In the United States, summer is now upon us, and at The Biographer’s Craft, this season we will be doing things a bit differently. Since we were able to return to an in-person conference (hurrah!), we’ve been receiving dispatches from some very generous BIO members who volunteered to be conference correspondents. Throughout the summer we will share their reports from each session.  

Additionally, we have a special variation on our “Member Interview” column this month. This issue is headlined by an exit interview with newly past BIO President Linda Leavell. So much happened during Leavell’s tenure as president (including a pandemic) that I’m very grateful she took the time post-presidency to reflect on her experiences leading our organization. We wish her the very best.  

Sadly, as our June issues were going into production, we learned of the passing of Robert Gottlieb, a titan among editors and a champion of biographers. At the BIO Conference, you may have caught the screening of Turn Every Page, the documentary about Gottlieb’s longtime collaboration with biographer Robert Caro. (The film was directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie.) While it would take books as long as Robert Caro’s to do justice to Gottlieb’s work as an editor, we will pay tribute to him as best we can in the July issue of The Biographer’s Craft.  

Please send along news, notes, photos, and anecdotes of your writing life for the July issue of The Insider. The inbox  is open.

Sincerely,

Holly

What was on your mind when you first took office? What were your goals, and did they change over the course of your tenure?  

 I didn’t have a specific agenda for BIO when I assumed the presidency, but I called each of the 15 Board members individually during my first month in office and asked them how they thought BIO could be improved and also what talents and enthusiasms they could bring to the organization. Two major goals emerged from these conversations: 1) hiring a part-time executive director to assume some of the duties formerly done by volunteers; 2) expanding and diversifying the membership, especially by recruiting more younger writers and persons of color.  

We eliminated the first goal within a few months when we hired Michael Gately as executive director. Michael’s initiative and professionalism have helped the organization run more efficiently in countless ways.  

Although membership grew from around 400 to over 600 members over the past four years, growth and diversity are still high priorities. In the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd, I established an ad hoc Black Lives Matter committee to recruit more Black members to the organization. That committee proposed offering the Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship, which has increased BIO’s visibility among African American scholars. At the urging of several young BIO members, I created another ad hoc committee to address their concerns about sexual harassment and to revise the Code of Conduct.  

When forming committees, I encouraged chairs to consider race, nationality, age, and gender as well as diversity of subject matter. The Board of Directors included one person of color when I started and now has five. We don’t keep statistics on diversity in our membership, but anecdotally I can see the results of our efforts to reach out beyond the over-65, white New Yorkers that some members have perceived as an inner circle.

Some other goals that emerged from early conversations with individuals, and with the Board as a whole, were: avoiding elitism (an accusation I heard from a number of BIO members then), establishing financial security for the organization, redesigning the website from the ground up, and creating more opportunities for members to interact with one another outside the conference. Except for redesigning the website, we made significant strides toward all of those goals. And all continue to be priorities. 

 

How did BIO change over the course of your tenure? 

We expanded and diversified our membership, our new nonprofit status allowed us to raise significant funds through individual donations, and with these contributions we more than doubled the number of and award amount of fellowships we offer to biographers. The COVID pandemic brought about other big changes in BIO. As soon as we had to cancel the 2020 conference, we began to think of ways to get BIO members to interact with one another virtually. Zoom meetings have now become so commonplace that it’s hard to realize that they hardly existed before COVID. Being able to see one another in person made a big difference in our monthly Board meetings, which had formerly been conducted by conference call. BIO’s Online Activities Committee organized a series of online workshops and panels to help both beginning and seasoned biographers refine their craft. As a result of new audiences that we reached through our online activities, we introduced a new annual Biography Lab, a one-day online conference held in January. We also instigated online roundtables on subjects ranging from American history to literary biography to marginalized lives. Not all of these have survived, but most have, and we are working to create ways for new roundtables to form as needed.
 

What are some of the biggest challenges of being president? 

One big challenge is dealing with the unexpected, such as a pandemic that kept us from meeting in person for three consecutive years. Another is monitoring the progress of committees, making sure that they meet deadlines and have the resources they need. This is rather like conducting an orchestra, I imagine, and it requires many emails, online meetings, and phone calls. The personal misunderstandings that sometimes arise require empathy and tact. 

The rewards of being president are also huge. It is a joy to work with intelligent, motivated, imaginative colleagues toward goals that we all care about. I learned a great deal from my fellow Board members and especially from my fellow officers, with whom I had the most frequent interactions. 

 

Do you find yourself missing anything about the role now that you are out of office?  

 Just from a personal perspective, it was a godsend to have the opportunity to interact with fellow BIO members during the pandemic. Although I am a natural introvert, I do need social interaction, and BIO provided that. I am excited now to have the time and mental space to devote to writing, but I already miss my almost daily interactions with BIO volunteers and staff.  

 

In hindsight, what were the biggest lessons you learned from this experience?  

 In my former life as an academic, I had chaired a number of committees and I had administered the graduate program in my English department for three years. But I had turned down other opportunities to be an administrator for a variety of reasons. So being president of BIO taught me that administration can be a rewarding experience, and it confirmed my belief that being a good listener is crucial both to getting things accomplished and to smoothing ruffled feathers. I am a firm believer in the power of the hive mind: an intelligent, diverse group of people (not too big) can come up with ideas that would most likely elude any of the members individually.  

 

Where do you see BIO going from here? 

Kitty Kelley’s gift of a million dollars will provide opportunities for BIO to expand its membership and services in exciting ways that I can’t yet predict. For me, the best benefit of BIO membership is belonging to a community, a community that celebrates the successes of its members and provides support and guidance out of the difficulties we inevitably face as biographers. I have done what I can to foster that sense of community, and I hope BIO continues to grow in diversity and in its collective wisdom. 

by Patricia Meisol

The question addressed in this panel was: How does one write about a legend everyone thinks they know with new information that sometimes contradicts stories that the subjects told about themselves? Led by moderator Carla Kaplan, the Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Northeastern University and author of Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (Doubleday, 2002; the first published collection of a major African American woman’s letters), this session’s panelists showed how they challenge ingrained perceptions of their subjects by highlighting contradictions, revealing their own fact-finding processes, and explaining the power of sometimes inaccurate family lore.  

First up was panelist David Maraniss, who is an associate editor at The Washington Post, a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and the author of biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Jim Thorpe, and others. He explained how he struggled to reconcile Clinton’s idealism and early “wonder boy” reputation with his ambition, but concluded they could not be separated. “Do you like him or not?” said Maraniss. “It was obvious I did not have to resolve that.”  

In the 1990s, when panelist Tamara Payne and her co-author and (now late) father Les Payne were researching The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (Liveright, 2020; winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award), Malcom X’s status was skyrocketing. She said her father advised her to ignore contemporary accounts, since he and she were telling a different story: one of Malcolm X as a son, brother, and friend. The elder Payne hadn’t wanted to write about Malcolm X until he heard these more intimate stories, she said, and these stories changed the way her father “thought of himself as a Black man in America.”  

When delving into Malcolm X’s lifelong belief that his father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, Tamara Payne said that she and her father were able to find a witness to the fatal streetcar accident. Their research results countered what many have maintained over the years. Tamara, then, put Malcolm X’s belief in the context of both his memories from childhood and his psyche as an adult contending with the loss of his father.    

Panelist Stacy Schiff, the author of the biography of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, Véra (Pan Books, 1999; winner of the Pulitzer Prize),  Saint-Exupéry (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994; a Pulitzer finalist), and best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Cleopatra, and Samuel Adams, said biographers must decide whether to include or ignore a legend about a subject in a book, because readers and editors come to the book with a certain amount of baggage. For example, there are two accounts of the way Cleopatra died, neither of which involves a snake (that story came later). Finding it impossible to reconcile them, Schiff chose a new strategy: her subject “dies twice” in her biography—majestically in one account and begging for her life in the other. “Probably both are embroideries,” Schiff said, “but it was [the] closest I could come to give [an] account of her death.” She ignored the snake legend, but legends seem to prevail even after you have published the book, she said. “Cleopatra is still going to be killed by the snake.”   

When writing about Benjamin Franklin, Schiff reconciled his reputation in France, where he sought to convince the monarchy to underwrite the American Revolution, with the view of him in Philadelphia, by using his own words and deeds. For example, “Just show him in motion, being a glutton at the table. . . .” she said.  

Moderator Kaplan asked panelists what should writers do “if you cannot simply recount the contradictions or give two accounts? What about interpretative moments?” Maraniss responded by explaining that both Clinton and Obama told mythological stories in their own writing that, while not necessarily true, were used by them to show their interior thinking at the time and did not warrant a “gotcha moment.” To check Obama’s recollection of a woman he was once in love with, Maraniss found the woman, who was upset “because [Obama] made her more naïve than she was” and so she gave Maraniss her diary. He then alerted Obama to what he found before interviewing him and noted his response: “he wanted to find out where she was, how she was doing.”  

When Maraniss checked Obama’s story that his stepfather died fighting heroically, he discovered on a trip to Indonesia that the man actually died when he fell off the ottoman changing the drapes. He did not conclude that Obama was a liar and instead explained how family lore works against the truth. “All of us have family stories,” he said.   

In conclusion, Schiff suggested showing readers how you reveal truth. To find out “what in the world” Vera Nabokov was doing in husband Vladimir’s class every day for years, she interviewed every student and collected some fabulous theories. She ended up including her entire search for the truth in her book. “Have fun with it,” she said.   

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by Patricia Meisol

Lisa Napoli, a journalist and biographer—most recently of the women who established National Public Radio—moderated this session, in which panelists demonstrated and discussed their favored ways of engaging with people to build an audience and potential customer base. “It’s all about giving readers something.” As Napoli said, “Make it about the subject . . . cloak yourself in your story . . . .”  

Panelist, Allison Gilbert, an award-winning journalist and co-author (with writer Julia Scheeres) of  Listen, World!: How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman (Seal Press, 2022), demoed three videos, some with graphics, which she used to promote a TV interview about her and Scheeres’ book. The first teased to an interview with an unnamed show, the second announced the show on CBS Sunday Morning, and the third illustrated how Gilbert humorously engaged her audience when, as she put it, “things went bad” and she had to lean into a sad moment. “What?” she says in the video, holding a banana to her ear, surrounded by a crowd she had assembled in her living room to watch the show and drink mimosas. “The show has been preempted by the Masters golf tournament?”  (The six-minute CBS Sunday Morning piece, when it finally aired, led to a bump in sales on Amazon, she said.) 

Although she uses Twitter and Instagram, Gilbert said her emailed newsletter has a far bigger audience. She relies on it to engage her readers directly, even localizing it, in order to draw crowds to readings. Since they opt into the newsletter, readers are likely to respond and she’s found it to be a “big boon” to getting people to show up at events—especially compared with notices on Facebook, which might be missed because of algorithms. For her newsletter, she collects email addresses online and at readings, and asks hosts for their lists. 

“The . . . whole point is not to sell a book but to give readers something,” she said. “Don’t raise your hand a week before and make it all about you.” She advised engaging with other people’s posts and creating real relationships. “You would not walk into a cocktail party and say ‘hey buy my book.’ So, if you enter the party before you need something and you lift up others, I think you will have much more success when you do want them to buy your biography.”    

Meanwhile, panelist Brian Jay Jones, biographer of Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination (Dutton, 2019), Jim Henson: The Biography  (Ballantine, 2013), and George Lucas: A Life  (Little,  Brown & Company, 2016), said he has the most luck using Twitter, partly because of his timely subjects. For instance, Disney has new shows on the Muppets and Star Wars. He uses Twitter not only to engage with readers but to comment on and converse about subjects unrelated to his books. Conversations result and even friendships, he said (and pointed to a new friend of his in the audience). He recommended attendees use a Twitter-run website, Tweet Deck, to monitor their subjects and alert them to conversations that they might want to jump into. He advised growing a following by following others: look to see who is following you and then follow them. He also uses Twitter to post photos on significant days in his subjects’ lives, such as a birthday, and to find out what is trending. “It might be something you know a lot about or be related to your subject,” he explained. He also takes readers behind the scenes of his work. “Take a picture of your manuscript when it’s done. People love to see that stuff,” he said, adding that it builds momentum before the book comes out.  

“The downside? Twitter can be toxic,” Jones said. He advised planning time each day to engage and then stepping away. He blocks anyone who is nasty. “You are not obligated to debate.” His plan: Tweet in the a.m. and then check in the p.m. (but not before bed). “This is [the] difference between being a day trader and having a financial advisor,” said Jones. Finally, he advised planning responses, learning about what is coming up, and not posting in real time. “Write, think, and then post,” he said. Otherwise you might contend with mistakes. “Anything that goes viral, you find a typo in.”  

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by Patricia Meisol

The moderator of this panel was BIO’s incoming president, Steve Paul,the author of  Hemingway at Eighteen: The Pivotal Year That Launched an American Legend  (Chicago Review Press, 2017) and Literary Alchemist: The Writing Life of Evan S. Connell (University of Missouri Press, 2021). He is currently at work on a biography of the American poet William Stafford. In opening this panel, Paul introduced Carl Rollyson as one of BIO’s most prolific biographers “and not organized!” Rollyson, who has published biographies of more than a dozen celebrities and writers from Marilyn Monroe to William Faulkner, eschews Scrivener, Excel, or any organizational tool, doesn’t make a chronology, and writes his draft before he researches.

“My organization really is my writing,” he said. “I don’t wait until I have all the research done.” He cautioned attendees against accumulating all the evidence before you begin to write. “You are the authority, not the archive,” he said, “don’t let the material drive the process.” For instance, writing the first draft of his biography of Sylvia Plath allowed him to discover what he didn’t know, Rollyson explained. To confirm what he had theorized for his biography on Martha Gellhorn, he called former biographers, discovered a Collier’s magazine archive at the New York Public Library, and looked up one of Gellhorn’s friends, art scholar Bernard Berenson, which led him to letters in Berenson’s archives at Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy. “Details matched up pretty well with what I theorized,” he said. He then followed up by confirming his discoveries with his subject. Rollyson further explained that his only tools are an iPad mini and Bluetooth. He also searches e-books and PDFs using key terms. For his upcoming biography of actor Ronald Colman, he began by watching films, not reading reviews. “I’m too busy writing to be organized,” he said. “I don’t think there is a right method, or if there is a right method, it is your method.” 

Panel participant and lawyer Timothy Christian, who wrote Hemingway’s Widow (Pegasus Books, 2022) is a fan of chronologies—as they can reveal causation. He demonstrated via PowerPoint how he uses Evernote to search, store, and easily retrieve facts or documents from multiple sources. Evernote allows him to load documents, copy and paste Word files, or clip from online sources, then file and/or tag by keyword or year. It then becomes a searchable database that he uses to store thousands of shareable documents. Additionally, he uses his iPhone to capture images and scan documents “as you find them in the library or other sources” and create a searchable note. And he demonstrated how he researches articles clipped from online sources like newspaper.com and how he tags unsearchable handwritten notes with keywords. He can then refer to the paper copy. (He keeps a paper copy of everything in the database.) He organizes Evernote material by filing thousands of pages into notebooks by topic or year, and these are accessible on all his devices, he said, “so you can work all the time.” (The latter comment made the audience laugh.) In conclusion, he believes Evernote is the easiest and fastest way to capture, organize, and find digital data. And one last tip he shared: he uses free Zotero software to create a bibliography from ISBN numbers.   

Panel member and journalist Caleb J. Gayle, who writes about the history of race and identity, said he uses Scrivener to outline, write, and continually collect facts at the same time. “It enables you to collect a host of material without slowing down your writing,” he explained. The author of We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power (Riverhead Books, 2022) and several forthcoming books—including Pushahead: The Story of Edward McCabe and his Dreams of Colonization, a children’s book called What Was the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921?, and Cow Tom’s Cabin, which examines the true story of Cow Tom, a former Black chief of the Creek Nation—Gayle said Scrivener allows him to keep track of research, fact-check, and write in multiple formats from 8,000-word essays to 100,000-word books.   

Caleb demonstrated for attendees how to use Scrivener to outline, collect, and store material within a chapter, by chapter. His screenshot showed an outline on the left, drop down flashcard summaries in the middle, and on the right is the actual material he is writing. He said you can store any media in a chapter: text, audio, videotape of a scene, or minutes from a meeting, “all of which might be fused into one paragraph.” Scrivener “enables you to quickly keep those in the loop. So, the goal is to continually keep the cycle of writing going.” He warned that Scrivener’s biggest downfall is its inability to do OCR (optical character recognition) scanning. And you need to connect to Dropbox or the cloud to use it on a phone or another device. But, he emphasized, Scrivener makes it easy to “continually write and pump out material” in any format: novel, e-book, newspaper article, Word document, or webpage.  

In conclusion, moderator Paul pointed out that Evernote is a repository or database, which allows writers to clip and annotate webpages and even email and store them to notebooks. The downside, he said, is that you don’t get a sense of how documents are related. Essentially that’s why writers, including Christian, write in Scrivener because it gives them the ability to see their outline and sources. You can, said Paul, pull Evernotes material into Scrivener.  

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by Patricia Meisol

What should you do when technology makes it possible to reveal sections of letters their writers never intended to reveal? This is the question that was posed by Megan Marshall, panel moderator and author of  The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005; finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013; winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017; finalist for the Christian Gauss Prize in Literary Criticism). Marshall and her panelists discussed the ethics of reading private letters never meant to be published and the dilemmas that arise when private material becomes available that changes our view of the subject. As Marshall noted, writers can now use better scans, microscopes, or a tool like a video spectral comparator to examine (and reveal) faded or crossed-out lines in an old text. This session was prompted by a discussion between Marshall and others on BIO’s Facebook Group page about how (or whether) to use software to read blacked-out lines of a private letter or notebook—material that the subject obviously did not want revealed.   

Abigail Santamaria, panelist and author of  Joy: Poet, Seeker, and the Woman Who Captivated C. S. Lewis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015)—and currently at work on I Am Meg: The Life of Madeleine L’Engle (forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux)—said she started the conversation when she learned that software like GIMP would allow her to read blacked-out lines in letters written by her subject. Colleagues questioned whether she should use material the subject obviously did not want others to read. “So, the question is,” said Santamaria, “how much do I let [my subject’s] desires . . . at a moment in time . . . inform what I do now in 2023, if at all?” She attends L’Engle’s Episcopal church, where many people knew L’Engle, and thus concluded that she knows her subject well enough to make a judgment. Santamaria has decided to go ahead and use blacked-out material that details L’Engle’s, and her husband’s, affairs. “I have a sense of her thinking and I think she would be OK [with making it public] in 2023,” she said. 

Such choices are not, however, made without some pain. Concerning her book Joy, Santamaria said she faced “fallout” from C. S. Lewis fans over letters she found that reveal how Joy Davidman manipulated Lewis to win him over and also challenged the Hollywood version of their romance as portrayed in the film Shadowlands. “But this [information] could not be left out,” she said. 

Panelist Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright, 2016; winner of several awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and BIO’s Plutarch Award), likened the use of new technology by biographers to the use of DNA by adopted children searching for their parents. “Things will come out that subjects—or biological parents—might not want revealed,” she said. There are “all sorts of questions, as we go through diaries, we should be having with each other and ourselves.”    

Now at work on a book about Anne Frank for the Yale University Press Jewish Lives series, Franklin described three versions of Frank’s diary, all of which a biographer would want to use: the original and most famous; a second version written a few years later that she intended to publish, which added information and feelings based on information Frank did not know at the time of the first version and removed personal information; and a third version, written by her father, Otto, which restored some personal information. As a biographer, Franklin said, she is drawn to the original version, although Frank didn’t intend to publish it. Is it ethical, then, to quote from the original version rather than version two or three? She called it foolish to exclude the first version. “The only answer is that my book is concerned with restoring Anne as a real person rather than the icon that she has become . . . as much as possible.”   

Paul Fisher, panelist and author of House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (Henry Holt, 2008) and The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World  (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022; named a TLS  “book of the year”), had a different take on the ethics of handling emotional and sexual secrets. While we want to be fair to the historical person, he said, “Do we want to out dead people who don’t want to be outed?” There is also the question of “what do we know, don’t know?” He decided to interpret Sargent’s relationship with fellow portraitist Albert de Belleroche as a “romantic friendship” although the biographer of Sargent’s famous portrait subject, Madame X, called Belleroche the love of Sargent’s life. With few letters and de Belleroche himself mum on the subject, Fisher explained, and the fact that Sargent already had a similar relationship with another man, “it is not possible to say whether it was erotic or even sexual.” Fisher said he writes about these relationships to understand or contextualize his subject’s sexuality in his time and because they influenced Sargent’s painting and choice of subject—works that included drawings and portraits of male nudes. 

In conclusion, Marshall said that she did not need enhanced technology to read a series of letters she found in the library that the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her psychoanalyst. However, Marshall, who was a student of Bishop’s, thought the letters contained material that she “felt should not be ‘out there.’” Knowing other researchers had seen the content, Marshall said, “it became my mission to use it responsibly.” In her biography of the poet, Marshall referred to the material in the end notes.  

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Special thanks to Patricia Meisol for writing the recaps in this issue.