Watch American History tv this weekend on cspan 3. You are watching American History tv. Every weekend on cspan 3, explore our nations past. Created by americas Cable Television companies as a public service, and brought to you today by your television provider. Next on American History tv, to bestselling authors discuss how they use Historical Research in their work. Novelist Kathleen Rouhanis latest as the world war one story, and miles harvey focuses on his new nonfiction book, the king of confidence. The conversation was moderated by the Paul University professor amy tyson. Authors roomy and harvey boast teach in the pauls English University department. They provided the video. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us tonight and this is an of vent hosted by the English Department of dePaul University and coast by the Depaul History Department. Its a thrill to get to host with them, to real stalwarts of the English Department, Kathleen Rouhani and miles harvey. Amazing writers and teachers. And because of the role of Historical Research and both of their books, we are very grateful to have amy tyson from the Depaul History Department to interview them. I also want to thank all of you especially for being here. Its always so meaningful and feels important for artists in the arts. Especially during this difficult time, when bombast and quick takes seem to rule the day, a lot of us recognize that its the quieter, more thoughtful, more intelligent creations that actually sustain us. That said, i would encourage you, if you like what you hear tonight, to please support these great writers. I will post links to their books in the chat, and i know they are also on the play at the depaul bookstore in lincoln park. We do have one technical issue or constrain that i ask your help with, potentially. We are limited to 100 participants tonight. I see we are at 52 right now. I anticipate that that will grow in the next ten minutes. If we do start to approach 100, i would ask some of you to go over to the link on facebook and watch it on Facebook Live so that more people can continue to come in. Thank you very much. And i will introduce amy tyson from the history department. Amy is an associate professor of history at depaul, the author of the wages of history, emotional labor on public histories front lines. And this summer, she began being a link in World History project. Its aim is to document the stories of individuals who perform in public as Abraham Lincoln and his contemporaries. Thank you for hosting this forest. It is a pleasure to be here in my house and to see all of you in yours. What we are going to do tonight is i am going to briefly introduce both miles harvey and catherine ronny, then both will read from their most recently published works. From there, we will have a conversation. But if you have questions, please put them over in the chat and dan who just introduced me will be helping us moderate the questions from you. Please feel free at anytime to draw up a chat, and towards the end of the hour we will be looking to that chat and having your questions come to the floor. I am just so happy to be with you here tonight. Ive been living and breathing both of your books the last few weeks. And i want to start by introducing the things that i know you have in common, aside from a penchant for Historical Research in your writing. Do you both teach creative writing at depaul. You both are devoted coffee drinkers who share the same High School Alma mater of downers north here in illinois. Long before you wrote your bestselling books, you also shared a history of disliking job that you once held in the food industry. And kathleen was briefly a failed smiling greed or at teegee eye fridays. Miles, long ago, had a stint as a mcdonalds cashier turned milkshake guy. But i think it is safe to say both have long been writers. Among other right early achievements, kathleen is the author of the national bestselling novel lillian takes a tale thats inspired by the real life of poet and copy ad writer Margaret Fish back, and perhaps also inspired by kathleen zone love of walking. She is also the author of life neutral, my life as an object, which is a memoir of her own experiences as an artist model. This august saw the release of the novel that we are going to talk about tonight. Jeremy and major whittle steam, a fictional story based on the real events of world war i. Miless latest book takes us a bit further back into the antebellum era of the United States, tracing the history of james jesse straying, the leader of the string section of the mormon faith. His book the king of confidence, i have to read this carefully, a tale of utopian dreamers, frontier screamers, true believers, false profits, and the murder of an american monarch, and quote, has already been listed as a New York Times editors choice selection. He has author the national and international bestseller, the island of lost maps, which i just purchased online last night and started reading today that the dentist office. Hes also the writer of the acclaimed painter in a savage land. Kathleen, would you begin by introducing your book and reading from it . Thank you so much for those fun introductions. Those were great, and im going to read a little bit from my book, and the title kind of contains most of what you need to know. Its about two main characters, and one of them as you can see is a messenger pigeon and one is a soldier. The two of them were involved in this incident in the forest in 1918 and world war i. And the book is a war book but it really focuses on their joint trajectorys as to how they ended up there in the first place and then what happened to them after. I think thats what you need to know. Now to get a sense of what exactly i had to research to get both the pigeon and the soldier perspective, i was going to read the first couple paragraphs of the first chapter and the first couple paragraphs of the second chapter. That goes back and forth. It is first person. So you get the pigeon and the soldier back and forth. This is the very beginning of chapter one, where we hear from cher ami. Monuments that are most to pigeons and soldiers. I myself have become a monument, a feathered statue in sight a glass case. And life, i was both a pigeon and soldier. And death, i am a piece of mediocre taxidermy, collecting dust in the Smithsonian Institutions National institute of American History. The museum has closed and everyone has gone home. Guests took their leave at 5 30 as they do every weekday, and even the janitorial staffers had finish their tasks. Miles of floors polished in pine scented, anchors of displays gleaming in silence. A few hours remain before midnight. This is the eve of the 100year anniversary of what, according to United States army, was the most important day of my avian life. October 4th, 1918. I am not sure i agree. That day was an important one, certainly, but days dont carry the same meeting for pigeons as they do for humans. And my life comprised other days, days that might be equally worth note, if not to the army, then at least to me and those i loved. Pigeons can love. Pigeons cannot fight. Yet, i was once as well known to any grownups it isnt as any human hero of what was then called the great war. So i will stop there. That is cher ami. You get a few more pages of her and then you get to chapter two, and thats the start of the story of whittlesey. Monuments matter most to pigeons and soldiers. Some matter more than others. None matters more to me than the soldiers and sailors monument on Riverside Drive on the upper west side. Its not a monument for my war, the great war, the war that has caused me to be known these past three years as go to hell whittlesey, heroic commander of the lost battalion. Instead, the army that won the civil war almost 60 years ago, the soldiers and sailors monument has personal significance for me, when that has nothing to do with war. Its where i, fresh from harvard law school, naive and lonesome, met the man who would be my entree into the double life i head into light show so at the war interrupted. So i will stop there. Introduce your book and read a bit from it, miles. My book is about a guy named james straying, who in the 18 fifties declared himself king of the universe. It was a sect of mormon rogue characters that took over and island in the middle of lake michigan. And this chapter of the book introduces where strang it came from. In august of 1843, a man from a small town in western new york vanished into the night. Such disappearances were not uncommon in those days. The panic of 1837, the deepest and longest lasting economic crisis, the Young Country had ever faced, had hurdled countless average americans into sudden financial ruin. For some, the humiliating prospect of having a sheriff take possession of their goods and real estate to satisfy a creditors claim was simply too much to bear. As one pennsylvania man who owed 200 dollars, 250 dollars, go on, i cannot tell, where put it in his 1842 suicide notes. I am hand forgotten, numbered with the dead, where the creditors call upon me no more. But for others, there was a way to end ones miserys without putting a bullet in ones brain. To lose ones life without actually dying. For years. Those who hoped about running creditors had sought refuge in the fast expanding western frontier. The man who disappeared from the new york town of randolph faced mounting debts for years, putting creditors with, putting off his creditors with increasingly ornate loses, until at last his only hope was to get out of town. In many other periods of history, the missing man might never have been heard from again after his disappearance. He lived in an era of southern transformations, where you could be broke one day and rich the next, and Anonymous One day and famous the next. An arrow and wild dreams and lunatic fantasies could quickly metamorphosis into hard facts. Such a precarious time when nothing felt stable or certain anymore. Chameleons like the man who is no longer there were favorite. Although he was physically unimposing, a few inches over five feet, and balled with an oddly bulging forehead, he did possess one distinguishing feature, his dark brown eyes which one acquaintance described as rather small but very bright and piercing, giving an extremely animated expression to his whole countenance. Another witness claim to the mans eyes seemed as though they could bore right through a person. More than any tangible attribute, the vanished man persisted within ineffable aura called confidence. And those days before electrical power, confidence was what made the antebellum era home. Confidence was black magic, good fortune, and hard cash combined. Confidence could turn worthless paper into glittering gold, kowtoweds into empty cities, empty lots into bustling businesses, losers into winners, paupers into millionaires. Confidence was a charm deployed by bankers and merchants, philosophers and politicians, clergymen and card sharks alike. Confidence was the soul of trade, in the words of a leading financial publication. Without, it added herman belleville, congress between man and man, as between country and country, wood, like awash, rundown and stop. In an age before the federal government began printing paper money, the age where you had to trust and privately issued banknotes, glorified iowa use, confidence was a de facto national currency. Thank you both. When i teach about history, i always start with my students talking about how historians are never really telling you the full truth about the past. All we have are the remains of what i use as the broken stained glass metaphor. There is these shards of glass everywhere, and the job of the historian is to try to piece all of these shards back together again to create a picture. We may never be fully prepared, but we do our best and we do our job to present the best picture that we possibly can over the past. Would you talk about your role as reconstructed measures of stained glass windows into your respective pasts . Miles, you go first. I think thats a great metaphor. I think in some ways, what i increasingly do as a writer, and i dont know how this strikes the two of you, is a kind of cure a shun. I feel like i am a great person to build these long timelines. I think my timeline for this book was 250 pages long. Everything going on in strangs life, but everything going on around him, and i started to see patterns and narratives emerge. Its like a story. And in some ways i feel, it may have had to do with my time in life. I am saying look at this. Think about this. I am sort of curating the past. I do feel like the job of the writer is becoming more and more like the job of the curator. Thank you. Kathleen . I like the stained glass and i like the curatorial work. I guess before i get a little more specific about it, i should say this book would not exist if not for dip all. I was teaching a class in 2013 and one of my students brian turned in a palm that referenced cher ami. I had never heard of cher ami, but i always say to my students look it up. Anytime you encounter an illusion or a reference, i say look at, up like a broken record. If i had a dollar for every time i said that. He put it in a poem. It was a throwaway line about a no guessing on a park bench surrounded by pigeons. And he said but this was no cher ami story. Look at up. And i looked up, which i thought was appropriate to share it a panel like this about looking stuff up. I was really struck by the story. To go to your question, for me, i think when i like about being a fiction writer is i dont have to assemble the whole stained glass window, exactly. I can just become really obsessively fixated on a couple pieces and their relationship. So i think thats what i did with cher ami. Once you look up cher ami, you cannot hear about her without hearing about whittlesey. So for me, my process as a fiction writer is almost a mapping process. I will find the object of my fascination and admiration, and i can drop a pin there and say there is cher ami. And i will start walking the perimeter and seeing what else is important and then i will drop a pen at whittlesey and start planning it from there. Did you talk then, kathleen, as a followup to that . I know that your other book is based on a real person, that its an entire work of fiction, as i understand it. But this novel is really based on two bona fide person and pigeon. How did you decide to write about real people and then take the fictional lead, and what was the process like two fictionalized parts of their story . Thats a great question. With lillian, the womans real name is margaret. You can tell from the title that i am taking perhaps greater liberties. I invented more of that story and i felt like i definitely wanted the book to call attention to the real margaret, but i didnt want people to read my book and think this is literally her life. This is the biography. That was important to me. With these two, i knew i had to use their names, because they are historic figures. Cher ami really is taxidermy tent in the smithsonian. You can see her. But i think this applies particularly to historical fiction, but to any kind of fiction. Theres lots of conversations happening now about whose stories are or are not given too riders to tell. I think because of how i just wanted to depicted in the first place and how i wanted to give them personalities, a big thing i have done that i havent seen anyone else quite do is i am pretty sure he was gay, charles whittlesey. Almost 100 . If i was a biographer i would be able to find a smoking gun, but he signed one of his suicide notes, im a misfit by nature and this is a way of ending it. That would be a way of someone to come out without coming out. I had to be under a huge obligation to be really responsible to the characters. Ive never been a pigeon and ive never been a gay soldier. I thought a lot about tony morrison, hauler in the chat if you like tony morrison. She has this great thing in her book where she says, the ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize these strange him mystify the familiar is a test. I wanted to take world war i, which is overfamiliar, and take it back so that they can see it again. To me, it is strange to be a game man or a pigeon so i wanted to make sure that i did it in a way that didnt mystified or get it wrong. I like that she puts it is a test. Research is the way that i tried to pass that test. Thank you. Miles, could you talk about when you first how did you get taken in by this confidence man . Whats sources led you to finding him . I got lucky with this. The source that led me to this was i got a call from my agent one day saying a guy from little brown wants to talk to you about a book. It turned out to be a wonderful editor named ben george. He said i am reading your work and i think you might be right for writing this book. I dont know, amy. My career was not exactly flying then. Of course, i wanted to hear him out. But ive had opportunities like that in the past. Its always been stuff that wasnt interesting that i would just be bored with. But this just instantly hit me as a book i really love dana character i really loved. Strang is just so amazingly complex, and there is so much information about him, including his journals from his years as a young man. I was really just so struck by his story, and also i think we quickly realized the times we lived in had certain echoes to the times we live in. Echoes allowed a confidence man like him to thrive. In fact, its the time from which we get the term confidence man, because there were so many of them around. So that interest to be a great deal as well. Miles, would you tell us a little bit about those journals as a source . They are coated. He writes in his own language. Lead of what was this process of finding these sources of this man in his late teens and early twenties as this is a window . I know he wanted to marry the future queen victoria, and then he ends up becoming self proclaimed king of earth and heaven. He makes it happen. There is such a wealth of information. The journals are interesting and he is full of he sort of puts it on the table. He talks about his dreams of royalty and power. He talks about how he wants to be a lawyer and a legislator and a king, and in fact, this was a great age of self realization. The period, as you know, of the self made man, strangle is the king of that. He kind of lived out all his dreams in some weird way, and it was a very famous man in his time. I think of another self made man in this period, Abraham Lincoln, who had much in common with straying. He was a country lawyer. He was a self educated kid who served in the legislature. They were both living parallel lives. They were contemporaries. Strang was the much more famous person. He is just endlessly much more fascinating to read about. A real bad person in many ways, and a very principled person at least one way. Are you referring to his abolitionism . Thats one thing that my Research Really helped to pin down. I can talk about it later, but i think i both can prove that he was running a pirate colony criminal operation out of his island. His abolitionism was real. I want to get to that. I also want to draw an odd comparison between your two works. I realized that in some way, both whittlesey and strang were confidence men, in different ways. Strang in the way we would think about a con man in the naval in idea of the confidence man. But whittlesey, because his men took such confidence in him, they were able to achieve something, be so successful that it led to many of their own demise. Kathleen, i need for you to explain what i just said and then maybe we can both talk about what its like to research a confidence man. He was an unlikely war here. He went to Williams College in western massachusetts and then to harvard. He became a lawyer, worked on wall street, you can google him, tall and meaty, very prophesy aerial. He was the last person anyone would expect to be a war hero. Yet, you only find this out if you go to war, he was very good it being a commanding officer. He was also such a diligent person and his man respected and environ him so much that in this battle of 1918, the plan all up and down the line in the classic world war one trench warfare style was that all of the allied forces at the same time were going to push Forward Together and breach the german defenses. All of the high, high, higher ups said no surrender, no first, dated lands without an extra supplies because they were so confident that everyone would succeed and just end the war. Long story short on that day, whittlesey was the only one who did that. Everyone else gave up and retreated. But they didnt know. Instead of being a line or a salient that projects out, they were just in a bubble by themselves. They were surrounded by the germans and then ultimately became victims. They didnt have coordinates and thats where cher ami comes in and flies the message that saves them. But it was very unexpected for him to be the kind of leader who did what he was able to do. Should i answer how i researched him . That is the question strang here. How did you, what were these sources. Classic historians ask what are all the range of sources that you started to collect, and how did you organize your sources. What was the history . How did the history process look . We will start with kathleen and then go to miles. For me, the organization of how i approach the research and how actually organize it within my own files as a researcher and eventual writer is very mapping in concentric circles. I will know in the heart that i want to get to, like, my question is how did this guy, charles whittlesey, how did he become this leader that everyone followed . Okay, what was world war i . I go out and concentric circles. Then gradually, on the western front specifically in france, specifically when the americans arrived in 1918 and just gradually zoom in. Thats more like history books. Then i like to follow this advice. I cant remember who already from, not just reading about the time period, but in the time period. For me, a big sources newspapers at the time, because the thing that was a gift to me as a writer was a lost battalion was comprised mostly of men from new york. They were a metropolitan division. Newspapers the world over cover them, but because the press industry was based in new york at the time, as it is to a large extent today, there was so much coverage especially once the lost battalion got famous. Also soldiers accounts. There were soldiers who are in the lost battalion under their own account. I went high and low in the sense there were people who were highly educated, where the officers. There was another private who is just barely illiterate and published this moving account at the end of his life on a vanity press. Youve got the feeling that he just wanted to tell somebody how this went down before he died. Stuff like that. Like i said, whittlesey is the cyber in the middle of it. He did not keep a journal, he did not keep a diary, but spoiler he killed himself. He jumped off this ocean liner because he could not handle being a hero. He was full of survivors guilt, so he jumped off this ship on the way to havana. It speaks to the meticulous nice and compassion and thoughtfulness. He left suicide mines with side notes to the people in his life and put them in his cabin so everyone would know what to do when he got to say goodbye. Thats where i got a few of the personal tidbits which were really helpful. Miles, could you talk about your process . I think a major difference between strang and with, being confidence meant in different ways, theres a lot of record about strang. Thats by comparison to someone like whittlesey. In that way, you are blessed with many things to cover. So how did you tackle the organizing candy collecting before you even got to be part of interpreting . But i am not blessed with, amy, historians basic knowledge of the periods i write about. Like kathleen, i have to start with a ton of secondary reading and just read up on the period. One of the joys of this book was, i am an english professor, and i had some knowledge of antebellum literature, but not that much. So it was just so essential to me to know what the writers of this period were thinking. Malveaux is the confidence man. That was a touchdown for me. Also people i new elf but had not really read a lot like margaret, fuller, this pro feminist. Gender relations are very important in this book. I just found her to be a revelation and just so smart. And talking literally about gender fluidity, like using those words. So i do that and then there were two great archives. When it yale. That was really useful. You have one in Central Michigan and there are some other places as well. I found some new sources. I was also blessed with something my predecessors who worked this. This was a great revolution in the 19th century online newspaper database. I was making great news in my basement where im sitting now at 1 am. There were unlikely places to go. The other thing i just benefit from this kind of being stupid and pursuing some stuff that may be a trained historian wouldnt do. A lot of times, i just wind up going down rabbit holes and farther down rabbit holes. But every now and then, sort of just going instinctual it me out. And my organization is, i reboot really believe this timeline i keep is a narrative generating machine. Just seeing things in context. Im working on another book proposal now. I dont even know if im going to write much of a proposal and i have 90 pages of timeline. Its one of my big ways of doing it. Okay. I also have a great photocopy or. I keep these big books of photocopies stuff. Did either of you encounter, beyond newspapers and secondary sources and journals, was there any material culture or even photographs . Kathleen, i know there might be a film to that also informed your historical inquiry. Yeah. Since you mentioned the film. First and foremost, the first thing that i did was go to see cher ami in the smithsonian. I knew that i had to go seat her. It just blew my mind that this was the way the government chose to commemorate her. One of the things im interested in is monuments and what is a monument. The idea that you could take a body of this sentient animal and make it a monument. They would never have put him in the museum and stuffed him, with that is. And they couldnt because the body was never found. So that was the first thing. I would say she was a text and the most inspiring text because it truly is written on the body when you look at her. Shes not stuffed very well. Shes tiny, shes just pageant size. Homing pigeons are just pigeons. You can see her injuries like when she flew her mission, she lost an eye. She was thought through the chest and lost a leg. So when she landed, and even this is a testament to her stories remarkable miss. Thousands of pigeons were killed in world war i and they mostly threw them away. It was nothing to dim. It was just material and no tragedy at all. They knew she was so important because of this friendly fire think that she stopped. They had medics sticker up and made her a little wooden leg. She was also assumed her whole life to be a male bird, which is something i think about who gets to be a hero. When the taxidermist got to stuffing her, he realized she was a female bird. He did not even bother to change it on the smithsonian plaque. That was facing fascinating to me as well. That had interesting parallels with whit where he was this war hero and no one had talked much about his sexuality. I dont want to reduce him to that, but that seemed to be a key facet for him to be able to the leader that he was. I just cant get over the fact that they did this. In 1918, just to explain the pocket was horrible. They were there for five days with no food or water and getting snapped and friendly fired. Surrounded by dying men they could do nothing to help. So they all come back and hollywood is like lets make a movie about this and lets have the guys who survived star in it. So whit, all stressed and full of survivors guilt as he is, place himself in this silent film from 1919. There is even a cher ami cameo. That was wild to me just to see the guy that i was writing about, but also saying that he was of a culture that doing Something Like that to survivors with thought the thought of as fine. Lots of good stuff like that. Photographs played an important role. Strang was murdered by his own people and one of his murders was also a professional itinerant photographer. So one of my chapters is based around straying and this photographer. This picture, which one of the things about this picture was it was a blast to learn how to read cool photographs a little bit. I think i discovered something about strang just from the photograph. Hes holding a book in a certain posed that is meant and would have coated at the time to an assertion of authority. Unlike, what is this book . Its not the bible and its not the book mormon. So i measured its proportions and i think its strangs own sort of holy book that he was having his people read. That was a really interesting thing. This was right at a time where he was losing power. Eventually he would be murdered and this photographer was in on the conspiracy. I thought heres this guy taking his picture who soon will be plotting to kill him. And strang is trying to assert authority. One of the many joys of research is learning how to see how other people saw things and the code the passed in a certain way that is really exciting and fun to me. Miles, would you also talk about another photograph in your novel, were not novel, but your book . Perhaps if cher amis gender was intentional and theres a picture of a certain mr. Douglas. Would you tell me a bit about him and her . So Charles Douglas, strang went around a long tour of fundraising and recruitment and the east coast in 1849 and 1850. He was accompanied by young man who he introduced to everyone as his nephew and private secretary. If we had it, i would put it up on the screen right now. Its quite a nice photograph. The trick with Charles Douglas was he wasnt Charles Douglas and he wasnt a he. He was strangs first polygamist wife. It says a great deal about the were gender relations. They did not fool everybody. A lot of people were like who is the woman strang is traveling around with . They pulled a lot of people and i think a lot of that had to do with the displays of femininity that happened, we hugely ornate displays of femininity. And i think folks just did not know what to make of this person. That was one of the really fun things. Truly interesting character, like the conman that strang surrounded himself with. Kathleen, im wondering if you could talk to us about how you used cher ami and whit to address as a window into world war i. Sure. The thing i guess that you have to go back and answer is that you ive always really been fascinated by world war i. Its always been my favorite war, i guess. That word is not exactly right, but its the war that has drawn me over the worse the most over the years. I think its because it is so hard. I think any war is hard to understand and im extremely committed to antiviolence. I know a lot of people think im a cockade fool, but i think many humans could choose without violence if they so choose. World war i was such a deliberateness, to this just cataclysmic and utterly annihilating self destruction. I was really interested in trying to figure out why that would happen. So i guess i wanted to write a world war i book for a while because that to me is such a huge mystery. Nick, why do people do that . More is the hyper object that you cant really find corners on. So it took me until brian, doing this line, to be thats my way in. Its corny, but like a birdseye view of this thing that is really hard to see. I felt like i also needed a human perspective. So i think what it was was once my feel division got narrowed and i was able because all of my research was guided at that point. I used a lot of secondary sources to make sure i have a complete contrast of the war right, but the point was more so to see through these two sets of very specific eyes and try to see the conflict in a way that we had not seen it before. I think one of the things that i was really trying to do you know, when you research, i think there is this idea that research is effective because its history and youre looking at these objective things, but you the researcher are not objective. I will say my tactic, if anyone is interested in coming at it, i think nonfiction does this do but i think fiction can do it more because its fiction, i had such an agenda. I had such a focus of like i wanted to be an antiwar book, i wanted it to be a really quick book, i wanted it to be an animal rights. That helps me. If i just went and looking at world war i to research, i would not be here at this event. I would still be researching it. I will never understand it that way, but having those points of reference to guide my Research Really helped. I know we are not jumping to audience questions, yet but i think someone asked how long did you research. I would say that is something encourage people to think about. Sometimes, the research and writing phase get presented as discreet. Sometimes they are for some people, and ive had front heavy years of research before i start trying to write, but then i think they can quickly become concurrent and coextensive to me. In a way, i never stopped researching it as i was writing it. Can i just jump in and say the research in this book is good . And i totally agree that it feels like a false dichotomy, the way my brain works. I am always writing and researching, and i was researching and finding important stuff late in the process of this book. So i just dont know how people segregate that out. Even writing itself i am amazed by that. Even writing doesnt look like writing sometimes. I was making a joke with my family over christmas, because i was writing my first oped, and i was taking a walk around the house. Someone said what are you doing, and i said i am writing, because i am taking a walk. Before return, in a moment, to some of the questions that i am saying are popping up on the chat and maybe weve got to some of them, i would like miles to have an opportunity to talk about how strang, the unique perspective you took as a historian on strang, because i understand it was different than others. Here is a quintessential figure that helps us understand something important about antebellum america. Could you talk to us about how he was a reflection or a product of his times, rather than a unique figure, in a sense . I think there have been several good books, three good books about history before, and they are all admirable. I was proud and lucky to build on the shoulders of these previous researchers. Strang has mostly been treated either as a footnote to mormon history or a kind of midwestern michigan figure. One of the books is called assassination of a michigan king, by university of michigan press. Usually my brain works really slowly, but i noticed that strang was a lightning rod for the weird religious enthusiasms and political enthusiasms and just a strange power of the antebellum era, which is a very unstable era. And i slowly came to see the antebellum area as comparable to our own. Trump is not in the book and there is no mention of 2020 in the book, but people are reading it in a certain way as an allegory for our own times. Thats not something amy, you would slap me if i said these two periods are alike. I know its a big mistake historically and rationally. But i do think we can learn from different periods. I am all bought into the idea of the liberal arts, letting us see our own period through the past. So the book was a blast to right in that way, and i think writing in the trump era, which is what i did, i started about the time of Trumps Campaign and the book took me five years to write or something. I dont think it would have been the same book if i had written it at a different time. I think its reflective of the times. For you to, kathleen, it sounds like that. Dan, are you there . Would you like me to go into the chat and pick out some questions . We can do it either way. Ive been writing down some of these questions and i can read them. I am a former student to asked, did either of you have a concrete moment where you knew the book was finished . If so, was there ever an attempt to go back and revise and you have to train yourself to let that feeling go . Kykn9 i will g. Yes. I always have a moment concretely when i know something is done, because i love outlining. I know there are fiction writers who start hearing voices and write down what they say and go on a quest and i believe that happens. It has never happened to me. I am a huge believer, and i will go back to the dropping the pins of events thing. I will know with the major incidents in each characters life, are and i will have little irks for each of, them and know how many chapters need to get covered. Writing a novel is so architectural, but i get to the end and i know i did. It and also, historical people, i know it had to end with cher ami in the smithsonian and whittlesey in the ocean. So i dont want to make it sound like that was easy on the way. But getting a finished draft, i think it helps to have an outline because we know and we are done and can then start getting feedback. Everything is baked in because you know you are going to get lost in the process. I guess, normally, i never feel anything is done, but i felt like this book i was more in control from start to finish. That may Say Something about meet a certain point, maybe that the material came in a certain way that it felt like i understood it, and i was really going to argue with you, kathleen, and say i find the architecture by building the house. Even for this book, where the editor basically said im very interested in having you write this book, i wrote 100 plea is saying thats how i do it. And im trying to capture both the architecture of the books. I guess it is like an outline, but also the tone is really important to me, to get the tone and the approach to the material down. And that came with a ton of research. I had a huge amount of research before i could even do these stupid about proposal. Here is a question i dont really like from parker bennett. Any interesting tidbits from your research that did not make it into the book . Lots, but that is part of it. I cant speak for miles, but when you do all this research, its just like a treasure chest. For fiction especially, that starts to make it more nonfiction. I feel like in a way, this is a fluid genre. I run a hybrid genre press, so im not trying to. I think if you are trying to do anything kind of commercial, you need to zip along to a certain extent. You need to have character arc, s a plot, it has to move. So if it starts and crossing everything with all the tidbits, it cannot move anymore. It loses the aerodynamic nature. So i always have to leave stuff out. My agent made me take this, out and she was totally right. This guy was one of the machine gunners of the lost battalion and he had this tragic death. If someone can keep loading my gun for me, i can keep fighting a little bit longer, and then his tourniquet slipped and he blend out and died. By all accounts he was a great guy. He had a fiancee back home, like so many did. There is a whole generation of women who did not ever get married because all the men died. , she lost battalion, every thanksgiving they held a lost battalion reunion right before thanksgiving were all the survivors could come together to reminisce. She never attended, but she always knew when they were happening. She always sent a bouquet of lilacs to where the lieutenant would have set. Its an interesting story, but so far out of the purview of the book. If someone wants to do historical fan fix, i would read about that fiancee. She seems cool. That is just one. I had many subplots and even just fascinating characters. Strang surrounded himself with so many conman from the 19th century, some semi famous. I say in the footnotes, you could write about a book about this guy and he is not even named. So i had to do that, and it kind of focused on i am in a Writers Group, hello Writers Group. I love you. One of the members of the Writers Group and an author has said you need to lose 90 pages. I said no and the writer said yes, because she was totally. Right if we have this language to talk to each other, i just thought this was such a blessing to have someone understand your work so well. And they can help you see what needs to be there and what needs to not be there. A question from sandy, the notes to the biography and epigraph are a joy to this librarian. What was your process for finding them and sliding them into each chapter . Hunting them down and reading a lot in the period, and also they kind of gave me a way of letting the mid 19th century speak without me having to speak at all. I sort of see those as the chorus in the book, and as far as footnotes go, they made me cut down those footnotes. I would write endless footnotes. I hate the process, because i am really disorganized and then i have to get really organized, and then i drop footnotes because i cannot find this quote. But i just love that process, and i love having a place where i can tell stories the cannot be in the book. And of course, i had to cut many things. There is a question from andrew fitzpatrick. Havent recently binged on hbos the vow, i am struck with how this confidence man grift or archetype just keeps coming up again and again in American History. Do you want to comment on that . Charles dickens visited the United States in 1841. He was struck by americas fascination with this type of person even before we had a name for it. He went to Southern Illinois and he saw this land fraud scheme and he was asking people about, it and he said isnt this guy a bad guy who ripped you off and ripped off all these other people. They said yes, hes a bad guy. Didnt he steal a lot of money . Sure, he stole a lot of money. But you still like him . Yes, we like him a lot. He is a smart man. I was just struck by that. We were showing clips of president s jumping in on his taxes during the last campaign, when he is talking about how he doesnt pay taxes. He says that means im smart. I just think there is something about that thats in the american character. Obviously conman exist and every culture. A question from earnest. Kathleen, do you think they didnt correct his sex because they thought he would be more identifiable as a male hero . That was a sub question i had about world war i. I think war is, of course, like a traditionally very masculine, male pursuit, and i think in world war i thats another reason im drawn to it. That is just so large. Theres so many sources both about americas involvement and about europe and globally how it had to do with this urbanization that was beginning and a shift for the male population to not be a soldier class or to not be working or doing some kind of manual thing but beginning to just go and do these more of feminists, feeds pursuits like working at offices or having this indoor power. Theres so many people who are kind of writing about, barely euphemistically, about american and european manhood going soft. I think a lot of my people why became people got involved in the war is because they thought it would be this fun boy scout adventure. I think it was more palatable to the audience at the time. Cher ami had become such a mascot that she was basically told around as a piece of propaganda in tours and parades. I think it was helpful to have her be available as a male hero. I think its still kind of unpalatable to people, rightly or wrongly, to think of bad physical things happening in a war, to anyone, but especially a woman. I think it was more expedient to say that he was a he. Thats what we want to believe. Okay. A question from maria. I would love to hear miles talk more about learning to read historical photos. How did you develop this skill . I would not necessarily call it a skill. Like all things, i know my limitations so that allows me to just be stupid and tried hard. We are blessed to have a colleague in the English Department who knows a lot about photographs from the 19th century. She turned me over to some other experts. I just kept asking people and kept reading books. You know that we are coming to the end of this thing, so i want to just, for the student riders out there, just repeat what kathleen says in her classes. I say it in my class is all the time. Three words, look it up. This is not a burden, it is a joy. There are incredible archives that you can use from your computers right now, even into paul. Our newspaper database for instance. Its not what you might find at some institutions, but they are quite good. I think so often students come to me with this sort of story, well theres a story in my family that soandso was a bank robber. Im like, well is it true . There, like i dont know. Unlike, look it up. So we are one minute to seven, i could do a couple more questions. Or, we could say goodnight. Due to more. I like to, two is good. Do you have make time to make yourself right, or are you so captivated in the process that it is easy, or somewhere in between . This is for kathleen. I love it. I love writing. I respect all points of view, whenever i hear writers say that writing is so painful and so hard and its like opening a vain and bleeding and just the worst. Im like, stop. Dont do that if it hurts so much. Like, dont. Why would you do a thing like that . I think its fun. I would not do it if it wasnt so fun. When im running a project, its all i want to do. This might be a novelist thing. My husband is a novelist as well. I think novelists get spooky a bit sometimes when they are writing a novel because you are living in this whole other world with other people. Im in the real world and im like, youre great, but there is these other people in this different or that i have to get back to. Also the research before the characters. Like miles said, its a joy to look things up. Its so exciting. Often you dont even know what you are looking for and just trip over it. Its like, there is my next plot point. I guess, i dont know if thats an obnoxious answer or not, but its never a problem. I just love being a writer. I want to do it all the time. Kathleen and i have many things in common perhaps, but our modus operandi i mean, im just such a slow writer. I clearly love writing as well. Its all ive ever been moderately even good at in my life. But i right so slowly that the difference between writing and riders block is just they blur together. I dont find it, like the whole vein thing and melodramatic this is so hard. I just find it incredibly boring. When you are spending 20 minutes on a verb, life speeds up. You are like, ok, i just spent five hours on that paragraph. At my age, thats five hours i wont get back. I guess i just love it and do it and this Research Thing is like a portal into another world. To me its just so exciting to do those guides. Weve never had more opportunity to do them. Okay. Should we do one last question . Yeah, a short one. Okay, a short one. So avery asks, what does your revision process look like . Thats a short one. Thats a short one. There were no yes no questions. I will do it really quick. Hi, avery. Avery is a former student of mine. Im a big believer in phased revision. So not trying to revise all at once, but breaking it into phases. I will do the whittlesey revision and not worry about anything else that is wrong. I will do a dialog revision and ignore everything else. I will do a factual accuracy revision. That would not necessarily work for other people. But otherwise, it makes a very daunting process doable to me. Im going to reverse course and say revision is the one time i truly have fun writing. Its like, i hate writing, but i love revising. First of all, my hunch is we love George Saunders when he came to speak. Kathleen, i dont know if you are there, but he talked about revision and just how great it is and where the creative writing professors. But then marilyn robinson, whos one of my favorite writers, says she only does it for draft stuff. I dont even know what i am saying until i get to do revision. To me, provision is finally when youre like, okay, this is a story i want to tell. This is how i want to tell it. This is the kind of pros approach i want to use. To me, its like this is fun. So revision to me just gets better and better until i find somehow that i like this. I love her vision as well. Revision is awesome. Thank you everybody for coming. Miles, it was awesome to hear more about your book and your process. Amy, thank you so much. Then, thanks to everybody who made it happen technology wise. Thanks for a lovely night. Mark and sarah, thanks so much. Amy, in honor to work with you and dan. Just one more plug. One of our colleagues, michelle, is starting in event right now on a another channel. I urge you to tune in. Its like a double header of light stuff tonight. Thank you so much all of you for coming. Yes. Thank you, guys. Thank you for merging history and creativity. But by. Byebye, everybody
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