Write Now with Scrivener, Episode no. 59: Brad Bigelow, Biographer

Show notes:

• Brad Bigelow
• Virginia Faulkner – A Life in Two Acts
• The Neglected Books Page
• The Space Age Pop Music Page
• A Dance to the Music of Time – musicoftime.com
• A Dance to the Music of Time audiobook
• Reading Pilgrimage
• Pilgrimage
• Paul Metcalf – Coffee House Press

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Brad Bigelow has written a biography of the neglected author Virginia Faulkner.

Brad Bigelow had a career working with the US Air Force at NATO. "I worked for a NATO agency that did IT technology and projects and then moved down to get closer to the people who had the real needs." After leaving NATO, he decided to go back to school, "partly because, as a retired Air Force officer, like anybody who’s done their time in the military, I had GI Bill rights. I had always been interested in going to get a Master’s, and I wanted to focus on biography because people fascinate me."

So why did he decide to write a biography of Virginia Faulkner, a forgotten writer? Was she related to William Faulkner? "Not at all. She was in Hollywood in the 30s at the same time Faulkner was there. And he jokingly said, ‘Call me Uncle Bill.’ But the family tree connection has to be many generations away from her."

"I was looking at other writers where I could do some archival research in the UK. [He had enrolled in a program at East Anglia University.] But come March 2020, the archives all shut down, and I had to figure out what kind of subject I could write about where I could do all my research online. I had done a short paper about Virginia Faulkner as a class assignment and saw that there was a story there. I knew her as somebody who had written books that had gone out of print and had been forgotten."

She had a fascinating life, then stopped writing. "She grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. She attended Radcliffe. She was a writer for the Washington Post. She worked in New York for Town and Country magazine. She worked for MGM. She wrote a number of books, did a Broadway play. And then the next thing I see is she’s an editor with the University of Nebraska Press. I thought that’s a weird left turn to take in a career."

None of her books are in print. I asked Brad if he thinks that this biography will bring some of her books back in print. "It’s a possibility. One of the things that I had to grapple with in writing this book was to realize that it wasn’t a literary biography. Most of the time when somebody writes about a writer’s life, they’re trying to show how their life illuminates the work. And in the case of Virginia Faulkner, frankly, a lot of her work was written to sell. It could be republished. It’s very funny. If it comes out, people will read it. They’ll chuckle, and they’ll put it back on the shelf and probably forget it. There are places in the world for books like that."

Brad’s biography is quite fragmented; it has 26 chapters in 280 pages. "It was fragmented. I felt that this, first and foremost, was simply the story of a life, and that I wanted it to have momentum. And so there are no long chapters. There are no long blocks of prose. It was kind of a deliberate choice to make it more of a readable book. And I hope people will think so."

Brad writes a lot of long articles for the many projects he’s involved with, but "I don’t use [Scrivener] for the articles, partly because I have done enough of them. I actually bought Scrivener several years before I was doing any work as a biographer. When I was looking ahead to retirement, I decided I wanted to get serious as a writer. I wanted to do book-length projects. I read up on Scrivener and realized that it was probably going to be an essential tool if I wanted to go down the path of moving away from 3,000 or 5,000-word pieces like I write on the website."

Brad did a lot of his research online during the pandemic, but started visiting archives when it was possible to do so again. "I did a series of research trips to the archives in Nebraska. Then I went to the East Coast, the Library of Congress, Columbia, Yale, and a few other places. Then I realized I needed to go back to Lincoln. So I did three rounds of archival research. And that’s the way in which Scrivener proved invaluable to me, because I didn’t start at the beginning and write my way through the book. I assembled blocks of information. I worked on a chapter when I had material. And then in other places, as I was doing research, I noted down quotes that I knew I was going to use, and I could put those in. The great thing about Scrivener is that you can do that piecemeal approach to assembling a book like Lego blocks, so to speak, before you have a complete manuscript. That book lived as blocks of prose in Scrivener for three and a half years."