Kate Carpenter: In this episode of Drafting the Past, you’ll hear from a historian who had to figure out how to wrangle narratives from twenty different countries to tell a new history of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

But keeping track of all those threads wasn’t her only formidable challenge.

I’m your host, Kate Carpenter, and in this episode I’m joined by historian Dr.

Renata Keller.

Renata Keller: Thank you for having me.

I'm so excited.

Kate Carpenter: Dr.

Keller is a professor at the University of Nevada and a historian of Modern Latin America.

She is the author

of two books, Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution, and The Fate of the

Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War.

I was eager to talk with Renata about how she grappled with the wide-ranging source material for The Fate of the Americas, but I also wanted to talk with her about another

challenge: writing a book while dealing with the isolation of new parenthood, the struggle of postpartum depression and anxiety, and the exhaustion of balancing parenthood and research.

In this conversation, you’ll hear how she made space for herself and her writing, both physically and mentally, while working on her book.

Here’s Dr.

Renata Keller.

Renata Keller: I think my trajectory is just kind of random.

It's it's me following my curiosity.

So one of the reasons I chose my graduate advisor, Jonathan Brown, was I really liked the variety he had in his work, and I think I've kind of copied him in that my first book was about Mexico and Cuba and how the Cuban Revolution kind of kicked off Mexico's Cold War.

And then I, in a small part of that book, I talked about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And then, you know, someone just invited me to expand on that, and I said, Oh, great idea.

And I was just curious, right?

I wanted to know how other countries responded to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

It wasn't something I had really planned.

It was just following, again, that curiosity and being willing to expand beyond my comfort zone.

So after writing that book, I was pretty comfortable with Mexico, and I had to push beyond that, and it was an opportunity to learn about other countries and other places and people.

And so it was following my curiosity and also just following my love of travel, it was a good excuse to go a lot of places and and get to know a lot of different communities that I hadn't experienced or hadn't really been exposed to before.

So yeah, I think just kind of following where, where the stories lead me.

Kate Carpenter: How have you seen yourself as a writer throughout that trajectory?

Renata Keller: I think I've become more and more interested in people and places and storytelling as I've gone through my career.

I think at the beginning, especially in graduate school, we're all taught to focus on argument, which is important, obviously, and to a lesser extent, theory and theory building and things like that.

And I think as I go along, I like to read stories more, and I like to write stories more.

And so I've gotten a lot more invested in and learning about specific people and and their actions and their mindset and their decisions and in specific places.

And I think, I think I just like that more.

I've become more accustomed to being like I like this, I don't like that, and comfortable with with saying that and embracing what I like.

Kate Carpenter: So tell me when and where do you do your work?

Renata Keller: Two main places.

So when I'm working from primary sources, and usually I have my notes from my primary sources on my computer, so that gives me more flexibility, and I'll, I'll spend my time writing from primary sources, mostly in my writing shed my husband and I built, oh, we had built a shed in our backyard, just a basic, Tuff Shed that we then had someone outfit as a nice space.

And so it has a desk and a and a sofa, and, most importantly, windows that look out onto the backyard, so I can see like what season it is, and, you know, look at changing weather, and look at the trees and the air and the sky.

So I like to be in that space.

That's my favorite writing space.

It's very peaceful, and I can be at home but away from home at the same time.

But when I need my books, I write in my office and at work, that's where all my books are, and I find especially when I'm writing things like about context, about different places, I will need my other books a lot more, and that's also a nice place to write, so I don't mind going into the office to write there.

Kate Carpenter: Is there a specific time of day or week or year that you like to do your writing?

Renata Keller: Mornings are best for me, and I find it easiest to do initial writing when I have time off, I have a difficult time kind of squeezing real writing into the semester.

I can do editing, which is great.

I can do that while I'm teaching, but I find it easiest to write things that are fresh, either during summer break or winter break, or if I can get fellowships or sabbaticals, then that's that's when I do most of my writing, and when I do get those breaks, I just try and write all day as much as I can.

Kate Carpenter: How do you like to organize yourself?

Renata Keller: I have a couple ways.

I am not as organized as I could be.

I'll admit that, but I do use Zotero for everything.

My husband and I often kid that if Zotero crashed or disappeared, we would probably just quit our jobs.

But I take all my notes on primary sources in Zotero.

I take all my notes on secondary sources there.

I take all my put all my feedback from my peers or friends.

I put my feedback in there.

Everything is in Zotero.

When I'm doing my research, I like to take photos, and I save those in in folders in Dropbox, usually labeled by the name of the archive, and then if I'm at an archive for a really long time, which wasn't the case with this book.

But for my first book, I got to spend like, nine months in Mexico City, which was amazing.

And because I was at the National Archives so much there, I organized those folders by date, by the date I'd taken the photo.

And then the nice thing about Zotero is, whenever you put a note in, it automatically puts a date stamp.

And so I was able to kind of cross reference date stamps from Zotero with the dates in my photo files.

So that's that's more or less my system.

It could be better, but it could be worse.

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

Renata Keller: It depends.

I like to try and get my big ideas out at the beginning.

So with the past two books I've written, I've I've written kind of a big overarching article towards the beginning of my research, where I play around with different arguments and in different ways to talk about the story.

And so I like to do that maybe a year or two into the process.

I wrote my first article about my my first book during my research year.

So I guess that was three years into my PhD.

And for this book, The Fate of the Americas, I wrote my first article actually only, like six months into the research.

So it was a little bit faster that time.

But then I for writing the book, I like to have most of the research done, and then I'll sit down and write the book, and I'll see where there's gaps, and I'll try and like, fill those gaps.

Or, you know, I'm always adding things at the last minute.

In my first book, I finally got access to Cuban archives right when my manuscript was due, I was able to go to Cuba at the last minute and and do some research there, and then kind of plug in those pieces where they made sense.

And I did the same thing with this book that I went to Colombia for a conference, and I found some really cool stuff there that I was able to plug in at the last minute.

But usually I like to do most of the research and then just find a headspace to sit and write for a year, or however much time I can get.

Kate Carpenter: For this book, you went to so many different countries in order to do the research.

How did, how did language play a role in the research and writing?

Renata Keller: Well, luckily for me, most of the places, well, everywhere I went, Spanish was a predominant language, and I majored in Spanish in college.

I'm not a native speaker, but I've used it a lot in my career, and I have studied a lot, so that wasn't too much of a challenge.

I also took two years of Portuguese in college as part of my Spanish major and I was supposed to go to Brazil, and I had planned that trip for summer 2020, and, yeah, for obvious reasons, had to cancel it, and I just ended up never rescheduling it.

There's been some amazing work by a historian named Jim hershberg on Brazil in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

So I was able to build off of some of what he's done.

He's done an amazing job also of sharing his primary sources through the National sorry, the Cold War International History Project and and then also the Brazilian archivists have done an amazing job of scanning newspapers and other sources, digitizing them and putting them online.

So I ended up deciding that I didn't need to go to Brazil, although it would have been nice to refresh my Portuguese.

Kate Carpenter: What does revision look like for you?

Renata Keller: Revision is fun.

I love revision.

I think it's the most kind of relaxing and creative part of it.

So for me, I usually revise as I write.

So every time I sit down to write something, I read, you know, the paragraphs or pages that came before wherever I am starting, and I'll revise those as I go back and read them, because I like them to look pretty.

And I'll get new ideas as I read them.

And so I'm, I'm always revising things as I write, it's not really a separate process for me.

But then once I have a full first draft, that's usually when I'll start sharing it with people.

My husband's also a historian, so he's one of the people who helped me revise.

I have a writing group on Zoom, and we meet once a month, so I share, I shared, I don't even know how many chapters of this book with them, they've been great.

And so I try and get feedback from as many people as possible.

And then I work off of that feedback I share with my students.

I share with anyone who is willing to read my work.

And then another really useful part of revision for this book was I was able to do a manuscript workshop.

I got some funding from my university, University of Nevada, and that allowed me to invite four scholars who I know to read the entire manuscript.

And we met over four hours on Zoom.

And my editor, Debbie Gershenowitz, she managed the whole meeting, and they gave me written comments.

They gave me verbal comments.

And it was really helpful to to discuss my ideas and not just kind of get the peer reports that you get from from the readers, from the anonymous readers, some of whom are sometimes anonymous, but to really be able to, like, kind of go back and forth with my ideas, so that was a really important part of the revision process for this book.

Kate Carpenter: Yeah, I saw in the acknowledgement that you shared an early draft with one of your classes.

What was that experience like?

How did, how did students react to that?

Renata Keller: It was fun.

That was a great group of students, and so I felt like they would actually be able to give me good feedback.

And it was an early draft, so it actually didn't have the introduction yet.

And so I think it maybe was a little hard for them to to figure out what the arguments were, but that helped me figure out what my arguments were in turn, and they also helped me see, okay, so where do I need to give more context?

Is this part?

Does it make sense?

What questions would specialist, but not super specialist readers have?

Because I wanted this book to be intelligible to people who aren't PhDs.

I wanted it to be a more public facing book, and so helping me with my language, with filling in the gaps.

And I think it was just fun for them.

I think they really enjoyed seeing that.

You know, writing books is a process, and they don't come out of our brains fully formed and in these beautiful things.

They, I think it helps them get a little bit of confidence in their work, to see our work when it's not done yet, and to and to be able to feel like they can actually help with it, that it's not just a one way process in graduate school, that it's a conversation between peers.

Kate Carpenter: After you get all of this feedback from whatever source, what does it look like, practically for you to then turn that into revisions to the text?

Renata Keller: So I, like I said, I always write out everything in Zotero.

I have notes that I label feedback from so and so.

So then I have all my little feedback digital sticky notes.

And I mostly do it on the computer.

I don't do much of that, really, much of anything by hand anymore.

It's all on the computer.

I I'm old fashioned.

I use Microsoft Word, and I just have a lot of different versions of the documents.

We'll say like, you know, version 20 or whatever, for each chapter.

And I go chapter by chapter, revising things like the argument and the language and, you know, how many quotes do I have?

Am I overwhelming the reader with quotes, or do I need to provide more analysis, things like that.

But it's, it's all on the computer.

I don't really mind working on the computer these days.

Kate Carpenter: To talk more about how the writing came together in Renata's new book, I asked her to read an excerpt so we could talk about it in detail.

Here's Dr Renata Keller reading from the introduction to The Fate of the Americas.

Renata Keller: “The Bolivian ambassador sat at his desk in Colombia’s capital.

Perhaps his hand trembled as he clipped stories from the day’s news, attached them to blank sheets of paper, and placed them in a file to send back home to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in La Paz.

The ambassador included articles that noted the historical significance of the

events he was witnessing: ‘For the first time since the rise of the Cold War in 1948, the direct threat of being reached by an international conflagration looms for Colombia.’ He also clipped stories that speculated about what would happen should a nuclear war break out.

‘Scientists tell us that it would take ten minutes for a bomb launched from Cuba to reach Bogotá’; ‘A bomb in Panama would bring us a slow death’; ‘The air itself could be so contaminated that, for a time, special precautions would have to be taken so as not to inhale death.’ Still other articles emphasized the uncertainty of

the moment: ‘In the current circumstances anything can happen.

It is possible that while you are reading this page, the extinction of all human life on the planet is being decided.

…Only God knows whether the hour of the Apocalypse draws near.’ The ambassador might have prayed that there would still be a ministry to receive his collection of clippings, that there would still be someone alive to deliver them.

On the evening of October 22, 1962, more than 200 million people across Latin America learned that they were living within reach of nuclear missiles located on the island of Cuba.

The news set off an explosion of activity in every part of the region.

The presidents of Mexico and Brazil sent messages to Fidel Castro, urging him to give up the catastrophic weapons.

Argentine ships steamed from the far southern waters of the Atlantic Ocean to join the Inter-American Quarantine Force in the Caribbean.

Cubans readied their island for an invasion.

Bolivians, Colombians, Peruvians, and Argentines littered the streets and plastered the walls of their cities with leaflets arguing for peace … and for war.

Thousands of people marched in demonstrations in Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil.

Saboteurs in Venezuela and Argentina set fire to oil fields and launched Molotov cocktails at US-owned businesses, while protestors in Uruguay and Brazil battled police armed with machine guns.

Bolivian demonstrations escalated into a bloody, deadly riot; ultimately more Bolivians than Cubans died in the turmoil surrounding the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Latin American citizens and leaders, confronted with the possibility of nuclear war, refused to wait for others to decide the fate of the Americas.”

Kate Carpenter: What went into writing this passage?

Renata Keller: So this was actually a product of happenstance.

When I was in Bolivia, I went to the Foreign Ministry archive there and just started looking at any boxes they had.

They actually keep the boxes from neighboring countries.

They're still classified.

But because Colombia wasn't a neighboring country, they don't share any borders with Bolivia, they did have Colombian boxes.

And I hadn't really planned to include Colombia much in the story initially, because we don't often think of Colombia when we're talking about the Cold War in Latin America, and I had fallen into that habit as well.

But then I started looking through these boxes, and there were so many reports from the ambassador in Bogota, and he was saying the people here are really freaking out, like they are terrified.

And he included all these newspaper articles, and he was just describing how terrified people were in Colombia that they were trying to calculate that if the Panama Canal got bombed, would the radiation reach Bogota?

What would happen if nuclear war broke out?

And it really struck me, because at that point, I had been to a lot of other places, and terror and panic weren't so much part of how most other Latin Americans responded.

And it really made me think, like, you know, if I were in Bogota in 1962 How would I respond?

And I think I it helped me understand how people across Latin America were thinking about their own lives and their own fates and and so I decided, okay, well, first of all, I need to go to Colombia, and this is a really important part of the story that people just haven't considered yet.

And I hadn't considered yet either, and I decided to use it as my introduction, because the newspaper articles were so, so rich, and I thought they helped bring people that would help bring the reader into the emotions of October 1962 and the emotions of the missile crisis, and remind them that what was at stake, that people really were worried about nuclear war and and dying and protecting their families, things like that.

So I decided to start with that paragraph, but then I also wanted to just show the variety of responses across the region.

So that's why, in that second paragraph, I try to take people on a very quick journey everywhere, all at once, to show that people were they were scared, but they were also inspired, and they were also, you know, engaging in protests, and they were really participating.

That it wasn't just sitting and watching and waiting to see what the United States or the Soviet Union would do, but they really seized very active roles in the crisis.

So those were the main goals of those two paragraphs, to show the stakes, but then also show that people were very much involved.

Kate Carpenter: Yeah, I really like these, these paragraphs for opening an introduction.

They really, the first one almost reminds me of a cinematic, sort of old school movie where, like, lots of newspaper headlines show kind of the context.

As you noted, you know, there, there are a lot of countries involved here, and that you incorporate as part of the story.

I think you said 20 countries, and this just covers a pretty short period, which means there's a lot to get through.

How did you think about the structure of the book and kind of keeping all those threads together?

Renata Keller: That was honestly the hardest part.

I love traveling.

So the research was fun.

That wasn't hard, and it was efficient, because I was looking at such a short period of time.

And so I could go to archives and be like, what do you have for October 1962?

But figuring out how to make everything make sense together was really hard, and I when I wrote my initial article, kind of playing with my initial thoughts, I had organized it country by country, and I think that worked for an article, because articles are much shorter.

But then one of my earlier workshops, someone pointed out, if you do this book country by country, you are going to bore your readers to death, and it's going to be really repetitive.

And I agreed.

So then I decided, Okay, I think it has to be chronological.

First of all, because it's a story, and you lose the excitement if you're not telling it chronologically, and you lose the drama and the tension.

So I knew I wanted to tell it chronologically and then also thematically, to capture, you know, all these different responses.

And then I decided to plug in, I guess, different countries where they made sense for the chronology and the and the themes.

I actually I did a writing retreat.

My we have a lot of historians in the family.

My brother is finishing a PhD in history as well, and I visited him in New Haven for a week when I was really struggling with the organization, and we went out for pizza and actually mapped out the structure of the book on like, a lot of napkins while we sit, we sat and ate, because I was trying to find that balance between showing a lot of different places but also giving the reader enough grounding in the places that I felt were the most important.

And so yeah, it was, it was hard.

That was the hardest part of it.

Kate Carpenter: I want to turn and ask you a little bit of a publishing question.

So this book came out with the University of North Carolina Press.

It's part of a series at the press that you are also a co editor of, a founding co editor, I believe.

First of all, for listeners, what does it mean to be an editor of a series for a press?

Because I know not everyone knows what that means.

Renata Keller: And this is actually the second series I've co-edited so I've been fortunate to work with two different series.

So the role of series editors is, we are practitioners in the field.

So we are fellow professors who've been through the process of publishing books, and so we understand it from the perspective of authors, and our role is to to work with our authors first, to recruit people, because we know the field really well, and so we can use our networks.

We can keep an eye on who's publishing interesting articles, who's doing, you know, cool conference presentations, and we can recruit people, reach out to authors, and then kind of shepherd them through what can be especially for first time authors a very confusing process.

Our role is to help Renata Keller: have gone through the process and to understand answer questions, to help them develop their proposals.

Sometimes we work with them on on their framing, especially, how things work with marketing and publicity and editing, I can be challenging for people.

So we work with them in the initial stages of the process, and then once we've sent a think I can now speak to the process in a very precise way, manuscript out for review, we actually get the reviews before the authors.

And so we can see, you know, what's going on, what more so than if I Renata Keller: conferences, and we we know our people, we know we want to do, whether we want to move forward with the project.

In both cases, the series I've worked with, the our books.

But for this series, we really want to get as wide of series editors had the ultimate ability to say, yes, we want to move forward with this, or no, which is great.

And then when we send the readers reports back to our authors, we also give our an audience as possible for all of our books.

own feedback, and we say, like, you know, let's, let's highlight this part of the reader report.

This is a really important piece Renata Keller: writing them it's a two hour process.

It well.

of advice.

This part you can respond to like, this is a really important piece to respond to, so we like curate, essentially the reader reports a little bit, and then help our authors figure out how to respond to them, how they want to take that feedback.

And with this series, with our UNC series Interconnections, we added an element that has been really fun, which is, we also write prefaces for the books, really short ones.

They're about two paragraphs, but they help the reader identify the most important parts and contributions of the books.

I think it's, I, as an author, I liked having a little preface.

It made me feel good.

But I think as a reader, it's also really helpful.

And so that's very intense.

But the moments that I was able to get away, I another thing that we do for the authors in our series.

Kate Carpenter: I want to switch gears was working on my book, and then I was like, I can do this.

This is something that makes sense.

And so for is a two hour process to get them out the door.

And so I know a lot of people who, like, get up at five, and I'm not a morning person.

I've started getting up at six and going for

Renata Keller: My husband had a fellowship in Princeton, and I was able to get maternity leave and a sabbatical from my job.

there was a long time when my book was what kept me sane, and that was part of what made it so hard to finish, was that it walks or runs and so but that means that writing doesn't start until 930 at the earliest, and then school ends at three, and we pay for aftercare, which is nice that we can afford that.

But you know, from 430 to whenever they go to bed, that's also their time, and so it just limits the number of hours in the day that I've been able to write.

And I think on the one hand, that's hard, but on that third hand, it does force you to focus and to really take advantage of those minutes wherever you can find them.

Kate Carpenter: Well, I want to know in the last bit of our time a little bit more about your inspiration.

So are there other writers, other historians, other people you like to read?

Renata Keller: I actually, I really like reading fiction.

I like reading history, obviously.

But when I want to relax, I read fiction.

And I recently started reading novels by Sylvia Moreno-Garcia, she writes like really amazing novels about Mexico.

And I just finished one called Velvet Was the Night, which is about 1970s Mexico and the Cold War.

And it was just really magical to see the research that I had done for my first book in novel form.

And is so beautiful.

It's just an amazing story.

And I love the way she writes.

And then also, last summer, I re read.

I've always been a big Anne Rice fan and Stephen King like, kind of a different side of things I enjoy, the kind of fantasy, horror stuff.

And I just reread The Witching Hour last summer by Anne Rice, and that was the first book I'd ever read by her.

I read as read it as a teenager, and I hadn't read it since, and then when I reread it last summer, I was like, oh my god, this is why I'm a historian.

Like this is such a light bulb moment, because the book has this amazing like, family history of a family of witches that's embedded, and there's a secret society of historians of supernatural things.

And I was like, Oh my gosh.

Like, this is everything I love to read about, and this is, this is a really formative book for me, and I hadn't realized it, but I think fantasy and fiction in general have just been really important to me as a writer, and to keep me like interested in the world.

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

Renata Keller: So obviously, Stephen King's "kill your darlings." Evergreen one, to remind you to edit.

But I had a professor in graduate school, Anne Twinam, who was really focused on the craft of writing, and she got, she would read 10 versions of the same article or the same seminar paper.

She was amazing, and she was really focused on passive voice.

So whenever she found passive voice, she had write a whole line of capital Ps, or she would write things like, "who did this, aliens?

vampires?" and so really helped me focus a lot on passive voice, which I now inflict upon my students.

And then she was also very vigilant about analytical topic sentences and making sure that your topic sentences had an argument and that they conveyed the point of the paragraph, and that has really stuck with me.

I'm now very careful with my topic sentences, and I harass my own students about them, because I think as a reader, you just need that kind of guidance, and you really notice it when it's missing.

Kate Carpenter: I also wanted to know-- we we first met a couple years ago at the AHA, because you were on a on a panel about podcasting, which I eagerly attended, and you were working on a narrative podcast about the Cuban Missile Crisis.

What was it like to be working on that, a project in that medium, while you were also working on a book.

Did that?

Did one shape the other?

Renata Keller: It did.

Yeah, it was really fun that actually just fell into my lap.

SECOLAS, the Southeastern Conference of Latin American Studies, they had applied for funding during COVID from from the NEH and the NEA and gotten funding to make a series of audio documentaries.

And Dustin Walcher, my co producer, decided to do one on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he knew I was writing this book, and so he approached me.

It was just a lot of fun working with him.

We brainstormed how we wanted to approach it, and we decided pretty early on that we wanted it to be narrative instead of a series of interviews, but we wanted to displace and weave the interviews together to tell a story which I think ultimately is good, but super challenging and time consuming.

And so we did the interviews, and it was really nice to speak to a lot of other experts in my field about the Cuban Missile Crisis, and some of them had ideas and insights that helped me with my book while I was working on it.

Michelle Chase in particular, had some really good points, and Lillian Guerra and Peter Kornbluh, like just a lot of people.

And then the process of finishing it that was hard, like so, and then we had to outline, okay, so what goes where, you know, listen back to the interviews and figure out where to cut, where to put things together.

And then we talk a lot about the connective tissue that we had to go back and record connective tissue for each episode where we're like and now so and so, we'll talk about this, but it was also just a nice way to do something different with my material, and think about how to share this story differently and how to communicate it with, again, a wider audience than usually will read our books, and especially for students.

We really wanted it to be a resource for classrooms, so you have to keep it at a level where it's informative, but also, you know, it's easy to understand.

So those were fun challenges, and we've we decided to make it six episodes.

We've released the first three, and we're going to release the last three in January 2026, but it's hard.

I think if I had realized how hard it would be going in, I would have done it as a series of interviews.

I think it would have been done four years earlier if we had approached it that way.

But it ended up being good timing that we finished it at the same time I finished my book.

So it worked out.

Kate Carpenter: I love narrative history podcasts generally, and I love assigning them, especially to undergrads.

They seem to really benefit from them.

And there's such a shortage of good narrative history.

I mean, there is some good stuff, but I just wish there would be more, but it is so much work.

I did an interview long ago now with with Abby Mullen about narrative history podcasting, and she talked about just the hours that go into a single minute of audio people do not appreciate so, yeah, I appreciate you doing that work.

Renata Keller: Thanks.

Kate Carpenter: That's awesome.

Well, aside from continuing to work on the podcast, do you have anything else on your plate that you want to, want to share at this point?

Renata Keller: Yeah, I'm starting work on a third book project, and this one is totally different.

And so it's again, me kind of just following my random curiosities.

It's a biography of a Cuban exile, Alberto Sicilia Falcon, who became Mexico's first drug kingpin in the early 1970s and I'm just starting the research.

I drafted my very first article, like I said, I like to do these, like, big overview articles to sort out my ideas.

I just submitted that earlier this week, but I'm thinking of this one definitely as a trade press book.

I really want to lean heavily into his story and just understanding, like, how, how he became so important, and then also he was the first target of the US-Mexican War on Drugs, and he was the he was arrested in 1975 and then tunneled out of prison, and so his story is just amazing, but I think it's also a really good way to to connect the Cold War to the war on drugs.

And I think it's it's been fun for me to learn about a different period of history, but also the one that's very closely connected to the Cold War that I focused on throughout most of my career, so that's what I'm doing now.

Kate Carpenter: That's fantastic, man.

I want to read it now, so I can't wait to hear more about it in the future.

Dr Renata Keller, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past and talking about your writing process.

Renata Keller: My pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me.

Kate Carpenter: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Drafting the Past.

Find links to the books we talked about at draftingthepast.com.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it online, and leave a 5-star review in your favorite podcast listening app.

Your recommendation is the most important thing in helping the show grow.

Until next time, remember that friends don’t let friends write boring history.