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On “The Great British Dream Factory”: An Interview With Dominic Sandbrook

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“I’ve written four books about Britain since the ’50s, and pop culture always played a big part in those books. So they were always sort of very broad, panoramic political and cultural histories. And I always thought it was a really interesting topic: how Britain went from being a country that really prided itself on its economic and imperial dominance to one that had reinvented itself as a kind of cultural power. So, the fact that I do television informed the book to some extent, as well as the work I’ve done for the newspapers. I’d say it’s made me very conscious of how historians like me write a lot about politics but the reality is that for most people, politics doesn’t play a very important role in their lives, whereas pop culture does. TV is part of our common currency in a way that politics just isn’t. I thought this would be a good way to explore Britain’s national experience in the last century or so, as well is how Britain has been perceived.”

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Counternarratives: The Power of Narrative

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In her well-known TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie argues for the importance of a multiplicity of stories, voices, and perspectives in order to do justice to the fullest range of experience and explode reductive stereotypes of people and places. “Stories matter,” she says. “Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and malign. But stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

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What is inside?: An Interview with Carrie Olivia Adams

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“What immediately began to intrigue me when reading the source material was the focus on domestic space; they literally teach you how to make an operating room in a dining room, using a raincoat to cover the table. Before the modern hospital, often the most sterile environment was your own home. Once the idea of surgery and the actual theater of the operation became domestic in my mind, the liminality of the body came next. The body at home is the body in a relationship; it is the barrier between one and other; it is the egress the other is always trying to cross, not just in a physically intimate way, but in an empathetic way. The futile desire to know the other completely is unstoppable; but the metaphorical notion of surgery—of cutting open the other to peer inside—offers a solution. Yet, at the same time, what intrigued me when looking at the slides was that in their images the body, the most personal, individual piece, was unidentifiable. Would you know your lungs or your brain by looking at them in an X-ray? Would you say, ‘Oh look there, that wrinkle in the left lobe, that’s so me?’ Though I want to look inside you, the deeper inside you I look, the more anonymous you become.”

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Snapchats and Secrets

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When I was a kid, I used to trade secrets like baseball cards. We moved around a bit when I was younger, and I wasn’t good at making friends. I was better at observing the kids around me, and analyzing how they talked to each other, which explains why I’m a writer now. But back then, all I really knew was that friends told each other secrets. I told a secret, I got a secret. I got a secret, I told a secret. The exchange rate was a perfect 1:1. Who is your crush? Who is my crush? We walked away none richer, none poorer. Or that was the hope.

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From the Desk of a Librarian: Archives as a Resource

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We all know libraries are great resources for writing. What isn’t always considered, however, is the intense power of archives for creative writers. What separates archives from the rest of the materials kept in libraries is that the vast majority of archival materials are unpublished. We can only truly know them, the stories they contain, the bits of brilliant light, by spending some time with them. Though we know archives as essential to the fact-finding part of research, not everyone sees them as essential to the creative part. But there are stories in archives, stories waiting to be told, and wading through the records for these gems is the tragically beautiful part of archival research.

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On “The World Is On Fire”: An Interview with Joni Tevis

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“Music definitely informs my writing process. I played the piano throughout my youth and still do. I also played the French horn throughout high school and college, and I thought that was going to be my life—I thought I’d become a band director. That could’ve been a great life, but then in college, English got me, so I started down this road, and ended up double-majoring in English and history. But still, I love music. It’s probably one of the art forms we’re most comfortable with; it just informs so much of our lives. We sing along to the radio without thinking about it. But if we investigate those songs that matter to us? That can be a rich vein of material.”

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Unsolved Histories: A Cave, A Poet, and Excavating the Truth

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In 1881, while wandering the woods near their Spring Valley, Wisconsin home, brothers William and George Vanasse spotted a small creature scurry into a hole. The boys gave chase, prodding the hole with a stick until the stick slipped, then listening as it clattered far below. Curious, the young adventurers returned to their hole the following day, and after securing a rope to a nearby tree, descended into darkness. Guided by lantern light, their shadows swelled along the cool limestone walls until at last their feet touched solid ground.

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Killing :: kogonada

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Not long after reading David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, still high on its rallying cry for emotion over narrative, concision over Great American Novel bloat, I came across :: kogonada’s work. In his visual essays I discovered the cinematic version of what Shields called “the folk tradition in action: finding new uses for things by selecting the parts that move you and discarding the rest.”

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An Egg Dipped In Ash

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Last week, I saw a film about the life of Julius Rosenwald, an early twentieth-century businessman and philanthropist who financed a series of rural black schools, built and run with the oversight of the Tuskegee Institute. Rosenwald otherwise had a life such as that from which the myth of the American dream is made. He started as a merchant on the streets of Chicago, worked his way up in the “rag trade” and eventually became chief of Sears and Roebuck. In the meantime, he made large matching donations to black YMCAs and attracted the attention of Booker T. Washington. Washington took him on a tour of Tuskegee, and soon the two formed a partnership, building what would be called the Rosenwald Schools, funded by Rosenwald and each school’s immediate community, staffed by Tuskegee-trained teachers, and erected by the black communities they served.

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