Author David Grann often writes about obsession. His stories feature people doing extraordinary, and often dangerous or morally questionable things, in pursuit of ambitious goals. He’s the author of the books “Lost City of Z,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and his newest, “The Wager.” Grann is also obsessive about the research and details he puts into his books. We talked to Grann in Jan. ‘24 in front of a group of students at Nelson High School in Happy Valley as part of a collaboration with Literary Arts.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you today in front of a student audience at Adrienne C. Nelson High School in Happy Valley. We’re going to spend the hour with the writer David Grann.
David Grann began his journalistic career as a political writer and editor, and he was good at it. He moved up the ranks winning awards and becoming a staff writer at the New Yorker. But he eventually transitioned away from political coverage and over the last 15 years or so, he has carved out a literary niche that has few equals. In his books, “The Lost City of Z,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “The White Darkness.” and his latest, “The Wager,” Grann has given us books with the propulsive energy of adventure stories and the moral weight of clear-eyed history. The locations vary from the Amazon Jungle to the Osage nation, from the endless expanse of Antarctica to the roiling waters of Cape Horn. But some themes emerge over and over; obsession and endurance, the bureaucracy of empire, the denigration of Indigenous knowledge and the way white supremacy destroys nonwhite lives and warps white ones.
David Grann, it is a pleasure having you on the show.
David Grann: Oh, it’s such a pleasure to be here. Thank you. And it’s great to be here with all the students as well.
Miller: Here we are in a high school. I’m wondering, what do you think your high school self would have made of that intro I just read?
Grann: Oh, [I] would have been shocked. I barely made it out of high school, true story. But was fortunate enough to have a few high school teachers that believed in me, and kind of propelled me on my way. But no, I would never have thought I’d be sitting here before you all and talking about my writing. Certainly not.
Miller: What do you mean that you barely made it out of high school?
Grann: Well, I was like a lot of people, trying to kind of figure out my place in the world, and wanted to be a writer, even when I was pretty young, but had a lot of insecurities about that; trying to find my voice and my place and I was somebody who was always kind of questioning, and high school was good for that. But I didn’t have a sense of confidence that I could actually do the things that I would hopefully go on to do.
Miller: But a handful of teachers made a big difference?
Grann: They did, they really did. They always kind of championed, believed in me. They helped me get into a college because they believed in me. I always had a great sense of curiosity and wonder about the world and a few of them saw that, even if my grades didn’t always live up to my curiosity.
Miller: Your books can take five years or longer to create, to research, to write, to revise. It’s a huge investment. For your various books, is there a moment when you say, there is a book here? I know enough now to actually fully plunge in. I mean, is that a moment?
Grann: Yeah, it’s funny, you go through a kind of very rigorous, almost rational process when you try to come across a story, something that seizes you, something that grabs you and then you look into it and you have to answer certain questions about it. One [is] just a practical question: Are there enough materials to even tell the story because I’m writing nonfiction? So are there diaries, are there journals, are there declassified documents? And then you’re also trying to figure out, is this story about something larger, does it raise these themes about systems or class or racism or injustices or something just even revealing about human nature?
So you kind of go through all these processes, and at a certain point, you make the decision. But at that point, you still probably only know a fraction of what the story will be. And so there is always some element of risk, but you have enough confidence at that point to go forward. But for example, for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which took five years, I spent the first year just collecting documents to see if the records existed before I decided to do that story.
Miller: I imagine you’re doing other things at that same time.
Grann: Yes, I did. I was writing magazine stories while doing that and in fact, I kind of put it out of my mind. I did a lot of what’s called freedom of information requests, using the Freedom of Information Act to get documents from the FBI, from prisons, from various government agencies or from sheriff’s offices, whatever it might be. And every month or so, I would usually get some envelope in the mail and sometimes, I kid you not, you would get the letter saying, “Oh, we’re so sorry. All our records were lost in a flood.” And I always wonder, like how many floods could there have been in sheriff’s offices across the country? There are obviously a lot of them, or people just don’t really want to look for the records. Then periodically, sometimes you would get nothing and then sometimes a box would come, and I would just put them in the corner of my office and I wouldn’t even think about them while I was doing my other work.
After a year, I began to look through the materials and records, to see what was there and what was there was really only about one-one hundredth of what I would eventually obtain and need to tell the story. But there was enough material there for me to give me the confidence to proceed and also enough clues for me to pursue, for the hunt for other materials.
Miller: Let’s take a question from the audience. What’s your name? What’s your question?
Evey Rothwell [audience member]: I’m Evey Rothwell. My question is, how did you stay engaged in your stories during the many years of research and writing?
Grann: Going back to that question about making a decision, one of the most important decisions I always make in pursuing a story is…you go through a rational process about a story. Is it interesting? What does it reveal about society? But ultimately, there is something also irrational, which is that you are obsessed with it. You feel some compulsion, there is a mystery or there are questions you want to answer, your curiosity consumes you. And that tends to happen with almost all the projects I work on, whether it be about “Killers of the Flower Moon,” about one of the worst racial injustices in American history, whether it be about “The Wager,” this kind of maritime disaster on this island that devolved into this “Lord of the Flies.” You always have a question you want to answer and usually one question leads to another question. I never feel like I know enough. And when you’re on the hunt with a great story of pursuing something like that, that compels you. In fact…
Miller: But it sounds like, I mean, this is something about you too, right? I mean, if you didn’t have the ability to get that deep into it, to care that much…it sounds like your answer to her question is that it’s not hard to not stay engaged because you’re so engaged in the question that you need to find the answer.
Grann: 100%. I mean, in fact, in a weird way based on my character, the question is, would I ever finish? Because I have the type of character that I can always find another question I want to answer. At some point, your wife and your children…I would joke with my book, like, “This is the high school book” because my kid was in high school when it began, and when it finished, they’re leaving high school. So for me, there are certain practical elements that make me finish. But I am probably somebody who could be in a Kafka story just working on the same story for 50 years of my life trying to answer all the questions.
The key though, when you get to that point, when you asked me earlier about when can you write, [it’s] when you feel like you have answered the most important questions. There will always be other questions out there, little questions, but you’ve answered the most fundamental questions, or you have come to realize that there is no way to answer some of these other questions because the records don’t exist, because let’s say there was a conspiracy and there was a cover up. Maybe the witnesses are all deceased. So there are sometimes the questions you can’t answer, but you get to that point where you feel like you have solved the major questions. There are just a few other questions. At that point, you feel like you can write.
Miller: What about the opposite? What are the various ways that a potential book can cease to be a book, can fall through?
Grann: Yeah, easily. For example, I’m working on a new project about espionage, which I am not really ready to fully talk about at this point. But there’s a question of, can I get classified documents declassified? And so you have certain, almost hurdles. For example, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” as I talked about that a little bit earlier, I knew instantly that I wanted to tell that story as a book. And the background to that was I went to the Osage Nation Museum in Northeast Oklahoma. And I had seen this great photograph on the wall that was taken in 1924. And it showed members of the Osage Nation, white settlers, and part of the photograph was missing. And when I asked the museum director, Kath Red Corn, what had happened to it, she pointed to it and she said, “the devil had been standing right there.” And then she went down to the basement, she brought up an image of the missing panel and it showed one of the killers of the Osage during the early parts of the 20th century, for their oil money. And I just kept thinking, OK, the Osage had removed that photograph not to forget what had happened, but because they can’t forget. And yet so many people, including myself, had never learned this history, we had never been taught it.
It is one of the rarest moments where something happened, that there was an origin story to a story. It was a moment as opposed to a process. And I thought, oh, I need to tell the story, but could I tell the story? Could I tell the story because these crimes that happened a long time ago, would the records exist? So I spent that year just trying to gather the records. Had there been no records, as much as I would have wanted to tell that story, I would not have been able to.
And sometimes, just even early on, you look into a story and you think it’s really about something larger and you find out it really isn’t. Maybe it’s just a gothic crime story that has no larger meaning, that doesn’t tell us larger questions about human beings or about society. So, in fact, I would say there are more ways for stories to not happen than for them to happen, because if you are going to make a two-to-five-year commitment, it’s really hard to find that story that can sustain you and hopefully be meaningful enough to justify that time and resonate with readers.
Miller: So you talked a couple times there about the themes that the book somehow needs to get at. So it’s not just a one off, not an idiosyncratic thing about something somebody did, but it’s bigger than that. And I mentioned in my intro, what strikes me as parts of a throughline, thematic throughlines about empires, about white supremacy, about versions of obsession or obedience to a state that’s so great that it seems like obsession. Looking back, do you think that this was a conscious throughline or is this just the way your brain has worked, that this is what the books have ended up being about?
Grann: Yeah, I don’t think it was always conscious. Usually when you find a story, often it isn’t the theme or it’s deeper import that hits you, it’s some of the particulars of the story. Who was that devil? Who was that devil in the picture? And why was he cut out? And then the story leads you to these things. I think sometimes those questions lurk in many historical stories. And so you end up there, but it wasn’t always conscious. I will say though that one story will shape you and will influence you to some degree. So for example, after I finished “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I was very interested in, why do some stories get told and why do other stories get erased from our collective consciousness? Why do they not become part of our history? Who gets to tell their story?
And so when I was doing research, afterwards looking for a new project, I was doing research on mutinies. Nothing to do with that theme, but I was interested in mutinies. And then I stumbled upon an old account from a 16-year-old midshipman who had been on this ship, The Wager, back in the 1700s and he was describing how they had set off in search of this galleon that was filled with treasure, known as a prize of all the oceans. And then they had become shipwrecked on this desolate island, and they had slowly descended into these fractious warring factions. And then some of them had made it back to England. And I was so struck by this that they were suddenly summoned to face a court martial for their alleged crimes on the island. And so they all had to tell their story, and if they didn’t tell a convincing story, they could be hanged. So they are all battling to shape their story.
But then as I researched more into the story, I learned that the empire didn’t really like any of their stories because they made the empire look bad. And so the empire, the authorities and the powers that be, suddenly want to tell a very different story and they begin to manufacture their own alternative history. And so when I realized that that’s what was at the heart of this story when you dug deep into it, I thought, wow, that’s a story I want to tell. Yes, it’s a maritime adventure. Yes, it’s a disaster. I mean, it’s compelling in terms of just the specifics of what happened. But at its core, all these scenes…and I was influenced by “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and I thought in this story, I found the perfect illustration of these forces at work. And I thought I had found this kind of parable for our own turbulent times.
Miller: Let’s take another question from the audience. What’s your name?
Paige Hunt [audience member]: Hi. My name is Paige Hunt. And my question is, what makes a great story?
Grann: Wow. What makes a great story? This is a personal answer because I think for everybody, they might answer that differently. I mean, I’d be really interested in what your answer is, reading books in school or when you hear stories from your grandmother. I mean, there are so many great stories. I’ll tell you the first stories I ever heard that kind of stirred my imagination [was] when I was a little kid, I was about maybe eight. And my grandfather, I didn’t really know him because he had had a stroke and he would sit at our house and he couldn’t communicate. And he was just, he was just kind of, he was very hunched over. He was very ailing and didn’t speak. And I thought I’ll never know this man. And my grandmother, while I was sitting watching him on our porch, began to tell me stories about him and she would tell me about how he had fled from Russia on foot during the revolution, how he had become a daredevil motorcycle racer. And suddenly she began to transform this figure before my eyes and he began to come alive to me and I could suddenly see him and I could suddenly understand somebody I thought I could not understand. To me, that gets at the core of all good storytelling.
But I think the great stories like, for example, “Moby Dick,” on one level is just a crazy obsessive search for a whale. But then when you get deeper, it’s about the sociology on the ship. It’s about class, it’s about obsession. It has biblical themes of good and evil. I mean, I think the greatest stories are the ones that you can reread over and over again and each time you’re taking something different or seeing something different in the story. And really what’s amazing to me about the best stories is that there is an eternal quality to them, that they may take place in a certain time, they may be very specific to the geography, to the accents, to the costumes. But what they tell us about human beings, about human nature, about society, about dreams, ambitions, beliefs, sin, crime - they still resonate and to me that is always the mark of a great story.
Miller: Let’s take another question. Give us your name, please and your question.
Nick Weigel [audience member]: Yeah, my name is Nick Weigel. And I was wondering, what sort of inspiration do you look for when you’re struggling to write, or do you find it easy to move on to each project?
Grann: I find the best inspiration is from reading, it really is. I will often, even before I write, just have a book in my office, one of my favorite books - maybe it’s a novel, maybe it’s one by Cormac McCarthy or Willa Cather or a short story - and I will just sometimes just read the first two paragraphs for inspiration, and just to be stirred. To be a writer, you need to be a good reader and you kind of need to read everything and you need to read things you love and things you don’t love to figure out why you don’t love them and within other stories, within other writings, I think are your masters. They are your teachers, they are your inspiration. So, that’s where I usually find my inspiration when I’m stuck. I’ll just say, you know what, I’m just gonna go read a little.
And I can even tell you, a real inspiration can come at very unexpected times with reading. I just want to tell you a story because for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” that book, I was completely stuck on how to structure that book, because the book sprawled so much time. There wasn’t one central figure who covered that whole period of history. There were so many different perspectives. I had no idea how to tell the story to the point where I was almost paralyzed, again facing that precipice; can I actually make this into a book? And one night I was reading “Absalom, Absalom” by Faulkner. I won’t explain why I was reading it, but there was a story about it in the New York Times saying, “this was a great novel.” And I said, well, I never read that. I’ll try it. For any of you who read it, it’s a very hard novel to read. I don’t think I still fully understand it. It’s kind of written in a very unusual language, but I was determined to try to read. I was reading it at night and I was reading and I suddenly realized, wait, this book is told from three different points of view about the kind of elliptical quality of storytelling in history and how do we capture it?
It was like 11:00 at night, I literally sat up and my wife was there, and I said, that’s it. That’s it. I’ll do it from three points of view. I’ll tell that book from three points of view. That way I can do it and I can show how we only fully understand the story and the history through a multiplicity of perspectives and it’s kind of elliptical. So that is not only where it’s an inspiration, but literally, it solved the problem and I wasn’t even looking for it to solve a problem.
Miller: We have another question. What’s your name?
Adam Burnside [audience member]: Adam Burnside. I was wondering, with “Killers of the Flower Moon,” it sounded like it was really impactful on the stories with that. And I was wondering, when they were making it into a movie and when you were entrusting your art with other parties, were you at all fearful that that part of the book that was so impactful for you would be lost?
Grann: Yes, you are always nervous when you have spent a lot of time working on a story or work of history, especially when it has something of such moral import. And you are nervous about how the story will be told and will it be treated with the kind of seriousness that it deserves and the judiciousness? And I am not a filmmaker, and I know nothing about making films. And so for me, the most important thing is always to get it into the hands of people who do know what they’re doing. And I was very blessed and fortunate that the people who were interested really knew what they were doing. I mean, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, and Lily Gladstone and Robert DeNiro wanna develop your project. These are people who know how to make a movie, they know how to inhabit roles, they know how to give it with care.
And the most important thing for me, early on, was that they were going to work closely with members of the Osage Nation in developing the story. I spent five years working on that book, often living in the community. Many Osage elders had shared with me their stories and now the movie people needed to develop those relationships and very early on, they wanted to do that, they did that. Chief Standing Bear of the Osage Nation appointed ambassadors to work with the people in developing the production and that connection took place. And I think that’s why it is a powerful film and why it has an authenticity.
I think ultimately, the thing that was most important for me, beyond the kind of wonder that I can’t believe these people are making a movie of this, was that I really did care about this history. And the reason I told it was because I was ignorant of it. And I thought it was important that a lot of people outside the Osage Nation - the Osage obviously knew this history, but so many people even in Oklahoma didn’t. And I know that a movie can reach people and hopefully fill in more of our consciousness and hopefully lead people to read other books, read other books about the Osage Nation. Maybe they’ll visit the museum or maybe they’ll read about other Native American history and culture. And to me that’s how knowledge really happens. And that’s been the best part for me about the movie.
Miller: A lot of your work has been based on things that people have written in diaries or in logbooks 10 years ago, recently, and 50 years ago, 300 years ago. What is the experience like for you to read words people wrote? Sometimes they were clearly intending someone to read them, they didn’t want to be hung; other times, it’s not clear that these were necessarily for other people. What’s your experience reading their words?
Grann: It’s kind of a strange feeling. I remember the first time I discovered the power of archives was when I was fairly young as a journalist, and I was doing a story about a congressman from Ohio. And I had heard that he was being investigated by federal authorities for alleged corruption. And I made a trip out to Ohio where he was from. And I had learned that when he had run for sheriff, he had been investigated for taking bribes from the mob. I went to an archive and I found a transcript. At that time, it was about 25 years old, and it was a recording that a mobster who had since disappeared and been rubbed out had taken his…it was like, Orly the Crab and I think Lenny the Crab had made this recording with this congressman James Traficant.
And I started reading it and I was just stunned because here, the honorable gentleman from Ohio, as the congressman was now known, was talking about taking bribes from the mob, talking about people coming up swimming in the Mahoning River, cursing every other word. He clearly never thought anyone was gonna listen to that or he didn’t know he was being recorded at the time. And I thought, wow, it’s revealing the truth. It’s also revealing somebody’s inner self that is hidden from the public. And it gave me a glimpse and I have found that over the years, archives can open up the world to you.
Now, often you will spend months and months of tedium looking through crumbling records from the 18th century. Sometimes you don’t even fully know what an archive, what a document may be telling you. You almost have to learn to read it, to decode it. When I was doing research, for example, on “The Wager,” the ship, I was reading these muster books, which are essentially just an enrollment document. When you entered a ship, if you were a seaman, your name was written in a muster book; the time you arrived, whether you were a seaman or an officer, but there were a few little initials written next to your name. I didn’t even know what those initials meant, and it took me a long time. I kept seeing the letters DD from this voyage, DD next to each name. I was like DD, what does DD stand for? And eventually I learned from a historian, he told me no, DD means “discharge dead.” And I realized that the DDs were basically these people’s epitaph. These were the people who had perished on this voyage.
Suddenly, I realized that this document, that at first I didn’t think told you that much, was telling me an enormous story of the toll that this voyage had taken, that out of some 2,000 people that had gone, more than 1,400 of them had perished from scurvy and shipwreck and typhoons. And so you suddenly have a sense of it. When a document reveals itself to you, when it speaks to you, it has an enormous amount of power and sometimes you just stumble upon documents that have just been tossed into boxes that you’re not even supposed to be looking at. I remember, for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” in one box, I had found the secret grand jury testimony from some of the trials that were not meant to be made public. And somebody cleaning out the office had clearly just dumped it there. And I first had a moment when I saw it like, am I supposed to be looking at this? This isn’t supposed to be made public, but it was in a public archive.
Perhaps the best version of this that ever happened to me was when I was working on “The Lost City of Z,” that was about an explorer who disappeared in the Amazon looking for a fabled city. He called it The City of Z or Zed, as he pronounced it because he was British. And I tracked down his granddaughter, who was living in Wales. And she said, would you really want to know what happened to my grandfather? And I said, well, sure, if at all possible, because he had disappeared and people had went looking for them and they had disappeared and died. And she led me into this back room and in that back room, there was like a trunk. It was a wooden trunk. I’ll never forget. She opened it up and inside were all these little booklets and they were covered in mud, and some were held together by a little lock, or the pages were coming apart. And I said, well, what are those? She said, well, those are my grandfather’s secret diaries and logbooks and she let me go through them. And you just have a sense of thrill that you were going to get to know…it’s like a passageway into a distant time, a distant place and another person’s consciousness.
Miller: It reminds me in one of your books, you note a line from the writer Janet Malcolm who says, that “a biographer is like a professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has a good reason to think contain the jewelry and money and triumphantly bearing his loot away.”
Grann: That’s why I said I never want anyone to write my biography. [Laughter]
Miller: What’s the loot? I mean, let’s imagine that every now and then, you believe that, you feel that the metaphor is good enough and you are looking for the loot. What is it?
Grann: That’s a really good question because there are kind of moral complications in that quote from Janet Malcolm because you are prying into other people’s lives, some things that they intended to be made public and they may have even shaped to manipulate you to make public, and some things that they didn’t want to make public. Certainly, for example, the recording with Orly the Crab was not meant to be made public.
I think what you are looking for as a researcher is some deeper sense of the truth, something that lets you peer beneath the veneer to better understand something about who we are. I mean, I think that’s why we tell stories, and I don’t want it to sound pretentious or anything. But I think the compulsion and the reason I tell stories and I think the reason we all tell each other stories, is to better understand who we are, both ourselves and other people, and to learn from them. And so I don’t always associate a negative connotation with the loot because I do think there is a purpose. If you are just rifling through documents for salacious reasons to publicize gossip or to take illicit photographs, that to me is deeply immoral. But if there is a purpose and that you treat that material with judiciousness, that your purpose is not just to mock or to hold people up to an x-ray, but to understand. And I think if you approach it that way, that material can lead to works of history, what I might call literature of fact, that helps us understand who we were and also who we are.
Miller: Let’s take another question from the audience. What’s your name? And go ahead.
Bernhard [audience member]: Hi, I’m Bernhard. Firstly, thank you so much for being here. As for my question, how do you think your opinion of the individuals in these events of “Killers of the Flower Moon” affected your retelling of them?
Grann: It’s a very good question because you get to know people, even when you were writing about them long deceased, you’re never gonna meet them, you know they’re flattened figures to some degree, because you’re meeting them through testimony or letters or photographs. It is in a movie where they’re three dimensional. And in a case like “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which is about this racial injustice in which many white settlers systematically murdered members of the Osage Nation for their oil money - and because of greed and because of prejudice because they didn’t see these people as human beings with individual souls, with dignity. And those people are committing acts of evil, right? I don’t think there’s any other way to describe marrying into a family, which is what these people did, these were inheritance schemes. So you had white settlers marrying into families, pretending to love you, while systematically plotting to kill you. I mean, to me that is evil. If evil exists, that is evil.
And so you are repelled, right? You are repelled by these acts but when you are telling their stories, you need to try to document them. You are…dispassionate isn’t the right word in a way because you wanna feel that emotion. But your job is to document and to show. And I really have a great trust in readers. If I show people what other people did, if they were committing acts of evil, and explain their actions or show and illuminate their actions, readers will be smart enough to judge them. So I am trying, to some degree, not just to speechify or give my opinions of these people because then you won’t feel it and you won’t understand it. It’s really important as an author, to show the reader what is happening, to depict it, to capture the emotion of what is happening, so that the reader can feel it. So if your judgments are so overt all the time, “Look, this is evil” at every sentence, the reader won’t actually feel or come to the reckoning with that evil in the profound sense that it is. So you do have to distance yourself.
On the other hand, you are also showing some people who showed remarkable courage. Mollie Burkhart, in the story, whose family was being systematically targeted, is crusading for justice even when there’s a bullseye on her back. And again, you’re trying to show that so the reader can witness it and see it. But I do tend to let the reader, as much as possible - because I have faith in readers, I think readers are really smart and human beings are complex - to form their judgments, rather than me telling them exactly how they should judge, if that makes sense.
Miller: I was struck by something you said there, that these are in some ways flattened people because you only have texts and historical documents, diaries, logbooks, whatever depositions, to flesh them out. I mean, when we read them in your book, they don’t seem flat to me because you do such a good job of filling them out. But I take your point. But as you noted, you don’t get a chance to interview them. That’s also a product of the stories you’ve chosen to tell. Would you want to have interviewed Mollie Burkhart or William Hale or Captain Sheep for the new book, or Colonel Fawcett for “The Lost City of Z,” or are you happy sticking with texts?
Grann: So that’s a great question, I think I would have liked to have interviewed them and met them. I do. For me, I guess what motivates me in a story is if I find this story… Originally, when I began telling stories, I was a journalist and so part of your job is to break news and what news means, it’s something new that is happening, it’s just happening. So you’re dealing with people who are living. And suddenly, as I dug more into storytelling and stories, I realized that there are incredibly important resonant stories that aren’t, quote unquote, “new,” that may actually tell us more about ourselves and our society even if they were happening centuries ago. So suddenly, I became detached from the kind of the prison chains of time that kind of governed much of my career. And I found myself in different time periods. So each one of the projects is kind of governed by that. The story kind of dictates what I can learn from it.
But I think I would be fascinated to meet almost all the figures because there are always certain questions I would love to ask them. When I was working on “The Lost City of Z,” I kept thinking Fawcett, this explorer who had taken his son on his last expedition with him, and they disappeared and no doubt perished, I just kept thinking, what are you thinking? Like, why are you taking your son with him? He’s not experienced. I mean, he’s not gonna survive. Are you nuts? And you just want to sit there and ask them that.
Miller: But I have the fear that you would have asked him that and the answer wouldn’t have been very satisfying.
Grann: Probably true. It is actually very interesting that sometimes - and actually this governs my reporting even with living subjects - I have to kind of ask them questions about stuff. But more often than not, I prefer to just spend time with people and see how they are, because sometimes when you ask them a direct question, like I am right now, I’m very conscious of my answers. You don’t want to mess up and you’re self-conscious and you’re trying to formulate. And sometimes you get to see people in these kind of unexpected, unvarnished moments when they least expect it. I mean, Joan Didion talked about her style of reporting. She was a great writer and she talked about kind of disappearing. And often, when I’m even dealing with living subjects, my approach is usually just to disappear so that people forget, hopefully, that I’m around. I’m usually just kind of a, “Well, he’s a part of the family. I don’t know, he’s just been hanging around for so long, we forget about him.” So, yes, it is true.
There are pluses and minuses, I would say to both approaches. I’ll tell you the hard part with living subjects. People talk about political biases in journalism, and I don’t find that that challenging. The harder challenge that I think people don’t acknowledge that much is the personal bias, which is when you spend a lot of time with people and you get to know them, you might get to like them, or if nothing else, you still feel some personal connection to them. And yet you may have discovered along the course of reporting, that they’re sociopathic or committed all these awful things and you are going to expose them.
Miller: And they have a nice dog.
Grann: Yeah, they have a nice dog.
Miller: And they gave you a cookie.
Grann: Yeah, they gave you a good meal. Maybe they have a kid. That is hard. And so like, when I’m writing about William K. Hale in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” I don’t really think about, oh, his poor daughter is going to be reading about this. So there is a certain kind of freedom to just be ruthlessly honest when the people are no longer alive.
Miller: Let’s take some more questions from the audience. Go ahead.
Chye Noble [audience member]: Hi, I’m Chye Noble. I was wondering, do you ever have to change or make up facts to make a story more compelling?
Grann: No. Never, for what I do know, because I am always bound by the facts to an obsessive level and I really believe that truth is stranger (often) than fiction, and that truth has its own power, its own startling qualities and surprises. The challenge of what I do as a nonfiction writer is different than fiction, which is I have to take the available facts and make them into a compelling story. And rather than imagining, you are excavating, you are searching for the truth that lies underneath the surface, but you are not imagining it or inventing it.
Miller: Most of your answers are both about the method you employ to do this, to stick to the truth and the fact that it can be more wonderful than making things up. But you didn’t yet answer, why, to you, is it so important to stick with what is true?
Grann: Well, because what I am after as a nonfiction writer is not emotional truth. I mean, there may be emotional truth as well, but it is two forms of truth. There is a factual truth and then there is the deeper meaning of that truth. And I think we live in an age - we always have, but it’s exacerbated today by disinformation and misinformation - of people choosing their own truths just because they prefer them. But they are completely detached from facticity. I think we have an obligation, a moral obligation when we are talking about history or real lives, again in the province of nonfiction, in the province of history, to get the facts right as best we can and stick to them. We can then argue about those facts. We can form different judgments about what people did and that’s healthy. But if a society can’t agree on the facts and we don’t believe in them, then we are in, I think, very morally dangerous terrain.
And so I just think in my own small way, I feel a moral compulsion to try to get to the facts. And if I could just tell a quick story about that. When I was working on the story of “The Wager,” when those seamen who came back to England after surviving this disaster on the island, where they had committed various alleged crimes and they’re all trying, after waging this extraordinary battle against the elements, they’re now waging an extraordinary battle over the truth. And I was going to the archives. Again, you gotta imagine these books are from the 18th century, you get them in a box. You go to England, they come out, the covers are crumbling dust like you just didn’t heal it. You lay the books on pillows so they don’t break apart. You turn them over, you see the felt tip that they were using…God, I can’t think of the word now. But, with the feathers and…
Miller: The quill.
Grann: The quill, thank you. The quill and ink, to write these and you could see it faded by waters and storm and you’re reading about how they’re having a war over the truth and they’re arguing over, I swear to God, fake diaries. Maybe this diary is made up, this is a fake journal. And then I would come home and I would read the newspaper, turn on the news and what would I hear, but alternative facts, fake news, fake this. And then I would go back to these archives and they would be having a war over who would get to tell this history, who had the right to tell it and who would tell it truthfully. And then I would come back home and I’d be reading about book banning and wars over the truth. And so I really did see this as a parable.
One of the reasons I wanted to tell it was getting to this question about my concern for the truth. These are battles that have always existed, but I do think there is a moral imperative for us to sort through the fog of disinformation and misinformation and to get as close to the truth as we possibly can, when that is our objective.
Miller: Let’s take another question.
Alana Heinbach [audience member]: Alana Heinbach. What would be a piece of advice to give to aspiring writers? What would you give?
Grann: Well, I’ll give you a couple of answers, but I’m gonna give you the most important answer [that] is the most boring. I’ll get to that last. I think for inspiration, if you are curious about the world, writing is about trying to better understand the world, right? You’re trying to organize thoughts with words, you’re trying to give meaning to events: discordant events, memories, things people said, things people did, whether you’re writing poetry or fiction or nonfiction, you’re in some way trying to make sense of the world. And so if you are curious and you read, you will find inspiration, but the most important advice for writing is really boring. It’s because it’s the most difficult and you know what it is: you just have to sit there and write. And I always joke that the difference between a writer and a non-writer is the writer will be willing to sit for eight hours rewriting the same sentence until they get it right, until they have managed to get that sentence to express precisely and most compellingly what you are trying to say.
I think sometimes people want a secret. It’s a magic secret about writing and the truth is, it’s like anything else, you just gotta do it, you gotta be willing to do it and you gotta be willing to struggle with it.
Miller: One of the things that I think every time I read your books is, man, there are so many terrible ways people can die. I mean, diseases, starvation, people are hungry in most of your books. Like hunger, it’s basically on death’s door versions of hunger. What’s it been like for you to be immersed in these varieties of death for so long?
Grann: Well, as you know, I always say if you read “The Wager,” no matter how bad you are feeling about your day, you will feel better about it, that you were not dragged, unwillingly pressed into action to go onto a ship. I mean, these people were just rounded up. They were short of men to go on the voyage, so they would just basically eyeball you and then drag you and throw you onto the ship. And they were still short of people, so they went to a retirement home. Imagine this. All I think about now [is] I’m getting old. You’re young, you’re in the beginning of your lives. I’m towards the back end now, so I think about my retirement. They went to a retirement home and got these old seamen who are missing limbs, thinking they were going to retire, and [they] drag them onto the ship.
Miller: Where then the horrors really started.
Grann: Yeah. And then the horrors started, and I mean, it was really unfathomable, to be honest, just in the way you understand. You learn a lot about it, just even like how little we understood about medicine. For example, even scurvy…for me, part of writing and research is understanding what something is. So we’ve all heard of scurvy or I’d heard of it. I thought, oh, doesn’t it kind of discolor your teeth or your gums or something? And little did I know that your body just kind of rots away and dissolves and that it even affects your senses until you kind of go raving mad. And of course, all they needed was some lime, all they needed was some Vitamin C.
Miller: A piece of celery.
Grann: Yeah, a piece of celery could have saved their lives, but you spend a lot of time with this. You get tough, you kind of get tough. I’ll say the hardest thing is sometimes, when I was working on something like “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and for something like that for example, I collected photographs of the people who were being killed. And so it was less not just reading about what had happened to them, but I had collected their photographs. And as I learned about more and more people who had been murdered, my office became just the walls of photographs and each day I went into my office, I was reminded of them. And so I thought that was somewhat difficult, but it was also important to me because it was always reminding me about what that book was about.
Miller: David Grann, we have to leave it there. Thank you very much.
Grann: Thank you.
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