Good evening everyoneand thank you so much for joining us. My name is bennett and im a bookseller and Event Coordinator and im going to be your host tonight for literati featuring miles and donovon hohn. I wanted to extend a thank you to everyone for your support of our Virtual Events programming. We feel incredibly lucky that we are able to continue to offer Virtual Events during these difficult times and we wouldnt be able to do that and gather and hear about king of confidence if it wasnt for you all showing up and stopping by so thank you for doing that. Id like to quickly go over our zoom policies. We do ask you keep your video feed disabled throughout the duration of the event and if you enable it we will disable it for you and if you and he let a second time we will have toreview remove you from the event. We appreciate your cooperation. I wanted to go over our format, were going to have a reading by miles and donovan to start us off and after miles reads from the king of confidence which was published this past tuesday and donovan reads from the inner coast was published early last month in june were going to hear an extended conversation to the two of them for 30 to 35 minutes and have a few slides here and there as needed and this adds some supplemental images to the conversation and once were done going to wrap things up in audience q a so if you have questions for miles or donovan feel free to send them my way through the chat. Ill be screening those and sharing them tonight. And now im going to readsome bios and were going to get the reading out of the way. Miles is the author of the national and interests International Bestseller in the journalism fellowship. His book stranger in a savage land was named chicago best book of the year and he teaches at Depaul University and his interlocutor donovon hohn is the author of moby duck, the New York Times notable book and a winner of the penn John Kenneth Galbraith award for fiction and a literary science writing award and his second book the inner coast was published early last month and i think a lot of us know this but both of these men graduated from the mfa program at the university of michigan a few blocks away from the bookstore so i wanted to show that to those who are familiar but otherwise id appreciate it if you wouldnt mind putting your virtual zoom reactions together for tonights first reader. Harvey, thank you. Hey miles. Hey donovan. Good to see you. At the us and a Program Works in and i was poetry. Its probably why your book is longer than nine and also we both teach nonfiction here in chicago and i do it in detroit so its nice seeing you are in the zoom space. And i want to be clear to everyone that this is miles event. He kindly is sharing our stage with me. Im going to get ahead of you with your reading and a quote in your book, when the antihero of the book and youre going to tell us about tonight is gettingcrowned as king , youre right somehow this man, this king that managed to convince the 235 lonely souls gathered in the tabernacle that his paper crown was a dazzling royal diadem, that is wooden scepter on with a cold energy and his red robes stitched together by ladies of the church enveloped in an righteousness and splendor so in tonights event we dont have 235 lonely souls gathered in this tabernacle you are the king with the paper crown my friend and im going to be george adams, the theatricalrosario. So why do you start. Ive always as ive said to you beforehand sometimes with nonfiction we end up being, Holding Forth as experts on the subject but i really love the pros so i want you to read some and i think youre going to go with something thatsgoing to help us understand the title. I know youre a journalist but will get to that in a minute. Bennett, if you could, i thought id introduce our zoom audience to the title character of mybook. All right, there he is. So im going to read a little bit about this man James J Strang and his time which is the decades leadingup to the civil war. And this is the guy and you wonder how he managed to establish it. You can leave it up. You can leave side one up. No one wants to watch meread. So if he doesnt look like the most charismatic guy to you, listen to this. Although james strang was physically unimposing at two inches over five feet and the ball with an oddly bulging for head, he did possess one distinguishing feature. His dark brown eyes which one acquaintance described as rather small but very bright and piercing, giving an extremely animated expression to his whole countenance. Another claimed that those eyes seemed as though they could bore right through a person but more than any tangibleattribute , strang possessed an invisible ineffable aura called confidence. In those days for electrical power, confidence was what made the antebellum era,. Confidence was black magic, good fortune and hard cash combined. Confidence could turn worthless paper into glittering gold, countdowns into cities, and the lots into bustling businesses, losers into winners, authors into millionaires. Confidence was a charm deployed by bankers and merchants, philosophers and politician. Confidence was the soul of the trade in the words of one leading financial publication. Without it added herman melville, commerce between man and man as between country and country would like a watch run down and stop. In an age before the federal government began printing paper money, and age when people had to trust in privately issued banknotes, glorified ious, confidence was the de facto national currency. So thats what this guy possessed and confidence and his ability to wield it was what took him from being an obscure farmboy in north new york and a failed lawyer, failed newspaper publisher, failed postmaster to the midwest which we then call the far west where he became a Mormon Prophet and a real threat to Brigham Young in the church and where he ran a couple utopian colonies which illtalk about, one of them in michigan. But you know donovan i want to talk to you about your book. We took a word out of my title. Lets take a word outof your title. Post, what is that all about . My book is called the inner coast and i talk about both the adjective and the noun but to use a noun, since here we are unfortunately speaking here in chicago. Im over here on the other side of michigan. But its part of what i was thinking about with this. I grew up on the coast of california the son of misplaced midwesterners and ive spent much of my life here by the great lakes and i kind of wanted to make the case for the great lakes at the coast. Coasts have always been contact zones between hereand elsewhere. Etymologically the word Coast Designs from latin and in middle english its a coast of lamb meeting a rack of ribs. The seacoast was the rib cage of the landand its primary sense , coast refers to the place where land ends and see begins and all coast are by definitionouter and oceanic ones. The usual term for the edge of the lake or stream bank for sure the maritime geography of the midwest is a paradox. Michigan is midwestern. Its also coastal. Peninsular in fact reared its shoreline is speckled with antilighthouses as new england is larger than californians, florida and that of the other states besides alaska. Standing on a midwestern beach you can watch freighters across the horizon and in nautical terms to coast is to travel by water while keeping the land nearby but in that sense you can coast through the heart of north america, circumnavigating all the states east of the mississippi without ever laying eyes onthe pacific. These days, the word coastal is as sociological as it is geographic and phrases like coastal living or coastal elites, the word collapse the west coast and eased into a conjoined seaboard inhabited by decadent sophisticates as if brooklyn were next to berkeley or boston and commuting distance of seattle. Certainly chicagoans or holiday goers are michigans gold coast might qualify as coastal in this sense but not the residence of gary or sandusky. Or of dearborn, home to the Largest Community states as a panel down the river from rouge erie and osborne an area on the north side of detroit and become popular with immigrants in vietnam. Ill stop there, its a little taste of what im trying to think i knew about that word coast. Lets go back to confidence though because you touched on , you brought in melville who wrote the confidence man and you talked about how this idea of confidence was required economically but was also a kind of secret power for the charismatic like strang. You talk later andcan you tell the story of the origins of that word . You quote the newspaper story that introduced it into the lexicon. One of the things im fascinated by in your book is that all of the materials your drawing into the story are also doing a certain amount of as i was in that pacs passage of analogical excavation. Youre reminding us that what parts of the american vernacular originated in this antebellum period. Some of it is strange now, you do all things on the idea of thinking which i love but once the origin of the confidence man . One of the fun things i did with this book as i kept finding words that were not early enough in Oxford English dictionary as a lot of the people in our audience know, oed is sort of the Gold Standard for etymology and i look up the word that i found in a newspaper story from 1820 and it would be like 1890 and i would write a letter on and i dont know if they changed it were never wrote back but confidence man , that word comes to us in 1849 and this is a period where everything, theres been an economic crash that the countries yet to recover from and is a massive logical revolution. Youve got the telegraph and the photograph, the railroad. Theres a Communications Revolution that is like the internet superhighway in a lot of ways. People are displaced so this confidence become such an important thing and in 1849 i got is arrested in new york and a newspaper called him the confidence man. His game was to go up to people and say on the street, pay donovan, you dont remember me . You dont remember me and of course youd be very embarrassed and miles, miles hardy and youre saying miles, ive gotyou , can you just give me a watch just as a show of your confidence and he would do that and people would give him their watches but this word spreads like wildfire. And its really fun to watch it spread through the american lexicon at this time as it describes so many people in so many walks of life and i think strang epitomized this. He was a guy who was able in this period when truth was malleable and where facts work really facts a lot like our own time in some ways. People like strang arrived in those times and he was able to invent his own truth. And pull it off with a kind of bluster that people wanted to believe. Im going to do something a little weird miles because you posit strang as a his is from a writers point of view its this treasure for you. As you know, you write about a bit but i want to make you speak a little bit about the index of your book. And the acknowledgments. Its amazing, so im just going to share. The way i think about how this book works is you got this central figure in strang is almost like a planetary object that was like force of personality exerts like Gravitational Force on antebellum 19th century of the upper midwest, really the whole nation and so your book draws into it all these kind of marbles and wonders and obscurities. From that time so like just from under a in your index ipo these items. John wilkes booth and henry clay and darwin and the sky shores who invaded the keyboard. Somehow youve manage, its this magnetic power of area if you can gather all the other. In your acknowledgments to talk about that. You say at the beginning you talk about this story, the man of the crowd and how theres this central figure, he spots into was once arrested and absorbed my whole attention. Tell me about like how you think of the way, i dont know if you want to explain that analogy to the poe story that its not a traditional biography, your book, write . So how does strang work with all the rest of history . At least three good books about strang and they are very good, im not being the list the dismissively. They can to treat them as either a footnote to mormon history or a michigan story, a midwestern story. One of the books is called the assassination of the michigan king. From the start i saw strang as a lightning rod for all the enthusiasms and social movements and apocalyptic fears of the age. I just saw them as this embodiment, of this crazy crazy time. As my writing style ghost its funny because i so admire you and we dont do the same thing but you do something similar. The new york review, New York Times book review i just got a review from a writer admire and he called my style wonderfully aggressive which is like the biggest compliment ive ever had. He talked about, i hadnt thought about this, this is where you getting the big picture from these little parts. Donovan, i to go back to you n this. I think you are one of the really most wonderful nonfiction writers today in doing exactly what you just praised me for. Donovan has served this story 1 million times but theres an essay in your i think the second essay, right . Called a romance of rust. This essay i always tell donovan this was before i knew him, was a real source of inspiration for me. I read it one day 20 years ago in harpers, c15 ago, a a long time ago and it was just at a time where i needed to be inspired by another writer. I picked up harpers and start reading about this antique tool collector in michigan and i thought thats kind of interesting, i made to collectors. I have written about collectors before and i was interested in him but the way you brought american history, american commerce, our desire, our commercial desires into that was just incredible to me. If you want to talk about that. Yeah, sure. Yeah, that one for me was kind of an important one because i had been writing nonfiction but i came to nonfiction by way of fiction and poetry which is not all that uncommon that people come to from one of those more historically with the standard genres are many programs but by initial, my earliest essays were a personal essay or two of confessional essay and this is a person i wanted to do what youve done in this book, which is due the act i think of it as the art of finding where something catches your imagination. Like an ant detecting the pheromones and youll follow it. But once you have that, this acai city and your mind starts generating questions. I have some ideas about what the questions might be behind making of confidence, so for that essay i had this article i i have grt affection for who loose on the outskirts of ann arbor was a botanist by training. He had begun collecting kind of by chance, happen to pick up two ranches that were identical and he had this vision of symmetry come , like ethan two specimens of the same plant but it was ranches and the kind of come you know, obsessively at least began collecting from all over the upper midwest factories, estate sales, foreclosed farms, just all of these artifacts of history. He turned this part on the outskirts of new dexter, he turned into this kind of museum. It was not open to the public where he made these arrays of like the artifact, they look like specimens come to look like fossils, balance of dinosaurs or bugs he finds when he said when hundreds spigot handles that are all identical he will make one a array eventually scott this kind of a cabinet of wonders but not of the natural artifacts but of manmade. That became hugely fascinating and then that accompanying him narrative and into the narrative he get to try to create your own museum of an essay actually i think and theres a way in which you are doing something similar here with your charismatic figure you are following the finney allows you to follow your own curiosity and questions and make think speak to each other so that some at the inventor of the keyboard is adjacent to the guy who introduced the tomato to the midwest as a medicinal plant, this wonderful, accidental juxtapositions that come up. I think we may be working from a similar method and may do i hide such admiration for you as a writer. I always tell my students that i think, i dont make me predictions about the future of writing a one of them is i just feel a own work and would be interesting to hear from you and i can talk but an example of it is i feel like writers and curators are in the digital age economy more and more similar, like writing is increasingly an active duration. For me thats all really cool. I really love that and i think increasingly i find myself, this book had a 250 page single spaced timeline where i just list what was happening in the strength life and the world and then i just come its there, its the narrative making machine. I mean, i give an example, ill do another quick reading if you dont find. Go for it. Bennet, if you could just put up the picture, slide number six. Did we lose bennet . Here it comes. I thought i would read, and im going to read two really short paragraphs and then i will just in between them ill give you a little explanation but i think its important for this and i want to resist little bit about islands. Islands, Edgar Allen Poe wrote, loomed in the stormy seas of the psyche is place a perfect security where freedom from all restraint can be enjoyed. Tiny cosmos when normal laws, number rules of conduct and normal systems of logic dont apply. They are frequent locales for experimental communities including the original utopia which thomas moore set on an island in the famous 16th century book. I would just say theres many things we can say about the community, strang had a a beavr island and its a fascinating place and somewhat controversial but i wanted to talk about the draw. Sometimes people think what was this guy, what was his draw . One of the things we need to understand is just what apocalyptic times these were picked in 1848 rightwing strength was starting to starts colony on beaver ivan and really push it, this was the year of just apocalyptic fevers and the United States and in the world. I thought i would read about those and then youll see why the sea monster is here. Strang spent the summer of 1848. 2 what he described as ominous signs including a series of revolutions in europe, the u. S. War in mexico, and rising tensions between north and south. For months he had been urging his followers to prefer prepare for th