Poet, editor, and writer John Freeman and novelist Omar El Akkad join co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about the final issue of Freeman’s, a literary magazine founded in 2015. El Akkad, a contributor to the volume, describes founding editor Freeman’s intense and uniquely broad interest in literature, as well as his unusual ability to curate collections of pieces that are in conversation with one another. Freeman explains the work and support that made the magazine possible, and reflects on the moment when he decided to pursue it, as well as how he decided to conclude it. They discuss the publication as a project that created a valuable network of literary connections and gave many writers a new context and outlet for their work. El Akkad reads from “Pillory,” his story which appears in the final edition of Freeman’s, and talks about how he came to write it.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf and Todd Loughran.

EMBED FROM MEGAPHONE

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: I’m teaching a creative nonfiction class right now. And I tell students: think of when you’re doing a polemic, you have to define terms like… Tom Frank in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas defines this term called the “great backlash” as a way of explaining what conservatives were doing in the late ’80s. And what I love about that piece is how easily you can quickly define these terms that don’t exist in our language, but we understand how they work, and they fit really easily into the flow. But the piece wouldn’t work without you creating a terminology for what’s happening.

Omar El Akkad: Yeah, I mean, I spend a lot of my time trying to think about the price of admission, because a lot of my stories end up in a place where there is a price of admission. I wrote a story a while back called “Government Slots” about this world in which there’s something like a post office and everybody gets a little box. And whatever you put in that box is believed to follow you into the afterlife. It disappears the moment you die. And so the whole story, which has almost no plot to speak of, is about what kind of things people would take with them, if they thought it would follow them into the next life or whatever comes after. And so, some of these boxes are full of Bibles, resumes, condoms; people have very different ideas of what’s coming next.

But that was another story where we had to think about the price of admission, like, here’s what you need to know about this setup. Because once I give it to you, I’m not interested in that anymore. We’re going on the emotional aftershocks of that. But it’s something I have to think about a lot. And I do it to varying degrees of success.

WT: I mean, it’s very hard to do world-building concisely, right? I think that story does a great job—it’s not a very long story, and it creates an entire world very quickly. Can you talk to us a little bit about, as a writer, you mentioned a little bit earlier that you were aware of Freeman’s and were reading it? When did you start reading it? In your mind is there such a thing as a “Freeman story”? Are there particular things that you value about the journal? We’re trying to start… find somebody to do a long book about this later, criticizing John for somehow doing something wrong, and the people that he’s brought into the novel like they do with Iowa.

OA: I make fun of them a lot. And then immediately send them an email saying, “Please don’t drop me. I beg you.” If I’m being perfectly honest, my ignorance knows no bounds. And the first time I came across Freeman’s was when I was researching John, so, the backstory, for whatever it’s worth, is that in the middle of working on the edits to my second novel, this book called What Strange Paradise, my editor Sonny Mehta passed away. And in fact, the last trip I did before everything went to hell because of the pandemic was to his memorial service in New York. And I was in a really bad place. I sort of won the lottery, with respect to my first agent, my first publisher. You’re a first time novelist, and you have no idea what the hell you’re doing and suddenly, you’re put into this position where you’re working with people who are among the best who have ever done it.

I didn’t want to do anything else with writing as a commercial endeavor. And John comes into Knopf, and I have no idea whether he asked for me to be working with him on another novel that still doesn’t exist, that I’m still working on. I have no idea what the backstory is. And I start looking up this guy, and I’m like, “Oh, he has a magazine named after him. That’s something. I guess I better read this thing.”

I think Arrivals was the first one that I picked up. And I just became obsessed with it. It was a great introduction to the kind of person John is, which is the sort of person that you can sit with and say, “Tell me your five favorite Nepalese poets,” and he’d be like, “Just five?” And you’ll have to come up with another container, or sub-container, to put it in, because the extent to which he really cares about literature as an individual effort, but also literature into how the stories speak to one another, I think is unlike almost anyone I’ve ever worked with. And so that’s how I became acquainted with the entire endeavor.

It was weird reading somebody’s work and reading the thing they’ve created before, I think, we ever had a discussion in person. Or no, we did have a discussion in person at the Vancouver festival, when I had no idea why you wanted to talk to me at all, because I had no idea what was going on, on the other side of this. But it was part of my introduction to who John is, as a literary mind. And that is a facet that continues to astound me.

John Freeman: Vancouver is a great place. I go to these festivals, in part in order to meet people like Omar. And for the last 10 years, Vancouver Writers Fest has been generous enough to schlep me out and in exchange for me moderating an event or two, I get to mooch around and listen to people whom I don’t know read, and it’s been a wonderful education, not just in Canadian lit but in literature from around the world. And Omar’s frequently roped in to moderate events as well as be in them. And so I had seen Omar both on the end of questions and on the questioning end. And it’s very unusual to see a novelist be able to do both. You two are particularly quite odd in that regard. Because most novelists are world builders, but they’re not necessarily journalists and interrogators, and both of you have worked in some capacities as nonfiction writers yourselves.

And Omar, of course, has spent a lot of time as an overseas reporter, sometimes in conflict zones. And it’s exciting when you see someone’s mind framing stories by the questions they ask. And then you can see them do that but in the fiction way, which is to create sort of invisible structures of enchantment, which are asking questions, but are not necessarily visible.

So, you know, with American War, what would happen if everything that ever happened around the world as a result of America’s imperial flex happened within American borders? What would that feel like? And you know, similarly, in What Strange Paradise, what would happen if you reset the story of Peter Pan but on the island of Lesbos, or in the middle of the Mediterranean, with two children trying to walk to safety? But I think that there are some people who have worked as journalists and are novelists – Colson Whitehead is another – where you can see that the skills are related and enhancing each other.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: John, you’re talking a little bit about questions. And you wrote about that in your introduction to the issue and you also write at some length about the late Barry Lopez. And you write about how keenly attuned he was to living and the intensity with which he paid attention to everything. And the issue includes, incredibly, a never before published story by him, and also includes a never before published poem by the late Denis Johnson. Can you talk a little bit about including those pieces in Conclusions?

JF: Yeah, there’s also a poem by an 11th century Chinese poet translated by Wendy Chen, who came to me as a submission at Knopf, and I was just completely bowled over by these poems. Li Qingzhao, who’s sort of regarded as highly as Li Po, but has a kind of Sappho-like quality to her poems. They’re poems of longing and love. The voice feels so immediate. And those poems have been known and been around and Wendy has just done a new translation.

In the case of Barry and Denis Johnson, those pieces were found recently. I’m friends with Barry’s widow, the writer Debra Gwartney. And when I went to Barry’s memorial up in Oregon, in his study there was a poem open on a kind of pedestal facing the woods, which had been recently scorched from one of the big Oregon fires. And it was a kind of poem that was about stewardship. And I had no idea Barry had written a poem and it was dated 1980-something in Port Townsend. And I asked Debra, I said, “What is this?” And she said, “I think he wrote this as a broadside in benefit for Copper Canyon.” So I asked if, at a later date, we could publish that. And she said, “Absolutely.” Because it’s a beautiful summary of all the ways in which maybe we underestimate our footprint on the world, but also, how much more improved our lives would be if we saw stewardship as not an “also” but just as a primary function of our reason to live.

And in the course of laying that out, she wrote back to me and said, “Hey, I’ve been looking through Barry’s papers, and I found this essay, do you want to look at it?” And she gave it to me on my birthday last year in Seattle when we were having an event for Freeman’s. She has a harrowing, beautiful piece about driving out of the fire that eventually claimed a big part of their house. They survived, but that was probably the beginning of the end of Barry’s life. They lived on a salmon river, and the river was really damaged, and the salmon suffered as a result of it. And in the course of this event, she just handed me a printout of this piece. And it’s a gorgeous piece of writing of walking home along this river. And for whatever reason, maybe someone commissioned it, and he never liked it or decided not to turn it in, or maybe the magazine folded, all those things can be very likely. But it’s a perfect piece of writing and a perfectly observed walk home. And it’s at the end of the day. So it felt like the most obvious place to begin the issue.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento.

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JOHN FREEMAN

Freeman’s • Wind, Trees • Maps • How to Read a Novelist • Dictionary of the Undoing

OMAR EL AKKAD

“Pillory” • American War • What Strange Paradise

OTHERS:

Freeman’s Conclusions | Vancouver Writers Fest • Freeman’s Conclusions – The Nest – Vancouver – Oct 20, 2023 · Showpass • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 3, Episode 22: “The Unpopular Tale of Populism: Thomas Frank on the Real History of an American Mass Movement” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 3, Episode 17: “Poetry, Prose, and the Climate Crisis: John Freeman and Tahmima Anam on Public Space and Global Inequality” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 1, Episode 5: “Is College Education a Right or a Privilege?” featuring John Freeman and Sarah Smarsh • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 2, Episode 17: “Emily Raboteau and Omar El Akkad Tell a Different Kind of Climate Change Story” • Denis Johnson • Barry Lopez • Wendy Chen • Li Qingzhao • Li Po • Debra Gwartney • Michael Salu • Colson Whitehead • Jon Gray

Novelist Rebecca Makkai joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about new accusations of sex crimes or sexual misconduct, this time leveled against comedian Russell Brand, actor Danny Masterson, and Spanish Soccer Federation president Luis Rubiales. Makkai observes that since the start of the  #MeToo movement, more people are willing to take such accusations seriously, but also describes the repetitive nature of the abuse as discouraging. She reads from her recent novel, I Have Some Questions for You, which, in part, asks readers to reconsider the way they think of sex, class, and race.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: Each of the cases that we cited in the intro have, for me, specific echoes of cases that began the #MeToo movement. And also with the plot of your most recent novel, I have some questions for you. For instance, Danny Masterson was convicted of rape, he’s going to prison. How does that compare to Harvey Weinstein, who was also convicted of rape and is in prison now, as his case was the original impetus behind this whole movement? I mean, are these cases parallel, can we learn anything from their repetition?

Rebecca Makkai: I don’t think it’s a shock to anyone that this is repetitive. It was certainly that repetition and that repetitiveness that was really on my mind as I wrote this novel, but also in the years in which I wrote the novel. So I started thinking about this book in 2018. And that was when this initial wave of stuff was happening. They’re not all going to be exactly the same. And that’s where we have to be careful about saying, “Well, this one’s not as bad” or “this one is different.” We have to have room to make those distinctions. But that doesn’t mean we are using those distinctions to diminish. Which is a tricky balance.

WT: One of the things that I was thinking about the parallels between Masterson and Weinstein is that Weinstein was protected by the old boy network of Hollywood, right? He had power. He was a producer. And so people were afraid to say things about the assaults that he made on them, the women.

And the similar thing with Masterson, although in his case, it was the Church of Scientology, because he’s a member there and the teachings of the church are that you shouldn’t report these kinds of things to the police or report anything outside of the church. And so the women who were involved in eventually making these allegations said that they had all felt discouraged directly by the church or implicitly by the church from reporting what Masterson was doing, and it seemed like that happened also in the Weinstein case.

RM: Yes. But what’s interesting is that, what has happened in both cases, is that people have eventually talked. That doesn’t mean people are always going to feel free to, they’re not always going to be listened to. But this is what’s shifted in the past six years, five years, right? There were two things that really surprised me a lot. Well, there were many things. But the two main things that really surprised me about #MeToo: one was that it lasted. Because I really thought it was going to be like, two days of this internet hashtag. And then we were going to go back to not caring about this stuff, and not listening and not believing stuff. So that was number one.

Number two was the way that people were digging down. It wasn’t just famous people. And it wasn’t just the big capital T traumas. It was more nuanced. Maybe not necessarily prosecutable things, but people talking about, “Hey, this stuff happened in high school, this stuff happened in college, and it really upset me.”

And I guess three, tying those all together, is that people were listening. It was not just about people expressing themselves. It was also about people listening – and certainly not everyone’s listening. Certainly not everyone feels free to speak. Certainly we’re not getting this all out there. But the understanding that I think we’re starting to have in these cases – and maybe social media is part of this, you can reach a bigger audience faster when you have a problem – but we’re starting to have this understanding that people might at least listen. That’s new. That’s huge.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: And I feel like one sign of this… RIP Twitter. We’ve already talked about this, but I do feel like I log on to X, and –

WT: Sugi, have you arranged for us to pay for Twitter now? We don’t have a lot of funds. We’re gonna have to sell real estate, the podcast real estate.

VVG: No. We’re not…no.

VVG: The things that are trending, by the way – which is one of the reasons for “RIP Twitter” – only like 50 percent of them, or maybe less, are even pertinent. But Russell Brand was trending recently. And he started as a comic who often talked about his drug and sex addictions, and he was in Forgetting Sarah Marshall in 2008. And then as one does, he set up a YouTube channel in 2013. I do not [have a YouTube channel], but anyway, Russell Brand does, and he became a hero –

WT: You do too have a YouTube channel, Sugi! We were just talking about this.

VVG: We have a YouTube channel. Anyway, he became a hero of the left in Britain. And then as one does, he shifted and became a vaccine denier and conservative nut job. And then in September, four alleged victims accused him of rape, sexual assault and emotional abuse during a five-year period from 2006 to 2013. Is there an earlier #MeToo figure who reminds you of that narrative arc?

RM: Yeah, no, definitely. You look at someone like Bill Cosby before #MeToo–

WT: That’s who I thought of…

RM: Right. And we had years before #MeToo, and there was this pile up of all these women. I remember, there was a cover of some magazine. I can’t remember which one – I don’t know if it was their pictures or their names…

VVG: It was New York Magazine.

RM: Lord knows how they felt about that. That was probably a problem in and of itself. But one of the effects… it’s all these women. All these women are saying the same thing. We were not – when I say “we” I don’t mean “me,” but, this aside – we weren’t ready to go, “Oh, my God, this is clearly real.” There was still that, “Well, but they’re all in it for the same thing,” which is fame and glory, or whatever it was that people thought. Fast track to wealth and success. But maybe there’s been a shift. I don’t want to sound pollyannaish, believe me, but maybe there’s been a shift to more of us sooner, more publicly believing when these stories come public.

VVG: I think that I was actually thinking of a different magazine story, which actually illustrates the shift that you’re talking about. I think it was the New York Magazine that had a bunch of accusers on the cover, kind of supporting that case, which was more recent. And so this makes me want to dig up the earlier story that you’re talking about. But even just the notion that similar imagery would be portrayed for almost opposite reasons. Like, in the first instance, some sort of subtext of “name and shame,” like the nerve of these women saying this thing?

RM: I don’t think that’s what New York Magazine was doing. That was not my impression. I think they were saying, “Look at all these accusers.” I think it was like “Look at all these women saying the same thing.” Standing with them.

VVG: So we are talking about the same story.

RM: I think we are talking about the same story. I mean, it’s one thing to come forward. It’s another thing when your name or image is put on the front of New York Magazine. Like, you wonder how they felt about that. Because of course, they are not in it for the fame and glory, quite the opposite. No one wants their name known in this regard. So it’s more just like, “God, I wonder what the underbelly of that was,” and the effect for those women.

But, no, this is the story where they were like, “Look at this army of women all saying the same thing,” and that had a profound effect. At that point, I certainly didn’t need to be convinced, but I was like, “What is wrong with us societally that when this many people come forward – which should also be the case even if one person comes forward – but this many people come forward all saying the same thing, and we’re still not believing them. What is wrong with us?” Although I was probably one of the last people who needed convincing, that still hit me really hard when that appeared.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento. Photograph of Rebecca Makkai by Brett Simison.

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REBECCA MAKKAI:

I Have Some Questions for You • The Great Believers • The Hundred-Year House • The Borrower • Music for Wartime

OTHERS:

Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 1, Episode 2: “Jia Tolentino and Claire Vaye Watkins Talk Abuse, Harassment, and Harvey Weinstein” • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 1, Episode 22: “Alice Bolin and Kristen Martin on the Problem With Dead Girl Stories” • “Russell Brand’s Timeline of Scandal and Controversy,” by Alex Marshall, New York Times • “Danny Masterson sentenced to 30 years to life in prison in rape case,” by Alli Rosenbloom, CNN • “Luis Rubiales resigns as Spanish soccer president following unwanted kiss with World Cup winner Jennifer Hermoso,” by Issy Ronald, Homero De la Fuente, Patrick Sung and Zoe Sottile, CNN • StoryStudio Chicago

Writer, programmer, and tech consultant Alex Reisner joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about his recent Atlantic articles on Books3, a massive data set that includes hundreds of thousands of pirated e-books, and that Meta and other companies have used to train generative AI. Reisner explains how he extracted book names and titles from long strings of text in Books3 to create a searchable database, and why not finding yourself in the database doesn’t mean your work is safe. He also reflects on the dangers of metaphorical language in discussing AI, what he’s heard from legal experts, what publishers are and aren’t doing, and how piracy has shifted from benefiting individuals to helping corporations profit. Reisner reads from his groundbreaking Atlantic coverage.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf and Todd Loughran.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: So, Alex, I wanted to go back to something you were talking about earlier—“substantial similarity.” I remember reading in one of your pieces that some of the lawyers were arguing that AI is creating works not substantially similar to our works. So then, that means—to Whitney’s point about hypocrisy—that there’s this two-faced thing going on where they’re saying to the court, “When we ask our AI to write a book in the style of Alice Munro, it’s not actually doing that.” But then the use is being marketed as, “We can get this AI to create a text that is Alice Munro-like, in a way that you won’t be able to tell the difference.” Am I understanding that correctly? What do you think about this “substantial similarity” argument?

Alex Reisner: Yeah, I think these systems can—to some degree—spit out their training text. The companies have gone to great lengths to prevent that from happening. [The systems] also can’t do that 100 percent of the time. In some cases they can, but companies are preventing that from happening.

VVG: How can they say to some people, “We can do a perfect imitation of Sugi,” and then say to these other people, “This definitely does not sound like Sugi. It’s legally defensible.”

AR: I’m not really sure how to answer that. I think it’s really getting into this gray area, because nothing like this has been in the courts before. There’s an undergraduate writing exercise where you try to imitate the voice of a writer you like, but no one goes out and tries to sell that in the way that—very soon—could be happening here. Going back to the “substantial similarity” thing again, I think the legal meaning of that is very technical, and I’m not sure exactly what it means. To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t know if the actual words need to be similar, or if capturing an author’s voice is similar enough? I’m just not totally sure how the judges are going to see that.

VVG: Yeah, and I’m sure there’s going to be all sorts of variability in the same way that like—are they going to be mapping syntactical patterns or vocabulary? All of which can probably be mathematically represented, as you were talking about earlier. So to ask the question that all of our listeners would probably like us to ask—if you had written a book that was in one of these data sets, what would you be doing right now to protect your own work?

The Authors Guild put out this piece and gave us some advice. Some of that advice is obvious, like send letters to the company, donate money to the Guild to support the lawsuit. Then some is less obvious, like setting up Google alerts for your book, sending takedown notices when you find unauthorized copies, including their “no AI” training statement that they suggest you put on your copyright page. Or… learn how to edit a robots.txt file so you can restrict open AI’s crawler, GPTBot. I just barely understood the last sentence I said. What do you think about this advice? Should I be learning how to edit a robots.txt file? 

AR: Robots.txt is actually important and may become a key part of this. It’s pretty technical. But the quick explanation is it’s a file that sits at the root of every website and describes what robots can and can’t view on your site, and to some extent, how they can use what they view. So a lot of people are now using robots.txt to block GPTBot, which is the robot that ChatGPT uses when it scrapes a lot of content from the web for training. So you can do that, but again, that’s not going to help with books, that’s only with stuff that you put on your own website, because that’s the only website where you can control robots.txt. Even suggestions that seem like they should work—like a “no AI” training clause in your copyright notice in the front of your book”—my understanding is that it’s not really going to work.

As an author, you have a very limited ability to specify how your work can be used, for example, you could put in a copyright notice that you can’t read this book on the Sabbath. But in court, a judge is gonna say you can’t enforce that. People who buy your book can read it whenever they want. In the same way, if a judge decides that training AI on copyrighted material is fair use, they’re going to say that no author can specify that a company can’t do that. So it’s really tricky on an individual author level.

I think what seems really important to me right now is staying on top of what the publishers are doing. As I said, they’re there, they seem to be embracing generative AI. They’re staying awfully quiet as all these authors are filing lawsuits. And I don’t know if the Authors Guild is planning some kind of interaction with them.

The Writers Guild of America just achieved something with the studios in Hollywood that could be helpful. The Authors Guild is a very different kind of organization. The whole labor situation is very different. But I don’t have any great advice other than to try to keep an eye on the publishers and maybe encourage them to keep AI out of the book acquisition and editing process.

Whitney Terrell: The Screenwriters Guild is much more powerful and has a much longer history of striking and negotiating with the studios. Authors like us, we’re more like professional golfers. We’re independent contractors. I don’t think people think of themselves as being in a union or guild in that way. So it may be the time for authors like us to learn how to do that because it’s going to take collective action to protect some of this stuff.

VVG: Alex, you were referring earlier to the guy who made Books3, Shawn Presser, who told you that he did it, in part, to have a data set available to people other than rich corporations who are developing AI. In other words, to level the playing field by making OpenAI-grade training data widely available. And as you wrote, piracy used to primarily benefit individuals. I have been thinking about this recently because I learned that my work appears in libraries like Z-Library. I was talking to someone else about it and they were like, “This is incredibly important for accessibility in the Global South. You’re writing about Sri Lanka and people there who want to be able to access your work might be accessing it this way.”

My initial reaction was to be like, “There are unauthorized copies out there, I feel violated.” And then she was talking about the grief that people experience when Z-Library gets taken down, pops back up again, gets taken down, pops back up again. The sadness people experience when they lose access to some of these things. I was moved by that story and thought about my friends who are copyleft activists, and have talked about this kind of accessibility. But now, this kind of piracy is benefiting corporations. So is there a way to thread that needle to stop corporations while adopting anything close to a copyleft perspective?

AR: Yeah, it’s a really good question. It’s pretty complicated. You’re talking basically about how we manage access to this stuff for different people. This situation is—as I see it—a consequence of just digitizing everything, which we’ve been doing for the past 25 years. There’s a sense in which digitization cheapens books. It cheapens writing. It just turns it into data and becomes kind of ephemeral. It spreads really easily across the internet. Since the advent of social media, we’ve seen how companies can scan and mine texts for demographic information, like our habits, our brand preferences, and our writing style, which they can mimic. Things being digital is extremely convenient, but this is part of the cost of it.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo.

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ALEX REISNER

Alex Reisner at The Atlantic • “What I Found in a Database Meta Uses to Train Generative AI” • “These 183,000 Books Are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech” • “Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI”

OTHERS

Open Letter to Generative AI Leaders (The Authors Guild) • Practical Tips for Authors to Protect Their Works from AI Use (The Authors Guild) • “Some writers are furious that AI consumed their books. Others? Less so,” by Sophia Nguyen, The Washington Post • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 6, Episode 17: “Chatbot vs. Writer: Vauhini Vara on the Perils and Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence” • “My Books Were Used to Train AI,” by Stephen King, The Atlantic • “Murdered by My Replica?” by Margaret Atwood, The Atlantic • “My Books Were Used to Train Meta’s Generative AI. Good.” by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic • Alice Munro • Rebecca Solnit • Meghan O’Rourke • George Saunders • Ta-Nehisi Coates • Martin Amis • “Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement,” by Wes Davis, The Verge

In anticipation of Banned Books Week, Brooklyn Public Library’s collections manager Leigh Hurwitz joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss how the recent, dramatic rise in book bans disproportionately affects young people, and why BPL has chosen to offer access to its half a million eBooks and audiobooks to every person in the U.S. between the ages of 13 to 21. Hurwitz, one of the librarians behind the groundbreaking digital library card program launched in April 2022, talks about how in its first eighteen months, Books Unbanned has helped more than 7,000 users in all 50 states to access the books they need. Hurwitz unpacks the range of reasons teens cite for needing the cards, including privacy, lack of transportation, and—in some places—the requirement to get a parental signature or use a deadname to acquire a physical card at the local library. They also explain the positive responses from Books Unbanned readers who are able to see marginalized aspects of their identities portrayed on the page for the first time. Hurwitz reads from their Vice article about the program.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: Are there challenges to the Books Unbanned program? Have you had any issues? What are you going to do if you do? What happens when this gets on Fox News… if Fox News decides to run a story about this terrible program that you have?

Leigh Hurwitz: We honestly—this is such a boring answer—we really have not had any pushback. A few annoyed emails at the beginning, maybe. But we’ve really only heard from the people that are supportive of this program.

WT: That’s good. Only a few annoyed emails is pretty good for anything a library does.

LH: I know. Yeah, we definitely have patrons who were more annoyed about other things that were happening at the library. But no, we have a wonderful community here of our patrons.

WT: Everyone’s perfect. 

LH: We’re here for them, we wouldn’t exist without them. I can tell you one very small personal thing, which I just sort of laughed at, was when I did a Reddit AMA a few months ago. And one person, I guess who attended that, tweeted at BPL with my full name saying, “BPL, do you have any response to this?: Leigh Hurwitz wants to give copies of Hustler to all preschool children in the country.” Just this stock statement, and BPL was incredibly supportive and asked me how I wanted them to handle it. We just ignored it.

WT: Or, Leigh, is that why they put you in the printing room for this interview?

LH: I’m in the printing room! They’re just trying to bury me! I know that this institution is so incredibly supportive of all its staff and pretty unwavering in its commitment to access and intellectual freedom. So I think we have enough goodwill locally and nationally that we would be able to withstand any negative attention from Fox News. Something that’s been happening across the country is that public libraries have seen an increase in bomb threats being called in.

A lot of times it’s because of things like drag story hour. This did happen to us recently as well but it wasn’t directly connected to Books Unbanned. There are other things that are part of this whole boiling cauldron but that aren’t directly related to Books Unbanned.

WT: Well, we’ll see if we can fix that by publishing this podcast.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: I know this is gonna surprise you. There’s not a ton of overlap between our listeners and Fox News watchers, so you may not be at huge risk being with us, but I’m curious just because – for people who maybe don’t know – or just if things have changed since the days when my mother would drop me off at the library and leave me there for hours. If you go to a public library, and you’re 13 years old, and your parents want to see the list of books you checked out, can they? Because it seems like one of the important things here is privacy, right? And that’s one of the things that digital collections allow too, if you’re reading something on your Kindle, it’s less visible than if you’re reading a book with its regular dust jacket. I mean, it sounds like you haven’t had parents writing in to say, “What is my kid reading? And why are you making that possible?” When you’re a minor—which, most of these Books Unbanned readers must be—what privacy rights do you have with what you’re reading?

LH: This is different in every public library system, they all have different requirements about what ID you need to be eligible for a card and things like that. But for anyone who’s 13 years old and up, you do not need a parent or guardian to sign the application or get permission for you to have a library card. For children who are 12 years old and under… I mean, you can have your own library card pretty much as soon as you’re born. For now, we do require anyone who’s 12 years old and under to have a parent or guardian sign the application so that they can have a library card.

But I will say that something we’ve uncovered as a result of Books Unbanned is finding out that there are a lot of public libraries in this country that require you to have a parent or guardian approve your library card application up until 18 years old, which is shocking. And a colleague of mine actually is putting together a survey to see what sorts of policies like this are in place and to say, “Okay, are you doing this because this is just the way you’ve always done it and no one’s evaluated it in a long time, or is there something else at play in this requirement?”

VVG: That’s just wild. You can go get your driver’s license at 16. Why would you be able to get a driver’s license but not a library card?

LH: I know. We take the privacy of all of our patrons extremely seriously. We don’t share data, and we also don’t keep track of what people have borrowed once they return it. So we don’t even keep track of that information. We consider our national teen eCard holders our patrons, too, and we take their privacy just as seriously. And that’s also why one of the reasons for Books Unbanned is to find out what is happening in this country and hear directly from teens themselves. We’ve collected a lot of stories, and we take their privacy and their vulnerability and their sharing of these stories with us really seriously. And so we are figuring out a way that we can get consent from some of them to share their stories, even if it’s in an anonymized way. But I think that that is an example of how we treat our patrons in Brooklyn as well.

VVG: So you’ve been talking about this program’s various successes. And I’m curious about what’s ahead. You mentioned you thought it would be temporary and now it seems like it might be a longer-term fixture and that Seattle Public Library is now on board. I’ve been reading about all of these other things like the Banned Book Club app, where it will sort out what books are banned in your area based on your geolocation and then help you check them out. I was like, “Yes, finally! The geolocation thing doesn’t freak me out anymore!” Anyway, I’m curious about what you have in the works. I understand you may have a new podcast in the wings.

LH: Yes! I’ll mention that first since you brought it up. We have an extension of our Borrowed podcast called Borrowed and Banned, which is seven episodes long and really takes you into the history of censorship in this country, especially as it relates to books and libraries, and takes a macro and micro look at all of this, focusing on individual stories, but also the broader history. I know I keep saying that word ‘history’ but that’s what it is. And just why and how books are being banned and what people can do about it. I think that’s a really important piece of this, too: “Okay, what are we going to do about it now?” It debuts on September 28.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento. Photograph of Leigh Hurwitz by Gregg Richards.

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Leigh Hurwitz:

“I Helped Thousands of Teens Impacted By Book Bans. Here’s What They Had To Say” | Vice • Blog posts by Leigh Hurwitz | Brooklyn Public Library

Others:

Banned in the USA: The Mounting Pressure to Censor | PEN America • Books Unbanned | Brooklyn Public Library • “Brooklyn Library’s ‘Books Unbanned’ Team Wins Accolades,” by James Barron, New York Times • How the Brooklyn Library Helped Fight Book Bans in Oklahoma by James Barron, New York Times, Sept. 12, 2022 • Introducing: Borrowed and Banned | Brooklyn Public Library • PEN America & BPL Freedom to Read Advocacy Institute • BookMatch and BookMatch Teen • Reddit AMA with Freedom Forum • Libraries for the People • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 6, Episode 45: Celeste Ng on the GOP’s War on Children • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 5, Episode 12: Intimate Contact: Garth Greenwell on Book Bans and Writing About Sex • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 6, Episode 13: Censoring the American Canon: Farah Jasmine Griffin on Book Bans Targeting Black Writers • “Readers Can Now Access Books Banned in Their Area for Free With New App,” by Christopher Parker, Smithsonian Magazine

Eighteen months into the invasion of Ukraine, Tetyana Ogarkova and Volodymyr Yermolenko, hosts of the podcast Explaining Ukraine, return to talk to co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan about how the war has affected Ukrainian artists and how they’re responding. They talk about the actions of deeply engaged writers and intellectuals they know, like Yaryna Chornohuz, a young poet who’s an activist and has joined the army as a paramedic. They also give an update on what’s happening at the front and the possibility of the formation of an international war tribunal to investigate crimes of the Russian Federation.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: We’re going to get to the way that Ukrainian writers and artists have been responding to the war in just a minute, but I wondered if you could first update us on what’s been happening. There’s been a lot of reporting here in the U.S. about the Ukrainian counter offensive. Is it happening? Is it going too slowly? And now, most recently, there seems to have been some important progress by Ukrainian forces along the frontline near the city of Zaporizhzia. So where do things stand as of mid-September?

Tetyana Ogarkova: Well, in fact, the situation is quite difficult on the frontline. The counter attack on the Ukrainian troops has been underway for a couple of months already. But there are a lot of problems with this because a lot of territories are really mined by Russian troops. That’s precisely why Ukrainian troops had to change their strategy to advance without destroying their own troops. That explains why the advances are slow—quite slow on the ground. They’re careful. But the most important issue they have is to continue moving forward. Even if they’re not moving hundreds of kilometers, they’re sometimes moving about hundreds of meters per day or kilometers per week, still advancing in the South.

In the East, the situation is even more difficult because in some places like Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region—northeastern Ukraine—Russians are trying to attack once again. There are a lot of troops in this direction trying to get what they lost one year ago. Let me remind you that last September, this brilliant military operation of Ukrainian troops for the Kharkiv operation took place, and they managed to liberate huge amounts of Ukrainian territories, but now, Russia is still trying to attack in this region. So the situation is really very tense. And Ukrainian society understands now that it will take a lot of time to liberate Ukrainian territories.

Volodymyr Yermolenko: That may also be because we had—both in Ukraine and in the outside world—exaggerated expectations. And it was like in a football match or a computer game where you are looking at some soldiers that are trying to liberate certain territories. Of course, in real life, it’s a little bit more complicated because Russians have been preparing for this counter offensive in the South, and they built three lines of defense. They astonish the mind with a lot of things.

We are talking about hundreds of kilometers of very dense minefields. But despite all that, the Ukrainian army succeeded in breaking these lines. And now, near the city of Zaporizhzhia and more to the south near the town of Robotyne, Ukrainians are really breaking through the first line of defense, which is very tense and complicated. We gradually see their little advance, which actually—if Ukrainians break through this corridor, the first line of defense, second line of defense, and the third line of defense, it is quite probable that they will build the actual corridor in the South and Russians will be in a very difficult situation because Ukrainians will be able to reach Crimea, for example, with strikes.

So I think we need to understand that obviously, the war will be longer than some expected, and we Ukrainians were saying this from the very beginning to not have the illusion that this will be just a series of brilliant blitzkriegs, and we should be prepared for a longer fight. Here, the question of technologies is very important and the question of drones in the air is very important. Who will actually conquer the air? This is very important. But also, we should not have the impression that this is an endless war. Russians are weakening, and they are actually exhausting their resources. They’re not helped by big supplies from the outside world. Instead, the solidarity with Ukraine is huge, we really appreciate it, and it’s important that it lasts.

Whitney Terrell: Well, that breakthrough that you’re talking about with these lines of defense seems very important—I read in the German news service, DW, that Russia has committed 60 percent of its available resources to that first line of defense, right? So the reason that the break in the first line, around Zaporizhzhia and another place that you mentioned, is important is because according to DW, they’ve only put 20 percent of their available resources to the second and third lines of defense. So I’m wondering, now that this first line has been broken in a couple of places, does that mean there’s a chance for Ukraine to make faster advances?

VY: I do think that there is a chance, but we should be very careful and understand that it’s also a battle of resources. And Russians are also learning, so it’s wrong to believe that this is a stupid army. Of course, they made a lot of mistakes, and Ukrainians are smarter, I think. But at the same time, we need to understand that this is a war that is increasingly going into the air and increasingly dependent on technologies. We should understand that many things are really done by infantry—by individual soldiers who are very carefully going through these really dense mines and losing their lives. And of course, we have this inhumane dimension of the war where we’re losing many, many soldiers. And the only way to decrease the suffering is to supply the Ukrainian army with better technologies that will help to better demine, target Russian artillery, and fight against the Russian drones, etc, etc. So we really need to understand that Ukrainians are paying a huge price for these but at the same time, we do need more weapons, technologists, and more smart technologies.

TO: I would also like to add an important comment about time and evaluation. So the evaluation was about 60 percent effort for the first line and 20 percent for the second line. It might be true. It’s only an evaluation and time plays against Ukrainians once again. During the time Ukrainian troops were busy with the first line, Russians had some time to prepare. The second line or the third line happened last year when Ukrainian troops were preparing their counter offensive in the South. Russians never lost a single minute of preparation time.

Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the commander-in-chief for the Ukrainian army, was asking for weapons to use for the long months of autumn 2022 and spring 2022 to prepare the defense lines. So what military experts say is that if you enter a territory it is really heavily mined now. If you compare what is happening now to what was happening during the Second World War in the Soviet Union—because Ukraine was a part of the Soviet Union—you can compare the level of mining. They have five to ten times more mines today than during the Second World War. So imagine the effort it took to have Ukrainian troops advance and also the effort it will take to demine all these territories for after, because this is a war, not a game of football. It’s not about who wins or who loses, it’s about having a place to live. And to get life back into these territories, you need to demine them. So it will take time and a lot of effort and a lot of resources from both the Ukraine and hopefully from our international partners.

VVG: So I think you’re both giving us some useful metrics to think about what exactly progress in this war looks like. And I’d like to keep talking about that. I also feel like podcasts aren’t a visual medium, but I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the geography and about the map of the war as it stands. We’ve been talking about Zaporizhzhia. Can you explain why progress there is particularly important, and if Ukrainians are about to advance further, where will they go next?

TO: Well, Zaporizhzhia is a key direction now for a simple reason. If you start from Zaporizhzhia and advance to the south, you may hopefully arrive in Melitopol. Melitopol is situated close to Azov. And the main plan of the Ukrainian army is to divide the Russian troops that are now occupying eastern Ukraine, southern Ukraine and Crimea. If they succeed, going to Melitopol and then later to Donetsk, they will reach the Sea of Azov. And when the Ukrainian troops reach the Sea of Azov, it would mean that Russian troops are divided in two parts. And given that Ukrainian troops are already partly able, they will be even more ready later to control the so-called Crimea bridge—the bridge which Russia constructed after the illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula back in 2014.
So they will be cutting off the logistics of the Russian army from the territory of the Russian Federation, and they will encircle all of these Russian troops in the part of Crimea, and in this tiny part of southern Ukraine. It will facilitate things for the Ukrainian army to fight further, to liberate, and to make Russians leave Crimea, and from this part of southern Ukraine. It will also facilitate things in eastern Ukraine. But in eastern Ukraine, it will be, in a way, more difficult to get Russians out because they still have a broader borderline with Ukraine. I mean—Donetsk region, Lugansk region, all these territories are close to Russia, so they will still be able to have these logistic chains, for weapons, for infantry, for artillery, for everything. This is why the southern direction is a key direction now. And a huge amount of Ukrainian efforts are concentrated in this area.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo.

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Tetyana Ogarkova and Volodymyr Yermolenko:

Explaining Ukraine (podcast) • Ukraine in Histories and Stories

Others:

Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 2: “How Dostoevsky’s Classic Has Shaped Russia’s War in Ukraine, with Explaining Ukraine’s Tetyana Ogarkova and Volodymyr Yermolenko” • Yaryna Chornohuz • “Being a poet and a woman on the frontline – with Yaryna Chornohuz” (Explaining Ukraine) • Timothy Snyder • “Timothy Snyder: Freedom as a Value and a Task – a Talk in Kyiv” (Explaining Ukraine) • Joseph Heller • Thomas Pynchon • All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque • “Guernica” by Pablo Picasso • “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” by Wilfred Owen • “Remembering Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina, killed by a Russian missile,” by Joanna Kikissis • Kateryna Kalytko

Novelist Leila Aboulela joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan on their 200th episode to talk about the fighting between rival military factions in her native Sudan, which has displaced millions of civilians. She compares the situation of Sudan, which underwent a coup in 2019, with the six other African countries that have experienced coups since 2020. Aboulela explains the historical precedents and particularities and reflects on how, when a country’s military is its mightiest institution, a coup can be the only way to change leadership. She also reads from her new novel River Spirit, which covers the period of time leading up to the British occupation of Sudan.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: This year, conflict between rival factions of Sudan’s military government has led to fighting that has prompted, unfortunately, millions of people to leave their homes. You spent most of your childhood in Khartoum. This must be hard to watch. How are your friends and family there faring? And what is the situation like on the ground for civilians from the reports you’ve been hearing?

Leila Aboulela: I spent more than my childhood in Khartoum—I actually left in my mid-20s. And I had already graduated from university and got married and had a baby. So I did a lot of life there. My friends and my cousins, most of them, by day 11 of this conflict, had left the country. The first instinct of people was just to get away from this sudden, unprecedented bombing of their homes. And after they left for Egypt and other neighboring countries, things are very bad now for civilians, because this war has indiscriminately targeted hospitals, it’s bombed the airport, it’s bombed schools, water facilities, electrical supplies. So day to day life is just unbearable at the moment, and that’s why people have fled.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: So they went to Egypt. Sudan borders, I think, seven other countries. I know there’s a lot of people who are internally displaced, and also people going into other countries. So your friends and family went to Egypt. Are there places within the country that are turning into refuges as well?

LA: Most people went outside the capital, they went to the provinces, which had less fighting. And they felt safer there. It just happened that my family and the people I know went to Egypt. I guess because we originally have ancestors from Egypt. So there’s always been a connection with Egypt. So the instinct was to go there as a place of safety. But people have gone to Ethiopia, Chad, South Sudan, depending on where they have links, where they have family members, but most of the displacement is happening within the country itself.

VVG: At the top of the show, we were talking a little bit about how I know someone in Egypt who has been working with people displaced from Sudan. And I was also reading a story in the Times about people who had gone from South Sudan, to Sudan, and were now returning, so doubly displaced. And I think that history of multiple displacements seems to be part of the larger story of the politics of this area. So Sudan became independent in 1955. And I was reading that since then, there have been 15 coup attempts in Sudan, five of which have been successful. Can you talk a little bit about how General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan came to power in 2019 and why he is now at odds with Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan, who is the leader of the paramilitary force, the Rapid Support Forces?

LA: Yeah, he came into power as a result of a civilian revolution against the old general, the old military dictator. So Sudan, almost from independence, with very few and short exceptions, has been ruled by one military dictator after the other, so really the army is the most powerful institution in the country. It’s got the biggest share of the budget. It’s the richest institution, it’s the most powerful institution in the country. So basically, just changing whoever’s ruling comes then with a coup, one coup after the other.

And so this General Burhan took over with a coup, but he was supported by this paramilitary, the Dagalo, that you mentioned. But then they fell out because this paramilitary was meant to be incorporated into the main army. But they negotiated the terms into which they would be incorporated in the country’s army, but they weren’t happy with the negotiations. And so they went to war in the capital, disregarding the people who were present. So that is what happened, unfortunately. And unfortunately, the paramilitary were encouraged and in the hope that they would lessen the power of the military. But it just backfired. It was just not a good idea. In theory, maybe it was a good idea. But in practice, it was just a disaster.

WT: Seems a little bit like the issues that Russia has been having with General Prigozhin, who runs a paramilitary organization there, as we all know, and he’s now dead. The Wagner group that became powerful then turned on the military itself. And there’s this infighting in that way. And both of these generals that we were speaking of played a role in an earlier conflict in Darfur. I wondered if you could talk about that and how that contributes to their history.

LA: Yeah, so this Hamdam Dagalo was a warlord in Darfur, and all these atrocities that were taking place in the capital [now] took place in Darfur. And he’s a warlord and he owns a lot of mines and gold and you know, he’s quite a powerful person in the west part of the country. And actually, people in Darfur are saying now to the people in Khartoum, well, you’re just tasting what we had before, the war has come to you in the capital. You used to be safe in your bubble. But now, the war has reached you as well.

WT: Sudan was a British colony. Earlier in the episode Sugi mentioned six African countries where there have been coups. Guinea, Niger, Chad, Gabon, Burkina Faso and Mali. These are all former French colonies. Of course, they all have their own specific political context. But what role does colonialism play in what’s happening here?

LA: Well, colonialism laid down the boundaries—the maps of all these countries—in ways which the colonialists thought was logical, but it might not have been logical for the people, and the way they were affiliated with their tribes and how they felt that they were loyal. But then colonialism decided to mark “this is Sudan, this is Chad, this is Guinea.” So that is one thing you’ve got, you’ve got a boundary, which is European-created. That is one thing.

And then the other thing is the way the colonialists did the divide and rule and how they kind of would set one group against the other and play one group against the other. And so this created these kinds of divisions and the separate development in certain areas of the countries and how perhaps one tribe would be elevated and be favorites amongst the British and be given land and be given help, whereas others won’t, because they’re deemed to be a threat. So these kinds of divisions and all of that, this is what the legacy is of colonialism, I would say. But I know at the end of the day, we’ve been independent for all these years, we can’t blame colonialism for every fault. We have to, as Sudanese, shoulder the good part of the blame.

WT: To what extent—this is just a thought experiment, you can tell me if this is completely nuts, but—you know, sometimes there are patterns. For instance, in the United States there’ll be clusters of mass shootings, right. If something bad happens, you give someone else an idea to do the same thing. And I wonder if—is it possible that because one state has a coup and then some other group thinks, “oh, we could do that in our country,” could that be contributing to the reasons why this number of coups are happening at this particular time, or are they all individually oriented and there’s no connection between them?

LA: It could also be to do with the flow of the firepower, you know, the guns, the weapons, the defense. The defense industry is very secretive, we never hear about unemployment in the defense sector, or how much sectors are earning. We’re not privy to all of these details, they’re all top secret. So we don’t know what is going on. And I’ve noticed, for example, in Sudan, you get a very poor country, and then suddenly a military truck is driving down the road, and it’s so sophisticated, and it’s so pristine, and the soldier is dressed really very nicely.

So a lot of money is being poured into this. And if there’s guns and bullets, why wouldn’t they use them? They’re gonna use them because they’re there. And how come they are affording all of these things in a place where they can’t afford vaccines, and they can’t afford schools and all that? But suddenly, there’s no problem, they never run out of arms, they never run out of bullets, and yet they run out of food, and they run out of all these other things. So the weapons are a big part of it.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento. Photograph of Leila Aboulela by Rania Rustom.

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LEILA ABOULELA

River Spirit • Bird Summons • Elsewhere, Home • The Kindness of Enemies • Lyrics Alley • Minaret • Coloured Lights • The Translator • Articles in The Guardian

Others:

“What’s behind the wave of coups in Africa,” Al Jazeera • “Chaos in Sudan: Who Is Battling for Power, and Why It Hasn’t Stopped,” by Declan Walsh and Abdi Latif Dahir • “How To Write About Africa,” Granta, by Binyavanga Wainaina, 2005 •  “Binyavanga Wainaina, Kenyan Writer And LGBTQ Activist, Dies At 48,” by Colin Dwyer, NPR, May 22, 2019 • Sudan, a coup laboratory – ISS Africa • Khartoum (1966 film)

Fiction writer Maurice Carlos Ruffin joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about the literary and historical antecedents to Fani Willis, the Georgia prosecutor who has filed a RICO case against Trump and 18 co-defendants for their illegal attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He discusses the long history of Black women who have challenged the white establishment when it comes to issues like political corruption, incarceration, and violence. He reads from his forthcoming novel The American Daughters, historical fiction about an enslaved woman who joins a society of spies.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: What kind of research did you do for the novel? And can you talk about the historical parallels for Ady and the women that she joins up with?

Maurice Ruffin: Yeah, this book really is the culmination of a lifetime of research. It comes from the stories told to me by my ancestors, including my grandmother, mother, and other people in my family, but also, going out to the French Quarter in New Orleans to a place called the Williams Research Center and going through stacks and stacks of old books and newspaper clippings and microfiche, and that sort of thing. And then, doing 23andMe ancestry and finding documents from old state legislatures in places like Virginia and Alabama. And, I began to basically compile for myself a compendium of activities by Black folks, but especially Black women across the South and across the country, things that people are vaguely aware of if you’d like to do the research, but are rarely spoken about. And it was those activities by Black women over the course of hundreds of years that really inspired me to put this book together.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: The section you read reminded me a little bit of The Handmaid’s Tale. There are these scraps of evidence and this academic conference and people gathering together to assess. It’s a feminist project, essentially, from the get-go, and you’re a male writer taking this on, which is great. I feel like this is one of the questions of our time. I just want to say that I really appreciate that. And I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about this: right in that prologue there’s this question of belief. I’m reminded of Phyllis Wheatley, who was tested. Could she really write? “There’s no way she could possibly have been the author of that.” And Black women are the authors of their own destinies. That’s so powerful. Yet, from the second that they begin to tell the story, there’s this note of disbelief.

MR: Yeah, absolutely. In my mind, this is a feminist project. And The Handmaid’s Tale is, for me, a very important book. I remember reading that book as a young person and getting to the end of it, and seeing that epilogue at the researchers’ conference set in the distant future. It always stuck with me. And so I’ve wanted to actually try that myself. As a creative person, you can do whatever you want, you can take what you want from the past and put in your own work.

Beyond that, I think it is really important for us to acknowledge the work of so many women who were disregarded whether they were in the arts, whether they were activists. You know, I’ve had people I’ve worked with in the past that led me along this path. One basic example was, I was a book reviewer for the Virginia Quarterly Review for a few years. And the editor over there, she had me reviewing these books that I think were below the radar. One of the books, for example, was about unsung Black women, heroes of the civil rights movement. I had a chance to read a book about nine women from the 1950s, who, you know, some are more ubiquitous than others.

In my hometown, Leah Chase, the great restaurateur, is a local hero who I’ve met in person. The things I learned about her in that book—how she never really wanted to get acclaim for herself, and yet as a restaurateur, she literally fed people like Dr. King when they came to New Orleans and helped them have the energy to go out there and give their speeches and do their protests and sit-ins. So those sorts of things really inspired me in this project.

WT: Don’t you think Fani Willis feels that history that you’re talking about? You know, when she goes into work? The DA’s office in Fulton County was also the same DA’s office that used to uphold Jim Crow laws. She is in the seat of power that used to be used to oppress people like her. And I’m sure that she must feel that weight of history when she’s in off hours.

MR: In my experience, I think it’s the most natural thing in the world for Black women to be the kind of people who are the first to stand up for rights. I mean, there’s a reason why in so many recent elections, you know, we’re actually going back a very long way, you may have a very conservative presidential candidate and a very liberal one, and Black women tend to vote 95-ish percent every single time for the candidate who’s for freedom of human rights and social rights. And, it’s not for nothing that following the activity of the civil rights activists in the ’50s, all over the world you saw people responding to that. In Africa, for example, throughout the late ’50s, and early ’60s, you had so many countries fighting for independence and gaining it one by one by one. So these things are all connected. And I think that for somebody like Ms. Willis, she was raised in that tradition, and it’s totally normal for her to do that without even having to think very much about it. She’s going to do it.

WT: We should mention, I want to mention, Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, Angela Davis, they are all in that sort of tradition of resistance in American life.

MR: Absolutely, no doubt about it. Those women are on my mind constantly. Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, for example, she was the first person to say, “I’m going to track all these lynchings, I need to have some actual evidence of what’s been happening here in this country, because the New York Times is not writing about it, you know. We’re not seeing so-called scholars writing about these things.” So at a great risk to her personal safety, she made it a point to go from place to place collecting these stories of people’s loved ones who had been killed by racist hate mongers, even to the point where she was being chased by these men who wanted to shut her up. And eventually, of course, she had to move to Chicago from the South, but not before she made a significant impact on the history of our country.

VVG: I was thinking, as we prepared for this episode about Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose Twitter handle is actually “Ida Bae Wells.” And I think that as the indictments were coming out, she tweeted, “Once again, it is Black people who are the greatest agents of democracy the United States has ever seen.” And I was like, yep.

MR: You’ll find no objection from me on that point.

WT: Three of the four prosecutors who are going after, and who have decided to file charges against Trump, are Black.

MR: Yeah. I will say that our country has always had challenges based on our history involving the treatment of Black men and women and children. I do think this is a sign of how far the nation has come that we do have three out of four Black prosecutors doing this. This would have been impossible even 50 years ago or so, and the fact that is happening right now. And there’s a very good chance that some of these charges will come to fruition and that people will be going to jail, including possibly the former president. I find it very compelling. I think it’s where things were meant to work based on our Constitution.

VVG: I mean, I don’t even know that it would have happened 20 years ago.

MR: I think you’re right.

VVG: It’s mind-blowing to watch. So we’re talking about the real life heroines of these resistances, and I’m curious to hear—you spoke a little bit about The Handmaid’s Tale earlier—I wonder what your favorite examples in literature are. I can think of so many examples in literature. You know, Sethe from Beloved comes to mind, Maya Angelou from her multiple memoirs. A favorite of mine is Cora from Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. There are tons and tons more. Who are your favorite characters in that vein? And what do they maybe tell us about Fani Willis?

MR: Oh my goodness, there’s so many of them. You mentioned some of my favorites already. I’ll just start off by saying basically every woman in every Toni Morrison book is a great example of it. You know, I just went back to reread Paradise, and there are probably 12 women in that book who are such striking leaders within that community of Ruby.

Of course, Maya Angelou—in high school I think I read all four autobiographies. I mean, who writes four autobiographies? She does, because she had a very big story to tell.

And I find it very compelling to read Zora Neale Hurston with Their Eyes Were Watching God. Even Ernest Gaines, who was a fellow Louisiana native and such an important writer to me, because he had a story in his short story collection where there’s a mother character who is trying her best to protect her young son against racism in the rural south. And reading that story as a 12-year-old, it really changed my life. And again, there are these mother figures, these auntie figures, these sister figures, who I see in real life, and I see them in fiction, and that makes me really inspired to see this work on the page.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo.

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MAURICE CARLOS RUFFIN:

We Cast a Shadow • The Ones Who Don’t Say I Love You • The American Daughters (forthcoming in 2024) • “Returning the Gaze” | VQR Online

Others:

Ida Bae Wells on X: “Once again, it is Black people who are the greatest agents of democracy the United States has ever seen.” / X • “Fani Willis Took On Atlanta’s Gangs. Now She May Be Coming For Trump.” The New York Times Magazine • Maurice Ruffin, First (Literary) Citizen of New Orleans (Literary Hub) • Maurice Carlos Ruffin’s Creative Journey from Lawyer to Award-Winning Writer (Literary Hub) • Fiction/Non/Fiction: Season 3, Episode 26: “The Past Is Never Dead: Maurice Carlos Ruffin and Michael Gorra on the ‘New South’ and Whether Faulkner Still Belongs There” • Toni Morrison • The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood • Lighting the Fires of Freedom: African American Women in the Civil Rights Movement, by Janet Dewart Bell   • Sojourner Truth • Angela Davis • Harriet Tubman • Ida B. Wells • Phillis Wheatley • Nikole Hannah-Jones • Maya Angelou • Zora Neale Hurston • Ernest J. Gaines • The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Kansas Reflector editor-in-chief Sherman Smith joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about the police raid on the tiny Marion County Record. He explains the newspaper’s investigation of the DUI history of a local restaurant owner who’d applied for a liquor license, which led to an August 11 raid of both the newspaper’s office and publishers’ home. The local magistrate, with her own DUI history, signed the warrant that alleged possible identity theft by one of the reporters. Sherman explains what the police took, why it was ultimately returned, and why he’s encouraged by the national and international response that sends the message that this treatment of journalists will not be tolerated. He also reads from the Reflector’s initial reporting.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: You were talking a little bit about all of the materials that [police took in the raid], and the lede of the Kansas Reflector story that ran the next day is pretty striking. I wonder if you would read from that for us.

Sherman Smith: Yeah, we published this online just hours after the raid.  I had help in writing the story from several staff members: Tim Carpenter, Sam Bailey, Rachel Mipro. And the headline was “Police stage ‘chilling’ raid on Marion County newspaper, seizing computers, records and cell phones.”

In an unprecedented raid Friday, local law enforcement seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, the newspaper’s reporters, and the publisher’s home.  

Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”  

The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.  

The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.  

Meyer said he had never heard of police raiding a newspaper office during his 20 years at the Milwaukee Journal or 26 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois.  “It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”

VVG: Thank you so much. That story really captures the scene. Clearly one of the effects of this raid, right, is that the newspaper is on the edge of not being able to publish, and I know from your coverage and from reading other stories as well, that of course the newspaper ended up managing to publish. The staff pulled an all-nighter and its front page headline read, “SEIZED … but not silenced.” And they actually cobbled together a computer. I’m imagining the TV drama episode adapted from this. They went and found a disk drive… It sounds like it was pretty MacGyver over there in the newsroom.

SS: A little bit, yeah.

Whitney Terrell: What do you think I do before we record every time this show?

VVG: I know that just outside the frame of what we see on YouTube, there’s all sorts of…

WT: There’s all sorts of naked motherboards here that I just touch wires to.

VVG: This podcast is held together by paper clips.

SS: Well, in this case, the raid was on a Friday. They’re a weekly paper, so they put the paper together Tuesday night and send it to press, and deliver it Wednesday morning. And so they had a few days in between there to try to figure out what to do.

There was an outpouring of support from people all over the state, all over the country, some even internationally. They went into this stressful period where they’re trying to fulfill a lot of interview requests. The publisher, Eric Meyer, is appearing on CNN and all these other major national outlets trying to help people understand the severity of what happened in his newsroom. And meanwhile, they’re like rummaging around the back shop for discarded old computers that they might be able to put together and actually have a machine that they can use.

They found an old Windows XP machine, if you remember the days of XP, and were able to bring it back to life and get some programs on it that allowed them to actually put the paper out that Tuesday night. The people from the Press Association, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and some others were kind of like forming a barricade at one point Tuesday afternoon at the front of the office so that the staff could just have some peace and quiet in the back and actually put this paper together, and they were there all night trying to make it work.

As you mentioned, they had to go find a standalone disk drive that they could plug into it. They backup all of their data. Their files are backed up on DVDs that they burned like we used to do years ago… But they were a month and a half behind on burning these discs so they had to go find discs from mid-June and figure out how to plug them into an old machine that didn’t even have a functioning disk drive just to be able to pull this together. So I think they finished the paper around 5 a.m. Wednesday morning, sent it out to the press, and  it arrives somewhere around 11 o’clock, 10 o’clock, something like that, late Wednesday morning. And they got the paper out.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Anne Kniggendorf.

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SHERMAN SMITH:

Kansas Reflector • “Police stage ‘chilling’ raid on Marion County newspaper, seizing computers, records and cellphones,” by Sherman Smith, Sam Bailey, Rachel Mipro, and Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector • “Sheriff’s office agrees to destroy evidence obtained from raid on Kansas newspaper,” Kansas Reflector

OTHERS:

Marion County Record • MacGyver • Carl Hiaasen • “Judge who approved raid on Kansas newspaper has history of DUI arrests,” by Chance Swaim, Wichita Eagle • Hunter Biden • Kris Kobach • American Press Institute • Rachel Maddow • States Newsroom

As summer draws to an end, Thurber Prize-winning novelist Julie Schumacher joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about the state of the American vacation and how holidays are portrayed in literature. Schumacher discusses her new comic novel, The English Experience, a sequel to Dear Committee Members and The Shakespeare Requirement that focuses on university professor Jay Fitger leading a study abroad trip to England. She reflects on favorite travel narratives, how technology has changed the way we vacation, and the ethics of tourism in relation to colonialism and climate change.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

*
From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: So one of the things I noticed about spending a chunk of the summer in Italy was that I wasn’t nearly as remote as I would have been even five or six years ago. And you know, we taped a bunch of podcast episodes while I was in Italy. I remember, Whit, doing the podcast with you when I was in Germany in 2017, our first fall, but we didn’t have Zoom. I didn’t see you. My phone didn’t work nearly as well. Julie, I’m curious if you could talk a little bit about the way that technology has changed the way we conceive of what is or is not a vacation. This appears, actually, in interesting ways in your novel.

Julie Schumacher: Yeah, I think that’s a great question. And I was one of the last people in the world, I think, to get a cell phone. I just resisted and didn’t want one. And so my spouse and I would go on vacation, and I would be on vacation. I would be on the beach happily disconnected, and he would say, “Hey, so and so’s trying to reach you.” I had actually once written a piece in The New York Times about a frightening or difficult student. And I published it and then merrily went off on vacation. And my spouse said, “Hey, the provost’s office is trying to reach you. They’re not happy.” And I thought, “I’m on vacation, you know, I’ll talk to them when I get back.” But he insisted that I call people back and I thought, “I should be on vacation. This is not part of the rule.”

But of course, then I had to get a cell phone because the rest of the world had one. And so it does, yeah, it does create a different kind of trip. It’s very hard to disconnect. I guess if you go to Alaska, and you’re in a tent, and you can’t get cell service, then that’s wonderful. But those things are rare. You can get cell service everywhere now. Which is disappointing to me. I kind of yearn still for the days when people had answering machines, and you would call them and leave a message and maybe they’d get back to you in a couple of days. You wouldn’t sit there staring at your screen saying, “Why, now that nine seconds have elapsed, has this person not called me back?” Time and vacation interacted differently back then.

VVG: I’m realizing, now, Julie, that you and I once met up when we were—I’m not sure, were we on vacation? We were traveling.

JS: In Oxford.

VVG: We were in Oxford. And we went to a museum and—

JS: One of my favorite museums!

VVG: It was a great museum. But I have sometimes been too cheap to pay for international phone service or just, my phone hasn’t worked. And I have a terrible sense of direction. So I just get lost without my cell phone.

JS: Oh, totally.

VVG: And that used to feel okay. I don’t know, at least if I was in an English-speaking country or a country where I spoke the language, I could kind of get around. And then when I was in Italy, I downloaded Italian Google Translate, so I could use it even when I was offline. And I would do things like go to the post office and mail a parcel in Italian, with atrocious pronunciation, no doubt. Or when we were in Japan, we had a little portable Wi-Fi hotspot, which was the first thing we got when we got off the plane. So I had Wi-Fi, but I didn’t have a cell phone, didn’t have phone service. Then someone stole my identity in the middle of the trip, and I couldn’t do much about it, because I didn’t have phone service. And I was like, “Oh, I wish I had done things the old-fashioned way.” Now I’m attempting to argue with Experian, or whoever, in this really awkward manner.

So, Whit, when you were in Ketchikan, I know sometimes in parts of Alaska that are more remote, when I’ve been there sometimes the phone service hasn’t been great. Do you disconnect? Or what do you do?

Whitney Terrell: Well, I mean, the last time I was there was probably 1994 or 1995, summer, fishing. So no cell phones, you know, I worked on a boat, we would literally go out to sea among these islands in the Inside Passage. And so you could be out there for a week or two. And there’s a radio that you could call in to shore and ask them to fly your groceries out in a plane. But otherwise, you actually literally have to come back to shore and mail a letter to someone and then go in and use a phone card and make a pay call to someone from the phone. I was very remote and now… not. There’s my cell phone, I can listen to the radio station in Kansas City that talks about the Chiefs if I want to while I’m jogging along the same road that I used to walk up and down totally isolated when I was there in the ’90s. So yeah, it’s very different.

I also remember… My wife teaches in Lyon in the summers. And so the first thing we would do when we would go over there is get a little map of the whole city, right? And I’d fold that up and put it in my pocket so when I went jogging, I wouldn’t get lost, right? And now I don’t need that anymore.

And I also noticed in The English Experience, there were scenes where Fitger is talking to his ex-wife while dealing with problems in England. And she’s just as present, even though she’s on another continent, as the people who are around him. That also is part of how technology has changed what a vacation is, I think.

So early in the novel, you have this very funny section that includes the statements of interest from students who are going on the study abroad trip. I’ve read a few statements of interest in my time, so I was amused by this. One of the students, Lin Jen Snow, says, “Tourism is a consumerist industry that wastes resources, contributes to climate crisis, and reinforces colonialist tropes.” You’re being tongue-in-cheek here, but this is still a pretty succinct summary of the two ways our thinking about vacations has changed. So let’s start with the politics. Do vacations reinforce colonialist tropes, as Lin Jen Snow is suggesting?

JS: I think they can. I think it’s tricky. It’s very tricky. I’ve been taking undergrads to Spain the last couple of years. It’s a travel writing class that I teach—we go to Spain in that context. And one of the books that I have assigned to them is Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, about Antigua, and about the white tourists, Europeans and Americans, coming to Antigua, and it’s a very bitter portrait of tourism, and what it is to be a tourist in a country when you are in fact often ignoring the people who live there all the time, their history, their culture, their language, and just sitting on their beaches and eating their food and walking away with the items that are sold in their country.

The students, when I’ve taught that book, are often kind of ticked off about it. They think, “Hey, you know, this, this instructor is spoiling our fun right off the bat, we want to go have fun. That’s what travel is about. It’s adventure. It’s a good time, we’re gonna go there, we’re able to drink in Spain, legally and here she is trying to make us feel bad.” And no, I want to stress the point that it’s a real double-edged sword. On the one hand, I really want students, many of them who haven’t been out of the U.S. before, to see another culture, to go somewhere and not just read about it, to walk around in a city where people are speaking a language they may not speak, and to know what that is. But on the other hand, yeah, tourism involves climate problems, it involves cultural moments of looking down possibly at other people because you are consuming them rather than vice versa. It’s very tricky, I think.

VVG: I feel like it’s pretty predictable of me that Lin Jen Snow is basically one of my favorite characters. The second she showed up, I was like, “YES, HER.” So yeah, I was thinking about, maybe back in 2010, The New York Times put Sri Lanka at the top of its list of places to visit in the world. This was right after the Sri Lankan civil war had ended. And there was like a lot of kind of disgusting—

JS: War’s over! Let’s go! Hit the beach!  Well, that’s even happening now with Maui, you know, they still need the tourist dollars and money is going to be desperately needed there. But on the other hand, there’s something very crass about people still checking into a hotel to hang out on the beach where all these people died, or nearby.

VVG: Basically. They were like, “Oh, and now we can go to the beach. The beach is unspoiled.” I was like, excellent! Now I’m going to become a critic of travel writing! So I wrote a bunch of very ranty things about this, and then got into some discussions, even with Sri Lankans, who said, “Sugi, don’t criticize this, we need the income. We need the business, we need the tourism.” And, I think some of those people who are [in Maui] are probably about to try to acquire that land, in the same way that in Sri Lanka post-tsunami, sometimes there were developers or what have you trying to prey on folks who had lost their homes closer to shore.

But rewinding a second—we were talking about the climate crisis, and I have to admit that this is one of the parts that has really been getting to me lately, yes, the part of the podcast episode where I have a quiet panic attack—I did fly all over the world this summer. And I was aware that I was leaving behind a huge carbon footprint. I was obviously not alone in doing that; the airports were full, the airlines were understaffed. The planes themselves are dealing with different weather than they used to. And now seeing the climate devastation in places like Florida and Maui and Alaska, which are all huge tourist sites, I’m wondering if maybe the reason so many people traveled this year is that they’re afraid that this kind of travel is coming to an end.

JS: Yeah, you read about the glaciers melting—let’s go to Alaska and see them before they’re totally gone! That countries are going to disappear in the middle of the Pacific Ocean… Let’s go. Let’s hit that island before it’s underwater. It’s, again, it’s a real conundrum, I think. You want to be able to support an economy that relies on tourism, but you have to do so with your eyes open and know the pros and cons of everything you’re doing. There are all those programs with the airline—I’m going to pay extra, and Delta will plant nine trees once I get on that flight. But I don’t think they’re really doing a whole lot other than making travelers not feel bad about traveling.

WT: I always just assume those are complete and utter bullshit.

JS: Maybe they’re not planting those trees at all.

VVG: Yeah, I mean, what they should actually be doing is handing out A Small Place to every passenger.

JS: That’s true. That’s true.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by V.V. Ganeshananthan.

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JULIE SCHUMACHER

The English Experience • The Shakespeare Requirement • Dear Committee Members • Was This Student Dangerous? – The New York Times, June 18, 2014

Others:

The Parent Trap (1961) •  Henry James • The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton • Voyage Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre • Baby-sitters on Board! by Ann M. Martin • Little Women by Louisa May Alcott • The British Museum • Rich in Love by Josephine Humphreys • A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid • The 31 Places to Go in 2010 – The New York Times

Award-winning journalist and professor Samuel G. Freedman joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about what progressives today can learn from an unexpected source: Democratic politician Hubert Humphrey. Freedman explains how today’s battles against far-right bigotry parallel the fight for civil rights Humphrey engaged in alongside Jewish and Black Americans in the 1940s. Freedman talks about the importance of progressive alliances and reads from his new book, Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

*
From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: Hubert Humphrey is probably best known for losing the ’68 presidential election to Richard Nixon. But your book focuses on the young Hubert Humphrey before he became Lyndon Johnson’s VP, even before he was a senator. What attracted you to that territory?

Samuel G. Freedman: That’s a great question, Whitney. Initially, I started this book in January 2015. And it’s very relevant to remind people that at that point, Barack Obama was in his second term. We’re a few months away from marriage equality being declared a constitutional right by the Supreme Court. I thought I was working on filling some holes in history and in biography. The whole of people knew about Humphrey from his mistake and catastrophic support for the Vietnam War and his several failed runs for president. And there’s the gap in history that assumed that the civil rights movement began in the mid-50s, with Brown vs. Board of Education and with Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott—there had actually been a really important decade of activity in the 1940s that sets the table for everything that comes later. And that felt like enough to me to be filling those two gaps.

But then November 2016 happened, and we know what happened then. I realized I was writing about current events. The battle that Humphrey and his allies were fighting was partly directly about civil rights which, at that time, was understood to mean not only the rights of Black Americans, but particularly the rights of Jewish Americans and even Catholic Americans as well, all of whom were the objects of varying degrees of discrimination by the white Protestant majority in this country at that time. But broadly, what Humphrey was involved in was a fight for interfaith, interracial, inclusive democracy against—and these are the exact terms used in the 1940s, too—white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and America first-ism. I was struck so often at the parallels between the 40s and the years we’ve been living in during the Trump era. And so that gave me an additional level of commitment and incentive to do the book as well as I could do it. Because, if I executed it the right way, it was going to be more than filling those gaps. Even though that would have been plenty of reason to validate the years of work on it anyway.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Sam, am I remembering right that you came to Minnesota in the fall of 2016 to begin researching it?

SF: I began in 2015. My first trip to Minneapolis to start to go through Humphrey’s archived papers at the state’s Historical Society was in June of 2015. And I came out a few more times that summer, both to work in the archives and also because there were only a handful of people I could interview who actually had been firsthand involved with Humphrey’s political life in the 40s. I was not interested in secondhand memories by people who knew him later. But there were a few people who I talked to literally the year before they died or the year before they fell deeply into dementia. I was doing some of that that summer.

And then I was fortunate to have a sabbatical semester from Columbia Journalism School in the fall of 2016. That allowed me to then get into that kind of day by day sitting in the archives. I can’t say that I did the exact Robert Caro thing of turning every page, but I turned a lot of pages.

VVG: I think that’s what I’m remembering. We were sort of passing ships in the night that semester.

WT: Yet another Minnesota-oriented podcast subject, I would note.

VVG: We’ve got to catch up with Kansas City sometime.

Early on in the book, Sam, you describe Hubert Humphrey’s encounter with a man named Otis Shipman, who was Black, and who was building a road near Humphrey’s childhood home in South Dakota. And you point out that this is really the only meaningful contact that Humphrey has with a Black person until he goes to graduate school at LSU decades later. So how does a person with that background become a champion for civil rights?

SF: That’s kind of the question that drove the whole book, Sugi. My good friend at Columbia Journalism School, Michael Shapiro, who’s also an author, always says that a book has to be driven by a question. And the book has to pursue the answer to that question. For me, the question was, “Why does this very white guy from this very white place care so much about Blacks and Jews?” And I think a clue to that is with his encounters with an 11-year-old boy with this Black road crew that comes from Omaha, Nebraska, up to the grasslands of eastern South Dakota, to put down the first gravel road near Humphrey’s hometown. They’re certainly a curiosity to the town’s people. But Humphrey has a different kind of curiosity. He goes out to meet them, and he kind of befriends them and they befriend him. And he still remembers this encounter decades later when he’s dictating recollections to his communications director that that man is going to shape in time for his autobiography. There’s kind of a mythological power to me of that moment. It doesn’t predict the rest of his life, but it says something about Humphrey’s temperament, even at a young age, but then you’re right.

Fast forward from 1922 to 1939, when he goes off to grad school at Louisiana State. And Humphrey, at that point, has only lived in overwhelmingly white Protestant places—in South Dakota or in Minneapolis, a couple of months in Denver to go to pharmacy school. And he’s been oblivious at that point to a great deal of the turmoil around Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota involving racism and antisemitism, a good deal of which was practiced by the university’s own president. People who want to find out more about that should look at an incredible online presentation called “A Campus Divided” by the scholar Riv-Ellen Prell.

But Humphrey– First of all, his college is interrupted for five, six years by the Great Depression. He has to drop out and help his family survive economically. He comes back, he’s married, he soon has a baby. He is so busy catching up and trying to finish his bachelor’s degree that he’s oblivious to these battles. And he’s also—typical of many liberals of his age—oriented around FDR’s economic-oriented New Deal programs. The New Deal doesn’t think in terms of racial inequality, it doesn’t think in terms of religious prejudice. It centers economic class, for better and for worse. And so Humphrey then goes to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, solely because they’re offering him 400 bucks at LSU to be a graduate assistant, and he really desperately needs the money.

WT: I have to say real quickly, as a former graduate student, it was fun to read the parts of him scraping along the teaching assistantships and all the other stuff that he had to go through. You don’t imagine a presidential candidate having to do that. But he did.

SF: Yeah, 400 bucks for TA-ing classes. His wife, Muriel, was normally working but they had a baby daughter, Nancy. She would make sandwiches at home and either go to the campus or send them with Hubert to sell to his classmates for a dime or a quarter, whatever they could get for a ham sandwich. That was part of how they managed to make the rent. But Humphrey goes and, for the first time, he’s plunged into a Jim Crow society. And it’s not just that he sees the separate waiting rooms and water fountains and the back of the bus, but he really remembers these individual degrading moments. Black pedestrians crossing the street too slowly for the satisfaction of a white motorist who just reviles him with the N word in front of everybody. It’s a complete humiliation. And that stays with Humphrey, those kinds of episodes. And then he also makes Jewish friends for the first time in his life, including a debate team teammate, who tells Humphrey about having five uncles who are trapped in Eastern Europe, under Nazi control, all of whom are going to be exterminated. That’s the beginning of Humphrey—at a time when America is very isolationist—really understanding the vulnerability of Jewish people.

And then what ties it all together—this is really remarkable to me—is Humphrey does a seminar during the whole academic year with a professor named Rudolf Heberle. And Heberle is this one-eighth Jewish, anti-Nazi sociologist, who had begun studying—in the early 1930s—the process that Germany went from being a democracy to a dictatorship because that question, “How could that have happened?” tormented him. And he’s kicked out of Germany for that and his partial Jewish ancestry, even though he’s converted to Christianity long ago. He is penniless, he’s scrambling to find somewhere to work and settle his family and ends up in Baton Rouge at LSU.

And in the class Humphrey has with him Heberle, he’s talking about his research, which he’s in the process of writing in a book form. Heberle talks about his family’s personal experiences, and Heberle draws a direct parallel between the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany and Blacks in the Jim Crow South. And these experiences that Humphrey has in Baton Rouge just give him a moral vision that he didn’t have in that same way before. They don’t replace his concern with economic inequality but they map on it and for him through his whole career. It’s not like you have a choice between dealing with economic and class issues and dealing with racial and religious bigotry. He sees them as part of a greater liberal whole. And that’s what he brings back to Minneapolis with him.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Han Mallek. Photograph of Samuel G. Freedman by Gabriela Bhaskar.

*

SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights • Breaking the Line • Letters to a Young Journalist

OTHERS:

Robert Caro • Michael Shapiro • A Campus Divided by Riv-Ellen Prell • Sam Scheiner • Cecil Newman • Charles Lindbergh • Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota • The Call • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6 Episode 6: “Nancy Pelosi’s Majority: Matthew Clark Davison’s San Francisco Take on a National Leader” • “75 years ago, Hubert H. Humphrey called for Dems to ‘walk into the bright sunshine of human rights’” by Cathy Wurzer and Gretchen Brown | Minnesota Public Radio