And donovan and reached from that was published early last month in june we will have an extended conversation up to 35 minutes and also a few slides here and there as needed with supplemental images and once were done with that wrap up with audience q a we will read some buyers and get the reading under the way. Miles the author of the national and International Bestseller the land of lost maps with the Chicago Tribune best book of the year. In this interlocutor is the true story of a New York Times notable book for nonfiction in the literary science award and the second book published early last month. But these men graduated from the university of michigan a few blocks away from the bookstore. Otherwise i would appreciate it if you wouldnt mind putting your reactions together for our reading. Thank you. Good to see you. So this is why your book is longer than mine and also teaching nonfiction here in chicago so its nice to see you here and i want to be clear to everyone and i will get ahead of you with your reading to call you in your book the antihero of the book and you write somehow this man is managed to convince those lonely souls in the tabernacle but it honed with the effigy byways of the church and in righteousness and splendor so for tonights event we dont have 235 moments what you are the king with a paper crown. And before hand we end up being called forth as experts so i want you to read some but then to understand the title. We will get to that in a minute so i thought i would introduce the audience to the title character of my book. Okay. There he is. So i will read a book about this man and his time. Which is antebellum era leading up to the civil war. And you wonder how she managed. And the most charismatic guide to you, listen to this. Although physically unimposing a few inches over 5 feet and balls with a bulging forehead he did possess one distinguishing feature with dark brown eyes that one acquaintance described as small but bright and piercing given the animated expression. Another claimed those eyes seemed as though they could pour right through a person. More than any tangible attribute he possessed an aura called confidence. In those days before electrical power, confidence made the antebellum era home. Confidence with black magic and hard tasks combined. To turn worthless paper into golden empty lots and bustling businesses and confidence was deployed by bankers and merchants and philosophers and politicians clergymen and card sharks alike. The soul of the trade in the words of one financial publication how much man and man and country and country. In the age before the federal government began printing paper money when people had to trust with that de facto national currency. And then to be a former employee in new york and a failed lawyer and a failed newspaper publisher and postmaster that was the far west that was a real threat and running utopian colonies i will talk about and one in michigan. But no doubt so take a word out of your title. What is that all about . My book is called the inner coast since here we are virtually speaking here in chicago. Im here on the other side of michigan. But part of what i was thinking of going up in the coast of california and they spent much of my life here by the great lakes so the word coast derives from latin and then could still offer a coast of land or a rack of ribs. The seacoast and the primary sense for men and women began and in that sense by definition that they would return from a lake or stream and it is a paradox. That the shoreline is speckled and to be longer than california and florida but an article terms and then to coast the heart of north america navigating all of the states east of the mississippi and it is sociological with coastal living or coastal elites and then into the conjoined seaboard inhabited the decadent sophisticates and in that commuting distance of seattle and those from chicago for holiday goers might qualify as coastal in the sense but not the residents of sandusky or dearborn are home to the Largest Community of states where neighborhood on the northeast side of the detroit so now i will stop there so with this idea that was required economically and also that charismatic strength. And of that origins of that the newspaper story that introduced it into the lexicon. Was fascinated by your book among all of the materials drawn into the story also of the epidemiological. And those in the antebellum. That confidence man . And in the Oxford English dictionary. That is the golds standard of time 1820 it will be 1890. But confidence man with 1849 that there is an economic crash. And that the telegraph is a photograph. And the internet superhighway in a lot of ways. And this becomes such an important thing and then just say hey and then to be very embarrassed and then say i got you. So just give me a watch is a show of your confidence and people would give them their watches its really fun to spell to the american lexicon because of so many walks of life and to epitomize this and in in this. Where truth was malleable and to pull that off with the bluster that people wanted to believe and as a historical figure from the writers point of view as you know and discover and then to speak of the index of your book and the acknowledgments because the way i think how this book works is the central figure but almost like a planetary object whose source of personality Gravitational Force to the antebellum in the upper midwest so it has all these intimate qualities to from obscurity from that time and then from your index i all these items the american revolution. Hans christian. So part of that is wonders about the book and then collecting on the historical figures that gather into the narrative to fall back and pt barnum of course and emily bronte and John Wilkes Booth and henry clay and darwin and also inventing the qwerty keyboard so somehow it is his power to gather that up and those acknowledgments to talk about that to talk about the man of the crowd and there is a central figure he was once arrested and absorbed my full attention. So how do you think of the way to explain that analogy . Is not a traditional biography so how does this work . All the enthusiasms and social movements and apocalyptic fears of the age, so i just saw him as an embodiment of this crazy time and as far as my writing goes its funny because i so admire you and we dont do the same thing but you do something similar. The New York Times book review he called my style wonderfully digressive. You get the big picture but ive got to go back to you on this. You were one of the most wonderful nonfiction writers today doing what you just praised me for. This essay i always tell this was before i knew him it was a source of inspiration for me. And it was at the time i needed to be inspired by another writ writer. I thought i meant to collectors ive written about collectors before, but the way you brought American History and american commerce, our commercial desires into that piece was incredible to me. Do you want to talk about that . Sure. That one for me was kind of a on an important one because i had been writing nonfiction but i came to nonfiction by way of fiction and poetry which is in that oncall men that people come to one of those more genres that historically with the standard. But my first earliest this is the first i wanted to do what you had done in the book i think of it as the art of finding where it comes from entomology not etymology your lycan and detecting the pheromones and youre going to follow it. But once you have that its fascinating i and your mind stas generating questions and i have some ideas about what the questions might be behind the confidence, so for that essay i have an uncle that i had great affection for on the outskirts whos a botanist by training and had gone collecting kind of by chance and happened to pick up two wrenches that were identical and had a vision of symmetry like he found two specimens at the same plant but it was wrenches and he kind of maybe manically began collecting from all of the upper midwest factories, state sales, foreclosed farms, all these artifacts of history. He turned on the outskirts and initially started with one. He put the artifacts that looked like specimen, they looked like fossils of dinosaurs or bugs, like 100 that are all identical so hes got the kind of cabinet of wonders but not the natural artifacts and that became hugely fascinating. And then that accompanied him and into that narrative you get to try to create your own kind of museum of an essay i think and there is a way in which i think you are doing something with that similar here. The charismatic figure you are following but he allows you to follow your own curiosities and questions and somehow the inventor to the qwerty keyboard is adjacent to the guy that entered the tomato to the midwest as a medicinal plant, this wonderful accidental juxtaposition that comes up. We may be working from a similar method and it may be why i have such admiration for you as a writer. I always told my students i dont make many predictions about the future of writing, but one of them i feel in my own work and it would be interesting to hear from you and i can talk about an example of it is i feel like writers and curators are in the digital age becoming more and more similar, like the writing is increasingly an active cure ration and act of storytelling. For me that is all really cool. I love that and i think increasingly i find myself, you know who this book had a 250 page singlespaced timeline of what was happening in the world and then the juxtaposition is there as a narrative machine. I will give you an example. I will do another quick reading if you dont mind. If you could put up the picture of slide number six. There he is. Im going to read two really short paragraphs and in between them i will give you a little explanation. I want to read this little bit about islands. Edgar allan co wrote in the stormy seas of the places of perfect security where freedom for oral restraint can be enjoyed in the cosmos where the rules of conduct and systems of logic dont apply. They are frequent locales for experimental communities including the original utopia which thomas moore sat on an island in his famous 16th century book and i just say that there is many things we can say about the community and its a fascinating place and almost controversial but i want to talk about the draw. What was his draw one of the things we need to understand is what apocalyptic times these were. Right when he was starting to start this colony and really pushing it, this was the year of apocalyptic fevers in the United States and in the world and i thought i would read about those and then you would see by the sea monsters appear. He spent the summer of 1848 pointing to what he described as ominous signs including a series of revolutions in europe, the u. S. War in mexico and rising tensions between north and south. For most he was urging followers to prepare for the end. None of them warn you the time draws near. Prophetic events are crowding close upon one another. The newspaper even reported mormons and local fishermen spotted a huge sea serpent off the coast of the island. One of many such sightings around the world during the years of 1847 and 1848. From a 21st century perspective of course its hard to know what to make of such an outlandish claim but one possibility is the intended the late great michigan monster with the beast from the sea whose appearance showed the apocalypse in the book of revelation. Knowing joseph smith claimed such symbolized, quote on quote, both the kingdoms of the wicked world, he may have hoped to underscore the idea of the island as the zion of prophecy that Promised Land where according to the teachings for the latter day saints would help gather and usher in the Second Coming of christ and add event t of the 1,000 year reign on earth. I should point out that this picture in front of you is not an illustration of the sea monster spotted off the island but it was one of the many sea monsters that legitimate people thought they saw in 1847 and 1848. This was a Royal Navy Ship that spotted this sea monster somewhere. So that gives you a sense of the really intense period we are talking about. It wasnt his only reason for going to the island. He also started a criminal enterprise. You can take it down now, then it. He basically had a pirate colony running out of the island and he would send his people out all over the lake to the various towns and throughout the midwest to steal horses and other items. Theres been a lot of controversy about this. Theres no proof they pulled off any of these crimes and that it was all antimormon. There was plenty of bias but he pulled off these crimes and one other things is the move to move them along a little bit. Theres pretty solid undeniable realtime reporting. You discovered the whole chapter in ohio and if i caught it right you did act like this was new research. I think its important first of all theres a lot of great 19th centur 19th century journas and he was the editor of the ohio newspaper, a wonderful sarcastic writer and this is important because in real time there is a series of stories one another. He comes to the town, there is a policy sent out after him, hes caught and brought back to one of the top lieutenants and enforcers and the paper reports on him coming to town and it predates that he would help get this guy out of jail. Theres a trial and the guy is found guilty but its overturned on a technicality that the sheriff didnt fill out a form or something. The papers in the area right about how the technicality seemed that it was corruption that somebody got bribed and sure enough, he doesnt go to the state penitentiary, he stays in the local jail and theres a jailbreak and hes gone and returns to Beaver Island. So there is a lot more of that. One of the things we both are interested in is the landscape of the midwest. I was wondering if theres some stuff from the introduction. This came out in early june and ive done a few of these events but im reading stuff i havent read before. I will do a couple of paragraphs. But its similar the way i think of all of these essays they have a kind of preoccupation are the idea of excavating and i think for me as somebody thats kind of an adoptive midwesterner, i think i grew up on as my family was very nostalgic for the illinois prairie, i grew up on the kind of mythical midwest, like lives with little house on the prairie and the whole project had been to try to do a sort of excavation and your book is privy to this. This is the midwest like weve never imagined it. Another thing before i jump into my own it feels to me like your whole book is doing the logic of the microcosms. Here we can look closely at the island and he becomes kind of the representative man of his period in so many ways. You didnt mention the rest of his career as a state legislature, amateur meteorologist to his credit ardent abolitionist so really a represented figure within the island becomes like this concentrate of america out there. My First Experience as a farm that came down to us in our family and i have two paragraphs i will read about it. It was passed down to generations in the county near the edge of Lake Michigan by the 1970s it was no longer operational. The family had held onto it as a kind of heritage sites to which the increasingly scattered tribe would make pilgrimages sharing meals and while lighting potato salad while commuting nostalgically with the past vestiges of which survived it was like a museum of anachronisms and it included an md red barn, an outhouse with a splintered door, glistening helix is that spiraled from the farmhouse rafters. There were also a few chickens including one whose beheading i would witness as an initiation into the sort of invaluable knowledge farm life was thought to in part. The body ran a single laugh around the chopping block a fee to both gruesome and comical. At the edge of the farm was a shallow body of water and according to legend, a loggerhead an opportunity to drive and oxen team across it and with harvested timber which comes up in your book, green gold, harvested timber his wagon had supposedly broken through the thin ice dragging the logger and oxen with it. A fate i thought about while in a dimly lit canoe. Lost lake, shiloh, you could touch the bottom with your paddle. The lot was so soft the paddle blade would soak into it as far as you could plunge it never touching hard ground. Who knew what was down there. I imagine if you fell overboard and tried to stand, you would get sucked into the muck disappearing like a unlikely prehistoric animal, miniature horses, sabertooth tigers [inaudible] perhaps how it had gone for that longer and his oxen. In encyclopedia of the prehistoric mammals of north america was among my possessions and although i never visited them, they were a prominent feature on the landscape of my inner life. One of the things i need to do as a writer is have images so that idea of things being buried that you can see especially for a collection of essays and poems needs a different kind of unity that you have because you have a plot. So you have an actual plot and i want to talk about that because i was thinking a lot and i want to make sure we have time to open up for questions, but you are a credentialed historian. You dont have a phd in history. Im curious because ive tried im curious about your method in the book i know you spent many years visiting archives and all the rest but im also wondering if you did the kind of thing i know some trained historians do and some writers must have done because youre trying to bring the story to life with a kind of sensory detail we might encounter in a novel so theres a moment you have like two dramatic climaxes in a moment one of which is the u. S. Navy sends a gunship to the island which is amazing. The tragic story of course in the end. But this is one moment where we talk about this figure whose sailing going out to Beaver Island. The worship closed in, the small channel between the lake and michigan and from the lake they could see the densely forested shores of Northern Michigan where a hundredyearold convert was high into the air with the fresh redness and i underlined that a little bit because that seemed exemplary of what distinguishes the kind of narrative history you are doing here and the creative nonfiction. The literary storytelling from at least some kind of scholarly history so it reminded me of this phrase about the historical imagination so when you talk about the methods how did you talk about getting this sense of place and detail . Its a little tricky to talk about this because not completely, but it would be one