Stephanie Gorton is a writer, editor, and journalist whose work has been published in a range of outlets including The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and Paris Review Daily. She has worked in editorial roles at several independent presses, and her first book came out in 2020, titled Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America. Her second book, which came out in November, is The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry that Brought Birth Control to America. It’s a fascinating dual biography that brings to life two complicated leaders of the birth control movement in the early 1900s, and the lasting impact of their actions and interactions. We spoke early this year, and I loved getting to hear more about Stephanie’s research and writing process, especially how she thought about narrative structure and revising with feedback.
Mentioned in this episode
- The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry that Brought Birth Control to America
- Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America
- Goucher College Nonfiction MFA
- LitArts RI
- Scrivener
- Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America
- James Reed, The Birth Control Movement and American Society: From Private Vice to a Public Virtue
- Janet Farrell Brodie
- Linda Gordon
- Dorothy Roberts
- Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America
- The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, Esther Katz, ed.
- Constance Chen, The Sex Side of Life: Mary Ware Dennett’s Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education
- Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism
- Wil Haygood
- Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
Transcript
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. I’m Kate Carpenter, and this is a podcast about the craft of writing history. As usual lately, I feel a bit odd releasing podcast episodes while it feels like the world is falling apart. But I also believe in the power of history and narrative to help us think about the struggles we’re facing today and to remember that nothing is inevitable. With that in mind, I’m particularly happy that in this episode I’m joined by Stephanie Gorton.
Stephanie Gorton 0:29
Thank you for having me, Kate.
Kate Carpenter 0:31
Stephanie is a writer, editor, and journalist, whose work has been published in a range of outlets including The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and Paris Review Daily. She has worked in editorial roles at several independent presses, and her first book came out in 2020, titled Citizen Reporters: S. S. McClure, Ida Tarbell, and the Magazine that Rewrote America. Her second book, which came out in November, is The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry that Brought Birth Control to America. It’s a fascinating dual biography that brings to life two complicated leaders of the birth control movement in the early 1900s, and the lasting impact of their actions and interactions. We spoke early this year, and I loved getting to hear more about Stephanie’s research and writing process, especially how she thought about narrative structure and revising with feedback. Here’s my conversation with Stephanie Gorton.
Stephanie Gorton 1:27
I came to writing kind of later. My first few jobs were in book publishing straight out of college. I started working at a small independent press in the editorial department, and I stayed in the industry about a decade. I worked in the UK and also in New York, still at smaller indie presses, and a couple of authors I'd worked with had come through a non fiction MFA program at Goucher College, and their books and the way they approach their writing just really intrigued me, and it was a program that you could do part time. So I enrolled myself, and that's what really led me to writing, first my first book, Citizen Reporters, and now, more recently, The Icon and the Idealist. You know, I will say that going into the realm of history and biography. I don't think it took a lot of people by surprise. I'm the child of an archeologist, and I grew up in a house that was full of books, and our idea of fun on the weekends was to go to museums or archeological sites. So there's just, you know, I think I always had this sense that putting events in context was really important, was something that I got excited about, and that has definitely carried through into my writing work. Also, more recently, I've become a volunteer staffer on my local abortion fund for the last maybe three years, and this, you know, my more recent book, The Icon and the Ddealist, came out of my interest in pre-Roe reproductive rights, in trying to put into context the activism and that kind of nuts and bolts of trying to make change that I see around us today.
Kate Carpenter 3:19
So you got an MFA in non fiction writing. How did your career develop out of that? How did you sort of then translate an MFA into a career as a writer?
Stephanie Gorton 3:29
That's a really good question, and it's still questionable, what it looks like to have careers as a writer, doesn't it? I mean, the books are there, the clips are there. You know, I think I started, I sold my first book. Let's see. It was in 2017 and I found out I was pregnant around the same time, and I had been patching together a very busy freelancing plus full time nonprofit job, plus developing this book proposal. And after I had my first child, it really just narrowed down to the baby and the book. And that has, you know, three years afterward, there was another book project that I sold very shortly after that, another pregnancy, and then at the same time, the pandemic. So, you know, I think it's only been in the last two years or so that I felt fully emerged from that, and you know that, that I've been able to focus on one book, and now that it's come out, I'm, you know, very much looking forward and getting back in touch with the work that I used to do, that I identified, I still identify really strongly with my work as a journalist, as an editor, as an activist. So those things are very much coming back into being aspects of my career also. But you know definitely when you make your book your focus, if you're able to do that. Which I know is a privilege to do that for any stretch of time, but especially for several months or even a year. You know, your identity as someone with a career, or someone with a like one single professional identity sometimes is challenged, you know, and has to take a new shape in your mind.
Kate Carpenter 5:21
Well, I want to ask you about the nuts and bolts of how you get your writing done. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Stephanie Gorton 5:29
Well, that's very much shaped by, you know, by other constraints, but I'm right now I'm talking to you from a corner of a bedroom, and that's where I've got my desk, and I kind of take pride in the fact that I don't need a whole lot of real estate to get it done. I like to do writing in the morning and revision after lunch, or, you know, work that doesn't take maybe quite as much creative juice. I set myself an extremely lenient goal for each day's word count. I've always thought 1000 words is incredibly ambitious. If I can write 500 words a day that have a chance of staying in the manuscript, then I'm pretty happy about it. I also belong to a writing community here in Providence called Lit Arts RI, and you know that even if I don't attend a ton of in person events, the fact of being part of a community, of being kept in the loop of workshops and opportunities to gather with other writers, that is helpful, right? And that more kind of community focused work is also stuff that I do in the afternoons. I organize all my sources and all my notes in Scrivener, and I start writing the book there also, and then eventually, before it gets delivered to anybody or sees, sees the light of day, it gets exported into a Word document. I went through more than a dozen drafts for this, this last book. So just a lot, a lot of desk time, not necessarily really long intervals. Could be as short as 90 minutes, up to four hours a day. That's, that's pretty much how it got done. It took five years total.
Kate Carpenter 7:14
Where in the research process do you like to start writing?
Stephanie Gorton 7:17
I like to start pretty late. I remember feeling early on that I just you know that you don't have a sense of your own expertise until you have been through dozens, if not hundreds, of sources, and especially when you're working with primary source archives, it doesn't feel like enough to have gone through the juvenilia or, you know, just one aspect of their professional papers, even if you're only writing a book about birth control, as I was, I still felt that for each of my characters, I wanted to know what their pressing priorities were before they got to that movement. You know, what it meant for them to transition away from suffrage or away from socialism to birth control. So you just have to spend a long time in those archives. I'd like to, I don't think you can put a timestamp on it, or even a number of pages read, but you do come to a point where you notice inconsistencies in your secondary sources, or you realize that you're recognizing, you're reading a secondary source, and you're recognizing the letter or the diary entry that's being referenced, and that that kind of gives you confidence to start working with that source yourself, I think, so. Yeah, I like to wait until I feel an opinion kind of spring up inside. It happens pretty organically. And then I get going.
Kate Carpenter 8:45
You mentioned 12 drafts. How do you approach the revision process?
Stephanie Gorton 8:49
It's not always in your control. When, you know, when you finish a draft and when you start the revision. I'm trying to think of an example of this, but okay, here, a friend of mine offered to read it, but he really only had a few weeks, you know, over a winter break. That really made me hustle to finish up a very rough and and weirdly structured version of the book and send it off to him. But then, not only a few weeks later, you know, was there his feedback, but I had also put the book away for those weeks I hadn't kept looking at it. So knowing, I think that that, that ability, if you, if you, if the time is there, and maybe this is also a blessing that came with the pandemic, because the publisher was understanding about pushing the deadline for a year, but being able to put the book away for a few weeks or even a month, and then to grapple with it again. You know, it was so helpful. The editors' feedback or the friend's feedback came back saying, you know, the structure is not working at all. I think it had like six parts, maybe even more. It was crazy, and to realize that it could be, be simplified and it could be made into a better reading experience. You know? I could see where that was coming from and reading it fresh myself. I could see ways to get there. You know, I think that if there's any like foundational philosophy I have for revision, it's taking long breaks from it, just not looking at it, if that's at all possible.
Kate Carpenter 10:22
It sounds like you asked for feedback pretty early in the process. Is that true?
Stephanie Gorton 10:26
Yes, yes. You know, I think because it happens to me pretty early on that I almost can't see the forest for the trees, that I get extremely attached to paragraphs or to episodes which sometimes don't belong in the main narrative at all. I knew when I completed my first draft that it was way too long, but I was pretty attached to every part of it. I couldn't see where the sweeping cuts should be made, and that made me reach out to other people.
Kate Carpenter 10:55
Are there techniques that you have for self editing, or do you rely almost exclusively on other people's kind of perspectives?
Stephanie Gorton 11:02
No, you know, it's hard. It's hard to find like a, you know, a deep bench of people you can burden with hundreds and hundreds of pages of unfinished stuff. I like to read the pages aloud. Sometimes I'll even record myself reading the pages aloud, and that helps a lot. You know, not that your book has to be primarily an audio product, or that it's the same as a podcast or, you know, but it does help in catching things like repetitions, sentence rhythm. You realize you're dwelling too much on a specific description of something, or you've gotten very tangled up in a certain address, making sure the reader knows, you know, which block in Manhattan this is all happening on. Some readers are into that level of detail, and sometimes it's unnecessary and it's distracting from the episode you're trying to convey. So I think if there's, if there's one technique that's consistently helpful in everything I've written that has definitely been it.
Kate Carpenter 12:09
This is your second book. Both are about historical subjects, and you've also written a lot of history in other shorter, shorter pieces in many venues. How do you decide which events or figures from history will make a good narrative?
Stephanie Gorton 12:25
That's a great question. You know, because I have never, nobody I've written about has been, you know, a quote, unquote, lost or rediscovered figure. My first book was about S. S. McClure, legendary magazine editor, and Ida Tarbell his equally, if not more, legendary investigative journalist. And the second book is about Margaret Sanger and the lesser known, but still quite well known, Mary Ware Dennett. I do think that there's something about a central relationship I find really interesting. This period of history, you know, the Progressive Era, moving into the Gilded Age, has always fascinated me. I couldn't tell you why, but I kept finding in the instance of my first book, I kept finding McClure and Tarbell referenced as side plots or side stories and other books, and I found myself really curious and wondering, why wasn't there a book just about, you know, the rise and fall of the magazine, this incredibly influential magazine called McClure's that is now pretty much vanished to history, but it brought a lot of of great, great we think of as now canonical writers into into a higher profile people like Willa Cather and Jack London and McClure and Tarbell were just really fun and idiosyncratic to write about at the same time, there was a larger political story going on that had a lot of parallels to the present day. At that point, the present day, there was a president who was antagonistic to investigative reporting. There was this revolution in communication technology. I thought those parallels would be fun to play with, and the relationship at the center of it, the kind of exploitative, symbiotic mentorship, you know, between McClure and Tarbell. I was excited to dig into that too. And you know, of course, most importantly of all, the archives were there that I could read each person's perspective on, you know, pretty minute events. And that that was really exciting. I think, when you can put events into order so precisely, and have people's actual voices, you know, giving their version of events to me that really, it's energizing. And, you know, good to the point where you're you want to spend five years with them. And that's very much what happens with The Icon and the Idealist. I. I relied for the first book, I relied on institutional archives almost completely. There was one private family archive and interview that was really valuable, but it was a smaller part of the the whole research for The Icon and the Idealist. I relied much more on private family archives. The descendants of Mary Ware Dennett have kept all of her personal papers. Her professional ones are in an institution, but her personal ones are still in the family homes. And that was just incredible. You really, you know, I just to not only to feel that the archive was there, but to think that not very many eyes had been on it before, you know, or really gives you a sense of purpose, of wanting to do justice to this individual, to this time in history. And of course, again, even more so than with the first book, I felt really driven by this sense of of wanting to make a contribution, of wanting to write a biography that shed light on the current discourse around reproductive rights.
Kate Carpenter 16:06
I'm curious, as you may or may not know, there can sometimes be a slightly, I don't know, awkward relationship between people who identify themselves as journalists who write history and people who identify themselves as academic historians.Ssometimes I think the difficulties in the relationship only go one way. Journalists maybe don't care that much. But how do you see your work writing history in relationship to academic historians? Or do you?
Stephanie Gorton 16:34
Well, you know, I very much can only do my work because academic historians have done so much of the foundational work. I really see myself as a biographer, and that this, you know, both books are dual biographies, not just of individuals, but of the relationship and of the larger movement that they were committed to. So, you know, it's a different field, isn't it? I think to be a historian, I would say you do need that high, higher academic credential and to be more immersed in historiography, and you know that all that is part of being a historian. To be a biographer, that's not really part of the qualifications that are needed to go about your work. I will say scholars have been universally supportive of my work when I've reached out on to them on a on a one to one basis. And of course, people like Andrea Tone, who wrote Devices and Desires, and James Reed, From Private Vice to Public Virtue. Books by Janet Farrell Brody, Linda Gordon, Dorothy Roberts, those are kind of like the pillars of what any later work stands on. So, you know, I don't know. I haven't, I haven't encountered the issue between historians and journalists outside of Twitter. I noticed it happening there, and decided just to not look at it for a while, because work was happening productively. But anyway, it, I was very fortunate in the scholars that I worked with and who who looked at the book before it was published.
Kate Carpenter 18:18
I asked Stephanie to read an excerpt from her book so that we could take a closer look at how she brought her subjects to life on the page. Here’s Stephanie Gorton reading from the first chapter of The Icon and the Idealist: Margaret Sanger, Mary Ware Dennett, and the Rivalry that Brought Birth Control to America.
Stephanie Gorton 18:35
By August, Mary and Hartley started sharing the news that she was pregnant. “It was a very great surprise to us,” she confided in Annie Dennett, “and not at all in accordance with our plans for the immediate future, but we are grateful now that our plans were so nicely upset, and we can’t help being very courageous and confident that all will be well.” She was twenty-eight and conscious of being an older mother. The couple had, from their chaste beginnings, become ardent lovers since their marriage. She later wrote concerning sex, “It is the very greatest physical pleasure to be had in all human experience, and it helps very much to increase all other kinds of pleasure also. . . . It is then most of all that [married couples] feel sure they belong to each other.” She was determined to shed the prudery of her upbringing and seemed to have succeeded. Sexual pleasure, she decided, was “a joy to be proudly and serenely experienced.” That serenity was about to meet its foil. A boy, Carleton Dennett, was born December 23. He came in the middle of the afternoon, “after a very long serious time,” Hartley wrote his mother in the birth announcement. For Mary and Hartley, becoming parents was a decisive loss of innocence. Carleton’s passage into the world was nearly fatal to Mary, and the pain stayed seared into her mind. Despite her slow recovery and breastfeeding difficulties, Carleton was a healthy, happy baby, in Mary’s eyes a “remarkable show-off baby” with a “beamy smile.” Gradually, the puzzle of family life began to fit together. Mary hired a nanny, renovated and repainted the farmhouse, cooked, gardened, and hosted gatherings. She and Hartley attended meetings and joined leagues supporting free trade, anti-imperialism, peace, and arts and crafts. The couple was knit close by their routine of family life and varied, side-by-side projects. A friend described their Framingham place as “one of the most beautiful homes I have ever known, perhaps the most beautiful, the relations not only of Mr. Dennett and Mrs. Dennett, but the relations towards their friends and towards the community. It was, I think, to everyone who knew them a singularly blessed spot.” Their newly built cement house, with its pretty red-tile roof and tower, was now finished: it held ten rooms, and it had hot water, central heat, and a walled garden. Its beamed ceilings presided over built-in shelves and Morris & Co. wallpaper, a true monument to the Arts and Crafts style, and a sleeping porch Hartley loved. By spring 1903, despite hoping for a longer interval between children, Mary was pregnant again. Appleton was born December 11, 1903. Again, the delivery was long and difficult, but this time the newborn was unable to feed from breast or bottle. Appleton died of malnutrition when he was three weeks old. As far as relatives can recall and the record shows, Mary did not speak or write of him for the rest of her life, apart from a parenthetical line in the life story she wrote up for a close friend. A third child, Devon, came barely eighteen months later. This time labor progressed fast—too fast. Devon thrived, but Mary was severely injured, with pelvic pain and dysfunction that did not ease over time. The lingering wound, probably a fistula, hobbled her daily life for at least two years. Doctors told the Dennetts they should not risk another pregnancy. Mary and Hartley had little knowledge of birth control. They already had the certainty, hard won, that any assumptions they’d had about fertile and infertile times of the month were inaccurate. Mary later wrote, “I was utterly ignorant of the control of conception, as was my husband also. We had never had anything like normal relations, having approximated almost complete abstinence in the endeavor to space our babies.” Carleton and Devon—she didn’t mention Appleton—were “both wanted, but both accidental.” After 1905, the Dennetts never risked much of a physical relationship again.
Kate Carpenter 22:41
Talk to me about what went into writing this passage.
Stephanie Gorton 22:45
Yes, I was looking at the sources that I drew from for just for this passage. So there were letters and notes from the Dennett papers. There are some in Sandy, Utah, and that's where these came from. There's a biography of Mary Ward Dennett by Constance Chen, just called The Sex Side of Life, that came out about 25 years ago and also draws heavily from some of Dennett's personal papers. There is, importantly, a letter from Mary Ward Dennett to Marie Stopes, who became a close friend of hers, and then maybe the source that gave the most intimate insights into when the Dennetts stopped having a physical relationship, Dennett became close with a sex therapist named Dr Roby, and there was a whole file in the Utah Dennett papers of her correspondence with Roby, talking about her own case, she referred relatives to go see him. He was someone she really, she really trusted. And that, to me was, you know, that's something that I hadn't found in any other source on Dennett. And it really brought into perspective what it meant, you know, what it meant to be told you shouldn't risk another pregnancy. That's the end of, you know, sex life with your spouse. And within a few years, of course, Hartley had drifted out of the marriage, and the Dennetts were put through a really humiliating divorce. So, you know, whenever I'm piecing together a handful of sources into a narrative that has scenes and quotes and trying to convey a vivid sense of what's going on personally for the characters. You know, I start by writing it out how I think I would like to read it. And then I go through and really make sure the who, what, where, when, why is there, you know, try and really situate the reader. And then I think about, you know, is there a balance between thinking about the internal experience of these characters and also, you know, what the outside world would have seen? Seen what the norms were, you know, how, how typical was this for a couple at that time? And the answer is, you know, it was very typical for childbirth to be fatal, for it to at least be traumatic, and for the only recourse that a doctor would offer to a couple would be, you know, don't risk another pregnancy. You must be celibate from this point on.
Kate Carpenter 25:25
I was intrigued, and you've hinted at it so far in our conversation, but in your author's note, you talk about where you found many of the archival materials for Mary Ware Dennett. Can you talk a little bit more about where you found them and what what it was like to research that way?
Stephanie Gorton 25:39
Yeah, well, you know, I think what something I tried to keep in mind through the research process was just how much I didn't find and how much is not there, because topics like birth control and maternity were just not really seen as valid topics to be kept in the historical record. This, you know, women's experience, domestic experience, we do have some records, but they haven't been preserved and prioritized necessarily. There's also, of course, the huge human, you know, life force that is you know, or the influence, that is embarrassment and just that feeling of not wanting to set something down that could be humiliating or improper. I think that's muffled a lot of the history of sex also, or at least the kind of history of everyday use of birth control that I was trying to dig into. I started out with Dennett's professional papers that were at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. And I live in Providence, Rhode Island, so, you know, I've been taking the train up for each day that I spent there. And that, of course, was a great foundation. I think it's where, you know, anyone who's interested in Dennett, we need to start. But then, when the pandemic began, institutions shut down, especially to people who didn't have an academic affiliation, like me. I was so so fortunate to meet a research librarian at the Providence Public Library who basically made everything possible as far as secondary sources. She made everything possible through interlibrary loan, and she kind of waived any limits. It was truly amazing to be able to work through the pandemic as far as possible after being shut out of so many other institutions. And you know, as a kind of footnote, it was really, I had coffee with her last week, and it was really hard to hear that our public library is going through such budget challenges that they don't have a research desk at all anymore. So if a researcher shows up and doesn't know to ask for her by name, you know that kind of good fortune that I had is just no longer there. The public library is really important. Another avenue that I started pursuing during the pandemic was descendants of my subjects. I thought, well, I can't, I can't, you know, I was also very fortunate that the librarians at the Schlesinger would would scan or download and send me Dennett documents. I requested them, but there was a pretty tight management of that. You know, I couldn't request dozens and dozens of documents at once. It was a handful here and a handful there. So I started writing to the Dennett descendants, and fortunately, there is a feminist historian named Sharon Spaulding, who is married to one of Dennett's great grandsons, and she has been gathering and curating and organizing and copying Dennett's personal papers. Huge project. There are two locations for those archives. There's the actual Dennett property in Halstead, New Hampshire, which is a, you know, it's a house that's more than 300 years old, and it's been in the Dennett family since Mary and Hartley, really, and also Sharon's own home in Sandy, Utah. And it was through making a connection with Sharon that all of this personal archive research became possible. So it, you know, it actually is like the best case scenario story that you could ever share with a researcher. I drove up to visit her in New Hampshire. And you know, we're in this 300 plus year old home next to a lake, and there are steamer trunks full of Dennett's papers, her clothes, her jewelry. And it was just not only the most incredibly collaborative relationship with Sharon, but the materials themselves were so exciting. And that's, you know, I think, yeah, it was, it was really special to research this book. I placed less focus on primary sources when it came to Sanger. Sanger has been, she's had dozens of biographies, people have been over her life countless times. She, of course, documented her own life a ton, something Dennett didn't do as much. You know, I think when you look at the number of photographs that still exist of Singer, there are hundreds, if not 1000s. And when it comes to Dennett, there's, you know, barely a dozen. It's, it's really hard to to get a sense--she didn't, she didn't have herself photographed, or think of herself as a persona in the public eye quite as much. So I relied a lot on the scholars who edited Sanger's letters and her papers to get through the Sanger portions of the book and to put those together. I also visited the archives at Smith, but it was not so much to dig into the letters and the diaries as it was to choose images. But when it came to Dennett, I realized there was enough uncovered material there that that's really, you know, she became like, kind of the emotional center of the book, and it felt right to be spending that time with her personal papers.
Kate Carpenter 31:04
Obviously, this is a dual biography, and you mentioned earlier that the structure evolved as you revised. How did you think about the narrative structure and how did you kind of settle on its final form?
Stephanie Gorton 31:16
That took a really long time to get it to its final form, and there's still, you know, when I open the book today, there's still parts that I think I would re-sequence or cut or expand on. I wanted to juxtapose how far Dennett and Sanger had a great deal in common, and then also how just the makeup of their characters and how their formative experiences, uh, kind of motivated them to approach their work with such different strategies, you know, to go down such different paths. At first, I started in an extremely basic way. I would alternate one for another, chapter by chapter. But then, you know, there came the challenge of trying to weave in the story of cultural change that is also very much the backdrop where one of the, one of the focuses of the biography. So there were smaller stories about what was happening in fiction, in the movies, theater, journalism and sociology and anthropology, integrating those episodes smoothly really took some time. They had to, they had to be tied to the right place chronologically. But they couldn't seem like a distraction from the character driven story. And they also couldn't feel like I was including research just because I had done it. You know that that is, you sometimes read a book and you realize, oh, the author just really wants me to know that they know this, but it doesn't, it doesn't really have the same energy as the rest of the of the narrative here. So, you know, I was less interested, every time I wrote up a piece that felt like pure background, I would ask, I would, you know, really go through and interrogate, what does this have to do with the with the more character driven story that I'm trying to tell here? And, of course, as it evolved, it became less simply a matter of alternating chapters, and more of trying to think, well, what are the chapters in their lives. You know, in the rise and fall of one birth control organization, one lobbying season in Washington. You know, what it was like to open a birth control clinic in Harlem? You know when, when did they actually start to get responses from eugenicists, from leaders in the eugenics movement, and then how did they react to those differently? So it became, you know, this interplay of chronology and theme, but it took, it really took a long time to get there.
Kate Carpenter 33:51
As you mentioned, and you answered this a little bit, but I want to touch on it some more, which is that one, one challenge in this book is that you have one character, Margaret Sanger, who's basically a household name, and another in Mary Ware Dennett, that she's not unknown, but is less, perhaps generally familiar to people and has been written about less. How did you, what were your strategies for making sure that that narrative stayed balanced?
Stephanie Gorton 34:18
You know, I deliberately didn't pursue the goal of uncovering a new version of Margaret Sanger. There's an incredible biography of her by Ellen Chesler. And then there's the selected papers of Margaret Sanger, edited by Esther Katz and colleagues. When it comes to Dennett, there's that single biography, The Sex Side of Life, by Constance Chen, which is wonderful, but there are not a lot of other sources just for the general reader. The family papers could really energize me. It allowed me to go deep into Dennett and to realize, you know, to be able to put her on the same level as Sanger. It's something that I had wanted to do, just because Dennett's vision was so compelling to me, her gumption and taking reproductive rights to Washington for the first time, she started lobbying to legalize birth control starting in 1919, that was kind of staggering to realize she had had this vision of really reproductive rights being a way of getting, bodily autonomy being a way for women to get, really to get full citizenship. It's something that I think is such a fresh and modern perspective. And I just had this inkling that once readers saw that, that they would see that she's kind of been unfairly overshadowed by Sanger. She didn't have the funding or the profile or the or ultimately, the success that Sanger did, but the courage and the vision and those Initial lobbying sessions really laid the groundwork for our current discourse around reproductive rights. So I think that kind of attachment or affection or belief in Dennett helped even out the fact that, you know, the overwhelming amount of material, of course, was on Sanger side. But then, you know, there was also the incredible contribution of the family papers from Sharon Spaulding and the Dennett family. So it did, it wasn't like, it wasn't at any point that balance, you know, was, was never really a problem, which I think is also that's something that you have to count on the archives being there to be able to feel comfortable with it. And that was, that was really lucky.
Kate Carpenter 36:47
Well, in the last part of our time, I want to talk a little bit about your own influences and inspirations. I usually ask if people have sort of regular people they turn to for feedback. You've talked a little bit about that, but do you also have a writing group or anything like that that you're a part of?
Stephanie Gorton 37:01
You know, I have a group that I met at grad school, and there's, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't repeatedly send drafts to anyone in that group, but maybe if there was a chunk that I really wanted feedback on, then we, you know, it's kind of taken as a matter of course. We send each other our work, and if people have time, they send back their comments. I did have a lot of help from a former former publishing colleague and friend. He's the one I mentioned who really helped with the structure. There's a newer friend I met actually through my kids' preschool. So former academic and novelist, and he just was incredible at going through the manuscript. I think he used, you know, that comment, awk, A W K for awkward, upwards of 1000 times, but really, kind of helped me iron out the sentences. I'm really, really grateful to him. And you know, I worked on some loosely related articles, and getting editorial feedback on those was helpful. Ultimately, I think the most, you know, the reads that shaped the manuscript the most, I guess predictably came from my agent and from the editor. I did switch editors halfway through the process, my initial editor moved to a different job, but that was an opportunity for, you know, for another round of feedback. It is really hard to make congressional lobbying interesting reading, you know, it just goes on and on and on. There are so many meetings, sessions and and it kind of feels like Groundhog Day, because birth control just got this hostile and mocking response so many times when Dennett introduced her bill. But, you know, I think through those last round of edits with my agent, with the first editor and with the second they, you know, they really encouraged me to boil it down, you know, to try and distill it. And I don't know, I remember having a conversation saying, well, that's the nature of lobbying, and it's just really grueling, and it goes on and on, and I want the reader to like, feel what it's actually like. Them saying, No, the reader doesn't want to feel like it's actually like, this might be a chance for you like, you know, you tell rather than show.
Kate Carpenter 39:26
Probably solid advice. Are there other writers, other books that you--or maybe other media too--that you look to for inspiration for your own writing?
Stephanie Gorton 39:36
Absolutely there are. You know, there are some books and some pieces that when I feel really stymied, I will kind of go back and try and find, find the joy again and the creative spark. Maybe the book that, more than any other single book put me on the path to this kind of work was The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall. I know Marshall spent over a decade researching and writing that book, and read every note. She did, she took the Caro advice, she turned every page. She knew these characters' lives, and again, the archives were there. They've been preserved. And she's also, Marshall is also the one, I wrote her a piece of fan mail about it, and she responded saying, you know, I think at the end of it, I said something, you know, some really vague question, like, how did you do that? And she said, you just need to figure out very precisely what happened when. And, you know, who said what, when. And you can start getting a sense of these, these people and and trying to put on the page their authentic interactions. You know, it's really exciting to do that, to resurrect the past. There's also, when I was in grad school, we saw the journalist Will Haygood give a speech, and he really broke down, I remember, this is what I remember from his talk, is that he talked about how daunting it is to write a book, and then he encouraged us to think of it--and you know, this is maybe very basic, but at the time, it felt revelatory--just think of it as 12 magazine pieces. Just think of it as an article, and then another article and then another one. I read another book that's not related to my topic recently, and this is the last one I'm going to talk about. But What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo. It's her memoir of growing up and then realizing she has complex post traumatic stress disorder, but it just weaves-- she's a long time audio journalist that worked on This American Life for a long time--but it weaves together this vivid personal experience with rigorous research so seamlessly, you know, and obviously she's writing about, it's a reported memoir, and she's writing about something that must have been so close to the bone. I thought it was a model of writing about a topic that gets you emotionally, you know, where you're implicated, and yet keeping it to such a high level of craft.
Kate Carpenter 42:14
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Stephanie Gorton 42:18
I guess I mentioned put it away for a while, that is powerful. There's a post-it that I had stuck by my screen for a while, also, that just said "it's later than you think," which means you have less time to make that new draft. You're probably not going to be able to fix it next time around. If there's something you're concerned about, like, just tackle it now. I would, yeah, I think it's a tie between those two.
Kate Carpenter 42:44
Excellent. Well, Stephanie Gordon, thank you so much for joining me to talk about your writing process on Drafting the Past.
Stephanie Gorton 42:50
Thank you so much, Kate.
Kate Carpenter 42:52
Thanks again to Stephanie for joining me for this episode, and thanks to you for listening. As always, you can find show notes with links to all of the books we talked about and a complete transcript at draftingthepast.com. You can also sign up for the newsletter to get sporadic updates on the show, links to other interesting stuff about writing history, and more. And here’s a dissertation update for you: I’m back in the thick of things, trying to finish up Chapter 4 in the next couple of weeks. I’ve made a list of everything I still need to add to the chapter and I’m slowly working my way through it, tackling everything from verifying small dates to adding passages that require more research. I’ll try to send out a newsletter with more details about how I’m working through some of the harder sections, like explaining developments in Doppler radar in the 1980s and early 90s without boring the reader to tears. I hope you’re staying safe wherever you are. Until next time, friends don’t let friends write boring history.
