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For the eighth episode of Drafting the Past, I interviewed geographer and historian Elizabeth Hennessy about her first book, On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden (Yale, 2019). We talked about bringing a wide variety of sources and approaches together in a book, how she made Darwin funny, and the benefits of an undergraduate education in journalism.
MENTIONED IN THE SHOW:
- William Cronon, "Kennecott Journey" and "A Place for Stories"
- Stephen King, On Writing
- Writing software Scrivener
- Hugh Raffles, In Amazonia: A Natural History
- Jake Kosek, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
- Lauret Savoy, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape
Here's Dr. Hennessy's complete bio from her website: "Elizabeth Hennessy is a geographer and assistant professor of history, history of science, and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she is a Vilas Associate and sits on the steering committee of the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History, and Environment. She also co-directs a working group on Environmental Justice in Multispecies Worlds.
As a scholar of environmental governance in Latin America, Hennessy’s research bridges political ecology, environmental history, multispecies studies, and science and technology studies to reveal how diverse ways of knowing the world structure political conflicts surrounding charismatic and economically important species. She combines place-based ethnographic and archival research to analyze how relationships among scientific understandings of life, the political economy of development, and local livelihoods shape resource-based development and conservation strategies in Ecuador.
Hennessy completed her PhD in Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. Her research has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation/Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society."
TRANSCRIPT
Elizabeth Hennessy 0:01
I was working on the Galapagos, which is just like kind of begging for a public audience, right? So I knew I was like sitting on this thing that people might potentially want to read about, which is not always the case for the work that we do as academics, certainly hasn't been the case for everything that I've done before. And so I didn't want to like squander that possibility either and write this really dense book that wasn't gonna get any traction.
Kate Carpenter 0:25
This is Drafting the Past, a show devoted to the craft of writing history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. And I am so happy to be back this week with an interview with historian and geographer Elizabeth Hennessy.
Elizabeth Hennessy 0:38
Thanks so much for having me, Kate.
Kate Carpenter 0:40
Dr. Hennessy is a professor of History and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where she also co directs the environmental justice and multispecies worlds research group. She is the author of On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galapagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden, which I loved, and which we will talk about more in this conversation. I hope you enjoy.
Elizabeth Hennessy 1:05
I started writing, really in high school, I think when I was on the newsmagazine staff at my high school and, and that was a like, that was the big extracurricular activities that I did. And so I learned first to write in a more journalistic sense, so lots of like, really short declarative sentences and learned how to write ledes. And I think those schools have served me really well throughout. And then so I wrote a lot in high school about, you know, kind of ridiculous things, looking back on it, but then I was a journalism double major in college. And that was, again, my parents wanted me to be a business major, but that was not for me. And my mom was like, Well, you know, then you should, you should at least write because that'll always serve you. And she was very right about that. Yeah. So I, you know, wrote for the college newspaper, and I had a food column, actually, at one point for the kind of like, alternative weekly newspaper on my college campus. So that was fun. And then I really didn't write very much. I was an editor, and did editing work after college, but didn't really get back into writing myself until, you know, I was writing my master's.
Kate Carpenter 2:09
Did you, as you were working in grad school, did you think of yourself as a writer at that point?
Elizabeth Hennessy 2:14
I had always kind of wanted to write a book, I think, like growing up, and I never really knew what it would be about. And I think that, yeah, like, I was like, Oh, I don't think I could ever write a fiction book. Like, I just didn't feel like I was that kind of creative writer. And so I don't think I really thought about myselt--I knew I, I knew I was a good writer going into grad school, and I had had a lot of journalism experience. And so it was easy for me to like, find what was interesting in a story in a way that I think isn't always true of academics. I think, you know, my advisor really trained us on writing proposals, that was how I learned to think like an academic is how to formulate research questions and support, lit review and figure out like, what your methods would be. And so I really, we spent a lot of time writing, but it was much more focused on, on getting grant money, honestly, and like getting funding to do the projects that we wanted to do, and to be able to sell your project as something that had legs, and it was going to be valuable in terms of the knowledge that we produced for the communities you were working with, but also for your own scholarly career. And I don't think that I really, I didn't really fancy myself a writer, I think until I was really working on the book and was like, done with grad school and the pressures of writing your master's thesis and your dissertation, because those are such specific genres. And it was hard to be creative about those things in a way that I felt like when I got my job, which is, you know, partially in the history department, and I'm, you know, a geographer, it was like, kind of this new carte blanche to thinking about being more creative and writing the kind of book that I wanted to write and hopefully reach broader audiences.
Kate Carpenter 3:49
That was one of the things I was curious to know is, you know, do do geographers and historians approach writing differently?
Elizabeth Hennessy 3:55
And of course, I can only speak from my experience, right? And like, the particular ways in which that I'm trained in each of those fields and so in geography, I come out of political ecology and critical nature, society, geography, and we definitely, I mean, definitely, when I was a grad student, I read, for theory, and I was always interested in the whatever, you know, the empirical situation, and the context of an article was always interesting. But it really, the juice was in the theory. And so and when you would write something you were there's a lot of pressure to like, apply different theories, and how are you going to bring these two different theoretical frameworks together and make sense of your case study using these different theoretical concepts and, and that I think, exists in some senses in history, but is much, it's much less the focus of writing. And like when I write articles for history journals, I don't write them focused on thinking about, like, what neologism I can come up with to explain some empirical context, right? And so in that sense, I do think it's, it's different, and even geographers, you know, there are many geographers who write books but when I was applying for jobs and talking to people in geography departments about how I wanted to write a book that was hopefully going to be read by people who weren't just geographers, they're like, oh, great, you know, you can do that, in like your first two years, and then you move on and do all the other articles you're supposed to do for tenure. Whereas in history departments, you know, you take five years, and you write your book, and you do a couple of articles on the side that are kind of spin offs of the book and your next project. But the emphasis is really on taking your time to write a well crafted book. And I really appreciated that. And I think one of the other things that I that was new to me coming into history was just the way, and this is perhaps unique to environmental history and unique to like this kind of Bill Cronon world that I was very much ensconced in when I came to Wisconsin, of thinking of like that the narrative and your narrative choices really are representative of your theory and the kind of theoretical assumptions that you bring in. And so I think like Kennecott Kourney and A Place for Stories are really good examples of how that works for Bill and Bill'ss writing. And for me, where that really showed up in this Galapagos book was in thinking about, you know, like, I didn't want to write a chronological book that started like, either Galapagos books tends to start in 1534, when they were quote, unquote, discovered by the Spanish or they start in 1832, when Ecuador first claimed the islands, or they started at 1835, when Darwin visited, and all of those starting points have really important political ramifications for sovereignty in the islands and for who, like who the islands belong to, and who has the best claim to them. And are they understood as this place that's supposed to be kind of prehistoric and pristine and without much human, human historical footprint. And so I didn't want, I knew, like, whenever I was going to, like, put my claim, temporarily, that it was going to be really significant for the rest of the of the book. And so I went about it thinking of histories of the present. And so I start in the present moment, you know, that's really informed by the ethnographic work I did. And then kind of go back to figuring out how did this present situation that I see is problematic in several ways, how did it come to be? And then through that figured out almost also, how could it then be different, so kind of coming back up to the present at the end of the book,
Kate Carpenter 4:23
So I want to dive into that a little bit more. But first, I want to back up so I'll start very simply, with when and where do you do your writing?
Elizabeth Hennessy 7:21
These days, I'm not doing a lot. But when I was reading the book, it really, it differed. And there were different periods. And I would kind of go through when I was doing I often I write best in the morning. And so I would usually, you know, for for the first like six months or so that I was really focused on writing the book, I was off for a semester, and I was living in Oaxaca. And I would go to this beautiful indigenous languages library that opened at 10am. And I would write from like 10 to 1 every day, and then go have lunch and then do some other stuff in the afternoon. And that was really lovely. It wasn't the most productive. I wrote one chapter while I was doing that. And then things got, you know, the pressure turned on. And I realized that I had to go much faster than that. And so like at one point, my, a good friend of mine and I were both getting up. And we'd be writing by 6am in our in our dark offices in our houses and kind of texting with each other to check in, have an accountability partner. And so I would just write in the morning until I had to go to campus and teach and do meetings and all the other parts of our job.
Kate Carpenter 8:20
You have such a wide variety of source material. How do you keep that all organized while you're working?
Elizabeth Hennessy 8:25
When I was doing my, like archival work in those collections, I took lots and lots of photographs of all these documents. And I kept them in iPhoto, which is perhaps not a decision I would make, again, only because every time I've updated my computer, I lose a big chunk of the that database, but I did find I could code some of it. And so it would be searchable. And that was nice. Yeah, so I have like a bunch of sources that I kept photographs of. But then I also have a lot of interview transcripts. And you know, it's just like a big file structure in my Dropbox and trying to be kind of organized both temporarily like when like I would do the Galapagos research, I would kind of do out in different chunks depending on like when the trip that I took was and who I talked to there because I would often talk to people repeatedly. So I'd have these different interviews with them at different points in time. And so trying to keep track of all of that. So yeah, it's a lot like transcripts and word documents, but also wav files, so I can go back and listen to some things. And lots of photographs. I do most of my writing I did for the book in Scrivener, which I really liked. Because you can, it's really easy to pull the kind of multimedia files into it. And so you don't have like 25 different Word documents open on your screen or like PDFs and Word, just kind of all centralize it all in and it has one of those lovely like focus functions where you can block out the rest of your computer screen so you can't see all the other stuff. And so that was really helpful to be able to kind of look at things on the same screen together.
Kate Carpenter 9:54
At what point in your research process do you start writing?
Elizabeth Hennessy 9:57
When I have a deadline. [laughs] I got the advice in grad school to like start writing, like to sign myself up for a lot of conference presentations. And so lots of 15 minute paper presentations. And I did that probably, you know, I wrote my master's about Galapagos. And then then while I was doing the dissertation work, I was really, it was probably like six months in after I had done like my big first stint living in Galapagos for a long time. At that point, I was starting to write up what I could write about. Yeah. And then I just kind of kept going with that. And, you know, I was, I was traveling a lot to do my research. And this isn't always the case for historians. But I had this period, and I was like, out of the country for a long time. And then I came home and I had to write up fellowship. And so my, like periods of collection versus writing were kind of distinct in a way that they aren't always, yeah, I would definitely just kind of start when I had to write a paper, and I made those deadlines for myself, because otherwise, I knew I would never get them done. But also one of the things like I always kept a journal while I was in the field, especially and did a lot of field notes for myself, just like my impressions of the day, or like, what the weather was, like, try and get some of that descriptive material in there. Because you forget, like, it's so present in your, in my brain, at least when I was there, and I'm like, Oh, I couldn't possibly forget what the smell is like, or what this like what the sun feels like, but I completely forget. And I completely would forget, like, who it was that I talked to, or like, what what a particular conversation was, and like, why I thought it was funny at the time, or, you know, and so I learned to like, take notes. And so in that sense, I was writing throughout. And some of those were ended up being useful, and some of them didn't end up being very useful at all. But that's kind of how it goes.
Kate Carpenter 11:38
Aside from conference audiences. Are there people that you share your work with, as you're working on it?
Elizabeth Hennessy 11:44
Yeah, I've always had writing groups. And I think initially, I was of the, of the ilk that find it really hard to share unfinished writing with other people. And I got over that pretty quickly. And I think being a journalist helped that too, because I was very used to being edited and, and editing people too. And giving back, you know, getting back piece pieces are just marked up with all this red pen. And I like I certainly have done that to other people too. And it can be really intimidating. But I think that the journalist experience helped and having to do that on a deadline, as a journalist, it was just like this kind of collaborative effort to get a story out. Whereas in the academy, especially in history, it's such an individualized process, and a measure of self worth, and all of these, all of these things like go into our writing. And so the pressure becomes, I think, really immense sometimes when you have to share work. Yeah, I think it's super important to have a writing group. And you know, I have a friend that I we traded things, and then sometimes we would just sit and write together. And I had lots of other folks who I would share chapters with and get feedback on them, which was really helpful.
Kate Carpenter 12:47
At what point do you feel ready to share something with with other people?
Elizabeth Hennessy 12:50
Sometimes it again, is just because there's a deadline, or you signed up to do like, a kind of lunchtime colloquium with folks or like, you have to do a pre circulated chapter. And it's just like, there, there's an hour in which you have to just send it out so that you're not being really rude to people and asking them to read 30 pages the night before you know they need to comment on it. Yeah, it's hard, I think. Because when you have something that you like, have all these ideas about what you want to do and haven't had time to do yet, it can be really hard to listen to feedback, because people can often they don't know that, right? They don't, they can't see in your mind. And so they'll give you feedback that might be like, Oh, that's not at all where I wanted to go with that chapter. So yeah, it's hard. It's like you want to get it pretty polished. So you're pretty happy with it. But certainly, like kind of let the perfectionism go.
Kate Carpenter 13:38
And then what's your approach to revision like? Do you revise as you go? Do you have sort of stages that you'd like to go through?
Elizabeth Hennessy 13:43
I think it depends on what I'm writing. And you know, sometimes for articles, it's, at least, at least the way that I have written geography articles, there's much more of like a kind of formulaic outline for introduction, and this lit review and the empirical stuff. And then your like, theoretical conclusions, and, and so sometimes revising those is really about responding to whatever the reviewers wanted from you. And sometimes it's about defending yourself. And sometimes it's about making revisions. And really like incorporating what they've had to say, or I've often gotten really helpful advice for how to kind of broaden the theoretical conclusions that I want to make in an article. It's like, I know, the empirics are really interesting, but sometimes it's hard to get there yourself. And so like having other people's feedback can be really helpful for kind of teasing out the significance of something. And then when I was writing the book, I think the revisions were often much more about cutting. And because things were very long in the first chapter that I wrote, not the first chapter that ended up being chapter one, but the first one that I wrote the first draft of it was like 25,000 words, and, you know, they shouldn't be longer than 9, 10,000. So I had just like, really dived into my sources, and it was about histories of maritime exploration and things that I really didn't know very much about before I set about writing this chapter, so I had a lot to learn. And I was like a kind of explaining things to myself as I would write and kind of learning about it and writing it up as I went. And then, you know, I had a reading group read it, and they were like, wow, there's a lot of detail. And they didn't know what to do with it, or like, what the main part that they were supposed to hang on to was. And so then you have to go back and really figure out okay, what is the main point? What am I trying to say, in this article? And then what is essential for making that argument and what is like otherwise just detail that you know, a specialist might be really interested in. But we don't get to include all that stuff.
Kate Carpenter 15:37
I want to build on my question actually about sort of the wide variety of sources you're dealing with, because you're also dealing with such a wide variety of subjects from sort of natural history to contemporary science, and questions of tourism and ecology, and even perspectives of non human species. And you weave that together so well, in this book, it's part of what I love about it. But I have to, at least to me, that seems very challenging to do that so smoothly. Was that something that you struggled with? How did you sort of bring those things together?
Elizabeth Hennessy 16:09
First, thank you. I think, I think the reason that I did that and maybe I'll come at your question kind of sideways is, is because of my geographic training. And because I really was focused on understanding the place that is Galapagos, and like, what goes into that, and I picked the tortoises as the kind of the focal point for the book, because I found that they, they took me through all of these different effects of Galapagos history and in a way like none of the other species did. And they're so well known that it was an easy, like, place to like meet readers where they were and like, with their, you know, with the exposure that they had already had through nature, documentaries, or whatever it may be to, to these animals. And they're charismatic and fun. So that was kind of a fun thing to do, too. It took me a really long time to figure out how to make the project my own as a grad student. And I, you know, my advisor, it was wonderful. She's a social movements person. And so a lot of the folks that I went into grad school with came in with a social movement that they had worked with for, like 10 years, and they were going to do some research project with them. And I was like, Oh, I don't have that. Like, I don't know how to figure this out. So you know, I had this whole project on urban slum upgrading in Brazil that I worked on for like a year and a half when I started grad school, and then I got the opportunity to go to Galapagos and ended up liking that much better. And I wasn't quite like, I didn't want to do just like a social ethnography of oh, there are people who live in Galapagos, and this is what their life is like. And like, partially because there are other anthropologists who have done that very well before. And so I didn't feel like I needed to do that. Or like, that's where the most pressing question was for me. But but when I went, there was all of this crisis discourse about Galapagos being in peril. And, you know, it's very malthusian arguments. And so I got really interested in like, where the all of those arguments came from, and this idea that Galapagos wasn't supposed to have any people. And then I did this STS training fellowship at one point in grad school, and one of the, like, one of the faculty leads was like encouraging me to take the symbolism of Galapagos really seriously. And she was like, oh, you know, you could have a chapter about tortoises, a chapter about Darwin, a chapter about the finches. And I was like, oh, it would be kind of a fun way to organize something. And then I just like, well, I'm just gonna go in whole hog with the tortoises, because they can get me into all the things that I want to talk about. And I have all these different aspects and facets of the place. And then, like, they all come together in Galapagos. So it's not like I am very eclectic. And in geography, you can be very eclectic. And so I've got history of science and contemporary STS and political ecology and environmental history and, and all of those things, it's easier. You just have permission to do that, I think when you're a geographer, than the way that, I don't know, I probably don't train my historians in the same kind of permission either. Yeah, I think for me, it was really just like trying to figure out how did the power of conservation become so strong in Galapagos like, well, it became so strong because you, you have to take Darwin really seriously and understand this whole kind of weight of Darwinian science and Galapagos and why he's so associated with the place. And so I felt like I was like, Oh, I have to do this archival component for this project, like it can't just be a contemporary ethnography, because that will only get me so far, in kind of understanding the power dynamics of this place, and the politics of this place, and like to really understand that there's a lot more history to unpack. And so then in terms of like, practically pulling it all together, I think most of the chapters have different sources. And so there aren't, I think there's some degree in which like, thinking about like, the last substantive chapter talks about like contemporary conservation science and has a lot of my ethnographic material in it. So that does pull from different sources. But you know, there's one chapter that's primarily about pulling from travel narratives and another one that's primarily history of science, another one that's more like political history about how the national park was founded. And so I tried to kind of segment that out and I think that made it a little bit easier in terms of like, how you pulled sources together.
Kate Carpenter 20:02
Was it challenging-- I sometimes find when I'm working with different types of sources, to make everything feel like it's the same piece, if that makes sense, you know, I write about different kinds of sources differently. Was that a challenge to not make every chapter feel like a totally different beast?
Elizabeth Hennessy 20:21
You can tell me how well I succeeded in that. In some ways. I felt like different, I mean, I guess. Yeah, I think there's always some some degree of magic in it. And I think I mean, I don't know, I guess like my writerly voice is what connects them all together. But it is hard. And it was really hard for me, like I wrote the ethnographic chapter last, and in some ways, that was the research that I really had done first. And so that was a really hard chapter for me to figure out how I wanted to structure it and I ended up doing it based on what I call these multispecies transects across the archipelago. And so I was thinking about like, going up a road and like this is very influenced by Cronon's, Kennecott Journey and all of those narrative devices and thinking through like, I didn't want to just tell like the social history of like, this is what people think in Galapagos because what I really wanted to find ways to show like just how close knit nature and society were in different contradictory ways in their islands. And that was a really hard chapter for me to figure out how to write. The other ones were a little bit easier in terms of like pulling sources together.
Kate Carpenter 21:26
To dig into her writing process some more I asked Dr. Hennessy to take a closer look with me at one of my favorite paragraphs from On the Backs of Tortoises from the second chapter. Here's that paragraph: On a sunny day in October 1835, a twenty-six-year-old Darwin hiked from the parched coast of Santiago Island (then called James) to the island’s green, damp highlands, where he was taken with the giant tortoises he found. After a long walk, he sat in the shade and watched them as they ambled along broad roads that had been trodden by their elephant-like feet over countless generations. He timed their gait (faster than he supposed), measured their carapaces (six and eight feet in circumference), and tried to lift them (some weigh well over five hundred pounds). Finding their weight too much, he climbed aboard, rapping on their shells and trying not to slip off their backs as they trudged along. Riding tortoises is today, of course, not among the approved ways of following Darwin’s footsteps. Tourists may observe the animals Darwin saw, but they are not permitted to do as he did. Re-creating the experiences of the Darwin who actually walked the islands would mean doing a host of things now prohibited by national park rules–trying to net birds with your hat or catching iguanas by the tail and dissecting their stomachs to see what they eat."
In many ways, one of the things I love about this paragraph is kind of just what we were talking about, is how it moves so smoothly between perspectives. So we go from being alongside Darwin on the island and his experiences there in ways that many readers might not expect to envision Darwin. And then we also imagine ourselves as tourists there. So I'm curious about how you thought through this paragraph.
Elizabeth Hennessy 23:15
So this was the chapter that I wrote that was first 25,000 words. Okay, so it didn't start, I think it starts off now kind of comparing the gray beard Darwin who celebrated as like this conservation icon in Galapagos versus the young Darwin, who, as I point out in this paragraph, like did all these things like eating the tortoises that you aren't actually supposed to do today, of course, as conservationists. And so that's kind of disjointed between the guy who's remembered in Galapagos and like, idolized as this patron saint of conservation, versus the actual Darwin, who was not, you know, for him to be a conservationist would be an anachronism. So I when I first wrote this, it went much more chronologically and like started with early mariners, and, and then kind of got to Darwin in the middle of it. And then, like, more contemporary travel narratives toward the end, and it was just, it was long and painful to read, I think, you know, talking with with Cronon, who was my mentor here, and was a great help as a developmental editor as I was writing this book, we were really talking about like, well, what's the real crux of this? And this is how I came up with these two Darwin figures and so yeah, so figuring out like, how you can have these two, two different, like versions of Darwin and thinking through that. And also thinking that I wanted to, like I write the book, mostly with the thought that like, hopefully tourists would read it before they go to Galapagos or tourists who have gone and want to think more about their experience there. And so I had, like, I wanted to, like, take the tourists and make them think about the place in a different way, but also kind of figure out like, oh, you know, like most people, if you're not Ecuadorian and living in the islands or working for conservation, some kind of NGO. You're gonna go if you have experience you're gonna go as a tourist. And so trying to think about like, Okay, well, what's that experience like for people, especially like North Americans who I was really writing the book for. And so that's why I start and then go back. And there's also a lot of literature in Galapagos and advertising that is about walking in Darwin's footsteps. And that's like one of these tropes of tourism propaganda. And so I was like, wanted to dive into that, too, because I think there's a lot more to Galapagos than this kind of neo-colonial idea that you can go and be a young Darwin again today. You know, and Cronon was always encouraging me to, like, have fun with the writing, which was not advice that I felt like I could really take when I was on the tenure track and very worried about getting this book out on time. But then this was like, this is one of the funny things about like, picturing Darwin slipping off a tortoise's back and like that happens in the Galapagos today, and people get in trouble for it and would like, here's Darwin doing it, and like writing all of these funny journal entries about it, so. So that was a kind of fun thing to set up.
Kate Carpenter 26:06
As I mentioned, the voice in this paragraph is especially great, you know, it has this very, like frank and fresh and then there are these sort of humorous parenthetical asides, which is such a great way, I mean, in them, you communicate really, like specific scientific detail, right, about the size of tortoises and yet, like, the way that they're framed is just hilarious to me. Really? Do you write funny naturally?
Elizabeth Hennessy 26:32
No, I don't think I'm particularly funny, naturally. Yeah. Like, I don't I mean, honestly, I don't know where this came from. This is like the strokes of magic that sometimes things just pop into your head. And I mean, one of the great things is like Darwin had this Beagle diary and his Journal of Researches that was the published version of it later, and he had this Galapagos notebook. So there are lots of different sources about like, the days that he spent on this island, and his notes about like, Oh, this is how big the tortoise I measured was, and this is like, Oh, they're going much faster than you would think. Like, these are notes that like Darwin was making for himself, too. And it's like, oh, well, it's not really interesting, just to say like, he timed how fast the tortoise went. That's boring. But if they go fast, then it's funny because tortoises, tortoise and the hare, and all of these kind of tropes about tortoises moving so slowly. So it's kind of cool to think that Darwin had the same preconceptions that we would today, too, and it just kind of makes him more of a human character.
Kate Carpenter 27:29
It sounds like Bill Cronon definitely had an influence on you. Have there been other pieces of writing advice that have made an impact on you?
Elizabeth Hennessy 27:37
There's so much I went through a phase when I was writing this too, when I was just like reading all the advice and all the like Stephen King's book On Writing, and I always love reading that kind of stuff. And some of it's helpful, and some of it's not very helpful, or it'd be helpful in an ideal world that I don't actually live in maybe. I think, like reading everything that you write out loud, is really helpful advice. And, you know, omit needless words, of course, like, that's the journalist in me too. Yeah, I think it can be really hard, especially like coming out of theoretical geography to write these like really crazy plotting and decipherable sentences. And so if you read that out loud to yourself, or you give a conference presentation, and you're like reading this paper to someone, and you're just like, Oh, my God, what am I saying? Then it's really easy to write to think like, oh, I just need to break this down into really short and declarative sentences and make my points with active voice. And so that kind of I think that's probably the best advice that I've gotten.
Kate Carpenter 28:32
Who do you like to read? Are there other people that you sort of turn to as inspiration?
Elizabeth Hennessy 28:37
I mean, it's really differed over the years. I still find, I still find kind of theoretical geography books to be the most inspiring for thinking about just like theoretical interventions, or how I want to frame something. You know, I was trying to think recently, like what I've been reading and you know, haven't read a ton of history lately. I think, like I've always really loved Hugh Raffle's work, In Amazonia, it was always really inspirational for me, he's a great writer, and like, did this like amazing kind of weaving together of different narratives about the Amazon, so that was a huge influence. Also thinking about like, he had this thing going about critical natural history for a while and that was big. I was really excited about thinking about how I could contribute to that. I think Jake Cosek's work is also fantastic, his book Understories, that's really beautifully written. And that was a big influence. More recently, I've been reading like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Lauret Savoy, and like more essayistic writing, which I think is great, and something I haven't done a lot of, but would like to do more of in the future.
Kate Carpenter 29:39
Has teaching impacted your writing?
Elizabeth Hennessy 29:41
I mean, in the direct sense of like, I've had students read my stuff and give me feedback about like, what makes sense and where they get bored and, and that kind of stuff. I think teaching is so helpful for like really getting you down to brass tacks and explaining like, this is the main point that I want you to take away from this discussion we're having today. And to be sure that, you know, when you're writing, you can be that clear and that you can like, really, you know, they say you should always start, like frame your lectures around the questions. So the students are like engaged with you in answering this question with you, as you talk at them for an hour, hopefully not, you have more engaging teaching methods, but then coming back and like coming back to the end and being sure that you like wrap up that question. And then you can tease out like, well, what are some other questions that come out of this exploration we've all gone on together. And so I do think that that's good advice for writing generally, too.
Kate Carpenter 30:35
As you look ahead, is another book in your future?
Elizabeth Hennessy 30:38
Like I said before, I haven't been writing very much I wrote like an introduction for a set of Melville short stories about Galapagos, like a year ago. And other than that, it's been like letters. And that's about it recently, partly just because my job has changed a little bit in the last couple years. And so also the pandemic, like this project that I was working on in Ecuador has been kind of put on hold for a bit. And so two years ago, I would have been like, yes, another book is in the works. And now it's, it's not really, I'm working on translating, or I should say, I am not doing the translation. But I've hired a wonderful translator for this book. And so we're starting to work with one of my research assistants and her about getting out a Spanish translation of the book. And so that's another really interesting aspect of like, figuring out how, how the writing works in a different language.
Kate Carpenter 31:28
Do you think that will impact how you write in the future? Or is that sort of just specific to translation?
Elizabeth Hennessy 31:34
I don't know. I don't know that I am skilled enough for that to actually influence how I write in the future. I think it speaks to the value of having a really good translator, I think.
Kate Carpenter 31:44
When you think of what it is to be a writer, I mean, are there other components of the so called writing life that you think about?
Elizabeth Hennessy 31:52
I mean, I think I always think about this idea that writers are supposed to write every day, even if it's just like in a journal, or just kind of quick notes about things. And I don't, I mean, in that sense, I don't feel like a successful writer, because I have not been doing that. And it's like, I'll tend to get really into something when I am working on it. And then I can go months without really writing very much at all. And so it's kind of a hit or miss thing. I would like to be writing more and doing more like not creative writing, but more like creative nonfiction fiction essays, and thinking a little bit more about, like public writing, too.
Kate Carpenter 32:30
You know, you mentioned with your first book that you were interested in writing a book that might reach beyond sort of just an academic audience. What motivated that desire?
Elizabeth Hennessy 32:41
I think my training in journalism definitely motivated that and just having been trained from the beginning that like, you know, journalists tend to write like a ninth grade reading level, so that your work is really accessible to a broad public and easily understood. And so clearly, most academics do not write that clearly, or to be understood. Often, I feel like trying to obfuscate things so that we feel like nobody can understand us are so brilliant. And I don't I don't like that about the academy. And I didn't want to write something like that. And that was going to be so jargon heavy or so theoretical, that, you know, my mom wouldn't understand it, or feel like she could really engage with it. And then also, like, I was working in the Galapagos, which is just like kind of begging for a public audience, right? So I knew I was like sitting on this thing that people might potentially want to read about, which is not always the case for the work that we do as academics, certainly hasn't been the case for everything that I've done before. And so I want, I didn't want to like squander that possibility, either and write this really dense book that wasn't going to get any traction. So I kind of felt like, you know, I have this popular thing, an opportunity, that I should I should go for it.
Kate Carpenter 33:52
That makes sense. I always wonder if people who sort of do ethnography or oral histories, depending on the field, if there's more of a sense of obligation to make it widely accessible because of the people's stories you're telling?
Elizabeth Hennessy 34:07
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's a big piece of it. And I, you know, it's a big piece of why I want to translate it into Spanish too so that it, like, I took, I took English copies back to the Galapagos. And, you know, it's of somewhat limited utility for a lot of the people there, you know, like, we took them to a high school and like, they can use it in English class, but it would be much better, I think, if people could read something about the place that they live in their native language. Yeah. And I think, you know, we know, we do as academics not always think about the communities in which we are always embedded even if we're not doing like publicly engaged research. And I do think we have a responsibility to those communities and to make our work accessible to them.
Kate Carpenter 34:49
Thanks again to Dr. Hennessy, for taking the time to talk research and writing with me and thanks to you for listening. You can find links to Dr. Hennessy's work and show notes at draftingthepast.com Thanks to everyone who has shared the show, the best way you can support this project is to keep telling people about it, and to buy books to support our guests. Until next time, happy writing
