For this episode I was lucky enough to speak with a historian and writer I have long admired, Dr. Catherine McNeur. Catherine’s first book, Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City, first came out in 2014, and it is one of my favorite environmental histories. So I was more than a little excited to learn about her new book out this year, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science. I couldn’t pass up the chance to talk with Catherine about how the book emerged out of a different book project, the techniques she uses for bringing place so vividly to the page, and the writing process that results in prose that is such a pleasure to read. Plus, this book has one of the best stories of serendipitous archival discovery I have ever heard.
MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
- John Demos (Learn more about him in episode 26 with Aaron Sachs)
- Microsoft Access and FileMaker
- Catherine’s grad school adviser, John Mack Faragher
- Catherine’s agent, Wendy Strothman
- Ann Fabian
- McNeur’s public history work, including the work she’s done with her public history lab course: https://www.catherinemcneur.com/public-history
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
- Aaron Sachs (Listen to my interview with Aaron)
- Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast (Listen to my episode with Bathsheba)
- Anna Singh, The Mushroom at the End of the World
- Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things
- Esi Edugyan, Washington Black
- Ross Gay, Book of Delights and Book of More Delights
TRANSCRIPT
Kate Carpenter:
Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I’m your host, Kate Carpenter, and for this episode I was lucky enough to speak with a historian and writer I have long admired, Dr. Catherine McNeur.
Catherine McNeur:
Thanks for having me.
Kate Carpenter:
Catherine’s first book Taming Manhattan: Environmental Battles in the Antebellum City first came out in 2014 and it is one of my favorite environmental histories. So I was more than a little excited to learn about her new book out this year, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science. I couldn’t pass up the chance to talk with Catherine about how the book emerged out of a different book project, the technique she uses for bringing place so vividly to the page and the writing process that results in prose, that is such a pleasure to read. Plus this book has one of the best stories of serendipitous archival discovery I have ever heard. Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Catherine McNeur.
Catherine McNeur:
I really started to think of myself as a writer in grad school, and much of that is thanks to John Demos who is a professor at Yale where I was at grad school and he taught a narrative history class that I really was glad that… I mean in retrospect, I’m so happy that I took that course. It seemed so separate from the rest of the courses because it wasn’t historical content based. It was more just great writing that he really liked and shared with the class and some that was pushing at the edges of what historians at that moment would think of as history. And so you kind of felt your way through figuring out what would good history writing mean, and it was corresponding with a time where…
I mean, which just continues, where historians were really thinking about how can we reach a broader audience? Why aren’t historians the ones who are getting in the bestseller list? Why is it mostly political commentators or journalists who get to write the really most powerful far-reaching history books? Why can’t history professors or people trained with doctorates do that too? And so it was kind of an interesting intersection of that. How can you write a compelling book that will reach past just the academy or just the 12 people who are really interested in your micro topic to hit it out of the park in a way? I just enjoyed the reading in that class as well as the writing, and then I’ve just kind of carried that with me ever since that course.
Kate Carpenter:
And then you published a first book that was based on your dissertation, is that right?
Catherine McNeur:
That’s right. Yeah, I published Taming Manhattan in 2014, and that was based on my dissertation. I graduated in 2012, so it was a quick turnaround after that. So it’s actually very similar to the dissertation itself. I really wrote that dissertation with an eye for it being a book, not to be just for the audience of my committee, but to kind of just have a draft of the book. And the job market at that time was pretty rough, and so getting a book contract early on was very helpful to push ahead my own career too.
Kate Carpenter:
Before we come back to all of that, let’s talk just about the practical stuff. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Catherine McNeur:
I like to write at home in my home office primarily because I have natural light here and for the first nine years of my job at Portland State, I did not have a window in my office. I now have a window and that’s much better, but for the longest time I didn’t have a window and that meant I kept my door open so that I could get some natural light from the hallway or ambient light coming in, which meant that I was constantly interrupted by students and colleagues and any kind of noise coming from the general history department. So I didn’t get much writing done there. I would write emails or have meetings or do whatever, but teaching related stuff, but I couldn’t get writing done in any serious way. So I mostly write here in my home office.
Editing though I’ll do anywhere. I don’t mind noisiness when I’m editing. I can be in a coffee shop or in a park. Lately I’ve been at a park while one of my kids has an afterschool program, and so I’m kind of nearby and I just sit on a bench and work as long as it’s not raining, which in Portland is a very few number of days, and sit with a draft and it’s kind of nice to have paper and not a lot of distraction from a computer screen at that time.
Kate Carpenter:
Do you have a writing routine?
Catherine McNeur:
I’d say that I fit in writing wherever I can. At the end of the day, if I look back at my day, it’s all about balancing between teaching and service work at the university and sitting on committees and whatever fires that need to be fought in my job. And so I fit in writing wherever I can, but it’s always something that I would put on a back burner. Because if there’s somebody like a student in need or a faculty member who needs something, I’ll always prioritize that sort of immediate deadline or that immediate need. So one thing I do is… It sounds almost like…
It’s probably obvious I have small children because it’s like it’s a sticker reward chart almost. I keep a calendar to the side of my desk and it’s just a plain calendar and every time I spend some time writing in a day, whether it’s a paragraph or two pages or 10 pages, whatever, I mean 10 pages, that’d be really ambitious, but whatever I write, I put a little sticker on that day and so I can look back and just be like, hey, I did a good job this month. It ends up being a visual to-do list or whatever. That really helps me to prioritize myself because that’s something I love doing is writing, otherwise I’d be prioritizing everybody else instead.
Kate Carpenter:
Are there tools that you use to manage your writing or to organize your sources?
Catherine McNeur:
Well, my writing is very simplified. I use Microsoft Word. I keep databases for my sources. So I have this project, I use FileMaker and I designed the database myself in terms of what fields I needed and keywords. I have keywords for each document and I transcribe every single document that I have. So primarily that’s because of the sources I’m using and I’m looking at 19th century letters and it’s in script and it can’t be plugged through OCR to give anything that’s legible. And so that’s a major reason why I was processing it this way and writing out everyone. But it’s also a way for me to think about the sources in a very slow way, to read it in a very methodical and slow manner because otherwise I might just miss some fact or some little sentence that was actually really crucial to a story.
So if I’m going slowly through it, it’s a good way for me to process it. I once had a little bit of money to hire research assistants and I had them transcribe articles and then I came to regret it immediately. I was like, actually this feels like busy work, but it’s actually really crucial to the way I process and think about it. So the database for my new book is, I don’t know, has maybe a thousand entries, something huge and enormous and unwieldy. I tie it back to the initial photograph from the archives that I took of the letter or whatever, or the PDF so that I could always look back and find and see where my transcriptions went wrong or if I got a punctuation mark at the wrong place or something, which was very helpful when I was editing the book and found a quote that seemed a little off and wasn’t sure if it was just 19th century quirky grammar or if it was just me miswriting something. So it’s good to have both of those.
Kate Carpenter:
That’s so interesting. I talked to so many writers and I really have learned that for a lot of people, convenience can really kill the creative process. Those things that seem sort of just like a slog turn out to be essential.
Catherine McNeur:
Oh yeah, the devil’s in the details. It’s where you find the best stories. And some of my people that I… Or characters in my books, they have horrible handwriting and so it’s a huge amount of work to make sense of what they’re writing about. Like Dorothea Dix, she is a major reformer in the 19th century and she’s also friends with my… And kind of a scientist in her own. She collects a lot of specimens while she’s traveling around the country, but she’s writing on stage coaches and her handwriting is horrible and unreadable and it’ll take me so long to read through these letters and try to make sense of it. And some of my poor friends have gotten text messages like, what do you think this word is? Can you decipher what this says? But it’s really a good process to work through what they’re working through.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you go then from that process transcription and research to writing?
Catherine McNeur:
Yeah, so my grad school advisor is Johnny [inaudible 00:08:31] and his advice was stop when you think you have 60% of the research done. And this has been my load star… Because whenever you have about 60% of the research done, you can probably tell a lot of the story from just that amount, but you also then come to realize as you start writing that you have 90% of the research done. There’s not 40% left to go. There’s really just like 10, maybe even 5% left to go, and I can then be really fine tuned in when I go back to find in the archives to fill out the rest of the story. So that’s really the moment where I switch. And sometimes I’ll write one chapter far in advance of maybe the other chapters aren’t ready. I don’t have 60% or 90% of those to go, but I’ll have one chapter kind of in a hardy way, like enough sources to go with that and I’ll write that one chapter and then I’ll go back and do more research or more transcription until I can get another chapter or two.
Kate Carpenter:
So then what does revision look like for you?
Catherine McNeur:
I revise as I go. I know that there are those who write the entire draft and then they go back. But I will write… Let’s say I write two paragraphs one day and then I’ll always write the topic sentence for the next paragraph before I stop for the day, just so I can kind of know where I plan to start and not having to really catch up. I guess I can just sort of get to that right away. But as I sit down the next day, I’ll read through those two paragraphs and revise them in detail and then get onto the next one, so I kind of build up my momentum and remember where I was. And so the beginnings of my chapters will be the most edited over time because I’ve been editing them every single day that I sit down with a chapter.
Kate Carpenter:
Do you go back then and do a big picture revision once you have multiple chapters?
Catherine McNeur:
Oh, 100%, yes. And I can’t even tell you how many revisions this book, Mischievous Creatures has been through, because it’s not only my revisions, which were super intense, but then I also workshop it and then I had so many different editors at the press who also had their hands in it too. So I don’t know, each of these chapters went through 20 different major revisions after having been fully written too.
Kate Carpenter:
So I’d like to hear a little bit about the publishing side of your book. So your first book, Taming Manhattan, which was also wonderful, was published with Harvard University Press, obviously, and then this one is published with Basic Books, which is a trade press. In both books, as you already mentioned, your writing is beautiful. It was important to you to write artfully. How is it different to write these two books?
Catherine McNeur:
Yeah, I think in terms of writing it from my beginning process, I would say the only difference is maybe I had more confidence in the second book because I had gone through the whole experience with the first already, so that made it easier. But in terms of editing, I think that’s where it’s been the difference in the production of it. So there’s just so much more thought and effort given to editing at Basic Books just because it’s a trade press and there’s more people who work there and they have more funds to put towards it. So I had my main editor, he gave a huge overview editing suggestions about the book and some macro suggestions. And I went back and revised based on that. Then I had a line editor who went through and gave amazing line edits on the sentence level throughout, and some of that was still macro too, suggesting that I change an entire introduction to a chapter or doing things like that. So there’s still some big changes that happened at the line editing stage.
And then there was the copy editor who went through and did more of the grammar stuff, but also kind of finessing the meaning of sentences too when there were questions about how things turned out. And then there was the production manager who I thought was just more of a project manager first who would be directing other people, but she also read through the book and made suggestions, and two proofreaders, and there was so many people who were involved in this and the number of hands that were like, wait, do you really mean this? Is this how it’s supposed to be?
So I’m so thankful for all of that effort, and sometimes people caught me when I was like, I was spinning in circles about how to describe something. They’re like, I don’t know that you’re meaning what you’re saying here. So I’m really thankful for how many people were involved. Which makes me think back, I had a great editor at Harvard Press too, but a lot of it was really just me messing with my language in that one, it’s a different world and I really appreciate that kind of hands-on teamwork about making sense of a book and how to edit it.
Kate Carpenter:
I think, correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I think for your first book you didn’t have an agent and you do have one for this one now. Did that also impact how the experience proceeded?
Catherine McNeur:
Yes. Oh, and I adore my agent, Wendy Strothman. She’s fantastic and a powerhouse. She was mostly involved with the book proposal and the language around that was in my book proposal, but goodness was she so great with the suggestions that she gave me when I would have a blind spot. She was just like heavy suggestions, line edits that I wish I had gotten that level of work on my dissertation way back when. It would’ve been really helpful. I would like to have her as a life coach as well as an agent. But it’s fantastic working with her.
Kate Carpenter:
I’m also curious because in the introduction to Mischievous Creatures, you talk a little bit about how you came to this story, which is something I always love what historians do, but as a result, we learned that this wasn’t actually the story you set out to tell. You were researching an entirely different topic and sort of stumbled across this one. How did that change unfold? And I’m especially curious about what that looked like from a publication perspective. Had you already pitched a project at that point or were you just kind of searching for the next one?
Catherine McNeur:
Yeah, so my first book is an urban environmental history, and as I wrote my tenure narrative as I was going up for tenure, I proposed to my department and university that I was going to continue on with urban environmental history, that this is my path, and I was planning to write a book about the history of a tree that’s much hated, the tree of heaven, it’s everywhere, but it has come in and out of love or Americans have come in and out of love with it at times. It’s a tree that grows in Brooklyn and it’s kind of an emblem for immigrants, but it’s also an invasive species now, and there’s a lot of anti-Chinese racism tied to it. And I had gotten about two years into that book project as I sat down at the New York Historical Society, I happened to be there to attend a meeting and I had a day to work in the archives and the archivist said to me, you should look at the papers of William Darlington.
He’s a botanist. We have some of his materials here. People rarely use these papers, and he wrote about this tree in a book, so there might be something in his collection. And so I sat down with the finding aid and there were 250 letters from this woman named Elizabeth Morris there. The finding aid was just a list of all his correspondence. There wasn’t a lot of content. I wasn’t seeing anything directly relevant to the tree, but I was just like, who’s this Elizabeth Morris? Like anybody would. She was probably the most… The person in his collections that there were the most letters. And so I just googled her. I had my laptop there and nothing came up. There was just nothing. I was able to make sense that her sister was an entomologist, but there was no Wikipedia page for Elizabeth Morris. There is now luckily. And the Wikipedia page for Margaretta Morris was pretty anemic, so I just marked that down.
I had to go catch my flight, and so I just wrote her name in my book and was like, who is this? And then left. The next month I happened to be in Boston and Cambridge to give a talk, and I spent a day at Harvard’s Museum of Zoological… Whatever, their library, looking at the papers of an entomologist who had written about drop worms that infested urban trees, but not the tree of heaven. So again, I’m still like, I’m researching this tree, and I came across these letters from Margaretta Morris that stopped me in my tracks and I was like, wait a minute. This is the same set of sisters, so it’s completely coincidental I stumbling upon them. And her letters were like… They’re so passionate. They were like, I have panted for the sympathy of someone who can respect my or understand my love of entomology despite me being a woman.
And despite me not having access to the same education. I was like, oh. I left that library that night and went to have dinner with a friend who lives in Boston. And I was like, I think I have to change my project. These women, they’re so interesting and whatever I’m learning about them, I’m just getting drawn in. And I’m also just confused about why I’ve never heard of them. I had found that Margaretta Morris was the first woman elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, along with the astronomer Maria Mitchell, and she was originally a path breaker. There weren’t many women who were working in entomology in the same way as her at the same time. And she was in correspondence with Charles Darwin and [inaudible 00:17:53] and her sister, Elizabeth Morris, the botanist who I first fell upon. She was a major supplier of specimens to Harvard’s library. And I’m just so confused about why I hadn’t heard of them.
Anyway, so that’s what charged me with this. I changed projects pretty quickly. When I had started working with Wendy Strothman, I had proposed a couple… She had reached out to me initially, and so at that point I didn’t really have a project, and so I proposed a few ideas and she was like, that sounds good. Come back to me when it’s more formed. And I had said something about the tree and she said, yes, that has promise, come back to me. But then I came across this and after I started digging more and I realized that there was enough because these women were erased, I wasn’t sure how much material there really was out there or if I could actually form a story or if this was an article instead of a book.
But once I had enough and I wrote an initial chapter and started to map out a book proposal, I sent that to her and she then whipped my book proposal into shape, and we went through so many drafts and eventually as I got the chapter a little bit more refined, she started sending it out and moving it around. But I hadn’t had a book proposal for the tree book, that was still very formative at that point. So it was an okay transition. I didn’t have to break out of any contracts or anything dramatic like that.
Kate Carpenter:
To take a closer look at how the book that Catherine ended up writing came to life, I’ve asked her to read an excerpt from the beginning of chapter two. Here’s Dr. Catherine McNeur reading from her new book, Mischievous Creatures.
Catherine McNeur:
This chapter is titled, In a Tangled Wilderness Without a Guide. Hiking past the paper mill on narrow, uneven pads woven with the roots of chestnut, oak and hickory trees, Margaretta and Elizabeth watched their step as they reached the Wissahickon Creek. The young women brought picnics that they unwrapped as they found space to sit on rocks shaded by the dense canopy overhead. Even on the sunniest days, they were hidden and dappled light as they sang songs, sketched landscapes and scribbled lines of poetry, meandering down paths for miles to collect treasures like ladies slipper, orchids and regal moths to put in their tin vasculum cases and pillboxes in order to study them back home. The Wissahickon, just a mile from their home in Germantown, was one of Margaretta and Elizabeth’s favorite places to go in search of specimens and adventures. Before the actress Fanny Kemble alerted tourists to the beautiful forest so close to Philadelphia, before Edgar Allen Poe waxed on about floating down the lazy brook, Margaretta and Elizabeth were venturing out into the forest, climbing boulders and hiking for miles alongside tutors, neighbors, siblings, friends, and lovers.
These adventures in the woods were social events as much as they were scientific explorations. Margaretta and Elizabeth benefited from a network of relatives and neighbors who connected the girls to mentors and taught them to read their environment. If their garden was a space where they could tinker and experiment, the forest around the Wissahickon Creek set the stage for the exploration alongside their ever-growing community of scientists and friends. Young women who joined them to watch meteor showers, the mentors who taught them to closely observe and draw fuchsia, shield ferns and damselflies, and the neighbors who shared their books and invited the young women on hikes with visiting scientists all helped Margaretta and Elizabeth navigate their youth.
Kate Carpenter:
So this is just one example of many of the scenes in the book that you really bring to life through careful detail. What does it take to write a scene like this?
Catherine McNeur:
Yeah, so there’s a lot that goes into this. In other scenes where I am looking at a specific event on a day, I have spent more than a day going through microfilm trying to figure out the weather around that time. I think I spent an entire Friday in a dark space in the Portland State Library kind of figuring out the raininess and the snowiness of a March day in 1851. So anyway, there’s a lot. So in this case, I knew this whole chapter is really centered on the Wissahickon Creek, and a lot of the book is honestly because it’s such an important space for the sisters and the work that they were doing. But this chapter very specifically is very much about that space. So in some ways it was tricky because I had planned to visit the Wissahickon Creek in the spring of 2020, and as you know, everything shut down. And so I couldn’t go.
And you can walk the Wissahickon Creek on Google Maps. It is not the same thing. That was not yet, you can’t do the same thing. So I made sure in 2022, no, 2021, I went back to Philadelphia, 2022 maybe, and actually hiked it for a day and spent a lot of time there. But as an environmental historian, I know that what I’m experiencing in 2022 is not what they’re experiencing in 1822. It’s a completely different forest. Things have grown, things have fallen down. There’s new introductions, different birds, everything like that. So I also used a lot of material, maps from the time period. There are some garden enthusiasts who were centered in Germantown, and they cataloged every fern and every orchid that existed in that space in the late 19th and early 20th century. So I had that. The sisters themselves painted a lot of things from the Wissahickon Creek, and I have those paintings.
They wrote poems about their experience in the Wissahickon… And I have not been a person who analyzes poems in my life. I don’t have that background, but gosh, the poems were a major source for this time period in their youth, and so figuring out how their poems aligned with what their experiences were in this forest, and their sisters also painted and drew other parts of the forest too. So I kind of used a lot of material from across my own experience and across the historical sources that I had to try to build this out. Some of it is so extensive that I couldn’t fit it all into a footnote, but it was there.
Kate Carpenter:
So one other thing that you mentioned, I think in the introduction that I found so interesting is that on the one hand, because of COVID, you ended up having sources digitized and being able to research things that way. But on the other hand, this amazing thing happened to you that came about just from talking to someone and serendipity, would you tell that story about how you came to the source?
Catherine McNeur:
Yeah, so all of my research is on the East Coast. This is a Philadelphia story, and all of the scientists were East Coast based. All the archives are from Massachusetts down to Delaware, and I did not expect anything to be on the West Coast at all, but I happened to be in maybe 2021, I was on the playground at my kid’s school. There was less afterschool care because of the pandemic, and so I was there while she was on the playground playing with friends, and I was just chatting with parents and found one of the dads was talking about his insurance business, and I was talking about my book project, and he was asking me the names of the scientists as anybody would, and that was that. And then he came back two months later and said, I might be related to the scientists that you’re researching, and I sent him the genealogy and he’s like, yeah, that’s my family. And my uncle lives an hour away and has one of their books in his attic. And it was mind-blowing.
I still can’t wrap my mind around the luck of this, that one of my kids’ close friends is a descendant of the people I’ve been writing about for six years. And the fact that a source, actually a very crucial source, the book that they had in their attic was a book of poetry. It was a friendship album, but it was mostly poetry that Margaretta Morris had written or collected from friends, and it was her paintings and a lot of the paintings are all over the book, on the cover and throughout the book, some of the poems are in the book too, and I still can’t… The magic of this… I was speaking to a historian at a conference about it and he was like, you have to write an essay about this. And I was like, I don’t know what the moral is. It’s like don’t keep your cards too close to your test.
Kate Carpenter:
Talk to people.
Catherine McNeur:
Yeah, talk to random folks. Just bring up your project wherever you go, and then maybe something will come out of an attic and you never know. I imagine, especially because these women have been written out of history, I imagined I’d come across things after the book came out that somebody would come out and say like, oh, I have these letters that you didn’t get a chance to see, or something like that. And I had actually done a lot of work on ancestry.com trying to find descendants. I found out that this relative who has the book in his attic hates ancestry.com, so I’ve never been involved with that, so that’s how I missed him there. But it’s that magical moment. The woo woo Portland person in me is like, they’re haunting me. They’re making my path a little easier.
Kate Carpenter:
I love that.
Catherine McNeur:
Which we could all use.
Kate Carpenter:
Absolutely. Well, despite that and the fact that this book of course is carefully sourced, the sources fade into the background. As a reader, unless you’re a historian who knows how much it must go into this, it doesn’t interrupt the way that you read it. Was that a challenge and what did it take to develop the confidence to be able to write that way?
Catherine McNeur:
Yeah, I think age. I don’t know. Yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard to not cite everything, and sometimes I’d have readers or not cite, but not prioritize featuring like, yes, and Miss Gardner from Germantown talked about the ferns and let’s talk about the ferns. I had some readers who would go through and be like, wait, how do you know exactly who’s living in this house in 1800? I’m like, okay, I can mention the census then, or I can bring the source into the paragraph. I don’t have to hide it all or subsume it all. But to some extent, I just wanted to really set a scene and that was important here.
In this case, this opening is not set at a very specific date, and so I wasn’t very precise about exactly what the foliage would’ve been like in September of 1821 or something. Instead, I was kind of using amorphous time because it was kind of showing a larger scale of their experiences across their childhood and young adulthood. But it’s hard to subsume that or it’s hard to feel confident doing that. And also you have this fear in your head of who is that cynical historian who’s going to read this and be like, she made it all up, it doesn’t exist. I’d be like, no, I spent so much time in a microfilm room.
Kate Carpenter:
Oh, that imaginary, cynical historian in all of our heads is such a problem.
Catherine McNeur:
It is.
Kate Carpenter:
So a place of course plays a huge role in your work, and I know that part of that is because you are an environmental historian. How do you make sure that readers also get a strong sense of setting?
Catherine McNeur:
So these kinds of passages are really how I’m trying to do that, or their house was torn down, which is part of the story in general about the [inaudible 00:29:23] of these women. All I have are photographs of their house, and then I found fire insurance descriptions when they got fire insurance policies, and so the fire insurance agent walked through the house and described every room, not in the detail that I would want, but I know how many pine boards are on their floors or whatever, where the furnace was. I tried as best I could to make sense of that. I sat down… My father-in-law was a contractor, and so he sat down with me to go through the fire insurance descriptions and try to work through exactly what they’re talking about in terms of the door jamb so I could get more of a sense of it.
Some of that made it in, but I was trying to just decipher things as best I could. And also same thing with the plants and insects that they were working with. I had to learn a lot about their subjects in order to describe them properly and to understand the flies habitat or exactly where things were. I even derailed family vacations for the sake of this. Both my husband and my family live on the east coast and we were driving between their two homes and I was like, we have to stop in northern Pennsylvania because this is where Margaretta spent a lot of time looking at water bugs. I want to find generally where her friend’s house was, where they stayed. So I get a sense of the location and sort of hike around that. It is now a nature conservancy space, and so I was able to go through and hike a little bit while my kids were in the car complaining.
They just wanted to move along and get back to grandma and grandpa’s house. But there I was trying to avoid the ticks and make my way through to see, so I can better describe a scene, which is maybe two sentences, but thanks to my family for dealing with me for that.
Kate Carpenter:
I love that. Something I’m always curious about, especially in a book like this where you have sort of woven together, in this case, dual biography of these sisters along with the more immediate world they were part of, but then also the context of much larger both US history, but the history of science at this time too. How do you weave that together in the writing process? Do you have a strategy?
Catherine McNeur:
Yeah, it’s so hard. I mean sometimes because it is like I want to be telling the story of them as humans who lived a life and they’re not just symbols of this one moment in the history of science. I wanted to be like just telling about the story of their lives, but also telling us a larger story about the history of science and power in both history and science and how that affects what we know. And then also they’re living through major events like the Civil War, and so there are things that I want to zoom in and zoom out and giving context. In some places the lack of sources on their life ended up encouraging me to zoom out more, so I don’t have a ton on their childhood. I also don’t have… Gosh, the one source I would love is letters between them because they lived together their whole life, they never wrote to each other, so that was heartbreaking to not have that sort of sourcing.
But in terms of scale, I would go in and out. So with their childhood, for instance, I don’t know exactly how they were educated. I have little snippets of information about their education, but I could go and zoom out and talk about what was science education for girls like in the early 19th century. How would that differ from what we would now call elementary school education to later when the kids are teenagers, what would that look like? What would it look like when they’re young adults, when they would otherwise be in college? And so I can kind of talk about their personal experience from those snippets, but then it’s an invitation to also talk more broadly to fill in the larger landscape and fit them into this larger pattern too.
Kate Carpenter:
In the acknowledgements, you mentioned several writing groups and also just writing friendships. How do those connections impact your writing?
Catherine McNeur:
Oh my goodness, I love writing groups. I live for writing groups, and so I mean, part of this I could say is longstanding. I have a writing group from grad school that are my dearest friends who are kind of like aunts to my kids and these women we’ve been meeting… We used to meet in grad school and have a potluck once a month and exchange a few pages and talk about everyone’s writing. It’s like my fondest memory of grad school. And we continued… We all are at kind of similar points in our careers and went on sabbatical right before the pandemic hit, and so we kicked up our writing group again on Zoom right before… We got familiar with Zoom before Zoom was everywhere. And so we’re scattered across the world really, but we’re able to find time that worked across our time zones and just continue to exchange writing about our second books, which is such delight. A delight for friendship and a delight for writing because they work across the field.
They’re in American studies, and history, and 20th century, and the earliest time period, religious history, and environmental, and social, and cultural and urban. And so everyone’s working in different things and we’re not necessarily an expert in anybody else’s very specific field, but we can talk about writing that way and it’s a delight. Then I also formed, because… The trade press, I don’t have the peer reviews this time, so I was just very aggressive about asking people to read, and I’m so thankful for everyone who read with me. I created this writing group with my friends, Andrew [inaudible 00:34:46] and [inaudible 00:34:46], and they’re both environmental historians. So I was able to get that kind of feedback, which was really valuable.
And then I just also cornered people and I was like, would you read this? Would you be willing to read? I have a friend who’s a fiction writer, and I just handed her a couple chapters and she willingly read and gave me feedback. And Ann Fabian, who’s a professor emerita from Rutgers is just like… I should dedicate this whole book to her. She read the entire thing. She was giving me fiction book recommendations from early on, and she made so many great… She’s like the fairy godmother for this book. She read everything in such detail. So even to the point where she’s like, are you giving Charles Darwin too hard of a time? And I ended up amending. I was getting a bit rough with him, [inaudible 00:35:37] sexist of him. And she was like, but he’s such a nice guy too. So I’d end up amending things or softening my blows a little bit.
Kate Carpenter:
I’m curious, I did not pose this question ahead of time, so forgive me, but I saw that you teach an environmental history, or no, maybe not environmental history, but a public history lab at Portland State that looks so cool. I was so jealous of the existence of it, but I was wondering if that has impacted the way you think about your writing?
Catherine McNeur:
Yeah, I would say that my writing has also impacted the way I think about public history too. I like to speak to a broader audience. I want to make sure that my writing is accessible to someone who likes fiction about women in science as much as they would like history about women in science. And so in the same way, writing environmental history or having my students create history in forms that can be consumed in a park sign or a podcast or things like that, that it’s a different genre of writing or a different kind of writing to write something that’s going to be spoken or to write something that fits on the hundred words that you can fit on a sign that’s mostly image heavy. I think it all has fed into itself in that kind of broad audience sort of work.
Kate Carpenter:
I want to turn to some of my questions about inspiration now. So first I’d love to know what the most influential piece of writing advice is that you’ve ever received?
Catherine McNeur:
I would say… So it’s kind of life advice as well as writing advice. I’m someone who gets tangled up in a lot of projects at once and gets overwhelmed by it all. And my mom used to always say one thing at a time. And that’s also echoed in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird book, which I adore that book, and I assign it to my students. In so many ways because she has this chapter that’s about bad first drafts and how you just have to have a terrible first draft, and that is such a relief for students to hear about that.
But the Bird by Bird part of just like if you’re stuck and you can’t write, just write what fits into… Just write about one bird or write about what fits into a one by one picture frame, what’s right in front of your face, and then you’ll get something on the page and then you have another… You can put your foot down into the next step and figure out what comes next. And I love that advice. I think it’s just good soul soothing advice for me generally, and then also helpful if I ever feel stuck with a blank page in front of me.
Kate Carpenter:
Who do you like to look to for inspiration? Are there people that you read or maybe even watch or listen to?
Catherine McNeur:
Yeah, so I don’t read history for fun. I have to get away from it. So I mean I love… There are so many historians that I find so inspirational, and they’re often the people who are kind of mischievously, I’ll use that word, pushing back at… The way we learned to read in grad school is to skip around, to speed read or read really efficiently. So you can get through a book really quickly and read the introduction and read the conclusion and then skip around a little bit to get the point. I love the historians who write in ways that force you to not do that, who force you to go slow and make it a page turner. So Aaron Sachs’s books and Bathsheba Demuth or even Anna Tsing’s book about The Mushroom at the End of the World. I love that book for so many reasons.
The fact that the chapters are structured like a mushroom, like mushrooms grow. There’s so many things that I adore about that book on multiple levels, existential levels even. And then in terms of… There’s so many great fiction writers who write about women in science, and I didn’t actually just for fear of getting too close at times. I read them very early on in my project and I set them aside because I didn’t want to get too close to that. But Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, the Signature of All Things is about a woman who’s so similar to Elizabeth Morris that it’s almost eerie. I thought that Elizabeth Gilbert had written about… But I like to think about fiction in this way because… Especially in these historical fiction moments, it’s almost a reflection on the lack of sources that exist because they’re able to fill it in with their imagination in ways that historians can’t.
And if we’re sticking to the sources, we can’t do that. We can’t know what these women are thinking about when they’re trying, or just marginalized sciences too. The book Washington Black is so good. You can’t know what these people are thinking or how they’re moving through the world. And so it’s kind of fun to have… To read someone who has that freedom, to fill in the blanks where the sources don’t exist. But also, one of my favorite writer of all time right now is Ross Gay, who’s a poet. Probably if you go back in the transcript for this podcast, you’ll hear that I’ve said the word delight probably a thousand times, and that’s a total influence of his Book of Delights and more recently, his Book of More Delights. I’m just so influenced by that.
I’ve read them so many times. And he’s a gardener as well as a poet and a professor, and his prose are amazing, and it’s not just about delight. He’s also looking at power in terms of race and class and everything like that, but also still finding the wonder of the world while mixed in and something to find joy in while still facing the darker sides of humanity at the same time. And his writing, it’s just so good. And it’s also a good audiobook. I highly recommend it because he reads them both and it’s really good.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, before I let you go, I am curious if there’s anything you’re working on now that you’re up for talking about. I realize that’s a very unfair question when you have a book coming out, and I’m also curious if you’ll come back to the tree of heaven book because I still want to read it.
Catherine McNeur:
Yeah, I do think I might come back to the tree of heaven in some form. I’m in conversations with a botanist who knows the science of the trees a lot more than I do, so he can speak to what’s going on with the trees and their interactions and the way that they’ve been classified as invasive. While I can talk about the racism and the cultural history of these trees and everything that’s gone on in terms of the history of the trees, so I’m excited about the collaboration with that, which I’ve never worked in that kind of way for a collaboration, so there’s a lot of potential there, but it’s still early days, so who knows what will come of it.
And otherwise, at this moment… When my last book came out and I had some interviews about it, I was really nervous about the fact that I didn’t have an answer for what the next book was. I had been so immersed in that book that I hadn’t figured out my next book. I know some historians have three books in advance. They know what they’re doing so far in advance. This time I’m feeling a little bit more confident in my desire to let the field lay fallow. I want to read a lot. I want to just explore, and who knows, maybe I’ll fall across something along the way that’s… Like someone unknown in the archives or something like that and fall across a new story that I want to tell.
Kate Carpenter:
That’s a great answer. I love that. If you could give advice to a graduate student who’s in the midst of writing their dissertation, not that I know any, what would you tell them?
Catherine McNeur:
I would say write as if it’s a book. Write for your smart friend who is gleefully going to read it, who might not be familiar with the topic, but is going to be interested. And write for that kind of audience rather than writing out a fear for your committee or for that mean historian in your head who’s going to question what you’re doing. Instead, write the book you want to write and just kind of walk confidently forward with that. Take the criticism that people give you, that your committee gives you, but write the book you want to write.
Kate Carpenter:
Dr. Catherine McNeur, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past. This has been a delight.
Catherine McNeur:
Thank you. It has been a delight.
Kate Carpenter:
Thank you again to Dr. Catherine McNeur for joining me for what was truly a delightful conversation about writing. To learn more about her books as well as the other things we mentioned in this conversation, visit draftingthepast.com. And thanks to you for listening to the podcast, sharing it with your friends and social networks, and for buying books by the authors featured on the show. You’re helping to spread the word that friends don’t let friends write boring history.
