In this episode, host Kate Carpenter is joined by Dr. James Tejani. James is an associate professor of history at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. His first book, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles—and America came out last year with Norton, and it’s a fascinating history that covers Western settlement, slavery, the Civil War, science and engineering, and much more. Our interview ranges from how Tejani came to think of himself as a writer to how developing tendonitis changed his writing practice.
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Mentioned in this episode:
- Sign up for the Drafting the Past newsletter
- James Tejani, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles—and America
- Endnote
- Eric Foner
- Steven Hahn
- Richard White
- Elliott West
- William Deverell
- Erik Larson
- Hampton Sides
- William Finnegan
- Michael Hiltzik
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. It is January 2025 which means that this is the first episode of the fourth season of this podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter, and I am glad to be back with you. I know the first month of this year has already been a lot, and I hope that these interviews can bring a little inspiration and encouragement to keep doing the work. Before I get to today's interview, I want to invite you to sign up for the show newsletter at draftingthepast.com. Who knows what's happening with social media this year. So if you'd like regular reminders about new episodes, along with other interesting morsels about writing history, the newsletter is where it's at. Today, I am delighted to be joined by Dr. James Tejani.
James Tejani 0:41
I'm so happy to be here.
Kate Carpenter 0:42
James is an associate professor of history at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. His first book, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles--and America, came out last year with Norton. It's a fascinating history that covers western settlement, slavery, the Civil War, science and engineering and much more. Our interview ranges from how to Tejani came to think of himself as a writer to how developing tendonitis changed his writing practice. Enjoy my conversation with Dr James Tejani.
James Tejani 1:11
I think it's important to say, first of all, there's several parts to my trajectory, but I think the most important thing to say is that I didn't really think of myself as a writer until very recently. And in many ways, it's strange you don't think of yourself as a writer, especially for someone who trains as a academic historian, until someone asks you to comment on on the topic of writing. So I owe you a gratitude for that. You know, one of the things I think that is distinct about me, perhaps, compared to other guests who've been on your show, is that I didn't grow up around writing, and I therefore did not think about writing or think of myself as a writer, until very, very recently. For a long time, I didn't even think of myself as capable of being a writer until it somehow happened, and I think I became a writer through the verb of writing, through the act of writing. It was something I had to discover, and very much did so as an adult in middle age. You know, before that point, writing was mysterious. It was mystified, but that's exactly why I ended up wanting to do it. So the back story to that is that my parents are immigrants, and they're both educated and professionals, and both worked outside the home a lot, but neither of them knew much about the world of writing or books or literature. It was, if anything, it was only a minor part of their education. And so, you know, I didn't grow up around readers. I didn't grow up around writers, the oldest kid in the family. And so that, I think that had a big effect on me, that kind of dearth of literary material around me, but it was also the answer to the question in that, because I was from an immigrant family, I wanted to understand United States society, this place I had landed in I was born into, and so that's what led me to start to take history classes after initially starting as a science major. And it's the history classes that gave me my first taste of writing, research based writing, and I think that's really where I discovered writing and language as a creative and expressive form. I found that I could understand much more about the society around me by writing. And I really started to hunger for that feeling that, you know, even though writing was strange and unfamiliar, that was exactly what I wanted. That was why I wanted it. And I looked up to my professors for that. And so somewhere along the line in that process, it started to make sense to me. And I say that because I, you know, I assume that for some of your listeners who have a similar background, who don't grow up around writing in books, it can be quite intimidating from the outside, but I think what's really remarkable about writing is that even though we can have different paths into it, some of us, you know, come from from a writing background, some of us don't, it's really remarkable that the rewards are kind of there alike. And for me, that was very much about understanding the immigrant, first generation perspective and experience and gaining the tools to grapple with that. That's kind of the answer, the why answer. There's also a few milestones in the shaping how I came to write, in terms of how I started to evolve or get shaped as a writer. I think a key part of that was the experience of teaching, because as academically trained historians, especially in graduate school and in early career. And this was very true for me. I spent so much time striving to learn sophistication and complexity and wrapping my hands, wrap my head around big ideas. But it's really when you teach and when you teach your own students that you have to strive to be simple and clear and even in explaining very complex things. And so my experience, very much, was learning to do just that, and that became a huge factor that changed me, I think, improved me, and I didn't expect that. In addition to that, I think the last part of my evolution as a writer was learning to say and speak my writing, and most people do that, I think, in the process of editing. But what ended up happening for me was that as I was writing the manuscript, I started to get tendinitis in both of my hands from typing, and I had to eventually rely very heavily on voice to text software, and I didn't know what I was getting into, but I think that was very formative, because it turned me away from long, complex sentences and excessive detail, and it really started to streamline things, having to actually hear it, not just, not just in that I had written it and I was reading it back to myself, but I was actually hearing it in the process of creating a sentence. And so I think I became very convinced that the earlier you start to do that, the better. And dictation software is, it can be slow, it makes these mistakes that are really irritating, but the software is getting better, and so I think there's great potential there, especially for someone like me that you know had that problem with overly complex formulations.
Kate Carpenter 7:00
Well, I am even more excited to talk to you now because this book is really beautifully written. And if, if I had been asked to guess ahead of time, I would have said that you'd been a writer from a very young age and had thought about craft since you were a child. So this is exciting. Well, let's start out just kind of with the practical questions. So when and where do you like to write?
James Tejani 7:22
That's an interesting question as well for me, because I think that for me, the where and when of writing, the routine of writing that became very defined by my job situation, I think, in unique ways, that defines so much of how we can approach writing. Very few of us get to go about the routine of writing as like a full time professional writer, so we need a day job. So, you know, for someone who teaches classes, the teaching load can really determine the possibilities, and we don't get to choose an ideal situation, at least some of us for writing. So I'll speak to that experience. I have a heavy teaching load and a lot of grading to do on my own. And so opportunities of where and when to write became, they can be regular and they can be less about like sustainable routine and more about these bursts of writing in windows of the semester, summers especially. And so I started to look for those windows, and they took me away from campus, away from kind of the work stress. And so I wrote a lot at home, and I would write kind of long periods of time when I could find those windows, kind of sprinting. And so I think for some of your listeners, it might be the same as well. And then what's really interesting to my story is that the COVID pandemic hit, and what that did, I think that was really valuable to me is it opened up an extended window. And I know many academics have that experience as well, but for me, it was really valuable because it gave me a long period of time where I could throw myself into the writing and kind of seize the moment. And so, you know, starting in 2020 that's exactly what I did. And very interestingly, as part of that, the COVID pandemic put the issue of ports and supply chains in the news. So it was an opportunity, doubly because of that. And so my routine, you know, in short, was to write like mad, especially in the drafting stage. And so every day for hours, as long as I could sustain productivity. It's what I did. You know, I really had a hard time stepping away from writing if an idea was in my head and not on the page quite yet. And so I think I needed that. I needed writing to be kind of long and intense as an experience, not stressful, but you know, to be fully enveloped in it, headphones on, listening to lots of good music and just really being in the moment. And that became my routine, essentially. And then another part of shaping that routine was something that I think is peculiar to my book. But other books have it as well. Other people's projects have that. And this is something your listeners should be thinking about, which is that you know my book, at a certain point, it became about a scoop. It became about a story or a set of stories that, in large part, hadn't been told before. And once you kind of sense that you really get a sense of urgency, like the clock is ticking and you're racing someone else might discover this, or you may not finish it in time, and so that added to kind of the mad dash. And I think, like I said, for your listeners, it's important to think about that, both because it can kind of give you this great momentum and motivation, but also because I found that it was something that publishers asked me about when it came time to the interviews, you know, they asked me how much, how much of this is out there, how much of this is known already. You know, what was in the dissertation, what was in the journal articles, what have you done at conference papers? And, you know, I was able to say, you know, very little, actually. And I think that was an appeal, because they're thinking of, publishers are thinking about the book marketplace as they evaluate a project. And so it ended up, I ended up being lucky in that way, but all of those things made me write in a kind of fever of energy over several years.
Kate Carpenter 11:55
How do you keep yourself organized, especially in the midst of a fever of energy?
James Tejani 11:59
Yeah, it was hard. I think that was another reason why I needed the intensity. I needed my brain to never clock out and, you know, grade midterms for the next two weeks or something like that, before I could come back. That helped with the organization, for sure, but I, you know, I was someone who struggled with the how to organize, and especially I struggled with the technology of organizing sources that I think could be very useful. It just wasn't. I just couldn't figure it out, nor did I have the patience for technology. So I, you know, I the project started when, when I was in grad school, and things like database software was becoming, it was just kind of coming on the scene and becoming popular. I remember other graduate students doing presentations on how to use it. I had a friend in graduate school who would actually buy books, tear pages out of the book and then scan them so that he could word search them, which I thought, that just blew my mind, that people were doing that and actually destroying books, you know, to create books. It was really this really strange thing. None of that really ended up working for me, and so I did use ENDNOTE to keep track of sources, and I did find it helpful in note taking and kind of finding things quickly as I tried to remember where they were. But a mentor in graduate school, they recommended to me, I think, I think she diagnosed the problems I was having, and she really impressed upon me this idea, this strategy for organization of of taking notes on your notes, and then even taking notes on the notes of your notes as a kind of synthetic practice where you're kind of always building and putting things together to discover the connections of sources like assembling pieces of a puzzle. And so ultimately, that really became the way I organized things, was by, by doing it in Word documents, which, you know, again, are they have the benefit of being searchable now, I think a lot more than when I started. So I did a lot of that, just kind of writing out thoughts. And then around 2018 the tendinitis came in, and I couldn't do that anymore, and so I switched to pen Sharpies and yellow notepads. And I just tore through that, and I organized a lot of the sources from the book in that way, kind of an all analog approach, very kind of old school. And it was very helpful to me. There was something about the speed of it, of actually hand-writing that, I think was, it was much more attuned to the speed that my brain worked, and that's, that's how I did it. And so there's somewhere, there's notepads in binders, you know, everywhere that sort of built the book out. And how I organize sources.
Kate Carpenter 13:39
Do you, as you take sort of notes on notes, do you feel like that's kind of starting the writing process as you're doing research, or where do you see kind of the transition from researching to writing?
James Tejani 15:28
I think that's, I think that was the wisdom of what my mentor was suggesting to me was really kind of getting your brain into a kind of writing mode, versus just, you know, copying down what you're seeing in a source. And I think, you know, for me, that was a big part of the challenge, because I was a student that really, I wasn't comfortable writing anything. I always felt like I didn't know the topic. Yet, I needed to read one more source. I needed to figure out one more piece of the the picture, and that really became a constraint in my research process. And I would, I would, sort of, I procrastinate the writing and the notes on notes really, I think, got me over that, that that hurdle, and I've come to really believe that you can't, I certainly can't figure out a project until I start writing. Because writing it so quickly identifies the gaps in your story, in your source base. It highlights unresolved questions. And so the notes on notes approach, I think it gets you writing earlier, and the earlier the better, especially for someone like me who struggled and didn't have the confidence and the kind of lifelong experience of writing, I just can't sort out a project entirely in my head and then outline it perfectly In a way that's useful. So I ended up in a kind of back and forth process. And I've heard, I've heard some of your other guests talk about this, a back and forth process of writing, outlining and reading sources, kind of all at the same time, taking on small segments of the manuscript, piecing it together and building it out in that way.
Kate Carpenter 17:22
This project originated as a dissertation, if I'm not mistaken, but it sounds like it you worked on it for a long time, and it underwent a lot of changes on its way to becoming a book. What were those changes like? What was that transformation like?
James Tejani 17:38
Other than the changes of kind of the learning curve of learning to organize and be productive in my routine, the changes from dissertation to book, it's kind of fascinating for me to look back on because the dissertation in the book, they have in common, the same topic, San Pedro Bay and what today is the Port of Los Angeles, but they feel entirely different to me, and they were very different in execution and even the content, and because of the years in between, they're like different stages of my life almost entirely. So I think, other than sharing the same topic, the way I would articulate it is that the dissertation, in the dissertation, I hadn't really figured out huge parts of the story. I kind of identified the place, and I had identified some major parts of the timeline as this place changes and is developed and industrialized and becomes more and more central to US society. But there were parts of the book's story, of, ultimately, the book story, that just weren't there in the dissertation. So there's very little about geo survey, scientific exploration and work in the dissertation, very little connection to the sectional politics and the Pacific Railroad project, very little about the Civil War in the southwest desert, and almost nothing about the city of Los Angeles and its expansion and Municipal Development of the harbor. So major story lines are absent, or at least underdeveloped in the dissertation, and I think that's really an indication, a clue, that the project was just, it was just too big for me starting out in the dissertation and too mysterious. There were just too many things that I didn't know and had to, had to figure out, and that, you know, that was a very risky thing, because I may not have worked out, and the project may have been abandoned even before finishing the dissertation. So I was lucky in that way. So storyline is a big difference in the change. And on top of that, I would say the biggest difference between the district and book is the characters. So the dissertation is not character driven. There are some characters that are starting to, that start to appear there. And I actually remember my advisor, Eric Foner, at my defense, saying, well, your dissertation has people. It has characters. Most dissertations don't have that. And I was actually surprised, because I didn't think of it that way. And I didn't, I wasn't quite thinking of characters yet. But most of the book's characters, the core characters, they actually only occupy a few sentences each in the dissertation. And this is that's most true about George Davidson and Alexander Dallas Bache, the the geo survey scientists. It's true of Jefferson Davis. It's true of Molly Ord and Edward Ord, the future Union Army General and participant and hero in the Civil War. And Ord, Edward Ord, really emerged as the centerpiece character of the book and the great source of kind of intrigue, or at least the intrigue kind of spirals around him. And he really was, I think, really just a sentence. And so for the transformation to happen from dissertation to book, I need really, needed more time. I needed to learn about the characters. I had to work. Had to have time to work through their letters, which I hadn't done enough at the dissertation stage. But even more importantly, I needed the time to assemble the characters into their sets of relationships and timelines. I needed to kind of figure out not just them individually, but them collectively as a mosaic, and that was a lot of work. And so I think that really explains what changed. It also explains, I think, what sustained me over a long haul, because there was still so much discovery and the project was, it just kind of kept opening up with new possibility, and it kept me going. And so I owe a lot to those characters for for being so interesting in the end.
Kate Carpenter 22:04
You know, I talk to a fair number of historians who work with agents and who publish, maybe with a more popular press like Norton, but often they write, sort of an initial book that's based on a dissertation, and then they get an agent and they go in that direction. What prompted you to look for an agent for this book?
James Tejani 22:22
There was a moment where I in this process of discovery and getting to know the characters and seeing how they started to link up in their kind of daily life as individuals, to kind of bigger picture, bigger history. There was a moment in that where I started to feel like I had something special that a monograph couldn't, wasn't going to capture, and that if I went the monograph route, the kind of standard first academic history book. All I would what I'd be doing is I'd be setting up someone else to come along and and rewrite the story, especially a popular writer or a journalist. And so it became--
Kate Carpenter 23:12
Erik Larson was just going to come and come and take your research.
James Tejani 23:18
That became a great fear, because I, you know, I started to feel like I wasn't going to get the credit. And so I, you know, I started to think about how to, how I could make, really, that, that leap to skip the first book and go, go straight into a second book type project, and especially as kind of an argument about U.S. paradox in the world today started to take shape, and I was, you know, really starting to feel like I had much to lose as a scholar if I didn't do this. And so I had to, I had to find an agent, and I had the help of my advisor in doing that, in providing the introduction and the agent, ended up being very helpful, especially for someone like me who's moving from a dissertation into something very different, because I didn't understand the process or have any signposts or experience that I think for most scholars, comes from that first book, and so I needed to work with someone who did, who could sponsor and advocate, but also guide me and push me. So that ended up being invaluable in ways that I think I don't even realize, having not gone through the first book experience, it certainly also sped up the process. And so I was, I was saved the kind of long waits that an unsolicited manuscript submission puts people through, first time academic authors. And so I think for your listeners, even those who don't end up working with an agent, I think it's important to try to find somebody who can act somewhat in that capacity, whether it's a more experienced scholar, someone you trust, who, who can provide introductions and kind of areas where the process is streamlined, the process of linking up with a publisher so that things can move faster, especially if you feel like there's a moment that you have to try to seize upon. And then the other thing I would say about working with an agent, and you can tell that in answer your question, I working with an agent, I was very grateful for it. It was a very good experience. The other area where I think it was a great benefit, was her advice on writing samples, because I was very focused, I think as as an academic might tend to be, or an inexperienced academic, I was very convinced that my best writing samples were from the middle of the book, when the story really picks up momentum and there's a lot happening. But my agent focused me on the fact that it's really the opener and the first chapter, because that's where readers are going to experience, that's how they're going to approach your book. And I hadn't thought about that enough. And you know, I think that that is very important to publishers. That's why the agent had this insight. And so even for your listeners who don't go with an agent, considering the audience and the market and how they will interact with your book different than you is, I think that's essential, and I wouldn't have come to that on my own. I'm very grateful to my agent for that.
Kate Carpenter 26:50
To take a closer look at how the book came together, I asked James to read an excerpt. Here's Dr. James Tejani reading an excerpt called "The Invaders" from Part One of A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles--and America.
James Tejani 27:05
They came by sea. Fur trappers, cavalry and covered wagons provide the lasting images of us westward expansion. But outsiders first came to California by way of the coast. It was the unexpected arrival of a supply ship that saved the 1769 sacred expedition from failure. The Franciscan missionary Junipero Serra pronounced it a miracle and proceeded to set up the first Spanish colony in Alta California. The Yankee vessel Lelia Bird trespassed through San Diego and San Pedro bays in 1803, one year before Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery started up the Missouri River. Forty-three years later, hundreds of U.S. troops landed ashore as Navy Commodore Robert Stockton declared that California was no longer Mexican territory. The soldiers displaced a smaller force led by John C. Fremont that had trekked across the continent. These Americans of 1846 were forerunners. The discovery of gold brought invaders by the hundreds of thousands. The earliest during 1848 and 1849 arrived by ship. They took first sight of California from the vantage point of Pacific waters, not the other way around. This was true as well for George Davidson. On a June morning in 1850 he disembarked the overcrowded Pacific mail steamer Tennessee and walked a makeshift gangplank to the shores of San Francisco. He did not look like an invader. The 25-year-old from Philadelphia wore civilian clothes. He carried the instruments, notebooks and meager salary of the United States geo survey. But his bookish appearance masked a taste for adventure and profanity. Like many Americans of his time, he was familiar with outdoor life and adept with a gun. Davidson would need all of his qualities. He came to research in the uncharted wilderness of the Pacific coast. Most Gold Rush migrants arrived to seize land and resources for themselves. They pushed prior occupants aside and justified this as progress, civilization and racial superiority. Davidson shared those assumptions, but they were not the larger part of him. Instead, California offered the opportunity to study and banish the unknown. Science was his life's object. He pursued it not merely for himself, but for the U.S. Republic. Davidson was a government scientist. That proved irreconcilable at times. It drove him to over exertion, suffering and acclaim. His steps held many dangers. They led both north and south and soon to the estuary at San Pedro Bay. There, Davidson's path would intersect with that of Manuel Dominguez. He, too was an invader, but without the need to voyage anywhere. Dominguez was a native Californian, as Americans of the era called the Spanish speaking upper class, and the mixed race descendant two generations removed of a soldier who led the 1769 Spanish Conquest. He saw Southern California as his birthright and he wanted more. Dominguez spent his adulthood consolidating a massive land grant, the legacy of Spain's and Mexico's expropriation of native peoples located on the shores of San Pedro Bay. Using politics and law, he drove off challengers and guarded his family's Rancho San Pedro, but he also grew frustrated in Mexican authorities. U.S. conquest seemed to improve his prospects. Dominguez would succeed, but he would fail too. Both results were set in motion by the young, arriving scientist and the instruments he carried. That an estuary brought Davidson and Dominguez together speaks to the complex story of conquest on the Pacific coast. Invasion was most visible in military action and the flood of settlers, yet its enduring force came by less visible things like law and bureaucracy, the building blocks of order in society. Federal agents like Davidson came to study and catalog. Claimants like Dominguez appealed to a once-foreign government to perpetuate their property and privilege. Both looked to piece together California's past into a future they desired, but the more Davidson or Dominguez acted to realize their ambitions, the more they found the outcome beyond control. That caused their paths to encircle, along with many others in far off places. The story began decades before with a flawed, though brilliant idea to fix the American nation.
Kate Carpenter 31:59
What went into writing this passage?
James Tejani 32:02
A lot of my comments about writing, they come from reflection, rather than something I set out to do. And I think this passage is a good example of that. I think what drew me to start to write about these two individuals, two individuals on opposite sides of the experience of U.S. conquest of California and the West. I think what drew me to that was I wanted to pair Davidson and Dominguez, because each seemed to me to be a character that affirmed and at the same time defied what I thought I knew about American conquest and what I think historians think they know about it. They both seem to be, in part, what we think they are, but also not quite who we assume them to be. And so I was really drawn to aspects of their biographies that surprised me and stunned me and bewildered me. So both, what I found in common to both of them to put them together, was that both seemed to be opportunists of a sort. They had something they wished to gain in the experience of U.S. conquest, U.S. imperialism, and they had outlooks that shaped those goals. And so there was an idea there that I was I was trying to get it behind them, that they symbolized. And in terms of achieving their goals, both succeed and left a legacy that's going to end up shaping the estuary into the Port of Los Angeles, and at the same time, both are left frustrated and kind of cast aside by that legacy. So there was something, there was something tragic in them, as much as them being triumphant characters. And so Davidson and Dominguez, they both became models for how I approached, or how I ended up approaching the characters, at least the central characters. I think what I started to do again, at first unconsciously, but then consciously, was I tried to take the main characters and strip them back to an essence, to an idea, and to use that to present a facet of the book's argument. So each of the main characters in my book storyline, I think, represents an argument and an intervention in a historical question. So for Dominguez, it's about Hispanic colonialism in the Southwest, and how we look back on it and think about it. For Davidson, it's about U.S. imperialism, connecting different geographies within that. And I think questions about, about the place of science and reason, both in conquest, but in democratic politics, even to today with someone like Edward Ord, it's about land dispossession in the West, U.S. conflict over slavery and the Civil War, and questions about how we remember the war and its participants, and so, you know my what I think I struck upon, and what I would point out to your listeners by reflection, is to always be looking for potential characters who aren't just historical people, who leave us sources and sometimes very compelling good sources, but who also start to function in the way that I think characters function in a work of fiction where they start to become symbols of something larger, of ideas, of questions. And I think "The Invaders" is really a good example of me figuring out how to do that. And I am sometimes blown away when I look back at it and I realize that I did that, and that it happened. It's really a wonderful, gratifying feeling.
Kate Carpenter 36:18
I think this is fantastic advice. Because I can hear the protests of some historians in the back of my head already, how, as a historian, do you make sure, then, that, you know, people are people, they're not symbols in real life, right? And how do you make sure that you're not, what am I trying to say, putting them into a box, maybe that they wouldn't have seen themselves in, you know, which I don't think you do, to be clear, but how do you avoid that?
James Tejani 36:45
I think I was fortunate in that I didn't set out to put them in boxes. And that happened more by happenstance in the process, I think, for academic historians. So looking at some popular histories, I can see, I can see that happening to some writers, especially who don't get into the texture of kind of granular research, I think from, from for me, I think because I started with the texture and then had to figure out characters and kind of work towards the idea. I hope that for me, that's how I I sidestepped that very real problem that you point out, and that it was the texture that led to ideas, rather than the other way around. And so I'm glad you brought that up, because I think that that's a very important that's a very important point to add on to what I said. And I think that's really a value that we as as researchers and academic historians need to bring and need to not lose sight of, is that these are people, and the more we can kind of give them their due as people, who they themselves are figuring out kind of where they fit in the moment, and they don't have the benefit of hindsight to really know where they fit. They have all this possibility to become who they become, in our eyes, I think we can't lose sight of that.
Kate Carpenter 38:14
I also want to talk about, we've talked about character a bit, but, you know, I wanted to say too that I could have chosen many passages from this book, especially because your descriptions are really what I think of as sort of cinematic. They really evoke a scene, not just a person. Did you have strategies for sort of transforming archival sources, which sadly, do not always come to us in cinematic form, into these great descriptions?
James Tejani 38:41
So this is again, a case, I think, where I didn't set out with strategies, but I sort of found them along the way and grew and learned. So I believe you're referring especially to like, descriptions of landscape and nature. So I did have the benefit that some of my sources, both written and visual sources, I was fortunate that they they came from survey reports and scientific reports where, say, of the by the coast survey or the Pacific Railroad explorations, where they themselves had to describe places for government officials and politicians, other scientists and even general readers at the time who purchased these publications, who weren't actually going to travel there. And so the descriptions were, they were fairly rich to begin with, and that gave me a good foundation. I think another thing about surveyors in the mid 19th century is that their life in the field is so difficult and painful that they tend to write about why that's kind of happening, and so they tend to describe nature, they have that, that different relationship to nature than we have, where nature is a foe, I think, an enemy to some extent, or an antagonist. So they tended to describe things at least, kind of glimpse, descriptions of setting and scenery that I could, I could use as a foundation. But I would say that a good deal of the description, and I think, I think you can relate to this living and having grown up in the West, that it comes, or it came from my own travels and time spent in places. So coastal California, the South Sierra, the San Joaquin Valley, the Olympic Peninsula, Colorado, Utah and Montana, where some of my in laws live nearby, and the deserts, the Mojave and the Sonoran deserts, these are all places that I had gone to and had gone back to quite regularly as an adult, and so I think that became part of of a strategy. And I think for your listeners, if they have places that they are writing about and that feature prominently in the story, there's really no substitute for being there and absorbing a place feeling, you know, how hard is the ground? And you know what? What does the air taste like? And you know, how does, how strong is the sun feel on your skin? It certainly for me, it made the sources come alive. The historical sources come alive in my mind's eye, in ways that I think the sources themselves may not, may not have done. So travel, go out in the world and travel.
Kate Carpenter 41:53
Are there people that you turn to regularly for feedback on your writing?
James Tejani 41:57
There were in the project, for sure. I think knowing what you now know about me and kind of how I came to writing, kind of from the outside, I sometimes have kind of an excessive self criticism, so I gave myself a lot of feedback, but the bulk of I think the feedback that you're asking about what came from my editor and from my wife, who is also a historian. She's a historian of modern Germany, modern Europe and urban politics. So between the two of them, there were different contributions. So my editor, Dan Gerstle, who first was at Liveright, an imprint within Norton, and then moved to Norton. His feedback really showed his experience, because he was just very incisive, to the point in his feedback about, you know, this the big picture, and kind of the question of writing for a wider market that I just didn't have that in my skill set. And I felt like with his feedback, that was where I really had to reach and grow and mature in order to work with him. I I really felt like I had to keep up with him. And it started that way, and it became more so as he, as he moved into a leader, leadership position at Norton, and so his feedback was just just invaluable. Just rubbing shoulders with him was invaluable. For my wife, Molly, she was really the one who read the manuscript the most, and she ended up going through the entire thing multiple times and offering the most feedback, and to have a reader like that who was equally invested in the project and so accessible in the house, especially during kind of the lockdown moments of the pandemic, and also just able to speak freely and be blunt when when necessary, when it was necessary to be helpful, even impolite. You know, she was really the one to tell me when I was trying too hard in a passage, just didn't sound like me anymore. I think what I glean from that is, for me, it was very useful to pair professional level feedback of a colleague, or say, an editor, with personal level feedback from someone who knows you well and is willing to say what needs to be said. You know, when the stakes are high. And so it was those two people where I looked to feedback the most. It wasn't a broad set of people, but people who I trusted very much.
Kate Carpenter 44:55
Are there authors who you look to for inspiration when you're writing?
James Tejani 44:59
Again, and this has become more a part of my life as I started to think of myself as a writer and get asked about it. And I, you know, in many ways, I wish, I wish I had encountered a podcast like yours early on to kind of demystify writing for me and hear more about people's experiences. Because I think in other formats, people can be kind of guarded about how they talk about writing. There's, you know, I think there's things they don't want to say about it sometimes. So as a, you know, as I've come to think of myself as a writer and become more comfortable with that idea, I'm still very inspired by reading the academic historians that made me want to study and write about history in the first place. So I still go back to that work, senior scholars, people who are even in retirement now, but still producing inspiring work, or have left us inspiring work. So I do that as well, especially my my advisors, people like Eric Foner, Steven Hahn, people who weren't my advisors, but who I look up to, people like Richard White, Elliot West, William Deverell and his writings about Los Angeles and California. I think what, what started to build on that, and what became new for me especially was that just as I was finishing the manuscript, I started to catch up on more recent crossover work. Because in the proposals to publishers, you have to, you have to speak to that, to comparative titles in the market. And I think we really live in a great moment. I think it's a hard moment for publishing, but yet, there's such fantastic work being done by academic historians that is crossing over. And so I started to discover that there's so many names, I don't want to leave anybody out, so I'll skip the names. But so I did that, and then I think a step further, something I had never really done before, was to read popular writers of history, journalists and full time kind of freelance writers. And this is also a really robust market, especially if you work in areas like the American West, the Civil War era, technology and nature writing, the environmental history, you brought up outdoor enthusiasts and that that became a great inspiration. And I think it should be a great inspiration for anybody looking to cross over, because they will be your competitors. And so you brought up Erik Larson before, I never read a book by by Erik Larson until quite recently, Hampton Sides, William Finnegan, who writes for The New Yorker and wrote about surfing columnists like the LA Times columnist Michael Hiltzik, that was really a great discovery for me in the later stages of producing the book manuscript. And it really, it really helped me grow and mature as well. So I'm glad you brought that up.
Kate Carpenter 48:14
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
James Tejani 48:17
Yeah, I think, I think this is, this is why people can be guarded about what they say about their experience writing, but I'll put it out there. My editor's most influential advice, the advice that kind of hit me the hardest and changed me, was to cut back on unnecessary detail and characters, what he called tertiary characters, and to really just stop being so precious and meticulous, was the word he used in my writing, and to aim instead for, you know, a kind of smart but elegant simplicity. And I think as you know, especially you know, as a grad student, and especially as an early career stage academic. You know, you're trying to make a name in your field, and the tendency is really to over, overdo in those areas, and try to show how much, how much you've learned, how much you know. So I had to really be broken of that. And so I took his advice. My editor's advice is really just saying, you know, grow up kid, grow up as a writer. Dispense with being a student. You're not a student anymore. And I am really grateful for that advice. I hope I got most of the way there in the end, but it was very valuable.
Kate Carpenter 49:42
Sounds like great advice to me. Well, as we wrap up here, before we started recording, you mentioned the sort of pleasure of having finished a project and being in a moment where you can sort of explore other things, catch up on other things. But as a reader of this book, I hope that there will be another project coming up. Is there anything you're working on now that you're up for talking about?
James Tejani 50:03
Yeah, thank you for saying that. Living with all the constraints of producing research and writing that I mentioned, I'll speak just in general terms. I would say that there, in the process of writing this book, there were characters that I enjoyed spending time with, and ultimately want to try to spend more time with, like I didn't get to know them enough. And so there's several characters in the book that I would want to pursue more research on about their lives, and kind of, especially in the the key moments in the timeline of their lives. And I think if you, for those who read the book, I think you'll know who they are, you'll know who I'm speaking about. But I just, yeah, I would, I would like to get to know these people better, and I hope that I get the chance to do so.
Kate Carpenter 51:03
Fantastic. Well, I hope we get the chance to get to know them through you. Dr. James Tejani, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past and sharing your writing process with us.
James Tejani 51:12
It's been my pleasure, Kate.
Kate Carpenter 51:13
Thanks for joining us for this episode and this new season of Drafting the Past. For show notes and links to everything we talked about, visit draftingthepast.com. Don't forget to sign up for the newsletter while you're there. In the midst of everything else happening in the world, here's a gentle reminder to hang on to what you value, and of course, to remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
