(Matt Burriesci, Maitrayee Basu, Bret Schulte, Scott Burgan) Four accomplished nonfiction writers from different cultural backgrounds explore the challenges of reconstructing and translating cultural dimensions that are no longer easily accessible to modern Western audiences. From Hellenic culture to China’s Middle Kingdom, authors will discuss interpreting past cultural practices, recognizing the discomfort and surprise involved in cultural re-discovery.

Published Date: July 26, 2017

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:05):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2017 A W P conference in Washington dc. The recording features Matt Bari, matri based suit, Brett Chu and Scott Bergen. You'll now hear Matt Bari provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:32):

Lemme go around the table first and do introductions. So I just wanted to let you know Juan Chu couldn't make it, so I want that to be down for the record. So let's start with Scott, who is graciously accepted to step in for.

Speaker 3 (00:47):

Hi, I'm Scott Berger. I am not Juan, but I was Juan's teacher and I was one of one's thesis advisors at George Mason University. I'm on the nonfiction faculty there and maybe we'll give you Juan's contact information because I had this marked on my schedule, partly because I know these fine folks, but also because there's a lot they have to say in including one, but he's in Amsterdam and not here. So I've got two books of narrative history out and I spend most of my and the third one on the way. And all we're going to do here is outline what we do. Talk a little bit about how it connects this idea of research into, it talks about vanish cultures, but I want to complicate that a little bit. And then what I'd like to do, we'd like to do is we really do want to hear from you why you're here, but also what your questions are because this does relate to research and all of the four people here have done very different kinds of research.

Speaker 3 (01:58):

My two books are, one came out in 2007, another one, 2012. My first book is called Grand Avenues. It's the story of how Washington DC came to be, the people who put it together, the man who designed the p Charles infant, the environment in which that happened. I have an undergrad in architecture and I'm very interested in how in cities as places, but also in how cities came to be origin stories, in other words and origin stories of cities are often very, where one sort of culture becomes another kind of culture. I'll jump my second book to talk about the book I'm working on now, and then I'll come back to my second book. As yet Untitled, it's contracted and it's essentially a history of the aftermath of the Great Chicago fire, which has all kinds of parallels and analogs to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Speaker 3 (02:54):

I've taught a class at Church Mason for many years on the literature of Hurricane Katrina where we cover graphic novels and novels and nonfiction, memoir, journalism, all this. And that would partly to sort of fit in with the work I was doing on my own book. And it's got a lot of analogs and parallels to post nine 11, the way we rebuild and how we rebuild and the tension we give to rebuilding and who gets to be in charge of rebuilding and what happens to people who are being rebuilt and who stays and who goes. And all that's present in the aftermath of the Great Chicago fire, 15 years after the Great Chicago Fire, two things happened in right around 18 85, 18 86. The first was the first skyscraper in America, went up the home insurance building, the first curtain wall building as they called it. The second was the haymarket bomb went off, which was very sort of shortly after dynamite had become a readily available thing in America.

Speaker 3 (03:55):

And both of those are fascinating, sort of very familiar pieces of the urban landscape to us today. Were surrounded by skyscrapers and we've become all too familiar with urban violence, but those things were brand new in 1886 and Chicago was the first place that America ever came to understand those phenomenon. And the period of time between 1871 and 1886 is the time period covered, but it's also the story of 200,000 immigrants in the city of Chicago and the struggle between the folks who needed the immigrants to do the work but despised them for it in a way which is also somewhat of a contemporary story. So that's my third book, and it connects to the origin of all American cities and who lives in them. My second book to go back to 2012 is a book called 38 Nooses. And the best way to explain it is that in the day after Christmas, 18 62, 38, Dakota Indians were hanged on a single scaffold in Mankato, Minnesota at the behest of Abraham Lincoln, who also commuted almost 300, commuted is the wrong word, stayed 300 other death penalties against their Dakota Indians.

Speaker 3 (05:18):

The original plan was to hang 300 plus Dakota Indians in groups of 40 on a single scaffold over the course of a weekend instead of turned into 38 Dakota Indians. And the book is the story of the Dakota War and the people in the place that came to do that. And so I'm going to pass this on, but when I looked at the title of this talk is interesting to think about what a vanish culture is. Because in all of these books, I hope at least this much is clear that there's a whole lot of different cultures. Part of the kind of books I write is not a deep dive into one culture, but rather understanding how cultures interact and sometimes peacefully, but very often not. And I write about history, I've written a lot of history, done a lot of history writing for Washington Post other publications.

Speaker 3 (06:14):

And in a way, every trip I take to the past, whether there's whatever, the continuity between the past and the present is a vanished culture. We are bound to the past, but people lived very different lives in some ways than we did. And so for instance, the life of a bohemian immigrant in Chicago in 1871, which I'm trying to become very familiar with, is in many ways is a culture that has vanished. And because especially in cities where cities are constantly renewing and reinventing themselves. And so I think that all cultures are present from ancient times to present. They're also all vanished. When I hear my parents talk about their child in Waverly, Iowa, I think that's a vanished culture. And so that aspect of this kind of discussion, transporting yourself through your research to a different place, whether it's 10 years ago or a thousand years ago, it's really interesting to me. So I'll pass it to Brett.

Speaker 3 (07:18):

Thank you, Scott. Hi, my name is Brett Schulte. I teach journalism at the University of Arkansas and spent most of my career working as a journalist and working very much in the present. Most of my stories went as far back into the past as yesterday, and now I'm working on a book about Boystown, Nebraska, which most people don't know about anymore, but used to be a very famous place created by a celebrity priest named Father Flanagan. And it is a home for wayward children, originally wayward boys up until 1979 when girls were allowed. But it is the story of one particular priest who happened as far as we know, to be a good priest and legitimate in his concern for what was happening to children in Omaha, Nebraska. He was an Irish immigrant who came to this country very much endowed of the ideals of Americanism and prosperity and progress.

Speaker 3 (08:18):

He was a populous progressive alongside many of the prairie populists and thought that what was happening to children was an attitude of criminalization, and it was also imbued with discrimination against class and race. So he started a home in 1917 that was integrated immediately. He had black children alongside Jewish children, alongside Hispanic children, and it was also non-sectarian. Even though he was a Catholic priest, he had many, many, in fact, most of his children were Protestant in his home. For me, it has been a revelation in a lot of ways because I never believed that a hundred years ago was that long ago I never believed. And he died 1948, and Boystown is still around today. In fact, it's bigger than ever. It has a billion dollars in assets. It's got satellite campuses from coast to coast. It has a national hotline, it's got research hospitals. Nobody knows about it anymore though back in the day, they made a movie about Boystown in 1938 called Boystown. And Father Flanagan is played by Spencer Tracy, who won two Academy awards. Spencer Tracy won one of those academy awards and it rocketed Flanagan and his home to fame. Since then, it has sort of fallen off the cultural landscape. But what Flanagan did had long lasting ramifications in terms of the way we thought about kids and child welfare and juvenile justice.

Speaker 3 (09:54):

He managed to change a culture to a degree of how Americans shaped their attitudes towards children. So when he was first involved in getting kids off the streets, it was because the only place for kids to go, he didn't have a home, and there were many, many children who did not have a home, was an orphanage or a jail, and many of them went to jail and there was no such thing as a juvenile detention center per se, if they did not have any other option than they were sent to work. So there was an attitude of labor, a culture of labor for kids, and if they were not kept busy in this culture of labor, then they were in a culture of criminality and they were detained essentially until they reached adulthood and freed in which, and then oftentimes they were trained as criminals in jail and continued along that path. So he believed in disrupting these sort of American ideas that boys weren't worth anything if they didn't come from the right home. As part of that research, I discovered that there was a much deeper sense of what heritage meant back then and a deeper sense of identity as well.

Speaker 3 (11:05):

Flanagan got castoffs from various subgroups, various sub communities throughout the Midwest. You mentioned the Bohemians in New York. There were many, many Bohemian communities throughout the Midwest and the kids that oftentimes found their way to Boystown where those kids who were products of fragmented communities where they're no longer able to take care of their own kids, there were strong, strong pockets of Irish immigrants, Bohemian immigrants, German immigrants, Italian immigrants throughout the Midwest that kept those ethnic identities that were more prevalent than whiteness. And those identities were preserved even after they came to Boystown or Father Flanagan's home. As I've been doing research in the archives and gaining access to some of the private files of these kids who have gone through, I saw that there was an ethnicity box for every single one. And right now that ethnicity box might be marked white or black or Hispanic or whatever those were marked Bohemian or German or Irish or Scottish or Welsh.

Speaker 3 (12:10):

And the boys' home for decades essentially operated as a clearing house for kids. He brought kids in one door and tried to get them out the other into a home. Those homes that he found for them were often identical ethnic matches for those kids, and he advertised kids based on those ethnic identities. They were essentially a catalog you could go through and find a nice Italian kid that's going to fit into your nice Italian home and you can request that Italian kid just like you can request the brown Chevrolet or something like that, or the couch that's going to match the drapes. So anyway, it's been an interesting process for me to discover how cultural identities changed just even in the last century. And I noticed that ideas of whiteness were changing through time along with ideas of class, and I think that our current idea of ethnicity really took shape after World War II when the idea of Americanism sort of galvanized because of the unification domestically of the war that the war efforts brought on. And I also think it was exaggerated in rural areas too, which were more isolated and perhaps in the cities which are less involved in my research that maybe that phenomenon dissolved or changed ideas of culture faster than in the places that Father Flanagan was routinely receiving the kids. But can you talk more about that later if you want?

Speaker 4 (13:29):

So I'm moire and I'm a PhD student at Middlesex University in London. So disclaimer, I'm not an author, so I don't write, but my thesis, in my thesis, I'm actually looking at the discursive construction of the author figure and the role of that in how a particular narrative is read and how it travels within the transnational public space. The particular book I'm talking about is called myself Mona Ahmed. It's a photo book by a photojournalist Dan Singh, and it documents the life of Mona, who's a 61 year old eunuch who lives in Delhi. The book is published by the Swiss publisher called slo, if you're aware of them. They do similar projects and features black and white images taken by DHA over a period of 20 years. This text in the books book are emails written by Mona on Nita's computer addressed to the editor of the book.

Speaker 4 (14:28):

And the caption of the photos too are Mona's. And in the front cover of the book, it actually is described as a look within a secretive, and I'm quoting here, tight-knit world of the Unix and the fact that it enables the book enables us to see Indian society from its margins. So I found that really interesting in the sense that it kind of poses itself as this kind of a look into this invisible world and invisible to a western public. So almost in the emails that Mona writes to the editor Swiss man, it's sort of like an explication of this world and almost a critical view of the mainstream society, mainstream Indian society, but also kind of an explicatory view within this space also. So just to give you a brief description, Mona was born just before 1947, which was the Indian independence as Ahmed a boy in a lower middle class Muslim family.

Speaker 4 (15:43):

And she was the only son in the family. And when she showed disinterest in masculine things, often playing with girls and wearing women's clothing, her family were displeased and tried to threaten and often cajole her into acting more masculine. So when she finally met the eunuch Sona and Chaman, she got closer to the world of Hedras. By the way, this is all described by her in the emails she wrote, and she discovered a sense of belonging with the hijras, which is a word in Hindi for Uno. And then she ran off to Bombay and got operated and joined the Hira community. And in India, if any of you're aware of that, unex lived together. They visit houses where marriages and birth take place to sing and dance, and these families give them money.

Speaker 4 (16:32):

Mona wanted to stay away from the stereotypical occupation that Hedras traditionally have in Indian society and eventually distanced herself from her eunuch family. And then she moved into a graveyard, her family grave, which she built up as a house. I don't think she has a permit for that. But eventually in the book she's built this house and she's coming up with these really innovative and often really her brain business scheme. And I really encourage you to pick up the book if you can. And it's really funny, it's very moving and funny. The thing that I wanted to really look at is also the figure of the author de Anita who lives between Delhi and she's lived in various places abroad. In her introduction, she says, when you work for the media, which Tennessee India only as either exotic or a disaster as story on Unix is a must along with as story on prostitution, child labor, diary debts and child marriage. And she also talks about how media savvy UN are, and she talks about her first interview with Mona in 1989, I think it was, and the bond that was created between them. And that's something that I look at and I can talk about it a bit more about this description of the bond between them, the friendship that lasted 20 years and how that feeds into this narrative and the role that this narrative has in representing the story and also the world of Phoenix in India up to the western public. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (18:14):

I'm Matt Parisi and I'm the author of Dead White Guys. And I should just talk a little bit about what that project is. About 10 years ago, I decided to start reading through the great books of the Western world, which was a set that was curated in the fifties by Robert Maiden Hutchins and Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago. This became sort of the poster child of the western cannon that's been under attack I think for the last 50 years in the academy. And it's everyone from Plato to Karl Marx. They stopped in the 19th century, and I sort of had three challenges when I was doing this book. First of all, I don't have a background in philosophy or political science, so reading these books was a bit of a challenge just by itself. But then I also had difficulty understanding how alien these cultures actually were.

Speaker 2 (19:05):

We tend to think of Greece and Rome as sort of us, but without electricity and with spears, and that's not really what it was like at all. And understanding that they were even within those distinctions. In Greece, you're talking about a thousand years, and in Rome you're talking about another thousand years, and there's various periods in these and understanding them, and they give a lot of color to some of the works if you understand the context. And I think when I approached these books originally, I approached them from an academic point of view, putting all my modern biases on them and all this. But as I started reading, I realized understanding the context of these books in their historical locations. For instance, Oedipus is a perfect example. Oedipus has a whole modern feeling to us or a modern connotations to us. But in ancient Greece, really probably it was a commentary on Parles, the ruler, there was a plague in Athens, in Oedipus starts with a plague that's been brought on, and Oedipus promises to get to the bottom of this, who's causing this plague?

Speaker 2 (20:06):

This was an actual historical event in Athens that Pericles was responsible for. And so essentially the plague is calling Pericles a mother clocker. I mean, that's one of the things that happens in this play. And the same is true of Lyda, which is modern audiences tend to look at Lyda and say, well, this is how progressive actually the Greeks were. But in effect, that's not true at all. It was really, this is the height of scandal to suggest that women could be in charge of anything important. And so that play takes on a different dimension as well. And the second problem I had was really dealing with modern intolerance of these texts, which has become increasingly vitriolic I think in the last 20 or 30 years, understanding if you ever go and look at the greatest books ever written list, you'll find that most of them, and about the earliest book that you'll find on that list is really written around 1800. So we have a real modern bias these days, and there's a huge pyramid of thought that happened before the modern industrial period that needs to be understood. And then the last challenge I think I encountered there was understanding that these books are not museum pieces. There's a huge hits.

Speaker 2 (21:27):

And that the way that we treat these books now, we tend to look at them as dusty relics and we look at them to understand something that we look at it from a modern perspective and we say, weren't they cute and these primitive savages? But really they're very relevant to us today, especially in our current political context with Trump. The books that spring to mind right off the top of my head are Book nine of the Republic and Machiavelli's discourses on Libby. These are extremely relevant books and the editors of the great books of the western world called this The Great Conversation. And to them how they perceived Western culture advancing was a series of conversations between great thinkers. And that sense has, I think, been lost to a great degree in the modern academy. So with that, I might start with Scott with a question for you. Is that okay? So is it 38 nooses? That's the name of the book. Yeah. So in that book, I mean, it must be very difficult to recreate, to get to the truth of the matter because these are people who have either been romanticized or vilified, and how do you recreate the truth in that situation?

Speaker 3 (22:41):

Yeah, I guess a treat it as, I think a lot of you would know this, but you sort of treat that as a fool's errand, right? That in fact, I think the hardest thing when you do historical research of any kind is,

Speaker 3 (23:03):

And I think this comes from whether you're delving into your own past or you're delving into somebody else's past, is I think acknowledging that the veil will always be there. And I think historians have gotten a lot better at this, and people who write about history have gotten a lot better at this. And there's always ultimately a curtain over between yourself and those people. It doesn't matter if it was your great-great-great, great great grandmother or it doesn't matter if it's another people. And so I think you need to start there and think about how far you can get and sort of forgive yourself for not getting as far as you'd like. And it starts there in terms of specifically the Dakota Indians, which is about 30 to 40% of the book.

Speaker 3 (23:58):

Part of my book is about recently arrived immigrants taking captive. Part of my book is about the Dakota in a particular spot, and therefore part of my book is about entrenched political interests. And so there's a bunch of different folks, but when it comes to, so trying to understand the Dakota experience, I mean, I think you do have to start in all cases with how the folks you're researching communicated amongst one another. Meaning what is the mediation between where I am and where they are? There was no written culture and the Presbyterian, there was no written Dakota culture in the early 19th century. And the Presbyterian missionaries come in. And what I'm fascinated by is that whenever missionaries come in into a culture, the first thing they do, and this is true, all colonial efforts ever is before the guns, before the money, before the fort says they start putting a dictionary together.

Speaker 3 (25:10):

The central, you could use the word weapon, you could use word tool, you can pick whatever word you want to use, but the central sort of effort is always to put a dictionary together and sort of to establish on our part what they're saying. And what's fascinating is that the way this works is that these Presbyterian missionaries listen and listen and listen and record and record. And they all have some sort of, it is a very linguistic sort of effort in they're recording and they're figuring out how to notate, and they're figuring out what accents to put in the dictionary.

Speaker 3 (25:51):

And what's interesting about it's invariably then what they do with that dictionary is they turn right back around to the Dakota and they teach them the dictionary so that they can learn to write about that I think about. And then what they do is teach folks to write based on the dictionary you just made, but then they're also interviewing them a whole lot in addition to linguistics, they're doing a whole lot of ethnography. What I'm fascinated by is the rigorous ethnography that these Presbyterian missionaries conducted and the Dakota that, I mean, the books, number of books written about Dakota culture are, there must be 10 written in a period of about 20 years life among the Dakota stuff, life among the Dakota, the Dakota world, all this. And you're reading all that. And then the newspaper folks, you're a journalist where the newspaper folks flow in and they interview and very near to the action was sort of the Minihaha Falls and the Song of Hiawatha.

Speaker 3 (27:01):

And all of this was written there. And the journalists are obsessed with sort of a sense of the tragic, as you said, Indian or the sense of the Noble Indian or the sense of the savage unredeemable Indian or the sense of they all come to this and then they'll interview and then they'll language, it all comes back to language. And then the language they'll use, they'll interview a Dakota chieftain and then they'll write an article in the words of that Dakota chieftain. And the language will be elevated beyond elevated and noble and it sounds like Longfellow.

Speaker 3 (27:35):

And so all this comes to place, and again, I'm sure most of you're aware this where we're starting to realize that the only way to do this is to a realize that there are still existing Dakota communities meet those folks to drive out to South Dakota and North Dakota and Minnesota get the stories and come to a sort of full understanding that the oral history that's being transmitted there is, and this of course is a notion we've sort of come to understand, but that oral history in no sense is any more dubious or false in any of the written history. And so talk to as many people as you can. And what you do is you sort of try to think about in your writing of narrative history, how do I indicate to people this is what happened? If an oral history was living and you wrote about it, you'd say, according to the elder of the tribe, and you'd write that, but then you'd quote a newspaper article, but you wouldn't say anything about the stance biases, the purposes of the newspaper.

Speaker 3 (28:41):

Our newspaper article is treated as a primary source. And so you have two choices. You start either indicating at every step of the way, what would the politics of the newspaper, who did they know? Who was it owned by? You can start sort of calling into question on the newspapers, like you sort of implicitly call into question all the oral history, at least this is what's happened. Or the second thing you can do is treat the oral history as much more authoritative. You can treat it as authoritative, and I think readers are smart. I think you can treat oral history as the same way you can treat newspapers and let the readers sort of sort it out. You can just say, according to the oral history, and oral histories are fascinating because sometimes they disagree with the historical record, but as Brett can tell you, sometimes newspapers disagree with other historical records as well.

Speaker 3 (29:31):

And so part of what you do is you think always about who's receiving this, what their bias is, and also about the fact that any act of sort of writing it has to do who controlled the language, the language you're getting, who decided how these words would be presented? Who? And you don't. If he was somebody who's interviewing Woodrow Wilson, you still have to think about how, why are they reporting his words the way they're the same Wood Dakota chief? And so I go back to those Presbyterian missionaries and think, who were they? Why were they writing all this down? What power did they get by writing it down? And you go from there. Wow.

Speaker 3 (30:11):

To speak to your point about sources. So I'm dealing with a multitude of sources from primary records held by Boystown, some of them confidential, some of them public, and as well as newspaper articles and documents from the census or the feds or state and tax returns or whatever. And there's also official histories that you contend with, right? So one thing that I came across just recently was I was going back through Boys Town's official history. It has its own coffee table book that it sells out of the bookstore. And you get that Father Flanagan narrative and how the whole thing came to happen. And it tells the story of this wonderfully progressive priest who saved children of all creeds and color in one of those pages is a story of this famous football game in 1947, the Boystown football team, which was undefeated. They were a touring powerhouse football team that decimated prep schools from coast to coast.

Speaker 3 (31:17):

And every game was a fundraiser. Every game. Father Flanigan attended if he could, and there was an announcement and money poured in for these poor orphan boys or wayward boys who were now on the grid iron and slugging it out for their team. And they were awesome because these were tough kids. One of those stories, one of those stories about this game in Miami that's published in the book was of their African-American quarterback, Tom Carradine. Tom Carradine was an all-American football star, and he led them on this undefeated season. He's a tremendous athlete who would later be recruited by the University of Nebraska's football team, which was also a powerhouse. And in the history, they say that in the culminating game of the season in the Orange Bowl, Boystown won, led by Tom Carradine, and they crushed this poor Miami Prep school by 56 points or something.

Speaker 3 (32:11):

So I'm working on the research of this particular game, and I come across a piece of oral history that Boystown had collected. Boystown had collected tons of oral histories that were just sitting there gathering dust. The archivists don't even know what they have in the archive anymore. And I am listening to this oral history and this guy who played in this game says, it's too bad that the African-American players couldn't play. And I thought, what the hell? Tom Carradine led this team to victory. It's in the history book. And then I go to the newspaper records and I can't find any reference to the black players not playing in this game in the Miami newspaper or in the Omaha paper. But I did find a sort of a football box score. And sure enough, Carradine and the other African-American players were not listed in that box score.

Speaker 3 (33:02):

And then I kept searching and I found in a newspaper archive, one photo with a caption, and it was in the Pittsburgh Courier, which is a historically black newspaper. And in that caption is a picture of one of the boys town coaches with the three African-American football players. And it says that these boys were withheld from the game because of pressure from the Jim Crow era south, and that the Florida Orange Bowl officials would not allow 'em to play. And that was the only reference to it. And it only happened in the black newspaper. I don't know if boys town's official record keepers purposely misled or if they didn't do their own research, but what was most striking to me, I thought the most important part was that the Miami Herald and that the Omaha world Herald who covered the game did not. And these are the sins of omissions that you see over and over again in a lot of your research obliterated this piece of history.

Speaker 3 (34:06):

They obliterated the history that these players were prevented from playing in the Orange Bowl because of the predominance of racism in the Jim Crow South. And it also indicates that Father Flanagan as heroic as he was in his efforts to integrate, had his limits too. He did not push that issue. He did not take a stand and say, all my players play or none of my players play, which is part of the Father Flanagan narrative, he compromised. He wanted to win that game. That game was going to be, it was a huge fundraiser for that school. So the African-American players sat out. So in doing research, I've discovered over and over again these numerous problems that have to be navigated. And then you have to think next, how do I treat this in the work? Is the purpose of the work to debunk narratives created?

Speaker 3 (34:58):

Or is the purpose just to tell the story without acknowledging that yes, there is this coffee table book that Boystown puts out that it contains misinformation about what father planning did or what these boys played. And then that changes the purpose of the story and it changes the storytelling itself. And you wonder how much of this book is going to be about the storytelling and how much of it's going to be about a correction of the record. And just to say one thing really quick in writing about history, I have found that this never used to happen. And it's interesting because you were talking about a storyteller who you've got a person telling the story of another person, which I think is, that to me is much about it is like Boswell, right? It's like thinking about the person telling the story becomes, in many ways is a story that used to be erased from history.

Speaker 3 (35:51):

We never used to talk about that this is what supposedly happened and this were the person telling the story. And I think the more you find a way to talk about who's telling the story and why, and it helps us today think about our own role as storytellers, it helps us to think, if you ever write about anybody from think about, okay, I'm one of these storytellers too, and not to be too cliche about, but what are they going to say about me in 50 years? What's my role going to be? And said, well, this book was written by this person and this was, but we never used to do that. And so one of the first places I go, I'll pass it, but one of the first places I like to go is especially when you're doing work on cities, because every city, the number of newspapers in Chicago, I don't dunno the exact 65 newspapers in Chicago in 1871, kind or another, just an astonishing amount of journalism happening. And the first place I go is to get a history of journalism and the journalism in a town or a place or whatever. And I try to understand, and I wrote about Minnesota, all of the Minnesota Dotted with every town had a newspaper, and every newspaper was up to something different.

Speaker 3 (37:14):

So when I hear the New York Times describe themselves as the paper of record, well, I like reading the New York Times when I would describe the paper of record, there is no paper of record. And talking about the newspapers, the reporters as storytellers rather than as journalists, I think goes a long way to start thinking about how we get the stories we get.

Speaker 4 (37:39):

So I think that that's one of the things that I'm looking at is how, so I'm looking at authors who kind of move from being journalists at some point in their careers to being sort of in quotation authors, although journalists are authors of their pieces as we know. But yeah, definitely that kind of transition between seeing themselves as working for a particular newspaper to then being responsible for a book in terms of being an author figure. And I think that there is a lot of reflexivity these days in thinking about yourself and your role in representing different stories, different subjects, et cetera. What I found really interesting is that, well, especially when recording well, history is in contemporary post-colonial, and I use that word with a lot of, it's a very problematic term, but let's say Indian stories when talking about Indian marginalized subjects, especially in English, the author is often really removed from the subject as well as the reader, not just Western readers, but also domestic readers by divisions of class, language, geography, et cetera. And the thing that's really interesting is that the author biographies often try to explain the relationship between establish a sort of close connection between the author and the subject. In this case, for example, within the text as well as a parat text, there is a lot of discussion about, or the really, really constructed this friendship between Anita and Mona. How did it happen?

Speaker 4 (39:38):

After the interview that Mona did with Denita, apparently she told the Anita to throw away the film because she thought that it was going to be published in New York when she did the interview, but then later found out that it was going to be in London and she had family in London and she didn't want her pictures being revealed to her relatives in London. So the story goes that that's where the bond was established. And Mona grew to trust Nita and almost grew to be a very close friend that Denita saw every time she visited Deli. And so I was kind of curious about what that, I mean, why is there such an emphasis on this emotional relationship between Moura and Danita? And it struck me that that is actually almost like that's a construction of the authority to tell a particular story. And being authors, how do you see, do you find yourself justifying your role in telling the story or establishing those credentials?

Speaker 2 (40:51):

I feel like I'm always, yes. I feel like you're always justifying what you're doing. Sort of when I wrote this book, I was wondering what gave me the right to write the book in a way. But also I feel like, Scott, you were talking about presenting all the information to the reader, letting the reader make a choice. But even in what you present, you're making a choice. So it's hard when you're writing a book to sort of you, how do you make the decisions that you make, where do you come down? Because no matter what you do, you're making a choice. I mean, I don't know if you feel that way or not. Yeah, well, absolutely. I mean, I think about what I'm also

Speaker 3 (41:32):

Interested in is, so everybody has read biographies, and I'm also interested in the attention paid, and this connects this to authorized versus unauthorized biographies. And I'm always interested in the kind of reader when my first book is kind of a biography. I'm always interested in the kind of reader that looks at who sees authorized biography on a cover or something. And that's a good thing versus the other kind of reader that sees authorized biography and mistrust it. And you all know whether authorized, unauthorized or make you trust it or mistrust it. And I think Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs full access, complete cooperation of Steve Jobs himself. And I think they're selling a certain thing there. They're selling a certain thing expert, but all writing about history, people in history is an unauthorized biography.

Speaker 3 (42:34):

So most of what we read is unauthorized. And then I think a little bit about what we're talking about here, which is then I think about that there's this third category that fascinates me to no end, which is not neither authorized in, but the intimate biography, the autobiography of Atlas b Tolus is the one that comes to mind immediately. I mean, talk about an intimate biography and I think about what keep Gertrude saying the right to do that. And so each kind of delving into somebody else's life, just because you're super close to somebody and just because you're sort of writing doesn't mean what you're writing is any more sort of accurate and factual or trustworthy. And so again, it comes back to, I think the question is how do we signal the reader? And it sounds obvious, do we signal to the reader our own position?

Speaker 3 (43:37):

But for most of the history of writing history, that wasn't even part of the picture. You have a signal to the reader who you are. And I don't see, and I find this to be an enormously interesting development, is we research the biographer or the person writing about the person as much as we research. You've got three levels going on there. Okay? So anyway, so when I think about that, I like to think a lot about my relationship to the subject, but my relationship to the other people writing what subject I'm kin with all these people, I'm just, I came along a hundred years later, but I'm not kin to the Dakota chief then that's being written about. I have to think about my own position now, but I am kin to the reporter who 20 years after these events sits down with them and hears the story and writes it down. And that's a person I feel connected to. And I think, okay, I have to think about what that means about me.

Speaker 4 (44:39):

I think that, I dunno if you wanted to answer that question, but I just thought of something which is that when writing about contemporary subjects, I think that most of the authors and I interviewed some of them, felt that in a way it's true that they're in competition with other writers and other stories. And often, for example, they would use their biography or their position within a particular social group to justify their right to tell the story or why their narrative is truer. So I think was, I dunno if any of you're familiar with the work called a Free Man written by Amman. Seti about a casual labor in Delhi as well. And he kind of wrote about deli slums. And I think it was also around the same time, there was also behind the beautiful forevers, and it was written by an American journalist.

Speaker 4 (45:44):

And I remember in one of my interviews he mentioned that at the end of the day, she didn't speak the language and therefore was operating through a translator. So the fact that you speak the language then becomes this kind of a sort of signal that you can get to. I mean, I think everyone acknowledges that there is no way to tell the story exactly how the subject would do if they had the power, whether institutionally or class-wise to tell their own story. But the emphasis seems to be really to kind of capture a true voice, an authentic voice. And yeah, I think writers do kind of have that sense of competition about them. So yeah, in a way it's kind of kinship, but also positioning yourself in the field.

Speaker 3 (46:34):

I love that idea of thinking with competition between writers because two people write about the same subject, and we are always talk the influence that everything's come by, but you're also always in some kind of competition. Why would you write a book about anything if you felt that the person who came before you had done it perfectly, you wouldn't do it. In fact, forget nonfiction, pretending you're writing fiction about divorce. If you read the perfect book about divorce, you wouldn't write your book about divorce. You may not consciously acknowledge it sometimes, but you're always in competition about the way it was represented there. Something was incorrect or not incorrectly, but something wasn't represented there that needs to be represented. And I love that idea of what I'm representing is. And so I never quite thought of it that way, but I was in competition with every other book that had been written about every one of these subjects.

Speaker 3 (47:27):

And I feel very, the Chicago Fire Book is the competition I feel that I'm deeply involved in is the story of the city burning stuff happens, right? I mean, I'm not trying to minimize it, but disasters are, they're going to go on forever. And I thought what we need to be talking about is what we do in the wake of disaster. What we do in the, I mean, I'm more interested in the story of what happened to the Titanic survivors in many ways, the Titanic that story's never been told. Nobody's ever written the book about that. And then you think about, okay, well of course we like to watch the ship go down bestselling best moneymaking movie of all time, Titanic. We love to watch the ship go down, but is that really story or is a story? So all I'm saying is I find myself in competition and you do invite, how are these people's lives going to be represented? Thank you very much everyone.

Speaker 1 (48:27):

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