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For Episode 27 of Drafting the Past, I was delighted to be joined by historian Dr. Carly Goodman.
Carly is a historian, a senior editor for the Made by History section at the Washington Post, and the Communications Coordinator for Nationalities Service Center, an immigration agency. Her first book, Dreamland: America’s Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction, came out in May from the University of North Carolina Press. I was so excited to talk with Carly earlier this spring about her research and writing, how her work as an editor has impacted her own writing, and the excellent craft advice she has to offer other historians.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW
- Washington Post Made by History column
- DevonThink
- Turbo Scan
- Dropbox
- Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, in which she famously encourages writers to write “shitty first drafts”
- Carl Bon Tempo’s Americans at the Gate: The United States and Refugees During the Cold War
- American Friends Service Committee
- Nationalities Service Center
- Chloe Angyal on Twitter
- The Op-Ed Project
- Ask a Manager Blog
- Carolyn Hax
- Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump
- Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
- Kiese Laymon
- Bryant Simon
TRANSCRIPT
Kate Carpenter:
Hello and welcome back to Drafting the Past. This is a show about the craft of writing history, and I am your host, Kate Carpenter. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by historian Dr. Carly Goodman.
Carly Goodman:
Thank you so much for having me. It’s really an honor to join you.
Kate Carpenter:
Carly is a historian, a senior editor for the Made by History section at The Washington Post and the communications coordinator for Nationalities Service Center, an Immigration Agency. Her first book is called Dreamland: America’s Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction. It just came out in May from the University of North Carolina Press. I was so excited to talk with Carly earlier this spring about her research and writing, how her work as an editor has impacted her own writing, and the excellent craft advice she has to offer other historians. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Carly Goodman.
Carly Goodman:
I’ve done a lot of things in my career. Before going to graduate school, I was working at a human rights organization and I started to do some blogging and that was in the 2000s and blogging was still in existence and reaching its sort of apex as a cultural touchstone. That experience was really important because I got to talk to people who did strategic communications for a living and I learned a lesson that I’ve carried with me, which is that there’s no such thing as the general public. We sometimes use writing for the public as kind of a shorthand, but it’s really kind of a fiction because writing is all about connecting with an audience and an audience that you perhaps have in mind, maybe you reach an audience that you didn’t have in mind, but there’s an intimacy to it that I think can be forgotten when we start thinking about writing a big book or writing to the public or writing for The Washington Post audience and I try to keep that in mind.
I went to graduate school with one goal, to write a book, so I guess I succeeded. Then after graduate school I had a stint as an ACLS Public Fellow working at AFSC, the American Friend Service Committee where I worked on a communications team again, and my role was really focused on audience research and thinking about framing and that question of audience again. I was doing some blogging, but my time there intersected with the Trump presidency, which came as a shock, perhaps it shouldn’t have come as a shock, but it came as a shock. And all of a sudden, my career as a historian, my research on immigration became very pertinent, relevant, urgent, and so I started to write pieces for the Made by History section of The Washington Post, which had just launched in 2017.
That gave me the opportunity to bring my historical insights and knowledge and my research to this broader set of audiences beyond my advisors and beyond fellow historians. It was very exciting and a little daunting, but I could also see meeting the moment. I was able to meet the moment and that felt very gratifying and satisfying as a next step in my career. In late 2019, I sort of got two jobs at the same time. I became an editor at Made By History. Nicole Hemmer, a brilliant historian, great writer, was transitioning out of editing at Made by History. She had helped found the site with Brian Rosenwald and Kathryn Brownell, and so she brought me on board, having been an experienced writer for the section, they asked me to come on as an editor, and I loved that work, getting to work with other writers and other historians and help crystallize their arguments and sharpen their prose and get their messages out to the readers.
I also became a professor at the same time, a visiting assistant professor at La Salle University teaching and prepping all kinds of new classes, so I started to work too much right in that moment. I think that’s important for my career as a writer because I learned that I had no time and I could not be precious and I could not let my anxiety stop me from getting the words down on the page or editing somebody else’s work because of the urgency of the publishing schedule. You needed content for the next day, that sort of thing. I did that and then after my visiting professorship ended, I turned back to my dissertation project and wrote this book.
Kate Carpenter:
I want to talk first a little bit about your habits as a writer or perhaps your lack thereof, depending on the kind of writer you are. When and where do you like to do your writing?
Carly Goodman:
Like I was sort of saying, I had to learn to write when it wasn’t convenient, and so I think I used to really want things to feel right before I sat down for a writing day and then, nothing ever felt right. I never had the time to really focus, so I learned to squeeze time where I could. The morning is better than later. I think I tried to preserve mornings when I could for my own work and to try to prioritize it because I thought that my brain would be its freshest, but I also learned to just sort of find interstitial times to write. I have a beautiful computer that I finally bought for myself, a desktop computer and it’s great to write on. I can see documents and other things while I have my document open to write, but I can also write on my rapidly aging MacBook that is on its last legs and can barely hold a battery charge. I don’t know that I have any routine other than pushing through anxiety is probably the most important thing in getting into the groove. When I can find a nice morning or day to dedicate to writing because of all this, it now feels like a gift instead of pressure.
Kate Carpenter:
For you is pushing through anxiety about practice at this point, or do you have things that you do?
Carly Goodman:
It’s been a great help to work on other people’s writing and to learn through experience, how to solve some of the problems in writing. How to say, “Well, you actually haven’t drilled down on your argument here. It’s so easy to see in other people’s writing and it’s so challenging to see in your own writing,” is to find the place to plug in that argument or the paragraph that actually needs to be moved up here. The experience of practice and experience and just doing it all the time I think is very helpful when it comes time to sit down to my own documents and say, “Well, what am I really trying to say here?”
Kate Carpenter:
How about research tools? Are there ways that you like to take notes or organize yourself? Listeners can’t see, but you’re making the same face everyone makes when I ask this question.
Carly Goodman:
I’m sure other people are so organized and they have their methods and they never make mistakes and they’re not just a total mess. It’s just crazy, right? I sometimes think about how my paintings and my writing are good in the same way and that they’re sort of like they get the job done, but then they’re not beautiful and graceful. I don’t even know how to put into words this sense that I have that my brushstrokes and my words, that they kind of share that in common, which is a weird thing to notice. But I’m just now realizing that my research does kind of look like my house with my children’s toys all over the floor, it drives me crazy. I wish it was more orderly than it is.
Late in book writing, but it’s been very helpful, I did get DEVONthink, which is a good tool for organizing documents and OCRing everything, and so I’ve been able to sort of say, “Oh, didn’t I read that somewhere,” and find it quickly instead of slowly. That has been very helpful. I write and research sort of together. Come home from the archives, I have everything. I use TurboScan and Dropbox in archives and recreate the folder structure of the archive itself, so that I won’t have the footnote problem of like where did this belong? I just start reading through and picking out what’s interesting to me and I try to keep in my mind the question what happened? Because so much of our work and so much of our argumentation as historians is embedded in narrative and a lot of times, we forget to say what happened happened, which is, it’s something that I noticed when I was looking for academic articles to share with my students, didn’t want them to have to buy long books that they didn’t have the time to read, so I was looking for shorter things.
A lot of those articles were so analytical that they kind of skipped over the story of what happened, but you can really embed a lot of argument in what happened through your choices. That is what I think about when I’m sitting down with documents and try to get the story down on the page. All writing is rewriting, right? That’s like one of those cliches, probably all of your guests revisit that one. But I do try to prioritize getting any draft and [inaudible 00:09:39] shitty first drafts, get something down because you can always go back and sort of rework the draft to make it less shitty, hopefully.
Kate Carpenter:
What does that reworking, revising process look like for you?
Carly Goodman:
It has varied. Sometimes I will work on getting bigger chunk of text down onto the page, trying to get several pages of work down and then I’ll revisit it right away. Then a lot of times, when I do have those periods of writing where I can write every day, I will start in the morning by going back to what I wrote the previous day, and sometimes you’re pleasantly surprised like, oh, actually this isn’t so bad. At least to get the draft into shape to start sharing it and thinking about sort of what’s missing.
Kate Carpenter:
Dreamland, before it was a book, was a project that started in graduate school. I’m interested not only in how it changed over the years before it became a book, but also what it was like to be writing a book that was so connected to things in the news all of the time while also being very much a history.
Carly Goodman:
Yes. Should I tell you about the origin of the dissertation too?
Kate Carpenter:
Sure, yeah.
Carly Goodman:
I think I might even talk about it a little bit in the book, although I can’t remember now.
Kate Carpenter:
In Africa, your visit to Africa?
Carly Goodman:
Yeah, yeah.
Kate Carpenter:
Yeah, you do talk about it a bit.
Carly Goodman:
Okay, great. Because when I would tell the story of the research when I was sharing my research during graduate school, people’s eyes would sort of light up and the story of how people choose their projects I think is so interesting. We have to remember that history is written by people, people making choices, and that human side of it I think has always appealed, always reading the acknowledgements first to get a sense of a person. I was thinking I was going to write about asylum and refugee issues. I had come from this organization, Human Rights First, and heard the stories of asylum seekers coming through our doors and telling their stories about why they were seeking asylum in the United States. I loved Carl Bon Tempo’s book on refugee policy, the history of refugee policy and its embeddedness in the Cold War, and so I really thought I was going to write about asylum policy since the Refugee Act of 1980.
Then, I was traveling in West Africa in my first summer after graduate school and visiting my spouse’s aunt who had retired to live in Ghana, and we would go to internet cafes while we were traveling and to send emails home because it was 2011. Notice other people at these internet cafes on the Department of State website looking into this thing, this Diversity Visa lottery that I had never heard of. My spouse was then in law school to go become an immigration lawyer, and he hadn’t really stumbled across it either, so we had this kind of thought we knew some stuff about immigration policy, but this Diversity Visa lottery was kind of this black box, no idea what this was, but it seemed to have this huge importance to people in these cafes where we were stopping to check our email.
Whenever something is kind of invisible in one place and hugely important in another place, I think you have a very interesting question about what’s going on here, and that was the motivation for writing my first paper about the Diversity Visa lottery in a seminar with Beth Bailey, who actually has a book coming out with UNC press at the same time as I do, which is really cool and then to develop the dissertation.
I finished the dissertation in 2016 at the end of the Obama presidency, and I actually put it aside for a long time. I started to work on a different research project when I was working at AFSC because in my role there, I was tracking a lot of the news coverage about immigration issues during the Trump presidency and I noticed over and over again, individuals from these organizations fair, the Center for Immigration Studies NumbersUSA were being quoted kind of uncritically in the media coverage as experts, but on the conservative side or restrictionist side. They were sort of organizations that favor lower immigration rates.
But I had seen these guys in my archival research and I knew that they actually advocated for some pretty radical positions like curtailing all immigration or ending birthright citizenship, and so I started to do research on John Tanton who founded those organizations and who’s kind of the mastermind and architect for the anti-immigration movement for the last 40 years. Started working on this. People thought this was really cool. I was writing pieces in The Washington Post about it. It was getting a lot of attention, and I sort of wondered, where does the diversity visa fit in all of this? Maybe I’ll write my second book first. That’s not a good idea. Nobody thinks that’s a good idea. It turned out it was not a very good idea, but I sort of kept these two projects alive simultaneously.
When I came to the end of my visiting professorship, I realized I do want to move forward with a book, and I think it’s the Diversity Visa lottery book, and it turned out to be a gift to be, well, I should say I felt like I should hurry and write it when people cared about immigration. During the Trump administration, we saw this public mobilization, outrage. It seemed like a public realization of the cruelty of our system, and there were headline news stories that really touched people and moved people to action. We saw these rallies at the airport when the Muslim ban was first implemented. We saw real action and people saying, “This is not okay. This is not who we are.” All the historians in the world were like, well, maybe this is who we are, but good, right? This is not who we should aspire to be. And so I thought, oh, I should really write this book quickly, but I couldn’t write the book quickly. I have a little kid and now I have two little kids. I have a six-year-old and a 10-month-old baby, and I just couldn’t write. And I had two jobs for a couple of those years, so I just couldn’t write any more quickly than I did.
But that turned out to be a gift because I realized that by the time I was finishing up the book, that sort of three historical eras had transpired since I finished, that I really needed to take a moment and consider the Obama administration and more of a historical perspective since I had finished the book in the midst of it and the Trump era, which I don’t think is in the rear view necessarily, but certainly the period from 2017 to 2020, I needed a little bit of distance from it to know how to write about it in the book in a way that would not just capture clicks and eyeballs in the moment, but also last, since books are physical things that live in our hands. I felt like a responsibility to try to write about it, not in that reactive mode, but with a little bit more distance, and I was able also to write about what was happening in the first part of the Biden administration, and I tried to bring a little bit of that perspective as well.
It really changed, and I was really ultimately glad that I had that distance between the end of the dissertation and finishing the book to really transform what I was trying to say. I do sort of comment in the book that that period really showed the importance of the diversity visa lottery. It’s not just as something that was really fascinating and worth exploring on its own right, but the way that it serves the United States and the communities that we live in just seemed clearer to me after watching President Trump tried to destroy it.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, I want to turn now to talk a little bit about how this works on the page. If you’re up for it, I’ll have you read this excerpt from Dreamland.
Carly Goodman:
The first time Sean Benson landed in New York, he came as a student from Ireland on an exchange trip to see the country that loomed so large in the Irish imagination. The second time he took a gamble. It was the same flight just a few years later, Aer Lingus number 105, from Dublin to JFK. But this time was different. After finishing his degree in management at Trinity College, he had struck out in the job market in Ireland. Many others suffered the same fate. Benson was part of a post-war Irish baby boom, reaching adulthood only to find that good jobs and opportunities weren’t keeping pace with their numbers. Leaving home wasn’t easy. In fact, the idea that he would ever have to leave his home and his family had been the furthest thing from his mind. His parents never thought they’d have to say goodbye to their children.
But by 1985, with degree in hand and no job, he felt he had no choice, not if he was going to live the kind of life he’d dreamed of and planned for. There were simply no options for him in Ireland. Reluctantly, he entered a kind of exile. Even so, he was ambitious, ready to begin his life as an adult, to earn a living and to put his education and skills to use. Benson had worked briefly on Wall Street when he was first in New York on a J-1 Exchange visa, so he was ready to pick up where he’d left off. Wall Street in the 1980s was dazzling. The stuff of Hollywood glamor and films like Wall Street and Working Girl. New York, City of Possibilities, was where he would start his life. He talked his way into a tourist visa at the US Consulate in Dublin, packed his bags and soon found himself sharing a city with a Statue of Liberty and millions of dreamers and strivers.
There was nobody to greet him at the airport when he arrived, but a friend had a place in Woodside in Queens where he could crash. He and about 10 other guys, all of them undocumented, stayed there. Within a couple of days, he had landed a job at a restaurant on the east side of Manhattan. Six months later when his visa expired, Benson stayed. As an immigrant without legal status or work authorization in the United States, Benson joined a growing cohort. Between 1982 and 1986, hundreds of thousands of Irish people, as much as 10% of Ireland’s population fled a cratering economy at home, nearly 150,000 like Benson sought a new life in New York.
Kate Carpenter:
Do you read your work out loud while you’re writing and editing?
Carly Goodman:
You’re supposed to.
Kate Carpenter:
I just wondered if you do because it comes so smoothly that I wondered if that was part of your approach.
Carly Goodman:
I do sometimes, it’s hard. At the end of my book when I was doing the final proof ,I was using, there’s a function on Word that reads your work out loud, and it’s a little bit of a robot voice, but I knew that I needed to hear it out loud, and I just couldn’t bear the thought of reading it all loud and I had a three-week-old baby and I was just sitting and nursing her and listening. It’s so important to find the things, the stumbles. You just can’t read them. You have to listen.
Kate Carpenter:
One thing I really enjoyed about this book is what a lovely job you do of blending sort of these stories of individuals like Sean Benson with these much sort of more abstract policy, political demographic concepts. How did you bring those together on the page?
Carly Goodman:
Well, I’m listening to a comment that Daniel Immerwahr made about my dissertation, which was like the more time we can spend with Sean Benson and these other guys and the less we spend on policymaking, the better. I just kept writing drafts where there was still so much policymaking and everyone just kept saying like, “Cut that down. We don’t want to hear about how the sausage gets made, but we do want to hear the story of these guys.” I think because they are so compelling, there’s good sources for them, there’s a really great oral history project, so I was able to hear his voice describing the work that they did in organizing and mobilizing as the Irish Immigration Reform Movement. Also here, I really wanted to, well, I tried to infuse the whole book with empathy and to sort of take seriously the experiences of everybody in the book and what motivated them and what they were experiencing.
As I was doing that, I was also sort of trying to deconstruct some of the myths that I knew were still embedded deep in my brain, despite knowing better about these immigration narratives that are so celebratory. I think about my own family, my grandparents, parents who came, and the story has a happy ending because that’s where I came from, that I’m born, right? But I tried to take seriously the loss that came with those movements of people and what it felt like to sort of give up what you had planned on and how exciting it is, I think, and it was exciting for Benson and some of these other Irish immigrants who were mobilizing to change the laws to start a life in New York. They saw it as a place of possibility, but also that it has this kind of loss baked into it.
Kate Carpenter:
One thing that really interests me in this book and caught my eyes is that I know you relied a lot on oral histories in our archives like this, and I think in the notes, I see that you’ve interviewed people also, and yet you resist. There’s sometimes a temptation for historians and journalists too, for that matter, to use a lot of quotes, and you’ve done a really lovely job of turning those interviews into these very smooth narratives like this, so we’re not distracted so much, and instead can be right there with Benson. Is there a practical way you approach that when you think about writing these pieces?
Carly Goodman:
I’m glad that it felt effective. Maybe there’s a difference between how I approached it when I was reading other oral history projects and then dealing with the interviews that I did. I went to Ghana and Cameroon and conducted interviews and talked to people at internet cafes, a lot of people, especially working at internet cafes, to hear their understanding of this lottery thing and to let them explain what it meant to them in their lives. I think you’re right that we sometimes rely too heavily on quotes, and it’s not always the easiest thing for the reader to follow along, so accessibility is really important. I really wanted the reader to follow these stories, and so I was able to use some of these details here and then supplement that with other research to figure out, geez, was that the flight number for Aer Lingus in 1985? And to let the person’s perspective be part of the framing of the narrative.
I think I was talking earlier about just the power of stories, and it’s not just in the specific words that we say, but sort of how we understand our place in the world. I let some of that come in to how I talked about Benson’s experience, I think as a method of trying to build empathy and understanding, especially on a subject like this where I think the dominant media narratives of visa overstayers. I mean, if there can be said to be dominant narratives of that, maybe that’s a little bit niche, but this idea of what the immigration system is and how people encounter and navigate it, it seemed very important to tell this as an individual story because you can sort of see the way people’s choices are constrained and see the way that people’s stories run up against these big systems over which they might feel that they have very little control.
Kate Carpenter:
I’m interested in talking a little bit more about op-ed writing and Made by History because I suspect your work there has also sort of informed your approach to things like this. The first thing I might ask you is in case listeners don’t know what Made by History is, and they all should, could you just define it for me?
Carly Goodman:
Made by History is a section at The Washington Post edited by professional historians, and we run 10 or 11 or in some cases, more history analysis pieces every week, usually two a day, in which historians at sort of all stages of their careers are invited to share their expertise to help contextualize the breaking news, the general news, the moment. It was started by my colleagues Brian Rosenwald, Nicole Hemmer, and Kathryn Brownell because they were finding that there were not that many places on traditional op-ed pages for historians to write. It always seems to historians that these secret and the most important thing is history and to bring historical analysis to bear and to unearth and uncover and lift up the deeper roots and continuities over time, and yet you do see op-eds by historians. Historians are not reticent about participating in public writing or sharing their opinions.
We sometimes debate this in ways that suggest that we’re either reticent to do it or we’re doing it too much, but there’s no shortage of it and in fact, teaching is a very important form of public engagement, but there just weren’t that many outlets where you could write really good historical analysis and reach a lot of people, so that is why my colleagues proposed to our colleagues at The Post that Made by History should exist. And how many years has it been since 2017? Almost six. I joined in 2019, and so thousands and thousands of people have been able to share their work through this platform.
Kate Carpenter:
I love Made by History, so I’m glad it’s spread the word. I’m curious, we talked earlier about how working on Made by History and other op-eds, both as a writer and an editor, has influenced your process, helped you be less precious about writing and focus. I’d like to know more though about how it’s influenced your writing itself. Has it changed your approach to narrative or argument?
Carly Goodman:
Well, one thing that we almost always do, if we get a draft and there’s something not working, the first step is to put the story in chronological order. I know that sounds so simple, chronology, but it’s really important and a lot of people who are practicing writing because they’ve written a book about something and suddenly, there’s headline news, so they want to write about it. A lot of times, I will see drafts where they feel that they have to keep reminding the reader, and this is like this, right? I’m telling you about this history, and here’s how it’s like what Biden’s doing now, or here’s how it’s like what we saw during the Trump administration, and actually you can trust the reader a little bit more and use the power of narrative to tell the story in chronological order before you come back to your analysis at the end of the piece and draw out those parallels. You don’t need to stop in the middle of the story to say, “And this is really important,” because if you’re writing it effectively, they will be able to see how important it is.
I edited a great piece about an election in South Africa, the election that led to the imposition of the apartheid state. Her first draft had a lot of like, here’s the alarm bells, here’s the Trump stuff, the sort of unwillingness or inability of liberal parties to unite against a common foe. It didn’t work, because how many of us know about the South African elections of the 1940s? She was just sort of assuming maybe too much knowledge about one thing in the reader and not trusting them enough about their knowledge of the present. Chronological order and focusing on saying what happened are these intuitive things that historians do, but I want us to be more conscious about it and to recognize those as really important methods in our work.
Because I think we’re kind of a promiscuous discipline, where we borrow from a lot of other disciplinary practices, but if your argument is about change over time, chronology is a really, really powerful tool for conveying that. I think about that, I think at more at a conscious level. It’s great to just have a few tricks like that to say like, “Well, I’ll just put this in order and maybe that will tell me what my argument is.” I do think writing is thinking, also. There’s a reason our students all put their thesis statements and their conclusions because often, you have to write your way into figuring out what the argument really is.
Kate Carpenter:
Are there other things that you often find yourself teaching historians who are new to writing op-ed?
Carly Goodman:
I mean, they teach me. I don’t know. I learned so much from working with people. Mariame Kaba says, “Everything worthwhile is done with others.” So much of writing feels very solitary, especially in our profession, I think, where we don’t always have the benefit of an editor, and so being able to work in this collaborative way to help people figure out what they’re arguing or convey it more clearly has just been something that I really treasure, trying to think about what else I teach. It’s harder to write short than it is to write long, so people do sometimes want to write with too much detail and learning where to cut detail and where to leave it in is something that I think you can only learn by practice.
When I do trainings, I always pull up this tweet by this great writer, Chloe Angel, who is not an academic, but she’s written a non-fiction book and some novels, and she has been an editor and a writer, and she taught me at the op-ed project training that I was able to attend. She has this tweet about how important it is to realize that you have knowledge that nobody else has and that there are things that you know and understand that other people just don’t have the privilege or the time or the experience to know, and so sharing it is something that is very generous and ultimately hopefully, useful to making us all collectively wiser.
But I think that that’s really hard, especially for graduate students, for students to own that they know something because a lot of our processes are about telling us all the things that we don’t know, all the things that we haven’t figured out yet, all the things we haven’t read, and it’s really hard to know everything, but you don’t need to have all of the answers to have something valuable to contribute. In op-ed writing, a lot of times that can be because of your personal experience, your experience that you’ve lived, you can bring those experiences to bear and write an op-ed about our messed up healthcare system or unemployment systems and all of these things.
But even as scholars and as people who are interested in creating and sharing knowledge, it can be so hard to believe sometimes because there’s always someone out there who has written a better book or has written something where you’re like, “Oh man, I wish I could have written something so smart.” Trying to tackle the insecurities and the voices in our heads that tell us that we’re not enough, it’s like trying to remember that like we matter and we have something to share. I try to also convey that in my editing, although maybe those that I’ve edited would say that I’m too tough. I don’t know.
Kate Carpenter:
I don’t know, this felt like a pep talk directly for me, so I imagine other listeners will feel the same way. I think tough editing is something maybe we could all use more of in terms of working on our own writing. It’s such a gift to be edited well.
Carly Goodman:
I like to think so. I say that it’s my love language, even though I don’t really know what the love languages are. I heard people talking about it, but editing where I’m really, really just staring at the words and trying to figure out like why doesn’t this thesis make sense? What is this person really trying to say in this tangle of words? If I can illuminate it, it feels like an act of love.
Kate Carpenter:
Are there historians or other writers that you look to for inspiration?
Carly Goodman:
I was thinking about this question because a lot of the last year, I haven’t even been able to spend very much time reading because I have a 10-month-old baby and I’m always just feeding her and scrolling on my phone. The two writers that I read the most of are Ask a Manager blog, which I read every day, for some reason. It’s an advice column and it’s about work and professional norms and navigating workplace questions. Nothing to do with what I study, nothing to do with what I write about. I don’t know what it is, but she’s very reassuring, and so the fact that I return day after day means that she must be a great writer.
Carolyn Hax I’ve been reading since she started her advice column in 1997 when my mom handed it to me. I grew up in the D.C. Suburbs and we got The Washington Post every day, and it was initially tell me about it, advice for under 30 crowd, and now none of us are under 30 and I read that too, and I don’t know why. I have no insight or intelligent things to say about why advice is so powerful, but I think, empathy, the human experience, the breadth of human experience, I just love that. Those are what I read every day.
Spencer Ackerman wrote an amazing book called Reign of Terror that I cite a lot in my book when I’m talking about post 9/11 US policy. I’ve been reading him since like 2006, 2007 when he was a blogger. So brilliant that it’s almost painful to read, the truths that he uncovers. I read Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing when I was thinking about how I was going to structure Dreamland and they have nothing in common, but I did think about short chapters. I don’t know if I got them short enough, but I tried to do short chapters, and there’s a lot of them.
Kiese Laymon is a writer, and I am sure I’ve butchered his name, but I love his essays and novels and I just love the daring or like the… Like writing can be scary, even writing history, even writing op-eds, and so to see someone just be, I don’t know if fearless is even like the right term, but just to be so dedicated to the truth and getting the truth on the page. Those were some of the people who came to mind. One of my advisors for my dissertation was Bryant Simon, and he writes really beautifully and accessible work that is historical work, and so I’ve talked to him a little bit about writing and feel very lucky to be able to have those conversations.
Kate Carpenter:
What’s some of the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Carly Goodman:
I think just that all good writing is revising. It’s like crazy what we ask graduate students to do. We give them all these polished books to read. I had never even read a dissertation when I was a graduate student, so I didn’t even know what the genre was, but also how much people’s writing becomes brilliant through process and editing and honing and rewriting, and so we should not compare our first drafts to other people’s polished published drafts. Good writing advice. I was struggling to keep up with all of my work and my editing and Nicole Hemmer told me to edit fast, and so I sometimes think just write fast. I mean, it’s easier said than done, but I think getting your words down on the page is the only way you’re ever going to wind up with a finished product, so you’ve got to do it.
I think a lot about framing. I think my experience, reading more about how framing affects how people understand key issues has informed a lot of my writing choices, so I did a lot of things differently in this book than I did when I was writing my dissertation where I really thought about what are these turns of phrase like an influx of immigrants, a flood of refugees? What work are those word choices doing in the world? I tried to unpack them and actually I have a writing tick that my editor Brandon Poya pointed out, which is that I do and maybe there’s still some of it in the book, but I do a lot of like, well, people say, people did this, people did that.
Because I was like, well, does it matter if they’re undocumented? The choice of how we label and describe people, those are not value neutral choices, and so is the most important thing about a person that they’re an undocumented immigrant? That’s a policy results. That’s how the state sees them. Do I need to reproduce the language of the state seeing them in this way? I tried to think about when do you need to say immigrants? When can you say people? When can you say a youth or a man or whatever? I tried to be careful about that, and I hope that helps us see our shared humanity, which is such an important part of the book.
Kate Carpenter:
I’m guessing that a lot of what you’re working on right now in addition to just your day-to-day work is focusing on the new book and promoting it and talking about it in the world. But before I let you go, are there any new projects you’re working on that you want to talk about?
Carly Goodman:
Well, I have that second book project that I started and that I have a proposal for, and all I need is somehow to come up with some money so that I can write it or time, because I do think it feels important to write about how we got here with this policy landscape that is so restrictionist, and I don’t know if you follow it at all, but it’s been dismaying, to say the least, to watch the Biden administration embrace really harsh enforcement measures and restrictionist measures that fly in the face of US international law, but also even the commentary from the Biden campaign during the 2020 election, and so understanding the deeper roots, not just that nativism has always been a part of the United States, and it’s so-called nation of immigrants, but that actually the policy terrain has been really transformed and shaped by the activism of this one man, John Tanton who passed away in 2019.
He was an ophthalmologist who in his spare time became a crusader for anti-immigration, and it’s about him, but it’s not only about him because he had these noxious views, but I think they’re really grounded in the ordinariness of his experience as a white American at mid-century, so I want to weave together the policy shifts since 1980 with his story. In some ways, it’s like an inspiring story of what one man can do and about social movement building and policy change, but in other ways, it’s really a devastating story, but then also situate it in a recent history of our time because I do think that this is really very central to our most thorny problems about who has power and who is allowed to be included in our society and you can’t be anything like a democracy when huge swaths of your population are denied basic human rights.
Kate Carpenter:
Dr. Carly Goodman, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past and talking more about how you write.
Carly Goodman:
Thank you so much for having me.
Kate Carpenter:
Thanks again to Dr. Carly Goodman for taking the time to join me on Drafting the Past. And of course, thank you to you for listening. Find links to all of the books we talked about, especially Carly’s new book, Dreamland in the show notes at draftingthepast.com. Until next time, remember that friends don’t let friends write boring history.
[…] Carly Goodman’s Dreamland: America’s Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction (check out Episode 27 with Carly Goodman) […]