Tuesday, August 1, 2023

Writing Historical Biography: An Interview with Rebecca Boggs Roberts

This post is an interview with Rebecca Boggs Roberts, author of the eye-opening and highly enjoyable biography, Untold Power: The Fascinating Rise and Complex Legacy of First Lady Edith Wilson.

Rebecca Boggs Roberts
Zack Rogow: What was the greatest challenge you faced in writing a biography of Edith Bolling Wilson?

Rebecca Boggs Roberts: There were two big, related challenges. One was the challenge common to many writers who want to tell women’s stories: no one paid much attention to Edith before she married the President in 1915. For much of her life, the only primary source I had was Edith’s own memoir. But that memoir, while delightful, is, at times, demonstrably untrue. So the second challenge is that Edith was an unreliable narrator of her own story.

 

ZR: You begin the book not at the start of Edith Bolling Wilson’s life, but with a dramatic moment in 1919 after President Wilson’s stroke, when his wife successfully concealed her husband’s incapacity from leaders of the U.S. Congress. What made you chose that moment to begin the biography?

 

RBR: It’s a completely bonkers scene: All the President’s Men meets Weekend at Bernie’s. If I couldn’t grab readers’ attention with that episode, it was hopeless. I wanted readers to finish that scene and think, “How did things get to that point? What the heck was going on?” and desperately want to read the rest of it.


ZR: We are used to reading about New York society in the Gilded Age, and the world of the Boston Brahmins. Edith Bolling Wilson came of age and flourished in Washington DC, which had its own distinctive social scene. What made DC society different, and how did that benefit or hinder Edith?

 RBR: Gilded Age Washington was absolutely booming with new money and new plans. The city was less than a century old and the social arbiters often changed with administrations, so there was much more space for social mobility that there was in the confines of Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. Think of Countess Olenska in Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence. Countess Olenska relocates to DC because New York is too conventional. Edith Bolling Wilson didn’t have the Countess’ resources, but she had the same instinct for self-invention.

 

ZR: There’s an intriguing passage in the book’s introduction where you say, “She [Edith Bolling Wilson] is not a hero; she is also not a villain. Very few people in American history are either, and I believe that our collective insistence on picking one category or the other for all of our most influential people has left us (at best) confused about how and through whom our history is made.” I agree with much of that statement, but how are we then to make judgments about the past that will improve our actions in the present, if we just see everyone as complex individuals? 

 

RBR: Is the alternative seeing everyone as stock characters? What can we possibly learn from that? Seeing someone as a complex individual does not preclude judging them. In fact, it gives you better information to make a more informed judgment. And if we require everyone who has had a positive impact on history to be a saint, we risk alienating all future potential agents of social change. Why try to change the word if you are convinced that you need to be a once-in-a-generation genius angel to do so? I think the fact that historical characters are flawed is liberating.

 

ZR: One fascinating fact you discuss in your biography is that Edith Bolling Wilson was the first woman in Washington DC licensed to drive a car and an electric automobile. How did you find that out, and where did you get the details about her zipping around Washington in an electric car?

 

RBR: The actual license survives at Edith’s birthplace museum in Wytheville, Virginia. Researching the history of electric cars was a delightful tangent. I found some original ads for them in early twentieth-century newspapers, clearly aimed at wealthy urban women, since “little electrics” were not as smelly or cumbersome as gas vehicles. Car makers advertised bud vases on the dash and a top speed of thirteen miles an hour. Edith became known for her car—several memoirs of the time by society women like Dolly Gann and Ellen Maury Slayton mention her zipping around town.

 

ZR: When you’re doing historical research for a book like this one, you can easily go down “rabbit holes”—sidetracks only tangentially related to the main story. How do you know whether an interesting lead is a detour, or a direction that provides a new approach to the story?

 

RBR: Every rabbit hole seems fascinating at the time (see the history of electric cars, above)! The act of falling down those holes and burrowing into obscure archives is totally addictive to research nerds like me. I particularly had to curb my enthusiasm for the history of Washington DC. Every time a specific location came up in Edith’s story, I wanted to know the entire history of the building, the neighborhood, and the inhabitants. You lose all critical distance after a while. If anyone wants to know more about the Dupont Circle area a hundred years ago, I stand ready to describe it block by block.

 

ZR: The current political climate is very judgmental when it comes to figures in the past who do not measure up to our current standards of correctness. How did you handle the aspects of Edith’s life, and Woodrow Wilson’s career, that now seem unjust and wrongheaded?

 

RBR: It’s really hard not to judge past actors through contemporary standards. For Woodrow Wilson, he was racist and sexist in his own time—he resegregated the Civil Service after it had integrated under previous administrations, and he continued to oppose women’s suffrage long after his peers supported it. So it’s not current standards of correctness that he fails to measure up to. Edith was also racist. The “darkie” jokes she told and Lost Cause mythology she used for the Civil War might have been more acceptable in her time, but you can’t argue that she wasn’t bigoted. My goal was to simply tell the truth, as far as I could verify it, and not try to either sugarcoat or demonize. I think readers are smart enough to judge for themselves.

 

ZR: Untold Power also has untold humor. There are so many laugh-out-loud anecdotes, including the hilarious bit about the sheep that grazed the White House lawn during World War I to save energy and produce wool for the war effort. How did you mix in humor without diminishing the seriousness of the issues of Edith Bolling Wilson’s time?

 

RBR: This is a corollary of the argument that historical figures are complex humans. Historical eras are complex times. Edith herself was very funny – I love her description of French President Raymond Poincaré leading her into a diplomatic dinner in Paris and feeling “like a big liner with a tiny tug pushing her out from her moorings.”

 

ZR: At the end of her life, what would Edith Bolling Wilson say was her greatest accomplishment or legacy? What would you say was her greatest accomplishment or legacy?

 

RBR: Unquestionably, she would say her greatest accomplishment, the work of her life, was protecting and curating the legacy of Woodrow Wilson. As we find ourselves revising that legacy in contemporary times, it continues to amaze me how much of his reputation as the Great Moral Visionary of Global Peace was a result of Edith’s myth-making.

 

I would say her greatest accomplishment is steering the nation through a crisis in leadership all the while pretending she was doing nothing of the kind. You don’t have to admire her actions to be impressed by her. And as part of that, her legacy must be to serve as an example of the kind of compromises ambitious women have made over time, and how they have operated outside the Hall of Fame model of history to enact social change. If any reader of Untold Power takes the opportunity to rethink who gets to make history and how, then that is no small feat.

 

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent book of translations, Bérenice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introductionthe Sonnetthe Sestinathe Ghazalthe Tankathe Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry


Saturday, July 22, 2023

How to Move on to the Next Creative Project

Whether you are a writer or you’re involved in another art, it can be difficult to make the transition from one major project to another. That is particularly the case when an artist has gotten some recognition for a series that took years to create. There is tremendous satisfaction in finishing a body of work, but that completion also poses a question: How can you now equal or improve on the originality and power of your last project? 

And what if you’re not fully satisfied with your most recent works? What if time has now given you the distance to see the flaws or shortcomings of your previous creations? Now that you realize how high the bar is set, how can you trust yourself to do better in the future, if that’s the peak you reached last time?

 

All those self doubts can be paralyzing for an artist. How do you get past them?

 

One useful answer for these dilemmas is in the work of the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772–1837).


Charles Fourier
Fourier believed that all humans have a “butterfly passion,” almost a physical craving for variation and change:
 

“The alternating or butterfly [passion] is the need for regular variety, contrasting situations, change of scenery, spicy encounters, and novelties that give rise to fantasies, that stimulate both the senses and the soul….[The butterfly passion] is the agent of universal transition, the principle of liberty…”

—Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements

 

When you get stuck between projects, set loose your creative butterfly. Allow your thoughts to flit to every possible flowering of your imagination. Enjoy the process of generating different ideas that take on colors and shapes you’ve never before considered.


Starting a new project is like traveling to a country you’ve never visited. But don’t expect that it’s going to be thrilling while you’re still on the long line at the airport security checkpoint. Give that new idea time and space, so that it can surprise you, and lead you places you never planned to see.

If you’re stuck after a big project, it can be extremely tempting to repeat what you’ve done in the past, particularly if you’ve gotten praise and acclaim for recent work. But there is nothing deadlier for art than repetition. You have to cut the ropes that dock you to past successes and failures and set sail, even if there is no land in sight yet. You’re actually in much better shape to complete your next project successfully, because you now have the knowledge you’ve carefully collected throughout your career in the arts.


Friday, June 23, 2023

Killing Dumbledore: Why main characters have to resolve plots

I couldn’t believe it when J.K. Rowling killed off the greatest wizard, Albus Dumbledore, at the end of book six, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Dumbledore was my favorite character in that series of books. He was not only the most skilled wizard, he was the perfect teacher for Harry Potter. Dumbledores was stern, a tough taskmaster, yet you knew that he had Harry’s best interests at heart and cared deeply for his pupil. Without Dumbledore’s abilities, how could the concluding book seven show Good triumphing over the forces of Evil, personified by Voldemort and his minions?

Michael Gambon as Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies
But that is precisely why it was brilliant of J.K. Rowling to have Dumbledore succumb before the end of the Harry Potter series. She was not writing Albus Dumbledore and the Deathly Hallows, she was writing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It was essential for Harry and his friends to solve the problem of the Death Eaters themselves. If Dumbledore had just stepped in, out-dueled Voldemort, and finished off the chief villain, there would have been no challenge, no plot. It’s vital for the main characters of a story to resolve the plot dilemma themselves.

J.K. Rowling
If the author chooses to have a deus ex machina step in and pull strings from above to solve the problem in the narrative, the reader or viewer feels cheated. It’s as if two people were playing a chess match, and someone from the outside stepped in and gave Black a second queen. That’s simply not how the game is played. Whenever I’ve read or seen a plot where the main characters are extraneous to resolving their own issues, I feel deflated, and as if I’ve been cheated.

When you’re writing a plot, you have to keep in mind who your main characters are. They are the ones who have to untangle the issues that the narrative is following, even if you have to shove off the stage the most interesting, charismatic, powerful, or witty character. This is particularly true in literature for children and young adults, where the kids have to resolve the difficulties, and not the adults.

 

In any case, a larger-than-life character such as Albus Dumbledore is not necessarily the one readers identify with as strongly as the protagonist, and not necessarily the one readers root for most ardently. The hero/heroine, more like us, with our flaws and fears, is the one who has to face down the antagonist in the end, in order for the drama to work its magic.


Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent book of translations, Bérenice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introductionthe Sonnetthe Sestinathe Ghazalthe Tankathe Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry


Sunday, June 11, 2023

Why Ron DeSantis Is Wrong about Western Civilization

In a January 2023 press release, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called for legislation to “ensure Florida’s public universities and colleges are grounded in the history and philosophy of Western Civilization…” Some of DeSantis’ ideas were then incorporated in to Florida Senate Bill 266, which passed the legislature and was signed into law by DeSantis in May 2023. What DeSantis’ views and the Florida law ignore is that a university education cannot be complete or true if the curriculum emphasizes only “Western Civilization.”

To begin with, “Western Civilization” cannot be properly understood or appreciated in isolation from the rest of the world. Take one key facet of “Western Civilization”: Christianity. That religion began in the Middle East, and it developed primarily out of spiritual traditions outside the West, including Judaism. In fact, none of the world’s major religions started in Western Europe or the United States, so a university education “grounded in the history and philosophy of Western Civilization” leaves out most spiritual traditions, among so many other things.

Take another example, this one from literature. What could be more quintessential about the literature of “Western Civilization” than the work of Shakespeare? The sonnet structure that Shakespeare used for most of his poems developed in Sicily during the 13th century CE. It was highly influenced by the ghazal, a poetic form created in neighboring Arab lands, a form that dates from the five centuries earlier than the sonnet. Not only that, rhymed poetry like the sonnet didn’t even exist in “Western Civilization” until the Middle Ages—Homer and Virgil didn’t write in rhyme. Western European poets borrowed rhyme from Arabic poetry, and from the verses of the Qu’ran, when Muslim civilization was flourishing in Spain.

Don’t even get me started on Shakespeare and the ridiculous set of laws that conservatives have enacted or proposed to limit drag shows. Do the reactionaries advocating that censorship realize that every female character in a Shakespeare play was performed in the Bard’s time by a man in drag, from Juliet to Cordelia to Queen Gertrude? If you really want to talk about “Western Civilization,” you can’t possibly discuss it without talking about the importance of female impersonators.

Another example: the democratic system in the United States, presumably a feature of “Western Civilization” that DeSantis believes in, was highly influenced by the organizing principles of the Iroquois Confederacy, which date back to the 12th century. To explain American democracy without that context is misleading and untrue.

Not only is it wrong intellectually to view “Western Civilization” in a vacuum, it is also extremely limiting for students. Why should students not learn about many of the world’s religions, philosophies, and cultures, and grow to appreciate the best in each tradition? If those in the West want to understand their own culture in three dimensions, one great way to do that is to step outside it and see it from the standpoint of other societies.

The current right-wing obsession with “Western Civilization” has little to do with education and truthfulness, and everything to do with race. By “Western Civilization,” politicians like DeSantis really mean White culture. The phrase “Western Civilization” serves as a dog-whistle to inform reactionary Caucasians that their interests and culture will be favored under a Republican administration. Not only that, the campaign of reactionaries in the United States and elsewhere to favor “Western Civilization” is scarily reminiscent of the Nazis banning culture that they considered “decadent,” namely any art not created by Aryans.

The Republicans and their allies outside the United States are hawking a myth. “Western Civilization,” like all civilizations, has great strengths and weaknesses, but it cannot have meaning and depth without understanding it in the context of world culture. Why deprive students of the full spectrum of global history and philosophy? By expanding the latitudes and longitudes of our knowledge, we only deepen our understanding of all cultures. And that should be the goal of a university education.


Sunday, April 9, 2023

Writing Poems from Childhood Memories: An Interview with Jeanne Wagner

This post is an interview with the writer Jeanne Wagner, who has created many powerful poems based on childhood memories.


Jeanne Wagner
Jeanne Wagner’s poetry collections have great titles: The Zen Piano-mover, which won the NFSPS Poetry Prize; In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press; and most recently, Everything Turns Into Something Else, published in 2020 as runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize. She is the winner of the 2021 Joy Harjo Award and the 2022 Cloudbank Poetry Prize. Here is the poem by Jeanne that we discuss in this blog:

A Private History of Light

 

I was a shy girl who wanted

a soft light, a sieved light,  

the penury of starlight strained

through an infinite sky.

I thought light should be holy,

nestled in small red jars

we lit for a nickel to smell

the sweet paraffin

softening beneath the flame.

I wanted a nun-light

that lived in the convent’s

honey-scented floor wax

so the sisters could apply

the glint of their God

on their hands and knees.

Not those garish palettes

shouting from billboards and

TV screens their technicolor

desires. Not the bright

flit of cardinal wings

launching from the feeder.

Not yet, they all said, not yet.

Certainly not those carnal

sunsets, red as pain.

A woman’s color.

 

Zack Rogow: What kind of experiences from your childhood seem to lend themselves to becoming poems? With a based on childhood, do you base it on one incident, or on a series of memories?

 

Jeanne Wagner: Usually I base a poem on an isolated memory – my earliest memories are very intense and visual. In the case of “A Private History of Light,” I’ve based it on memories of lighting candles in church and of once sitting on the convent stairs, admiring the smooth, golden surface of the wood, the freshness and purity of it, which even then I saw as a kind of lovely artifice, like stained glass windows and choir music. Elements that contrasted with the life around me.

 

Q: In your poems, the imagery is from your childhood, but it feels so immediate. How do you take a private, personal memory and turn it into something a reader can experience directly?

 

JW: Well, first I trust the memory’s sensuous capabilities, which make it survive. Also, I don’t believe that memories are random, but are created in a binary system of pleasure or pain that is automatically triggered to help us survive. I have to relive the memory, put it under my mental microscope and examine what made it so imperative that it has lasted a lifetime. Then there is usually some more contemporary image I want to pair it with. The motive for the poem. That’s the difficult part, fusing these two worlds without seeming labored and obvious.

 

Q: You’re skilled at using active and distinctive language that conveys motion. In “A Private History of Light,” I see the words strained, nestled, softening, shouting, flit, launching. How do you find the right word to make a description come alive?

 

JW: Interesting that you pointed this out. I notice that most of those words are participles or adverbs. I do tend to use a lot of those, rather than adjectives. Adjectives are more static. It’s a way, I suppose, of instilling motion in a scene which is primarily visual.

 

Q: Would you say there’s an unspoken tension in this poem between two opposing world views or realms of experience: a softly lit religious retreat from the world, and a brightly lit realm of vitality that is also associated with pain? How did those two realms crystalize as the poem formed in your mind? Should a poem create a dialectic between conflicting world views?

 

JW: When I started this poem, I had been trying to write a poem about the color red, my early experiences and reactions to it. I found myself choosing images from my parochial school background. My poems, especially my childhood poems, often center on the conflict between the sacramental, abstract principles of the Catholic church and the unbalanced, but vivid home life of my childhood. That dialectic is always very near the surface, because religion deals with the primary transitions of life: birth, marriage, death, and everyone’s favorite, sex. A poem doesn’t have to have a dialectic between two worlds, but poems do need a kind of tension or a turning point or an implicit analogy. Even narrative poems, if well done, will find themselves working against the world of ordinary expectations or reactions.

 

Q: There is a surprising turn at the end of “A Private History of Light” where you describe red as the color of pain, “A woman’s color.” That mention of gender seems to come out of nowhere, and yet it fits the poem. At what point in your writing process did that become the ending of the poem, and how did you prepare the reader for it without tipping your hand?

JW: The writer Stephen Dunn once said that a poet should always know the ending before beginning the poem. Unfortunately, I don’t always live up to that. But in this poem, the red worked as a final image for me because it is the color childbirth and menstruation. That came to me suddenly as the heart of the poem: the inherent wounds of women, which are internal and recurring.


Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent book of translations, Bérenice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introductionthe Sonnetthe Sestinathe Ghazalthe Tankathe Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry