Kate Carpenter: Hey there.

This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history, and I'm your host, Kate Carpenter.

This is the first episode of 2026, which means that we are at the beginning of the fifth season of this show.

That is a lot of great conversations about writing history, and I want to thank you for being here for them.

There are lots more to come this year.

First up, in this episode, I'm talking with Dr.

Jeff Roche, author of the new book, The

Conservative Frontier: Texas and The Origins of the New Right.

Jeff Roche: It's a pleasure to be here.

I'm a big fan.

Kate Carpenter: Jeff is a professor of history at the College of Wooster in Ohio.

Along with his new book, he is the author of Restructured Resistance: The Sibley Commission and the Politics of Desegregation in Georgia, and the editor of two additional books.

I'll confess to you that I was not entirely sure about this book when the press first reached out to tell me about it, but it blew me away.

The history is fascinating, but even more, Jeff's writing is lively, smart, often funny.

I was excited to get to ask him about how the book came together and how he has developed such an engaging writing voice.

You'll even learn why he considered 90s hip hop and Texas country music to be essential to his writing process.

Here's my conversation with Dr.

Jeff Roche.

Jeff Roche: I was a, I took a long time to get through college.

I was on the 11 year plan with six years in the middle there where I was having fun.

But I started back to college in early 90s, and went straight from BA to MA, and that was my first real experience with having my writing assessed as writing.

Very often, as we know, most times undergraduate writing is being assessed primarily is, is, can you demonstrate that you've done the assignment, that you understand the material?

So, but when you get to, when you get to graduate school, it's, it's being assessed as writing, and does it work?

Is it effective?

So that was a big, big moment for me, and I took it very, very seriously.

I'd always been interested in writing as a means of expression, so I had a I had a couple of really, really good professors at Georgia State, where I got my MA, that really helped, and I ended up actually publishing my master's thesis as a monograph as a result of that.

No one, no one ever told me, I was first for my family to go to college.

So there's a lot of stuff that I didn't really know or understand.

No one told me how long an MA thesis was supposed to be.

Mine was 322 pages.

Kate Carpenter: Wow, yeah, I bet your advisorwas very excited about that.

Jeff Roche: He never said anything different.

He just let me go.

So I didn't know I like I said, I didn't know any better.

I had a really good time with it, and the results worked out well.

So then, when I got to my PhD program, I came under the tutelage of David Farber, who's this magnificent American historian who is just an absolutely excellent writer.

And over working with him in various various projects and things, he really helped me become a much, much better writer.

And since then, it's been, I've edited two volumes.

And I think editing other people's work, especially other professionals' work, is a fantastic way to discover different forms of writing, and the editorial process really helps you become a better writer, I think, as well.

And then I did this thing.

Kate Carpenter: Well, let me ask you some nosy questions about your writing.

When and where do you like to write?

Jeff Roche: I like to write at home.

I have an office, like a lot of people, I built out a home office during COVID.

So I work there.

I can do sort of grunt work, processing notes or taking notes, kind of anywhere, but when it comes to writing, home.

And then on Fridays, so I've set up a schedule where Fridays are, are sacrosanct, and Monday to Wednesday mornings.

So I've got this, you know, nice, 15, 18-hour block a week as a bare minimum.

Kate Carpenter: Do you set goals for yourself in that time?

Jeff Roche: No, not really.

The process that I use for writing is, is one that I can get done.

I can get done in a matter of in a matter of hours, and just sort of move forward.

But I'm I'm really fairly productive on those days.

Kate Carpenter: How do you like to organize yourself?

Jeff Roche: Organize myself or the work?

Kate Carpenter: Both.

Jeff Roche: So the office is usually very neat and and tidy when I start each day, not necessarily by the end of the day.

And everything on my computer is very organized.

I have to, I'm a I'm a collector.

So for the for The Conservative Frontier, for example, I got counted a couple days ago in prep for this interview.

I have 7000 separate things in the Dropbox folder of this.

Kate Carpenter: So you like Dropbox for keeping it all?

Jeff Roche: Oh, yeah, you want to hear the story?

Kate Carpenter: Sure, I never say no to a story.

Jeff Roche: So when I was working on my master's thesis, I worked at a restaurant, they did, as a bartender.

We were about to open.

It's called Veni Vidi Vici.

And the big thing about Veni Vidi Vici was we roasted a whole pig over in the middle of the restaurant each day, porcetto rostito was a specialty of the house.

And we were, I don't know, three or four days away from being open, and I would come straight from class to work, and I had my master's thesis on three and a half inch floppy disks that I kept in my backpack, the only copy.

And I'd stash my backpack in my locker, and we were across the street.

Oh, and it, And then the fire alarms were off, and the restaurant filled with smoke, and I get across the street, and I realized that the only copy of my master's thesis was in this backpack, which is in this locker, and I literally ran back into the building, and I'm sitting there at my locker, opening my locker, when the firemen showed up and they come into the smoke rooms, like I just got to get this.

And since then, I've been very, very careful in making sure that I don't keep anything on discs, and now I don't keep anything on my actual computer.

It's all stored off site, where I can always find it and get to it.

So yes, I like Dropbox.

Kate Carpenter: I'm glad that the floppies survive.

Jeff Roche: And it turned out it was just we roasted pigs and the suet had got into the chimney, and it was the suet in the chimney that it caught fired, not the actual restaurant.

Kate Carpenter: Where in the research process do you like to start writing?

Jeff Roche: So I start during note taking.

When I'm looking at any any document, whether it be a primary source or secondary source, anything that I'm doing for research, I take my notes in complete sentences for lots of different reasons, one of which, and this has happened to all of us.

You'll go back and look at notes that you took six weeks earlier and what at the time made perfect sense.

You go back six weeks later, and it just makes no sense at all.

So here was here's a piece of data.

Here was a thing that you found literally noteworthy, and it's become worthless because you don't know what it means any longer.

So I found that that writing these out in complete sentences really helps me clarify exactly what, forces me to clarify exactly what I'm thinking in that moment.

So, and I'm writing, and then when it comes time to sort of process those notes and organize them, the initial idea has already been written down.

So, and I'm trying to write with clarity as I do that, so it's, there's never sort of a moment where, oh, today I'm gonna start writing.

It's always, how am I gonna organize this data that I've already processed in these complete senses into something that resembles more than just a single thought?

Kate Carpenter: What does that conversion process look like?

Do you at some point outline or just start diving in.

Jeff Roche: So again, I'm a collector.

Notes are one of the things that I collect.

So the process is, I actually teach this to my students.

Once I've gotten several, 100 notes, let's say, from from a bunch of different kinds of sources, what I'll do is I will make sure that each of those notes has some kind of the notation so I know exactly where I got it.

Because again, if you have, how many times have we taken a note, forgot to put the source there, and then suddenly this fantastic quote is lost into the ether.

So take all of those and I just dump them into a massive Word file.

It'll be 60, 70 pages long, and that just go through.

And what I've noticed is, and I think we all do this, human beings work in patterns.

Even if it's happening at some subconscious level, we're developing the things that we identify as noteworthy.

Something's happening at, our brain is filtering what we think is important, what's not important.

So what I notice is, I go through these notes from dozens of separate sources, I'll notice the patterns start to emerge.

And once I see the patterns, what I'll do is I'll give them like an alphanumeric code, and then I'll go back and each one of those notes that has a, you know, 1A, I will put a little 1A at the beginning, and then I can use the sort feature in Word, and then all of those notes scattered across dozens, hundreds of different sources will suddenly all be grouped together.

Grouped together under some thing, some theme or moment, story that I want to tell, and they're all grouped there together.

So that's the very, very rough origins of an outlet.

It starts with those those patterns, recognizing those patterns, and grouping them together.

And then from there, once you've got them all, you can fine tune it a little bit more, and soon enough, you've got rough paragraphs emerging, and then you can merge those rough sections.

So it's like that.

Kate Carpenter: Cool.

Jeff Roche: Time consuming.

Kate Carpenter: But I like it.

I've never heard anyone describe a process like that, and it sounds really helpful.

What does your revision process look like?

Jeff Roche: That's where the fun, that's where the fun starts.

So the old story, the Michelangelo and the elephant, right?

The I'm going to chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.

So once I've got a document or manuscript or a chapter or section of a chapter into something that resembles a draft.

We're not even at a rough draft stage yet.

We're just, we're just sort of at a draft.

Then it's time to go through and clean it up a little bit.

And once it's once it's getting clean, that's when I sort of reopen the research.

What gaps are missing and what details can I add to this?

Once, once I know this, the setting, and once I know who's where, I can go back and do a little bit more research into into those people and find the, you know, the sort of factual information that fleshes stuff out so they're not, they're a little bit more than just two dimensional creatures on a page.

They can, you know, become more fully functioning humans operating in a particular plane.

Kate Carpenter: Once you get that material then incorporated, is there another round of revision?

Jeff Roche: Oh yeah.

So this book, Conservative Frontier, originally had 18 short chapters, and they were all around 11,000 to 12,000 words.

So I cut two altogether, and then I took all the rest, and then started slashing, just cutting because I wanted every one of them to be be between 90, 9500 words.

So that's the last sort of stage.

That's what all the decisions that you've been putting off to that moment.

Do you include this?

Do not this?

Do not include this?

That's what those decisions are made.

That's when a lot of prepositional phrasing comes out.

That's when, you know, have overly descriptive transitions come out.

That's when a lot of exposition comes out and and that's, once I get there, I felt, once I get to that stage, I'm feeling pretty good about it.

Kate Carpenter: You mentioned earlier that you feel like editing other people has really contributed to how you think about writing.

What kinds of things does it make you think about?

Jeff Roche: Pretty much every element of the work.

So we did, David Farber and I did a book called The Conservative Sixties, and I did a book called The Political Culture of the New West, and you're bringing in 10, 12 other voices.

You know, other other scholars have different interests and have a different style.

As an editor, I always what I wanted to do with their work was help them express themselves as clearly and convincingly in their voice as I could.

So I treat each one of them, you know, very individual.

And you have to be really, you have to be very political, not political, that's not the right word.

You have to be, you have to sometimes put the velvet glove inside the steel fistor whatever.

I can't remember the phrase.

Have to tell people you want them to do something that they've done differently, but in but in a way that helps them be excited about that process.

And once you do that enough, and then suddenly I need to apply the same kind of rigor to my own book.

So it's just helping me make sure that I'm as clear and as convincing, and I'm concise as I can be in my own writing, by helping other people do that, and it's very it's rewarding.

Kate Carpenter: As I understand it, a Conservative Frontier emerged from your dissertation, which, or at least it maybe originated in your dissertation, maybe, is the right word.

Jeff Roche: I like the originated.

It's probably the better word.

Kate Carpenter: Yeah, and you, not not to age you, but you defended your dissertation more than 20 years ago.

Jeff Roche: 25 years ago, yeah.

Kate Carpenter: I'm curious what that process looked like of working on this book over the course of two decades.

How do you think it was different than it would have been 20 years ago?

Jeff Roche: The dissertation was not particularly good back then.

It was kind of crappy.

I was married, had, I had a child, and I had to get it done and I had to get it defended.

So I did those two things.

I got it done and I got it defended.

And I knew that I had a luxury of time, and you know, because I already had a book out.

And by this point, David Farber and I were in the midst of putting this edited volume, so there's a little pressure off, which may have led to the longer delay.

And once it was done, I didn't even look at it for a decade.

You know, I did the Conservative 60s book, and I did the Political Culture of the New West book, and then I then I went back to it, and the original one was really focused in on the 60s, because that's kind of I was, you know, David Farber was history in the '60s, and I was interested in '60s conservatism in graduate school and in the interim between sort of the late '90s and the early 20 teens or 2010s we had, as a field, political historians, to begin moving the conservative movement back even further.

So when we came out with the with the 60s, that was, oh my gosh, the 60s were conservative, and that was that was a big thing in 2001 or 2000, but eight years later, that was not necessarily the case.

So I was interested in pushing it the narrative further back.

The other problem that I had with the dissertation was I didn't get far enough back to understand to really answer the central question, which is, how did the people of this part of the world come to their politics, their political ideology, how did they become so conservative, and why this one kind of conservatism dominated there?

Because I'd started it too late.

So one of the things I did was go much further back and bring it and start back there and bring it forward, rather than starting with, say, Goldwater and moving backwards.

That was one of the biggest philosophical changes.

The other major difference is technological, just, access.

I've always been fairly tech forward, and first adopting, I was writing HTML in 1995.

I'd always been, you know, keeping up with the newer developments.

And when I came back to doing original research again, 2010, 2011 when I came back to the book, there was just, there had been an explosion of material that just continues.

Archives were put, they were digitizing sources and putting them online.

Newspapers, Google had done the newspaper project that ended up being newspaper.com and newspaperarchive.com.

JSTOR, JSTOR had emerged, at that time so suddenly, just the access to information, and I dived.

I dived right in.

I loved it.

I just had an absolute blast going through and exploring not just new sources, but new ways to get to new sources.

That was massive.

It was fantastic.

Kate Carpenter: Did you feel like you saw the history and the questions you were asking differently?

You know, we, our own sort of perspectives change across our lives and careers.

Jeff Roche: Yeah, I began, I began asking different kinds of questions, certainly, of my subjects, for sure, and part of that, I think, was that process of going back and watching this political philosophy develop over generations, rather than just kind of starting in one place.

And once I saw that, I became much more empathetic to to the folks in that part of the world, even though, you know, I had grown up there, but I didn't really get in the politics, but I became much more empathetic to recognize how it was that this massive group of people vote the same way, election after election.

So that would be, that would be one of the things I think that that changed over that time.

The other it's just kind of becoming much more comfortable with who I am as a scholar, because I could afford to.

I had tenure, right?

I mean, I had a good job, wasn't going anywhere.

My wife has a good job, she wasn't going anywhere.

So there was that, there was a level of comfort that I was afforded that helped me take the time I needed to take to get to know the subject a lot better.

So there were, while there was a couple of major sort of historical questions, there were hundreds of smaller ones that I had the luxury to to answer.

Kate Carpenter: To talk in more detail about the book that resulted, I asked Jeff to read an excerpt from his new book and answer some questions about it for me.

Here's Dr.

Jeff Roche reading from the start of chapter two of The Conservative Frontier.

Jeff Roche: Timothy Dwight Hobart was a respectable and tidy man, an upstanding young citizen of an equally respectable and tidy New England village, Berlin, Vermont.

Hobart men and women had been spreading across New England founding tidy towns, settling tidy farms, and founding respectable schools and churches since 1635.

Almost all of them were farmers, preachers, or teachers, or some combination of the three.

Timothy was born in 1855, the son of a farmer and a schoolteacher.

He started his own farm in his teens.

At twenty-nine he was running his farm, supervising Berlin’s one-room school, and handling the village’s finances.

He was single and still lived with his parents.

One day in 1882, T.

D.’s cousin, Ira Hobart Evans, a flamboyant wheeler-dealer from one village over, blew in from Texas, spinning thrilling tales of daring railroad and real estate deals.

Timothy sat spellbound.

Within weeks, Berlin’s favorite son and most important bureaucrat ditched the do-gooder life and lit out for Texas.

Unlike the thousands of other young men heading west in those years, seeking adventure on the trails or in the mountains, Timothy wasn’t going to be a cowboy or gold seeker; he was going to sell real estate in the nation’s most speculative market and on its wildest frontier.

A self-taught surveyor, Hobart spent his first four years in Texas living out of a tricked-out wagon, bringing tidiness and respectability to the lands of West Texas.

With his tripod, transit, leveling rod, and compass Hobart imposed the geometry of real estate onto the intractable prairie.

Day after day, and week after week, he neatly tallied up the holdings of the New York and Texas Land Company…in leather-bound survey books.

He probably knew that part of West Texas better than anyone, even Goodnight.

In 1886, Hobart earned a promotion to sales and took up an office in Mobeetie, still little more than a market for buffalo hunters.

He shared the space with flamboyant frontier lawyer Temple Houston.

Hobart was entrusted with a portfolio of a million acres.

Within a decade, he had them all surveyed, leased, and sold.

At forty-one, he was a real estate legend.

And he was just getting started.

Kate Carpenter: What went into writing these paragraphs?

Jeff Roche: A lot of work.

The short answer.

It was a matter of finding just little pieces of factual data and then organizing them in a way that can help a reader get a sense of who this guy is.

He's an important figure in the history of the region, an important figure in this in this part of the book.

So I wanted, I wanted to get certain things across to the reader.

One was how organized this guy was.

And he was, he was incredibly organized.

The survey books, you can still see them.

They're still that you look at and that that he was going to bring something new to this part of the world.

Because prior to prior to this, it had been basically just cattle ranges, which are haphazardly organized and extra legal for the most part.

So how do I then create something that's easy to see in the mind's eye?

You can sort of get a sense of this guy, and then again, just take little pieces of information and put them into an order that makes sense and paints a picture, I guess.

Kate Carpenter: I want to talk about voice with you.

I feel like this, this excerpt isn't even necessarily the best example, although you can certainly see it here, but your writing voice in this book is so great.

It's warm and chatty and kind of casual.

I feel like it's the kind of book that people might call voicey, which is not necessarily helpful, but you know, the author's voice is really there and it's engaging.

And I think that's part of why this is a real pleasure to read, especially when compared to a lot of political history.

I'm curious about how you developed that voice.

Is that something you did consciously to some degree?

Jeff Roche: Yeah, I got, actually, I got called folksy last week.

That's the first time I was folksy, I thought that was interesting.

Yeah, the one of, the one of the, you know, you know what it's like, you write something, and then it gets to a certain point where you share it and you send it to friends.

You say, you know, do you mind reading this?

And almost without exception, one of the comments that my friends are gonna be is like they could hear me when they read it.

So it was very, very important to me to sound like me, to use phrases that I would use, use metaphors that I would use, to make cultural references that I would that I would make and not try to sound like anyone else.

So that was part of the second part of the developing voice, particularly for this book, is I had an audience in mind when I was writing it, so I'm envisioning that reader.

So when I'm making choices for, say, a metaphor or just a turn of phrase, I could, will this person get it?

Or how much do I need to explain to this person?

Would they will they get what it is that I'm saying?

So that was, that was the second part of the the voice for this book.

But yeah, I write in this voice.

I write emails in this voice.

It's the only one I have.

Kate Carpenter: How did you think about the audience?

Jeff Roche: So from the beginning, when I signed on with University of Texas Press, we agreed that it was going to be a trade book, rather than than necessarily an academic monograph.

This is a book that was going to be written, be written for and marketed as a book for a popular audience.

And I remember in graduate school, we had a, the history department had invited in three or four acquisitions editors from academic presses to speak to the graduate community of some sort of really cool kind of workshop that UNM put on.

And one of them said, if you want to sell books when you get out of graduate school, write about Texas or write about California.

And the reason that they said that is because this, these are two very big markets, and these are populations that like their, to read their own history.

So my audience in my head was a Texas Monthly subscriber.

It's a very popular magazine there.

It's it's witty, it's well done.

Its readers are historically minded to some degree.

They do care about Texas.

So I had them, I had them in my head when I was writing, and I know, I lived there for a while.

So it's a part of the world that I think I know pretty well.

Kate Carpenter: How did you think about the narrative structure of this book?

Jeff Roche: Yeah, this was, this is tough.

I'm not gonna lie.

This, this was a, I'm trying to think how did I put this thing together?

I had a year leave in 2015, 2016 and that's when I, that's when I really started, sat down, started writing.

I'd been collecting for the previous, the previous few years, I really sat down and tried to crank out a draft, and I put out, I think, three chapters, the first three chapters of the book, and they were insanely long and terribly dull, and I sent 'em to my editor, to Robert.

And he said, Yeah, he basically said the same thing, these are really way too long and very, very dull.

So he suggested that I read this book called Boom Town, which is about Oklahoma City, and it's a really kind of cool journalisticy book, but it was short chapters in three or four sections that moved forward by telling stories.

And then, boy, once I read that and then converted, decided that that was the route I was going to go.

It, the narrative fell into place, and the three sections of the book became much more obvious than they had been before.

So it was, it was the process of converting all of this information, rather than a six chapter monograph, into what was originally an 18 chapter trade boat, that that's how the narrative, the narrative merged.

It is so, so freeing to just say, I'm going to write 12 paragraphs on this, and then I'm stop writing about that.

Move on

Kate Carpenter: I want to talk a little bit more about your to something else.

I'm gonna write 12 paragraphs on that.

So that's the way that's developed.

editor, actually, because I noticed in the acknowledgments, your your thanks are pretty effusive to him.

As someone who has edited other people, I'm sure you have a an appreciation of good editorial work.

What was that relationship like?

Jeff Roche: Very good from the from the from the very beginning, Robert Devens, who's the, who's now the, he runs the University of Texas Press.

But then they, he just came on and we met, I think we met at the Portland WHA, which is the Western History Association.

I think we met there, and we just, we hit it off.

And then I sent him, like, 20 sample pages with an idea of what I wanted to do with the book.

And he was on board from the get go.

He loved the trade book idea.

We probably my Devens email folder, there's hundreds, hundreds of emails, and he's never he's never been hesitant, seemingly, to call me out when I'm going over the top, or if I'm doing screwing up somehow, or pushing the boundaries a little bit, and I've never been afraid to defend myself.

If I thought--so, we would have, we would have discussions and disagreements on certain things, but we, but we always hash it out.

It's just been, it was, it was a great, very professional working relationship.

Is it was, it was delightful.

I had a great, I had great time with not just him, but pretty much everybody at that press was.

I'm not a, I'm not a, I take criticism fine.

I know some people don't, but yeah, so it worked.

It worked out really, really well.

Kate Carpenter: That's great.

How did you decide to go with that press rather than, you know, try to pitch it to a trade or something?

Jeff Roche: That's a good question.

I didn't pitch it to a trade, probably because I wasn't confident enough, if I were looking back, that's probably, it never really sort of crossed my mind.

And I wanted to go, so, there are a few pretty major presses that do this kind of stuff.

But part of the reason was, I know that the University of Texas Press doesn't publish a lot of books about Texas history, maybe one a year, maybe, and sometimes, sometimes not at all.

And Devens had just come from Chicago.

He was from the University of Chicago Press.

And the things they were doing at the University of Texas Press, I was really impressed with, they're doing lots of cool stuff with music.

They were doing great architecture stuff.

It was just a really well rounded operation.

And I and I knew that if I'm sort of the only Texas book, I would get attention.

And they were excited.

They were they were excited about this thing from the get go.

And I had a, I had a contract within weeks of meeting Robert.

So, yeah, that was it.

And I just, I wanted to go with a press that I knew would support it a lot of people, though, and it's a great press to I mean, so there's a, I think there's a lot to be said with finding a press that wants to work with you and together, I could not be more pleased with the product.

The book looks good.

It's a good looking book.

Kate Carpenter: I want to ask one more question about the book itself.

This is a totally selfish question, as a person struggling to figure out where, where to end a project.

You end The Conservative Frontier in the 70s with Reagan.

But of course, you know, conservativism in Texas, ongoing.

How did you decide where to end?

Unknown: There were a couple of, a couple of, there were a couple things that motivated that, that decision.

One is I was really just interested in what I was referring to, and some of the people use this phrase, but, but it was the one that occupied my mind, the DIY right, the grassroots folks, the people who are putting it together from from the ground up, the ones that are going to the meetings and reading the books and doing everything that they're supposed to do.

And the mid 70s that falls away in the movement.

The movement becomes national, professionals move in, and they didn't interest me, you know, as much.

That's probably the big reason, and then the other reason was, I really just wanted to describe the beginnings of this, how it came about.

And by '76 it's about Reagan is going to crush it in Texas in '80 and '84 and I think the last Democrat presidential candidate to win Texas, think was, I think it was, it was Carter.

I should know this off the top of my head.

But it's not really working out.

But yeah, so the story story had ended, so I knew the story I wanted to tell, and that was a good place.

They lived after, I don't know how happily.

But yeah.

Kate Carpenter: I want to ask a little bit about your influences.

Are there other people that you read for writing inspiration?

Jeff Roche: For writing inspiration, I read a lot of fiction, and I love, I love fiction books where I'll see like a sentence on a page, and I'll go back and I'll reread it, like Michael Chabon, Yiddish Policemen's Union is like this.

There's a sentence on every page of that book.

How did you put that together?

And then, you know, non fiction, I mostly when I read.

I read a lot of essays.

I love Joan Didion and it's sacrilege, but Sarah Vowell is one of my favorite historians.

I just love the way she puts things together.

Ian Frazier, Bill Bryson, you know, people who write for, you know, write for the masses, but also are clearly taking joy in the art of putting it together.

Even more influential is musicians.

I listen to music continuously when I'm writing, and when I started this, when I was writing the initial draft, I only listened to Texas country artists when I when I dealt with it with the initial draft.

And then when I was revising, I pretty much just listened up, sort of early 90s hip hop, De La Soul, Q-Tip, that sort of thing.

And that, they, there's just great influence, the word play, the word built, the world building, the referencing.

There's no two genres I think that are greater with wordplay than hip hop and country.

So that they were, I must have borrowed sentence structure from Billy Joe Shaver 50 times in this book.

I just love that, the way that, you know, some of these guys turn a phrase.

So, yeah, those are, those are the biggest influences, I think.

Kate Carpenter: What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?

Jeff Roche: That I've ever gotten, and I don't think it was given to me directly, but I was I remember this.

I'm vividly, and I tell my junior colleagues this all the time.

I was at a conference, was hanging around the book exhibit, and it was an editor for University of North Carolina Press.

And I don't remember how involved I was in the conversation, or if I was just on the periphery of the conversation, but I remember him Jeff Roche: is a paragraph, and it's gonna be a good paragraph, telling someone that the advice that he gives to the people who and if you don't are giving him pitches of their dissertations is some version, you've probably heard this on your podcast, is you've written a dissertation.

Great.

Now go write a book.

And that always stuck with me.

Always that these are these are different things.

You're writing a dissertation, you're writing it for four people.

When you're writing a book, hopefully you're writing it 4000 or 40,000 or 400,000 people.

You're not just writing for 40 or 400 so, yeah, that that really that stuck with me.

And the other, just, I was so lucky at three or four times in both MA and PhD, I had classes with faculty, with professors who line edited stuff.

And I'm the sort of person that once you pointed something out to me like, Oh, this is not, you don't want to split these infinitives unless you're trying to do this other thing.

I just absorb that and just and take that so those, those kind of faculty who take the time to really sort of show you what you're doing, what you could be doing better, sentence or paragraph level, all those micro suggestions add up into something.

Jeff Roche: I was a little surprised.

There's a I run a small nonprofit called the Monday Night Mile, and it's an event.

And we raise money for children's for Akron Children's Hospital.

And our event was the night before.

It was on October 6, and I am in Pittsburgh on sabbatical, and we are renting our house out.

So I wasn't even in my house back in Wooster.

I was staying in a friend's house.

So, you know, we run that it's a night event, and we ran, out kind of late, and then I wake up on the morning of the seventh when the review came out, and I'm stumbling around in a unfamiliar space after this completely exhausting day, the day before, and I opened my email, and I don't know if my editor sent it to me or anything, and I'm I'm reading this, I'm stumbling around, and I had to read it three or four times.

And, yeah, it was a shock.

They told me that it might get reviewed, but they but I never knew when or if.

So.

Yeah, massive surprise, pleasant surprise.

Kate Carpenter: What are you up to now?

Are you, are you working on writing anything new you want to talk about?

Jeff Roche: I am, I am in the process.

I'm using a sabbatical.

I'm writing a cultural biography of CW Post, yeah, who shows up in Conservative Frontier and intrigued my, piqued my interest.

Interesting guy.

His dad was a part of Lincoln's funeral guard.

His daughter built Mar a Lago.

And in between, he knows everybody.

It's, yeah, it's just this, it's this fascinating guy, and I've got, I spent my last leave starting the research for it.

All the, all the papers that his second wife didn't burn, which are most of them, are in Ann Arbor.

So I've, over the last three or four years, gone to the archive, and I've taken a photograph of every document in his papers that might be interesting.

And I am in the process of going through those.

I got through a box yesterday, actually.

Kate Carpenter: I am looking forward to reading it, so I'm glad to hear you're working on it.

Jeff Roche: Hopefully it'll be done faster than this one was well.

Kate Carpenter: Dr.

Jeff Roche, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past and thanks for talking about your writing process.

Jeff Roche: Thank you.

It was a pleasure.

Kate Carpenter: Thanks again to Jeff for joining me in this episode, and thanks to you for listening.

You can find links to the books that we talked about and a complete transcript at draftingthepast.com.

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