Thomas Andrews Revels in Revision

Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome to the Drafting the Past podcast. I'm Kate Carpenter, and in each episode, I interview a historian about how they research and write history. My guest in this episode is a historian who cares deeply about the writing process, and I'm delighted to have a chance to talk with Dr. Thomas Andrews.

Thomas Andrews 0:16
Thanks so much for having me, Kate.

Kate Carpenter 0:18
Thomas is a professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder, and is also the faculty director of the Center for the American West. He's the author of three books, including the Bancroft Award-winning Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies, and his newest book, The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Pandemic and the Fate of Reconstruction America. In addition to his own writing, he has interviewed historians as part of the Writer's Studio feature in the journal Modern American History, which is a series of absolutely terrific interviews about how some of the most highly regarded American historians work. As you might imagine, we had a great time talking about the writing process and especially Thomas's love of revision. This one also includes a treadmill desk, a harrowing publishing tale, and why he might have taken Bill Cronon's dissertation advice a little too seriously. Here's my conversation with Dr. Thomas Andrews.

Thomas Andrews 1:18
I think my trajectory has been kind of chaotic. Like I look back on it, and I'm— sometimes I wonder what I was thinking. You know, it's a little bit, it's a little bit haphazard, I guess is probably the single word that best describes it. You know, I mean, my first book, Killing for Coal, was really, you know, I mean, it was really driven by a desire to use environmental—to show how environmental history could help to explain a set of historical events where it didn't seem like nature had any like clear cut, ostensible role, and so you know that was a book that was in a lot of ways was sort of driven initially by a kind of conceptual or theoretical problem, but then you know I got so immersed in the story and I had the opportunity to do basically, you know, full day trips to the archives for several years, and so I was so immersed in the stuff of that story that I got to go really deep, and it had like a you know that that one had like a very satisfying story arc. You know, I felt like I could that was kind of like I think the most literary of of my books in some ways, and then the second one, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the high Rockies. That one, you know, I mean, to the point of like randomness, it came out of a project for the National Park Service that just sort of fell into my lap. It wasn't really something I was I was looking to do, and you know, it was initially a report for the Park Service, but then I I spent enough time on it, got sufficiently committed to it that I decided that I needed to turn it into a book, and it had a much different timetable. You know, I mean, that book really runs from like the last ice age to the present. It's about a place that few people know, and it's not like the it's not an obvious place to pick for doing a long term environmental history. You know, so the the impetus for it really came out of what the Park Service needed, rather rather than from you know some sort of story that I really wanted to tell, and then this this new book, The Great Horse Flu, is you know again had had kind of a a strange trajectory where it started out as kind of emerged from this big ambitious kind of crazy idea of writing an animal's history of the United States, and I hit a point where I just it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I was going to go crazy if I kept trying to write that book. Every chapter wanted to be its own book, and finally I just decided that I had to give in and do that. Turn one of the chapters into a book, and this was the, you know, this was the chapter that I picked because it was the one that sort of it seemed most manageable, which in retrospect may not have been true at all. But that's kind of how I ended up on it. So yeah, I mean, I think that you know when I sort of, you know, when I look back, I I do, I mean the trajectory like I don't even know how I would plot it. It's sort of it's been pretty strange, and I think maybe moving forward, that's one thing I want to try to do is have a bit more, you know, give a bit more forethought to what types of projects I'm seeking out.

Kate Carpenter 4:11
All right. Well, first, I want to know some about how you work. When and where do you like to write?

Thomas Andrews 4:16
Yeah. So I'm a morning person. You know, I'm one of those people who kind of like wakes up, you know, way too. I mean, I wake up way too early. I don't necessarily get up way too early, but I wake up and my mind is just kind of going. And I've long since realized that I do a lot of background processing. And so, what works best for me is writing really regularly, you know. So I try to write every day or almost every day, I don't always pull that off, but I would say probably for like you know eight or nine months of most years, I'm writing almost every day, and then my goal is to put in like 30 to 60 minutes, usually in the morning, usually before other stuff starts intervening and demanding my attention, you know. And then as far as where I write, my main place to write is actually where I am right now, which is my home office. So I have like a detached garage, and I used actually used some of the prize money for my first book, I used my Bancroft prize money to finish my garage and turn it into an office where I could get away from my kids and actually be able to to concentrate pretty reliably. And then to be a little bit more specific, the place I do most of my writing is actually on a treadmill desk. So I became a big fan of the treadmill approach to doing work. From a, I think actually the first time I knew that there was such a thing was from a Susan Orlean article in the New Yorker, and I immediately was like, oh yeah, I definitely need to experiment with one of those. For quite a long time now, that's been like my main workstation is I, you know, I walk and I write and I find that the walking really helps. It keeps I think just like trying to not fall off the treadmill keeps some of my more anxious parts of my brain just like busy with something, and so they don't like impinge on me as much as they used to. They have kind of a, they have a job which is to just kind of keep me moving, and then I feel like it kind of frees up my brain a little bit. So that's kind of like my drafting mode, and then for revision I can do in bigger chunks. That tends to be a lot more random, so I'll do that, and you know, I'll do that in a bigger variety of places.

Kate Carpenter 6:29
How do you organize your research and your writing?

Thomas Andrews 6:32
Yeah, this is probably an area where I really could learn some new things. I would say that I suffer from a fair amount of disorganization. I mean, the basic way I tend to write is I I take notes mostly within Endnote, sometimes just in like Word documents, and then I usually just try to write up a a really terrible initial draft. Yeah, I mean, often just on like a really simple principle, like something that's chronological, usually a combination of chronological and thematic. And so, what I'm going for in a first draft, and you know, I didn't realize this for a while, but I think it's what I've always done. What I'm really going for in a first draft, I've realized it's just an account. I'm just looking for like a basic account of like here's what I think happened, here's why I think it happened. Here's why I think it matters. And so my, you know, my first drafts are really thick with evidence. They're you know quote heavy. Like I'm just starting to try to get my head around the material, and I'm beginning to try to provide just some basic ligatures. And so you know, like I think it's a way of drafting where I'm pretty like, for better and for worse, it means that I'm pretty beholden to the evidence in early drafts. And so one of the things I've realized then is that like one of my main tasks as I revise is to, like, my first draft, I always feel like my main obligation is to the evidence and to the sources, but no reader should really care past a certain point about that stuff, and so as I go through successive drafts, what I'm, one of the things I'm really consciously trying to do is to shift that, is to sort of shift that burden of who or what the draft is for from the evidence, and then eventually try to bring it over to the reader without obviously compromising the evidence, or you know, making anything up, or pulling off any of those sorts of historian's no-nos.

Kate Carpenter 8:27
Is there a point in the research process where you know you're ready to start writing?

Thomas Andrews 8:31
I love research, and I can research for a really long time. Research never really feels done to me. It just, you know, I think there's a point where there's definitely a point in a project where I feel like it's really unlikely that I'm going to find something tremendously important. Like I feel like I've established the basic patterns. I've kind of constrained the subject enough, but I start writing long before that. I really, I get impatient, and I like to write. Writing is, you know, I mean, I just think writing is fun, and I also just get super anxious if I'm researching something for too long without, I mean, it just starts feeling kind of aimless if I do too much of it, and so I'm a pretty big fan of like researching and writing at the same time. I'll work up sections. I mean, especially for the Great Horse Flu, like I didn't—It took a long time for me to even figure out what chapters were going to look like for that book, and so I kind of built it from the ground up, sort of like section by section in a lot of ways, and then built the chapters out of collections of sections that seemed to talk to each other. So you know, for that project, that worked pretty well. I mean, I would say that that's not an efficient way to work. That's sort of the downside, because I think I, you know, like I appease my anxiety in the short term, but over the long run, I almost certainly make more work for myself because I end up, I end up discarding just huge amounts of material. So I overwrite in a pretty massive way.

Kate Carpenter 10:03
I have to imagine though you're doing a lot of thinking and working through things that is not wasted in that writing process.

Thomas Andrews 10:09
Yeah, totally. I think you're, I think you're right. You know, I mean, there's—it's so non linear. You know, and there's, I mean, that's one of the things that I find really just like enjoyable about it all is kind of some of the mysterious ways that it works, and just trying to kind of, you know, there's all these like sort of ineluctable processes where it's like, you know, you just kind of, I'll like bang my head against the wall for a while, just really painstakingly trying to come up with a basic account of something, and then I get to a certain point, I'm not sure that anything's really come of it, but then when I put it in conversation with another section, then something emerges that I didn't see before. I mean, when I'm, you know, when I'm working with grad students, they, like me, understandably want kind of like a straight path. They want to know what the best way to do things is, with best usually having some component of efficiency, and I'm just like I'm, I'm either the wrong person to ask, or that's the wrong question to ask. Because, yeah, my processes, my processes are pretty—they're in no way a straight line. They're pretty shaggy.

Kate Carpenter 11:14
So the Great Horse Flu is your third book. You've obviously written many other things in your career as well. Have you changed your approach to writing in that time?

Thomas Andrews 11:23
I think, in some ways, yeah. I think that there's when I think about it, there's a few big changes that I notice. One is that when I was in grad school, you know, I mean, I sought out—I mean, I really cared a lot about writing and what made me want to become a historian, it was really about some of the landmark works that really inspired me, and so you know I really wanted to work with Bill Cronon at Wisconsin, and I was lucky enough to get to work with Bill. You know, one of the ways that Bill taught grad students was to really think about their dissertations as a book, and I think I overdid that. So I think I was, I think I was sort of like too consumed in trying to write like a first draft that had literary qualities, and I didn't really understand because I hadn't really done a lot of revision before I got to my dissertation. I didn't really understand how many more go-throughs my work would have. You know, I mean, by the time I finished Killing for Coal, I would say that most of that, most parts of that book were probably in like a, you know, a 12th draft, a 16th draft. It was intensively revised from beginning to end. I mean, there, you know, there's a few parts where like by that point I pretty much knew what I needed to say, and so those didn't get quite as much reworking. But I, you know, I just didn't understand what that looked like, and so one big change then is that at this point, I just I'm full on with Anne Lamott. Just you know, first draft is just something to be endured. I have no expectations that it will be at all good, and that has been super liberating. And then I think the other thing that I've, you know, the other thing that sort of emerged for me over time is that, and it's a sort of like a, you know, it's a difficult truth and then a nice thing. The difficult truth is that first drafts are always going to be awful for me. They're always just going to be really hard and unsatisfying, and you know it's always going to be unclear to me like how I'm actually going to turn any of it into something that a person might ever want to read, but the other, you know, the nice part of it is that the part of writing that's gotten easier for me over time is revision, and so I feel like at this point, like once I can get that first draft out, it's not like revision is going to be easy, but it feels you know like I know what that path looks like, and it doesn't have as many of the, I mean, doesn't have the kind of like yuck quality that drafting often has for me. So I think I just, I can do it more confidently, and you know I just, I feel like I know what I'm doing with revision at this point.

Kate Carpenter 14:00
So I want to talk more about revision because you told me ahead of this that you you love revision strategies. You're not the first person to tell me that they love revision, but often I find that people have a hard time sort of articulating what they do in the revision process. Would would you talk to me about your strategies? What's your approach to revision?

Thomas Andrews 14:18
I have a core approach or a core strategy, core tool, whatever you want to call it. That you know, again, this is something that Bill Cronon initially taught me, but it was, it was, it's just reverse outlining. And so I, you know, I outline everything that I ever write. I reverse outline everything that I write. I'm not actually a great outliner upfront. My, you know, my drafts are kind of accidental. You could probably guess that from what I said earlier, but they—I don't have a really clear sense of like where where a draft is going to head. But once I have a first draft, I'm pretty religious about reverse outlining it, and then I'll do that actually for every subsequent stage of it. And so you know the way I reverse outline then is I really like to use Microsoft Word for it just because it has that outline view, and that outline view can help me represent the hierarchical organization within the chapter, and it can also help me, you know, you can hide. It's a sort of like tree format, and you can you know you can hide, you can sort of like reduce it to like, okay, what are the sections in this chapter, or you know, what are the subsections, or if you want, you can look at the entire thing paragraph by paragraph. And so it allows me to kind of get my head around how the chapter is currently working at several different levels. You know, and so my practice then with the reverse outline is is I create it, and just in the process of creating it, I usually learn some important things. And so sometimes, you know, like the initial go through is just about like paragraphing. So if I see that what I'm trying to say one paragraph is about the next paragraph, I have to use the exact same descriptor. Then those probably shouldn't be two different paragraphs. Or if I really can't decide what a paragraph, you know, how I can represent a paragraph in a phrase, then that paragraph has more than one idea, right? Which is usually kind of a no-no as well. So there's just, you know, like just trying to create the reverse outline. I usually learn a few things, but the bigger things that emerge from it really happen when you know my next step is that I'll go to a place like a coffee shop and you know just try to kind of get into like a a bit more of an open minded space. This works best if I've, if I haven't done anything with the draft in several days or even you know a week or something like that. And then at that point, I just really look at the, you know, I try to get as far from I try to basically look at the reverse outline as just kind of like a curiosity, you know, right? I think that like non attachment is a crucial revision skill, and so I look at the reverse outline and I just try to get a sense of like, wow, like what did I do here? You know, how is this draft working? Like, what is the flow? How does one thing lead to another? What's the sort of order of operations in the argument? What's the chain of events in the narrative, you know, and then every now and then, very very rarely, but every now and then, I realize that I've nailed something, and I'm like, okay, that that that's perfect. That really really works. That almost never happens. What what almost happen, what almost always happens instead is I look at it, and you know, I can usually start to see things that aren't working, you know, things that don't flow, or section that really requires knowledge about something that I haven't introduced to the reader yet. You know, or leaps of logic. All these sorts of things will come out from that. And so, you know, I basically sort of like subject the reverse outline to kind of an analysis. You know, what is this doing? How does it work? What would happen if I move things around?

Thomas Andrews 17:44
That's another thing I like about about using Word to do this is I can just like take an entire section and move it to another place, and then I can just kind of go through the thought experiment of like, well, what if I started this story at the end? What does that get me? What does that cost me? You know, and so I can I try to be like, you know, I try to just sort of be really kind of strategic and like hard nosed about each aspect of the, of whatever, you know, whatever level the thing that I'm reverse outlining it is. You know, like eventually I'll do it for the entire book, and you know then I try to learn from it. I try to implement what I, you know, what I think I've understood from the process, and then I'll go through that whole exercise again, and I find that it really helps me zero in. You know, as I said earlier, like I really, I really do tend to overwrite, and so a lot of my writing, like a lot of what I need to do in revision, is is a huge amount of cutting, and it helps me figure out, you know, sort of like what the minimum I can say about various things will be, and also you know, of course, like how the parts can fit together better.

Kate Carpenter 18:46
Once you have your reverse outline and you've sort of looked at what you can learn from it, how do you go back into the draft? Then do you just, I mean, do you make yourself like a to-do list? Do you just kind of wade in and start cutting? What's the approach?

Thomas Andrews 18:59
It's usually a bit of both. I don't come up with like a detailed revision plan that I write down. I usually like scroll a few notes, and they're sort of like my main priorities, and then I just kind of dig in. And I think that's, you know, that's another thing that I think has sort of changed over over time. You know, part of like why I feel more confident about revision now, is I think I've learned how to like hold more of it in my head. You know, it's sort of like once I get clarity on it from the reverse outline, like I'm kind of good to go. You know, it's not a lot of stuff that I like really need to write down or I'll forget. It's stuff that I like at that point. I, it's kind of like undeniable for me, and so you know, usually a few notes are all I really need. Yeah, and then I dig back in, you know, and at that point, like I try to be, I try to be as fearless as I can be. I think that when I revise, when I find myself revising, and I'm like worried, if my revision is about trying to not make mistakes or trying to not mess something up. Then I get, like, it's no fun. It doesn't work very well. I feel like revision is much more about trying to have some boldness. It's sort of like, I don't know, it's a little bit. I don't know what the metaphor I would use for it is, but it's, there is like a kind of imposition. You know, like I'm becoming increasingly aware that I'm trying to impose something on the story, on the material, whereas like in an early draft, I'm sort of trying to, I'm trying to do a lot of listening, a lot of just like getting, as I said earlier, just trying to kind of like get get the basics down.

Kate Carpenter 20:34
Well, I want to talk more about the Great Horse Flu. Speaking of of revision, because, you know, you started with this much larger scope, as you mentioned earlier, and then kind of dialed down to just the story of the Great Horse Flu, rather than an entire animal history of America. What did that make the process like for you? Did you sort of just start over again at that point, or or did you have material that you focused on?

Thomas Andrews 20:59
Yeah. So what I had at that point was, I mean, first of all, I had hundreds and hundreds of pages of drafts of various chapters, and you know, I mean, I think there was one chapter that I probably had like 180 pages drafted for, you know, so I, you know, there's all this stuff that just like is never going to see any kind of light of day, which is which is a little bit hard to handle. I had a chapter on the Great Horse Flu that was in really just kind of like in a first or a second draft. It was really kind of broad scope and jumped around a lot. What that chapter had, though, was it had some of the key stories that then I could dig down into more deeply in the book, and so you know, I knew about the Great Horse Flu's kind of complicated relationship with the Great Boston Fire. I'd also come across, you know, the sort of like pretty limited evidence that gets into everything that ensues in San Francisco when Anglo business owners start hiring Chinese American men to pull wagons and drays and other conveyances, so you know I was beginning to get like these little, there were these little clusters. There were things that I could see had the capacity to grow into into chapters of their own, and then you know I also had like enough of a sense of the topic to know to know some of the things that I could make more of. You know, so for instance like I knew that I I was already aware of like what I think is the you know I mean historians have written about this event before people the time called it the epizootic urban historians have written several you know it's in several of the books on horses in the 19th century and then there's sort of like a a little teeny cottage industry of like you know the great horse blue comes through a particular part of the world or a particular part of North America. So you know there's like a literature out there, but I think what what that previous literature hadn't fully brought to light was that for the outbreak to behave the way in which it did, you know I mean this thing this thing infects like 90 to 90 99% of horses, donkeys, and mules across North America, but influenza was already present and you know commonly infected equines by this time. It had to be a novel influenza virus, so you know I knew that there was a sort of story to be told about why this new form of the virus would have emerged in the place and time where it did. So you know, I had kind of like I had I had some building blocks, but I I was not really aware of what the what the ultimate book would end up looking like, and there there are huge chunks of it that I hadn't researched at all. I had no idea what happened in Mexico, Cuba, you know, all that came later.

Kate Carpenter 23:36
Did you have a book contract when you decided to change direction, or or what was the publication process like?

Thomas Andrews 23:42
Well, this is a whole story. So, so when I was so when I when I was finishing Killing for Coal, I started teaching a class on animal history, and back then I was at Cal State Northridge, and it was it was just an incredible class to teach. I love teaching it, and it came out of you know there's a section of Killing for Coal that focuses on what I call the mine workscape, and it goes, you know, there's I kept coming across all these oral histories in which old mine workers in the 1970s and 1980s were talking about, and they were recalling like the relationships they had with mice and with mules, and it was it's like one of my favorite parts of the book, and it was one where like when I when I gave talks to public audiences. They always they they always seemed fascinated by that part of the book. So that's what that's what spurred me to take the to to start teaching the class. Teaching the class made me think like that there wasn't really a a book that I could use and assign across the entirety of the semester. And so then then I thought, well, why not you know why not write that book? And I had this kind of like post Bancroft bump of of interest in my work, and so you know I sort of took advantage of that bump to get a contract for an animal's history of the United States with Harvard University Press. And so then when I decided that I couldn't follow through on the version of the book that I had originally. Envisioned, then it became like a whole thing, and I was hopeful that I could, you know, complete the book and give it to Harvard, and that things would be okay. And that's not what happened. I had a quite a quite a rough experience, and and had to, you know, they they basically they basically refused the book, and then we had to get into lawyers and all that good stuff. And yeah, not really at liberty to divulge the details of what happened after that. But I was really lucky to to find a you know really really welcoming new home for the book with with UNC Press. So yeah, that was that was that was one of the really you know tough parts about the whole kind of trajectory with the Great Horse Flu. You know, but I also try to I I always try to you know after I after I go through you know after I go after I get really pissed off and you know grieve and go through those like various stages. Once I've kind of like worked through something that that is really difficult in life, you know, I usually try to find ways to to turn it into something that I can look back on in the future as a positive. And so, you know, in the case the great horse flu, you know, what went down with that allowed me to go through an an entire new revision of the book, and I think that that really made it significantly better, more coherent. You know, helped me find an overall argument for the book. So you know, it wasn't it wasn't what I wanted. It wasn't you know, none of none of that was pleasant. I wish none of it had happened, but I'm hoping that in the end, you know, the results a better book for it.

Kate Carpenter 26:40
You mentioned to me that one of the challenges in this book is figuring out how to tell stories about non-human animals, subjects like viruses, geography. They play a really significant role, but of course, they don't speak in in archives in the same way as humans. How did you think about balancing those stories and including them?

Thomas Andrews 27:00
Yeah, I mean, this is you know this this book was really, you know, I think about like Olympics, like gymnastics or like ice skating, how how you have like the degree of difficulty quotient that they use sometimes in some of those sports that are judged. And when I you know when I look at this book, I'm like this this book had a serious seriously high degree of difficulty. First of all, it's a book about an event that, in some ways, is a non-event. Like it wasn't like it. You know, it existed at the time. People usually referred to it as the epizootic, but it was sort of diffuse, and it you know there's not like a there's not a huge center of gravity in the moment. There's not like a big national discussion, for instance, so it doesn't doesn't lead to some landmark change in policy. It yields no huge epidemiological breakthrough. You know, it's so even just at the start, then it's a book where like the the central event doesn't really have the quality of like the other events that I've written about in the past. You know, something like the Colorado Coalfield War or the Ludlow Massacre, or you know, kind of like anything I've ever written about before, the the creation of Rocky Mountain National Park. There's like a you know, there's a clear thing that happens, and and everybody can recognize that it happens. So yeah, this book first of all just has that kind of it's a you know it's it it has that weirdness, yeah. And then it's you know in a lot of ways its central character is is a virus, and you know non human animals mostly, and the virus, you know how to how to treat that as a character, or or even how to treat that as a phenomenon was definitely made doubly challenging by the by the fact like people at the time don't necessarily think of it as I mean they certainly don't think of it the way that we do, occasionally people would actually refer to it as a virus, but they meant a much older meaning of virus, right? I mean, the sort of like current usage of virus doesn't really start until the 1890s, so they, you know, they just mean something that causes disease in a in a certain kind of way, you know. So there's sort of like like I had to kind of kind of have it both ways. I would use, you know, I would use current science to understand the phenomenon, and yet I also had to try to, you know, do that in a way that didn't violate what people at the time understood about that. That's always a difficult balance. I think with, you know, with with a huge disease outbreak, it doesn't have intentionality, right? There's not like a purpose that the virus is trying to achieve. Really, viruses are extra weird because they're not even necessarily alive. So a lot of the you know a lot of the sort of arguments you might want to ham-handedly pull from like evolutionary biology for why this is even going on doesn't really work. Because like if a virus isn't really alive, why does it want to expand its range? There's a lot of like kind of chaotic, random, stochastic things happening, and then with the other human, the other than human animals that are like the main victims for the for the disease, there's obviously the problem of like you know they like viruses leave no direct sources, and I you know I like I like I didn't want them to I didn't want it to be a book that was just about like how humans perceived horses. At the time, I really believed that there was an actual thing happening. You know that that like real horses were were becoming very very sick, and and like one one to 4% of cases ending up dying from the whole thing. And and so I you know I I didn't want the horses to completely disappear as like you know sentient affective beings who had some kind of, you know, some kind of like control in their lives.

Thomas Andrews 30:25
So it was an interesting book to try to work through and to try to find like to try to find sources that would allow me to get into the things I wanted to get into. Like, you know, journalists mostly just describe symptoms, but every now and then they would pay visits to library stables, and you know, occasionally there'd be a really sensitive journalist who would provide a really detailed account of where I could really get a clear sense and really help you know convey to my readers the suffering that these animals experienced as a result of of the disease, you know. And I think that like I had I was able to piece together enough evidence about how the virus behaved that you know I could at least talk about that in in a fair amount of detail. So I could talk about it as like a at least as an agent, even if trying to figure out how to characterize it, you know, was something that I don't think I ever fully got my head around.

Kate Carpenter 31:15
One of the things you do in this book is, of course, you're telling the story of a flu outbreak, but you also are expanding beyond that in order to sort of establish the context so that we know why this is a big deal, right? Not just that it happened, but what were the conditions that allowed it to happen or made it worse, and then what what kind of effects might it have had? And that means you kind of have to, as as you put it to me, that you have sort of a narrative spine, but then you kind of have to go off in these different directions to give us these other stories, which seems effortless in the book. But I imagine takes takes a lot of work to figure out how to kind of weave those together. How did you think about doing that?

Thomas Andrews 31:55
Yeah, I mean that's you know like I didn't have the one can certainly write a book about a large scale disease outbreak that doesn't do so much contextual stuff, or that does the contextual stuff very differently. But I had, I think, I had particular constraints with this outbreak because it focused on other than human animals. That gives a certain limitation because it doesn't kill that many of them, doesn't create an obvious event in its own right. Then that created further limitations, and so I went into the book knowing that it would, you know, really kind of knowing that it would have to be both. It would have to be both a story of the outbreak, but also, you know, like like a story of the outbreak as a phenomenon in its own, but also a book that would repeatedly, you know, change the lens, expand it, go back in time, you know, do those other sorts of like cinematic moves because otherwise there wouldn't really be enough of it there. There, you know, just sort of like narratively and argumentatively. But it was also, you know, like I, you know, some of the things that the outbreak ended up exposing over time, I learned were like so interesting and important in their own right that I, I think it maybe it helped me not get exhausted with kind of the core topic itself, because I could, you know, gave me like permission to go off on these side trips and, you know, get into all sorts of things that I didn't didn't expect I would find fascinating, like how, you know, sort of like story of kind of like the environmental history of Ontario agriculture from the from from native times through loyalist settlement through sort of the arrival of progressive agriculture, or you know, sort of like early phases of anti-Chinese agitation in San Francisco, that would set the stage for the Chinese Exclusion Act, but that historians haven't paid a huge amount of attention to outside of Asian American historians, California historians, you know. So I think it it gave me a nice scope. Then I guess as a historian, for you know, for just sort of like I'm I'm I'm super curious, and I and I part of why I want to do this is so that I'm always learning new things, and so it ended up being a project that was pretty well suited for that because I you know there are these like little kind of I don't know what you'd call them almost like side trips that I got to go on that were that end up being really fun for me, and that I learned a lot from, and that hopefully, you know, hopefully the book makes worthwhile for readers.

Kate Carpenter 34:08
It's funny. I was saying to someone the other day that there's a phenomenon right now where you can tell someone a story about your life and be like, "Well, we were planning to you know go on a trip to to Europe or open our new restaurant, and that was in February of 2020, and everyone understands the significance of that statement, right? But that at some point that will fade. Like you won't be able to just sort of allude to the start of the COVID pandemic in that way anymore. And I kept thinking about that reading this book, right? That there must have been a time when you could be like, oh, well, I was starting a you know warehouse delivery business in at the beginning of 1872, and everyone would know why that had not gone well for you. But that this too is kind of like a I don't want to say forgotten, but we don't hear a lot about the horse flu, even though it must have it was hugely impactful for the people and horses who lived through it. Anyway, I say all that to say that obviously when I read this book, and you think about it even just the phrase "novel virus outbreak," it has a lot of relevance to to today, to COVID 19 pandemic. But I also imagine that you didn't want the book to feel very much like just of the moment, and then be kind of dated immediately. That it wasn't wasn't just a COVID 19 book. How did you think about kind of that balance of including the present day relevance, so it has that element of it, but that it's much broader perspective.

Thomas Andrews 35:29
I mean, first of all, probably worth saying a little bit more about how COVID, you know, how COVID shaped the book, you know, and how it how it influenced it, because you know, it really did in all sorts of ways. I really made the decision to turn to the Great Horse Flu. Looking back, I think it was at some point in 2018. I'd certainly made that decision by 2019. And so, you know, when COVID broke out, I mean, first of all, I I was in a really I was really lucky to be working on this project because the book relies almost entirely on digitized sources, and so you know, it really the the pandemic did not slow me down in the way that it slowed down so many historians. I didn't really need to go to archives for for much of the book, and most of the archival trips were, you know, were really for much more focused research, and I could do them later on. You know, during COVID too, I was I was you know I mean George Floyd, everything that goes down, you know, starting in May of of 2020, that entire summer, you know, I mean, I live in I live near downtown Denver. I mean, we could smell tear gas in our front yard. You know, was in a lot of protests and and all of this and and that, you know, that that set of events, you know, the ways in which like the relationship between racial justice movements on the one hand and the pandemic on the other, you know it's not clear cut. You know, like I don't have a simple way of saying like, well, here's here's what those two things had to do with each other. They happened at the same time. There were clearly relationships, but the relationships were were difficult and submerged. And you know, I sort of like I I thought that that understanding or that kind of that sort of framework applied to what I was trying to do in the book as well, with the you know the central focus on the disease itself, but then these chapters that were going to be deep dives into things like racial justice in San Francisco at the same time, right? Where like you know I didn't I was not interested in trying to make an argument about how the great horse blue like brought about all these things. I was aware that it was sort of it was more about like exposure or intersection. You know, there's a relationship, but not a not a direct one, not a causal relationship between the outbreak and these things that happen at the same time. And so that's what I really tried to bring into the book. And so I think with that with that sort of thinking driving everything, I and I also just, I mean, to this day, like I, and I'm, I'm sure most or or all listeners can sympathize, like I don't have my head around COVID, right? So, like, the idea that I would write a book about an event in the 1870s that was really sort of like deeply informed by my understanding of these really recent events, like I don't understand what happened recently very well. I'm still working. I'm still working through it. So then, I think that the like the you know the relationship between between COVID and and my book then is it helped me to. It sort of like opened up more questions for me to look at, and also left me more more like interested and committed to like a kind of level of indeterminacy that I might not have otherwise had. And on top of all that, I also had like I had readers who were pretty stern in reminding me not to like not to try too hard to make connections between the two. So you know, and with kind of like the usual concern that like, well, that'll that'll recede at some point. You know, what you're assuming people think about COVID in 2023 won't apply in 2028 or whatever. So you know, I I often had encouragement to or sort of reminders to to try to take a pretty light hand on that. I don't know. I think that's what the book ultimately does. I mean, you know, COVID. I mentioned COVID explicitly a few times.

Thomas Andrews 38:56
I try to draw some connections between the great horse flu and COVID. I think that there, I think there are a few that that matter. You know, I mean, there's there's this similarity in that they're both emergent zoonotic viruses. So you know, viruses that circulate between human and other than human hosts. You know, and I think that there's I found I found the timing of the outbreak important. It's in the early 1870s, right? Which like in the history of disease, is often held up as like this is when Koch and Pasteur are starting to make these big discoveries, and it's everything's pointing toward the you know toward the bacteriological revolution and vaccines and the conquest of disease. And now I think having grown up in the '80s during the AIDS crisis, looking at COVID, Zika, Ebola, so on and so forth, not to mention influenza. We now know that there that arc is important. We should completely keep telling versions of that story, probably. But that there's also, you know, there's there there are these other types of of diseases that do not follow that trajectory and that probably never will adhere to that kind of narrative of human dominance and and human.

Kate Carpenter 40:00
Well, I want to shift away from the book a little bit because I want to ask you oversee the Writer Studio feature in Modern American History, the journal, which is so great, and and I wish more people knew about it. So this is my my moment to say, please go read the Writer Studio feature. Also, I those interviews stick with me all the time, especially the Richard White one. I'm curious what what you have taken from from working on that feature about writing. What have you learned?

Speaker 1 40:29
It's been been a real privilege to get to do that. So you know, big shout outs to modern American history and to Brooke Blower really kind of got that rolling with me. And then Darren Dochuck has taken it over. So it's been just been super fun to work with them, and it's been you know fabulous to get to do interviews with all of the historians that we've featured over the years. I think that I don't know. I mean, I I can't point to like a lot of real specific things that I've taken from those interviews, but I think that I don't know. I mean, this maybe on just kind of like a basic, slightly cheesy level. I think that those interviews have really helped me understand how different different historians are and how different their circumstances are. And so, like you know, like I, I mean, you know, so for instance, like talking to a a really senior historian who, at this point in their lives, you know, they don't have kids at home, they've got an endowed professorship, they don't necessarily teach that often, or have that many grad students. You know, it's like I'm, I can, you know, sometimes in the course of those interviews, one of the things I've learned is is simply like I'm in a pretty different situation, and um, and so it's just that that thing that people have told me across my life, right? Like, do your own work, um, you know, figure out figure out what works for you. But I think it's really reinforced that that there's that there's not there's not sort of like big default answers laying out there about how to do this. It's it's really about trying to figure out what is going to work well for you given who you are and given you know sort of the realities of the other parts of your life and how this fits into it. So I definitely you know I think I've taken that. I mean, just a huge amount of like admiration. I think none of them say it's easy. Get it? You know, you look through those interviews, and I get a sense of just like the the attentiveness and the the the passion and the care that these really renowned historians put into their work. And so I, you know, like I always find that inspiring. That always helps me to to try to like ask more of myself.

Kate Carpenter 42:19
Has anything really surprised you about that feature?

Thomas Andrews 42:22
I mean, it was it was a small thing, but like one of the little surprises that I that I hold on to is Linda Gordon talking about you know rolling up a spliff. I thought that that was I thought that that was hilarious, and you know I just sort of like loved her her her blase you know attention to that. I don't know. Just like you know, there's sort of like a. I guess I liked it as kind of like a way of getting out of like excessive seriousness or like being too prim and proper about what you're doing. You know, I think that like there's certain things that can you know we're like a bit more of like a rock and roll approach can be can be appropriate. So I appreciated that.

Kate Carpenter 43:00
I just want to close with a couple kind of broader questions about influences. So, so the first I love to ask people is, what's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?

Thomas Andrews 43:08
The best writing advice I've ever received. I can't think of like a single like a single version of it. I I can think of sort of like similar guidance coming from multiple people that was all about some version of get over yourself and remember the reader, you know, and that's that's really hard for me. But I think that that's that's probably the most important piece of advice to try to kind of sublimate the like you know showy tendencies or the oh look how clever I am or you know all those sorts of impulses that that I unfortunately have, and to you know to to really try to make what I'm doing about the you know whoever it is who might actually eventually read the thing. So yeah, I think that's I think that's what the most important writing advice for me is ever. You know, it's all kind of gravitated toward that. I mean, you know, some important things on technique. Just the you know Bill Cronon teaching me about reverse outlining has been especially important. And then just some like basic you know kind of Strunk and White repeated endlessly to like be really good with nouns and verbs and leave most other parts of speech aside when I can.

Kate Carpenter 44:19
Are there any books or authors that you particularly look to as sort of inspiration for your writing, books you recommend to people?

Thomas Andrews 44:26
I think it depends. I mean, you know, there's, I mean, I just, you know, really, I continue to, I continue to love, you know, that kind of like spectacular generation of environmental and Western historians. You know, your Bill Cronon, Richard White, Don Worster, Patty Limerick. I mean, those books are all fantastic and kind of enduring classics for me, and just just so well written. I think so, such a great combination of argument and storytelling. Almost always so considerate of the reader, and there's sort of like an edge and an urgency to how they do things. So I appreciate all of that. Narrative, I mean, I really go. I really go fiction, and even just. I mean, I love you know some of like my favorite TV shows. What I love about them is what I what I really aspire, but undoubtedly you know never quite measure up to in terms of like the elegance of a story. And so, like I'm a. I mean, you know, he's a reprehensible character, but I love Curb Your Enthusiasm, and like your good Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes are just masterpieces of of elegance in the storytelling. Nothing is wasted. Nothing's extraneous. Everything belongs, you know. And so that's especially as somebody who has a real proclivity for overwriting. That's something that I really think about when I'm revising. Is like what's the what's the minimal version of this story, where like everything, everything needs to be there. You know, I don't get there, but just having that as an ideal, I think, is is hugely helpful.

Kate Carpenter 45:49
Before I let you go, I do want to know you. You mentioned wanting to sort of have a have a clearer direction, maybe in the future for the types of projects you tackle. Do you have another project that you're looking toward next? Is there another chapter of animal history that you have?

Thomas Andrews 46:03
I don't know. I'm I'm giving myself a little time to to think about it, and also giving myself some permission to like probably think about it more expansively. Because at this point, you know, at this point, I feel like I really should just you know make like a more considered decision. But there's a few things that I've. I mean, there's a few things that have like been on my mind for a long time. One thing that I feel like I'll probably do a version of at some point is of is I love the high country in Colorado, especially the areas above timberline, and I think that they're fascinating because they're these landscapes and ecosystems where there's still very very few permanent human inhabitants, and they've actually kind of always been that way. You know, they're really only inhabitable for certain seasons, and and they're they're still unlike almost any other ecosystem I can think of. They're still not like as humanized. You know, they're also places, of course, that are like you know under urgent threat with climate change and its consequences. And so I think that there's maybe something interesting to do along those lines, but I don't know. I don't know. Maybe I, you know, I might also turn back to one of the other chapters that I was envisioning for an animal's history. So I don't know. I'm going to kind of let it sit for a while and and and and sort of see what emerges.

Kate Carpenter 47:16
Dr. Thomas Andrews, thanks so much for joining me and and talking about your writing process and about the Great Horse Flu.

Thomas Andrews 47:22
Ah, thanks so much, Kate. I've really appreciated getting to chat with you about all these things, and thank you so much for all the fabulous questions.

Kate Carpenter 47:29
Thanks for joining Dr. Thomas Andrews and me for this conversation. Find a link to his new book, The Great Horse Flu, and all the other books we mentioned in this episode in the show notes or at draftingthefast.com. While you're there, sign up for the newsletter to get podcast updates, book reviews, essays, and more. You can sign up for free, but if you would like to support Drafting the Past and access exclusive content, not to mention ad-free podcast episodes, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Until next time, all together now. Friends don't let friends write boring history.