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Florence Williams
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Florence Williams is a journalist, author, and podcaster. She is a contributing editor at Outside Magazine and a freelance writer for the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, The New York Review of Books and numerous other publications.
Florence’s latest book, Heartbreak: A Personal and Scientific Journey, won the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing and is called “show-stopping” and “courageous” by Publisher’s Weekly. Her first book, BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History (W.W. Norton 2012) received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science and technology and the 2013 Audie in general nonfiction. It was also named a notable book of 2012 by the New York Times. Her 2017 book, The Nature Fix, was an Audible bestseller and was named a top summer read by J.P Morgan. She was the writer and host of two Gracie-Award-winning Audible Original series, Breasts Unbound and The Three-Day Effect, as well as numerous episodes for Outside Magazine’s podcast. The Wall Street Journal calls her writing “droll and crisp,” which makes her feel like a pastry.
Her public speaking includes keynotes at Google, the Smithsonian, the Seattle Zoo, the Aspen Ideas Festival and many other corporate, academic and nonprofit venues. A fellow at the Center for Humans and Nature and a visiting scholar at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., Florence’s work focuses on the environment, health and science.
In 2007-2008, Florence was a Scripps Fellow at the Center of Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado. She has received many awards, including a PEN America award, two National Magazine Award nominations, six magazine awards from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the John Hersey Prize at Yale. Her work has been anthologized in numerous books, including Outside 25, the New Montana Story, How the West Was Warmed and Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008. Florence serves on the board of two of her favorite non-profits, the Trust for Public Land and the Ted Scripps Fellowship in Environmental Journalism.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:03
Speaker
You are listening to something rather than nothing. Creator and host, Ken Zalante. Editor and producer, Peter Bauer.
00:00:18
Speaker
This is Ken Vellante with the Something Rather Than Nothing podcast, and very pleased to welcome Florence Williams, who is a writer. She's
Award Recognition for Florence Williams
00:00:28
Speaker
a lot more than a writer, but I'm familiar with The Nature Fix, which is a great book. Heartbreak, her most recent personal scientific journey, which I just learned recently, Florence won the 2023 Penn EO Wilson
00:00:45
Speaker
Award for literary science. So I wanted to welcome you and say congratulations on that award. Thank you so much Ken. It's great to be here Yeah, I loved them when I read the end of the what you wanted for the literary science writing that became It helped me understand that those words helped me understand some of your writing and you know move in between
00:01:09
Speaker
You know, science and personal and human experience and creativity. I also wanted to mention the first time I came into contact with your work was the three-day effect on Audible, that podcast, which was just a wonderful work. So I was introduced to you in that podcast. Oh, that's great. You found that.
00:01:35
Speaker
Really enjoyed that. So Florence,
Florence's Early Writing Influences
00:01:38
Speaker
I wanted to get right into you as an artist, you as a writer. When did you see yourself as an artist? Or if you prefer, when did you see yourself as a writer, however you wish to approach it? Well, I guess I saw myself as an aspiring artist when I was nine, because that's when I knew I wanted to be a writer. I'm not sure I would have applied the word artist to it.
00:02:05
Speaker
But I was reading a lot of fiction, adult fiction, I guess. And I think there was something about the sort of outsider status of first person narrators in fiction that appealed to me. At the time, my parents were divorced. And I think I saw myself as being a little bit different, you know, from from other people, the way I think a lot of self described artists do.
00:02:34
Speaker
Yeah. And there's something about that outsider status that I think enables us to try to process the world and share it, I guess. Yeah, I like the word outsider because it feels like a perspective thing, you know, just
00:02:53
Speaker
The ability to do something different, I guess, writing a book feels different. You might be around a writer crowd, but that's such a different thing to do or to think about.
Blending Science and Personal Experience in Writing
00:03:03
Speaker
One of the things I find fascinating about your writing is how you immerse the scientific and the personal with it. It's very experiential.
00:03:17
Speaker
You know, it's not the type of science writing. You think of that literary science writing, right, the term literary. It's not, it has the science in the background, and you go deep into that. But it tends to have more of that personal, and I think the listener or reader can understand, because it's so personal, why you've arrived at that. I wanted to talk about the nature fix and
00:03:44
Speaker
its relation to creativity. I mentioned the Three Day Effect podcast. And when I listened to it, it was very influential on me because I was just starting to put together things in my head. I'm a city kid. I've lived out in Oregon for 11 years and just learned more about the woods.
00:04:05
Speaker
And I didn't have the language or couldn't quite figure out some of the things I was experiencing or maybe feeling more creative at ease. And in the three-day effect, you look to arrive at that something happens, that something happens to a person when they're in this environment, that the environment in and of itself can help change.
00:04:27
Speaker
and can also inspire creativity. So could you talk a little bit about your exploration there and your realization of the connection between, say, that environment and art and creativity?
Creativity and Nature's Influence
00:04:43
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I mean, I always knew that I got my best ideas outside when I was walking. And I walk every day. I've been lucky to live.
00:04:55
Speaker
in beautiful places for a lot of my adult life, not all of it, but for a lot of it where I could, you know, walk places that felt peaceful and not too busy and not too noisy and not too, you know, crazy. And I, yeah, I mean, I just became really interested in why that happened, you know, why I was able to think more clearly outside. And of course, there's a lot of
00:05:22
Speaker
Literature and history about this, you know, we know that Thoreau, you know, got a lot of his ideas outside and a lot of inventors, you know, like Nikola Tesla, you know, came up with the design for his engine while he was walking in a park. Wordsworth, you know, walked 10,000 miles in his life and actually composed poetry.
00:05:45
Speaker
while he was walking. And that made total sense to me. But it wasn't until I started to kind of delve into the psychology of it and the science of it that I started to learn some of the possible reasons that might be happening. So I'm really drawn to this phrase popularized by the Kaplan's who are environmental psychologists at the University of Michigan
00:06:10
Speaker
Rachel and Stephen Kaplan and it's this term soft fascination Which is kind of where our brains are when we're wandering around in a pleasant natural setting there's kind of the sweet spot of not being boring and Also, the landscape is not boring, but it's also not over stimulating. Yeah and it's in that sweet spot of kind of soft fascination and
00:06:40
Speaker
that our minds can really wander in this really fruitful way. And then I was really interested to learn about the work of cognitive neuroscientist David Strayer at the University of Utah, who noticed, well, he actually administered tests of creativity and found that people's creativity improved 50%.
00:07:07
Speaker
after they'd been outside for a few days. And he started to think more about what that actually meant in terms of the real estate in our brain, like where was the activation going? Where was the blood flow going? And, you know, he seemed to kind of notice that our frontal cortex, you know, which is kind of our thinking task oriented, kind of executive functioning brain kind of goes offline.
00:07:34
Speaker
after we've been outside for a while as our sensory brains and our more emotional brains wake up. Um, you know, the reality is that in daily modern life, most of us are still living in our frontal cortex all the time. You know, we're, we're shutting out sensory input. We don't really want to hear the street noise or the garbage, you know, or, um, want to see all those flashing lights, you know,
00:08:04
Speaker
as we're trying to drive through an intersection or something. We can't listen to the radio and drive through an intersection at the same time. You know, we sort of filter stuff out. And when we're outside of nature, this amazing thing happens where we don't have to do that. We can just kind of relax and actually take it all in and then start to kind of space out in this dreamy mind wandering way that is just really fruitful. So I think that's part of what's going on, you know, that our brains can kind of
00:08:32
Speaker
Connect more widely and kind of open up to the sensory experience instead of trying to shut down Yeah, thank you I was You know listening listening to deeply to to what you were saying and that just the sound of soft Fascination is somehow kind of captured just the sound of it it kind of captured that that idea so so well because I
00:08:59
Speaker
There is a change, as you described, that I would only describe it as being at ease or more quickly at ease in that environment. And just in my head, that must allow space for something else. Yeah, exactly.
Understanding Biophilia and Well-being
00:09:17
Speaker
And it's space that we don't necessarily allow in very often. It's tougher to find as well sometimes, yeah. It's tougher to find it.
00:09:28
Speaker
The late Harvard entomologist, E.O. Wilson, talked about this term biophilia, that we have this kind of innate affiliation for living things. And so when we're surrounded by them, it feels very pleasant for us. It's relaxing, it's comforting, even on a subconscious level. We may think, oh, I'm not someone who really likes the mountains or the woods or whatever, but your brain actually
00:09:58
Speaker
knows how to read those landscapes. Our perceptual systems were actually built to read natural landscapes, right? We evolved in them. And so on some level, we're just kind of comfortable enough there that our brains can kind of let go a little bit and do some other stuff. Yeah, that's quite the powerful idea.
00:10:24
Speaker
I find the state of Oregon grew up on the East Coast, and the state of Oregon is just so wildly different, both in its rugged ocean and Pacific Ocean and the mountains and the valley. It's such a different landscape, but there's a lot more opportunity to define that space and go towards that space here in the woods. So I can bump into it more regularly, right?
00:10:51
Speaker
Yeah, you can bump into it exactly. And there's so much variety in the Oregon landscape. There's coastal stuff. There's forest stuff. There's mountain stuff. There's dry. There's wet. It really does keep you interested, I think. And there's a lot of novelty, too, which our brain's like.
00:11:07
Speaker
Yeah, I had a statewide job. I was doing political organizing statewide not too long after I arrived here. I tell you, it was the best job in the best state at the best time just in my life because I did it for a couple years.
00:11:24
Speaker
Through that process, I just so adored each spot that I was arriving in, no matter where it was and the ability to go to it, that I talked to friends of mine who are from Oregon, and I tell them stuff about Oregon. They're like, what the heck? I didn't know all that type of thing, because I just maybe went around more as an outsider being like, this is all wild. And so I view that as such a wonderful experience, the high desert as well.
00:11:53
Speaker
down in Klamath Falls and such. Yeah, sounds great. Yeah, yeah. One of the chat about heartbreak as well, and I think one of the most profound ideas that came through in that book as I read it was some sort of reckoning with the reality of loss, relationship, divorce, and how much that impacts us. And I felt within the book of saying,
00:12:23
Speaker
There's a blase attitude about something that can have significant mental and physical effects, in particular for women, but manifest in different genders. But in Heartbreak, which is described as a personal and scientific journey,
00:12:48
Speaker
What was the process like as you were going through things, grappling with, researching it as you're going through it? It sounds and reads as a unique experience. Can you just tell us how that happened?
Personal Story of Heartbreak
00:13:07
Speaker
Yeah. I was going through this heartbreak after a 25-year marriage ended, and it was incredibly destabilizing and disorienting.
00:13:18
Speaker
Uh, you know, my body felt super hypervigilant. You know, like I was kind of in this threat state because I didn't feel so comfortable or safe, you know, being alone. And there, and there are a lot of deep, deep, deeply evolved reasons, right? That our bodies kind of freak out a little bit. If we feel like we've been abandoned, uh, you know, even, even emotionally, our bodies kind of process it as if it's happening kind of in real time, you know, on the Savannah.
00:13:49
Speaker
And I guess just as a science journalist, I was interested in that. It really surprised me. I'd never been heartbroken before. Certainly there are a lot of popular books out there about the way trauma kind of resides in our bodies, but I hadn't actually experienced it. And so I was just interested in it. And I guess it's Nora Ephron who said,
00:14:18
Speaker
Everything is material for a writer. It's kind of a fruitful and very urgent kind of curiosity. And so I think as someone who just had written in the first person kind of loosely for many, many years, it seemed a little bit natural to turn to that as a subject in my writing. And I also think it helped me, or at least I thought it would.
00:14:47
Speaker
because it would kind of get me out of bed every day and give me a project and a sense of purpose and an excuse to talk to some really interesting people who I was hoping would be helpful to me. And of course they were. Then of course the problem was that I had to actually sit with this material for years and write the book. And so I think what had been initially kind of a helpful motivation
00:15:14
Speaker
became also a burden. I had to live in this land of heartbreak every day while I was talking about the physical effects of it and the bummer trivia of what happens to people who feel lonely or feel abandoned. There's a lot out there in the data about
00:15:39
Speaker
early rates of death and increased chronic disease and heart attacks and loss of cognitive function, all this stuff that people go through kind of who are in trauma for a long time or who feel lonely for a long time. So that was the downside. And then I guess the upside again is when I was done with the book, when I actually kind of pushed the button to send it off
00:16:09
Speaker
to my editor, it was a huge sense of relief. And I kind of had the sense of closure a little bit in that, oh, I'm so done with heartbreak. I'm so done with it. And I think that closure, it's up at the very end, was in fact helpful. Yeah, it was, like I said, there's a,
00:16:34
Speaker
i want to see pulls you in but it is it will i mean it does i mean the personal aspect in thinking about uh... when you're talking about the the impacts on your body and then i was thinking and try to translate it to because i'm thinking about my experience with relationship breakups and i and i think that they've been mike as a human like i've i've i've felt them i felt them hard you know and um... but there's a language type of thing and even hearing about describing in terms of
00:17:03
Speaker
the body i had a radical realization that i've only grown that type of language or being able to realize the body impact of what's going on and way back then i didn't so i'm like you know what the heck was going on with my body and i'm sure i didn't like
00:17:21
Speaker
Process it. I think I was I know I was drinking more around that time after the loss and so I know you know in my head why they might not have been that that processing but just Just how serious of a of a matter it is Really really seriously and I can't tell you how many readers, you know reach out to me and say oh now I understand
00:17:50
Speaker
what was happening in my body. And I think it's helpful. It's helpful to kind of understand that. When we go through heartbreak, it feels like a very singular experience. It may be something we only go through a couple of times in our lives. We don't necessarily have friends going through it at the same time. And so that's another reason it can be sort of disorienting.
00:18:14
Speaker
And so I think being able to kind of read about it and understand that there is a language for it and there is a vocabulary and that there is a very universally shared response, I think a lot of people do find that very helpful.
00:18:30
Speaker
is that community or group help or group experience that can really help with that. Noah, thank you for that work. I think it's recognized or even conveyed a sensation with the book that there was a lot of surprises as you went along that you were kind of pulling together new ground. How surprised were you with the lack of
00:18:57
Speaker
maybe serious consideration of heartbreak as you explored this. What was that like? Were you just shocked or what was it like? I mean, I think there is a lot out there about heartbreak in art and poetry and popular music. But there wasn't a lot of science. And that's what my mind is drawn to, what my mind wants for reassurance.
Impact of Heartbreak on Health
00:19:24
Speaker
So that was surprising. And then the science itself was surprising, knowing that we have these transcription factors, these genetic factors in our immune system that respond to our social state, that listen. As one immunologist told me, we have these cells that listen for loneliness. And they change their genetic expression depending on whether we feel like we're alone or not.
00:19:54
Speaker
They change how they respond to viruses. They change how they respond to bacteria and infection. That was like mind blowing to me and part of why I felt so motivated to write this book. I just felt like that was new, interesting stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I, um,
00:20:14
Speaker
I wanted to ask you, we were talking about some, it's very inspiring ideas about the environment and creativity and just thinking about the ways that you create, but I wanted to ask you one of the big questions that I ask all guests is, what is art? Yeah, what is art? So I'm reading a book by the Irish poet, John O'Donohue called,
00:20:44
Speaker
Anamkara. And, you know, when I saw you were going to ask me that question, I just immediately thought of this passage that I had read from it. Yeah. And, you know, basically that art is this way to sort of reconcile our interior lives and our exterior lives. And so, you know, if it's OK, I'll just read a couple of sentences from this. I'd love that. I'd love that. Yeah. So, you know, John O'Donohue, unfortunately, he's not alive any longer, but he was a priest who
00:21:13
Speaker
left being a priest to become kind of a spiritual philosopher. And so he thinks about these things. So here he says, to be wholesome, we must remain truthful to our vulnerable complexity. No one else can undertake this task for you. You are the one and only threshold of an inner world.
00:21:42
Speaker
He says, this wholesomeness is holiness. Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world. I thought that was really
00:22:11
Speaker
provocative and interesting. Wow, that's quite amazing. I'm kind of bowled over by that.
00:22:25
Speaker
I've had a lot of poetry and a lot of succinct language on the show lately. And listening to it and reading, there's just something special about that when it captures it for you. So thank you for that. Good timing, it seems like, for everybody. What do you think the...
00:22:49
Speaker
What do you think, a little more specifically, if you want to build off that, what do you think the role of art is? What's it do for us? I think it's a way of processing what it means to be human in a way that makes us feel kind of special and unique and privileged in our uniqueness, but also gives us a sense of belonging because it is through art.
00:23:18
Speaker
that we access another language with which to share what it means to be human. That's part of what I think it is.
Art's Role in Healing and Belonging
00:23:32
Speaker
Thank you for that as well. What about art and healing? I started this show four years ago. I've done about 200 episodes.
00:23:46
Speaker
you learn as you create things that you don't know the whole story of why you were creating it or what you were moving towards. But part of it is a lot connected to what you'd read there of this kind of like primal freedom of this desire, of this liberation of being yourself, you know, philosophy, art, and just being who you are.
00:24:17
Speaker
In that, your books are about healing and recovery. And how crucial do you think arts are in that? I hear conversations that say, well, arts heal. And I'm not trying to poo-poo it, because I agree with it. But how important are the arts in helping us heal as humans?
00:24:44
Speaker
Well, here's where the science journalist in me I think can add something because what I learned through writing this book is that one of the antidotes to grief is awe, is beauty. And that was fascinating to me. And I go into it quite a lot in the book, what experiencing awe kind of opens up for us.
00:25:11
Speaker
And there's been a lot of really interesting psychology in this field. And among the things that opens up for us is a sense of belonging, sort of feeling connected to something larger than ourselves. To feel awe is to feel a little bit overpowered by something amazing and something that is outside of us, but that we also feel connected to. That's really important for healing.
00:25:38
Speaker
And then it also, because it is a response to something external, it gets us out of our heads in this really healthy way. It kind of reduces our ego quite famously in a similar way that now there's a lot of research in the science of psychedelics and why that's so transformational. There's
Art, Ego, and Healing Pathways
00:26:01
Speaker
something about kind of quieting our ego as we
00:26:07
Speaker
I think explode in some new neuronal pathways in our brains in a way that helps us tell stories of healing, who we are, who we want to be, how we relate to the world, that we don't have to be enslaved to these patterns and stories that we've been telling ourselves for years, that there's awe and beauty provide this window of opportunity to write a new story.
00:26:37
Speaker
And I think it's a really undertold kind of antidote to human misery. So it really got me excited when I heard about the science of that.
00:26:52
Speaker
Yeah, and there's a lot of the idea of a discard in old notions, even around creativity, right? I was very influenced, I am very influenced by David Lynch and his description and experience with transcendental meditation of moving away from the idea of all this intense suffering is what pushes the stuff out as an artist, which is part of the complicated story of an artist.
00:27:21
Speaker
It was the reduction of the ego. It wasn't the exaggeration. It was the reduction of the ego. And then what is there watching, what you would say, the big fish that are coming by and just catch them. And it sounds poetic, but it's the idea that it's due to the rescission of, like, on the same point of the ego that you're like, something different is happening here.
00:27:51
Speaker
Like what John O'Donohue was saying, it's kind of both, right? It's that connection between what's going on inside of us and the external world. And sometimes we tend to just get a little too wrapped up in just the internal stuff. And it's really art, you know, that can help pull us out. Yeah, I know that.
00:28:15
Speaker
I'm glad there's something good about talking about these issues, too, because we've only got some science back there before that, because I was lodged in the philosophy department for a while. And even philosophers, some philosophers do a lot of science, but for me it was like what I know about
00:28:36
Speaker
the science like academically is you know the philosophy of science which sounds sounds like okay you're gonna think about the idea but it's an important uh it's an important piece and i'm so impacted by um my background is in studying literature and and philosophy so you know i do or
00:28:55
Speaker
writing and and the craft and I think that I think In in in your combination like I said of you know personal Scientific and narrative that's a really tough area to move through effectively and I and I think you do because The science will look at it one way right and then you know personal experience emotion and not you know
00:29:21
Speaker
So I see that you do that. I want to move to the big overarching question regarding the show and the life, the universe and everything. I was wondering if you had an answer of why there's something rather than nothing. You tell me, isn't that the name of your show?
00:29:47
Speaker
I know, right? It's like, let's talk about it because I don't know. I'm curious to know why you named your show that. Yeah. Why the question and everything? No, that's cool. Um, yes. So, uh, uh, something around the nothing's like the biggest question of all, right? Like why?
00:30:08
Speaker
Why did all this happen? And what I tried to do at the beginning of the show, or at least I was thinking about, is it can be approached through art, science, and philosophy in very different ways. So I find guests who answer it. I made something from nothing. This shit wasn't here before, and now I did it, and I made it.
00:30:35
Speaker
I didn't know at the time when I started the show, but what I like about the big question is that since it's a variety show that I do a variety show in many different directions, I felt like I just cast a wide net and I'm able to talk to you and an opera singer and otherwise.
00:30:58
Speaker
My answer to it, I've had to give an answer before, is I'm very influenced by Buddhist philosophy. And there's the notion of nothing, which is different than there being no thing. It's kind of like an empty of inherent existence, right? There's no thing, thing behind something that there's phenomena that we experience.
00:31:28
Speaker
It matters how you look at the term nothing, no thing, right? In Western philosophy, it's like, I make things because I don't want there to be nothing. But you can also approach it in a different way of that there's like, okay, now this is going there. That there's no thing behind the thing, that there's no inherent existence there and there's phenomena.
00:31:50
Speaker
Florence, I think you flipped the question and turned me into a circle. Thank you. I think you turned it around and turned me around on this show. Which is what the question can do. Florence, tell folks, I mean,
00:32:14
Speaker
There's a lot of places folks can go to find your writing. I mentioned Audible. Where do folks go to find your books, your writing? Thank you for asking that. I have a website that's really easy to find. It's FlorenceWilliams.com. There are links to my audio work and my print work.
00:32:37
Speaker
And retreats, I give talks that I give. Because I'm so into the three-day effect, I actually do lead retreats for three days, where we go out into a beautiful place and try to find some awe and try to experience some of that. So yeah, everything's on there.
00:33:00
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. I even had looked at the website and I seen some nice animated videos connected to your work as well. So there's like, nice, nice little promotional pieces and things in there. And I worked with some great artists to do these like cut out videos as book trailers.
00:33:21
Speaker
Those those those were lovely and yeah, I appreciate the audio work you do I appreciate your writing and what you go into I like the you know going right in with things and and I think you're I I think you're
00:33:39
Speaker
courageous in trying to pull off what you do. And I think you pull off what you do. And I think that the recent award recognizes that for literary science writing. So I've appreciated all your work. And I just wanted to thank you for chatting some of these big questions, turning the big question around on me, talking about poetry and heartbreak. And I wanted to thank you so much, Florence, for coming on to the show. Well, thank you, Ken. It's really an honor.
00:34:06
Speaker
to be here. And it's just an honor, you know, when anyone actually reads my books and makes it through them and wants to talk about them. So thank you.
00:34:16
Speaker
Yeah, that's what I've kind of done my whole thing. If I find, I find one that I get into and it's all piled through after that. So, uh, uh, great chatting with you and, um, uh, best of luck in your adventures. And I hope that sometime be out in one of those three days and maybe find. Yeah, that's what we all need if you can. Thanks so much, Florence. Thank you, Ken.
00:34:48
Speaker
This is something rather than nothing.