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Episode 460:Pulitzer Prize-Winning Biographer Megan Marshall Takes on Personal Essays in ‘After Lives’
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Megan Marshall is the author of After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart (Mariner Books), a new collection of essays. Megan won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.
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Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
Oh boy, things are things are just crazy over here.
Introduction & Book Promotion
00:00:06
Speaker
Man, hey CNFers, we're less than two months away from the publication of The Front Runner, so be sure you secure yourself a pre-order while supplies last. Call now.
00:00:18
Speaker
But seriously, go to your bookseller of choice and maybe consider pre-ordering it. Also, it's getting close to the next live taping of the podcast. If you're in Eugene, Sunday, April 13th, 1 p.m. at Gratitude Brewing, I'll be interviewing Leah Cittilli about Blazing Eye Sees All, her latest book.
00:00:39
Speaker
It is amazing, the book that is. Dig it. Each biographer comes to the could come to the exact same material and pull out something entirely different from it.
00:00:56
Speaker
Hey, CNFers.
Creative Nonfiction Podcast Overview
00:00:57
Speaker
It's the Creative Non-Section Podcast, a show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. I'm Brendan O'Meara. Don't worry about it. By the time you hear this, I will be having a panic attack of sorts as I get ready to deliver my talk on unauthorized biography at the Power of Narrative Conference.
00:01:16
Speaker
Hope you got your CNF 15 discount. discount They sold out. I hope some of that sellout came from people on the show who might have gotten some burrito money from that discount. No matter.
00:01:27
Speaker
My slides are pretty boss. I will say that. Most are hand-drawn with the signature reverence you've come to expect from your boy,
Interview with Megan Marshall
00:01:36
Speaker
B.O. Megan Marshall is here.
00:01:38
Speaker
You can find her at meganmarshallauthor.com. Megan is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Margaret Fuller, A New American Life. She's also the author of the Peabody Sisters.
00:01:51
Speaker
I'm pronouncing Peabody. It might be Peabody Sisters, but like if you grew up in Massachusetts, there's a town called Peabody with north of Boston. Some people come in, they're like, oh, it's Peabody. And they're like, nope, it's Peabody.
00:02:04
Speaker
ah Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, and Elizabeth Bishop, A Miracle Before Breakfast. Her latest book, which is featured in the briefly noted section of The New Yorker, and The New Yorker also ran one of her essays of the book as a weekend essay, it's titled Afterlives on Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart.
00:02:25
Speaker
It's a slim, wonderful book, and I like to view it, too or view its title, as chasing or pursuing lives, Though that isn't its literal take in the book, but as a biographer, you are after lies.
00:02:37
Speaker
In the same way that, when this wraps up, I am after a burrito. Show notes to this episode and more at brendanomero.com. Hey, there, you can read hot blogs and sign up for the monthly Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter.
00:02:50
Speaker
I'm getting more and more ragey, CNFers, so if you want book recs, cool links, and good cheer, sign up. First of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it. There is now an official weekly companion pod stack at creative nonfictionpodcast.substack.com. If you want the transcripts and the text of the parting shot and deep dives into the archives, this is the newsletter to enrich your podcast experience.
00:03:19
Speaker
I thought more people would be into it, but it's no big deal. i I need to do the transcripts anyway for what will eventually be a CNF pod book. And this holds me accountable to get those transcripts done every single week.
00:03:33
Speaker
ah So whether five of you sign up for it or 5,000, it's fine. I'd prefer 5,000, but whatevs. Had a nice time talking with Megan Marshall several weeks ago at this
Biographical Writing Techniques
00:03:44
Speaker
point.
00:03:44
Speaker
Getting to it. Yes. About how she goes about her biographies, what she relates to most in the central figures she follows. how she put her career on the back burner when she became a mom, and how she organizes the titanic amount of research she does to bring her books to life.
00:04:04
Speaker
Parting shot on flying and being tempted by beautiful AI and tactical gear. You'll you'll you'll learn. You'll learn. But for now,
Ethics in Unauthorized Biographies
00:04:14
Speaker
here's Megan Riff.
00:04:23
Speaker
That is horseshit. That has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. Pleasing, I guess, to a biographer than that they would be able to look in the coffin of their subject. You are the Dan Patrick of creative nonfiction. How about that? is This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
00:04:42
Speaker
Yeah, and I left, you know, i don't know when you left New England, but I left California at age 17 and really never lived back in the West for more than a few months at a time since then. Although, you know, with the fires in Altadena and Pasadena where I grew but grew up, i mean, there's so much that i I'm always going to be a Californian. and ah That's where I grew up and my parents grew up and my grandparents, some of them grew up and I'm very sad for my friends who've lost houses and actually in one of the essays that I, couple of the essays, the the little house in Altadena where my grandparents lived.
00:05:20
Speaker
lived, which they built in 1923, comes up and um it survived amazingly. Oh, wow. Yeah, that was one of the things I highlighted when I read the book was yeah know that you had this connection to Pasadena and Altadena. I'm like, oh my gosh, like yeah that those fires you know definitely definitely hit home or you know or former home ah for you. Yeah, yeah a lost past, which I almost feel having written about That little house, a stucco bungalow, maybe it had to live in order to back me up in my memories in this book.
00:05:57
Speaker
I don't know what I would have done if it were gone. As someone, I'm just wrapping up ah yeah my first soiree into biography. And in i i love how you write about biography and afterlives.
00:06:11
Speaker
And i just wanted to one one thing that struck struck out to me was like quite literally the final passage of of the book in the epilogue. you know Where you write, you know, we're all biographers from childhood. Life is short. The ancient Dr. Hippocrates warned.
00:06:26
Speaker
And art is long. The pursuit of a craft and the lasting creation itself. So, too, is the art we make of lives. And I love that passage. And i wonder maybe we can you can expand on that and just how biography, in a way, was just always a part of you. And, you know, you made a vocation of it. It was.
00:06:43
Speaker
Yes, I think it's a part of all of us. That's another quotation that I refer to very early in the book is from Gamaliel Bradford, who was a biographer 100 or more years ago. And he said, we're all biographers from childhood.
00:06:59
Speaker
We're always watching those around us and learning from them, comparing ourselves and That's very much the kind of kid I was growing up. I guess we can also say like Henry James, one on whom nothing is lost. That was the kind of kid I was and helps me write memoirish pieces now. But yes, biography, when I was a kid, I loved reading young adult biographies um about heroes and heroines and imagining that I might one day grow up and do something important. But it was more being moved by these life stories
00:07:34
Speaker
And when I came to college, I started writing poetry, thought I would be a great, you know, literary figure maybe one day. But what I was most interested in were the poets who were teaching me, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop and and their lives. I began to realize these people had real lives, just the way, of course,
00:07:55
Speaker
in my young adult biographies of Amelia Earhart and Johann Sebastian Bach and people like that, you know, their real, just ordinary lives were of as much interest to me as, in some ways, as to the poetry they were writing.
00:08:10
Speaker
What was it like to be a person of such talent and ambition and drive and also fears? And I think there there is a great gift to the reader in a biography that can uplift, it can inspire, it can also make you feel, you know, this person made the kind of mistakes I've made or they've made mistakes I'm going to not make. um it's ah It's a real learning experience. And this book called After Lives is really one that I started in after having written three really big biographies over a period of about 30 years.
00:08:46
Speaker
And, you know, it's it's ah it's a great honor and also something of a burden to try to convey an entire life. and These essays are are sort of shorter pieces that I began to feel I wanted to ah work at that length. You know, it was a time like now. I started in on this when there was a big change of presidential administration about eight years ago. And also at the same time, my partner of 15 years was kind of sinking into what became his final illness. There was that to deal with.
00:09:21
Speaker
And then the COVID pandemic came upon all us. So working at a length of a project that might take three to six months rather than three years to 20 years seemed like the right kind of thing to do. And also a way of bringing the techniques and skills and and curiosity of biography to you know some issues that I had left unexplored in writing the writing those books, but also my own life. Who were these people that had helped me become who I was, who had helped me become a biographer?
00:09:56
Speaker
When you look back at the the body of work that you have in reporting out and researching your main subjects, what of you do you see in them that might have attracted you to them in the first place?
00:10:12
Speaker
That's a very good question. So I have these... Three books, the first, The Peabody Sisters, about three women who were part of the transcendentalist movement. One married Nathaniel Hawthorne, one married Horace Mann, third never married anyone and was her own kind of rabble rouser.
00:10:30
Speaker
That book I wrote in a period mainly of child rearing and where I was really interested in you know what kinds of compromises women had to make, even women of great talent in the nineteenth century, still have to do that today.
00:10:47
Speaker
and I was interested in the ways those same pressures might affect three you very different people, although from the same family. So it was a little bit like a, you know, an experiment. But I was testing out my own feelings about how to handle my ambitions in a time period in my life where I couldn't really go full throttle at them. I was ah had had this this also comes up in the book for a number of rather personal reasons.
00:11:13
Speaker
well, i'll just say having had ah ah a mother who, you know, worked at a job that she didn't enjoy at a time when she had thought she would be working as a painter instead, you know, I wanted to, i missed my mom and I didn't want my kids to grow up missing me.
00:11:27
Speaker
So I did give a lot of time to their rearing and I'm glad that I did, but it meant putting my book on on the back burner. And I was trying to learn how to,
00:11:39
Speaker
have the patience and the endurance to to live in that way. And the Peabody sisters were a comfort to me at that time. And then I got divorced and I was thrown on my own devices. And who did i come up with then? Margaret Fuller.
00:11:55
Speaker
America's first great feminist writer of the 19th century, and someone who was always thrown on her own devices from ah her mid-20s and led a very creative life. And so she was an inspiration to me when I was suddenly, you know, she was in her 20s and 30s.
00:12:12
Speaker
sadly died at 40 in a shipwreck, but I was in my 50s, but I needed that kind of life to inspire me. And then, you know, why Elizabeth Bishop? It was kind of a way, i guess, creeping towards this Afterlives book through ah thinking about Elizabeth Bishop and my ah years as a poetry student at Harvard and a little bit before that at Bennington.
00:12:35
Speaker
And my original plan as a writer to be more literary, I guess I imagined, than i would be as a writer of nonfiction. And ah as I mentioned, my partner who died now in 2019, but I had become involved with him after the divorce. And um he was a poet too. We had met in Robert Lowell's class and then remet.
00:12:59
Speaker
later as our marriages were falling apart and our first marriages, i guess, our only marriages, really, we never married. I'd had enough of marriage. but you know So poetry, i kind of wanted to return to my roots in poetry and think back to that time. And um Elizabeth Bishop you know was her own kind of model to me in terms of her art really sustaining her through her life. She had a very, very difficult, ah more than either of the women I'd written about before childhood, with a mother who became unhinged after her
00:13:34
Speaker
ah Elizabeth's father died when Elizabeth was just eight months old. And so she was kind of raised, ah that her mother was institutionalized when she was, Elizabeth was five and died when Elizabeth was in college. And she was kind of shunted back and forth from from one household to another. And, and you know, words really became her life raft and first reading and then writing them very early on, writing them. and that was a life I really wanted to explore. Plus, you know, what and don't want to, if anybody's going to read that book, there's a little subplot about my getting on Elizabeth Bishop's bad side in the class.
00:14:16
Speaker
And i it's always that stayed with me that she didn't understand. And so I was kind of working that out in the book in my own. The book is primarily biography chapters about bishop and but interspersed with my own little plot about you know taking that class and and getting on her wrong side and what might I do. And and and those two storylines, the kind of the big plot of the biography and my little plot,
00:14:42
Speaker
um end up coming together at the end in a very kind of surprising and poetic, I would say. i am just so pleased to be on a podcast that's called Creative Nonfiction because after my divorce in 2007, I took a job teaching at Emerson College.
00:14:59
Speaker
primarily in the MFA Creative Writing Program, as, ah you know, teaching nonfiction. And of course, I've done a lot of teaching of, you know, how to work in archives, um writing the lives of others, literature courses on transcendentalism. But in the workshop class, the majority of students are writing creative nonfiction, essays, memoirs, that sort of thing. And I think that kind of rubbed off on me a little bit. I've always loved that form. And so, you know, here's a book, After Lives, which is ah collection of six essays, each exploring a different maybe phase of my family history or questions that came up while I was working on ah the biographies, mysteries that had gone unsolved. And I really started for the first time writing essays, a form that I hadn't yet really explored, and but had taught to my students and read their own essays. And and I'm sure that helped me
00:15:56
Speaker
pull these together and have a sense of what to do with it. I guess there within the book, there a couple of, maybe two types of essay, one ones that give a full kind of historical narrative, which is what I'm used to writing. There's one about my grandparents who found themselves in Paris during World War one a really amazing fact. You know, everybody thinks about these wars, World War I and World War II, and the men who went off to war and the marriages that were made.
00:16:25
Speaker
precipitately and and then there were these separations. But my grandparents found a way to stick together here and live in a little pension in Paris while my grandfather was um running the photographic wing of the and and film and photography wing of the press office.
00:16:42
Speaker
for the American troops when they joined the war in 1917. So that has a kind of narrative arc to it following the course of the war and the course of their early marriage. But there are others where I just start in from a nugget of an idea and kind of work my way through. And I find that also very a challenging and fascinating kind of writing to do and much, really much more like writing a poem. Speaking of like finding that nugget and working your way through, over the course of your research or, you know, in be it interviewing or archival stuff or newspaper stuff, yeah when does the the shape of the book and the structure of it begin to develop?
00:17:25
Speaker
That's a very good question. You know, I think it's changed as I got as i became more accustomed to more confidence so that with the Peabody sisters, I said it took 20 years.
00:17:37
Speaker
I would say it wasn't until the last four years that I suddenly had a brainstorm about how to shape that book. I mentioned the two interesting marriages to famous men, and um they took place that The sisters married pretty late um for that era, not maybe so late for us now, but in their 30s.
00:17:57
Speaker
And their husbands also were older. And so there's a lot of the story to tell before they married. I don't want to give everything away about that book, but I ended up, because the Hawthorns married in 1842 and the Mans married in 1843, and those weddings are kind of the bookends of the book. And you We have the Hawthorne wedding and then a big flashback to all the lives that lead up and and then the fulfillment in 1843, which is the peak of transcendentalism and the peak of Elizabeth's influence. so But that notion didn't come to me until very late, very late in the work on the book.
00:18:37
Speaker
Whereas for Margaret Fuller and for Elizabeth Bishop, I really had a plan from the beginning or almost from the beginning. In the case of Margaret Fuller, um she was one of the most famous women of the 19th century, in you know not just in America, but in the world. you know George Eliot read about her.
00:18:57
Speaker
She was a friend of George Sand. She was part of the and and you know her last years. She had traveled to Europe. as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune and was in ah Rome during the Italian first wave of the Italian revolution, Risorgimento for independence. and covered that. And so she she had been written about a great deal. And the first book about her was written by her three very close friends, Ralph Waldo Emerson, um James Freeman Clark, and William Henry Channing. And they came up with a structure that I thought was really quite good. So I ended up following
00:19:36
Speaker
that in a loose way, they each section was named for a location, or most of them. there was There was youth, but then there was, you know, the different locations where she settled. And I adopted adapted those kind part sections or chapter headings for for the book.
00:19:54
Speaker
um And then within that, of course, I wasn't writing anything at all like what these guys were writing about her because they kind of famously tried to make her a more tame person and, um you know,
00:20:06
Speaker
less of a radical. They wanted her to be a polite more polite woman. Nevertheless, it was such a dramatic story. I said that many people, many women and men were drawn to her life as a model. so i that was the structure that i planned. And I even also had, I knew about this shipwreck, which I'm not hiding that. it come I just talked about in the very beginning of the book, because one of the most thrilling ah documents that i looked at was her diary of her year in Rome, year and a half in Rome, and it had survived the shipwreck. She didn't, but this this journal did. And I you know was so curious to see what a journal that had washed ashore might look like. And amazingly, you know ink can survive, it can dry, it was readable. so So I mentioned that, but I also had a sense of
00:20:56
Speaker
of how, where I wanted the book to end and what quotations I would use. And that was reassuring, I guess. And, you know, the book that, as I said, is 20 years on the Peabody sisters and then seven years in and out of teaching on Margaret Fuller. I guess another thing I wanted to say, i also knew as soon as i I, was lucky in the case of Margaret Fuller that a scholar named Robert Hutzpeth had edited and published all of her letters in six volumes.
00:21:22
Speaker
And i started reading them. I opened the book and I read the first letter and it was Dear Father. Her father her father was a politician and went to Washington ah in the House of Representatives. She was five or six years old writing. and And went to look at the letter, just very, you know, print and kind of wobbling down the page. But here I was reading it these official books. She said, Dear Father, it is a heavy storm. I hope you will not have to come home in it.
00:21:47
Speaker
And I thought, whoa, you know, this is a book about someone who dies in a storm. coming home from Europe. And I thought, you know, this this has to be where the book starts. And and um and I was astonished that no other biography of Margaret Fuller, because there have been many, started that way. And actually, there was someone else working at the same time on a biography of Margaret Fuller who finished their book first. And i looked at the book, I thought, you know, I was sure that that person would start the same place, but they didn't. So, you know, I had a lot of it planned out for me.
00:22:21
Speaker
when I started, not so much so that I was became bored or anything. But and then in the case of Elizabeth Bishop, I again, I knew almost before I started researching, I had a plan, which was ah she as I said, she had a difficult childhood and a and a difficult life as an adult. She she ah was an alcoholic, which she fought against. She had asthma, which really ah very severe asthma, which was not well controlled in those days and not well understood. And, and ah she was very shy. And she also loved women and all of these things made it harder for her to function in a world where, you know, her best friend, Robert Lowell was one of the most famous men of his time and on, ah on the cover of Time magazine and
00:23:14
Speaker
you know, a very public person. She could not be a public person. And she had dark hours. And I wanted a book that would nonetheless convey the great spirit she had that carried her through. So I had come up with a title, which is the title of one of her poems, a sestina, title is um A Miracle for Breakfast. so My book is called Elizabeth Bishop, A Miracle for Breakfast, which conveyed that um sense of wonder that that could come through in many of her poems and that carried her through her life. And that
00:23:52
Speaker
poem, um A Miracle for Breakfast, is in a particular verse form that is now pretty often practiced. In her day, it wasn't. She really made it popular. She wrote two sestinas, one of them just called sestina.
00:24:05
Speaker
This was the first of them. Nobody was doing that much at the time, but so a sestina is ah a poem of six stanzas with six lines each and the end words of each of those first six lines are repeated in a particular order as end words in the next stances. And then there's a last little envoi, it's called of three lines where all six words show up.
00:24:31
Speaker
And I thought, my God, this here's my book structure, I would name my chapters from the end words of a miracle for breakfast, which were balcony, crumb, coffee, river, miracle, and sun.
00:24:47
Speaker
And each of those really spoke to a period in her life. So balcony, this is her first chapter, she's kind of looking out onto the world, and there actually were scenes where she was overlooking something. One really horrible incident from her childhood where her mean uncle with whom she was living hung her over the railing of the balcony in their house in Revere by her hair, you know. So each of these chapters had something, you know, coffee, she's in Key West and she's in Brazil and ah river, she's still in Brazil. All of these things kind of came together. And so, and I knew from the start that I wanted the last
00:25:25
Speaker
sentence of the book to have all those six words. So I was right. I wrote that book in three years. I knew where I was headed. And it was a great pleasure.
00:25:36
Speaker
Part of that that structure and using that as an inspiration, it it ah it gets to this idea of point of view and what you're bringing to a subject, and in particular in particular, like a subject that who may have been written about a lot. And it's like, well, how do you say anything new?
00:25:53
Speaker
you know What are you bringing to the table? And how are you going to imbue new life into someone who maybe we think we know everything there is to know about this person? So like when you have approached the subject who has been written about and how have you come at it from a different angle or just put that put a unique spin on it that is unique to your taste in the prism through which you do your research and your writing?
00:26:18
Speaker
Well, there are a couple of things about that. One is, you know, having been an English major, I'm really drawn to the kind of close reading and close reading of their works and of their own writings and.
00:26:29
Speaker
And so i also I really believe that each person, each biographer comes to the could come to the exact same material and pull out something entirely different from it. But I'm also looking for new things. What can I put out there that nobody has found before?
00:26:45
Speaker
And I've been lucky to find that too in all three of the books. In the case of Elizabeth Bishop, around the time I decided to start writing the book, it turned out that her last partner, Alice Methfessel, had held back. alice Elizabeth died in 1979, guess it was, and and Alice was much younger, didn't die until around, i think, 2011 or so.
00:27:10
Speaker
And shortly after Elizabeth's death, she had sold Elizabeth's papers and drafts and everything, and everybody assumed everything there was to um the archive at Vassar College, where Elizabeth had gone to college. But After her death, it emerged that Alice had saved all the letters that she and Elizabeth had exchanged and some very, ah very confessional letters that Elizabeth had written to her psychoanalyst in the late 1940s.
00:27:38
Speaker
And that's where I found that anecdote about the uncle hanging her over the balcony by her hair. I mean, so there was a lot in those. They were just four letters, but very dense and very confessional as if Maybe then and nobody really knows why she wrote them, but it's as if she's telling the psychoanalysts some key points in her childhood and, and you know, almost doing the analysis by letter, it it seemed. so So I had a lot of new material in that book.
00:28:09
Speaker
Same with Margaret Fuller. I was able, by the the result of a lot of scholarship others had done and in putting all of her magazine journalism, the the letters,
00:28:20
Speaker
home that she wrote to the New York Tribune during ah the Italian Revolution. She had taken a lover there, a younger man who was in the Civic Guard, a part of the revolutionary force, and and become pregnant out of wedlock. And you know nobody really knew exactly how or when this happened, but putting together her letters and these um dispatches, I was able to read into them exactly when she had fall in love and how and where, ah you know, with this younger man in a way that no one had before because of the excellent annotation of these Tribune columns. So that suddenly I knew she was quoting a poem of Shelley's that described two lovers, you know, walking above a city and and and and spending a night together. and and she quotes that just a very brief line from it. But I
00:29:12
Speaker
I looked up the quotation. I saw here, she's really leaving clues, I realized. And in the case of the Peabody sisters, I had also uncovered some romantic secrets. Elizabeth, the oldest who didn't marry, had a a suitor who she had, it was known, she'd written in a letter that he'd found his way out of this world in so dreadful a fashion after she had rejected him. She didn't, I don't know whether she didn't want to marry anyone or she sensed that he was a little bit unhinged He was a you know a Harvard Divinity School student, you know part of one of the promising young men, but ah he wasn't for her. and And not too long after, he went and put a bullet through his brain. But nobody knew who that was or or that about that he put a bullet through his brain until I did a lot of scrounging and finding and figured out who he was. There was only his initials, LB, but...
00:30:07
Speaker
I found he was Lyman buckidster lyman Buckminster. um Anyway, so that's a combination of close reading and and going at the research so so avidly and creatively, I guess, and insistently. I guess another discovery I had in the Peabody Sisters book was ah about a love triangle of the Elizabeth and Sophia both being in love with Nathaniel Hawthorne, which was something that had been rumored endlessly and denied and denied by Elizabeth through her life. She outlived Sophia and Nathaniel by ah several decades.
00:30:43
Speaker
But I found, I won't tell you, anyway, i found some evidence. and But that you know that that kind of curiosity and search is really what kept driving me through the essays in Afterlives. So that the first one, um I've said the title of the book kind of refers to being after writing these lives, but it's also interested I'm also interested in the afterlives of my subject, what goes on with them, you know my own continued interest in them and after thoughts in a way about them. So
00:31:15
Speaker
the first of the essays has that same title, After Lives, and it's about my ongoing fascination with Una Hawthorne, the oldest of the Hawthorne's children, who died at 33, kind of mysteriously. And i won't reveal to you what I found, but I will say that it the little nugget from which this essay began was a chance opportunity when the remains of both Sophia and Una, her daughter Una, who had both of them died in England, were returned, as people thought of it, to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, where Nathaniel was buried and where the family had lived a great deal of their time. um I happened to be invited to a situation where I was allowed to look inside the coffin.
00:32:05
Speaker
You can't ah think of anything more... pleasing, I guess, to a biographer than that they would be able to look in the coffin of their subject. But I did. i mean, it's weird to say that's pleasing, but of course, who wouldn't want to look if they could? And it was you know over 150 years later, there wasn't what you might think, no skeleton. but And I won't tell you what I did fine, because that's in the essay.
00:32:29
Speaker
And it sent me on this hunt for what really might have become of Una Hawthorne. And taking Deadline out of it when do you know you're ready to start writing?
00:32:44
Speaker
Oh, well, um when do I know I'm ready to start writing? People often say it's when they start finding, you know, if you're working biographically, finding the same thing said in different ways by same people, you're not finding any new material.
00:32:59
Speaker
But, and I think there is something to that. But for me, I think maybe it's when the first sentence comes to me in a kind of, you know, surprising moment, I might be going for a walk or that was very true of these essays.
00:33:18
Speaker
They began with a a nugget of, you know, what I might want to write about. One of them is about objects and what objects mean to us and how they can be used in writing history and and and memoir.
00:33:33
Speaker
And of i was thinking about this thing, this ice pick that had belonged to my dad and and other things, you know, but, and I was reading a lot about the, the um you know, what sociologists and art historians and historians say about the meaning of objects.
00:33:51
Speaker
in people's lives, anthropologists. But then suddenly a line came to me and I knew that's when I was ready to write and I would start writing and all this research I would do, you know, um would fall into place somewhere.
00:34:07
Speaker
And that line was, I said, why do I keep it? That was really, you know, why do I keep it? I asked myself each morning, why do I keep a wooden handled ice pick on my kitchen windowsill?
00:34:18
Speaker
It's tarnished prong thrust into an ancient wine cork for safety's sake. Anyway, I won't go on from there, but it's the line the line comes to me. And then, you know, I i work in and, revise a lot as I'm going forward. And,
00:34:34
Speaker
take walks and more lines come to me and I try to remember them as I'm walking home. Yeah, the and and in that essay, there was one little passage I had highlighted. you know it was about these ah these portable desks. and But you're you're speaking to it having these objects into like to give things you know life and words. and like Embedded in that is just how you can take this little thing as a springboard and follow that.
00:35:01
Speaker
It's amazing the if you allow it to take you wherever it's going to take you, the kind of journey it'll take you on, like from the ice pick to... where the essay took you. it's It's kind of invigorating when you allow it to... when you when you ride the current of that.
00:35:16
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, I think that is you know maybe the very definition of creative nonfiction, which I don't necessarily... consider, although they are created, they are, you know, works of the imagination, but my biographies, I, I tend to less, I wouldn't necessarily categorize them as creative nonfiction, although perhaps the Bishop one, because it's got this memoir aspect, but yeah, the, the essay that follows, well, it's something that Bishop's also said about her poem. She wanted the poem to reproduce the mind in the act of thinking.
00:35:55
Speaker
And um that's kind of what essays often do. As I said, I teach the essay, the personal essay, and I've read many of them, but um because I'm putting my own passion for history in them. Mine, I think, are are rather different from ones you might find. and And they're meant to give the reader the sense, which we all should be aware of, that we're living in history as it's being made. We're living with history, carrying our history with us. And I think that's part of what I'm trying to give the reader as well, a sense of ah a place in the world, a place in in time.
00:36:35
Speaker
Well, yeah, there's a moment in in the book, too, and it seems all the more prescient, especially, yeah I think it yesterday, an executive order to make a patriotic education standard in k through twelve in Something you wrote where, know, it's just, ah you know, but they also brought to life the man in the photograph that's in your grandfather essay. but And it said it reminded me how much we lose when we turn away from the past.
00:37:01
Speaker
And that just seems like yeah that's what they want to do is turn turn away from the past that might might be ugly. And I think that good biography and good history, like cast our gaze back into and then reflected into a modern context so we can best learn or be inspired and chart a better path. And i wonder, yeah, just like how how you how you're thinking about that when you cast your eyes backward and to try to learn from things in the past.
00:37:28
Speaker
you You say that very well. So thank you, everybody. Remember what Brendan said. But, you know, I think I was searching, too, for for a past. And one of the essays I'm particularly um proud of having written, because it's a it's writing that I had wanted to do pretty much my entire adult life, um is a kind of a tribute to my high school classmate, Jonathan Jackson, who was the younger brother of George Jackson.
00:38:03
Speaker
People might know of the Soledad brothers. They certainly know of Angela Davis and her arrest after this terrible shootout in the Marin County courthouse that was provoked by my classmate, Jonathan, at age 17, who had a plan, he thought, to ah rescue his brother who had been wrongly imprisoned for 10 years and then seemingly wrongly implicated in the murder of a prison guard.
00:38:32
Speaker
And Angela Davis had fallen in love with him even though just across the courtroom. So Jonathan gets kind of lost in these stories.
00:38:43
Speaker
And I wanted to bring to life that time 1969 and and when um you know the world seemed to be falling apart for all of us, but there we were in high school. I mean, it was the the peak of the Vietnam War and the protests and you know the the assassinations in 68 and the rise of the ah Black Panther Party and the murders of Black Panthers.
00:39:12
Speaker
Into this came 17-year-old Jonathan and his love for his brother, who he'd not seen at home since Jonathan was five. They'd visited him certainly in prison, the family had. But you know his radicalization, both through corresponding with his brother um and seeing what there was around him. the high school we attended was a new school built um with the intention of having ah an integrated school in the and the city of Pasadena, which is quite um segregated
00:39:47
Speaker
by in terms of neighborhoods, as is true of so many larger cities, and the school system had become very segregated as a result of that. though Of course, but the zoning and codes and all those sorts, you know how this happens and how wrong it is.
00:40:11
Speaker
And there were, after Brown versus Board of Education, there were Pasadena was one of the first cities outside the South where there was um there were suits brought against the city of Pasadena to desegregate the schools. And I think in an effort to head off the busing decision that did anyway in the early seventies, they had built this new high school that I think opened in the 1964 or so where it was an integrated high school. And although not all classes were integrated, there was still ah real sense of community spirit. And, you know, the, the homecoming queen was often a black girl and,
00:40:53
Speaker
We were proud of Blair High School and its integrationist spirit, and yet it wasn't perfect by any means.
00:41:04
Speaker
And Jonathan saw that and began writing about it in the student underground newspaper, which of course wasn't allowed to be distributed on campus, but it was all the more popular for that reason.
00:41:16
Speaker
um So I don't wanna go into, don't wanna spoil what, what is the meat of that essay, which is called Free for a While. That's what Jonathan's brother George wrote about Jonathan after his death. He said maybe he was free for a while in that moment that he took charge of the courtroom, having brought in weapons and taken hostages and freed the black prisoners who were on trial and brought them in on his misguided
00:41:47
Speaker
plan, but maybe he was free for a while, which is more than most of us can say is what George said um in the introduction to his book, Soledad Brother, his book of prison letters, which is still widely read to this day. And then George himself was dead within a year that.
00:42:08
Speaker
um So it's it's an American tragedy and one that I think people need to know more about and not forget and think about what it's like to be ah person with a sibling in jail your entire life for, you know, just being part of a holdup of a gas station for $70. Yeah.
00:42:30
Speaker
yeah In biography also, and this is something I kind of wrestled with, with, ah with my subject, kind of the, the ethics of, of, of it with, um, where it feels like maybe you're being, as as the writer or the journalist, being kind of exploitative, like in a Janet Malcomy kind of way.
00:42:47
Speaker
And and i wonder for you, just a a lot of lot of the subjects you you wrote about have have had passed or had long passed, and so maybe it doesn't feel as, maybe as thorny, but in some in some level, as the writer, you know we we stand to benefit from publishing these books, and we can reason ah the value and the utility of it, which,
00:43:09
Speaker
I could do that all day long, and I'm sure you can too. ah But I wonder to what extent you you wrestle with the the ethics of writing biography and certainly unauthorized biography. Yeah, well, it's a very a tricky question, I think. And i i had not, you know, as I said, I'd always thought I wanted to write about Jonathan because I think, you know, some part of me as a writer was made in that moment, a sense of being next to important history. And I don't want to give anything away, but some of the most important writing I learned
00:43:44
Speaker
or the first time I wrote something that had a slight bit of impact, it was was um as a result of of what was going on in our high school then.
00:43:56
Speaker
You know, i wasn't I wasn't ready. I didn't understand enough to do it. um And in truth, a ah a woman I mentioned, a scholar, Karen Stanford,
00:44:07
Speaker
got in touch with me this was during the pandemic and she teaches at Cal State Northridge and is a historian of the Black Panthers in Los Angeles. And she she had been teaching about Jonathan to her class and called me and she said, you know,
00:44:27
Speaker
did I think there was a book in this? And would I help her contact Jonathan's classmates, which I did. And in talking with her, I began to realize that I, this story I had wanted to tell, i did want to tell it. And she encouraged me very much to do it. And I said, you know, why should I do it?
00:44:45
Speaker
yeah I left Pasadena. I, you know, and she said, well, you're the one who can do it. And so I took that to heart. And there are a few people that are mentioned by name in the essay that I spoke to while I was researching it, and I wanted to give them credit for their help.
00:45:03
Speaker
And they have read it and their their names are there, but mostly people go unnamed in my in my essays, people who are still living. over the Over the years and ah all the the research ah that you do in hunkering down in archives and and everything, you know ah for anyone doing even like really good reported essay and certainly biography, needs to have a good system of indexing this stuff so you can access it, so you can cite it accordingly, and then you know where to find information to fact check yourself or to have a fact checker come in if you're if we're so blessed to have that
00:45:40
Speaker
ah So for you, how how do you organize your material so it's best so you can access it um as seamlessly as possible? Well, it's been a bit different for each book. And, you know, the Peabody Sisters was done before there were portable computers or, you know, even...
00:45:59
Speaker
yeah i just I guess I was writing on a desktop computer, but um it has changed over time. But I would say, however it is, you store the material you get. I always store it as I found it, you know, initially. So that, say, for the Elizabeth Bishop book, I i um went to the archive at Vassar, and they have a wonderful policy, which, ah well, I was speeded up in that partly because she typed, you know. I can read these things rather than handwritten, but they were very willing to photocopy.
00:46:30
Speaker
ah They don't let people actually look at the originals. They are photocopies anyway. And so they don't mind photocopying photocopies for a certain not very large price. And so I kind of reproduce the archive in my own office and I reproduce it as it is in the library with the same code numbers for each file.
00:46:49
Speaker
and And then I will make a kind of secondary organization where I take the the bits that are important to me and put them in a kind of chronological file so that I can piece things together. But I always make sure that I carry with that piece, you know, the information about where it came from so I can go back and check the quotation and make sure I got it right.
00:47:12
Speaker
It is an important point. But you know what you're saying about this reminds me of the great liberation I felt when I had a semester in Kyoto as a visiting professor in 2017. And that's one of the earliest essays that I wrote.
00:47:32
Speaker
It's in the book um called Without, although it appears appears near the end of the book, I had written these three books and I got there to Kyoto where i had, you know, a sort of i don't know if you had like a junior year abroad or a semester abroad. I never did in college.
00:47:47
Speaker
I never did. I wish I did. Yeah. But yeah, i'd always wanted to live. abroad somewhere, you know, see what it was really like to live in another place. And I would never have necessarily chosen Kyoto.
00:48:00
Speaker
But as it turns out, the Japanese American lit scholars really love the transcendentalists. And so they wanted me to come and talk to them about, you know, transcendentalism in the US.
00:48:12
Speaker
I didn't know anything at all about Japan, but I got there, I had written these three books, and I just didn't want to read. I didn't want, you know, and I was in this place that was just a feast for the eyes.
00:48:24
Speaker
And that's some of what's in that ah essay, which ah goes a little bit dark in certain ways, because it's when I'm thinking about, ah it's the situation of the essay is recalling being in Kyoto during the pandemic and the year after my partner died. And And um thinking about that time in Kyoto, where I was in a way quite radically isolated because I didn't know the language, I couldn't read anything, and and the professors I was working with initially weren't even on campus. I had arrived without knowing it a month before the semester began in Japan. Semesters run from
00:49:03
Speaker
I think April through August and then October through January. So, so I'd come, I thought, you know, I'll be there at the beginning of the semester. I'll come September 1st, but there was nothing going on. So I really explored by myself and, and experienced this kind of solitude that once there I was living alone and the pandemic came and we were so isolated. It it reminded me of that. And I was kind of,
00:49:30
Speaker
thrown back to that time in Kyoto and the resources I began to develop in myself in part by studying, ah ah not studying because I was just not reading very much, but there was a wonderful 12th century Buddhist monk named Kamono Chome who'd written a book about retreating ah from the court life and establishing himself up in the wilds above Kyoto in a little hut, very much the way Thoreau did. And that was how I even knew about this person, because I'd heard about him through a Thoreau Society meeting. And it turned out he had, you know, lived in Kyoto, there was a replica of his hut in a temple on the temple grounds, not far from Kyoto University, where I was stationed, and and there was the hut site. and So it's sort of like going to Walden Pond, you can see that the yeah the replica of Thoreau's cabin right by the parking lot. And then you can
00:50:25
Speaker
walk over and see where the cabin actually was. And and Kyoto was much farther, much much greater distance between the replica and the hut site, which was really a very wild place.
00:50:37
Speaker
But anyway, i I think that that, period of great luxury where i there were i i wasn't there wasn't too much expected of me in this in this guest professorship.
00:50:51
Speaker
I made so much out of that experience and most of it was outdoors or without you know without certain things, but in the great outside.
00:51:02
Speaker
Oh, that's wonderful. Well, well Megan, as we yeah kind of coming closer to the end of our time, I love to end these conversations by um asking the guests, you in this case, for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. And that can just be you know anything you're excited about. it It could be a book, but it could be a brand of coffee or a certain brand of socks you really like. So it's totally up to you. Oh, and let me, you know, I'm just going to get my, um I have a couple of books.
00:51:28
Speaker
i thought i'm like and sure um although gosh i do like um certain brands of i have to confess ever since i was pregnant with my last second child and the last child i have been a decaf drinker the intelligentsia coffee down the street from me has a 10 or 20% off on coffee beans on Tuesdays. to Make sure to get their house blend decaf beans there whenever I can. um
00:52:04
Speaker
So, but there are a couple of books that I wanted to mention. um First, Because this is creative nonfiction, I'm so proud of two of my students who have published books recently.
00:52:18
Speaker
And one is Kim Liao, L-I-A-O, a book called Where Every Ghost Has a Name, a Memoir of Taiwanese Independence.
00:52:29
Speaker
She started working on this book. when she was in my archival research class. And I guess it's just a fabulous family memoir trying to figure out about her grandfather, who no one spoke about, but had been a leader in the Taiwanese independence movement. And she just determined her her grandmother, her father's mother, um left the idealistic but very dangerous situation of the marriage that she was in and raised her children in the US and and Kim grew up in the US, s but she'd never understood what was the story of this grandfather and of the whole Taiwanese independence movement. i mean, he had been the president of Taiwan in absentia um and a horrible massacres. and
00:53:17
Speaker
i don't know I learned so much from it and she narrates it so well as a you know trip. I think she had a Fulbright to go to Taiwan and and she found people who ah helped her out. and It was a real hidden history that she uncovered in this book, where every ghost has a name.
00:53:35
Speaker
and Then another student, Nicole Grave Lipson, L-I-P-S-O-N. Her book is of essays is coming out in March, so very soon. It's called Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, a memoir in essays. And she's just ah such a close observer of the challenges and gifts of of raising children and trying to retain a sense of of um autonomy and an intellectual life while engaging children.
00:54:08
Speaker
with younger children. and And most of the essays are kind of infused with some literary, so a particular book or Shakespeare play. So it's it's a great, a lot of fun to read that book and I'm very excited for it. And then I just want to mention three ah biographies that are coming out in the next summer and fall.
00:54:28
Speaker
that I'm really looking forward to. There's Nicholas Boggs has a biography of James Baldwin. oh wow Carla Kaplan has a biography of Jessica Mitford and Lance Richardson, a biography of Peter Matheson. So I'm really looking forward to these big books by ah you know wonderful biographers who've spent you know, in some cases, decades, in some cases, only nine years.
00:54:54
Speaker
these books um And I think go read a biography and and make a long haul journalist long haul nonfiction writer happy.
00:55:07
Speaker
Oh my God, that that is such a perfect term, like a long haul journalist for a biography. I think that is that is perfect. ah My dear friend and mentor, Madeline Blaze, out at UMass Amherst. um yeah yeah Do you know Maddie?
00:55:22
Speaker
I don't know her, but I know how adored she is by students. And and she's such a fine writer. She wrote about the basketball team. is that Yeah. In These Girls, Hope is a Muscle. Yes. What an important book. Yeah. And her most recent book, which ah just came out in paperback last year, is a biography on the kind of a forgotten tennis legend in Alice Marble called Queen of the Court.
00:55:44
Speaker
And um in ah in it, where yeah Maddie, when she was she and I were speaking about it, you know she called biography the most brazen of genres because we we seek to resurrect a life. And I really loved how she put that. i was like, yeah, it is a brazen genre and it's a damn damn fine one to traffic in.
00:56:01
Speaker
Yep. Well, we do the best we can. and um And I think you're right to call it creative nonfiction biography because of that ah very, the hubris that's involved bringing someone back into the world and sometimes they are people not all that well known and that's all the more ah miraculous oh for sure well well Megan this was this was wonderful to get to talk a little shop and and hear how you think about ah writing and biography and certainly this ah wonderful collection of essays and afterlives so just thank you so much for carving out the time to come on the show and thanks for your great questions too
00:56:48
Speaker
Thanks to Megan for coming on the podcast and talking biography with this budding biographer over here. And if you're thinking of pre-ordering the front runner, go and do it friend. We're less than two months away from pub day.
00:57:02
Speaker
Also, the deletion of all my meta properties is imminent after this book push. So if you want to know what's what, bookmark brendanamara.com for hot blogs and other stuff.
00:57:16
Speaker
And sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletter. the month That's monthly. And then there's the weekly Podstack, creative nonfictionpodcast.substack.com that comes out with every single podcast.
00:57:30
Speaker
If you're listening to this on Friday, I flew into Boston last night. One hopes I landed safely and didn't meet the same callous, tragic, and avoidable fate of the Flyers from a couple months ago.
00:57:41
Speaker
Part of me, hardcore, wanted to cancel on making this trip. but But I'm taking the chance, or took the chance. don't Depends. Pick your tents. so Must be damned. My flight numbers are DL 4149 and you any of those numbers in the news in the next 24 hours,
00:57:57
Speaker
so if you hear any of those numbers in the news in the next twenty four hours Don't expect a podcast next week. With apologies to Amanda Heckert, Yishun Lai, Maggie Messick, Megan Baxter, John O'Connor, John Gliana, for their episodes that are in the can and won't be produced.
00:58:16
Speaker
ah Throw Debbie Millman in there, too, because shell that her her interview will be in the can. And ah Nick Palmgarten is scheduled in a couple weeks or next week. And i won't be there.
00:58:29
Speaker
if If this plane goes down, i i won't be there. It's not my fault. Please don't be mad at me. I have a nice long layover or had a nice long life or, you know, whatever. Don't worry about it.
00:58:40
Speaker
Seattle. And I love that airport. And I love my little Eugene Airport, too. It's the best. And flying east is always easier than west. You get a nice little tailwind. Time-wise, at least, you get a... It's far easier.
00:58:53
Speaker
About two weeks ago, I had Instagram, that thing, on my phone for pod purposes. But as is always the case, if it's on my phone, I will mindlessly open it, click on three stories at the top, close it, repeat 7,000 times, give or take.
00:59:06
Speaker
But what was really troubling was when I scrolled down a few squares... I was met with a string of meta AI bot profiles, if you want to call it that.
00:59:18
Speaker
The first, a very Republican-looking, boomer-age white male, think Tommy Tuberville, in a suit with an American flag tie. And this AI asked if I wanted to talk about conservative politics.
00:59:32
Speaker
I was like, what the fuck is going on? It gets weirder. Beside that, think about how like profiles they like suggest you follow. It's kind of like in that line where it goes horizontal.
00:59:42
Speaker
So beside that is a sexy image of a blonde and aviators with a bulletproof vest on, some tactical gear, toting a pistol, just wondering if I'd like to talk, you know. Maybe about certain unalienable rights.
00:59:55
Speaker
There was another sexy lady who looked like she was about to head to the shooting range, you know, but after a day at the spa. I deleted it from my phone immediately. I should have taken screen stars screenshots for posterity's sake and just to share because it was absurd.
01:00:12
Speaker
But I was troubled by what the algorithm thought of me or what it was trying to bait me into and what it no doubt is baiting millions if not billions of people into. Yeah, then of course, what's making the rounds this week was all of our books in LibGen being used by Meta to teach its AI how to be human or whatever the hell it's doing.
01:00:32
Speaker
So yeah, six weeks in Saratoga was there. Joke's on you, Meta. Horse racing's dead. But in all seriousness, these fuckers need to burn. I don't mean that literally, but this shit has gone on long enough.
01:00:45
Speaker
So the podcast feed on Instagram, at Creative Nonfiction Podcast for now, ah just eclipsed 1,000 followers, which took a long time to accrue because I'm not on there a lot, and I don't i don't spend a ton of time there. But so the fact that it's not insignificant.
01:01:02
Speaker
And I post about the podcast and unless the guest shares with their followers, maybe 10% of my audience sees anything. I used to get decent traction in stories, but now maybe it's like 15 or 16 impressions.
01:01:16
Speaker
So even if people like what I post, the the math is still absurd. It's like barely more than 1% of my entire audience even sees it.
01:01:28
Speaker
This is why we can't build an audience on these terrible platforms. They're not serving us. And think of how much time we waste or we have wasted, and most likely will waste, trying to reach people we hope to serve with our work on these platforms that don't have our best interests at heart.
01:01:46
Speaker
That's why I hope you'll, if you haven't already, you know subscribe to my two newsletter lists, The Rager being my favorite. It's monthly, first of the month, no spam can't beat it. ah The other has its value too, creativenonfictionpodcast.substack.com if you want transcripts and such.
01:02:02
Speaker
For now, we can rely on email. If you kindly provide me with your email address, you get my email newsletter on the first of the month for the rager. And with every new pod for the pod stack, it arrives in your inbox at the time of sending.
01:02:17
Speaker
No algorithm, though it might get sorted into spam or promotion folders or whatever. But that's an easy fix.
Social Media Algorithms Rant
01:02:25
Speaker
But it's not like... the algorithms are deciding what emails you see and what emails you don't see.
01:02:33
Speaker
You get them all. At least for now. Who knows? I don't trust anyone anymore. It's why I'm doing quarterly live podcasts. Because the only way these gilded age motherfuckers win is if we allow it.
01:02:44
Speaker
Don't let the fact that you share family pictures keep you on these platforms. Like create a fucking website. Or a group thread. Group text thread. or something.
01:02:56
Speaker
You know, these people are evil. and For too long we've given them everything, and they've given us what? Network effect? And a network effect that they have slowly eroded away to nearly nothing? Fuck them.
01:03:09
Speaker
This is how we rage against the algorithm, man. But doing things in person? By doing things the slow way? By building trust? It's difficult. It's frustratingly slow. But in the long run it is best.
01:03:21
Speaker
I'll do my part to rage. I hope you'll do yours. So stay wild, CNFers. If you can't do, interview. See ya.