This semester I have been inundated with requests to speak at different venues about JFK because of the upcoming 50th anniversary of his assasination. Just this week I was asked to write an opinion piece for the Houston Chronicle's Op-ed page and next week I will be on the Travis Smiley radio show to talk about Kennedy and civil rights. Most of this is a result of having written a book on JFK and Mexican Americans years ago.
When the book first came out it was received well by reviewers and a number of the top people in my field but the larger response was almost non-existent. Now, almost 12 years later it is selling briskly and I'm getting all kinds of call for interviews and I even have a well-paid speaking engagement at the University of Houston this month to talk on Kennedy. When asked in a radio program earlier this week whether writing academic book "pays", I had to say yes, but usually not with large royalty checks, but in opportunities to engage the public, to give presentations, get promotion and tenure, and receive research grants. Writing in the academy is all about how it helps us in the classroom and in engaging the larger public.
When my book When Mexicans Could Play Ball comes out in January the focus of my lectures and presentations will be basketball, sports and class/race & ethnicity. Even though I mostly write about civil rights and politics, it is in this book that all the things I've written and experienced came together to inform a story. I'm simply doing what my first writing teacher told me and a lot of other disinterested Chicanitos in class, "write about things you know". Having been a coach for several church basketball teams, a sports writer for a couple of years, having attended the same school and lived in the same barrios as the basketball players, and writting a lot on race, class and culture, helped me to write the story.
The thing I most liked about this project was the ability to use all the skills I could muster from both fiction and nonfiction writing. My drama classes on character development and plot, my creative nonfiction training on essayish imagery, and my sports journalism all came into play. I also used a bit of material culture analysis. I don't know that it is a great work but it is one of the best that I have done. More importantly, it taught me how to expand boundaries while maintaining the integrity of the historical discipline.
As I pick up from where I left off last year on one of my novels I know that I will be using a lot of historical analysis and "research" to move the story along. More than a decade before the book The Road came out I was experimenting with dialogue as storytelling. The ability to write dialogue comes from my self-taught skill of playwriting. Having written books that take different approaches makes me more confident in approaching any topic that interests me. I've come to realize that most scholars who are talented but not too productive are those who struggle to say what they really want to say. Most think it is a theoretical or methodological problem, but usually it is because they have not honed their skills enough to have their words catch up to their thoughts.
Earlier this week I was on the BYU-Radio program "This Will Take a While" with Dean Dunkin and we spoke on writing history and of course we wandered off to all the peripheral topics that come with such a discussion. I enjoyed it because it is not often that I get to talk about the writing process in any profound way, though I try in several of my history classes that focus on producing a "big paper". Most of the time, however, students are uninterested in learning skills beyond those absolutely necessary to write the final paper. And of course there is rarely time to explore all aspects of writing. I have discovered, and re-affirmed it again during the interview, that when we talk about writing we often learn something about our own writing and about the process itself.
While I planned to be creative and expansive in writing my biography on Octavio Romano I came out of the interview even more convinced that there are still other approaches that I can use to tell a better story. At the same time, I am more committed to not blurring the lines between scholarship and fiction, or better put to not let creativity become the story. All these writing techniques are simply a way to understand and to export knowledge more efficiently to the reader. It is not about creating imagery for the sake of selling a book or getting a prize or showing off my skills as a writer or historian.
I take seriously my responsibilities and especially so today when too many scholars are writing fiction with footnotes. I have seen some young scholars try to write work that can be appealing to a larger audience and they'll use some literary styles but most are not good enough at them to know when they cross boundaries. The fact that history is not a science per se and that often fiction can cover ground that documents or oral history can't does not justify making assumptions that are based simply on conjecture. As one article published said almost twenty years ago, historians are coming back to the narrative "but can they write?". In every academic or writing career, tiime will tell.
