Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. In this episode, host Kate Carpenter welcomes someone a little bit different to the podcast: writer and writing coach Helen Betya Rubinstein.
Helen is neither a historian nor a writer or history herself, but she has been working as a writing coach for the past six years, often with historians and other academics. If you remember my conversation with Anna Zeide in episode 29 last year, Helen was the writing coach that Anna and her co-editors brought in to a workshop to help book contributors work on writing essays aimed at wider audiences. I’m delighted to have the chance to talk more with Helen about what exactly a writing coach does and the kinds of conversations she finds herself having with historians. In addition to her work as a coach and teacher, Helen is a writer with MFA degrees from Brooklyn College and the University of Iowa, and her essays and fiction have appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and Literary Hub. She is the author of a book of lyric fictions and also has a forthcoming book about writing, teaching, and publishing.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Episode 29: Anna Zeide Gets Comfortable
- Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (affiliate link)
- Catina Bacote, “Eighty-Three Questions About the Death of De’Sohn Wilson: An Ongoing Investigation,” Gulf Coast
- Helen Betya Rubinstein and Anna Zeide, “Lessons for Academics from a Weekend Writing Retreat,” Chronicle of Higher Education
- Resources from Helen’s website: Radical Revision prompts (PDF), Variations on Morning Pages (PDF)
- Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe (PDF)
- Michelle Caswell, “Feeling Liberatory Memory Work: On the Archival Uses of Joy and Anger,” Archivaria (PDF)
- David Naimon, Between the Covers podcast
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs
- Laura Henriksen, Laura’s Desires Zoe Schlanger, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm Kate Carpenter and today, I'm excited to welcome someone a little bit different to the podcast, writer and writing coach, Helen Betya Rubinstein.
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
I'm so happy to be here.
Kate Carpenter:
Helen is neither a historian nor a writer of history herself, but she has been working as a writing coach for the past six years, often with historians and other academics. If you remember my conversation with Anna Zeide in Episode 29 last year, Helen was the writing coach that Anna and her co-editors brought into a workshop to help book contributors work on writing essays aimed at wider audiences. I'm delighted to have the chance to talk more with Helen about what exactly a writing coach does and the kinds of conversations she finds herself having with historians. In addition to her work as a coach and teacher, Helen is a writer with MFA degrees from Brooklyn College and the University of Iowa. And her essays and fiction have appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily and Literary Hub.
She's the author of a book of lyric fictions and also has a forthcoming book about writing, teaching and publishing. As you'll hear in our interview, Helen has a gift for sharing concrete writing advice, so be sure to check out the show notes after the interview for links to some of these resources. Please enjoy my conversation with Helen Betya Rubinstein.
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
So I'm someone who's always written and always been interested in writing, but I also did a lot of other things growing up and a lot of other creative things like I played piano, I painted. And when I started college, I wanted to be a cognitive science major. And I had something that I've recently started to think about as almost a spiritual experience where I just became so entranced with the possibilities of printed text and what we could discover there. And I wrote my college thesis basically arguing, although not in these exact terms, that fiction was a better and more honest form than nonfiction.
So I went on … After college, I worked a little bit in book publishing and I got an MFA in fiction and started teaching composition, which meant that I was teaching nonfiction writing. And I was really lucky to go to an MFA program that had really great preparation in composition theory, so I became really interested in that at the same time. And really through my teaching, I became more and more interested in the possibilities of nonfiction, the possibilities of what it might mean to say as directly as we can something true about the world. And I started to write nonfiction. I then got an MFA in nonfiction. And then I became really interested in thinking about that question with scholars. And a lot of my own creative work is also based in history, in archival work. So that's my writing trajectory and how it might've led me toward coaching or being predisposed toward what I do as a coach.
And I became a coach through the creative nonfiction workshop that Anna Zeide mentioned on your podcast interview with her. And that was a little bit more than six years ago now and it was just a really fun, wonderfully successful weekend, not because of me, but because of everybody who was there. And afterward, one of the participants brought me to lead a workshop for another writing group that she was a part of and asked me to work with her one on one. And then it spread through word of mouth, and eventually, coaching switched from being a peripheral part of my professional life to a central or the central part of my professional life and I learned how much I really love and feel honored to be deeply in process with writers doing one on one work.
Kate Carpenter:
That's marvelous. I don't think that I realized that that workshop was your launch of coaching. I don't remember what Anna said in the interview, but how did you come to know Anna and be part of that?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
She and I know each other through growing up. We've known each other since we were 14. So they were trying to write public-facing work that they wanted to be a bit more creative and a bit more engaged with readers than typical scholarship might be and she thought of me as a person who might be able to help them with that.
Kate Carpenter:
Was it daunting at all to put yourself in that position or did your teaching really prepare you for that?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
I felt pretty prepared for it by teaching, but I'll say, thinking back on it now, especially as I was thinking about my trajectory in anticipation of this conversation, it's true that I had a lot less exposure to scholarship and scholarship that was in progress than I have now after having worked on it with people for so many years. And in some ways, I think that actually probably benefited the workshop because I came in with a really different perspective from what most historians were starting from, um, or most of the people at that workshop, so it was a really dynamic conversation.
Kate Carpenter:
So we're going to talk a lot more about your coaching, but I first want to start with the nuts and bolts of your own writing because you are a writer, I guess now maybe you might say also a writer, but I think you are maybe a writer first and foremost. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
So I'm a very routinized writer and I always get a little embarrassed when I share a lot with the people I work with as a coach because I feel like I require or maintain a lot more boundaries and rituals than some of the writers I know. And I don't at all think that what's right for me is necessarily right for anyone else. Your podcast is actually a really great way of dispelling the myth that there's one right way. But I'll say I've been really lucky as a writer to do a lot of artist residencies, so places where I could be isolated or with other people who were working.
And when I started doing them in 2010, I just found them to be so powerfully productive for my work and often that had to do with being off the grid or outside of my normal routine. So eventually where I've landed now is I have a room in my apartment, which is also my bedroom, the only room in my apartment that has a door and I treat it as though it's an off-grid cabin within my own house. So I never, ever, ever use the internet in that room. I never bring my phone into that room and I pretty much spend the first few hours of every day in there with the door closed doing my creative work.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you approach your writing generally? How do you get organized? How do you approach first drafts?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
I feel like first drafts grow for me out of little seeds, like things I jot down in my notebook. Sometimes I go through phases of doing morning pages or doing free writing more or less regularly, which is something I often end up recommending to people and I'll find that drafts grow out of there. But if I'm honest, I'll say that at least 99.5% of my work is revising or what I think of as revising, if not more. And some of that revision is generating new material, a lot of it is, but it feels like there's already a scaffold or a frame or a conversation on the page with myself that I'm entering back into with that revision. And so I move between the notebook, between Text Editor, which is the very low-fi word processor on MacBooks and composing in Microsoft Word. And for me, those are levels of formality or stakes with the composition.
And even when I'm working in Microsoft Word in an active draft, which is most of the time, I always write with a notebook that I think of like a sidecar. So a place where I put down, I just jot down anything that's coming into my head, sometimes related to the work, sometimes not related to the work. And often the stuff that comes up that is related to the work, I actually end up incorporating, but it's never for that purpose. And I try to make writing more physical and embodied as much as I can. So I also go through phases of working on a typewriter or writing on different kinds of paper with markers or other kinds of medium.
I try to write more than I think I need to write even when I'm in the final stages of work because I find that counterintuitively when we feel like we have just a little bit left to do, shrinking ourselves into the shape of the little amount that's left can really slow us down. And sometimes writing a lot in those final moments can actually be what accelerates the finishing. And I'm often working on more than one project at once, probably too often, but I do find that working on new work and working on new work if I can before old work can help with greasing the wheels of the process.
And I share my work with friends and especially with one writer friend who functions like a coach to me in a really similar way to how I work with other people. So she reads work in progress, iterations of the same work in progress, ask me questions about it. And as a coach, I've gotten very much in the habit of basically transcribing my conversations with people. And when I talk to her, I do the same things and I transcribe myself. So often, while she's asking me these questions, I'm answering in ways that I can then directly put into the work.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, that's a great transition. So I was curious to know, what does coaching look like? How do you connect with writers and then how do you proceed?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
So for me, it's really not one-size-fits-all at all. I really try to work with each person and what they need and what they're looking for in terms of support. But usually, I work with people in an ongoing way like we'll have a one-hour meeting every two weeks, sometimes more often, sometimes less. And usually, I'll read their work in progress and we'll talk about it and it's very iterative. But when I start working with somebody as a way of connecting with them as a writer, I really like to start by identifying their values as readers and writers. So for example, I've learned that as a reader I really value surprise, but I know that other readers really value predictability or they really value evenness or tidiness on the page.
And there are a lot of contexts where this identification of values has been demonstrated to be useful. So in an educational context, it helps avoid stereotype confirmation, it can be a foundation for community building, for developing a therapeutic relationship or just connecting with other people, but I have this strong sense that, when it comes to reading and writing, basically starting in elementary school, we get so inculcated into the idea that there's something called good writing out there that we need to strive for, that we can get really alienated from our own values as readers and writers. And often we don't even examine the institutional values that we're indoctrinated into through this idea of good writing.
So I always want that kind of conversation to be the foundation of my work with somebody. And often, we do that by reading a little excerpt of work that they love together and they might point to moments that they especially appreciate and why. And we'll talk about how the writer achieves the effects they're going for in those places and start to discern some particular values that they have about the reading. So yeah, that's how we start a process. And then I read the work in progress with people. The meetings usually begin just by me hearing from the writer how they're feeling about the work, what frustrates them, what satisfies them, what questions they have. And usually, the seeds of our whole conversation are in that opening moment, which is extemporaneous.
And I listen really carefully and try to respond with questions about those work, about what they've said and about their work, and together, we come up with next steps for the process.
Kate Carpenter:
It sounds really therapeutic. Do you ever think of yourself as a writing therapist?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
A little bit, yeah, yeah. And it's really different with everybody. Some people come to me wanting to talk more about process. Some people are stuck, or actually, I've worked with a lot of people who are like, "I had a kid in the last year. I used to be able to write. Now I'm stuck."
Kate Carpenter:
I can't at all relate to that.
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
And sometimes it's more about product and I'll spend time hashing out the big ideas of a book or a chapter with somebody. And I know there are coaches who just work on one or the other, but to me, I feel like they're so related. And it's really interesting to think about the ways in which process and product are related. So what I really love about these conversations is that we get to think about both of those aspects together.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, we talked a little bit about how in part, thanks to that workshop and the way you got into coaching, you've worked with quite a few historians and I was wondering, are there things that you find historians have common as they approach work? Do you find yourself talking about the same issues frequently?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
Yeah, I don't know if I would think of them as issues necessarily or maybe problems in the interesting sense, not the negative sense, but a lot of people I work with want to write stories and I'd be curious what you think, how true this is of all historians, but a lot of people I work with want to write stories that haven't been written before or stories of people whose lives haven't been represented on the page. And often, that's a problem of the archive or a problem of the way that scholarship approaches the archive. So something that people I've worked with, both in workshops and one-on-one have found really revelatory are some strategies for using one's imagination.
For what I've heard some historians call speculation, but which I like to think of using Saidiya Hartman's term critical fabulation and I think Hartman's work is more and more in the mainstream, but I think for historians who haven't encountered it, just reading her note on method at the beginning of Wayward Lives can be really, really revelatory. So for anyone who doesn't know, she's a literary scholar and cultural historian who writes so powerfully, both about the historical actors she's writing about, which are Black women, queers, radicals, whose lives have been excluded from archives or represented in archives as a problem. But she also writes really powerfully about her strategies for approaching that.
And I don't think that she would necessarily think of it as speculation, but as using what we do know and from the archives and otherwise to strain against the limits of the archives. So that's really exciting and I've worked with a lot of historians on strategies for doing that within the scope of what's expected in the field, whether that means framing those moments of imagination with words maybe or might have. There's an exercise I've done in workshops with people where we generate a lot of questions, so like a list of questions about all the things that the writer might not know about the historical period, but often based in these really concrete details that they do know. And I treat that just as an exercise, like a foundation for thinking. But I've seen that a lot of people actually end up generating questions that they want to use in the writing itself.
And it's a way of thinking about the multiplicity of history, like this subjunctive tense like, "What if this happened? What if that happened? Could it have been this way? Could it have been that way?" And as a model for that, I like to use a very short text written by a friend of mine, Catina Bacote, that's called Eighty-Three Questions About the Death of De'Sohn Wilson. That's a really powerful text that I just recommend. And another thing that I work on a lot with historians is perspective. So how to write in perspectives? Again, often those that are less representative, conventional scholarship or in the archives and some of that has to do with framing or foregrounding certain details. Some of it has to do with word choice, like choosing strong verbs or verbs that can switch us into or out of someone's mind.
And something I think that people find useful is that you don't really have to stay in one perspective as you're writing, but can really move around and navigate. So it's not like you have to make a choice and always be with a certain individual or group.
Kate Carpenter:
This is fantastic. I love hearing these approaches and I think it must be transformative for the writers you work with. But as I'm listening, I'm also thinking about how … I know quite a few historians who resist some of these ideas.
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
Totally.
Kate Carpenter:
And even if they don't resist them for themselves, they think they're wonderful, there's that fear of, "What are other people in my profession going to say?"
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
Exactly.
Kate Carpenter:
Do you encounter that and how do you help writers work through those blocks, I guess?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
Yeah, I think that's very real. I do encounter it more so when I'm leading a workshop just because when I'm working one on one, it's so much more responsive to someone's needs. So I'm never going to be like, "Do this exercise," if they don't seem up for it. But in workshops, the response is often like, "Oh my God, I love this. This is revelatory and I can't submit this to a journal." And I actually think that's a really interesting conversation to have, again in the form of a workshop, so with other historians who might be present because … I mean, it brings up these interesting questions about challenging the status quo, challenging these structures of power that we're within.
A lot of people are like, "I love this, but I'll do it after I get tenure," that's one thing or, "I love this, but my article won't be accepted if I do it." And then we start thinking about, "Well, who are the journal editors?" And then there are people in the room who are journal editors and it's like, "Well, could you accept an article like this?" So I think it's a really interesting conversation. I don't necessarily have an answer about it, but I also think that it's less, I guess I feel like there's a sense that if the writer steps outside the bounds of normative scholarship that they've transgressed and they're writing something that can't be proven. But I actually feel like there are many ways to "speculate" or use one's imagination or critically fabulate that relieve the author from a burden of proof and allow them to say things that are really, really reasonable to have said about the past.
Yeah, I did have a conversation about this one on one with an author just on Monday. I'm trying to think of the exact circumstances, but she was like … It was something like, "Well, I don't know that it was very difficult for her to lift 30 pounds of laundry or something, but it was so reasonable to …" You know what I mean? And that … Yeah.
Kate Carpenter:
It is. I've had this conversation with historians before too, that the idea that if you can't point to a source that says, "The bottom of her dress was dirty as she walked down the dirt road," you can't write it. It's like, "Well, I'm a human with the power of logic and creativity. If you wear long dress on dirt roads, the bottom of it will be dirty unless you're like magic, I guess," but it's interesting.
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
And I feel like if you're really concerned about having a source, you can probably find a source about another person walking down the dirt road at that moment and then you can say, "Like this other person, who according to this source had a dirty dress hem, her dress was probably dirty too." So I feel like there are ways of getting around it and being really pinned down when people want to be.
Kate Carpenter:
I think one thing that makes you really interesting as a coach is that you don't come from history. There are many wonderful coaches, this is not a knock at all, but many wonderful coaches who are themselves historians. But you bring this really interesting outside perspective where you have not always had all the disciplinary things pounded into you in the same way. In your email to me when we were talking about this, you said something that I thought was really interesting that I wanted to unpack a little, which is such a historian thing to say, you wrote that questions about how to write history, our questions about history itself. Could you expand on that for me a little?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
So I'll say one of the things that I've learned over these years of coaching is really that questions about scholarship or questions about the scholarship itself, but that really came clear to me first in the context of working with historians. So to a certain extent, starting really generally, it's so intuitive that we don't really think about it. So for instance, when you're deciding what chapters your book should have or what sections your chapters should have, you're organizing meaning in a certain way and creating these boundaries between ideas and making them hierarchical because we read in a linear way. So you're choosing which ones to foreground, which ones to background, which ones to highlight by putting at the very beginning and very end or to bury in the middle.
But the way that this first came clear to me was in the context of the hook or vignette, which when I led that workshop six years ago really stood out to me as a convention where many of the essays that I read in advance of the workshop would begin with this scene, usually of one person and then that was just the introduction and the sections would step back and then zoomed out way. And sometimes we never come back to that scene or we come back with a line at the end. And again, I think it was partly because I had less exposure to historical scholarship at that time, then it really stood out to me and now I'm a little bit inured against it or something. It probably wouldn't strike me quite as strongly.
But I thought it was really interesting because the vignette was like a teaser and sometimes that tease never really got followed through on. And I started thinking about, "What does it mean about scholarship to be structured in this way?" So one of the things is that those teasers or vignettes literally get marginalized by being moved to the margins of an essay or a chapter. Another aspect of it is that often those vignettes were about an individual and the rest of the work would be about a group or patterns. And so in a way, what that does is it puts the weight or seriousness in the discovery of these patterns, but at the same time, these hooks were often about the lives of people whose lives we could know.
So they might be the leaders of movement. Sometimes they were antagonists who got in the way of historical actors that we were actually rooting for. They were people with certain kinds of structural power and I started thinking about how putting them at the beginning of these essays was a way of giving them structural power within the structure of the essay. So they again, were occupying this position of prominence. So that's one way in which I feel like this choice really becomes a choice about who's important and how to pay attention as a historian or a reader of history. And then there's the question of perspective that I already mentioned and then chronology, which is so important to historians, but also thorny and difficult in the ways that it might conflict with the attempt to find patterns or themes and the questions of what connections get illuminated when we try to hew really closely to telling a story chronologically versus what connections get illuminated when we don't try to hew really closely to chronology.
And then I just love thinking about how structure on the page has meaning for the scholarship itself. So recently, in the spring, I led a workshop for historians where someone was writing about migrant farmers in, I think it was early 20th century Germany. And he was mainly interested in the worker experience, but also in the particular impact of this kind of farming on the land itself. And he was working to separate that story from the story of the overseer of this work, which was the one real story he had a lot of documentation of. And during the workshop, he started to experiment with this idea of, in between his chapters, having these little vignettes, as he called them, that were written almost from the perspective of plants or from the land and showing what was going on on the land in an unpeopled way.
He presented it to the group and we all got really excited about it. And I realized that part of what was exciting is that it was allowing the land to butt in and have its own agency in a story that otherwise would be really top down and otherwise might just mimic the structures of power that have already shaped the archival research, but he was proposing a structure that would let the land butt in almost like weeds growing up through a sidewalk or something in this powerful surprising way.
Kate Carpenter:
That's really interesting. I want to ask, this is switching gears a little bit, but there are editors and then there are coaches and you talk a little bit on your website about the differences between them. For listeners who are still maybe grappling with that difference, could you talk a little bit about what you mean by that difference?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
So one way that I think about it is that most editors work primarily with the text and work primarily in text. And my work is also text-based, but I work primarily with a writer and I work mainly in real-time conversation. That's where I think the real work happens. So I'll give you a few examples of moments when I felt like the difference really profoundly. So one is a writer would send me something to read and I could look at it and say like, "Oh, I clearly see that something's off with the structure. I'm going to come back to her and say, 'Part D should become part A. Part A should become part B,'" and I feel like that's the work of an editor.
Similarly, once I read the opening chapter of a novel from a novelist that I was working with and I could see something was funny about the perspective, it started in the perspective of the 17-year-old, but it didn't feel quite authentic. So if I were an editor, I might just come back and say, "Why don't you think about what this 17-year-old is really seeing, you know?" But as a coach, I go into these conversations not by presenting an answer to a problem that I've identified, but by asking questions. So I might ask the first writer, "Why did you structure it in this order" and I might ask the second writer, "What are you going for with this section in the 17-year-old's perspective?" And in both cases, those are real examples. I got answers that completely changed my sense of what the best next step for the work is.
So with the structure, what we realized is that, as she explained it to me, it actually was just missing some framing language. She'd been almost detailing a journey that she'd taken, but not grounding it in herself. So if it was framed differently, then the structure as she had it could stay, but there was something that just wasn't on the page yet. And similarly, with the 17-year-old's perspective, when we started talking about it, it turned out that the novelist was really trying to satirize that perspective. But to satirize the perspective, again similarly, there needed to be more of a strong omniscient voice on the page.
So the solution was completely different from what I might've thought otherwise. And I don't think because I'm not an intuitive reader, but because at the drafting stage, a lot of what's missing just literally isn't on the page. And so instead of guess, I get to talk to writers about what's going on for them. And another example that's a little more grounded in process, this spring, I was talking to a writer who kept getting stuck as he was drafting a certain section of an article and he would just get trapped in this cycle of uncertainty like, "To put the argument this way didn't feel true. To put the argument that way didn't feel true." And we were kind of talking it through, going back and forth in the same way that he had been going back and forth on his own.
And we realized, and I felt like this was really profound, that actually the feeling of uncertainty was his scholarly contribution. So the feeling that he'd been experiencing as a sign that he couldn't make an argument at all was actually the sign that he had this novel argument to make and he was going to be complicating the existing frameworks for thinking about this. And I don't think that we could have realized that without actually talking it through or without really dwelling in the place where process and product come together. So conversation is the main tool for how I work with writers.
And like I was saying, I always basically transcribe my conversations with people, and often, the conversations are almost a kind of writing or revising out loud. So they'll end up saying things to me that I write down and then I'm just like, "You can put this directly into the piece."
Kate Carpenter:
I think this ties really well into my next question because as I was looking at your website ahead of this and preparing, I was struck by how many of the authors you work with talk about how much you helped their confidence and their excitement about their writing again. And I often think, sometimes when we're resistant to feedback or to sharing our work, it's because we're afraid that our confidence and our excitement in writing will be destroyed in the process often because some of us have had that very real experience. How do you try to draw out those qualities when you're giving feedback?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
I really appreciated that you pulled that out because I hadn't noticed that and I think you're so right that that's often what stops people from seeking feedback. And I can even say, for myself, it stops me from asking certain people for feedback. It's actually not because I'm afraid they'll be too critical, but because I'm afraid they won't listen to my questions in a certain way. But anyway, I think part of building that confidence really comes out of what I was describing the work that I do with people in terms of identifying their values, which is a reorientation away from the mindset that graduate school or even being on the tenure track can keep us in where we're always concerned about the values of the often, sometimes individual people and sometimes entities who have the power to give us jobs.
And one thing that I think is probably counterintuitive, and I say with some hesitation because it might alienate people, is that I'm actually against praise in the same way that I'm against criticism. And I don't believe in the construct of good writing. I feel like these things are all harmful. So although I try to respond to writer's work in a really honest way, which means that, if I love a certain moment or I feel moved by something, I definitely say so. I also try really hard never to simply say, "This is good," or, "This is so good," and the reason is that I think so many writers come to writing in a hollowed out kind of way or come to maybe writing coaching or come out of graduate school in a hollowed out way where their sense of worth is coming so much from these external sources like grad school advisors, journal editors, colleague, mentors, publishers.
So I feel like reconnecting to your own values as a writer and reader can be super powerful in providing confidence. If I'm saying, "I love surprise," I'm going to try to create surprise on the page or, "I love beauty. What is beauty to me?" I'm going to try to make beauty on the page. There's a self-validation in that process and there's also pleasure. And one of the things that I like to remind scholars is they've chosen this often really difficult path because of some moment of pleasure that they had at some point, like a pleasure of discovery, an aha moment.
And sometimes the pressures of graduate school or the tenure track wring that pleasure out of us and make us forget it. So reconnecting to our values can be a way of reconnecting to that pleasure and reminding ourselves of the intrinsic value of the work. And I also feel like the conversation helps with it too because people say things out loud sometimes in plainer language than they might write, like a little bit dressed down. And when you see that reflected back on the page, like in my transcript, you can see, "Oh my God, I said something really profound," and there doesn't need to be quite as much anxiety about crafting something on the page.
And I feel like especially this reconnecting to values serves the work in a really broad scholarly way beyond just one writer's experience of feeling confidence and pleasure because I feel like writers who can identify and work toward fulfilling their own priorities and goals and values can help us diversify scholarship and make the change and the status quo happen a little bit more quickly instead of just repeating and reinscribing these conventions.
Kate Carpenter:
As she mentioned earlier, in 2018, Helen was invited to coach a team of historians during a weekend writing retreat while they worked on essays for a book that became Acquired Tastes: Stories About the Origins of Modern Food. After that weekend, Helen and one of the book's editors, historian Anna Zeide, wrote an essay for the Chronicle of higher education about that retreat. I asked Helen if she would read one of her parts of that essay to give a sense of what she did at the retreat.
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
Our weekend together opened with the provocation, what if we began from the premise that history is not a tellable story, that the historian's responsibility to uncover the past is in conflict with the responsibility to represent the past in a comprehensible fashion, that research and reporting are at odds? And what if we allowed ourselves to think of scholarship, including and especially the articles and book chapters we don't necessarily think of as "narrative" as a story? An idea story, as I call it, is the story of how a question develops into an idea that itself develops into a meaningful argument.
On our first evening together, we held a public storytelling event in which the writers were given seven minutes each to present a version of the work they would be contributing to the book. I probably don't need to tell you that this proved challenging or that the exercise of distilling one's work into a pithy, punchy presentation was hugely valuable to those writers still finding their story's essential point, which I found in my work as a coach and writer is almost everyone who's still tinkering with the draft. Translating ideas for different audiences in different forms can be tremendously useful, helping us see our work more clearly and feel less attached to what's already on the page.
Academics rarely get opportunities like that in part because scholarly values like comprehensiveness and objectivity are so often at odds with our storytelling impulses. Setting aside those values and conventions can sometimes be useful, especially during the drafting process.
Kate Carpenter:
And I will tell listeners that, in the article then, you follow this up with a list of suggestions that you offered to the writers at the workshop, so I'll link to that in the show notes so that people can read it because it's wildly helpful. We touched on this question a little bit, but some of these ideas you're presenting here … Let me back up. I imagine that when people come to you for one-on-one coaching, they're pretty open to being coached because why would they seek you out otherwise? But in a workshop like this, of course, it's a little different, right? The organizers have brought you in and these are big ideas you're asking them to think about that might really upend the way they've thought about history writing. Did you encounter pushback from writers or anyone who just, I don't know, even just maybe froze up in response and how do you navigate that?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
Yeah, yeah. I think in the way we did touch on before some people saying, "I love this, but it has no place in my serious work," that's one kind of response. But I think what you said, the workshop leaders brought me in and I guess I'll say, in the context of one-on-one coaching, not everybody wants to do something like radical with their scholarship, although I think it's fun when people do. So this isn't necessarily how I work with every single historian, but when I'm leading a workshop specifically about using one's imagination or specifically about writing more creatively as a historian, yeah, somebody has brought me in.
And one of the things that was so successful about that particular workshop that I take no credit for, but I think is really, really valuable for writing workshops like this that might be asking people to take a certain level of risk is the community building aspect of it that happened. So I think part of the reason that that workshop worked really well is that the three organizers, Anna Zeide, Ben Cohen, Michael Kideckel really … We all stayed in the same house for a weekend. There was a lot more going on besides just the workshop. And so there was some trust between the people and it made these conversations. It made the conversation that you and I are talking about like, "I love this, but what do I do with it?" There was a foundation of trust for having that conversation.
And I've seen that work well. Like if I'm leading a workshop for department, people … I mean, I guess there's some departments where that might not work well, but in other departments, there's a great sense of trust and community and so that can be a really rich conversation when people know each other's work Or there's another group of historians I work with who've been meeting every year and building a sense of community over the course of several years and I think that is actually really important because the conversation is really a conversation about the future of the field or the present of the field in this way that it's not really my conversation to have with people, though I think it's so interesting, but I think it's richer when people are having it with each other.
Kate Carpenter:
One thing I really appreciate about your advice and readers will see it if they go check out the suggestions from this article is that your advice is often so concrete and I think a lot of writing advice is vague or maybe philosophical is the right word, so you listen to it and you're like, "Yes, this is amazing. Thank you for this." And then you turn to your own writing and you're like, "Okay, but what do I do now on the page with my pen?" How have you arrived at communicating such helpful advice?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
That's very nice. Thank you for saying that. I'm not sure I have a good answer to it. I think I'm a very self-conscious writer. I've always been so interested in the process of writing. When I got to college, I immediately was in an email exchange with my freshman writing teacher about why she was teaching a certain way. And I've also always been really interested in the process of reading. And I feel like a lot of writing and something that scholars might not pay as much attention to as creative writers is that so much of writing is just creating an experience for a reader. So it's about a relationship, which is another reason I like coaching. It's very relational as opposed to transactional.
So I think I've thought about writing from the perspective of fictions, rhetoric, composition theory, creative nonfiction and I'm also interested in the psychology of writing. But I feel like if my advice is concrete, it's probably because I've given it in conversation with people who've been wonderful and have asked me questions and pushed me to make it concrete in ways that are specific to their needs. So I think it was last week, a writer and I realized we had different definitions of free writing and spent … We had a really granular conversation about what free writing looks like and what it could look like for her and what particular prompts might help make that possible.
Kate Carpenter:
Another example of this is you have a document available on your website that I will also link to on radical revision ideas, which I found so helpful that I printed out to hang up next to my desk. It should probably be clear from this conversation that I am in the midst of revisions myself, so it's of great interest to me, but I think a lot of really struggle with revision or at least I do. So maybe I'm projecting that, but why do you think that's so much of a struggle and you have so many great ideas for revision, but are there a couple of top things that you feel like really make a difference?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
Yeah, it's funny, I also feel like I struggle with revision and maybe project that all writers must struggle with revision. And then I've worked with some people who are incredible revisers, very, very inspiring. And part of me thinks that maybe the less you identify as a writer, the easier it becomes, just be throwing away your draft constantly and I envy that. And another part of me feels like that struggle with revision is a deeper psychological thing that could be related to control or one's relationship to the past really because revision is also this profound way that we can go through life off the page as well. So yeah, I wish I knew exactly what caused it, but I don't feel like I do.
In terms of helpful things, I think for people for whom writing by hand is accessible, that's what I've seen over and over be really, really helpful for people. And a lot of evidence shows that people's minds are more active when they're writing by hand as opposed to typing. Personally, I think I believe that our nervous system, our whole nervous system is probably calmer and quieter when we're not looking at a screen, which feels truer for me now even than five years ago. And so I recommend writing by hand as a practice, like something you do when you get to your desk, something you do when you leave your desk or both times.
I've seen that be so useful to people who are revising. And it might mean having a morning pages practice. So for people who might not be familiar with that, morning pages is the idea that came from Julia Cameron's wildly bestselling book, The Artist's Way, where you roll over in bed and scribble out three pages as fast as you can in the morning. And there are lots of people who can't write first thing in the morning for a variety of reasons. So I always present that to people with many options of variations and I can actually share a document with you with some of those variations.
But I think for people who are stuck, that can be a ritual to get going and I think of it as building a muscle, so you don't have to start off writing about your project, you can just start off writing and you're exercising a muscle that's going to help you write about your project. And for people who don't write by hand for any reason, including that their own handwriting is illegible to them, I recommend just writing in a different software from the one in which you draft. So for me, like I mentioned, I like to use Text Editor. I think it feels like it has a very low footprint on my computer. It literally does because it takes up no space, but also there's no options. And so it just feels very different from working in a draft and I use that a lot.
And another tool that I think is really powerful for people is what I call a north star, so finding a north star of the project, which might be the thing you most want to say. It might be the question you most want to answer. It might be the experience you most want to create, but that north star, and mine is on an index card by my desk and I revise it sometimes, but that north star, it's a way to make choices. So you can have a paragraph and think, "Do I need this paragraph or do I need this detail?" and it's like you look at your North Star, "Is this paragraph or detail pointing me toward my north star, yes, keep it, no, toss it?" and that can be really powerful as well.
Kate Carpenter:
I love that, even in that answer, you have given me really solid concrete advice for working. I have a question for you that honestly I would feel sort of awkward asking except that I know that you think deeply about these issues too. So editorial coaching, freelance editing have really become growing fields, especially when it comes to helping academics and a lot of short former academics go into these fields. But sometimes I worry, and I know other people do too, that this just reflects the scarcity of the job market or the limited resources that presses have where they don't do the developmental editing that maybe they used to do and all these other structural issues.
And like I said, I know you're someone who thinks a lot about questions of equity and antiracism. How do you see that situation? And I don't want to ask you something really unfair, how do we go forward from here? But maybe I'll just ask, what you think about when you think about those things?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
I'm so glad you asked that question. I think it's such a good and interesting question. From my perspective, I think of it more or I see it more as a result of the crumbling of traditional publishing. And this is just my perspective, but I feel like the people that I've seen moving from the traditional academic market into editing, maybe doing so indirectly out-of-the-market scarcity, but to me it seems more about the unsustainability of the tenure track experience, how difficult and overwhelming it is to be on the tenure track and have so many responsibilities in addition to the ones that you signed up for when you decided to do this. And so I see people choosing a different kind of lifestyle and that's connected to scarcity, of course, like that overwhelm, but it doesn't seem as direct to me.
But I guess I feel like, as long as universities are providing resources for coaching and editing, and I very much hope that that will continue, then I think the growth of coaching and freelance editing has the potential to be a really good thing because it puts more power into the hands of writers, so they're less beholden to dusty old institutions because those institutions aren't pulling the strings quite as fully or powerfully or all controllingly. And another aspect that I think is positive is that it helps unveil the writing process. And I think not talking about the writing process can be a form of gatekeeping.
And then on the other hand, I think the wrong editor can be dangerous and I have met with a lot of people who have had an unhelpful or maybe even harmful experience with a one-off editing person or a coach actually. But I don't know that a bad experience with an editor is necessarily more likely to happen outside of traditional publishing than within it. It's just a risk of less oversight. And so I guess, for me, the takeaway is to take care in finding the person who's right for you, who's probably out there.
Kate Carpenter:
I want to turn, as we are wrapping up here to ask about your sources of inspiration. So who are there people you like to read or watch or listen to that inspire your writing?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
I am inspired and excited about the writing of a lot of people I work with and some of the stuff I've already mentioned like Saidiya Hartman's work, Note on Method from Wayward Lives, Venus in Two Acts where she coins and defines the term critical fabulation, Michelle Caswell's Feeling Liberatory Memory Work. Those are articles that give me a lot of methodological inspiration for my creative work and for my work as a coach. For writing inspiration, I really love David, now, I don't know if it's Nieman or Naimon's podcast, Between the Covers. Do you know that one? It's like these really in-depth interviews with writers and he is so brilliant. So I often find inspiring tidbits about writing there as well. And scholars who are doing really innovative things with form like Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
And then I read poetry as well for inspiration. Recently, I really loved a book called Laura's Desires by the poet Laura Henriksen, which is like an analysis of a movie variety, but from within the very specific context of her own life and I just thought it was really incredible.
Kate Carpenter:
I know that you have a new book forthcoming, which I believe is titled Feels Like Trouble: Transgressive Takes on Teaching, Writing, and Publishing, seems like a really great title. Could you talk a little bit about that book and what you're trying to do with it?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
A lot of it is similar to stuff that we've been talking about. So basically the book looks at some conventions of teaching, practicing and publishing writing that I think can be harmful and proposes alternatives for repair. As it's structured right now, it's going to be a little bit memoirish in that it'll trace some of these moments in my life where I've had a turning point around those practices. But it'll be very grounded in this question of literary and scholarly values and what might become possible if we don't think about writing in terms of good or bad or if the good or bad we used were grounded in ethics instead of aesthetics and what the relationship between aesthetics and ethics is.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, I have asked you a lot of questions, but is there anything that I haven't asked that you wish you could tell historians who are writers who are listening to this podcast?
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
The first thing that's coming to me is trust yourself. I'm interested in what becomes possible when people do listen to instinct. And I think there's reason that people have largely distrusted that as a method for scholarship because sometimes instinct leads us right into harmful cultural mythology. But in part because I was just listening to this book, The Light Eaters, do you know this book about plant intelligence?
Kate Carpenter:
Yeah.
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
There are a couple of really important scientists in there, both of whom happen to be women, who talk about how powerfully instinct guided their work and how much they were pushed out of science for that reason. So probably, that's part of why this is on my mind, but yeah, I encourage people to trust themselves and take risks and move the field forward through those risks.
Kate Carpenter:
Fantastic. Well, Helen Betya Rubinstein, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past.
Helen Betya Rubinstein:
Thank you so much.
Kate Carpenter:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of Drafting the Past. You'll find links to the many resources and books that we talked about at draftingthepast.com. There, you can also sign up for the show newsletter, learn about ways to support the show and check out past episodes. If you've found Drafting the Past inspiring, would you please take a minute to leave a review on Apple Podcasts? It really helps people find the show and it's a big support to me. Thanks for being here and remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
