Katherine Grandjean Lands Every Word Like a Tiny Punch

Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome back to the Drafting the Past podcast. This is a show all about how historians write history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. Today's guest published her latest book this summer, and I have to confess that I missed it when it first came out. But I am thankful to historian Robert Parkinson who brought it to my attention because this is a remarkable book—one I think deserves a huge audience, and I was thrilled to get to talk with Dr. Katherine Grandjean about how she wrote it.

Katherine Grandjean 0:25
Hi, Kate. It's my pleasure.

Kate Carpenter 0:27
Katherine is an associate professor of history at Wellesley University and a historian of early America. Her new book is Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution In it, she follows the trail of a pair of brothers who terrorized the Kentucky and Tennessee countryside for nine months in 1798, murdering dozens of people for reasons that were unclear to their contemporaries and to the people who have written about them for the past 200 years. Grandjean not only tells a gripping, beautifully written story, but she weaves it with the uncertain political and social atmosphere of the United States in the wake of the American Revolution. It's a story about masculine violence, class, property, the creation of a nation, and it has surprising resonance even now. So here's my endorsement: Read this one; you won't regret it. But first, listen to our conversation because Katherine also had insightful things to say about building tension, balancing narrative threads, and the hard, tireless work it took to track down the evidence that makes a story like this possible to write. Here's my conversation with Dr. Katherine Grandjean.

Katherine Grandjean 1:36
The trajectory of my career as a writer, I think of as having begun really when I was a kid, actually, I mean, I've been writing since I was probably seven or eight years old. I think when I was in grade school, I would actually staple together, you know, yellow legal paper and with a construction paper cover and write books, you know, write stories. And I started out, you know, when I was younger, writing fiction. That was sort of what I wrote when I was a teenager, and but somehow along the way, I got sort of bitten by the bug of history. And I I sometimes joke that I would have kept writing fiction, but I I was sort of drawn to history because the plots were already mapped out for me. You know, I came from a family that loved storytelling, and I think I've spent the rest of my life since I was a kid trying to tell a story, as well as my grandfather at the Christmas or Thanksgiving table, and so that's kind of where it came from.

Kate Carpenter 2:39
Well, let's start with just how you work. So, when and where do you like to do your writing?

Katherine Grandjean 2:43
I write at home mostly. I'm sitting in my office at home. I like it to be pretty quiet. It's good if no one's in the house, and I try to set aside days. You know, like I think of sort of the rhythm of my writing as being days within the week that I set apart. So if it's a teaching day, I'm probably not going to try to shoehorn writing into that. I know there are people who preach the gospel of write every day. You know, make some progress, chip away at it before your kids get up in the morning, sit down, and write. I'm, I've never really been that kind of writer. I'm not good at multitasking. I'm too distractible. So, you know, a couple of days a week, I'm usually at home writing, hopefully alone, so I can concentrate.

Kate Carpenter 3:32
How do you like to organize your research and your writing?

Katherine Grandjean 3:40
Boy, I am very old-fashioned. I'm a very analog researcher in the way that I take notes and keep notes. Historically, I mean, I grew up using note cards. I was taught that like super old school method of you keep your notes on kind of bite-sized index cards, and I think because I grew up doing that, and that was the way I always sort of organized my notes. I've never really been able to fully get away from thinking about that as the building blocks of a writing project. So now I've kind of moved into this system where I take notes really just in Word documents, I tend to sort of just type into Word documents, but I take notes in you know roughly kind of index card or like paragraph sized chunks with some type of headline over each piece of information, so that I kind of know, you know, this is about the governor of Kentucky being elected in 1798 or something. Sort of. Once I feel like I've amassed enough of that kind of material, I tend to print it out, cut it up, and put it onto note cards or sort of like half sheets of paper, so that when I'm thinking about organizing. I can just kind of like physically shuffle or place them in a in a certain order, and that's really a process. I've never been an outliner. It's always a process of like I just feel, I just kind of like sense this goes here. Okay, this has to come after that. No, this has to go earlier. This is the opening vignette, and if I don't have them physically on cards that I can kind of rearrange and like reshuffle, I just can't sort of see the shape of the piece of writing. So, so you know, I usually start out just kind of casting a pretty wide net, taking notes into word documents, and then if I know if it's a book project and I sort of know at some point. Okay, this is probably going to be a chapter. There'll be a chapter about this. There'll be a chapter about this. Then I start putting things in buckets. You know, sort of chapter by chapter. I wish I could say I was more methodical. You know, I just sort of. I tend to sort of write like really over, I tend to over do overkill on note taking, and then figure out what I need later on.

Kate Carpenter 6:07
Is there a point in your research where you know you're ready to start writing?

Katherine Grandjean 6:10
I would say I write and research sort of at the same time, and I often start writing too early, which is a which is a sort of Achilles' heel, I think, in some ways, you know, because I think I have often told my students and other writers really the best way to write is to know what you want to say. Usually, if you know what you want to say, or if you sort of know the overall thrust of the piece that you're that you're putting together, things kind of come together. They fall into place. They sort of move quickly, like dancing. You know, if you don't know where you're going, that's a whole other ball game, right? And I had many, many sort of tangents along the way in writing this current book that I just put out, where I was sort of writing into places that you know I had no idea whether they're going to end up in the book or not. But you know, it's a sort of gut instinct. I think do I have a critical mass of stuff to start putting pen to paper? And I'm usually excited about that. You know, I like writing, so I'm excited to sit down and kind of set the scene and bring people into John Adams's parlor or something like that, so I may be over eager and and start writing earlier than I really should often. How how does the revision process work for you? Revision for me is a lot of rereading my writing. It's strange, but again, I'm very analog, and I tend to print out once I have a draft. Let's say I'm revising a chapter. If I have a draft of it, I will print out that draft, and I'll print it out. You know, probably two pages to a sheet, so it's sort of landscape format. Looks like a book, right? Looks like you're sort of looking at pages, and I have to see it on the page. I have to see the writing, how it's moving, how the paragraphs are kind of flowing. There will be things I see if I'm looking at a hard copy of a draft that I would absolutely, you know, if I've read something on a computer screen a zillion times, drafting it, I won't see the things that I'll see if it's actually on paper, and I'll kind of notice like, oh, there's too many words there. This needs to be cut down. I don't like the rhythm of that, and so I will just sit down with the draft on paper and kind of, you know, not exactly line edit it, but sort of I can see better. There's a hole here, or there needs to be more explanation here, or I really don't like how this is landing. I need to explain this. I need to explain that, and it's you know many many rounds of doing that. Another writer once said to me, "Oh God, I'm so embarrassed. You know, it's like every chapter I go through 13 rounds of revision. It's like 13 word documents, 13 versions." I think it's at least that many for me. You know, that's how many times I have to sort of go over and gloss things. So, and I'm I'm a writer who I think underwrites. You know, there are these people in the world, there are these creatures out there who overwrite everything. I have friends who will tell me, you know, my book project has 150,000 words. It has 200,000 words. It has 250,000 words, and I have to cut it way down. I have never been that kind of writer. I tend to be sort of concise and punchy. There are two kinds of writers. I think there are sculptors who like begin with this big mass, and they kind of cut down and shape it and and edit things, and sort of slowly a beautiful thing comes out of that. And there are, on the other hand, people like me who are painters, and so the process for me is much more like I start with something. It's probably not enough, right?

Katherine Grandjean 10:00
It's like a sketch, and so either I look at it later on and see, okay, I need to sort of paint in some trees, or I need to paint in some detail about something else, or other people read my work, or an editor reads my work and says, "You need more about this. You need to add more here. You need to explain more about this." And so slowly, I kind of build up from the kind of core thing that I started with, and eventually, I get to a place where I feel like, Okay, this is sort of has the shape and the contours and all of the ingredients that it needs to be a full piece of writing.

Kate Carpenter 10:47
Who do you look to for feedback on your writing?

Katherine Grandjean 10:50
I think it's important to get feedback from all kinds of people. I will turn to everybody from you know my husband or my friends who have no place in academia, or and don't write at all. Those people are important to get feedback from because if you're writing for a general audience, those are the people you're really speaking to, ultimately. Then there are sort of the the second tier of people who I turn to, which are other writers who I really respect, like a writing group, other people who have experience writing for the kind of audience I might want to write for, and then of of course I think if you're a historian, if you're working professionally in academia, you have to sort of consult other academics and other people who have expertise in the period that you're writing about or the subject matter that you're writing about. So, I mean, my my knee jerk answer to that question is talk to a lot of different kinds of people. But I think I would add as an addendum, it's also important to know who not to rely on too heavily. You know, I think especially as a young writer, I tended to listen too much to the VIPs, and regardless of whether they really were right about things in the long run. And so, if you're too, if you're sort of too eager to take on board people's criticism and people's own ideas about what you should be doing, then I think it can sometimes send you in wild directions and you know goose chases, and so I have learned to protect a little bit my own sort of sense of things and know that okay, this person, though they may be a really well-respected, very important, very kind of acclaimed historian with the right kinds of background expertise, they're probably not going to share the same sensibilities stylistically as I would. So maybe that's not the person to sort of be listening to the most carefully.

Kate Carpenter 12:57
Very good advice. I'm curious about moving from an— what the process was like for you of moving from an academic to a trade press, how have you experienced that change?

Katherine Grandjean 13:08
Oh boy, it's whiplash. It's very different. You know, I would say that it's been both exhilarating and difficult in a lot of ways, I mean, I think, you know, from the very beginning of my publishing career, I knew that I wanted to write for a fairly broad audience. You know, I like storytelling. I like thinking about historical writing in ways that are bigger than just making an argument in an academic journal, and so it was my dream. I mean, it was really my dream from the time I was a little girl to write for a commercial publisher and sort of have a bigger opportunity to speak to people. So it was incredibly exciting to sign a contract with Random House to publish Kingdom of Devils because that meant that that was happening. You know, it's also wonderful because I think trade publishing takes takes your sort of sensibilities as a writer and a storyteller and an artist much more seriously and sort of carefully than academia tends to. I think I was sometimes punished actually for trying to write in ways that that sort of attended to those things when I was writing for academic audiences. So it was really wonderful to move, to make that move. Having said that, you know there were many things I did not know going into commercial publishing, and one of the things I think I didn't account for quite as much as I probably should have is that you do lose some amount of control, control of the process, not not necessarily control of the product. But certainly control of the process and the kind of rhythms of the project and the the ways that it unfolds, which is I know that sounds strange because people think, well, you know, if you're publishing with an academic press, you have to go through peer review and you have to sort of address the critiques of of people who are reading your writing, coming at it with all kinds of their own knowledge and preferences, et cetera, et cetera. But it's really no less rigorous to publish with a trade press. At least that's been my experience. I mean, I think everyone's experience is different. But you know, my editor, I think I went through three rounds of full manuscript revision, kind of a developmental edit, which is like you know the full vision, and then a sort of more intricate kind of how the narrative is working, chapter by chapter, and then a kind of final polish and line edit, and it was rigorous. You know, it was very, very rigorous. And what I was not prepared for is how much the timeline becomes sort of the publisher's timeline, right? If something else is going on, you wait. There's a lot of kind of sitting on your hands and waiting, and then you know, have it back to us by this time. So you know it's been fun, but it's been difficult. You know, it's there are challenges that I think I was not necessarily prepared for.

Kate Carpenter 16:31
You know, in reading your first book, American Passage, which was with an academic press, it is it is nonetheless clear that writing style and narrative were really important to you, you know. They were, they're still there, even though it's an academic press. How did you protect that as a priority in your work, even when, as you mentioned, you know, you can sometimes be sort of punished for that in academia?

Katherine Grandjean 16:54
You know, I think I'm stubborn, is one thing I would say. I just was sort of bound and determined to make narrative and style real priorities in my writing, and Harvard University Press, which published my first book, to their credit, they did sort of let me write the book I wanted to write. You know, they they did not really insist on making a lot of stylistic changes, which was great, but I think it was earlier in the process, probably when I was working on my dissertation, that I had to kind of find my footing a little bit and understand that in order to write in ways that were not going to be totally conventional and orthodox for a graduate student, it was going to take a little sort of stick to itiveness in terms of audience reactions, peer review. Reviewer two often would say things about my work that was like, sometimes you can sort of get taken to task actually for for attending to storytelling and narrative. But I also figured out that if I kind of trusted my own instincts and leaned into it, in workshops with my peers, with my mentors, I got good feedback. You know, I got rewarded for it, and so it was. I think it was a sort of process of like placing a piece, placing another piece, trying things out, and eventually getting confident enough to think, okay, I can sort of get away with this. You know, I still have to write a book that's for an academic audience. I still have to sort of attend to argument and historiography and the interventions that I want to make. But I can sort of make space for the things I want to prioritize too. And that that was a journey. Honestly, like when I was younger, it was a bit of a process to sort of feel like I could sort of be within myself and own the things I wanted to do as a writer.

Kate Carpenter 18:55
Well, I want to talk more about the research for Kingdom of Devils because I was just, as I was reading and as I was looking at your notes, I was just astounded by the research you did for this book. Not only because you know there were many sites, lots of archives, which is true for many historians, but you did an incredible amount of legwork. This was not a book that you could just write by like searching, finding aids for things. You

Katherine Grandjean 19:19
No.

Kate Carpenter 19:19
had to go to places and knock on doors and chase down leads. How did you do that? What was that process like?

Katherine Grandjean 19:25
It was a wild ride. It really was. I mean, it was fun, and I think sort of what I want to say at the outset of this is: I think obsession is a huge asset. I'm really serious. In any writing project, you have to have the belly fire that it takes to bring it to completion. And I, when I found this story, you know, I had never heard of these two brothers that went on this kind of wild killing spree in Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1790s, and I was blown away that I had never heard of them. But I was immediately sucked in and could not put it down from the, really from the rip. Like as soon as I found the story, I just was hooked, and so I think that did me a lot of good over the years that I researched this book because I really treated it as a discovery project where every research trip, every saga of me getting a rental car and driving 700 miles in a day across western Kentucky, and begging you know circuit clerks to like look through their closets for depositions that dated back to 1799, or you know, convincing people in county courthouses to open up their vaults to let me see what they had—that was like a fascinating detective project for me. Where I, you know, I was excited every day to get up and see what I could turn up. And a lot of those trips—I mean, this murder spree covered hundreds of miles. The Harps sort of came up north from East Tennessee, and they went into Kentucky and arced westward. And eventually, the story spills all the way down into the Mississippi River Valley. So, this book and the research that I did for it really necessitated me going to dozens and dozens of archives, county archives, courthouses, you know, little local repositories, and all kinds of places to sort of try to see what I could find. And sometimes I didn't find anything. You know, a lot of the time I did not find anything. I remember one day I was in Greensburg, Kentucky, I think in Greene County, which still had file papers from the county court records that dated back to the 18th century, and I thought, oh my God, this is going to be a gold mine because there had been a murder that happened there in 1799, and I thought, oh, this is going to be great. I'm going to go. I'm going to sort of find the box that that dates to the period of this murder, and there's going to be stuff people have never seen. And I got to the box, and it was missing the exact sort of series of dates that I needed. You know, after after I had driven way out of the way, you know, dozens upon dozens of miles to just to sort of like find this hidden treasure, and there wasn't any. So there was, you know, sometimes you turn over rocks and there's nothing underneath them, but sometimes that's not the case. And sort of on the other end of the spectrum, I also had this incredible experience at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky. I knew that Otto Rothert, who had written about the Harps in the 1920s, had left his papers to the Filson. Rothert was sort of the last author that really did kind of thorough research into these murders, and it was about 100 years ago. But he wrote a pretty well documented, well sourced account with citations. You could sort of see what he had been working with, and he had transcriptions of things that I knew were probably not extant anymore, or had been lost, or had long ago kind of withered away in the damp in Mississippi courthouses, etc. So I went to the Filson, hoping that there would be lots of great stuff in Rothert's papers. And this was probably about 10 years ago, right at the beginning of this project. And I went through his papers, and nothing. There was zero. There was just like, I I couldn't believe it almost. I thought, God, he wrote, you know, he wrote all of this stuff about these murders. How could there not be anything in his papers? And I was sort of heartbroken.

Katherine Grandjean 23:53
And then about five or six years later, I got a fellowship at the Filson, a short-term fellowship. So I went back in 2022 and was looking at other stuff. I was kind of digging into other things about early Kentucky, but I happened to have a conversation with one of the archivists there, Kelly Heiberger, and she said to me, "You know, I think we have a bunch of stuff that was in Rothert's desk when he died, and it's not in the catalog, but like there's a couple boxes. Let me bring them out. And she brought these boxes out. And as soon as I opened the first one, I was like, "Oh my God, this is it! This is all of his Harps research. Like this is, these are the transcriptions and the depositions and all of the court filings that he had, that I could not find in other places where I knew he had gone, and so it was a kind of a magical moment. Actually, that that, it was a lovely illustration of the fact that if you are truly committed and dedicated. And you know, go back over your tracks and refuse to sort of quit, sometimes you turn stuff up that you don't get the first time. So researching this book was a lot like that. You know, I retreaded material. I went, I went to the same archives over and over again to sort of look at different chunks of material that I thought might be revealing, and here and there, I sort of found bits and pieces and shards of evidence that let me kind of recreate the Harp's lives.

Kate Carpenter 25:38
Is there a point where you knew that this this story that had caught your attention was actually going to be a viable book to write?

Katherine Grandjean 25:44
I don't know whether I let myself believe that until I was actually talking to editors and had an agent. You know, I think I waited a long time. I kind of dragged my feet getting an agent and trying to actually get a book contract because I did, I think some part of me did worry. What if I can't pull this off? Like, what if I can't? What if I can't really sort of pull all of these pieces together and make it a compelling narrative because this is a book with a lot of you know gaps in the evidence. There's—I don't have all the things I wish I had about these two men. They weren't literate. They didn't really leave behind, you know, letters, diaries, that kind of, everything you wish you might have, I didn't have, and so I think I sensed from the beginning I wanted it to be a book. And the truth is, were I smarter, had I been able to say no emotionally to writing this book, I think I would have. Like that's probably that probably would have been, in some ways, a smarter career move. You know, it would have been, it would have been probably like a more prudent and cautious way forward in my own career as a historian. But I, but honestly, I could not resist. I really could not. This was one of those cases in which I really felt like the story chose me. You know, I don't did not feel voluntary, and so was there a point when I knew it was a viable book? I think I was nervous all along the way, but I just couldn't stop myself.

Kate Carpenter 27:29
Well, if you're up for it, I'm going to have you read this this brief excerpt from the end of chapter three, so we can talk a little bit more about your writing here.

Katherine Grandjean 27:39
"In the waning days of 1798, a body bobbed to the surface of the Holston River. It was bloodless and blue, possible half-frozen after being submerged in icy water.
A stream of constables and onlookers flitted in to have a look at the waterlogged corpse. When the dead man was pulled from the water, he was recognized as someone named Johnson who dwelled somewhere in the hills northeast of Knoxville. He had last been seen at Hughes’s cabin, a ‘rowdy groggery’ that was stopped along the road toward Southwest Point, a place frequented (the governor’s son later said) by men of ‘suspicious character.’
Had he been gambling—involved in some card game gone bad? Was he the victim of a heated dispute, fueled by liquor, that followed him out of Hughes’s place into the lonely road home? Or was he simply ‘robbed,’ as one man later suggested? Why Johnson was ‘taken into the woods & killed,’ his body then pitched into the river, was apparent to no one at the time. But in retrospect, one Knoxvillian would recall, notably, that the Johnson murder occurred not very long after Wiley Harp’s bad day at the races.
His injuries were odd. He appeared to have been gutted somehow. In his belly was a deep, cavernous gash, as if he had been ‘ripped…open.’ Only later—much later—would some men begin to suspect what had happened: In a possible attempt to conceal the murder, Johnson’s killer—or killers—had ‘cut his bowels open, filled his body with rocks, & sunk it.’
Although no one knew it yet, Johnson may have been the first to die."

Kate Carpenter 29:36
I know that it was really important to you to create a sense of mood in this book, and I hope for listeners that it's clear that you have accomplished that in this book. But I think that creating mood is is something that's hard to define and something that's hard to sort of explain. But nonetheless, I'm going to ask you: How do you create a sense of mood?

Katherine Grandjean 30:01
I think you're right. I think it is hard to articulate. You know, and so much of writing, at least for me, is just sort of gut instinct. You know, and sometimes it's really, it's difficult to define how you're doing what you're doing. But when I think about this question, what I think is, I tend to think about writing as music in some ways. You know, it has a kind of rhythm to it, and tonally, I think when I'm sort of creating a, this kind of moody atmospheric kind of approach. What I'm doing is write often. I'm writing sort of shorter sentences, kind of clipped prose. One of my best friends once said that the my writing reminded her kind of of Emily Dickinson, which is a strange thing to say about a prose writer, but I think what she meant was that sometimes I write in this kind of like staccato kind of rhythm where you're sort of landing little punches all along the way and not sort of overburdening the prose with lots of extra words or wordiness, but kind of almost having a sharpness to the rhythm of the sentences themselves. And the other thing I think I do quite a lot as a writer, which probably more so than than many other writers, and certainly more so than other academics, is that I tend to use the negative space on the page. I think more than others, I like to just sort of drop a sentence or kind of leave you hanging at the end of a section in a way where it seems like, oh, there could be more here. You know, there could be more explication. There could be more. There could be more narrative or drama or go deeper. But I sort of leave leave some silence there a little bit. You know, and I like I like sort of chunky writing where I I sort of break things up into sections and I have shorter sections and then sometimes I'll have a paragraph that's just one sentence. And for me, I don't think I'm doing this consciously as I'm writing necessarily, but when I sort of think consciously about how I'm creating the tone of the book, I think that's partly how I'm going about it. If that makes sense.

Kate Carpenter 32:46
Yeah, absolutely. That's, it's a little bit of an answer to my next question too, which is that you you really create a sense of suspense in this book. That there's sort of a driving narrative as we both follow these murders and and their development, but also follow you as the researcher in trying to find them. Do you have strategies for making sure that that feeling of suspense and tension comes through?

Katherine Grandjean 33:10
First of all, thank you for saying that it's suspenseful because this was a priority for me. Absolutely, you know, I wanted to write a book that not only said new things about the wake of the American Revolution and the early Republic, and kind of made traditional interventions that way, but also that would be a kind of propulsive narrative and have some suspense and sort of move the reader through the story in ways that would want to make you keep turning the pages. So, I did work hard to do that in writing the book, and I think one of the things I had going for me was that this story just naturally has a lot of strange, unexpected twists. It has cliffhangers. It has, you know, jailbreaks and surprises, you know revelations. And so I kind of knew when I found it that it was unshaped gold to begin with. Having said that, I do I do employ some techniques I think in the book to to make it feel suspenseful. One of them is to kind of toggle between the Harp story and the world around them and the sort of the things that I'm trying to say about the early republic and about violence and about the sort of social politics of the time more generally. So, the book I think it has this kind of tension throughout between these moments where you're with the Harps very intimately, so witnessing a murder, or in a jail room, or on a flatboat, kind of gliding down the Mississippi River, and then the lens kind of widens out a bit to sort of look around and say, Here's everything else you need to know about what's going on. This is what I want you to be taking away from this, and so I am often making the reader wait a little bit, you know, which I think for some people is can be frustrating, you know, but it's it's it's also a way of kind of moving through the story in in ways that never let you kind of relax in a certain sense, right? You never sort of settle into okay, this is this is where we are, and of course, again, it's it's the use of sort of negative spaces. I think you landing on chapters or landing on sort of you know cliffhangers or things where I'm not giving up everything, and you have to kind of move into the next section to understand where you're going at all times. So, not sure if that's a full answer to your question, but but it was something that was important to me as I was writing the book to try to make it be suspenseful as well as educational.

Kate Carpenter 36:03
There, there is a thread in this book of your role as researcher. You are present in this book, not not a huge amount of you, but we get to sort of step alongside you sometimes when you are finding that that perfect scrap of paper or or going into a courthouse. Did you always know that you would be part of the story, or or did you have to kind of figure out how to include yourself as you went along?

Katherine Grandjean 36:28
I didn't know, and you know, I think historians are sort of allergic to this idea. Traditionally speaking, they don't like the idea of you know inserting yourself into the narrative, and so I was a little bit resistant about it too, honestly. And from the time I signed my book contract, my editor was sort of saying, you know, I think you could really write yourself in a little bit. Like you should write yourself in, Kate, I think it would be interesting. You know, you are sort of the latest keeper of this story, you are the latest kind of Harp researcher in a long line of people who have written about this tale, and so it might be interesting if you were present and kind of made that role more visible. And I kind of thought about that and resisted it for a while, but I finally came around to the position that there were a couple of hinge points in the narrative itself where it was going to be difficult to move the reader from point to point without just being sort of transparent about okay, I found this promissory note. I mean, this is this is this sort of critical piece of evidence, and we can't really get from whatever was happening before to the next piece of the puzzle unless you understand that I'm finding this thing, this little glimpse, it just didn't seem to work for to me for me to sort of be this omniscient presence for the entire book. So, as you said, it's not a lot. It's maybe like a handful of moments where you sort of see me, but I felt ultimately like it was just a device that I I was not going to be able to avoid, and I've had some interesting reactions. I mean, the book is relatively new, but I did have one person, another historian who who read some of my book in draft, say to me, you know, this is kind of an interesting rejoinder in a way to AI and the idea that you know because AI cannot go into the Knox County archives and pull things out of a sleeve of court records and you know some of these discoveries that you're sort of making visible in the book are are a way of illustrating that you know, it still takes elbow grease. It still takes persistence. It still takes, it still takes that kind of old school gumshoe detective work of going into local archives and seeing what you turn up. It cannot all be done in these sort of newly digital ways. So I thought that was interesting. It's not why I chose to write the book the way I wrote it, but it was a kind of interesting reaction.

Kate Carpenter 39:27
That is interesting. You talked about this a little bit when it came to the question of suspense, but you know, one thing your book does so well is that it's you know this in many ways historical true crime story, which is fun to read with the distance of time, but it's not just salacious. You know, you really are making an argument and illuminating sort of these currents in the U.S. in the post-revolutionary era, a period that a lot of people don't know that much about, or we tend to sort of skip over on our on our way to civil war. I love how you weave those two things together. How did you keep one part of the narrative from overwhelming the other part?

Katherine Grandjean 40:08
That's a tough question. It is a serious history, you know. I think I to this day I'm a little nervous actually that because it's a it's it's so narrative and so literary and so focused on sort of suspense and good storytelling, I'm a little worried that the the arguments I'm trying to make will get lost in the shuffle. So I appreciate you even asking the question. Actually, the truth is there is a certain amount of just instinctive sensing the kind of the rhythms of the book itself, not spending too much time on the Harps and their narrative without kind of returning to the big picture and what's at stake. And usually, that's me moving back and forth, even within chapters. Right, several times within chapters from the narrative back to here's what I want to tell you about law enforcement, or here's what I want to tell you about the patterns of violence that emerged in the wake of the American Revolution. This was one of the things that a lot of the the editors who considered my book when I was trying to sell it and sign a contract they really loved this about the writing the fact that it it it really toggled back and forth between those two things: the big picture, the small picture, the big picture, the small picture. And Molly Turpin, who is my brilliant editor at Random House, at one point said to me, "How do you do that? Like, how do you know? How do you know when to sort of move, make the moves, and I said to her in that moment, "It's really just alchemy. The truth is, I don't know. I just kind of sense, you know, when I'm when I'm kind of laying out the chapter and then writing it. I just sort of sense, okay, it's time in the concerto to have a sort of bridge or to move to a different verse, and sometimes that's not, just, that doesn't just happen in the process of drafting it for the first time. Sometimes it's looking back at the draft and saying to myself, the reader can't take four pages here about land distribution in North Carolina. That's going to have to go because it's it's ruining the rhythms of the of the story. It's ruining the kind of lilting poetry and the movement of the story. So it's it's both, I think, instinctive and also editorial work on the back end of figuring out. There's, this is too bloated. There's too much here about background information, and you know I'm not sure I'm always getting the balance correct. But it's a long process of thinking about how to sort of keep keep those two priorities in balance: good storytelling, but also some amount of argumentation and context.

Kate Carpenter 43:01
Whenever a historian is good at doing this, as you are, I I think that there must you must be really skilled at keeping the reader in mind and sort of their sense of both their experience of reading, but also what they know and what they don't know and what they might need to know. How do you think about the reader while you're working on a book?

Katherine Grandjean 43:19
Oh boy, that's a great question, Kate. You know, I think teaching undergraduates is a huge boon in this way because when I'm writing lectures, I'm constantly cognizant of having to explain everything. I mean, I think at this point, I really don't assume any prior knowledge on the part of my students, even if many of them do have a background in whatever it is I'm talking about, I have sort of conditioned myself to assume I'm going to have to like really take their hand and carefully lead them down whatever primrose path I want them to be going down. So that has trained me in some ways. When I'm writing, I do think a lot about the experience of the reader, you know. And I think I don't think I've ever thought this consciously, but I'm thinking it in this moment. I think I sort of treat my proverbial reader in my mind as somewhat impatient, right? They're not they're not going to sort of sit and and wait too much. They're not going to tolerate a lot of self-indulgent, long exegesis on something they may not care about. And so, I feel like I have to keep moving. I feel like I don't want to weigh things down. I feel like things should be light enough that I can imagine, you know, my father or somebody else who's just interested in history but may not know anything or have any other sort of like real commitments to what I'm doing. They will be able to sort of pretty easily move through the pages that they'll want. To turn the pages without feeling overburdened and sort of weighted down, so yeah, impatience I think is is a trait that I imagine my readers having, even if that's not necessarily true.

Kate Carpenter 45:13
I think it's better to assume impatience than to assume probably less patience. Well, speaking of readers, who who do you read? Who do you look to for inspiration for writing?

Katherine Grandjean 45:24
I love people who really attend carefully to prose, and I think that's in fact, as a reader, I think that's becoming more and more unusual. Actually, you know, I I pour blood, sweat, and tears into my own prose. You know, as much as I think about sort of chapter to chapter or section to section, or you know, the book as an overall animal. I think about the prose and the sort of beauty of the sentences, and I'm not sure. I'm not sure many people care about that as much as they used to, but I do. So I love I love people who are very careful about their prose and write beautifully at the sentence level. So you know I love Jane Kamensky's work. I love Jill Lepore. I read a lot of classics. I get asked very often who are your favorite historians to read. The truth is the people I admire most as writers are typically fiction writers and literary figures like F. Scott Fitzgerald, you know, The Great Gatsby, just beautiful, simple, poetic. Margaret Atwood. I think Margaret Atwood, when I was probably 16 or so, I read a book of hers called Cat's Eye. I think she's where I learned, honestly, to employ some of these techniques of you know using the negative space, short sentences, punchy little moments where you kind of leave the reader wondering or wanting a little bit more. So yeah, I mean, I I read all kinds of stuff, but I think those those are the ones who typically tend to be my favorites.

Kate Carpenter 47:08
What's the best writing advice you've ever gotten?

Katherine Grandjean 47:10
I you know I was thinking about this question, and I'm not sure I'm not sure there's one thing that I sort of go to in my mind as a piece of writing advice, but there have been a couple of things that have stuck with me, and one of the quotes that that I sort of return to is something that Jill Lepore said to me when I was a graduate student. This was after she had read, I think, a draft of my dissertation, and she said to me, "It cannot show its stitches, and I just sort of I knew immediately what she meant, you know. And I I think I just kind of love that as a way of thinking about, you know, things have to be fluid. Reader cannot be able to see where you are kind of forcing things in, or haven't quite figured out, you know, how this first part works with the second part, and so I work hard on it on things being kind of fluid, even when I'm trying to keep different balls in the air in a piece of writing. Yeah, that's that's maybe the one I would sort of offer that's probably stuck with me the most.

Kate Carpenter 48:20
Well, I know that Kingdom of Devils is still relatively new, but is there another another story that has caught your eye that has sparked that sense of obsession to to work on next?

Katherine Grandjean 48:31
I wish I could say yes. I'm not sure. I'm, look, I'm not sure, to be honest with you, I'll ever feel quite the same way about another project as I did about this one, the Harps. You know, it just was kind of probably I was overly invested in it, and you know, I was almost like I kind of fell in love with this project, and I have to get out of this relationship to have another one. But one of the things I've been thinking about a lot is the environmental history of the American Revolution, which I think there's a lot of work yet to be done on that. The revolution's been written about, of course, you know, ad nauseum. But the sort of environmental history of it, I think, is, there's there is some work ongoing, but there is also a lot left to say so. There's a story that is sort of I think beckoning to me, which is about the Great Hurricane of 1780, a storm that came through the Caribbean during the American Revolution, during the Revolutionary War, and is still the deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record. Actually, it killed probably 25,000 people. So that may be the path I'm going down next. I think it has some great possibilities, both in terms of storytelling and contribution. So that's what I'm thinking. But you know, I have a lot of different interests, and I think I'm I'm waiting a little bit for that feeling of agic to sort of hit me again.

Kate Carpenter 50:02
Well, Dr. Catherine Granjine, I am glad that the feeling of magic hit you for this one because I certainly enjoyed reading it. I recommend it to all listeners, and I want to thank you for joining me on Drafting the Past to talk about your writing process.

Katherine Grandjean 50:15
Thanks so much, Kate.

Kate Carpenter 50:16
Thanks again to Katherine Grandjean for joining me for this episode. You can get your own copy of Kingdom of Devils, and I hope you do, at the link in the show notes, where you'll also find links to the other books we mentioned in this episode. Also, be sure to go to draftingthepast.com. Not only can you find notes from all podcast episodes there, but today, October 13, we published our first nonfiction book reviews. There's tons more to come. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss anything. You can subscribe for free, or if you want to support our work and get ad-free episodes and articles, exclusive content, and other perks, become a paid subscriber today. Thanks for listening and for caring about history books. I'll catch you next time.