Historian and writer Emily Lieb’s professional history is a fascinating one, from crafting textbooks for kids to leaving a job as a professor to become a full-time writer. She taught history and urban studies at Seattle University for more than a decade. Now, in addition to her work as a historian, she also works for the Derfner & Sons writing agency.
Her first book came out in 2025 after many years of research, writing and revision. It’s called Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, and it tells the story of a plan to build an expressway through Black, middle-class community in Baltimore, and how even though the road was never built, the plan paved the way for the destruction of a vibrant neighborhood. It’s a history that echoes similar ones in cities across the United States, and Emily uses it to tell a fascinating but frustrating, deeply human story about racial inequality and the resistance of determined residents. Emily had a clear vision of how she wanted to tell this history, right down to the kind of book it should be, and you’ll learn a lot in this interview from how she got there and her frank approach to writing and editing.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Emily Lieb, Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore
- Derfner & Sons
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, the origin of the phrase “shitty first drafts”
- Andrew Hartman also praised editor Tim Mennel in episode 69
- Calvin Trillin, “Thoughts Brought On By Prolonged Exposure to Exposed Brick”
Note: Bookshop.org links are affiliate links.
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter, and I'm getting over a cold, so if I sound a little funny, forgive me. In this episode, I'm happy to be joined by historian and writer Dr. Emily Lieb.
Emily Lieb 0:15
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to have this conversation.
Kate Carpenter 0:19
Emily's writing history is a fascinating one, from crafting textbooks for kids to leaving a job as a professor to become a full time writer. You'll hear more about that path in our interview. She taught history and urban studies at Seattle University for more than a decade now. In addition to her work as a historian, she also works for the Derfner & Sons writing agency. Her first book came out in 2025 after many years of research, writing and revision. It's called Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, and it tells the story of a plan to build an expressway through a Black, middle class community in Baltimore, and how, even though the road was never built, the plan paved the way for the destruction of a vibrant neighborhood. It's a history that echoes similar ones in cities across the United States, and Emily uses it to tell a fascinating but frustrating, deeply human story about racial inequality and the resistance of determined residents. Emily had a clear vision of how she wanted to tell this history right down to the kind of book it should be, and I think you'll learn a lot from how she got there and her frank approach to writing and editing. Here's my conversation with Dr Emily Lieb.
Emily Lieb 1:30
So I have always been a writer as sort of a job that is on the side of the job that I had after I graduated from college I went to Brown in the 90s. So picture this like be overalled, person leaving going out into the world. I worked in publishing. I worked in Educational Publishing. It was an editor at a what then was a Pearson like subsidiary. Now everything is a Pearson subsidiary. Actually, maybe that's not even true anymore, like the world has moved on past Pearson, but I was a textbook editor. But even then I worked. This is probably not something that you're supposed to admit. But so I had a bunch of friends who worked in, in and around publishing, and it didn't, obviously pay any money. And so we would all do, like, freelance writing jobs for one another with it. So we would just, like, push stuff from, like, company to company. I was like, editing at work during the day, and then writing for other people and other companies at night. And then when I went to graduate school, maybe two I think I did that for like, two years, and then I went to graduate school at Columbia. Then too, I kept on always doing I was like, doing writing projects for at that point, Pearson and other things. You know, some of it was history textbook. Some of it was math textbooks. Some of it was like writing little stories about, I remember one about, there's an island in Maine that doesn't, you can't drive a car on, like, a long book about that for small children. And then I did a lot of write, even then, when I, and we'll talk probably about this later. But so I always, you know, work during graduate school, doing things that were writing, but not scholarly writing, necessarily non fiction writing, but not scholarly non fiction writing, and not sophisticated writing, and not journalist writing. Like taking, taking things and complicated things, or less complicated things, depending on the age of the reader, and making them clear and understandable. So that is sort of actually like a skill that I got from writing math textbooks for little children. I don't understand math either, so, so like taking information in and trying to digest it pre digest it for the reader in a way that is doing more chewing for the reader than writing for grown ups does. And then I did a lot of right freelance work for the History Channel during graduate school, and then after graduate school, writing supplemental things that went on their website. After graduate school, I moved well. During graduate school, I moved out to Seattle to take a job as a professor in the humanities college at Seattle University, another job that paid $0 so I was always, always had two jobs, at least when I was a faculty member, full time faculty member. But I always had to have more than one job. And all of that work, all of that writing work, was it? It was not like I wasn't producing beautiful writing. That was not the point. It was always like digesting things that are complicated for an audience of people who who maybe aren't expert in the field, or don't even maybe care about the field. And then for some of that time, when I was still teaching full time at Seattle U, and then I left Seattle U to be full time A writer for a writing company that a couple of my friends started. A couple of my friends from graduate school started, and we it was a friend of mine who had done a lot of work at the Gates Foundation, and so it's sort of a we just write whatever white papers, speeches. I'm not a good speech writer, but others are. But again, taking things that are so like I do a lot of stuff, have always in my career as this in this part of my writing career, have sort of focused on climate and also on global. Health, which are two things I also knew nothing about, going in and continue to know nothing about as a, you know, general, compared to people who know. But again, like the skill is to the skill that I got from that, and I think has served me really well, although I don't know that I would have necessarily known this. But again, it's like the same, it's the same idea as writing math textbooks for little children. It's just like, you know, taking hard to digest scholarly pieces of writing, or taking scholarly research, or whatever it is, and translating it into something that people who are, like, a little bit interested in the field might be able to read and digest and understand, like, what is it that we're talking about when we're talking about, you know, primary health care in Kenya, like what is important here, or what is important here, about methane mitigation in, you know, the EU or whatever, for people who maybe know a little bit about those things, but aren't necessarily, like, completely consumed in the field. So again, those are, those are things that we're not I'm not writing for like, beautiful prose in that work. I'm writing for clarity, and I'm writing for and, you know, like any writer, and, in fact, like any writer who who writes more beautiful things, like journal, you know, there's always an editor who's on your case about something, and there's always somebody who's like, coming in and adding things that you're like absolutely so learning not to take things personally, learning not to be super attached to, you know, like the whole Kill Your Darlings thing, even though there are no darlings in this line of work, what the all that sort of, all those words that I have written that did not belong to me, that did not have my name on them, that that were not my stuff going into it, right? Somebody just handed me, like, here's a 300 page report. Make it into a five page report, or whatever it is, gets you out of your own ego in ways that I think a problem, perhaps with some less so now, because everybody is so precarious, everybody's life as a writer and as a scholar is so precarious. So I think people now are better at it. I think books are better now than they used to be. Because I think, you know, I think if you you know, if it's 1984 or whatever, and you're, you know, a professor or someplace where, like, all you do is get worshiped, but like, that sort of Tweety vision of you're just followed by little Tweety mini me's when nobody tells you no nobody tells you to, like, shove it or stop you. Stop yapping. I think that having jobs where you write a bunch of things that doesn't belong to you, the ideas are not yours, and the the job is to translate, to think about it as translation something really complicated into something really simple. And like, on that, that's obviously a spectrum, right? Either you're writing a math textbook for five year olds, or you're writing a piece about family planning for grownups, it's still, it's the same idea, right? Like, how do you take something really complicated and make it into something that people will find engaging, or, if not engaging, because we can't always get to engaging, but like, find readable and find interesting and find there's something in there that they can take with them. It's a story of things that aren't interesting, teaching you how to do things that are interesting.
Kate Carpenter 8:00
So then, how did you come, what was kind of the path to ending up publishing The Road to Nowhere?
Emily Lieb 8:04
What a long and convoluted tale. So when I was in graduate school, I was trying to figure out what I was going to write my dissertation about as one does and also as one does. I was writing about something completely not this. And I happened to be some somebody happened to be going to Baltimore, happened to be driving a car to Baltimore. So I, like, was like, Okay, I'll get in the car with this guy and go. And I went to this city archives in Baltimore. This is a really long time ago now, and it was when the city archives are now not in this place anymore, but at the time, they were in just sort of a warehouse in Baltimore, and they were incredibly underfunded. This is all not true anymore. The city is doing the city and state are doing a much, much, much better job at funding. This is now like an incredible it was always an incredible institution. It was just sort of ignored at the time by the city and particularly the state. And so because of the resource limitations, it was sort of just in this warehouse. And the stacks were therefore open, which is great for someone like me, because I am very, like, I'm a rummager, like, I like to rummage through things. I like to go to the library stacks. I am a very, like a paper person and a physical media person, and just again, like, like, somebody who just, like, flips through things. So when I'm trying to figure out what I'm learning about things. I like to go to the stacks of the library and see what's on the shelves. Like that is how, to me, I get a good sense, just like being standing in a space, looking around, seeing what's there, is how I get a pretty good sense of what's out there. And so I was just going through boxes in the Baltimore city archives. Again, I don't know what I was looking for, but I found a box of photographs that was some of them are reproduced in the book of houses in this neighborhood that were falling apart, you know. So I'm looking at pictures of houses that are falling apart. That's the information that I had. They were labeled, so I knew that the city had taken them, and they were dated. So I knew that the city had taken them, and I knew that they had been taken in 19 the late the end of the 1960s and the very beginning of the 1970s And so it emerged that those these were pictures of a neighborhood in West Baltimore, a black homeowner's neighborhood in West Baltimore called Rosemont, which is what this book is about. However, that is not what my dissertation was about. So I sort of this played a little bit of a role in what ended up being my dissertation, the story of Rosemont. That is this book, but it really was just as part a chunk of my dissertation, which was about urban renewal in Baltimore, more generally, pretty boring, honestly, but that was what sort of stuck in my head. Was like, this place and these houses and what happened to these houses. Can I write a book? Can I tell a story about a house? Basically, like, how do you tell a story of a house and the story of, why am I looking at a house with the awning falling off, right? And make it a real story. Because that was, to me, the interesting part of the sort of whole saga of urban renewal in Baltimore was like, how does this land on people? How does this kind of places where people live and continue to live and are trying to make a life in the middle of all this turmoil that the city is like visiting upon them and won't stop visiting upon them, right? How do you tell a story about that that people want to read and that people can sort of see their own cities in this story? And how? How can we make a story about functionally, transportation policy and urban like a dry policy story into actually a story about a city and its people? And that's what I wanted to do with this book was sort of take pull out of my dissertation the parts of the story that were the human and the city story, and pay less attention to the parts of it that are sort of a much drier and to me, less interesting story of, you know, downtown policy and politics. But it has been a long road. I then, as I said, finished graduate school and took up a job as a professor here in Seattle, and the department that I taught in at Seattle University was at the time the it continues to be. It exists. The humanities college separate from the College of Arts and Sciences, also separate from the College of Liberal Arts. We've got a lot of things going on. What made the experimental college experimental was that it did not tenure its faculty. It had its own faculty, but that faculty, and, you know, that's the experiment, honestly, that's an experiment that now it's like very few things from Seattle University have been taken up with such enthusiasm nationwide as, hey, let's not tenure our faculty. So I had a full it was a full time job, you know, same, same as every any other faculty job, but it was not a 10 year line job. It was just a full time job. The expectation was that you were doing all of the things that you would have been doing if you had been in a 10 year tenured or tenure line job, including research and writing. But of course, there was no support for that work in the job contract. So you're teaching, it was quarter a system, so you're teaching, you know, up to seven or eight classes a year. But then also in your contract isn't, hey, go be a scholar, but you have to go be a scholar. So I kept, like, I picked this book up and put it down a million times in the time that I was a full time faculty member, which was maybe 15 years or so Seattle, u maybe not quite that long, a number of years, and the thing that is interesting or was interesting at the time, I don't know that this would necessarily still be true, because the landscape of academic work is so bleak. But one of the things that I needed to figure out is, like, when I come back to this book and write this book, am I writing a book that is like a 10 year book? So am I going to try to take this book and go on to the job market like, you know, try to get the kind of job that, you know? I think we were all sort of trained to expect or not to expect to get right? Let's sort of, it's a 10 year track job at a whatever, which is a different book than this book, I think. So I started out kind of thinking that that was what I was going to do. So I started out writing one version of that book, which is, I think, closer to what the dissertation was. And then as time passed, it became clear that enough time had passed that I was not ever going to be on a tenure track job market, because I had, then had a lot of experience, right? So nobody wanted would want to hire me as a, you know, like a first year professor. And so then it was like, Okay, well, now it's a different book. So now I got to figure out, 1am, I going to write this book? And then two, if I am, what kind of book is it going to be? Because it doesn't have to be the kind of book that I thought it had to be. And by the way, one of the things about, you know, writing that tenure track book or that 10 year book is that one of the things it mostly needs to be is done. And so like having some that kind of fire under your butt, I didn't have, and so I had lots of time to sort of think about. And again, this is terrible advice. Do not take this listeners do not take this advice. But sort of thinking about, okay, so what am I trying to do by publishing this book? Right? What am I trying to accomplish here? If it's not about a teaching job, it's not about academia, it's not necessarily even anymore about intervening in a intervening in a scholarly discourse, as much because it doesn't have to be, and that's not something that I, I was ever particularly interested in doing anyway, like I wanted to write a book that people wanted to read. I wanted to write a book that explained something hard in a way that was clear. I wanted to write a book that was short. I wanted to write a book that was like a real book. And I wanted. Write a book that I was proud of. I have seen a lot of friends who, again, had, this is not a knock on them. This is like the economy of scholarship is they had to just quickly write things right and like, be done with it, and were not happy with the results necessarily. Again, because of the speed of which it had to happen, I didn't if I, in the end, was writing this for me, then I didn't want to feel like I could have done it better, or I didn't want to feel like I could I wasn't proud of it. If it had been something that I needed to get done in order to get tenure at read or something, then I would have done that, and it would have been fine. But I wanted to feel like I did. I wrote the book that I wanted to write, which I was very fortunate to be able to have done because I had the time and the space and the money, because I had a job, I then got another job, which is another huge piece of this. I think that we need to really acknowledge. I think everybody who's listening to this acknowledges it, but I think the world needs to acknowledge, the world of academia needs to acknowledge that this costs so much, this kind of work costs money to do, and this is a cheap version of it, because this is like me going to an American from a major American city to a major American city to work in an archive that is an established archive in English. I was working with documents that were recent, comparatively speaking, and so they existed. They existed many times because they existed because they didn't people didn't people didn't know they were there. Retention schedules would have said that they were destroyed, and they just weren't, which is great for me, you know, this, this is like the cheapest and easiest possible version of doing scholarly work, right? Or doing non fiction writing. I think I don't have kids. I was able to, therefore, able to go away for, you know, weeks at a time to do research trips, which I love. My favorite part of doing this kind of work is being in archives. And so that brings me enormous joy. But I think, like the expectations, and again, in past generations, those things have been covered by people's institutions, right. And now it's like good luck to you, unless you have a lot of free time, which I did, like a fair amount of disposable income, which I did, and a weird chip on your shoulder, right?
Emily Lieb 17:05
If you don't have the quiet engine of like rage or something pushing you forward. So I think that it is important to note, and people note this. I'm not the first person to say this, but it is always important, I think, to say aloud that this is a really expensive, really luxurious indulgence, and it should, you know, writing books should not be an expensive, luxurious indulgence, putting books out into the world, that's not what it should be, right? But it is. And so I think people need to maybe hear that it's not that like it requires an enormous amount of privilege and resources that people don't have anymore, especially now. And so this is a huge problem, I think, for like, the community of readers and writers in this world. But also, you know, just understanding that like that, no, that's true. Your sense that this is actually just very expensive folly is in some ways accurate. So young listeners take heart, I guess, or something, your read of the situation is correct. This is very expensive and very takes a lot of time. So anyway, that that is how we got in the end, that is how we got to this, this version of this book, and and this book generally, is like a very long and winding process of picking the work up and putting it down again and letting it sit, and picking it up and putting it down again and letting it sit, which, again, did it a huge favor, but is not a realistic advice.
Kate Carpenter 18:19
I want to talk about kind of the nuts and bolts of your writing process before we get into more about the book. So when and where do you like to do your work?
Emily Lieb 18:27
That's a, again, a terribly traumatic question to answer, because it really I'm a very lazy person. The other thing is, I'm extremely lazy. So this is all this all must be filtered through that lens. I am not a morning person. So I am not a person who gets up in the morning. You know, there are always people. Always people are always telling you to just get up in the morning and write for two hours before you have coffee or whatever. Just completely deranged nonsense. That is like, I need to get up and spend three hours working my way into the world I couldn't possibly think in the morning. And so I am a late afternoon like my brain is a late afternoon brain. Late afternoon to evening is when my brain really works. Well, it starts to work after lunch. So when I am trying to do something like I think, like many people, I have a I have a real problem if I'm in something, if I'm writing a chapter, or if I'm if I'm in the work, then I love to do it, and I find it very easy to do, and I love to get started on it when I am in between pieces, or, like, between chapters, or have to start drafting something that I will put that off for weeks. So it really depends on, like, where we are in the work. If it's something that I'm in into, it's happening and I'm into it, typically I will. This is also strange, but I have, like, a rotation of coffee shops that they're either on or they're not on. So like, if a place is good has, like good energy, like, is working, then I will go back to that place every day until it's not working, until it's like, all of a sudden, too loud or too hot or something. And then I will move on to another in the in the rotation. And. Till I find someplace so like, sometimes it's a bar, sometimes I prefer to work, not at home. I prefer to work in places that are public and loud, but a very particular kind of loud. I don't want to be hearing exactly what's being said next to me, but I don't like to work like, I like to hear din. So like, high ceilings, like that kind of thing. Often bars are really good for this. The music is loud, the people are loud, but you can't hear specific things. So like, if a place has the right kind of noise level and energy, then I, I mine it until it is dry, and then I find another place, and then I and then I start the whole thing over again. But I am a person who is an editor, drafting something as hell, right? Like getting something from zero to something on the page is the worst experience of your life, and then fiddling with it is, for me, also where the fun is, and also where you stop feeling mean. Sometimes you'll be fiddling with something for years and it won't work. But sometimes, you know, it just takes you can turn real garbage into something that is not garbage, but it you've got to start. I mean, this is the, you know, shitty first draft thing, which is classic, for a reason, because it's true, you have to have something. It has to be terrible. It will always be terrible. I don't have one shitty first draft. I have like, 10, you know, like all of my I have, like, many drafts that are bad. Then it will click and, like, I will sort of hear in my head a click when it's like, okay, I figured it out, right? I figure out what I'm thinking by writing. And so I never start with like, here's what I'm gonna say, or like, here is the idea. Now I just have to get it down, and then I figure out what the idea is by writing through it, which, again, I think is something that has been trained by by all those years of working. And like, here's something that doesn't really make sense to me. And so I have to make it make sense to somebody else, but before I can do that, I have to make it make sense to myself, and I do that by writing through it. You know, I hate drafting something. When I do draft it, it's bad, bad, and then it stays bad for a long time, and then it gets, eventually, gets, gets better, but it takes time. I'm not a person who can just sit down and, like, unfurl brilliant prose and like, call it a day.
Kate Carpenter 21:59
How does that revision work for you? I mean, do you write it over again many times?
Emily Lieb 22:05
I just, I sit down, I print it out. I will keep hp in business forever, because I print it out, and then I just rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it. So very few things, nothing I would say, survives intact through the many, many, many iterations. But yeah, I just, I print it out, I sit down, and then I just, for a long time, I had a particular like a college ruled legal yellow college ruled call it has to be college ruled not white. I would just physically write, physically rewrite it on paper and then type it in. In recent years that has, particularly as I have come now that I'm a full time writer for my job, my brain now works better, better than it did work at just editing on the computer without having to do the process of the actual handwriting. But I still print things out, I still edit them with a pen, or I still like, at least flag things that need to be changed with a pen, and then yeah, I just like, rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. So sometimes I'll spend days, weeks on a on a paragraph, because that's the key to the next thing. And if you can't, if it's not clear, and a lot of the things about this book in particular, is that it is explaining a lot of things that are very complicated and confusing. For example, there were a whole bunch of different road maps right? The city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland produced a bunch of different plans for expressways that we're going to carve through the city truly question mark number of them, because, and if anybody knew how many there were total, it would be me, and I don't like that's how many. Because every everybody, every time there's a new mayor, every time there's a new city planning guy, every time like they hire a consultancy and they make a new map, I would not necessarily come out and say 100% this was the point. The confusion was the point. However, I will say it is a fact that the confusion served those people very well, because nobody in Baltimore ever quite knew what's the extant plan. Like, what are what's happening right now? Where is this road supposed to be? Like, what's the story? What's going on? And so that kind of back and forth. And now it's two blocks this way. And now it's two blocks this way was part of the way that planners and policymakers diffused pushback, because nobody ever quite knew what was happening. So what I did not want to do was write a book that was a catalog of all of these plans, because that is boring. It is also confusing. And the point of it is not really that there, you know, here's the details of these plans. So I had to sort of strike a balance between you have to have enough details so that people understand. People understand what's happening. You have to have enough actually confusing detail so that people know it's confusing. I mean, that was actually sort of a handy thing, was that there are parts of this book that are actually, I think are a little confusing when I'm describing what's going on with a particular policy or with a particular map. And the point of that exercise is to show that it's confusing, right? Because readers need to be a little confused. Because readers who of the Baltimore Sun in 1964 were confused, and people who were trying to go to to a public meeting about this thing in 1967 were confused. And that was again, I will not 100% make the claim that that was on purpose all the time, but it certainly. Was a happy result for the people who were pushing these plans, who wanted to get these plans passed, because they wanted people to not completely understand what was going to happen to them and to their communities and to their homes. The point is, it just like is a it's rewriting. It's rewriting. It's rewriting. It's letting it sit. It's coming back, seeing what is confusing, what is not what works, what does not work, which, again, is not useful advice for people who are sane and would like to get things done in a timely fashion.
Kate Carpenter 25:28
Are there ways that you organize your research and writing? Do you use any specific tools?
Emily Lieb 25:32
I do not. I am just old enough that all of these things that people love, that you know, all the sort of different ways that you can file your stuff and your computer, like, find things. Imagine being able to find things. I'm like, just a little too old to use those. What I do is I take my research also. I prefer I now have moved on to, like everybody else, I take picture, photo, you know, digital, like on my phone, in the archives. But if I had my druthers, I would still photocopy things. My brain works best on paper. Ideally, what would happen is I would come home with photocopies of, like, a zillion things from the archive, and then I just sit down and I basically take notes in a shape notes in a like, okay, so this is chapter three, or whatever it is. And then I just sit down with the sources, and I go through and I just basically block quote type in block quotes. And I always tell my students, I understand how people I don't think I did this here. I understand how people can find themselves in plagiarism situations, because if you forget to put the quotes on the things that you're just typing. Because I do, just type in into my computer from the primary documents, right? Like this is just big block quotes, then sort of just draft little like, you know, connecting me, right? Like, what's the point that this is trying to make? Right? So then I have, like, notes for a Chapter, like, 120 pages of notes, right? I am also a person who does not have any filter on the incoming side, anything that is maybe relevant I put into this huge, big document. So I end up with these enormously long notes that are just, you know, here's the quote, and then I try to have like, a proper footnote in those notes, because I have learned, here's a real piece of advice. You will forget where things came from. You will have taken notes 10 years ago, and then your computer will die twice. And when it comes time to finalize your manuscript, you will be like, I do not know this footnote I wrote is crazy, so I now know do the best that you can from the beginning to actually have full footnotes with everything in your notes, because that will make your life so much easier at the end. However, I understand that if you're using these database that is becomes less of a less of an issue if you're an adult who can use technology, but I just take really long notes, I make them into a huge, big block. Then like, go through and draft a chapter out of that, and then go through and rewrite that, and then go through and rewrite it again. And then, like, bring stuff back from the big you know, never delete the big doc, right? Because you bring stuff back and reshape things. And, I mean, this has been in a million different versions, a million different it has looked a million different ways. It has been put together a million different ways. But, you know, it's sort of a puzzle right? Then, I just sort of think of it as, where's the piece that needs to go here? How do I go about filling this hole in the either it maybe it's in hole in the research, maybe it's a hole in the writing, like, maybe the stuff is there. I'm just not walking the reader from A to B, and I need to be or whatever it is, having a very critical eye is good. I think again, my I have learned, strangely, to like, have my ego be kind of out of the writing process. From all of my years of working in jobs as a writer, that I was just the vessel. I wasn't. It's not the ideas. The ideas weren't mine. And so I am very good at seeing what's bad and not gnashing my teeth about it, but being able to be like, no, that's just bad, and we got to fix it. It's terrible advice to writers to, you know, be more self critical, but I think that having the ability to be real about most of what we write is bad, and that is great. That is the process. That is what writing is. And you got to write the bad stuff in order to find the bad stuff, in order to fix the bad stuff. The bad stuff is critically important. It's not an accident or like a well, that's unfortunate that it's bad. It has to be bad. That's where the thinking happens. So you got to make it better, but it has to be bad first. So you got to be able to identify what's bad.
Kate Carpenter 29:18
To take a closer look at how Emily brought all of this together on the page, I asked her to read an excerpt from her book. Here's Dr Emily Leib reading from Chapter Four of Road to Nowhere.
Emily Lieb 29:30
"Highways are politics. That’s especially true in Baltimore, where by happenstance the city council was the legislative body that had to crank through the arduous process of passing separate condemnation ordinances for every ‘leg’ of every proposed expressway. Since a leg was usually 10 or 20 blocks long and a block or two wide, this process required dozens of individual condemnation ordinances, each of which was supposed to follow its own public hearing. But even before things got to that point, road maps were horse trades like anything else. A leg that carved up one man’s district at lunchtime could peel through another’s by dinner. It was easier where there was no one to speak up. For instance, as Johns Hopkins sociologist Douglas Hauber pointed out in 1974, Robert Moses’s Franklin Street route through Old West Baltimore had traced over the crack between two city council districts, making it ‘a kind of political ‘no man’s land’…leaving some question as to who is responsible for the welfare of the people living there.’ Likewise, in the middle of the 1950s Rosemont sat at the very eastern edge of its city council district, and its residents were outnumbered by all the white voters in all the white neighborhoods to its north and west, all the way out to the city line. But weren’t Baltimore’s highways also supposed to be clearing its slums? Wasn’t that the argument for Robert Moses’s Franklin Street Expressway, and the argument for—and then against—the Tyson Street route? As was perfectly obvious to anyone who visited the place, and as was right then being corroborated by the fight over demolishing the R.N.I.A.’s houses to build the Belmont Avenue elementary school, Rosemont wasn’t a slum. Was it?"
Kate Carpenter 31:04
I picked this passage, which probably feels a little bit random, but I picked it because it's a great example of how you have this really engaging voice that is walking readers through what are kind of dry details, right about what's happening here. You've talked a little bit about how your past experiences really helped with that, but how do you think about crafting that voice?
Emily Lieb 31:22
That is a really good question, and thank you for thank you for being so kind about it. Because, yes, this is a really good example of exactly, exactly what we're talking about, which is like, how do you take, how do you give people enough details that they understand what is happening, but not giving them so many details? I mean, there are versions of this that exists in my on my computer, that this chunk is 10 pages long, right? There's like a million details that are not here, and they don't need to be here. This is the right level. You know, you got to write the one that's like, Jesus, calm down before you can kind of get to here. I tried, this is, like, a very granular thing. I did try to when it came to language that I used throughout the book, I tried when I could to use, but not overuse, kind of visceral language. So like words, like carved and peel, like things that are like actually talking about what would happen to a body if it was the way that you would describe the dismemberment of a body. I think like trying to use language that is not only active, but visceral, I think helps make these kind of dry details a little bit more come a little bit more alive. I tried to use, not like tried really hard not to keep it, not to make it purple, but to use language you can feel. But I think that you know again, there is when I say, here, like the carved up one man's district at lunchtime could peel through another's by dinner, as I say, right? That is in that sentence, is 20 pages of information, because that's what happened. But who cares? Thinking about how to balance how much detail do we really need, how much detail is necessary to understand what is going on, but also really, is it the detail that can communicate that piece of the story, or can we do that through the language, by using visceral language words like peel or carpenter or whatever? Can I communicate the impact of these policy choices in a way that then allows me to not actually tell you all five versions of the story about how it was, you know, went through one person's district at lunchtime and then moved to another person's district. For a reader, you get the point right. Like we understand that this is not only moving around. We also understand that it's incredibly harmful to the city these choices that people are making this, these horse trades. However, as I keep saying, this version of this piece of the story is version, you know, 397 you know, it takes a really long time, and you need to know so much to get it from. And I'm so this is a short book. I'm so glad I tried really hard. I worked really hard to make it a short book. That is the thing that I'm happiest about, that it's short. But in order to write a book that isn't quite 200 pages. I needed to write a book that was 1000 pages and then trim it down. And trim it down. That's part of the thing, thinking about not only what we don't need in terms of detail, but also thinking about how I can use language to take a dry story and communicate to readers its import and its weight and its consequence, not just by saying that, but just by trying to, if I can use words that suggest that.
Kate Carpenter 34:29
Do you have like an ideal reader in mind?
Emily Lieb 34:31
Not really. I mean, I think I sort of imagine like somebody's, well, two, I guess there are probably two. One, an interested undergraduate, part of what I aimed to do, and part of the reason why I was so important to me that this be short to give young people a way of understanding the cities around them that is fairly comprehensive in its like we get this book moves really from the progressive era, but mostly from the 50s to the 70s. But it. Kind of captures the 20th century. It is a book about Baltimore. It is also a book about the United States. It is a book about, you know, this book can be written about any city, and so giving a fairly comprehensive overview of what this arc is. And then there are many, many other extremely good books that like dig much more deeply into the individual parts of this story. So one ideal reader is an undergraduate who is trying to figure out, what is the story about American cities in the 20th century? And then this is, I think, a good introduction. So that's one. One is like thinking about what an undergraduate would need to know in order to understand that this is a really important story. And then also thinking about, I guess there's two others. One, I think a person from I thought a lot about people from Baltimore reading this book and people from other cities reading this book, other cities that experience very similar things. Because one of the things that is really important about this book, and one of the things that I'm really proud of, is the depth of the research in it and the diversity of the sources that I was able to find and shape this story. And so I think that one of the things that I've had a very gratifying response to this book in general, which has been great, one of the most gratifying responses has been people from Baltimore and from other cities who lived through this or something like this, and are getting out of this book Not Just validation, but like, yes, this happened, and it happened on purpose, and it happened for a reason, and these choices that policymakers made were deliberate. They were trying to accomplish something. And so what people have understood to be true, I think in many cases, like folks who live in neighborhoods like Rosemont, it has been really wonderful to hear from those readers who feel like they have been given some ballast in their case. This is not telling people something they don't know. It is telling them something they do know, but it is affirming their experience with evidence in a way that I think has been really, I hope, can be really, actually useful to people who are trying to make things better. So that's really important to me, is thinking about the people who lived through this and the places that have lived through this sort of confluence of abuses and events that this book describes. But then also the third kind of reader that I like to think about is just like a person who this sounds like a child, a person who would read a book, right? One of the things that I wanted to do with this book is, and again, one of the reasons it's short is that I did want this book to be the kind of book that people would pick up and read. It's an Academic Press. I made that choice deliberately, but I wanted it to be as readable as narratively compelling and as accessible as it possibly could be, because I wanted people to pick it up and read it and hopefully get some insight about not only just like this story and Baltimore, but what happened to American cities in the 20th century. Why are our cities in 2026 the way that they are? Why is our discourse around cities in 2026 as screwed up as it is? Well, here is one way of understanding that, you know, it's never going to be the Devil in the White City or something. But I tried really hard to bring people into it. I tried really hard to make it not just a book about transportation policy, which is what, where it's like classified, which is sort of funny to me, because transportation transportation or policy? No, I do know about policy, but so in No, in no universe is like my ideal reader, another academic, although I hope that they read it like it. I know that, you know some have done and some have liked it. To me, it's students, it's people who live in places that have been affected by these choices, and then it's people who just like want to read a good nonfiction book that is compelling and also will not take that long to read.
Kate Carpenter 38:48
I want to go back to that university press for a second, and I especially, I want to ask about your relationship with your editor. So you worked with Tim Mennel at the University of Chicago Press. You are not the first person on the show to mention what a supportive editor he was, but I wondered if you could just tell us a little bit more about what it was like to work with him, how that relationship went.
Emily Lieb 39:07
He is amazing. He is a truly extraordinary, everybody should, everybody should work with him. His patience is truly godlike. So we got connected when I finished my dissertation in the year of our Lord. I don't know. Let's say 2010 I think was 2010 the dissertation won an award from the Society for architectural and Regional Planning history, I believe. And Tim was on the committee, and he, at that time, I think, worked for the AIA press. And so we were having a drink after the awards ceremony, and he said, you ever want this to be a book? Call me. And then he moved to Chicago, the University of Chicago Press. And again, because I was in a situation, even in 2010 where I was working full time, I was teaching full time, and I sort of assumed I would stay at Seattle U forever teaching. I was in a situation where, again, like writing the book and publishing the book was not a. Technically part of my job, whereas if I had been in a tenure track job, I would have had three years to just goddamn do it, and I would have done it, would have been fine. I think academic presses are accustomed typically, probably less so now, given the state of the world, but I think, like they are set up to deal with people whose motivation is, like, I need to do this to get promoted. So like, the timeline is not, does not have to be the editor crawling up your ass all the time, because your job is doing that. The editor doesn't have to do that. Whereas, I imagine in trade publishing, there is an element of like, you have to walk people through, you know. So I had to, he had to walk me through much more. He had to, like, treat me like a, like a, like a baby. So he was very, very again, a great reader, a great editor, a great person to talk through ideas with, a great person to drink with, like he's a great pal, and he is very good at seeing what matters to an author. So he knew that what mattered to me could not be that I was going to get tenure out of this because I wasn't like that wasn't my job. And so he understood that what mattered to me was what I've said to you today, like I wanted it to be readable. I wanted it to have a narrative thrust. I wanted it to be like a good book, book that I was proud of, not just a catalog of things that I learned in the archives. And I wanted it, you know, to be sort of short, and I wanted wanted to have a lot of maps and pictures, which was that's one thing at the end, you spend a lot of time negotiating with your press about how many pictures and maps you get. And I was able to successfully argue that because I had fewer pages than most, and so I had less ink on the page that like they were spending less money on ink than they would have if it had been 300 pages. So I should get a couple extra pictures, which I did get. So and it was very important to me that it not cost a bajillion dollars. And so the thing I was able to negotiate was that it come out in paperback from the beginning, so that I didn't have to do the thing where it like comes out in hardcover, it costs a million dollars, and then if it sells a certain number of copies, then it can come out in paperback. It came out in paperback from the beginning, which was really important. Tim and the everybody at the press, they also valued those things. They also really valued readability. They really valued because they're operating in the same ecosystem we all are. They're trying to figure out how to get undergraduates to buy books. They're figuring out how to and so there was not ever any pushback around this is a different kind of book than they typically publish, because it is more deliberately, so more readable, shorter, crisper. It is, you know, again, a very archivally rich book. It has a really a lot of footnotes, and it is more analytical in some ways than a trade book would be. But not that. I mean, it's, it's closer to a trade non fiction book than a lot of the books that they publish very deliberately. So that's why he's such a great editor. That's why people love him, because he hears what you want to do with your book, and he sees how that can overlap with the interests of the press, and he lets that happen. So not every book that he has a hand in is the same book, right? It's like they're all very different, and they all reflect what is important to writers. And again, I think that that's that is obviously a huge skill in this particular publishing economy, because not everybody has the same goal as they might have had in 1982 at a university press publishing with Chicago has been very helpful in that it has given me kind of like external legitimacy in a way that had I published with a trade press as somebody who no longer works, really, in the Academy would have done, obviously, publishing with a trade press would have come with different pluses and minuses and pros and cons and, you know, I don't know what I would do for the next thing, whatever that may be, but Tim is the best. I would not have finished this without him. It would not have been so I just wouldn't have done it. I would have just given up. But he had such a really great balance of patience, but also, like, every year, like, let's send this person an email and find out what her deal is. So he just has a great read of people and a great read of writers, and a great read of like, what people need and what they don't need. I did need to be bothered, but I didn't need to be bothered constantly, but I did need to be bothered. So just figuring out how to balance, like, what these assholes need, how to make them produce the best work that they can, but also have it be something that is really my book. It looks the way I wanted it to look.
Kate Carpenter 44:24
I want to ask a little bit about your influences. What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Emily Lieb 44:30
I think it might be that, like totally cliche, Anne Lamott, shitty first drafts, thing, you have got to be okay not only be okay with it is essential to the process that you write things that are bad and that you learn to understand why things are bad and why you learn to understand how to make them better. You can't if you think, and this is something I think students have a lot of trouble wrapping their heads around, because they are trying to do things fast. I mean, I also was in college. I also wrote papers the night before. I'm not saying. Saying that that's going to stop, but the idea that, like this is garbage. You are going to write something and it is going to and it is by definition bad, is something that I think is hard for people to learn. That is not a an indictment of you, that is not an indictment of your writing. It is the process. It has to be there. It has to the step where you write something that isn't any good has to happen, and your job as a writer is to then take from that draft. But if you are writing for something good from the beginning, that's not You're not going to get there. I think also, you know, I went to college again, just long enough ago that I my professors in college were I had a professor, Jack Thomas at Brown, who was a very he was very elderly when I had he was like a cartoon of the typical, like New England history professor. And he would, you would give him papers, and he would, like, cross out pages and just write, no the way that the my college professors were able to interact with my writing in college is something that I don't think can happen anymore, for a number of reasons, most of which, most of which are quite good, but I do think we have lost something when, when Jack Thomas crossed out three pages of a paper and wrote, like, Absolutely not, no. He wasn't saying, you're dumb. He wasn't saying, this is you should walk into the river. He was saying this isn't good. And like, that's okay, and that you're looking around, and that everybody you know has stuff. So the kind of reader that is no, this is not right, like this is bad again, for great reasons. We should not be treating students writing this way anymore, but that way of thinking about, well, sometimes it's just, you know, this is a no, and that's you're gonna gotta go back to the drawing board on this one sister. That's good advice. You have to, like, learn again. Learn to be insulted a little bit. Learn to be, I mean, it stings, sure, obviously, but you know, okay, well, now we do it better. Like, let's figure out why this was bad. And also, I think, again, I'm old, right? But I think that there's something to like, I gotta figure out why it's bad. He is not going to write me a three page letter about why he crossed out that page. I got to figure out what was a no about that. It's not sometimes I might decide that I'm I'm right and he's wrong, and that's fine too, but actually thinking about like taking something and figuring out what's wrong with it yourself is a very useful skill to to have. So you know, basically it's all the advice that has really stuck with me, and has really, I think, made my writing much better. Has been around like it's got to be bad, and that's fine.
Kate Carpenter 47:26
I like that. Who do you read for inspiration? Are there other writers that you turn to? Have you read anything good lately?
Emily Lieb 47:32
I try really hard to read like everybody. I mostly just read the Internet at this point in time, which is terrible, terrible. And I I get really, like, when I get back into reading. I read voraciously. I am a very fast reader, so that's good. And I read a lot of trashy things. That's also good, right? So I read really wide, like, I read, you know, I love detective fiction, I love, like, just any kind of and so I think that helps part of, like, just, How do other people put together other kinds of things that have nothing to do with this kind of thing. I will say one thing that is not good is that, as somebody who is not in the academy anymore, I am not actually at all up on what are other people publishing in the field? I cannot say I'm like up on what's been what's been published, you know, this month in the field of American urban history, which is not good. I try to read really widely. Just the other day I was in I was giving a talk in Portland, and we were talking about James Rouse, who is a appears a little bit in the book. He's a developer. He's a Baltimore developer, but he he is the guy who kind of invented the festival marketplace like the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, fan well Hall in Boston. That kind of urban public spaces of the 1970s and so I was recommending, we were talking about Rouse and talking about Faneuil Hall. And I was sort of remembering that there was a Calvin Trillin piece in The New Yorker from the 70s called, I just found it so I can tell you what it's called. I knew I was like, it's about exposed brick. It's called thoughts brought on by prolonged exposure to exposed brick from May 1977 and it's just an essay about, I mean, it's Calvin Trillin, so it's funny. He is a reporter, so it's a reported piece. He, you know, he went, traveled around to Faneuil Hall and to, you know, St Louis, to all these kinds of places, to talk about the phenomenon that was the 1970s phenomenon of everything was in an old warehouse, and everything had, as he says, exposed brick like that came from buildings that got knocked down and in rust belt cities and then trucked to yuppie bars and made into the like the wall where they hung the ferns and served you whatever, like a sun dried tomato. So that kind of writing actually is really non fiction writing, reportage, which I don't do. I'm terrible at reporting, reporting. I wish it was good at it, but I'm not. But writing that is, you know, this is the New Yorker, right? It's Calvin Trillin. He is. Language is as important to and like the humor in it, right? Is as important to the story that he's telling as the story that he's telling, and not always. But in this case, in particular, this is just a funny little piece about burns thinking about like, I like to read things that are not exactly what it is that I'm trying to do, and to see how people put things together like that. I also like to read when I'm writing, I also do this kind of strange it's very strange thing, which is that reading like just whatever actually like to try to read a slightly more what I would describe as overwritten kind of writer like TC Boyle or something like that, like somebody who uses really dense language to tell a story and to think about actually the words, just to make a list of like and again, this is the reason this works better with kind of writers that I would describe as maybe a little more florid, is that they are using the kinds of words that I would not necessarily use myself. And so like making a list of words that catch my eye, and think about why they catch my eye. I don't ever use the words on the list, but I do like to kind of, you know, if I'm eating lunch, I read 50 pages of a novel or whatever, and then I think about why those five words caught my eye in this thing, and maybe it's because it's okay, that's that's way too much we got the back. But maybe it's because, like, what about this word caught my eye? And then I can think about how to, again, not use necessarily those words, but to think about how to use different words when I'm editing. How do we make verbs better? How do we make adjectives be useful? Like, not use too many, but use enough that you can get a sense of the place, like you can get a sense of the feel of the place or the time. And so writers, who are sort of writers first, are really good to read, I think when I am writing, as opposed to as opposed to people who are trying to get obviously, people don't. Everybody's a combination of these things, but thinking about prose, writers who think about prose first, as opposed to writers who maybe think more about Okay, so this is the research, and here's what I'm telling you. It's helpful to me when I'm when I'm writing,
Kate Carpenter 51:58
Before I let you go, I want to know, are you working on another big project? Are you up for talking about it?
Emily Lieb 52:04
If you are, I don't really know this is I have to have a better answer to this question. I have been thinking a lot about, I live in Seattle now, and I have been thinking a lot about historic preservation, because here in Seattle, as some listeners may know, in many cities as well, but Seattle is kind of one of these cities. We are really weaponizing the language of historic preservation here to keep the city, sort of, in my opinion, stuck in an amber kind of like stuck the way like, to keep density out, to keep apartment buildings out, to like, to minimize the usage. Like this is a very suburban city, and to keep it that way. And one of the ways we've been keeping things that way is by deciding that things are historic, capital H, historic, and which they, you know, maybe. But thinking about how, how we are using Historic Preservation here as a weapon has so I'm thinking around like something about the history of historic preservation, which people have worked on again, they've worked out of recently I certainly don't know about I will learn. I will find out. And so that's something that I've been thinking about. I've also, you know, there's a big part of this book that is about the really profound significance that school school segregation, and the role that segregated schools, Jim Crow schools, in this case, played in building Baltimore and keeping Baltimore segregated and then making it possible for, again, very deliberately, for all of these abuses that the book talks about to unfold. And so I have done a fair amount of work research on school segregation and desegregation and bussing here in Seattle. So that is sort of what I thought I was going to do, next to something about bussing in Seattle. That's more of an article than a book. But of course, the question becomes, as ever in 2026 like an article, where we don't, unfortunately, there aren't that many places anymore. So thinking about those two things, however, the thing that I, as I said in the beginning, what I really love, is going to archives, being in archives, and also having those archives not be where I live. And so I don't know that I want to write something that is really about Seattle, because, I mean, I would get over it, but I get such joy out of, like, going to a place and, you know, staying in a if possible, I love hotels more than anything. So staying staying in hotels, like the best thing. I just love staying in hotels, being in a bubble that is just me, and the archive is such a calming and, you know, such fun to me. You go spend it all day in the archive, and then you go have take yourself to dinner and think about it. Ideally I would think of something that wasn't in Seattle. So that's my next, my next, my next. Really, it's on my list. I have a long list of things to do, and on the to do list is book question mark. Stay tuned.
Kate Carpenter 54:45
Well, Dr. Emily Lieb, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past. Thanks for talking about your writing process with me.
Emily Lieb 54:51
Thank you so much, and thanks everybody for listening. This was so fun.
Kate Carpenter 54:54
Like Emily said, thanks for joining us for this episode of Drafting the Past. Find the link to her new book, Road to Nowhere, at draftingthepast.com. While you're there, sign up for the show newsletter. I'll see you back here next time, where friends don't let friends write boring history.
