From: Davis, Jill <JIDAVIS>
Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2003 12:37:28 -0500

Pardon me for dwelling: A couple of thoughts on the discussion, specifically about Elizabeth Partridge's book about Woody Guthrie. As the editor of the book, it was my job to help Betsy figure out who to have "vet" it. Someone suggested in this dicussion that having history vetted was just as important as other subjects. Well of course it is! And we do! And we did. But is there one specialist on Woody Guthrie? Probably not.

Pete Seeger read it for us, and he found lots of things about Woody's life and times that he remembered differently than what Betsy's research showed. Some changes were made, yes, but others were not. For the historical background, a professor of history read it and commented. For the political background, a political activist read it and commented. Nora Guthrie read it and told us that she actually learned some things about her dad that she never knew. Harold Leventhal read it. No one knows more about the folk scene than Harold. So this leads to another point: when a writer conducts as much original research as Betsy did, how can anyone check it? What CAN be checked are the obvious things. When he was born, what his parents did . . . . but that's not what we're talking about here, is it?

Here's my point: There were many instances in this book where it would have taken five source notes to document the information that came from ONE of Betsy's sentences: What if Woody's mood during a particular event was documented in a letter he wrote. What if a dramatic detail about that same event came from a newspaper article or from the back of a photograph? What if the very same event came up in an interview Betsy did with one of Woody's children? Then in her writing, what if Betsy synthesized all of this information and wrote a sentence including all of that research? Nobody can document that much stuff. And no one would be able to vet the kind of research that was done on this book, unless it was their independent research project for six credits--and honestly it wouldn't make sense to do it.

When the Woody Guthrie archives were opened up to Betsy, and she realized the vast amount of materials she had to work with, that's when she realized the potential for telling Woody's story, weaving together ideas and facts and thoughts and feelings and lyrics and stories that she got from what she describes in her source notes as someone who wrote "more than three thousand songs, filled dozens of journals, and wrote thousands of letters and two autobiographies." If teachers want to point to be able to point to another published work and say: "That's where she got that fact from!" That can happen here in some cases. And if they they want to go a step further and point to a primary source and say the same thing, they can especially do that with the interviews and letters. But if they want to go a step further, they can explain to their students what original research really is, and explain what it means to really find out things for yourself by going to an archive and looking at letters and telegrams and old sheets of lyrics with notes written on them and awesome stuff like that. And then, just to make them really itchy, explain to them what it would take to document every single obscure fact.

Also, from a publisher's point of view, to document every fact would have turned five pages of source notes to twenty pages. And with the time constraints we have in publishing, the book wouldn't have come out until a season or two later. Then we wouldn't be having this discussion!

Happy New Year!

Jill Davis Senior Editor Viking Children's Books


This email may contain confidential material. If you were not an intended recipient, please notify the sender and delete all copies. We may monitor email to and from our network.
Received on Fri 03 Jan 2003 11:37:28 AM CST