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Episode 140—James Carl Nelson on What It Takes to be a Writer, Jumping into the Action, and ‘The Polar Bear Expedition’
146 Plays6 years ago
“If you’re gonna be a writer, you gotta sweat,” says James Carl Nelson. James Carl Nelson, author of The Polar Bear Expedition: The Heroes of America’s Forgotten Invasion of Russia, 1918-1919, came by the show. The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to badass writers, filmmakers, and producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. It’s here we learn how they became the artists they are, the struggles they deal with, and the routines that allow them to get the work done, so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. Let’s keep the conversation going on Twitter. Tag me and the show @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod to let me know what you liked. And head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes to this show and the previous 139 shows and to subscribe to my monthly newsletter. I share my book recommendations and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. You don’t want to miss out. Once a month. No spam. Can’t beat it.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey there, CNFers. What is going on? You fired up? Guess who this is? If you're gonna be a writer, you know, you gotta, you gotta sweat. You gotta write. If you guessed James Carl Nelson, you are correct. He is the author of the Polar Bear Expedition, the heroes of America's forgotten invasion of Russia, 1918 to 1919. I love it, baby. Ooh!
00:00:31
Speaker
Alright, okay, here we are. We here at HQ are the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I talk to badass writers, filmmakers, and producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. It's here we learn how they became the artists they are, the struggles they deal with, and the routines that allow them to get the work done. So you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. Add to Cartman.
00:01:00
Speaker
Well, that's it. It's that simple. Well, a little housekeeping, of course. I mean, you know the drill by now. Go and subscribe to the show at Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher. And share this across your platforms. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever.
00:01:18
Speaker
That's really more valuable than anything. You handing it off to somebody else. Be sure to tag the show on Twitter at cnfpod and I'll happily give you a fist bump or some head banging devil horns. You can leave a review on iTunes. I'm not going to scoff at that. If you like and even email the show creative nonfiction podcast at gmail.com and let me know what you liked. Now let's read a fan email. This is this is what happens sometimes if you send an email.
00:01:49
Speaker
Okay, nobody emailed this week. The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Goucher College's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction. Hey, I went there. The Goucher MFA
Influence of Family on Nelson's Work
00:02:00
Speaker
is a two year limited residency program. Students enjoy summer and winter residencies and intense workshops where you hone your craft with accomplished mentors who have pulled surprises and best selling books to their names. The program boasts a great student and alumni network.
00:02:18
Speaker
and its students and faculty have published 140 books and counting. You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry. Visit goucher.edu slash MFA for more information. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published and Goucher's MFA program for creative non-fiction.
00:02:44
Speaker
I did it. I went there. Great stuff. So yes, James Carl Nelson is here. And he's made his bones with four bucks now on World War I. World
From Journalist to Author
00:03:00
Speaker
War I, of course, is now starting to come out of World War II's shadow. All war is horrific, but World War I was particularly heinous. Its greatest failure was that it was supposed to be the war that end all wars.
00:03:14
Speaker
Nope, that didn't happen, certainly did not. James is also the author of I Will Hold, the story of USMC legend Clifton B. Cates, From Bellawood to Victory in the Great War. Five lieutenants, the heartbreaking story of five Harvard men who led America to victory in World War I.
00:03:37
Speaker
in the remains of Company D, a story of the Great War. He received the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation's Colonel Joseph Alexander, I want to say Alexandra because of the Saratoga book and I'm just so conditioned to say Alexandra, Colonel Joseph Alexander Award for Biography in 2017
Crafting Stories with Historical Research
00:04:00
Speaker
and is a former staff writer for the Miami Herald. He's a Chicago Bears fan.
00:04:06
Speaker
One more thing. Be sure to stay tuned to the end of the show where I have an exciting offer to make. I'm not kidding. There is an offer. It's a raffle of sorts, but you're going to have to listen. You're gonna have to listen through the entire show. All right. I'm a bit tired of talking right now, so it's time for James Carl Nelson, baby. Episode 140. Woo!
00:04:31
Speaker
Did you have like a lot of people who become writers a penchant for the written word and just love stories growing up? Yeah, you know, it was I tell people it's the only thing I've really been able to do fairly well. So yeah, I'm terrible. I'm terrible math outside of the natural sciences. I haven't just lost. So it was something I could always do. I was I was seven years old. I was ripping off these how and why books about the Revolutionary War.
00:05:00
Speaker
Civil War, and I was writing and illustrating these books. I still have them. It's pretty funny. So to be where I am now, it's kind of like, you know, show me the boy at seven. You know what I mean? So
00:05:12
Speaker
And what do you, I know your grandfather was a World War I veteran as well, and that really pulled you into writing about military stuff in a very detailed and wonderful way. But I wonder, was history always something you were gravitating towards as a young person? Yeah, I think I've always been interested in, especially in military history. I grew up
00:05:37
Speaker
in the 60s. And by the time I was 18, it was like, you know, the Vietnam War was winding down. And I was a hippie by then. And I was against war and stuff. So so the chances that I was actually gonna go, we're not going to work out. But when I was seven, I was making plans to go to West Point. So things change, things change in between there. But I've always had a strong history,
Challenges in Writing Historical Narratives
00:06:00
Speaker
interest in history. And my grandfather's story, just
00:06:05
Speaker
drew stronger and stronger inside of me. He died in 1993 and intervening 10 years after that, I just got very, very curious about exactly what had happened to him, because he had been shot when he was 26 and lived to be 101 and had a very sketchy story about it. I see so many people now trying to figure out what their great uncle did, their grandfather, this has become kind of a genre, you know? So I was glad I could kind of jump in and sort of
00:06:33
Speaker
in some ways, getting on the ground floor on those stories.
00:06:38
Speaker
And as you were developing as a writer, you know, saying that this is kind of the one thing you had a talent for as a maybe in high school and even college, what was it about maybe getting into journalism or any form of writing that appealed to you in that way? And maybe who were you reading at the time too that kind of influenced you and as you took on this this craft?
00:07:04
Speaker
Yeah, you know, in high school I had a thing for the beats, Karowak, Hemingway, Faulkner especially. I took a short story class and it was reading, but one of the assignments was he had to write a short story. And I wrote a short story kind of modeled after Faulkner's The Bear as it turned out, which I never even read, but my instructor pointed it out. And there's like 25 kids in the class and
00:07:31
Speaker
He hands him back, blah, blah. Of course, I got an A. And he goes, of all the people in the class, he goes, you should read Nelson's story sometime. It's pretty good. And I was just like, wow, this is really great. I just love that. But then I kind of got lost in between there. I was thinking journalism, but then everybody was going to journalism school because of Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein. So for a while there, I was lost.
00:07:55
Speaker
I worked for my dad as a painter, as a paper hanger. I knocked around. And then finally came
Publishing and the Evolution of WWI Literature
00:08:00
Speaker
back. I got one year of school, University of Maine at Fort Kent. And it wasn't until I was 24 that I decided, hey, duh, journalism. I was just kind of like, why wasn't I thinking about this? Because I went back to school when I was 23. And from that time on, then my goal became to write for the Minnesota Daily, the University of Minnesota newspaper. And I got on there. I became an editor.
00:08:24
Speaker
And then I got hired right out of school at the Miami Herald, went to the Key West Bureau for a year. So it was kind of a, once I figured out what to do, it was kind of a natural progression. And so I've been writing for 35 years now and I always wanted to write a book. I was like, do I have a book in me? Could I write a book? And turns out I have four so far. So kind of cute, you know.
00:08:50
Speaker
And since you worked at the Miami Herald in the 80s there and beyond, do you know Mike Capuzzo by
Highlighting Overlooked WWI Narratives
00:09:00
Speaker
any chance? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I know Mike. Yeah, he's a good friend of mine. Oh, is he OK? I've got his book right here. We're Facebook friends. Yeah. He had been in the keys bureau before me, maybe a year or two before. So we actually met down there. He came back down for he had been moved to Palm Beach, but he came back down.
00:09:19
Speaker
In fact, I interviewed Mike, you know, his book Close to Shore in 2001. He was like a best seller. And I think he just optioned that for a movie finally. And I, you know, when I was first trying to get my first book published, I was like,
00:09:36
Speaker
Can you read this and give me a blurb? And he's like, well, I'm really busy with my own stuff. But he's an elegant writer. He's a great writer. Yeah. And how about Madeline Blaze? Did you overlap with her at all? I didn't. I know she's a great writer. He used to read her stuff. I mean, I interact a little bit with Dave Barry, Edna Buchanan, Kyle Hyacin.
00:09:58
Speaker
It was a real golden era for the
Engaging with the Audience
00:10:00
Speaker
Miami Herald, early 80s, early mid 80s. Some great people there that Fred Hyatt, I think, has amazing talent they had.
00:10:10
Speaker
And being in a great era for newspapers and being at a great paper that valued good reporting and great storytelling, how did you develop there and develop and improve as a writer once you got on that beat? Well, I think the secret to becoming a writer is to write, then write some more.
00:10:39
Speaker
You know, I think I do have, because of my background, I think my writing is sometimes kind of journalistic, kind of newspaper type writing, more as opposed to I don't know, maybe somebody who's got it comes from a different slant, more classical writing. But yeah, I've just I just I always tell people, you know, I'm just a storyteller, you know, I don't consider myself anything more than that.
00:11:04
Speaker
But so I think, you know, really, once you've been writing, you've been writing, it occurred to me, I wrote a knockoff little book for my company back, I think, in the early 2000s. And it was about Tom Cruise or somebody. And then I wrote a book about some medical kind of things. And I said, you know what, I could write a book because I just did, you know, it was not like a best seller or anything. But it's kind of like, you start from A,
00:11:30
Speaker
go to B and then Z and you're done with your book. And I said, wow, I could write a book. And that's where I really started formulating my first book that remains a company D thinking, can I research and tell my grandfather's story of his unit? And it took about six years of researching and writing before I actually sat down and wrote it. And then I wrote it again. And then I wanted to get an agent and I got lucky and I got Jim Hornfisher, who was like the premier
00:12:00
Speaker
agent for military nonfiction and general nonfiction. So I think it's just a process. I knew that. I always knew that. If you're going to be a writer, you got to sweat. You got to write. And I think my newspaper career engendered that because I had to write every day. And I think you just get better and better.
00:12:24
Speaker
Yeah, there's a great quote that you said that kind of echoes exactly what you just said, and this is when your company D-book came out. You said, my experience as a journalist was invaluable in putting the book together. I've been writing every day for more than 25 years, so the storytelling is just second nature to me.
00:12:43
Speaker
And I had to be persistent and know the right questions to ask while researching the book. I was also able to parlay some hunches into some big scores regarding source material, which is probably a reflection of my journalistic background. So I think that what you said there kind of echoes that very dogmatic way, that very repartorial, like that reporter bulldog mentality, but also a sensibility to ask the right questions and do the research and do the work.
00:13:09
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's exactly true. And I mean, I was, you know, I didn't even know where to start. You know, and I just got little clues here and there. Oh, they have records of this stuff. The National Archives. Oh, wow. And so it was a it was a baby step process at first. And I noticed that they had these things called burial files for all the men. And they were at the National Archives. They're now in St. Louis at the National Personal Records Center, but they're invaluable.
00:13:37
Speaker
You know, people write letters and things like that. And they're all in these files. And I said, that's a great place to start. So I pulled like 125 burial files. And those told more of a story almost than anybody who had survived as I write in the book.
00:13:53
Speaker
People came home from the war, they didn't talk about it, but people who died, people remembered them, they wrote about them, whatever. They saved their letters, it was more common. So yeah, just little things like that, pulling it from all different places and searching for context. And then having to learn the war. I mean, just having to research, what am I writing about? What's the larger context here? The Battle of Cantini, what really went on there? And I wanted to write the best account of Cantini that I could,
00:14:21
Speaker
Matt Davenport now has come out with a really good book about it too, just sent it right on that. And then so I saw where my grandfather was shot. I want to do a great job on that. So I mean, I had a ball, I'll be honest. Yeah, it was just a as a labor of love.
00:14:36
Speaker
worked out, I was able to get an agent and sell it and get it published. And I was just like, uh, it was a dream come true. I mean, uh, seriously, it's always going to be my baby. That first book. And when you first started out as a reporter, what were, what would you identify as maybe some of your growing pains as a reporter, uh, on that beat? And how did you work through that to become the reporter and the writer that you are? Well, you know, I was totally really, when I think about, I was at the year and a half,
00:15:05
Speaker
at the Minnesota Daily as a student journalist. That's not really much experience. I mean, things move so quickly there. Like I said, within six months, I was an editor. It was just a turnover. When I got to Miami Herald, I started on an internship in the Keys Bureau, Key West, just me and another person, Patty Shillington. I had a lot to learn. I had to learn
00:15:25
Speaker
You go down to the cop station and you pull the reports every morning, you go to the court, you do tort checks, interacting with people. I had some episodes where people were really put out by what I'd written, how I'd done something. That too, like the writing aspect, is just a real learning process. You mess up, you try not to mess up too much, but you do, everybody does, and then you learn from that.
00:15:53
Speaker
Did you have a trusted editor who even those times when you might mess up or have a misstep would, you know, metaphorically put his arm around you or her arm around you and just be like, all right, all right, James, like, this is what you did, but let's, you know, keep going, though. You know, you've got got a knack for it, but let's, you know, just, you know, fix this, but keep going. You're doing the right thing. Yeah, I have one. His name is John Wolin. And
00:16:19
Speaker
as when I was transferred back up to Miami, a suburban bureau up there. And he was like, you're going to be my writer. I mean, he saw something in me. That's great. And he would encourage me. So I did have that. When I was in the keys bureau and I just started right out of school, it's, you know, you're 150 miles from Miami. That's where your editors are. So I was pretty much on your own and it was sink or swim. So, but that was a good experience too. But it was nice to get a little more hands on once I got to Miami, you know?
00:16:48
Speaker
And at what point in, as a journalist and as a reporter down there, did the book bug start to kind of worm its way into your head as something you wanted to do and exercise, you know, your creativity in that way? Like I said, when I finally did sit down and just write sort of a knockoff trade little paperback, a couple of them actually, and learned that I could
00:17:14
Speaker
I could write. And I always wanted to do something with my grandfather's story. It was always that was what was in the back of my head of just telling that story and finding out like a like a detective story, what happened and who were these, you know, and I started researching that a little bit. And I wrote away to the First Division Museum in Wheaton, Illinois. And they sent me this muster roll after a month and all these names on him on this muster roll that surrounded his. And I was like, wow, he never talked about any of these guys at all. I wonder what these guys were. So that's where
00:17:44
Speaker
I said, okay, you know what, I think there might be a book in this. And sure enough, there was a first book haul I made to one of the descendants of a guy who had disappeared. I said, you know, you ever heard of a guy named Roland Livak? And the guy goes, you mean Uncle Raleigh? And they had a whole box full of stuff. I said, yeah, it was a slow process of getting the book together, the research. But I just said, that was a sign that this could be a book. So yeah,
00:18:12
Speaker
And that was like, that was in like 2003, I really earnestly started researching it. Yeah. And you've covered so many sort of Titanic events of the last 25 years or so to Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine shooting, Unabomber, so many things like that. And they're so such big stories and big events. So how did you over time develop
00:18:41
Speaker
develop the muscle to be able to cover that stuff. Those are so big, and it's overwhelming to think about it. But how did you approach that, and how did you come out of that a better reporter and writer? Well, you know what? You just have to—I had an early reporting instructor at the U of M who said, you know what? If you're going to be shy, you can't be a journalist or a reporter. It's just not going to work. And I always remembered that.
00:19:08
Speaker
Just sort of like you just I'm not naturally super outgoing I am more now than I used to be Sometimes it's hard for me to just approach strangers and talk to them, you know, but that's what you have to do So that was a hurdle that maybe some people never get over and so ergo. They don't become journalists or even even book authors because I talked to a lot of people for my first book interviewed quite a few people just looking to see can I get something here, you know, and I just you know, I had a
00:19:38
Speaker
Paul Herbert, who was the director of the First Division Foundation, he said, you cold call people? I said, well, yeah, that's what reporters do. And he said, he knows some historians wouldn't do that. They deproach through a letter or something like that. But it's just second nature to me now. I need some information. I'm going to pick up the phone, find a person, call them, or doorstep them. So he's just got to be tough, got to be a little bit tough. But at the same time, be a human being.
00:20:08
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that is a learned thing and it's uncomfortable I think for a lot of people to do that, especially cold calling. There's any other ways to maybe make a soft open but sometimes you just have to suck it up, dial the phone number and muddle your way through the pitch of who you are and try to sell them on who you are in five seconds before they hang up the phone on you so you might have a chance of talking to them.
00:20:33
Speaker
Well, that's it. And you got to be able to accept rejection. You're going to get the phone slammed on you. That happened even in my first book. I was trying to get some information about this one guy. And I called his daughter-in-law on. And she, like,
00:20:52
Speaker
You know, she's like, well, that's private stuff. He had letters, but no, you can't happen. So I went back there like six months later. And I said, Hey, going in saying, Hey, Johnny, photos of so and so. And she goes, Oh, I talked to you six months ago. Slam. You know, I'm just I'm trying to write a book about highlight your heroic, you know, father-in-law or whatever.
00:21:12
Speaker
So yeah, but it all – I think the journalism was a great training ground for writing nonfiction. Yeah. Exactly. And when you start taking on the Titanic projects that is doing historical recreation, historical narrative nonfiction, what does the nature of your research look like? And how do you start to organize the – just the sheer volume of stuff that you start to accumulate?
00:21:43
Speaker
Well, you know, I was lucky. My second book was five lieutenants, which kind of sprang out of my first book. It was about these five Harvard boys who served in the first division. And I was lucky in that almost all of them had, like, papers somewhere. You know, Richard Newhall had papers at Williams College. And there was a guy who had papers at Harvard. And I contacted a great nephew of George Heydock who had his diary.
00:22:12
Speaker
and letters. So instantly, once I've located these papers, it was a matter of getting them, you know. And then, you know, that was kind of huge because there's five different men, you know, different experiences. But at least I had a starting point. The same thing with my third book, I Will Hold, which is about Clifton Cates, who became a Marine Commandant in 1949.
00:22:39
Speaker
He had papers at Quantico at the Marine Museum there. And so I went to Quantico and pulled what I could, what I thought was important, and then just sort of supplement it through other means. So yeah, and then my most forthcoming book, The Polar Bear Expedition, there's a repository in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, which is, part of it is devoted to the polar bears and they have a wonderful stockpile
00:23:08
Speaker
diaries, memoirs, all sorts of things. So that you can keep things succinct, you know where to go. And then you can just, you know, I mean, I use newspapers.com. I use what the web, ancestry.com. I talk to people, whatever I got to do to try to flesh out the story. But then I also, you know, a story like the polar bears, I look, I want to know who's going to be the strong characters in here? Who are we going to, you know, build this book around that I can introduce
00:23:36
Speaker
and follow them through their experience. So that's always an important element too. Give us a sense of what that's like when you go to Michigan, you find this repository of information and you're swimming in that information and you're gonna start panning for gold and you see it around you. What is that like for you to just be swimming in all that information?
00:24:04
Speaker
Well, you know, I think I have a pretty good eye for what's important and what's good, what's not so good, what doesn't really have anything to do with this. You know, I was talking to a friend of mine about when I was writing Remains of Company D and I said, you know, I'd have people send me things and I'd find something and I'd say, oh, I know where that can go. And he was like, wow, amazing. It's like, but, you know, once you know the story,
00:24:34
Speaker
you know, where you can plug that in. I found this letter, a guy from the Sergeant Willard storms at Swasson, where my grandfather had been. He also got shot in the abdomen. He had this great account of this, this charge on this village of Burzi Lasek. And God, he said right there. Okay, that's it. That's that's that he gave me the title for that chapter and everything. I just knew it as soon as I read it. I said, it was like bingo, you know. So
00:25:01
Speaker
And have you had the experience of, actually, I'll just relay kind of how I know how Laura Hillenbrand came across Louise Amperini. She was researching Seabiscuit. And then on the other side of the article or on a separate page, it was like, you know, the only person who's as fast as Seabiscuit is Louise Amperini. And she just kind of tucked that away in her files. And of course, eventually that turns into what becomes unbroken.
00:25:30
Speaker
And I wonder, have you had any of those kind of experiences where you're researching on the one thing and then you see something else and you're like, oh, I'm going to just put that in my back pocket for now. Yeah, there's been a couple of those. Like I said, the five lieutenants grew out of, I was looking for context for that first book. It remains a company D for the battles. And so I do, I use a lot of different people because it can't just be about, you know, company D. They didn't fight in a vacuum, you know? And so I said, oh, you know, these guys, and I found this story of this great friendship.
00:26:00
Speaker
between George Hadock and Richard Newhall. And I said, yeah, this is, I mean, they were like almost lovers, not that they were, but I'm saying they just developed this incredible bond during wartime because, you know, life is so precious, you don't know if you're going to live. And so it just intensifies it. And sure enough, I'm not going to say who died, but one of them did. And I said, can I, you know, their story, but it can't just be these two guys. They also had acquaintances. And so everybody talked about each other and knew each other.
00:26:28
Speaker
I said, well, you know, build a story around five of these guys. Funny thing about my third book, I Will Hold, about the Marine, I had done a proposal, just standalone book on the Battle of Soisone. And my editor, I mean, my agent, Jim Hornfisher, who's authored four or five books himself, Naval History, he read the proposal. And he said, how about a book about Clifton Cates, who I'd mentioned in the proposal? It's like, oh, okay, yeah, check these papers, boom.
00:26:57
Speaker
So it can be just kind of kismet like that. And when you're recording or when you're interviewing people, do you typically use a voice recorder or do you rely solely on notes? I usually use a recorder. It just really helps for accuracy. I write slower and slower the older I get it seems.
00:27:20
Speaker
So historically, I've used a recorder. Yeah. Yeah. And I have to too. And I think a lot of people do is why I can't tell you how many quotes I've lost over the years of various stories of just my handwriting being so bad. I'm like, I know something good happened here, but I can't make anything of these words. That's really true. And that was true. I mean, I think I was better at it when I was a working journalist.
00:27:49
Speaker
And yeah, I was more used to it. But if I take a break now and I don't totally interview anybody for a while, it's just kind of like I'm hopeless. I just, I don't know where it is. So I'm like, I can't do it. Do you choose to transcribe yourself or do you outsource that to an assistant or a service? I do that. I mean, usually, you know what? One thing that's nice about working with the World War I subject matter, which all four of my books has been, is that
00:28:18
Speaker
It's mostly records and letters and things like that as opposed to interviews. And it's all up to 1923 now. It's all in the public domain as opposed to having to go out and do a book about Korea. Something like that where you have to really do a lot of interviews. Guys serve there. I've never really had to do that. It is kind of handy though, World War I.
00:28:46
Speaker
And when you start gathering all this information and you start to see the shape of the story and what that's gonna be like, how do you go about structuring it in terms of your outline or cork boards, index cards? How do you approach the ordering of your book once you have the story sort of fleshed out in your head? Like you said, it's really in my head. I don't outline, I don't do cards.
00:29:14
Speaker
you know, my first book, I just sat down and kind of started writing and I wrote the intro about my grandfather. And I think I wrote like seven sample chapters just and they were kind of all over the place. So it was was forming in my head at that point. Then once I hooked up with Jim Hornfisher, he says, you know, gave me some tips before we even submitted a proposal said, write me or give me tell me more about your grandfather, tell me more about your search for what happened to him. And in the process,
00:29:45
Speaker
I come down here at 7 o'clock in the morning. I start writing and it was an amazing thing. You've heard people say it was like I was channeling. I don't even know where it came from and that's that hasn't been the case so much for my other books. But I think because I was so fanatical about this story, it just the words just came to me that the intro to the chapter came to me. And I think, you know, more recently, I've kind of developed this technique of starting with the action of I was in a
00:30:14
Speaker
big proponent of jump right into the action. Yeah, I do that most of my books that I think as a little didn't yet say, here's the crux of that matter right here, not long. And then go back and tell the story. But chapter by chapter, maybe I don't even know how maybe I do it too much. I start, I start farther forward, then I left it off in the next chapter, then I come back. And I think that's just something that's really worked for me structurally wise. And
00:30:40
Speaker
And I want to keep people interested. I mean, I want the story to not be boring. I want it to charge ahead. I really do. And so that's really one of my thoughts. There's so much competition out there for media and time and entertainment. So I want to not be boring, is basically, and just really keep that story moving, keep people engrossed, keep them turning the pages.
00:31:06
Speaker
And to that point, that's a note I made and wanted to ask you, of course, especially dealing with people who are long dead. You don't get a chance to actually interview them and get that kind of firsthand color in recollection. So what is the key and the challenge of bringing history to life out of documents? I think, you know, I think detail.
00:31:36
Speaker
You know, like Cliff Cates from I Will Hold, I had his letters and he was a college graduate and he was quite a good writer. So I was able to use, he's a terrible speller, but he's a good, fair enough writer. And so I was able to use that and either verbatim or put in my own words, keep the narrative going. The same with these, the five lieutenants, they're all Harvard graduates, so they were
00:32:07
Speaker
quite eloquent in their letters. So that helped a lot too. But here with the polar bear expedition, it was not quite the same. It was more of paraphrasing, putting in my own words, telling, but citing them with what they were going through.
00:32:25
Speaker
So it does depend on who you're talking to, who you're talking about. Yeah, and there was a, of the several passages I decided as I was reading the book, this one struck me as a great example of you putting us there and bringing out the feeling of desperation and the need for something, just something to hang onto. And it's like, you write, or you cite that,
00:32:53
Speaker
Coffee thus far is unheard of but often thought of one of my men Remarked to me the other day that if he had a cigarette the latest Detroit Free Press and 15 minutes quiet He would gladly serve the remainder of this emergency without compensation or hope of other rewards Yeah, there's a cabinet company B. Yeah, and I mean, you know, that's some good detail It's it tells you know, we don't have coffee and have smokes and what do soldiers want coffee smokes more meal place to sleep You know, I mean
00:33:22
Speaker
So that's something, a good letter. I mean, I would look at that and I would say, I'm just going to quote this entirely. And I think I sometimes tend to overquote, I have to go back and kind of put it back in my own words sometimes. So I've been guilty of that over the years. But I just, I like their voices, you know, I mean, maybe too much, but I like their voices talking about what they're going through.
00:33:52
Speaker
It's sort of one of my weaknesses. Well, I think I understand where you're coming from completely. I think there's a tendency, especially if someone has a really great way of phrasing something. It's like, oh, you want to showcase them. You want to get out of the way yourself and let them shine. Yeah, it kind of reveals who they are sometimes, you know what I mean, in their own words.
00:34:14
Speaker
Even like, you know, not to go to like a Mark Twain kind of vernacular or anything, but sometimes, you know, how they speak says something about who they are, you know. Yeah, there was another great line too. There was a battle.
00:34:31
Speaker
Artillery was raining on the Bolsheviks, and the scene was laid waste. It was effective to the extent where the Allied forces were able to sort of thwart an attack. And then one of the leaders wrote, it was pretty forlorn, but at the very end he was like, mute testimony that at least some of our fire was effective.
00:34:55
Speaker
I was like, what a line. I mean, you got to come across these things and wonder like, whoa, like these are just really brilliant writers of their time. And, you know, they're just, you know, they're foot soldiers who are going to go back to, hopefully go back to the States. Yeah. I mean, and, and one thing, especially with World War I was most of the officers were either professionals of some sort or college graduates, you know? Yeah. Um, so they bought more.
00:35:20
Speaker
in general, more highly educated than the rank and file, who are mostly farm boys or immigrants. I don't know where you find much, I have thought about with my first book, are there foreign language newspapers that might have stories about some of these guys, but it was just like kind of hopeless. I didn't, so they were underrepresented simply because if they're writing letters,
00:35:45
Speaker
they're writing them back to Poland or somewhere, you know, even Germany. So where would they be? If my grandfather had written any letters, which I doubt, who would he have sent them to? I have no idea. You know, maybe, maybe his folks back in Sweden, he was a Swedish immigrant. But yeah, you do, you know, you do find people who can just really describe what's going on. And it's just great when you do.
00:36:10
Speaker
And when you're writing something that has such great scope and you have tons of information to draw from, and I always like calling it sort of like the dark forest or the sort of muddy middle of a draft. You're a little too far away from the honeymoon period, but you're still far away from the ending.
00:36:32
Speaker
How do you power through that make sense of where the story is going when you're just when you're stuck in the middle and there's still so much work to do and it's easy to get overwhelmed. Yeah, it is. I tend to I tend to think very literally linearly in general. So like with the polar bear expedition, I knew what battles were to come, which were which were the important ones. I knew, you know,
00:37:02
Speaker
Company A was attacked 250 miles from Archangel that were attacked on January 19th, 1919. There's 46 men, 1,700 Bolsheviks. I mean, I just knew. I think I wrote about four chapters on that, because the battle, the flight, they besieged. And that really, to me, is like I knew that was like the center point of the book. And it's all really the height of the action, too, because after that,
00:37:30
Speaker
people are like, we need to get out of here, basically, because this is not working. So that was a good place to aim for as sort of the plateau middle, as a story arc, because I've got Harry Mead, who's one of the officers of Company A, follow him from the beginning, describe who he is, and some of the other guys too. And then finally, Company A gets out of the line.
00:37:55
Speaker
And then you just kind of slowly pick up the stories of Company B. They're going to get out of line. You know, there's still some big battles to fight. And I knew, you know, sometimes I just, you know, like Clifford Phillips, he's a lieutenant with Company H. Sometimes I just, I guess I hit the web or newspapers.com or something. Here's a guy, can I find anything out about him? He's been dead for a hundred years. But if you can flesh him out through your research, then you can make him a character, you know? And so I'm always thinking, I need to, you know,
00:38:25
Speaker
introduce Cliff Phillips and then we'll get away from him, but then we're going to come back to him because, you know, this story I think is emblematic of what was going on over there. And when you're in the throes of a writing project of this nature, what is the kind of ritual you set for yourself every day? Morning routine, so you kind of warm up that engine and you can hit the ground running and get the work done you want for that day. Yeah, I've always found it much better in the morning.
00:38:53
Speaker
So, like, I had left my job in October of 17. I had until like April 1st to do this book. So I had to write a book in like less than six months. But yeah, it was pretty much a matter of I get up, I have my coffee, and I'm down in my basement, my little office by, you know, 9am or so. And, you know, I'm gonna, I'll give it, you know, five, six hours a day.
00:39:23
Speaker
Because sometimes I'm researching as I'm writing, too. That's not just all pure writing. But yeah, I think you have to keep a pretty good routine. Since my second book, I had a routine where I said, I'm not going to do anything on Sunday, you know, just one day a week, I'm just gonna clear my head with this, which I think helps a lot. Because then things occur to you, you know, you might wake up in the morning and say, wait a minute, you know, I need to put this in there, or something, something will occur to you that will make you go back in and
00:39:52
Speaker
add something or change something. I've always been a fast writer and I think the journalism part helps that too. You're working on deadlines every day. I'm not a big, tedious go back and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, but I don't want to be like Jack Kerouac that's not writing, that's typing. I like to keep a nice pace and sometimes
00:40:22
Speaker
where the stories going, like in any writing comes to you as you're doing it, you know, you see, you see your next jumping off point as you're finishing say what chapter, you know, that's always nice. Yeah, for sure. And on those Sundays, what do you typically do to occupy yourself to unplug from the project? Well, I play hockey in the morning. Cool. And if it's summer, I'll watch the Cubs.
00:40:47
Speaker
MLB TV. It's the fall. I'll watch the Bears because I'm from Chicago. You know, I'm kind of a homebody, but just relax, do the paper, do the Sunday crossword chill. I don't, I don't really read a lot. I find when I'm when I'm working on a book, I don't want to be influenced by anybody else because I tend to read only nonfiction. So I just want to, you know, stay away from
00:41:11
Speaker
looking like a sound like anybody else. Yeah, I'm just kind of a boring guy just to hang out. Yeah. Wow. Walk the dog. Yeah. And what are some maybe like three to five books that you you do tend to find yourself maybe rereading or books that you kind of model yourself model your style after or structurally or in terms of prose, you know, what are some of those that you revisit? You know, I do go back to books I like I've written I've read
00:41:41
Speaker
Nathaniel Philbricks Mayflower, several times. I think he's a great writer, a great storyteller. I'm just looking at my bookcase here now. You know, some Stephen Ambrose, you know, Band of Brothers. I kind of, I had Band of Brothers in my head when I was working on The Remains of Company D as a natural take off from that. I have a book here that I don't want you to laugh, but it's called Garcia.
00:42:10
Speaker
oral history of what's about Jerry Garcia. Okay. And I'm just interested in that kind of stuff. So that's, you know, just to get totally away from the war thing. Yeah, you know, just a real wide variety of nonfiction, you know, battles, or personalities. There's a book I like Daniel J. Borsten, former librarian of Congress. He's got a book called The Discovers. And I'll just
00:42:33
Speaker
delve into that once in a while, sitting in front of the two of them or something. It's like the discoveries of everything since day one in world history, so it's very interesting. It's things like that. You got to get away from war once in a while. Yeah, for sure.
00:42:48
Speaker
Yeah, and supposedly, of course, World War I was supposed to be this war to end all wars, and of course it wasn't. And yet, after the armistice, this Russian invasion is still ongoing.
00:43:07
Speaker
Take us to that moment of maybe for you for that moment of surprise that this was still ongoing in that torturous land at such a horrible time of year after the war was technically over. Yeah, I think the key scenes, key day for me, whatever, the key surprise was Armistice Day itself, November 11th, 1918. They're signing the Armistice, the Compagnie Forest in France. And meanwhile, Company B,
00:43:36
Speaker
is being besieged by hundreds of Bolshevik warriors. And for them, the war is not over. And I think that's the centerpiece, because after that, they held on, by the way, I'm going to spoil the whole book, but after that, it just became like among the soldiers was a little bit like, why are we still here? Because word got back to them that the armistice had been signed, the war was over.
00:44:00
Speaker
So it became something of an issue for as an allied force, all sorts of the soldiers had been sent there from France, English, American Poles, Italians, even, you know, and it's become sort of a story of just hanging on endurance. And I mean, that's why we subtitled it, you know, the heroes of the forgotten invasion was just like, you can argue that they fought under worse conditions than anybody on the Western front, simply because of the weather,
00:44:28
Speaker
the overwhelming numbers, they didn't have enough artillery, the weapons were bad. So that's why they are heroes. And they endured and persevered, although 235 of them were killed or died of disease. Yeah. And the fact that of how ill-equipped they were, too, I'm just thinking specifically of their footwear. These guys would eschew the Shackleton boots because they were too slippery. And when walking maybe one or two pairs of wool socks up there, it's just like, whoa.
00:44:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think one humic fail when Company A was on its running retreat in the face of all those Bolsheviks. I think he said he put eight pairs of woolen socks on because what happened was Ernest Shackleton, famous Antarctic explorer, had developed this boot called the Shackleton boot. But the problem was in Africa, it was like a muckluck, but it had a sort of a slick bottom for the soul. And so they found in those conditions, it was just too slippery. You guys were just flailing all over the place. So yeah, like you said,
00:45:28
Speaker
A lot of them would just put on several pairs of socks, but a lot of them got frostbit too. It became quite an issue. They had decent equipment. They had decent clothing per se for the time, I think. Lots of wool, fur jackets, fur hoods, mittens. At least in that vein, they were okay equipped, let's say.
00:45:52
Speaker
And in your research, how did you find that these men, over the course of nearly a year after the Armistice, you know, several months into the 1919, before the forces were sort of pulled back finally?
00:46:12
Speaker
What were some moments in there that you saw these men finally had some glimmer of hope or just some way to enjoy themselves a little bit given how bleak the mission was and the landscape? Well, I think the thing is, there was a vignette of Company A in its quarters that came from this book, The Romance of Company A.
00:46:37
Speaker
And I wanted to have that in there just to show a little bit what life was like. They were smoking their pipes and their bunks and their razz in each other. And it was thought not to be too boring, that it was slowing down the action a little bit. So I actually wrote it out. But otherwise, I think that the overriding story is, you know,
00:46:59
Speaker
Who do soldiers fight for? They fight for each other, in a way. So that was, I think, the key element. And it was ongoing. When are we going to get out of here? And finally, you're right. In the spring, the pulling out really began in late spring. And then by July, they were out on their way back to the US. And it was tough for them, I'd tell you what.
00:47:29
Speaker
And why do you think nobody, certainly I didn't know about this ongoing conflict on Russian soil and turf. And I'm someone who loves history and loves learning about a lot of these militaristic slants on history. And I had never known about this. So how surprised, I mean, you're in this, but how surprised were you
00:47:56
Speaker
that so few of us in the West really know that this even occurred. Well, you know, even I, I mean, I was, I was sort of, sort of aware more of, there was also two regiments were sent to Siberia to Vladivstok. I was a little more aware of that end than I was of the Archangel end in northern Russia. So I was there with you. I mean, you run across references and stuff. In fact, this book came from
00:48:25
Speaker
Peter Hubbard, my editor at HarperCollins, he found a World War I dot com story about the Siberian end and he sent the link to my agent, Jim Hornfisher. And Jim sent it to me and said, Peter's like, do you think there's a book on this? And Jim sent it to me and I said, let me take a look. And I actually started researching both ends. And I just thought the better, more cohesive story was in the Archangel end of the two expeditions to Russia. But I started
00:48:53
Speaker
And I started putting together a proposal, and that's really the first time I ever really knew about this either. I started from square one, and I had no idea. These proposals run 50 pages or so. And so in the course of research, you write it, you get to know it a little bit. But I was in the dark like most people.
00:49:16
Speaker
Yeah, and so much of it is – it's lost on us but not for the Russians too. They have a long memory of this and you cite that towards the end of the book too because it's kind of easy for us to be kind of myopic about it.
00:49:35
Speaker
that uh yeah that we just take for all they must not remember either but no no no they like uh was it Khrushchev uh right pronouncing his name right yeah right he he remembers incited that in a speech you know the whenever that might have been in late 60s or late I think it was in the 50s yeah um and I think that was when Khrushchev came to this country and they I think they probably had the famous kitchen debate with Nixon um it's a very famous episode um but yeah I mean I talked to some people um
00:50:04
Speaker
while I was trying to put that section together, because what does it really mean? Does it mean anything to what's going on between the US and Russia now? The consensus is that, yes, Russia has been invaded over and over by different forces through its history. Certainly, the Russian mind remembers the Allied invasions of World War I more than we know in America, because when these guys got home,
00:50:34
Speaker
They just basically said, OK, that's it. This didn't happen. I want to sweep this under the rug. It was like, let's not talk about this anymore, because it was a mistake. Or it should have been done in real force that they were actually going to achieve something as opposed to sending one regiment. And so, yes, the consensus was between Russian meddling in the elections and the invasion of 1918, 1919, maybe not so much except
00:51:04
Speaker
you know, maybe there's like, you know, turn abouts fair play.
00:51:08
Speaker
to the Russian mind. You meddled in our internal affairs. What's wrong with us meddling in yours? I don't know. I don't know how valid that would be. It's hard to find a real concrete opinion about that. Yeah, and I think a lot of us, when we think of World War I and the Russian side of it, and I know for me when the Russian Revolution happened in December of 1917, to me it was like, oh, then
00:51:35
Speaker
Russia's done and they're just doing their thing, you know, trying the communist revolution and Lenin and Trotsky and everyone's kind of washed their hands of them. And then he didn't even, I had no, I just can't believe it. I hope a lot of people get that out of this book, that there was just so much more going on in the East that occupied a lot of the forces from Europe and beyond. Oh yeah. And I mean, you know, the Brits who ran the Northern expedition,
00:52:03
Speaker
They had big plans. Some of their generals were really talking about when we land at Archangel, we're going to incite a general counter-revolution against the Bolsheviks, and we're taking it all the way to Moscow. In fact, as a whole, the farthest anybody got was company A, 250 miles from Archangel. Quite short of 600 miles to Moscow, or 1,000.
00:52:32
Speaker
It is an interesting episode in history that is not taught here that I know of. Yeah. And are you finding now that World War I is starting to come out of, in terms of the coverage and the writing, starting to come out of World War II's shadow a bit? Yeah, I do. When I started researching the remains of Company D 15, 16 years ago, and I was trying to find an agent and this and that.
00:53:02
Speaker
or even just a publisher that would just publish it without an agent. And they're like, well, no, we're, you know, books about the Army and World War I don't sell. Okay. But, you know, I'm not gonna say that since my book, but since then, there have been plenty of books that have been published to great acclaim. You know, Patrick A. O. Donald's recent book, The Unknowns. I mean, I think he's doing fabulous with it. I think there's, what happened was, you know, the centennial arrived last year, which helped stoke interest.
00:53:32
Speaker
And like I say, I think you get to a certain age. I was in my late 40s when I started wondering what had happened to my grandfather. And I think you get a little older, you get more knowledgeable about the world and you start to think more about your ancestors and what they went through. And I think that with the baby boomers has happened. They all of a sudden
00:53:53
Speaker
They don't know a thing, and why is that? And they were trying to research. And I think that's fueled some of the interest in books about World War I. I think they're much more prolific, and they sell much better, I think, than 15 years ago. And the remains of the company did quite well. Yeah, you wrote, well, you said in an interview with a man from Company D, but it might as well apply to Polar Expedition 2, you said that
00:54:22
Speaker
I hope people come away with a new appreciation for the young Americans who fought and died in World War I and a new appreciation for the lasting effects the war had on the survivors. And I hope they come away realizing that while these men fought some 90 odd years ago, now 100 roughly, they were really just like the soldiers who are fighting our wars today. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. And that's that's one thing I really I do try to do in these books is write about unknown, you know,
00:54:52
Speaker
ordinary Joe, citizen soldiers, unsung heroes, wherever you want to call them. The question was, when I was staring at that muster roll before I really plunged into Company D, was, who were these people and what became of them? It is universal. We think people are so different because they lived 100 years ago. They're not. People are people, I think, really. They all had their same
00:55:22
Speaker
hates, loves, desires, aspirations, whatever. But they've gone unrecognized. Yeah, I can't recognize all four million who served in World War I, but I can hopefully represent the experience, like with the polar bears, what they went through. Those are just the same as Company D, same guys, farmers, factory workers, whatever, who got caught up in these extraordinary conditions.
00:55:53
Speaker
Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing about a storytelling, and just when you try to put yourself in their boots and realize what they were dealing with, and also just the vast history of people trying to invade Russia, whether it's Napoleon and then Hitler, it never works. Yeah, well, yeah, I mentioned in there, you're always up against general winter, you know? Yeah. Napoleon found that out. Hitler found that out.
00:56:20
Speaker
and the polar bears found that out. The polar bears, the allies, they thought once winter fell, and we're talking temperatures of 60 below, 70 below, they thought the fighting would stop once winter arrived. Everybody would just hunker down in the snow, try to stay warm. That's when the war really began, like in November. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks under Leon Trotsky were recruiting and growing a large red army
00:56:50
Speaker
and making plans to drive these guys into the White Sea. And that's what began, like I said, in really in earnest in January of 1919.
00:57:01
Speaker
Well, James, this book is, it's an incredible bout of storytelling about something that has just gone unnoticed to so many of us, even people that even proclaim to know a little bit about history. So I want to just thank you for the work you've done on the book and the other books you've written, which I'm eager to dive into. And just, yeah, thanks for the work and thanks for coming on the show.
00:57:25
Speaker
Thank you very much. Thanks for your interest. Of course. Where can people find more about your work online if they're not already familiar with it? You can go to my James Carl Nelson Facebook page. Otherwise, go to my Amazon.com page. They've got three of the four books up now. I think they wait until the publication. The publication of the Polar Bear Expedition is February 19th. Great. After that, four books should be on there.
00:57:56
Speaker
I'm trying to think, I used to have a website, but I don't anymore because I decided Facebook was a lot cheaper. But yeah, I don't know, Google me, see what comes up. As always, that was a pleasure. Big thanks to James for the time and the insights. Be sure to kick over to Facebook and like his page and see what he's up to. Let's keep our conversation going on Twitter. Tag me and the show at Brendan O'Mara and at CNF Pot and let me know what you liked.
00:58:25
Speaker
All right? Why not? And here's that offer. Promise you, if you made it this far, here's the reward. I have a beautiful hardcover copy of James' book, The Polar Bear Expedition, the one you just heard so much about that I want to raffle out. So how do you enter this raffle? There's the raffle. How are you going to enter? You must share the show on Twitter. There must be a minimum of 10 tweets this week for the book to win this book.
00:58:54
Speaker
Once 10 or more of you have shared the show, and tag it at cnfpod so I see it, I will pick among those names, reach out to you and send you the book. Fewer than 10, no go. Nine, I'm sorry, not gonna happen. 10 or more, gotta be at least 10. The contest ends March 1st, 2019. Listen, share, win, maybe?
00:59:20
Speaker
Hey, head over to BrendanOmero.com too. Hey, hey, four show notes to this show in the previous 139. And subscribe to that monthly newsletter. It's a growing list. It's a fun list. I share my book recommendations and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast and maybe some other cool things that I read over the course of a month. You don't want to miss out, man. Once a month, no spam. Can't beat it.
00:59:47
Speaker
Alright man, that's gotta be it. Have a CNF and great week and remember, if you can't do interview, see ya!