“I was trying to not be boring”

Don’t let traditional structures and processes get in the way of your vision as an author. That was a big lesson we found out earlier this week in our live Q&A with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the author of March’s book of the month What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures.

Ayana joined us for a rapid-fire half hour conversation last Tuesday afternoon/evening, and it was great to see some folks who haven’t dialed in before. There’s never any pressure to join or to even take part (sitting and listening is totally fine!) but as the club gets bigger, it’s definitely nice to see different people joining us for these conversations.

Topics up for discussion included the interview format, the design of the book, what moves her, how you balance motivating people and flooding them with information, and what got left out of the book. It was a fun chat, and here are some of the highlights.

What If We Get It Right? didn’t start out structured around a series of conversations. While the approach might seem like an obvious answer (given Ayana’s work in podcasting) that answer came to her more slowly.

In January 2020, I signed a two-book deal with Penguin Random House, and the first book was All We Can Save, this anthology of essays by women climate leaders, which has had a beautiful life as a book. Then I was like, OK, I have to do this again. 

Partly because of that experience, partly because of the How To Save a Planet podcast, and partly because of my own awareness that I don't have all the answers, I couldn't actually imagine a way to make a climate book that didn't feel like a textbook. I could read all the things that these other people have written and summarize for you their perspectives, and weave that into paragraph form, but I find that kind of writing really annoying. If you're just gonna quote other people to me for a whole book, why am I not just reading those other people's writing?

But I already signed the book deal. I had to write the book. 

It took me a very long time to hack the format—how can I do this in a way that doesn't feel like a textbook, that's engaging, that's something that I would actually want to read?—and this interview format came to me. 

I was thinking of just profiling all these people, and I was like, if I'm interviewing them anyway, why don't I just give people the conversations? Because they will be by definition more engaging than me writing about the conversations, especially because these are my friends and close colleagues. These are people I've known for—in some cases, like Bill McKibben—since I was a junior in college in 2000. So the hope was that those relationships would create the kind of tone, and my ability to push those people with follow-up questions… would resonate with people, that those relationships would lead people to appreciate these topics in different ways.

But the book as it emerged—with its mix of conversations, provocations and art—the format was always in Ayana’s mind.

I was the art director for the book, which I was not supposed to be. But I had a vision that was not being realized, so I literally weaseled my way and found the email of the art director and was like Can we have a meeting?

They worked on new approaches, including the section openers that lay out 10 problems and 10 possibilities side by side.

I came up with that because I want people to have their takeaway talking points. Sometimes you need a number to throw at someone when you're arguing with them, and all those references are available online, so it's all backed up. Personally can't read statistics in paragraph form: I need them in bullet points. So this was just the way my brain works, to give the reader a different format.

But to me, it's also a way of showing that every time we talk about problems, we should be talking about possibilities right next to them, because we have things we can do, right? I found that to be just another way of getting that point across. Dwelling on the problems is not actually that helpful. We need to be grounded in the reality of what we're facing, of course. 

What emerged was really a map of Ayana’s mind.

I mean, this book is actually probably a good encapsulation of how my brain works. There's a poem by my cousin in the book, Steve Connell is my first cousin. I grew up with him, and I was so excited he had written a poem about climate. 

It's basically like my scrapbook, in a way. These are the pieces of what's helped me both understand the problem, see the ways forward and motivate myself. So a lot of the quotes are from black leaders of the civil rights movement; there’s pop culture from the 90s, which was my era of paying most attention to pop culture when I was in middle school and high school, early college; there's my mix tape at the back, because I am a girl from Brooklyn, so that's part of the way I process things. 

I was also trying to not be boring, very deliberately. Like, how do we make this so that people can read it on different levels? If you just read the questions, you'll get something. If you just look at the stats, you'll get something. If you only read the poems, you'll get something. Because I know that people have a short attention span. I do!

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While the vision became clear, there were still some surprises as she put the book together—particularly on themes that pushed their way to the front of the line. 

One thing that I really didn't expect to come up repeatedly in the book when I asked people about the barriers to implementing solutions was shareholder capitalism. I did not expect this book to be a critique of capitalism, although of course, that's on me. But it was interesting to have so many different people talk about that, that this imperative of maximizing quarterly earnings is just completely at odds with the need for some longer-term thinking about how to be better citizens of this planet. 

The other thing that kept coming up that I didn't totally expect was that at the heart of all this is love. Which seems a bit corny, I guess, or did to me. But that's why we do these things, right? For the people and places we love. That's what's going to motivate us to roll up our sleeves and get to work. That's what makes us concerned. And that actually is a very powerful force that we haven't really tapped into when it comes to climate. 

There's polling data on this, especially when it comes to love for future generations, that it’s 12 times more powerful and motivating for people than, say, economic growth. 

The community piece is interesting too, because that's something that I think people are really eager for right now: connection and community. What do we do now, especially with the sort of fracturing of any sort of federal engagement on climate.

Not everything made it in though, far from it. Ayana’s actually been producing a podcast that gets into a range of different topics that weren’t included in the book. She gave some examples.

Fashion, which has a major impact on climate in terms of water pollution, a lot of fabrics are now made from fossil fuels, all these different synthetic fabrics. Fast fashion, especially just like disposability, consumerism, shipping things around the world, not to mention the labor practice associated with the supply chain. Cotton has a huge climate impact. 

And there's a whole section on policy [in the book] but there's not really something specifically on politics. So one of the first episodes of season one of the podcast was with people who work on electing politicians who get it on climate, especially in local elections where so much change is possible, still to this day. Like, are we investing in municipal composting or bike lanes or green buildings or electric school buses or all that kind of stuff needs to happen? 

She’s also able to expand on viewpoints from outside the US—since most of the book deliberately focused on American and western contexts to make answers a little more approachable.

I didn't really do much international conversation [in the book], and there's certainly stuff happening everywhere… I do think it's important to learn lessons from anywhere in the world where something's working, but I was very deliberate in choosing the same socio-cultural-political context, the same economic context. I thought would be really helpful [in the book.]

We wrapped the conversation by talking about other books that provided her with inspiration.

Black Futures [2020, edited by Kimberley Drew and Jenna Wortham] was essentially a yearbook of black excellence. It's all these different artists, creators, thinkers. I was asked to write an essay for that on the ocean, and it's a stunningly beautiful book. The way they integrate group texts and art projects and essays and photography and all these different ways that people are engaging and creating culture was an inspiration to me.

One book I come back to? If people ask me about [seaweed farming] there's a book that I have right here called Eat Like A Fish by Bren Smith, who is the last interview in the book, about his career… He's had a crazy life, there's some wild stories in there.

There's a biography of this fisheries biologist named Daniel Pauly called The Ocean’s Whistleblower [by David Grémillet and translated from French by Georgia Froman]. This man has been working on small-scale fisheries in developing countries since the 70s, probably, and so a 50-year career thinking about food security and biology and economics. He's the most cited fisheries biologist in the world, a black man who grew up in post-war Germany and Switzerland, who left agriculture because the Ag department had too many Nazis in it. 

His life is so inspiring, incredible. So I am drawn a bit to biographies of people who have done big things, especially if I've had the chance to meet them, and then it's really a chance to put the pieces together. 

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Thanks to Ayana for her time, it was a real pleasure. You can find her What If We Get It Right? podcast here, or subscribe via Apple podcasts, Spotify, or Pocketcasts. I’m in!

I’ll sign off with a couple of updates and insights from previous Curious authors.

First off, Carvell Wallace (CUR004, Another Word For Love) does an episode of Slate’s How To podcast on the process of writing and sharing a memoir with Melissa Febos – which is a fascinating set of insights into how to wrestle with your own story from two terrific authors.

Last, there’s an intriguing conversation with Annalee Newitz (CUR009, Stories Are Weapons) on the ways that science fiction can help merge and shape science fact: “I think what science fiction offers is a safe sandbox where we can game out possible future scenarios, imagining unexpected secondary and tertiary effects of new technologies and policies.” 

It’s a question that I’m currently obsessed with as I’m currently advising the team at Locus magazine, the outlet for science fiction, fantasy and horror publishing. More on that in the future, I’m sure.

That’s all for this time: next up is a new month, and a new pick… and I’m looking forward to sharing April’s book of the month with you all next week.

Onwards!

Bobbie