Historical Writer To Speak in Authors Series

An historical writer is the latest installment in Chesterfield Arts’ , which is meant to provide an opportunity for aspiring authors to interact with established ones.

Candace O’Connor will speak Wednesday evening at . The series, which follows a casual format and is free and open to all, allows for plenty of time for audience questions.

O’Connor has written seven books, including several corporate histories, such as Beginning a Great Work: Washington University, 1853-2003, which was commissioned for Washington University’s 150th anniversary. O’Connor said she has enjoyed the chance to research and write history as a story.

“Some people think history is very dry, and they’re afraid to read history because they’re worried it will be a dull repetition of facts,” she said. O’Connor said to avoid writing that dull repetition she does as much research as she can to get a sense of a time period or person. She reads letters, journals and newspaper articles, and then uses the facts presented to tell a story based more on characters and their surroundings than a timeline.

At Wednesday’s talk, O’Connor said she would share some research tips. She plans to talk about the resources available for doing historical research, and then discuss some of the stories she’s uncovered using those tools. She said the plans to address the difficulty in finding historical information about minorities, including women and African-Americans.

O’Connor is currently writing a corporate history of Express Scripts, which is a pharmacy benefit manager located on the University of Missouri, St. Louis campus and employs more than 13,000 people nationally. To tell the company’s 25-year history, O’Connor has interviewed 125 people from around the company. She said she’s most enjoyed hearing different perspectives on the same story.

O’Connor said that through her books have been commissioned, they aren’t slanted to favor the institutions she writes about. For example, in her history of Washington University, O’Connor said she was quick to admit that the university was slow to accept African-American students. “It’s not like I’m writing public relations,” she said.

She’s also working on a biography of William Greenleaf Eliot, the grandfather of T.S. Eliot and a cofounder of Washington University. During the Civil War, O’Connor said, William Eliot founded the Western Sanitary Commission, which helped injured soldiers and their families. To research the book, O’Connor has read journals and letters written by and about William Eliot, who was also a Unitarian minister.

O’Connor had some advice for people looking to break into the business of writing. Join professional networks, she said, to expand your contacts. Keep actively writing articles in the subject area you’re interested in to get your name out there. And, mostly, keep at it. Particularly in history writing, you’ve got to preserve.

“You really have to keep at it and use all the different tools available—talking to family members, going to archives and searching for old newspapers, hunting and hunting and hunting until you find what you need, and then you can tell your story,” she said.

All the work, though, is rewarding, O’Connor said. And there’s a sense of urgency to it. When O’Connor was working on the documentary Oh Freedom After While: The Missouri Sharecroppers Protest of 1939, she traveled to the Missouri Bootheel to research and conduct interviews. She said she felt she was catching the story just before it was too late. Those who remembered the protest were aging; one of the men she was scheduled to interview died the week before their appointment.

“If you know of a good story in history, you’ve got to catch it, do it right away. Interview the people who are still left, gather the materials while you can because things get scattered. People die. And if you wait too much, it can be gone,” she said.

O’Connor Wednesday at The Gallery at Chesterfield Arts, 444 Chesterfield Center.