someday, creative nonfiction has been my thing. I mean, I could have easily went down a different path where I was a novelist, but to be honest,
00:46:46
Speaker
There's so many people who elevate the novel and think you're not really a quote unquote writer unless you write novels. And to me, that's just a silly concept. I mean, use all your powers as a writer to write good stuff and what interests you. And to me, biography, history, historical context means so much. So to find the sources in which, you know, Remus is talking,
00:47:15
Speaker
Luckily, both he and Dodge were manipulating the media and the newspapers were pushing them off against one another. So there's a lot of dialogue. These two guys were having a conversation. These two men who hated each other and came to blows and wanted to kill each other, they were having an ongoing warfare across the biggest newspapers in America.
00:47:39
Speaker
who were eating this stuff up because it was an era in which newspapers were highly, highly competitive. And it just made for such an ability. I felt like I was just the medium for this story. I mean, it was, you know, my literary and historical detective work kind of having a sense of what needed to be told, putting in its context. But these guys were like screaming and
00:48:06
Speaker
Imogene Remus as well. These people were screaming from beyond the grave for me to tell this story.
00:48:11
Speaker
And how did you arrive at the structure of the book? It opens up, of course, in the moments after Remus shoots his wife dead in broad daylight. And that's a prologue. And then, of course, we start getting his backstory. And then it unfolds from there. I suspect you had some artistic choices to make in terms of how you structured this book. So I wonder, what was some of that dialogue that you were having with yourself about this?
00:48:40
Speaker
Definitely. There was a lot of dialogue going back and forth because to tell you the truth, I don't like straight chronology. And I think my feeling is I wanted to write this as almost, you know, the longest screenplay possible. That was what I was going for. And what I like about movies is when there's flashbacks and you get context
00:49:09
Speaker
as people think because in our everyday lives, what makes it interesting isn't the moment to the moment. What makes it interesting is how we look back and try to project forward. I mean, people don't necessarily just live in the moment. They're constantly ping ponging and pinballing these ideas of like their past and what they see in the future. So I wanted to include some of this in the book and probably
00:49:39
Speaker
Keith was not always super happy with my lack of chronological events. But I think that readers, particularly the kind of reader who's going to pick up the Bourbon King, I think they're going to dig it more than they're not going to dig it, because this is the way life unfolds. It's not a straight circle or a straight arrow from one point to another. And for me, Remus's entire
00:50:07
Speaker
life changed in a way that he couldn't anticipate in those seconds after he pulled the trigger. And so to me, if if I'm, you know, I don't know, I don't know if you've seen the movie Little Big Man. I saw that at the drive in when I was a little kid. It just had a profound impact on me. It's Dustin Hoffman. I don't you know, he's he lives. It's a Thomas Berger novel that's adapted in the mid 70s.
00:50:35
Speaker
And it's basically almost like Forrest Gump before Forrest Gump. And that just had a profound impact on me because the character is over a hundred years old and he's looking back like he was at Custer's Last Stand, all these different events in American history, particularly in the West. And I don't know, I just, I love to tell a non chronological story.
00:50:59
Speaker
yeah there's a a point i probably about halfway through the book where they were where i thought you did that really well it's it's right after you know remiss get he's he's uh... locked up in the big a and you know you're wondering you know what what's happening here and then there's this flashback to him and as speaking with imaging and uh... giving her power of attorney over his various estates in their everything uh... across his empire at which of course is like
00:51:28
Speaker
the tinder that really sets off the next half of the book as Dodge and Imogene are then have their illicit affair and then try to basically gut everything Remus had while he spent his about, you know, two years in prison. Yeah, which one of the things I've never even really talked about in some other interviews I've done, there's an entire chapter called, you know, it's something that's assassins, cutthroats and assassins because
00:51:56
Speaker
for a good six months, Remus and on one side, and then Franklin Dodge and Imogene Remus on the other, they're hiring real murderers. I mean, some of the biggest kind of cut throats in American history at that time, they're hiring these gangs, competing gangs to kill the other group. It's shocking that they never really were able to do it. I think in some senses, the media glare would have been so
00:52:25
Speaker
intense if a gang member would have killed Remus, they would have probably almost guaranteed been caught. And so the media in some ways saves Remus' life because he was too much of a celebrity to be murdered. And it's really interesting to me how these pieces, they just come out of nowhere and they're
00:52:51
Speaker
There are moments in which these different characters couldn't see what was going to happen. And I really wanted those to pop for the reader because history is all about context. And if you put yourself back in that time, there were big events that started with these little tiny moments.
00:53:09
Speaker
and speaking of contacts of course the backdrop is the volstead act in prohibition uh... in your research of course you've spent a lot of time uh... swimming in gatsby and then of course this is almost uh... this is like a non-fiction sort of uh... uh... gatsby adjacent story if you will uh... what was that again just in terms of you're the context of prohibition like what is you know
00:53:35
Speaker
100 years later, what do you make of that and the fact that the country had come to a certain point with the 18th Amendment to actually do away with alcohol, which of course just led to a lot of illicit activity and very charismatic people to take advantage? Of course, my publisher and I, we wanted this book because it's the 100th anniversary of Prohibition.
00:54:02
Speaker
That's a given. You know, you have to have these kind of hooks in today's. I mean, unless you're David McCullough and you can write about whatever you want. I mean, you have to be smart about the topics that you choose. So while I'm writing the book, it's clear that we are still dealing with the consequences of prohibition and maybe in all of its forms today, we're still dealing with presidential corruption. I mean, it's right in our faces and Harding,
00:54:32
Speaker
Luckily for him, he died before the full truth came out because Harding was, I don't know, depending on who you believe, either a total dupe or a criminal mastermind. And so I thought that as we celebrate 100 years, there's still a lot to be learned from prohibition and from the roaring 20s that if readers look at the Bourbon King, they will start to see these pieces
00:55:02
Speaker
and maybe it may change to some degree how they think about what we're going through today. I mean, knock on wood, it doesn't end with another great, you know, depression like it did at the end of the 20s. I mean, that would, I hope that I'm not a, you know, the Bourbon King's not a crystal ball because I do not want that for any of us, but, you know, there's a lot of writing on the wall and I spent a lot of time in the Bourbon King bringing that context to life at the time so the reader would really get a full picture.
00:55:33
Speaker
And what do you think is the appeal of the jazz age and the roaring 20s, even from 100 years later, and why we are, I read Great Gatsby every year in December. I read once a year, it's kind of like an anniversary thing for me, and I love the book to pieces, of course, and it's been adapted into movies and everything. There's something to be said about the allure of that era, and I wonder, since you've spent so much time there, so to speak,
00:56:02
Speaker
What do you think the appeal is even to this day? Yeah, yet another thing you and I share, Brendan, because I read The Great Gatsby again at least once a year, because I just I can't put it down. I think at last count, I've read it 147 times, I think. And I just it's one of those. It's a it's a guidepost for me mentally. I just have to do it. And what I found both really, and this comes back to the research,
00:56:32
Speaker
People love that Gatsby-esque. They love the parties. They've built the idea of what is Gatsby like or, you know, as you mentioned quite astutely, Gatsby adjacent in their minds because of the films and because we've mythologized it as part of the American dream and this wonderful time. But on the other hand, people hate the 1920s. So a lot of stuff that I really hope to find at the beginning of the research
00:57:02
Speaker
I found out had simply been destroyed. Even Imogene's dress was one of the pieces of evidence that they showed in the trial. And so when I went to the county clerk of courts, I'm trying to track down all these pieces of evidence and I have a secret contact. I mean, maybe it's not going to be so secret now, but I have a contact in the office.
00:57:26
Speaker
He tells me that stuff was just destroyed because people wanted to bury the 1920s. The 1920s here in the Cincinnati area, it was a black mark. One of the things readers will see is that Remus got on the bad side of the Taft family, and it was almost a precursor to what was going to happen to him. This was the most powerful family in the city, one of the most powerful families in the United States. You couldn't cross them.
00:57:53
Speaker
We love the 1920s. I mean, this next decade is going to be nothing but Gatsby weddings, Gatsby New Year's parties. I mean, I'm already seeing it on Facebook, you know, listing for Gatsby events because that that revelry part we all love, but people don't want to talk about the 1920s in terms of prohibition. So it's it's a really strange thing. I saw it in my research where you'd expect something would be available and is gone. You know, it's not just gone, but obliterated and
00:58:23
Speaker
It's a very interesting facet of how we think about this dark mark on American history.
00:58:30
Speaker
And there's something to be said, too, the romanticism of that era, specifically, you know, Jay James Gatz and then, you know, Remus that there these are people who are on the fringe of society coming from quite literally nothing and then through sheer force of will are able to actually make something of themselves. And I think that's always going to be something timeless in this country, especially. Yeah. And Remus, you know, I think is interesting.
00:58:59
Speaker
Everybody knows Al Capone. You go anywhere in the world and you say, Capone, people are going to know what you're talking about. It's amazing. But Capone was a career criminal and Remus' story couldn't be further from the truth. I mean, Remus was this upstanding pharmacist, then really the top criminal defense attorney in America, if not all of America, at least one of the top two or three in the country.
00:59:24
Speaker
you have to ask yourself, why would a guy like this turn? And that's really part of that central thesis of the Bourbon King, is how would this guy turn to become one of the real criminal masterminds in American history, along with why we don't know who he is today? So yeah, that American dream facet or factor of the 1920s, it's really caught people's attention.
00:59:50
Speaker
Yeah, and we're coming up against our hour here. I feel like I could... I'm happy you have more work coming out and you have work in the past because I want to keep having these kind of conversations. This is fascinating to me. I didn't prompt you when I emailed you. I forgot to, but you've been listening. You've listened to McDougal and you've been listening the last few weeks, so maybe you have something ready.
01:00:13
Speaker
I've been asking people for a recommendation of sorts to kind of close things out that maybe unplug take mind off of the daily grind and I wonder if maybe if Something comes to mind like what might you recommend to people out there just as a as something to unplug from Well, I'll tell you what Brennan. I am a very lucky man because I in in later life I have found the woman of my dreams and Suzette and I unwind by
01:00:43
Speaker
traveling and going to, you know, these kind of vintage flea markets. And we like to go to cool bars. And when we're there, we just like to talk and we talk to people. And, uh, you know, the next thing you know, you have like a little mini party going on and you're meeting interesting people because even though we as writers market in and
01:01:08
Speaker
traffic in this existential nightmare of jealousy and rage and loneliness and anxiety. I actually do like to get out amongst the people because everybody's so complex and everybody has a story and I love the story. So we do a lot of this going out and meeting people.
01:01:29
Speaker
And one of the other things that we really like to do, we have this, our favorite jazz band is this group called the Hot Sardines. They're out of Brooklyn and they do music basically a hundred years ago and they travel around the world and we try to go see them when they're within a couple hundred miles of here. And so we just, we have as much fun when I'm not sitting here in my office and it's semi-dark and it's really quiet. So when it's not that time,
01:01:59
Speaker
We try to do just the opposite, whether it's having a bottle of Prosecco and singing 1980s songs at the top of our lungs or going out amongst the people. Just trying to get that existential dread out of the middle of my forehead and experience something different. That's what I would say to people. I love to write and I love to write probably more than anything else outside of my family.
01:02:29
Speaker
You gotta shut it down at times because it'll eat you alive. That's amazing. And Bob, where can people get more familiar with your work if they're not already familiar with it? Sure. The easiest thing is my website, which is just my name, bobbachelor.com. I'm on Facebook. I'm on Twitter at at cultpopculture. And I'm active on social media. I like engaging with readers.
01:02:58
Speaker
I've had since the book came out a couple people who knew Remus. I've had some Remus family members who are kind of distant cousins reach out to me. So there's there's a lot of people who have bootleg stories and they like to tell them. And I'll tell you the truth. I love to hear them. So it's easy. It's just Bob at BobBachelor.com. It couldn't be more simple to get in touch with me. And unlike
01:03:21
Speaker
I am eternally grateful to people who spend the time reading my stuff. So I love getting those kind of emails from people. Fantastic. Well, this is a ton of fun to get to finally talk to you about your work and this great book that you've written. And we've been back and forth a lot on Twitter and in email. So this is a thrill. And I hope this is the first of many conversations we have going forward, Bob.
01:03:48
Speaker
Yes, you know, Brendan, I'm a huge fan and I consider myself a CNF-er and I will continue to listen and when this post, I'm going to share it with all my friends and family because I think maybe this is the most I've ever talked about my writing life at one time and maybe dug through some holes in my brain that I haven't contemplated before. So I appreciate the time. It's really been a fun time today.
01:04:20
Speaker
And now we come to the part of the show where I take off my cardigan, take off my blue canvas boating shoes, sing you a song, and leave the neighborhood.
01:04:29
Speaker
That was fun. Thanks to Bay Path and River Key for the support, of course. Be sure to head over to rindenomerra.com to sign up for the monthly newsletter. It could turn into a weekly newsletter to coincide with the podcast publishing on CNN Friday. I don't know. For now, once a month, no spam. Can't beat that.
01:04:52
Speaker
Link up to the show on social media and tag the show so I can give you digital fist bumps and devil horns, perhaps a little skull. If you dig the show, consider leaving a kind review on Apple Podcasts. They have flatlined of late.
01:05:06
Speaker
I haven't had a new one in months. I'd love to reach 100 and we're stuck on 79. And as of this recording, that could all change because of you, man. There's 21 of you out there, right? Maybe not. We'd love to get to 100. I say we, but it's just me. Show Today was edited, produced, booked by yours truly, Brendan O'Mara. In turn, Brendan O'Mara.
01:05:33
Speaker
So, whatever. If there's one thing I've learned, if you can do interviews, see ya!