Bathsheba: you know, I had one historian actually tell me pretty bluntly that a book that was about the Bering Strait was an absolute professional curse and I should probably change tack immediately because
Cory: No.
Bathsheba: you know, nobody gets up in the morning who doesn't live there thinking about this place. and it was kind of blunt advice, but I it was well meant, I think. and I took that as a a reason to be extremely thoughtful about bringing people into the story because d this is not a book about the American Revolution or something where you can be like, yes, there's a corner of the bookstore and there is a readership that will
Jon: Right.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: probably just go looking for the next book and
Jon: Right.
Bathsheba: They might buy it even if they don't love it past the first chapter. And you you can get tons of buy-in just because if you do write a good book, then they will keep going after it and tell their friends. I knew that that probably wasn't the case for something about the Bering Strait. And that that was really a writerly problem, right? That that meant showing people why this place is fascinating, not just telling them that something interesting happened there.
Cory: I reached out to today's guest back in May to see if she'd be interested in coming on the show to chat with us about a book she'd written. She took a couple weeks to reply and apologized for doing so, which I have to stress is not that unusual, and I am enormously appreciative that authors talk to us at all. But I will hopefully, with the author's blessing, read the part of her response that did jump out to me. Quote, I've been traveling in and out of the Arctic over the past few weeks and am quite behind on email. I texted Jon when I got this, and I said that of all the reasons we have gotten and will get in the future for delayed replies, that has to be one of the coolest. Bathsheba Demouth is the author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, winner of the 2021 American Historical Association's Jon H. Dunning Prize, among many others. It's billed as the first comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic lands and waters that stretch from Russia to Canada. It's part natural history. Big chunks of the book revolve around hunting whales, walruses, and reindeer in the region. It's part geology and the search for and mining of gold and tin. But what's really interesting about Bathsheba's book is her framing of the last hundred and fifty years or so in this part of the world as a race between two encroaching civilizations, the Russian socialists and the American capitalists. And their determination to turn the region's ecological wealth into economic growth and state power. Bathsheba also draws a really sharp contrast between the mindsets of those foreigners and the area's original inhabitants, the Beringians themselves. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that the foreigners in this book are takers and extractors and I did not finish it feeling great about what we've done to such a wondrous part of the world and the people and animals that inhabit it. I love to read before work, and one morning my wife found me on the couch. I had tears welling in my eyes as I read, and she goes, Cory, is it the whales again? And I just nodded. That is a real testament to how powerful Floating Coast is to read, and so I'm very happy to have the author here with us today to take us behind the scenes. Bathsheba Demuth, welcome to the passage.
Bathsheba: Thank you so much, Cory, and and Jon. It's great to meet you.
Cory: so before we get started, you've got a passage selected that you're going to read. Is there anything that people need to know context-wise about what you're about to to to read? Do you just want to jump right in?
Bathsheba: So very briefly, this is from the second section of the book, which moves from the whales that Cory you just mentioned to their sort of partly aquatic, partly landbound kin, the walruses. but it's from the beginning of the chapter, so I think it should be fairly self explanatory.
Cory: Excellent. Well, we're ready well when you
Bathsheba: All right. Walruses are coastline embodied. They cannot eat without the sea, feeding a hundred or more feet underwater, where they root beds of clams and benthic worms from the mud. But they must breed and birth in the air. So the herds slide and wallow between, riding the edge of the sea ice south in autumn, then north through the Bering Strait in summer, sometimes leaving the ice to flop onto patches of sandy earth. Like whales, They concentrate rich seas in their bodies, over a ton for females, more than two tons for males. Walruses are not as fat as bowheads. The mussels they eat take their cut of the sunlight. But beneath inches of furrowed skin, a third of a walrus's body weight is blubber. They do labor no person can, transforming submarine muck into useful tissue and hauling it to shore, drawing a line of energy from the sea onto the solid world.
Jon: Bastba, there there's so much that I like about this this passage. It's very like, you know, for nonfiction, it's very writerly, it's very kind of lyrical. And I like I'm not joking, I could have listened to another three, four minutes without any issue at all. It's really it's really good to to listen to. so we want to ask a bunch of questions about that side of it, but we'll start with an easy one, which is why did you choose this passage when Cory reached out?
Bathsheba: I was trying to think of a passage that indicated the ways in which I, as a someone who's trained as a historian, and this is a is a work of history, so it includes lots of people,
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: as traditional histories do, also wanted to introduce readers to the the non human or the other than human or the more than human or whatever awkward English portmanteau you wanna put together, that really make this part of the world. So vibrant and alive and frankly
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: make it possible for human beings to live there. And it meant introducing a cast of characters that I think in traditional history nonfiction narratives are often sidelined or ignored or not part of the main action. And it's a little challenging because, you know, I can see walrus and I have definitely smelled them, and they leave an impression in the olfactory realms. but I can't interview them. And there's only so far you can get to know Walrus as an individual. All of the tools that nonfiction writers have for human characters, even human characters
Jon: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: that are long dead and you meet in the archives, are a little trickier with animals, even very charismatic
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: ones. So some of it was thinking about a passage where I tried to do some of that work with the the kind of non-human parts of the the Bering Strait. And the other was a place where I was kind of sneaking in this sub-theme of energy. which runs through the book and is in many ways the organizing principle of the book, but trying to tie it not just to a kind of overarching argument about extractive versus less extractive forms of economic relationship, but to the actual ways that these animals and people inhabit this particular place.
Cory: the book, I mean, a as you j just said, there is a lot of it that is about how humans are extracting energy, resources, value from this region outsiders. And one of the things that really struck me as I was reading it was my sense that if you gave this topic, an environmental history of the Bering Strait, to ten other researchers, historians, nonfiction writers, I think the book that they would write would be quite different from yours. Your framing is really unique. This look at communism, at capitalism, and what happens when it kind of comes into a region that just has no previous imagination for these two systems. And so I wonder, was that part of the core of this idea for a book from the very beginning? Did it develop as you were kind of working on the the project? Like ha well Starting way back, where did the idea for this book come from and like what was it? Was that the core of the book?
Bathsheba: I wish I could say yes, because it would make it sound like I had these things really figured out from the beginning, but it was not it was not the case. so this book in a in an immediate sense came out of my doctoral dissertation. and I went to graduate school after a two-year stint in the Peace Corps, where I became really interested in the kind of ways in which the Soviet Union, I was living in a former Soviet satellite, the ways in which the
Jon: Which which one?
Bathsheba: Moldova.
Jon: Okay.
Bathsheba: so it was a place that had been essentially colonized by the Soviet Union after the Second World War. And it reminded me in a lot of ways of the community in the Canadian Arctic that I had lived in between high school and college, which had been recently colonized by the Canadian state. And, you know, these these two very different cultures that otherwise had very little to do with each other. In Moldova, it's an agrarian peasant society and in Canada, I was living with a Gwichʼin community, which is a semi-nomadic, Arctic people. So very different in lots of ways. But in the experience of just sort of recently dealing with a culture coming in from the outside and saying, We need you to change everything about the way that you live right now, they were going through some really similar things. And it made me interested in in what that looked like in the Arctic. So I was like, Well, I guess I should study Russia because they have both a lot of socialist you know, aspirations in the 20th century and they have all of this Arctic territory. and as soon as I started doing the research for the book as a dissertation initially, it became really clear to me that a border between the USN and the USSR made no sense. the place itself that that was such a recent imposition, it didn't even exist in the 20th century until 1948. It was just it I was doing all of this work to try to make it just a Russian story. So that seemed silly. That came before I started doing the full-on research for it. and I spent a year in archives and visiting places in the United States, and then I spent a year doing it in Russia, and I was about halfway through the year in Russia, and I had accumulated vast quantities of archival material and had been reading the accounts of all different kinds of people and talking to different communities and had absolutely no sense of how to organize this thing. It was a hot mess. and then one day I had what I'm hoping is not the only Eureka moment I get in my professional life. I'm waiting for the next one, but
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: I basically realized that the the pattern of European colonization that I was seeing in the archives and hearing people talk about matched in time the distribution of energy in the ecology that I was studying. That starts with whales, it moves to walrus, it heads for the coasts with reindeer.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: I was like, well, there's the structure of this whole thing. That's what actually is making this tick. and I think that other people would have found other ways of doing that comparison and other kind of paths into the story. But part of what was really important to me about that, it's partly a metaphor and it's partly just a material fact, is that it kind of allows the story to get down on the ground with the people and the animals who are implicated in this process and actually kind of think of human beings as as part of those ecologies in a really fundamental sense, in the kind of most basic who gets to take energy from whom, who gives it to whom, those those exchanges that make an ecosystem tick.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: And so that that was the moment where it's like, I could, I could actually hang this project on this concept structurally.
Jon: so you had a moment where basically you had all of this material and these ideas, but no structure with which to organize them. And
Bathsheba: Yes.
Jon: then that just came to you like, here's here's here's one way you can do it. That's super interesting. I think that that that speaks to how important f finding a structure for a book like this really
Cory: Mm-hmm.
Jon: is. to find a way into the story.
Bathsheba: Yeah, and it's made me really pay attention to authors whose structure is also a piece of their their overall point or their argument or their
Jon: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: sort of what it is that they're trying to upro that that feels like the dreamy kind of structure. And at least for me it took being very much in the high grasses for about eighteen months
Jon: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: before before that was clear.
Cory: Had you tried to do any writing up until that point, or were you still waiting for I need some sort of a framework for which I can start writing about everything that I'm collecting and all the research I'm doing?
Bathsheba: I hadn't done a lot of writing. I kept a a kind of process journal or a you know, a field journal. People call them different kinds of things, where I tried to at the end of the days in the archives, come home and kind of think through on paper what it was that I was learning. was a process that I did and still do often resent because at the end of the day, like you I was tired. I didn't want to think about what I'd been thinking about, I didn't want to put it in words. but it was, I think, through that exercise of writing that had n didn't and was never supposed to really see the light of day, but was just kind of keeping track of what I was seeing. That's actually where this this kind of breakthrough moment came from. It's like, the whales keep coming up. I I was sitting in a in an archive in Vladivostok in in Far Eastern Russia and had this epiphany which was great. And then I was like, I need to go to the new Bedford Whaling Museum. Like I need to go to a place that's on the opposite side of the globe. to actually make this story work. there there there was some real reality checks to the moment too.
Jon: I wanna
Cory: That was another question that I that I sort of had was wondering how much research or how much time you'd spent on these subjects prior to the concreteness, the sort of framework of what this book was prior to having that epiphany or that realization, versus once you realized, okay, this is actually what the book that I want to write is going to be about. Then realizing, okay, here are the gaps that I need to fill in. the whaling industry sounds like one of those things. Were there any others where you were like, okay, now that I know what the book is, here's what I need to go and learn more?
Bathsheba: Whaling was the biggest gap because it it also drew the timeline of the book back considerably because it initially it was the the care comparison between the capitalist and socialist systems was and it still is the heart of the book. but the archival sources and other sources were telling me pretty clearly that this is a story that actually started with commercial whaling in the in the eighteen forties. So I also was like, I guess now I have to be a nineteenth century historian too. The twentieth century isn't gonna be enough. so that was the biggest piece. It added a whole chapter to the book. And initially I was really interested in adding a chapter on the kind of nuclear energy story of Chikotka and the Seward Peninsula in Alaska, but the sources were too classified essentially. I there's a an RMBK type nuclear power reactor on the the The Chukchi Peninsula in Russia, which is the same type as Chernobyl, sitting on a hunk of permafrost. I really wanted to kind of write about that and how it was working and its future. And I couldn't even get permission to go to that town. and it wasn't a lot easier to get, you know, the American military r records on, you know, where the ballistic missiles were perhaps are housed in Alaska.
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: so that just sort of had to go by the wayside because I didn't have the material.
Cory: What did you need to do to be able to learn what you needed to know to write the passages around walruses? Was this a lot of reading books that you'd found? Was this a lot of sort of research and digging through the archives? Was this going straight to the source?
Bathsheba: It was both. this book draws a lot on kind of traditional Western science for things like what does a walrus eat? how long do they live, that kind of information. I tried to get as much kind of first hand experience as possible, like go out with was able to go on a couple of walrus hunts on the Russian side of the border, and just sort of see them see them up close. smell them up close, get a sense of they're really noisy also. Like that, you they're they're kind of a full spectrum animal, in a in a sensory way. and and then talk with people. I did more of this in Alaska than Russia just because of time constraints. you know, communities that are really reliant on walrus, so have this incredibly deep knowledge of these animals that does not come from a Western scientific perspective and understands them. both as absolutely critical sources of nutrition, but as family members, as you know, co-constituents of their social and cultural worlds going back very, very far. and so kind of trying to keep that in view alongside this this passage kind of emphasizes a kind of knowing that's probably familiar to a lot of readers of nonfiction or science writing, but to include with as much force and giving it as much validity understandings of people who've actually known walruses for far longer than Western science has.
Jon: I wanna ask about the first sentence of this passage, walruses are coastline embodied. I think it's a surprising sentence in the in the kind of way that good writing can be surprising. It it gives you something that you'd never have thought of before, you never would have put it in in in those words. How do you come up with that that voice or that kind of style when you're working on a book like this?
Bathsheba: That's such a good question. I'm starting a new book because I'm on sabbatical this year and I'm like, how do I do this? I've done it. I guess it's possible.
Jon: Yeah. Yeah.
Cory: Ha ha ha.
Bathsheba: I mean, I think you've probably heard this from other writers. Some of it is just reading and reading people who not necessarily that I want to sound like, but who have a sensibility around word choice that is unexpected. I read a lot of poetry. I am not a poet. I don't know anything about writing poetry. I couldn't analyze a poem to save my life. But
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: I think that poets are extremely good because of the economy of words on a page at picking a noun that you never would have thought of, right? And also doing it in order to get to a higher order of analysis about the thing that they're talking about. And that to me is often the way to if you're thinking about what a walrus is, well it's a walrus that's constantly going back and forth between solid and liquid. That's that's its whole way of conducting its life. And it does this on the sea ice, which itself is something that is going back and forth between a solid and a liquid.
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: well, that's kind of what a coastline does, right? They go back and forth between solid and liquid. And so Thinking of what happens if you abstract what's going on in a verb or a noun a couple of times and then
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: play around with it is something that I've learned from from poets.
Jon: Yeah, that's interesting. I'm I'm I'm glad you said that because as I was reading this passage, I thought there's something like the there's like a poetic quality. I c I it's not a obviously it's not a poem, but there are elements in here that sound like poetry, like herds slide and wallow between. there's the last line, transforming submarine muck into useful tissue, drawing a line of energy from the sea onto the solid world. There's like
Cory: Yeah.
Jon: that that qu that quality to it. that I think you can find a lot in really, really good nonfiction writing. Yeah, and that's interesting to to hear you say that you read a lot of poetry. I'm I'm not surprised having having read this. But when you were writing this book or writing this passage, is that something that you were sort of working towards or did that come naturally when you started?
Bathsheba: I mean, I think like like all writers, a lot of that comes in in drafting and redrafting.
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: it was clear to me early on in working on this project that I knew why this part of the world was interesting. I found it fascinating
Cory: Mm.
Bathsheba: since I moved up there as a teenager. And you know, I had one historian actually tell me pretty bluntly that a book that was about the Bering Strait was an absolute professional curse and I should probably change tack immediately because
Cory: No.
Bathsheba: you know, nobody gets up in the morning who doesn't live there thinking about this place. and it was kind of blunt advice, but I it was well meant, I think. and I took that as a a reason to be extremely thoughtful about bringing people into the story because d this is not a book about the American Revolution or something where you can be like, yes, there's a corner of the bookstore and there is a readership that will
Jon: Right.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: probably just go looking for the next book and
Jon: Right.
Bathsheba: They might buy it even if they don't love it past the first chapter. And you you can get tons of buy-in just because if you do write a good book, then they will keep going after it and tell their friends. I knew that that probably wasn't the case for something about the Bering Strait. And that that was really a writerly problem, right? That that meant showing people why this place is fascinating, not just telling them that something interesting happened there. And I also wrote it for. historians, even as a dissertation phase who were not specialists in this place. That, you know, this is not a place that historians had paid attention to in the past, some anthropologists, but s in even in a scholarly context, I didn't have a lot of readers where I had buy-in, you know, I had
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: a committee member who was writing an amazing book about an apartment building in Moscow. I had a committee member who was, you know, writing an amazing book about the arms trade in early America. They needed some help too, kind of getting getting on board with it. So I think from the beginning I understood that the there needed to be a really strong story voice in
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: order to get people to just stay with it.
Jon: Yeah, yeah.
Cory: That's really interesting. it's accurate that I've never like I don't wake up thinking a lot about the Bering Strait. But it's also one of the things that attracted to me to it is when I came
Bathsheba: Mm-hmm.
Cory: across the book, stumbled across the book. I wasn't looking for a history of the Bering Strait, but when I stumbled across it, I thought to myself, I don't really know anything about the Bering Strait. Like this sounds really interesting to me. It's something that I'm looking for sometimes when I'm looking for a new book is to learn something about a part of the world or a Topic that I really don't know anything about. when you sort of talk about needing that strong voice, that sort of storytelling, did you arrive at that through an enormous amount of labor and revisions and edits? Did it just kind of happen as it's on the page? I mean, walruses are coastline embodied. Was that how that sentence was written the very first time that you drafted this chapter or or this section, or was that something that you really worked over?
Bathsheba: I think some of those sentences, particularly if I've been in a chapter or a section long enough, they actually do just come. And that's very gratifying. and I think some of it came from d having the time. I mean, I've come to actually really think about there are all sorts of problems with the contemporary academy, and that would be a whole other podcast. But I think for nonfiction writers, one of the real luxuries that comes from being a graduate student and being a professor is that you can actually sit with the thinking for a long time. and you are somebody is covering your health insurance while you figure out how you're going to approach a chapter. And that a lot of that pre-thinking or you know, having your brain just rumbling along in the background about what a walrus is and why you're writing a chapter about them and what's important in it makes
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: the actually sitting down and writing part have these moments where you can be like, Yes, I'm I'm on a kind of wavelength with this material where I can actually just write some sentences and I don't have
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: to you know, it's it's not an incredibly belabored thing. sometimes I write too many of those and that's what has to come out in the in the editing,
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: right? Is that you you can get a little precious about this stuff in a good editor
Jon: Sure.
Bathsheba: and just sort of learning your own bad habits to be like, all right, enough, we've talked about the walrus for a long time. We need to like move into some action. But I think that that that kind of luxury of sitting with the the sources and the and the place is something I've I've really come to appreciate as I've talked to more nonfiction writers.
Jon: were you conscious of a reader? Did you have a reader in mind when you were writing this book? Or were you writing it for yourself and hoping people would like it?
Bathsheba: It's interesting. I think I mean the the first draft of it was written as my dissertation. So I technically had my committee in mind. and I
Jon: Right. Right, right.
Bathsheba: always had sort of my committee plus the whole book. Yeah,
Cory: whole book or a sh a shortened version? Wow.
Bathsheba: no actually a much longer version. it it got it got trimmed down.
Jon: Really? 'Cause it's a long book.
Bathsheba: it's a long book, yeah. And dissertations are notoriously overwritten. and mine was.
Jon: Okay.
Bathsheba: partly because there's like lots of stuff you put in footnotes that
Jon: Right.
Bathsheba: no reader actually needs, but when you're first writing it, it's helpful to have all that kind of background material at your fingertips. so in that case I had some very specific readers in mind and I knew who they were and I knew they were gonna read
Jon: Yeah, yeah.
Bathsheba: it. And I always kept some of the people that I'm really close to up north in mind because I didn't want this to be a book that sat entirely in a kind of academic context and I had no idea what its publishing future would be when I was a grad student. But even then there was a sense of you know, being responsible to the story for an audience that was not just scholars. but I think in a lot of ways that as I was drafting the that kind of first round, and I've kind of started to think of this in general, that my first drafts of things often have to be kind of a selfish draft because they're the
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: ones where I'm figuring the thing out. and so sometimes I need to take like five paragraphs to figure out something that in the final version will be a paragraph, maybe, sometimes not even that. and you need some digressions because writing into those digressions is actually where you figure out where the main story is. And some of it's just like, you know, I didn't know what the chronology of walrus hunting in the 20th century was, and
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: there wasn't a book that just like laid that out. So some of it is just putting together some really nuts and bolts, factual chronological. Who is this person kind of material? And that writing, some of it is not particularly exciting to read.
Cory: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: But it's great raw stuff for the second
Jon: Yeah. Right.
Bathsheba: draft where you can actually really think about who is the audience of this book. I know what the story is, how do I get it to them? and then put you know, after that in the in the third draft, or when you have an editor look at it, I think that really can clarify.
Jon: do you have creative writing training? I mean, I'm sure you've done an enormous amount of writing as a graduate student, as an academic, but it's a little maybe it's a little bit different from creative nonfiction writing for a general reader. Do you have training in that or is that something you're sort of self self teaching as you as you go?
Bathsheba: I took two undergraduate classes on nonfiction writing. one was a journalism class and one was just sort of a introduction to creative nonfiction, which have been very helpful.
Jon: Okay. Yeah.
Bathsheba: and that's it. the rest of it is
Jon: And what do you think you learned from those classes?
Bathsheba: I think the journalism class was helpful and remains very helpful in some of the really practical pieces of like how do you do an interview? How do you, you know, how do you interview somebody in a position of power versus somebody who's not? How do you like
Cory: Mm.
Bathsheba: actually some of the ethics, which are I of think often under discussed in history if you're working with people who are still alive? and I think perhaps in nonfiction more generally, that you know, journalism has some pretty strong codes within it of,
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: you know, how how do you approach these things? How do you protect people who need protected while actually representing their stories with care? And how do you really think about the operations of political and economic power in situations
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: where you are not going to make those people happy with what you're writing? so that that class was really helpful. And also just like how do you file a FOIA request and, you know, do public records and those kinds of things. And the creative nonfiction class was we basically read two or three different nonfiction writers every week. And then w we came into it with an idea for what we wanted to write about at the end of the semester, and we rewrote in the voice of the authors we were reading every single week. So it was just a crash course in voice, essentially. And
Jon: Wow.
Cory: that's cool.
Bathsheba: like how do you pay attention? Take a paragraph of your own writing and rewrite it as if you are, you know, Robert Macfarlane. Take a paragraph of your
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: writing and rewrite it as if you are, you know, just sort of pick a and
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: it was a really wide-ranging class in terms of who we were reading. I don't I don't remember everyone, but it's an exercise I actually still do because if you're really
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: like stuck and can't stand the sentences that are coming out on the page. I'm like, well just take this material and go pretend you're someone else. Like and the things you learn
Jon: Yeah, what a great exercise.
Bathsheba: about sentence length and rhythm and repetition or breaking repetition
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: and, you know, I learned a lot from that.
Cory: I'd never heard of that before, but I love that idea. What what would Robert McFarlane do in this situation?
Bathsheba: Right. And it makes you pay attention to things like at a very,
Jon: Yeah, and probably right.
Bathsheba: very close level.
Jon: Yeah, and probably just just thinking about something in the voice of somebody else can really unlock a sentence or a paragraph kinda kinda quickly probably. I I don't know if I've
Bathsheba: Mm-hmm.
Jon: done that intentionally, but I've definitely like I've definitely been stuck in something and then just gone to read s somebody else who wrote something along the same lines of what I'm trying to do and been like, Okay, that's like maybe if I just do two sorts short sentences and one long sentence, that will kind of help me a little bit.
Bathsheba: Yeah. Can I prime the pump a little here? Yeah. Yeah.
Jon: Something like really simple like that. Yeah, yeah.
Cory: Was there anything that you learned from working with your editor at Norton that helped you in subsequent writing or illuminated a part of the writing process that you hadn't ever really kins considered?
Bathsheba: I mean, I think that the thing that I learned that's been in many ways the most exciting is just how much you can trust your readers. I think I expected partly because the peer review process is really helpful, and I value it and it's a useful kind of feedback, but it's deeply adversarial. Like it is set up to be that you write something and you try to Part of the reason your dissertation footnotes are so long, right? You're trying to ward off every possible, you know, kind of form of critique or why didn't you read this or why didn't you cite me or, you know, that kind of stuff. and it's not focused on there are curious people in the world who, if you present them a deeply researched, well-told story, are going to walk with you through that. And they might love it, they might hate it, they might be indifferent to it, they might find parts of it to be exciting and parts of it less so. But there's there's actually kind of a trust there with readers based on their their curiosity and your ability to say, yes, I can help you meet that in some way through my research or my experience or whatever it is. and I actually think that my editor at Norton, Elaine Mason, really helped me see that. because there was never a moment in this in the editing process where she asked me to simplify anything. not once. I
Jon: Hmm. Yeah.
Bathsheba: have had that from academic readers, but she was like, no. Like if you if you give people enough kind of narrative drive that they know how to read this book, if there's two sentences that don't speak directly to them, they're just gonna move on to the third one. And
Jon: Yeah, yeah.
Bathsheba: if you can pick them up there, you're fine. if you lose them on that third sentence, you're probably not fine.
Jon: I'm curious about your writing process. Can you walk us through a afternoon or a morning of writing, sitting down at a at a blank page and seeing what comes comes out? What does that look like?
Bathsheba: So this is something I'm also trying to rediscover as I start sabbatical. Like right now, I'm like, okay, how did I write how did I write the first draft of this book? Because I need to do it again. I've done
Jon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do I do this? I've done this before. How do I do it again?
Cory: But it's been a while.
Bathsheba: it before. but it's been a minute. so for me, and this is this is gonna sound like probably the most cliched version of a writer's routine, it requires
Jon: We're ready for it.
Bathsheba: quite a bit of coffee.
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: and I write best on endorphins. So this book was entirely written running with my dog and best friend in the California Redwoods. Like we go run every single morning and we lived in fear as we were finishing our dissertations of an injury. We're like the this whole
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: edifice hangs on a daily
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: dose of endorphin. And if any of us break our ankles, we're just we're in so much trouble. it still starts for me with some form of usually going for a run, be I think being outside and you know. looking at a horizon, not a screen, and it's often where whatever I was stuck on yesterday gets fixed and I have to stop and like frantically text it into my phone and hope I leave Yes. Yep. And I'm like,
Jon: On the on the run you'll s you'll solve a problem. Gotcha. Okay.
Bathsheba: I'll forget it if I don't write it down. So you have to stop the
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: run and, you know, record it in some form and then keep going.
Jon: Yeah, yeah.
Bathsheba: and then I usually can write, you know, or sometimes I start by rewriting. So I'll I'll leave myself like a really half assed paragraph at the end of the day the previous day so that I know that where I start the next day is fixing because that's g kind of gets you back in the thinking and you're like you're doing the fun part of like finding the word
Jon: Yeah.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: coastline as opposed to, you know, like really having to produce something new.
Jon: Right. Right.
Bathsheba: and then I have to like take a break for lunch and walk around. I'm a really pacey writer, and I used
Jon: Okay.
Bathsheba: to be like, why can't you just sit down? And I was like, well probably 'cause you do all your thinking when you're walking. So you know, I'll get up and unload the dishwasher or whatever and that will fix whatever I'm stuck on and then you go back
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: and and write. and then writing my dissertation, we would usually, you know, take my dog for a long walk in the afternoon and then have a glass of wine, which would like quiet our brains down enough that we could write for another ninety minutes. So it was a deeply medicated it was like you start with a coffee, you end with a glass of wine.
Jon: Uh-huh.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: It helped to be living in Northern California,
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: and kind of work in between and And be okay with days where, you know, some days I write five hundred words and sometimes I write five and I I'm not a good person if I'm like I have a daily word count. I think
Jon: Okay.
Bathsheba: for some people that's
Cory: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: deeply motivating. I find it produces words that I wish I hadn't written,
Jon: Right. Right. Just to meet the word count.
Bathsheba: Yeah.
Cory: Yeah. You're not the first person who has talked about writing while you're in the middle of running. And you're also not the first writer that we've had on who's talked about this idea of leaving something at the end of one writing session to sort
Bathsheba: Mm-hmm.
Cory: of jump start the next one. so that's really interesting to see that overlap.
Bathsheba: Yeah, I think that like give yourself I've heard people talk about it as like park downhill or you know, there's like a bunch of different metaphors for like you know.
Cory: Hm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I I ha I hadn't heard it described that way.
Jon: I like that.
Cory: Bathsheba, one question that we ask every author that's on the show, if you could hear any author talk about their process, in the same way that we've been asking you, dead or alive, dud doesn't matter, who would you most want to hear from and why?
Bathsheba: that's such a good question. I would love to hear Barry Lopez talk about his process. I read Arctic Dreams quite a bit while I was writing Floating Coast. and I think there's still something in his kind of ethical vision that I find really compelling. And also his use of the first person, which is both there and you have a a kind of an understanding or a sense that you understand this person you're reading, but he's also very not present. It's kind
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: of an interesting sense of both. intimacy but not disclosure, which I find really interesting and leaves a lot of space for his interlocutors that I appreciate. I think in the kind of more contemporary writers, there's a a poet named Joan Naviyuk Kane. she wrote the the poem that inter introduces the book. she's somebody that I I her thoughts on craft I would be really interested in.
Cory: We haven't had a pod on yet, Jon.
Jon: Awesome. I know. We've we've we've got to get one.
Cory: Should we do some rapid fire
Jon: I love
Cory: and and close things
Bathsheba: Yeah.
Cory: up?
Jon: Yeah. so Bathsheba, we're gonna ask you, I think we have eight or nine questions maybe. Yeah, these are just rapid fire. So give us kind of the first thing you think of. These don't have to be long,
Bathsheba: Okay.
Jon: long answers. I'm usually the one interrupting with long long
Cory: Yeah.
Jon: answers anyway. So what's one aspect of writing you think you're particularly good at?
Bathsheba: Verb use.
Jon: Verb use. Can you give an example of what you mean?
Bathsheba: I think it particularly thinking about writing about animals, like using verbs that people don't expect
Jon: Yeah.
Cory: How about one aspect of writing you think you're bad at?
Bathsheba: I think I go on too long. And I bury the lead. I mean, I probably every editor that I've worked with would tell you that I'm really good at burying the lead.
Jon: what's harder to I think we already know the answer to this, but I'll ask it anyway. What's harder to write the first line or the last line?
Bathsheba: The first.
Cory: What's the first thing you edit out of a draft?
Bathsheba: usually way too much information. I overs you know, kind of overload and then have to draw it back once I know what's really important.
Jon: what's a word you always misspell and auto correct saves you?
Bathsheba: Bureaucrat. I have typed it
Jon: It's so hard.
Cory: yeah.
Bathsheba: once successfully and it was a banner day.
Jon: Ha ha ha.
Bathsheba: and it's never happened again.
Jon: When bureaucrat comes up, I just smash the keys in roughly the area I need
Bathsheba: Yeah.
Jon: and it'll just get me close enough. It's too hard.
Bathsheba: It it yik it's too hard. Right, it's like what is this?
Cory: Sometimes I don't even get close enough and yeah, word is is just
Jon: It doesn't know.
Cory: like I don't know what you were going for there.
Bathsheba: This was not a good word to not be able to spell when writing about the Soviet Union, I can
Jon: Yeah,
Bathsheba: tell you, but
Jon: yeah, yeah.
Cory: Bathsheba, was Floating Coast always the title of this book? And if not, I'd love to hear any other contenders that you were thinking about.
Bathsheba: It had a terrible title when it went out for sale, but I don't
Cory: okay.
Bathsheba: it was not the original title. This was actually the original title of the third chapter. and it was
Cory: yeah, yeah.
Bathsheba: it was actually somebody on Norton's editorial board that said, I think this should be the title of the book.
Jon: Wow.
Bathsheba: And I agreed. but I find titling books to be really difficult.
Jon: Did you know that the title you had was not really working or did you think it was fine? okay. Okay. Okay.
Bathsheba: I thought it was terrible. I thought it was an a hundred percent a placeholder, but I didn't have any better ideas. It's funny 'cause I actually liked the chapter titles, so it's probably not surprising that one of them ended up being the book title.
Jon: And did the did the sub was there a subtitle and did it change with Norton as well?
Bathsheba: Yeah, I can't the subtitle on the dissertation was like it was extremely long and had to have the dates in there and all sorts of stuff.
Jon: Yeah.
Cory: Right.
Bathsheba: and so y they did come up with the with the subtitle.
Jon: Okay. Yeah. 'Cause I think with nonfiction books, subtitles do a do a lot of the work. You need a good
Cory: Yeah.
Jon: Cory and I are both former book editors and you spend hours trying to come up with a good subtitle that like has all the words you need, but like sounds good and t tells people what the book is about. It's really tough.
Bathsheba: Right. Yes.
Cory: Well it's like there's a there's a formula to it. It's like the poetry of the actual title and then the subtitle has to do all the
Jon: Right. Right.
Cory: heavy lifting of like immediately telling you yes.
Bathsheba: Right. Like here's your search engine optimization in a phrase.
Jon: Exactly. Kind of, yeah. okay, do you write in Google Docs, Microsoft Word, longhand? What do you use? Word?
Bathsheba: Microsoft Word.
Cory: Is that just
Bathsheba: at least as long as I can turn the AI off.
Jon: Yeah. Yeah.
Cory: Is that just by default? Is there did you try other programs and that's just the one you find easiest?
Bathsheba: I tried Scrivener,
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: which I know many writers swear by, and I was so trained to and at this point just think with footnotes and it doesn't footnote very well. It doesn't export them very well.
Jon: okay.
Bathsheba: so it it that's that hasn't worked for me. And Google d I just need a I need to be able to download drafts onto a hard drive. And so Google Docs has never felt very secure. And at this point I consider it to be like I wouldn't really don't want my writing touching a Google Doc if I can if I can help it because of the various security issues with their with their AI built in. But and I've worried about what's gonna happen if Microsoft kind of goes in that direction. typewriter perhaps
Jon: Yeah.
Cory: Yeah. when Yeah.
Jon: Okay.
Cory: We haven't had somebody say, I use a typewriter one of these days. When you're writing, do you have music, podcasts, TV on in the background? Do you have to write with silence?
Bathsheba: I usually have music on, and it it changes all the time. I feel like sometimes I'll get stuck on an album. I did a bunch of shorter writing projects last summer that were entirely fueled by the Sinners soundtrack. Like that was just constantly on.
Cory: okay, yeah. Cool soundtrack.
Jon: Okay.
Bathsheba: I finished the first draft of Floating Coast listening exclusively to the White album. on like endless repeat. I mean, so it it has no rhyme or reason. I can't I'm just like, okay, this is
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: what I need to listen to and then I listen to it and
Jon: Whatever works.
Cory: It's a good thing that you didn't tell us that at the beginning of the show 'cause this would have just turned into a Beatles episode.
Jon: Yeah, yeah,
Bathsheba: Okay.
Jon: yeah. right, last last question. What's your go to procrastination?
Bathsheba: Cooking. Yeah,
Jon: Cooking.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: my husband can tell when I'm really stuck because the dinners get more elaborate.
Cory: Smells really good in there, seems like you're making progress.
Bathsheba: Yeah. And if it's really not close to a meal time, there's always a closet that needs some sort of dramatic so also
Jon: Right.
Bathsheba: my husband knows like if he can't find anything in the house, it's because I was like, Well, I'm I can't write, so I'm gonna go rearrange the basement.
Jon: Yeah.
Cory: Yeah.
Jon: well, that's the all the questions we have. thank you so much for coming on the show. It was super fun to to talk to you.
Bathsheba: Yeah, likewise. These were great questions and I I love the I love the idea of this podcast 'cause I agree. I think we're not asked enough these funny things that we do.
Cory: No.
Bathsheba: you know, nobody gets up in the morning who doesn't live there thinking about this place. and it was kind of blunt advice, but I it was well meant, I think. and I took that as a a reason to be extremely thoughtful about bringing people into the story because d this is not a book about the American Revolution or something where you can be like, yes, there's a corner of the bookstore and there is a readership that will
Jon: Right.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: probably just go looking for the next book and
Jon: Right.
Bathsheba: They might buy it even if they don't love it past the first chapter. And you you can get tons of buy-in just because if you do write a good book, then they will keep going after it and tell their friends. I knew that that probably wasn't the case for something about the Bering Strait. And that that was really a writerly problem, right? That that meant showing people why this place is fascinating, not just telling them that something interesting happened there.
Cory: I reached out to today's guest back in May to see if she'd be interested in coming on the show to chat with us about a book she'd written. She took a couple weeks to reply and apologized for doing so, which I have to stress is not that unusual, and I am enormously appreciative that authors talk to us at all. But I will hopefully, with the author's blessing, read the part of her response that did jump out to me. Quote, I've been traveling in and out of the Arctic over the past few weeks and am quite behind on email. I texted Jon when I got this, and I said that of all the reasons we have gotten and will get in the future for delayed replies, that has to be one of the coolest. Bathsheba Demouth is the author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, winner of the 2021 American Historical Association's Jon H. Dunning Prize, among many others. It's billed as the first comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic lands and waters that stretch from Russia to Canada. It's part natural history. Big chunks of the book revolve around hunting whales, walruses, and reindeer in the region. It's part geology and the search for and mining of gold and tin. But what's really interesting about Bathsheba's book is her framing of the last hundred and fifty years or so in this part of the world as a race between two encroaching civilizations, the Russian socialists and the American capitalists. And their determination to turn the region's ecological wealth into economic growth and state power. Bathsheba also draws a really sharp contrast between the mindsets of those foreigners and the area's original inhabitants, the Beringians themselves. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that the foreigners in this book are takers and extractors and I did not finish it feeling great about what we've done to such a wondrous part of the world and the people and animals that inhabit it. I love to read before work, and one morning my wife found me on the couch. I had tears welling in my eyes as I read, and she goes, Cory, is it the whales again? And I just nodded. That is a real testament to how powerful Floating Coast is to read, and so I'm very happy to have the author here with us today to take us behind the scenes. Bathsheba Demuth, welcome to the passage.
Bathsheba: Thank you so much, Cory, and and Jon. It's great to meet you.
Cory: so before we get started, you've got a passage selected that you're going to read. Is there anything that people need to know context-wise about what you're about to to to read? Do you just want to jump right in?
Bathsheba: So very briefly, this is from the second section of the book, which moves from the whales that Cory you just mentioned to their sort of partly aquatic, partly landbound kin, the walruses. but it's from the beginning of the chapter, so I think it should be fairly self explanatory.
Cory: Excellent. Well, we're ready well when you
Bathsheba: All right. Walruses are coastline embodied. They cannot eat without the sea, feeding a hundred or more feet underwater, where they root beds of clams and benthic worms from the mud. But they must breed and birth in the air. So the herds slide and wallow between, riding the edge of the sea ice south in autumn, then north through the Bering Strait in summer, sometimes leaving the ice to flop onto patches of sandy earth. Like whales, They concentrate rich seas in their bodies, over a ton for females, more than two tons for males. Walruses are not as fat as bowheads. The mussels they eat take their cut of the sunlight. But beneath inches of furrowed skin, a third of a walrus's body weight is blubber. They do labor no person can, transforming submarine muck into useful tissue and hauling it to shore, drawing a line of energy from the sea onto the solid world.
Jon: Bastba, there there's so much that I like about this this passage. It's very like, you know, for nonfiction, it's very writerly, it's very kind of lyrical. And I like I'm not joking, I could have listened to another three, four minutes without any issue at all. It's really it's really good to to listen to. so we want to ask a bunch of questions about that side of it, but we'll start with an easy one, which is why did you choose this passage when Cory reached out?
Bathsheba: I was trying to think of a passage that indicated the ways in which I, as a someone who's trained as a historian, and this is a is a work of history, so it includes lots of people,
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: as traditional histories do, also wanted to introduce readers to the the non human or the other than human or the more than human or whatever awkward English portmanteau you wanna put together, that really make this part of the world. So vibrant and alive and frankly
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: make it possible for human beings to live there. And it meant introducing a cast of characters that I think in traditional history nonfiction narratives are often sidelined or ignored or not part of the main action. And it's a little challenging because, you know, I can see walrus and I have definitely smelled them, and they leave an impression in the olfactory realms. but I can't interview them. And there's only so far you can get to know Walrus as an individual. All of the tools that nonfiction writers have for human characters, even human characters
Jon: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: that are long dead and you meet in the archives, are a little trickier with animals, even very charismatic
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: ones. So some of it was thinking about a passage where I tried to do some of that work with the the kind of non-human parts of the the Bering Strait. And the other was a place where I was kind of sneaking in this sub-theme of energy. which runs through the book and is in many ways the organizing principle of the book, but trying to tie it not just to a kind of overarching argument about extractive versus less extractive forms of economic relationship, but to the actual ways that these animals and people inhabit this particular place.
Cory: the book, I mean, a as you j just said, there is a lot of it that is about how humans are extracting energy, resources, value from this region outsiders. And one of the things that really struck me as I was reading it was my sense that if you gave this topic, an environmental history of the Bering Strait, to ten other researchers, historians, nonfiction writers, I think the book that they would write would be quite different from yours. Your framing is really unique. This look at communism, at capitalism, and what happens when it kind of comes into a region that just has no previous imagination for these two systems. And so I wonder, was that part of the core of this idea for a book from the very beginning? Did it develop as you were kind of working on the the project? Like ha well Starting way back, where did the idea for this book come from and like what was it? Was that the core of the book?
Bathsheba: I wish I could say yes, because it would make it sound like I had these things really figured out from the beginning, but it was not it was not the case. so this book in a in an immediate sense came out of my doctoral dissertation. and I went to graduate school after a two-year stint in the Peace Corps, where I became really interested in the kind of ways in which the Soviet Union, I was living in a former Soviet satellite, the ways in which the
Jon: Which which one?
Bathsheba: Moldova.
Jon: Okay.
Bathsheba: so it was a place that had been essentially colonized by the Soviet Union after the Second World War. And it reminded me in a lot of ways of the community in the Canadian Arctic that I had lived in between high school and college, which had been recently colonized by the Canadian state. And, you know, these these two very different cultures that otherwise had very little to do with each other. In Moldova, it's an agrarian peasant society and in Canada, I was living with a Gwichʼin community, which is a semi-nomadic, Arctic people. So very different in lots of ways. But in the experience of just sort of recently dealing with a culture coming in from the outside and saying, We need you to change everything about the way that you live right now, they were going through some really similar things. And it made me interested in in what that looked like in the Arctic. So I was like, Well, I guess I should study Russia because they have both a lot of socialist you know, aspirations in the 20th century and they have all of this Arctic territory. and as soon as I started doing the research for the book as a dissertation initially, it became really clear to me that a border between the USN and the USSR made no sense. the place itself that that was such a recent imposition, it didn't even exist in the 20th century until 1948. It was just it I was doing all of this work to try to make it just a Russian story. So that seemed silly. That came before I started doing the full-on research for it. and I spent a year in archives and visiting places in the United States, and then I spent a year doing it in Russia, and I was about halfway through the year in Russia, and I had accumulated vast quantities of archival material and had been reading the accounts of all different kinds of people and talking to different communities and had absolutely no sense of how to organize this thing. It was a hot mess. and then one day I had what I'm hoping is not the only Eureka moment I get in my professional life. I'm waiting for the next one, but
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: I basically realized that the the pattern of European colonization that I was seeing in the archives and hearing people talk about matched in time the distribution of energy in the ecology that I was studying. That starts with whales, it moves to walrus, it heads for the coasts with reindeer.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: I was like, well, there's the structure of this whole thing. That's what actually is making this tick. and I think that other people would have found other ways of doing that comparison and other kind of paths into the story. But part of what was really important to me about that, it's partly a metaphor and it's partly just a material fact, is that it kind of allows the story to get down on the ground with the people and the animals who are implicated in this process and actually kind of think of human beings as as part of those ecologies in a really fundamental sense, in the kind of most basic who gets to take energy from whom, who gives it to whom, those those exchanges that make an ecosystem tick.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: And so that that was the moment where it's like, I could, I could actually hang this project on this concept structurally.
Jon: so you had a moment where basically you had all of this material and these ideas, but no structure with which to organize them. And
Bathsheba: Yes.
Jon: then that just came to you like, here's here's here's one way you can do it. That's super interesting. I think that that that speaks to how important f finding a structure for a book like this really
Cory: Mm-hmm.
Jon: is. to find a way into the story.
Bathsheba: Yeah, and it's made me really pay attention to authors whose structure is also a piece of their their overall point or their argument or their
Jon: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: sort of what it is that they're trying to upro that that feels like the dreamy kind of structure. And at least for me it took being very much in the high grasses for about eighteen months
Jon: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: before before that was clear.
Cory: Had you tried to do any writing up until that point, or were you still waiting for I need some sort of a framework for which I can start writing about everything that I'm collecting and all the research I'm doing?
Bathsheba: I hadn't done a lot of writing. I kept a a kind of process journal or a you know, a field journal. People call them different kinds of things, where I tried to at the end of the days in the archives, come home and kind of think through on paper what it was that I was learning. was a process that I did and still do often resent because at the end of the day, like you I was tired. I didn't want to think about what I'd been thinking about, I didn't want to put it in words. but it was, I think, through that exercise of writing that had n didn't and was never supposed to really see the light of day, but was just kind of keeping track of what I was seeing. That's actually where this this kind of breakthrough moment came from. It's like, the whales keep coming up. I I was sitting in a in an archive in Vladivostok in in Far Eastern Russia and had this epiphany which was great. And then I was like, I need to go to the new Bedford Whaling Museum. Like I need to go to a place that's on the opposite side of the globe. to actually make this story work. there there there was some real reality checks to the moment too.
Jon: I wanna
Cory: That was another question that I that I sort of had was wondering how much research or how much time you'd spent on these subjects prior to the concreteness, the sort of framework of what this book was prior to having that epiphany or that realization, versus once you realized, okay, this is actually what the book that I want to write is going to be about. Then realizing, okay, here are the gaps that I need to fill in. the whaling industry sounds like one of those things. Were there any others where you were like, okay, now that I know what the book is, here's what I need to go and learn more?
Bathsheba: Whaling was the biggest gap because it it also drew the timeline of the book back considerably because it initially it was the the care comparison between the capitalist and socialist systems was and it still is the heart of the book. but the archival sources and other sources were telling me pretty clearly that this is a story that actually started with commercial whaling in the in the eighteen forties. So I also was like, I guess now I have to be a nineteenth century historian too. The twentieth century isn't gonna be enough. so that was the biggest piece. It added a whole chapter to the book. And initially I was really interested in adding a chapter on the kind of nuclear energy story of Chikotka and the Seward Peninsula in Alaska, but the sources were too classified essentially. I there's a an RMBK type nuclear power reactor on the the The Chukchi Peninsula in Russia, which is the same type as Chernobyl, sitting on a hunk of permafrost. I really wanted to kind of write about that and how it was working and its future. And I couldn't even get permission to go to that town. and it wasn't a lot easier to get, you know, the American military r records on, you know, where the ballistic missiles were perhaps are housed in Alaska.
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: so that just sort of had to go by the wayside because I didn't have the material.
Cory: What did you need to do to be able to learn what you needed to know to write the passages around walruses? Was this a lot of reading books that you'd found? Was this a lot of sort of research and digging through the archives? Was this going straight to the source?
Bathsheba: It was both. this book draws a lot on kind of traditional Western science for things like what does a walrus eat? how long do they live, that kind of information. I tried to get as much kind of first hand experience as possible, like go out with was able to go on a couple of walrus hunts on the Russian side of the border, and just sort of see them see them up close. smell them up close, get a sense of they're really noisy also. Like that, you they're they're kind of a full spectrum animal, in a in a sensory way. and and then talk with people. I did more of this in Alaska than Russia just because of time constraints. you know, communities that are really reliant on walrus, so have this incredibly deep knowledge of these animals that does not come from a Western scientific perspective and understands them. both as absolutely critical sources of nutrition, but as family members, as you know, co-constituents of their social and cultural worlds going back very, very far. and so kind of trying to keep that in view alongside this this passage kind of emphasizes a kind of knowing that's probably familiar to a lot of readers of nonfiction or science writing, but to include with as much force and giving it as much validity understandings of people who've actually known walruses for far longer than Western science has.
Jon: I wanna ask about the first sentence of this passage, walruses are coastline embodied. I think it's a surprising sentence in the in the kind of way that good writing can be surprising. It it gives you something that you'd never have thought of before, you never would have put it in in in those words. How do you come up with that that voice or that kind of style when you're working on a book like this?
Bathsheba: That's such a good question. I'm starting a new book because I'm on sabbatical this year and I'm like, how do I do this? I've done it. I guess it's possible.
Jon: Yeah. Yeah.
Cory: Ha ha ha.
Bathsheba: I mean, I think you've probably heard this from other writers. Some of it is just reading and reading people who not necessarily that I want to sound like, but who have a sensibility around word choice that is unexpected. I read a lot of poetry. I am not a poet. I don't know anything about writing poetry. I couldn't analyze a poem to save my life. But
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: I think that poets are extremely good because of the economy of words on a page at picking a noun that you never would have thought of, right? And also doing it in order to get to a higher order of analysis about the thing that they're talking about. And that to me is often the way to if you're thinking about what a walrus is, well it's a walrus that's constantly going back and forth between solid and liquid. That's that's its whole way of conducting its life. And it does this on the sea ice, which itself is something that is going back and forth between a solid and a liquid.
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: well, that's kind of what a coastline does, right? They go back and forth between solid and liquid. And so Thinking of what happens if you abstract what's going on in a verb or a noun a couple of times and then
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: play around with it is something that I've learned from from poets.
Jon: Yeah, that's interesting. I'm I'm I'm glad you said that because as I was reading this passage, I thought there's something like the there's like a poetic quality. I c I it's not a obviously it's not a poem, but there are elements in here that sound like poetry, like herds slide and wallow between. there's the last line, transforming submarine muck into useful tissue, drawing a line of energy from the sea onto the solid world. There's like
Cory: Yeah.
Jon: that that qu that quality to it. that I think you can find a lot in really, really good nonfiction writing. Yeah, and that's interesting to to hear you say that you read a lot of poetry. I'm I'm not surprised having having read this. But when you were writing this book or writing this passage, is that something that you were sort of working towards or did that come naturally when you started?
Bathsheba: I mean, I think like like all writers, a lot of that comes in in drafting and redrafting.
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: it was clear to me early on in working on this project that I knew why this part of the world was interesting. I found it fascinating
Cory: Mm.
Bathsheba: since I moved up there as a teenager. And you know, I had one historian actually tell me pretty bluntly that a book that was about the Bering Strait was an absolute professional curse and I should probably change tack immediately because
Cory: No.
Bathsheba: you know, nobody gets up in the morning who doesn't live there thinking about this place. and it was kind of blunt advice, but I it was well meant, I think. and I took that as a a reason to be extremely thoughtful about bringing people into the story because d this is not a book about the American Revolution or something where you can be like, yes, there's a corner of the bookstore and there is a readership that will
Jon: Right.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: probably just go looking for the next book and
Jon: Right.
Bathsheba: They might buy it even if they don't love it past the first chapter. And you you can get tons of buy-in just because if you do write a good book, then they will keep going after it and tell their friends. I knew that that probably wasn't the case for something about the Bering Strait. And that that was really a writerly problem, right? That that meant showing people why this place is fascinating, not just telling them that something interesting happened there. And I also wrote it for. historians, even as a dissertation phase who were not specialists in this place. That, you know, this is not a place that historians had paid attention to in the past, some anthropologists, but s in even in a scholarly context, I didn't have a lot of readers where I had buy-in, you know, I had
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: a committee member who was writing an amazing book about an apartment building in Moscow. I had a committee member who was, you know, writing an amazing book about the arms trade in early America. They needed some help too, kind of getting getting on board with it. So I think from the beginning I understood that the there needed to be a really strong story voice in
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: order to get people to just stay with it.
Jon: Yeah, yeah.
Cory: That's really interesting. it's accurate that I've never like I don't wake up thinking a lot about the Bering Strait. But it's also one of the things that attracted to me to it is when I came
Bathsheba: Mm-hmm.
Cory: across the book, stumbled across the book. I wasn't looking for a history of the Bering Strait, but when I stumbled across it, I thought to myself, I don't really know anything about the Bering Strait. Like this sounds really interesting to me. It's something that I'm looking for sometimes when I'm looking for a new book is to learn something about a part of the world or a Topic that I really don't know anything about. when you sort of talk about needing that strong voice, that sort of storytelling, did you arrive at that through an enormous amount of labor and revisions and edits? Did it just kind of happen as it's on the page? I mean, walruses are coastline embodied. Was that how that sentence was written the very first time that you drafted this chapter or or this section, or was that something that you really worked over?
Bathsheba: I think some of those sentences, particularly if I've been in a chapter or a section long enough, they actually do just come. And that's very gratifying. and I think some of it came from d having the time. I mean, I've come to actually really think about there are all sorts of problems with the contemporary academy, and that would be a whole other podcast. But I think for nonfiction writers, one of the real luxuries that comes from being a graduate student and being a professor is that you can actually sit with the thinking for a long time. and you are somebody is covering your health insurance while you figure out how you're going to approach a chapter. And that a lot of that pre-thinking or you know, having your brain just rumbling along in the background about what a walrus is and why you're writing a chapter about them and what's important in it makes
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: the actually sitting down and writing part have these moments where you can be like, Yes, I'm I'm on a kind of wavelength with this material where I can actually just write some sentences and I don't have
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: to you know, it's it's not an incredibly belabored thing. sometimes I write too many of those and that's what has to come out in the in the editing,
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: right? Is that you you can get a little precious about this stuff in a good editor
Jon: Sure.
Bathsheba: and just sort of learning your own bad habits to be like, all right, enough, we've talked about the walrus for a long time. We need to like move into some action. But I think that that that kind of luxury of sitting with the the sources and the and the place is something I've I've really come to appreciate as I've talked to more nonfiction writers.
Jon: were you conscious of a reader? Did you have a reader in mind when you were writing this book? Or were you writing it for yourself and hoping people would like it?
Bathsheba: It's interesting. I think I mean the the first draft of it was written as my dissertation. So I technically had my committee in mind. and I
Jon: Right. Right, right.
Bathsheba: always had sort of my committee plus the whole book. Yeah,
Cory: whole book or a sh a shortened version? Wow.
Bathsheba: no actually a much longer version. it it got it got trimmed down.
Jon: Really? 'Cause it's a long book.
Bathsheba: it's a long book, yeah. And dissertations are notoriously overwritten. and mine was.
Jon: Okay.
Bathsheba: partly because there's like lots of stuff you put in footnotes that
Jon: Right.
Bathsheba: no reader actually needs, but when you're first writing it, it's helpful to have all that kind of background material at your fingertips. so in that case I had some very specific readers in mind and I knew who they were and I knew they were gonna read
Jon: Yeah, yeah.
Bathsheba: it. And I always kept some of the people that I'm really close to up north in mind because I didn't want this to be a book that sat entirely in a kind of academic context and I had no idea what its publishing future would be when I was a grad student. But even then there was a sense of you know, being responsible to the story for an audience that was not just scholars. but I think in a lot of ways that as I was drafting the that kind of first round, and I've kind of started to think of this in general, that my first drafts of things often have to be kind of a selfish draft because they're the
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: ones where I'm figuring the thing out. and so sometimes I need to take like five paragraphs to figure out something that in the final version will be a paragraph, maybe, sometimes not even that. and you need some digressions because writing into those digressions is actually where you figure out where the main story is. And some of it's just like, you know, I didn't know what the chronology of walrus hunting in the 20th century was, and
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: there wasn't a book that just like laid that out. So some of it is just putting together some really nuts and bolts, factual chronological. Who is this person kind of material? And that writing, some of it is not particularly exciting to read.
Cory: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: But it's great raw stuff for the second
Jon: Yeah. Right.
Bathsheba: draft where you can actually really think about who is the audience of this book. I know what the story is, how do I get it to them? and then put you know, after that in the in the third draft, or when you have an editor look at it, I think that really can clarify.
Jon: do you have creative writing training? I mean, I'm sure you've done an enormous amount of writing as a graduate student, as an academic, but it's a little maybe it's a little bit different from creative nonfiction writing for a general reader. Do you have training in that or is that something you're sort of self self teaching as you as you go?
Bathsheba: I took two undergraduate classes on nonfiction writing. one was a journalism class and one was just sort of a introduction to creative nonfiction, which have been very helpful.
Jon: Okay. Yeah.
Bathsheba: and that's it. the rest of it is
Jon: And what do you think you learned from those classes?
Bathsheba: I think the journalism class was helpful and remains very helpful in some of the really practical pieces of like how do you do an interview? How do you, you know, how do you interview somebody in a position of power versus somebody who's not? How do you like
Cory: Mm.
Bathsheba: actually some of the ethics, which are I of think often under discussed in history if you're working with people who are still alive? and I think perhaps in nonfiction more generally, that you know, journalism has some pretty strong codes within it of,
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: you know, how how do you approach these things? How do you protect people who need protected while actually representing their stories with care? And how do you really think about the operations of political and economic power in situations
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: where you are not going to make those people happy with what you're writing? so that that class was really helpful. And also just like how do you file a FOIA request and, you know, do public records and those kinds of things. And the creative nonfiction class was we basically read two or three different nonfiction writers every week. And then w we came into it with an idea for what we wanted to write about at the end of the semester, and we rewrote in the voice of the authors we were reading every single week. So it was just a crash course in voice, essentially. And
Jon: Wow.
Cory: that's cool.
Bathsheba: like how do you pay attention? Take a paragraph of your own writing and rewrite it as if you are, you know, Robert Macfarlane. Take a paragraph of your
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: writing and rewrite it as if you are, you know, just sort of pick a and
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: it was a really wide-ranging class in terms of who we were reading. I don't I don't remember everyone, but it's an exercise I actually still do because if you're really
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: like stuck and can't stand the sentences that are coming out on the page. I'm like, well just take this material and go pretend you're someone else. Like and the things you learn
Jon: Yeah, what a great exercise.
Bathsheba: about sentence length and rhythm and repetition or breaking repetition
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: and, you know, I learned a lot from that.
Cory: I'd never heard of that before, but I love that idea. What what would Robert McFarlane do in this situation?
Bathsheba: Right. And it makes you pay attention to things like at a very,
Jon: Yeah, and probably right.
Bathsheba: very close level.
Jon: Yeah, and probably just just thinking about something in the voice of somebody else can really unlock a sentence or a paragraph kinda kinda quickly probably. I I don't know if I've
Bathsheba: Mm-hmm.
Jon: done that intentionally, but I've definitely like I've definitely been stuck in something and then just gone to read s somebody else who wrote something along the same lines of what I'm trying to do and been like, Okay, that's like maybe if I just do two sorts short sentences and one long sentence, that will kind of help me a little bit.
Bathsheba: Yeah. Can I prime the pump a little here? Yeah. Yeah.
Jon: Something like really simple like that. Yeah, yeah.
Cory: Was there anything that you learned from working with your editor at Norton that helped you in subsequent writing or illuminated a part of the writing process that you hadn't ever really kins considered?
Bathsheba: I mean, I think that the thing that I learned that's been in many ways the most exciting is just how much you can trust your readers. I think I expected partly because the peer review process is really helpful, and I value it and it's a useful kind of feedback, but it's deeply adversarial. Like it is set up to be that you write something and you try to Part of the reason your dissertation footnotes are so long, right? You're trying to ward off every possible, you know, kind of form of critique or why didn't you read this or why didn't you cite me or, you know, that kind of stuff. and it's not focused on there are curious people in the world who, if you present them a deeply researched, well-told story, are going to walk with you through that. And they might love it, they might hate it, they might be indifferent to it, they might find parts of it to be exciting and parts of it less so. But there's there's actually kind of a trust there with readers based on their their curiosity and your ability to say, yes, I can help you meet that in some way through my research or my experience or whatever it is. and I actually think that my editor at Norton, Elaine Mason, really helped me see that. because there was never a moment in this in the editing process where she asked me to simplify anything. not once. I
Jon: Hmm. Yeah.
Bathsheba: have had that from academic readers, but she was like, no. Like if you if you give people enough kind of narrative drive that they know how to read this book, if there's two sentences that don't speak directly to them, they're just gonna move on to the third one. And
Jon: Yeah, yeah.
Bathsheba: if you can pick them up there, you're fine. if you lose them on that third sentence, you're probably not fine.
Jon: I'm curious about your writing process. Can you walk us through a afternoon or a morning of writing, sitting down at a at a blank page and seeing what comes comes out? What does that look like?
Bathsheba: So this is something I'm also trying to rediscover as I start sabbatical. Like right now, I'm like, okay, how did I write how did I write the first draft of this book? Because I need to do it again. I've done
Jon: Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do I do this? I've done this before. How do I do it again?
Cory: But it's been a while.
Bathsheba: it before. but it's been a minute. so for me, and this is this is gonna sound like probably the most cliched version of a writer's routine, it requires
Jon: We're ready for it.
Bathsheba: quite a bit of coffee.
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: and I write best on endorphins. So this book was entirely written running with my dog and best friend in the California Redwoods. Like we go run every single morning and we lived in fear as we were finishing our dissertations of an injury. We're like the this whole
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: edifice hangs on a daily
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: dose of endorphin. And if any of us break our ankles, we're just we're in so much trouble. it still starts for me with some form of usually going for a run, be I think being outside and you know. looking at a horizon, not a screen, and it's often where whatever I was stuck on yesterday gets fixed and I have to stop and like frantically text it into my phone and hope I leave Yes. Yep. And I'm like,
Jon: On the on the run you'll s you'll solve a problem. Gotcha. Okay.
Bathsheba: I'll forget it if I don't write it down. So you have to stop the
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: run and, you know, record it in some form and then keep going.
Jon: Yeah, yeah.
Bathsheba: and then I usually can write, you know, or sometimes I start by rewriting. So I'll I'll leave myself like a really half assed paragraph at the end of the day the previous day so that I know that where I start the next day is fixing because that's g kind of gets you back in the thinking and you're like you're doing the fun part of like finding the word
Jon: Yeah.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: coastline as opposed to, you know, like really having to produce something new.
Jon: Right. Right.
Bathsheba: and then I have to like take a break for lunch and walk around. I'm a really pacey writer, and I used
Jon: Okay.
Bathsheba: to be like, why can't you just sit down? And I was like, well probably 'cause you do all your thinking when you're walking. So you know, I'll get up and unload the dishwasher or whatever and that will fix whatever I'm stuck on and then you go back
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: and and write. and then writing my dissertation, we would usually, you know, take my dog for a long walk in the afternoon and then have a glass of wine, which would like quiet our brains down enough that we could write for another ninety minutes. So it was a deeply medicated it was like you start with a coffee, you end with a glass of wine.
Jon: Uh-huh.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: It helped to be living in Northern California,
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: and kind of work in between and And be okay with days where, you know, some days I write five hundred words and sometimes I write five and I I'm not a good person if I'm like I have a daily word count. I think
Jon: Okay.
Bathsheba: for some people that's
Cory: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: deeply motivating. I find it produces words that I wish I hadn't written,
Jon: Right. Right. Just to meet the word count.
Bathsheba: Yeah.
Cory: Yeah. You're not the first person who has talked about writing while you're in the middle of running. And you're also not the first writer that we've had on who's talked about this idea of leaving something at the end of one writing session to sort
Bathsheba: Mm-hmm.
Cory: of jump start the next one. so that's really interesting to see that overlap.
Bathsheba: Yeah, I think that like give yourself I've heard people talk about it as like park downhill or you know, there's like a bunch of different metaphors for like you know.
Cory: Hm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I I ha I hadn't heard it described that way.
Jon: I like that.
Cory: Bathsheba, one question that we ask every author that's on the show, if you could hear any author talk about their process, in the same way that we've been asking you, dead or alive, dud doesn't matter, who would you most want to hear from and why?
Bathsheba: that's such a good question. I would love to hear Barry Lopez talk about his process. I read Arctic Dreams quite a bit while I was writing Floating Coast. and I think there's still something in his kind of ethical vision that I find really compelling. And also his use of the first person, which is both there and you have a a kind of an understanding or a sense that you understand this person you're reading, but he's also very not present. It's kind
Jon: Mm-hmm.
Bathsheba: of an interesting sense of both. intimacy but not disclosure, which I find really interesting and leaves a lot of space for his interlocutors that I appreciate. I think in the kind of more contemporary writers, there's a a poet named Joan Naviyuk Kane. she wrote the the poem that inter introduces the book. she's somebody that I I her thoughts on craft I would be really interested in.
Cory: We haven't had a pod on yet, Jon.
Jon: Awesome. I know. We've we've we've got to get one.
Cory: Should we do some rapid fire
Jon: I love
Cory: and and close things
Bathsheba: Yeah.
Cory: up?
Jon: Yeah. so Bathsheba, we're gonna ask you, I think we have eight or nine questions maybe. Yeah, these are just rapid fire. So give us kind of the first thing you think of. These don't have to be long,
Bathsheba: Okay.
Jon: long answers. I'm usually the one interrupting with long long
Cory: Yeah.
Jon: answers anyway. So what's one aspect of writing you think you're particularly good at?
Bathsheba: Verb use.
Jon: Verb use. Can you give an example of what you mean?
Bathsheba: I think it particularly thinking about writing about animals, like using verbs that people don't expect
Jon: Yeah.
Cory: How about one aspect of writing you think you're bad at?
Bathsheba: I think I go on too long. And I bury the lead. I mean, I probably every editor that I've worked with would tell you that I'm really good at burying the lead.
Jon: what's harder to I think we already know the answer to this, but I'll ask it anyway. What's harder to write the first line or the last line?
Bathsheba: The first.
Cory: What's the first thing you edit out of a draft?
Bathsheba: usually way too much information. I overs you know, kind of overload and then have to draw it back once I know what's really important.
Jon: what's a word you always misspell and auto correct saves you?
Bathsheba: Bureaucrat. I have typed it
Jon: It's so hard.
Cory: yeah.
Bathsheba: once successfully and it was a banner day.
Jon: Ha ha ha.
Bathsheba: and it's never happened again.
Jon: When bureaucrat comes up, I just smash the keys in roughly the area I need
Bathsheba: Yeah.
Jon: and it'll just get me close enough. It's too hard.
Bathsheba: It it yik it's too hard. Right, it's like what is this?
Cory: Sometimes I don't even get close enough and yeah, word is is just
Jon: It doesn't know.
Cory: like I don't know what you were going for there.
Bathsheba: This was not a good word to not be able to spell when writing about the Soviet Union, I can
Jon: Yeah,
Bathsheba: tell you, but
Jon: yeah, yeah.
Cory: Bathsheba, was Floating Coast always the title of this book? And if not, I'd love to hear any other contenders that you were thinking about.
Bathsheba: It had a terrible title when it went out for sale, but I don't
Cory: okay.
Bathsheba: it was not the original title. This was actually the original title of the third chapter. and it was
Cory: yeah, yeah.
Bathsheba: it was actually somebody on Norton's editorial board that said, I think this should be the title of the book.
Jon: Wow.
Bathsheba: And I agreed. but I find titling books to be really difficult.
Jon: Did you know that the title you had was not really working or did you think it was fine? okay. Okay. Okay.
Bathsheba: I thought it was terrible. I thought it was an a hundred percent a placeholder, but I didn't have any better ideas. It's funny 'cause I actually liked the chapter titles, so it's probably not surprising that one of them ended up being the book title.
Jon: And did the did the sub was there a subtitle and did it change with Norton as well?
Bathsheba: Yeah, I can't the subtitle on the dissertation was like it was extremely long and had to have the dates in there and all sorts of stuff.
Jon: Yeah.
Cory: Right.
Bathsheba: and so y they did come up with the with the subtitle.
Jon: Okay. Yeah. 'Cause I think with nonfiction books, subtitles do a do a lot of the work. You need a good
Cory: Yeah.
Jon: Cory and I are both former book editors and you spend hours trying to come up with a good subtitle that like has all the words you need, but like sounds good and t tells people what the book is about. It's really tough.
Bathsheba: Right. Yes.
Cory: Well it's like there's a there's a formula to it. It's like the poetry of the actual title and then the subtitle has to do all the
Jon: Right. Right.
Cory: heavy lifting of like immediately telling you yes.
Bathsheba: Right. Like here's your search engine optimization in a phrase.
Jon: Exactly. Kind of, yeah. okay, do you write in Google Docs, Microsoft Word, longhand? What do you use? Word?
Bathsheba: Microsoft Word.
Cory: Is that just
Bathsheba: at least as long as I can turn the AI off.
Jon: Yeah. Yeah.
Cory: Is that just by default? Is there did you try other programs and that's just the one you find easiest?
Bathsheba: I tried Scrivener,
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: which I know many writers swear by, and I was so trained to and at this point just think with footnotes and it doesn't footnote very well. It doesn't export them very well.
Jon: okay.
Bathsheba: so it it that's that hasn't worked for me. And Google d I just need a I need to be able to download drafts onto a hard drive. And so Google Docs has never felt very secure. And at this point I consider it to be like I wouldn't really don't want my writing touching a Google Doc if I can if I can help it because of the various security issues with their with their AI built in. But and I've worried about what's gonna happen if Microsoft kind of goes in that direction. typewriter perhaps
Jon: Yeah.
Cory: Yeah. when Yeah.
Jon: Okay.
Cory: We haven't had somebody say, I use a typewriter one of these days. When you're writing, do you have music, podcasts, TV on in the background? Do you have to write with silence?
Bathsheba: I usually have music on, and it it changes all the time. I feel like sometimes I'll get stuck on an album. I did a bunch of shorter writing projects last summer that were entirely fueled by the Sinners soundtrack. Like that was just constantly on.
Cory: okay, yeah. Cool soundtrack.
Jon: Okay.
Bathsheba: I finished the first draft of Floating Coast listening exclusively to the White album. on like endless repeat. I mean, so it it has no rhyme or reason. I can't I'm just like, okay, this is
Jon: Yeah.
Bathsheba: what I need to listen to and then I listen to it and
Jon: Whatever works.
Cory: It's a good thing that you didn't tell us that at the beginning of the show 'cause this would have just turned into a Beatles episode.
Jon: Yeah, yeah,
Bathsheba: Okay.
Jon: yeah. right, last last question. What's your go to procrastination?
Bathsheba: Cooking. Yeah,
Jon: Cooking.
Cory: Yeah.
Bathsheba: my husband can tell when I'm really stuck because the dinners get more elaborate.
Cory: Smells really good in there, seems like you're making progress.
Bathsheba: Yeah. And if it's really not close to a meal time, there's always a closet that needs some sort of dramatic so also
Jon: Right.
Bathsheba: my husband knows like if he can't find anything in the house, it's because I was like, Well, I'm I can't write, so I'm gonna go rearrange the basement.
Jon: Yeah.
Cory: Yeah.
Jon: well, that's the all the questions we have. thank you so much for coming on the show. It was super fun to to talk to you.
Bathsheba: Yeah, likewise. These were great questions and I I love the I love the idea of this podcast 'cause I agree. I think we're not asked enough these funny things that we do.
