In this episode, I was thrilled to welcome historian—and fellow Missourian—Kimberly Harper to the show. I am especially delighted by this episode because I get many requests to feature guests who have written history books while off of the tenure track or outside of academia, and Kim is a great example of that. I find guests for the show in a lot different ways – sometimes they are people I am a longtime fan of, other times I see books getting some press, or they pitch themselves for the show or other people suggest them. But I also scan catalogs of upcoming books to make sure I’m catching things that might otherwise get overlooked, and that’s how I first learned about Kimberly Harper. I spotted her new book, Men of No Reputation: Robert Boatright, the Buckfoot Gang, and the Fleecing of Middle America in the University of Arkansas Press catalog, and got to read an early copy. I was so impressed by the research and storytelling that I knew I had to reach out right away, and lucky for us, Kim agreed to come on the show. Kimberly Harper earned a master’s degree in history from the University of Arkansas, and she is an editor for the Missouri Historical Review. Her first book, White Man’s Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1894-1909, came out in 2010, and it received the Missouri Humanities Council’s Distinguished Achievement in Literature award. Kim and I spoke about how some key mentors helped her find her way as a historian and writer, how she is learning to balance her day job, writing, and family life, and how you deal with sources for a book in which everyone is lying. Enjoy my conversation with Kimberly Harper.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Kimberly Harper, Men of No Reputation: Robert Boatright, the Buckfoot Gang, and the Fleecing of Middle America
- Kimberly Harpter, White Man’s Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1894-1909
- The Natural
- Missouri Historical Review
- Ellen Gilchrist
- “Down the Mississippi: An Account of a River Journey in the Summer of 1895 by P.W. Pogson,” Missouri Historical Review, annotated by Kimberly Harper and John Brenner; Part 1 and Part 2
- Gregg Andrews, Shantyboats and Roustabouts: The River Poor of St. Louis, 1875-1930
- Brooks Blevins, Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins as well as his other works
- Articles by Lynn Morrow
- Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi
- William Childress, Out of the Ozarks
- Charles Portis, Collected Works (separately, True Grit, The Dog of the South, Norwood, Masters of Atlantis)
- Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder
- Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American newsletter
- Eli Saslow
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I’m your host, Kate Carpenter, and I am thrilled today to welcome historian and fellow Missourian, Kimberly Harper, to the show.
Kimberly Harper:
Well, thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure.
Kate Carpenter:
I’m especially delighted by this episode because I get a lot of requests of feature guests who have written history books while off of the tenure track or even outside of academia, and Kim is a great example of that. I find guests for the show in a lot of different ways. Sometimes they are people that I’ve been a fan of for a long time, other times I might see a book getting some press and want to learn more about it, or maybe a writer pitches themselves for the show or someone else suggests them.
But I also like to scan catalogs of upcoming books to make sure I’m catching things that might otherwise get overlooked, and I’m glad I do because that’s how I first learned about Kimberly Harper. I spotted her new book, Men of No Reputation: Robert Boatright, The Buckfoot Gang, and the Fleecing of Middle America, in the University of Arkansas Press catalog and I got to read an early copy. It was right up my alley and I was so impressed by the research and storytelling that I knew I had to reach out right away. Lucky for us, Kim agreed to come on the show.
Kimberly Harper earned a Master’s degree in history from the University of Arkansas and she’s an editor for the Missouri Historical Review. Our first book, White Man’s Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, came out in 2010 and it received the Missouri Humanities Council’s Distinguished Achievement in Literature Award. Kim and I spoke about how some key mentors helped her find her way as a historian and writer, how she is learning to balance her day job, writing, and family life, and how you deal with sources for a book in which everyone is lying. Enjoy my conversation with Kimberly Harper.
Kimberly Harper:
I have a confession to make. When I hear the word writer, I think of Twain, Fitzgerald, Ellen Gilchrist. I don’t immediately think of myself as a writer, and I think that’s probably because of the circuitous route that I took to becoming an author. At my rural high school teachers, at least in my experience, they didn’t encourage anyone to become anything as impractical as a writer. I’ve always loved writing, but it never occurred to me that that was something that I could do. That was for people from far away, not for someone from rural Route 3 Anderson, Missouri. When I graduated, I knew three things: I loved history, I could not do math, and as a first generation college student, I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life. So fortunately, I went to the local community college, where I had instructors who encouraged me.
Then I had the good fortune to transfer to my local four-year state school, and at the time it had a really good department despite its size. There was a professor there, Larry Sabula, who’s now at Eastern Washington, but he had arrived there by way of the University of Chicago and the College of William and Mary. It showed, because if you took a class with Larry, and it didn’t matter if you’re going to be a middle school teacher, a dental hygienist, a nurse, he still wanted you to walk away from his classes as a better writer, to develop good writing skills. He had these two great, wonderful handouts, one of which I still have somewhere to this day, and in them he stressed the importance of how to write a hook to engage the reader, how to construct powerful introductory paragraphs, how to craft lively sentences, how to come up with seamless transitions. Now, these are all things that you can learn by reading the work of good writers, but I think Larry recognized that not all of the students coming into his classroom had had that opportunity.
A few years later, when I went to graduate school at Arkansas, Larry would turn out to be a pivotal person in my trajectory as a writer. When I arrived at Arkansas, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study, and eventually I emailed a prominent faculty member, lengthy publishing record, with a thesis proposal and I asked if I could work with them. I never received a response. Thank God for that because in hindsight, it wasn’t a topic that I was really passionate about. Maybe that’s shown in my proposal, I don’t know, but it doesn’t matter because once again, serendipity struck. I ended up taking a lot of classes with Patrick Williams, who was a student of Eric Founer’s, fantastic teacher. One semester I signed up for a writing seminar on 19th Century America with Williams.
Once again, I needed a research topic, but it was getting late and I needed to write about something for my master’s thesis. As I racked my brain, I thought about something that Larry Sabula had said years ago in one of my undergraduate classes. He had said, “You know, there were a lot of race riots and lynchings in southwest Missouri. Someone needs to write about it. Jason Navarro,” Jason was a student a few years ahead of me who turned out to be a fantastic, award-winning teacher, “Jason’s written about the pure city race, but someone needs to go ahead and connect the dots and maybe someday one of you will.” Well, a light bulb went off. Here was something that appealed to me because I was passionate about local history, and in my neck of the woods local history has been ignored for too long. It also gave me the opportunity to better understand my region, where I came from, and that seminar paper ended up becoming the basis for my master’s thesis.
After my thesis defense, one of the committee members who I’d never met before, David Chappelle, who’s now at Oklahoma, he pulled me aside and he asked me, “Have you thought about publishing this? If not, I think you should.” Well, you could have knocked me out with a feather. I never thought that I’d hear that from anyone. But at the same time, I encountered individuals who were not entirely supportive. That fired me up. I wasn’t going to have anyone tell me that I wasn’t good enough. So I drafted a letter to the University of Arkansas Press, I printed out my master’s thesis, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing in hindsight, and I sent it off. I will be forever grateful to the late Larry Malley, who was the director of the press, for taking a chance on me. I’ve been very lucky, and that’s how I became a writer.
Kate Carpenter:
I love hearing that. Well, I’m excited to talk about many of those things more with you, but if you’ve listened to the show, I like to start out with just some practical questions. First off, when and where do you like to do your writing?
Kimberly Harper:
I like to write at home, in the afternoons and in the evening when possible. I wish I was one of those people who could get up at 4:30 in the morning and start writing. I can typically get up without being too much of a grumpy bear, but I’m just not in the right mindset to write. Typically, my gears really get going in the late afternoon and the early evening. I like to work in complete silence if possible, which has become more difficult lately. I like to hear myself think. I don’t like to listen to music, I need to hear my voice. I also have a habit of talking through problems. When there’s a paragraph or a sentence that I just find myself getting hung up on, I will talk it out. That’s not really something I want to do in a public place, so it’s better I keep that to myself at home because sometimes, I do admit, there’s some cussing involved.
Kate Carpenter:
Do you have a routine for writing? Do you try to do a certain amount all the time?
Kimberly Harper:
I don’t really have a routine. I would love to always crank out 500 words, like Hemingway advised, but that’s not always possible. When I’m not in the mood, I’ll stop what I’m doing and I’ll walk away, go take a walk, ride my bike, but I know eventually that the answer will come to me. But I hate to admit this, I’m unfairly undisciplined. I just have to put myself in the chair, that’s the first step. A piece of advice someone once gave me is get yourself in the chair and see what you can produce.
Kate Carpenter:
That’s good advice. How do you organize your sources while you’re researching?
Kimberly Harper:
So I primarily use newspapers and court records, and this is a real tedious answer, but this is what works for me. With newspaper articles, I’ll typically print out the scans and I organize them chronologically in a binder so I can follow the chronology of my story. I’ll also, depending on the subject, sometimes print out duplicates and I’ll create binders that have items organized by event, person, or theme, and that way I can cross reference my material. Now that microfilm scanners are fairly common, I’ll organize my digital files as well. I’ll typically create folders for each individual newspaper. Then when I name the scans, I’ll use the newspaper title, the date, the page number, and most importantly a keyword or a series of keywords so I can find it easier, because sometimes it’s a lot faster to do that than it is to flip through my binders.
I think it’s important to cross-reference as much as possible without it becoming too onerous. With court records, I’ll organize those by state and whether it’s at the local, state, or federal level. If you’d looked in my office while I was working on Men of No Reputation, it looked chaotic, but it was organized chaos because I had a four-drawer filing cabinet that was packed to the gills with material and I ran out of space. So I organized piles of court records all around my office floor, which drove me nuts, but I knew where everything was, so it worked for me. Now, thank God, they are all packed away and I do not have to look at that mess anymore.
Kate Carpenter:
Where in that research process do you like to start writing?
Kimberly Harper:
So my problem is I’m addicted to research. I’m addicted to research more than I am to writing. So in the past, I’ve waited to start writing until I think I have everything. But when you’re addicted to research, you never have everything. I always find some excuse to do just a little more research, and I would be far more productive if I started writing as I researched. I had problems with Men of No Reputation because I would find some little nugget of information and I would want to include it, but then I’d have to rework paragraphs and transitions. So now, not only do I try to start writing as I research, I’m trying to tamp down on my gluttony for another good story. Sometimes you just have to know when to stop.
Kate Carpenter:
It must’ve been hard with this book because there are so many good stories, I can’t even imagine.
Kimberly Harper:
I admit that I am still periodically looking for a story to pop up as more newspapers are digitized.
Kate Carpenter:
I understand though, that happens in my research too. Sometimes it’s a curse when Newspapers.com sends you the email that’s like, “We’ve just added new newspapers.” Are you a person who likes to outline? How do you approach the writing process?
Kimberly Harper:
I sometimes outline, but I don’t always stick to it, and that was the case with this book. I ended up with far too many chapters and I had to condense it. Ultimately, what I do is I just let the material take me where it takes me. With Men of No Reputation, I ended up with a 600-page draft. It took me a lot farther than I ever anticipated, and I enjoyed the journey, but when it came time to revise, I wasn’t really happy with myself.
Kate Carpenter:
So what does your revision process look like?
Kimberly Harper:
I am a glutton for punishment. I will try to write as perfect of a first draft as I can, try being the keyword there, but I will revise lightly as I go. If there’s a sentence or a paragraph that is just giving me fits, I’ll highlight it or I’ll make a comment out to the side and I’ll keep moving and then I’ll come to it later. But with the last book, I waited to do major revisions until the press told me I had to because I really wasn’t sure what I needed to cut. I knew I needed to cut, but I wanted the peer reviewers to weigh in, I wanted an outside opinion before I started cutting away at 600 pages.
Kate Carpenter:
As you’ve mentioned, Men of No Reputation is your second book. Did your process change at all between your first and second books?
Kimberly Harper:
No.
Kate Carpenter:
They’re both published with University of Arkansas Press. What was it like to work with the same press but for the second time? Did it change the way it felt?
Kimberly Harper:
It did. Both times were great, but they were very different experiences. When I first published with the University of Arkansas Press, the late Larry Malley was the director and Julie Watkins was the editor, and I had no idea what to expect and they were incredibly gracious and kind and patient throughout the entire editorial process. Larry passed away and Mike Beaker became the director, and David Scott Cunningham is now the editor in chief, and I want to say both experiences with Arkansas have been great.
The second time, with Men of No Reputation, it’s been a much more thorough process, which is not a slight to Larry or to Julie. Different people, different editors and directors have ways of doing things, and I found this process somewhat more streamlined with Men of No Reputation. The copy editor was much more rigorous, which I appreciate because we all make mistakes. I don’t care who you are, we’re all capable of making stupid mistakes, and thank God for copy editors for saving them from them. I appreciated the rigorous editorial process. Janet Foxman, who’s the managing editor, brings experience from Oxford University Press and it showed. I had a delightful experience.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, one thing I want to ask you about is that I hear from listeners a lot who are very interested in historians who aren’t on the tenure track and how they find time to write and then the resources even to do research and to write books. So how does that work for you? How do you prioritize your historical writing?
Kimberly Harper:
At this point, I’m still figuring out because my life has changed dramatically. I was fortunate that White Man’s Heaven was published in 2010, what seems like a lifetime ago, and I had written most of Men of No Reputation before my son was born. My son’s arrival made me write with much more focused intensity. I wouldn’t have been able to finish the manuscript if it hadn’t been for my husband. He made sure that I had time in the evenings and on the weekends to write. In that sense, the book is as much his as it is mine. In my experience, it’s incredibly important to have a supportive partner. My husband is incredibly generous with his time and he’s never complained about me writing, but when I work on something, that means I shut myself and my office away from my family, and in doing that, it makes me feel selfish and guilty. Even though I shouldn’t, it does.
So I’m at a point where the book is done, it’s out, and I’m going to take a break from writing at least at that same level of intensity. I’m trying to find balance. I’m trying to find time for myself, for my family, and thankfully, I say thankfully because I get cranky when I don’t write, after a certain point in time if I don’t get in front of a keyboard and start telling a story I turn into a little bit of a grizzly bear, right now I just have a couple of articles in mind. I don’t have a particular book project lined up at the moment, and it’s always possible that I’ll write another one, I’d like to think that good things come in threes, but I often think about something that Brooks Blevins said to me, and that’s that the Santa Claus days don’t last long.
I’ve been reading a lot of Ellen Gilchrist’s essays recently, and in one of them she remarks, in speaking about children, “If you aren’t there to watch it, you don’t get a second chance.” I don’t want to have regrets. I’m very fortunate to be outside academia because my job doesn’t require me to publish. On the other hand, sometimes you need that kick in the pants to publish, and yet I don’t have to teach, I don’t have to serve on committees, I don’t have to worry about tenure. But would I love a sabbatical? Yes, I would love a sabbatical now and then to do research and writing. Honestly, I love my job, but I work eight hours a day staring at a screen, and then once I get off work, my husband and I start our second job, which is taking care of our son.
I think a lot of people will agree, once you cook dinner and you clean up, and maybe you read stories or play, and you try to squeeze in time to exercise or do something that you want to do, the evening’s just gone. By the time that’s all said and done, I’m too tired to go drag myself into my office. I don’t want to sound all doom and gloom, I don’t want to be Debbie Downer. I recognize that I will likely have more time in the future to work on my projects as my son grows older and develops his own interests, but right now I’m just enjoying watching him grow up.
Kate Carpenter:
I have a 10-month-old, so I am just sort of starting to experience all this and live this, so I find this so relatable and so interesting. Life sometimes just happens in seasons and you do different things at different times.
Kimberly Harper:
The struggle is real.
Kate Carpenter:
We’ll just switch gears a little bit. You mentioned how White Man’s Heaven came to be. How did Men of No Reputation come about?
Kimberly Harper:
When I was researching my master’s thesis, which ultimately became White Man’s Heaven, I spent a lot of time reading southwest Missouri newspapers. I read the Joplin Globe and the Joplin News Herald from 1900 to 1910. I don’t think I missed a single issue. As I was reading the papers, I kept seeing article after article about Robert Boatright and the Buckfoot Gang, and I kept asking myself, what is that? So finally, I started reading the articles and I couldn’t believe that there were fixed athletic contests. I just kept thinking, how stupid could you be to bet on a foot race? It turns out there were a lot of stupid, greedy men who would. Men who would bet the equivalent of a million dollars in today’s money. Obviously, it captured my attention. After publishing White Man’s Heaven, I knew I wanted to write another book, and this just seemed like a great story.
Kate Carpenter:
That’s a perfect transition for us to take a closer look at a passage from Men of No Reputation and talk a little bit about how this great story is brought to life on the page. To help us do that, here’s Kimberly Harper reading from chapter two of Men of No Reputation.
Kimberly Harper:
Decades after Bud Gillette was buried in the Flint Hills, old timers in Greenwood County, Kansas still spoke of him with a mix of pride and bitterness. The Gillette family lived on Dry Creek five miles northeast of Quincy. Local lore had it that Bud and his brother, Frank, often went to town with Frank on horseback riding at elope and Bud running alongside, holding on the Frank saddle strings. Six-feet tall with a powerful physique and a slim waist, Bud Gillette was a natural. When he practiced on a hundred yard track alongside the rail line in Quincy, a gaggle of boys waited halfway down the stretch. When Bud began running, they shot off like bottle rockets, but never beat him. Local sports called him the fastest sprinter in the world. Quincy natively, Glenn Slough, remembered, “I never saw Bud Gillette run a race, but as a child, I did see him practice sprints. While the untrained eye of a child is not reliable, it seemed to me that Bud was the fastest sprinter to date.”
Life in 19th Century rural America was full of amusements quaint by modern standards. One of the most common, though now forgotten, was foot racing. Together with horse racing, it could be held almost year round and was popular during community events such as the 4th of July, but this seemingly innocent pastime was easily corrupted. Large amounts of money were often wagered, which presented savvy individuals the perfect opportunity. Some foot racers traveled the country with promoters, others worked alone. The simplest way to make money was to arrange the outcome of the race in advance, with one of the runners agreeing to throw the contest.
Gillette, however, won race after race without a whiff of suspicion. By 1894, he was known throughout the Verdigris River Valley as the man to beat in the 100-yard dash. It may have been that his family struggled to earn a living in an area characterized by rugged, rocky soil, it could have been that he believed criminal behavior was acceptable, his brother Frank had several scrapes with the law, or it could have been an easy way to make a living for someone to whom running came so naturally. Dozens of newspaper articles bear testament to Bud’s speed and athleticism during the early 1890s and show how he became the pride of tiny Quincy. Somewhere along the way, though, Bud chose to start running fixed races.
Kate Carpenter:
This section I chose because it does a really lovely job of combining a miniature biography of one of the characters in the book with the larger context of the social world that he lived in. What went into writing a section like this?
Kimberly Harper:
Well, thank you, this is actually one of my favorite parts. Men of No Reputation may be centered around Robert Boatright, but the book began with Bud Gillette. Reading newspaper accounts of Gillette’s races and Glenn Slough’s childhood memories of watching him run made me think cinematically. I was reminded of the Barry Levinson, Robert Redford film, The Natural. I thought of when Robert Redford’s character’s at a county fair early in the film. Levinson does a great job capturing the awe that a rural audience must have felt watching a natural phenom. Those scenes were also filmed during magic hour, that time in the late afternoon when anything seems possible. In my mind, I could see Bud Gillette in this tiny, dusty Kansas town practicing sprints with little boys milling around watching the local hero, but I could also picture him loping across the Flint Hills running alongside his brother into town as the sun started to go down behind the Flint Hills.
One thing I like to do is try to impart to my readers what Robert Caro refers to as a sense of place, and I think that extends to people too. I want readers to visualize, if possible, at least get a sense of the people in places I’m writing about, because chances are they’re completely unfamiliar with them. If you visit Joplin and Webb City today, they’re very different than what they were like in the 1900s. Much of the built environment that I describe is gone thanks to Urban Renewal. 4th and Maine in downtown Joplin looks nothing like it did. The lead mines, the chat piles, the 60-mile interurban trolley system, they’re all gone, but I want my readers to understand that at one time this was a booming metropolis.
Kate Carpenter:
Like you’ve just kind of said, one of the things you really have to do in this book is sort of try to make sure that readers can understand things that are unfamiliar to us now, but we’re very familiar to the characters you’re writing about. Foot races are a good example of that. You do a great job of really smoothly incorporating those explanations without making it feel sort of clunky. Do you have a strategy for doing that?
Kimberly Harper:
Well, I’m glad you didn’t think they were clunky because I was worried about that as I was cut, cut, cutting material. It’s hard to describe, but as I write, I just tend to have a feel for when I need to explain something at a certain point, and I think it’s because I try to think of my readers when I write. Who are they? In my mind, I have both academic and general readers in my audience, people who may have a PhD, but more likely than not, it’s probably individuals who are interested in local history. So I ask myself, what should they know? What might they already know? How can I explain something in an accessible way? How can I balance good scholarship with good storytelling? I believe that the best work is produced by people who write for everyone, not just an academic audience. So I asked myself, will Edith in Iowa City understand this? Should I explain it? How much should I tell her before her eyes start to glaze over? These are the things I ask myself as I write.
Kate Carpenter:
Those are good questions. I also want to talk a little bit about sources in your writing of this book. All historians have to deal with bias, of course, in sources. That’s just the nature of archival sources. But for you, that challenge is extreme in this book, because as you put it in the introduction, “Everyone in this story is lying.” It’s very hard to know who to trust. How did you work through that when you were looking at sources? How did you sort of separate truth from fiction and sort it out, especially when there are lots of different accounts?
Kimberly Harper:
I quote Brooks Blevins in the book. He’s got this great line about the intersection of myth and reality, and that’s where this book is situated, right there, smack dab in the middle of myth and reality. As you know, Boatright, his associates, his victims, everyone’s a liar, and not only do they lie, but they omit information. I also had to deal with missing court cases, and as you know, partisan newspapers brought their own prejudices and biases to the story, and it was difficult. Boatright’s victims lied about their participation and fixed athletic events. They were not, as they claimed, in town to look at drill rigs or cattle. They were there, at least as they understood it, to take part in a scheme that would enrich themselves at the expense of others. No one’s going to admit that on the stand.
On the flip side, when some of these con men took the stand, they would tell the truth to a certain degree. They would openly admit they were part of the Buckfoot Gang because they understood the danger of committing perjury. They also knew they could try to use the truth to poison the public against their own dishonest victims. Ultimately, I looked for common threads running between the different court cases and newspaper accounts and weaved them together. In some cases, I’d like to think I got close to the truth. In others, due to holes in the historical record. I’m not sure I got as close to the truth as I would’ve liked, but I tried.
Kate Carpenter:
It definitely comes through in the book how hard you worked to get those accounts together. In addition to the readers that you imagine while you’re writing, are there other people you rely on for feedback?
Kimberly Harper:
My husband is always my first reader, he has a background in history and I always trust his opinion. But I also think it’s very important to have people that don’t live with you read your work as well. So when I finish something, I’ll send it to Patrick Williams at Arkansas because he’ll tell me the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Kate Carpenter:
I saw that you are also an editor for the Missouri Historical Review.
Kimberly Harper:
Yes, I am an editor at the Missouri Historical Review at the State Historical Society of Missouri.
Kate Carpenter:
How has that work impacted your writing?
Kimberly Harper:
Well, I love my job because it exposes me to the work of historians who are publishing on areas of Missouri history that I might not otherwise encounter on my own. For example, I admit I’ve never really been interested in Missouri’s colonial period, but we’ve recently published a couple of pieces by John Craig Hammond, who’s made me look at that time and place in a much different way just through the power of his writing and his ability to balance scholarship with telling a really great story.
It’s also exposed me to a variety of different writing styles. I appreciate that. I like to see the different ways that people will set up their arguments. I love seeing the way that people craft a story. Sometimes I’ll encounter someone’s work and it will make me look at something that I thought I understood in a whole new perspective, and I appreciate that.
I also love the fact that now that I don’t have as much personal time to write, I get the opportunity to work on in-house projects as well. One of my favorite projects of all time was getting to write annotations for Percy Pogson’s 1890s Mississippi River memoir. Annotations are one of my favorite things in the world. I love footnotes, and to anyone who says you shouldn’t try to cram information in the footnotes, I strongly disagree. So I’m grateful that my job gives me an opportunity like that to keep up with my writing skills.
Kate Carpenter:
That is wonderful. What’s the most influential writing advice you’ve ever received?
Kimberly Harper:
I wouldn’t say this is the most influential piece of writing advice I’ve ever received, but it’s the one that I’ve always remembered, and that is the reader will never know what you cut. It’s true. I hate it, I don’t really like cutting paragraphs and sentences that I’ve labored over for hours, if not days, but it’s absolutely true and I console myself with that whenever I have to make cuts. The other piece of advice that’s always stuck with me is that everyone needs an editor. We do need someone to save us from our stupid mistakes, but sometimes editors don’t always make the right call. It’s not because they want to do harm to your manuscript, it’s just because they might not understand the material as well as you do. If that’s the case, if you disagree with an edit, then be professional, be diplomatic, but speak up because ultimately it’s your baby, not theirs.
Kate Carpenter:
What other writers do you read for inspiration? Who do you turn to?
Kimberly Harper:
One of the best books I’ve read recently is Greg Andrews’ Shanty Boats and Roustabouts. Greg is incapable of writing an ugly sentence. He focuses on the details, he tells an incredible story, and he gives voice to people who would otherwise be forgotten. What more could you ask for? I’ll read anything that Brooks Blevins writes about the Ozarks. I’ve been rereading a lot of Lynn Morrow’s articles about the Ozarks. He knows more about the region than anyone else alive and I can learn so much from him.
Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. Twain probably could have used an editor, but my God, some of his lines, specifically that sentence about Hannibal being the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning, it’s just lovely. I’ve been reading Ellen Gilchrist’s essays, the late journalist William Childress’s Out of the Ozarks, Charles Portis. I loved Caroline Frazier’s Prairie Fires. Of course, Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American. Paul Reed. Anything that’s long form journalism, the New Yorker, New York Times, Eli Saslow, his work when he started at the Washington Post and now at The Times. I’ll pretty much read anything. It’s a great time to be a reader.
Kate Carpenter:
Congratulations on the new book coming out, and I know this is always a really unfair question to ask, especially since you’ve just said that you are taking a break from thinking about a book project, but is there anything else you’re working on that you want to talk about?
Kimberly Harper:
I am. I am working on something, and it’s about what may have been the longest running feud in the Ozarks and it doesn’t involve moonshine. If you can believe it, it involves hitch racks in front of county courthouses.
Kate Carpenter:
That sounds fascinating.
Kimberly Harper:
Hey, it actually is. Just wait, you’ll love it.
Kate Carpenter:
Excellent. Well, Kimberly Harper, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for talking about Men of No Reputation and this has been a wonderful conversation.
Kimberly Harper:
Thanks so much, Kate. I appreciate you having me on.
Kate Carpenter:
Thanks again to Kimberly Harper for joining me on Drafting the Past. Please do check out her new book, Men of No Reputation, out now from the University of Arkansas Press. I’ll include a link to it and all of the other books that Kim mentioned in the show notes at DraftingthePast.com. Thanks for listening to this episode and continuing to support the show and its guests by telling your friends and by buying books. Remember that friends don’t let friends write boring history.
