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Episode 103—Persistent, Constant, Careful Work with Dennis Overbye
151 Plays7 years ago
“What interests me are questions that don’t have answers,” says Dennis Overbye. Promotional support is provided by Hippocampus Magazine. Its 2018 Remember in November Contest for Creative Nonfiction is open for submissions until July 15th! This annual contest has a grand prize of $1,000 and publication for all finalists. That’s awesome. Visit hippocampusmagazine.com for details. Hippocampus Magazine: Memorable Creative Nonfiction. So what is this show? It’s the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to artists about telling true stories. Today’s guest for episode 103 is Dennis Overbye, @overbye on Twitter, a science writer for the New York Times. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-finalist and author of two books: Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe and Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance. I’d love it you subscribed to the show wherever you get your podcasts and share episodes across your social streams with people you think might get some value from the interview. You are the social network.
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Transcript
Introduction & Contest Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey CNFers, promotional support is provided by Hippocampus Magazine. It's 2018 Remember in November contest for Creative Nonfiction is open for submissions until July 15th. This annual contest has a grand prize of $1,000 in publication for all finalists.
00:00:22
Speaker
That's
Host's Return & Personal Updates
00:00:23
Speaker
awesome. Visit hippocampusmagazine.com for details. Hippocampus Magazine, memorable, creative non-fiction. Hey, we're back in the saddle again.
00:00:38
Speaker
I took a week off from producing a show, much to the chagrin of the wife. We thought it was a bad move to miss a week, but I had two hard deadlines, a long feature, and a long column. And our dog is in rough shape these days, so it's incredibly hard to focus.
00:00:56
Speaker
on top of that I had some feedback great feedback on this book have been writing since 2009 and it's it's the kind of feedback that is incredibly valuable smart and incisive but it's made me realize just how shitty I am at this and paying a significant amount of our GDP to become a better writer and editor myself throughout this whole process but it's a continuing ed thing as much as trying to get my stupid book published
00:01:25
Speaker
OK, so I'm probably less shitty than I was 10 years ago, but I'm still, like, wicked shitty. 10 years from now I'll be less shitty than I am today, and all the people I've disappointed along the way will likely be dead, so there's that.
Guest Introduction: Dennis Overby
00:01:41
Speaker
So what is the show? It's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. You know, that's the show where I speak to artists about telling true stories. Today's guest for episode 103 is Dennis Overby, at Overby on Twitter. It's O-V-E-R-B-Y-E. He's a science writer for The New York Times. He's also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of two books, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos,
00:02:10
Speaker
the story of
00:02:21
Speaker
That's fun. I'd love it if you subscribe to the show, wherever you get your podcasts, and share episodes across your social streams with people you think you might get some value from the interview. You are the social network. I algorithm you. That's it, friends.
Writing Stephen Hawking's Obituary
00:02:37
Speaker
Here's Dennis Overby, episode one. The day that we were actually supposed to speak several weeks ago was the day that Stephen Hawking passed. And I suspect that that is about as hectic a day
00:02:38
Speaker
the scientific quest
00:02:48
Speaker
as you get on the cosmic beat. So what was that day like as the news hit you and then you had to craft these very long obituaries and also a really fine essay about what Stephen Hawking taught us about life. Right. Well, of course, I found out at midnight and it had been a bad day and I didn't sleep that night. Now, luckily,
00:03:17
Speaker
And it's no secret that we prepare advanced obituaries of important people. So I'd actually written this Hawking's obituary about three or four times before. So that was pretty much ready to go. But I knew that, in fact, by the time I got in the next morning, it had already been posted online. But I did have to write that essay, which I had sort of thought about. I mean, I'd been thinking about this
00:03:47
Speaker
And then I thought, well, this is never going to happen. And then it is. So it was a terrible blow. I'm still trying to come to grips with it because I spent a lot of my career writing about Hawking. I started out writing about Hawking 40 years ago. I followed him through the decades and seeing this become such a phenomenon. It's still hard for me to believe.
00:04:19
Speaker
Yeah, what was your first interactions with him in your first chance meetings back in the 70s?
First Encounter with Stephen Hawking
00:04:30
Speaker
Well, I saw him rolling through the ballroom of the complicated plaza in Boston at a meeting, and I thought, oh, this is—
00:04:38
Speaker
just one of the most dramatic things I've ever seen. And he was there to give a talk about his recent discoveries that black holes would explode and what that meant for the universe. And it was very deep and very moving up. Oh, wow. This is like, in some ways, I felt like I'd always known him. But of course, I didn't. Right. But I, you know, I got to know him a little bit. And then I went to England later on and spent some time with him.
00:05:06
Speaker
Yeah, I suspect that meeting him and then being lucky and blessed enough to be able to follow him and have him be a key figure of your first book, that it must have been like what people experienced in the 20s and 30s when they brushed shoulders with Einstein. Someone who was really on the cusp of innovation and just expanding what we knew and really changing the way we understand or think about
00:05:35
Speaker
thing. Think about the universe. So did you in those moments, they realized that you were experiencing something that might only come around every 50 to 100 years? You know, I think as a writer, you recognize when an extraordinary story, an extraordinary character walks into your life. And you want to make the most of it.
00:06:02
Speaker
So I've been lucky enough to have that happen a few times and talking was one of them. You get to be in the right place at the right time.
00:06:20
Speaker
What was your early, early start and your early love for covering science writing and then specifically getting put on to, say, getting on the coolest beat of all time, which is just covering the universe?
Early Career at Sky and Telescope
00:06:36
Speaker
Got a job as the assistant type center at Sky and Telescope magazine for $6 an hour after writing a letter to every publisher in the Boston Yellow Pages.
00:06:51
Speaker
leading for a job. Who might have been those writers say in the sci-fi genre that were sufficiently exciting to you and then you decided to then sort of maybe merge that exciting language with the non-fiction elements of covering the cosmic beat. So who are some of those early influences for you?
Influences from Science Fiction
00:07:15
Speaker
In terms of science fiction, you know, it's the kind of the Trinity of Arthur C. Clarke.
00:07:21
Speaker
Robert Fineland and Isaac Asimov. I think probably Clark, especially, because I actually met him at one of my most valued possessions framed in my office. Actually, there's a letter he wrote about Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos after he read it. What is that? Can you recall off the top of your head what that letter says?
00:07:50
Speaker
Well, so the only hearts of the cosmos is sort of a kind of a history of recent cosmology and the people who kind of first happened on the idea of the Big Bang and the expanding universe and the Palomar telescope and Clark knew all these guys. So he read the book and he said, you know, reminded him of his old days choosing Palomar and the people he met.
00:08:21
Speaker
captured them well. We have some technical disagreements, but we had some wild ideas. But it was fun, except he didn't like the title. Not the title. He thought the title was offering.
00:08:39
Speaker
With the positive things that he said about it was that as any writer can attest to, having someone validate a particular artistic endeavor can put a lot of fuel in the tank. So getting that letter from someone that you revered from your early reading, what did that do to you as a writer? Did it just kind of fill your blood with a lot more energy? And how long did that last?
00:09:09
Speaker
Well, like I said, you know, I framed it and it's hanging on the wall of my study along with, you know, award blacks and things like that. Cause it's another kind of award as far as I'm concerned. I don't think it at that point had any effect on my, um, you know, made me feel good, but didn't have any effect on my career aspirations or anything like that.
00:09:34
Speaker
So when you were in 9th grade, I read from your bio, you got kicked off the newspaper and it took you – All right, I've forgotten what parts of this story you've written. I was in an after school without permission and a room in which an eraser was thrown. Just one? Just one eraser?
00:10:03
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, the other thing was that I had, which I kind of forgot, and I kind of remembered that I'd also written a letter pretty much accusing the principal of lying. He didn't like that either. And that, actually, that editorial never ran. So that was the end of my journalism career for 20 years. And I, and I got more interested in
MIT Degree & Science Reporting
00:10:28
Speaker
science. I mean, I already have been reading lots of science fiction anyway.
00:10:33
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, degree in physics from MIT, that'll get you in the door in terms of very high level, high concept science. So how did that inform the reporting that you would later do after that? Well, it didn't actually, you know, I would show you my MIT transcript, which is like, it embarrasses my daughter when I discuss it because it was
00:11:04
Speaker
pretty bad, what it did give me with sort of background and fundamentals and the kind of language, you know, I can, I can melt into the crowd. Yeah, it allows you to, to at least ask a question that doesn't seem totally inane. And then you can get the real like dirty information, good, dirty, muddy information from the real, the real experts, but like that kind of gets you in the door, doesn't it?
00:11:34
Speaker
You know, I'm familiar with the landscape, so I'm comfortable around scientists and they just regard me as part of their furniture. Before I joined the Times, now at the Times it's different because there's a light shining on you. Even if everything is all off the record, they still don't want to say certain things because they're so terrified of the Times.
Gaining Trust in Science Journalism
00:12:02
Speaker
I can say things in books or magazine articles that I can't get away with saying in the New York Times because it's so prominent. And then I realized the only thing I've learned is that a lot of people that I write about I've known for a long time and I met them when they were young, they were starting their careers, they were postdocs or something. They're all senior professors
00:12:31
Speaker
Presidents of professional societies and they'll go prize winners and their words carry more weight than they used to.
00:12:44
Speaker
So it's great in a sense that when you were coming up covering cosmology in the universe that so many of these people were kind of almost, you know, paralleled you in age. So you guys were kind of just kind of growing and developing in your careers together. It wasn't like you were maybe a 25-year-old cub reporter covering
00:13:07
Speaker
a 60-year-old tenured professor, president of whatever society. So that must have been kind of neat to see almost the entire arc of a career play out before you, I imagine. Yes, although in my mind, I'm still a 25-year-old cover reporter.
00:13:30
Speaker
And that's got to be key to sort of maintain that hunger and hustle of a young reporter but imbued with all the experience you've had over the last 40 years. I guess you could put it that way.
00:14:07
Speaker
people who are doing this kind of research. So how have you been able to engender trust and get access to these people so you can write about it as eloquently as you do? So some of it is just because I've known people a long time. And when I started out, I had this credential of working for this kind of telescope, which was regarded as a serious, respectable outlet, as opposed to the New York Times.
00:14:08
Speaker
I don't feel that way.
00:14:38
Speaker
And so people let me in and they talk to me and they just keep talking to me now. The New York Times, so maybe it's me or maybe it's the New York Times, but I always get my calls returned. But I don't know if it's because it's me, Dennis Overby, or it's the New York Times. Maybe it's a combination of both. The access kind of comes with it.
00:15:03
Speaker
Yeah, and what strikes you? What is the most exciting part of what you cover? What fascinates you the most? And what are some of those things that you're tapped into that really excites
Fascination with Unanswered Questions
00:15:18
Speaker
you? And when you get the chance to write about it, it really, that kind of spark ignites. I mean, what interests me really are sort of questions that don't have answers.
00:15:28
Speaker
Yeah, which seems to be much of the, much of cosmology. It's more each answer seems to spark five or a dozen more questions. So I guess, I mean, the fact that we're really ignorant of everything important about the universe and ourselves is fascinating. And we should bask in it because it makes us humble and it makes us
00:15:58
Speaker
It makes us curious and it drives us ahead.
00:16:02
Speaker
Yeah, and when I was reading the Killanova story you wrote, and then prior to that, other people who were, and I'm sure you were covering it too, with the gravitational wave of those two black holes colliding, and that little blip they hear at the LIGO stations. And I wonder, in your experience of speaking with these scientists and researchers, it really just happened to be,
00:16:29
Speaker
the lucky that they had the technology and the equipment to catch these chirps at the right time. And have any of them expressed any degree of regret might be the wrong word, but they maybe do they feel anxious about what they might be missing because they don't have the technology right now to register what data might be out there going unregistered? Does that make any sense?
00:16:58
Speaker
What did they just not think about it? Too much time worrying about signals they didn't see. They're busy getting ready to, you know, they're improving the LIGO antennas right now so that they can see deeper and they can see more. So, I mean, it's a field that's driven by optimism and not regret. I think, I mean, luck. I'll get nothing to do with it. It took 40 years and a billion dollars.
00:17:27
Speaker
I toured one of these facilities last week and it's just mind-bendingly complex. It's so complicated. If you asked me to set out things that we have to do in order to make this work, I would just run screaming. They have to compensate for earthquakes in Alaska and the tides out on the Pacific coast.
00:17:57
Speaker
birds pecking on nitrogen tanks nearby, mice that get into their tunnels and the mice poop makes little pinholes in their vacuum tubes. Unbelievable. It's just staggering. So it wasn't luck. It was hard work and determination.
00:18:25
Speaker
Yeah, I guess maybe what I'm thinking in terms of luck is just the timing of the windows, because I think in the Killanova story, someone said that it was only like a couple weeks ago prior to them hearing that signal that the two neutron stars collided, that they were even able to register it or something. Maybe I read that wrong.
00:18:46
Speaker
But yeah, I don't discount the work and the rigor and my god, the microscopic attention to detail that these things to register the, oh, these things that happen, you know, billions of light years. I think to kill the one that, I mean, the key to it was that this third detector had come online in Italy and there were now three and the fact that that detector didn't
00:19:13
Speaker
see it or got a very weak signal because it was in a part of the sky where that detector had a little sensitivity and that was able, they were able to sort of combine that information from the detectors and really localize the signal which allowed the astronomers to find it and then they went to town, you know, and it was like 4000, half the world's astronomers got in there on the action. Wasn't lucky. I mean, so the first
00:19:43
Speaker
collision that they found. I mean, that was kind of lucky because they were just turning the thing on and it's new, but they actually called it advanced LIGO. And they actually hadn't even started their visual observing run. This thing happened. It was kind of like if you're going fishing and you pull up on the stream and there's this nice looking fishing hole there and you drop a line and then bam, you get a strike right away.
00:20:11
Speaker
They think, wow, this is a good spot. You might spend the rest of the day in that same hole and not get another strike. None of the astronomers or physicists I've talked to were surprised that gravitational waves existed. But it was a surprise that the first thing they saw were big black holes colliding, because they had expected to see neutron stars colliding. Those were the specs that they built this thing to.
00:20:41
Speaker
Because nobody knew black holes would collide. Einstein had hypothesized that, but then, yeah, they didn't have the data, right? Einstein's theory suggested that black holes should exist. Einstein didn't like them. He didn't like the idea.
00:21:04
Speaker
nobody knew if they would actually be colliding. That was exciting because it's just, oh, I mean, there's all this stuff going on out there in the darkness and the void that now, you know, we may well, maybe I'll detect, you know, what kinds of other strange vibrations are out there that we never even thought about.
LIGO's Discoveries in Cosmology
00:21:24
Speaker
You know, the excitement about LIGO, less than gravitational waves existed more than like, we're going to turn into this whole
00:21:33
Speaker
other level of the universe that we haven't had yet. I heard an interesting conversation on the Design Matters podcast with Debbie Millman and she was interviewing, I believe his name is David Spiegel. I think that's his name, but that name should, I'm sorry?
00:21:56
Speaker
Spergall. Spergall. That's it. And yeah, about his career, I'm sure he's someone you're very familiar with in the course of your career. And yeah, just what they, oh, just the, you know, he was able to take that sort of baby picture of the universe from the, like, I guess 300,000 years out from the Big Bang or something, which is very infancy.
00:22:21
Speaker
So it's listening to that and then the vast dark energy and all this stuff. And I wonder how you as a reporter of this stuff kind of get your head around it because it is, like you were saying earlier, a lot of this stuff is very mind-bendy. So how do you ground it and try to make sense of it and then convey that to a reader? Well, nobody asked me that.
00:22:52
Speaker
None of it makes any sense, right? The universe doesn't make much sense. We don't know what dark energy is and we don't know what dark matter is. I guess it doesn't... I mean, it doesn't... I don't have trouble bending my head around it because I spent too much time reading Arthur C. Clarke when I was a kid and I expect all this stuff to be strange and wondrous.
00:23:18
Speaker
It's getting to your routine and the way you approach the writing and so forth. I wonder how you set up your day and what your morning routine might be as you're looking to get into warm up the engine, so to speak, and get to the work you do. This might apply more to when you're doing more long-form stuff, magazine stuff, or even book work.
00:23:42
Speaker
So if you're in that mode, how are you setting up your days? What time are you waking up so you can start, you can hit the day and feel like you are accomplishing something of merit for that day? Well, so I wake up at six o'clock and my daughter wakes up a little bit after that and I see that she gets out the door. I go out the door with her and I go to the gym and sometimes I have my best ideas of the day then.
00:24:11
Speaker
on the rowing machine at the gym. In some ways, every day is the same, and every day is different. I mean, if I'm working on some long arc Hawaiian, I'm kind of obsessed with it, and I'm thinking about it all the time. And do you say a lot of your best ideas happen at the gym sometimes? So do you have a way of a system of keeping track of these ideas so you can harvest them later? No, it's just my brain.
00:24:38
Speaker
I never stopped thinking about it. If I have a good idea, it usually sticks around. That's your metric of a good idea. If I don't forget this idea, then this is something worth pursuing. If I forget it, it probably wasn't that good in the first place, at least for your taste. It often happens that when you actually sit down to write it down, somehow the sentence just doesn't work or it never
00:25:06
Speaker
You realize that you can actually see half of it or something. And that's sort of frustrating. Sometimes you think you have a good idea and it doesn't go anywhere for you.
00:25:21
Speaker
So, and then when you're working on longer stuff, book, book length narrative, long narratives, and you're beyond that initial honeymoon phase of thinking that the idea is great and you know, and you love it and you're in love with it, but then you get to the ugly middle of the draft. How do you handle the ugly grind in that, in that section when you're too far away to turn home and you're very far away from the end? How do you just muscle through that part?
00:25:51
Speaker
So, well, when I was writing my books, I felt like I was coming swimming across the Atlantic. And so at some point, you've lost sight of land behind you and you haven't seen land ahead of you and you just are going. So I hate it. I mean, I hate it. I love the problem at the same time. You know, it's kind of a contradiction.
00:26:17
Speaker
But if it's that hard, if it's that hard for you, maybe it's going to be that hard for the reader too. You should be doing something differently. So how do you approach your research and then organize your notes? You're giving me credit for a lot more organization than I have. If you saw my desk, we'd probably be kindred spirits.
00:26:46
Speaker
I mean, in general, less over a big project. I mean, you just start out with a list of people and you talk to them and then you talk to the people that they thought you should talk to. And you just keep going. You just keep stepping through all these people and sooner or later, their stories converge. And then, then I feel like I'm actually sort of getting someplace and I have a story to tell. I guess the best example of this lately was the Kiggs boson. I did spend six months
00:27:16
Speaker
trying to recreate what actually happened, how they found it. And, you know, there are 3,000, there are two teams of 3,000 people each and can't talk to 6,000 people. You can talk to a lot of people and they all have kind of different views of the thing. But eventually, when the stories start echoing each other, then I felt like I kind of phoned in on the
00:27:46
Speaker
bumping in on the main narrative. I'd say and which story was this? Oh, so this is the was called chasing the Higgs. It was kind of was a was the entire science time section a few years ago. Okay. I did the old search for these rows on and you know, who was involved in the two teams and how they false leads and the rumors and then how it finally came into view and what we call tik tok.
00:28:17
Speaker
And what do you mean by TikTok? Pardon my ignorance. Go back and reconstruct what actually happened behind the scenes of some work of that. You actually said what to whom, when, and what did they do with what was going on. Gotcha. That was my TikTok of the Discovery of the Exposons. So that was the Pulitzer finalist. And that was just a massive amount of
00:28:47
Speaker
of reporting and just keep talking to more people and asking more questions. I had this fantasy that some place there was some postdoc or graduate student who had first seen a little bump on a graph and that that was the big pose on it. I could find that person in the first sock. And I think I did, but she didn't really want to be. And it came out of this philosophy that
00:29:16
Speaker
They're all in it together and nobody should get any individual credit because everybody has a different job to do it. It's sort of not fair. And people who like built the detectors and spent months down in the hole and certain wiring things together. And then some years later, some young kids working in the computer program would like do the final analysis and say, oh, there it is.
00:29:44
Speaker
But those people who came in at the end and ran the software didn't work any more important than the people that built the thing years ago. So they should all get equal credits. And they didn't like having individual people simple down. And they wouldn't actually say who actually drafted the final report.
00:30:16
Speaker
signed by everybody but clearly 3,000 people didn't write the paper on a committee. They were not allowed to be identified. They were fighting that tendency if you want to know what's happening behind the scenes. That would be a philosophical problem.
00:30:42
Speaker
When you're working on a long piece of this nature, do you outline your work? Do you use cork boards, flash cards? How do you go about that degree of organization and structure? Or do you just fly by the seat of your pants? Well, let's see. So it's been different. I can't remember what I did with the Higgs. I mean, I tend to want to organize things in a narration chronologically.
00:31:12
Speaker
When I did the Einstein book, I actually constructed this file on my computer and every quote, every factoid that I cleaned about Einstein, I put in this big document in Crawlodge border. It had as many pages as the final book.
00:31:31
Speaker
And when you're writing the book, you've got your notes and anything, on a given day, what's your endurance like for the writing? How long can you go before you need to just stop for the day or just take breaks? What does that look like as you're getting into that real generative phase of a project? Well, so that...
00:32:02
Speaker
When I'm in that mode, I would start first thing in the morning, then I go eat breakfast, then I come back and I would wear out about three or four o'clock in the afternoon.
00:32:17
Speaker
And do you measure those days often by a word count or just sheer hours in the chair? Certainly not by word count. Maybe just my own sense of like, am I progressing through this narrative or not? I mean, if it's a book, so you're, you know, you're broken up in chapters and you have, I mean, you have a chapter outline, so it's kind of exciting.
00:32:47
Speaker
You get to the end of a chapter, that's cool. I can go on to the next thing, but I'll have a post for yourself. Anything, yeah, in a large newspaper piece, the same way. Divide it up into subdivisions and you get one section done. You feel good. Go home.
00:33:09
Speaker
face the horrible dilemma of starting over again the next day. You never feel good for very long. Right, or in some cases feel good at all. I'm always interested in how writers fight off loneliness and self-doubt, so I'd extend that question to you too, especially in the throes of a long project. How do you fend off those feelings of loneliness and self-doubt?
00:33:38
Speaker
Well, they're always there, but you have to, it's better to produce something than to not produce something. I've kind of gotten to that point about it. I do worry. I mean, every time I write a beat, my editor is actually going to like this or it's really just not as good as what I was doing before. Somewhere along the way, I developed the attitude that, okay, I was, I'm allowed to have one that's
00:34:08
Speaker
I'm allowed to come today, right? Of course. And so I just, you know, I give myself permission. I'll be less lonely now than when I was writing books and I was alone and I was living alone. It was, uh, it was now I'm in a different environment. You know, if you're writing a book, I mean, you're off, you don't know if the world cares about you. If the world still remembers you're there, I don't worry about the world not knowing I'm here.
00:34:38
Speaker
My editor sits purely six feet away from me. Like I can't disappear. And an interesting conversation I was having with a baseball coach, actually, for the show. He had written this book about finding clarity, about hitting and finding purpose. And so when the guys step up to the plate, they have clear vision of what they
00:35:03
Speaker
need to do and it and we were talking about strengths and weaknesses and oftentimes we're told when no matter what the discipline to you have your strengths, but you should try to level up your weaknesses. And he was arguing that really, you know, especially in the major leagues, it's just like, you're good at one thing, one or two things, actually, you should be leaning into your strengths and
00:35:29
Speaker
mitigating weaknesses but not leveling them up so much because otherwise you'll the average of your strengths and weaknesses will then just kind of muddy and you'll end up being sort of jack-of-all-trades master of none so to speak and in this line of work i wonder what you would identify as your strengths and weaknesses and whether you sort of buy into that leaning into the strength versus trying to level up weaknesses i'm kind of interested in how
00:35:58
Speaker
writers and artists process that. I guess by strings it might be, you know, better for us. Probably my weakness is back checking. I always have to, because I still want you doing the same thing over and over again, so I could be better at that. Yeah, in terms of, you know, the
00:36:29
Speaker
In reading your work, especially that part that I read before we were officially recording, and I'll just read it again now just so listeners would hear it. It said, this is in your Killanova story, and it's just this wonderful sentence that starts, all the atoms in your wedding band and the pharaoh's treasures and the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and still threaten us all, so the story goes.
00:36:54
Speaker
have been formed in cosmic gong shows that reverberated across the heavens and i think just the way you were able to take this this weird cosmic event that happened you know just
00:37:10
Speaker
Countless light years away, and then you say you know the medals in your wedding band And then the pharaoh's treasures all of a sudden you took something way out there and brought it right down to earth and So like is that kind of what you're getting at in terms of what you think that you're particularly good at yeah, I think that's probably what people think I'm good at Next thing we cause a mick in the personal One book reviewer said mm-hmm
00:37:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's the only way for people to get their head around this kind of stuff in a lot of ways. It's like you really do have to pull that thread from way the hell out there and get it, get it down into something concrete. And they're like, Oh, wow. So when those neutron stars slammed into each other, like that made gold, that, you know, billions and billions of years later is what was forged, forged on my hand and is a symbol of eternity, so to speak. Right. Well, that's what you owe people because I mean, people don't need to know that
00:38:07
Speaker
details of nucleosynthesis or whatever, but they draw them kind of a sense of what it's like to be in the universe. If you can convey that, you've done your job because it's their universe. It's not the science time universe. This is the only one we have, I think,
00:38:28
Speaker
Maybe not. There might be other universes, but we can't go there. Well, it's like that great Carl Sagan quote that he said something to the effect that, you know, we're all made of star stuff. And that's kind of a cool way to tie in the cosmos and then bring it back into the heart in a way. Well, it's literally true. Yeah. Yeah.
00:38:58
Speaker
very freaky if you really try to think about it.
Literary Influences on Overby's Style
00:39:03
Speaker
In terms of your non-fiction, you referred to some of those great iconic science fiction writers when you were coming up. In terms of maybe some non-fiction, what were some maybe like three to five books, if you can remember them off the top of your head, that are very influential for you in terms of
00:39:29
Speaker
the work you do and maybe even the style you've adopted over the years. So I should mention Timothy Ferris, who's a friend of mine and was into this whole business before I was. When I read his work, I was very impressed and I probably saw, yeah, you can write about this stuff poetically.
00:39:58
Speaker
When I wrote Lonely Hearts, I was, two things that I was trying to follow was one was, was the, the right stuff by Tom Wolf. And the other one was the Snow Leopard by Peter Matheson. And they, those books affected me a lot. What was it about Wolf and Matheson's approach to those books that, that struck a chord with you?
00:40:26
Speaker
Well, it's easier to talk about Wolff because I remember the book better than I do the stone. He was a great writer and he took something you thought you knew about the astronauts and realized you didn't know anything about the astronauts and put you into their heads in a way that nobody had done. And I thought that's I'm going to do that with the cosmologists.
00:40:52
Speaker
Yeah, it goes to the immense patience it takes and then just the willingness to sit back and like you said earlier, just kind of become a piece of furniture in the room. That allows you to be sort of anthropological.
00:41:12
Speaker
feel more like an anthropologist and kind of recede into the background. And then you can empathically get into people's heads over time. And just like in Wolf's book, and I suspect with your work, that's kind of what you need to get at to really ground some of this really abstract stuff. Well, it's not magic. It's a lot of work. I mean, you've got to do a lot of interviewing. You've got to find out. Yeah. You can't intuit what
00:41:43
Speaker
in people's heads. They'll tell you if you ask them. A lot of times when you do this kind of stuff, you have to ask what seems like really inane and boring questions. But if you don't ask them, then you don't really know what's going on in someone's head or what they were thinking at a certain time. Do you have any experiences of getting some pushback from anybody who just kind of rolls their eyes and be like, man, Dennis, why are you asking me this?
00:42:12
Speaker
many moments like that. You just have to endure it. It's your job. It's your job to be there and ask the questions. And you're asked to ask stupid questions, especially you have to ask stupid questions. In my case, because I know a fair amount of background, I have to remember that I'm there for the reader. I'm not there for me. And so I have to remember to ask the questions that readers might ask. And sometimes you get surprising.
00:42:42
Speaker
And the other thing is if you ask them to, you know, you can get them to do a lot of the work for you. So when, how does this work? And sometimes they'll give you a nice metaphor or something like that. You can take and run with it. And then they can't complain because it's something they made up themselves. Right.
00:43:06
Speaker
And given how technical a lot of this reporting and jargon can be, do you conduct your interviews with a voice recorder to make sure you're getting every little nuance and even the way syllables and everything are pronounced and the words exactly right? Or do you rely just kind of old school notebook and scribbling? So when they had lonely hearts, I did do a whole series of interviews with one guy, Alan Sandich, who was like the
00:43:36
Speaker
practically independent cosmology and was famous for not talking to anybody yet. And have hours of conversations with him, which I then had to transcribe, which took days, months actually. I got so sick of it. So I don't, I don't, generally I don't record conversations because then I'd have to listen to them. I take notes.
00:44:01
Speaker
I always like hearing how people do that because there are some writers like John McPhee and Lillian Ross who are adamantly against tape recorders. They think they're intrusive and actually not selective because they take everything in. Other people fight the other way. It's just like you get everything and then you can be selective later as you transcribe and throw out what you need, but at least you've got it all there.
00:44:29
Speaker
So I'm always interested to see how different reporters and writers process that. Yeah, it depends on what you're there for. And if it's something like for the newspaper, if you have this conversation, the things that you remember from it are probably the most important things anyway. And you've written them down. And you know what? You don't want to get too far down into the weeds.
00:44:58
Speaker
On other occasions, you want a whole complete documentary record of it. And somebody wants to deal with it. Actually, I've been doing more recordings because now I can send it off and have it transcribed at a pretty reasonable price and the times will pay for it. Oh, that's excellent. What service do you use?
00:45:27
Speaker
This freelancer who wasn't counted now for some reason, she's living in Cyprus, but she's very fast and very accurate. The thing is, then you still get this multi-page document back. You have to read and find the stuff that you want, but at least you'll get a very accurate transcription.
00:45:53
Speaker
Is there a piece of advice maybe when you were 25, you wish someone had told you that just would have maybe just helped you out as you were, as you were, say, getting started or just would have helped sharpen the knife and made things maybe a little bit easier for you and expedited things? Well, I just tell you the same thing I tell everybody is it's not over until the fat lady sings and you just got to keep going. You just got to, you have to be persistent and just
00:46:23
Speaker
Like keep reporting, keep reporting out. Just keep asking questions. Never give up. There's no, I don't think there's any kind of magical cure for anything. I don't think of myself as particularly clever or articulate or charming interviewer or anything. And when I hear other people doing interviews, I feel the same thing, but there's nothing
00:46:52
Speaker
There's nothing magic, but it was just like persistent, constant, careful work. Yeah, I like that. Persistent, careful work. I mean, I think lots of people are graceful, lyrical writers than me, but it's not stubborn. I just do it whether I challenge it or not.
00:47:18
Speaker
I guess the last thing I'd ask you is, you know, what still excites you about, about the work you do and where does your optimism lie? God, I don't think anybody ever confused me for an optimist, especially these days. I think it's just because there's so much you have to learn and know and wonder about. We're not running out of mystery. Yeah.
Connecting with Dennis Overby Online
00:47:46
Speaker
All right, and Dennis, where can people find you online and maybe become more familiar with your work before you get out of here? Online, I mean, the New York Times, I mean... Or like Twitter, you know, your social media, you know, where you hang out online. Well, I do have a Twitter account out over me and I do have a Facebook page and I don't use much
00:48:14
Speaker
I post pictures on it from every now and then. Well, fantastic. Well, Dennis, thanks for carving out an hour of your day and allowing me to get to know you a little more and sort of the person behind the work. So yeah, thanks for the work you do. And I know every time I see a Dennis Overby byline, I'm in for a nice little ride. So thanks for the work you do, and we'll be in touch. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot.
How to Connect with the Host
00:48:42
Speaker
A huge outro. Another CNF pod in the can. Can you believe it? Thanks CNFers. Got any questions or concerns? You can email me. Or you can ping me on Twitter at Brendan O'Mara or at CNFpod. I'm also at Brendan O'Mara on Instagram and at CNF Podcast on Facebook. There's no shortage of maddening ways to get in touch with your CNFing buddy.
00:49:12
Speaker
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00:49:39
Speaker
but don't unsubscribe. I like subscribers, it's fun. If you're feeling especially kind, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts slash iTunes.
00:49:51
Speaker
as that helps with visibility and validates this entire operation so we can reach as many people as possible in our little corner of the internet. All right, sorry I took last week off. That's not gonna happen again. No, this week it'll likely happen again, but not next week. I'll be back next Friday for another episode. Have a CNF and gray week, friends.
00:50:56
Speaker
you