Episode 59: Brad Bigelow, Biographer

0:00Welcome to right now with Scribner, where writers talk about how they work, how they develop their ideas, and how they use Scribner. The app will perform long form writing projects. I'm your host, Kirk McLean, author of Take Control of Scribner. Today, I'm very happy to welcome Brad Bigelow. Brad recently wrote a biography of Virginia Faulkner, and I had never heard of Virginia Faulkner. So Brad, thank you for joining me. Thanks, Kirk, and you're not alone, I would say, the vast majority of people have never heard of Virginia Faulkner, and that's probably my first challenge in getting anybody to read the book is, who the hell is this woman? Well, people are going to see Faulkner, and they're going to think, was it William Faulkner's wife, or daughter, or aunt, or something, but is there any relation? None at all, none at all. She was in Hollywood in the thirties at the same time Faulkner was there, and he jokingly

1:05said, call me Uncle Bill, but no, there was no, the family tree connection has to be many generations away from her. She was from Lincoln, Nebraska, her family were from Lincoln, and which is not something at that time. I mean, her family all moved to Lincoln within 10, 15 years of the city becoming a place. Let's talk about you because you've had an interesting life. You grew up as an Air Force brat living in places around the US and Italy, then you went into the Air Force, and then you worked for NATO doing some sort of secret spy stuff. Can you tell us about that? No, no, no. In fact, that's one of the great, the jokes about NATO is the one great secret about NATO is there are no great secrets about NATO. No, no, no. I spent a lot of time in what we're known as special access programs in the US Air Force. You worked at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe.

2:07I mean, that sounds like something where, you know, Churchill's going to drop in for a cup of tea. Impressive. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It was, well, I had that job during World War II. It's a name they kept for, I guess, legal reasons, but it's the operational military headquarters of NATO. And yeah, I worked for a NATO agency that did IT technology and projects and then moved down to shape to kind of get closer to the people who had the real needs. And so after you left NATO, you went back to school. And I think that's really interesting. First of all, why did you go back to school and what did you get out of it? That's a great question. Well, I went back to school partly because as a retired Air Force officer, like anybody who's done their time in the military, I had GI Bill rights. And I had always kind of thought about using it once I retired, retired.

3:11But as I was kind of coming up to 60, I decided I'd look into what I was actually entitled to. And the great news was I'd earned up to three years of full-time support from the GI Bill. The bad news is when I got the letter telling me about that, I had like 18 months left before they expired, which I never knew they expired, they expire. So at that point, I was still working for NATO. I had no immediate plans to retire. And I thought, well, that's the end of that because, of course, in the US, if you want to go back to get a master's, it's a two-year program. And my wife, who was taking a psychology certification in the UK part-time, said, well, why don't you look at the UK? I think their master's programs are one year. So I thought, well, yeah, but the GI Bill won't cover me going to England, but it turned

4:13out that actually they'll send you to any university that's accredited in the world. You've got them. If there's a difference in the tuition, of course, you have to make it up. They only give you so much. But so I started looking around and I had always been interested in going to get a master's, but I wanted to kind of focus on biography because people fascinate me. And I stumbled across a biography, a master's program at the University of East Anglia and applied to it and got accepted. So put in my retirement papers for NATO and we packed up the household and sent most of the stuff here to Montana and some stuff to the UK and we moved to the UK. And then we got stuck there because of COVID because in the middle of my master's degree, the pandemic hit, did you enjoy living in the UK after what had you been in Brussels before that? Yes. We lived in Brussels for 18 years. Yeah, we loved the UK.

5:13It was an interesting time to be in the K was frustrated in the UK was frustrating because when lockdown hit, we suddenly couldn't travel around. And in fact, that's kind of why I wrote, I decided to take Virginia Faulkner as a subject. I was actually looking at other writers where I could do some archival research in the UK, but come March of 2020, the archives all shut down. And I had to figure out how what kind of subject could I write about where I could do essentially all my research online. And I had done a short paper about Virginia Faulkner is just a class assignment. And saw that there was a story there and what fascinated me about Virginia Faulkner, I mean, I knew her as somebody who had written books that had gone out of print and had

6:15been forgotten. And I'd read a couple of them and they're very funny and well constructed. But whenever I read a book, I always look into the author a little bit about what their story is. And when I looked into Virginia Faulkner, of course, there wasn't a lot about her. But she was written up in one of these things you see in the library, I think it's contemporary author series. I forget the title of it, but it's these volumes you see in the reference section. They're all brown with little black labels on them. And she had a little write up in that and it's going through her history. And it says, you know, she grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. She attended Radcliffe. She was a writer for the Washington Post. She worked in New York for Town and Country magazine. She worked for MGM. She wrote a number of books, did a Broadway play. And then the next thing I see is she's an editor with the University in Nebraska Press.

7:19And I thought, that's a weird left turn to take in a career. And so that kind of had always stuck in my mind. And I decided when I was looking around for alternatives that I could do online, I decided to go back to that because it kept intriguing me. Why would somebody kind of take a Dorothy Parker career path, so to speak? And then suddenly she ends up in an academic press in Lincoln, Nebraska. And luckily, really, the lucky break was when I started pursuing where there were sources from that, a woman named Samantha Sheda in LA who had started to do a little research on her, had copied a whole bunch of Virginia Faulkner's letters that are in the archive in Lincoln. And when I contacted, she said, well, I'm not doing any research on that now because I've

8:20got other things. But here's the PDF files with all the letters. And I was immediately hooked because Virginia was, she was an amazing letter writer. She was funny, she was smart, and she was self-effacing. And I just, it was a personality I wanted to know more about. I looked her up on why none of her books are in print. Do you think that this biography will make some of her books come back in print? It's a possibility if it, if it happens, it'll probably be because I try to push something through. I'm divided on that because actually one of the things that I kind of had to grapple with in writing this book was to realize that it wasn't a literary biography. Once the time when somebody writes about a writer's life, they're trying to show how their life illuminates the work. And in the case of Virginia Faulkner, frankly, a lot of her work was written to sell.

9:23In fact, her working title of her first novel, Friends in Roman, was written to sell. And the funny thing was it went well through the editorial process before anybody said, well, actually we should have a better title than written to first written to sell. And one of the things that really detected me was, so she ended up at the Washington Post because she kind of got stuck in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was very unhappy there. When she had been in high school, she had gotten a small scholarship to Radcliffe. And at the time, she wasn't really in a position to take it. A couple of years later, she's sitting in Nebraska. She's kind of feeling stymied and she decides, well, maybe that Radcliffe thing is still a option. And she looks into it and Radcliffe says, we don't care, fine, come.

10:24So she went to Radcliffe for a year. While she was there, she became friends with a woman named Florence Myers, who was the eldest daughter of Eugene Myers. Eugene Myers was Catherine Graham's father. So he bought the Washington Post in an auction in 1933. And he had met Virginia when she and Florence came down for a weekend at their family house. And he thought, this woman is so bright. And he said, if you want a job on the Washington Post, just give me a holler, I'll employ you. And so she decided to take a job with the Washington Post. She went down, she worked there for about nine months while she was finishing her first novel. And there's an amazing letter. She wrote her brother right as she's deciding to leave. She decided to leave Washington and move to New York and make her try to be an author,

11:28to join the smart set. And she's writing this letter to her brother and she said, what I've been doing for the post, what I did in her first novel, friends and warm Romans, it's all this witty, smart, wise cracking stuff. And she said, but I'm never going to be a real writer. I've got to find something kinder and truer in my work. And the bottom line was money seducer. And for the next 15 plus years, she really just went after the commercially attractive stuff. So she wrote a lot of magazine stories. She wrote another novel. She wrote a lot of magazine pieces for magazines like Saturday evening. Post and Liberty and all the big magazines of that time. But a lot of them are very, they're funny. They're in fact very similar to the wise cracking comedies of the 1930s.

12:33Almost always involving a rich couple and their marital disputes and a third person comes in and there's a tension and that sort of thing. They're very much of a pattern. They're very funny, but they're relatively forgettable. And so she was in a relationship with a woman named Dana Swiss who was a songwriter. She wrote tons of songs for Billy Rose, the Broadway producer. And Dana, they wrote a play that was a bomb, but they were very lucky. They sold the rights to RKO for a fortune before it even hit the stage. So Dana took her money and she went to Paris to study with the very famous composition teacher Nadia Boulanger who taught Aaron Copeland and others. And Virginia had a breakdown. She just realized she was unhappy emotionally.

13:35She was unhappy where she was artistically and she ended up spending over a year in an asylum being probably subjected to multiple bouts of electro-convulsive therapy and came out and kind of decided she had to remake her life. So will her stuff get republished? I would say it could be republished, it's very funny, but the truth is if it comes out as a book, people will read it, they'll chuckle and they'll put it back on the shelf and probably forget it. I mean, there are places in the world for books like that. There are, certainly, and I enjoy reading books like that, but it's what you're describing is books that are fun reads rather than literature. Yes. Okay, let's take a break. When we come back, we're going to talk more about your biography and some of the other really interesting things you do. Writing a book, screenplay, or even a long article was a juggling act.

14:38You need to find the right words and the right structure, keep track of research and refer to notes. Tailor made for long writing projects, Scribner is the go-to app for writers of all types. Scribner combines a typewriter, binder and corkboard in a single app. A project outline makes it easy to get an overview of your work and flip between sections. Refer to research alongside your writing and just drag and drop to rearrange your work. Write in any order in sections as large or small as you like and let Scribner stitch it all together when you're ready to share your words with the world. With Scribner, you'll find everything you need to start writing and keep writing. Scribner is available from Mac, Windows, iPad and iPhone. Download the free trial from ScribnerApp.com. Right now with Scribner listeners can get a 20% discount with the coupon code podcast. That's ScribnerApp.com. In addition to Virginia Faulkner, you are a, and I'm quoting from your website, a champion

15:39of neglected books. What is it about these neglected books that is, I mean, we know why they're neglected. There are so many books and it's hard to keep them all in print and there are trends. And you've talked about Virginia Faulkner's novels. They are of their time of the 1930s, but what is it that makes someone find neglected books that can speak to a new generation now, 50 or maybe a hundred years after? I stumbled into this. When I was an undergrad, I used to do all my studying at the Sousa Library at the University of Washington, which is, it's got like nine million volumes or some ridiculous number, but it's one of the biggest university libraries in America. And when I would take breaks, I would just go up and down the stacks, looking at titles and pulling out books and what I quickly found was that there were a lot of books that looked intriguing. And in fact, I read a bunch of them and I just started to realize that what gets remembered

16:44isn't necessarily, people assume that like when you look at classics, like the Library of America, that it gets recognized as a classic because those are the good books. By a corollary, the ones that got forgotten weren't as good. And I quickly figured out that that was completely wrong. In fact, Alfred Kanop once said that most novels fail on the day they get published because they come out of the wrong time or they have the wrong cover or nobody knows the name or it gets one lousy review, whatever it might be, as you said, most books are going to get forgotten. That's the default solution. And I started to realize that there were actually a lot of books that were forgotten but unjustly. And for several decades, I just kind of had that habit. I would go into a bookstore and not look for the William Faulkner, but to look for the

17:49Oh, Virginia Faulkner, who the heck is this? And built up kind of a repository of titles and authors who were interesting, who had just fallen out of print. And in 2006, I had been doing this other website called Space Ape Chopop music and got tired about writing about music and I decided to start focusing on neglected books. I figured I could probably keep that site running for about three years. And I now realize I will die and there will be authors and books that I never covered. And the articles on that site are extremely long. You don't write blurbs about books. You write theses about these books. I call that a feature. Other people call it a bug. Yeah, I'm a wordy bastard. So I just like to be thorough. But your biography of Virginia Faulkner is only 280 pages.

18:49Well, that's my fault because when I negotiated the length, I was very unsure of myself and didn't really know what material was available. So I put in a word range of like 75 to 90 and I overshot that grossly and the press wanted me to kind of reign it in. And you know, there's some benefit to keep it short and sweet. Let's talk about how you use Scrivener. I'm assuming you use Scrivener to write the book to use it to write your articles as well. I don't use it for the articles partly because I have done enough of them. I sort of automatically know how to organize them. But Scrivener, I actually bought Scrivener several years before I was doing any, you know, work as a biographer. I had aspirations to be. I was sent through college, I got a four year RTC scholarship, but it was for a technical degree. So I did that, but I went to college in the days when State University tuition was dirt

19:53cheap as it should be. And so I took an English degree in parallel because I loved English and always kind of wanted to be a writer, but you know, I preferred things that actually earned me a pension and a decent salary. So I when I was looking ahead to retirement, I decided, you know, I wanted to get serious as a writer. I wanted to do book length projects. And I read off on Scrivener and realized that it was probably going to be an essential tool. If I wanted to go down the path of moving away from, you know, 3,000, 5,000 word pieces like I write on the on the website, you're the second biographer I've interviewed. The first one was Charles Shields and he writes biographies. Well, he's retired. He's written biographies about lesser known American authors. And I think he said that he spent a year doing research for each book and then a year

20:54writing each book. Did you approach this in a similar way? Not at all. I wish I was that organized. I mean, partly it was due to the pandemic. Partly it was due to my not having written a book before. So I didn't even know I took a master's program in biography. Everything you do there are relative. I mean, the longest thing you write is that is what in the UK, they call a dissertation. We call it thesis in the US. And I can't remember how long that was. I want to say, let's say, 15,000 words. That's dramatically shorter than, you know, a book is going to be. I was also in the situation where what I did for my thesis was based entirely on virtual research. I at the time, actually, that I signed the contract with the University of Nebraska Press, I hadn't actually been to any archives because they were all locked up. So my research took place over, I would say, about three years.

21:59I mean, I was working on other projects, so I wasn't continuously working on the book. But I did a series of research trips to the archives in Nebraska. Then I went to the East Coast, the Library of Congress, Columbia, Yale, and a few other places. And then I realized I needed to do, go back to Lincoln. So I did three rounds of archival research. And honestly, that's the first and foremost way in which Scrivener, Scrivener proved invaluable to me because I didn't started the beginning and right my way through the book. I assembled blocks of information. I worked on a chapter when I had material. And then in other places, as I'm doing research, I noted down quotes that I knew I was going to use. And I could put that in, you know, the great thing about Scrivener is you can do that sort of piecemeal approach to assembling a book like Lego blocks, so to speak, before you have

23:04a complete manuscript. Now, once I exported the complete manuscript, you know, everything from there on was in the word, but it, I mean, that book lived as blocks of prose in Scrivener for three and a half years. What's interesting is in 280 pages, you have 26 chapters. So assuming notes and index, that's less than 10 pages a chapter. So this really was fragmented, wasn't it? Absolutely. It was fragmented. So for example, there's a chapter called Bernice, which is about Virginia's partner for much of her time in Lincoln, a scholar named Bernice Slote. I had to go down a completely different path. Bernice Slote still has two nieces who were still alive. They were wonderful and remembering things and providing a material. And there are a few scholars around who knew her as colleagues.

24:09So yeah, there were times when I, you know, I wasn't at an archive, but I could call people who knew Bernice and have phone interviews and collect that information. So and partly I had a deliberate choice. I could have written a door stopper biography. I think there was enough material for that, but I felt, you know, once I realized it wasn't a literary biography, it was clear that this first and foremost was simply the story of a life. And that I wanted it to have momentum and, and I, and so there, there are no long chapters, there are no long blocks of prose. It was kind of a deliberate choice to make it a more of a readable book. And I hope people will, will think this so. I like that word readable when people say that about a book because it means so many things. It means I can read it without suffering through academic prose or it's a page turner or all of that.

25:10And it's an overused term in marketing. But when we write, we know what that means. It means that there's a fluidity to the writing you want readers to not have what I call speed bumps in writing when someone sticks in a really big paragraph of really long sentences with really big words and you have to stop and think about it too much. Yeah. I mean, it's not that I don't admire writing like that, you know, I've read Thomas Bernhardt and I admire that sort of, here's a novel of 250 pages, which is one solid block of prose. I just can't write like that and I also don't think it's the right form for this particular book. I want to talk about one of your projects, which is really dear to my heart. And this is another book that I discovered. I want to say 10 or 15 years ago. And it's Anthony Poles, a dance to the music of time. And you have a website about it where you, I wish I had known about this early this year when you're doing this group reading of the 12 volumes. I don't, do you consider this an neglected book because it's not long ago that a biography

26:15of Anthony Poles was published in the UK. And I think there's a rediscovery of his work. I first read it before I was in the UK, I've been in the UK since 2013. So I've read it about 15 years ago. And the second time I listened to Simon Vance's narration on audiobook during lockdown, which if you want to hear that book the way it should be heard, you have to listen to that. It's one of the most wonderful audiobooks I've ever listened to. But do you consider this neglected? I mean, one of the ways I discovered it is I'm a real fan of Marcel Proust and he's often compared with Proust incorrectly because they're not writing about the same thing, but they're just long sequences of novels. But is he really neglected these days? No, no, and I didn't, I would never argue that Paul, I mean, all his stuff is in print, at least in the UK. He's widely discussed. He has his own society, which is very active. No, so in 2022, I organized a year-long virtual reading group to read Dorothy Richardson's

27:24serial novel Pilgrimage, which I think is an amazing book. It's a classic of the 20th century, really. And it is a neglected book. And that was wonderful. And then I wanted to keep on doing these things as kind of monthly projects over the course of a year. We did one where we, I think 23, I talked to a series of publishers who focused on recovery and then in 24, we did what we called the Waferthin Book Club, which is we read very short, books under 150 pages each month. We picked a title and read that. And I wanted to do another group and was looking at different options. Pilgrimage, I'll talk about in a second. I wanted to do Pilgrimage, but Pilgrimage at that time in 24 was still out of print in the U.S. and there are a lot of people interested in reading it in the U.S.

28:28So I went for a poll simply because if it works well in a year, you've got 12 books. It's a continuous activity and there were definitely plenty of people to participate in reading. And it's been great. I mean, we have 20, as many as 40 plus people on every call. And they're really engaged and it's been a great group, a wonderful experience. But while that was going on, after finding that no publisher in the U.S. was interested in reissuing Dorothy Richardson's, I decided about this time last year that I would go ahead and publish Richardson's work in the U.S. So I got the rights and worked with a designer and we in July, we published a new U.S. edition of Pilgrimage. And so in 2026, you can go to the site readingpilgrimage.com and find out about the reading

29:35group that we'll be doing in 26 for Dorothy Richardson's. So you're not just a champion of neglected books, you're a publisher of neglected books. You got to be careful because that's a rabbit hole. And if you go down that rabbit hole, you don't want to republish a lot more books. It's an expensive rabbit hole though. So that's a big deterrent, cost money to print books, at least I did physical print runs of the Dorothy Richardson set, which is available now throughout the U.K., throughout the U.S. I think it's a really nice package. It's available from asterism books in Seattle, but it's under my press. But I also have the recovered book series that I do with Boylar House Press out of the University of East Anglia. Okay, I'd like to ask my guests if they have a book that they can recommend. Something that you've recently read or something that has influenced you. And you're not the right kind of guy to ask because you've got a whole website of all these books.

30:37But if you chose something that maybe has influenced the way you write, do you have anything you can recommend? Oh boy, that's a great question. I will say, let me pitch the writer that I believe is the greatest under recognized American writer is a man named Paul Metcalf. And his influence is mainly, he wrote a series of books between, oh, I guess his first was in the late 50s and then he wrote into the 90s before he died. There is a collection of his books like everything he wrote, virtually, is available from a small press in Minnesota called Cafe Press. And they did a beautiful edition of it. What I like about Paul Metcalf is he tells American stories, but he was never happy in conventional forms like the novel, the biography, the history.

31:40So his books are really more collages of, and there's a lot of reuse of material that he researched and it'll just extract things, whole hog and put them into his book. What I like about Paul Metcalf is he, I think, a writer who is struggling with form who reads Paul Metcalf will say, I feel like I feel like I am being given permission to draw outside the box. Brad Bigelow, your book is Virginia Folkner, a life in two acts. Brad, thank you for joining us. Thank you very much for inviting me. If you enjoyed the podcast, please follow it in Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. To learn more about Scribner, go to ScribnerApp.com. Join us next month for another conversation on right now with Scribner.