One Year Later- What Publishing a Book Taught Me

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

What was it like to hear about the JFK assassination? Or America's triumph over Hitler? We're seeing Queen at Live Aid. Our past is a collection of stories that bring us to now.

Welcome to the Eyewitness History Podcast, where we view history through the eyes of the people that watch the events that shaped our world. Here's your host, Josh Cohen, and these are their stories.

Josh Cohen (0:32)

Hello, listeners, and thank you for tuning in to the Eyewitness History Podcast. I wanted to check in with you, listeners. Exactly one year ago today, I realized my dream of publishing a book. As perhaps you will know, it's called William F. Buckley Jr's Guide to Friendship in a Polarized Era. I released an episode on the podcast here, around that time, talking about the book, so I certainly don't want to just repeat myself. But I did want to take a step back and reflect on the experience of writing it, publishing it, and certainly promoting it, which has been a dream come true in and of itself, what the past year has taught me about the whole process. Because there's a difference between writing a book, holding the finished product in your hands for the first time, and living with the reality of having published one, I think it might be a worthwhile thing to talk through. The first is the creative process, and the second is the moment you'll remember, and the third is something you can only really understand with time. So with time having passed, I'd like to get into it. In a way, this is a book that I've been writing for over 10 years. I just listened back to an interview that I did with the late great author and biographer James Reston Jr. This was in 2018, almost 10 years ago.

In it, you can hear me talk about William F. Buckley Jr. and the book that I was working on, which would become the book that got published. I asked him if he had any advice for me in terms of becoming a better writer, thinking through the process and what lessons I might be able to engulf to become better in pursuit of my dream of becoming a published author.

He had some rather solid advice for me. He told me to look into an essay that was written by Virginia Woolf, called The Art of Biography.

And he told me that this has been a touchstone for him for over 40 years. So I thought I better have a look. And I have since read the essay many times. He talks about Virginia Woolf describing what she calls fertile facts or creative facts. These are facts which may not be on the page scientific or data driven, let's say, but are nonetheless facts that give you insight into the personality of whoever you are covering for a biography. And that's crucially important because Virginia Woolf says in the essay that personality, covering personality is the true test of the solidity and the worth wildness, the coin word, of the biography of whoever you're covering for your biography. And she goes on to describe that the point of biography is the fusing, the melding of granite and rainbow. The granite are the hard and fast scientific facts, the names, the dates, the events, et cetera. Whereas the rainbow is the personality, the character traits, the things that make up the texture of a person and what really give your biography life. And of course, it's in pursuit of the rainbow that the real fun begins as a writer and as a biographer. So I want to thank the dearly departed James Reston Jr. for that advice. And it's been a dream come true to be able to put that advice into practice in the way that I have.

Um, the research for the book, the William F. Buckley Jr.'s Guide to Friendship in a Polarized Era, was daunting, daunting indeed. I have in my study here a bookshelf comprising perhaps 30 different books to do with William F. Buckley, two of which are his autobiographies, Miles Gone By, and his faith-flavored biography, his faith-flavored autobiography, as I call it in the book, Near My God, both of which were, as you might imagine, touchstones for me in terms of getting this book done.

Um, but I might want to back up just a minute and describe what it was like actually getting the book deal. When I first met Fidelis Publishing, when I first met with Fidelis Publishing, I had interviewed, perhaps you will know, dear reader, Oliver North, Colonel Oliver North, for Town Hall Magazine, one of Salem Media's other digital assets. He had published a book that was called American Gulag, which is a lament of the infiltration of Marxist and Neomarxist philosophies on our college campuses. And I do cite that in some detail in the book. And I had the pleasure of interviewing Colonel North for Town Hall, which was great fun, and it was very, very interesting. And it also gave me a chance to develop a relationship with the publisher, Fidelis Publishing. I published his book. And sometime later, after that article and that interview got published, I decided to reach back out and tell them, tell Fidelis that I had this concept in mind.