Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 184: Kristina Gaddy — ‘Flowers in the Gutter’ and the Loving What’s Underneath It All
129 Plays5 years ago
Hey, CNFers! It's Kristina Gaddy, author of Flowers in the Gutter.
This episode is sponsored by Bay Path University's MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing.
It's also sponsored by my monthly newsletters. Reading recommendations, riffs, and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. First of the month. No spam. Can't beat it.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Book Enthusiasm
00:00:00
Speaker
It's a book about kids fighting Nazis. Like, why doesn't everybody love this?
00:00:09
Speaker
a Brendan O'Mara and this is CNF the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. Greatest podcast in the world. We got Christina Gatti on the podcast today for episode 184. Oh, I love it baby. But first, discover your story man with Pay Path University's fully online MFA and creative nonfiction writing.
00:00:31
Speaker
The faculty have a true passion and love for their work. It shines through with every comment, edit, and reading assignment. The instructors are available to answer your questions, big and small, and their years of experience as writers and teachers have made for an unbeatable experience. Apply now at baypath.edu slash MFA. Classes begin January 21st. That's like in two weeks. Less maybe.
Inspirational Quote and Daily Planning Tips
00:00:56
Speaker
I don't know.
00:00:58
Speaker
Thich Nhat Hanh said, quote, to be beautiful means to be yourself. You don't need to be accepted by others. You need to be yourself, end quote, which I take to mean riff.
00:01:19
Speaker
Oh, I got my mic back. I'm back on home turf with my microphone. My beautiful, beautiful microphone. It's not getting weird in here. Trust me. How's the new year treating you? You give up yet? You quit that thing? Is your peloton holding your dress shirts okay? That's what it's meant for.
00:01:41
Speaker
I have some shiny new notebooks and I use these particular moleskin daily planner things. One as a to-do list. So it's like a year's worth of to-do lists for every day. And I have an equal one that I use kind of as a end of day. These are five to ten cool things that happened over the course of this day and I number it or sometimes I put stickers in there or receipt from a cool coffee shop.
Writing and Editing Techniques
00:02:10
Speaker
But, so in my day log for yesterday, January 8th, not that that matters, Seth Godin's blog post of the day was something titled, A Simple Editing Trick. So I was like, well, okay. So I actually wrote down the whole blog post, probably 50 words or anything, but this is great.
00:02:30
Speaker
So a simple editing trick, okay? Every sentence has a purpose. It doesn't exist to take up space. It exists for the reader to move her from here to there. This sentence then, what's it for? If it doesn't move us closer to where we seek to go, delete it.
00:02:52
Speaker
And then I went on to say, number two, I'm gassed, nothing in the tank. Three, bike costs $175 to fix. That's neither here nor there. But what a good editing trick, right? I think that's what it's about, right? I think we get caught up with what we put into the work, the massive words, the massive pages.
00:03:15
Speaker
Perhaps it's the restraint in the ruthless nature of cutting and deadheading and heck, telling a sentence from draft two that, you know, hey son, you slap it on the ass. You did good work. You got us this far, man, but we're cutting ties with you. Nothing personal. You won't be alone.
00:03:35
Speaker
You're never really dead. There's a lot of darlings on this floor. Go hang. Hang with them. It'll be like the dead marshes and Lord of the Rings. They're all there. They're just kind of... They're there in the fields of Pelennor or wherever the hell those soldiers are. Those are all dead sentences. You're the mass underneath the ocean. We love you. Another slap on the ass. That'll mean something. Not the slap on the ass.
00:04:04
Speaker
The mass underneath the ocean. That'll mean something as we get to hear from Christina Gaddy. The rock star responsible for flowers in the gutter. The true story of the teenagers who resisted the Nazis. ear moths. Good shit, man. Good shit.
00:04:22
Speaker
You signed up for the newsletter. People seem to really be digging it, except for the ones who unsubscribe. But the ones who don't unsubscribe seem to be digging it. And there's an added bonus. I'm gonna be raffling off books at random to subscribers of the show. I have a shiny new hardcover of Christina's book, Flowers in the Gutter, and I'm going to give it away to a lucky newsletter subscriber. If you're not on it, get on it. BrendanOmero.com, hey.
00:04:49
Speaker
I will email you out of the blue and say, hey, you won.
00:04:54
Speaker
What's your address? And you'll say 114 South Picking Street. And I'll say, that's weird. That's where I grew up. And I will mail it to you. Meteorate. So be patient. Newsletter means reading recommendations, riffs, and podcast news. First of the month, no spam. As far as I can tell, you can't beat it. Unsubscribe anytime, but know that I take it wicked personally. Is that it? You betcha. Here's Christina Getty.
00:05:26
Speaker
resolutions or goals you have for this year, you know, personally or as a writer?
Christina Gatti's Publishing Journey
00:05:35
Speaker
As a writer, I have started working on a next project that I envision as a book, and that's where it currently stands. So my goal with that is to kind of secure a publisher, which is a very, you know,
00:05:53
Speaker
an ever-changing goal because sometimes things move very quickly and sometimes things move very slowly in publishing. But that would make me really happy if that happened by the end of this calendar year.
00:06:06
Speaker
I think one of the things that I've been thinking about as a writer but also as a reader is I read a lot of books last year. I set a very high goal of number of books read for myself and I found that I was like reading them too quickly and sometimes
00:06:26
Speaker
like not slowing down to appreciate the language or the structure. And even, I'll admit this, I avoided some books because I was like, oh, these are really long. So if I read this one, I might not, you know, be able to get to my goal. Right. So I was like, okay, I need to just like, scale it way back and then be able to dive into something that's really dense or really long, you know, and just
00:06:56
Speaker
and then be able to appreciate it as well as a writer, maybe more so than a reader. There's something to be said about not necessarily reading for sheer volume, but to read deeper. It's better to read maybe 25 books really well or you can maybe even revisit it versus just trying to churn through and read 52 books a year or 60 books a year because how many of those are you actually going to remember? But maybe you'll take away a lot more if you dive deeper on half of that number.
00:07:27
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And one of the books that I read last year that I'm going to reread is a book about structure called Meander Spiral Explode by Jane Allison. And I was just really struck, you know, because she's writing about the structure of other fiction authors, but works of fiction.
00:07:48
Speaker
And I was just thinking, wow, she's read these so deeply. And I think I need to kind of like slow down and, you know, read books this deeply so I can really critically think about, you know, what it is, especially I'm becoming a little bit of a structure fanatic recently and stopping to think, okay, what did they do on a structural level, like globally, but also, you know, chapter by chapter or even just section by section.
00:08:18
Speaker
to kind of bring in interesting narrative flows. So that book is on my reread list this year because I think I need to read it again even more deeply. And yeah, so with respect to that, how many books did you end up reading in your 2019 year?
00:08:40
Speaker
I read 53. I started out with a goal of 26. And then I was like, oh, I'm gonna reach this, you know, quite easily. So I'll knock it up to 52. And that is everything from, there were some dense nonfiction things in there, but there was also some really light
00:09:01
Speaker
some light fiction, read a play, read some really like, you know, short, not even quite novels. And I do like reading some of the fast paced like mystery, mysteries or thriller fiction, because I think that their ability to pace their writing and even
00:09:31
Speaker
some elements of what they reveal, what they don't reveal, so that that keeps you reading. I've found really instructive for writing nonfiction in terms of, okay, you should have a section that's a little bit exciting that keeps the pages turning, but then you need to relax a little bit and rest and bring in, in the case of nonfiction, background information.
00:09:59
Speaker
um or bigger contexts and so to read those books they go by very quickly um and they're often very entertaining but I do there's there's something about them where I'm like yeah they they have some structure stuff here that I think we non-fiction writers can really learn from and um yeah
00:10:20
Speaker
that's a big reason why i love reading a lot of fiction too because uh... even though i don't identify and probably will never identify as a as a novelist uh... there are so many tools and tricks uh... that about crafting that story that when i read fiction like okay well what are the questions i can be asking of my sources if i'm shadowing them around uh... what things should i be more in tune to uh... in terms of story elements so i oftentimes i'm like alright this this makes me a better reporter by
00:10:49
Speaker
by reading the fiction because it's starting to make me see things a little differently. Has that been your experience?
00:10:57
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, definitely. You know, just thinking about, okay, I think especially when there's a little bit of a demand with narrative nonfiction that it reads like fiction, right? That seems to be a big compliment where like, oh, that read like a novel. And I think then reading, closely reading
00:11:20
Speaker
passages in novels or in fiction where there's a really nice description or, you know, even if it's like close third person or maybe limited third person, you know, what are the details that they can get in there? Of course, they're creating these characters, they can totally get in their heads if they want to, but what are some of the things that you could glean from that about where you're not getting into the character's head
00:11:49
Speaker
but other things are then revealing what they're thinking. And so I think that's also been really informative as well. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it often leads to some really weird conversations that you have with your main characters. When I'm always asking them, what were you thinking at this time? What were you thinking at this time? What were you wearing? What was the weather like? And they're like, I don't fucking know. I don't remember. And I'm like, well, here's the thing.
00:12:17
Speaker
Novels are good at interiority. And if this is gonna read like a really good story and you're a character in the story, these little details, they just help round you out a little more. So I'm like, just try to go a little deeper. Try to remember a little more for me. And then they tend to kind of soften up a little bit. But it can be, those conversations can be a little awkward if you're dealing with real people. I suspect it's even more challenging with you, like doing historical stuff where people might be dead and you're just relying on written stuff.
00:12:45
Speaker
in primary sources that it can be all the more challenging to get to that interiority that makes things really hum.
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah, and that's something that I was just working on this week is, in this new project that I'm working on, there are these two anthropologists who go to Suriname in South America and observe lots of stuff. And they published a book about it. But of course, the book is an anthropological, you know, academic text.
00:13:17
Speaker
And so they do have some nice details that they provide in there in the context of their kind of anthropology, but they as people are completely removed from the experience. But luckily they took lots of diaries and journals and notes as they were doing this research. And so my next step is, okay, I got to go to that archive in New York.
00:13:45
Speaker
and dig into that. And I know for a fact that there'll be discrepancies between what they wrote down in their journals and notes and what they actually ended up publishing, but just to get some of their own personal views on what they were doing and what they were experiencing.
00:14:07
Speaker
rather than, you know, just what they put in this kind of polished book. And so that's something that I try to do all the time is, you know, it's even from the same person, multiple sources, the photographs, the diaries, the journals, any published material and kind of trying to weave those all in together to create
Historical Writing and Project Transition
00:14:29
Speaker
that thing that if they're dead, you can't, you know, you can't ask them what they were thinking or what they were
00:14:35
Speaker
feeling or wearing even. Do you prefer to work with dead people versus live people? At this point, I do, mostly because I think there's so many interesting historical stories that are just existing in archives and need to be unearthed and told.
00:15:03
Speaker
Yeah, so at this point I do, but I, you know, in other stories that I've written, magazine pieces and interviewing people that, you know, that's fun then too because you can follow up with those questions of, hey,
00:15:22
Speaker
What were you thinking? What were you feeling? In this new project I'm working on, there are some people still alive that are relevant to the context of the story. There's definitely those interviews in the future that I haven't gotten to yet of, tell me about that experience. What was that like? What were you thinking?
00:15:46
Speaker
What were you wearing? What did it smell like? All of the questions that can flush out that world. And so I love this idea, too, that you started our conversation with. You were kind of working on something else already. And that gets me to this point of what Austin Kleon calls creative chain smoking. You finish one project and you use the burning ember of that one to light the next one. That way you create this kind of momentum
00:16:15
Speaker
And is that something that you've kind of applied to your work that way you don't fall into a rut, you can kind of sustain a certain degree of creative momentum that carries you from one project to the next? I think so. But I also think it was completely unintentional. And I do like that phrase of chain smoking for this because what really happened was I turned in a draft of Flowers in the Gutter to my editor. And I turned it in.
00:16:45
Speaker
early thinking like, oh, I'm being a good student. I'm turning it in early. Of course, he didn't actually have time to look at it until it was actually due. I had maybe a month and a half, at least, where I didn't have any bigger project to work on. That's when I started getting obsessed with this new project.
00:17:12
Speaker
I think had it not been that I kind of had that space and that time where it was, I can't possibly be working on Flowers in the Gutter because it's completely out of my hands right now. And I had a couple of smaller projects that I was working on, but I needed something to fill that gap. And at first I thought it was just going to be kind of a fun side thing that I was going to do a bunch of research on for no apparent reason.
00:17:43
Speaker
And at that point, I was not sure at all that it was going to become anything bigger. I thought, oh, I'm just unearthing a bunch of interesting things and I'll have those for some reason. And then, I don't know, I had no idea what I was doing. I was just having fun researching things and discovering new things that I didn't know and reading old documents. And so that then morphed into something
00:18:12
Speaker
over time, but it was definitely having been so productive on writing the first book that I was just like in that mood of, oh, I want to be, I want to keep, you know, being productive and learning new things and researching. And so that kind of just went right into it. Recently, I was talking to some
00:18:35
Speaker
Nonfiction writers and they're like you can't believe like this book's coming out and you're already working on this next project and I was just like I'm not sure that I just like that's In a way, I think it's a really good I You know attitude for for all writers to have because we're
00:19:00
Speaker
If we're only working on one project, like any book project, everybody else is working on more than one thing, right? Your editor is working on lots of things. Your agent is working on lots of things. And so if you're just like sitting there like, okay, I have this project and
00:19:20
Speaker
you don't have kind of the next idea in mind. It might sound crazy, but I think if you don't even have like, oh, this is something that I would want to write about, and maybe it's not even a book, maybe it's just a magazine story or something else that you can work on in the meantime, but if you don't have that, I think we can get really stuck. And I remember a Goucher in the MFA program, Diana Hume George being one of the people that was like, all right, what's the next book, right? You're working on this right now. What's the next thing that you want to write?
00:19:51
Speaker
And I think that that's really helpful.
00:19:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's almost like you need to have the next project be, even though it's technically in terms of temporality ahead of you, you almost have to view it like a predator chasing you in a sense like, this is the thing that's gonna make me finish the current thing, and then it creates this sense of urgency that this needs to get addressed in a way, right? Like it's chasing you. Finish this thing so you can get to me now.
00:20:23
Speaker
That's also actually true where I'm like, oh, I have this other thing that I want to work on too, but I can't, you know, you can't just abandon, you can't abandon a project halfway through, right? So, you know, I got to see this through and make sure that it gets out there. And I mean, I will also say that there's lots of, there's lots of things that we work really hard on and they might never see the light of day, right? They might be that manuscript that's like in the drawer and maybe it comes back in some other form at some other time.
00:20:51
Speaker
But if, if we create something with like obvious, we have to have that balance between like, yes, it's going to succeed. And what happens if it doesn't succeed? Um, which is a really hard mind space. I always find to occupy, but yeah, I want this project to do well, but what if everybody says no, you know, what are you going to do then? What's your next?
00:21:15
Speaker
Exactly. That happened to me. I was so wed to my MFA thesis book, which I still think is good, but I'm biased and no one else thinks it's good, so I have to just let it die. But it was one of those things where Tom French told me, sometimes we write books and they don't get published, so move on to the next thing.
00:21:38
Speaker
And that's true. It's just like this thing that I just tried. I eventually just had to kind of, it's in the drawer, but it's more or less buried six feet under. It's like, all right, well, take the lessons that you learned from writing this thing and move on to the next thing. So it's, yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, sometimes these things don't see the light of day, but you just gotta just kind of roll with it and move on to the next thing and try to tease out some lessons from the whole experience. Absolutely. And that's the same thing that happened
00:22:08
Speaker
I wrote an MFA thesis and I thought, oh, this is great.
00:22:11
Speaker
gonna turn into a book and it didn't and nobody wanted it. And I see lots of the problems with it now and I think I know how to kind of rework it in the future. Maybe. Maybe I think that nobody else thinks that. But then I got to this point where I was like, okay, this is not going anywhere. What's the next thing that I'm gonna do? And that's where the Edelweiss Pirates and Flowers in the Gutter came in where I was like,
00:22:39
Speaker
Oh, here's another story it hasn't been told. And then I started doing that basic research of, is there enough primary source material? Is there enough narrative to drive this? What are the big parts that I need to put into it? And then started working on that. And if I hadn't done all the writing that I had done, and all of the lessons and structure and
00:23:05
Speaker
everything that went into that first, you know, however many tens of thousands of words that that was, you know, then there was there'd be no way that I would have been able to write this book. And so I totally agree that we can take those lessons we've learned from them, just like apply them and maybe come back to that other thing, you know, some other time when it's had enough time in the drawer and can be excavated.
00:23:32
Speaker
Yeah, there's something to be said that every single word you write, or there's no such thing as a wasted word, I guess is what I'm trying to say here. Like, you know, you can really lament the fact that you went through this whole process and it took you a couple years, did a ton of research, ton of reporting. You put this thing together, you think it's good, and it just kind of dies on the vine, just not because you don't love it, but just because it's the nature of things. But that experience can really, if you can reframe it, it can really carry you into the,
00:24:02
Speaker
into the next, into the next thing. I think a lot of people tend to get hung up on that and see it as a loss instead of reframing it as, Hey, this is great. I finished this. Sure. It's not published, but my goodness, what a muscle I developed because I went through that process. Yeah, absolutely. And that's not even just for, for books. I mean, for magazine pieces too, I mean, it's absolutely awful if
00:24:28
Speaker
It doesn't get published or you only get your kill fee or whatever ends up happening, but you did all the work for it, right? Like you did the reporting, you did the writing, you made it the best that you could, and that's also an accomplishment. And I understand that you came to writing by way of museums. Can't expand on that. How did you come to writing by way of museums?
00:24:54
Speaker
So I studied history as an undergraduate where you do a lot of writing, but it's more academic, obviously. And I thought that I wanted to work in museums because I had very much the same attitude then that I have now, which is that there are these really interesting stories from history. And I think that a broad public should know them. And
00:25:21
Speaker
academics do an amazing job of unearthing a lot of this information and publishing it in books or making it accessible, but often they are writing for an academic audience and not for a popular audience. And so I thought going into museums, well, I can take these interesting stories and
00:25:44
Speaker
you know, incorporate them into exhibits or, you know, videos that go along with exhibits or even, you know, put together archival material in such a way that it's accessible. So like I produced a CD of field recordings of the banjo player in West Virginia. And I really thought, okay, that's a way to get this out there.
00:26:10
Speaker
And it absolutely is, but it came with a lot of constraints that I didn't always love of, you know, there's, I mean, there's always gonna be the barriers that keep people from things like if it's a museum, many accessibility issues, just of people getting into that space or where that museum is and what that's like.
00:26:37
Speaker
Obviously with reading, it's like, well, you know, somebody's got to pick up the book there too. Um, so I won't deny that, but I just, I just really wanted to tell longer stories, um, more in-depth stories than I could in a museum setting and be a little bit freer. Uh, many museums do, you know, have a board of directors that they have to report to. And maybe the story that you want to tell.
00:27:07
Speaker
isn't the one that the board of directors wants to tell in that museum space. And, you know, if you're, if you're freelance writing, especially you can take that story and you can go to one person and they can say, that's not really right for us. And then you can go somewhere else and they're like, yeah, that's great. We want that. And if you're, you know, just working in, if you're working for specific museum,
00:27:32
Speaker
You know, you can't do that. But even if you're kind of doing freelance exhibit stuff, it's much harder. And I just, yeah, I really, really wanted to tell these interesting stories from history in a way that's accessible for people. Where do you think that creative agency for you came from?
00:28:01
Speaker
Well, that's a good question. I'm not exactly sure. I think, I think it's just come from kind of being obsessed with history since I was little and knowing that there are these interesting stories out there and curiosity too, which I think is a hallmark of almost all nonfiction writers.
00:28:24
Speaker
trying to figure out okay I know this one thing but how did that how did that get to be that way or I've heard of this kind of experience generally but what are the really you know nuanced things that made that experience what it was and it's definitely not a
00:28:46
Speaker
not wanting to look at the past and kind of think, oh, it was lovely and it was so much better, but rather think like, well, what was the real experience of people in that time? What were they thinking? What were they doing? What were they feeling? And really trying to dig deep into that. And again, that's something that often on a museum while you're never going to be able to do, you know,
00:29:11
Speaker
It's kind of, I think a lot of the time it's limited to bigger picture things rather than, you know, really nuanced looks at characters and people and experiences.
00:29:27
Speaker
I think Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast does that particularly well, where he really gets down with the soldiers on the ground, whatever story he's telling, and he kind of puts you there on the theater, on the field.
00:29:42
Speaker
and you get a sense of just how real and gruesome it is instead of this big sort of helicopter view of moving little risk pieces around the board and all that and really getting down and seeing how ugly it is and it puts you there. I suspect that's something that's part of the appeal for you too in terms of these historical narratives. Yeah, exactly. Just the extreme nuance
00:30:11
Speaker
And even if it's boring of just, in one thing I was researching, I asked to see a nurse's uniform from like 1910 at Johns Hopkins because I was like, well, you can see pictures of what the nurses are wearing, but what does that material feel like? What is it? How would it have felt to have worn that? And it was really informative because it was really thin material. And I thought, wow, you're going to sweat through this super quickly.
00:30:41
Speaker
if somebody's, you know, blood, any other fluids gets on this material, it's just going to soak right through it. And how long are you going to then have to wear it after that? And so those types of details, they just, you know, really, I mean, number one, I think the inform us as a writer, but I think those are also the details and nuance that makes it come alive for the reader as well.
00:31:07
Speaker
And of course, there's being a consumer of history and being an enthusiastic reader, of course. But then it's another leap for that reader to leap into writing and wanting to contribute and be that kind of a creative person. Do you have a particular moment where you remember where you wanted to make that creative leap to be a writer and not just
00:31:35
Speaker
not just a reader but someone who is gonna, you know, digest this stuff and make something of your own.
00:31:44
Speaker
I mean, yeah, it probably came right before I was right in my decision to go to an MFA program since I had studied history and I hadn't studied writing. I had studied history and languages as an undergraduate and I had never studied writing in like an academic way. And what year is this, just so we have a timeline?
00:32:08
Speaker
This was in 2010, no, 2011. In 2011, I was, so I was in 2009, I was diagnosed with leukemia and I was dealing with chemotherapy and all of the associated
00:32:29
Speaker
um, crap that comes along with a cancer diagnosis. And after that, I kind of was like, all right, what, what is next? What, what do I enjoy doing? Um, and, and previous to that I had been working in museums. And so that was the point where I was like, okay, I
00:32:45
Speaker
I really liked that aspect of it, but I do want to take this like creative step. And that was the time for me to do it because of the fact that I was like, all right, I'm now getting well, I can now start planning for what comes next. And this is the direction that I want to go in. And so it is one of those, it's a little bit trite in many ways, but you know, had I not
00:33:15
Speaker
been diagnosed, I'm not sure that I would have ever made that leap of, okay, that's really the direction that I want to go in. Right. Well, you are very really and viscerally confronted with your own mortality in that moment.
00:33:29
Speaker
Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so it's kind of like, all right, I got to do something, you know, something has to happen now, what is it going to be? And it was I was like, just on a walk. And I said, I want to I want to tell stories from history, and I want to do it really well. And I want to do it so that people want to read it.
00:33:46
Speaker
Um, and that was the impetus of, okay, I think going to an MFA program to learn specifically how to do that and having experts, uh, teach me how to do that was, was how I envisioned being able to do it. And there's obviously lots of other ways that, you know, anybody could go about it, but that was the path that I chose. And so in 2009, 2011, like how old are you at that time?
00:34:14
Speaker
Um, well, how, how old was I? I was 20, I was 24, 25. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. In that period. Um, yeah. So, so I, yeah, sorry. Go ahead.
00:34:33
Speaker
Oh yeah. No, that's just a, it's just a, um, I'm so glad you're, you know, you're, you're healthy here and you're able to contribute. I mean, that's a, it's an undeniable moment in your life that just totally like reshapes and recontextualizes, uh, you know, the years, the years ahead of you. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
00:34:56
Speaker
And so as you enroll in the MFA program and you start taking up the pen, so to speak, how did you maintain your own focus on your own work and not necessarily look over your shoulder and have those competitive juices kind of come out, which as we all know are more toxic than they are good, at least in my opinion. But I wonder how you maybe navigated those waters.
00:35:27
Speaker
I don't, I'm not actually sure I know the answer to that. I think I just really wanted to do what I wanted to do well. And I also found that in the MFA program at Goucher, it was very, very nurturing. And so there were, and that's not just the, you know, the mentors to the students, but the other students. So there are other students who are working on similar
00:35:57
Speaker
history, you know, historical narrative projects and kind of comparing notes with them of, okay, how are you doing this or how are you doing that? How do we, you know, how do we approach the same problem differently and what are solutions to those, you know, craft-wise?
00:36:16
Speaker
just found that really helpful and I think you know there's many moments that we have where it's like oh gosh I have this really good idea and I don't want anybody else to take it and I don't want anybody else you know so I'm not going to tell anybody about it but hopefully we can all find a community of writers where you can talk about these ideas and just be very confident that nobody's going to
00:36:41
Speaker
you know, steal it, um, which I think book writing, it's a very hard thing to do. Um, and even if somebody's writing about something similar to you, you know, that's not, that's not the end of the world. And we shouldn't kind of have that idea that, you know, Oh, it's so similar to mine. What am I going to do? Hey, yours is different. You're a different writer. You're a different person. You're going to have a different outlook on it. So just, if that's what you want to write about, go for it.
00:37:08
Speaker
Um, but yeah, just to kind of have, you know, and it's, and it's hard because I think we always have these pangs of like, Oh, that person got a really good review or, Oh, that person got a really, you know, good agent or all this, then, and that. And it's like, well, that, you know, it's.
00:37:25
Speaker
It's, it's, as it's said, it's not a pie. It's, you know, it's every, everybody can have their success. And, and especially within a community of writers, hopefully we can be helping each other of, okay, here's, here's how we can, you know,
00:37:44
Speaker
gets you that agent or gets you that contract or just even just helping with writing, regardless of kind of those monetary commercial side of it, how can I help you with your writing so that it gets better.
00:37:58
Speaker
And so that's just such a great abundant mindset that you have there. I wish I could say I was always like that, but I definitely harbored a lot of toxicity and jealousy, especially in my early 30s as I was looking over my shoulder, failing to run my own race. I was just getting bitter and resentful about feeling like I was capable of doing the things from the people I admired and peers I admired were doing. And I just wasn't generating that kind of opportunity for myself.
00:38:27
Speaker
And so that's great to hear that you just had such a much more fruitful mindset to it. And yeah, it's inspiring to hear that. I think a lot of people can glean a lot from that. So that's really cool. Thanks. But it does take work. It wasn't like I was just like, oh, yay, woohoo. It's like, all right, we have to remember that that's the case and that it's OK. And things are OK. Things are OK. I mean, there is also that, like,
00:38:56
Speaker
things could totally be worse than they are. So we should be appreciative. But it's, it's a mantra that I have to remind myself of like a lot of the time of like, it's okay. It's good. It's good. We're, we're good. It's, you know, think things are okay. It's going to be fine. Um, but yeah, I like, I mean, you know, that's, it's good to see people. It's good. It's always good to see people do well. That's that should, that should make us all happy.
00:39:25
Speaker
Yeah, and some of the more, I would say, evolved people I've spoken to on this show, they see somebody write a good story and they're just like, that's freaking awesome that you wrote that. It's not like you stole a story from me. It's like, oh, you wrote something awesome. That means I can write something awesome too. It truly rises all the boats, as they say.
00:39:51
Speaker
Yeah. And I think also good writing. I mean, if somebody writes something that's really good and you really like it, again, the deep dive thing, study what is it about the way that they wrote that or told that, um, that made it really successful or that made it impactful and then don't copy it, you know, obviously, but, but figure out what it was that made it good and then apply that, you know, to your own writing in whatever way that you can.
00:40:20
Speaker
So to that point, what have you read or what are you reading that helped inform the way you wanted to approach flowers in the gutter with essentially your three main threads that you discovered? How did you go about saying, oh, I can kind of steal this idea from this book that I read and steal maybe this one from another one and then make my own, which ultimately became this one?
00:40:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, one book that kind of just got me on the trajectory of, you know, narrative nonfiction, creative nonfiction, whatever we're calling it these days, was Eric Larson's in the Garden of Beasts, which was just so like, oh my gosh, you know, the scenes that he paints and
00:41:14
Speaker
how intricately he goes into these lives and uses just few people to tell this broader story. That had always been in the back of my mind. And as I started researching, I had originally planned to include many more of the Edelweiss pirates of these young people.
00:41:40
Speaker
in the narrative thinking, well, this person's important and this person's important and this person has an interesting story, but ultimately there just wasn't enough primary source material from those characters to kind of bring them from the front, you know, from the beginning of the story to the end of the story.
00:42:02
Speaker
Um, and I did have that with first Jean and Gertrude. And so I thought I have, I have to use them as kind of the, the case studies. Um, you know, it was the representatives of, of the story at large. And they, they did it beautifully in this way that it's, it's, I mean, it is, there's something lucky about it.
00:42:33
Speaker
There is something lucky about it that they kind of follow different paths and they are in similar situations but make different decisions along the way presented with similar scenarios. And I thought that that
00:42:51
Speaker
I settled on the three of them because of that. I think there's like maybe one or two more that could have kind of worked their way into the narrative. But the fact that they had
00:43:07
Speaker
this way of like, you know, only kind of going, they each went in a different direction or in a different longitude of their resistance and how far they were willing to go and what choices they were willing to make in the end. And I thought that that presented a really nice, you know, kind of comparison
00:43:27
Speaker
study. It's, you know, it's not academic, it's not a study, but of just having the reader think like, okay, this person chose to only do this, this person went a little bit further and did this, this person did a little bit more and did this, and then what are the consequences of those actions that they took? And it was actually a book of fiction that made me decide to put in the primary source documents
00:43:54
Speaker
I have a couple of translated Gestapo documents and new stories that actually originally were in English that are peppered throughout. And I thought, you know, I saw some, it was actually a young adult fiction book, Melinda Lowe's, A Line in the Dark, had a bit of that in order to tell the story. And I thought, you know, what's the point of me trying to be in
00:44:25
Speaker
interlocutor between, you know, these Gestapo documents that exist still, and the reader, let me just put them there for, for the reader to experience themselves. And so that's how I made that specific choice. And I really like how the designers of the book ended up putting it in there. Because I didn't know how that was gonna happen. I just thought, I want these in there. Okay. Yeah.
00:44:54
Speaker
i i i like the the the choice you made in terms of how you sort of segmented this book to at at at the beginning of every sort of chunk five or six or so you kind of uh... you you go into the second person and you kind of set the stage of this is where you're at at this point you know in nineteen forty one uh... how did you arrive at that as a as a way to put us
00:45:21
Speaker
In that in that year and then as then using that as a springboard to dive back into Gertrude, you know Jean and Fritz Yeah, so I had originally most of what's
Challenges in Publishing and Contact Info
00:45:34
Speaker
in those kind of heading second-person Bits they were in the narrative spread throughout the section that they that it comes before and
00:45:50
Speaker
I think it was mostly my editor who was like, I think this is drawing the reader out too much of the action that's happening. It's really important that we understand the kind of geopolitical big stuff that's happening as a reader. But even everyday people might not have known some of those things
00:46:18
Speaker
that were happening. We know them today because of history, but at that time, people everyday on the ground wouldn't have known all of those nuances. But the reader needs to know them in order to understand kind of everything that's going on. So my editor said, I think you should just take those, find where those things are, where it's not the close third person and take them out and like put them in these heading sections.
00:46:48
Speaker
And I think it was really interesting because I think a lot of times in narrative nonfiction, we're like, okay, we need to have the action and then we need to like intersperse, you know, the context that the reader needs to know to know why that action is important. And I think that can still definitely work really well in narratives in nonfiction. But in this case, it was, you know, there's so much action driving it and especially because if the characters don't know that,
00:47:18
Speaker
it felt strange to have that material, you know, right next to, okay, here's this action that's happening. And then here's, you know, background that they might not have known about. And so does that really belong there with them in their section in this close third person? Or does it function better in these kinds of introductions to the section? And so we opted for that and
00:47:44
Speaker
It was just the second person was, I thought, okay, I want it to be different enough for the reader so that we understand that it's a different, even if it's not in different font or on a different style background, that we as readers then understand this is something different than the narrative story that's happening.
00:48:10
Speaker
And then of course, second person just brings it in really close to the reader. And I thought that that would help in this idea of being close to the action and feeling more invested in the characters if you are imagining yourself standing on that bridge or having your, you know, brother sent to war and your dad arrested or whatever the case may be.
00:48:38
Speaker
And as you were writing this book and sitting down, what was the practice and the discipline you put into place so you could adequately access the titanic research you did here and get the writing done? What was that discipline like?
00:48:57
Speaker
Um, well, one of the things that I'm also evangelical about is Scrivner and I'm not getting paid to say this, but to have all of my primary, like all of my research.
00:49:09
Speaker
there in this document and being able to like see it and compose at the same time was huge and like global search functions so you could just like type in like 1940 am i missing anything that happened in 1940 that needs to go into this section or just rearranging stuff especially since it is a braided narrative between these three characters you know i i wrote i wrote each character each character's narrative on their own and then put them
00:49:38
Speaker
into place in this braid after I had written them. They obviously still come chronologically, but kind of, okay, I should break this up and put that in there and, you know, really some tension with this section from the other character that's a little bit, you know, not as intense at that point. And Scrivener is an amazing program for doing that.
00:50:04
Speaker
But also just I had a very, I had a very tight deadline of when I had to write this so the amount of time that I had to write it so I, I wrote it in about
00:50:18
Speaker
I wrote the majority of it in about five weeks and just sat. I did, I was still doing some like research and stuff in the mornings, but nighttime is my productive time. So I would sit down and try to write about, yeah, 1500 to 2000 words.
00:50:44
Speaker
a day. And it happened to coincide with November. So it was my own little private national novel writing month, even though I wasn't doing anything official. I was just like, all right, no social media. No, nothing. Nobody talked to me. Nobody do anything. I'm just going to sit here
00:51:06
Speaker
and turn this and write this out. And then I would also edit in the morning, so I'd write at night and then in the next morning after writing it, I'd go back and I'd look at it and just make sure that I hadn't worked too late and that it was still coherent and then put it all together and then revised again at the end. That initial writing, again, happened rather quickly, but then probably spent
00:51:31
Speaker
Um, almost a year, 10 months, probably after that, working with my editor, um, revising it to the, to the kind of final version. And, uh, do you have a day job that you were threading this writing time around? I didn't because I quit, I, I quit my job because I knew that I wasn't going to be able to do
00:51:58
Speaker
I wasn't going to be able to meet the publisher's deadline and work a full time job at that time. So that was when I quit my job and I started doing various freelance writing to supplement my income.
00:52:17
Speaker
Yeah, so I was also lucky in that way that I didn't have to have a full-time job and do this because I'm pretty sure that I would have either not been able to do it or been a miserable person that was not very fun to be around. Did you experience any rejection with respect to getting this book represented and ultimately with your publisher?
00:52:45
Speaker
Oh my God, so much. Um, and I think that's again, the whole, like, we have to, we have to have another plan. Cause even though I was like, it's a, it's a book about kids fighting Nazis. Like, why doesn't everybody love this? Um, but the first round of editors that my agent sent it out to, there was kind of one was, this should just be a novel. Why should it be? I don't think there should be nonfiction.
00:53:15
Speaker
And then others saying, I think it's too creative. It needs to be like more straight nonfiction. It's kind of the thing that they were saying. I'm not 100% sure what that means. And then, you know, there's always people who are just like, oh, I don't really like this writing style or this is not for me. And, you know, we're, as writers, we're gonna get that kind of criticism from readers all the time of like, this is just not for me. I didn't like it. There was one point
00:53:44
Speaker
where my agent was kind of like, well, maybe you should like, you know, tone down and not have so much, you know, dialogue or kind of take out some of the things that I really loved about it. And I just felt like, no, I want the voices of the young people of these characters. That's the important part of this story is their experiences and their thoughts
00:54:14
Speaker
Yeah, like what goal to have a historical narrative nonfiction and have dialogue to give you a freshness of voice and also some white space on the page, which is always welcoming. Yeah. And it's like, you know, I, I, 100% I acknowledge that like, do these people, do they remember exactly what transpired in that conversation? And is this a word for word, you know?
00:54:38
Speaker
recorder of what happened, no, but it's their remembrance of what that what a person would have said, or, you know, what what their mom said in that situation. And maybe they do remember, you know, especially in traumatic instances, maybe you do remember exactly the words that your mom said, or exactly the words that, you know, when somebody tells you that your dad is dead, you could remember that exactly. But yeah, I just I felt that was so important to keep as much of their
00:55:07
Speaker
experience and voices in there and their emotions, that we stuck it out and the agent sent it to more editors and one of those ended up being, you know, buying it or whatever we say, getting the book. And I was also very lucky because the first time that I had a conversation with him, his name is Andrew Carr,
00:55:36
Speaker
he immediately got it on a very deep level that was not in the book proposal, like words and things and emotions and modern context that I had tried to imply in various parts of it, and he got those immediately.
00:55:58
Speaker
And I knew basically from that first conversation, I was like, okay, this is this is fine that all of those other people said no, because he gets it. And he can make it. That's also ultimately what we want is both an agent and an editor who get it and understand what you're trying to do and want to make it better with you.
00:56:20
Speaker
And as you were sitting down at those nights to write this book, and of course the mornings when you were editing what you had written the night before, what's the inner Christina voice that you wrestle with in your artistic generation of these things? And how do you quell that voice if you have it? And I suspect you do, because most of us do.
00:56:47
Speaker
The voice that I mean, you know, there's there's definitely like the Oh, this isn't any good or oh, this doesn't make any sense or like, you know,
00:56:56
Speaker
I haven't actually, you know, is this really enough to convey what I need to do, you know, self-doubt and criticism and just to kind of keep working through it and be like, all right, we're gonna, you know, it is always the like, you got to, you got to sit there and you got to write and
00:57:19
Speaker
especially having that deadline and just being like, all right, you're not in the mood or you don't think this is very good, but you have to get something on the page and you can come back and work on it again later. Or it might end up getting, you know, cut entirely at some future date. But we have to sit there, we have to do it. And yeah, as many people say crappy, you know,
00:57:47
Speaker
100 crappy words are better than zero words. Lots of things that I work on and that I write, I think, okay, just a little bit, right? Just a little bit. It's okay. I think it's also, you set goals for yourself. I'm like, oh, I'm going to do this. I'm going to get this many words. I'm going to do this much stuff.
00:58:13
Speaker
And if we don't meet it, then we get self critical of like, why did you meet your goal? But if you just think, okay, you know, just whatever. I'm going to sit here for 15 minutes and do something or I'm not, you know, I'm going to write 100 words or whatever it is, and just do it. And then if it's crappy, come back and fix it later.
00:58:31
Speaker
What would you identify as your particular strengths as a writer and researcher and also conversely like some weaknesses that you mitigate over the course of maybe doubling down on your strengths? I mean I think one of my strengths is that I write fast and I can produce a lot quickly but that also means that if I'm not writing a lot then I kind of
00:58:59
Speaker
get anxious of like, you don't have enough written. So, so that's, that's part of that, like me telling myself, okay, it's okay if you didn't write that much, like just the fact that you wrote something is good. I hope maybe it's gotten across in the course of this conversation, but like I love detail and I love knowing
00:59:21
Speaker
You know, we talk about like writing is this iceberg where like what the, you know, reader or the audiences is just this little tip and there's this huge thing underneath. And I love the huge thing underneath. I love doing all of this like research and reading that's never going to make it above the waterline. And sometimes I can get stuck.
00:59:44
Speaker
that space of just like I'm just doing this research and like there's still things I don't know so I need to go learn them and that can come at the detriment of actually writing and producing because at some point you have to take all of that stuff that you've done all of those interviews all of that research all of maybe that like scene writing or just you know notes and sketches here and there and pull it into something
01:00:09
Speaker
that is going to be above that waterline. Sometimes if I don't have an external deadline, I have to stop myself and say, okay, you've done a lot of research on this, what can you produce from it? And then I think,
01:00:31
Speaker
you start writing and you realize, oh, there is actually something more that's missing from this. Oh, it would be really informative to have this or that. And so sometimes I really do have to stop myself from like going into those crazy details of like, this is good, it's good, it's always good background. But sometimes you gotta like cut yourself off and just say, okay, writing now, writing time, stop.
01:01:01
Speaker
Well, Christina, I think we're kind of up against our time here, and where can people find you online, get familiar with Flowers in the Gutter, and of course, just you and the work you're doing. Yeah, so I have a website, www.ChristinaGaddy.com, where I put up articles that I've written. I have a blog that I
01:01:25
Speaker
posted, you know, more kind of like just historical thoughts that I was having or, you know, again, some of that like research that I knew was never going to see the light of day in a finished piece, but it was like the cool background to a piece that I've written or some weird research hole that I went down that I'm just like, Oh, I should share this with folks. Nice. And, uh, do you have a social media of preference where they, uh, hang out at?
01:01:55
Speaker
I hang out on Instagram. I'm at K G A D Z. Um, and that that's where, that's where I hang out. I've managed to avoid Twitter for various reasons. So Instagram is my social media of choice. Fantastic. Cool. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for doing this, Christina. It was great to talk to you at length and you know, and thanks for the work and I wish you the best of luck with it. Thank you so much for having me, Brendan.
01:02:27
Speaker
Well, that was fun. And I'm recording this outro basically right after I recorded that intro and I'm realizing how incredibly manic that was. But what the hell, baby? It's what happens. Yep, we made it. We did it. We got here. Thank you, Christina. You complete this podcast. Go buy her book for the World War II enthusiast in your life.
01:02:49
Speaker
Yeah, for that guy. Follow the show on the various social media channels. You know that it's a 2020 social media sabbatical of sorts, but follow along, nevertheless, at cnfpod across the mall, at Brendan O'Mara on Twitter. Get that newsletter, man. Win books, win zines. Hang out with your buddy BO. Digitally speaking, of course, maybe in person. You never know.
01:03:14
Speaker
This must be it, because if you can do interviews, see ya!