Depaul English Department and cohosted by Depaul History Department. Its a thrill to get to host an event with two real stalwarts of the English Department, Kathleen Rooney and miles harvey. Amazing writers and researchers. Were very grateful to have amy tyson from the Depaul History Department to present and interview them. I also want to thank all of you especially for being here. Its always so meaningful to feel support for artists and the arts. During this difficult time when bombast and quick takes seem to rule the day, a lot of us recognize its the quieter, more thoughtful creations that actually sustain us. So, that said, i would encourage you, if you like what you hear tonight, to please support these great writers. I will both links to their books in the chat and i know theyre on display at the depaul bookstore in lincoln park. We do have one technical issue or constraint that i would ask your help with, potentially. We are limited to 100 participates tonight and i see were at 52 right now. And i anticipate that will grow quite a bit in the next few minutes. If we start to approach 100, i would ask some of you to go over to the link on facebook and watch it on Facebook Live so that more people can continue to come in. Thank you very much. And i will introduce amy tyson from the history department. Amy tyson is an associate professor of history at depaul. Shes the author of the wages of history emotional labor on historys front lines and she began the oral history project whose aim is to document the stories of individuals who perform in public as Abraham Lincoln and his contemporaries. Thank you for hosting this for us. Its a pleasure to be here in my house and to see all of you in yours. What were going to do tonight is, im going to briefly introduce both miles harvey and Kathleen Rooney and then both will read from their most recently published works and from there well have a conversation. If you have questions, please put them over in the chat and dan who just introduced me will be helping us moderate the questions from you. Please feel free at any time to drop a chat in there and towards the end of the hour, we will be looking into that chat and having your questions come to the floor. Miles and kathleen, im just so excite to be here with you tonight. Ive been living and breathing both of your books these last few weeks. And i want to start by introducing the things that i know you have in common, aside from a penchant for Historical Research in your writing. You both teach creative writing at depaul. You both are devoted coffee drinkers who share the same High School Alma mater of downers north here in illinois. Long before you wrote your bestselling books, you also shared a history of disliking jobs that you once held in the food industry. And kathleen was briefly a failed smiling greeter at tgif fridays. Miles had a stint as a mcdonalds cashier turned milk shake guy. But they have long been writers. Kathleen is the author of the National Best selling novel, lily and box fish takes a walk. Inspired by kathleens own love of walking. Shes also the writer of my life as an object which is a memoir based on kathleens own experiences as an artists novel. Were going to talk about a fictional story based on the real events of world war i. Miless latest took takes us further back in history. His book the king of confidence a tale of efalse prophets and the murder of an american monarch has already been listed as a choice selection. He has authored the national and interNational Best seller, the island of lost maps which i purchased online last night and started reading tonight at the dentists office. And hes also the writer of the acclaimed painter in a savage land. Kathleen would you begin by introducing cher ami and major whittlesey. Thank you for the introduction. The title contains most of what you need to know. Its about two main characteristics and one of them as you can see is a pigeon named cher ami. They were involved in an incident in world war i and the book is a war book, but it focuses on their joint trajectories. So i think thats what you need to know now. And so just to give us a sense of kind of what exactly i had to research to get both the pigeon and the soldier perspective, i was going to read the first couple paragraphs of the first and Second Chapter because it goes back and forth. Its first person, cher ami and first person whit. This is chapter one. Monuments matter most to pigeons and soldiers. I myself have become a monument. A feathered statue inside a glass case. In life i was a pigeon in a soldier. In death, im a tax adermy collecting dust. The museum has closed and everyone as gone home. The last guests took their leave at 5 30 as they do every weekday and even the janitorial staffers have finished their tasks, miles of floors polished, acres of displays gleaming in silent. A few hours remain before midnight. This is the eve of the 100year anniversary of what according to the United States army was the most important day of my avian life. October 4th, 1918. Im not sure i agree. That day was an important one, certainly, but days dont carry the same meaning for pigeons as they do for humans and my life comprised other days, days that might be equally worth note, if not to the army, then lets to me and those i loved. Pigeons can love. Pigeons cannot fight. Yet i was once as well known to any school child and grownup citizen as any human hero of once was called the great war. You get a few more pages of her and then you get to chapter two and thats the start of whits story. Monuments matter most to pigeons and soldiers. None matter more than me than the soldiers and sailors monument on the upper west side. Its not a monument for my war, the great war, the war that has caused me to be known these past three years as go to held whittlesey, its white marble gleams. The monument has personal significance for me. One, that has nothing to do with war, its where i, prefresh fro harvard law school. Ill stop there. Thank you. Miles, would you introduce your book and then read a bit from it. So my book is about a guy by the name of james who in 1850 declared himself king of the universe. He and his sect of mormon sort of rogue characters had taken over Beaver Island in the middle of lake michigan. And ill just start with a few paragraphs from the first chapter of my book that introduces where stran came from. In august of 1843, a man from a small town in western new york vanished into the night. Such disappearances were not uncommon in those days. The panic of 1837, the deepest and longest lasting economic crisis a Young Country had ever faced, had hurdled countless average americans into sudden financial ruin. For some, the humiliating prospect of having the sheriff take possession of their goods and real estate to satisfy a creditors claim was too much to bear. As one pennsylvania man who owed 200 250 gone, i cant tell where, put it in his 1842 suicide note. Im gone and forgotten. Numbered with the dead. Where the creditors call upon me no more. But for others, there was a way to end ones miseries without putting a bullet in ones brain. To lose ones life without actually dying. For years, those who hoped to outrun creditors had sought refuge in the fast expanding western frontier. The man who disappeared from the new york town of randolph had faced mounting debts for years, putting creditors putting off his creditors with ornate ruses until his only hope was to get out of town. In many other periods of history, the missing man might never have been heard from again after his disappearance. He lived in an era of sudden transformations, an era when you could be broke one day and rich the next. Anonymous one day and famous the next. When wild dreams and lunatic fantasies would move into harden facts. Nothing felt stable or certain anymore. Favored chameleons like the man who was no longer there. Although he was physically unimposing, a few inches over five feet and bald with an oddly bulging forehead, he possessed one distinguishing feature, his dark brown eyes which someone described as rather small but very bright and piercing, giving an extremely animated expression. Another witness claimed the mans eyes seemed as though they could bore right through a person. But more than any tangible at tra beauty, the man possessed an aura called confidence. In those days before electrical power, confidence was what made the antebellum era hum. It was black magic, good fortune and hard cash combined. It could turn losers into winners, paupers into millionaires. Confidence was a charm deployed by bankers and merchants, philosophers and politicians. Confidence was the soul of trade in the words of a leading financial publication. Without it, commerce between man and man, as mean country and country would run down and stop. In an age before the federal government began printing paper money, when you had to trust in privately issued bank notes, glorified ious, confidence was a de facto national currency. Thank you. Thank you, both. When i teach history, i start with historians are never telling you the truth of the whole past. All we have are the remains of a broken stained glass metaphor. The job of the historian is to try to piece all of the shards together to create a picture. It can never been fully repaired, but we do our best and do our job to present the best picture we can of the past. Would you talk about your role as recon instructors of stained glass windows into your respective pasts . Miles, you go first. I think thats a great metaphor, the glass shards metaphor. And i think in some ways of what i do increasingly just as a writer is i dont know how this strikes the two of you as kind of cure ratiation. Im a great person to build these long timelines, right . I think my timeline for this book was 250 pages long. It lists everything going on in strans life and everything going on around him. I start to see patterns emerge from that, a narrative emerge from that. Its like a storymaking machine, right . And in some ways it may have to do with my time in life. What im doing is saying, look at this. Think about this. Im sort of curating the past. And i feel like the writers job is becoming more and more like the curators job. Thank you. Kathleen . I like the stained glass and i like the curatorial work. I should say, this book wouldnt exist if not for depaul. I was teaching a class in 2013 and one my students turned in a poem that referenced c herks re cher ami. He put it in a poem and it was about an old guy sitting on a park bench surrounded by pigeons and he said, but this is no cher ami story, look it up. And i looked it up. And i was really struck by the story. And so to go, amy, to your question, for me, i think what i like about being a fiction writer, i dont have to assemble the whole stained glass window exactly. I can become fixated on a couple of pieces and their relationship. I think thats what i did with cher ami and major whittlesey. And so i think for me, my process as a fiction writer is almost like a mapping process where ill find the object of my fascination and admiration and ill drop a pin there and ill be like, there is cher ami. And i start plotting it out from there. Your novel is based on a real person, its an entirely is a work of fiction, as i understand. But this novel is really based on two bona fide person and pigeon and so what how did you decide to write about real people and take the fictional leap and what was that process like also to fictionalize parts of their story . Yeah, thats a great question. I think, you know, with lillian boxfish. I wanted the book to call attention to the real margaret but i didnt want people to read this and think this is her life. That was important to me. With these two, i knew i had to use their names. Cher ami is in the smithsonian. But i think this applies particularly to historical fiction but to any kind of fiction and theres lots of conversations happening now about whose stories are or arent given writers to tell. And so i think because of how i just wanted to depict them in the first place but also how i wanted to give them personalities, a big thing that ive done that i havent seen anyone else do, im pretty sure he was gay. But he signed one of his suicide notes, im a misfit by nature and training and theres an end of it. At the time it would have been a way for someone to kind of come out without coming out. So i had to be i felt like i was under a huge obligation to be responsible to both characters. Ive never been a pigeon and ive never been a gay soldier. So i thought about tony morrison. She has this great thing where she says on page 15, the ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar is the test of their power. And i thought, you know, i wanted to take world war i which is overfamiliar and give is bt k to people in a strange way. But its strange to be a gay man or a pigeon so i wanted to write that in a way that didnt get it wrong. I like that she puts it as a test. Research is the way that i tried to pass that test. Thank you. Miles, could you talk about when you first how did you get taken in by this confidence man and what sources what sources led you to finding him . So i got lucky with this. The source that led me to this was an editor. So i got a call from my agent and said, a guy from little brown wants to talk to you about a book and it turned out to be this wonderful editor named ben george. And he said ive been reading your work and i think you might be right for writing this book. I dont know, amy, my career was not exactly flying then. So of course i wanted to hear him out. But ive had some opportunities like that in the past. Theyve been like stuff that wasnt interesting that i just would be bored with and wouldnt do and have to give back my advance and all that stuff. This one hit me as a book i really loved and a character i really loved. Stran is so amazingly complex and theres so much information about him, including his journals from his years as a young man. And i was very struck by his story and also i just think that i quickly realized the times he lived in had certain echoes to the times we live in. Echoes that allowed a confidence man like him to thrive. In fact its the time from which we get the term confidence man. Because there were so many of them around. And so that interested me a great deal too. Would you tell us, miles, a little bit about those journals as a source. Theyre coded. He writes in his own language. Did an archivist decode them . What was this process of finding these sources of this man in his late teens and early 20s as this is a window into, you know i know he wanted to marry the future Queen Victoria and then he ends up becoming king of the selfproclaimed king of earth and heaven. He makes it happen. There was such a wealth of information. The journals are interesting, yet hes full of he sort of puts it on the table. He talks about his dreams of royalty and power. And he talks about how he wants to be a lawyer and a legislator and a king. The period of the selfmade man, stran was the king of that, right . So he kind of lived out all of his dreams in some weird way and was a very famous man in his time. I think of another selfmade man from that period, Abraham Lincoln, who had much in common with stran. He was a country lawyer. He was, you know, selfeducated, kid who served in the legislature. They were both postmasters. And for much of their parallel lives, because they were contemporary, strain was the much more famous person. Hes endlessly fascinating to write about. A real bad person in many ways and in some ways very principled person. In one way, at least, a very principled person. Are you referring to his abolitionism . Yeah, thats one thing my research helped pin down. I can talk about it later. But i pinned down some stuff that showed that he was running a criminal operation out of Beaver Island for sure. And that he his abolitionism was real and i think i got at the roots of his abolitionism through research. I want to get to that. I also want to draw an odd comparison between your two works, i think, is that i realized that in some way both whit and stran were confidence men in different ways. Stran in the way we would think about a confidence man in the sense of the confidence man. But whit in the sense that he took because his men took such confidence in him, they were able to achieve such be so successful that it led to many of their own demise. I guess i need kathleen for you to explain what i just said and maybe we can talk both of you can talk about what its like to research a confidence man. Yeah. So charles whittlesey, he worked on wall street. He was very tall. He was 63. He was the last person anyone would expect to be a war hero and yet this is one of those things that you only find out, i guess, if you go to war, he was very good at being a commanding officer. Like youre saying, he was a diligent person and his men and respected and admired him so much. In this battle, the plan, all up and down the line in kind of the classic world war i trench warfare style, they were going to breach the german defenses. And all the higher ups said no surrender, no first aid. Advance until the last man drops. They were so confident that everyone would succeed and they would just end the war. And on that day, long story short, whit and his group were the only one who is did that. Everyone else gave up and retreated. But they didnt know. Thats how they ended up in the pocket where instead of being a line that projects out, they were in a bubble by themselves and so they were surrounded very quickli quickly by the germans. Thats where cher ami flies in sends in the message that saves them. Should i answer how i researched him . Yeah thats the question here is, then how did you what were the sources. A classic historians question is going to be, what are the range of sources that you started to collect and how did you organization your sources . What was the history how did the history project of this project look like . Well start with kathleen and go to miles. Yeah. Thats i think for me, like the organization of how i approached the research and how i organized it within my own files as a researcher and writer is very, like, again with the map thing. Circles. I know at the heart i want to get to my questions s how did this guy who no one knew who he was, how did he become this leader that everyone was so loyal to, and so like a way out and a concentric circles of what was world war i . I know. But what was it . On the western front, okay, specifically in france, okay, specifically this forest, specifically when the americans arrived in 1918 and gradually zooming in. And then i started thats more like books, history books. But then i like to follow this advice. I cant remember who i heard it from about, reading not just about the time period but in the time period. And so thats the archives and for me a big source was newspapers at the time because the thing that was like a gift to me as a writer is that the lost battalion was comprised of men from new york. And so newspapers kind of covered them, but because the press was based in new york at the time there was all of this media there. There was so much coverage, especially once the battalion got famous. Also, soldiers, there were a couple of soldiers who were in the lost battalion who wrote their own accounts. Some of them were people who were highly educated who were more the officers, and there was this other guy who was barely literate. Published this count at the end of his life. He wanted to tell somebody before he died. Stuff like that. Whit is in the middle of it. He didnt keep a journal or diary. But spoiler, he killed himself. He jumped off this ocean liner because he couldnt handle be a hero and he was very full of survivors guilt. So he jumped off this ship on the way to havana. It speaks to the thoughtfulness and compassion. He left nine suicide notes to the different people in his life, different notes and put them in his cabin so everyone would know what to do when he got to say goodbye. Thats where i got a few of the personal tidbits which were really helpful. Thank you. Miles, could you talk about your process of i think a major difference between stran and whit, despite being confidence men in different ways, theres a lot of record about stran and writing about stran as i understand by comparison to someone like whit. In that way, its over, you know, your blessed with many things to cover. How did you tackle the organizing and the collecting before you even got to the part of interpreting . What im not blessed with, amy, is the historians basic knowledge of the periods i write about. I have to start with like kathleen, i just start with a ton of secondary reading and i just read up on the period and then one of the joys of this book was, im an english professor and so and i had some knowledge of antebellum literature, but not that much. And just, it was so essential to me to know what the writers of this period were thinking. The obvious ones, like melville who is the confidence man was a really touchstone for me. But also people i knew of but hadnt really read a lot, like margaret fuller, gender relations are important in this book. And i just found her to be a revelation and so smart and talking literally about gender fluidity, using those words. And so i do that and then there were two great archives, one at yale, theres a huge archive and that was useful. And then one at Central Michigan and theres some other places too. And i found some new sources. I was also blessed with something my predecessor worked on. He didnt have this just great revolution in 19th century online newspaper databases. And so i was making breakthroughs in this in my basement where im sitting now at 1 00 a. M. In my underwear that people couldnt have made before because they were unlikely places to go. The other thing i benefit from is kind of being stupid and just kind of pursuing some stuff that maybe a trained historian wouldnt do. And a lot of times i wind up going down rabbit holes and going farther down rabbit holes. Every now and then, it helps me out. And my organization is, like, i really believed that this timeline i keep is the narrative generating machine. It just seeing things in context to each other. Im working on another book proposal now and i had 90 i dont even know if im going to write much of a proposal. I have a 90page timeline. Im still a great photo copier. I keep books of photo copied stuff. Did either of you encounter, beyond the newspapers, secondary sources, newspapers, journals, was there any material culture or even photographs kathleen, i know there might be a film too, that also informed your historical inquiry . Lets start with yeah, yeah. Since you mentioned the film, yeah. First and foremost the first thing that i did was go to see cher ami in the smithsonian. It blew my mind that this is the way that the government chose to commemorate her. One of the things im interested in is, the thing as you heard me read, monuments and what is a monument, and the idea that you could take the body of this, you know, animal and make it a monument and theres a crack in there where cher ami is like, they would have never done it to whit. And they couldnt anyway because he his body was never found. So that was the first thing and i would say that she was a text. She was the most inspiring text because it is written on the body when you look at her, shes not stuffed very well. Shes tiny. She was pigeon sized. Homing pigeons are just pigeons. She was shot through the chest and she lost her leg. The germans shot it off. When she landed even this is a testament to her storys remarkableness. Thousands of pigeons were killed in world war i. They threw them away. It was nothing. It was merle aterial to them. But they knew she was so important that they had medics stitch her up and they made her a wooden leg. So it was crucial. And also she assumed her whole life to be a male bird which i think says something about our assumptions who gets to be a hero. And hes like, shes a female bird. And they didnt bother to change it on the smithsonian plaque. And that was fascinating to me too. And that had interesting parallels with whit where he was this war hero and no one had talked that much about his sexuality which i dont want to reduce him to that, but that seemed like a key facet of how he was able to be the kind of leader he was. And so the other material thing, amy, like you mentioned, theres a film this is completely i just still cant get over the fact that they did this. In 1919 after 1918 when they did this horrible thing and just to explain the pocket was horrible. They were there for five days. No food. No water. Getting sniped. Getting friendly fire. Surrounded by dying men they could do nothing to help. They come back and hollywood is, like, lets make a movie about this. And lets have the guys who survived star in it. So whit, all stressed and full of survivors guilt as he is, plays himself in this silent film from 1919. And theres even a cher ami cameo. That was wild to me just to be able to see this guy i was writing about but to see he was of a culture that would think that doing Something Like that to survivors would be fine. Lots of good stuff like that. Thank you. Photographs played an Important Role in what i did partly because stran was murdered by his own people. And one of his murders was also a professional photographer and so one of my chapters is based around he and this photographer and this picture which one of the things about this picture was it was a blast to learn how to read old photographs a little bit and i think i discovered something about strain just from the photograph. Hes holding the book in a certain pose that is meant to be an assertion of authority. And i was like, what is this book . Its not the bible. Its not the book of mormon. So i measured its, you know, proportions and its i think its strains own holy book that he was having his people read. So that was really interesting thing. And this was right at a time when he was losing power and eventually would be murdered and this photographer was in on the conspiracy. And i just thought, here is this guy taking his picture who soon will be plotting to kill him and strain is trying to assert authority in this picture. Thats one of the many joys of research is learning how to see how other people saw things and decode the past in a certain way that is really exciting and fun to me. Would you also talk about another photograph in your novel not novel, but your book, theres a photograph of a certain mr. Douglas, was it . Thats right. Would you tell me a little bit about him and her. Charles douglas, strang went on a long tour of fundraising on the east coast in 1849 and 1850. He was accompanied by a young man who he introduced to everyone as his nephew and private secretary. Its a great photograph. Charles douglas posed for a photograph. But the trick with charles j. Douglas was, he wasnt charles j. Douglas and he wasnt a he. He was in fact strangs first plural wife. And it says a great deal about the weird gender relations in the time. They didnt fool everybody, right . A lot of people were like, you know, who is the woman strang is traveling around with. But they fooled a lot of people. And i think a lot of that had to do with the displays of femininity that happened and the hugely ornate displays of femininity and people didnt know what to make of this person. And so that was one of the really fun things. In fact, this woman, elvira field is a fascinating figure in her own right. Like many of the con men and true believers that strang surrounded himself with. Thank you. Kathleen, im wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about how you use cher ami and whit to address as a window into world war i more broadly. Yeah. So the thing i guess to go back and then answer is, ive always really been fascinated by world war i. Its always been, i guess, my favorite war, you know, that word is not exactly right. But its the war thats drawn me the most over the years and i think its because its so hard i think any war is hard to understand and im extremely committed to antiviolence and i know some people think im a cockeyed fool, but i think humans could live without violence if they chose and thats one of the things that fascinated me that world war was a deliberate choice to just this cataclysmic annihilating selfdestruction and i was really interested in trying to figure out why that would happen. And so so i guess i wanted to write a world war i book for a while. Thats a huge mystery. Why do people do that . But i didnt want to write a world war i book because its massive. Its too big. War is the hyper object that you cant find the corners on. It took me until brian, you know, doing this line to be like, okay, thats my way in. I can do its corny, but i can do a birds eye view of a thing that is hard to see. But i felt like i needed the human perspective. Once my field of vision got narrowed and i was able to all of my research was guided at that point i did a secondary sources to make sure i got the big contours of the war right. But the point was to see through these two sets of very specific eyes and see the conflict in a way that we havent seen it before and it hasnt just been told to us before. One of the things that i was trying to do and when you research, i think theres this idea that research is objective because its history and youre looking at these objective things. But you the researcher arent objective. So i will say that my tactic, if anyone is interested in coming at it, i think fiction can do this more because its fiction, i had such an agenda. I had such a focus of i want this to be an antiwar book. I want it to be a queer book. I want it to be an Animal Rights book and that helped me. If i think i went in looking at world war i to research, i would not be here on this event because id still be researching it. Im never going to understand it that way. Having those two points of reference to guide my research helped. And then i think i know were not jumping to the audience questions yet, but someone asked me how long did you research . Its something i encourage people to think about, sometimes theres the Research Phase and the writing phase, get presented as really discreet and sometimes they are for some people and i have a frontheavier of research before i start trying to write. But i think they quickly become concurrent and coextensive for me. I would say in a way i never totally stopped searching it as i was writing it. Thank you. Can i jump in and say the research in this book is wonderful, kathleen. And also just ill just add that i totally agree that that feels like a false dichotomy the way that my brain works. Im always writing and researching and i was researching and finding important stuff late in the process of this book. So i just dont know how people segregate that out. Amy, you know even writing itself im a mess with that. I got to keep going. Even writing doesnt look like writing sometimes. I was making a joke with my family over christmas because i was writing some my first oped and im taking a walk around the house and someone said, what are you doing . I said, im writing. Im taking a walk. Before we turn in a moment to some of the questions that im seeing are popping up on the chat and maybe weve gotten to some of them, but i would like miles to have an opportunity to talk about how strang the unique perspective you took as a look at strang, you didnt take you werent taking a Church History perspective or a Beaver Island perspective, but here is the ga quintessential f who helps us understand something about antebellum america. Could you talk to us about how he was a reflection or a product of his times rather than a unique figure in a sense . Yeah. I think that thats there have been three good books about strang before and theyre really quite good and theyre all admirable. And i was proud and lucky to build on the shoulders of these previous researchers. But strang has been treated as a mormon figure or a midwestern michigan figure. One of the books is called the assassination of a michigan king and i just was one of things i realized, usually my brain works slowly, but it was one of the things i realized quickly with this project, if i saw strang as a lightning rod for all of the weird religious enthusiasms and political enthusiasms and just the strange power of the antebellum era which is a very unstable era and slowly i came to see the antebellum era is comparable to our own. You know trump isnt in the book and theres no mention of 2020 in the book. But people are reading it in a certain way as an allegory for our own times which is not something i dislike. I definitely i didnt want amy, you would slap me if i said these two periods are alike. I know thats a big mistake h k historically, but we can learn from other periods. Im all bought into the idea of the liberal arts of letting us see our own period through the past. It was the book was a blast to write in that way. Writing in the trump era, which is what i did, i started about the time of trumps campaign, and the book took me, you know, five years to write or something. And it just i dont think it would have been the same book if i had written it in different times. In some ways, i think its reflective of the time. It sounds like for you too, kathleen, these passions of yours. Yeah, for sure. Dan, are you there . Or would you like me to go into the chat and pick out some questions. We can do it either way. I have been writing down some of the questions and i can read them. Okay. A former student asked, did either of you have a concrete moment where you felt your book was finished . If so, was there ever a temptation to go back and revise and did you have to train yourself to let that feeling go . Ill go first. Yeah, i always have a concrete moment when i know something is done because im an outliner. I love outlining. I know theres fiction writers who just start hearing voices and, like, write down what they say and go on a quest. And i believe that happens. But its never happened to me. And so im a huge believer in again, ill go back to the map thing, dropping the pins of events and ill know, like, what the major incidents in each characters life are, and ill have arcs for each of them and ill know how many chapters and what needs to get covered so to me, writing a novel is so architectural. Its like trying to build a house without a blueprint. You couldnt live in it. I get to the end and im like, i did it. It ended. With historical people, i knew it had to end with cher ami in the smithsonian and whit in the ocean. So i dont want to make it sound like that was easy and theres not die aggressiogressions and along the way. It helps to have an outline because you know youre done. You can get feedback and subsequent drafts. The temptation to rewrite is baked in because you know youre not going to have to but youre not going to get lost in the process if you outline, hopefully. Yeah, i guess i normally i never feel anything is done. This book, i felt more in control from start to finish and that may something about me at a certain point in the career. Maybe just that the material came to me in a certain way that i felt like i understood it. And i was going to really argue with you, kathleen, and say, no, man. I build a house i find the architecture by building the house and i think to a certain extent thats true. But i write these even for this book where the editor said im interested in having you write this book, i wrote 100 pageplus book proposal which youre not supposed to do. Thats just how i do it. Im trying to capture the architecture of the book, so i guess it is an outline. But the tone and the approach to the material down in that. And that came with a town of research. I had a huge amount of research before i could do the stupid book proposal. Heres a question i really liked from parker bennett, any interesting tidbits from your research that didnt make it into the book . Yeah. Lots. Thats part of it i wont speak for miles. You find so much great stuff. Its like a treasure chest. For fiction you cant put it all in because that starts to make it more nonfictiony. Nonfiction can this is do what you want, genre is fluid. Im not trying to lay down rules. But for the most part, i think the youre doing anything kind of commercial, you need to zip along to a certain extent. You need to have character arcs, a lot, it has to move. If you start encrusting everything with all of the tidbits, it cant move anymore. It loses its aerodynamic nature. It was in there and my agent made me take it out and she was totally right. But this guy lieutenant peabody was one of the machine gunners and he had a tragic death where he lost his leg but he had somebody tie a tourniquet. He was like, if someone can load my gun i can keep fighting a little bit longer. He had this fiancee waiting for him back home. There was a generation of women who didnt get married because all of the men died. And so she was the lost battalion, the second in command held a lost battalion reunion before thanksgiving where all of the survivors could come, it was just for them to realm innocence a and have a meal. She never came but she sent a bouquet of lilacs. If somebody wants to write a sequel or do some cher ami fan fiction, thats just one. I had many subplots and even just fascinating characters. Strang surrounded himself with so many some of them semi famous conmen from the mid19th century. I say in the footnotes, you could write a book about this guy and hes not even named in the book. I had to do that and kind of focus on the thing parker, thanks for the good question. I had a good writing friend im in a Writers Group, hello, Writers Group, i love you. And one of the members of the Writers Group and an author in her own right when i got a draft of the book done, she said, okay, you need to lose the first 90 pages. Instead of being like, oh, no, i was like, yeah, thats exciting. She was totally right and i totally because we have this language to talk to each other, i just thought, this is such a blessing to have someone who understands your work so well that they can help you see what needs to be there and what needs to not be there. Okay. A question from sandy, in miles book, the notes were a joy to this librarian and it fit so well. What was your process for finding them and sliding them into each chapter. Well, i hunted them down and just reading a lot in the period but also just, i guess, they gave me a way of letting the mid19th century speak without me having to speak at all. I see those as the chorus in the book and as far as footnotes go, i could they made me cut down those footnotes. I would write endless footnotes. I love footnotes. I hate the process because im disorganized and i have to get organized for those. Im like i had to drop footnotes because im like, i cannot find this quote. But i just love that process and i love having this place where i can tell stories that cant be in the book. Just and of course i had to cut many of those out too. Theres a question from andrew fitzpatrick, having recently binged on hbos the bow, im struck how this man keeps popping up again and again in American History. Do you want to comment on that . Charles dickens visited the United States in 1841 and he was struck with americas fascination with this type of person before we had a name for it. He went to Southern Illinois and he saw this land fraud scheme and was asking people about it. And he said, isnt this guy a bad guy who ripped you off, and they said, yeah, hes a bad guy. Didnt he steal a lot of money . But you still like him . Yeah, we like him a lot. Hes a smart man. I was struck by that. They were showing clips of the president jumping in on his taxes in the last campaign, when hes talking about how he when someone accused him of not paying taxes, e goes, i think Something Like that is in the american character. Obviously con men exist in every culture. Kathleen, do you think they didnt correct cher amis sex because they thought a male would be a more appropriate hero . I do. That was one of the sub questions that i had about world war i is that i think war is, of course, a traditionally very masculine pursuit and i think thats another reason im drawn to it. Theres so many sources both about americas involvement and about europe and how it became a global conflict. But especially with europe and america with this urbanization that was beginning and a shift for the male population to not be a soldier class or to not be working land or doing some kind of manual thing, but beginning to go and do these more per suits like working in offices or having this indoor pallor. Theres so many people writing about, you know, american and european manhood going soft. A lot of why people became war t it would be a fun, boy scout adventure and it was more palatable to the audience at the time and she had become such a mascot and she was basically toured around as a piece of propaganda to schools and to parades. I think it was helpful to have her be available as a male hero, and i think its still unpalatable to a lot of people rightly or wrongly to think of bad, physical things happening in a war to anyone, but especially a woman, and so i think it was very expedient to be, like, no. Its a he. Thats just what we want to believe. Okay. A question for maria. Im not sure how to pronounce the last name. Id like to hear myles talk more about historical photos . I wouldnt necessarily call it a skill. Like all things, i know my limitations which allows me just to be stupid and try hard, but were blessed to have a colleague in the English Department who knows a lot about photographs in the 19th century and she turned me over to some other experts. I just kept asking people and i just kept reading books. You know, were coming to the end of this thing, so i want to just, for the student writers out there, just repeat what kathleen says in her classes and i say in my classes all of the time, three words. Look it up. And this is not a burden. Its a joy, and there are incredible archives, even at depaul that you can use from your computers right now. Our newspaper databases, for instance, are perhaps not what you might find at some institutions, but theyre good and theyre just i mean, so often students come to me, and its a story of my family that so and so is a bank robber. Is it true . Theyre, like, i dont know. Im, like, look it up. So were at one minute to 7 00. I could do a couple more questions or we could say good night and do more. Id like two. Twos good. Okay. From andrea fitzpatrick, for the whole panel, do you have to make time to make yourself right or are you so inspired and captivated or is the process as easy or somewhere in between . I love it. I love writing. I respect all points of view, but wherever i hear writers say that writing is so painful and so hard and its, like, opening a vein and bleeding and its just the worst. Stop, dont do that if it hurts so much . Dont. Why would you do a thing like that . I wouldnt do it if it wasnt so fun. Like, when im writing a project its all i want to do. I dont know, this might be a novelist thing. My husband is a novelist, too, and novelists get spooky sometimes when youre working on a novel because youre living in this whole other world with other people and in the real world, youre great, but i have another world with people id love to get back to. And even with the research, for the characters to echo what myles said, its a joy to look stuff up and its exciting because so often you wont know what youre looking for and youll trip over it and be, like, aha, theres my next plot point. So its fun. I dont i dont know if thats an obnoxious answer or not. Its never a problem. I love being a writer. I just want to do it all of the time. So kathleen and i have many things in common including donnas girl and our modus operandi. Im just such a slow its clearly, i love writing and its all ive been moderately good at in my life. I write so slowly that the difference between writing and Writers Block is they blur together and i dont find it, like, the whole vein thing and the whole mel on dramatic oh, this is so hard. I just find it incredibly boring. When you are spending 20 minutes on a verb, it does slow your life speeds up. Youre just, like, i just spent five hours on that paragraph and thats five hours im not going to get back, but i guess i love it and i do it, and you know, this Research Thing is like a portal into another world. To me it is so exciting to do those, and weve never had more opportunity, you guy, to do them. Okay. Should we do one last question . A short one. A short one. So what do your revision process look like . Thats a short one. Thats a short one. There arent any yes no questions. Ill do one really quick. Hi, avery. Avery is a former student of mine, and im a big believer in phased revision so not trying to revise all at once, but breaking it into phases and all right, ill do the literacy revision and im not going to do anything else thats wrong and ill do a dialogue revision and again, that wouldnt necessarily work for other people and that would make what otherwise makes a really daunting process do to me. Revision is a one time and i truly have fun writing. Myles, i hate writing, but i love revising. When students say i dont want to revise, and then, first of all, my hunch is we love George Saunders when he came to speak because he talked about, like kathleen, i dont know if you were there, but he talked about revision and how great it is and how the create of writing professors and Marilyn Robinson who is one of my favorite writers said i only do this first draft stuff. I cant imagine it and i dont really know what im saying until i get to revision and to me, its, okay, this is a story i want to tell. This is how i want to tell it, and this is the approach i want to use. To me, this is fun. Revision to me is it gets better and better until i somehow think i like this. I love revision, too. Revision is awesome. Thank you, everybody, for coming. Myles, it was awesome to hear more about your book and your process and amy, thank you so much and dan, thanks to everybody who made it happen technologywise, just thanks for a lovely night. Thanks so much, and amy, what an honor to work with you, and dan, thank you so much. One more plug, michelle murano, one of our colleagues is starting an event right now on another channel. I urge you to tune in and its like the doubleheader of lit stuff tonight, but thank you so much all of you for coming. Yes. Thank you, guys. Thank you for merging history and creativity. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Looking at whats coming up tonight beginning at 8 00 eastern a couple of programs from our American History tv real america series. First, all of the way home, a 1957 film looking at changing racial demographics in u. S. Neighborhoods and its the american look. This film examines the style of mass goods produced in the 1950s including classic american cars. At 9 00 p. M. Well show you this years cable tv pioneers induction ceremony honoring 22 men and women who made lasting contributions to todays cable and broadband industry, and at 9 55, more from reel america with crisis in levitytown, a film about racial issues in american suburbs during the 1950s. American history tv on cspan3. Exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend. Coming up this weekend, saturday at 10 00 p. M. Eastern in reel america, as Health Official press pair to roll out a vaccine for the coronavirus we take you back in time about five archival films on the vaccines and the disease. On sunday, at 6 00 p. M. Eastern on american artifact, tour new york citys Lower East Side Tenement Museum to show how immigrant families coped with poverty and crowded conditions in the 19th and early 20th centuries. At 6 30 p. M. A look at president ial leadership during the cold war with historian William Hitchcock and the author of the age of eisenhower, america and the world in the 1950s. At 9 00 p. M. , a u. S. Constitutional debate hosted by the Colonial Williamsburg foundation featuring a reenactment of founding parts James Madison and james mason on the bill of rights to slavery. Watch American History tv, this weekend on cspan3. With joe biden as president elect, stay with cspan for live coverage of the election process and transition of power. Cspan, your unfiltered view of politics. And now Pulitzer Prize winner carol fraser talks about Laura Ingalls wilder. Good evening, everybody. We are really thrilled to see you here tonight. This is the third and final program in the series, and we kept ms. Fraser in the last few days and we sold out of the books and its been really very satisfying and to have cspan here taping this to show on