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David M. Perry, "The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook" (JHU Press, 2026)
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- [00:00]
David Perry
I was groomed to become one of his wives. This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her. I want to see action, and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk. You need to start walking the walk now. It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.
- [00:31]
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New Books Network Announcer
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Interviewer
Hello and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm here today with David Perry to discuss his new book, the Public Scholar, A Practical Handbook. Perry, an academic historian turned university staff member and freelance writer and journalist, has written this book to answer burning questions for would be public scholars. How do you actually do the work? How do you write a pitch and break into an industry where the best way to be published is to have already been published? David, thanks so much for joining us today. Could you introduce yourself for our audience, tell us a little bit about yourself?
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David Perry
Yeah, so I am by training a medieval historian. I got a PhD in history at the University of Minnesota in 2006. I was a professor for 10 years at a wonderful little school in the Chicago area called Dominican University. I quit to become staff back at Minnesota for lots of reasons and Some of them are, you know, like Medicaid policy in the state of Minnesota. I'm the father of a boy with down syndrome. Some of it is aging parents of my wife or friends here. But one of the things I really wanted to do was try to become rather than a faculty member in which the work can be kind of all consuming. I thought it would be worth trying to be a writer with a day job to have a job that ends at the end of the day. I'm an advisor in the history department that are very rarely advising emergencies on a Sunday. And I do not even like I have segregated email and I try not to look at it after 4:30 and I try not to look at it on weekends. And except for when I'm teaching, I mostly succeed. And when I'm teaching, I remember, oh yeah, that's why I left that faculty job because teaching six classes a year, I just couldn't do any of this writing. So I became a writer. I became a journalist and writer kind of by accident about 12, 13 years ago now. And I do a lot of writing for a lot of outlets and a lot of formats. And that's kind of what I'm here to talk about.
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Interviewer
Amazing. So in this first chapter you sort of outline a journey into journalism writing for the public. Can you outline, you apply four simple lessons that are a high level guide how to write for a public audience. What are they and sort of how did you arrive at them?
- [04:07]
David Perry
Yeah, so I've got this book about how to do this work and it comes out of workshops I've been running for a long time. And so hopefully sort of the things I say are tested as good models for how to do this work. The whole book is about what sometimes we call hidden curriculum. It's the stuff that gets you in and out of writing less than the. There's a chapter on the writing itself but again kind of the. The thought process behind it that I'm trying to make that visible and the way I know how to do that best is to illustrate it through my own experiences. But to try to not say well I did it, you can do it too. But to say well I did it and here's what that means and here's how you might think about it generally. So the first one is that generally public writing moves very fast that most public writing by of the type I'm talking about, it doesn't happens in relationship to a news cycle. That news happens you as an expert, whether it's your academic topic or just something you care Deeply about, have a reaction. And you have to move quickly. You have to respond right away, because the news cycle moves on. So we're talking in early April. We just had the no Kings march. And I was saying to sociologists who are interested in writing about it, listen, the march was on a Saturday. You have until Tuesday to pitch. Here's why. And maybe not even pitch, but file. Here's why. Protests and public demonstrations matter. Here's what we know as sociologists. It's not a lot of days, but the good news is, and bad news, there's going to be another protest in May and another one in July. So if you miss this one, write it now, be ready to go the next time it happens. So. But these things move fast. Not all public writing has to move this fast. But the easiest way to get published is to already be published. And the easiest way to break through that paradox is to move quickly when news happens. So that's the first one. The second one is that when you work in public, you will lose control of your work, and you'll lose control in a way that is unpredictable. It can be wonderful. It can be terrible. It can be kind of. I don't really know what's happening. I wrote this thing. Is anybody reading it? But you lose control in a way that is not the same as when you do scholarship. And you can lose control very quickly. I had a plane detour from Dallas to Minneapolis. It landed in Des Moines because an engine went out. And I was standing there chatting with people while we were waiting to figure out what happened. And one of them had read my last column. That's a kind of loss of control. It's amazing. I mean, not, you know, it wasn't like then, you know, I had to sign an autograph, but she had read my column. It's just a random person in the line. That does not happen. As a medieval historian, so you lose control. It goes out in the world. The editor does things to it. The readers will have responses to it. And you have to be a little bit ready for that. You're not going to be able to be in charge. But then. So the last two things I have is write broadly and write anything. And what I mean by both of them is that a lot of people who want to do public scholarship have academic expertise and want to write from that. But about half the people I've worked with also have other things that they think about as a full human living in the world with ideas and experiences and. And. And academic training that makes them good at Thinking stuff and writing it down and you know, it. I'm not going to write. I'm not going to write any scholarship really now, but when I was a professor, I didn't write academic scholarship about Medicaid policy. I'm a medieval historian. But as a human living in a state where Medicaid policy is deeply shaping my and my son's experiences with. I have training to read documents and legislation and think about it, understand how policy impacts lives. I feel like it is totally appropriate for me to apply that and write about that in, you know, for cnn. It's a very different kind of thing. And so there's a kind of liberation. And that doesn't mean just make stuff up. But graduate school, and this is the last thing I'll say on this part, which I know is kind of a long answer, but graduate school teaches us to narrow. That is one of the things that, not inappropriately necessarily, it teaches us to think of ourselves as members of a field and then a subfield and maybe a sub subfield to define limits of our expertise in very narrow ways. And I want people who are thinking of taking the step into public work to radically reprogram their, Their. Their thoughts about themselves and what, what it's okay to do.
- [08:39]
Interviewer
Excellent. Thank you. Now this, your next chapter is on pitching. And I just got to say, like, as somebody who was in 2019 trying to figure out how to pitch and how to write, I wish I'd had this in front of me. I go back and read some of my earlier stuff and it's just, oh, well, no wonder nobody wanted to publish this.
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David Perry
I have those, too. I have those, too. Right.
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Interviewer
Every writer has that. But, you know, I guess for people who are interested, but, you know, especially if you're coming from an academic background, nobody's really told you what a pitch is or, you know, it's just this very inchoate kind of thing. What's your formula for a good pitch? What are the things you want? And then what are the things you were probably better leaving out?
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David Perry
Yeah, I'm going to start with that second part, because what happens to me all the time is there's someone who is. Who knows I'm interested in or off, because I've said so very loudly on social media, interested in helping people do this kind of work. And they'll send me a pitch and essentially it will say, this news has happened. I'm an expert. I would like to comment. And that is not a pitch. That's just not. That's not a pitch. That is a press release, if a journal, if you're trying to get a journalist to interview you and quote you. But if you want to be a writer, you have to have an argument, an argument that connects back to you in some capacity. You have to say everything that's relevant about you, except you have to do it in about six or seven short sentences. So there is a rhetorical challenge here. It's not a rhetorical challenge that we're unfamiliar with in, in kind, if not in specifics. And this is, you know, there's all of this, oh, academics can't write discourse out there. I think we're very good in general, the ones who at least bake it at learning how to write highly specific kinds of things that are weird kinds of things and we get good at them, like grant proposals where you have to, you know, in very limited numbers of words, you have to say, this is the most important project of all time or job cover letters or conference abstracts or whatever. And the pitch is one of these kinds of non public documents with very specific norms in which you want to place yourself on the other person's turf. You want to say, not aggressively, but to say, listen, I know I'm moving out of my context into your context, your context being the editor's context. Look, I've already thought about this. I will not waste your time. I will not turn in a 5,000 word draft for an 800 word piece. I will not turn in a piece that just sort of meanders through my thoughts rather than presenting a really structured essay that works within the formulas of the thing. So a pitch says, here's who I am and I know these things, whatever is relevant. And it's a little vague because if I'm writing about, as today, I'm writing about the history of the Crusades and Pete Hesketh. And so if I were pitching that to a new editor, I'm not. I'm pitching it to my usual editor. It's a different story. But a new editor, I would say, you know, I am a historian of the Crusades, but next week I hope to write about the Olmstead act and Olmstead implementation in the state of Minnesota. And if you don't know what that is, you're not alone. But it has to do with segregated or inclusive housing for people with disabilities. And nobody in that pitch cares that I'm a medieval historian. What matters is I'm an academic, I know things. And I'm the father of a boy with down syndrome and I write about Medicaid and disability policy. So it'd be a different second sentence. And that's the kind of thinking that one's really easy because one is the medieval history and one is housing policy. But it's not always that easy. But you have to think in a sophisticated way, what is it? And then you have to say, in this essay, I will argue, and I still often write those words, like, exactly those words, and then I fill in the blank. And if I can't fill in the blank, I am not ready to try to sell an essay. So it's that I am this person, I know these things, and I'm going to argue this about this story that people care about. Six sentences, seven sentences tops. I often think it is the most useful thing that I do in my workshops or with people who reach out to me. I think it's, I think it's the most useful thing in the book because, as you say, like, there are some models out there, but they're just not. People don't know. People don't know. And I hope I've shared something useful.
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Interviewer
No, and I think you have. You know, the, the best piece of advice, which unfortunately came like a year and a half into me starting to try to pitch people, was the best pitch is one that an editor can read on their phone while they're waiting for a cup of coffee. You know, and if it goes longer than that, you're competing with 90 other emails that they're probably going to read in lieu of yours.
- [13:28]
David Perry
So, yeah, and it's, it's, it's too bad. But also, like, they're just getting a lot of email, right? I mean, I, I, I quote, you mention, I quote my former editor at cnn, and I don't remember, I'd have to flip the page. But it was hundreds and hundreds of emails a day. And I get a lot of emails, but I don't get that many emails. And even at my local paper, it's still 20 or 30 pitches a day. Right. So it's just, you have to, you have to respect that they're busy and give them what they need really fast. And then if they're interested, they will ask you for more, and then you can have a more discursive conversation. But that first connection has to be really respectful to their time.
- [14:05]
Interviewer
It's a good rule. I like that. So then you've gotten the first pitch, somebody has expressed interest, what makes for a good essay, and how does it differ from academic writing?
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David Perry
I mean, it differs from academic writing in almost every way except that it's all words. And I guess that the goal is to educate. I think it's really important at the core that most academic writing, maybe all, I don't know, aspires towards being authoritative, to being the final or definitive or the authoritative word on whatever it's about, that it's really. And that it is as complete as possible. Now, no big academic project is ever fully complete, but as possible. As complete as possible. Right. I think public writing, especially short form public writing, the kind that I mostly do, should aspire to be iterative and that it should aspire to incrementally move understanding or action or policy or whatever. Whatever it is. There's different goals for different essays and I try to be really clear with myself. Anyway, what is the goal? Am I trying to persuade people who disagree with me? Am I trying to. To activate people who agree with me but don't know it? Am I trying to provide resources to people within my community, but who might not have the resources? What. Whatever I'm trying. Am I trying to take the inchoate thoughts of my community and make them, or just me, and make them collate so that people can grab onto them in a short. I don't know if koate's a word, but in a. You know, grab onto them in a. In a kind of a short way. But it is always incremental, it is always narrow. And then you write the next essay and then the next, and then the next and then the next. And that, you know, you. You take topics and you work them over time and, and to me, once you accept that it's incremental and that that is different than what we are trained to do in academia. A lot of the other kinds of secondary things you have to think through become much clearer. Quick pause. Something useful for you. Love fishing. TikTok isn't just for young people. It's full of real tips. Better knots, better baits, better catches. Quick videos from people who actually fish. Download TikTok now to realize the future America needs. We understand what's needed from us to face each threat head on. We've earned our place in the fight for our nation's future. We are Marines. We were made for this. I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine. Fifteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.
- [16:41]
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- [17:35]
Interviewer
Now this was another useful chapter because I think this is really hidden curriculum stuff, the sort of the business of being a writer. You know, how do you navigate pay? How do you navigate social media? How do you navigate the pitfalls of social media? I just threw three things at you, but could you break down some of that for our listeners?
- [17:53]
David Perry
I would love to. And as I think you know, one of my mantras is that in academia we don't talk enough about money. We don't talk enough about making a living, paying rent, paying bills, getting compensated for labor. The implications of not being compensated for labor when we work for free. What are the implications? I mean, all of these things. I just, it's a frustration for me and it is, I think, getting better in part because more and more academia has become more and more precarious, which then makes talking about rent more harder to not talk about rent. But I started doing public writing because I wanted to. But I really committed to it in part at a moment when I had two kids in childcare and I was working at again, a wonderful institution, but not a wealthy one at a pretty low salary in Chicago, not a cheap place to live, my wife finishing school. We needed income and I knew people who tended bar and I, you know, professors tend in bar. It does, right? I knew people who had all kinds of other secondary writing income streams, rather secondary income streams. And for me, writing was always part of once I started getting paid for it, it became really an important way to help cover childcare, then help work, work our way down from credit card debt from grad school and having babies and all, you know, so that these things really matter to me in a like I need, I need a few hundred extra dollars a month. Here's One way to get it. So the good news is that actually I think outlets in general are much more transparent about pay than they were 10 years ago. There's not a lot of good news, but I do think that's good news. Um, and partially because of being shamed on the Internet for not for trying to get free work. And then people would yell at them on the Internet. And, and, and so in general, places are better at being paid. You still sometimes have to ask to be paid. There is an assumption. So, you know, early I wrote 10 pieces for CNN and I just kept waiting for them to pay me, and they didn't. And then one day they asked me to write something when I was writing something else, and I said, okay, but can, you know, I have to put aside of this other work. Can you pay me? And they said, sure, 300 bucks an essay. But they did not. So $300, right. That's a, that's still kind of a standard, pretty good rate. 200 to $400 is what I experienced. I don't know what you get, but that's kind of, that's kind of the standard rate. Right. So it's, it's money. It's not, you know, quit your day job money, but it's, it's supplement. It's a side good side gig money. But, you know, they did not pay me $3,000 in back pay for the 10 essays they hadn't paid me for. Because, you know, they're CNN. They're also publishing CEOs, they're publishing senators, they are publishing senior faculty. They don't, if they don't have to pay, they're not going to pay. Once you ask to be put in that category, they're happy to do it. That's not always true. But in general, you, you know, in general, you should expect to be paid for your labor. And the time you get to ask that is after you're accepted, not before you're accepted. But you do get to ask it. And if they say no, sometimes it's okay to write for free. You get to make that decision. I have done it a few times, but I do think it is ethically important to ask to be compensated for writing, in part, just because, like, there are lots of other people out here trying to make a living doing it, and you can't. If you're providing free work, you're undercutting them. But. So that's one piece pay. You should be paid for it. You should not be paid for a lot. You will see people on the Internet say you should always try to negotiate a higher fee. That has not historically worked for me, that an outlet has a standard rate for freelancers and they pay me that rate and that's great. And then if I write for them for a while, sometimes I have asked for a raise, but like, I just haven't. I haven't been, oh, your standard rate's 200. Well, can you pay me 250? That just hasn't worked for me. But it does apparently work for other people, so good luck. But it hasn't worked for me. Social media. So it is helpful if you can build audience for your own work. There's a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of things written every day. We are in a hyper lexic and hyper scribal moment in human history with just tons of words being poured out on unprecedented levels. And if you can build at least a small audience to find your work and start to share it, then that will be helpful to you. It will help you professionally in terms of selling your work. But also just like, presumably you want to be read now, it's hard because social media keeps. Social media is the way to do that. But it keeps changing and people find different ways to build audiences. I had Twitter for a long time. Many people now use paid or unpaid or free newsletters. I'm very happy, as you know, because we chat there all the time on Blue Sky. Come say hi, everybody who listens to this podcast, you know, I'll say hi back. But there are, there are other spaces out there and social media is, is how you can start to build an audience. It only works, though, if you want to do it authentically and that you give 10 times more than you take. By which I mean you have to read other people's work and you have to share it. And not only do you have to read other people's work, you have to actually, genuinely want to. Like, you can't. You can fake it for a week, but you cannot fake it for the months or years it takes to really make connections so that people also authentically want to share your work. The good news is I love reading and I love essays and I love books. And so people sharing their essays or people or their books or people sharing work that they like from other people. And that, to me, is a gift. I get to wake up every morning and be told about interesting things to read from all over the world. Hallelujah. That's great. I love that. And then hopefully, because I love that that energy goes out in the world and people share my work. I can say that that has pretty much happened. But it didn't happen on day one. It happened over. Over a long period of time. The other thing, though, is that, and this is especially to academics, social media is not your classroom, which means you actually don't owe people on social media your attention. If I have a student who is upset at me, a student in my classroom, I actually feel like I owe them a lot. That doesn't mean that I let them abuse me or threaten me, but I do owe a student. The social contract between teacher and student is a really thick one. The social contract between poster and responder is a really thin one, if there's one at all. And so you just don't have to sit there online and let people yell at you. You don't have to read the comments. Anyone who tells you that you have to read the comments, ethically, that is wrong. You do not have to read your replies. You don't have to be online at all. There are professional reasons to do it, but I just don't. There used to be kind of a message that, well, ethically, if you're going to write something, you then have to engage with readers. You don't. You can. And good faith readers, even good faith critics, I love good faith critics. But you, it is not, it is not your classroom. You do not owe people that kind of attention. And it can be really damaging to you if you give too much.
- [25:17]
Interviewer
Thank you for calling that out because I feel like I've seen people get in trouble when a piece that they've written is not received in a way that's, you know, with the reception to. It is not happy. And then they try to defend it and wind up getting just eaten alive by.
- [25:34]
David Perry
Log off the Internet when things go badly, log off and then think about it. And then if things are really bad, ask a friend to log on for you and delete posts. And, you know, and sometimes it's just because you've messed up. I have messed up plenty. Sometimes it's because you're on Twitter in 2018 and the Nazis have discovered you're Jewish. I'm. I'm Jewish and. But I don't have a Jewish last name. As, as the Nazis understand it, so they don't know it first and then they discover it and then it's really bad. And then I, then I log off and I say to a friend, hey, can you log on and clean up my mentions? Because I don't want to see this stuff. And then they do log off. It's you can always delete posts. You can always log off. People should log off more often.
- [26:15]
Interviewer
The Internet has a short attention span and if you don't try to make yourself into the main character, it will be forgotten pretty quickly. Generally it's when people double down that it goes really ugly. Well, that's enough on social media this. So the sort of. The presumptive point of this book is that you're sort of starting with opinion essays because that's a really easy end of the pool to get into.
- [26:40]
David Perry
Yeah, and let me, let me just jump in on that really quickly because I think people haven't thought about it. There is a pre existing infrastructure in opinion and in a few other spaces to find new writers if you want to cover, I don't know, local sports teams. There is no infrastructure at your local paper for you to get in the press box and watch the twins and write a commentary on what happened in the ball game. That infrastructure does not exist for you. But if you have an opinion essay, there is already an editor, there is an inbox, there is a context in which you can jump in. There's a few other spaces like that and some of them are vanishing like book reviews, but you know, book reviews. There is a space for outsiders to pitch and it is worth trying to be to work with that infrastructure rather than against it. So I just, you know, thinking about what does it look like from inside the media outlet? Where is their space where they're thinking, can I find a new writer? Do I want to find a new writer? Is really worth your time trying to think through. So that's why I start with these kind of short form opinion essays.
- [27:47]
Interviewer
And that makes sense. And that's actually, I hadn't explicitly thought in those terms, but you're right, that's where the on ramp is if you're a new writer or the easiest one. But there are other kinds of writing out there and you have a chapter sort of breaking down what those are. And I think it's really useful to enumerate those because at least for myself, I didn't think of them as quite as discreetly as I should have when I was starting out. So maybe walk through what some of those are for listeners.
- [28:14]
David Perry
I'm seeing if I put a list in my table of contents with all of them. I did with some of them. So you know, I just trying to make sure I don't skip them. What I. A lot of people I work with want to get into criticism, movies, films, music. That is A space. Right. And that is a different space. And some of it can be very literary, some of it can be very utilitarian, sort of more utilitarian reviews. I spent the years writing about Game of Thrones for Vice. I had many things to say about Game of Thrones, but also, I'm a medievalist. But also it was very popular and they wanted Game of Thrones content. And I needed, again, I needed to, I think, by that point to pay off accumulated credit card debt in any way that I could. Right. So I'm just, just work, just doing utilitarian. But there are people who write beautiful, you know, London Review of Books style criticism, that's another. That is, that's something I see a lot of people wanting to move into to. There's the whole world of what I still call blogging. But what I mean is writing regular content every day, every week, every month, quarterly, and publishing it on a platform that you control. Now the problem is that you have to do 100% of the work of building audience. When I write for my local paper, the Star Tribune, they have a subscriber base. They have their own social media channels. They have people who literally get it still in their house. They've turned, you know, the last page of the front section and there's an opinion essay I wrote. Right. I don't, I didn't have to do that work. But the great thing about blogging is that you do control it. And there's, you know, newsletters still people on. I mean, I still have WordPress, whatever, and I think a lot of podcasting works like that too, that, that you're producing regular content and uploading it onto a platform that you control. My tip about that is that the work itself has to be worthwhile. The writing has to be worthwhile. If you want to write a blog, it can't be. And then I'll get lots of readers and that will feel great because the odds are you won't. And certainly the time to get to lots of readers will be long. And so the writing itself, the thought processing, the putting the words down has to feed you, at least metaphorically, if not actually itself. Long form nonfiction, you know, literary nonfiction. I quote my friend Irina Dumatrescu in, in. In that because I have written many long form literary nonfiction essays and the number that I have sold successfully is zero. Not, not one out of a hundred or one out of ten or one out of twenty, it is zero. I have sold zero of these essays. I think some of them are pretty good, but I have failed to sell them, but other people have succeeded in selling them. And they do write really beautifully. So I. I reached out to one to tell me, you know, what is the hidden curriculum there? And you can, you know, you can check that out, but that's another one. Not trade books. And there's a lot of. There's so much written about how to write a nonfiction trade book, not just for academics, but in general, how to write memoir, how to write, you know, whatever nonfiction trade books are out there that I really give that pretty short shrift. But on purpose, because I wanted this to be a short book. I actually was just sent, and I'm doing an event with Take it from Me by Alia Hannah Habib, who is a big time literary agent who just wrote about how to build nonfiction writing careers. But she's really focused on the book robot. And that just came out like January. There'll be another one in the summer. I think some of these books are really good. I think this one's really good. I think some of them are less good at communicating to academics rather than communicating to people in the general public who want to be writers, which is a different kind of pool. But literary, you know, trade nonfiction books. That is a different kind of thing with a whole different hidden curriculum, like how to write a nonfiction book proposal, which is a weird genre. You can move on to, you know, journalism, by which I mean reported pieces, where instead of writing an opinion essay, you do reporting, you go into the field, you talk to people, you study data, you off, you put out freedom of information requests, and you work with that kind of information. There is a room for the reported feature, even the opinion driven feature out there. It's just hard as a first step. But I've done a lot of them. Now, if you think about essays in the Atlantic are essays in the Nation. If you read through them, you'll see some of them are just people who know stuff talking about it, and some of them are people who know stuff but have also done reporting. And that the, you know, the transition. The transition is pretty easy. So those are, I mean, not, I don't know, pretty easy. The transition is doable. There is a transition you can make there. You do not need a journalism degree to do journalism, but you do, again, have to think about the context you're moving into and what are the norms of that context and how can you operate ethically and effectively and comfortably within those norms. You need to learn the difference between on background and off the record and how that works. You need to know, am I, you know, what are the rules for recording conversations in this state or that state? There are things you have to learn. They're not hard to learn, but they're not, you know, 10 years of study to learn, but they are things you have to learn. They're someone else's expertise. And fortunately it's out there. You can go learn it, but you do have to do that. So those are some of the different kinds of writing that some of which I've moved into, many of which I've seen people or even helped people move into. Beautiful K Pop Demon Hunters, Haja Boy's Breakfast Meal and Hunt Tricks Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.
- [33:59]
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It is an honor to share.
- [34:01]
David Perry
No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really, stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. Ba da ba ba ba.
- [34:13]
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David Perry
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- [35:00]
Interviewer
So this was a question that I've been thinking a lot about, so I wanted to get your sort of read on it. Having written this book, where does academic writing and preparation help somebody to write this way? You know, for the public? And where is it also a hindrance? I'm sort of, I'm curious, you know, what are the benefits of academic preparation? What are the costs?
- [35:20]
David Perry
I mean, I think the costs is that again, I mean, I said that's a little bit. The biggest cost is the way that we narrow so that, you know, I had a whole cycle in 2013. I really opened the book with it and writing about the 13th century and about the retirement of Pope Saint Celestine the Fifth, and the retirement of Pope Benedict in 2013. And then this new Pope Francis, who named himself after Francis of assisi, again a 13th century saint. And you know, I really am a 13th century Italianist, but if I was in a company of 13th century Italianists, I would say I work on Venice and really only in the first 20, 30 years of the 13th century. And that is nonsense. Like, you know, are there people who know more about St. Francis than me? Absolutely. But I can read their books and I'm, I'm really pretty good compared to almost all other humans on 13th century Italy. So it's okay. But my academic training tells me not to do that. And you have to again, you have to deprogram yourself. The real space that I think then first of all, it helps us with that problem of narrowness, but also with voice that academic training gives us is in the classroom that our teaching experience is where we go into a room. Often a physical, usually a physical room, but not always we go into a space. We have all these constraints in the classroom, right. The class meets for a set period of time, 9 o' clock to 9, 50, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So you have 50 minutes three days a week. That is a constraint. You have a physical room with people in it or not. That's a kind of constraint. Those people have a degree of interest in preparation that may vary and it may be none, but usually it's at least some. Some interest, some preparation. But, you know, we all know the difference between teaching the same topic, as we all hypothetically know, to a general survey, to an upper division seminar in our major, to a graduate class that, you know, or. And at least we've been, and I am only now teaching two graduate students for the first time in my life independently. I've never done that. But I was a graduate student, so I know what graduate student classes are like compared to freshman classes. Right. Those constraints are a lot to me. Like writing UK, you have 800 words instead of 50 minutes. But it's an analogous constraint. I have to figure out this thing I care about a lot. Like, I don't know, the conversion of Constantine to Christianity. That's a huge topic. But I really only have Monday morning in February to cover that because then I got to move on to the sack of Rome. Right. Like, I really don't have more than 50 minutes. So what are the three important things I'm going to say about it? What are the, the 10 you know the 10 pages I'm going to ask students to read out of the thousands they could read? What am I going to try to say to make it interesting to them and tell them why this stuff matters? That kind of thought process is so analogous to the public writing, in part because it starts for real. If you. If you're good, if. And I'm not always good, but I think some days I'm a really good teacher. It starts with genuine respect for your audience to think, all right, what does this look like? Yeah, it would be nice if these freshmen had already spent 10 years learning Latin and cared deeply about 4th century heresies. But they don't, and I shouldn't expect them to. So how am I going to get to them and make them understand why this stuff is interesting? You start where they are. That is the attitude I try to have towards my readers as well. And again, I'm writing about the Crusades right now. I'm writing about historical memory. I'm writing about violence. I can't assume they already care about this stuff. I have to genuinely think, all right, I'm going to get them. But I only have 900 words because my editor likes me, but she'd rather it was 700 words. But I can stretch it to nine, but I don't have 1200 words. So I have to work within this constraint. And I just think teaching, the preparation to teach and the preparation to do this work are so closely analogous that I feel lucky I spent all those years in the classroom.
- [39:34]
Interviewer
That's an interesting thought. I hadn't actually thought about that own connection between teaching and writing there. So thank you for that. That's illuminating.
- [39:41]
David Perry
It works for me. I don't know if it works for everyone, but it really works for me because. And also part of what we're dealing with in this topic is like, academic value. We could say academic snobbishness. But I'd rather think, what. What do academics value? And they generally don't value short form writing. But at least in theory, and I hope in practice, we value teaching. We recognize teaching and the kind of work you have to do to simplify, but simplify ethically and engagingly in a classroom as a valorized thing that academics do. And I really feel like. So that's part of my. My analogy, I think, is both true, but also strategic, saying, hey, we value this one thing. Maybe we could value this other thing as well.
- [40:27]
Interviewer
Yeah, yeah, it's simplification or distillation, which could be fiendishly difficult to actually get the Simplest, most distilled version of an idea in front of somebody who's just never had to consume it before. So you have to prepare it for them. I'm curious, you know, because I think about this, I have my own list of where I think scholarly writing can just be really dysfunctional. And some things I think people would have just agree with me on. Peer review is really slow. Or some things that they might completely disagree with me on. We're not talking about me, though. I'm curious, from your perspective, are there things that scholarly writing can take away from sort of short form writing, writing for public audiences that would enhance scholarly or academic writing without sort of subtracting something away or subtracting too much away?
- [41:19]
David Perry
Yeah, and I always like to be really clear that I get really mad when people try to say public writing is good and scholarly writing is bad, which I know you're not doing. I get really angry about it. I get really angry if someone tries to use my work to contrast to specialized scholarship, because I've also written specialized scholarship, and I think it's good. You know, my. My. This work in public spaces has given me such a respect for genre, such a respect for thinking about what is the work that I want a piece of writing to do and what is the optimal way to do that work? And is it in short writing? Is it in longer writing? Is it in iterative writing? Is it in a popular book? Is it in a monograph? What is, you know, a scholarly monograph? What is the work that I want to accomplish with a piece of writing? And then what are the best forms in which to do that? That is not something I thought about in those ways. When I wrote my university. I only. I've only written one university press monograph, but I did write one. I was not thinking in that way of what is the actual work I want this to do. And when I go back and look at it, there are lots of. I think there are lots of good things in that book, but there's definitely places I could have written it with more precision about, hey, I know who the audience is. And in some ways I know who the audience is for that book so much better than I know who the audience is for my column in the local paper, let alone on something like CNN or, you know, some. Some big outlet. I know. I know who the thousand people are who might be interested in reading a chapter of that book. A thousand people is a big number. I know the hundred people are. Right? I know them. So I can really think what is the work that I want to do with these things I know in that context and that, that it helps cut away from. Well, I'm just going to put all the stuff I've learned on a page rather than doing something that is really argument driven and functional in scholarly work. I also do think though that like having been so shaped by thinking about genre and format, I have even more respect for specialized scholarship that I. That as. As a. As a way of doing things that other kinds of writing can't do, ways of working very slowly ways of having incredibly dense footnotes that you just can't have a relationship to your sources like that in public work that you can in scholarship and being transparent about, you know, every, every step along the way to build a case, you know, with, with thousands maybe of footnotes with, in my case, you know, untransliterated Latin, untranslated Latin in the footnotes so you can see what I did. And yeah, I had a German reviewer who said, you know, on page 130 in footnote 297, I really think David mistranslated some Latin. And that didn't make my day, but I probably did mistranslate the Latin. And that hard. That, that kind of process of, of sharing everything you've done, I think is really special and we need to defend it. And part of what I hope I do with my public work is defend not it's not private work, but defend specialized scholarship intended at. At smaller internal audiences as something that is really valuable and really necessary.
- [44:40]
Interviewer
And then my second to last question, you know, we're living in a poly crisis. I think that term is getting thrown around a lot. I certainly feel it every day when I get out of bed. What's the value of public scholarship right now, especially contrasted against everything that's going on? Why does it matter beyond I like sitting down with the computer and writing because it's fun and I get a little bit of money out of it.
- [45:03]
David Perry
Yeah. And I don't know if it is fun, but it is. It is something I seem to not, I should say I'm dyslexic. My grad school experiences were terrible. I collected incompletes one after another. I'm not quite sure how I made it through. I now work with some of my grad professors and I was joking with one about how she gave me a B plus, which is not a good grad school grade. She's like, no one thought. Everyone thought you were smart, David. It's just the paper wasn't that great. I like, I know didn't know how to write. You know, it's fine now, but. And so I came to writing late. I came to loving writing late, in my late 30s, early 40s, really is when I started doing it. I'm 52 now. The impact is real again. And it helps if you remember that one essay isn't going to change the world. And that's not the function of the essay. One essay is iterative. The impact is real, and you get to hear about it sometimes you don't get to hear about it most of the time, but you get to really communicate with audiences in a way that I have said. The reader isn't your student. But it does have an impact sometimes, like teaching, where you hear 10 years later from a student about how something you taught really shaped how they. What they do now or what they remember. The impact of this kind of work is real. Putting work in public matters, there is going to be. When news happens. In particular, there is going to be commentary. And it is my mission for that commentary to be by people who really know things, rather than by people who have. Takes. Takes, by people who really know things. It's fine. That's part of. That's the gig. But, like, I just think it's not, you know, I'm not like. And then the world is fixed, but that when news happens, when things happen, there is commentary. And we need to have informed commentary by people who have thought deeply about things and then. And then figured out how to communicate it. I just. I just think that's a fundamental social good. And I say in the first part of my book, like, this is a book about the how, not the why. And again, it's because I feel there's lots and lots of writing about why public scholarship matters, why public humanities or public intellectuals. I mean, there's endless numbers of essays and books, many of them which are wonderful, about why it matters. And so I'm really interested in, okay, here's how you do it. But there is a why. And I really do think that it's fundamentally a social good good. And that at our best, we can. We can really shift things, mostly in small ways. Mostly it's, oh, I didn't know that. Oh, I never really thought about the fact that there's a history behind Irish protest music that speaks to today. I never, you know, I say something like the Olmstead act, and a reader who's been reading me for medieval history suddenly knows a little something about disability policy and vice versa. Um, you know, I. You. When you write, and then sometimes it's it's much, much smaller than that. And I'm giving away sort of the last, the last paragraph of my book. But that's okay. I'm not really into spoilers. You know, I wrote, I, I started being suicidal at age 9. Sorry to get heavy suddenly, but it's true. I started going into treatment at age 44. That's a pretty big gap. I started writing about it around then, trying to figure out, well, you know, I'm pretty smart guy, I'm well educated, I'm a feminist, I've been writing about disability, and yet I never took care of myself for all these years. And then someone writes back and says, hey, me neither. You going into therapy? I'm going to start trying that too. So I can't think of a more important impact. So sometimes it's big. Like, let's share big policy ideas. Let's make sure people understand the history or the science or the sociology or whatever it is, and that really matters. And I try to do that a lot. But also just writing something and helping someone rethink what they're doing and maybe seeking help or seeking new solutions. If you do that once in a lifetime, it's pretty good, I'd say.
- [49:07]
Interviewer
So thank you for sharing that. I think it's a good place to end on with this book. You are a person who's always doing a lot of things, so this might, might be a tricky one. What are you working on next?
- [49:18]
David Perry
Yeah, so I, after the last presidential election, I, I thought, what can I do that's useful? What can I do that is doable as opposed to trying to do all the things? And I decided I would try to write locally, try to write in Minnesota, in the Twin Cities where I live. And so I started writing for the Star Tribune. They did not pay me for my first essay. That is an example of deciding to write for free. They do pay me now and I have now written, I don't know, I think I wrote maybe 12, 13 pieces last year and now I'm writing a couple a month. They actually put me on, on, on for the year contract as a contributor, sort of a formal contributing columnist on the masthead. Maybe I'll stay, maybe I won't. But I'm really trying to write in my community and be able to do that kind of iterative writing, but in a publication so that instead of having each essay be a standalone thing, I can build over the course of the year saying, remember when I talked about this policy? Well, now it's July and we're doing this thing or whatever, whatever the story is that I want to follow. So that's one of my big projects. And then I am writing a book. I have sold another book and it is going slowly in part because of family health issues. But I'm writing a book about men and masculinity, trying to add more, deeper history to this endless infuriating discourse around the crisis of men, the male loneliness epidemic, the crisis of masculinity. Um, and it's one of those things where, like, I know the scholarship and everyone who knows the scholarship knows what I'm going to say already, but it turns out that there are lots of people who don't already know that. So I'm, I'm trying to write a short but historically long reaching history about the crisis of masculinity and, and ways people have historically found their way out of it. So, you know, stay tuned. It's not coming soon to a bookshelf near you, but I am hoping it's. It's coming, it's coming, but it's, it's a, it's a tough, it's a tough one.
- [51:28]
Interviewer
That's a, that's a pretty big sandwich to take a bite out of. So understandable on that one. Thank you so much for talking to us today, David. I really appreciate it.
- [51:36]
David Perry
It's just a del.