Speaker 0 00:00:02 You are listening to right on radio on KFA 90.3 FM and streaming live on the
[email protected]. I'm Annie view tonight on, right on radio Dave FEDEC, we'll be talking with Russell shorto about his book, small time, a story of my family and the mob, a frequent contributor to the New York times magazine and other publications. Shorter was also the author of the bestselling Island at the center of the world, as well as Amsterdam and revolution song.
Speaker 1 00:00:31 <inaudible> can you hear me now? I can hear you. Josh. Are we on? We are on the air right now. We are on the air and Josh, Josh in the studio. I am Dave bedding here on zoom with Russell Charlottesville, Russell. Welcome to the show. Thanks Dave. Nice to be with you. It's wonderful to have you, uh, thrill actually, uh, we've had a great career and it's a great book. And, uh, I was look forward to this chat. Now the subtitle of the book, the book is small time as we just heard a story of my family and the mob. Now, most people can't say that about their family, so that they're going to tell us the great about the mom. So, um, just to get things started, maybe frame, um, what we're going to talk about, um, how did it come to pass that Russell ShoreTel was able to write a story about his family and the mob?
Speaker 2 00:01:25 Well, because there was another Russell shorter, my grandfather who, uh, together with his brother-in-law my great uncle, uh, ran the, uh, I guess you would say the mob franchise in my hometown, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in Western Pennsylvania. And, uh, it's, it's something that I, you know, nobody talked about growing up, but kids just absorb stuff, you know, so I kind of knew about it, but I also kinda knew we don't talk about it. And by the time I was really aware, he, that was, that was over, you know, when I was like six, seven years old, that was kind of a thing of the past. Uh, so it stayed in my mind somewhere. It stayed lodged in my mind, but also lodged in my mind was this notion that, all right. Um, I'm going to forget about that.
Speaker 1 00:02:14 I understand that I could just share a little personal anecdote. So my wife is Italian-American and her father who came over an early product, 20th century from Italy, um, spent a little time in prison for bootlegging. Um, and, uh, I tell you that was a subject you would never bring up in front of certain relatives. Um, you, you would have been ostracized. It was just never spoken up until some people frankly died. And we were able to just talk about it,
Speaker 2 00:02:42 Part of it. Yeah. That was part of the case here. I mean, realizing, wait, these guys are all gone. I mean, it was another relative who said to me, Hey, why don't you write about this and that? And I suddenly thought, well, why have I not even thought about that before? Um, and of course the people of that generation are all gone. And most the people who, who I then spent a lot of time with, I did, you know, hundreds of hours of interviewing people in my family and other people in town who were connected to it. Um, most of them wanted to talk. I found, uh, because I think they felt, you know, this was a piece of history that was going to be lost. So, uh, so, uh, people, I mean, not everybody, but most people were grateful for it.
Speaker 1 00:03:23 I'm going to ask you to give a reading after we have this one harder, uh, discussion that little bit of discussion here, but, uh, the book really is you hit on something to me, it's three books and it's relatively brief. It's about 250 pages, very compelling, reads like a novel. So maybe those four books, it's a novel, but really it's a story about your family. It's a story about Italian American history in America, mid century, essentially 20th century. And it's a story about you. Uh, and it it's really powerful in that respect, um, Russell, uh, to, to, um, to learn with you about your family and experience with view your emotions as you, uh, uh, acquire this knowledge. It's, it's quite a piece of work.
Speaker 2 00:04:05 I, well, thank you. I greatly appreciate that. Um, and all of those things were in there from the beginning in my, in my idea of what it would be, except maybe the last part, you know, I didn't realize until I was like wading into the middle of it that, wait, this has to be about me for goodness sake. It's somewhat, it's about someone who has my name for one thing. Um, and it becomes then ultimately I'm looking for, I'm looking for my grandfather in the book and then I'm using my, my dad is my kind of research assistant his, my grandfather's eldest son. So it's about ultimate at a certain point. It's about their relationship that these, this father and son relationship, and then my dad and I are kind of looking at each other and it's about our relationship too. So it's a story of fathers and sons, I guess
Speaker 1 00:04:57 That's well said. Uh, and if we get to what I want to talk about a closing scene of the book, uh, which was very touching, uh, but, uh, I have a million questions, but let's get a reading. We'd love to have a reading on our show, Russell, um, get a sense for the book. And can you set us up?
Speaker 2 00:05:13 Well, I thought I would just read the first, um, couple of pages. I don't know how long do you want me to go? But, um, because that does indeed set up the whole thing that what we're talking about, and chapter one is called the setup
Speaker 1 00:05:26 Plan this, and by the way, we did not, we did not.
Speaker 2 00:05:30 Um, it started one evening when I was home for the holidays picture a two warm living room. So crammed with relatives that people's limbs are overlapping a day or two after Christmas, a cloudy gray night sky, snow starting to fall. I'm a writer of narrative history, by the way, someone who makes a living telling nonfiction stories about the past. So in terms of subject, you might think this one would have been obvious to me long ago. It was not. Anyway, the TV is blaring from one corner of my parents' living room. The tree is stuffed into another. A tray of cookies is going around and somebody mentions that Frankie is in town. Who's Frankie, your mother's cousin, Frankie Philly. I'd met Frankie once or twice. I knew he was a jazz singer who had left town a lifetime ago for Las Vegas, that he had a long career there playing gigs and tending bar and casinos.
Speaker 2 00:06:31 After five decades of fingering, the thick strings of the standup bass crooning for an endless succession of smoky rooms, he'd decided to retire and come home an hour later, a couple of carloads of us figure we'll head down to the lounge where Frankie now plays once a week in a local local geriatric combo, stepping from the snowy night into a dark room, confronted by the dank smell of all old bars. And there's Frank luridly lit on the makeshift stage, a little guy in his late seventies, roundish body flanked by the shapely neck of the base. He puts a hand over his eyes to peer at the doorway smiles. As he sees us distant relations here to partake of what he's offering. We pile in order drinks, stand there with our big coats on ranged around like Easter Island statues. Frank's got a nice foggy breezy voice, the kind that invites you to take a ride with him. Volare fly me to the moon at a break in the set. There are kisses greetings. We're standing in a circle. And at some point, Frank looks across at me and wags a finger Russell I've been wanting to talk to you. You're a writer. What are we going to do about the story? What story in the middle of asking the answer is right there fully formed in my mind.
Speaker 1 00:07:53 Beautiful. That's a great setup. Uh, and Frankie appears at the end of the book and a beautiful book ended fashion cleverly done, whether you intended that or not, uh, was a song. Uh, but let's talk about a little bit of craft here. As soon as you mentioned in this setup, uh, that you're a writer of narrative fiction. How do you, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yes. How do you define that term Russell? I apologize.
Speaker 2 00:08:19 Storytelling telling true stories about people in the past. Um, I'm a great believer in a narrative that is to say storytelling as a legitimate and maybe the most legitimate way of doing history and the, certainly the oldest it's, uh, how we going back thousands of years, how we know who we are and the stories we tell about the past. Um, and, uh, so that's, you know, I, in, in the way I've worked in all of my books has been, you know, you, you fall in love for whatever reason, with a particular topic and decide you're going to write about it and you start digging. And, uh, I do, you know, I, I do, I write history and I do journalism from time to time and they both, um, have their there's a lot of overlap. In fact, uh, there's there was an old woman, an old historian I once talked to who confided in me and said, you know, I wanted to do journalism, but I was afraid I was too nervous to interview people.
Speaker 2 00:09:19 So I do history. History is journalism with dead people. Um, so, uh, you know, so in both of those cases, you look for, you know, you're, you're gathering information and you get your big mound of information and you start then weaving, you're cutting, cutting a path through it. And when you come up with information that's challenging or that's controversial that you're not sure of you look for corroboration, you look for a second independent source. That's the same in journalism and in history. And as I started this project, I thought, naively, okay, I'm going to do the same thing. But as we said, at the beginning, as I got further into it, I realized, okay, this has to be different because it's got to be personal. And therefore, am I willing to kind of put myself into this in a way I haven't before
Speaker 1 00:10:09 Going back to what I described earlier as three or maybe four different books that at least I read when I read your one book, uh, one is about, uh, the Italian mob, uh, in mid century, 20th century America. But I T talk to us about the distinction between, say the local mob, and I'm going to get the terms wrong. You can set me straight here, uh, versus the bigger organization, the mafia, it seemed like, and you discussed this a bit, there were two different animals here. What happened on a local sort of Johnstone level? And what happened in the bigger universe of the mafia? Is that, is that right?
Speaker 2 00:10:43 Well, I mean, we all know that usually I think for most of us, this, the mob, the mafia we think of, uh, New York, Chicago, the big cities. Um, but what I, you know, so Johnstown is definitely not one of those. Um, and, uh, what I learned pretty quickly and in research was that it was everywhere, every medium-sized and smaller city in the country. I mean, when I started, I did, I filed freedom of information, act requests with the FBI, and you start getting all the they're, you know, reports of FBI officers when they were realizing the extent of it in the fifties. And they are in, uh, uh, Schenectady and they're in Amarillo and they're in Sacramento and, and Butte, Montana, and, and just in Western Pennsylvania, they were in not just Johnstown, but Altoona and Braddock and Greensburg and McKeesport and, and, and, um,
Speaker 1 00:11:39 Good just to draw this distinction. So did they operate in their own little, uh, geography if you will? That was their space.
Speaker 2 00:11:47 Yeah, but I mean, it was very much, I was struck by the extent to which first of all, how much a, of these guys admired, uh, American capitalism and corporations, um, and how they emulated it. Uh, so they sent out branch managers basically. Um, and, uh, the guy who became my great uncle was sent from the Philly mob to Johnstown to kind of open the branch office. And my grandfather was a, uh, he was a card sharp who, who ran card games out of the trunk of his car. So he knew the town, those two met up, they met the, the guy who came to town, married his sister, and they formed a partnership. And that's how they got things going. And yeah, they connect, they communicated with the guys in Pittsburgh to some extent, I think they mostly, um, uh, uh, uh, they interacted, but mostly in a contentious way with the guys immediately around them and the other towns, uh, right around them. Um, and then from Pittsburgh, they communicated to New York. So there was, there was definitely a network.
Speaker 1 00:12:53 How does, how did some of these games or these rackets work? Um, we are all familiar with, because of American culture, popular culture with terms like bookie and, uh, uh play-making and, uh, you know, rackets generally speaking are plain numbers. Um, can you give us a sense for, what does that mean? How, how did they make their money? Because,
Speaker 2 00:13:14 I mean, first of all, as you were, um, describing about your, was it your grandfather or something? Yeah. Um, first of all, it's, it's generally recognized that the mob grew out of prohibition. Um, and, and it also grew out of discrimination. So in the generation, before that you had these millions of Italian immigrants coming to the U S legally. I mean, they were off, they came to do work that other people didn't want to do. And, but they were viciously discriminated against, kept in, in company towns and told how to behave and how to live. Um, and, but their kids went to American schools and they grew up admiring the American system. And being told that these robber Baron, you know, capitalists are great figures. Who've built the country, and yet they themselves can't. I mean, they're, they're denied they're they, they couldn't become at that age.
Speaker 2 00:14:02 You couldn't, I mean, at that era, if you were Southern Italian, you couldn't become a manager of a bank or a department store or whatever. Um, so they found this other Avenue prohibition, suddenly, there's this wonderful opportunity. And that's what, that's how they got their start. When prohibition ended, then they shifted to gambling as the next revenue stream. And so the numbers game, which originated in Harlem, it was a black game similarly because blacks in Harlem, uh couldn't I mean, they, they, you couldn't work in a bank. If you were black a bank, wasn't going to give you a mortgage. They distrusted banks. So they created their own system, which was, they thought of it as a bank. They, you know, the idea was every, every day you're gonna play your nickel on your number and maybe 10, maybe it won't be for 10 years, but your number is going to hit. And when it does your, uh, your, your, your CD has matured, so to speak. Interesting. And so that was the, the, the Italians copied that. And they took it, they went, um, nationwide with it, and that became their central, uh, in my, in the case of my town and my family that was there, uh, central operation. But then they ran card games and dice games, and they had something called tip seals, which were kind of like lottery tickets. Uh, pinball machines were a big gambling source.
Speaker 1 00:15:25 I play pinball a lot as a child. And that just hard to wrap my head around the idea that someone was making money off it, but maybe they were,
Speaker 2 00:15:31 Yeah. W briefly the way they did it was quite brilliant. You, it was a free, I mean, I mean, you, you, you, if you want, and you were good, you won free games. And what you did, if once you racked up 10 free games or whatever, you went to the bartender and the bartender was in on it, and they paid you 10 bucks or whatever it is for your winnings. Um, and then they would split the take with, in this case, the rackets, the guys who ran the rackets, because it were their machines. Uh, and what was brilliant about it was there was no product, you know, it wasn't like you were selling packs of chewing gum or something like that, that the IRS was going to say, Hey, where's our, where's our tax on this? You know, so it was free money.
Speaker 1 00:16:12 Right? Right. Well, I can talk about this all night. And in my site, in my day job, I talk to economists and write about economics. And, uh, basically what you're talking about is a whole economic system is terribly fascinating. Uh, we are speaking with Russell ShoreTel just to remind everyone the author of small time, a story of my family and the mob just out. It's fascinating book let's. Um, before we run out of time, a lot of talk about you and your relationship with your family, and, uh, what sort of happened as you were working on this. It took years to put this together. Let me just jump to sort of a bigger question at the end. Uh, were you ever at any moment, sorry that you opened this can of worms, um, you know, that you maybe expose some of these things to the world, uh, and to each other within the family?
Speaker 2 00:16:57 Uh, no. Um, there, for the most part, you know, I have a big open Italian family and, um, uh, people have wanted to participate in this. And my dad was really my partner in this and my, my kind of guiding light in that he, he had this, he was like an old AA guy. And he would say, you're only as sick as your secrets. So as soon as I asked him, do you want to explore this with me? He said, yes. And he really did his best to, to, you know, go down every Avenue. Um, which isn't to say that there aren't a couple of people who didn't want this didn't want me to go there. Um, and I really wrestled with that a lot and talk with them and I sent them drafts of it and I showed them what I was doing. Um, but you know, my dad said is ultimately, it's your book, it's story. You're entitled to your story. And that's, that's, um, you know, I, I, you have to, it's, it's not an easy, there's not an easy answer there, but that's how I've come down on it.
Speaker 1 00:17:58 Yeah. Speaking of your dad, uh, I want to talk about at the end of the funeral of your father, um, and it was, it was touching in many respects and it, it also made me think of what, if you hadn't spent those last years working with your father on this, your experience of that moment would have been so different. Uh, yeah.
Speaker 2 00:18:18 That's, you know, when you just said, or do I have any regrets that my immediate that's what came to mind? No, because, because I happen to, you know, because Frank happened to say, Hey, why don't you write about this? Uh, and I, uh, ended up doing this project. It was like a father, son project with my father. Uh, I got to spend more time with him and, and really meaningful time, uh, in these last, in the last couple of years of his life then than any time, really, since, since I was a kid.
Speaker 1 00:18:47 Yeah. Um, why, why did this happen? Do you think at that particular time in America, you described how, uh, we had a discriminated class. Um, and so they took advantage of other ways to make a living if you will. Uh, but this was a time in America when you could do that. Uh, I'm not so sure that playing cards out of your back of your car today would have the same sort of, you know, you would make as much money these days. What was going on in America that this was happening?
Speaker 2 00:19:17 Well, there was that, the other side of that was how puritanical the country was. And, and, you know, it's hard to imagine now what a stigma there was about gambling, and yet everybody wanted to do it. You know, it was kind of like alcohol during prohibition. That's why that was such a great gig to get into cause everybody wanted a drink, but they, the government had closed down the very businesses that were allowed to, you know, that were there to make alcohol. Um, so yeah, I mean, there was gambling was this real taboo and it was a, uh, um, a very, uh, you know, it was a very moralistic religious overtones to this. And yet they knew everybody that people wanted to do this. And a big factor in that is, um, television tell, you know, when this was really in its heyday, most homes did not have televisions. And what we're talking about is just simple, doing something in the evening entertainment. And most people I talked to in town who were over, you know, 75 or whatever knew all these guys, they knew everything that was going on. They were able to piece it all together. It was all widened it's in the open. Uh, so it was the thing that was technically illegal, but it was completely in the open. And because it was, it was a public service people, people, you know, more or less needed it.
Speaker 1 00:20:35 Yeah. W what was it about the Italians, or what is it about the Italians Russel that we somewhat, I don't know, idolize, we turn the time mob into some sort of icon of something or other. We celebrated with books and, uh, novels and movies, uh, in a way that I'm not sure. And your historian I'll defer to you on this one. This is just an impression I got reading this, that we don't do necessarily with say at the Irish gangs of the day, Jewish gangs, black gangs of today, Asian gangs, there's something. Or am I misreading this in America? Part of the culture?
Speaker 2 00:21:10 Yeah, that's a good question. I haven't posed it quite that way to myself before. Um, but you know, it partly, I mean, this is a Southern Italian phenomenon and particularly, which is what my, where my, uh, father's side of the family comes from. Um, and it was of course a thing there, and it had to do with, uh, you know, for centuries, as you probably know, Cecily was invaded by one, uh, Mediterranean country after another. And, uh, so the mafia formed there as this kind of underground, you know, resistance, but, but, uh, uh, a way to get by an organization. And when that came, I think it was like they were, they were already structured for I'm making this up as I'm talking, but I think they were already structured mentally for prejudice and repression. And so they kind of had a, you know, a cultural memory of a system for, for handling that that's, that's my initial thought on that kind of came fully formed almost
Speaker 1 00:22:21 It did well. That helps me. Thank you. And then again, I'll repeat myself a little bit here. Try to be a little more clear. We embrace this in American popular culture. I can turn on my TV right now and I'm on some channel. There's an Italian mob movie on a Netflix series based on it. Um,
Speaker 2 00:22:41 Yeah, so I guess what I was getting at was since they had this and it had within it, these, you know, I mean, I was talking about like their, um, kind of emulating corporations and things, but they also had this other kind of structure that had to do with reverence for family and for, for loyalty and, and, and all of that. And I think that came, and that has this natural. I mean, it's, it's easily. I think it's easy to romanticize that kind of thing, which of course, you know, it was probably, uh, I don't know how legitimate that is to do, but you know, it's, it's easy. It applies easily to, to fiction or to a movie.
Speaker 1 00:23:18 Yeah. Well, and by the way, so with this book of yours, that's a compliment. So let's talk about your grandfather. You mentioned at some point, if I am searching for a personality and you were talking about, uh, Russell, short-haul your grandfather, um, what did you find out about him? Did you get, did you feel like you got to know him?
Speaker 2 00:23:38 He was, uh, as I spent a good amount of time talking about in the book, he was very frustrating because he was a very quiet guy and, uh, several people who I talked to said, they thought maybe he was pathologically shy. He mumbled, um, my dad strikingly said to me that his, he said he never broke. Uh, he never broke cover, you know, like he never, his own son didn't really know who he was. It was that kind of thing. So when that's the kind of guy you're looking for, you're, you're setting yourself up for failure, I guess. Um, and then, but then I decided, all right, I'm gonna, I'm going to switch hats. I'm going to become a historian again. And I'm just gonna look for a historical figure. Then I went to Sicily and started investigating his parents. And like, where did the, where did they come from and then followed them.
Speaker 2 00:24:28 And then, so then coming at it from the other side, I saw this kid growing up, what his mother, his father gets killed. His mother, uh, runs a still during prohibition too. And, and there's like a neighborhood kind of pre mafia, community organizer. Who's op who's working her and other people running stills. And, and her son is, is selling moonshine on the streets, you know, and he's grows up in this system and, and grows up without, I mean, he grows up in the American system, but also he was of the generation that did not, wasn't allowed to participate in it. And, um, I then coming at it from that direction, then I did actually begin to get a little sympathy feeling. What other route did he have? This was available and there was a future here.
Speaker 1 00:25:16 Right, right. Um, we didn't get a chance to talk about why your father did not become a mobster. Um, we just have about a half a minute here. Um, I'll let you answer that if we have a second, but I want to remind everyone that we have been speaking with Russell shorto author of small time, a story of my family and the mob. Um, great book. I really enjoyed it, Russell. It was wonderful talking with you and, uh, remind our listeners that, uh, this interview will be up on our podcast. Um, so, uh, let people know about it. Uh, Russell, it's been a pleasure talking with you. Well, what's up next before I turn things back over to Josh in the studio, what's up next for you?
Speaker 2 00:25:55 Uh, I'm. I'm back to the 17th century about way back. Okay. But I really loved, um, doing the, doing the, uh, you know, actual interviews with people, living people who were in it within living memory. So that it's a little unfortunate, but thank you. It's been great. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:26:13 And I'm glad I had the pleasure to meet you this way. And once again, Russell, shorto the author of small time, a story of my family and the mob. And now this,
Speaker 0 00:26:32 You are listening to KFA 90.3 FM live on the
[email protected]. This is Annie, and I'm really excited to have here today. Lisa's Leidner author of who says,
Speaker 3 00:26:44 Lisa, can you hear me okay? Yes, I can. Great. Would you like to explain a little bit what who says is about and read a short passage from it?
Speaker 4 00:26:54 Uh, so the book is called, who says mastering point of view and fiction. And I argue in the book that point of view is the thing that most people who are trying to write understand least, and that it's actually kind of complicated. It's not just first, second and third person. And so I kind of lay out a method to think about point of view, and I'll just read three or four paragraphs from the beginning. There's always a Menasha trough when you're reading you the author and the character, at least the threesome, though, in sprawling epics, the trio can morphed into an immense tribal polygamous family. You're in Paris or Pittsburgh in bed, or at a cafe holding the book or your device in your hand, your lips moving or not as your eyes scan the page. But even if you belong to a book club, you read alone.
Speaker 4 00:27:46 And unless he is James Patterson with the Santas workshop full of ghost, writing elves, churning out thrillers for his insatiable fans, the author is alone to when he creates the characters who basically don't exist acceptance of far as the author, Frankenstein's them into lurk life. The author is an intermediary. He's a guide and translator, and that is true even, or as will later see, especially when the story is being told in first person or involves facts or historical events, point of view choices involve skillful manipulations in and modulations of your Alliance with your characters. In fact, I'll argue in these, this book that those manipulations are the very heart of fiction, more central and crucial than plot, that only fiction that challenges Shirley Jones to author character ever fully succeeds.
Speaker 3 00:28:48 Perfect. Well, I think that really summarized why I found this book so exciting, really getting into the meat of why different lenses of storytelling that may feel like there's simply a factor, a piece of convenience, or actually a deeply thoughtful and really evocative way to get to certain parts of the story and the level of detail in which you talk about voice in this book and go into different examples, strongly evoked for me, creative writing classes that I took at the collegiate level, like having that kind of meat, which makes sense as I believe you teach creative writing, um, childhood teaching, creative writing since forever, but it was also a fun read for me that flew by and it had a fun and friendly mood. It felt a little conspiratorial, like you were letting me in on some secrets about how writing works. And I was just wondering, as you wrote this book, who was the audience in your mind? I'll say, well, I did teach
Speaker 4 00:29:42 A craft course in point of view at the MFA program at Rutgers university in Camden. So I I've been talking to graduate students about this material for some number of years, and they're pretty good writers. They're not beginning writers. So I see this book as a book for serious writers. I think you could also, sorry, useful for serious readers because if you're in a book club and you're saying, Oh, I don't like this character. It helps think of about a way of what do you do with not liking a character? What does that mean? And as you know, I argue in the book that you can like, or not like a character, but if you don't like the author, you don't like the book. So you're always in some sort of relationship with the author.
Speaker 3 00:30:32 Well kind of following that with the, the book, being a conversation with the author and reading this book, being a conversation with you, how did you find a voice that would be good in this conversation with your reader? And how did you craft that as you went
Speaker 4 00:30:47 Well? I mean, you just can't lecture and a lot of creative writing books that are very, very dry, you know, you might as well be writing, reading a math textbook. Uh, and I haven't found that it works with students, uh, and people who were trying to write. And if you've got, you know, your own 300 page novel and you know that something's kind of wrong with it, but it's hard to get a grasp of exactly what's wrong with it. You really don't just want to be given a checklist of things you have to change. You need to be given some way to think about what you need to do that will allow you to dive in. So, um, you know, writing your writer yourself, right? Writing is it's a process. It's not, you know, it's not like you get a final product and then you fix it. It's a process of going through stuff. So I'm really engaged with the process and with talking to people where they are when I teach.
Speaker 3 00:31:48 Yeah. I think just feeding right into that. The book depicts writing techniques in a couple ways that I thought both provided something really valuable, which has both a manual, kind of, these are the elements of voice and techniques that can feel kind of like manual, just something you do to create a certain effect, but it also expresses the subjectivity and personal experience that will go into whether or not someone likes a book, like what you were saying earlier about, you may, you may hate the main character, but it's, if you don't like the way the author does things, you won't like the book as someone writing this book, who is one human being. Were there any times when you were trying to figure out if you should describe something in like an objective manual way or a subjective personal experience way and had to consult outside sources or bring in another person? Well, I will say that my
Speaker 4 00:32:40 Editor and a couple of friends who read the book, cut out some snark, you know, my personal voice, uh, can get a little, um, buoyantly sarcastic at times. Um, you know, I think somebody said, as I was making a joke about Edgar Allen Poe's character approaching the fall of the house of usher, uh, I was kind of making fun of that gremlin polling that maybe I should be a little more respectful of the writers. So, uh, you know, that, you know, the pulse I had to check a little bit and, you know, there's some, I do quote a lot of both positive and negative reviews in the book. And, you know, I just tried to be pretty balanced and show different sides of how people approach work. I mean, just as one example from the book, uh, there's a book by Gabriel talent called my absolute darling that involves the incest EWAS rape.
Speaker 4 00:33:40 So four to 10 year old girl, that's pretty charged material. Uh, I quote a kind of negative review of that book that says, you know, this is a male author and he doesn't really understand how a 14 year old girl would feel. And that was a review by a woman. And so, you know, I talk about issues of authenticity would, uh, would we feel differently about reading this if a woman wrote it and then as a, as a man writing, and would we feel differently if it was in third person or first person, because all of those involve what I describe as your distance from the character, your closeness to the character. So if you're writing about the incestuous rape of a young girl, and you're pretending to be in her head, but a reader feels like, Oh, you're like this, you know, this is torture porn. You're kind of outside looking at this girl being mistreated. That's a point of view failure. And so even a casual reader who isn't necessarily writing can maybe better understand what they're reacting to by going through those, um, those kinds of delineations in the book.
Speaker 3 00:34:57 Yeah. And that's so important, especially with all the cultural conversation today about authenticity and voices behind books. And that's something that I think is really valuable about this book in this particular moment. And I'm glad you mentioned, uh, having different reviewers and different sources in your book to pull samples of language and samples of reviews from, because for those who haven't read the book yet, there's literally everything from Shakespeare to cat person in this book. There are things that I read in my intro English classes, and there are things that I've gotten from the library in the past two years and amidst this kind of timeless goes, we're interested in whatever, feel the story itself. And the voice feels very situated in the present. Both in the casual tone you discussed the reader. The, I found the sarcasm that made it. So we were pretty fun. So thank you. I'm glad, um, to referencing modern phenomena like cultivating a personality on Instagram made it feel like even though the texts were everywhere in time, the book was very much in now, the book is in the 2010s and 2020s was dating the book to now a conscious decision. I'm assuming it was because you're a writing teacher. And why did you choose to do so?
Speaker 4 00:36:17 Well, you know, I teach creative writing. I also teach film. And when I teach, um, even Chinatown from the seventies, the students are like, wow, this is really old. You know, they weren't even born. So, you know, people are more, but then they get really engaged when you're talking about Spider-Man the universe or whatever it's called, you know, so people, I always feel like it's better to meet people with the stuff they're writing and excited about. So, you know, what I tried to do, I think there are like 250 short excerpts in the book. And I first tried to keep a really short, because again, since I'm really talking about a method for breaking down crows, so I'm not like it's not an English class, we're not, you know, analyze. And, uh, the lady with the dog by checkoff, you know, we're, we're trying to think of a way to approach a sentence and to approach the way you tell a story. So I wanted, uh, a lot of range of examples, but you're right. I w I wanted them to be current and it was frustrating working on the book because every time I finished something, some other example would come up. That was the, you know, newer, like Charles, you just published a book that's in screenplay format and it won the national book award. And it's not in this book, uh, maybe, maybe a future edition. Right?
Speaker 3 00:37:40 Yeah. To that, to that extent, how did you decide that this project was done and is going to be situated where it is in terms of both chronology, like stopping it now, even though groundbreaking books will come out in the future. And also it comes in pretty tidy around 250 pages, and like, I'm sure you could have made it a lot longer with the amount of stuff you probably read in your life.
Speaker 4 00:38:06 Uh, well actually I had hoped to make it a lot shorter, you know, kind of shrunk and white size, like something this big that would teach you everything that you needed to know about point of view, but it's just a complicated subject, you know, it's really more complicated than you think. Uh, so I mean, I, I couldn't go on it. I think I've said everything I have to say about point of view in this book. I mean, I could certainly entertain other examples and I'm really curious when I talk to people, the questions they have, like, they'll say, you know, I'm working on a book and it has two points of view. And is that okay? And do I, when do I switch between one and the other? And you know, when you start applying it to your own work, different things can come up. But I hope I'm done with this, with this process. It wasn't, uh, it was, it took a while
Speaker 3 00:38:59 I recently read, I think it was the newest Patti Smith book, but it had to afterwards because more events had transgressed and that was not just a hardcover to paperback thing that was hardcover, paperback, paperback they made.
Speaker 4 00:39:11 Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, people are talking now, you know, the, the big universe of Twitter, uh, friends of mine, most of whom are writers. Uh, okay. Who's writing the first big COVID novel. Yeah. Writing, you know, who's going to be in COVID universe. And how does stuff date when you start using current events? I mean, that's, those are really interesting questions that you're asking.
Speaker 3 00:39:39 And I feel like that's also kind of been treated somewhat by essay writing and online essays and stuff, but it's already been being treated by normal television. And I find it kind of hard to watch either way, like it's stressful to watch a TV show where there are people in a bar drinking and slapping each other's backs when it's like, there's, the show is in 2005,
Speaker 4 00:40:02 Where's your, where's your mask. But, you know, uh, the movie contagion that Facciola, um, consultant on is 10 or 15 years old and it gets a lot, right. Yeah. You know, good research. I mean, I do have some stuff in, in the book about research and ways to use research in third person accounts. Um, so, you know, good research can get you pretty far, like the combination of good research and imagination, uh, gets you, gets you where you need to go.
Speaker 3 00:40:35 Cool. Did you undertake research besides I know you've cobbled sources and critics and your own discoveries and learnings. Did you do craft research that you then also cited into this book?
Speaker 4 00:40:51 Well, I tried to read a lot of the scholarship on point of view. There's, you know, there's a lot of it and I realized to how strongly it's not useful for writers, uh, you know, a lot of it. And I almost finished my PhD. I didn't quite pull it out. A lot of it really goes over my head and I've been in this game a long time, and I've sat in interviews with scholarly colleagues when we're interviewing candidates for creative writing jobs and seeing the way they talk about literature. And it's so not the way we talk about it and workshop. Yeah. Um, so, but I did have to do some consulting. Like I, I find out that most writers don't know the term free indirect discourse, which is when you go you're in third person, but you'd go into a character's head and you don't demarcate it with Oh, my she thought, yeah, with the thought, and in quotation marks, you just want to make a quick kind of flash of change in voice so that we know we've gone interior with the voice, but that's not a term that most people in workshops know.
Speaker 4 00:42:04 So I did, I did bone up a little on the scholarship and on, um, I mean, there is an entire field of critical inquiry about the, the delineations of third person alive thirst person on mission. I didn't want to get too into that. And the bulk I, again, just because it's not that useful when you're writing. Yeah. I don't think,
Speaker 3 00:42:29 Yeah. When you are teaching in the MFA where you teach, do you try to give terminology or literary theory and history education in that context, are you very much workshopping the pieces that are in to be workshopped in a given week?
Speaker 4 00:42:47 Well, it depends on the class. I mean, I just finished a class called the history of the short story and we do it from PO to, I think we end with, you know, more like Alice Munro and, uh, other writers. So we, we kind of are looking at a whole history I do there, but not obviously in a workshop yeah. In a workshop or two, just talking about people's people's actual work.
Speaker 0 00:43:11 Yeah. So
Speaker 3 00:43:14 I want to talk a little more to the way your experiences at our writing as a writing educator, visibly fed into this book. So you do everything from like referencing topics for cliche student papers, like writing a paper about the topic that you can't find a topic paper to. Um, okay.
Speaker 0 00:43:33 You read that one
Speaker 3 00:43:38 To acknowledging like your gratitude for your students' feedback. And I was wondering if your, how your, how your students and your experience as a teacher shaped this into the book that it is both directly and indirectly. Wow.
Speaker 4 00:43:51 Oh, very much so. I mean, a lot of the examples came from the students and sometimes the students push back pretty hard against ideas. So I knew where I had to, to, you know, kind of make a stronger case. You know, it's very different teaching, beginning writers and more experienced writers. And with beginning writers, you know, it's a little like teaching swimming. It's like, here's the arm movement. Here's the breathing, here's the kick now put it all together. So I kind of have a way of talking about different elements of what goes into fiction for undergraduates, but with graduate, since I've already got some pages they want to show to you. So the question is, you know, let me give one example. It's, it's actually in the book really good first draft from a student set in Saudi Arabia, where we have the American guy who's working there as a computer program and a maid at his office building who's native to the country.
Speaker 4 00:44:53 And the point of view of the young man was great. And the point of view of the maid was just not that convincing. And it's easy to see how that can happen because the guy knows the guy, the American guy better than he knows this, this kind of Solen, silent, abused woman, poor woman. So we'll have a conversation about how do I get into the head of this character. Do I want to get into this head of this character, maybe having the guy just observe her and talk to her is enough. What am I going to gain by getting into the character? Do I want to do some research? Do I want to do some interviews? You know, so there are a lot of questions you can ask about that once you get to it. Um, but you're never telling a writer what to do. You're always trying to think of a way to tell a writer how to think himself or herself about what they want to do differently.
Speaker 3 00:45:57 Yes. What do you think on kind of a similar note? What do you think about scenarios in which something in a workshop environment reads as unrealistic or perhaps not thoroughly researched, and then it turns out it actually had happened in someone's life. Um, I took fiction undergraduate workshops, and this was kind of a staple occurrence. And I was just wondering from a technical perspective, what you're saying,
Speaker 4 00:46:22 Oh, wow. That happens so much. You know, I don't believe this conversation between the divorcing couple. Well, that was my divorce. The student will say, you know, okay. But it's not, it's not coming across on the page. It's believable. So how do we solve that problem? And it's like, you know, sometimes with autobiographical fiction, it's like looking at yourself in the mirror, you know, there's how you think you look, and then there's how you look in the mirror. So you're kind of thinking about your lighting filter. You're thinking about what angle you're being shot from. You know, there are things you can think about that would make the scene more believable and more sympathetic because a lot of the time, those accounts of quote unquote, real events are in first person and you get into what in the book I called the TMI problem. You know, I do not want to hear everything about your divorce. You have to choose a couple of good things here and really get them right. Not write me a 50 page screed about how much you hate your husband. So sometimes, um, that's the way in to getting believability on the page and also interest in likeability because nobody wants to be blathered to in a book, right? You want to feel that it's going somewhere. You want to feel engaged, but you don't want to feel lectured to. And you certainly don't want to be bored to death with details.
Speaker 3 00:47:54 Yeah. This all comes to mind. Uh, one of the first creative writing teachers, I had told us to always try reading our piece again, after either covering up or taking out the first paragraph, because we'd often either blather to overexplain or include too many details or put in too much personal framing when what's actually interesting is what's happening. And the reader is able to, for themselves assess the situation and see if
Speaker 4 00:48:21 It's so interesting. Cutting out the first paragraph, you know, as you know, I have a whole chapter in this book on first sentences and first paragraphs, and I argue that you should know the point of view from the first sentence. Yes. And you know, people often are told, Oh, people won't read past your first paragraph if they're editors and they don't like it. Yeah. So what they'll do is they'll try to be really dramatic in the first paragraph, so that something really big is going to happen. You know, if it's uninteresting screaming of additives and kind of hell. Yeah. So, um, you know, so that chapter has a way of thinking about what's your, what's driving you to the next sentence. When you read a first sentence, you know, Lolita light of my life, fire of my loins, who yeah. You know, you're reading there just because who's Lolita. I mean, the book's called Lolita. It's obviously about Lolita, but say what? Yeah. You're over here
Speaker 3 00:49:25 And hearing something and then leaning in closer because it sounds spicy. Right? The thing that I liked most about this book and the thing that made me want to interview you most is that from the book itself to the writing exercises in the back, your premise seems to come so much from a place of curiosity and exploration and not from dictating how it's done or prescriptive writing. In fact, you kind of, you state that very straightforwardly. When you say that you are not creating a checklist for people you're giving people tools to use, to make a decision. And in the context of the exercises you give at the back of the book, which are kind of a, not a prescription of what to do, but a way to bulk some things up, look at it from a different perspective. Um, when you're teaching workshop classes, do you recommend exercises like that specifically to your students, or are these kind of a way to replicate that change of perspective and an outside experience and not necessarily something you do in addition to workshop? I do think
Speaker 4 00:50:28 That often, especially if you're stuck in a project, it helps to start small. Mm. Uh, you know, so it's not, how can I fix this and get it to an agent as soon as possible, but gee, what is my character to look like I say, she's blonde, but that's all I've said. Is there anything else I want a reader to know about this character? So just one of the exercises is rather than giving me a, you know, a police checklist of somebody whose height, weight, and hair color, and eye color for their driver's license, choose one quality that you think will define how somebody looks. And I think that's a useful thing to do as a writer, you know, to just pause and try something a little differently. You know, the writer, Donald Bartholin, we used to talk about running every sentence through a strict quality control mechanism, you know, like it's a factory.
Speaker 4 00:51:29 Um, but you know, some of those exercises are just meant to prompt that kind of discovery. So I say in the book, you know, if you have written the phrase, a blanket of snow stop, do not go, is there any way I can make the snow interesting. And I suggest that one way to do it is, think who is looking at the snow? Does she live in Vermont? Has she been living in, uh, the Sahara and she's never seen snow before? Does she, is she worried about picking up her groceries? How are her boots? Where are her boots? You know, just a way to get into how you have the character would react to seeing snow, other than writing all blanket of snow,
Speaker 3 00:52:20 A blanket of snow I'm from Northern Minnesota. And I've seen snow in many variations that are non blanket, like yes.
Speaker 4 00:52:29 Also, you know, smell snow has a smell. Yeah. This guy has a particular valence when it's about to snow. It's really kind of beautiful and exciting. Yeah. You know, there's a kind of snow day feeling about snow. Yeah. So, you know, you can just pause there and even if you don't know what on earth you're doing with a given product project, you can find some joy in the process, just feeling your way into snow. Yeah. That's what, that's what the exercises are designed for. Just, um, to give a sense of that.
Speaker 3 00:53:05 Yeah. Oh, I love that. Well, we're coming up on our half hour, so I think this has been really great. And I really appreciate you taking the time to call in. It's been lovely to speak with you and
Speaker 4 00:53:16 Learn more. Likewise, thanks so much for the.
