Four New Mexico authors enthralled a crowd of 75 people June 26 at Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe with their insights into the art of nonfiction writing. The panelists were Alex Heard, Virginia Scharff, Sally Denton and James McGrath Morris.
Their talk was broadcast via Google Hangouts on Air in two parts. You can view them here: Part 1 and Part 2
Each author has a different approach to research, organizing material and writing. But all four have produced great works that bring historical people and events to life.
Sally Denton, whose most recent book is The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis and the Rise of the American Right, said she tends to write about the footnote in history, unfolding less well know events and people. “I don’t write about what most historians write about,” Denton said.
Heard, whose day job as editorial director for Outside magazine leaves him little time for writing books, said you have to find the process fun and the subject deeply engaging to make a book worth the time. He spent several years researching and writing about the case of Willie McGee, a black man in Mississippi convicted in 1951 by an all-white jury of raping a white woman. The case made international headline as people pleaded for a stay to his execution. “I saw an important story that was forgotten,” Heard told the audience. of his book The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex and Secrets in the Jim Crow South.
Every book is a different process, said Virginia Scharff, a history professor at the University of New Mexico who has written both fiction and nonfiction books. When she wrote her book The Women Jefferson Loved, Scharff knew she was tackling a sensitive subject involving a man about whom much had already been written, Thomas Jefferson. “You might as well paint a target on your back,” she quipped. The challenges didn’t stop her from tackling the subject.
James McGrath Morris, author of Pultizer: A Life in Politics, Print and Power, said families and even the estate executors of the deceased will try to control what is written. The trick is to convince them to share details without trying to control the story. (Sound familiar, reporters?) Morris is currently working on a book about Ethel Payne, a Civil Rights reporter in the 1950s and 1960s, who became the first female African American commentator hired by a national network.