Dr. Dolly Jørgensen is professor of history at the University of Stavanger in Norway. As you’ll hear in this episode, Dolly is one very busy historian. She is the author of three books, including her newest, Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums. She has also co-edited five books and written a truly impressive number of academic articles. She recently ended a term as the editor of the journal Environmental Humanities, and she co-directs the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities, which is most known for its excellent series of online book talks.
As an environmental historian, I have been impressed not only by Dr. Dolly Jørgensen’s work for years, but also by her warm and friendly presence at conferences and online. I was delighted when she said yes to coming on the show and talking with me about her writing process.
I was eager to hear from Dolly about how she juggles her projects, what draws her to a topic, and how working at a university in Scandinavia changes her approach to scholarship.
Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. When you purchase books through these links, you support not only authors and indie bookstores but the podcast itself.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Dolly Jørgensen, Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums
- Dolly Jørgensen, The Medieval Pig
- Dolly Jørgensen, Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging
- Dolly Jørgensen’s website
- Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities Book Talks Series
- Dolly Jørgensen on Bluesky
- Finn Arne Jørgensen
- Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait(and check out my Episode 3 interview with Bathsheba Demuth)
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Hey there. Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast all about how historians write. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. Today's interview was a true pleasure for me, with a guest I have long admired, and I'm excited to introduce you to her. But before we get there, a quick heads up: the podcast will be on vacation for the next month, in July, while I do a big push to get my dissertation draft done and take a short summer break. It's a perfect time to catch up on episodes you might have missed. You'll also want to subscribe to the Drafting the Past newsletter, because I'll be sending out some weekly bonus content in the meantime. Okay, back to that interview. As an environmental historian, I have been impressed not only by Dr. Dolly Jorgensen's work for years, but also by her warm and friendly presence at conferences and online. I was delighted when she said yes to coming on the show and talking with me about her writing process.
Dolly Jorgensen 0:52
Thank you for having me on, Kate.
Kate Carpenter 0:54
Dr. Dolly Jorgensen is professor of history at the University of Stavanger in Norway. As you'll hear in this episode, Dolly is one very busy historian. She's the author of three books, including her newest, Ghost Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums, and she already has a fourth book in production. She has also co-edited five books and written a truly impressive number of academic articles. She recently ended a term as the editor of the journal Environmental Humanities, and she co-directs the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities, which is most known for its excellent series of online book talks. I was eager to hear from Dolly about how she juggles her projects, what draws her to a topic, and how working at a university in Scandinavia changes her approach to scholarship. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Dolly Jorgensen.
Dolly Jorgensen 1:45
I have a very interesting career in that I got my PhD in the US, but rather than getting a tenure-track job in the US, where you're expected to produce a monograph within five or six years from your PhD thesis, I got a job in Scandinavia, and it was as a postdoc. After a postdoc, I ended up in a project management position, and then another funded research project. And in all of those, you needed to write articles, you needed to produce something within a very limited amount of time, and a monograph wasn't going to work, so I actually wrote a lot of articles before I'd ever written a book, which is a, made the genre very different than most people who come to a book, if you will, with the, a really long dissertation to start with.
Kate Carpenter 2:35
Let's start just with the basics of how you work. When and where do you like to do your writing?
Dolly Jorgensen 2:40
Well, you know, there's there's always demands on your time when you're teaching, when you're doing administration centers. I find that I can't actually write just in between those things. I can do research, I can look up data, I can look at files, I can write notes. That's all fine, but when it actually comes to writing sentences that I want on a paper, I need to have dedicated time for it, because I actually am going to sit there and really write through, so I need to have several hours in a row before I can make really progress, so my best times for writing have actually been when I've done some kind of away retreat, so I had a fellowship at a center in Edinburgh, and there for two months I got to work on a project, and I wrote almost all of the book that'll be coming out next year, because I'd done all the research, but I just hadn't been able to sit down and, and write it.
Kate Carpenter 3:47
Are there, you know, are there surroundings that you find most, most amenable to your writing process?
Dolly Jorgensen 3:54
I'm the kind of person that I have to have that focus. If there's other things going on, I know some people, like, for example, like to write in cafes where there's like noise and things, and I'm not that way at all. I need it to just be about the text that's there. Sometimes I can listen to music, but even that, I'm a bit iffy. I have to be in a particular mood to even do that. So actually, I find one of the spaces that I probably write the best on a regular type of basis would be on an airplane, which is kind of weird and sad, but but it's because you're not talking to anybody, you do put on some kind of noise cancelation sound, maybe some background kind of music, and you can really get into the groove with writing.
Kate Carpenter 4:44
And you're trapped.
Dolly Jorgensen 4:46
Exactly, you've got nothing else to do. I mean, if you're in a seat that has, you know, some movies or something, you could get distracted doing that, but I'll just leave the screen off. I won't even turn it on until I finished the writing bit that I had planned to do. Then I'm like, okay, now I get my reward if I'm on one of these long flights, for example.
Kate Carpenter 5:07
How do you like to keep your research and your writing organized?
Dolly Jorgensen 5:10
Oh gosh, I have folder system, you know, on my computer, but unfortunately I just kind of put everything in there. They are by project. Unfortunately, I also have a folder that's called small projects, which somehow then ends up with these sub folders that are many projects, which are probably all books. So they're actually not a small project after all, but they start small. I tend to organize my archival materials and historical materials with kind of subjects, subject folders, and then dates. As a historian, I do - I mean, I don't remember dates at all. I'm a horrible date rememberer, but I do like my story to follow in, in some kind of time fashion. So I do tend to give files names by like date first, and then what this is that I've made a copy of.
Kate Carpenter 6:08
Where in your research process do you like to start writing?
Dolly Jorgensen 6:11
Yeah, I'm one of those people that I have to know what I'm going to write before I write it, so very different than other people that I regularly interact with, who, who think with writing. I think first I need to know already what my organization is. So, what? What are going to be my sections? Let's say I'm writing an article or chapter. What are going to be my sections? What's the argument I want to make? Which evidence am I going to use before I will ever put the words to the paper. Sometimes, of course, in putting the words to the paper, I might change things or modify them a little, but if I don't know what I'm writing, I can't do it. So I actually spend a lot of time before there's words on a paper for a project, thinking about it.
Kate Carpenter 7:04
Do you then create an outline that you work from?
Dolly Jorgensen 7:06
In my mind, yes, but I don't actually write it out interestingly.
Kate Carpenter 7:11
Okay.
Dolly Jorgensen 7:11
Yeah, I'm not - I'm also not a notes person, where I write my notes out. I tend to just hold it, which is probably not a good procedure at all.
Kate Carpenter 7:23
It seems to be working for you.
Dolly Jorgensen 7:25
But yeah, I mean, I guess the other thing is that often my writing, and you can see it on my CV, has taken a form of articles and of shorter pieces, which tends to mean that you can hold that in, in your mind. I mean, you've gone through the evidence. I have all my, you know, documents and my sources, and they're lined up, and I, I've thought about them, I've read them, so I know where I'm going with the piece, and which article, which sources I need to use in which section, for example. So, my, my notes, if I have notes from reading, will tend to be very close to the source rather than what I'm going to write about.
Kate Carpenter 8:06
What is your approach to revision?
Dolly Jorgensen 8:08
Oh, that's always it's always hard in that, well, I try and get people to read my text right before I actually submit it, before I send it in, friendly readers, and I try to take their questions seriously, but it's always hard to like change something when you're like, but this is the order that I wanted, or this is the argument I'm trying to make, and this was like, well, that doesn't work, so you just have to move on and go, okay, well, it doesn't work, obviously, you have this question. I try to take that same approach, of course, with peer reviewers, which is to say, well, if you had a question, then I must not have explained what I thought I explained as well as I did, because you obviously didn't get it. But I will say, I generally find in revision that the places I change the most are the bookends, it's the introduction and the conclusion. What's the right way to make the argument rather than the data in between? So often that doesn't change a whole lot in these versions, and maybe it's because I've, I've thought about it, thought about it, and when I write it, I know what I'm trying to say there, but the bookends can change a lot, actually, between versions.
Kate Carpenter 9:31
Interesting. So, as I told you ahead of this conversation, I have often thought of you as one of the hardest working historians I know of. You, let's see, let me make sure I get all my numbers here. You've written three books, and I know you've just turned in the manuscript for a fourth. You've edited or co-edited another five books. You do tons of public history projects, all those articles and book chapters we've talked about. You co-convene a book talk series, which we'll talk about more in a little bit. Anyway, every time I turn around, I see that you're doing some cool new project. First of all, how do you do that? But also, how do you think about your scholarly output?
Dolly Jorgensen 10:05
Yeah, I mean, it is interesting because I don't have one profile topic area that, you know, really narrow, and then you go really deep and you work on this for a really long time. I'm a grazer in that sense. The grass is always greener on the other side, so I move over to the other side and try some grass there, and then doesn't look good over in this other place. I mean, that doesn't mean I don't have an intellectual agenda. I think, as an overall agenda, I'm very interested in human animal history and where they intersect, and I'm very interested in the role of technology in mediating those relationships, but that's a pretty wide remit, right, as an idea. So, yeah, when I think about my outputs, you know, they have followed that career trajectory that I mentioned, so I needed - in positions that are postdoc, that are funded research projects, you make commitments about what you're going to produce, and they don't want to see a book in eight years or something, because that's not how long you have funding for. You have funding for three or four years, and what can you legitimately produce in three or four years is articles, so that's that was kind of the cycle that I was in, and I always found interesting stuff to say, I guess, you know, in this genre. So I always had something else to write, because there was always some new thing that was interesting, so it actually took me a long time before I wrote a book, in that it was longer than a standard kind of 10 year review, I guess 11 years after I finished my PhD, and that was not on my PhD topic, that was on a topic that had come up in the meantime that I worked on, but I keep coming back to things, so I guess that's part of my writing process. I, I come back to projects that I had before. So, my second book on the medieval pig was because back in my master's degree I had seen that pigs showed up in the Anglo-Norman forest, and in my PhD, I had some pigs showing up in cities, medieval cities, and their sanitation. And after that, I'd still been interested in them, and written a couple articles, and looked a little bit at agricultural illustrations, and I was like, you know, this just needs to be written. I have all this stuff about pigs, I love, you know, I've been accumulating them on medieval pigs, so, so I decided to write it. So, in a way, I guess what I'd say is that my projects are always ongoing. There's always a potential for this book at the end, but it might just be a couple articles, and so I come back to things after, after a long time, in some cases.
Kate Carpenter 13:10
Do you think that, obviously, in the form of the PhD and the push for articles to start, but are there other ways that the Scandinavian university system changes the way you approach scholarship, do you think?
Dolly Jorgensen 13:22
I mean, the article one is a big one. In fact, a lot of our PhDs write article compilation theses. They don't even write monographs anymore, even within history, which is a real shift. And because we have funded projects, so there's a lot of external funding. In systems like the US, you have a few potential NEH, maybe an NSF, if you're in environmental studies that you can rely on, but in Scandinavia, a lot of our work is, if you're going to do research, is externally funded, so you've applied for grants, and we're talking big grants here, you know, a typical just kind of average everyday Norwegian grant is about 1.2 million in US numbers, so it's they're large grants to employ people to do things, so that actually makes your research quite different, because whenever I make a project now, I have to think, what part of this project do I not want to do, what do I not want to research, what do I want to give away to someone as a PhD project or as a postdoc project, which is very different from a model in which, you know, a PhD comes to you with their grand idea. I mean, we still have PhDs that come with that, but some way of shaping your idea that you have, but often it is yours as a researcher, and then you're giving away parts, so that actually changes your research and writing process too. Because it means you have to recognize you're not going to write some things that maybe you thought you might or they would be interesting to write, but you have to say, "Wow, I only have so much time on this planet, so somebody else, if I actually want it to be done, needs to take this and make it their project.
Kate Carpenter 15:18
Sure. Do you think that sort of cycle of funding also helps you keep producing things, you know, you're not just then sort of like wallowing in one project for 15 years?
Dolly Jorgensen 15:28
Well, exactly, because so our project cycles, depending on the kind of project, anywhere from three years to five years is quite typical, and you can't apply, very easily anyway, for an extension of a project, so it's not like I'm going to apply after five years I've done this project. Oh, but I just want to do more on it, or I just want to finish the book now of it. No, that doesn't work. Your next project needs to be innovative and novel, and all these things that funding agencies want to see, so it does mean that you need to come up with something new every time, so it has to be a new project in five years. Now, like I said, there can be trajectories, you can have things, research questions that are of interest to you, but you need to say why this project is somehow novel, different than the previous work you've already done, so that does keep things on their toes. You're always coming - that's, I think, that's why I have this small projects files, so there are all these things, which could potentially be a project.
Kate Carpenter 16:35
Who are the funding sources? Is that government funding or foundations?
Dolly Jorgensen 16:39
For the most part, yes. In Norway, almost all the funding comes through the Research Council of Norway. In Sweden, you had both the Research Council for Sweden, Vetenskapsradet, but you also had some bigger private funds. Sweden had historically more industrialists, so kind of the Rockefeller type, so they tended to set up funds to fund research, so there you have more of that kind of funding than you do in in Norway, but a good chunk of the research funding comes through the research council. There are other opportunities too, internationalization collaboration grants, so I have a number of those, including a rather large project that's funded by the EU, so it's in their EU horizon topics, so there it's a project that's not related to very much that I write on, although I have one new article on it related to petro cultures and cultural heritage.
Kate Carpenter 17:46
Wow, fascinating. Before you became a historian, you also had a background as an environmental engineer. Do you, do you think that that affects the way that you approach writing?
Dolly Jorgensen 17:54
Absolutely, I think it's two things. One is particularly at the beginning, I wrote in a very economical sense, because that's what engineers were supposed to get to the point, right? So you just wrote your little facts, and I mean, you had interpretation, I wasn't being not a historian, but, but I get to the point very fast, and in fact, of many times in my career, people say, well, can you explain that more. Can you, can you write out more, you know, use more words to say this, because I would just tell it how it is, you know, or how I thought it is. So that definitely, as a writing style, a way of thinking as an engineer. There is a particular also logics, and that has affected my writing, and I think this is about me thinking through an article, for example, and what I want the subheadings to be, and how my organization is going to work. That's that's very much what I did as an engineer, if you will, organizing data into that kind of structure, so I'm a very structured person in that sense, so it's, you know, a benefit in some other ways, and that that's how I came to environmental history was because I was an environmental engineer, so I worked on environmental projects, and in fact was a waste specialist, which is what I ended up writing my PhD about, just in the Middle Ages, so, so it certainly has affected the way I think about text and being simple, I guess. So I'm not a person who writes with really complex words or really high language, I tend to be very straightforward, sometimes to my detriment, but in the way that I write, because, because of that background.
Kate Carpenter 19:49
That's funny. I mean, that I can totally see that. We're going to talk more, though, about your most recent book, too, which I think you write so poetically, so I'll be curious to talk about that, but before we get there, I do want to ask, because you're the co-director of the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities, which every environmental historian knows, hosts an incredible series of book talks that are accessible online, so everyone can attend them. They're truly wonderful. Does working on that, just having being in conversation with those authors all the time, does that also affect the way that you write?
Dolly Jorgensen 20:20
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think it makes me realize the great breadth that people have in their scholarship topics that are things I would have never thought about, and quite honestly, I think their enthusiasm really catches people who've written a book recently. I mean, there's a sparkle in their eye about the fact that they have this really awesome thing that's now available, and they really want to share it, and I think that does keep me motivated also to write, to put things out there, to put my own work out there, because I see how, how it matters, I mean. So we're coming up, yes, in September, we'll have our 200th episode. Wow, which is just incredible, right? Especially, you know, you started it under the pandemic, you started it to basically replace the fact that all these authors had all their book talks canceled, they weren't going to conferences, we were like, hey, we need to, you know, promote these, promote these books, and the scholarship, so it really makes me think about, about that, as a, that monographs matter, books, they really do matter in our field, it matters that people have thought and are thinking really complex thoughts about something that's bigger than this article size bite that I'd written for so many years, and that, that, that is, it's a key element of history of our historical profession, and this is why I certainly hope that we can really have our students read, continue to read, and read monographs, because I do think this matters. To say, oh, here's something that's a sustained argument that you, you did, you know, so much work for one footnote, right? You spent the entire day looking up something, nobody will know that in the writing itself, but yet when you read it, you do know, you know, the care and the time that went into it. So I think that's really been an encouragement to me to keep writing books, is having all these authors on.
Kate Carpenter 22:39
Certainly, I think I can speak on behalf of a lot of people to say that we appreciate it also. I'd like to talk about your newest book, Ghost Behind Glass, and I think the best way to start is just to have you read a passage from it. So, if you're up for it, we'll have you read from chapter six.
Dolly Jorgensen 22:55
o “The thylacine pup looked so small and helpless. The large tag on its hind leg gave its specimen number (87.5.18.9), its species name (Thylacinus cynocephalus Harris), the location of collection (Tasmania), and the name of the collector (Tasmanian naturalist William Frederick Petterd). Towering above the little stitched and mended body was a picture of the last adult thylacine, which at the time was living in a zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. Underneath, a text explained that thylacine were intentionally eradicated because British settler farmers thought they threatened their sheep. Museum scientist Anjali Gowami offered her thoughts on the display: ‘To me, this baby Tasmanian tiger represents the fragility of the natural world. When we eradicated this species, we lost a very unique part of nature forever.’ This display was part of the Natural History Museum’s Our Broken Planet temporary exhibition in London. The exhibit covered myriad environmental pressures on the planet, including human-induced climate change, pollution, waste disposal, habitat loss, and extinction. It was easy to sense the broken planet in this little guy’s broken body. A life cut short. Extinction as a process doesn’t just happen to one individual; it happens to populations. It breaks down herds and flocks. It means lonesome individuals cannot locate mates. It means unborn future generations, beings that will never come to be. Extinction severs relations in both time and space. The non-Western, Indigenous understanding of kinship is useful when thinking about these broken relations because kinship encompasses complex interactions between all kin (both humans and others) outside the biodiversity paradigm. Human-animal relations are sites of engagement and reciprocity, which can either help others thrive or cause them to die. Human-induced extinction, then, might be considered the ultimate failure of reciprocity—humans did not live up to our side of the bargain What kind of family relations are visible in extinction displays? What relations have been broken because of extinction? Thinking through museum displays of extinction relations—the eggs and nests, pairs and flocks of extinct species that inhabit museum halls—helps us consider the knots undone by extinction.”
Kate Carpenter 25:50
I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about how Ghost Behind Glass came to be. It is such a beautiful book, I mean, it's physically a beautiful book. It draws to some degree on your previous work, but it's also doing something totally different. How did you think about this book?
Dolly Jorgensen 26:06
Yeah, I had started becoming interested in extinction, and how we told museum stories, you know, with extinction, when I'd worked on my first book about recovering lost species in the modern age, and I did have a chapter that touched on how rewilding and stories were shown in museums, but during that research I actually had a chance to come face to face with the most famous extinction, which is Martha the Passenger Pigeon, so she was on display in the Smithsonian as part of the 100 year anniversary of the passenger pigeon's extinction, and there was just something about realizing that you were seeing the very last of a species that really struck me as something that needed to be written about, and I needed to write it to show how these stories work in museums, and so what happened was, then after that time, you know, I wrote that book, and I mentioned Martha, because I had a chapter about passenger pigeons and the museum exhibition, but I kept going back every time I would travel to natural history museums. I mean, I like museums, I'm a museum goer. I will say, if you follow me on social medias, you're going to see lots of museums that I visit, but there was something particular about natural history museums that really attracted me to understand this human animal history, right? So this relation, and how did it function in a museum? And that's where the book started. So it was about what, what do we see when we go into this museum, and we come face to face with this extinct animal, this thing that isn't it, just isn't alive outside these museum halls in any biological way, and so as a, as a process, it was very different than what I'd written before, in that I decided what I didn't want to do was just tell a history of each species, right? One can do that, and there's plenty of books that are kind of that in the natural history genre, or even in some environmental and animal histories that go through the specific history of a specific species, but I was interested instead, how did these stories show up in a museum? And so that was that was where it was coming from, was this this encounter, and then thinking, huh, well, what happens in, in other places with other specimens? Do we notice them, or do we not? How are how did they show up in groups, or show up alone. Do the museums even mention that they're extinct? Oh, these were all questions that started rolling around in my head, and I wanted to find out.
Kate Carpenter 29:10
As I kind of alluded to earlier, your, your voice in this book is a little different than in your, your previous work. It has a sort of poetic tone to it. Were you working to achieve that tone? Was that a conscious decision?
Dolly Jorgensen 29:23
It was very much a conscious decision. So, as I mentioned, as an engineer, I tended to write very factual, very economical, conservative kind of language, and here I really wanted the reader to come with me in this place and to have some encounter through the text and that that would only happen by making myself more visible in the text and making the things I was seeing more evocative. And this is also why in the book there are 80 pictures full color and I absolutely insisted to the press this had to be integrated full color because of course, you see in full color or at least most people do, and I wanted it as the journey with me, it was an important, very, very important part of that way of presenting what was going on in these exhibitions. So, when I wrote about these exhibitions, I also looked at all of my photos. I always had all the photos up on my desktop, you know, all over the place, where I could think about it. I remember every one of those exhibitions that I saw, you know, when I encountered extinct animals, and there's a long list, right? There's an appendix to the to the book with, I think, it's 85 museums that I visited across the world, and I list all the species that I saw at each one, but I remember them, you know. I can tell you, like in general, where they were on the shelf in the exhibition, and what kind of thing it was, and whether it was a taxidermy or bones or a pile of bones or a model or whatever. So that's what I wanted to do with my writing. I wanted to make it so that you could see it too, and that was very different for me. I had been the co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities since the beginning of 2020 so I had also been reading a lot of humanities work based in generally anthropology, geography, that would depict a place, and you really felt that you were there, that there was something about the description, the richness of the description that was very different than what I had done as a historian up to then, and so I think that also influenced me wanting to take you through and see this history. So, in that sense, it's really a uses of history book, right? It's about how do we deploy and communicate these histories, and what's lost in the way that we do that, but to do that, I needed to show you the exhibition.
Kate Carpenter 32:31
Yeah, it's interesting that you, I mean, you did visit so many museums, and you had to take what is a very not only visual but embodied experience, right, of moving through a space and encountering an exhibit, but then translate that to text, and you did have photographs, beautiful photographs, which you took to help the reader, but you still, you still have to do sort of a translation for them. How did you approach that? Was it hard?
Dolly Jorgensen 32:58
Yeah, I mean, I've tried to let my emotions lead, which is not a typical thing we do. It's not what we're trained to do as historians, right? We're trained to analyze the data, but I, I think that was why I came up with the kind of topics or the questions that I had in the book, like that you had me read from the chapter on broken relations, right? That it, that's not a topic that just somehow naturally presents itself. It was that it was felt, I felt something seeing this Thylacine pup or the Taiwanese cloud leopard baby, I mean, you, you felt it, and so that changed the way then that I wanted to write it to make it clear, or to evoke that space and evoke their story. I mean, the other thing I guess is with this book, there's a reason that I picked ghosts as the title, I wasn't just being metaphorical, and you know, oh, let's pick something that's in, or something. But it's because I really think that the presence is there, and being face to face with that presence makes you think differently. It does make you have, I'm not going to say, like, you're haunted by some weird apparition, that's not what I mean by it, but it, but the extinct is still present, and one of the things I say is that, you know, they, to allow them to speak means I needed to speak, I needed to write for them, or let them help me to write, if you will.
Kate Carpenter 34:44
I like that. Who did you imagine as the reader of this book as you were writing it?
Dolly Jorgensen 34:49
Yeah, in this case I really thought about museum goers, just people who are in the museum who maybe like animals, so they take their kids to the natural history museum on Saturday, because what else you gonna do? It's raining outside, you know, but the people who.. because I would see them in the museum, that's the thing, I would watch people, too, and how they interacted, and how they looked at cases and things like this, you know, they're curious, they want to know, they're interested. They read the labels. Don't let anybody tell you people don't read labels. They absolutely read the labels. Do they remember it? You know, 10 minutes from now, maybe not, but they remember as they're looking at the specimen. But they might remember the specimen. I mean, this is interesting. But it was those people, it was the 1000s of people who walked through these halls of natural history museums. I mean, certainly I want historians and others who are in environmental humanities to read it too, but it was one of the reasons why, and you know, scholars may think it's a, it's a not scholarly choice, but there's not footnotes in the book, but there are extended essays in the back that give you every single citation to everything that I use, and it's very easy to identify which paragraph this, you know, stuff goes with. So, if you want the references, they're all there, and in fact, I liked writing those. It was, it was really interesting as a process. I had written the text with footnotes, and then moved it all out, so that the essay followed the same order as the chapter did, but it wasn't about having a scholarly apparatus per se, it was about that, you know, leading you through the halls, so that was my imagined, you know, reader.
Kate Carpenter 36:46
Oh, well, I want to move on a little bit from Ghost Behind Glass, reluctantly, to also ask about your forthcoming book. I don't always get to ask people, sort of, as they're in the middle of the next one. If I'm not mistaken, the research for your, the book that you are currently sort of in the production process for goes back to your postdoctoral work, so you've, you've kind of had it in your files for a while. What's it been like to return to that research?
Dolly Jorgensen 37:11
Yes, because the project, which is Reefs or Rubbish, is going back to my postdoctoral work on offshore oil rigs that are turned into artificial reefs, and it's a policy history, so it's a very different genre than what I just wrote. It's a very much in the weeds of policy and policy change, and how that happens. How does policy happen, and what was interesting about coming back to it, because I'd written a number of articles as a postdoc, and then I moved on to these other projects, and it just went there, but I always knew that it actually needed a monograph, because in this case, what you see is the policy moving into different geographies, so I'd had, if you will, an article about each geography, but it really didn't connect the dots, and it didn't show it as having I think that the theoretical basis that's actually going on for why these policies were taking place, which has to do with how people respond to new natures that they encounter, again going back to really old ideas. So my first edited volume was called New Natures, and ever since then I've been thinking about it, and what did it mean, and how, how was it, how did I want to use it, and so coming back to things like that after years in between is actually really interesting, because you've had a lot of experience since then, you've written other things, you've thought other things, there's been a lot of time for the ideas to rise like bread, right? So I had to go back to my data because I didn't remember stuff, right? I had to go back and read it again, not just the articles I'd written, but you know, going back to the primary sources. Oh yeah, what happened? Who was this person again? What, you know, because you forget, it's kind of like when you, when you pick up an old article. I don't know if other people do this, but I'll pick up something and I'm like, did I know that? I don't remember knowing that, right? But obviously I did. I wrote it, so cool. You know, right? I'm learning something new, right? My current self is learning something from my past self, so it was like that. It was going back and having to refresh, but I also already had a fair chunk of this, you know, the primary sources were ready for me to then use all this experience I'd had in between and the thinking I'd done about completely unrelated things to make what I hope is a really interesting argument about why policy happens the way it does.
Kate Carpenter 39:45
You've published with a variety of different presses. How do you decide where, where to take a book?
Dolly Jorgensen 39:50
I mean, it's a great question. I would say the first thing people need to do is go to a university press. I am a big fan of university presses. I think they are - their specific mission is to advance knowledge. They're advancing scholarship. They're not trying to make a buck off of what you do. I mean, they have to cover some costs, but they're nonprofit. That's that's how they're existing. And so I have found that they give you really good service in terms of good copy editing, good proofs in Ghost Behind Glass with the University of Chicago Press. I mean, I was absolutely pleased with the paper they picked for it, the, you know, designer who laid out the cover, fantastic, you know, the graphics design people who laid out the photos, I mean, it was, it was really, really good. So, generally, I've opted for university presses. My Medieval Pigs book was with a small press that has a really good medieval line, so it's, it's not a university press, but it is an academic press, and it's not one of the big ones, or one of the biggest ones. I don't personally like those biggest commercial presses. I think they don't have the level of finishing either in caring about what the peer review looks like, but caring about the layout, and the, you know, were your footnotes right or not. I mean, I just don't think that's their business model, whereas university presses actually do care. I find that they fact-check you, you know, verify that, oh yeah, this date that wasn't the same as this other place, and they, the copy editing level in my experience has been really good, so I've opted for that. So the newest book will be with University of Oklahoma Press. We'll see where the one after that that I need to write in this next school year, hopefully, will be, but it will be with a university press, I'm sure.
Kate Carpenter 42:07
I want to ask a little bit about your family. So, one of your closest intellectual collaborators is Finn Arne Jorgensen, who is also your partner. What's it like to look so close to work so closely together?
Dolly Jorgensen 42:19
Oh, both heaven and hell, probably. Yeah, no, it's actually fantastic to be able to have somebody that you can bounce ideas off of, and because, as I said, I'm a thinker before writer, I do a lot of that thinking time, and because I'm not doing it on paper, I do like to think about it out loud, or you know, going through issues not just in my head. And so it's great to have somebody who can hear what you're saying and give you feedback and say, no, no, that doesn't, that doesn't work. He's not afraid to tell me that something, you know, is not good. He tends to be one of those that says you need to explain more here, you know, write, write more about this. But we also, yes, have, have intellectual similarities, but we don't work on the same thing, so we come at it from different angles, but we have some joint interests, and so that's been really productive to have somebody that you can think through and think interesting thoughts with. It's of course a challenge too, because it means if things are difficult, they can end up to be difficult everywhere, because well, you brought it home. So work can, in a way, never stay at work when you work together and you're partners. So, but it is also, I mean, one of the great benefits of having a husband who's also in your same field, and you have kids, is that they grew up going to conferences with us, everybody knew Marion and Lina, and they would come have their little name badges, you know, they just understood that this was something that we did, so in a way, and we would use those opportunities to then, okay, well, we're going to the ASEH conference, or to ESEH, or whatever, and then you take a holiday, because your whole family would be there, so it was actually a real benefit from that perspective of being able to combine family, not to mention my family then had to go with me to these natural history museums all over the world, so.
Kate Carpenter 44:28
That's delightful. I've always enjoyed seeing your kids at conferences, it's kind of an inspiration, so I'm, I'm glad that they were able to tag along.
Dolly Jorgensen 44:36
Oh, I think it's really important, and I think it's important for academics to understand that people do have a family, and that it can be, the academic life is not a completely separate thing than that. I also think it shows, of course, great support, particularly for women in the field, because many women who are doing the caretaking for children think think that they can't come to events, I would say no, no, bring them, and you know, if you have a baby, I love the ones when they're there and the husband is with the, is with the baby with the stroller, while the woman is the one who's presenting, I'm like, yes, more of this, please.
Kate Carpenter 45:19
Yes, absolutely. Are there other people that you turn to for feedback on your work?
Dolly Jorgensen 45:24
Well, at the moment, actually, my closest copy editor, maybe developmental editor might be a better word, my developmental editor, I stayed in the family, and that's my daughter, Marion, who's now in college, and she's really good, like the questions she asked me, particularly when I'm trying to think, oh, how do I write for an audience that doesn't know necessarily the theoretical things that are in my mind, how do I write in a way that is still accessible but uses that theory, right, in a good way, so how do you, how do you explain things? So she's actually been great as a developmental editor. She read a lot of Ghost Behind Glass and reads a lot of my texts and things that I produce these days, you know. Otherwise, it kind of depends on what the particular thing is, but I have depended on the peer review system often in that sometimes I know, or I think I know who these people might be who are giving me the comments, and I have tried to take seriously then the ways in which I can develop and move a text forward into something that's that's hopefully high quality and publishable.
Kate Carpenter 46:40
What's the best writing advice you've ever gotten?
Dolly Jorgensen 46:42
The best advice I ever got was done is better than perfect, and this was really important to me. And I tell it to my students, I tell it to postdocs, I tell it to others who are mentoring in different ways, is you know, you, you can spend years and years and years on a text. It can always be better. And I think every text I've ever submitted, every text I've ever published, it could have been better. There could be things that I could do differently. Maybe there would be one more source I could look at. Maybe it could be, oh, that paragraph could be better. But what good does it do to just be on my computer for years and years and years. So, at some point, and I'm not saying submit or publish stuff that's not good, not saying that, but you know, an 80/20 rule isn't a bad one. It can be better if somebody else reads it and gets into this into their head, so then they can take the scholarship forward, because that's the other thing I guess I'd say is about my writing, I don't think I've written the definitive thing on anything, I am thinking that people are always going to be able to jump off and go forward, whether it's in the same topic and some other topic that relates, and use it, but I'm not going to be upset about that, or say, "Oh my gosh, how dare you question my conclusion?" because I don't think it's definitive, and so, yeah, so done is better than perfect.
Kate Carpenter 48:18
Are there other writers who you read for inspiration or models of writing?
Dolly Jorgensen 48:24
Oh, that's that's really hard. I think I was, I was inspired before writing Ghosts Behind Glass, also with Bathsheba Demuth's book, because I felt that Floating Coast also evoked the place and the being in, in a good way, so that was a, it was kind of in, in my mind somewhere, I mean, otherwise, if you will, I have ended up reading a whole lot that are particularly articles and not books, because of my editorial work. So, I don't think there's a particular person, per se, that inspired me, but there, but there was this kind of approach to writing that did inspire me.
Kate Carpenter 49:19
Well, so I know that you are in production on your next book, which I will be very excited to see and to read. How do you think about the project after that? Are you thinking about the project after that?
Dolly Jorgensen 49:30
Yeah, actually, so in this case, I've done almost all of the research for the project after that. There's a couple of archives I wouldn't mind going to, so I'm gonna put in for some fellowship visits, kind of things. It is a project about bird houses and hospitality, and so it's gonna be, I hope, more like Ghosts Behind Glass than Reef or Rubbish in that it'll be more, more storytelling, so about the Purple Martin bird in North America, and how people have made bird houses historically for it, so I'm, I'm actually looking forward to writing this, I kind of, I have my basic organization, but now I need to figure out how to tell the story, and I think it may be quite a different way of telling for me, because I'm, I'm thinking that there's going to be more biography or more writing about people, these bird house makers, if you will, than I've done in my other work, so it'll be interesting to see.
Kate Carpenter 50:47
Absolutely, I am looking forward to reading it. Dr. Dolly Jorgensen, this has been such a treat for me. Thank you so much for coming on Drafting the Past and talking about your writing process.
Dolly Jorgensen 50:57
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciated the questions, and to think myself about what it is that I do all day long. So, thank you, Kate.
Kate Carpenter 51:09
Thanks again to Dr. Dolly Jorgensen for joining me. Her newest book is Ghost Behind Glass, and you can find a link to it and all the other books we talked about in the show notes. I'll meet you back here in four weeks with a whole batch of amazing new interviews. In the meantime, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
