Friday, May 9, 2025
Become a Patron!Who’s on the docket for the Friday matinee, looks like it’s Will Bardenwerper, author of The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves Unsaid and most recently, Homestand: Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America (Doubleday).
The story takes us to Batavia, New York in the western part of the state not too far from Buffalo. Batavia used to be home to the minor league Muckdogs but was wiped out during Major League Baseball’s consolidation of dozens of minor league teams, teams that were often the beating hearts of so many communities. What took that team’s place was a wood-bat college baseball summer league similar to the Cape Cod League, but not quite as awash in talent.
What separates Will’s book from many of these “a season with” books is that he focuses more on the people in the stands vs. the ones in the dugout, the often quirky people who love the game more for what it symbolizes: a meeting place and a chance to set aside our differences to agree on the bang bang bang of a 6-4-3 double play.
Will graduated from Princeton, served in the military after 9/11, is the author of two books, and has had work appear in The New York Times, Washington Post, Outside, The Denver Post and more. He enjoys a tough Crossfit workout — probably not eating an entire box of fucking chickpea pasta like I just did before I recorded this, fucking asshole, you know, I say I want to get in better shape, then I go ahead and do that? — playing ice hockey and rooting for the Mets, Capitals, and Steelers.
Lots of good stuff to chew on in this conversation including:
- How to bounce back from negative feedback
- How he navigated his reporting at the ballpark
- The state of Major League Baseball
- And self-doubt
No right and wrong …
“It doesn’t seem like there really is a right or wrong way of doing things. You’ll hear two equally accomplished authors who do things like interviewing completely differently. One might use a tape recorder, one might write notes. I recognized that, and I picked and chose which one seemed to suit me the best, and went from there.”
On what Will struggles with …
“Sometimes I have a tendency to become preoccupied with the mechanics of writing and the construction of each sentence, making sure that that those are done as well as humanly possible. I don’t want to say to the detriment of but without maybe spending a commensurate amount of time thinking through kind where this will all fit in the overall narrative arc of the story. You don’t want to become sort of paralyzed with wordsmithing at the expense of the actual overall design of the story you’re trying to tell.”
On trust …
“Anytime you show up somewhere with like a notebook and you say, ‘I’m here to write about you.’ I think you naturally can expect maybe some degree of at least hesitation.”
On bad feedback for Will’s first book …
“[My editor] takes it and reviews it and sends me back this attachment. It was actually an email, a seven-page document attached on, you know, the publisher’s letterhead. And so I double click on it, I open it up, and it just says, ‘Dear Will, I don’t know how else to put this, but I had a viscerally negative reaction to these pages. Period. In short, I feel as if you violated every rule of storytelling. I’m sitting at my desk, in my apartment, having just walked away from a job to take this leap into the unknown world of writing. And here I have this prominent editor basically telling me that I’m terrible at this and and it was tough.”
On vulnerability …
“As any writer knows, you’re vulnerable when you put yourself out there on the page. I’ve been to Army Ranger School. I’d subjected myself to all kinds of physical torments over the years, but this is kind of a unique vulnerability that I think you assume in this profession and have someone that candidly tell you that you fell short was was not easy. And so it took me a few days, I’m sure, to kind of lick my wounds and get up back up off the ground.”
On trusting the reader …
“Trust the reader. If you do a good enough job telling the story, they’re smart enough to conclude that he’s not a nice guy. You don’t need to then beat them over the head with this editorial voice to connect every dot.”
Worth the pain …
“That experience did harden me and toughen me in a way that’s valuable, because now I think it made me recognize the value of a good editor. As miserable as that was, and as horrible as I felt for a period of time, I wouldn’t do it over, because I’m proud of this book. He was right, and the book is better as a result. If it meant I had to be miserable for a month, I’d rather do that than have the book come out and be less good than it could have been had he not shared that with me. So it strengthened me in that it illustrated, to me, the value of having a good editor and the fact that a good outcome is worth some degree of pain along the way.”
On smart phones …
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two people that I noticed had this contagious, spiritual calm about them. The one thing they had in common is they did not own, and I don’t think they even had a cell phone, much less an iPhone, and I don’t think it’s a pure coincidence that that’s the case.”
Will’s rec
Parting Shot: On Learning By Doing
As we get older, there’s definitely a reluctance to take on new hobbies or new skills because they take a lot of time and it can take years and years to reach mastery, or some facsimile of mastery.
I didn’t train as an audio guy, but on a whim in 2012 into 2013 I started experimenting and now look at us … But I didn’t start with a $300 mic, a boom arm, an interface, and fancy software. It was a very gradual leveling up through constant repetition, trial and error after error after error.
Now, as the Patreon gang knows I’ve flirted with video and whether or not to incorporate it as part of the podcast.
The short answer is NO. There will never be a video component to the show.
THAT SAID, there’s room to fuck around with video as a wing of the CNF Pod expanded universe. So I’ve started fucking around with what I already have: iMovie, my phone camera, that’s it. I’ve watched a few videos, but I don’t want to get too skilled with iMovie because I’m ultimately going to level up to Premier and you might as well dive into the software you ultimate want to learn on and master before too long.
The video interface is more overwhelming than audio, more moving parts, quite literally more levels in the program. But once I got going, it was pretty fun to play with the main clips, overlaying B-roll and photos to something that looks a little better than just something you’d film on your phone and post to Instagram. This is already a cut above. It’s far from a fully polished, professional, slick-looking YouTuber setup with 4K cameras, lighting, and microphones, with intercuts of licensed photos and B-roll.
My point is that it’s far too easy to get overwhelmed and I’ve learned more through the early doing than I could ever from YouTube video. Video is the next frontier for platform building and the cross pollination of audio and video will further lend greater breadth to what I do hear at CNF Pod HQ. As I see it, video is a chance to make goofy, irreverent mini-movies that pokes fun at being a writer. The video audience would be its own audience. If there’s bleed, cool, but, as I see it, it’s just another wing of the platform.
I’ve long resisted video mainly because it feels so complicated. … but through the doing it’s become less so. [It also feels like the “trendy” thing to do in podcasting.]
But it’s gotta be fun … I hate hearing how people feel like they NEED to start a podcast or a YouTube channel and lament. You hear this with comedians and podcasting and they’re like, ‘Uh, I’ve gotta start a podcast.’ No you don’t. In fact, if that’s your attitude, then definitely don’t.
Video for me goes all the way back to my high school days in the late 1990s. My pals Pete and Keith, we made comedic detective movies on micro VHS. We had no idea what we were doing, but we made it work. A big regret I have in this life is not pursuing filmmaking in college. I kinda resent some of my teachers in high school who should have seen what we were doing (they knew what we were doing) and maybe telling us, ‘Hey you should consider this path.’ So I’ve always been into making movies. And so making videos now, be it book trailers, or just goofy writer videos with some polish is all about having fun and learning a new skill that might keep me relevant over the next ten years.
Audio has opened doors for me, not blown them open in one gust, but deadbolts unclicked and I could slip a credit card and sneak through some. It’s allowed me to platform hundreds of writers. Video might similarly pave new roads. To quote Tom Petty, under my feet babe grass is growin’ … you gotta be nimble, can’t just be a writer. The next frontier is dancing with AI, but I might wait a few years to tap that maple tree.
Many moons ago . ..
400 Episodes Ago
300 Episodes Ago
200 Episodes Ago
100 Episodes Ago
