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When Marcia Chatelain spoke with me as a guest on the first season of the Drafting the Past podcast in October 2022, two life-changing things had happened to her in the previous year: She had won a Pulitzer Prize in history for her second book, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. And she had become a mother. Now, four years later, she’s back with a new book, an eye-opening account of the women of the March on Washington, overlooked by their fellow organizers and in our collective memory of the march. In How Bright the Path Grows: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the March on Washington, Chatelain brings these women into focus and tells their stories with finesse and verve.
In this Q & A, we talked about how her life has changed and how she has stepped more fully into her identity as a writer. We also talked about the editorial process, how Chatelain met her ideal reader at book events, and the podcast she helped create with bonus research that didn’t make it into the book.
Kate Carpenter: The last time we talked, you had recently become a mom, and your last book, Franchise, was written pre-motherhood. Did it feel different to write this one?
Marcia Chatelain: Everything changed by becoming a writing parent. I think I had a little bit of post-child delusion in the sense that, if I could do this, then what can't I do? Parenting gave me both this intense confidence and this intense sense of wonder that made me think that I could write this book while my child is small, which I did do, but it is very difficult, and I don't know if I recommend it. These conversations about writing are always so fascinating to me because they're kind of like conversations about parenting. I only recommend someone become a parent if they can parent my child, and I only recommend a person to write a book if they have exactly the conditions of my life to write a book with a child. I have nothing else to offer this conversation because it's so specific.
But what I can say is that when I sold the proposal for this book, it was a few months before my son's first birthday, and for me, I felt like if I write this book, then when he is older he has a way of getting to know me in this stage of my life. That is something that he will always have, right? I don't know if this is just the thing that I have to tell myself every morning to get up and actually do it. But I felt so compelled by this idea that there's only so many ways that my kid will get to really know me, and my writing gets to become one of those things, and I felt really moved by that.
And then, while writing this book, I was also doing a writing group called Parakeet, run by Beth Pickens, who wrote Make Your Art No Matter What and Making Art During Fascism. She's also my best friend from college. One of the things that she talks about in her workshop is death acceptance and that we will all die. So what are we going to do with the time that we have? And these are the things I find strangely motivating. I mean, existentially difficult, but also, you know, this is the time I have. Like everyone, I struggle with motivation, procrastination, writer's block, all the stuff. But I think about, as someone who works in archives, what do families have left of the people that they love? I might have access to maybe four pictures of my grandparents, and my mom, maybe I have 20 pictures of her. As an Xennial, I didn't take tons of pictures in college because it cost a lot of money. And then my son has like 100,000 pictures of himself. So I think about: what are the things that he's going to have as a reference point for me? My books are the thing, right? So that was really a helpful way of pushing through an incredibly exhausting and ridiculous set of experiences that I had over the past few years writing this book.
KC: I'm glad you brought up Beth Pickens because in your acknowledgements you said something that made my jaw drop when I read it, which was that it was thanks to her that you had only recently begun to identify as a writer.