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Who Owns History? · Political Junkie Podcast

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SPEAKER_03: And so I don't know if the silhouette artist realized he was in the home of lesbians
0:03
SPEAKER_03: because these lesbians,
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SPEAKER_03: Sylvia and Charity,
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SPEAKER_03: then put their portraits next to one another, looking at one another.
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SPEAKER_03: And then we don't know who did it.
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SPEAKER_03: We suspect Charity, because she was a more advanced seamstress, cut some of their hair.
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SPEAKER_03: And you can see it's two different colors of hair.
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SPEAKER_03: So it's the both of them and braided it around the silhouette.
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SPEAKER_03: In the shape of a heart.
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SPEAKER_03: And then they hung this in their house.
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SPEAKER_03: Just to say to their community, you know, by the way, we're two women and we're in love.
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We believe.
0:45
SPEAKER_03: I can hear the sound of violins.
0:51
SPEAKER_03: I can hear the piper play.
0:57
SPEAKER_03: Every time the song begins
1:02
SPEAKER_03: You just leave my heart away The
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SPEAKER_03: journey's longer
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SPEAKER_03: than I thought my love A lot of things get in the way But every time I think of you
1:24
SPEAKER_02: At the
1:50
SPEAKER_02: But on how those intimate relations are refracted and even shape the larger realm
1:56
SPEAKER_02: of culture and politics.
1:58
SPEAKER_02: Cleves had gone on Facebook to publish an open letter about what she believes are
2:02
SPEAKER_02: the troubling similarities between a path-breaking book she wrote,
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SPEAKER_02: Charity and Sylvia,
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SPEAKER_02: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America,
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SPEAKER_02: and a new graphic history by cartoonist Tilly Walden,
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SPEAKER_02: also called Charity and Sylvia, but without the subtitle.
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SPEAKER_02: Both books tell the story of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake,
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SPEAKER_02: a Vermont couple who lived openly and were acknowledged in their community as
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SPEAKER_02: a married couple.
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SPEAKER_02: Cleves, along with other scholars like Jen Mannion and Elizabeth Reese,
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SPEAKER_02: toppled the notion that categories like gay,
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SPEAKER_02: lesbian,
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SPEAKER_02: and trans are modern inventions,
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SPEAKER_02: or that Anglo-American society was uniformly repressive,
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SPEAKER_02: either of non-heteronormative identities or
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SPEAKER_02: of queer people fashioning new identities that allowed them to take
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SPEAKER_02: a respectable place in society.
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SPEAKER_02: Histories like these have long been a source of pride and comfort to LGBTQ plus people.
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SPEAKER_02: After all,
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SPEAKER_02: being grounded in a proud past was a companion task to the forms
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SPEAKER_02: of civil rights activism that liberated queers, women, and people of color.
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SPEAKER_02: It's no wonder that at a time when these hard-won rights are under threat,
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SPEAKER_02: that Walden would create an accessible version of the charity and Sylvia story.
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SPEAKER_02: Walden dug back into archives and artifacts that Cleves had studied a decade earlier
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SPEAKER_02: and wrote her own version.
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SPEAKER_02: But Cleves believes that the similarities between the two books and the use
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SPEAKER_02: of silhouettes in Walden's cover,
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SPEAKER_02: the title itself, the structure of the book, too closely resemble her own work.
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SPEAKER_02: The ensuing controversy,
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SPEAKER_02: largely fought out on social media,
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SPEAKER_02: demonstrated a revealing split between professional historians
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SPEAKER_02: and general audience readers.
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SPEAKER_02: Numerous historians chimed in to say that similar things had happened to them and
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SPEAKER_02: to their friends, expressing solidarity with Cleves.
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SPEAKER_02: Walden herself defended her own research,
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SPEAKER_02: pointing to differences in the substance and purpose of the two texts and to
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SPEAKER_02: a website where she listed her sources and bibliography.
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SPEAKER_02: Walden's press and her supporters saw the controversy as a David
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SPEAKER_02: and Goliath struggle in which an economically secure
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SPEAKER_02: and prestigious historian was trying to own the story at the cost of
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SPEAKER_02: an independent artist's reputation.
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SPEAKER_02: They have also argued that Cleves has misrepresented Walden's claims about
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SPEAKER_02: the originality of the story itself,
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SPEAKER_02: minimized the work Walden had to do to produce the book,
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SPEAKER_02: And neglected the fact that by virtue of it being a graphic account
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SPEAKER_02: with conversations and other elements that Walden acknowledges she invented,
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SPEAKER_02: the two are necessarily quite different books.
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SPEAKER_02: Finally,
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SPEAKER_02: some have inferred that historians who are concerned
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SPEAKER_02: about Walden's possible infringement on Cleves' intellectual property look down on
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SPEAKER_02: the art that graphic writers produce.
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SPEAKER_02: I cannot speak for the rest of the Guild, but I could not disagree more.
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SPEAKER_02: I myself learned some of my first history from non-scholarly texts
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SPEAKER_02: that included comic books from the 1930s and 40s.
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SPEAKER_02: Graphic histories are not only a great way to get young people interested in stories
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SPEAKER_02: about our past,
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SPEAKER_02: but I've used them in class,
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SPEAKER_02: in college classes,
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SPEAKER_02: to convey the larger narratives that the subject I am teaching relies on.
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SPEAKER_02: There are no easy answers here, and I don't intend to even attempt them.
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SPEAKER_02: As the high profile plagiarism cases of the past few years have demonstrated,
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SPEAKER_02: scholars aren't perfect and work written for
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SPEAKER_02: a general audience does not always reflect the respect for intellectual property
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SPEAKER_02: that scholars expect.
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SPEAKER_02: As one commenter pointed out,
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SPEAKER_02: much of this controversy might never have occurred had Walden simply chosen
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SPEAKER_02: a different title.
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SPEAKER_02: But one cannot copyright a title,
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SPEAKER_02: and it is not uncommon in publishing to make those choices so that
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SPEAKER_02: a new book will appear in an internet search alongside another well-established one.
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SPEAKER_02: So I wanted to see what Rachel had to say.
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SPEAKER_01: So Rachel, we haven't spent a whole lot of time together.
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SPEAKER_01: I'm a recent historian of the 20th and 21st century.
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SPEAKER_01: You're an early Americanist.
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SPEAKER_01: People who are not in history...
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SPEAKER_01: Probably don't know that our circles overlap a little bit,
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SPEAKER_01: particularly around gender and sexuality, but we kind of go to different meetings.
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SPEAKER_01: We don't run into each other that much.
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SPEAKER_01: But I was aware of you because of your wonderful book,
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SPEAKER_01: Charity and Sylvia,
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SPEAKER_01: which came out in 2014 and really sort of broke through the history of sexuality
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SPEAKER_01: in early America by saying,
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SPEAKER_01: Proposing or rather documenting the fact that these two women who lived in Vermont,
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SPEAKER_01: slight age difference,
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SPEAKER_01: Considered themselves to be married and they were considered by
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SPEAKER_01: the people around them to be married.
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SPEAKER_01: Their families actually weren't too happy with them for doing this,
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SPEAKER_01: but they were accepted in their community as a couple.
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SPEAKER_01: And then I was reading Facebook a couple of months ago and stumbled on a post
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SPEAKER_01: from you that this book had been replicated as a graphic novel.
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SPEAKER_01: And that raises a number of questions for both of us,
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SPEAKER_01: I think, that I'm hoping we can talk about today.
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SPEAKER_01: But let's begin with you telling the Political Junkies listeners,
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SPEAKER_01: what is Charity and Sylvia about?
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SPEAKER_00: Well, Thanks for having me.
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SPEAKER_00: So Charity and Sylvia is a microhistory or kind of dual biography of two women,
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SPEAKER_00: Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake,
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SPEAKER_00: who were both born in the revolutionary era,
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SPEAKER_00: Charity at the beginning,
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SPEAKER_00: Sylvia at the end,
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SPEAKER_00: and who met and set up a household together in a rural village
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SPEAKER_00: in Vermont called Weybridge and lived together as a married couple from 1807
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SPEAKER_00: until Charity's death in 1852.
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SPEAKER_00: And it's about how they made that Life together possible by their labor,
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SPEAKER_00: by their contributions to their community,
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SPEAKER_00: their church, their role within their family networks.
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SPEAKER_00: And it's about,
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SPEAKER_00: it's sort of a rethinking of the possibilities for queer history as a lot
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SPEAKER_00: of queer history has focused on the 20th century and the city as the sort of site
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SPEAKER_00: where that made queer lives possible and personal cultures possible.
8:33
SPEAKER_01: Well, if this was so unknown to other historians, how did you stumble upon them?
8:41
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's a very funny story.
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SPEAKER_00: So it was kismet, you know, somebody pulling strings like up somewhere.
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SPEAKER_00: And so the summer before I finished my dissertation,
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SPEAKER_00: which was actually about American reactions to the violence of
8:56
SPEAKER_00: the French Revolution,
8:57
SPEAKER_00: I was camping in Vermont and I went and had a day trip in Middlebury.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: And There's a wonderful local museum there called the Henry Sheldon.
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SPEAKER_00: And I went into the museum because I was a history nerd.
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SPEAKER_00: I was finishing my PhD and I saw there was a sign that said archives.
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SPEAKER_00: And I was like,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: places like this have like, you know, who knows what riches in their archives.
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SPEAKER_00: I was just like, I bet there's like great stories in the archives.
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SPEAKER_00: Anyway.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: I go back,
9:23
SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: complete my semester,
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SPEAKER_00: I'm writing the final chapter of my dissertation,
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SPEAKER_00: and I was tracing the children of what were called anti-Jacobins,
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SPEAKER_00: people who were opposed to the French Revolution,
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SPEAKER_00: and how the children of anti-Jacobins became abolitionists,
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SPEAKER_00: and I'm reading, so I was doing this sort of like, You know, genealogical work.
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SPEAKER_00: I'm reading a lot of 19th century biographies.
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SPEAKER_00: And I read this biography of William Cullen Bryant,
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SPEAKER_00: who was the son of an anti-Jacobin and then became
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SPEAKER_00: a major democratic newspaper editor and abolitionist in the anti-bellum era.
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SPEAKER_00: And it's a 19th century biography by his son-in-law.
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SPEAKER_00: So it included a lot of his original letters and writings, very typical of the era.
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SPEAKER_00: And one of the The letters that included written by Brian was
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SPEAKER_00: about this visit he had paid to his aunt and her partner in Weybridge,
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SPEAKER_00: which he had published in a book called Letters of a Traveler.
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SPEAKER_00: And I'm reading this description and it was modeled on The book of,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: the marriage ceremony from the Book of Common Prayer,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: that we're all familiar with,
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SPEAKER_00: for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, et cetera, et cetera.
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SPEAKER_00: And so it was like William Cullen Bryant really clearly describing his aunt
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SPEAKER_00: as being married to a woman.
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SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
10:35
SPEAKER_00: by that time,
10:35
SPEAKER_00: I'd been studying the early Republic for a while,
10:38
SPEAKER_00: and I thought, like,
10:39
SPEAKER_00: I had a good grasp on American history in the first half of the 19th century,
10:44
SPEAKER_00: and it just blew me away.
10:45
SPEAKER_00: Because at that moment, it was around 2004, 2005,
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SPEAKER_00: Gay marriage was a live issue, right?
10:52
SPEAKER_00: And it was very much in the news and very much under debate.
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SPEAKER_00: And the whole terms of the political debate were like, oh, this is brand new.
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SPEAKER_00: Nobody could ever imagine this before.
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SPEAKER_00: This is,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: either a wonderful modern innovation or it's like a terrible modern,
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SPEAKER_00: you know,
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SPEAKER_00: sign of the declension of Western civilization,
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SPEAKER_00: whichever side of the, you know, political spectrum you were on.
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SPEAKER_00: But like nobody was saying, hey,
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SPEAKER_00: Like actually people could be known as married couples,
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SPEAKER_00: like same sex couples could be known as married in like small town America in
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SPEAKER_00: the early 19th century.
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SPEAKER_00: So anyway,
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SPEAKER_00: I got very interested and I started thinking like,
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SPEAKER_00: oh, I wonder if there's any sources about these women.
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SPEAKER_00: Can I find out more?
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SPEAKER_00: And I start looking and I find out that.
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SPEAKER_00: There are sources, and they're in two places.
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SPEAKER_00: There's two big bodies of evidence.
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SPEAKER_00: I later found a lot more.
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SPEAKER_00: But one is at the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vermont.
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SPEAKER_00: And I was like, what sort of kismet is this?
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SPEAKER_00: And then the other was at the Regional History Center
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SPEAKER_00: at Northern Illinois University, where I had just accepted my first job.
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SPEAKER_00: Wow.
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SPEAKER_00: Where part of Brian's family had moved to the region.
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SPEAKER_00: And so there were reasons I was in the Regional History Center there.
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SPEAKER_00: So I was like, oh, my God.
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SPEAKER_00: You know, strings are being pulled.
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SPEAKER_00: Clearly, I have to do this project.
12:07
SPEAKER_00: It's faded.
12:08
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
12:09
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Charity and Sylvia came for you, I think.
12:13
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
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SPEAKER_01: I think our subjects find us.
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SPEAKER_01: They reach out from the afterworld and they insist that we write about them.
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SPEAKER_01: Stories find us.
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SPEAKER_01: Yes, that's really important.
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SPEAKER_01: And I think stories are really sort of at the heart of what we're going
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SPEAKER_01: to be talking about today and how we get stories to people.
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SPEAKER_01: One of the things I love about Charity and Sylvia is it's so beautifully written
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SPEAKER_01: and it's so accessible.
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SPEAKER_01: And it, through the lives of these women,
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SPEAKER_01: a period of time,
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SPEAKER_01: which is really,
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SPEAKER_01: you know, as volatile a period of change as the one we're living through now.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you think about the period,
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SPEAKER_01: you know,
12:56
SPEAKER_01: right at the beginning of the revolution,
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SPEAKER_01: All the way through practically to the eve of the Civil War.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's so much happening in that period.
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SPEAKER_01: And through these two women,
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SPEAKER_01: you not only make their intimacy accessible to us,
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SPEAKER_01: but the world that they were embedded in.
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SPEAKER_01: And so what kind of work did it take to tell this story?
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SPEAKER_01: Because clearly Charity and Sylvia were not sitting down alone.
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SPEAKER_01: Confessing to what they were up to.
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SPEAKER_01: There's a great deal that was unspoken.
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SPEAKER_01: So what did you have to do to really assemble the argument that you assembled?
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SPEAKER_00: So it ended up being a 10-year project.
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SPEAKER_00: I first began researching in about 2004 and the book came out in 2014.
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SPEAKER_00: And over the course of those 10 years,
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SPEAKER_00: I visited at least 20 archives as well as like The physical sites that
13:53
SPEAKER_00: the women had lived at.
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SPEAKER_00: And a lot of that was, it was really wonderful local history research.
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SPEAKER_00: So like I went to,
13:59
SPEAKER_00: you know,
14:00
SPEAKER_00: these villages in like Western Mass in central Massachusetts,
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SPEAKER_00: for example,
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SPEAKER_00: where like a good friend of theirs had lived and I like Plainfield and I,
14:10
SPEAKER_00: you know, went into homes, like historic homes that still existed.
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SPEAKER_00: Like I knocked on people's doors.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: One of the,
14:16
SPEAKER_00: you know,
14:17
SPEAKER_00: one of the pieces of the story that I found was by like I found
14:21
SPEAKER_00: where this former lover of Charity's named Lydia Richards had lived.
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SPEAKER_00: I went, I knocked on the door,
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SPEAKER_00: I told the people, hey,
14:28
SPEAKER_00: I just would love to see this house because I know this woman I'm writing
14:31
SPEAKER_00: about lived in this house for a few months and I'm just curious.
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SPEAKER_00: And they were so excited and they took me inside and they took me up to the attic
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SPEAKER_00: where Charity's former lover had like Scratched her name or her initials.
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SPEAKER_00: It was this just crazy story.
14:49
SPEAKER_00: I went into people's homes.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: I tracked down forgotten graveyards.
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SPEAKER_00: I went to historic houses.
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SPEAKER_00: I went to the Eastern Historical Society.
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SPEAKER_00: The Brockton Historical Society and the Taunton,
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SPEAKER_00: all these towns that they had lived in, like just looking for scraps of anything.
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SPEAKER_00: I found,
15:08
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:09
SPEAKER_00: a fragment of a piece of embroidery,
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SPEAKER_00: an old embroidered bed sheet that had been done by Charity's aunt from
15:18
SPEAKER_00: whom she'd learned the art of tailoring.
15:19
SPEAKER_00: And I found that in.
15:21
SPEAKER_00: Washington and Seattle,
15:23
SPEAKER_00: but like it was a very complicated,
15:25
SPEAKER_00: like I found like one reference to the existence of this fragment in a book
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SPEAKER_00: that had been published in the 19th century.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: And then I had to like,
15:33
SPEAKER_00: Figure out,
15:33
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:34
SPEAKER_00: by emailing various curators,
15:36
SPEAKER_00: like where I had gone,
15:37
SPEAKER_00: you know,
15:38
SPEAKER_00: just it was so there's a lot of detective work to find all the scraps and fragments
15:44
SPEAKER_00: and answer my questions.
15:45
SPEAKER_00: And then and then I had to do the creative work of like you stitch all
15:50
SPEAKER_00: the pieces together into a story.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: Right.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: And I think that that is something that.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: I think people who haven't worked in the archives don't understand that process
16:00
SPEAKER_00: and I have that experience all the time with students
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SPEAKER_00: where I'm leading their research and students have an idea of what they want to do
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SPEAKER_00: and I'll be like, that's a 20-year project.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: This is what you can actually do in the archives in the time you have for this course.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: History doesn't just exist as narratives in the past.
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SPEAKER_00: You collect all these fragments And then you have to figure out how to put them together.
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SPEAKER_00: And there are other things they did, too.
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SPEAKER_00: Like the book draws extensively on Sylvia Drake's diary.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: There's a couple of years of her diary that are preserved.
16:31
SPEAKER_00: But that diary is written in shorthand.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: Right.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: And so I went through the whole I transcribed the whole diary.
16:38
SPEAKER_00: It had actually been transcribed in the 1930s,
16:42
SPEAKER_00: I think, by like Works Progress Administration Project.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: But I didn't want to use that because I knew if I just read the transcription,
16:50
SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't process it like cognitively.
16:54
SPEAKER_00: So I transcribed the whole diary afresh also to make sure it was accurate and coded it all.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: And that's what enabled me to sort of Make sense of what was in the diary,
17:05
SPEAKER_00: which was, like I said, it was a lot of abbreviations and shorthand.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: And like, it's not a diary in the modern sense where we get into interiority.
17:13
SPEAKER_00: It was more like, you know, this was the weather.
17:14
SPEAKER_00: This is the work I did.
17:16
SPEAKER_00: This is how much money, you know, this is the Bible verse I read.
17:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
17:20
SPEAKER_01: So listeners, this is how the sausage is made.
17:23
SPEAKER_01: You just heard it.
17:25
SPEAKER_01: And I just want to echo something Rachel is saying.
17:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm writing a biography right now with Susan Brownmiller.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: She was a 20th century person, so the sources are voluminous.
17:34
SPEAKER_01: But it takes a long time of sort of turning everything around in your head to get to
17:41
SPEAKER_01: a Self-confidence that you know who this person,
17:46
SPEAKER_01: or in your case,
17:47
SPEAKER_01: these people were,
17:48
SPEAKER_01: and to know it well enough that you can actually
17:52
SPEAKER_01: then reconstruct three-dimensional characters that your readers will fall in love
17:57
SPEAKER_01: with.
17:58
SPEAKER_01: So this being said,
18:01
SPEAKER_01: that you,
18:02
SPEAKER_01: in fact,
18:02
SPEAKER_01: went to all of that labor to bring the Charity and Sylvia back to life for us on
18:09
SPEAKER_01: a certain level that you figured out the narrative.
18:12
SPEAKER_01: You were able to tell this vivid story.
18:16
SPEAKER_01: Along comes Tilly Walden, a graphic novelist who publishes a book called Charity and Sylvia.
18:24
SPEAKER_01: How did you encounter that book, Rachel?
18:26
SPEAKER_00: So I knew before Tilly Walden ever began the project,
18:31
SPEAKER_00: what happened was that the Henry Sheldon Museum,
18:33
SPEAKER_00: which had the biggest collection of Charity and Sylvia's archival sources,
18:39
SPEAKER_00: wanted to create a like accessible text, I think, for people.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: And so they applied for a grant.
18:48
SPEAKER_00: They wanted to hire like a graphic Mm-hmm.
18:50
SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: And so they ended up bringing in Tilly Walden and Tilly Walden emailed me at
19:16
SPEAKER_00: the beginning of that process, which was not long ago.
19:20
SPEAKER_00: It was like two years ago.
19:22
SPEAKER_00: And I said, that's awesome.
19:24
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know,
19:25
SPEAKER_00: because since Charity and Sylvia had come out,
19:28
SPEAKER_00: you know,
19:28
SPEAKER_00: now 12 years ago,
19:29
SPEAKER_00: but at that point,
19:30
SPEAKER_00: 10 years ago,
19:30
SPEAKER_00: I had inspired all sorts of like wonderful projects that has It's been like
19:35
SPEAKER_00: the great joy of my life as a writer, right?
19:38
SPEAKER_00: To know that like I put this story out into the world and it had inspired a lot of stuff, right?
19:45
SPEAKER_00: So like people had gotten Cherit and Sylvia's gravestone.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: Historically landmarked.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: A young person worked on a musical.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: At one point,
19:54
SPEAKER_00: very early,
19:54
SPEAKER_00: an MFA student optioned the book and wrote a screenplay and tried to get
20:01
SPEAKER_00: the screenplay produced.
20:02
SPEAKER_00: So over the years, it had inspired a lot of projects, a short documentary, all these things.
20:07
SPEAKER_00: And I've always been like,
20:11
SPEAKER_00: You know,
20:12
SPEAKER_00: like very happy about like the afterlife of the book and
20:17
SPEAKER_00: the further creative work it's inspired.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know,
20:21
SPEAKER_00: at the beginning of this process, I was like really happy that this was happening.
20:26
SPEAKER_00: And then I think,
20:27
SPEAKER_00: you know,
20:28
SPEAKER_00: a year later,
20:29
SPEAKER_00: so like Walden got in touch and said like,
20:30
SPEAKER_00: hey, I'm doing this and I was like, hey, that's great.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: About a year later,
20:35
SPEAKER_00: she sent me a draft of the book and I opened it up and like read the beginning
20:39
SPEAKER_00: of it.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: I've gone through a lot in the last couple of years, I should say.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: So like I did not have time at the moment at which she sent me to like read the whole thing.
20:50
SPEAKER_00: But I opened it.
20:51
SPEAKER_00: I looked at the beginning and it looked great.
20:54
SPEAKER_00: And I could see that it was, you know, like influenced by my work.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I need to Let go of this and like, you know.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: And so then a few months ago,
21:05
SPEAKER_00: the media campaign for Tilly's book began,
21:10
SPEAKER_00: you know, maybe three months before the release in June.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: And that's when I became aware that the book had the same title as my book,
21:18
SPEAKER_00: that it had a cover that was very clearly like a more like the same cover as mine,
21:24
SPEAKER_00: which features these two silhouettes of the women.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: My cover is much more plain because it was produced by an academic press,
21:32
SPEAKER_00: Tilly drew hers, and it is, you know, much more Elaborate and lovely.
21:38
SPEAKER_00: And then I started fielding all these emails and calls and texts from everyone
21:43
SPEAKER_00: who knew me saying, hey, Rachel, how come somebody is got their name on your book?
21:50
SPEAKER_00: And what's going on?
21:51
SPEAKER_00: Why am I getting advertising?
21:53
SPEAKER_00: Right.
21:53
SPEAKER_00: From, you know, that Tilly Walden has written this book called Charity and Sylvia.
21:57
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, I know, I know, I know.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: I need to, you know, I know.
22:01
SPEAKER_00: You know, every people were very upset on my behalf.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: And then the media campaign began and then Walden started doing some interviews,
22:09
SPEAKER_00: including ones that colleagues of mine heard,
22:11
SPEAKER_00: you know,
22:12
SPEAKER_00: people heard and they came back to me and said,
22:14
SPEAKER_00: I just heard Tilly Walden on the CBC saying like they're the only person
22:17
SPEAKER_00: to have ever read all the letters in And there is like one single sentence
22:20
SPEAKER_00: the back of the book that acknowledges it's an adaptation.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: And all the reviews came in, like,
22:43
SPEAKER_00: I could tell from the reviewers that, like, no,
22:45
SPEAKER_00: you know, like,
22:46
SPEAKER_00: unless the reviewers did their research,
22:48
SPEAKER_00: they had no idea that it was based on my scholarship.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: And the marketing campaign was clearly about how Tilly had, like,
22:58
SPEAKER_00: done this historical work,
22:59
SPEAKER_00: had gone into the archive and done this historical work and come up with this story.
23:03
SPEAKER_00: And so that is why I then wrote an open letter saying, that's not true.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: Like, there's a huge, like, this...
23:11
SPEAKER_00: Tilly's book is beautifully done and a wonderful novel,
23:14
SPEAKER_00: but it is not original historical research.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: It is based on my book and it is filled with research.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: I did like my story, but also filled with research.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: I did all over the place, not just Henry Sheldon.
23:29
SPEAKER_00: And then someone pointed me to Tilly's website where,
23:33
SPEAKER_00: which is not attached to the book,
23:35
SPEAKER_00: where she clearly lays out her And her process,
23:39
SPEAKER_00: as she says, was she read my book twice, closely outlined it.
23:44
SPEAKER_00: And then she went to, you know, go look at some documents.
23:48
SPEAKER_00: And like, I don't, you know, I don't fault a cartoonist for not being a historian.
23:54
SPEAKER_00: Like that's a totally legitimate process.
23:56
SPEAKER_00: I am just upset that the book was taken without any credit.
24:01
SPEAKER_00: And, and that they took my title and my cover and then like,
24:07
SPEAKER_00: And then marketed the whole thing as original.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: And then when I called them out on it, you know, said I was betraying the queers by complaining.
24:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
24:21
SPEAKER_01: So let's take apart a couple of things.
24:24
SPEAKER_01: One is while one cannot copyright a title...
24:29
SPEAKER_01: Which is an interesting little glitch in copyright law.
24:33
SPEAKER_01: Choosing a title that was exactly yours is not a mistake.
24:38
SPEAKER_01: Choosing a cover...
24:41
SPEAKER_01: That mimics yours is not a mistake.
24:44
SPEAKER_01: Have you talked to anyone at Drawn and Quarterly Press about how these decisions were made?
24:50
SPEAKER_00: No, no.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: I wrote a letter to readers because the book was out.
24:54
SPEAKER_00: And like, again, they made their choices and they clearly made their choices consciously.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: I mean,
25:00
SPEAKER_00: the problem for anybody who hasn't been involved in publishing is The problem
25:04
SPEAKER_00: with taking the same title as mine,
25:06
SPEAKER_00: with taking my title,
25:08
SPEAKER_00: is that it makes it impossible for readers to find my book because Walden is,
25:13
SPEAKER_00: in fact, a very successful and popular graphic novelist and very talented.
25:19
SPEAKER_00: Her book will sell many more copies than mine and it will algorithmically rise to the top.
25:25
SPEAKER_00: So in the future,
25:26
SPEAKER_00: you know,
25:27
SPEAKER_00: anyone who Googles Charity and Sylvia will not find my book or they'll find my book
25:31
SPEAKER_00: after hers.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: And I mean, I,
25:33
SPEAKER_00: you know,
25:33
SPEAKER_00: in response to my open letter saying,
25:35
SPEAKER_00: oh, I went to the bookstore to try and order your book.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: And the bookstore said, oh, do you mean Tilly Walden's book?
25:41
SPEAKER_00: Right.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: Right.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: So.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: Right.
25:44
SPEAKER_00: It's an act of, it was an act of erasure.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: I wrote that open letter and drawn and quarterly responded with a pretty nasty response.
25:55
SPEAKER_01: What did they have to say for themselves?
25:58
SPEAKER_00: That I was a mean,
26:01
SPEAKER_00: powerful Canadian academic who was punching down a poor lesbian who was living
26:08
SPEAKER_00: in Trump's America.
26:10
SPEAKER_00: And if I were like a good queer, I wouldn't do that.
26:13
SPEAKER_01: That's shocking to me.
26:16
SPEAKER_01: That is actually just shocking to me.
26:18
SPEAKER_00: That was the basic message.
26:22
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
26:23
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
26:25
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
26:26
SPEAKER_01: Well, let me just take a moment here to say that This has happened to me too.
26:33
SPEAKER_01: I wrote a book called War on Crime, which was about the FBI in the 1930s.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: And you could have hit me over the head with a hammer
26:40
SPEAKER_01: and I would not have been more astonished when I walked into Shakespeare and Company
26:44
SPEAKER_01: in New York City one day and saw a book called War on Crime written by
26:48
SPEAKER_01: a guy named Brian Burroughs that basically...
26:52
SPEAKER_01: It was basically an outline of my book rewritten for, you know, a general audience.
26:59
SPEAKER_01: And actually, the original book, I think, was pretty well written, too.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: It was a little more academic than I would write today.
27:06
SPEAKER_01: But it was my...
27:07
SPEAKER_01: So that happened.
27:07
SPEAKER_01: And then there was another moment at which somebody called me about a book
27:11
SPEAKER_01: that had just come out on prohibition.
27:13
SPEAKER_01: And
27:28
SPEAKER_01: This friend,
27:29
SPEAKER_01: who's now a history professor,
27:31
SPEAKER_01: was a former student of mine,
27:32
SPEAKER_01: said, do you understand like that first chapter in that book is your work?
27:37
SPEAKER_01: And this was a very prestigious person who had done this.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: And I never confronted anybody about that, but it left a very, very sour taste in my mouth.
27:48
SPEAKER_01: And it's also very counter to our ethics.
27:54
SPEAKER_01: As historical scholars.
27:56
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, it's one thing to have somebody rely on your work.
28:01
SPEAKER_01: It's another thing for them to copy it or not ask for a collaboration.
28:07
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
28:08
SPEAKER_01: I can imagine a world in which Tilly Walden and Rachel Hope Cleaves collaborated
28:13
SPEAKER_01: a graphic novel.
28:15
SPEAKER_01: And that would be amazing for everybody.
28:18
SPEAKER_01: But no.
28:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was a single authored piece.
28:22
SPEAKER_01: So...
28:23
SPEAKER_01: What should our listeners be thinking about in terms
28:27
SPEAKER_01: of how this leaves someone like you feeling about the commercial publishing world?
28:35
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I felt really bad, obviously.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah, I would have loved to have had an authorized collaboration or...
28:43
SPEAKER_00: I would say that like, yeah,
28:45
SPEAKER_00: the other,
28:46
SPEAKER_00: so it's that John and Quarterly,
28:47
SPEAKER_00: you know, kind of rejected my open letter as, you know, me being a mean academic.
28:54
SPEAKER_00: They also insinuated, they called the letter, they called their response in defense of context.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: They also insinuated that, like,
29:01
SPEAKER_00: I hate comics, or like, you know, I don't understand comics are a valuable form.
29:06
SPEAKER_00: And I should say that there was an article about the whole dust-up in
29:10
SPEAKER_00: the Vermont Journal, Seven Days.
29:12
SPEAKER_00: And there's a quote in it,
29:13
SPEAKER_00: actually,
29:13
SPEAKER_00: from Alison Bechdel,
29:14
SPEAKER_00: who blurbs Walden's book,
29:16
SPEAKER_00: saying something like, yeah,
29:18
SPEAKER_00: Walden's book will supersede Cleves' and that's,
29:21
SPEAKER_00: you know, maybe a sad reflection in our post-literate society.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: I just want to go ahead.
29:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
29:27
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
29:28
SPEAKER_00: Not at all my concern.
29:30
SPEAKER_00: Like I am not concerned with Tilly's book selling more than my book.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: I think it's wonderful that Tilly's story,
29:38
SPEAKER_00: it makes Charity and Sylvia's story accessible to so many more people
29:43
SPEAKER_00: than I will ever reach as a writer
29:46
SPEAKER_00: of what we would call like crossover academic nonfiction, right?
29:50
SPEAKER_00: Like scholarly, written for like an audience, but like still like scholarly.
29:56
SPEAKER_00: So I'm concerned about that.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: I think that's awesome.
29:59
SPEAKER_00: And I actually think the book itself is awesome.
30:02
SPEAKER_00: And I think graphic novels are awesome.
30:05
SPEAKER_00: I read them all the time.
30:06
SPEAKER_00: And in fact,
30:07
SPEAKER_00: I love Alison Bechdel's work,
30:09
SPEAKER_00: and I also love,
30:10
SPEAKER_00: and I also think, like,
30:11
SPEAKER_00: Tilly did a great job,
30:13
SPEAKER_00: and there are,
30:13
SPEAKER_00: like, a lot of else in her book which are very original to her, right?
30:18
SPEAKER_00: It's not exactly my book.
30:20
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it uses my book,
30:22
SPEAKER_00: but she also tells the story creatively in all sorts of ways,
30:26
SPEAKER_00: and it's fictionalized,
30:28
SPEAKER_00: and so it is,
30:29
SPEAKER_00: it imagines scenes and dialogue between Sherry and Sylvia,
30:33
SPEAKER_00: which I don't do as a historian.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: I just want to clarify that.
30:37
SPEAKER_00: I think adaptations of scholarship are great.
30:44
SPEAKER_00: My complaint is that they were dishonest about the fact that it was an adaptation
30:51
SPEAKER_00: of my scholarship.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: That is my complaint.
30:54
SPEAKER_00: That there was no way for anybody who bought that book or reviews,
30:58
SPEAKER_00: unless they They read the reviews that were written by like good journalists,
31:03
SPEAKER_00: like the journalist at the New York Times who called me and interviewed me
31:06
SPEAKER_00: and was like, have you read Tilly's book?
31:07
SPEAKER_00: You really ought to read it.
31:08
SPEAKER_00: Unless it was reviews by scholars,
31:12
SPEAKER_00: you know,
31:12
SPEAKER_00: by like,
31:13
SPEAKER_00: not by scholars,
31:14
SPEAKER_00: by like good journalists, like no one else would have any way to know, right?
31:18
SPEAKER_00: That the book was based on it.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: So that's it.
31:21
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, it, it, You know, it leaves me bummed out.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: I wish we lived in a world where people were a little bit more ethical.
31:27
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know why they chose the route they chose,
31:31
SPEAKER_00: whether it was they don't care about the work I did or because they didn't want
31:37
SPEAKER_00: to share revenue or because they thought the book would sell better,
31:41
SPEAKER_00: Tilly's book would sell better if they represented it as like her great discovery in
31:46
SPEAKER_00: the archives.
31:46
SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't know what happened at the marketing table, but.
31:50
SPEAKER_01: Well, there is this sort of love affair with,
31:54
SPEAKER_01: you know,
31:55
SPEAKER_01: suddenly found history,
31:58
SPEAKER_01: which almost never happens in early American history because the documents are like
32:02
SPEAKER_01: so well known,
32:03
SPEAKER_01: you know,
32:04
SPEAKER_01: so that occasionally when it does,
32:06
SPEAKER_01: as in the case of Charity and Sylvia,
32:08
SPEAKER_01: it's a very big deal in our world to discover a new story.
32:12
SPEAKER_01: I think...
32:13
SPEAKER_01: Some of the stories that Jen Mannion uncovered in Female Husbands,
32:17
SPEAKER_01: which were known, and I think that's the important thing to say.
32:21
SPEAKER_01: They're known,
32:22
SPEAKER_01: but they don't poke their heads up in the archive unless there's somebody there
32:27
SPEAKER_01: who knows what to do with them.
32:29
SPEAKER_01: So it's the kind of confluence of things that exist that are known by the archivists
32:34
SPEAKER_01: that are sitting there and the person who Encounters them and says,
32:39
SPEAKER_01: I know what this means.
32:40
SPEAKER_01: I know what story this is telling.
32:43
SPEAKER_01: So that's important.
32:44
SPEAKER_01: And that's something that Tilly Walden did not do.
32:48
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
32:49
SPEAKER_01: So I guess I'd like to pose another question to you for the non-academics,
32:56
SPEAKER_01: which is mostly everybody who's listening to this.
32:58
SPEAKER_01: Let's say Tilly Walden were an assistant professor,
33:02
SPEAKER_01: associate professor in the journalism department.
33:06
SPEAKER_01: At your university and had turned in this graphic novel as part of
33:12
SPEAKER_01: a promotion package or a tenure package.
33:14
SPEAKER_01: And somebody said, gee, this looks an awful lot like Rachel's book.
33:20
SPEAKER_01: Would it pass the plagiarism
33:22
SPEAKER_00: test in our world?
33:24
SPEAKER_00: Not being a journalist is hard for me to say.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: I suspect it would not.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: I suspect that, you know, you would get into some...
33:34
SPEAKER_00: You know, he did.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: Yes, I think it would have caused trouble for her.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: Right.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: But that's not the world of the popular press, right?
33:42
SPEAKER_00: There is no,
33:43
SPEAKER_00: you know,
33:45
SPEAKER_00: there's no punishment for making false claims to being original in
33:51
SPEAKER_00: the popular press.
33:52
SPEAKER_00: And to get back to your observation about how,
33:55
SPEAKER_00: like, Like marketers and the media like love the story of the discovery.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: I think that I suspect that is exactly,
34:02
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:03
SPEAKER_00: why they ended up taking the route they did of being like,
34:06
SPEAKER_00: look at what Tilly found in the archives.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: Right.
34:09
SPEAKER_00: But the great irony of this is as anybody who publishes history knows,
34:16
SPEAKER_00: like it's very hard To publish any history,
34:21
SPEAKER_00: anything popular, anything with a trade press, that is unknown.
34:26
SPEAKER_00: Because publishers, commercial publishers are very conservative, right?
34:31
SPEAKER_00: And so commercial publishers want to know that the book that they're investing
34:35
SPEAKER_00: in is similar to other things that have sold and made money, right?
34:39
SPEAKER_00: They're not nonprofits.
34:41
SPEAKER_00: And so when I was writing Cherry and Sylvia,
34:45
SPEAKER_00: I did talk to trade publishers and About working with,
34:50
SPEAKER_00: you know, putting out the book with the trade press.
34:53
SPEAKER_00: And what they told me was nobody will buy a book of, you know, about two unknown women, right?
35:00
SPEAKER_00: Like the people who buy history are, you know, are men or it's like people buying books for men.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: They want, you know, they want books about people who are known.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: They want another biography of Churchill or John Adams at that time or.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: You know,
35:15
SPEAKER_00: George Washington or Ulysses S.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: Grant or Robert E. Lee or, you know, somebody they have heard of.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: And so there's no commercial market for a book about two unknown women.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: Right.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: And so that is why I ended up publishing with an academic press with Oxford.
35:33
SPEAKER_00: And then the book has had great legs.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: Like it sold a lot for an academic book,
35:38
SPEAKER_00: which is not much for a popular book, but it's sold well over the years.
35:42
SPEAKER_00: Because it's been assigned in classrooms and it's been quite widely read for
35:46
SPEAKER_00: an academic book and ironically like that's what enabled The popularization
35:52
SPEAKER_00: the graphic novel to come out, right?
35:54
SPEAKER_00: But then there's still this like marketing incentive to market it as like
36:00
SPEAKER_00: the untold story,
36:01
SPEAKER_00: even though like its whole publishing existence is predicated on the fact that no,
36:06
SPEAKER_00: it's actually a proven, it's actually a known story that's been proven to sell well.
36:09
SPEAKER_00: And that's a complaint I have with the whole like You know,
36:15
SPEAKER_00: popular history publishing industry at the moment.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: Right.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: Because we get, you know, we see this all the time.
36:21
SPEAKER_00: Books that are being marketed as the untold story that are not.
36:25
SPEAKER_00: Right.
36:26
SPEAKER_01: They just aren't.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: Right.
36:28
SPEAKER_01: Right.
36:28
SPEAKER_01: Right.
36:29
SPEAKER_01: And that, that is, that is marketing.
36:31
SPEAKER_01: That is, you know, or, or that every subtitle has to begin with how, you know.
36:37
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
36:38
SPEAKER_01: You know, sewing machines, colon, you know.
36:41
SPEAKER_01: How a machine took over the world and created the first working class.
36:45
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's always some huge claim in the subtitle.
36:48
SPEAKER_01: But just sort of rolling back a little bit,
36:52
SPEAKER_01: granted that Tilly Walden wanted to do something different,
36:56
SPEAKER_01: is probably aimed at a different audience, probably LGBT youth.
37:00
SPEAKER_01: Who are, you know, interested in history and what to see themselves in the past and so on.
37:06
SPEAKER_01: Would it have really solved this problem if she had had an acknowledgement at
37:12
SPEAKER_01: the beginning of the book that said,
37:15
SPEAKER_01: this work is indebted to Rachel Hope Cleave's book.
37:21
SPEAKER_01: Of the same title,
37:22
SPEAKER_01: or it'd be nice if she'd chosen a different title,
37:25
SPEAKER_01: Charity and Sylvia,
37:27
SPEAKER_01: for those who want to know the full story of these remarkable women, go here.
37:34
SPEAKER_01: Would that have made you feel like this was an acceptable way of solving the problem?
37:42
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
37:44
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so...
37:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, if she had chosen a different title...
37:47
SPEAKER_00: So that it didn't make my book harder to find.
37:50
SPEAKER_00: Right.
38:18
SPEAKER_01: Right.
38:18
SPEAKER_01: You will be disappointed, listeners.
38:20
SPEAKER_01: Don't become a historian.
38:22
SPEAKER_01: Remember those little matchbooks that Marho used to hand out that said,
38:26
SPEAKER_01: become a historian, make big bucks?
38:28
SPEAKER_01: And they were based on like the International Trucking School or something like that.
38:32
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that's our age difference.
38:34
SPEAKER_01: I remember those matchbooks.
38:35
SPEAKER_01: You don't.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: I do not.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
38:37
SPEAKER_00: I appreciate the humor.
38:40
SPEAKER_00: So when I said somebody had optioned my book for a screenplay once,
38:47
SPEAKER_00: just to give people an idea of the amount of money we're talking about,
38:51
SPEAKER_00: I think I got $2,000 for the option.
38:54
SPEAKER_00: We're not talking about vast enrichment.
38:57
SPEAKER_00: And so my complaint is not that there was some huge amount
39:02
SPEAKER_00: of money I should have gotten but didn't get.
39:05
SPEAKER_01: Right.
39:06
SPEAKER_01: And had the movie been made, you still wouldn't have made any money.
39:09
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
39:10
SPEAKER_01: my former colleague Judith Brown actually got her book about the lesbian nun in like
39:16
SPEAKER_01: the 12th century or something like that got optioned.
39:19
SPEAKER_01: And they actually did make the movie and I can't find it anywhere.
39:23
SPEAKER_01: I think it's being marketed in Europe or something like that.
39:26
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, again,
39:27
SPEAKER_01: it would have been fun to have a movie of your book or a Miniseries on HBO
39:33
SPEAKER_01: or something like that, but you still wouldn't have made much money.
39:36
SPEAKER_01: So it's really about in many ways that this is your work
39:42
SPEAKER_01: that someone else has lifted and claimed as their own while in fact doing lots
39:48
SPEAKER_01: of her own work, doing the drawings, doing a range of things.
39:53
SPEAKER_01: And then when you got upset about it, you were told that you were a bad person.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: And that you should be supporting this project of having your work thieved
40:05
SPEAKER_01: and superseded by a graphic novel.
40:08
SPEAKER_01: So let's just sort of broaden the conversation before we end.
40:12
SPEAKER_01: Because one of the things I have had a lot in my life is movie companies
40:20
SPEAKER_01: and documentarians and so on and so forth mine our brains.
40:26
SPEAKER_01: For material.
40:27
SPEAKER_01: Journalists mine our brains for material.
40:30
SPEAKER_01: So you might spend like an hour on the phone with a journalist
40:34
SPEAKER_01: and you will have two paragraphs that says,
40:37
SPEAKER_01: you know, as Claire Potter noted, blah, blah, blah, blah.
40:40
SPEAKER_01: And then five paragraphs down.
40:42
SPEAKER_01: Potter says, you know, and there you've spent like 50 minutes educating this journalist.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: Well, on the one hand,
40:48
SPEAKER_01: it is part of our civic duty to inform the public,
40:53
SPEAKER_01: whether we are enriched by it or not.
40:56
SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's what historians should be doing.
40:58
SPEAKER_01: And in this day and age of history being altered and falsified and hidden,
41:06
SPEAKER_01: it's an ever more important task.
41:08
SPEAKER_01: But that is actually a different question from someone just taking your work
41:14
SPEAKER_01: and claiming it as their own.
41:17
SPEAKER_01: How do we get the word out to publishers that they can't do this?
41:23
SPEAKER_00: Am I allowed to say I don't think we're going to succeed in that?
41:29
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
41:29
SPEAKER_01: Did Oxford Press have anything to say about it?
41:33
SPEAKER_01: I mean, did Oxford call them and say, actually, this is our, they didn't?
41:38
SPEAKER_01: No.
41:38
SPEAKER_01: Did you ask them to?
41:40
SPEAKER_01: My agent did.
41:42
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
41:43
SPEAKER_01: And they declined to do it?
41:45
SPEAKER_03: Mm-hmm.
41:46
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
41:47
SPEAKER_01: So what are you going to do with this experience, Rachel?
41:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know,
41:50
SPEAKER_01: we were talking at the beginning
41:52
SPEAKER_01: and you were basically saying you thought you just needed to let it go
41:56
SPEAKER_01: and you can't stay in this place.
41:58
SPEAKER_01: But are you planning on writing anything about this?
42:01
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
42:02
SPEAKER_00: You know,
42:03
SPEAKER_00: my I mean,
42:03
SPEAKER_00: my I never wanted to write the open letter in the first place
42:06
SPEAKER_00: because I thought it was like better for You know,
42:10
SPEAKER_00: like as a human to let it go and like,
42:12
SPEAKER_00: like being bitter and dwelling on stuff is not great for us as people.
42:16
SPEAKER_00: Right.
42:17
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
42:18
SPEAKER_00: But then I got a lot of like pressure from people I knew who cared about me to say something.
42:23
SPEAKER_00: And it just, it was almost like an FAQ writing out the letter.
42:27
SPEAKER_00: You know,
42:27
SPEAKER_00: it was just like so many people were asking me that I was just like,
42:30
SPEAKER_00: I'm just going to put it out there.
42:32
SPEAKER_00: So I can stop fielding like endless DMs and texts.
42:37
SPEAKER_00: Right.
42:39
SPEAKER_00: I'll just like let people know what I think.
42:41
SPEAKER_00: And really the catalyst was hearing from people who have seen,
42:46
SPEAKER_00: like listened to the CBC interview or seen other, like there was a marketing thing.
42:51
SPEAKER_00: The Henry Sheldon website, again,
42:53
SPEAKER_00: where Tilly's sort of like looking at the sources and she's like,
42:56
SPEAKER_00: this was all I had to go on,
42:58
SPEAKER_00: where these original sources, you know, and I'm like, really?
43:00
SPEAKER_00: That's just, you know.
43:02
SPEAKER_00: So I put it out there because I felt like,
43:06
SPEAKER_00: you know,
43:06
SPEAKER_00: ultimately I was stuck with the choice of either like swallowing my gall or,
43:12
SPEAKER_00: you know, standing up for myself.
43:15
SPEAKER_00: But that, the standing up for myself was the End goal, right?
43:20
SPEAKER_00: Because there is no, you can't copyright a title.
43:26
SPEAKER_00: Unfortunately, you can't really, you can't copyright facts, which is good.
43:31
SPEAKER_00: That's not unfortunate.
43:32
SPEAKER_00: It's good that you can't copyright facts.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: But there's no,
43:35
SPEAKER_00: I think,
43:36
SPEAKER_00: distinction or awareness in the law that what historians do is not just facts,
43:42
SPEAKER_00: that it is a narrative construction, right?
43:45
SPEAKER_00: And so Charity and Sylvia is a narrative,
43:47
SPEAKER_00: and that narrative is clearly adapted and reproduced by Walden,
43:52
SPEAKER_00: but the legal defense would be that she just took the facts from my book,
43:58
SPEAKER_00: and those are not copyrightable.
44:00
SPEAKER_00: So there is no legal remedy,
44:01
SPEAKER_00: and on top of that,
44:02
SPEAKER_00: there's clearly no remedy like an apology or something forthcoming from Drawn
44:09
SPEAKER_00: and Quarterly, which responded to my open letter by insulting me.
44:16
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing happening that way either.
44:18
SPEAKER_00: So I think, you know, the letter itself, at least I didn't have to, like, swallow it, right?
44:26
SPEAKER_00: At least I spoke up for myself, which I think is a positive thing for me.
44:31
SPEAKER_00: And then I think I just have to, like, I did my best to correct the record.
44:35
SPEAKER_00: So if people are curious,
44:37
SPEAKER_00: they will possibly,
44:39
SPEAKER_00: like, find out that actually Walden's book was based on mine and...
44:45
SPEAKER_00: And I think, you know, my focus is on like my current writing projects, which are wonderful.
44:50
SPEAKER_00: And right.
44:52
SPEAKER_00: Well, and I think we're all feeling by creativity.
44:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
44:55
SPEAKER_01: And I think we're all feeling a little vulnerable right now because of having gone
44:59
SPEAKER_01: through the past two years of learning that all of our work was used to train AIs.
45:04
SPEAKER_01: And now there are these.
45:07
SPEAKER_01: Including charity.
45:08
SPEAKER_01: Well, like everything I've ever written was,
45:10
SPEAKER_01: you know, and I filled out all the forms to, you know, for the lawsuit and so on.
45:15
SPEAKER_01: And I think maybe I've gotten like $29 or something like that.
45:19
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's just absurd.
45:21
SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, I don't know.
45:25
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
45:26
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
45:27
SPEAKER_01: And it's just like, it just all feels like another scam.
45:31
SPEAKER_01: It feels like,
45:31
SPEAKER_01: you know,
45:32
SPEAKER_01: they just want us to keep Filing paperwork and eventually we'll get tired and forget
45:37
SPEAKER_01: and never get any money.
45:40
SPEAKER_01: But really,
45:41
SPEAKER_01: actually,
45:41
SPEAKER_01: even getting $3,000 for someone who's making billions of dollars off of our books.
45:48
SPEAKER_01: So I think,
45:49
SPEAKER_01: you know,
45:49
SPEAKER_01: we really have to think about as a profession,
45:53
SPEAKER_01: how do we reorient in relation to the new ways of telling stories and the ways
46:00
SPEAKER_01: that those new media are Inevitably going to be feeding off of our work.
46:05
SPEAKER_01: And I think that's maybe something the American Historical Association needs
46:09
SPEAKER_01: to focus on,
46:10
SPEAKER_01: like put together a task force about the replication and the seizing of our words
46:18
SPEAKER_01: for other purposes.
46:19
SPEAKER_01: And, you know, what happened to you is a very conventional form of Let's say theft.
46:27
SPEAKER_01: But AI just happened when none of us were watching.
46:31
SPEAKER_01: We had no idea that this was happening.
46:34
SPEAKER_00: I'll interrupt you for a second because I don't know if you saw it.
46:38
SPEAKER_00: There was an article.
46:39
SPEAKER_00: I can't remember where I read it.
46:40
SPEAKER_00: It came out a few weeks ago,
46:42
SPEAKER_00: but it's actually about this other AI-enabled phenomenon of Like direct,
46:49
SPEAKER_00: like works of history by like invented authors that are AI digests
46:55
SPEAKER_00: of specific books,
46:57
SPEAKER_00: you know,
46:57
SPEAKER_00: that can be put out by the same title and like print on demand,
47:02
SPEAKER_00: self-published, you know, by, you know, Amazon.
47:05
SPEAKER_00: Right.
47:06
SPEAKER_00: You know, direct or whatever.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: And so like somebody could, I shouldn't suggest it because it'll happen.
47:14
SPEAKER_00: If somebody wanted to do an AI version of Charity and Sylvia and put it out there,
47:20
SPEAKER_00: like I could not stop them.
47:22
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I could like complain to Amazon and maybe it would get taken down,
47:26
SPEAKER_00: but that is a real phenomenon that is happening.
47:29
SPEAKER_00: People's books are just being like,
47:32
SPEAKER_00: you know,
47:33
SPEAKER_00: Fed into a,
47:34
SPEAKER_00: by like individual operators,
47:37
SPEAKER_00: you know,
47:37
SPEAKER_00: you can publish 10 books a day,
47:39
SPEAKER_00: I think, or 10 books a week on Amazon and people are doing that, right?
47:42
SPEAKER_00: They're just,
47:43
SPEAKER_00: you know,
47:44
SPEAKER_00: and if you sell,
47:46
SPEAKER_00: you know, if you sell enough of these, it doesn't even matter if it's terrible.
47:50
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know,
47:51
SPEAKER_00: you can generate a significant amount of,
47:54
SPEAKER_00: And so I think that is like what happened with my book and Tilly is very old school.
48:01
SPEAKER_00: I think we are in for a future in which just like,
48:05
SPEAKER_00: you know,
48:06
SPEAKER_00: actually keeping any sort of ownership of any of our words is going
48:11
SPEAKER_00: to be just impossible.
48:14
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
48:15
SPEAKER_01: And yet we go on.
48:16
SPEAKER_01: Why do we go on?
48:17
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
48:17
SPEAKER_01: Because writing is like actually one of the best things you can do.
48:21
SPEAKER_01: One of the, one of the most fun ways to spend our time.
48:25
SPEAKER_01: Rachel, before we are,
48:27
SPEAKER_01: we are going to link to the real Charity and Sylvia and listeners,
48:32
SPEAKER_01: I want you to buy that book.
48:33
SPEAKER_01: It is so fantastic.
48:35
SPEAKER_01: Buy it to support Rachel and then read it to love the book and to love Charity and Sylvia.
48:42
SPEAKER_01: Before we go, tell us what else you're working on.
48:46
SPEAKER_00: I am currently working on a book called To Russia With Love,
48:51
SPEAKER_00: A True Story of Sex, Spycraft, and Stolen Diamonds.
48:54
SPEAKER_00: And it is about an American woman who was born in Philadelphia in 1848
48:58
SPEAKER_00: and was arrested in St. Petersburg in Russia in 1874.
49:04
SPEAKER_00: For encouraging her boyfriend,
49:07
SPEAKER_00: who is the nephew of the Tsar,
49:09
SPEAKER_00: to steal diamonds from his mother's icon, a Romanov icon.
49:13
SPEAKER_00: But the true story is way more complicated than that.
49:17
SPEAKER_00: It involves the Great Game or Anglo-Russian contestation over Central Russia.
49:22
SPEAKER_00: I think it involves all sorts of complicated espionage.
49:27
SPEAKER_00: And I've been working on writing this story for years.
49:30
SPEAKER_00: I keep I keep starting it and throwing it out and starting over because I am trying
49:35
SPEAKER_00: to tell a really good story.
49:37
SPEAKER_00: And so hopefully I'm there now.
49:40
SPEAKER_00: I'm like in the zone.
49:42
SPEAKER_00: Well,
49:42
SPEAKER_00: and I think
49:43
SPEAKER_01: the only answer for you is to engage a graphic novelist now and have
49:49
SPEAKER_01: a simultaneous pub of your book and the graphic novel that is a collaboration
49:55
SPEAKER_01: with someone else.
49:56
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, and I just want to say.
49:59
SPEAKER_00: Who wants to volunteer, you know, get in contact.
50:01
SPEAKER_00: Just do it.
50:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it sounds like an amazing story and it sounds really fun.
50:06
SPEAKER_01: And let me just say, listeners, I am a huge fan of graphic novels and I used to teach them.
50:11
SPEAKER_01: There was a wonderful graphic novel about Ronald Reagan,
50:14
SPEAKER_01: which was a collaboration between an artist and a historian that I used to teach
50:18
SPEAKER_01: in my class,
50:19
SPEAKER_01: The Age of Reagan,
50:20
SPEAKER_01: because it was a terrific way to give students an overview of who this person was.
50:24
SPEAKER_01: And the pictures can convey personality and energy in ways that a few small words can't.
50:33
SPEAKER_01: So it's a dynamite way to present history.
50:36
SPEAKER_01: But, you know, for the graphic novelists out there, just work with us.
50:40
SPEAKER_01: Don't take our stuff.
50:42
SPEAKER_01: That's the only thing we're asking.
50:44
SPEAKER_01: Rachel, thank you so much for being on the show.
50:47
SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me on,
50:56
Claire.
50:58
SPEAKER_03: I can hear the sound of violins
51:04
SPEAKER_03: And that's
51:10
SPEAKER_02: it for today's show.
51:11
SPEAKER_02: Thanks for hanging out with us.
51:13
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51:18
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51:24
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51:29
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51:30
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51:31
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51:36
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51:40
SPEAKER_02: If you do, please leave a rating and a comment so that other listeners can find us.
51:45
SPEAKER_02: Our podcast is supported by the New School for Social Research and by paying subscribers.
51:50
SPEAKER_02: Political Junkie is written, recorded, edited, and produced by me, Claire Potter.
51:55
SPEAKER_02: Today's theme is Steal My Heart Away,
51:58
SPEAKER_02: written by Van Morrison,
51:59
SPEAKER_02: sung by Morrison and Willie Nelson, and licensed from Lichty.
52:03
SPEAKER_02: That's all for now.
52:05
SPEAKER_02: See you next time.
52:06
SPEAKER_03: Just like the sunshine after rain, I'll come to be with you, we'll save it today.
52:17
SPEAKER_03: Cause I know when I'm with you again,
52:23
SPEAKER_03: you just leave my heart away.
53:13
SPEAKER_03: Just like a morning and a night like this See the weather up on the hill
53:22
There's
53:25
SPEAKER_03: a place up on the mountainside
53:30
SPEAKER_03: Where the world is standing still
53:34
SPEAKER_03: Just like
53:35
SPEAKER_03: the sunshine after rain I'll come
53:41
SPEAKER_03: Be with you will save the day.
53:46
SPEAKER_03: Cause I know when I'm with you
53:51
SPEAKER_03: again, You just steal my heart away.
53:57
SPEAKER_03: Cause I know when I'm with you again,
54:03
SPEAKER_03: You just steal my heart away.
54:09
SPEAKER_03: I know when I'm with you again, you just steal my heart away.