An Interview with Michael Rousell, author of THE POWER OF SURPRISE

Posted on August 16, 2021 by Ed Battistella
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Dr. Michael A. Rousell is a teacher, psychologist, and professor emeritus at Southern Oregon University. Rousell studied life-changing events for over three decades and established his expertise by writing the internationally successful book Sudden Influence: How Spontaneous Events Shape Our Lives (2007). His pioneering work draws on research from a wide variety of brain sciences that show when, how, and why we instantly form new beliefs. He lives with his spouse in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

His new book is THE POWER OF SURPRISE: HOW YOUR BRAIN SECRETLY CHANGES YOUR BELIEFS (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).

Ed Battistella: Tell us about your forthcoming book THE POWER OF SURPRISE: HOW YOUR BRAIN SECRETLY CHANGES YOUR BELIEFS.

Mike Rousell: Formative moments always fascinated me, those moments that make us who we are, the ones that form beliefs about ourselves. But it’s hard to trace back a belief to when it first formed. For example, do you believe you are clever If so, how did that belief develop? Was it incremental, parents and teachers praising your efforts and commenting on your brilliant creative efforts? Did this belief erupt suddenly through a surprise? Here’s an example. Jane thinks she isn’t creative. One day her boss surprises her by saying, “You keep coming up with clever solutions.” While this isn’t all that stunning, it’s potentially transformative. If Jane already believes she is clever, she accepts this comment as praise. But, if it surprised her, a host of neurological and cognitive processes take place that just might generate an instant new belief: “I’m clever.” That’s what surprises do. And this all takes place instantly, usually outside our awareness because it happens so fast.

EB: You write about the evolutionary purpose of beliefs and your work involves neurological and cognitive research.

MR: Here’s the fascinating part. In our evolutionary past, a surprise often meant immense opportunity or imminent danger. Alert! Am I safe? Is this an opportunity? Those who stopped to think didn’t make it to the gene pool. Accordingly, evolution hard wired us to learn instantly during a moment of surprise.

Let’s take a look at the Jane example about being clever. Once the brain signals a surprise, it needs to make sense of the surprise so it doesn’t happen again. First, you need to know a little about dopamine. We usually think of it as our motivator neurotransmitter. High levels mean approach. Low levels mean avoid. But a sudden spike in dopamine is an error signal, our brain’s way of saying stop what you’re doing, pay attention, and learn. Neurologically, a surprise is a two-phase burst of dopamine, what scientists call phasic dopamine. Here’s how it works. Phase one is a sudden spike signaling that something important is going on. It only lasts milliseconds. Phase two produces a long-lasting change in the dopamine concentration, tagged to the cause or outcome. In Jane’s case, it means she shows signs of cleverness.

Here’s the cognitive part. If you see a monkey in your yard, you’d be surprised, and you’d check it out. We can confirm or disconfirm events in the concrete world. With beliefs about our identity, that doesn’t work. Our brains take a markedly different approach. They do an instant Google search in your repertoire of experiences. In Jane’s case her brain searches for and inevitable finds “times I was clever.” Also like any Google search, she will get pages of hits. That confirms her cleverness. And that’s not all. Now that her cleverness is confirmed, she starts to view life through the lens of “I’m clever.” She sees examples of her cleverness everywhere, more affirmation. That’s our friend confirmation bias at work.

Here’s a key aspect. If you asked Jane how she formed her belief about cleverness, she’d likely say she didn’t know. That’s the secret part. Her boss merely noted it. The belief formation happened so fast it bypassed conscious radar. Her instinctive Google search tells her she’s always been clever. Or her search may find an old memory when she won a coloring contest in third grade.

EB: How does surprise affect learning?

MR: Surprise boosts attention and facilitates long-term memory. So, use it as much as you can. Here’s an example I use in my teacher-preparation classes. I ask my students to predict the correlation between self-esteem and school success. Is it positive, as one increases, so does the other, and if so, is it strong, moderate, or weak? I give them a moment to think about it, then right down their answers, then discuss it within their groups. After a minute, I tell them to openly discuss their responses. The vast majority predict a strong positive correlation. They now expect me to begin a lesson on how to raise students’ self-esteem. I tricked them. I tell them that the correlation does not even exist. This surprises them, “What the,” and this surprise drives curiosity, a need to know. Now they listen thoughtfully as I give challenging examples. You know, the bully who loves himself but gets low grades, victims of ridicule that earn great grades but feel horrible about themselves. If I had simply lectured on the topic, it would have the same results as any lecture material. But because I surprised them, they will all remember this lesson and maybe even try to surprise other teachers. The media and entertainment use surprise strategically all the time to keep your attention. Think of news teasers, “And you thought dogs were your best friend—stay tuned. You won’t believe it.”

EB: How did you get interested in surprise and spontaneity?

MR: As a young man I was fascinated with hypnosis, so I gave it a try. I hypnotized everybody I could. People asked, “Can you hypnotize someone without them knowing? What if they never came out of it.” Epiphany! I started to think, are we all just hypnotized, acting out someone else’s inadvertent suggestions. That lead to a three-decade research agenda on formative moments, events that form beliefs we hold about ourselves. When I asked people to tell me about moments that changed a belief, they often told me about events in their lives that surprised them. Aha, I thought. So I started studying surprise as a catalyst of formative moments.

EB: This may seem like an odd question, but is it possible to plan surprise?

MR: If you mean, “Can we use surprise strategically,” yes, we can. Here’s an example from one of my graduate students. Karla taught junior English. Her student Jeremy regularly requested a library pass because he thought he wasn’t smart enough to participate in class. Karla knows he has impressive technical savvy because he helps his father repair computers. During one of his regular requests, she decided to surprise him by saying, “Are you kidding me? You’re one of the smartest kids I know. Anyone who can do what you do with computers is brilliant.” After that, his attendance improved, and he didn’t request library passes anymore. Karla surprised Jeremy by saying the opposite of what he thought about himself. If this comment surprised him, he has to make sense of it. He probably moved from “I’m not smart enough” to “I am smart enough, just not that interested.” And that’s a much more productive mindset.

Caveat: I don’t want to leave the impression just saying anything to someone that is opposite to what they expect will suddenly cause a character transformation. Most comments that challenge our beliefs get dismissed. The delivery of belief-changing comments requires artful and scientific wherewithal. But we can all learn it. For example, praise often sounds phony, and it’s easily dismissed. State something most others miss, like it’s an objective observation. Instead of “Wow! You’re creative.” Something like, “Your ability to think outside the box makes inventive ideas.”

EB: Do we ever surprise ourselves?

MR: That’s a fun question. Yes, we can surprise ourselves, but we can’t do it intentionally. Here’s an example. Someone challenges you to see how many pushups you can do. You haven’t done any in 10 years and think you’ll do 4 or 5 at most. You do 25. What! That surprised you. Here’s what happens instantly at a cognitive level. You instantly form a new belief, “I guess I’m in better shape than I thought.” And your brain does this Google search to understand why and it automatically finds pages of reasons: working on cabinets for the last few months, trimming overhead branches from trees in the yard, and so on. We surprise ourselves all the time.

EB: You’ve recently retired from teaching? How do you spend your time?

MR: I had planned a wonderful retirement, but COVID postponed it. I write, exercise, read, and make time to do interviews and podcasts.

EB: Thanks for talking with us. I really enjoyed THE POWER OF SURPRISE.

MR: Thank you for the opportunity. It’s a pleasure to share my passion for making lives richer.

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An Interview with Margaret Perrow, author of A Hidden History of Youth Development in South Africa

Posted on August 2, 2021 by Ed Battistella
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Dr. Margaret Perrow is Professor of English and English Education at Southern Oregon University, where she has taught since 2006. She has a BA from Yale University and an MA and PhD in Language, Literacy, and Culture in Education from the University of California, Berkeley and is the co-director of the Oregon Writing Project at SOU. Prior to joining Southern Oregon University, she worked at the Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools.

As part of its Perspectives on Education in Africa, Routledge has just released her book A Hidden History of Youth Development in South Africa: Learning in Transition, which draws on two decades of interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with a South African non-governmental organization called the Joint Enrichment Project.

Ed Battistella: Congratulations on A Hidden History of Youth Development in South Africa: Learning in Transition, which reflects your long involvement with education and democracy in south Africa. Can you tell us a little about your history and how this book came about?

Margaret Perrow: This book was nearly 25 years in the making! In 1997, I took an exploratory research trip to South Africa. I had both personal and professional reasons for that trip. My father, who’d passed away in 1982, was South African – but he had never really talked much about his childhood or his young adulthood there. I had relatives in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and I wanted to explore some family history.

On the professional front, I had been teaching in an alternative education (GED) program for young adults in San Francisco. My master’s thesis had investigated their perceptions of learning — what learning meant for them — and I was feeling around for a good related focus for my PhD dissertation. South Africa had recently held its first democratic elections after years of anti-apartheid struggle, and it seemed like an interesting place to do a similar study, looking at what learning might mean in alternative education settings for young adults in a country that was undergoing rapid socio-economic and political transition. Post-apartheid South Africa was also a good bet for finding research funding at the time. Several grants, including a Fulbright dissertation fellowship, made it possible for me to spend 18 months in Johannesburg. A series of fortuitous connections led me to the Joint Enrichment Project (JEP). JEP was a prominent youth-development NGO with strong roots in anti-apartheid resistance. I was privileged to be invited into JEP as a visiting researcher, where I got to know a group of young adults from Soweto, the townships outside Johannesburg.

I returned to California, completed my dissertation in 2000, and then did not follow the advice of my advisors at the time, to “write the book now!” But the friends I had made, both participants and staff at the NGO, tugged at my heart. I returned for several extended visits over the years, and periodically toyed with the idea of writing a book. By the time of my sabbatical from SOU in 2018, I was finally ready! In fact, the intervening years presented a unique opportunity to look back at how the lives of JEP’s participants and staff had changed over two decades. It was exciting and gratifying to reconnect with so many people who’d been young adults in the late ‘90s.

EB: I was intrigued by the idea that one of your interviewees had that they were “old youth”. What did that mean?

MP: Great question! In 1994, Nelson Mandela officially declared June 16 as Youth Day, making it a public holiday commemorating the young people who led and participated in the 1976 anti-apartheid uprising in Soweto. That man who wrote “we are all old youth” to me in a text message, replying to my “Happy Youth Day” message, was in his early 50s. The collective memory of the important role that youth played in the anti-apartheid struggle is still powerful today, 45 years after the Soweto uprising. You might even say that the idea of youth evokes a sort of nostalgia for agency and power that people today – particularly black South Africans, who make up the majority of the population – do not experience in their daily lives.

The people featured in my book were in their 20s when South Africa was emerging from apartheid. They were too young to have been leaders in the 1976 uprising, but as participants at JEP in the late 1990s they experienced a strong sense of purpose and agency. The memory of this feeling stuck with them – that’s one of the things I write about in the chapters on “repositioning” and “negotiating identity,” and also in the chapter titled “A time-being thing.” The NGO offered them the space and the language to gain an exciting feeling that they were in transition personally, in a country that was undergoing rapid transition. As adults today, that feeling remains an emotional touchstone for them, and they look back nostalgically at that period of their youth.

EB: How has South Africa changed since you first went there? You’ve got an interesting vantage point I think.

MP: With the 1994 elections came political freedoms, and also exuberant anticipation that socio-economic changes would be widespread and quick, especially for the majority-black population living in poverty. But change after 1994 was both astonishingly rapid and excruciatingly slow. Today South Africa is a better place in many ways for black Africans, who make up approximately 80% of the population: universal citizenship; legally desegregated education; business and employment opportunities theoretically available to all; an expanded social-grants program for pensioners and parents of dependent children; increased government housing; greater access to water, electricity and sanitation; more paved streets and streetlights in urban townships; a free press; business and government leaders who reflect the country’s racial demographics.

Yet the country is still plagued by an enormous and persistent gap between a well-off minority (which includes a growing percentage of black Africans) and the vast majority who continue to struggle with poverty and unemployment. The historian Colin Bundy has put it well, saying that in South Africa “the past permeates the present,” inhibiting real structural transformation. The JEP participants’ material circumstances have improved slightly over twenty years, but none have achieved the sort of upward mobility they hoped for when they completed the program in 1998.

EB: The subtitle of your book is “Learning in Transition.” How has learning been in transition in urban South Africa?

MP: I tried to make learning a kind of understated central character in the book. For decades under the system known as Bantu Education, education for black people in South Africa had the express purpose of developing a large supply of manual labor to support the capital interests of the minority white population. To greatly oversimplify things, it was this view of learning that young people were protesting in 1976. When high school students took to the Soweto streets in 1976, they were demanding “education for liberation” rather than education that systematically reproduced the racialized inequities of apartheid. Another significant shift in the meaning and purpose of learning took place in the 1990s, when terms like learner-centered education, a culture of teaching and learning, and learnerships became part of the language of education policy. These concepts – and a new curriculum that included “life skills” – suggested that learning could be viewed as a process of personal development. But in actual practice, learning in the schools attended by most black Africans has remained a matter of acquiring skills and information. That is, a view of learning as the development of human capital in service of the economy.

EB: The JEP or Joint Enrichment Project you worked with helped to construct identity for the Sowetan youth involved. Can you tell us a little about that identity construction?

MP: Yes, that is another shift in the meaning of learning that I tried to highlight: learning as a process of identity-construction. JEP modeled this in its youth-development programs, which emphasized what they called “personal development.” When education’s primary purpose is the producing human capital, development of the whole person is easily neglected. Emerging out of the violence and oppression of the apartheid era, young black South Africans had social and emotional needs that a human-capital view of learning did not address, even if the new curriculum had some content called “life skills.”

Many of the participants came to the Joint Enrichment Project feeling, as I came to see it, “stuck in-between” in their lives. Most were too young to have actively participated in the resistance movement, but too old to have benefited from post-apartheid changes in the education system. Many hadn’t finished formal schooling, and they all were unemployed. They had the feeling that the country was changing around them, and they didn’t want to be left behind. In addition to new skills, the NGO offered them new ways of talking and interacting that led to a personal sense of being “in transition” in a transitioning country. That shift in self-identity was palpable and powerful by the time they completed the program.

EB: In a couple of places you mention discourse paradoxes or discourse shifts. What was the role of language in the politics of education you studied?

MP: Any story about South Africa is at some level a story about language and languages – and which voices are heard or unheard. South Africa officially recognized eleven languages in its new Constitution. Eleven! You can imagine the challenge this creates for public education. Remapping the national discursive terrain, especially in education policy, is not as simple as legislating language protections.

English and Zulu tended to be the lingua francas at JEP. But all the participants were fluent to some degree in multiple languages. Language-meshing was common, with Afrikaans, Sotho, Tswana, and Xhosa woven into conversations.

My view of language in the book draws on critical discourse analysis, a methodology that analyzes how language use both reflects and constructs social realities. Shifts in the Joint Enrichment Project’s focus, purpose, and identity are visible in its shifting discourse over the years—from its formation in 1986 to its closure in 2008. It was fascinating to trace this history, especially as the NGO played a key role in the anti-apartheid movement and subsequent development of youth policy in South Africa.

I think JEP’s biggest challenge as an NGO was to shift from an anti-apartheid agenda to promoting a partnership with the government – a complete pivot in identity! Over time, a discourse of resistance gave way to a discourse of skill-building, which shifted to a focus on personal development, and eventually to a discourse of self-promotion in a free-market economy. What was fascinating to me was how these shifts in the institutional discourse were reflected in the participants’ own talk and interactions.

EB: As you point out, it’s difficult to write about race and privilege. Were there certain disciplines or perspectives that were particularly helpful for you?

MP: As a white, foreign researcher in a predominantly black African context, I worried a lot about committing what philosopher Miranda Fricker has called “epistemic injustice.” I’m acutely aware of the risk of misrepresenting people’s experiences, or interpreting their experiences in ways that would seem unfamiliar to them. At a couple of points, I almost actually gave up the project for this reason. But ultimately, I’ve come to believe that there is value in sharing my particular viewpoint, informed as it is by my whiteness, my foreignness, my position of relative privilege. So I’ve found Fricker’s concept of the researcher as “virtuous hearer” to be extremely helpful. It’s helpful to remember that in all our interactions, our relative social identities shape what people tell us, and also how we interpret what they say.There are some particular disciplinary perspectives that I think have helped me put this concept into practice. Providing readers with sufficient context is critical to writing about race, privilege, and oppression. This is why I’m a fan of the extended case-study method popularized by sociologist Michael Burawoy, which allowed me to situate particular events in a broader socio-historical context. As an ethnographic researcher, immersive participant-observation over many years helped me find an empathic stance. So did learning some isiZulu from the JEP participants. And as I mentioned earlier, critical discourse analysis has been a helpful lens for understanding how racialized privilege and oppression are reproduced or challenged through everyday language use.

EB: On a different note, how has the experience of studying youth development in South Africa shaped your understanding of learning in the US, especially in this time of pandemic?

MP: I must say first that it’s been difficult to hear the news from South Africa – they’re currently experiencing a third wave of COVID, with infection rates at an all-time high. Less than 5% of the population is fully vaccinated. Lockdowns are continuing, including school closures. This has been especially hard on people with young children living in townships or rural areas with limited or no Internet access at home. Like here in the US, pre-existing racialized inequities have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Studying youth development through the lens of a South African NGO has strengthened my belief that learning is most powerful when it’s understood not as simply acquiring marketable skills and knowledge, but as a process of identity construction. The students in my classes are human beings first and foremost; how and what they learn is shaped by who they are, and affects who they’re becoming. As teachers, it’s important to remember that learning and identity are inextricably linked. And that the process of learning – our teaching techniques, our use of language, the way we help students connect with each other – affect who our students become as much as the content or skills they are acquiring.

EB: Thanks for talking with us and sharing your insights.

MP: Thank you for the thought-provoking questions!

Book (hardcover and e-book versions) available from Routledge here: https://www.routledge.com/A-Hidden-History-of-Youth-Development-in-South-Africa-Learning-in-Transition/Perrow/p/book/9780367261412

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An Interview with Nathan Harris, author of The Sweetness of Water

Posted on July 14, 2021 by Ed Battistella
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Writer Nathan Harris has a MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon, where he won the Kidd Prize. He was a 2010 graduate of Ashland High School.

His debut novel, The Sweetness of Water, is the story of two brothers, formerly enslaved in Georgia, who form an alliance with a white farmer who believes he has lost his son in the Civil War. Oprah Winfrey selected it as an Oprah’s Book Club pick, calling The Sweetness of Water a “kind of a Juneteenth celebration.” Writer Richard Russo said: “Harris has, in a sense, unwritten Gone With the Wind, detonating its phony romanticism, its unearned sympathies, its wretched racism.” And The Sweetness of Water is one of the recommendations on Barack Obama’s 2021 Summer Reading List.

Ed Battistella: When I read about your book, I ran right over to Bloomsbury Books and bought a copy. I really loved the book. How did you get the idea to write about this period and these characters?

Nathan Harris: A few years ago, I happened upon the transcriptions of freed slaves speaking with historians, and I was struck by how little I knew about the days that immediately followed the Civil War. If all of you could just Imagine, having spent your entire life in bondage, your every movement controlled by others, and suddenly waking up to the earthshaking revelation that the government has given you a new identity, one of being free – while you’re still occupying the same traumatized body, living with the same tortured history of your past, that has defined your entire existence. And now you must navigate the next chapter of your life with no guidance, no signposts to tell you where you might go next, or what freedom even means in this precarious, and even dangerous, new circumstance. The thought fascinated me, and I realized that no novel that I had read had covered that specific moment in time. My imagination started working then, and the seeds for The Sweetness of Water were planted. I imagined two brothers, just freed, standing before the plantation that had been their home, their workplace, their everything… and suddenly being given the option to roam the world as they pleased. Where would they go? What would they do?

EB: One thing I found myself noticing was how you kept the tension going. I was on the edge of my seat again and again. Is this building the tension something you consciously worked on as you wrote the novel?

NH: I think keeping the reader’s interest is at the core of storytelling. It’s definitely something I strive for, but I also follow the story to its endpoint organically. I’m not going to orchestrate some huge twist just to keep the reader intrigued… but at the end of the day, if someone is willing to pick up my book, it’s my job to keep them entertained to some degree.

EB: How did the characters evolve as you wrote it? I loved the ensemble of characters you created and the way that each grew and stood out at different times. Did you have that in mind from the start or did some of the characters take over?

NH: Like the storyline, the necessity of each character became clear over time. George and the brothers were always there. But then I thought, why is George grieving? What brings him to the woods that night? And so Isabelle and Caleb become more clear to me, then. Each chapter that follows simply tags along to the consciousness of the person who best represents that moment in the story. It’s almost magical to find out where the story will go, following its twists and turns naturally, and finding the proper tools to burrow into the respective characters’ mind that I must in order to progress things.

EB: What was the historical research like for The Sweetness of Water? It must have been extensive.

NH: Extensive to me! Perhaps less so for a historian. Whenever I needed to educate myself on some matter, I certainly researched it, and that work can take up a whole writing session… learning just enough to finish a paragraph at times. But it’s part of the job.

EB: Who are some of the writers whose work inspired you?

NH: I could go on for days. Edward P. Jones, James McBride, Toni Morrison, Richard Russo, Marilynne Robinson, J. M. Coetzee, to name a few.

EB: Any thoughts on what the novel has to say about living in today’s world?

NH: We live in a country in flux. Somehow, still, we are going through a lot of the trials that these characters are going through in the novel. That’s a sobering thought, but we should also consider that our country survived that crisis. It can do so again. If only we empathize with one another. Try to overcome our differences. It’s possible.

EB: What are your plans for the future, writing-wise and career-wise?

NH: I imagine I’ll keep writing. I have little else to occupy my time. What I will write . . . now that’s the question.

EB: Thanks for talking with us. I hope you get back to Ashland sometime.

NH: Ashland is home, and I’m always planning my next return. I only hope I can meet with some readers while I’m there.

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An Interview with Margalit Fox, author of The Confidence Men

Posted on June 30, 2021 by Ed Battistella
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photo credit: Ivan Farkas

Margalit Fox is the author of three previous books: Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind (Simon & Schuster, 2007); The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2013), which received the William Saroyan Prize for International Writing; and Conan Doyle  for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer (Random House, 2018).

Ms. Fox enjoyed a 24-year-career at the New York Times, as an editor at the Sunday Book Review and a senior writer in the Obituary News department. She received the Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York in 2011 for feature writing, and in 2015 for beat reporting. She is one of four authors whose work is prominently featured in Steven Pinker’s 2014 best seller, The Sense of Style; in 2016, the Poynter Institute named her one of the six best writers in the Times’s history. With her Times colleagues, she stars in Obit, Vanessa Gould’s acclaimed documentary of 2017.

Her recently released nonfiction thriller, The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History, published by Random House, tells the true story of Elias Henry Jones and Cedric Waters Hill, two British POWs who orchestrated an elaborate con game, centering on a handmade Ouija board, that let them flee a Turkish prison camp during World War I. Publishers Weekly called The Confidence Men a “marvelous history” and the Washington Post said it was “enthralling.” (@margalitfox; #FoxConfidenceMen)

Ed Battistella: I really enjoyed The Confidence Men, both for the story itself, with its wonderful writing, and for its insights about the history of cons and mentalism. How did you discover the story of Elias Henry Jones and Cedric Waters Hill?

Margalit Fox: Thank you, Ed! This book, my fourth, is especially dear to my heart because of the eye-popping nature of its true story—the tale of a prison break so bizarre it should never have worked. What delighted me every bit as much as the story itself was the way in which I encountered it: thumbing through a dusty, long-out-of-print book, looking for something else entirely.

About three years ago, when my previous book, Conan Doyle for the Defense, was in production, I began casting about for what to write next. I was vaguely thinking of doing something about the nature of identity as seen through the exploits of pathological impostors—people like Frank Abagnale, of Catch Me if You Can fame, or Ferdinand Demara, the subject of Robert Crichton’s 1959 biography, The Great Imposter, and the Hollywood adaptation, starring Tony Curtis, released the next year.

From my home library, I took down one of my favorite volumes: Grand Deception: The World’s Most Spectacular and Successful Hoaxes, Impostures, Ruses and Frauds, a 1955 anthology edited by Alexander Klein. I knew it contained at least one piece on imposture, but what caught my eye was an essay with the most tantalizing title I’ve ever seen on a work of nonfiction: “The Invisible Accomplice.” That essay, written by my protagonist, the Welsh artilleryman Elias Henry Jones, and originally published in the 1930s, recounted his escapade in brief. It led me back to The Road to En-dor, Jones’s book-length memoir of 1919.

I’ve always been a huge fan of POW-escape narratives, both on the screen and the printed page—hardy perennials like The Great Escape, The Wooden Horse and Stalag 17. But Jones’s caper—rife with cunning, danger and moments of high farce that rival anything in Catch-22—was like nothing I’d seen before: It entailed no tunnelling, no weapons and no violence, all the stuff of traditional prison-camp breakouts.

Instead, Jones and his confederate, the Australian flier Cedric Hill, set in motion an ingeniously planned, daringly executed con game, worked bit by bit on their Ottoman captors—an elaborate piece of participatory theater entailing fake séances, magical illusions, secret codes and a hunt for buried treasure, with clues that appeared to have been planted by ghosts. If all went according to plan, the camp’s iron-fisted commandant would gleefully escort Jones and Hill along their escape route, with the Ottoman government paying their travel expenses. If their ruse was discovered, it would mean a bullet in the back for each of them.

Forget pathological imposters—here was my story! And to my wild delight, some quick research confirmed that with the exception of Hill’s own memoir, The Spook and the Commandant, published posthumously in 1975, there had been no book on the caper in the intervening hundred years. So in telling Jones and Hill’s story, I had not only the pleasure of levering it out of the crevice in history into which it had slipped, but also the privilege of a century’s hindsight, with its attendant advances in psychology. Those advances—in particular a spate of fascinating studies of magic, deception, confidence schemes and the implanting of false beliefs—let me answer the question that had beckoned since I first encountered Jones’s work: How could his escape plan, preposterous in all respects, actually have succeeded?

So began my enraptured involvement with Jones and Hill’s caper, one of the only known instances of a con game being used for good instead of ill. (On reading my proposal for The Confidence Men, my longtime literary agent, an elegant, erudite woman in her 70s, burst out: “Is this for real? These guys are wild!” I was happy to tell her that yes it is, and yes they are.)

EB: The Confidence Men was set roughly in the same time period as your book Conan Doyle for the Defense. Have you got a particular interest in British history of the early twentieth century or just in great mysteries of the past?

MF: I hadn’t planned to return to that period, so I can honestly say that the synchronicity is pure coincidence. But on second thought, one of the things that makes the early 20th century so fascinating (and a fount of wonderful real-life stories) is that it was very much a liminal time in social and intellectual history. On the one hand, you had the continued, hurtling onslaught of modern science, a development that had been a hallmark of the Victorian Age. On the other, you had the persistence—or, more accurately, the renewal, brought about by the Great War—of mass interest in spiritualism.

What seems counterintuitive to us, looking back from our 21st-century prospect, is that some of the most influential figures in both movements were one and the same. The distinguished English physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, for instance, wrote a deeply influential book, Raymond (1916), about his efforts—successful, he believed—to contact the spirit of his son, who had been killed in Flanders. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself, a trained physician and the creator of the single most rationalist character in world letters, was also an ardent spiritualist.

Though the spiritualist beliefs of men like these look risible today, it’s crucial to remember that the mass-communications technologies of the period—radio, the telephone, the phonograph—had advanced to the point where they were beyond the ken of most laymen: To the general public, they seemed to be quasi-magical devices that let voices travel through the ether as if by magic, and bygone men and women speak, via wax cylinders, as if from beyond the grave. So among men of science of the period, an authentic empirical question was this: Given technology’s power to do all these miraculous things, why shouldn’t communication across the ultimate divide—between the world of the living and the world of the dead—be possible, too? I now realize that Conan Doyle and his cohort are the connective tissue that links my previous book to this one.

In addition, what unites all my books, from Talking Hands (about a team of linguists decoding a sign language newly emerged in a Deaf Bedouin community) through The Riddle of Labyrinth (the story of the race to decipher the mysterious Bronze Age script known as Linear B) to Conan Doyle for the Defense (about Sir Arthur’s real-life investigation of a wrongful murder conviction) is that they’re all heuristic: They all center on the step-by-step process of advancing from an agnostic state to one of knowing. All involve intellectual treasure hunts of one sort or another—and in the case of The Confidence Men, an actual, cunningly designed treasure hunt, engineered to spring our heroes from an isolated prison camp high in the mountains of Anatolia.

map credit: Jonathan Corum

EB: What was the most difficult aspect of this project? I was amazed at the level of historical detail.

MF: How lovely, thanks! I don’t want to say that this book practically wrote itself, because (a) no book is easy, and (b) that would be the most hubristic tempting of the Fates I could imagine. However … one of the most remarkable things about this story is that it cleaved naturally into the classic three-act structure: the men’s imprisonment, their longing for escape, and their building of the Ouija board in Act I; the conception and playing of the con game in Act II (culminating at the end of the act in a disaster that capsizes their entire plan on the eve of their escape); and the dark turn the story takes in Act III, with our heroes attempting to salvage their plan by having themselves committed to a Turkish insane asylum, before the triumphant resolution.

I literally had to do no restructuring of the story whatsoever to create the basic armature of the book—something that almost never happens when one writes narrative nonfiction. I also spent about a year, as I do for all my books, reading background literature on a host of subjects, including the relevant work in psychology and social history; the history of the war’s Ottoman theater—far less well known to Americans than the Western Front—along with memoirs by other POWs in that theater. But even so, I found I was able to interleave the material from these works in and out of the very sturdy structure that Jones and Hill’s story had given me.

So in the end, perhaps because I’ve been researching and writing books for some 20 years now, I found that The Confidence Men leapt onto the page with a kind of unitary ease that I hadn’t experienced before. And now that the book is out, it’s become apparent that its three-act structure is readily discernible by others: I’ve been spending a very happy summer in conference calls with a string of Hollywood producers who want to option it—a fascinating kind of occupational anthropology for an old-school print gal like me.

EB: In some ways, this story of pseudoscience, cons, and spiritualism is a cautionary tale as well as a thrilling escape story. Is there a lesson here for people today?

MF: Indeed, Jones intended The Road to En-dor to be a cautionary tale about how remarkably easy it is to become a spiritualist charlatan, a species of war profiteer that flourished between 1914 and 1918 to wring dividends from gold-star families. (Jones took his title from “En-Dor,” Rudyard Kipling’s bitter poem of 1919. In it, Kipling, who had lost a son in World War I, decries such mountebanks: “The road to En-dor is easy to tread/For Mother or yearning Wife./There, it is sure, we shall meet our Dead/As they were even in life. …” Kipling’s title invokes the biblical Witch of Endor, from the First Book of Samuel, whom Saul asks to conjure Samuel’s spirit.)

Though I hadn’t set out to relate Jones’s story to our own time, it turned out to be remarkably relevant. As I’ve written in The Confidence Men and elsewhere, the process by which a master manipulator instills and sustains belief (a subtle psychological art known as “coercive persuasion”) impeccably explains the wide popular delusions that have suffused our post-2016 landscape—from the contention that top Democrats are running a sex-trafficking ring out of a pizza parlor to the belief that Covid vaccinations scramble the recipient’s DNA. As Michael Dirda of The Washington Post wrote in his thoughtful review of The Confidence Men: “We are all vulnerable to psychological manipulation. More than ever, with no sure footing in our rabidly media-dominated world, the only sensible course left us is to tread very, very carefully.”

EB: As a writer, what do you keep foremost when you are drafting and revising? I think in some ways being a writer is like being a magician, where you have to attend to your task and to the audience.

MF: I’ve always loved best the two endpoints that bracket the actual writing of a book. The first comes after I’ve spent that initial year reading the literature. At the end of that time, I’ll have anywhere from five hundred to a thousand typed pages of notes. I then go through them, page by page, on a very large table (I usually hole up in the library at Columbia University, to which I have blessed access as an alumna of their journalism school), coding every paragraph thematically and marking the quotes and anecdotes I want to use. This process can take days—even weeks—but at the end of it, there is the great pleasure of getting to see what Henry James called the figure in the carpet. That gives me the first strong sense of what the structure and content of the book will be.

Fast-forward a year or so, to when the entire first draft has been written. The thing I love most of all in the entire process is the buffing and polishing one does at this stage—wielding finer and finer grits of sandpaper until the text shines like a mirror.

EB: You made your journalistic bones, so to speak, in obituaries, which is a fairly concise form of storytelling. Do you see some parallels between writing engaging obituaries and thrilling long form histories?

MF: Since I was trained in the Chomskyan tradition of linguistic innatism, I can say that I truly believe all writers come into the world hard-wired for either long-form or short-form work. I happen to be a long-form writer in my bones, and never in my wildest professional dreams did I imagine that I’d spend three decades on daily newspapers. But I can assure all would-be book writers that that life turns out to be sublime training for long-form writing … because a properly written newspaper article is simply a book in microcosm: A story of a thousand words, say, has only to be gridded up a hundred times until you find you’re holding a book in your hands.

The reason for this is fascinating, and it harks back to the early days of modern American journalism. The structure of the contemporary news story was established during the Civil War, thanks to the prevalence of one of those quasi-miraculous communications technologies: the telegraph. For the first time, war correspondents did their reporting in the field and then cabled their stories back to their editors in Boston or Baltimore or New York or wherever. But as with many new technologies, this one was buggy, and the lines often went down. As a result, reporters learned to triage their dispatches, sending the broadest-based, most essential information first, so that if the lines did go down, at least their editors would have basic information to put in the next day’s paper. If the lines came back up again later, the reporters would send finer and finer-grained information in succeeding dispatches—material that it would be nice for readers to have, but that wasn’t essential. And … voila! Thus emerged the classic “inverted-pyramid” structure of the modern news story—broad information at the top, progressively finer stuff at the bottom—which remains the standard today.

This structure has endured unchanged for a century and a half because it’s cognitively perfect: It is an information-processing model, pure and simple. Anyone who’s ever been a teacher knows this: You don’t start the semester (or an individual lesson) with the background detail. You start with the broad stuff, and work your way down over time. Nonfiction books turn out to rely on this model just as heavily: They’re identical in structure to news stories because to be accessible to the reader, they have to be—the only truly significant difference is one of bulk.

A last historical note: It’s absolutely fascinating to go back in the historical clips and see the inverted-pyramid form taking shape. If you look at the coverage of Lincoln’s assassination, for instance, you can see immediately that the form was still in transition in 1865: Some newspapers were already using the inverted pyramid, while others continued the former tradition of straight-ahead, leaden chronology. In those papers, you’ll get stories—shocking to read today—that start, in effect [my paraphrase]: “The president, Mrs. Lincoln and a party of distinguished friends sallied out last night to Ford’s Theater to see that entertaining play, Our American Cousin.” There follow several more paragraphs of blah-blah-blah-ing about the play, the theater party and the cast. Only then, in about Paragraph 4 or 5, does the reporter get around to “a shot rang out.” Talk about burying your lede—the cardinal sin of newswriting today!

EB: Along with your work at the Times, your background included training as a cellist and as a linguist. How do those experiences make themselves felt in your writing?

MF: I always tell young journalists that a life in music is the single best preparation for being I writer that I can conceive of: It gives you an acute sense of tone and color and cadence and pacing—all essential arrows in the writer’s quiver. The number of serious musicians one finds in big-city newsrooms is striking: At the Times, we have a delightful chamber-music group, in which I still play, called the Qwerty Ensemble. Our rehearsals have been in abeyance as a result of Covid, of course, but we’re all eager to resume playing together.

And needless to say, my linguistics training—I did bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the field at SUNY-Stony Brook—helps me as a writer every hour of every day. When I was studying linguistics (long before I had any thoughts of a writing career) I was especially drawn to the subfields of poetics and stylistics—the analysis of what’s happening metrically, syntactically, semantically, phonetically, et al., that makes literary language resonate in the particular ways it does. Even now, nearly 40 years after that education, the conscious awareness of those factors aids me immeasurably in writing, particularly in the 10,000-grit sanding process described above.

EB: Did you ever have aspirations to be a mentalist or con artist? Or do you now?

MF: Good Lord, no! (Unless you’re willing to bake me a cake with a file in it.)

EB: Thanks for talking with us. I hope you find many more untold stories.

MF: It’s been my pleasure, Ed. But I’m now fascinated by the wonderful paradox contained in your last sentence. Any story that I’m lucky enough to come across in the literature, as I did with The Confidence Men, is by definition a “told” story. If it were truly “untold,” then I’d have no way of finding it to lever it out of that historical crevice.

This actually brings us back to pathological imposters. One reason (besides stumbling upon Jones’s story) that I ultimately decided not to write about them is that we can only ever know about the ones who slip up: the men and women who get caught in the act and have books and articles written about them. The most brilliantly successful imposters remain, by definition, indetectable.

So through the twin paradoxes of the “told story” and the “known imposter” we’ve come full circle!

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