Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat:

Joseph B. Atkins: Harry Dean Stanton. He lived on Mulholland Drive. His neighbors were Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando. He and Marlon Brando became very close friends. Everybody knew about Harry Dean’s philosophy of, there is no individual. There is no, we’re all just part of this sort of, being. But anyway, Marlon Brando comes over to visit one time. He says, Harry, when you met me, were you kind of intimidated by my thing? And Harry Dean says, I guess a little, maybe a little bit. Then Marlon Brando said, what do you think of me now? Harry Dean said, you are nothing.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success in the worlds of imagination and Entertainment. Here now is your host, Steve Cuden.

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, the noted author and teacher Joseph B. Atkins, is a veteran writer and professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Mississippi. Joe’s latest book, Harry Dean Stanton, Hollywood’s Zen Rebel, won the bronze award for biography from the Independent Publisher Book Awards in 2021. Regarding Joes novel, Caseys Last Chance, Edgar Award winning author Megan Abbott called it pitch perfect Vintage noir. Among his other notable works, Joe authored the nonfiction Covering for the Bosses: Labor, and the Southern Press, and his novella Crossed Roads was a finalist in the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Awards in New Orleans. Joe also edited and contributed to the short story collection Mojo Rising contemporary writers, Volume two. His articles and short stories have appeared in the Oxford American noir City, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, USA Today, Baltimore Sun, In These Times, Atlanta Journal Constitution, and the Guadalajara Reporter. Joe’s feature film screenplay, Memphis Tango, was a finalist in the 2021 final draft screenplay competition and Toronto and Vancouver Independent Film Festivals. He served as a congressional correspondent for Gannett News Service in Washington, DC and worked for several newspapers across the US south. I’ve read both Harry Dean Stanton, Hollywood Zen Rebel, and Casey’s Last Chance and can tell you that Joe has remarkable range. His book on Harry Dean Stanton is a fascinating, in depth look at one of the most beloved yet unsung actors Hollywood has ever produced, and Casey’s Last Chance is a ripping, action filled page turner. I highly recommend both books to you. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s my great honor to welcome the journalist, author, biographer, historian and teacher Joseph B. Atkins to StoryBeat today. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joseph B. Atkins: Steve, thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Steve Cuden: Well, it’s a great privilege to have you on the show. So let’s go back in time a little bit. How young were you when you first started to consider journalism and the news as something that fascinated you, that you wanted to go into?

Joseph B. Atkins: Well, it goes back to, the 8th grade. My 8th grade English teacher, Bill Watson, and a literature class I took under him. And this, was in Sanford, North Carolina, where I grew up. And he was a writer himself and a playwright, and his stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Jack London, all these writers just fascinated me. And so I went home in the evening and started writing really bad. Faux Iggar Allen Poe stories is how I became and just decided I was going to be a writer at the age of 14. In whatever way, you know, could you.

Steve Cuden: Have picked a more difficult author to emulate? I know, highfalutin language and just all kinds of beautiful words and poetry, of.

Joseph B. Atkins: Course, later on went on to other writers like Jack London, who was poet, was a journalist as well as a fiction writer. And, you, know, became interested in politics, certainly in college. This was the late sixties. It was a very political time, of course. And, I was a Vietnam protester who eventually got drafted by the army, and I didn’t want to go to Canada, so I ended up going into the army and ended up going to Vietnam. Thank you. So I came out okay. I’m part German, my mother’s German, and, or was German. My father was a world War two veteran. And so I ended up living in Germany for several years, studying there and what have you. And then I came back and I really began my journalism career sort of late in the late twenties, and from then on practiced, journalism with different newspapers, as you earlier said, looking at my biography. And then, like many old reporters of the old days, in the bottom drawer of my desk, I had that unpublished novel that I worked on and worked on and worked on and finally got published, you know.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that being a journalist helps you in a way, to be a novelist?

Joseph B. Atkins: Absolutely. You know, Ernest Hemingway, who was a reporter himself too, you know, with the Kansas City Star Thrower, said that what great experience, and you can tell in his writing style, the brevity, the succinctness and what have you came out of his newspaper days. and I think that’s really true. You learn, you don’t wait around for the muse to strike you or to inspire you. You get down and you write you don’t worry about writer’s block. And, you polish, you don’t worry about being too sensitive to criticism because, you know, you get, you know, tough editors along the way going to tell you, Atkins, that copy is not worth a damn. Get back at it again. You know, you get tough in that way. So all those things are good. Also, reporting and investigating, researching that can work for you as a fiction writer as well as a non fiction writer. Hemingway did warn that after a few years, you probably need to quit the newspaper because you’re going to have to unlearn a lot of things.

Steve Cuden: Like what?

Joseph B. Atkins: Well, I’ll tell you what. I was a newspaper reporter for 15 years, and then I came here to University of Mississippi and taught journalism up until, really, until last August when I retired. But, one of the things you have to unlearn is you get into the habit of this formulaic writing, the inverted pyramid, those kinds of things. When you’re knocking out copy for a newspaper or, even a magazine sometimes, even though there’s a little more leniency there. And when you’re writing fiction, you have to break those rules that you had hammered into your head during your newspaper days or whatever, and to sort of get outside of those boxes that are created for you there. And, that can be really tough. And, as a writer, you’re always learning. I’m still learning. And new ways to say things, to write things. But, yeah, I had to go through a process of unlearning as well as learning.

Steve Cuden: It’s interesting to me as a journalist and as a novelist, you’re still a storyteller, correct?

Joseph B. Atkins: Exactly.

Steve Cuden: And so on the nightly news, they say tonight’s top story it’s a story So you have to tell it in a way that’s compelling and not just pure facts.

Joseph B. Atkins: Exactly. And, you know, I’m not sure, you know, the whole sort of God of objectivity that’s hammered into us, you know, throughout journalism schools and what have you. I think, that’s a hard thing to achieve because can you really separate yourself completely from what you’re writing about? I think you want to be fair, you want to be accurate, but, you know, sometimes a little righteous indignation as a reporter, when you find injustice that inspires you to do the hard work to get the story And, so, but you have to learn how to, have to channel those things, channel your emotions and passions that you’re not preaching. You’re telling a story

Steve Cuden: I think one of the things that readers who have never been in journalism, have never been interviewed. I’ve had the privilege of being interviewed a number of times, but mostly for fluffy stuff, for being in the Entertainment business, not for any hard news. And one of the things that I’ve noticed in my time is that news reporters have a bias, and their journalists have a bias, and they come at it in a certain way. They have an angle of the story they want to tell, and that bias may shine through either quite loudly or not at all. But there’s going to be some kind of an edge that isn’t necessarily what you have in your head as an interviewee. Same like tonight. Tonight I have a bias toward what we want to talk about.

Joseph B. Atkins: That’s all true. I think that, you can’t hang your humanity at the door as you walk into the interview room, or you walk into, where you’re going to get the story You are a living, breathing human being who’s going to have reactions to what you’re learning, what you’re experiencing, as a reporter and your readers or your viewers are looking to you to tell them what’s going on here. Don’t try to sell me a package of something. Tell me what’s going on. You don’t want to have a hidden agenda. And I’ve done a million opinion pieces. I was a columnist for 35 years. You know, everything was opinion. But I had to work, report, research, back up those opinions, because if I had something wrong, well, it was going to come right back in me immediately.

Steve Cuden: Sure, sure.

Joseph B. Atkins: So, but you don’t want to have a hidden agenda. You don’t want to sort of be on a pretext. You know, this is a totally objective piece when it’s not one. I do think, your readers and your viewers, though, they want the facts. They want you to be fair. They want some insight into what’s going on. They don’t necessarily want you to get up on a soapbox. They want to hear the story But there are those places are those venues where you can get up on a soapbox, but you still better have your facts right.

Steve Cuden: And that’s different for an opinion writer, I assume.

Joseph B. Atkins: Exactly. Exactly.

Steve Cuden: You can get on a soapbox, or you’re supposed to get on a soapbox, I guess.

Joseph B. Atkins: Right.

Steve Cuden: So when did you start to study film history? Or in the specific case of Harry Dean Stanton? Why that subject?

Joseph B. Atkins: I’ve been a Film buff all my Life. I’ve loved Film. And, I was a political reporter in Washington, DC for a number of years. And, then before that, covering, a variety of beats over the years, feature writers and forth and always look for opportunities to write about Film. I was a theater reviewer among a half dozen other beats of my first newspaper. And, in fact, I wrote these glowing reviews for The Local dinner theater. And everybody was patting me on the back, great review. Until I wrote a bad review. And, then my editor told me, you’re no longer writing theater reviews.

Steve Cuden: Why not?

Joseph B. Atkins: The theater did not like your last review. And I came to find out there was an unholy alliance between my newspaper and The Local dinner theater.

Steve Cuden: Did The Local theater advertise in your paper?

Joseph B. Atkins: Yes.

Steve Cuden: And there you go. It’s all about commerce at the end of the day, isn’t it?

Joseph B. Atkins: But later on, you know, I interviewed Amanda Blake from Gunsmoke. I interviewed, Gene Hackman, when I covered the Washington, DC premiere of Mississippi burning back in the 1980s. So I was always looking for those opportunities after I published my novel. And, 2015, I really started turning my attention toward Film and Film writing. I, interviewed Nehemiah, persoff, the great character, actor, California, who was 97 at the time. I interviewed him. It just as. Just as sharp as he possibly could be telling these amazing stories of, working with Humphrey Bogart and all these other folks. And, so later, when I’m doing the story on Nehemiah Prissoff, I interview Pat McGilligan, who’s like the premier Film biographer in this country, or maybe the world, I don’t know. And because he had worked with some of the same people that Peristoff had worked with. And McGilligan had read some of the things I’d written before. I’d actually reviewed one of his books. And he said, have you ever thought about writing a book about Film? I said, you know, I’d love to. he said, give me a few ideas. I found out he was the Film series, editor or chief executive, whatever, in the Film series for the university of press, Kentucky. So I’ve always loved character actors. I’ve always been more interested in character actors than I have the big stars.

Steve Cuden: Why?

Joseph B. Atkins: My career. All my writing written about labor, working class. I come from the working class myself. I love to write about the sort of, either nameless or faceless people out there who have stories to tell. Character actors are not faceless. You know their faces, but you may not know their names, definitely. but they’re the grist and grind of filmmaking, or have been for many, many years. And so I suggested a book of a collection of essays about different, character actors. Nehemiah Purse often, and I mentioned Harry Dean Stanton. He said, forget the collection. Do a book about Harry Dean Stanton.

Steve Cuden: Okay.

Joseph B. Atkins: And I never thought I’d want to write a biography, but, I’d never been, sort of pursued like Pat McGilligan pursued me. He kept calling me and emailing me and said, you better. You better make up your mind. The ship’s going to sail. And so I said, okay, I’m going to do it. I’m so glad I did, because it was an amazing experience. It really was.

Steve Cuden: Was he still alive when you started?

Joseph B. Atkins: He was still alive, but he was really in bad health. He would live another four months or so after I started working on the book. And I really got worried, too, because, his friends, his colleagues all sort of circled the wagons around him, and they were protecting him, so I couldn’t get to him. And even they were not really at a point where they were ready to talk to me about Harry Dean Stanton. They were too worried about him, you know. So, man, I was getting a lot of closed doors and requests for interviews and so forth, and I got worried. And then he passed away. And then all the doors opened. They really did. People wanted to talk at that point, and the book really took off. You know, Hollywood was really, good to me. I went out there. My daughter lives in Los Angeles, so she was my chauffeur a lot of times. Going out there.

Steve Cuden: You need one out there sometimes.

Joseph B. Atkins: And she’s lived out there a long time, so she knows. She knows how to avoid the traffic when possible.

Steve Cuden: You know, that’s at 03:00 in the morning, right.

Joseph B. Atkins: Exactly.

Steve Cuden: So tell the listeners who may not know, they probably know the face, but maybe not the name. Tell the listeners who Harry Dean Stanton was.

Joseph B. Atkins: Well, my first introduction, as was the introduction from many people, is Cool Hand Luke. And he was the prisoner who was sitting next to Paul Newman, singing these old ballads, these old religious songs, which is kind of interesting because Harry Dean Stanton was an atheist, you know, but he was singing all these old gospel tunes.

Steve Cuden: But he grew up with all those songs. He knew all those.

Joseph B. Atkins: Oh, man, he did. He knew it. He knew that culture very much. as, Paul Newman gets up to go meet his mother outside the prison Gate, Joanne Fleet. And they had this. This very poignant scene because she’s dying. And Paul Newman comes back in. He’s Luke, you know, comes back into the prison, camp. And, as Harry Dean still singing, that was really Harry Dean’s first big, I think exposure. Although he had been in Film already ten years before that. 15 years before that. That Film was made in 67. He was in Gunsmoke. He was in how gun will travel, the rifleman, all those westerns from the 1950s into the early sixties. Later on, he was in a bunch of films. Oh, my gosh, let’s see.

Steve Cuden: I think the one that most people absolutely know him from, though they know him for many, but the one that I think they really know him from is from alien.

Joseph B. Atkins: Alien in 1979, he was an alien. He was, wise blood with John Huston, as the director. He was in Godfather two and one, from the heart with Francis Ford Coppola’s big disaster.

Steve Cuden: So tiny sidebar. I spent three or four months working for Joe Lombardi, who was the special effects guy from both the Godfather, Godfather two, and one from the heart and apocalypse now. And so I worked on one from the heart for three or four months.

Joseph B. Atkins: Wow. Okay. Okay. Yeah. You know, that movie was a flop, but I loved that movie. I loved that movie. You know, I know it had problems and what have you, but, I enjoy it.

Steve Cuden: It had big time financial problems, which we won’t get into tonight. But go on about Harry Dean, because I think it’s fascinating that you picked him.

Joseph B. Atkins: He really, it was all these supporting roles, you know. And, then he got his big break in 1984 with two leading roles right back to back. And it was repo man, directed by Alex Cox, and which became a kind of a cult film, even admired today, you know. And, he plays this veteran repo man in the movie. And then Paris, Texas, and that was directed, by them vendors. And that was Harrydine’s shining moment, where he plays. It’s an amazing film in which he’s this, strange man who wanders out of the desert, he won’t speak a word, and everybody’s trying to figure him out. And then his, brother finally, locates him and we find out that, he had abandoned, his wife and his son and was just kind of on this journey to sort of refined himself. And, the movie has a german director, Robbie Mueller was the cinematographer. It has a lot of european influences, but it’s also a very iconic, very american movie, too, with the desert, the West and everything. And Harry Dean after that, thought he was going to continue to get leading roles, which he really did not. But he was in still a lot of more memorable movies. last temptation of Christ. He played the apostle Paul. He was in a lot of David lynch movies in the 1990s.

Steve Cuden: and Twin, Peaks.

Joseph B. Atkins: Twin Peaks. He was in Twin Peaks and then, several others. And then right toward the end of his Life, a couple of people who’d been working close to him, helped sort of put together a movie called Lucky. And that was his last movie in which really Harry Dean Stanton sort of played. Lucky played himself in many ways. And he’s back out in the desert again in a small desert town. And that was his sort of a farewell to Hollywood with that movie. He died before it actually came out.

Steve Cuden: Why do you think, and I have my own feelings on it, but I’m curious why you think he didn’t become a bigger star, a better known star, you know?

Joseph B. Atkins: I In my reporting, I interviewed so many people. One, of the people I interviewed was Monty Hellman, you know, the director of, several movies that, Harry Dean was in. And in those movies, Warren, Oates also shared the billing with Harry, Dean’s stamp. But Warren Oates would usually get the lead. Harry Dean would be in the sporting cast. Bonnie Hellman, when I interviewed, he had an Airbnb in Laurel Canyon. I stayed there a couple days as I got to know him a little bit and talked about that. He just said he never saw Harry Dean as a leading guy. He just. He didn’t have the face. He just. He just saw him in the supporting cast and which, was no small irritation for Harry Dean. But, partly, I think maybe it was Harry Dean himself too. I think that, he was once offered a lead in a tv series, and turned it down later on in the early two thousands. He did play a leading role in Big Love, which was on for several years, but, that was later in his career. I think he, part of Harry Dean was, I don’t know that he wanted to make often the commitment to, that it takes it sometimes to a leading role. That may have been part of it, but he just never got those, he never got those roles. Even vim vendors, when he hired him for, Paris, Texas vendors told me that, people expressed concern to him. This guy’s a supporting cast guy. He’s a character actor. Do you really want to trust him in the lead? And, actually, benvenders first asked Sam, ah, Shepard to play that role. Sam Shepard was one of the writers for the screenplay. And shepherd said, basically, said, I’m too close to that character. I’m too close to it. I just cannot play it. And in a scene I described in my book, I think they were somewhere, in Santa fe, New Mexico, having drinks. And, that’s where Sam, Sheppard said, you need to play, the lead role in, Paris, Texas. And Harry Dean wasn’t sure at first, but then he accepted that role. And that basically was, like I said, his favorite role in his lifetime and one that, he’ll be perhaps best remembered by.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s almost undoubtedly true. of course, you know, people remember him for various things, escape from New York and other movies. I do think that Monty Hellman is right. That is to say, he doesn’t have a. What we think of as a classic leading man’s face. It’s not so much his delivery, because we’ve had laconic, laid back other actors that did become stars. Gary Cooper, for example, is very laconic and laid back. But Gary Cooper was a certain. Had a certain look to him that Harry Dean Stanton did not have. He had more of a character actor face. And once you get pigeonholed in Hollywood that way, it’s very hard to break.

Joseph B. Atkins: Out of it, you know, a few have, you know, but, they’re the exception. James Coburn, character actor for many, many years. Finally, you know, became the lead star. Bruce, Dern, you know. Gosh, Bruce Dern was another million tv westerns and so forth. Ended up playing a couple lead roles and what have you. But they’re the exceptions. They’re really the exceptions.

Steve Cuden: So how much research did you do? How long did it take you to put the research together?

Joseph B. Atkins: It was four years. Four years. Worked on that book.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Joseph B. Atkins: And, many trips to, Los Angeles, you know, and where I’d stay week, two weeks at a time, you know, and, went from one of the town to the other, also to, Kentucky. He grew up in Kentucky, small town in Kentucky. And I was lucky when I first got started on this book. Several of the people, you know, Harry Dean died, I think was 91 or 92. You know. A few of his contemporaries were still around, some of his, some of his relatives of that age that he had grown up with his former girlfriend in high school or in college at least. And, so I got to interview those folks who died within a year after I talked to them, you know. So several trips to Kentucky, also, trips to New York, because he spent some time in New York City. And then I went down to. He was a, I’ll tell you a little anecdote here. He was, Harry Dean got drafted into the, into the US Navy at the very end of world War two and served in the navy, and then, was on what they call an LST, a supply, supply ship at the Battle of Okinawa, the last big battle of World War two. And, there was not much information about his service. I find out. I found out what I could through, through the us military, the Defense department, so forth, but, it was still limited. I went down to New Orleans to the World War two museum, and my stepdaughter lived down there at that time. And so we were Venice. I went to the museum and a guy named Jerry Rogers, an author, was there signing his book, which was about his brother’s experience on an LST in Asia at the Battle of Okinawa. And so that book became an amazing resource for me. What was it like for him on that ship? You know, Harry Dean had talked briefly about it here and there in interviews and so forth, but I found myself having to do things like that at various points, in the book. He spent time in the early 1950s in New York, and, there were a few antidotes here and there from family members. What was it like up there for him? and, so I had little bits and pieces of the puzzle, but to sort of fill in gaps, I had to. What was it like in the early 1950s for an actor, you know, a young actor trying to make it in New York City? What was going on in that city at that time? And, sort of. Sort of what was the milieu in which he entered? So that’s what a writer finds himself having to do sometimes, too, as you, you know, when, particularly someone who’s on up in years and you’re going back a half century or more to try to paint this picture.

Steve Cuden: You approach this like a news story Like a journalistic piece. Not like a fiction piece at all.

Joseph B. Atkins: No, like a journalistic piece. Yeah, doing all my research, all my interviews and so forth. But here’s what you’ll find in modern day journalism, too. the so called, some of the things learned in the late fifties, early sixties with Jimi Breslin and other writers, Tom Wolf, and the so called new journalism of that time, where they began to borrow sort of the tricks of the trade of, fiction writers, like dialogue, like, you know, 98% of newspaper stories. You know, he said this, she said that, he said this, she said that. Let’s have these people talking to each other. And so I used sort of techniques like that in this book. A really neat scene, I think, in the book is where Harry Dean and his half brother Stanley, are going to their mother’s funeral. Harry Dean’s mother, Ursul, is kind of a very significant character in the book because of the tortured relationship between Harry Dean and his mother. She was very young when she got married. she had three strapping boys and then also inherited, some children from, her husband’s earlier marriage. And she couldn’t handle. She abandoned the family when Harry Dean was a young teenager. And then when she remarried, Stanley’s father, there was some bumps along the way there, too. And so both these guys were on the way to the funeral. And I’m interviewing Stanley at this point, telling me, what was that ride like? You know, what, did you talk about? And so he’s recreating. He said, well, we got stoned on the way to the mother’s funeral. So they were smoking. Smoking, marijuana, whatever, and they were just going through some of the, you know, thoughts about their mom, about their. About their family and so forth. And so what I got him to tell me as much as he could about that ride and what he said. What Harry Dean said is citizen just sort of just doing a traditional journalistic way of telling that story through, Stanley. I had them talking to each other, so I had enough together where I can piece together a conversation where I can put that reader in that car with those two as they’re getting more and more stones and beginning to laugh, and they show up at the funeral and they’re all. They got this, you know, they got the marijuana giggles, you know. And it was very inappropriate. And so that’s a scene I helped create. And that’s using sort of a technique of fiction in a nonfiction setting.

Steve Cuden: Is it legitimate in that case, to take what you have heard in an interview and then enhance it so that it’s not truly verbatim, it’s somewhat made up as dialogue.

Joseph B. Atkins: I think it is. It is a technique that, that is used, by journalists, I, think increasingly in, magazine pieces and in books when it’s appropriate. You don’t. You can abuse it. You know what? You don’t want to abuse it. I have to be very careful. I had to go back to him, said, tell me again what you talked about. What did you say? What did Harry Dean say? I wanted to get it right. There’s an old cardinal role in journalism. Once you’ve interviewed somebody and you’ve written a story don’t show them the story before you get it published, because inevitably they’re going to want to change this. And change that to make themselves look better or not to, you know, if they’re embarrassed about something, you know, you have to break that rule every now and then. And I’ve had to, you know, if I was uncertain about my material or something. And in this case, yeah, I wrote that dialogue. I said, okay, here’s what I wrote. Does that sound like about the way it was? He said, that’s pretty darn close. And so I felt comfortable doing that.

Steve Cuden: And so once you put it out, it sort of becomes part of the legacy.

Joseph B. Atkins: Exactly. Exactly.

Steve Cuden: When you set up the book, did you know in advance how you were going to structure it? Or did you go find a lot of stuff and then figure out how.

Joseph B. Atkins: To structure the book? You know, when I started out, it was a little daunting. I mean, this guy lived 90 plus years, you know, that’s a lot of Life.

Steve Cuden: Yep, indeed it is.

Joseph B. Atkins: And I didn’t know how open the Hollywood community would be to me, you know, and, they don’t know me. They know Harry Dean Stanton. So Harry Dean himself became a sort of a gateway to people talking to me because people, particularly after he passed away, as I said earlier, wanted to talk about Harry Dean because Harry Dean left a lot of, I think a lot of solid memories and good feelings behind him. And, people who felt close to him felt like that he had been not only a friend, but a teacher, perhaps just a good Buddy, someone they, a colleague they respected. And, it’s not like it was all just peaches and roses or whatever. I mean, you know, there are dark moments in Harry Dean, like in anybody’s Life.

Steve Cuden: Sure, of course.

Joseph B. Atkins: But, at the same time, people, were willing to talk about him. And, and so, of course, the story builds itself, you know, I’m telling this guy’s Life. And, he, his, what was his childhood like in rural, Kentucky? Grew. He grew up in a small town, then later moved to Lexington, Kentucky, a larger city not too far away. Then he’s in the military. He’s also a musician. You know, I felt some things that I felt some kindred feelings toward Harry Dean. I grew up in a small town in the south and, later got drafted into the army, went in the army, and then pursued my calling, as a writer, as he pursued his calling as an actor. And so I felt some kind of shift there. But your research is kind of the more and more research you do helps you sort of, begin to structure your story And how’s this going to go. Harry Dean was not only an actor, he was a musician, particularly later in his career. I think after. After Paris, Texas, when he. When he saw that he was not getting all those lead roles that he thought he might get, he really turned more and more to an old love of being a musician. He was a musician even early in Life, beginning with a. He was in a barbershop quartet as a young teenager, you know. And, so he has his own band. He plays in different venues in Los Angeles. He actually puts out a cd, which, I have a copy of. He’s really had a beautiful voice. And then he’s also a philosopher, sort of a. In Hollywood. There. There are a number of people, like there are anywhere, I guess, you know, who turned to alternative religions, alternative faiths, alternative belief systems. He, He said he never was a buddhist, but he embraced a lot of the tenets of Buddhism. that’s why I call him the Zen rebel. A lot of funny stories related to that, but he was kind of a philosopher who, Krishnamurti, Eckhart, tolle, people like that. He, he studied, he learned, he. It guided his life. I’ll tell you a little funny story He lived on Mulholland Drive. Very modest, you know. Mulholland Drive is, a nice place to live. His neighbors were Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, you know, but he lived on a relatively modest bungalow on Mulholland. and, he and Marlon Brando became very, very close friends. Everybody knew about, Harry Dean’s philosophy of, there is no individual. There is no. We’re all just part of this sort of, you know, being part of being. And there’s, no worry about tomorrow or yesterday. It’s all now. And it’s just this kind of amorphous existence or whatever, you know, a lot of it. I’m not sure how much it all will fit together, but everybody knew this about Harry Dean. But anyway, Marlon Brando comes over to visit one time, he says, because another person was there, he told me this story witnessed it, said that, they’re all drinking or whatever. Marla says, harry, when you met me, were you kind of intimidated by my thing? I mean, did it intimidate you when you first met? And Harry says, I guess a little. Maybe a little bit. Probably. Yeah, a little bit. Then Marlon Brando said, what about now? What do you think of me now? Harry Dean said, you are nothing.

Steve Cuden: He was a great big nothing.

Joseph B. Atkins: Particularly toward the end.

Steve Cuden: Yeah, particularly toward the end. He was a great big nothing. I’m curious what you do, technique wise, as both a reporter and as a researcher on a biography like this to get people to trust you. What do you do?

Joseph B. Atkins: That’s a good question. You know, you don’t want to be, You don’t want to be fake, or pretentious. And I’ve had some really tough interviews. I’ve interviewed convicted murderers, you know, and, I want to hear their story You know, I want to hear what they got to say. I interviewed, I don’t want to get off topic here, but in 1985, the newspaper I worked for, we did a 30 year retrospective of the murder of Emmett Till, the 14 year old black youth who was murdered, essentially lynched, in Mississippi. One of the two men who murdered him, Roy Bryant, was still alive, and I tracked him down. He had a small store in, the Mississippi delta. I went in that store. I was kicked out of that store, by the people who worked there, and Bryant wasn’t there. And then I was waiting in my car, trying to figure out what to do, and here Bryant pulls up and walks into the store. So I go in, back in there, and she was. I thought we kicked you out of here. And I’m talking to Brian, who’s going to the back of the store. And I said, look, we’re going to do this story Everybody else is telling their version of it. Here’s your chance to tell me what you can about what happened back in 1955. He motioned me on the back, and I spent hours with that guy. And so, basically, I didn’t. Wasn’t pretentious that I. We’re going to be buddies now or something, but I wanted to hear, okay, let’s talk about that night, you know, and whatever. I never got him to admit that he killed him until. But, when I asked him, you know, I asked him at one point in the interview, I says, I, said, did you kill Emmett till? Because, you know, they were found innocent by an all white jury.

Steve Cuden: Right, of course.

Joseph B. Atkins: And, and then they admitted killing it to a, ah, look magazine several months later. And it couldn’t be retried back then. And. But they were paid money for the interview, you know. So I said, did you kill Emmett till? He leaned. He’s a big guy, lean, right. Got his face right in my face and said, what you gonna pay me for my answer? And I said, I’m not paying you anything for your answer. We don’t do that. He said, well, I’m not going to tell you. Then we went toward the end of the interview, and I was getting ready to wrap up, and I had to get back there again. I said, you got to tell me about you and Emmett till that night. And he leaned against, once again, sort of in my face, and he said, I’ll tell you this much. If the boy hadn’t acted the way he did, it wouldn’t have happened to him. See, it was basically almost like a confession, you know?

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Joseph B. Atkins: And, it was about as close as you could get to a confession. So, that became the leader story obviously. But anyway, the point was, is that people can be uncomfortable in an interview. And you talked about this earlier. Me, too. As journalists, it’s good to be interviewed sometimes, because you see what’s it like on the other side of the table, you know, of course. And. But I want to try to be honest with people. You know, you don’t just sort of fire uncomfortable questions at them right away or something. You build a kind of a report, perhaps, and then, and get people to sort of talk and let them talk instead of you talk. Let’s hear what they have to say, and, And just try to be honest with them, you know? And people really, many of the directors who, worked with Harry Dean, were so openly them vendors from Germany. we had to do a. An email interview, but, he spent. He must have sat down for an hour to just answer dozens of questions. And then I interviewed on the telephone Bertrand Tavernier, who directed him in death wish, the french director who just. Just talked to me as long as I wanted to talk to him, you know? And so I think I’d like to say, that’s because I’m such a skilled interviewer. I think it was also because, as I said earlier, it was because of Harry dean.

Steve Cuden: Stanley, you have spent a lifetime talking to all kinds of people. and especially when you go talk to people, you know, committed murder. where do you get the bravery to walk into this guy’s store or to talk to a famous director? Or where, to me, there’s a degree of bravery to it. I think you do get used to it over time. Where did you get the strength to go into. Back into a store where. Who knows what they would have done to you?

Joseph B. Atkins: That was a little tense.

Steve Cuden: It wasn’t like you walked in with an armed escort.

Joseph B. Atkins: Everybody was very hostile toward me. I was definitely the enemy. And, he motioned me toward the back, and there was a little bar in the back of the store, and he had his bodyguard with him. He had this huge, hulking guy who was with him everywhere he went because he’s afraid some black guy someday is going to get revenge on him. You know, that was, He had a dual sort of, ah, attitude toward what happened to him. This was his one moment of fame. But also he had to worry about this for the rest of his Life, that somebody was going to get him, you know? But we went back there, and, it was a little tense, and something made it even more tense. We’ll get away from that story We’ll get back to Harry Dean. But we sat down just for a second. We were there. I don’t even know if I’d asked the first question when I heard this blood curdling scream out of the bathroom. And this, this kid runs out, just scream at the top of his lungs. He runs through the bar and he runs up into the front room. And Roy Bryan says, what the hell is wrong with him? His bodyguard said, I probably stuck his finger in that light socket again. I keep telling him not to do that.

Steve Cuden: Oh, my goodness.

Joseph B. Atkins: That had nothing to do with the interview. I never. That never became part of the story But when I tell that story it always becomes part of it.

Steve Cuden: So back to the Harry Dean. And then I want to move on to Casey’s last chance. Before we get too far into the interview, did you need to obtain any kind of rights or copyrights or photographic rights or anything in order to publish the book?

Joseph B. Atkins: Yeah, I did. You know, there’s several photo services. There’s one based out of Atlanta that, they have all kinds of photos of, actors galore in Hollywood and Film. And, I think when you work through them, they’ve already taken care of the copyright things, and I have to. Then my publisher, I got them together with my publisher, deciding which photographs we were going to use. Family members were amazing. I got to know, got. Became very close to Harry, Dean’s, nephew, Ralph Stanton. And, who wasn’t all that happy with some of the things I wrote about his grandmother Ursula, you know, but, we became friends anyway. And he, had some photographs of Jim Huggins, who was another cousin who basically, former FBI agent who was with Harry in his last months, really taking care of him. Sarah, ah, Stanton as well. Very close family, members who shared family photographs. Also in Harry Dean’s small little town of West Urban, Kentucky, there was like a local historian, Jerry Ellswroth. And this is what reporters, journalists need to do. In developing sources. And, not always the senator, the governor, the mayor, the big guys with the big names, but people, the secretaries, people who, basically have their. They know what’s going on. And this guy became a great source in tracking down a photograph of the home in which Harry Dean Stanton grew up in. That home has been torn down as a trailer on that site right now. But he helped me find, not a photograph, but a drawing. A drawing or a painting of Harry Dean’s boyhood, home. So things like that came into play, and those were the main issues as far as any kind of copyright goes or getting special permissions.

Steve Cuden: You didn’t need to get permissions for any of the interviews or any of that kind of thing?

Joseph B. Atkins: No, I did not. No.

Steve Cuden: And you didn’t have anybody sign any kind of document giving you permission to use their words?

Joseph B. Atkins: You know, that could have happened. I almost had an interview with Sean Penn, who was. Who knew Harry Dean very well. He. Even though Sean is also a journalist as well as an actor, he wanted all this kind of stuff upfront. He wanted every question I was going to ask. He wanted this, he wanted that. And it ended up never working out, you know?

Steve Cuden: Well, he has the reputation of being a little bit of a tough interview.

Joseph B. Atkins: Right, right. So that didn’t work out. But otherwise, everybody talked to me openly. I don’t recall ever having to get permission for an interview.

Steve Cuden: So I do want to talk about Casey’s last chance, tell the listeners, which is completely different way of looking at how to write, because that’s novelistic and it’s totally, creative. And it’s, I assume, not based on anything you’ve ever experienced, or maybe you have. You’ll tell us in a second, but tell the listeners about what Casey’s last chance is all about.

Joseph B. Atkins: Casey’s last chance is about this guy who is kind of a petty criminal in North Carolina. He’s, you know, he’s done a few things. He’s broken off a few times, but he gets into the situation. He gets into this shooting situation at this juke joint in North Carolina. He’s. He finds out his girlfriend is, is in this place. She knows what she’s doing. He’s had suspicions or whatever. He ends up, wanting to just fire a warning shot at her, but it ends up killing a, guy who’s there close to her, and that’s his own cousin. So he’s on the run. He’s trying to, get away. And he has this trek across the south. He has an old crony who’s down in Phoenix City, Alabama, back this 1960s, when this takes place during the civil. As the civil rights movement is beginning to begin to gather some momentum. So you’ve got this in the backdrop, you know, and racial tensions and so forth.

Steve Cuden: Was that why you picked that era, because of the racial tensions?

Joseph B. Atkins: Well, it is, but, there were a variety of reasons. I thought that was just a good time for it. it’s based, actually on a real life person who was the black sheep in the Atkins family.

Steve Cuden: Oh, my goodness.

Joseph B. Atkins: Okay, I’ll get that into a minute. But anyway, Casey goes on this crony down in Phoenix City, sets him up with, a very important man and a, boss, you know, in Memphis, Tennessee, who’s going to give him an assignment. So he’s basically entering the underworld, which he’s never really been before. He’s always been on the low key criminal stuff, but now he’s getting into big times deeper than he’s used to. He’s getting in over his head, is what he’s doing. He goes to Memphis. He’s hired by this guy to kill this union organizer at a plant in Mississippi. He goes down there to do it, but he can’t do it. He can’t go through the shooting. But now he’s on the run. He’s on the run from the big boss in Memphis. There was a shooting at the scene. He didn’t kill that organizer, but there’s a shooting that takes place. You have to read the book to get more details. But now the cops are after him, too. So everybody’s chasing Casey. The book is this chase back across the south. He ends up connecting with a reporter and an FBI agent who are investigating the big boss in Memphis. And he’s reluctant at first, but those three are going to hook up to finally try to bring the big guy down. And that’s kind of the gist of the story The inspiration for the story was I went back to my, my hometown in North Carolina, just to go see, one of my father’s best friends. He was also a relative, Lewis Atkins, who was then pushing 90. And we were just. I grew up with storytellers. My father was an amazing storyteller. My mother, too. and then, Lewis, too. And so everybody loved to tell stories about Clarence Medlon, I guess I can name him, since he’s deceased now. But Clarence had a, you know, he had a rough life. He was in and out of prison. He was suspected of murder, never convicted of it. But he had just a dissolute life. And, he was always this legendary figure who struck fear in everybody, and you just never knew when he was going to show up. And anyway, he was like I said, the black sheep of the family. And I said, louis, whatever happened to Clarence? He said, you didn’t know? I said, no. He said, well, he died. I said, what happened? He said he had been somewhere down in Atlanta, someplace, and then Charlotte. Then he came up to rural central North Carolina, near my hometown, and found a couple of old relatives, Blue and Thelma. Don’t you love these names? In rural, the rural South, Blue was the husband and Thelma was the wife and wanted to stay with them. And they put him up for a couple weeks and they just couldn’t have him around anymore. And so they kicked him out, but he had no money. They pulled together some money to give him a bus ticket to Charlotte. He gets a bus ticket to Charlotte and he’s walking the streets in Charlotte and dies of a heart attack. He couldn’t afford even a headstone for a grave. And family members, including Lewis, put together enough money for a headstone to get him buried. But anyway, that’s such a poignant story. He’s a bad guy. Yeah. But toward the end of his Life, he wants to come back to familiar ground. And it’s about the, the criminal who comes back home. Even though it’s dangerous, it’s not, you know, it’s not a good do that, but he wants to come back. And there was something poignant about this story So that’s at the heart of the Casey story of him ultimately trying to get back to where he started and then getting in all this trouble on way.

Steve Cuden: Well, he’s a classic anti hero.

Joseph B. Atkins: Yes, he’s an anti hero.

Steve Cuden: He’s not truly heroic in any real way, but yet you pull for him anyway.

Joseph B. Atkins: You do. And that’s what several reviewers and readers have told me and, written on Amazon and so forth, where you read these things that, you know, he’s not exactly a good guy, but, gosh, I was hoping he was going to pull through somehow, you know? And, I don’t want to give away too much, but he ends up. He ends up doing something that saves a life toward the end. And, so that, and that’s what.

Steve Cuden: Makes him heroic in some ways.

Joseph B. Atkins: He comes to some sort of reconciliation for his sorry past.

Steve Cuden: So were you trying to channel, or were you channeling Raymond Chandler? James M. M. Kane?

Joseph B. Atkins: Oh, well, yeah. You know, I love those guys. Oh, my gosh. I discovered hard boiled writing in the late eighties when I was. I’ve, loved literature all my life. You know, I was like I said, Edgar Allen, PoJack London, later, Dostoevsky. I love Dostoyevsky, but I discovered the Raymond, Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell, Woolrich, all those guys in the eighties when I was a reporter in DC and just, fell in love with that. And I’d been writing all along, but it helped give me some direction and some. A company of writers that, I’d love to hang with those guys. And I like that. I like their, their boiled down sort of tales that lack, any sort of pretension, but they somehow tell stories that, even though they’re crime stories or whatever, but they’re stories about their human stories, about people in tough situations trying to make it somehow, you know, in hard boiled writers became the inspiration for Film noir. And I love Film noir.

Steve Cuden: You know, that’s partly why you like Harry Dean Stanton.

Joseph B. Atkins: Exactly. You know, he, you know, Roger Ebert, you know, the critics that Harry Dean Stanton was the quintessence of noir.

Steve Cuden: American noir, you know, I think that’s very accurate.

Joseph B. Atkins: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: One of the big differences between writing a novel, like Casey’s last chance, you, had to do some research, obviously. But what are the big difference between doing that and then writing nonfiction?

Joseph B. Atkins: When you’re trained as a journalist, you have to, you can’t not do your research. I mean, I live in a town full of writers. Oxford, Mississippi is full of writers, musicians, artists. It’s a university town. This is Faulkner Land.

Steve Cuden: John Grisham Land, isn’t it?

Joseph B. Atkins: John Grisham, you know, lived here, still has a home here, you know. and, it’s full of writers today. Two of my best friends are Ace Atkins is a crime writer here in town, and, the, late Jerry Hoard, who knew Faulkner, and who had written a couple, well, a noir novel himself, which was amazing. Those guys were great help to me, too, as I sort of developed my own self as, a novelist. But, yeah. What was your initial question was about training you go into as a journalist. How does that affect you as a novelist or whatever? You know, as a journalist? when you’re writing nonfiction, facts and history become your sort of your guardrails. You know, they keep you on track. You know, you’re dealing with facts. When you’re dealing with fiction, you’re creating a world in which there are very few guardrails. I mean, I have to tell you, though, if your main, if your protagonist has blue eyes on page 15, he better still have blue eyes on page 215.

Steve Cuden: No kidding.

Joseph B. Atkins: And so, for Casey’s last chance, I had to write, you know, biographies of each of my character. I did, you know, short biographies. I had to gather photographs of what I thought they looked like or drawings. I, ah, have a whole book of just preparing that novel. And I went to all the places in which that novel takes place, and it’s a road. It’s a road. It’s a road story you know, through the whole south and back and forth across the south. But the south in 1960, I had to get, go out and find maps of the south in 1960, what highways existed, what didn’t.

Steve Cuden: And it has that veracity in the reading.

Joseph B. Atkins: Yeah. And then what was going on, you know, as far as the civil rights movement going on? What, what was happening? You had the, the lunch counter, sit ins at that time. It was long before, you know, one of the things that took place, like, you know, the freedom summer in 1964. So what was taking place then? And, so, yeah, there’s a lot of research that went into that for sure.

Steve Cuden: And so you treated, it sounds like you treated it like you were doing a crime story So you had the facts, and you put your facts up on the wall, or wherever you put them, and you could actually study what it is that you came up with as the facts of the story

Joseph B. Atkins: Absolutely. I, one of my main characters is this FBI guy, Hardy Beecher, who doesn’t really enter the novel until really midway or even toward the, last third. And he’s like a rogue FBI guy. He’s kind of lost his illusions about the FBI because Jay. Edgar Hoover is, all he cares is about communists. He doesn’t care about fascists like this boss in Memphis who’s a former Nazi, you know, and I didn’t mention that earlier, but, and so, I got to know some FBI guys, you know, and tell me what, you know, what, what you know about what it was like back then compared to what it’s now and so forth. John Heilman, a, former us attorney of the late John Heilman, who was roughly my age, a little bit older, worked, with FBI guys his entire legal life, and told me what it was like back then. And, so how disaffection wasn’t always that rare. It wasn’t really that rare many times during that era. And, because of just Jay. Edgar Hoover’s rule. And, so, anyway, so, yeah, I’m doing interviews as well as traveling myself to go to these places, I went to Phoenix City to kind of get the lay of the land.

Steve Cuden: This was all familiar to you. This process was familiar as a journalist.

Joseph B. Atkins: Even though it’s much changed now from what it used to be. But I went down there and found out everything I could about what it was back then. It was. It was one wild city at that time. You know, how much of that.

Steve Cuden: Would you be able to do today on the Internet?

Joseph B. Atkins: A lot. And I did a lot on the Internet back then, but the Internet wasn’t as developed as it is now. But my gosh, the Internet is a, saving Grace for writers in so many ways. When I was a reporter in Washington, DC, political, reporter, I’d have to go, every few months, maybe during election season, trek over to the Federal Elections Commission and sit down for hours and hours and hours going through campaign, contribution reports for each of these politicians who running for reelection. All of that is now available online.

Steve Cuden: Right.

Joseph B. Atkins: I don’t even have to go to Washington, DC.

Steve Cuden: You just go and search it.

Joseph B. Atkins: I just go search it. I mean, that’s how different it is now.

Steve Cuden: Indeed. Did you outline Casey’s last chance?

Joseph B. Atkins: Rough outlines? Not any kind of formal outlines, but what I did was, I did kind of a, I did so much. I’ve got a. I’ve got a notebook I’m looking at right now. It’s kind of. There’s only one copy of it. If I ever lose this thing, I lost a treasure because it was my whole sort of trek through this book.

Steve Cuden: Well, make a copy of it, will you?

Joseph B. Atkins: Yeah. It’s almost impossible to make a copy of. It has, like, probably 400 pages in it or 500 pages, but each chapter is sort of outlined. I sort of decided, okay, where am I going on the next chapter? And, each chapter has sort of a rough outline. And so, in a sense, I guess that’s an outline for the book as a whole. And, you know, one thing I want to mention earlier, when you’re talking about fiction, nonfiction. In the nonfiction books I’ve written, like Harry Dean, I wrote a book earlier about labor. Just like in a novel, you want to end each chapter with a teaser. You want that reader to go on to the next chapter. A very good idea, something to make them. And if you’re doing a long form magazine piece that has sections in one section to a little teaser to make them want to go on to read the next section, these are little tricks that writers use to keep that reader.

Steve Cuden: Reading it’s just like writing a screenplay. You want to end almost every scene with something that drives the viewer into the next scene.

Joseph B. Atkins: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Steve Cuden: It is the same principles, really.

Joseph B. Atkins: It is. Very much so.

Steve Cuden: I’ve been having the most marvelous conversation for just shy of an hour with, Joe Atkins. And we’re going to wind the show down a little bit. And I’m just wondering, Joe, in all of your myriad experiences in both journalism and fiction writing and biography writing, can you share with us a story story beyond the ones you’ve already told us that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, strange, or maybe just plain funny.

Joseph B. Atkins: Sure. Statement. I’m going to use a four letter word here. I hope that’s okay. I guess you can, there are.

Steve Cuden: Lots of them, and that’s quite okay.

Joseph B. Atkins: When I started working on the Harry Dean book, I got to know Jim Huggins, the former FBI agent who was, really spending a lot of time with Harry Dean in his last months. Harry Dean was very sick. and, I couldn’t get. Couldn’t get through to him to interview him, but I got. I got to know Jim a little bit. And he. And so I said at one point, jim, does Harry Dean know that there’s this guy out there writing a biography of him? He said, yeah, I told him. I said, well, what did Harry Dean say? He said, harry Dean said, I don’t give a fuck.

Steve Cuden: That sounds so Harry Dean Stanton.

Joseph B. Atkins: And, I include that in my book, and I go on to say, I do think he did give a fuck. I do.

Steve Cuden: Well, if he could tell Marlon Brando that you’re nothing, then why would he care if somebody’s writing a book about him?

Joseph B. Atkins: There’s a little quick story about Harry Dean. he was a musician and he was playing with Jamie James, his guitarist. Jamie became a friend of mine, too. And Jamie tells us a story that they’re on the stage performing at the mint or one of these clubs in LA, and, they’re really crowds out there. They’re doing well. And, this man comes up, middle aged man comes up, he says to Jamie, my little boy plays the harmonica. He is amazing. Would you mind if he played at least one song with you guys? Jamie asks Harry Dean. And Harry Dean says, sure, why not? The little kid gets up on the stage and he plays the harmonica like little Walter. He’s fantastic. You know, he’s out there just blowing away. The crowd goes nuts. And then the kid goes, sit down. They play a little further, another 20 minutes or so, and the father comes up again, says to James, you think he could play one more song? And Jamie says, well, let me ask Harry Dean. So he goes to Harry Dean, said, can the kid come up here one time? Another time? And Harry Dean says, hell no.

Steve Cuden: He did not want to be upstaged one more time.

Joseph B. Atkins: So much for we are nothing or I am nothing, you know?

Steve Cuden: So, last question for you today, Joe. You’ve already shared huge amounts of advice throughout the show today, but I’m just wondering if you have a single solid piece of advice that you like to give those who are starting out as writers, as journalists, whatever, or maybe those who are in a little bit and come to you to wonder how do you get to the next level?

Joseph B. Atkins: Yes, I’m going to quote, two folks here, some advice that. That I think helped me and might have helped me if I’d have heard this advice earlier in my life. One is from the catholic mystic St. Teresa Delacio, who said at one point, God wouldn’t give you the desire to achieve your goal if you didn’t think you could achieve it. If you have a deep desire to be a writer, there’s something in you, I think, that is a writer. You’ve just got to work really hard to do it. You’ve got to have persistence. You’ve got to keep at it. You’re going to get knocked down, a dozen times. You got to pick yourself back up again. my novel was rejected 20 times before I found a publisher to publish it. And I’ve had that kind of experience with other writings. You just got to pick yourself back up and hone your craft. Always learn. Always be open to learning. Don’t be too sensitive and willing to give up. Another piece of advice is from Jim Thompson, the hard boiled writer, crime writer. I love Jim Thompson. Jim Thompson said, there are 32 different ways to write a story and I’ve tried every one of them, but there’s only one plot, and that is things are not what they sing.

Steve Cuden: That’s wonderful.

Joseph B. Atkins: So I, borrowed some advice from two credible people as my advice to young writers.

Steve Cuden: I love that things are not what they seem. That is really good, because that means you’ve got the audience absolutely unsure what’s going to happen next. And that’s the best way to have the audience.

Joseph B. Atkins: Exactly. Exactly.

Steve Cuden: Joe Atkins, this has been so much fun for me. I greatly appreciate your time, your energy, and really all your wisdom in your many years of being a writer and a teacher and so on. And I can’t thank you enough for spending an hour plus with me today on story.

Joseph B. Atkins: Steve, I’ve really enjoyed this. You’re a great interviewer, and it’s an honor for me to be on your podcast.

Steve Cuden: And so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening to? Your support helps us bring more great StoryBeat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartradio, Tunein, and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Cuden and may all your stories be unforgettable.