Editor’s note: This is the twenty-sixth entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
Jay Ridler, forearms of a peasant, mind of a historian. All photos provided by the profile.
Jay Ridler (@JasonRidler on Twitter) is a historian, writer of fiction, and creative writing teacher. Here’s how he does history.
What are your current positions? How long have you worked there?
I’m an instructor for the Global Security Studies and Masters of Liberal Arts Graduate Programs, Advanced Academic Programs, at Johns Hopkins University. I’m also the Official Writing Instructor for the Google Arts: Theater program.
I started working for both in 2017 under unique circumstances. I got the job at Hopkins, in part, because I ranted on Facebook about British spies being better writers than their American equivalents. Someone wanted more detail and asked me to write a piece about it for War on the Rocks, a national security magazine with pop sensibilities. That someone was a program director at Hopkins. He loved the piece, and asked for another. Later, I pitched him a course idea about innovation and military affairs for their online classes. I’ve worked in online education for two decades. Now I’ve created three classes, and taught five, for a first-class American university. The latest one starts this fall about the misuses of history.
Google only happened because I taught at a learning annex for five years in Berkeley; a former student worked at Google, and on his last day he put my name in the hat for a new program looking for a writing instructor. So, while living in a rent-controlled house in West Berkeley with two fellow improv actors and my fiancée, I got a call saying “Hi! I’m from Google! I hear you’re a writing teacher.” The hiring authority was also an improv actor, and I’d been involved in improv theater in Oakland for five years so we hit it off and, like Hopkins, I built courses for them on creativity, storytelling and narrative for STEM folks, and writing fiction.
I also run a consulting and editing business on creativity, writing, and history at www.jasonridler.com. Like most historians, I have many jobs.
Jay’s first day at Google was . . . intense.
What’s it like teaching writing at Google? Who are your students and what are they like?
Rewarding! Google students (I can’t call them Googlers) are hungry to learn and a diverse cadre of people from around the world and the company: computer engineers and data scientists, HR professionals and marketing experts, safety and security staff. Different interests, different skill sets and different goals. They find me something of a novelty, as I am from a very different world.
What’s your typical work week like?
It shifts with priorities, but two days are dedicated to grading and teaching classes for Hopkins, including a great program called Osher where I lecture on military history and war literature for Hopkins alumni. Much of the rest of the week is devoted to course design. I am creating a class for the Masters of Liberal Arts Program called War on Reality: The Use and Misuse of History By Non-Historians. Now, I’ve been in course development for years. I helped create the first national online education program in Canada. But working at Hopkins is like working in Hollywood, since they have a multimedia department for online courses that is magic. I get to flex my performance chops making sizzle reels and promos for the class, animated and interactive material alongside lessons, and, in general, make an educational experience that is as engaging and compelling as can be.
At least twice a week I teach courses on creative writing for Google. I created a program where I teach basics of creative writing, how to kickstart novels, short stories and writing memoirs/nonfiction. Google also let me create a short history show called HISTORY BITES, where I have discussed everything from the history of flight to Abe Lincoln’s wrestling career. I also do more serious training in the structure of narrative and storytelling for people with a background in STEM. Most recently that was DeepMind, the AI side of Google. That was a great experience.
I also run a business on teaching creative writing to various folks, from beginners to New York Times-bestselling historian Nicholas Reynolds, who called me the “Swiss Army Knife of teaching, writing and history. Creative and multitalented, he has an enviable track record in all three endeavor teaching.” Kind words. I also love this work and I’m fairly intense with notes and having meetings with clients on how to make their creative work shine and succeed.
As for research? It is done in short, controlled bursts, or I have to carve time out on weekends. As you can see, most of the history work I do is in teaching, not scholarship. Since that pays the bills it gets most of my time. That said, I believe that course creation and teaching are valuable notches on a historian’s belt. James M. Banner’s Being a Historian pushes very hard to make this argument since so many of us who graduate into the contingent labor force can’t spend copious amounts of time finding independent funding for detailed research trips. Most of us do some teaching just to feel like we are still historians.
Then there is the perennial job of all contingent labor – hounding people for payment of work already rendered. This doesn’t happen with JHU or Google, but anytime I write an article, short story, novel, essay, review, column, whatever, I have to remind myself – I am the only one who cares if I get paid. This truth eats more time than you might expect.
If I get invitations to write an essay or a short story, or an opportunity arrives to write one for a cool anthology or publication, I find time on weekends or nights to work it out. I’ve spent two decades writing short fiction, so my chops are pretty good. I was just asked to write a third short story for an anthology series set in a fictional pro-wrestling universe called “The Territories.” Fun Fact: I am a die-hard pro-wrestling fan, my wife says WrestlerMania is a “high holy day” in our home. I recently submitted a novel to a small publisher, and I keep my eye on such markets because I write mostly crime fiction.1 Which is pretty niche.
To take care of my brain, I’ve returned to exercising (running while listening to podcasts), doing improv comedy theater, and watching at least two pro-wrestling shows a week. I’ve suffered severe cases of burnout, and worse, but it is hard to manage “self-care” when living in a world that only values “output.”
Security at YouTube is very modern.
Have you always been interested in history?
Nope. I’m Canadian and Canadians almost make it a virtue to suck the excitement out of history. Yet, when I learned about Louis Riel and the Metis Rebellions, how a indigenous/Franco Canadian rebel leader became a Member of Parliament before starting another revolt against the Feds and was tried and executed for treason, an act that divided the nation and raised fears of a civil war, I thought, “Well, that was unexpectedly fascinating.”
Plus, I’ve always hated my ignorance of the world. Hated it. History was one way to cure it.
Inta Mezgaillis Ridler pictured with son, Jason, in Montreal, Quebec. Inta was a refugee from Latvia during the Second World War. This included surviving under both Soviet and Nazi occupations and ending up in a refugee camp in northwestern Germany.
Was there a specific moment or moments that made you want to study history?
My mom was a war refugee from the Eastern Front in World War II. She was born in Latvia and suffered under Soviet and then Nazi occupations until her mother, pregnant with my aunt, ran out of the country and ended up in western Germany as the Soviets annexed the Baltic states in 1945. My grandma had stories about the refugee camp, and the older I got the more I realized that war was real, awful, and a powerful engine for history. Including mine. My mom had PTSD from being a child of the Eastern Front (her mother hustling her through the woods, telling her not to cry at the dead bodies because they “were just sleeping” still haunts me), and studying history helped me understand her better. Which was ironic, since she thought history was useless “dead white guy shit.” She followed this judgment with “but I am glad you like it, Jace.”
Tell us about your undergraduate and graduate experiences. What were your research interests?
Ragweed, my punk rock band of four years, broke up so I headed off to York University, Toronto. I was an odd duck. A punk guy who studied military history at a largely left-leaning school, long home to revisionist groundbreaker Gabriel Kolko. Worse, the only military historian they had, Jack Granetstein, had retired. So, waging war on my own ignorance, I took humanities courses until my eyes bled: German and Russian literature, courses on gladiatorial combat in Greece and Rome, the “fringes of the medieval west,” crime fiction as a reflection of American culture and values, Tolkien and Lewis, literary and cultural histories of North America. York had great European and Canadian scholars, and one of my TAs was Jeet Heer, future editor of The New Republic. Awesome teacher.
I received my M.A. and Ph.D. from the Royal Military College of Canada. Again, an outsider. I was a civilian student in the War Studies program, which was largely dedicated to soldiers and policy types working in the defense department. But they had a few civilian slots for military history (not many places to study it in Canada). I loved it! Brutal classes (I took the toughest reading and writing courses for the M.A., against the recommendation of the program director, and watched friends wash out), great teachers (they made the workload bearable), and tons of support for M.A. students to publish and stand on our own merits alongside established peers. In Canada, military history was punk rock – outsider stuff. And yet what I learned about U.N. peacekeeping, human rights abuses, modern civil wars (Yugoslavia in particular), the role of technology in shaping culture and more was innovative. And the soldiers and staff enjoyed having this weird punk kid around who wrote horror and fantasy novels on weekends while getting his Ph.D. My doctoral defense had more people in the audience than most of my punk shows.
Jay successfully defended his doctoral thesis at the Royal Military College of Canada, January 9th, 2009 . . . Ask him to tell you the story of the escaped monkeys from the Suffield Experimental Station in Alberta.
Tell us about your book, Undefeated: Stay a Writer Against the Odds!
Strategy guide and memoir, Undefeated was my attempt to answer the question – if success (meaning money) as a writer is so tough and getting tougher, how and why should you bother? How should you build a writing career?
My answer mined over twenty years of experience, research, and victories to create a helpful career guide that didn’t lie. Because the writing life is so tough, the publishing industry is full of myths that don’t really correspond to reality. And you can break your neck trying to make those myths work and then blame yourself for when you don’t achieve the impossible. Undefeated is the book I wish I had when I started, because it puts control of your career back in your hands, not some fable from an industry not-well-known for telling the truth about how it works (see the bizarre reveals from the failed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster). My job is to help you make as much cash and joy as possible.
Besides your own book, what other works on writing do you suggest writers check out?
Most writing books are good essays turned into bad books. Two of value, however, are Lance Olsen’s Architecture of Possibility and John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. They’re on opposite ends of the spectrum. One speaks to the need for modern authors to avoid viewing 19th century norms like novels as the god of narrative and instead embrace modern ideas, technologies, and experiences into making fiction, the other shows why traditional storytelling has value and multitudes within its supposed fixed boundaries. Both are correct.
I have yet to read a sublime book on how to write history. There are good sections in many books, but all my teachers said “read and study historians who grabbed you.” For me that was D. C. Watt, Modris Eksteins, and, these days, Priya Satia and Richard Overy. Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes’ How to Write is a good guide for non-fiction. It also has the decency to be short. Full disclosure, he also blurbed my last monograph, Mavericks of War, calling it “that rarest of books, a visceral page-turner which is also a deep examination of an overlooked human resource in war and international affairs—the expert outsider who works from inside while the ambassadors and the generals pace outside the walls.”
Reigning, Defending, Undefeated Universal Champion of Pro-Wrestling Novels.
You have written a lot of fiction as well. If we wanted to dive into your work as a novelist, where should we start?
If you want to support me directly, buy Death Match! It’s a punk rock thriller set in the world of pro-wrestling. If you want to help the people who helped me, purchase The Territories, an anthology of stories set in a fictional pro-wrestling league. But I am best known for The Brimstone Files from Nightshade Press, a supernatural thriller series set in 1970s L.A. Think X-Files meets The Rockford Files. The first book, Hex-Rated, with its salacious content, was favorably reviewed by NPR. That blew my mind.
Who are some of your writing idols and what are your favorite works by them?
I would not be the historian I am today without three mentors. Sean Maloney, Michael A. Hennessy, and Brian McKercher. Tough, tough instructors who were always supportive, and great historians in their own right.
Sean is the perennial maverick scholar, or “rogue historian.” He is a leading expert on Canada and nuclear weapons, and the official historian of the Canadian Army’s time in Afghanistan. He taught me that if your work stands up on its own merits, you don’t have to bow to anyone. Just do great work. And, frankly, he writes with a kinetic, engaging voice, not common among all Canadian historians, let me tell you. He was the first one to introduce me to Omond Solandt, and we shared a deep love of contrarian and anti-authoritarian writers like Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski and Harlan Ellison. Sean championed my work, gave me my first research job (analyzing media coverage of Kosovo’s road to war with Serbia in 1999), and always had time to talk about ideas, archives, and the best ways to conduct interviews.
Mike Hennessy was my supervisor and known as the cerebral assassin, he could destroy the weaknesses in your argument with three short sentences. And yet, his love of great history and creative intellect inspired us all to reach deeper and do better. His work Strategy in Vietnam, written on a Marine Corps scholarship, is so good and detailed with excellent analysis I almost dropped out. Sean saw me at a bar when I was reading it and muttering “how can I write like this? I can’t write this well.” He talked me down, reminding me that he did draft after draft to get it right, etc. Mike was the one who told me, “historians are good writers, Hemingway is a great writer. So, study Hemingway.” It was a coy way to get my mind to focus on essentials instead of rambling on the page.
Brian is a true “historian’s historian.” His work is masterful in execution and research, and, like Mike, his ability to compress details into clear paragraphs, and organize his ideas in such a way as to make reading a seamless joy, taught me to do better. I teach a class on historiography using his “Reaching for the Brass Ring: The Recent Historiography of Interwar American Foreign relations” as a model. Brian also introduced me to the work of his mentor D. C. Watt, whose writings on appeasement and the origins of the Second World War remain fresh and compelling as ever. Brian was infamous for being impossible to reach unless you showed up at his office, but when you did you received a masterclass in historiographical thinking and left with a list of books you needed to read.
I’ve had wonderful mentors in fiction, too. Jeanne Cavelos, director of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, where I trained to become a genre writer. Of those Odyssey teachers Steve and Melanie Tem were gracious and helpful and told me “you’re a real writer.” I took great inspiration from many writers whose work taught me how to do the job, from Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway to modern writers Joe R. Lansdale, Megan Abbot, and Gary Braunbeck. Of them, Gary has left the greatest mark. His work as a fantasist gets labeled horror, but it has as much in common with Raymond Carver than Stephen King. Few novels about grief can slay you like his short stories “Duty” and “Safe,” and his novel The Indifference of Heaven is a messy magnus opus that blends magic realism and modern horror into fever dreams of great power and effects.
You have written a lot of the role of punk music in your life. What does punk mean to you and what role did it play in your personal and intellectual journeys?
Punk was the first form of art that told me “just do it.” You don’t need to be the best, or even good. You don’t need to be talented or trained, just do it. Wanna be in a band, then form a band. Wanna record albums, do it, even if it’s on your tape recorder. Being a musician isn’t a secret club. It’s not just for the rich kids. And, some punks like Henry Rollins had strong work ethics. Rollins once said,“I don’t have talent, I have a work ethic, and no one will put in the time like me.”
I’ve felt the same way my entire life. My parents are Mensa-smart. My sisters are all wildly talented. I . . . was the funny kid who had a hard time tying his shoes. I’m not a genius. I’m not wealthy. I have no pedigree. I came from war refugees and kids raised in Dickensian poor-houses. But I will work like hell and make shit happen. That attitude saved my ass when I nearly flunked out of York my first year. It kept me alive when I was almost homeless and living under the poverty line on the fringes of Silicon Valley.
So you don’t have to be pretty, perfect, or rich. You will fail often. You may die poor. But no one will tell you that you didn’t achieve great things. No one can take that from you. That was the gift of punk.
Advice given to Jay by the late Neal Barrett, Jr., author of Interstate Dreams, The Hereafter Gang, and more.
What’s the best advice you have received or tell people about writing?
Your story matters. The greatest gift of literacy and modern public schools was to forever abolish the myth that only the privileged classes were made to be artists. Yes, they have leisure time and generational wealth to allow them to practice their craft far, far more than those digging ditches, picking fruit, or cleaning houses. But that’s why they get ahead. Not because everyone else is talentless. So don’t wait to be chosen to do art. Choose yourself. Write your story. And write it your way. Tell us the story only you could tell.
Such advice was distilled from people like Neal Barrett, Jr., a wonderful writer of strange fiction. I got very nasty rejection letters my first year. One said I had no talent. So, I reached out to Neal, who I did not know, and asked what do you do with that kind of rejection? The clearest advice he gave: “Jay, if you want to be a writer then keep going. The only one who can make you start, and the only one who can make you stop, is you.”
Cover of Secret Agent Magazine, from April 1937, advertising a story by Brant House. (Wikimedia Commons)
For Contingent and other outlets, you have written about pulp. To the uninitiated, what is pulp, as a genre, and what are some works or authors you recommend to folks wanting to know more about the art form?
Pulp generally means mass-produced literary works, printed on cheap pulp paper, from the 1920s to the television age. It became synonymous with sensationalist and garbage entertainment in genre fiction, especially crime, horror, and science fiction. But in the midden heap of pulp were some amazing flowers. Writers of great abilities learned their trade in these mags and books, from H. P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury to Patricia Highsmith and Jim Thompson, Chester Himes and Shirley Jackson to Raymond Chandler and Richard Matheson. There was freedom in the heap to take chances and write on taboo topics. Sex, crime, racism, gay and lesbian relationships, all that stuff could be written about with fury or power or subtext so long as it met a pulp sensationalist requirement. Now most pulp fiction was trash. And I can’t read it now. But, like heavy metal albums, I still love the covers. And the best writers sang above the stink of the heap. So, pulp and punk have similar qualities.2
Jay reading from Mavericks of War at the Mendocino Writers’ Conference, 2018.
Are you currently working on a new book or piece of writing? If so, would you like to tell us about it?
I always have five irons in the fire. I’ve finished a short story for the next Territories wrestling anthology, and handed over a biographical essay on American science fiction and fantasy author Lucius Shepard. My agent has my next history proposal, about pop psychology in the 1950s and its impact on pop culture, dealing with Rebel Without A Cause, Norman Mailer, and bizarre psychological practices, like recovered memories from being a baby and hypnotism as a cure-all for severe mental-health issues, that are no longer substantiated. And lastly, a novel about a hitwoman who becomes a life coach.
Tell us about the courses you have taught. What are you currently and where?
I currently teach classes on historical methods (I adore this course), innovation in military affairs, United States-Central American Relations, and the Global Cold War. I’ve also created numerous courses for JHU’s alumni and continuing education programs, on historical controversies, war literature of the 20th century, and even one based on my book Mavericks of War.
I’m also creating a class for JHU’s MLA program on the uses and misuses of history by non-historians. Everything from whitewashing the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to sell Dodge trucks to far worse creatures like Holocaust deniers. It’s called The War on Reality. And it’s phenomenal.
Mural from the US Army cemetery in Manila, Philippines, taken during the 2015 research trip for Mavericks of War.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
The biggest misconception is that historians are actually running around being historians.
Contingent readers know well, that’s the biggest myth. Those who work as historians full-time are an elite minority. The rest of us are part of what I call the “Great Historian Glut of the 21st Century.” It’s no small irony that while abusing history is evergreen in the news and public discourse, the U.S. has more historians walking the streets than anytime in its history and working as anything but historians due to abysmal full-time job prospects.
The biggest misconception about research is that it’s either boring or exciting when it’s both. I love the detective work of putting together a picture of the past that was otherwise hidden or missed or dismissed. That’s the biggest kick – adding a small rock to the foundations of human knowledge. I’ve also had my neck and back go numb from being hunched over documents and taking digital photos for eight to ten hours a day at the Imperial War Museum or the JFK Library or the National Archives. Between excitement and drudgery your mind plays a never ending game of pinball, making connections, seeing patterns, finding dead ends, haunting you until GAME OVER. Time to write!
If money, time, and distance were not issues, what’s a dream project you’d love to tackle? Or what’s a class you have always wanted to teach, but just haven’t had the opportunity to?
Smart answer: I’d love to finish my biography of American counterinsurgency pioneer Charles Bohannan, who served in World War II, the Philippine counter-guerrilla war against the Huk, early U.S.-led initiatives in South Vietnam, and the Columbian La Violencia. “Boh” was a real-life Indiana Jones, an archeologist who worked on major digs in the U.S., from Alaska to New Mexico, before heading off to war. He worked with world leaders in his field, and his command of cultural analysis and appreciation of other cultures were key instruments in his success working with guerrillas and indigenous peoples of the Philippines during the war. He also was a rangy, Stetson-wearing tough guy who almost never said a word but seemed to know everything that was going on. And he was a combat veteran who led his men into battle, from the campaigns in New Guinea until the end of the war where “El Lobo” was nearly killed by Japanese soldiers. Terrifying work, compelling guy, and I think many Americans would be interested in his amazing and sadly tragic story: all of it in the shadow of his friend and boss, Edward Lansdale, the so-called “Ugly American.”
Fun answer: I am the only one on this earth capable of writing the greatest history of American professional wrestling ever told. It has everything! A real combat art that killed people becomes a con job on the public to sell sensationalist violence, and then becomes an American art form. Sex, drugs, and steel chairs! Just need to find a publisher who believes pro-wrestling fans (of which there are millions) like reading.
If you weren’t a scholar, what other kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
There’s a painful and wonderful moment in an interview with Larry Brown, a celebrated writer of Southern “grit lit.” As a young father he worked as a firefighter but also bagged groceries, painted houses, hauled hay, and cut chain link fences seven-days-a week for years. Then he asked himself, is this it? Ten years later, where you going to be? “Ain’t there something better you could do with your life?” So, he tried to become a writer of fiction. If you’d read the first 5 novels and 100 short stories he wrote, he said, “you’d have to say I had no talent. You would have had no other choice. They were that bad.” And yet, becoming a writer changed his life before success arrived seven years later. He was able to create something unique and special in his life and mind, a quasi-secret life where he was more than the sum of his paychecks. It made him special in a world that said he wasn’t worth much.
I watch that interview every year, because that feeling, of being nothing in a world of successful and talented people, is the feeling we all have when we wish the world was fair, or meritorious. And there are days I get low because, well, I worked very hard to become a historian who writes great works of scholarship and I’ve done that and even won awards for that but academia is so busted I have no illusions about anything akin to a tenured life. It’s hard to work for a decade and then have people say “wow, incredible stuff, and history is so important . . . but do you code?” So, there are days I feel like the world has told me I’m not a scholar despite the work I do. So this question stings my nerves.
But if history, as I do it, was gone and I ended up managing an independent bookstore, or teaching high school, or returned to pushing a lawnmower as a cemetery groundskeeper (my last regular job before becoming a historian), I’d do my best to rage against the dying of the light, writing fiction or essays, or doing improv and sketch comedy at a rundown theater, and making a life for myself that was more than the sum of my paychecks, too.
Despite Spider Man’s superior strength and agility, The Ridler was victorious because . . . well, he’s real.
- For a taste of Jay’s crime writing, please see his February 2022 Contingent essay “Man of Smoke.”
- To get a better sense of pulp, read Jay’s December 2022 Contingent essay, “The Plot of the Dime Store Dostoyevsky”