I’m delighted to introduce you to my guest today, historian of science Dr. Kathleen Sheppard. Kate is a professor at Missouri S & T University, and the author of three books, as well as the editor of two books of correspondence. Kate is a historian of Egyptology, and her first book was a biography of Margaret Alice Murray, the first woman to become a university-trained Egyptologist in Britain. The second was Tea on the Terrace: Hotels and Egyptologists’ Social Networks, which was released in paperback this summer. And her newest book is out right now. It’s called Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age. I was excited to talk with Kate about the difference in writing a book for a trade press, how she has found each of her book subjects, her old school research methods, and how her agent coached her in writing for a public audience. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Kate Sheppard.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Tea on the Terrace: Hotels and Egyptologists’ Social Networks
- Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age
- Zotero
- Lady Science
- John C. McManus
- Joy Lisi Rankin
- Lee Childs’ Jack Reacher books
- Erik Larson, especially Devil in the White City and In the Garden of Beasts
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Hey. Hello. Welcome back. This is Drafting the Past, the podcast all about the craft of writing history. And I’m Kate Carpenter. I’m delighted to introduce you to my guest today, historian of science, Dr. Kathleen Sheppard.
Kate Sheppard:
Thank you for having me. I’m really excited.
Kate Carpenter:
Kate is a professor at Missouri S&T University and the author of three books, as well as the editor of two books of correspondence. She’s a historian of Egyptology and her first book was a biography of Margaret Alice Murray, the first woman to become a University-trained Egyptologist in Britain. The second book was Tea on the Terrace: Hotels and Egyptologists’ Social Networks. It actually came out in paperback this summer, and her newest book is out right now. It’s called Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age. I was excited to talk with Kate about the difference in writing a book for a trade press this time around, how she has found each of her book subjects, her old school research methods, and how her agent coached her in writing for a public audience. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Kate Sheppard.
Kate Sheppard:
I vividly remember telling one of my undergrad professors that I don’t like writing and I’m not very good at it, and they were like, “Well, if you want to be a professor, you’re going to have to write.” I mean, it’s not sort of a straight line towards success. There’s a lot of, if I have to go back and sort of look at my dissertation or my master’s thesis, it’s like, “Ooh, that could have used some editing work,” or I was a young writer, or whatever. The trajectory has been one of those sort of charts that goes up and then down and you’ve got some success, and then it’s like something drops off. And I could tell you the story of one article that got rejected twice from the same journal, but I won’t. So that one was one of those like natters or whatever falling into the trough.
But in general, I mean, it’s been one of those things where you’re working on balancing. If it’s during your grad school, you’re balancing coursework with having to write all of your papers and also have a life. But once you’re in, say, the academic position or the non-academic position that you choose, it’s still balancing the things that you have to do, your meetings and classes or your job tasks with the research part. Because I’m in a tenured position, and so technically 40% of my job is supposed to be research, but you have to carve that out on your own or else the entire day can be taken up by service or teaching or whatever. So yeah, I mean, in terms of trajectory, it’s been long and difficult because it’s like, “What’s another idea? What’s something else that I could write about?”
That’s pretty much it. And then thankfully, I’ve been really lucky to be part of groups where somebody recognizes that you have a contribution to make, and so they say, “Would you like to write a chapter for this volume that’s coming out?” Or “We’d like for you to write an article,” or whatever. And then I got really lucky with Lady Science also working with them and being a contributing editor so that I could get some of those baby ideas out, and they helped me develop them, and those turned into longer term projects. So luck. It was a lot of luck and time management-
Kate Carpenter:
Also hard work, I think.
Kate Sheppard:
Yeah, and hard work too. And hard work too, but a lot of it’s luck because there are so many good writers out there that aren’t lucky enough to be in those types of positions.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, let’s start with my standard questions about how you do your work. So when and where do you like to write?
Kate Sheppard:
I write at home most of the time. I have my office set up so I can see out my window into my front yard, and I have my schedule set up during the semester so that I teach Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and then usually I try to keep Tuesday and Thursday free from meetings and things so I can write or at least work on research. So yeah, I really prefer to do it at home because all my books right here, these are for coursework, and I don’t teach what I research, so I don’t teach Egyptology here. I do history of science. I do the big survey because I am a historian of science, but I don’t do history of Egyptology. I don’t teach history of Egyptology. So these are all my course books behind me and at home is where all of my research books are. So I really just prefer to do it there, and I like to do it before I open up my email.
So what I try to do, and this is not always successful, is on Tuesday, Thursday, I start working, I turn on my computer around eight o’clock and I try not to check my email for two hours. I try to just do some writing tasks, maybe it’s write an outline or find some books or do some editing of something that I know I need to do.
Sometimes part of that research is sending emails, but I won’t let myself check my emails. I’ll just send some stuff, because once you get into your email, it’s a time suck, it’s an abyss, it’s a soul suck. And so I try as hard as I can not to check email. Sometimes I’ll go down to an hour, I’ll say, “Okay, from eight to nine, I will write.” Then I know I have several emails that I need to deal with, so I’ll go on and do that kind of stuff. But that’s what I try to do. That’s ideal what I try to do on Tuesday, Thursday, and sometimes I can really get four or five good hours of just research and it’s not writing, it’s not sitting down and just straight up writing for five hours, but it’s doing different stuff.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you like to organize your sources and your writing?
Kate Sheppard:
I was just talking to a colleague of mine because here on our campus, they’re going to remove Zotero from computers, and there are some people in an uproar. And I hear Zotero is good, but I organize mine manually. So I just start a new bibliography every time because for me, it’s like a zen thing. I can make my lists and I can go in and fix them, and it’s like if I have to reorganize them or reformat them, I just turn on some music and reformat my stuff. Sometimes I wish I had some assistant to do that for me when it gets really long. So yeah, I mean, I just throw them in a Word document, if that’s what you mean by organizing or at home. What people don’t see outside of this little video box is the absolute stacks of books that I have just on my desk ready to be pulled from. We all have our stacks where we know that, “Oh, that source is in my third stack from the left, and it’s fourth up from the bottom,” sort of thing. So it’s all extremely analog and manual.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you organize archival sources? Is it the same system?
Kate Sheppard:
I have a little folder on my computer that says… What is it called? I’m going to tell you exactly what it’s called. I’m going to pull it up. It’s called Archival Images and Research Materials, and I just plunk my stuff in there. I have a colleague who he does a ton of archival stuff, and so I’ve asked him, “How do you go to these archives?” I mean, all of us, we’re taking tens of thousands of pictures trying to get through these documents as quick as we can, and he goes through each one and he hand types up an index in a Word document of this image or these three images are this one document and here’s a brief synopsis.
And so I started doing that, and it takes a really long time. But then in three years when I’m working on a project that’s sort of related to that and go, “I know exactly where that is,” and then I can just do a Ctrl+F through my Word document and figure out where that is. It’s time-intensive, but it still all sort of goes into your brain. And so you have this mental index of some of your sources, which is super helpful in the long run, but in the short run, it’s a little hard. You’re like, “All right, I’m ready to dive in there and read all of these.” Then it’s just like, “Oh, now I’m going to index them and then I can read them.”
Kate Carpenter:
Wow. Yeah. What does drafting look like for you? Where do you like to start writing in the research process?
Kate Sheppard:
So in the research process, I mix it together. It’s been a really long time since I’ve started a project from scratch, if that makes sense. So I had a book come out in 2022, and I had actually been on that for probably six or seven years, mainly because I’d had the idea for a really long time. But as I was researching that particular idea, I got pulled off into those side chutes. It’s just like, “Oh, I’m going to just publish something really quick on this.” So there was always something. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a really blank page, and so it’s hard to say from a blank page, where do I go? I don’t know how crazy this is going to drive people, but I love to have just a blank legal pad, and I start outlining by hand, usually in black pen.
I don’t know if this matters, but this is what I do, and I just start outlining like, “Here’s my argument that I think I want to make, and what are some of the documents that I could bring into this? What have some people said about this?” And then once I get tired of handwriting this out or my page gets too messy with arrows being drawn and things being scribbled, then I’ll go straight into a blank document and just start writing these ideas out. And then I start pulling the sources from either I’ve taken notes in a different Word document or I have the archival sources I’m ready to pull up, or I have PDFs of stuff that I want to talk about. And so that’s where it helps to know what archival sources I do have because it’s like, “Oh, I remember that letter that somebody wrote that said this.” And so I just need to go back in and find that real quick, and then I can plunk that little quote in there and then I can build from there.
So again, a lot of it’s manual, very sort of, but I’m really old school, I feel like, because when I started writing, like writing, writing, when I was in my junior year of undergrad, I had this just amazing comp professor, and this probably should have been in the answer to your first question, but she really did teach me how to write. This was in 1999. A lot of it came down to get a pack of index cards. And as you go through your book, every time you come up with a new quote from the book or a new idea, that’s a new index card and you write it down and you organize everything that way. And so that’s what I started doing so that my writing process started out analog. And so it’s really hard to shift to digital or shift to not starting off just handwriting everything.
And I have a colleague who hand writes drafts. He will draft things in handwriting. I only do outlines handwritten. I have to draft on the computer so I can move some things around. But yeah, I mean that’s from the get go, kind of my big process. But I like to have some sources ready to go and be ready to draw from. But I also being surprised a little bit in the middle of the process because I’ll draft maybe five or six pages, and I’ll print it off. I like to print it off and then edit it by hand. And a lot of that is like, “Oh, I just read this last week. I’m going to put a paragraph about that right in there.” It’s a bit of a hodgepodge, I guess. It’s like I start off with an idea, try to iron it out, and then it’s like, “Now what else do I need to read to fill in the blanks that I don’t know?” Or “Can I fill in those blanks?” Things like that.
Kate Carpenter:
So then what does revision look like for you?
Kate Sheppard:
Printing it. I know I’m not environmentally sound. I print front to back. But yeah, no, I print it off and I read through it, and it’s a lot of… I use black pen on myself because I’m very gentle with myself. Some people use red pen. But so I start editing that way and no, that doesn’t sound right, and move this sentence over here. And so there’s a lot of bracketing and arrows drawn, and that’s how my PhD advisor used to do it for me when she would look at my drafts. And so maybe there’s a little bit of comfort in the black pen all over my page. Yeah. So that is what revision looks like. And of course, a giant stack of books because I need to add all of this stuff back in where it belongs.
Kate Carpenter:
I’m curious, so you touched on this earlier, but your books all deal with overlapping subjects in a lot of ways. How do you see the relationship between them? How have you moved between topics?
Kate Sheppard:
I started all the way back at the beginning, which is when I started grad school, I thought that I was going to do Islamic science and I was going to work with Jamil Ragep, that’s why I went to Oklahoma. He’s like the top guy to work with. Still a fantastic, obviously, scholar, but that wasn’t really my passion. And I was talking to a senior grad student a week before I was about to start as a master’s student at Oklahoma. So I was telling her what my first master’s degree was in, was in Egyptian archaeology, and she said, “So why aren’t you doing history of Egyptian archaeology?” And I was like, “I didn’t know that I could.” And so within a week, I switched from having Dr. Ragep to Katherine Pandora as my advisor, and I started looking like what new can I say about the history of Egyptology. And it was one of those things where I went to the archive and I was like, “I don’t even know what I’m going to find here.”
And I found Flinders Petrie, there was a massive eugenicist, and no one had really touched on it before. And so I dove in. And then as I was reading his… I’m going to tell you because I see the direct thread from the beginning to now and so that’s what I’m telling you. And when I was reading his autobiography, it was called Seventy Years in Archaeology, he mentioned a woman one time, and he said, “That year, my colleague, Ms. Murray, came out to the field with us.” And I was like, “I wonder who that is.” But I had to put her to the side so I could finish my thesis. And then I finished that and I was like, “What am I going to do like my dissertation on? What should I do?” And I went back and I started looking for who this Ms. Murray was.
It turned out she worked with him for something like 60 years, 50 or 60 years. And he mentioned her one time. One time. And so I just dove into her life and it turned out she lived for a hundred years. She did all of these just really her life from 1863 to 1963 was sort of a microcosm of what was going on in Egyptology for women, in Britain for women, in academia for women. So it was just this really rich, really rich life to dive into and talk about. And I got mixed reviews when people found out that’s what I was doing my dissertation on. Some people said it’s about time somebody wrote about her. And then other people said, “We already know about her. Why are you doing this?” I’m like, “So then where’s her biography if we already know about her?” And of course, I had a great experience with my advisor.
So Katherine Pandora was like, “Just do it. Yes, people need to know these things.” And so that was my dissertation and my first book. But my first job, my first academic job was at The American University in Cairo. And so I was downtown just walking around after the revolution because I was there 2010 to 2011, so it was right when the revolution was going on. And I was walking around downtown and I started thinking about, because as you read through biographies of Egyptologists, they talk about going to Egypt and which hotels they stayed in before they went out to the field. And I was like, “I wonder.” So I started thinking of hotels as obviously political spaces. I’m not the first person to say that. I’m not the first person to think there was a lot of stuff out there on that, but I wanted to really talk about, what were they doing there?
What were each Egyptologists saying to each other? Is there even a way to find this out? Is there anything about that that I could possibly do? And so I started working on that after I turned my dissertation into my book, my first book. And then as I was looking for these things, I was just looking through archives and I found Caroline Ransom Williams at the what was then the Oriental Institute. It’s now the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at Chicago. And there was not that much about her in the literature, but I found this giant massive collection of her letters to James Breasted. And so it was like, “This is a great project, and so I’m going to put those letters out there.” There were all of these little projects that kept coming off of just going through the archives and finding what was there, which is another reason why it took so long for the second book to come out.
I say so long, I guess it was like nine years, but I had some other stuff going on in there. And so yeah, finding all of these women that you just wouldn’t find if you weren’t digging in the archives or if you didn’t have access to these archives because these archivists, they are knowledgeable, they’re very open, in my experience, they’re super open with their archives. They’re like, “Please come in and look. We want to know.” They already know what’s in there, but they’re administering the archives. They’re not writing about what’s in there, even though I think there are some of them that should because they know so, so much.
So yeah, just diving in and finding all of these women and going, “Something needs to happen.” Something needs to be said about these women and the jobs that they’re doing, because otherwise all we’re learning about are the men with women sort of sprinkled in throughout. They’re usually in footnotes, but I wanted them to not be in the footnotes anymore. So yeah, I think that’s the thread that I’ve at least seen go through my research.
Kate Carpenter:
I love that. I love hearing about projects that emerge just out of following those threads and those curiosities in the archive. That’s excellent.
Kate Sheppard:
Yeah. And it’s these just gaps in our knowledge of like, “But who was that?” Obviously, they were important. That’s my favorite thing about Emily Patterson, who’s in the new book. She gets sort of a split chapter with another woman named Kate Bradbury. But when I was looking through the Egypt Exploration Society’s archives, all of these letters and postcards were coming to a woman named Emily Patterson. I’m like, who is she? And I asked the archivist at the time, Carl Graves, who’s now the director of the EES, and he’s amazing. He just went in. I was like, “Who is she?” And then I went to lunch and I came back and he had four sources on my desk, but there were a couple of lines a piece. And so he and I worked together on finding some more stuff about her. I mean, there’s so much out there to know about her because she was clearly a center of knowledge for Egyptology, but we don’t see her out in the field. And so she doesn’t really get discussed like I think she should be.
Kate Carpenter:
So Women in the Valley of the Kings is published with a trade press, your first book with a trade press. How did that change the writing and publishing process or did it?
Kate Sheppard:
Oh yeah, it really did. So again, this is a lot of luck. I was actually contacted by the woman, who’s now my agent, Sarah, and she emailed me, she’s like, “I really like your work with Lady Science. I’d be interested in working on a book proposal with you.” And so I responded back. At first, I didn’t respond because I was like, “I don’t know. I’m really nervous about this. I don’t know, what do I do?” And so I was just like, “Maybe she’ll forget about me.” And then she followed up a week later, she’s like, “Hey, I was just wondering if you got that email.” And I was like, “I did, and yeah, I’d be interested to talk to you.” But I don’t know that whole side of things, but I have a colleague here at S&T, John McManus, who does. He knows that side, because he’s a military historian, and all of his books are with trade presses because his work is really, really good.
And so I talked to him. I got some advice from him, and I was just like, “What do you think I should do?” He’s like, “Talk to her, meet with her.” So yeah, she was asking me what are some of my ideas. And this was before the hotels book had a publisher, and I was like, “Well, I’ve got this idea about hotels.” She was like, “No, I don’t think so.” And so I was like, “Well, there’s this other thing that’s more of a group biography type of thing.” And so she helped me to iron out the… I mean, I did not know how extensive a trade book proposal needed to be, how much of the writing needed to be shifted. And it’s not that it can’t be academic because I have hundreds, I don’t know if it’s thousands, I have hundreds of citations throughout the book.
So public trade press writing is still a very academically based process. For me, everything must have evidence behind it. So every single story that I tell in the book is based on extensive evidence, and I didn’t want to do anything that was outside of that. And my agent said to use the tools of fiction to tell these stories. And so that’s what I tried to do, and she really helped me to iron out my proposal chapter, just like writing style wise because she’d say, “Stay in this story.” It’d be just one line, and she’d be like, “Stay in this scene.” I’m like, “How? I don’t know how to do that.” And so we had so many wonderful conversations where I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t know what you mean by that.”
She’s like, “Well, tell us more about what’s going on. What’s the scene? Set it. Where is she standing? What would she be looking at?” I’m like, “Oh, I can totally do that.” And so she really helped me with that. And then once we got it all figured out, she took it, and St. Martin’s Press had the widest reach for me, and so that was the one that we accepted. My editor is freaking amazing, and I honestly would not say that if it weren’t true. He is lovely and so encouraging to the point where I’m like, “Are you serious?” I don’t know. I mean, okay. So he’s just been lovely and it’s a really intense lead-up to the publication because publications in July and they have assigned me a marketing person and publicity person. And of course they have other books that they are marketing and doing publicity for, but they are just so wonderful and enthusiastic about the book.
And of course it matters to them. They want to sell it just as much as I do, probably more, but they’re working really hard on the process. So again, I think that I’m just really lucky because I got put with a really lovely team of people who are invested in the success of these stories. And that’s not to say that academic publishing, you don’t have editors that are lovely or that they don’t try to market your book. Because again, I’ve been really lucky with all of my editors who’ve been responsive and helpful and encouraging. But then once the book is about to be released, they’re like, “Here are some links to help sell it. Best of luck.” Kind of thing. You know what I mean?
And they want to sell it too, but a lot of it is on the author, and I think that’s true for trade also. But with trade, they have ideas and paths to go down that I don’t know about. And they’re like, “Would you want to go down this path?” I’m like, “I didn’t even know that that was a possibility.” So it’s a bit different. And I mean, the finances are different with trade also, right? Yeah. Which is nice.
Kate Carpenter:
It sounds like you’ve had a really great experience. That’s so lovely. And I am impressed at your willingness too, to be like, “I don’t know how to do this, but I am here to learn and I will try it.” I think that’s great.
Kate Sheppard:
In my first conversation with Sarah, we were talking and she was talking about, “Here’s what you can do. Here’s how things can be for you. Here are the benefits to working with me.” And so I was like, “This is great. Sarah, what’s in it for you?” But it wasn’t like a, “Hey, how dare you try to capitalize on me?” Or whatever. But it was really, “What if I fail? What if what we propose fails?” I was feeling like, how can I make this kind of worth her while too? Because if someone’s going to invest their time and resources in me, I want to make sure that it’s worth it for them too.
And she was really kind about it. She was like, “Well, here’s what agents kind of do. Here’s what agents get,” or whatever. But it wasn’t really, and obviously I know she has to support herself, but it wasn’t like, “Man, if you’re not going to make me that much money, then I’m not going to pay attention to you.” It hasn’t been that at all. Again, I mean, yeah, I’ve been super lucky to have people in my orbit that are extremely supportive and guiding me through this process from the first step.
Kate Carpenter:
To take a closer look at how all of this effort worked out on the page, I asked Kate to read an excerpt from her new book. Here’s Dr. Kathleen Sheppard reading from chapter two of Women in the Valley of the Kings.
Kate Sheppard:
“The first season lasted about five weeks starting in January of 1895. When Maggie and Fred arrived at the site that first morning, the scene couldn’t be more different than what Maggie had dreamed of in the previous year. They walked into a group of over 30 men and boys waiting to work, and as was customary, all of them had brought their own baskets and picks. When they saw Maggie and Fred, the group again shouting, pushing, jumping, and begging to be hired. Maggie was horrified at the disorder of the scene, but took heart when another excavator working nearby told her that he routinely broke many sticks over the backs of the potential crew members while trying to maintain order on site. Maggie didn’t do this. In the end, they chose ‘four men and 16 boys, an overseer, a night guardian, and a water carrier.’ After this harrowing feat, Maggie sat down on a ledge, still worn out from the journey to Egypt.”
“She recovered quickly in the warm weather showing what Fred wrote was ‘the most glorious contempt of bodily ailments which I have ever seen.’ When she took to leading the men and boys around the site to plan the season together, the men were the diggers. The boys took on the role of basket boys hauling baskets of dirt from the excavation to a mound to be sifted and disposed of. The overseer or race was generally in charge of the diggers keeping order and reporting back to the archaeologists in charge, which was Maggie. Their first race asked for a higher wage than normal because he wished to be compensated for having to report to a woman. He didn’t last long. The night guardian had the unenviable task of protecting the site from the possibility of plundering by his neighbors. Some subversive watchmen would allow their friends or family to trespass in the dark of night to take pieces to sell, and they would claim the following day to have accidentally fallen asleep.”
“The water carrier who filled the bucket of drinking water and carried it to all the workers was a young veiled girl. In the publication of their excavation, Maggie didn’t really mention the names of her crew, even though the crew did all the heavy lifting. Many archaeologists at the time, including Maggie and Fred, didn’t consider their names to be very important. While Maggie and Fred and later other British crew members paid for the privilege to excavate in their chosen spot, they really did very little, but watched the work being done before taking all the credit. The excavation crew, on the other hand, worked 10-hour days or longer in the sun, usually with breaks during the hottest parts of the day.”
Kate Carpenter:
So what goes into writing a passage like this? I think you mentioned trying to use the tools of the novelist to tell a story. How does that come through here?
Kate Sheppard:
What I love about trying to write about people that nobody’s really written about before, like if you’re writing about, and I always sort of compare it to writing about Darwin or Einstein, it’s like there are several dozen, if not hundreds of biographies of either one of them. And so to tell a new story about them is difficult, but I think you can do it. It’s just really hard because a lot of the sources have already been mined. With this one, there are so few sources that are easily retrievable that you are really pulling pieces of a puzzle together and from different places and trying to put them together and almost collate them into a chronological order to tell a story. So the sources, for example, that went into this were Maggie’s letters that were published, Fred’s letters that have been published, their site report called the Temple of Mut at Asher, which had been published in 1897 or ’99, I can’t remember which one.
And then just having that, I think, requisite knowledge of excavations in the 19th century. And so what the roles of Egyptians were on site and the roles that they would’ve taken and what that would have meant for how the excavation ran and how it was organized. So a lot of this comes from sort of Maggie writing back to her mother about how things went that first morning. And then of course, when I talk about four men and 16 boys and overseer, night guardian, that came from her site report. Fred had written letters back to his brothers about how great Maggie was doing and just very encouraging and all of this stuff. And so there’s sort of a host of sources that go into even building that day. I tried to tell it as a memory as though Maggie were remembering it.
Yeah, and then just trying to tell it in such a way that you do stay in that scene that you can, I hope, picture it in your head of like, “Okay, she’s walking up to this group and here’s then what happens. And nearby, there’s another excavator that’s like, ‘Don’t even worry about it.'” So that’s how that one sort of began just sitting down and going, “Okay, how am I going to organize all of these sources together and the stories that they have and how can I get people to picture this in their heads?”
Kate Carpenter:
One of the reasons that I picked this passage is that it demonstrates kind of this tricky balance you’re trying to strike in this book in which you are working to recover the work of these women, tell their stories, but there’s also this thing happening where they play a problematic role in history, and they in turn are leaving on other people’s stories. How did you strike that balance?
Kate Sheppard:
I was really critical of them in the introduction, which it’s hard though too, because they are, on the one hand, these women, like you said, they are marginalized, but then they’re turning around and they’re marginalizing others. While I tried to tell these stories of these women as sort of here they are, but also they’re super complex historical characters. They’re not heroes. And people like to excuse the historical behavior by saying, “Oh, they were a product of their time.” And on the one hand, but also a lot of these people were also agents of change. And so Maggie, for example, had this idea of, “How hard can it be boys do it? I am going to go excavate also.” Because her brother, Fred, was an archeologist too. And so she was like, “Well, if he’s doing it, I’m going to try.” And so they were agents of change in their own lives.
So if they are products of their environment, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to like it. And so they are trying to move women forward while at the same time stepping on the people who they’re allowed to step on basically legally, culturally, in so many ways. And so in the introduction, I do talk a bit about that, and then I tried to basically just tell the story in such a way that those moments were apparent without being heavy-handed, without really placing my thumb on this moment and going, “Do you see how she wanted to beat these guys up but in the end she didn’t?” Or “Do you see the colonial way in which they’re talking about them?” So I tried to include some direct quotes about the way that they did talk about Egyptians especially. But in part of this, so I said, “Some subversive watchmen would allow their friends or family to trespass in the dark of night to take pieces to sell.”
I very, very deliberately did not say steal, because if it is on your land, if it is in your town, and these outsiders come in and say, “I get to dig here now,” it’s not stealing to take those pieces as an Egyptian. What Maggie was doing, what Fred was doing, technically, even though legally at the time it wasn’t stealing was because it wasn’t their ground. It wasn’t theirs to take, but they took it anyway. And so I tried also in this history to shift a bit of that language so that it wasn’t the Egyptian watchman was stealing, because I don’t think that that’s what was going on. And that’s a really colonial way to look at the situation. And so I wanted to use some attempt at a framework to decolonize a lot of the language around Egyptology because it’s fraught. It’s absolutely fraught.
Kate Carpenter:
The other thing that really struck me here is that it must have been hard. So each chapter of this book is a biography or a dual biography, and they take place at different times, of course, in different people. And I thought it must’ve been hard to write in this way without the chapter starting to feel a little repetitive. And I want to be clear that you do a wonderful job. They are not repetitive, but how did you make sure that it didn’t kind feel like you were just telling roughly the same story over and over?
Kate Sheppard:
I don’t know if I did it deliberately or not. It’s going to seem like I’m not answering this question, but I swear I’m coming back to answer it. So I’m a runner and I read a lot of running memoirs or articles about, “Oh, I ran the Boston Marathon. I didn’t, but somebody else did.” And they’ll be like the way that they tell the story. And so it’ll be clips of like, “The gun went off,” or “We were riding the bus to the start line and here’s things that happened.” And then they go back and talk about their childhood and then they come back to Boston and they go back. And that works for some, but in running memoirs, that’s like a giant formula of how those chapters go. And so I was actually thinking about those chapter, those types of books as I was working on this and going, “I don’t want every chapter to be that.”
Sometimes they are very much chronological. I think I start almost everyone with a story that I come back to at some point in the chapter, but I don’t like to do too much jumping around in time. So I just tried to pick a story or a scene that I thought was interesting or that I thought was illustrative of that person’s experience in Egyptology and just trying to make their character in that first section of here’s who this person is, get them as this person, and then we’re going to revisit their trajectory throughout the rest of the chapter is what I tried to do.
Kate Carpenter:
I wanted to ask you a little bit about your work on Lady Science, which in case there are listeners who don’t know, Lady Science was the dearly departed and much missed online magazine focused histories of women and gender in science started by Anna Reser and Leila McNeill. You mentioned that that really had an impact on your writing and your work. Can you talk a little bit about what you learned in that work?
Kate Sheppard:
Yes. So again, that was one of my really lucky experiences in my career and actually, I just got an email from Leila today and we’re going to set up a chat because she’s amazing and so is Anna. The entire editorial team was wonderful. I’m still friends with every single one of them. They put together a wonderful team, and again, I mourn the loss of that work and that just amazing community that they put together. Yes, they wanted public-facing writing. They wanted it to be interesting for people to want to read the magazine every issue that came out and they didn’t want it… Everything was backed by academic sources, but it wasn’t meant to be written in an academic fashion. And so I was also really lucky because I was paired with Joy Lisi Rankin, was my editor on a couple of those articles.
And she is an amazing editor because what she does is she takes what you’ve written and she reads it and she shakes it out and she gets rid of all the stuff that is unnecessary. And she’s like, “Here is the essence of what you’re saying, build around this.” And it always blew my mind when she could do that because it was like, “Are you in my head sort of getting after this?” And so it was just a lot of, I mean, when you learn from your mistakes, right? So she would come in and she would edit a bunch of stuff and be like, I see how she wants me to write this and I can take this and I can then do what she wants me to do with it. And so I used just a ton of that experience of, I remember when I wrote this thing about, not even about Egyptology, about this woman named Ida Bengtson who was here in Rolla, Missouri as a microbiologist.
And how I had started out, that article was very different from the way it ended up turning out because Joy was like, “Center her in the story and not the institution that you’re talking about. This should be about her, not about this hospital, which was important, but also she was the important lady in that part of Lady Science.” And so centering it around the person and then having them as that node of all of this other activity opened my eyes to this is what people want the people story, not the, “Here’s a hospital that she started, and then let’s talk about her too.”
So types of experiences helped me sort of go, “Okay, this happened this time or this probably more often than it should have,” but she helped me recenter that work. And so I thought back to those moments ago, it needs to be centered on this person. It needs to be centered on this thing that they were doing, or it needs to be centered on this scene and not this massive institution that people care about, but not as much as they’re going to care about the person doing the work.
Kate Carpenter:
I often get questions from listeners who want to know more about forming writing groups and how writing groups work. And in your acknowledgments, you talk a little bit about your Zoom writing group. So I wonder if you could tell us a bit about how it came together and how it works.
Kate Sheppard:
So I don’t know if I’ve made it clear that I’ve been extremely lucky in this entire thing. So Elaine Ayers, who’s now at NYU and Brown, I think she and I had met at an HSS several years ago. I had chaired her session, and so she and I followed each other on Twitter, and I love her content. I love the work that she does. So we were always interacting. And then it was during COVID, or at least toward the end of maybe the big quarantine that we were all in, she was like, “Who wants to start a Zoom writing group? Let me know.” And so I’m just scrolling through Twitter, sometimes that can bring you some good luck. And I was like, “I do. I want to be in this.” And so we had a core group of about six people who met. We might’ve started out once a week or once every two weeks, and we would just come in and say, “Here’s what I’m working on this week. Here’s sort of what I’m struggling with.”
Everybody always had really good ideas as to how to either move past that struggle or, “Have you looked at this source? Have you thought about putting your article in this place?” And then we moved on to the next person. And so we all got to say the things we were working on and I learned so many cool things about fields I didn’t know about. And then we’d say, “Okay, in the next two weeks, here’s what I want to work on.” And then we would come back and it was really great. Elaine made this document that we could all put in our stuff. Here’s what I said I wanted to work on. Here’s what I actually got done. And it was so great just to have that accountability because you can let two weeks, a month, six months slip by and you haven’t done anything.
I know that COVID is not gone, but once restrictions and things started to go away and other, especially in-person work started to pick back up, we sort of faded off. And then probably a year ago, I reached out to people and said, “Hey, who wants to kind of pick this up again?” And a lot of people were busy, but me and Lydia Pyne now meet every couple of weeks and we just sort of go, “Here’s what we’re working on.” She’s working on such cool stuff, but it’s just wonderful to have somebody else there who knows what you’re doing and has an expectation of you to meet the deadline that’s in two years. You know what I mean? So again, luck and a really wonderful group of people who just are doing amazing work and are so supportive and so just so lovely as friends.
Kate Carpenter:
What’s the most influential writing advice you’ve ever received?
Kate Sheppard:
So writing a little each day. My PhD advisor told me, “Just get a little writing done each day.” And the best part was, especially in times when I was sunk in a deep hole of just despair, she would say, “Look, writing consists of finding a source or two and ordering them through the library website. Just do that five or 10 minutes, move the ball forward every day somehow.” Writing also consists of going on Twitter and seeing what are other people doing, what are some sources out there that you could find back when Twitter was the place to get connected academically or writing can be… This was the best. She’s like, “Just go to the library and get your books. Just pick them up. You’ve ordered them. Go get them now.” So it’s all of these little steps. And so she told me just do a little each day that is writing.
And so most days during the week, Monday through Friday, I do a little bit of that, whether it’s even just making a list of the things that I need to do on Tuesday that need to get done, at least the research is still in my head. You know what I mean? It’s still there. And then Joy Rankin told me that 80% is good enough. So when you’re doing your stuff and you’re writing it and you just feel kind of done, maybe you are, and maybe it’s time to send that to your editor. Maybe it’s time to even just send that to a colleague and say, “I’m sort of stuck here. Can you help me get past this?” Or “I’d love some comments or some feedback on what are questions you have? What am I not answering? What am I missing here?”
And so sending it out sometimes at 80% is what is again going to keep that ball moving forward, especially when it comes to something like a book manuscript that’s going to come back with review on it anyway. If you could spend 20 years fiddling with that manuscript and you think it’s perfect, you’re going to send it out and you’re going to get drastically long reviewer reports, and that’s what it should be. So just get it out there, just send it out.
I mean, that’s probably my number one piece of advice is just send that out and see what happens. If it comes back with a double rejection, then it does, but you’ll at least get some reviewer notes back.
Kate Carpenter:
Who do you like to read for inspiration?
Kate Sheppard:
So I read a lot of fiction.
Kate Carpenter:
That’s good.
Kate Sheppard:
Because most of my other reading has to do, especially during the semester with class, what am I catching up on? What book are we doing? So a lot of mystery novels, and I couldn’t even really tell you the authors, because I pull them up on Kindle, but it’s a lot of… During the Pandemic, for example, I read all of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books. I don’t know if anybody else did that. It’s really good brain candy. But also I picked up on a lot of storytelling from him, and people wouldn’t like those books so much if the stories were terrible. So I know that that maybe sounds… It’s not like Jack Kerouac or anything.
So Lee Child and then I also really love Eric Larson. Devil in the White City is the one I think he’s super famous for. He’s got another book coming out soon. He had the… What is it called? In the Garden of the Devil or In the Garden of the Beasts or something like that that had to do with the US Ambassador to Berlin during the rise of Nazi Germany. That was absolutely fascinating. I love his scene setting and also explaining characters too, because like the other day I was reading a book for a piece of research and the author was a man, and he was describing a woman, and twice on one page he said she was beautiful. And I just don’t feel like we need to do that. So yes, describe how they look, but why is it always they were handsome or they were beautiful. According to whom? But I think Eric Larson does a really good job of talking about how people, so you can picture them in your head.
Kate Carpenter:
Before I let you go, is there anything you’re working on next that you want to talk about?
Kate Sheppard:
I am trying to get Women in the Valley of the Kings out. So there are some pieces-
Kate Carpenter:
That is a good goal.
Kate Sheppard:
It is a good goal. So there are some pieces that I’ll be working on for that. But then the next thing is actually an academic project, which is Primary Sources in the History of Egyptology, and it’s with Routledge, it’s with the Nineteenth-Century Science Series. And so Piers Hale and Meegan Kennedy are the editors of that series. And so they asked me to do a four volume set on Primary Sources in the History of Egyptology, which is so fun because there’s so much really good stuff out there. And I get to go back and reread a lot of it. And there’s some really wild stuff that they were saying, especially in the early 19th century, and it’s all British, so it’s really difficult because a lot of the early Egyptology was French and British, and they were playing off each other and it was like this big contest, but I can only use British sources. And so it’s a bit of a challenge, which is really fun.
Kate Carpenter:
That sounds exciting.
Kate Sheppard:
It is. It’s cool.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, Dr. Kate Sheppard, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past and for talking about your writing process with me.
Kate Sheppard:
Oh, thank you so much. This was great.
Kate Carpenter:
That does it for this episode of Drafting the Past. Thanks for listening. You can find links to all of the books and other things we talked about in this episode at draftingthepast.com. You can also find the show on Instagram and Bluesky, and you can always email me at kate@draftingthepast.com. If you’d like to support the show and help keep it going, you could make a monthly donation at patreon.com/draftingthepast. Until next time, remember that friends don’t let friends write boring history.
Thank you for the suggestion of how to keep track of archival sources. I’ve started an excel spreadsheet (easier to sort and it will autofill common entries)