 Welcome to this evening's Maine Lipfest program, Rebecca Tracer in conversation with Harry Orson, moderated by Susan Connelly. We are here for a serious treatment. I'm Jefferson the Vicki, I'm the archivist for the Maine Women's Writers' Question, where we are passionate about collecting, preserving, and sharing Maine writers' work, writers who are identified as female, trans, feminine, and non-binary. On behalf of our director Jennifer Tuttle and the rest of the staff, I want to say how thrilled we are to be co-sponsoring tonight's event with Portland Public Library Mechanics Hall and Mechanics Hall. I want to say also that we're grateful to the Maine Writers' Publishers Alliance and Colby College for putting this festival together. It's been an incredible week and tonight is sure to be a highlight. Okay, well thank you everyone so very much for coming. It's a deep pleasure to see you all. Rebecca, Carrie, hi. Hi, is this working? Yes. You both write so resonantly and fluidly and granularly about this moment in time and political and environmental injustices. And I'm a keen reader and appreciator, as you know. We were just talking in the green room about how we all have descended from many generations of working-class manners. We all write about power in different ways and about women and the environment and authority and equality and facts and how to leverage them. And we're gonna thread a needle tonight. We're just gonna kind of move around and thread a needle. When I asked Rebecca this week to articulate what was coming up for her a lot in her work as a woman journalist, and she may or may not remember this, she went right to what she called political journalism. And she said, you said, I spend most of my magazine writing life bucking against hollow journalistic ideas about distance and objectivity, the latter of which I think is an inventive concept that is neither possible to achieve and also a way to justify the powerful passing judgment and continuing to shape the stories of the less powerful. The first of which I find impossible to feel in the midst of reporting on questions of injustice, power, health and democracy. So I thought we might start there with a snapshot of something you're both working on now and you're writing life that's moving you, inspiring you, perhaps angering you and coupling it with this idea of journalistic objectivity. And how you experience that and if you ditch it or you never believed it in the first place. And Rebecca, maybe you could start. Thank you so much. I'm so very pleased. It's such a huge question to start with. I'm going to pick apart one piece of it, the very last thing you said, which is this question. So I have my day job increasingly political journalism, right? I also write about culture and cultural criticism as a journalist, but increasingly it's like I write about electoral politics. I have mixed feelings and social movements. The question of objectivity, because when I was a young girl to make sources of that, right? And when I was taught journalism as plumbing, which I'm really glad I got this, it was hammered into me that distance and objectivity were absolutely key, that there were two sides and that your responsibility was to capture both of them equally, that it was important to get, and this actually continues to make more sense, important to seek out multiple perspectives, right? And that there was not, and that your own opinion, unless you were writing criticism, should not come into your life as a reporter. And so the 22 years since have been a process of me sometimes slowly and then sometimes all at once in big gulps, completely rejecting all those lessons who would like to have this kind of freedom. I'm very lucky too, where I can both do the recording, right? Where I'm not writing just opinion columns, so I do that, that's part of my work as well. But I can write political profiles. I just tonight I am finishing a political profile of a Senate candidate, John Petternin, in Pennsylvania, where I can do the recording and call 100 people and do the same the plumbing of recording, right? Making sure the dates are correct and then I lay on it that captures your attention and then a nut graph that tells you what the story is to get. All that plumbing is still there. But I also get to make sure that the way, when I think about the story or this person, the subject, the narrative comes through. And I, that in whatever the pursuit of truth is, because, and this is something Karen and I were talking about earlier, and I'm going to put it in different words that you might, there are a lot of stories and there are a lot of truths, right? And that this notion that there's one version of the truth is a balancing. But I think I can get closer to being transparent about the story as I see it, unburnished, clear, factual, by offering my opinion. Then what I just taught, which is that in order to make the story transparent, you have to keep your opinion out. Yes? Q you. Yes, I agree. No. Wait, is this better? This is better for your way. Two things about that, objectivity. So one, I started this thing that was mentioned in my bio called the Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University. I co-founded it within the story in there. And our main goal is to teach academics how to tell stories. So to marry scholarship with storytelling. Because it is, in my opinion, and I think of thousands of other academics opinion, that their stories, they carry a great amount of data and information and knowledge. But their knowledge isn't getting passed on to other people because it's not in a sort of a vehicle of a story. So we're going to teach them how to do that. So I think that's a little bit part of what you're saying. Second point of that is my entire book, Miltown, has anybody read that? I know my mother hasn't. She's over there in the front row. It's a, it's a num. I mean, it's a hard book. It's a hard book for my family. But anyway, I didn't forgive her for a minute. But the book is about this distance and proximity. And in fact, if it can plot the book, it's me going home to Mace to Mexico and coming back and going home and coming back. And so what that did was give me both a close-up view of what home is like and a distance to be able to get the distance of that. And so I went at it originally as a journalist because I was like the editor of my college paper and I had a journalism degree and I thought I was, you know, when I graduated from college in 1989, I thought it would be a foreign correspondent, whatever that meant. And then ever since I had 86 jobs since and then I became a writer. But I did a simple essay by the New York Review books called My 86 Jobs. But anyway, one story short. So going home and coming back and going home and coming back made me realize that there isn't that one story and that the truth is to come to look at both of those things. When you're close to something, you can see it in a new way and you're far away in a different way. And I was the perfect person to tell that story because I had left a place. But I also came back and there were people there that I still loved and cared about as well as the town. So it also became the plot of the book. So this idea of distance became moot because it was both about distance and closeness. And in fact, if you haven't read the book, I become so involved that I started like an activist group in the town because I actually never believed in objectivity myself in my school newspaper because it was, you know, as a photographer too, you have a viewpoint. You look through the camera. I'm going to look through the camera a different way you are and you are. And as proven, Monica Wood's book, you know, we just saw her in the street walking down the street. It was great. My mom knew it was her and my sister. And of course, I know her, but she wrote when we were the Kennedys, which is about my town. And I wrote a totally different book and it wasn't competing. They're different stories. And it was kind of interesting to see her book come out and thinking, anyway, point is, I never believed in objectivity. We have a viewpoint. It's hard. You can't erase that viewpoint, even if you want to pretend you can. Yeah. Absolutely. Let's just keep going on this viewpoint for a moment and the actual craft. Well, I want to just say you can't erase that viewpoint even if you pretend you can. I want to also just, the way I've come to see it is that the people who believe they can erase the viewpoint is really about power. And I think that's really important, right? There is, within the media, within journalism, within certain, there are people who are very used to being at the top of a power structure and whether that means we're talking about papers and record or whatever. There's this idea that there's a clean way. And that that, that conviction that your way is clean and clear and everybody else's is muddied or perhaps emotional. Really, it's irrational and it's often a very white page article, often corporate, class-aligned viewpoint. Yeah, I know. Lot two is in, I'm sorry to keep referring to my book, but it's the only book I've ever wrote. So itself, which I sort of take to task in my book, is not clean and clear because it's who's writing history. You know, in my case, it was in our history books about Rumford in Mexico was a guy named John Lee and he was the PR guy for the paper mill. So what does his history book look like? You know, I always wondered what if my father or my grandfather or my mother or somebody else wrote the history book, what would that look like? So even history itself, and that's what actually I started writing my book on, is I started looking up genealogy records, we were talking about earlier too, downstairs, and I found my grandfather's death certificate and his birth certificate, I kind of followed the lines of what they said and everything on them was incorrect. So who's writing this? Who's creating history? Who's writing down the archives? This is all problematic before we even get to reading these paper, right? What resources are we looking at? Let's keep going with the emotion and the anger. We were talking downstairs and you talk a lot about sort of this idea of a very different set of standards for men's anger, the media and women's anger, and in the culture, in the society at large. And it's clear that women's anger just sometimes isn't allowed or it gets tamped down or dismissed and mocked. And it looks like it looks like it never changes, like that lane of accepted cultural misogyny just flourishes. So I want to go there, but I wanted to like complicate it a little and say what do you do with it? If you know it's there, do you manipulate it? Do you leverage it? Do you, what do you do with it? I'm just curious. Well the question, like what do I do in a privileged position and that I can earn money from? Right, but how do you do it? Yeah, exactly. But how do you do it, Rebecca, in a piece? Yeah, technically, how do you turn it on its head because you know it's going to be there and leverage it even, or maybe you can't. I'm curious how you go about that. How I, in my writing, well sometimes I can't. So I will tell you a very specific story that is very tied to gender and how Salon, the New Yorker, right, is history of abortions and how you ask one question, twelve abortions, about how in this world is that sometimes I have to go on cable television or NPR or whatever and do the thing where you're talking descriptive. Like it's, there are all kinds of prohibitions and punishments and all kinds of baggage. Like there's not an easy solution for it. Here I have these calls from television networks and they're like, what will you be writing about dogs? And I was like, fuck no. I've done it for 20 years. It's too late now. It's happening. This is before the oral arguments. I was like, it's done. There's actually nothing to do about it now and talk about it now. So there's this moment where I was so angry that I was like the only solution that seemed to make sense for me professionally was to not say another word about it. Now then there was this was your next big feature. And again, it was a way, it was a sideways in the party whose job it was to defend abortion rights and excess. Who has remained and who is going to remain in power, right? That was my picture. I love that. I'm sure many of us have read that piece, right? And I love hearing that backstory to it. It was such a great piece and it was it was so sly and smart about how it walked around Diane Feinstein, you know, 360 degrees. But I also say that some people who are doing great abortion coverage, but not in a lot of the big publications, right? To it. And so then I went, I'm not ridden by abortion. It's called good and bad. It was just interesting to hear you talk about that and that we have to go at things sideways as women to confront it. I just thought that was interesting. And I think I did that too. I mean, the things that I was mad about in writing about working class America, not just work for Mexico, but working class America and trying to understand what happened. And also as I was writing the book, Donald Trump got elected president in our town, Mexico, went from the biggest Obama supporters in the state to the biggest Trump supporters in the state and to try to, well, I knew I actually understood why from the very beginning, but I wanted to understand even more intimately why that happened. And so I think that my anger took the form of a book that I wanted to not be an apologist for what happened in the state of Maine or what happened in politics, but to explain to people that there's a lot of working class people that are very angry to try to explain their anger in a way by using this sort of distance and proximity. There's a lot of people that have been screwed over for 40, 50, 60 years. And I live in Connecticut close to New York City to open my editor, my agent, a lot of people who are very progressive and liberal and they were very upset and wanted to blame working class people. And so actually in the middle of writing my book, I stopped and wrote this kind of big thing in the middle of my book explaining why people did vote for Trump. And not to say I wanted that to happen, but to explain it. So my book was more about talking about their anger and trying to translate it for other people, I think. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, that really does. So let's keep talking about your writing and environmental storytelling. It feels, organically to me, as someone who has taught Milltown, loves Milltown, teaches, I teach a lot of nonfiction and a lot of hybrid forms that it gives you inherently a little more room to move. And I'm curious, I know you're working on a book about Richard Carson now. And I'm curious, will your narrator just be, will you be carried right there on page one? Will you wait like Rebecca Sclu did in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and you wait till like page 70? She didn't want to be in that book, Sclu tried not to be in that book. But she had done so many years of research. It's an extraordinary book, if you haven't read it. And I'm wondering, what are you thinking? You may not know yet, but how are you approaching your persona narrator? So I'm so glad you brought up the Sclu book because my advisor in Pride Sclu made me go through that whole book and outline it. And so I based Milltown on looking at that. I haven't made a lot of my students know that. I did not know that, so that's why. I outlined it and I had to, he said, figure out what she's doing in every single sentence. I love that. I'm a book critic, so that's what I do naturally anyway, but that was an intense exercise. So I just, I figured out what I was writing this Rachel Carson book about. I, somebody told me that I needed to write a new biography of Rachel Carson because her old biography is old and it's boring. And, sorry, she's linear if you remember. Rachel Carson's nephew at his cottage in Southport, I just met with Dorothy Freeman's granddaughter yesterday. So I've been a man of the, I think they would agree it's boring too. So I didn't want to write, I have like problems with biography in general, like I don't like the genre because I feel like we're all reading it waiting for the part where they get to be the person that they're going to be. And so I think why waste all that time waiting for Rachel Carson in the right silent spring or whatever. So I was trying, I was struggling with that like, and she's not that interesting in a lot of ways. As a, as a person, she was very private and she wanted to maintain a privacy, so I was like, how can I respect that? And she didn't have a, there's not a lot of personal stuff about her. And so I came to the conclusion with a lot of help from the editor of the Ryan magazine, Samantha Proudbacker, who came to Cambridge to have lunch with me. And then he sat down and was like, we'll just figure this out. Let's get some food. So I told him everything that was bothering me. And what's bothering me really is about the environmental storytelling in general. And can, can, can environmental stories actually change anything? Is, is my question, or can stories even change anything? And here I am as a writer saying that. I'm just about to like cave in my career by saying no, but I don't, I don't know if they can change. And then I started thinking about that question. I'm like, maybe, you know, I read somewhere that stories don't change anything people do. So then I started thinking, can people change? And so now I'm like an anthropologist or something. I don't know. But, but this is what I'm swirling around and it's, it goes back to this whole one story thing. So the question is, can environmental stories change the world in which we live, which is an important question. Because if they don't, we don't have a role in which we can live. That's what I have to say about that. If anybody has the answer to my question, Rachel Krasn got DDT banned. First of all, Rachel Krasn never asked for DDT to be banned. That was not her premise. And she asked for it to be modified and modulated. She did not want it to be banned. A, B, the chemicals that they use now are 7,000 times worse than DDT. So has anything changed? No, nothing has changed. It's gotten worse. So that puts her aside. What I think she did do is she, she did marry storytelling with scholarship, which is something I'm interested in doing. But you know, maybe, maybe Upton Sinclair did it. I'm not sure. Or maybe there's other. So, so here's part of my, my attempt at answering questions. I mean, I have somebody write this down. So when you ask, can storytelling change anything? And then you go back and you talk, and you, you talk about the ways that Rachel Krasn himself might be a little boring. And then the previous stories told about her were my boring, a little boring, right? And part of the frustration. So here's what I think. So yes, my voice will be. So, so here's what I think. Some kinds of stories, perhaps stories that vary, stories with scholarship, right? Stories. Scholarship can be a broad category. It doesn't mean they have to be academic, like just research. The fight that I have within is to tell stories that are more nuanced. Stories that contain multiple stories, where there's, that inherently challenge the notion that there is one story. Because like biographies, right? And so putting yourself as one approach, right? Like the way you, the way the, the Sklut version, the Milntown version, right? Making a really noting the complexity, which is really about the complexity of trying to convey full humanity. And all of its contradictions and that there's not a clean, right? This goes back to the notion that there's some clean singular way to see the world and to express it. Right. And, and then complicating it in a variety of ways. Is it marrying a scholarship? Is it, is it interrogating the stories that have been told? Is it the open about the ways that your opinions and ideologies inform? Distance crux. So Rebecca, what do you do? Let's go right back to you and that, because you have, through your hard work and your, your general brilliance, carved the lane. It's not like it just happened. You've carved a lane where you get to show up, right? In the piece. So this leads me to kind of my next question is, how do you embed your feminism in, for example, a Fetterman story? Or like, how do you do that? I'm just, like, I'm really curious. I, I, there are ways you do it, I think. Well, I can answer that. So one of the things that I think about as I'm in conversation with both of you who teach writing, I'm like, and I think I was, I was doing it every sentence, is because I was like, oh my god, it was extremely one-dimensional. I had no ratio of class analysis to zero. I had never ever taken a women's studies class, what was now, what used to be called a women's studies class, is not a graduate. I didn't have 18th century fiction and 20th century American fiction. Like, that was it, myself by saying there was a little bit of stuff, but it probably wasn't. It, what, the way I now, the way I have come over decades to think of what it means to look at the world from a feminist perspective is actually looking at the world and understanding a lot more about how power works. I probably, I still use feminism as the, as the sort of word to describe what I do, but mostly what I'm doing is power analysis from one direction or another, and, and gender power is like the thing that's still easiest for me probably, but when I look at a candidate like John, a hundred different ways that gender and race come into the story. And so he is this enormous, he was six foot eight. I don't know if anybody here has followed this race, but he is a six foot eight former football player, white man running in Pennsylvania on he's, he waffled a lot on, he used to be a really, really articulate and strong climate change and environmental policy politician who then really sort of got tangled around fracking and stuff, but the future of the planet and the impervious to the kinds of attacks on liberals, hoodies and shores in January and every other weakness that he's enfeebled, that he is, that he can't talk, that he's stupid, that he's crazy, and then that very swiftly turned into, he's, once you've been cast in his week because he's had a stroke from which he's recovering, you could begin to do soft on crime. And now he is running entirely on the kinds of racist and sexist mass, so that's how, so it's not exactly, that's how Well, first of all, I have a shirt that says I'm living example sitting in the front row, my mother, my sister, my mother, my grandmother, my sister, I mean we weren't, I don't think we even knew the words from, I mean we knew, when I, I think I'd write this in my book, we had isms, it was like Catholicism and baptism, but I had such like, we're strong and thoughtful and caring and, I don't know, all the things, if you just want to throw it some adjectives, they were there. And, and, and my parents also both taught me, and my dad would never call himself a feminist, but he probably was because he taught me all the sports, he taught me how to ski, taught me how to play soft line, treat me like a boy or a girl, whatever he taught me, he didn't care, right? Neither of them did, you know what Mother of Justice and like really good clothes, which I love clothes now, but that's, that's not here and there, but, but they, they just said, you know, be what you want to be, and so if there's anything, like if you're any, any of your parents out there, that's like the, you can create feminist just by doing that, like, and boys too, you know, I mean, you can create feminist boys. Yeah. So you asked last week, and it's come up a lot tonight, does storytelling matter? Can storytelling change the world? Can it move the needle? So I wanted to get your pulse, just talk to us about the temperature of environmental storytelling right now. What's going on out there? So I'm a book critic too, and I get a lot of books that people think that I want to read about the environment. There's a lot of them that have red covers of fire, scary words on them. There's a lot of that kind of book, and then there's the other kind of book, which is, everything's very helpful and there are blue covers on them. There's all kinds of different environments, solutions based books, which are, you know, how to, how to, there's all those books. And then there's like, there are books that are academic books, which are really informative, but very written in jargon for a very specific audience, which I'm learning a lot about that at Harvard. So this is what's happening in this environmental storytelling. All these books are doing a lot of different things that are important, like we need to know about nature, but do we need to know about a white guy sitting on top of a mountain looking at things anymore? I mean, we need to know about nature, we need to know about animals, but can we, I'm just trying to, like our environment has changed so much that maybe these stories have to change to reflect that kind of environment. Like, how do you tell a story about drought to make it dramatic? Because drought is a long-term, boring thing, or the poisoning of a paper motown. Like how do you tell a story that has no beginning or no end? So I'm seeing books that aren't quite accomplishing that, but I can see a lot of people trying to do that. They're, they're lobbing their efforts at something. And, and they're not sure what. So this is, this is kind of partly why we started this thing at Brown University is to confront some of that, but, but also to just give people a place to go that are struggling with how to write about the environment so that it both matters and then a broader audience reads it because it, because it's my contention that if a broader audience reads it, then there will be a critical mass. And if a critical mass reads it, then maybe something will change. So, and it goes back to that question of people change. Yeah. So let's flip it in to talk about your readership for a minute. And so when Dodds was announced, you said, Rebecca, the task for those who are stunned by the baldness of the horror, paralyzed by the bleakness of the view is to figure out how to move forward anyway. Because while it is incumbent on us to digest the scope and breath of the badness, it is equally our responsibility not to despair. Well said, right? So I wondered, like, I was getting the temperature of environmental storytelling, the temperature of readership. Are you sensing, like, are people activated? Are they super tired? Like, what's, what's your pulse? So, this is very particular about my readership. I wrote Good and Mad between early 2017, the women's march, and I finished it in the summer of 2018. I wrote it very quickly. It was but it captures that particular moment. It has a lot of historical stuff in it too, but it captures that period. And a lot of what I was writing about that I write, and I write about this in the book, was a population that was recently routed to anger. A population of largely middle class women who became angry in many cases for the first time in their lives when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. And what I try to do within the book is think about how it could be that that anger came upon, like, how could you, there's the whole thing about being awake, right? How could you have slept up to that point, right? This is, I think this is tied to some of the stuff I was talking about, about abortion, right? But it's also a book that very deeply values, and I very much value because I think it is to be awake to that anger is correct and necessary. And so you want to be aware of a population that is late to anger, but also aware of how critical it is that they remain engaged, right? But then I have this very weird experience of selling it because the book was published by coincidence the week of Christine Baselford's testimony, which, like, was good for the book. But here's the thing, I have, and I'm actually, I have to write it forward to a new edition of the book, and in which I'm going to do this and it's not. Because I was on book tour between the beginning of October when Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court and the midterm elections in 2018 when there was a historic number of first-hand candidates, many of them women, many of them young, many of them women of color, a bunch of them left us, right? We're running for houses. And in that period, that's when it was going all around the country to big rooms, and my readership is a lot of the little class women who were new to my group. And the view that I got at that point, so a lot of that period that I'd written about in the book, actually, even though Donald Trump had won, then there were a period of big wood, big, big wins. So all these people who were new to political engagement and anger, then it was like the women's march. It was the biggest single day demonstration in this country's history. The women's march was insane. And if we went, like, it felt great, the world, yes. And it was all over the world, and it felt great. We were like, see what we can do if we're angry? And then there was like all this pressure applied to members of Congress, and John McCain did thumbs down. Powerful, abusive people lost their jobs, and there was, there was all of this stuff that felt like, wow, now see, now that we're engaged, like, we can win. But remember that this is a population that was really new to these kinds of fights. And where I was being greeted by hundreds of people were like, I can't even get out of that anymore. Which is why you're here, especially from so many middle class white women, I'm worried about my mother. And this is real. I don't mean to discount this. Like, oh my white women, they're the practice of loss, of continuing to work even when you lose them. If you're fighting against power, you're going to lose over and over again. And if the reaction is, oh my god, this is impossible, then the finance, right? And so there was no, there was no messaging. And that's like, we haven't conveyed in the book, I'm going to write that in the forward. But like, there's the piece that I wrote about jobs that day, was that. It was not hope. And I, and I worried, you know, I worried that it was like, see, we should still feel hope. And it was like, no, it's really bad. A popular example of this says, hope is a discipline, right? Like part of the actual labor of participating and fighting for a better world is maintaining a level of hope, even in moments where there's no rational reason for you to expect to see victory, which by the way, when it comes to a lot of stuff, like a lot of us are not going to live to see things get better, right? Be able to absorb that at the same time that you have to also understand that that is not like you're off the hook fighting for them to get better. And so that's what that piece was about. It was not hope is like, no, you just have to keep going. And it's going to be hope that gets, yes, feel hope as work. Sitting here, just passing very quickly. I'm going to say here a long, long, long. So if I was starting a little to open it up to questions, if I was just starting to do that, I would ask you, it's hard to ask this after all this incredible articulation that you just did of hope as discipline. But so I'll start with Carrie. So just to kind of inspire us, I think. It's inspiring you. You've got the racial Carson book. You might have also another project. Why are you getting out of bed? I guess. I want to buy a house in France. Also, there's something else I really want to work on, but probably won't pay as much for this house in France. But it's called biography of an ordinary woman. And I'm still picking apart this idea of biography. And I want to do a biography of somebody on the Harvard campus that is either a garbage woman or like takes up the garbage or his works in the cafeteria. Some really interested in the concept of work and what people do and how people are invisible and how sometimes we treat people who take care of our trash like trash. I don't want to do a biography of her, but write it like a novel. Very small novel, like two under pages. So that's what's really inspiring me. I don't know if that's cool, cool. But I think putting ordinary people and this all stands for my thing. I started, I go to New York itself a lot, which I'm sure everybody in this room does. And I started buying portraits of ordinary women that were like abandoned and I felt sorry for like a sorry stuffed animal, you know, in the corner. And they were just kind of not pretty pictures or painted like by amateurs. And they were like $5, $10. So I started collecting them. And I thought, I'm going to write a book about these ordinary women that aren't in museums. You know, so that kind of gets me out. And the Rachel Carson is kind of a, she was actually very, very poor, too, is something that's not talked about a lot. And she worked her ass off to provide for her family and brought up her nephew. And she did a lot of stuff too. So she was kind of an ordinary woman in a different way. But anyway, it's about work is what I'm interested in. And so I work to write about work. I love that. I love that. Articulation. Thank you. Over here. I don't know if I have a great answer for what's inspiring to me. I know that part of the badness is it can't quite go on as a cast, which is good that like I think that in terms of what I cover in politics. I mean, I've been inspired by, so that's true. And that's the people who have been on the ground doing all kinds of creative approaches to changing how power works, how government works to, you know, that's always been inspiring to me. I see them increasingly having influence. It's a little bit of a sunny way to put it. It's really useful. It's going to force totally new approaches. I saw young people questioning sort of capitalist assumptions in ways I've never seen before that I learned from every day. And I'm like, oh my God, this has been available to me when I was younger. This is great. And I see that happening in my profession. I see it with my kids. I think that is a real thing. And it's exciting to me because I feel like there's so much to learn and so many new ways that we are all going to be forced because of bad things. But we're going to be forced to think. These kids in Harvard are teaching us somewhere there and they're rabid to like do stuff. And it's really, that's inspiring to say they are rabid about engaging and feeling like they can do something. So that's exciting. The creativity of crisis. Okay. That feels like a good place to hit pause because it's got, there's so many side doors into that house. So this is the moment where we do open it up to you all. And our incredible director of main mechanics has a microphone in her hand. If someone has a question, maybe just raise your hand. I just want to say that I want to have the three of you in residence for the creativity of crisis. So let's think about that. That would be good. Subtitle code is a discipline. Thank you so much for coming. This was just so enriching. I have a question. I teach undergrads and I have complex but also history, policy, good theory, all of that. And I see it in the plot. I don't want to say rejection of objectivity, but you're sandwiched to objectivity. And what I hear you saying is we need to embrace the more pluralist approach to what meaning is. Not necessarily truth, right, but what meaning is. So when you're talking about your kind of beliefs, you're like, he can be the January short spy and also a straight white male who is also climate conscious, who is now also being perceived as perhaps a feeble by the stroke, right? And all of those perspectives are valid. Not one story. Correct. But something that shakes me to the core that I hear from my students is there is no such thing as unbiased fact. So I ask them to do historical research or we are talking historical and they literally do not believe that any mainstream publication is what they call unbiased. And to them, unbiased means completely unreliable. And my heart drops to my feet every time I confront a student like that. Can you help me? I could talk to you for like five hours about that, but do you want to go first? I told you that history is wrong. So I can understand why they believe that and I can understand why they believe that the government is lying to them because our government has lied to us for a long time. So I think their questions are right. I think they're right. It doesn't mean there is no, I mean, I don't know if I actually don't know if there's such thing as a one truth. Like I really don't know, but there are certain things like, you know, if you throw a ball up in the air, it's going to land on the ground. There are certain truths that are going to happen. Okay, but we got too many kids going into STEM already and that's why. Right? Like, I'm trying to clob in that humanities and we're like, oh, yeah, but the humanities, the humanities, we're both in the humanities. We're both writers and all three of us. And the things we exactly tackle is like to look at all those nuances of the truth. That's exactly what writing does. And I don't think, for me, I don't think there are, I don't think great writing provides answers. I think it provides questions. So I think they're kind of in the right place in a way. I was also going to say like, they're not wrong. But the problem is the false equivalence of is the New York Times bias equivalent to Tucker Carlson's bias or to like something they saw on rep. Okay, that's, that's an issue. But I think we have helped to get ourselves into this mess by thinking, by behaving as though the New York Times is unbiased and not, and by treating facts as, no, there are some, as fixed, right? So this is an obsession of mine that is sort of a side obsession. Because in the, in the realm of journalism, like there's huge rise in data journalism, right? One of the things I can't stand in my own profession is like the New York Times need all, it's the idea of certainty, right? And that, and that certainty can be delivered in tweets or whatever. And that, right? But that also numbers will explain everything. And there's all this stuff that sort of makes parties like, we're the, like the left is the party of science. And the left is the party of facts and democracy dies in darkness. And like newspapers, The Washington Post and Nate Silver are going to save us from the right. And that contributes to this problem. Yeah. Because the thing about journalism, right? If you take this, held up as journalism as facts, no good journalism is in theory, right? And, and it's questions. A scientist will tell you that science is about opening up further. It's about uncertainty. I read that in my book. It's a scientific uncertainty. They never are certain. They're never going to say that paper mill causes cancer. Right. I'm not going to say it. And that is, it is, but it is in fact in parts of authority and using words that were never accurate to begin with about surety, certainty, data, facts, as if these things are fixed rather than treating these stories as they are as stories, right? So, so we help to lose this disinformation that out or get on the wrong side of it by, by beginning with a frame that was distorted, if that makes sense. So that doesn't answer like, what do you do? Except for me, it has been useful. So I didn't toy with the idea actually. I'm so obsessed with the idea of uncertainty. I actually think our whole society is like, minging at the reason why we're rocking around this crazy boat is because of ambiguity. And so you should just teach your books. I toyed with the idea of writing a book about uncertainty. Me too. But I think that that is located in the book. You need a story. Right. I gave this story as I sort through it, right? Because you think about facts and, and as this somehow fundamentally progressive, and then you think about the way that numbers are used to say that like, bias doesn't exist, right? Like that, you know, racism or sexism doesn't exist because you can't plot bias on a graph or there, you know. So, so questioning and is Bernadette, like what gives you information? Like I don't know how to do it as a teacher because I'm not a teacher. Well, I also want to say that if you could have been in my house this summer, this was the fight that my husband and I had with our 21 year old all summer. He was so down with mainstream media that he refused to read. So he was conflating Reddit with the New York Times. And I mean I was just, my hair was falling out and we went to the mat on it. And many times my hair was what I said and it worked. Which was don't come to me with your BS ideas that you're getting from your podcasts unless you can back it up with some data and then find journalists who you believe in because they inspire you with the way they tell stories. Find them and follow them deeply, follow Rebecca Tracer and follow her deeply so that you at least are not just skimming the surface. They can't come to you with this if they are not doing deep reading. Find the multiple stories. And then the other thing I'm going to say is I'm just going to say it. I write novels. So when you write novels, I'm not about sex trafficking right now. It's got a lot of research, but I can be as biased as I want. Okay. All right, next question. Read novels, read novels is the answer. Don't read nonfiction. No it's true though. I think novels can offer a lot of information about the truth. First of all I'm excited to read the collaboration with you about uncertainty. You're really good. Welcome. I actually have a quick question for each of you. Carrie, I heard a story at NPR a few weeks ago about an increase in climate beef reporters. I've just been thinking about that. So I'm curious about your opinion of that and Rebecca. I'm wondering if you ever just want to write a story about like Beyonce or Neptune. Just for a little break. The reporters, she asked if there's an increase. She heard a story at NPR as an increase in climate reporters. And I don't know. I mean, I don't know if that throwing a bunch of more people at it. I think what needs to happen for sure is each media outlet feels like they need to have a climate a place and not just climate. It needs to be environment. I think climate is a word that everybody's already tired of. But like environment, which includes a lot of stuff that's happening that does includes like Rick, let's be honest. Every story in the newspaper is about climate in some way or another, or whether it's about a candidate or whether it's about Yemen or whether there's something that boils down to the environment and resource extraction or resource. We don't have enough resources. They all involve around some kind of problem with the planet. So I think what I mean, since really I'm just brainstorming here, so I could be wrong. But I think they need to just really kind of each media outlet needs to focus on like put it in a place so that people's minds go to that place. So it's not interspersed with the other news. So it seems like it's or maybe it just needs to be all the news. I don't know. I'm not sure. Because it didn't all the news or maybe we need to put it in one place. Like I think about book reviews. I'm a critic and I'm trying to place a column that just has environmental stories in it and everybody's like, no, we cover them. I'm like, yeah, but not focus so that people go, oh, here's what the environmental books are. You know, it's mixed in so it can become diluted. So there's one answer. But on the other hand, I think all stories are environmental stories. So I'm not sure the answer. Anybody can help. This is the challenge perpetually. Is it better to be siloed where there can be depth and focus? Or is it better to be reflected? I mean, ideally what you have is both. Ideally you have a world in which climate, gender, racial class and all this stuff is woven by skilled writers through all the coverage of the world. And then there are also there's a glorious woven through coverage. But then there are spaces where there's their reserve for in-depth focused writing on those subjects. The Beyonce question. I have a funny story. Just sometimes like not in the moment, it's very self-important. Like as if it really matters when somebody will play. It's genuinely like we'll go under in a bird cage like immediately upon publication. But in the moment where it was like, oh my god, because the stupid race I'm writing about is so important. It's so important, you know? And it's like, you know, and I swear to God, I'm writing about a pop star next. I was like, I'm moving into a new part. She had a book coming out. I wrote a long story about Kate Kirk. I was like, remember Kate Kirk? Let's do that again. And then that night, that same night, from the spouse section, I was like, hey, I wanted to ask you about Paris 18 years ago. It was not great. There was nobody. So I did used to do that regularly. I did. I wrote about, I've written stories about Beyonce. I have written stories about Whitney Houston. I have written stories about Kate Kirk. I have written a lot of pop culture when I first started to write from a feminist perspective. A lot of it was pop culture criticism. I didn't, I have to say, I didn't get into writing about politics until a woman ran a president in 2006. Well, when she was thinking about it. She wrote a scathingly critical story about Hillary Clinton, who I later came to be much more sympathetic for. But it was to be a degree that I ever wrote about politics when I first became a journalist. It was about, it was about Theresa May's Kerry. You can't. Kerry was the daughter's in the lives. It wasn't, it wasn't a candidate's. I mean, you can't close that box once it's opened. That's part of the problem about writing, right? Like I'm saying, when you start to discover all the systemic problems, you can't just, I mean, she could probably write about Beyonce, but it'd be some like take on it that would be, you could not write about her. No, everything would have the, right, the Kate Kirk thing had the like, which just kind of comes full circle to exactly the frame for tonight, right? It's kind of uncanny that you are writing from these subjective cisgender, you know, straight women positions, white women, and you bring that to the work. So you're going to bring your feminism and your anger and your Beyonce or to Kate Kirk. And we want you to. We celebrate that. We hope you do. Yay. Are we going to have time for one more? Can I ask? Yes. Can I ask? I can, yeah. Okay. Now I can ask one. So to hear your perspective of just how broken the journalism system is, I went to journalism school. I used to be a producer at the M.C. News. And you know, there was, let's put it in which, the three anchors. There was Broca, and there was Rathar, and there was Jeffers. And you tuned into one, and generally your preference had to do with whether you liked to hear it the way somebody from Texas spoke, or like, you know, but it was like generally you're getting the same information. And it felt quote unquote reliable. And I'm curious that, you know, clearly the system has no longer in place. There's no sort of like network where you can kind of tune in and you're getting basically the same information. And so, is it, so it feels broken, but my question for you is, is it better? Is it much better? I would say that the idea, it may need to be broken, but it is not. Whole. It was not fixed before. Right. It was the one message, kind of like Broca. Right. And rather, three white guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, clear, clear. And in a short segment, they chose what to cover, right? Right. They chose five stories that they were going to cover. And if you want to know about how nobody ever wanted to talk about abortion and the Hyde Amendment, right? That goes right after Roe, Hyde makes abortion, basically makes Roe moot for poor women. So that this thing right now, 50 years later, where people are like, I can't believe I might have access to abortion. That world began for people who were poor, disproportionately likely to be black, brown, immigrant, rural, young, right? That world has existed for the entirety of Roe, but those were not stories that were ever told on those nightly news programs by those people we were taught to understand as authoritative. So was it more organized? Yes, it was. Did it offer the sheen of authority? Yes, it did. Is that sheen completely shattered? Yes. Is it better or worse? It's different. In some ways it's more honest. Well, you said it, taking the skin off some things a little bit. Breaking those systems down, it takes a while to break a system down. Take like probably a couple centuries. It took that long to build it up. I guess the follow up to that is that then how do we how do we direct our younger people? How do we direct Susan's 21 year old son and your students to a place where this information asked and answered, I think, earlier? Don't you think? I mean, a little bit. I'm not being smart fans, but I think they have to ask the questions. I think keep asking questions. And keep reading deeply. And read novels. That's your ending. I joke, but novels can offer a lot of truths about the human heart that are not necessarily in stories, especially in environmental stories, which I hope to include more of the human heart in stories. You know, we can't remember data, but we remember people. And we remember what people do. And so that can lead to a different kind of truth, you know? Emotional truth, yeah. Thank you. I think is this our time? Is our time nigh? There are lots of, there's time here once we disperse to talk to these two amazing writers. They're not going anywhere for a little while. They're amazing books are for sale over there, so you can support an incredible local bookstore on fellow. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you, Carrie and Rebecca, so very much. Thank you. So great.