David Perry returns to talk with Kate about his new book, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook. If you’ve ever been curious about writing essays or op-eds, but are unsure where to get started, David’s book should answer pretty much any question you can dream up. I think this book is hugely helpful, and I was glad to hear more from David about why he wrote it—and to get answers to a few more burning questions about public scholarship (or, you know, just a pep talk).
When David first joined me on Drafting the Past during the show’s first season in 2022, we talked about The Bright Ages: A New History of Europe that he had just published with co-writer Matthew Gabriele. I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that episode, Episode 10. It’s especially inspiring for anyone interested in co-writing or who does not find writing to come to them naturally. Since that conversation, David and Matthew have co-authored a second book called Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe. And David has continued to write prolifically for the public. He has also been enthusiastic about giving other scholars the tools to do the same, and he started offering a workshop on public writing for university faculty and graduate students. Now, he’s bringing that advice to all of us in a short, essential book called The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook.
Mentioned in this episode:
- David’s website
- David M. Perry, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook
- Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe
- Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, The Bright Ages: A New History of Europe
- Matthew and David’s newsletter, Modern Medieval
- Drafting the Past Episode 10: David M. Perry Writes Out Loud
- David’s Star Tribune column about Irish music: “This St. Patrick’s Day, don’t forget Irish music’s anti-fascist roots”
- The Instagram reel promoting his column that we talked about at the start of the episode
- Tressie McMillan Cottom
- Irina Dumitrescu
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I’m host Kate Carpenter. Often on this show, we focus on the books that historians have written, with occasional dips into other types of public facing writing. But I think there are many historians who would like to try writing short pieces like essays or op-eds to share some of what they know, but they’re not entirely sure where to start. The whole process seems a little confusing, unclear, and maybe intimidating. Fortunately, Dr. David Perry has literally written the book on how to delve into this kind of public scholarship. I invited him back on the show to talk with me about it.
David Perry 0:37
I'm thrilled to be here.
Kate Carpenter 0:39
When David first joined me on Drafting the Past during the show’s first season in 2022, we talked about The Bright Ages: A New History of Europe that he had just published with co-writer Matthew Gabriele. We also talked about the many essays and op-eds that he had written for public outlets. I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that episode, Episode 10. It’s especially inspiring for anyone interested in co-writing or who does not find writing to come to them naturally. Since that conversation, David and Matthew have co-authored a second book called Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe. And David has continued to write prolifically for the public. He has also been enthusiastic about giving other scholars the tools to do the same, and he started offering a workshop on public writing for university faculty and graduate students. Now, he’s bringing that advice to all of us in a short, essential book called The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook. I asked David to come back on the show to talk to me about this book and ask for some encouragement for nervous potential public scholars. Here’s our conversation.
Kate Carpenter 1:41
So we're going to do things a little differently, since you've been here before, but I will first ask you, has anything changed about your writing process since the last time we talked?
David Perry 1:51
Well, full disclosure, we were just discussing this, but I'm, I am pivoting to, I'm pivoting to video, as they say, by which I mean I'm, I'm writing for this local news, my local newspaper now, the Star Tribune, and one of the things they're experimenting with is pairing, kind of a one minute video with essays when there's good content. And I did an essay about a rock show. So, as you might expect, there's good content and about and about history and about Irish music and about St Patrick's Day and so, so that's a whole I'm thinking about writing. What happens when you try to distill what you're doing to six sentences and 50 seconds of video and images, which is, you know, the video selection, that's also writing. I don't know if that's changed about my writing process, but I sure am thinking about it right now as we talk like, what does that look like? What do I do differently? So it's, it's fun.
Kate Carpenter 2:43
That's fascinating. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna look it up once they, once they put it up so I can kind of, kind of see, like how you translated that piece into the video. I'm super excited to have you here to talk about your new book, The Public Scholar. First of all, could you just, what is this book? Tell us what it is.
David Perry 2:59
Yeah. So this is a short book, 35,000 words, in which I am trying to lay out all of the information and techniques and ideas and answers to questions and a few manifestos and other sorts of things about how to do public scholarship, focusing particularly on writing, though, it doesn't have to be writing. Focusing particularly on people with academic expertise of some sort, but that doesn't mean faculty, and it doesn't even mean PhDs or MFAs, if that's the terminal degree. It doesn't mean a terminal degree in a field, necessarily, but it is for people who have spent a lot of time thinking about something and studying and doing the work, and then want to write in public, either for bigger public audiences, either about that topic or related to that topic, or about something else, but using the same skills. So I write about history a lot. I'm a historian, but I'm only, you know, one type of historian, as we all are. I'm a medieval historian, but I do, I'm writing about Irish music and Irish history right now, so you know, that's fine, but also write about my son who has Down Syndrome and Medicaid policy. And I argue these are kind of all public scholarship. So it's really a book about the how, and I think it's the first book on this kind of thing that just says, here's how you interact with editors. Here's how you write a pitch email. Here's how you structure an essay. There's a lot of people, many much smarter and better writers than me, who have written about the importance of the public intellectual or the problems of the public intellectual. There's a 40 year at least discourse on that latter one, you know, including Edward Said and other other true luminaries. But I just wanted to, I've been doing this workshop. So I guess the better answer is, for the last 10 years, I've been doing a workshop. I go to colleges and universities and other groups, and I say, here's how you write your pitch. Okay, write a pitch. Here's what's good, here's what I would change. I say, now, here's how you write an essay. All right. Draft an essay. Let's talk about leads. Let's talk about news hooks. Let's talk about rebuttals and okay, now you've sold an essay. Let's talk about getting paid. Let's talk about social media. Let's talk about expanding from an essay. I've been doing these workshops, and I like them. I think they're good. I think that people learn something. And definitely there have been people who have succeeded, and now I've put that down in book form, so you can still hire me to come to your campus, but also people could buy this book.
Kate Carpenter 5:25
I really like about this book that you don't just tell people how to pitch and how to write pieces, which, of course, is important, but it's advice that's also out there, but you also kind of talk about the entire spectrum of the public scholarship process, from like figuring out what you might want to talk about to getting paid and how to send good emails to editors. And I think those are all things that are sort of like, you know, in academia, we talk about, like, the secret curriculum, you know, or the hidden curriculum. There's kind of a hidden curriculum of public scholarship too. And I like that. You really shine a light on that.
David Perry 5:59
Yeah, absolutely, it's absolutely it's absolutely a hidden curriculum, and it's not unusual to us, as you say, as academics. And that's one of my big arguments. A lot of the "academics should write for public" kind of writing is very much based on the assumption that academics can't write and that academic writers are bad, but need to be good. Or, I don't know, there's, my whole life there's been this. And I think that's sort of nonsense. What I'm really interested in is that academics develop skills to understand how genres work, understand how systems work. And by systems, I don't mean just sort of intellectually studying systems. But how do grants work in your field? How does publication work in your field? What are the different kinds of presses? You know? What do you have to write to get published in one type of journal versus another. What is a cover letter? What needs to go into a cover letter for a job application? And clearly, access to that information and training is not equal. There's the whole hidden curriculum in academic jobs world and these sorts of things. All of those skills that people use to learn how to write a book review in your discipline are the same skills to learn how to write this kind of thing, my kind of public essay, but they are, it is different content. You have to actually do the work, and you have to know to do the work, which people don't even know. They have to do the work unless someone tells them. So I'm telling them and then modeling it, hopefully.
Kate Carpenter 7:16
Yeah. I mean, you've been modeling it for years for us, so I love that, that you've written this book to kind of bring all that knowledge together. I want to know, I know, I know out there are academics, or maybe even non academics, who are listening to this and thinking, cool. This sounds great. I'm glad he's written this book. Also, it sounds terrifying, though, like I don't I don't know if I could do it. I don't know if I could write for the public. What would you say to those people?
David Perry 7:39
Well, every time we go into a classroom, we're doing something analogous to this. That doesn't mean going to a classroom isn't scary. It can be very scary, particularly when one starts or in new contexts. But we are doing this kind of work in many ways. That's more important than what I'm talking about, I think in almost all the ways, at least it potentially can be. And so if you're comfortable, if you become comfortable doing that, even if comfortable means a lot of stage fright first. You know, I know musicians who, I'm a musician. I know musicians who have never felt stage fright, and I know musicians who need to go vomit before they get on stage. But that has nothing to do with whether they do it or not, right? It's about a process. So if you can do that teaching, then you can do this. I can also say that the risks are real, though not-- the worst case scenarios that people have heard about are are extreme outliers. The best case scenarios people have heard about are also extreme outliers. You know, the ones where people get famous and win huge awards, and I mean, I'm I'm really lucky to have a blurb from Tressie McMillan Cottom, who I would say is a positive outlier on a scale that is just almost unthinkable to me, right? MacArthur awards, big jobs, New York Times columns that also is really unlike, you know, National Book Award, right? Or finalist. Like that, that also is not likely to happen, but the the worst case scenarios of harassment driving you to leave your home, losing, loss of job, those things are also very unlikely to happen. So what we're really talking about is mostly a much smaller margin of possible outcomes, and the negative outcomes are real, but mostly sustainable. I do get hate mail. I got a letter today that I thought was going to be hate mail, but actually it was about praying for this country. I have not read the whole letter. It's 12 pages long. There's a lot of, there's a lot of prayer in there. So, you know, that's that's fine, but I get hate mail. I get I get threats. It's not fun, but, um, it's not terrible usually, and it is usually not terrible for other people in my space, though, it's not fun. Positive outcomes too. They can be very they can be really big. They can be small. But you can actually change minds. You can have a legislator tell you, you know, I was thinking about your family when I wrote this law, not just my family, but you know, in the conversation, you can have someone say, you know, I didn't know that about Irish music. I'd never listened to the music, but now I'm listening differently. It's pretty good, right? So it's teaching as well, and and I just think that these, I don't want to say that anyone has to do it. I get really mad when people try to place my writing in conflict with specialized scholarship. I don't think there's any conflict there, but I do want to say it's possible to do it, and that many of us want to at least on some level, and that it's possible to do a kind of writing that is informed, that is significant, that is creative, that is not limited by the boundaries of formal academic writing, and that can be really, that can be really worth doing, and it doesn't have to be all encompassing. Just to say, like, I have now written 600 essays or some, some number. I don't know what it is, but my first six years on the job as a faculty member, I wrote three essays. And that's really what I'm hoping people will do is at a moment where they have something to say that they really want to say they have the tools to do it, as opposed to just, which was what my other mode is, yelling on Facebook or whatever or social media or in my kitchen or whatever else I might be yelling, right, that they have the tools to do it if they want to.
Kate Carpenter 10:56
Fantastic. I also wanted to ask you, again, for those people listening who are throwing up their hands in protest about the question of time, because this does not come up a lot in the book, but I know it's something that people will point out fairly, is that people are busy. Now, I know that you are busy. You have a full time job, you have a family, are a caretaker. You write a lot, not only, you know, in essays and articles, but you also co write popular history books with Matthew Gabriele, which is what we were talking about the first time you appeared on the show. You are working on another book that we can talk about at the end. Anyway, the point is that it's not like you have loads of free time on your hands. How do you make time for this kind of writing?
David Perry 11:38
You know, I really started doing it when I was a full time professor. So now I'm staff, and that is a different kind of job. With, it takes, it's more hours and more structure, but takes a little less of my brain. So we can kind of put that to the side. I'm happy to talk about being a writer with a day job. I recommend it. But, um, I was a professor at a teaching school, three-three load, so not the highest, but not the lowest. And where teaching really was what the school was all about. And for me, I had ideas. I had thoughts. I had things I wanted to write down, and there was just no way during a semester to do my research or writing about my research. I'm a medievalist. My research, my sources, are in Latin or Greek or sometimes medieval French, occasionally, you know, late medieval Venetian. And I'm just not good enough with languages to finish teaching a class, answer a couple emails, sit down, open my files and start reading handwritten Latin. I just can't do it. Maybe there are people who can, but I cannot. So I found during my early years as a professor, I just from September to December, I would do no writing, and then from February to May, I would do no writing. And that was okay. I was getting writing done in the summer. I did. I sort of inched towards my book. I wrote a couple articles. I could kind of write conference papers if I really planned it out, but those rarely were about original research, right? But more about summarizing or new, arguments based on the work that are done. I just couldn't do the thinking. But I could write these. I could write these. They're short. They're 800 to 1000 words. That's sort of my length. Some people write a little longer, but these, this kind of writing, occupied a different part of my brain. And in fact, if I wanted to write while also being very busy, this was the writing that I could do, and I'm really lucky to have found it.
Kate Carpenter 13:20
I also want to talk a little bit about ideas and inspiration. You talk in the book about how you could apply, sort of the topic of your research to things that come up in the news, which is awesome, but you also write about a lot of other things. And you note in the book like, you don't just, you don't just have to write about the narrowly focused area that you are an expert in. But I think that a lot of people think, like, I don't have that much else to say that is interesting. And I wanted to ask you how you think about coming up with new ideas. And especially, it becomes clear in the book that you have a regular writing practice, and that that is is part of it, that you're always kind of thinking in terms of what are interesting things that I'm thinking about. What do you advise for people who want to generate more ideas?
David Perry 14:02
Well, read. Read people who are producing work analogous to what you want to produce, and see what they're doing. And you, in many, I often say you have no business trying to write things you're not reading. That is a kind of hubris that at least I don't have, and I don't think anyone should have. You should read the things you want to write. And there are things that I'd be interested in writing that I don't really read like I don't know. I don't read very many science fiction short stories, and I've drafted a couple of them, and I'm pretty sure that if I gave a couple years of my life, they would improve. I don't know if they'd be good, but they would improve. But I haven't. I haven't done that work. There's labor here. I think you and I have talked about this, but most people don't necessarily know I'm dyslexic, and writing in graduate school was terrible. I liked learning, but writing was terrible. Writing even in the first couple years of my academic career, was terrible. Some writing is still very hard for me. My relationship with language is very fraught. But I started doing this work and really committing to it in 2013, I remember saying to my brother and sister in law in June of 2013, no, I really want to do this, and thinking about how I could get better at it. And so I started a blog. The key thing with the blog is that it's on a platform you control. There is no quality control other than that which you impose, which can be dangerous, but also can be liberating. And I would just read things, and I would think, do I have anything to say? I would look for something to say, and then I'd write a couple sentences down. And then if I had more I'd write three or four more sentences. Then often I just hit post. Sometimes I would just hit delete. But that I built a daily writing practice for for, I don't know, five or six years, so years to really become more skilled at moving from a vague sense of things to sentences that someone else might read. And I don't know that you have to do that, but it is what I did. And then it gets faster and throughout this book, and I'm not the only one. I use the analogy of, I've already done it today, of teaching that I think the the thing that is most analogous to this kind of writing is preparing and delivering a class rather than writing a university press monograph. That is a very different kind of part of my brain. When we start teaching in grad school, I remember the first time I had to teach my own class. I put a lot of hours into every class, a lot of hours, way more hours than I need if it was a 50 minute class, I probably had four hours of material ready to go. I probably had, you know, I don't know how many hours to prep for each class. I put in enormous amounts of work in for each class. And now, if you said, Hey, David, it's 1145 right now, at two o'clock, I need you to go teach about the investiture controversy. So that's a medieval thing. I'd say, Sure. I would take 30 minutes. I'd pull together some things. I'd grab some sources. I'd skim them. I've read them before. I pretty much know what I know right now, what I want to say about the investiture controversy, and I'd go do it. You know, it'd be fine. It'd be good class. I think I could do it right now. If I didn't need a PowerPoint, I think I could do it right now. Let's not though. You know, that's because I've practiced, not because I'm a brilliant teacher, but because I've practiced and this kind of work, I've practiced and gotten better at it and gotten faster at it and gotten better at just seeing framing in in events that I want to talk about. So, you know, I was thinking about, I'm an Irish musician. We have St Patrick's Day coming up. We're having this conversation in March. One of my favorite bands, the Dropkick Murphy's was coming to town, and I was thinking about Irish history and about anti colonial music and anti occupation music, about a song The Fields of Athenry, a great song that people do in pubs everywhere, but also that the Dropkick Murphy's, this punk band, delivers a pretty straight version of that I know. It's a song about breaking up families and deporting one of them to a country they don't know, it's in Australia in this case. Well, you know, here I am in Minnesota. It's a different kind of story, in some ways, but in other ways, it's not so. Suddenly, I have an essay, right? Everything I just said to you are things I'm just thinking about. I'm thinking about this concert. I want to go to it. I want to see the band. Suddenly, I've got an essay. The essay is visible in my head, but that's not a day one level. I might have had to do a little more thinking, a little more working before I can see the essay. But it's also not, it's really not that hard. It's just, it is a practice. You have to build it, and then you get better at it.
Kate Carpenter 18:13
Okay, this leads into my next sort of, like, I guess, sort of straw man protest question, and really, all of my anxieties are just on display in these questions. So if anyone, if anyone wants, to plumb my psyche, that's how. But, you know, I told you ahead of this, and I often joke, but actually I'm very serious, and say that there's a mean academic who lives in my head that whenever I'm trying to write something, that person is pointing out all of the flaws in my argument. They're saying, like, this isn't original, so-and-so wrote a book on this 20 years ago. What right do you have to talk about this? You're not an expert in this subject. What advice do you have for people, and by people, I mean me, who have an internal mean academic?
David Perry 18:52
So first of all, I want to be clear, this is not a joke. My first answer, which is therapy.
Kate Carpenter 18:57
Yes.
David Perry 18:57
I have a therapist, right? I have, I have a long history of mental health issues. I have a therapist. I haven't actually seen her lately because things have been pretty stable, but I'm sure that will change, and I will be seeing her again. Adequate mental health support, community support, whatever that looks like for people I actually think is really important. There's a lot of jokes about men not going to therapy. I do not write essays instead of going to therapy. I write essays because I go to therapy, and I think that's really, really I mean, it's fun to make the jokes, but it's not a joke. I do think again, just to reiterate, teaching, right? We teach about things that are not. I mean, I never teach a class about Venetian relics and hagiography from 1190 to 1267, I've never been invited to teach that class, and if I did, I might be bad at it without a lot of practice, because I have too much to say, right? We teach about things we care about and that we think are interesting and that we are informed about, but that, you know, maybe we don't write university press monographs about, and that's okay, because that's not the job of the teacher. Or to only teach the thing that they're they're very narrow on and if you're at a research university, you get to be a little more narrow. And if you're at the kind of school where I was at, where I had antiquity to the early modern period. And I did teach a little though modern as well. And we did not have anyone who was an expert in Asia, so the the Africanist, and I figured out what we could teach about Asia, because we thought that might be important for our students, but it wasn't what, you know, we just didn't we didn't have the faculty line, no one. We had no one else to teach it. So it had to be us. And you do the reading, and you think really hard, and you talk about it, and we know that's okay, if not always easy. I do think that there is still plenty of academic snobbery, plenty of people who look at this work and see it as as not serious and not rigorous, and that that's a culture that we're raised in in graduate school, that graduate school trains us to see that way. And often graduate students are more snobby than people who've been in the field for 30 years, because we've come right out of graduate school where that's the culture, right? And and every graduate training institution is a graduate training institution, so it operates at kind of a level that relatively few other places in academia do. I know that's a tautology, but I think it's an important one. When we think about this, the position that this work isn't serious is not a serious position, by which I mean like we are here in a very different academic landscape and intellectual landscape and communication landscape and media landscape than anyone who trained us, and certainly anyone of the sort of the great scholars we read from the last you know, if it's more than 30 years ago, they might as well have been publishing in, you know, 130 years ago in terms of how it is. So we're just we're just in a different place. This work can be rigorous and serious and say things. It can also be fun. And hopefully, once upon a time, most of us had more fun writing than we might in academic context. This is a way of of putting the mean academic into another room, because you're not, you're not playing on their turf. You're on a different turf. They're over, you know, yelling about things in a different room. You're you're here in your playroom, and you get to remember what it was like to enjoy writing, or for me, discover for the first time in my life what it would be like to enjoy writing. I, because I did not come into grad school enjoying writing and then have it beaten out of me. I never liked writing. Writing was terrible in my late 30s, and I'm 52 now it's in my late 30s, I discovered a love of writing, and I feel really lucky that I did, because it's great. Writing can be really great. It's hard, but I'm really lucky that I found something that is so joyful.
Kate Carpenter 22:32
I love that. I even had the experience of having been just totally stuck in my dissertation, but then circumstances made it so that I could pitch a public facing essay about the subject of my dissertation to an online publication. And it was so fun. I loved it. It was like, All right, all right. Writing is good.
David Perry 22:51
I picked this topic on purpose. It's great.
Kate Carpenter 22:53
Exactly, exactly. I want to talk to you about something that I know you're really excited about right now, which is writing locally. So I think when people think about being public scholars, we tend to have maybe, like these same five publications in mind. You know, some people want to be in the Atlantic, in the New Yorker or New York Times or whatever, but you make the case in the book that there's obviously a lot of much more local and regional outlets looking for people to write for them. And I know that's something that you've been doing more and more of and getting a lot out of. Can you talk about local writing?
David Perry 23:21
Absolutely. So I, and just so people know, I'm putting my money where my time, where my mouth is, or whatever, I, after the last election, I thought very hard about what I wanted to do with where I could be useful, and I decided I would try and see if it was useful and see if someone published me to write for a local outlet. And I was lucky enough to start at the Star Tribune, which is the Minnesota Star Tribune. If you have been following the events this winter in Minnesota, you have been reading their coverage, it's, it's a, I mean, all all media outlets are large and complicated and have multiple moving pieces, some of which I like better, but I think it's great. I'm really proud to be associated with it, and now I'm on their staff as a contributing columnist for at least this year. I just thought it would be worth putting my time in writing locally, in part because then you know who your readers are, that--you know, I would write for CNN. It was great. It was felt really neat to see CNN and David Perry in the same picture, right? But even if a couple hundred thousand people read it, which is totally possible. It's a ridiculous number. Or 60,000 people is sort of a low, a low set of hits, right? It's 60,000 people all over the Anglosphere, at least. So there's almost, there's individuals who might encounter your work and think about it, but there's no like I'm working within a community, a community of people. If 60,000 people in the Twin Cities read something I've written, or 10,000 people, that's really like, that's us, that's me, that's me and my people. And it holds me to a different kind of account, but it also has a possibility to have an immediate, direct impact. There are policies, there are issues, there are things happening that I want people in this community to know. I want them to go to the pubs on next Tuesday, on St Patrick's Day, one, to support local music, but then I want them to listen to the lyrics, right? I could have written that piece for for CNN, but it's different when I'm talking about the Dubliner on University, or Kip's Pub out in the suburbs where I'm going to be playing, or Landmark Center, where there is a there's a more family friendly event, right? It's specific. It's us, it's our community. And that's really satisfying. So it's satisfying. The other thing, though, is that if you have a relationship with an institution, so this is more for people who are faculty or graduate students, or, in my case, staff, but you know, staff is sometimes harder to parse for editors what that means, but sometimes you can use that to your advantage. You can say, I teach or I work in the history department, and you don't have to really clarify what exactly that means. But editors at local outlets see your, their job in part as publishing expert commentary from within the institution. Reporters, when they want experts to comment on something that's happening, even happening nationally or globally, their first instinct is to turn to the local institution. Readers, when you say, you know, I work for the University of Minnesota or one of the other 30 institutions around here, it doesn't have to be the big public university, although I think that the big public university has a, there's a kind of, it's our university, right? It's the University of Minnesota. I think there's a way that readers respond to that differently, even if they don't have, didn't go here, even if they, you know, only moved here 35 years ago, like, or 30 years ago, like I did, it's still kind of our university, these public universities, it's also easier. So I think it's good in terms of, like, the values, that's why I'm doing it. But it's also easier. It's an easier place to sell. If you're a faculty member, in particular, at an at a university, and you have a reasonable essay, by reasonable, I mean, conforms to the norms of what the that outlet does in some kind of way, it has an argument. It's about the news. It's the right word length. So it's not, you know, 5000 words long. It's written in a way that their readers can understand. And those are all things that hopefully my book helps you do. If you don't know how to do it already, at least that's my goal. You're just going to get published. I mean, they're going to, they're going to take the pitch that, if you're a professor and you say, hey, this news happened, I have an argument. You're going to sell that if you, if you do it right, and the same thing could be true, and you pitch New York Times, you're probably not going to sell it because of the competition level, unless it's really, really a special kind of argument and pitch. And that, you know, usually it's not.
Kate Carpenter 27:36
My dream for this book is that all graduate advisors buy a copy for all of their graduate students, maybe even their undergraduates.
David Perry 27:45
Well, that would be great. That would be really good for me.
Kate Carpenter 27:48
I think this book has so much to offer, and I love that it comes at it from an academic perspective, because I think it feels really welcoming to people who have been brought up in that in that discipline. What's your dream for this book? What do you hope it accomplishes?
David Perry 28:02
Yeah, that's interesting. So I wrote this book. So first of all, I do think that kind of the there are other people who there's lots of people who train in how to write op eds, and many of them are much more accomplished writers than I am, or have many more resources. I really think that the thing that got me doing workshops and then led me to writing this book, is that, because I have a PhD and did peer reviewed scholarship and a university press monograph, and have a relationship with knowledge that is in some ways the same one that all people who go through that kind of training have, and then moved that I can talk about the relationship between them and hopefully make that path clear. So I mean, I hope a couple people read it and write some essays they wouldn't have even written. On a small level, I wrote this book because an editor reached out to me, actually, on blue sky in my DMs. I talk at one point in the book about, like, what social media can do for you. And I, I put my editor in the book. I did not ask him if I could, but he liked it. But it's true, he just sent me a message saying, hey, I really like what you're saying on here about how to do this writing. You want to write a book. It's different when it's someone else's idea, right? So I didn't say I'm going to write this book, because I have a dream. The editor said, you want to write it? And I sat down. It turns out all the words are already in my mouth, because I've been saying them in rooms around the country for 10 years, and I believe them. I just want, my deepest sort of mission is not that everyone do lots of public writing. I want people who want to do it to be able to do it, but that there are these moments where people with real learning have something really significant to say about things that are happening in the world. And in those moments, someone is going to say something, that those spaces are going to be filled. There are going to be columns that get published, and I just want them to more often come from people who really know things. And I want to make sure that if in this moment, you who really know something, see a story, see a voice, have your own voice, or a voice from the, you know, I'm a historian, so it could be from the past. Who knows? I mean, it really varies. And I do think that this book, I hope, transcends disciplines, and transcends, you know, from the liberal arts and the humanities into the social sciences, into the sciences, that it reaches across disciplines, but just in those moments, I want people to feel like this is possible, and if they want to do it that they can and have the best chance. And it's, when I have coached people who have something to say, and have helped them get themselves into print and get that just that one essay out there. It's really, it's really great. It's really important. It feels important that this is a moment when we've always, we always need more expert commentary and more diverse expert commentary. I I don't think the public intellectuals should just be people at Harvard, and especially tenured white guys at Harvard, and that's what it has been. Those are the people who have the easiest access. But there are editors who are waiting to hear from you, wherever you are and whatever your credentials. And if you have something to say, I want to make sure you can say it.
Kate Carpenter 31:01
What have you been reading lately that inspires you?
David Perry 31:03
I am teaching a class called Medieval Tales, Modern Echoes, that was developed by some of my colleagues. I'm co teaching it, which I've never done before. I have never taught more than 25 people, and this is a 90 person class, and so I've been doing a lot of reading for that, like I've never read Mark Twain, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Well, I'm I'm reading it now. It has been a while since I read Thomas Mallory, so I had to reread that. I'm reading an advanced copy secret of the next Shannon Chakraborty book. She wrote a book called The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi. But I've got an ARC sitting here waiting for me, so I'm really excited to read that next. It's set in the medieval Indian Ocean, and I'm kind of reading it for class, but I'm almost just reading it because I I really, really like it, and so that's what I'm reading. And then I just have this endless pile of things to read about, about my next book, which is about the history of masculinity and tensions around masculinity, and trying to historicize, deeply historicize, some of these debates that are happening in pop culture that, you know, we talked about how I see ideas well, endlessly, people are talking about toxic masculinity or male loneliness or whatever, whatever it is, and how to be a man, all these different kinds of things. That's not a new debate. You know, people sometimes historicize it back to say, I don't know, the 1970s and Iron John, or they historicize it back to the 1920s or whatever. And I want to historicize it back to Gilgamesh and before. And just me thinking as a pre modernist, this both is new, but also it ain't new. And we could talk about what that means. And so that's what, that's what I'm reading endlessly.
Kate Carpenter 32:41
Oh well, I was gonna ask you about what you were working on next, but you've just, you've just brought it up, which is fantastic.
David Perry 32:46
Jumped the gun.
Kate Carpenter 32:46
And so instead, I'm gonna ask you a weird question. But these are things I always want to know. Just before we got on the call here, I was looking at social media and saw that your second book with Matthew Gabriele Oathbreakers, is now in airports as an outward facing book display, which is amazing and delightful to me. How great that that is happening. What does that feel like? I mean, what does it feel like to be that version of a public intellectual?
David Perry 33:15
So first of all, everyone should know that is pay to play. All right? The reason that happens is that your publisher pays to put it there, so that's not nothing, right? That's a sign that Harper Collins has decided that for the month of March. And they did tell us this was going to happen back in November or October, but it hadn't happened yet. And I had actually forgotten about it until my sister saw it there. It's not because it's a best seller, though. I wish it was because it's best seller. That's a different rack. The rack of best sellers is, it says best sellers. That's how you know that's a different rack. This is the one that the publishers think someone looking for a book before they get on a plane would pick up and and buy it. It is a place where people encounter books who otherwise don't encounter books a lot in their life. The airport's like a really important space to encounter different readers. It's surreal. I mean, it's really surreal. But I can remember, before my first book, when that came out, the book, The Bright Ages, that when we were talking about short book versus long book and what we wanted to look like, I said, you know, I want a book in which someone could buy it in the airport in New York and fly to LA and be basically done by the time they land. If they just sat there and read it, that that's kind of the vision of what could happen, that someone was really committed to it, that it's that it's one long flight, certainly flying across, you know, they're going to, they're going to Paris. Well, I need to learn a little bit more about the history of Europe. They read that book on the flight across, across the ocean. And so that feels a little more real. The Bright Ages did not get placed on an outward magazine rack. It has mostly vanished from airport bookstores. People still buy it and read it, but it is not mostly in airport bookstores anymore. And so it's kind of surreal to see this, this book, sitting in that in that rack, next to a very idiosyncratic collection of other books that also reflect publisher choices of what they think people will buy. So, you know, normally, my book doesn't get shelved next to next to romance and self help and and whatever else is on that shelf. I mean, it's, it's a it's idiosyncratic, it's kind of fun, because, on one level, with Oathbreakers, Matt and I just wanted to tell a really good story that we think is a really good story. And yeah, there's important things about it, both in terms of the history of the Middle Ages and and more broadly, about civil wars and coups and family violence and and other things that are far too, far too relevant for today. But, um, you know, we really thought we had a good story to tell, and we're excited to see it being treated like a good story, and maybe some fancy you know, I think it would be a great movie. And we don't really know, like, like, there's all, there's hidden curriculum. I've been trying to figure out that hidden curriculum. And first of all, everyone who has says, well, basically nothing gets made. But I haven't really been able to figure that out. But I don't know, the story of Hamilton is that Lin Manuel Miranda bought the biography of Hamilton in an airport, right? So I don't really want a musical version of Oathbreakers; that, that already exists. It's called Pippin, which, if you don't know it, is a very trippy 1970s musical that is about Charlemagne's son Pippin. So it is exactly about the moment of our book. So that's weird. I don't really want another. I don't think we need another medieval Carolingian musical, one is one more than I would expect, but I do, you know, just one of the things about writing any kind of public work, books, articles, this podcast, whatever is that, mostly it goes out to readers you would expect it to go out to. I have a collection of readers through my social media networks that are usually the people I know who read my work. I now know that mostly when I write a column for the Star Tribune, it will be people who every day look at the opinion columns on the Star Tribune, which is not a small number of people, but it's a pretty discrete body of people. And in some ways that's a gift as a writer, because I'm writing for them, but it is always possible when you do public work, that it will go places you just don't expect. And that can be terrible, but it can also be kind of magical. And so this is a moment where it feels like this book, the book is on, the is in this on the edge of falling into spaces that I wouldn't have been able to expect, I wouldn't have been able to predict, I certainly can't control now. And so it's kind of exciting at the same time. My expectation is that nothing will change, that it will be, you know, some hundreds more people will buy the book, and that will be great. And then March will come to an end, and then there'll be different books on that rack, and that will be okay, too. I feel really lucky to have just sort of been there for a minute. I am flying in a couple of weeks, and I will be stopping by Hudson News at every chance I get, just to feel it for a minute, though.
Kate Carpenter 37:50
Is there anything else you want to leave people who are thinking about picking up The Public Scholar, or maybe already have, anything you want to leave them with?
David Perry 37:57
Yeah. I mean, I'm very enthusiastic about where this, you know, every writing project has the hopefully, you're excited about stage, and then the you're really, really, really not excited about stage, and then, if you're lucky, you get back to an excited about stage at some point along the way. And I'm definitely, I'm definitely in that, in that mode and the writing process. You know, one of the things, one of the things I was thinking about, because you and I have often talked about sort of the nuts and bolts of writing. I write a lot of this book in, directed to you. I mean, I use second person, and that is not how I write, but it is how I talk. When I'm in a room of doing a workshop, I say, so you, and I mean, you know, you, the person in the room right now. I mean, you, Kate, right? So, so that was kind of fun to just abandon other forms of writing and just just sort of jump in on that. And I knew, I knew the book did what I wanted it to do when, she actually blurbed it, Irina Dumitrescu, who is one of the writers I admire the most, and who has succeeded, you know, I quote in the book because I wanted to write about other kinds of public writing, including longer literary nonfiction, and I have written longer literary nonfiction, and I read longer literary nonfiction, and I have sold zero pieces of longer literary nonfiction, and that's fine. I think that failure, failure is part of this process. But I asked Irena about it, and then I sent her a copy of the book, and sort of two and a half hours later, she wrote back and said, Well, that was really fun. And I said, Oh, so it's a voice that you can just sit with for a couple hours and just have it carry you through the end. And that was, that was really satisfying. That was really then I then I knew it was that it was a good read, that it's sort of a good hang, that the book is and then, and then it's done, and then it has these tools you can use as you go forward.
Kate Carpenter 39:43
Yeah, I read it in one sitting and then have it here because I know I will be referring back to it.
David Perry 39:48
It's a one sitting book. It's even a short. It's even a short. You don't even have to fly to LA.
Kate Carpenter 39:53
Dr. David Perry, I want to say thanks for writing this book, on behalf of all of us who would like to write more for the public. So thanks for writing it, and thanks for joining me on Drafting the Past.
David Perry 40:03
Thank you so much, Kate.
Kate Carpenter 40:04
Thanks again to Dr. David Perry for returning to Drafting the Past, and thanks to you for listening. You can find his new book The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook in the show notes, along with links to the newsletter he writes with Matthew Gabriele and other books and articles we mentioned in this episode. Drafting the Past is produced by me, Kate Carpenter, and supported by the generosity of listeners on Patreon. Please help the show grow by telling a friend about it. Until next time, friends don’t let friends write boring history.
