Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 522: Anthony DePalma Won’t Wear Headphones on a Walk
0 Playsin 18 hours
“Not to confuse journalism with newspapers. Newspapers are one set of communication methods. But it's certainly not the only one. If they have the right mindset, and that's what I try to get them to do, there are so many more opportunities. You can go out and do a podcast, or you can do a newsletter. You can't think of it as I need to work at The New York Times. You have to think of it as I need — I need — to tell stories, and I've got this curiosity.”
Anthony DePalma is a journalist and professor at Columbia University. He’s the author of several books, his latest being On This Ground: Hardship and Hope at the Toughest Prep School in America. It’s published by Mariner Books.
He spent 22 years as a reporter for The New York Times, and another 8 as a stringer for them, so, let’s do the math … that’s 30 years. He reported a lot on Mexico and Cuba, as well as Albania, Guyana, and Suriname. You can find him at anthonydepalma.com and on the Facebooks and Substacks, at anthontyrdepalma
Anthony DePalma has been all over the world telling true stories. He’s the author of The Cubans, City of Dust, The Man Who Invented Fidel, and Here: A Biography of the New American Continent.
In this conversation we talk about:
- How not to confuse journalism with newspapers
- The NEED to tell stories
- The stunning lack of curiosity among young journalists
- Not wearing headphones on walks
- Accelerated intimacy
- Challenge of being of satisfied with the writing
- Still being a WIP
- What to do when you can’t be everywhere at once
- Cutting 30-40% of his ms
- Radical pragmatism
- What makes St. Benedict’s tough
- And how grafting apple trees is like writing
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
Recommended
Transcript
Upcoming Live Podcast Event
00:00:01
Speaker
Oh, hey, tomorrow, if you give a damn, the next live recording of the podcast will be Saturday, April 18th at 1 p.m. Gratitude Brewing. They're going to kick our ass out at 4 o'clock.
00:00:12
Speaker
Yeah, why the the event's 1 to 3, but we got to get the fuck out of there, man. ah Lydia Yuknovich is going to be our guest. She's the author of The Chronology of Water, Reading the Ways, and the editor of a new collection on menopause called The Big M. We do this event in partnership with the Northwest Review. It should be rockin' event. And if you're in Eugene or the surrounding areas, just ah RSVP with a link in the show notes or my various social feeds to reserve a free ticket. You don't have to show the ticket. You don't need it to get in. It's just to get a head count.
00:00:45
Speaker
so gratitude isn't blindsided by Lydia super fans more than 30 RSVPs which is going to be our biggest event by far if even a third of them even if four of them show it'll be our biggest event just kidding it's amazing did I sell it did I sell it well enough good So it's a struggle. I'll say, right, you need to get three sources to confirm this. Well, they'll say, i emailed so-and-so and they haven't gotten back to me.
00:01:15
Speaker
Okay. Well, did you go to the office? No. Did you wait outside the office until that person came out and then asked them? No. Did you call them on the telephone?
00:01:33
Speaker
AC members, the Creative Nonfiction
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
00:01:35
Speaker
Podcast. Whoopee! The show where I talk to tellers of true tales about how the fuck they do it. Everything from the research to the organization to the sense of impending doom to the 2 a.m. voice that tells you you're a piece of shit. I named mine. I call her Daisy. I'm Brendan O'Meara, the voice of a generation. Don't you hate it?
00:01:53
Speaker
When a potential podcast guest tells you months in advance that they're not making the podcast rounds for their next book, and then they start doing the podcast rounds? Me too. Anthony De Palma is not one of those motherfuckers. I feel like we're getting off on the wrong foot today. I feel like it's very profane
Interview with Anthony De Palma
00:02:10
Speaker
foot. Anthony is a journalist and professor at Columbia University. He's the author of several books, his latest being On This Ground, Hardship and Hope at the Toughest Prep School in America. It's published by Mariner Books.
00:02:23
Speaker
Now, he spent 22 years as a reporter for The New York Times and another eight before that as a stringer for them. So doing the math, that's like 30 years. He reported a lot on Mexico and Cuba, as well as Albania, Guyana, and Suriname.
00:02:39
Speaker
You can find him at anthonydepalma.com and on the Facebooks and Substacks at anthonyrdepalma. Speaking of Substack, make sure you head over to welcomethepitchclub.substack.com. And check out Pitch Club, where I invite people to share pitches of any kind and have them audio annotate them. It's a thing I wish I had as a baby freelancer.
00:03:00
Speaker
And I offer this wisdom outside the academy, man. Yeah, I don't do that shit. Outside the academy, the wisdom of people who do this for a living, and I give it away for free. All I ask is for your trust and permission. Welcome to pitchclub.substack.com. Rate and review the podcast, too. Anthony De Palma.
00:03:21
Speaker
All right. He's been all over the world, man, telling true stories. He's the author of The Cubans, City of Dust, The Man Who Invented Fidel, and here, a biography of the new American continent. And now he's got this new book out on this ground. And in this conversation, we talk about how not to confuse journalism with newspapers, the need to tell stories, the stunning lack of curiosity among young journalists, not wearing headphones on walks, accelerated intimacy, the challenge of being satisfied with the writing, still being a work in progress after all these years, what to do when you can't be everywhere at once, cutting 30 to 40% of his manuscript, radical pragmatism, what makes St. Benedict's such a tough,
00:04:05
Speaker
school and how grafting apple trees is like writing. I hope you'll stick around for the after dinner mint, the parting shot on when does being realistic become a limiting belief.
00:04:18
Speaker
But for now, let's cue up the riff. who
00:04:29
Speaker
There's this long pause and he goes, I just hear this. Oh, fuck. But you're a writer and you're supposed to be writing. Sitting down and putting in the hours is is where it's at.
00:04:40
Speaker
This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
Teaching and Curiosity in Journalism
00:04:54
Speaker
I feel journalism has always been, it's always been like a murky, and there's always been threats to it, be it technology or government or whatever. ah But how, given the span of your career when you came up as a reporter and now trying to teach you know younger reporters everything, how to go about the work, like how how do you approach teaching it in this ecosystem?
00:05:16
Speaker
Listen, it's it you're right, it's nothing new. When I was in college, and that was a long time ago, I wanted to write. right And I started there and the professors in the department pulled me aside and said, hey, look, kid, that's a dead end. You might as well try something else. And so I did. I switched over to TV broadcast ah ah news, broadcast journalism, and did it for a few years and it wasn't satisfying. So I came back to writing and then you know things went on. So what I try to tell the students at Columbia, and they're not kids, so it's a graduate program. Many of them have some experience already, is not to confuse journalism with newspapers. Newspapers are one set of...
00:06:04
Speaker
communication methods one way of getting it out there but it's certainly not the only one and today if they have the right mindset and that's what i try to get them to do is to have the right mindset there are so many more opportunities because you can go out and do a podcast like this or you can do a newsletter or you can you can set up there are so many other opportunities for you uh you can't think of it as i need to work at the new york times you have to think of it as i need I need to tell stories and I've got this curiosity. You know, Brendan, one of the the most interesting things that happens at Columbia is when kids come to me or these young students or young journalists, and I'll give them a line like that about curiosity and they'll say, but like, how do you build curiosity?
00:06:56
Speaker
Which means that they're not curious. Right. And that means what? That they're not meeting people, that they're not reading, and they're not reading widely enough.
00:07:08
Speaker
I can't imagine not being curious. I'm curious about everything. When I was at the at the newspapers, you you could give me a story about just about anything.
00:07:20
Speaker
I even did sports. I'm not a sports person, but I even did ah some sports. But as a generalist, I legitimately could be interested in anything. And the little bit that I i learned would always lead to more questions. So it was...
00:07:38
Speaker
a curious question to be asked about curiosity. But I think it is a problem that the younger people have. And if you're going into journalism, it is like the the canary in the mine. If you don't have curiosity, you might as well just find a different way to to make a living because it's just not going to work for you.
00:08:01
Speaker
Oh, 100%. It seems like that would be, and it is, table stakes just to to be interested in in other people. And nowadays it seems hard because ah most people, and I heard ah Connie Schultz talk about this at a conference last year, how she it kind of annoys her when she sees so many people walking around with earbuds in the ears and like with no shade throw towards people who are listening to the music or podcasts. But it's like when you're constantly maybe cocooned,
00:08:28
Speaker
you're not going to overhear something and you are going to actually wall yourself off from something that could spark your curiosity. Or maybe there's a story, a little breadcrumb. They're like, oh, that sounded cool. But with, with, uh, with these earbuds in and everything, and I'm like, no shade. I do the same thing. I have to something to remind myself, maybe, maybe just walk without the headphones in for a time, but yeah that leaves yourself open to the possibility of ah really a cool story or cool opportunity.
00:08:56
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. When I walk the dog, I never use a headset. When I run, i never use a headset. And actually, those are two opportunities to write.
00:09:08
Speaker
When I'm walking or running, I'm writing. I'm writing the scene maybe that I've seen or I'm going back over the lead of a piece that I had or the chapter that I was working on or some – I start every morning reading, reading something somebody else.
00:09:27
Speaker
And so ah a turn of phrase or a particular word or a way that they did something, you can go through that. But if you've got the headset on, you're not thinking about that, or it's at least I can do both of those things at the same time, especially if it's music with words.
00:09:42
Speaker
See, words, I'm all about words. So if there's music with words, I'm listening to the words. I'm not thinking about my own words. So if there's ever music, it's always just instrumental. I don't i don't like to listen to words. ah ah But when I'm with a dog, even just something as simple as that.
00:09:59
Speaker
I need the dog to look at me. I need to know that he's looking at me in order to get that bond. And as I'm training him now, if I'm got, I watch all people coming by, they've got the headsets on. They don't even say good morning. They don't know who I am and they don't even know who their dog is or what he or she is doing. So I think the, the young journalists that I see at Columbia are very much like that.
00:10:25
Speaker
And one of the biggest problems they have is actually going out and talking to people. So it's a struggle. I'll say, right, you need to get three sources to confirm this. Well, they'll say, emailed so-and-so and they haven't gotten back to me.
00:10:41
Speaker
Okay. Well, did you go to the office? No. Did you wait outside the office until that person came out and then asked them? No. Did you call them on the telephone? No.
00:10:52
Speaker
And so I think... ah they've They've grown up in a way that you communicate electronically or digitally. you You don't have a face-to-face communication and they don't understand or realize or value what you get out of talking to someone in person, out of actually being there.
00:11:12
Speaker
So they'll try to recreate a scene based on a photograph or a digital representation of it. And I'll have to say, well, go out there. Or go out there again.
00:11:25
Speaker
yeah I just had this situation and ah the the reporter said, well, I was out there a lot. said, really? Well, yeah. I said, I was out there probably a couple of hours.
00:11:36
Speaker
And this was for a ah five-month project. I said, a couple of hours? No, no. Yeah. You practically have to live there. so people will understand that you're there for some reason and you'll make those contacts. So we ended up five months later and he wasn't able to bring me one real person.
00:11:55
Speaker
Oh, wow. That he interviewed on the street. Well, yeah, journalism done ah well is such a face-to-face human
Building Trust in Journalism
00:12:04
Speaker
craft and trade. and And getting face-to-face, especially when we're in such a digitally interfaced era, like talk about a a trust accelerator. If you can, break down this digital divide and just meet someone face-to-face, whether you are you know see eye-to-eye. But if you're there in person, people are going to be far more willing to share their stories, open up.
00:12:25
Speaker
And yeah, and and just you know give us the juice that we can run with. Sure. and I talk to them a lot about the term accelerated intimacy, ah which is is really, really critical for them to learn.
00:12:39
Speaker
You understand how you make friendships with neighbors, how you make friendships with your roommate over a course of a couple of years, a personal relationship. But if I'm going to go into a school of 800 kids who don't know me, who are three generations younger than I am, and then there are faculty and monks who are suspicious because I'm a reporter coming from outside, even if I'm going to spend a year or two there, I need at the very outset to accelerate this process of intimacy so they trust me and they open up to me and allow me into their lives. That's basically what I need to do is I need to get into your life.
00:13:23
Speaker
The natural reaction to somebody else, you know if they're not a ah celebrity, ah is, hold off, no, no, no, i I don't want you in here because I don't trust you. So trust is the currency that we deal with. and you can't do that, you you can't develop trust in an email.
00:13:43
Speaker
You just can't. right you have to You have to do it face-to-face, person-to-person. The previous book I did to this one was on Cuba, right? The Cubans.
00:13:53
Speaker
Ordinary Lives and Extraordinary Times. Although I've been going to Cuba since 1979, at this particular point, i there's no body there that I'd know.
00:14:04
Speaker
So I had to start from scratch. I basically began with one contact in this one town. But I picked this town because it's the town where my wife was born.
00:14:17
Speaker
She left Cuba. in 1961. So there's nobody there. There's no family there. There's no one that she knew, but showing up there in Cuba as me, as a gringo with blue eyes, right? Standing out, there's no way I could pass for anything but an American.
00:14:35
Speaker
The fact that I could say, well, yes, I know this town because my wife was from here made all the difference. And so we accelerated intimacy that way for on this ground,
00:14:48
Speaker
I did not go to St. Benedict's in Newark. I didn't know anything about it when I was in school, but I did go to a Catholic high school, a boys' Catholic high school, and that seemed to be the same trigger to accelerate the intimacy. Yeah. and nowadays the, the more, ah let's say, you know, famous people, if you're going to be doing biography or anything like that, it or a documentary, it's like they have such insulation around them. And because of social media and other things, yeah they feel like they can just control their own narrative. So you can't even get close to these people anymore to do that really investigative, ah even introspective look and and examination of a life. And youre if you're going to do it these days, you're going to do it at a two or three level removed by talking to the outer circle. But you're really never going to get that kind of ah intimacy to that central figure anymore unless they're like, and I almost understand why they, why would I trust, you know, a reporter to put their own point of view on my story when I could just control it myself and sanitize it myself. And so like, those are some, like so many of the challenges we face now too.
00:16:00
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. ah Absolutely right. They could have their own channel. They have their own their own website. They can put out any story that they want and they can tightly control the kind of access you have.
00:16:12
Speaker
For me, I don't do celebrities. yeah I do ordinary people. And um it's ah it's a challenge as well because they are not they are not media savvy.
00:16:23
Speaker
One of the issues I had with On This Ground was I got to know the kids. The kids got to know me And i had an issue with confidentiality because many of them were minors at the time that I interviewed them. So I had to get written ah consent forms from their parents.
00:16:44
Speaker
ah to use their names. What I didn't expect was that the kids were going to get into some serious trouble. And these are kids that I had already sort of ah picked out to be my principal characters. And then I had to make a decision about whether to name them or not. And I i felt it was important to name them you know for the sake of readers' trust.
00:17:10
Speaker
you know If you're going to change that, what else have you changed? so I didn't want to do that. And the kids wanted to be named, even the ones who got in trouble.
00:17:20
Speaker
But ah in this case, i had to be a little bit more paternalistic about them and say, yeah because they were 18 by the time they graduated, so they could give me ah permission.
00:17:32
Speaker
But I said, you know, in in five years when you're looking for a job, your name will come up, and it will come up easily in connection to the book, and anybody who cares you know will be able to – to make this connection and not necessarily understand that the value of it was not that you got in trouble. That's not the important thing. It's how you handle the trouble and how the school handled you. And the fact that you didn't just throw your hands up and run away, but that you ah dealt with it as an adult, took the the punishment and then changed your life.
00:18:09
Speaker
That's the really important thing. That's, that's what Benedictines do. That's the path to redemption that they offer. But an 18 year old didn't necessarily know that. So I had to step in and say, yeah, sorry. Anybody who who knows you will know that that's you in the book. But for people in the future who will want to know you but won't know you now, they're not going to know.
00:18:34
Speaker
So I had to protect them that way. Yeah, well, that's a great sort of ah ethical spectrum and, you know a toggling of the ethical dial that you're working with there because maybe in a different circumstance, you're like, yeah, hell yeah, I'm naming you. Or you could have just been like, you know, this is what you did. You know, we're going to name you anyway. But you're like, you know what? i In this instance, I do need to protect you from, you know, put some guard ah guidelines on this. And yeah that's something you kind of cultivate over time, I imagine.
00:19:01
Speaker
Yeah, well, as a foreign correspondent, When you're dealing in in other countries where where people have no idea what a free press is like, they have no idea how powerful the New York Times is and how many people in whatever government office it is in whatever country it is are actually reading it and then can trace them back. They may need to you know be coached a little bit on what the consequences are.
00:19:28
Speaker
So in the Cuba book, I was very mindful of that. Or do you have a repressive regime that can can check anything and and can have severe repercussions for the people reprisals if they're speaking out? And they in the book spoke out very forcefully against the regime.
00:19:47
Speaker
So in for the five individuals who were ah the principal characters in the book, I went over it many times right up until the editing of the book. and said, are you sure?
00:19:59
Speaker
And they all said, yes, I want you to use my real name and I want you to get the truth out. And the consequences for them could have been great. Fortunately, they didn't, so far, they haven't suffered any reprisals.
00:20:14
Speaker
On the other hand, the government got me. And the first time I tried to go back to Cuba after the book was published, they stopped me at the airport in Havana, pulled me out of the line, grabbed my passport,
00:20:26
Speaker
detained me. And then when they were done, they escorted me back to the plane, put me on the plane. After I got on the plane, they handed me the passport. They handed the stewardess my passport and said, get him out of here.
00:20:40
Speaker
oh my So I'm now officially persona non grata in Cuba, but my people down there are okay, at least for reprisals from the book. Unfortunately, they're suffering a great deal right now. Oh, wow. Yeah. what a i mean What does that do to your yeah to just your headspace and your psyche when you're like, yeah, yeah yeah suddenly persona non grata, you know pulled out of a line, passport taken? away that's ah That's a real scary situation to be in. Yeah.
00:21:09
Speaker
Well, you you realize how defenseless you are. My phone didn't work at that time in Cuba. There was nobody there except for the the car that was outside waiting for me, but I couldn't even get a message to them.
00:21:24
Speaker
My family didn't know anything. And i had no organization behind me. I was not any longer a New York Times correspondent. um But on the other hand, it gives you an insight and some empathy to what those people down there live with every day.
00:21:44
Speaker
And so anybody who speaks out, and you might see some of the videos now, they're they're encouraged to go out in the street and they don't have guns and and they're not organized in the way that they can overthrow the government, but they do what they can. So they go out in the street and they bang pots. Mm-hmm.
00:22:00
Speaker
And they burn the garbage that's been there because it hasn't been collected. But even that is a statement of extreme courage, because when you have so little and you know that the government can take away the little bit that you have, ah risking it takes a lot of courage.
00:22:19
Speaker
And you've written several books and i always love getting a sense of what what is easier and what is still really difficult about book writing from someone who has a lot of that experience. And for people who are listening who have very little of it and they like to get a sense of what that experience is like. So for you, Anthony, just, you know, what is ah what has become easier in book writing for
Anthony De Palma's Writing Process
00:22:42
Speaker
you? But what is still really a huge challenge to it?
00:22:45
Speaker
Yeah. Actually, you know, gearing up to tackle a big subject, whether it's, you know, 150 year old school and an unfortunate and unloved city like Newark and putting those things together, or, you know, the earlier books were either about a whole country or in one case, the entire North American continent.
00:23:09
Speaker
I can gear up now ah much more easily than before and have a confidence that I can put together a proposal, that the proposal will, isn't it's not guaranteed that it will result in a book, but that it's got a pretty good shot at resulting in a book. So that part is easier.
00:23:28
Speaker
Actually, knowing that I can find the people, you Imagine how scary it is. I've got a contract for one year to write the book about stuff that's not happened yet, including about people who I haven't yet identified.
00:23:43
Speaker
So both the the last two books were both followed that format. But now i yeah I've got enough of a sense early on and a kind of a... a good luck about it that I can, you know, zero in on people who are likely to be the, you know, good subjects who have a good complicated story, ah who are most importantly willing and not afraid to express themselves, which I, I, I absolutely need. So those things have gotten a little bit easier.
00:24:14
Speaker
What's gotten harder is being satisfied with the writing. um i'm I'm still, you know, I was at the New York Times for 22 years and I freelanced for them and eight years before that. So 30 years altogether of daily journalism where ah it's, you know, it's it's at a very high quality, but it's also very regimented. You know, there are certain things you do and lots of things that you don't do.
00:24:40
Speaker
And although the paper has loosened up a lot, even during the time I was there, it still can be formulaic. I remember being so upset when the first book came out. It was reviewed by the New York Times Book Review. And at one point, the reviewer said, well, he's a journalist and said it in a disparaging way. And I was I was very angry at that.
00:25:04
Speaker
Now I understand what he meant. And I've been trying to to sort of put that tiger back in the cage. And ah sometimes it works. And sometimes when I look back over the book or I'm asked to read from it, I thought, man, i you know I could have done so much, so much better.
00:25:26
Speaker
ah So that gets harder. And then there's a whole other category of marketing, which I don't even want to talk about. Well, yeah, when ah people coming up in journalism was or newspaper reporters and then you get maybe the opportunity and thrust into pure narrative, it can be hard and like that journalistic ah pejorative could be like it feels maybe stilted and you know yeah it doesn't feel, and not that I love lyrical writing, but like but it doesn't feel you know novelistic, I guess, which is why when a writer, say, like George Saunders writes like a reported essay, I like, That has some snap, crackle, and pop that maybe a newspaper reporter doesn't because he's just writing so virtuostically. And then he brings that to nonfiction. It's like, oh wow, this is pretty pyrotechnic.
00:26:12
Speaker
But I totally see that because I came up with newspapers, too. And then you're just like you're you you have to unlearn a lot. I imagine that's kind of what you had to unlearn a lot of muscle memory to sink into book writing and narrative.
00:26:26
Speaker
You know, it's it's all that that analysis and, you know, that personal observation that you you leave out. I remember one time writing a story. It was about a conference, an international conference. And I wrote that the the person at the dais was ah close to tears.
00:26:44
Speaker
And we had a whole thing about it. Well, how do you know it who was close to tears? Did you see tears? Well, if you saw tears, then you would have said tears. Well, no, it wasn't. that but it was obvious that he was he was emotional about it and it looked And so that had to be taken out. But when you are writing a book or you're outside of the the daily journalism, well, you have an opportunity to put your own observations in there and create an atmosphere, not just ah not just to observe a scene, but to create the atmosphere. And that's that's a leap that I push myself to do and
00:27:26
Speaker
You know, ah part of me just isn't there yet. So it's still a work in progress, even after all these years. and that's okay. I like that. I like that idea that, well, the next time I'll be able to do it better. Yeah.
Challenges of Writing About St. Benedict's
00:27:42
Speaker
And ah you talked about gearing up earlier and and to immerse yourself in this prep school at St. Benedict's in Newark. What was the gearing up for this, the the access and that initial trust that allowed got got you into the door, got you on the ground?
00:27:59
Speaker
Yeah. Well, ah Brendan, actually, this a book had a 45-year gestation. So I first found out about it and wrote about it. as a freelancer for the New York Times in 1981.
00:28:14
Speaker
And from that initial encounter, I was convinced that it had all the elements of a book. Because it's not just ah ah the school itself, it's the story of the monks and the school that they created refusing to die in a city that was dying around them and nearly was lost, right?
00:28:38
Speaker
So this school was started in 1868. It lasted for a century doing what ah you know ah a middle-class working man's prep school does.
00:28:48
Speaker
Takes the sons of immigrants and puts them up a couple of legs up on the social and economic ladder, creating lawyers, doctors, politicians, mayors, even a couple of bishops, right? 1960s. And it started in a monastery.
00:29:05
Speaker
Most monasteries are up on a hill. out in the countryside, serene, sublime, contemplative. Well, this one was started on what was the outskirts of the city of Newark in the eighteen fifty s But by 1967 is in the inner city, in the worst neighborhood in this city that's on the decline.
00:29:30
Speaker
So the riots take place basically across the street. And almost immediately, all those faithful alums um are reluctant to send their sons into the city.
00:29:42
Speaker
It staggers along for until 1972 until the monks say, yeah, you know what? One of us is going to get killed here. They're white in the middle of a totally black neighborhood.
00:29:53
Speaker
their next The building next door is occupied by Imiri Baraka and the ah the not the Nation of Islam, but his his organization, which was basically black power right next door. Mm-hmm.
00:30:07
Speaker
They vote to close the school, and half of them leave, but the other half stay, and monks take this vow of stability, which differentiates them from mother priests, basically meaning a commitment to the community where they take their vows. In this case, Newark.
00:30:26
Speaker
It's not on a hill. It's right in the middle of the city. So by ah extension, the community is also the community of Newark and the people in it. The guys who stay try to find jobs, and they look at each other after a couple of weeks and say, hey, you know, and we never signed up for this. We're teachers. The need is still here. The kids are different, but so what?
00:30:47
Speaker
So they reimagine the school. Imagine that they reimagine the school in 1972 and reopen it in 1973 while the city is falling apart around them.
00:30:58
Speaker
The Newark News, the biggest newspaper in the state, 100 years old, folds. Nobody's going to buy it anymore in Newark. Ballantyne Beer, the biggest one of the biggest employers, been there for 100 years, closes 3,000 people out of work.
00:31:13
Speaker
All the railroads that come into Newark that make it a transportation hub, they're all bankrupt. Everybody who can is getting on the the new highway, going down to the Jersey Shore, and getting out of town.
00:31:26
Speaker
That's the moment that they decide to stand fast. Wow. um And they reopened the school, a school that had up to a thousand kids. They reopened it with 89 and basically no business plan, no real idea of how they're going to do this.
00:31:45
Speaker
They elect as headmaster, a 26 year old monk who's a graduate of the school who has had more experience in the classroom as a student than as a teacher. And he's the headmaster.
00:31:56
Speaker
And they say, well, yeah, they're priests, right, in their monks. So they say God will prevail and God will provide. And they just do it. They do it because they're committed to it.
00:32:08
Speaker
And ah now, 50 years later, they're back up to a thousand kids. They are a model for urban education. All the kids graduate. Nearly all of them go on to college, not because they're studying for the SATs,
00:32:23
Speaker
studying for the sat solely right They take s SATs, but they do all right. But basically because the monks and the staff, there's a lot of lay staff that are just as dedicated, believe that the word preparatory really means preparing for life and not just for taking a test.
00:32:43
Speaker
Most of the kids come from some kind of a disadvantaged background, either ah economically or, you know, broken family or something like that. And they find themselves immediately on the very first day inside a community that wants them to be there. Big difference from their life outside. So all of those things, I mean, these are decent people doing selfless things.
00:33:08
Speaker
Why isn't that a story? yeah Why isn't that a book? right So I pursued it from 1981 on. After the first book about North America, I thought, now's the time to do it. So I was a New York Times correspondent. I had just come back from overseas. I lived not far from Newark.
00:33:27
Speaker
The people that I interviewed in 1981 for that freelance story, are still there in 2001. In fact, they're still there today. The headmaster, that 26-year-old guy, is now 80, and he's still the headmaster.
00:33:39
Speaker
So I came up with the proposal. Now I had an agent. I had a history. i was going to do a second book. I went back to them, easy, because that intimacy was there. Over the years, I had done other stories and been in touch with them. And I met with the monks.
00:33:54
Speaker
ah They had me make a presentation in the monastery with all of the monks sitting in a semicircle around me asking questions. They then voted in the traditional way with black and white marbles.
00:34:07
Speaker
And the white marbles outnumbered the black ones. And i was all set. And then a few days later, the abbot in each of these monasteries is self-governing and the abbot is the the head.
00:34:20
Speaker
called me in and said, yeah, you know what, good idea, but we're going to pass. And i think he was uneasy with my demand that I have access to everything and everyone at any time.
00:34:36
Speaker
And he just didn't see the the value of it. So I passed on it. I went ahead and did three other books. Spotlight came up, and the whole whole idea of priests and kids, you know, got to be very sticky. I had to wait until New Jersey passed a law that lifted the statute of limitations on sexual assault suits to see if anything was out there that would come up.
00:35:03
Speaker
And ah waited two years for that period to go through. When it finally did, I got in touch. I had been in touch with the lawyers who were handling cases in other parishes and other schools.
00:35:15
Speaker
And I said, look, is there anything there that I need to worry about? And it was only when I'd gone through that process that I went back to my agent and said, you know, I'd like to try it again.
00:35:26
Speaker
He was not enthusiastic about it, ah to be frank. ah his concern so My approach was going to be focusing on one person, the headmaster.
00:35:39
Speaker
And my model I know you had him on just recently, and I listened to the interview. It was fascinating. But my model was McPhee, who did a 1967 profile called The Headmaster, which became a book.
00:35:55
Speaker
And it turned out that when Father Ed, the headmaster of St. Benedict's, was just a very young priest in the seminary, one of the older priests handed him a book and said, you should read this.
00:36:06
Speaker
And he looked at it, and it was McPhee's The Headmaster. about the headmaster of Deerfield Academy who'd been there for 60 years, who who came in when the school was just about bankrupt and made it into you know a national institution.
00:36:21
Speaker
So I thought, perfect. Here, after doing the five families and the Cubans, I could focus on one person, which is what I wanted to do. And it's this blend, right? Because obviously I'm white. Most of the kids are black or Latino, but the monks are white.
00:36:37
Speaker
So it it seemed to be a good in between. could meet all of those people. My agent said, I can't sell that. I can't sell a story about white monks in a black neighborhood. It would look like the white savior story. And there's no market for that.
00:36:55
Speaker
i I argued with him that it's not the case that the monks were there before the neighborhood was back by about 100 years, but it didn't work. So I had to switch to a focus on students.
00:37:11
Speaker
That was a problem because I wanted to tell the story from 1967 on. Father Ed could do that. None of the students could because they're only there for four or five years.
00:37:24
Speaker
so i So I looked around and then I thought about alumni and I was lucky enough to find one of the people who were who was in that very first class of 89 kids in time lived in.
00:37:42
Speaker
he was a black kid at the time who lived ah two miles away from the school, used to go down there to play basketball. ah And then when he was encouraged to to enroll in the school, his parents were encouraged, he would get to the school by walking the two miles down Springfield Avenue, which was the principal area of the riots. It had it was a commercial street that was basically ravaged by 1967. And in the years that he was making that walk was still devastated.
00:38:14
Speaker
So he became a continuing character because he's now the freshman basketball coach. Anthony. He retired and went back. Yeah. So that that gave me a narrative arc telling his story. And within his story, I could tell the story of Newark and of the school closing and reopening, which then allowed me to talk about the 50th year of the new school, the reimagined school, which is the year that I embedded myself and introduced those students and then end the narrative with Anthony, the basketball coach,
00:38:51
Speaker
Making that same walk back to his former home along Springfield Avenue that now has changed and it allowed me to talk about the changes in Newark and the changes in the school and the changes in in Coach Badger as well.
00:39:08
Speaker
His story is quite dramatic. Yeah, yeah, Anthony's a story, yeah, is incredible. And i yeah yeah, I mean, you essentially like lead off the book with with him. He's one of the very first names that we encounter in the book and certainly one of the last one of the more you powerful ah characters and stories in the book, too. And, you know, as you're embedding with ah with the school for for a year, you can only be in so many places at one time. So like how do you divide your time so you're you know your you're reporting on things that will help give the the book its ah kinetic energy, but you know at the same time, like, ah I can't be everywhere all at once. So yeah how did you do that?
00:39:50
Speaker
you know I think journalism helped in that, um especially being a foreign correspondent. If you're a foreign correspondent in Mexico, there's stuff happening all the time and you have to decide what you're going to cover and and have contingencies. If this doesn't work out, let me do that. In Mexico, we used to it was incredible. We used to schedule three interviews, same day, same time.
00:40:12
Speaker
with the understanding that at least one of them was going to cancel, one was going to be late, and maybe if you were lucky, one would actually hold to the schedule time. So it was easy to to schedule three.
00:40:24
Speaker
i had the I kind of knew because I'd been following the school for so long what their schedule was like, although much more complicated than I i realized. I knew I didn't want to be in the classroom every day.
00:40:38
Speaker
i didn't want it to be that kind of a book. I was mostly looking at ah the aspects of the school that made it tough and different. So i could um I could pick and choose that way. And then once I sort of settled by you know maybe three or four months in on ah on a small group of kids who I thought were going to be in the book, I could then switch over to follow their schedule.
00:41:07
Speaker
And then there were there were events in the school year that I knew I had to cover, like the the freshman overnight, you know, at the very beginning where they they so they live there for a week and they start this process of building a community.
00:41:22
Speaker
The Appalachian Trail hike, which I was intent on completing with the kids, the complication there was that they now have girls and ah they stagger the groups so that the girls never encountered the boys on the trail, which meant that I had to extend my trip and could only do both. And they're, they're happening simultaneously one day apart. The only way I could do it was to get help from the school, which sort of trucked me back and forth between the girls and the boys. But the five day trip for me was six days and it's supposed to be 55 miles. I probably did close to 60 or more. oh wow. They were also in the middle. I didn't want to do much about sports, although sports is a big thing because I thought it it wasn't that unique a part of what the school does. Lots of schools do it. They were exceptional in that they they could succeed so much, particularly in a few sports. Water polo, who'd expect it, right? Water polo, fencing, sports.
00:42:29
Speaker
Soccer. Soccer was more expected. But the year that I was there, they were on a 106 game winning streak. the The seniors in the school had never gone to a game that the the soccer team lost. They had ah the Gatorade High School Soccer Player of the Year.
00:42:50
Speaker
He was awarded it two years in a row. So here they were going for the state prep school championships. which was against and another very good prep school, which would have meant whoever won that was basically the best high school soccer team in the country.
00:43:08
Speaker
So I knew I had to cover that as we got to it. And I went down there um and I've been now persona non grata for soccer games at St. Benedict's as well, because they they lost the the only, the only game that I watched was the only game they lost in, in seven years.
00:43:27
Speaker
um But that led to another incident that you know that i cover in the book, which then got even more complicated as some of those characters became involved in ah in another controversy later on. Yeah, and speaking of like those two particular controversies, it's one of those things where you're when you're embedded and you're reporting on in real time and you don't know how the arc of the thing is going to play out, you know you don't want to wish ill will on anybody, but ill will often leads to the dramatic beats in a narrative. So at some point you're like, well, I hope something happens. But you don't... I had an experience with this too. I won't belabor it. But it's just like...
00:44:09
Speaker
you do wish for something kind of like gnarly to happen because that's good for the book, but at the same time you don't want it to happen because it's bad for the kids at the heart of this. So it's like, how do how do you navigate that tension that you need these things to happen, but at the same time you you kind of don't want them to happen for their own sake?
00:44:26
Speaker
Yeah. And that's exactly what happened because the characters involved in in both of those incidents were initially supposed to be the heroes of the book. And in a way they are still, but the circumstances changed ah dramatically. So as soon as the first incident happened at the soccer game, I thought, well, this is rich.
00:44:49
Speaker
And actually, did i started it without my contract being signed. So we were still negotiating. with the publishers. And that happened.
00:44:59
Speaker
ah So I could then add an ah addendum to the proposal with that in it. And it helped seal the deal. So that wasn't so severe. ah When the second incident came, and some of the same people were involved, and now we were talking about, you know, a real challenge to the a profile of the school that I was writing about. Now, in the We got reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. it was a nice big review on publication day. So that was good. um I objected to one aspect of it because they did mention these incidents and they used it to question whether or not the the high standards are actually effective.
00:45:46
Speaker
ah legitimate, but they left it at that. The important part of putting it in the book was the way the kids responded to it and what they did afterwards. We mentioned it earlier on that they didn't just throw up their hands, but they they acknowledged that they had made a mistake and they dealt with it. And that's a big part of what St. Benedict's and the Benedictines themselves do.
00:46:11
Speaker
So I felt that I could decently include those incidents because they showed so much about how the school works. And it also showed how difficult life is for these kids.
00:46:27
Speaker
you know You could have done a book from the inside about a school like St. Benedict's and presented it in glowing terms. Just focus on the fact that all the kids graduate. Attendance is 96% on most days for an urban high school.
00:46:44
Speaker
There are schools in Newark where daily attendance is around 40%. where graduation is, you know, 60% of the kids graduate and many of them don't go on to college. So it's it's it's unique in so many ways, but it's not perfect.
00:47:02
Speaker
And i i thought legitimately I needed to include people like this and their experiences.
00:47:13
Speaker
ah I'd like to mention one thing that happened to me in this book that I'd never dealt with before. The publisher required the manuscript when I handed it in to be sent to a sensitivity reader, is someone one that I didn't pick and didn't know, not someone in-house. It was a freelance sensitivity reader.
00:47:37
Speaker
And she was given the manuscript and told to look through it to make sure that I wasn't stepping on any toes, misstating things, being insensitive. Mm-hmm.
00:47:48
Speaker
We never really talked about what the consequences would be. i mean, who gets the last say? i didn't have any say about whether or not I wanted it to to be reviewed that way.
00:48:01
Speaker
As it turns out, she ah ah the only she didn't have any objections. The only comment she came back with was asking me to make sure that the kids who were negatively portrayed – aren't all minority kids.
00:48:17
Speaker
They wanted to make sure that there was that negative aspect didn't just fall on minority kids. And it it didn't. And so we were okay there. But I was a little bit taken aback by the sensitivity review.
00:48:32
Speaker
It could have been gnarly, but it was it was okay. So in going back to your question, um yeah, I have to admit guiltily that when the first incident at the soccer game came up, I thought, yeah, that's drama.
00:48:48
Speaker
And when the second one came up, it was a little bit more difficult to deal with because now I had to restructure the story, but still it was drama. And that's one of the things when – at At Columbia, I'm now mostly what I do is each of the students in the one year graduate program has a not a dissertation to write, but a capstone narrative nonfiction article of 5000 words. And what I try to they'll come in with a you know a general topic. I want to do something about kids or I want to do something about education.
00:49:24
Speaker
And we'll have to narrow it down, narrow down the focus till you get to a story. And I tried to tell them, look, this is narrative nonfiction, 5,000 words. You're going to have to be with the people a lot. And you're going to need some kind of drama, something that during the course of the article, somebody has a revelation. Somebody has is forced to go through some kind of a change. And it's it's a little bit foreign for them because most of them have just done academic writing and you can get away with. Of course, you don't want drama there. And we work on it during the reporting. And during the writing and in the end, I think they get it, but they don't always. it's ah Really, it's an important part of it. When when they come up with the original article, the start of the semester and their first um the first meeting, they'll have some idea that there are all these rules that you have to follow. And maybe they've taken a magazine writing class and you've got the five sections and you start this way and do that.
00:50:27
Speaker
And I'll tell them, look, There are only two things that you have to do because the form could be anything. I can give you an example of anything from Frank Sinatra has a cold to, you know, the latest article in the New Yorker.
00:50:40
Speaker
Two things you have to meet. One is it has to be true. This is nonfiction. So you don't make up anything. AI doesn't do anything for you, right? It has to be exactly as it happened, as you saw it happen. And second, once you've got that part of it down, you've got to make sure that it's interesting.
00:51:01
Speaker
Beyond that, hand me anything that you feel compelled to do and I will work with it. It sometimes is too broad a mandate for them. they They would much rather say, oh, I want you to do five sections. The first section should have a thousand words. The second one should have two sources. The third one should have three sources and some auxiliary sources and blah, blah, blah.
00:51:23
Speaker
Well, yeah, it is speaking of of how to you know streamline things and get things to the right focus, you know on this ground, is it's a lean book. And you know you were there for a long time, and the school year's 11 months, and they've got all these things, this pool initiation thing, and the AT, t their leadership structures, and all all these things that make the school so incredibly unique. And yet the book is pretty lean. I mean, like you could have stayed with Father Ed for a long time and written something longer than this just on him. ah But, you know, he's integral to the story, but he's not the whole story, of course. And yet you've kept this book very lean and on the track. So, yeah, just what was the challenge in just being so economical with your storytelling for the time you were embedded with these students?
00:52:09
Speaker
The contract.
00:52:13
Speaker
it It is the first time that um I handed in a manuscript and the first response was, hey, this is longer than the contract. And I said, ah what's in the contract? i didn't even i didn't even look at it because it's never been a case before. It's usually the contract has a minimum a word count.
00:52:33
Speaker
But it turns out that in nonfiction publishing today, ah the major publishers, and this is Harper Collins, um see 300 pages as the sweet spot.
00:52:46
Speaker
ah So the first thing I had to do after submitting the manuscript was to cut 30 to 40% of it. um yeah So i I had envisioned a much broader canvas.
00:53:01
Speaker
My original idea was a book about Newark Abbey, about St. Benedict's and about the city of Newark. And ah the original covers were intended to put all those things together.
00:53:18
Speaker
At 300 pages, it it is impossible to do that. ah Not with the history of a city like Newark, the first black majority black city in the Northeast, the first majority black city to have a black mayor, ah having gone down as far as it has, and then now coming back up, the school closing and then opening, the complications of all of the kids the monks and their vow of stability and their survival in this ancient form of community in in a ghetto and dealing these these old white monks dealing with young black and Latino kids, all of it very complicated.
00:54:00
Speaker
um And i I had envisioned it being much broader than that. This was a compromise. It was a book, as I said, that I'd wanted to do for 45 years.
00:54:11
Speaker
It's not the way I had originally envisioned it, but with my agent, Stuart Krzyzewski, convinced me that, look, if you want to do the book, it's going to have to be this way. I had to cut out a lot of everything that wasn't the school.
00:54:28
Speaker
So ah all of that stuff about the monks, you know, for the monks living together for 60 years in this place, watching the world change around them. Remember these, Father Ed and some of his ah the confreres entered the monastery as Vatican II was being negotiated in Rome.
00:54:50
Speaker
So they are part of what I like to call the Holy Ghost generation. that They recited the the state the ah the cross, the crucifix as ah Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
00:55:02
Speaker
That has now changed. The number of Kids in Catholic school has dropped by 70% from then. The number of Catholic schools dropped by the similar amount. The number of religious in the United States has dropped tremendously.
00:55:19
Speaker
What used to be the ah a an honored figure in the community, now after the whole spotlight era, they're sort of radioactive. And yet these guys continue in their devoted way of of selflessly giving. How do you tell that story without making it into sort of a sop, without all of the detail?
00:55:44
Speaker
In the end, I had to leave most of that out. It was very interesting. During the time I was there, the oldest monk died, died in the monastery.
00:55:56
Speaker
They don't have a retirement home. They don't have retirement pensions or anything else. They stay until they die. So we went to the, I accompanied them to the cemetery and there were two young monks there, guys who had just taken their initial vows. So one was 25 and the other one was, I think, 23, maybe just 24.
00:56:18
Speaker
So I watched them standing there during the burial. They're watching this elderly monk who was 90 being buried in the monk's own burial plot.
00:56:29
Speaker
in the cemetery that they once owned way back when. And I said to them, what does it feel like to know that that's the arc of your entire life? You've dedicated yourself to this place. You're going to, at some point, you're going to be right there.
00:56:44
Speaker
And ah it was interesting that they said, well, it's comforting in a way. Unlike us, or at least I'll talk for myself, not knowing when I was 23, what was going to happen, where I was going to be. how far I'd get if I got anywhere at all, I could see the the sort of sublime serenity of knowing in advance and being dedicated to something. Now I was dedicated to writing, but there was no, no guarantee that I was going to be able to do it. Here they're dedicated to this life that they've chosen. And in spite the fact that the numbers are decreasing and, you know, society seems to be changing, they've already survived 1500 years.
00:57:29
Speaker
I'm sure that for them, this is sort of um a momentary disruption and they'll get through it. All of that stuff that I had hoped to get in there is in my notebooks and in the computer somewhere and the, in the edits and the rest of it, i I had to do the best I could to try to weave a little bit of that in there.
00:57:51
Speaker
but basically let the kids, uh, tell the story. Yeah, I was ah I particularly love like Ray and Lucia and like their yeah their leadership styles and then how, you know, those are you know, they were left to ah have like this no cell phone policy that was pushed up against ah pushed against by the head leadership. But then they're like, you know, what the this is the students call. And that's part of what makes the school unique. We're going to let them.
00:58:19
Speaker
ah see that this thing through. And then, ah yeah, then you see leadership styles change over the years. And that's kind of the that baked into the ethos of the school. That was really great to see that illustrated in your book.
00:58:31
Speaker
Yeah. they Their point of view is that the kids should be leader. Don't do anything for kids that they can do themselves and be prepared for them to make mistakes. Because they will.
00:58:42
Speaker
I think that is a pretty logical way of doing it. I like to think that Father Ed and the others have have adopted a kind of radical pragmatism. they They look at life as it is. And so even when it came time when it comes to dealing with the kids, they're gonna make mistakes because as Father Ed said, they're mentally impaired. They've only got partially formed brains and they don't always understand the impact of what they're doing.
00:59:11
Speaker
But for the monks themselves, you know staying in Newark, it would have made much more sense financially and even from their own personal point of view, for all of them to have left in 1972 and move out to the suburbs where they had another school that has a much more traditional prep school profile, kids with lots of money, lots of privilege, no problems like they have in Newark.
00:59:39
Speaker
But they didn't do it. They stayed. And when they were struggling, one of the alums from before the reimagination, came along with tons of money, and they accepted it.
00:59:51
Speaker
ah which let them build up the school and and keep it going to the point where they then made the transition to be their own success. But it was based on that money that they took from the alumni, and and one alumnus in particular, who ended up being hauled before federal court for penny stock fraud and then evading the the ruling of the court to pay back those investors. It was a bankruptcy evasion.
01:00:19
Speaker
So Father Ed got called in as a character witness, and the lawyers for the government asked him, well, what kept you from calling up your friend and asking him, like, where'd this money come from, and isn't it dirty?
01:00:33
Speaker
And Father Ed showed his his Irish background and the big chip he has on his shoulder. And he said, what what kept me? Well, it's all these kids that kept me from doing it and all the stuff that they have to go through all the time.
01:00:47
Speaker
And he took a lot of heat for that from alumni and from you know the general community for taking that money. But he doesn't back down at all from it and said, if if we didn't do that, the school wouldn't exist. And the school's existence is more important than than that.
01:01:03
Speaker
Not everybody agreed with that, but that's the kind of tough approach. That's that's part of what makes it the toughest prep school. it's it's It's not tough in the academic sense that most people would think, although they have very high academic standards. But it's tough because the monks are tough. They had to be in order to do this. The city is tough.
01:01:23
Speaker
A city that is on its knees could have just given up. And if you looked at if you went to St. Benedict's today and looked east from their ah playing field behind there, you would see 48-story market-rate apartment building that is under construction right now because Newark is is bouncing back.
01:01:45
Speaker
Still got a lot of problems, but it the worst of it
Themes in Anthony's Book
01:01:48
Speaker
is over. And the kids themselves are tough. They come from tough backgrounds and tough city streets. They have tough home lives. And the school puts them through ah the ringer from the very first day ah through that water challenge where they, of course, they're they're taught how to swim. And most kids don't know how to swim. Most black and Latino kids don't.
01:02:12
Speaker
And in the end of it, they are dressed in fully clothed with a backpack. They get marched up a a ladder to the top of a platform over the deep end, the 13 foot deep end of the pool. they're put They have a swim mask that's blacked out that is applied to them.
01:02:34
Speaker
um They get to the edge of the platform. The instructor right next to him says, swimmer, ready? And when the student puts a thumbs up, he gets a little nudge on the shoulder or she gets a little nudge on the shoulder and they're thrown into the pool.
01:02:50
Speaker
They have to remove their shoes, remove their pants, tie them up and create a sort of a flotation device. remove, not remove the mask, the mask has to stay on.
01:03:00
Speaker
And all the while a former Navy sail is in the water with them, either splashing water in their face or pushing them down to the bottom of the pool. Now, I did the Appalachian Trail and it was rough, but I did not go into the pool and I'm not sure I could do it now. But what it says to these kids is, hey, look, if you're prepared and you work as a team, you can do it.
01:03:25
Speaker
And that's an important lesson. So in the end, like how do you value how do you put a value on education? Is it the score that you get on a test? you know How well you do in calculus?
01:03:37
Speaker
Or is it based on the person you become? And I think this school, while it's not a ah model for every school, certainly lots of the things they do could only be done here. But there are some things and their their approach, their approach to community, brotherhood, empathy, and saying, you need to be willing to sacrifice what you want for the sake of what we all need. Those are decent, honest, and ah integral things that that we could take a lesson from.
01:04:12
Speaker
i think people like Coach Badger, who's in the in the book, who went through hard times in his own life, but now has made a success for himself and is now giving back. And even what happened to Ray and the way he handled it, I think is really a ah ah testament to that idea that you're you're preparing kids for life and not just for taking a test. Yeah, it makes it the book so great and yeah what they what what they stand for, ah really like like like you said, like truly purport preparatory for for life. like I don't care if you got a 1,400 in your SATs, but like yeah if push comes to shove, can you help someone from drowning? Or like if you get... You know, turning your the pants into a flotation device, you little little things like this in the totality of the education was really, you know, um impressive and just, ah yeah, commendable in so many ways.
01:05:09
Speaker
will Will they want you to be on their team? can Can you be on my team if I work at IBM or I work at Indeed or I work anywhere? Can you be part of the team?
01:05:20
Speaker
You know, hiking with the kids on the Appalachian Trail was interesting because it was clear then, and i I've been hiking forever. I did the hike with St. Benedict's in 1981.
01:05:32
Speaker
ah And so this was like 40 years later, still doing it. Hiking on your own would not be a problem for 14-year-old kids, even if they've never done it. They have so much energy. They have so much. ah They're so fast. and they just That was not a problem. The problem was working as a team.
01:05:53
Speaker
They're in teams of eight. And there's one kid in the team who's racing up ahead, right? And then there's one kid in the team who's ta whose shoe never gets tied and he's always lagging behind. You've got to somehow figure, and the teams each have a captain, and those the captain and everybody else in the team has to figure out how we're going to work together when what I think is funny isn't something that you think is funny. When you want to take a break and I've got to keep moving and all of that. So it really teaches them what it means to be part of a community.
01:06:27
Speaker
And that goes from earning the right to wear the uniform, which can also be taken away, to how you work together in groups. And the kids are in groups mixing together, the young ones with the older ones. It's not like homeroom the way we had it and it's just the kids in your own year. So they learn from each other from the very first day of that overnight at the beginning of the school year in July till the very last day of graduation.
01:06:56
Speaker
On the day of graduation, they sit within their same group, the group that they've been with for four years, not their class or their homeroom teacher, but that group. And you can find, I talked to alumni who did the hike 50 years ago, and they can tell me what team they were on, who was in their team and what happened.
01:07:17
Speaker
And there, I think when I've been there and I've watched alumni come back, it's really extraordinary because they so much align themselves with the school and what it stood for. And they also can see Father Ed and Father Albert and Father Philip, some of these guys who were there when they were students 50 years ago. It's really, it gives the idea of,
01:07:42
Speaker
stability and resilience a whole new meaning and resilience is something that i've found myself you know like being my controlling theme for the writing that i do it's it's it's resilience in so many ways from the cubans to the monks there um to the bristlecone pine trees out in california which really are the ultimate lesson in resilience Well, the book's incredible, Anthony. And ah as I bring these conversations out for a landing, I always just love asking the guests for a recommendation of some kind for the listeners. And that's just like anything you're finding fun and cool and you want to share. So I'll extend that to you as we bring our conversation down.
01:08:25
Speaker
Yeah. A couple of things. For a writing tip, what I learned at the at the New York Times was TK, the two letters TK. All right. There are very few words, if any at all, that have that combination.
01:08:40
Speaker
So when you're writing, and if you're writing on deadline, you're sort of like in a red hot mood of of creation, right? So you need to get it in there because there's a deadline.
01:08:52
Speaker
I'm talking about Coleman, is it Alabama or is it Georgia? All right, let me just put Coleman, TK, and move on, right? So it's it's in essence, it's the absolute opposite of McPhee's ah fixation on putting an outline together. can remember reading about him doing his outline, taking days and days and days to do the outline or laying on a table somewhere out in a picnic table and and just looking at the sky thinking of how am I going to do this?
01:09:25
Speaker
Well, you can't do that when you're working for a newspaper. New Yorker will let you do that, but the New York Times won't let you do that. And so ah I find that it's a good hint for some of the students at Columbia who were used to doing in that kind of academic writing where you stop, go back to the book, find the exact date or the figure, and then come back, and you've lost the the animation.
01:09:47
Speaker
So I said, try doing it this way, and when you get to a spot like that, even if it's a whole sentence, you know don't make it up and just write through it because you won't necessarily catch it on the way back, but you put the TK in there, and when you're going through it, it can't be mistaken for anything other than TK, which means you're missing something.
01:10:08
Speaker
On the other hand, i mentioned the bristlecone pines. The bristlecones are 5,000 years old. They are the oldest living things. Now, there are some cloning organisms that are older than that, but they just you know reproduce themselves. This is a tree that started from a seed 5,000 years ago, and it's still there.
01:10:31
Speaker
And the way it survives in a very harsh environment, I've been there and it's it's not even soil, it's rock. It's it's just their rock on the top of the white mountains in California. Nothing else can survive there but them. They survive by growing very slowly.
01:10:49
Speaker
So I visited them in the 1970s. 40 years later, when I went back to see them again, they're evergreen trees, but it really means evergreen. because the needles on the tree that I saw in the 1970s were still there. They take about 50 years for the needles to change. They can grow, you know, trees have tree rings.
01:11:12
Speaker
A hundred years of tree rings in a bristle cone could be about less than an inch. So they grow very slowly. ah They are in a harsh environment, which makes them ah adaptable to the conditions and they have the ability to block off one part of the tree that's not getting enough nutrients. They let that part die and train the resources to the rest of the tree.
01:11:39
Speaker
So trees, but you know, that, that idea of resilience has got me into, you know, thinking about and looking at and appreciating trees much more. What I'm doing now is trying to graft apple trees,
01:11:53
Speaker
I've got a little piece of property up in upstate New York. There are old apple trees there. I don't know what kind they are. they're I guess you would call them heirloom, but they don't look like anything else. And the trees are quite old, so I'd like to propagate them and and get keep them going.
01:12:09
Speaker
I was born in the city, so what do I know from trees? So I i got the apples and I saved the seeds. And I was ready to plant the seeds until I did some checking and I found out That's not going to work.
01:12:21
Speaker
You can't grow that tree from the apple seeds from that tree. You have to take the tree itself and you do that by grafting. Well, a who knew? Lots of people know, but this kid from Hoboken didn't know. So now I've been trying. I did it last year.
01:12:41
Speaker
you have And it's a long process, almost like writing a book. You have to go up there in late winter to grab the ends of the tree, just the one year growth, take those and you have to preserve them in the refrigerator. No fruit in the refrigerator because the fruit changes the the texture of it. You have to preserve them for months until you get the rootstock and then you start to put them together. You have to slice them and and merge them. It's like writing when you slice and put together different things. um I did eight of them last year.
01:13:18
Speaker
Seven didn't do anything at all. Like writing, right? Not everything works. The one that did take, i I kept in a pot here in New Jersey and watched it every day and you know made sure it had everything it needed. It finally started to sprout up on top. We got to the fall and it was time to actually put it in the ground. So I put it in the ground right next to the old apple tree.
01:13:45
Speaker
that it came from. And I felt very proud of myself. The next morning I came out and the deer had chopped off the top. Oh, no.
01:13:56
Speaker
ah Just like writing. Just like writing. so This year, i have a whole bunch of sprouts in the refrigerator from the back in January. And my Scion stock just arrived last week. So I'm ready to do it again. Resiliency, right? You need it. You're going to get knocked down. You're going to get rejected.
01:14:21
Speaker
But like the bristle cone, the more adverse the conditions are, the stronger you become and the more resilient you are. Oh, amazing. Well, Anthony, this is so great to get the talk writing and talk about your wonderful book and everything. So thanks so much for carving out the time to do this and for coming on the show to talk shop. This was awesome.
01:14:39
Speaker
You bet. Anytime.
01:14:47
Speaker
Awesome. Thank you very much to Anthony for coming on the show. Great conversation, fun stuff. Also, thanks for you for making it this far and spending time with the podcast. And if you want to support the show and with, I don't know, more than just your valuable time and attention, you can visit patreon.com slash cnfpod and see if you'd like to support the show with a few bucks and go to brendanamero.com for show notes and to sign up for the Rage Against the Algorithm newsletters and Pitch Club.
01:15:16
Speaker
Oh yeah. That's right, baby. So while I was walking Laughlin the other day, I got to thinking of the balance between being realistic in your goals and expectations and ability and talent okay versus it bleeding into limiting beliefs.
01:15:41
Speaker
What's the balance? How helpful are delusional thoughts to our progress? Are delusional thoughts okay? I'll make the point that they are, in a way, but I'll get there in a second.
01:15:54
Speaker
As with most things, I always go back to my baseball career, such as it was. I wanted to play professionally, and I was just good enough that maybe perhaps I could have been one of those late-round draft picks they used to fill out a roster or some shit. Probably not going anywhere, but we got to fill it up with with warm bodies.
01:16:14
Speaker
and This was clearly delusional thinking. But that delusion made me work very hard and made me a great high school player.
01:16:24
Speaker
And if I hadn't burned myself out, I suspect I would have been a pretty decent Division I college player at UMass or if I had transferred elsewhere, you know, whoever. I probably would have been ah a very good college player.
01:16:36
Speaker
You know being a late bloomer, I could have been quite good, probably in my you junior to senior years or whatever. In my last fall at UMass, before I was cut, so by the start of my sophomore year, I was doing really well against the team and the scholarship players and intra-squad stuff. I belonged, clearly, until I didn't.
01:16:55
Speaker
yeah Not being a scholarship player means there are no strings attached. you know the The coach would look like a fool if he cut a scholarship player over this walk-on. who is every bit as good, but like I said, a coach has to protect his reputation, and it's a and cutting me was really easy, and I understand that now, the the politics of it all, right?
01:17:17
Speaker
Right? Point being... If I didn't shoot for being a pro, I'm probably not a Division I or II college player. Had it been more realistic, then maybe my floor wouldn't be as high.
01:17:31
Speaker
In hindsight, my pro dreams were very clearly delusional. But it got me pretty far. So what of writing? Yeah, I'd love nothing more than to write the kind of ah a kind of Nick Palmgarden-style profile for The New Yorker.
01:17:45
Speaker
I think we'd all agree that that's the big time or comparable magazines. But that's, to me, the filet mignon of profile writing. Not that I eat that stuff, but you follow.
01:17:57
Speaker
It could very well be more delusional than me playing baseball for the Red Sox. But if I say I'm not of that cut, let's look at the facts. I'm not as good as these New Yorker writers. Few of us are.
01:18:10
Speaker
But is that a limiting belief? Or is that merely being realistic? Or, as I might argue, drinking from the delusional fountain... doing work that might get you close to that New Yorker standard might make you a pretty damn good writer for maybe a magazine a tier or two down the list.
01:18:30
Speaker
Is that a failure? Depends on your viewpoint. Shoot for the stars and landing on the moon is all well and good if you're okay landing short of the stars. During my baseball days, anything short of making it to the majors was a failure.
01:18:42
Speaker
I very much landed on the moon, having shot for the stars, but that wasn't good enough. So there's the lesson. You shoot for the stars knowing that the work you put in will extend you, will create a riptide that pulls you into deeper waters than you ever could have imagined.
01:19:01
Speaker
Key in all of this is to have fun and enjoy the ride. I stopped playing ball because once it became clear I couldn't make it, I saw no point in playing. I had long missed the point of playing a sport I was good at.
01:19:12
Speaker
It was never fun. like Even though I was a top 100 player in the all of New England, it wasn't fun anymore. I can't remember the time when it was.
01:19:24
Speaker
he Each rung on the ladder was merely to get me one step higher and nothing more. And listen, I may never get a major book contract again. yeah Maybe I had my chance, and it was great, and I appreciate it for what it was. It happened.
01:19:38
Speaker
Not a lot of people can say that. I would love to earn another, ah but I will definitely have to earn that shit. yu Maybe one day I'll crack into a big magazine, and it'll make me feel all warm and fuzzy.
01:19:49
Speaker
And I can't believe I'm going to say this. Fuck me. Apologies. I'm go to throw up a little in my mouth. It's not about the destination. It's about the fuck. I can't say it. I can't do it, but it's so true, and you know what I was going to say.
01:20:06
Speaker
I see this being realistic versus limiting belief like a dial, and the needle needs to be somewhere in the middle, and at times it's going to wiggle too far in each direction. Maybe you had that. that thinking too real is actually a limiting belief and you're not really pushing yourself where to where you could be or maybe you have too much belief in yourself and you're like dude it's just not that's not going to happen you can't dunk a basketball it's just it' never going to happen I don't care how much you believe you're going dunk that basketball you cannot do it
01:20:38
Speaker
your body will break even if you tried to. But over time, we find a sweet spot between the belief that we can do it and the voice of reason that keeps us from being maybe forever burned out and disappointed.
01:20:54
Speaker
So stay wild, CNFers. And if you can't do, interview. See