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Episode 104—Elizabeth Rush on "Rising" and What It Means to Be a Woman in the Field
147 Plays7 years ago
Here we are again, welcome to The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the best artists about telling true stories. I’m Brendan O’Meara. I gotta say right up top that there’s been some serious issues with my hosting, Podomatic for those in the know, with the RSS Feeds. Shows are coming up unavailable in Apple Podcasts and it disappeared from Google Play and Stitcher. They say they’re on it, but it’s been three days with no improvement. You can still stream the episodes from the embedded player on my website, brendanomeara.com, but in the meantime, downloading through the most popular and widely used platform—Apple Podcasts—is impossible until Podomatic gets it fixed. You might say I’ve been shopping around for other options. Episode 104 brings back Elizabeth Rush to the podcast. Her new book Rising: Dispataches from the New American Shore (Milkweed Editions) is out. She could be coming to a city near you so check the show notes for the Rising Tour. I think that’s what Bruce Springsteen called his tour when his Rising came out. In this episode we talk about: Rising sea levels How to turn bleak material into something beautiful How Elizabeth finds teaching energizing And sexual harassment while doing fieldwork, something she’s never been asked about and was happy to get to talk about. So that’s where we’re at. Please bear with me on the RSS nonsense. If you follow the social feeds, that links you up to my website so go find @CNFPod and @BrendanOMeara on Twitter and @CNFPodcast on Facebook. Follow Elizabeth @ElizabethaRush on Twitter for all things Rising. If you made it this far I suspect you might like the show and want to help it out. Would you mind leaving an honest review on Apple Podcasts? That helps with validation and visibility. Let’s try and get to 100. We’re 57 ratings away at the moment. If a small fraction of you take out your phones, click on the star you deem appropriate, hit submit, that’s all you gotta do and you will have helped out the show in a major way. That takes like 10 seconds, if you want to leave a review, I will still edit a piece of writing up to 2,000 words for your kindness and time. Just send me a screenshot of the review with the date and we’ll get started. I also have a great monthly reading list newsletter where I send out four book recommendations and what you might have missed from the world of the podcast. I don’t get any kickbacks or anything, so it’s just things I dig and endorse for your pleasure. First of the month. No Spam. Can’t beat that.
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Transcript
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Promotional support is also provided by Hippo Campus Magazine.
Remembering November Contest
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It's 2018 Remembering 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!
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Visit hippocampusmagazine.com for details. Hippocampus magazine, memorable, creative non-fiction. Let's do the show!
Introduction to Creative Nonfiction Podcast
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Here we go again. Welcome to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to the best artists about telling true stories. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara. I got to say right up top that there's been some serious issues with my hosting.
Technical Issues with RSS Feeds
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Podomatic is the platform that I post the show on. And there's these issues with the RSS feeds.
00:01:03
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Shows are coming up unavailable in Apple Podcasts, and it appears that it has just disappeared completely off Google Play and Stitcher. Potomatix says they're on it, but it's been over three days with no improvement. You can still stream the episodes from the Embedded Player on my website, friendinomera.com. But in the meantime, downloading through the most popular and widely used platform, Apple Podcasts.
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is completely impossible until Potomac gets it fixed. You might say I've been shopping around for other options.
Personal Update on Dog's Health
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In any case, I think I teased last week that my dog isn't doing too well and that's unfair for me to say and then not give a follow-up. The fact is he's technically still not doing very well, but he's on a steroid and a few other meds that have alleviated much of his discomfort.
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Excuse me. We have to take him out to pee like every two hours because steroids make him drink about a gallon of water in one sitting but that's okay. Smarty is sort of in hospice care and we're just trying to make the guy comfortable. His illness could be as serious as terminal lung cancer or it could be fungal and thus treatable. He's 14 so we're, you know, we know we're signing up for it here but
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We don't know right now, but the meds are helping with his comfort levels, and that's what's important. As long as he's comfortable, we're happy. Okay, enough about that, smarty.
Interview with Elizabeth Rush
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All right, so episode 104 brings back Elizabeth Rush to the podcast. She was on at episode 71, go check that out in the show notes, but her new book, Rising,
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Dispatches from the new American Shore Milkweed Editions 2018 is out now. She could be coming to a city near you, so check the show notes for the rising tour. I think that's what Bruce Springsteen called his tour when his album rising came out 15 years ago or so, I don't know.
Topics on Sea Levels and Writing Challenges
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In this episode, Elizabeth and I talk about, of course, rising sea levels, managed an organized retreat, how to turn bleak material into something beautiful, how Elizabeth finds teaching energizing to her writing, and something she's never been asked about and was happy to talk about as the sexual harassment for women who are doing field work.
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So that's where we're at. Please bear with me on the RSS nonsense. If you follow the social feeds, those will link you up to my website, so at cnfpod and at Brendan O'Mear on Twitter.
Social Media Mentions
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at CNF Podcast on Facebook. Follow Elizabeth at Elizabeth A. Rush on Twitter for all things rising. At long last, here is episode 104.
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Well thank you. I do.
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In general, that's sort of a response that I've gotten from a lot of people. And I think at its core, it is kind of depressing, but there's also little places to find hope in some of these stories. And I think, how should I put it? I tried to write it as beautifully as possible. So despite the depressing stuff, it would be difficult to put it down.
00:04:53
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It's quite a challenge, but you, you know, you rose to it in the way you were able to tell the story. So, uh, was that, was that something early on, like a strategy you realized that you needed to adopt to, to make this approachable and not too bleak? You know, so before I wrote rising, I did some more like straightforward journalism on sea level rise. One of the first, one of the first pieces I did was for, um,
00:05:23
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an online magazine called Urban Omnibus that's really all about architecture and design, in particular New York City. And some of the earliest writing I did on the book was reporting for them on Staten Island. And so I wrote this long article that ended up actually winning an award, the Association of Science Writers Award.
00:05:50
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a couple years ago. And I really was pleased with how the article turned out. But that being said, I started doing some other straight sort of journalism on sea level rise and about a year, a year and a half into sort of covering that beat. I felt like fatigued by the language of like public policy and the very
00:06:16
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specific like hard science language that often surrounds this phenomenon. And so I started I applied for and got this amazing fellowship that allowed me to teach at Bates College one class a semester for two years. And that was really like winning the lottery because that gave me time to write and write in a way that was
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essentially not making any money immediately. Like I got my salary from teaching, but I didn't have to teach that much. And then I got to sink into the writing of rising. And I, you know, I essentially was like, all right, I'm going to tell the story of these coastal communities, some of which I've already reported on, but I want to do it with lyric language. I want to write the story in such a way that's like, hopefully leans more towards the literary.
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How did you arrive at covering sea level rise as a beat, so to speak? That's a long circuitous story, but essentially, I graduated from Reed College with a BA in English and I wrote a creative thesis.
00:07:35
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It was a collection of lyric poems, essentially about the female body and the way the female body encounters like wildernesses and wild spaces. And put another way, like I always wanted to be an environmental writer, but when I graduated, the school was in Oregon. I was like, oh,
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half of Oregon also wants to be environmental writers. I'm not sure that there's like much that makes me profoundly different than the rest than everybody else. So I rode my bike to Alaska by myself and then I moved to Vietnam alone as one does. And
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You know, I thought like, okay, if I can't be an environmental writer, I'm going to figure out how to be alone, which was something I felt like I was never very good at. And then, amazingly, I started getting paid to write in Vietnam. I was the arts writer for this foundation that supported controversial North Vietnamese artists called Art Vietnam. And then I started getting occasional sort of long form newspaper assignments.
00:08:51
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from a journal called Le Monde Diplomatique in France. And so I felt like then I got this amazing crash course for three years and doing nonfiction writing. And during that time, I also earned my MFA through a low residency MFA program, which we spoke about, I think, on a previous podcast. And then, um,
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And then when I moved to New York City, I sort of, I was very, I kept writing about Asia and had to travel back to Asia somewhat frequently. And I was very aware that it was possible that I'd get sort of like pigeonholed as a person who only writes about Southeast Asia. And so I kind of knew that my chance to pivot and to define myself in the genre that
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that I wanted to write in would be, was that moment. And so I started writing about sea level rise. Sandy happened shortly thereafter. I had just been in India and Bangladesh and had seen the impact of sea level rise in Bangladesh really tangibly firsthand. And that felt like something that was newsy that I could write about and get paid for, but that also really satiated my desire to write about human beings and the environment.
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In a similar sense of being afraid to be pigeonholed as a writer covering a lot of Southeast Asia, do you feel a similar sense of worry about being typecast, so to speak, as someone who only writes about sea level rise?
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Not in the same way, one, because it's much closer to the initial set of interests that have always driven who I read and what I read. That being said, well, and on top of that, I guess I should add that I just found out that I will be going to Antarctica next year with the National Science Foundation.
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on this boat that's going to study the Thoates Glacier, which has been nicknamed by the news media the Doomsday Glacier and is sort of
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described as the cork to the West Antarctic ice sheet. And if it pops or the rate at which it pops will determine how much sea level rise we have and when. It's really tied fundamentally to the future of rising seas and the rate at which they're happening. So I think that is probably the next book and I'm really excited about it. Beyond that, I don't know. It's like hard to imagine
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continuing to cover sea level rise and getting an even better story than a journey to Antarctica to write about, but who knows? I think the climate change is constant and ongoing and will offer many opportunities that are really important for storytelling. For sure.
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And you wrote early in the book that, um, yeah, I wonder if there's a threshold between immersing myself and my subject matter and drowning in it. And you, and you wondered whether you would cross that line or not. And, uh, was that a worry as you and a real feeling like waiting down on your chest as you were writing, writing this book? I remember about,
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I think it was two summers ago. I was in the middle of my 10 year middle of my two years at Bates College and I decided that I wanted to teach a class in the fall on climate change fiction. A lot of my nonfiction writing friends.
00:12:46
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have also started to rate speculative fiction in this genre. Some people call it sci-fi. I'm not sure if it's so close to science fiction that it deserves exactly that term, but let's use it because everyone uses it. I decided I wanted to teach a class on sci-fi. And what sci-fi does really well, I think, as a genre is it allows writers
00:13:11
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to imagine themselves into the shoes, into the positions of people who are fundamentally being changed by climate change. So I always say climate change is slow moving, incredibly place-based. It's about something like the late arrival of ice in the lake. It's about the slow drop in the aquifer and the loss of arable land.
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The average American moves once every four years. And so those changes are actually really hard for us to perceive. And I think CLIFI as a genre allows us to imagine ourselves into the position of those kinds of people, those people that are being fundamentally changed by climate change. And so I was really excited to teach this class that also meant spending my most of my summer reading CLIFI books. And there was a moment
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where I was described as sort of like probably the darkest place that I reached while writing this book. I think I said to my husband is like, I can't, I need to take a break from reading from reading these books, because they're
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profoundly disturbing. You have huge migrations and racial violence and sexual violence that's precipitated because so many more people have been made vulnerable by changes in the climate. And it also sort of, that experience, I think, changed how I decided to teach that class. I started to also look for sci-fi that
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um, presented like possible new world orders. So, uh, Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 is a good example. It's sort of in a sly and subtle way about the overthrow of capitalism. It's also really long. It's like 700 pages long. But, um, yeah, if there were moments, there were moments that were difficult, but I think in equal measure,
00:15:15
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Seeing coastal communities also rise to this challenge firsthand, you know, seeing them come together, start grassroots movements to advocate for better flood infrastructure or advocate for federal help to retreat from shifting shores, that also, those small stories sort of bullied me through the process.
00:15:40
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Yeah, specifically the rallying around on Staten Island, that particular retreat, and then the way you described the bulldozers taking the houses down, like praying mantises, and then the wooden stake going in the ground of a former plot of land, a former home, that was...
00:16:08
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abandoned by, you know, abandoned is kind of the wrong word, but, you know, the, the idea. Purposefully left behind. Yes, there we go. Purposely left behind. It was, it almost had this, this post-apocalyptic kind of feel too, like the people are feeling the crunch of the water and they're moving, moving inward. And it's probably something that really struck you and surprised you in your reporting as you were going through this process. Yeah, I mean, this was a community,
00:16:37
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I would describe them as sort of like right leaning working class would on paper seem to be the least likely to participate in a really progressive climate change adaptation strategy called managed retreat essentially where
00:17:01
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The federal or state government comes in, as you mentioned, they offer pre-storm prices for their homes. And then the homeowner sell the homes to the government. The government's responsible for knocking them all over, removing all the infrastructure, and then helping the land return to nature so that it can act as a buffer in the next storm. And when I say return to nature in this context, I specifically mean helping the tidal wetlands.
00:17:30
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Um, come back because tidal wetlands are a really great, great buffer for us to have in big storm events. They help slow down, um, the storm surges and they can hold and retain a lot of water. That community was one of the first that I reported on. And that also means that I've just had the incredible, um, good luck. I don't know if that's the right word.
00:17:57
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I've just had the incredible honor of getting to watch that community over time. I've stayed in touch with a lot of the residents who chose to sell their homes to the state and leave. Many of them relocated in Staten Island. The city of New York gave them a 5% bonus if they'd stay within the five boroughs because the city didn't want to lose the property tax value.
00:18:26
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Next weekend, for instance, I'm going down to New York City and I'm visiting with Nicole Montalto, whose story appears in the book. She lost her father during Hurricane Sandy. And she moved about two and a half miles, three miles inland. She's up on a hill in Stapleton Heights.
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And she and her husband just had a baby that they named after her deceased father. And she said to me, watching my house come down felt like the end, the closing of a chapter. We're really glad that we're still nearby. We get to keep many of our friends and our relationship to the place itself, but in a slightly different location. So that community has just been
00:19:15
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really fascinating to watch. And I think in some ways the further we get out from the storm and the greater distance they have from the trauma that was the storm, the happier they are that they did decide to leave and start over somewhere else. It's fascinating.
00:19:34
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Yeah. Yeah. And you make a, made a good point earlier about, about how wetlands are, they're really, they're very important ecosystems as, as a buffer, especially towards for, for storms, they're natural filtration systems. Um, maybe you could speak, speak to that. Cause of course people tend to think of swamps and wetlands as wastelands. So maybe you can really speak to the ecology and how important they are.
00:20:03
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Sure. I mean, when I started writing rising, when I started like reporting on sea level rise, I had this desire to be an environmental writer and I really wanted to spend time outside.
00:20:16
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And it dawned on me pretty quickly that in order to cover this topic, I was going to have to spend all my time in wetlands. And I was like, oh, boring. You know, why can't I be like writing about, I don't know, spotted owls on South Sister Mountain in Oregon? You know, that would be a whole heck of a lot more fun to cover. But what I uncovered as I started to sort of like sink into this topic matter is that wetlands are incredibly dynamic ecosystems and that
00:20:46
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my response to them as being sort of like boring or not that interesting is really conditioned through culture and they have you know historically been associated with
00:21:02
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the product like with health disorders. If you go back as far as like the Hippocratic writings, you see that there's all of these suppositions that the gases that emanate from wetlands make human beings sick. And in part, I mean, there's probably some kind of thread of scientific truth there because they are, they do tend to be breeding grounds for mosquitoes. We know that there's a lot of mosquito-borne disease.
00:21:32
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But I also don't think they deserve the bad rep that they get. They're also, I hope I get this right. They cover something like 5% of the Earth's surface and they store almost a quarter of the carbon that's stored in the soil. So wetlands are also really
00:21:56
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incredibly productive at the sort of like a botanical level. So every year marsh grasses grow at this really incredible rate and their root systems are able to suck up out. They're able to sort of like pull carbon out of the atmosphere and hold it in their root systems. And so
00:22:22
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Not only are the amazing carbon storage sites as they start to drown with sea level rise, they're beginning to release some of those gases back into the atmosphere, making them sort of huge sites of CO2 and methane production. So they're really dynamic and they're really great at storing all the gases that we don't want to have in the atmosphere. And yet as they're threatened and starting to drown there,
00:22:52
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giving up and releasing some of those gases back. Yeah, they're like a time bomb. Yeah, unfortunately, yes. That was a revelation in studying these spaces as well, how useful they are for us and how overlooked.
00:23:10
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Yeah, the methane too, I think by an order of magnitude is like a much more sort of toxic greenhouse gas too. Yeah, it doesn't last as long in the atmosphere, but I think it's over a 30-year time span. It's like 70 times more capable of heating the atmosphere than a molecule of carbon. It's bonkers, having the most immediate sense. It's really bad for
00:23:40
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this dynamic equation that is climate change and global warming. Yeah. And there was an incident in the book too where you were speaking with Alvin and you were pressing him for details about his experience. And you admit this kind of moment of guilt as you're kind of
00:24:06
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prying into his life in very sensitive ways. And that's kind of the nature of this whole story and this whole book you've written when you talk to a lot of these people by its very nature, it's pretty sensitive. So you're very sort of self aware of that. So how did you get through those moments of that, you feeling like you were prying too much, but ultimately to give them voice? Like, how did you process that and get through that?
00:24:37
Speaker
So I think that's an excellent question and one that I think is in my approach to this is slightly different everywhere I go, but there are some unifying themes. So one thing that I realized in writing this book was that, you know, if I wanted to come into a community and ask them
00:25:06
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ask individuals about the storm that took their father's lives, that was causing the rapid deterioration of their property value, was literally taking the ground beneath their feet. One, I think I realized that I sort of needed to make myself vulnerable too. And so on a practical level, that meant
00:25:33
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walking instead of driving a car. That meant biking instead of driving a car. That meant spending a lot of time in single locations, going door to door, knocking on doors, instead of calling or asking for someone to meet me, let's say, at the local cafe. I tried to present and show folks that I
00:26:01
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was to be trusted because I didn't do much to sort of defend myself, my body, that I was entering into these spaces as sort of as vulnerably as I could. And then I think that in a very basic level helped them feel comfortable sharing what makes them vulnerable with me.
00:26:27
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The other thing is just time. I think a lot of journalists are expected to go somewhere for like a week and get the story in that week. You know, the Staten Island stuff, I was teaching at the College of Staten Island. I was out, I spent probably a year and a half physically going to that community regularly. I became sort of a fixture. And in other locations,
00:26:56
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You know, I tried to instead of take a week, take a month, take a month and a half and really sink into a specific location and spend time there and get folks to trust me.
00:27:09
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Was there ever any pause of putting yourself in such maybe physically precarious situations like that? Because in a worst case scenario, you could have been really, really harmed and traumatized. And so in what sense did you kind of wrestle with that? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think as a female,
00:27:37
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journalist going door to door, knocking on strangers doors. You always, I always felt that my safety was a concern. And I think on the one hand over the years, I mean, this is like an approach to writing creative nonfiction that I've used, not just with rising, but with other projects. And I think on the one hand, I've gotten pretty good at
00:28:07
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trusting my instinct which is of course not always the most useful bit of advice to hear probably because everyone's relationship to their own instinct is different. There are also just sort of basic precautionary measures like this maybe sounds a bit, I treated it sort of like I would treat going hiking.
00:28:31
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or backpacking by myself. So you always let someone know where you're going. You always let them know when you expect to be back. You set up times to check in with them so that if you don't return, that sends off an immediate kind of alarm. And also with the door knocking going door to door, I would tend to try to analyze the situation on someone's porch, not enter their house,
00:29:01
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until I felt like I had a bit of a read on who they were and what to expect and just not to feel fearful of saying like, okay, thank you for your time and turning around and walking away.
00:29:17
Speaker
Yeah, because you talk a lot about that, about in the risk section. I believe it was on the, was it in Pensacola and the Panhandle part where this came up or was it in Louisiana? I think it was in Pensacola. It's the risk section. Yeah. Yeah. You got it.
00:29:33
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Yeah. In that section, you are sort of by this man, Samuel, and he's a bit forceful in kind of a creepy way. And then there are other people too who kind of like, oh, come around here, I'll kidnap you. And it's like, holy fucking shit. It's like,
00:29:57
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And then you have this interaction with a very bright student of yours. So you really bring in this element of what it's like to be a woman with her boots on the ground and the stuff that you're constantly dealing with out there in the field. And how important was it for you to, in a book that's about sea level rise, but that has its own form of risk,
00:30:22
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So how important was it for you to sort of put in and talk about the risk that it takes to unearth this kind of information as a woman? You know, so that chapter that you're referring to I would say was definitely the hardest for me to write. And for a while it contained none of the stuff about sexual harassment and assault while carrying out field work.
00:30:50
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There was this moment, so I went on this research trip and a senior colleague of mine, I'm not sure if it's harassment or assault or somewhere right on the line, but had treated me really inappropriately. I had expected that from an interviewee.
00:31:10
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hadn't expected it from a colleague of mine. And so I was really surprised by who turned out to be the risk and how that was fundamentally different than what I had been set up culturally to expect. And then I got back to campus and a student of mine
00:31:30
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Well, during that summer, she had written me a series of emails and we spoke on the phone and she was being harassed, carrying out her fieldwork and we came back to campus and had this lunch together. And she was a senior, she was going, she was a senior and she just looked at me and said, no one told me that this was possible. And my response was like, oh, it happens all the time. I mean, I've been,
00:31:58
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harassed carrying out field work since day one in Vietnam. And it was sort of an eye-opening moment to realize that we could be training creative nonfiction writers, female creative nonfiction writers, that we could be training female anthropologists and never even bring up that their gender might make them vulnerable and that would
00:32:24
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more likely than not at some point in their lives precipitate a kind of experience that is fundamentally, you hope that it's only fundamentally uncomfortable, but that could actually be violent and really detrimental to their safety. So somehow that conversation with my student made me realize that that part of this chapter had to, that this had to make its way into the book, that it couldn't not be there.
00:32:55
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we ended up like having a roundtable discussion at our college and to the college's benefit. They started thinking about, okay, so how do we incorporate this into the curriculum? And yeah, it's sort of the case of, I'm sure all nonfiction writers know that
00:33:16
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The process of writing is sort of like you watch your thinking unfold and you don't necessarily know where a project's going to carry you. So when I started that chapter, I didn't know that it would essentially create a parallel between the kinds of vulnerability that low income communities of color face along the coast and the kinds of vulnerability that women carrying out field research
00:33:46
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face but but there it is over time it sort of it refused to be anything else.
00:33:53
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Yeah, that's something, like you said, you had this round table with women, young women, to kind of let them sort of know that this is a reality. Is this something that you've consciously started to fold into your curriculum too, like as really as like a workplace hazard that if you're gonna be doing field work, this is what you're gonna unfortunately be approached with?
00:34:21
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Yeah, I mean, I absolutely make it part of the discussion in my class, especially when I teach courses where I ask students to go out and conduct interviews and to do fieldwork. There's a great essay by Gia Tolentino and the New Yorker that
00:34:43
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came out sort of right as the Harvey Weinstein story was breaking and it was also just about how fundamentally sexual harassment can sort of
00:34:56
Speaker
twist a woman's idea of herself. So you thought your senior colleague was taking interest in your writing because they really liked your writing and you found out that really it was a sort of step towards sexual harassment or part of sexual harassment and opportunism because they might hold the keys to your future in some sense. And so then you started out
00:35:22
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not only them and their motivations, but also the quality of your own work. And that was sort of the most heartbreaking thing for me to see with my student was that, you know, this experience made her think less about the incredible work that she was doing. And so we talk, we talk about physical safety. We talk about, you know, tactics to employ in the field in my class, you know,
00:35:49
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sort of what we were talking about, create check-in times and dress really conservatively and get business cards. But all of those things together don't always necessarily shield you from these experiences happening. So also, how do you think about and not allow as best you can your self-esteem and your esteem and your idea of your own work to be tarnished when your physical body is treated inappropriately?
00:36:19
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Yeah, especially with this guy that you had this experience with down there, it's like when you brought up the subject to him, first he says, I have no idea, I love my family, I have no further intentions, and then he's like, let me know when you get over it.
00:36:34
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So it's like he totally like put the freaking blame on you. And then from there, you weren't allowed to present at this thing you were hoping to present at this National Academy of the Sciences, you know, he didn't take another fellowship, you don't co author an article you think you're gonna write. And all of a sudden, it's like, you had to take all the baggage for this guy's carelessness. And so like, that's kind of the shitty aspect of this too.
00:37:03
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, the bottom line is that I have the power to say, no, I don't want to have a professional relationship with you. And that felt really important and really good to my long time, long term sort of personal sanity, but that's not without repercussions. And, um,
00:37:26
Speaker
And it's true that he would continue to contact me for about a year with different opportunities. Oh, you know, essentially, are you over it yet? You can you can come do this thing with me. And so I just said, no, no, no, again and again. And it felt like I felt like I was I had this book contract. I felt like I was at a point in my career
00:37:50
Speaker
Where I could say no and I could walk away from some opportunities and that that wouldn't feel like total career suicide, but that. Also felt like a place that I had arrived at after 10 years of work, and so I think what's also really particularly damaging about these experiences is when you're.
00:38:09
Speaker
earlier on in your career and you feel like, okay, I really need to take advantage of this contact. I need to pursue the opportunities presented here because that could be a really big break for me. That being said, I think we're also getting to this moment where there are more women editors, there are more women in senior positions,
00:38:38
Speaker
or genderqueer people in senior positions that can help and usher in and create opportunities for young women and genderqueer people because the more sort of diverse the gatekeepers, the more opportunities you can have to pass through those gates without having to face this kind of discrimination.
00:39:02
Speaker
An important part of the book too was you don't only profile people and sort of tell their stories in your own narrative voice. You actually just kind of transcribe some of the conversations that they have and some of that with Nicole Montalto, right? That's a tongue-tied story.
00:39:27
Speaker
Her story is particularly gripping and tragic, and there are others too. And I wonder, what made you want to, instead of you telling that story, what made you want to just give them the microphone?
00:39:45
Speaker
I mean, I think my experience with Nicole was the moment that really created that space for me to even think about. I call them testimonies. Monologues is also a great term to have the folks who are living through these changes speak for themselves about sort of the moment that woke them up to sea level rise and the actions that they took as a result.
00:40:11
Speaker
I met Nicole Montalto. She lived in Oakwood Beach, Staten Island, that community that was coming together and asking the state to purchase and demolish their homes. I had been probably reporting on that community for six months, eight months when I finally met her. I had spent a lot of time with her Aunt Patty and her Aunt Patty invited me to
00:40:42
Speaker
the two year anniversary of her brother's death, Leonard Montalto. Leonard died during Hurricane Sandy. And so I went to this, this sort of like celebration of life ceremony at Patty's house and met Nicole there. And she just pulled me aside, sat me down in the guest bedroom and said, you know, you're writing a book
00:41:08
Speaker
I want to tell you this story. And she told me essentially the story of the night of Hurricane Sandy. She and her father were in their home together in Oakwood Beach, and she flees. Her father tells her to leave. And then for about two days after, they can't find him. And eventually, they discover his drowned body in the basement.
00:41:39
Speaker
listening to her tell this story, I just thought, what else? There's nothing I can do. There's no essaying that would make this story any more impactful. It had such an impact on me listening to her. And I felt sort of a great intimacy. She really opened herself up to tell me this story. And I felt that, you know, my readers would
00:42:06
Speaker
understand how profound this experience was by hearing it in her own words. And then I think it was, you know, like a couple months later someone, my best friend in fact, handed me a book called Voices from Chernobyl that very much uses this style of storytelling called testimony.
00:42:30
Speaker
There it's a woman named Svetlana Alexevich, and she interviews over 500 people over a 10-year period who lived in and around the Chernobyl power plant when it exploded. And that book is just a collection only of their voices, of their experience with the actual events and then the aftermath. And so when I dug into that book, I realized that I could actually
00:42:57
Speaker
Um, just transcribe what Nicole had said and put it in the book, um, fairly unmediated. So that was a real revelation. And I'm, I'm really glad. I think there's seven testimonies in all and rising. And I think they're really key.
00:43:13
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. What did this project teach you about the sort of the helicopter style journalism versus more anthropological approach? Well, I've always I've always preferred more time in one space.
00:43:40
Speaker
And I've always preferred time to make the prose as beautiful as possible, as compelling as possible. And I think that goes back to my roots as a poet.
00:43:55
Speaker
I also know that that's, I mean, that approach to writing nonfiction, I think is part of what we've lost as newspapers struggle to keep their doors open. Sending someone to go, you know, go on a two month long reporting trip is costly for the newspaper. So I think in some ways, writing rising very much sort of falls into line with
00:44:22
Speaker
the approach to creative nonfiction that I've always had. And it also was sort of about figuring out how do you do that in the absence of a contractor, a job with a newspaper to create a long form story. And so for me, part of it is also taking a teaching job and teaching at the college level.
00:44:44
Speaker
eight months out of the year, but then you have these four months in which you're still getting paid if you have a full-time job, and then you can go immerse yourself in a community. Should that be what you want to do? Yeah, that's something John McPhee does. I think he calls it his crop rotation.
00:45:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's also nice to like actually spend time with human beings in the classroom. I feel like some writers can spend a lot of time slaving over a text and never really see what it does once they release it into the world. But with students in the classroom, you see their growth and evolution and it's always really stunning and deeply rewarding. So.
00:45:33
Speaker
Yeah, it makes it makes me feel like my life has a specific purpose too, which is nice. Do you find that teaching actually energizes your capacity to be a better writer? Absolutely. Also, because one, I mean, on the one hand, it just makes me have to stay
00:45:55
Speaker
really contemporary. So I've been teaching a version of the same creative nonfiction class for six years, and I have a sabbatical coming up next year. And I'm looking in my office right now at a stack of the nonfiction books that have come out, let's say in the past two years, that I'm really excited to sort of redesign the syllabus and put them heart and center.
00:46:19
Speaker
in the new version of this class because those are the books, you know, that our students are reading and really energized by. So I want them to be able to learn from the voices that speak to them in the present moment. Yeah, it keeps me sort of contemporary and also just like
00:46:39
Speaker
Teaching is nerve wracking and there your students are ready to make all different kinds of judgments about you at any given moment. So I think it also makes you sort of like stay abreast with contemporary discussions around like how do you write about racism or sexism on the page? I think that conversation has fundamentally evolved in the past like two years. What does it mean to be a right white writer?
00:47:07
Speaker
writing about a community of color and how can you do that in a way that doesn't feel exploitative and that also might be like self-aware of the privilege that it is to be able to come in and visit from the outside and pass, you know, pass into this community and then be able to leave just as easily. Those conversations have all changed fundamentally in the past year and or two and I think
00:47:36
Speaker
If I didn't have students asking me questions about it, I wouldn't necessarily be automatically as up to date, so they helped me stay fresh. Yeah, that's a big element of the book, too, is having to go into these lower income communities where there are people of color, lower income,
00:48:04
Speaker
Yeah there is there are these elements where you're coming in and you know that you can leave and so how did you. Navigate those sort of that that that tension of you know being able to handle their stories responsibly as you as you did wonderfully done of course so how did you how did you navigate that tension.
00:48:28
Speaker
There was an absolutely excellent essay by Claudia Rakhine on the White Imaginary. The essay has a slightly longer title, and it's on Lit Hub. But she, I think, is a really brilliant thinker and voice
00:48:56
Speaker
pedagogue in terms of thinking through how do we represent race and culture and privilege on the page. And in the most basic sense, you know, she says, if you're going to call out a community as a community of color, call out your own whiteness. That whiteness is the thing that we don't name. And that is that not naming that silence around whiteness is a sign of
00:49:25
Speaker
privilege that it's considered sort of the center and everything else is peripheral to it. And so I think I was constantly aware on the page to draw attention to the circumstances that allowed me to visit these communities, just as I try to draw attention to the circumstances, historical,
00:49:49
Speaker
circumstances that led to different communities' vulnerabilities. So one thing that also was really fascinating and I think a really important discovery was to realize that in part as wetlands are considered wastelands, a lot of our displaced indigenous communities and runaway slave communities, maroon communities, sought them out as a kind of refuge. So there's a history of oppression that leads
00:50:19
Speaker
these people to occupy these marginal borderland spaces in the first place. And so I think in a subtle way, the book is also a call to reckon with that history and think of climate change as an opportunity to mend some of that history through perhaps like redistribution of
00:50:47
Speaker
property or turning some of these coastal communities into a kind of commons where the land can be held by all and get equitable and just Relocation and disaster recovery because that their vulnerability. It's not like they're choosing to live in the most vulnerable place I think many times circumstance dictates that so yes, I mean, I guess I've gone slightly astray of your question but
00:51:17
Speaker
I guess always to have that sense of history in the text, both the sort of circumstances historical that allow me to come into and leave communities. And that's a set of privileges that have to do with the color of my skin, to be sure. And then also thinking about the different histories and oppressive histories that lead to the marginalization of those
00:51:47
Speaker
of these communities financially, economically, socially. So I tried to do both at the same time.
00:51:55
Speaker
In the book also it's it's very For the individuals involved in profile throughout the whole thing. It's like very very painful and real what what's happening to their their native lands homeland in their their houses and then the fact that some are Forced to to buy into flood insurance that they can't afford which is just leads to this whole other downward spiral of
00:52:23
Speaker
a forced retreat, there's the managed retreat, and then sometimes there's a forced retreat. And then it's so, in a sense, it's very painful for these people, and you're deeply immersed with them. So how did you not take on or how did you check in with yourself in such a way that you didn't take on too much of that pain yourself and were able to keep working in the face of everybody's, everybody's reaction to these the rising sea levels in their communities?
00:52:55
Speaker
I don't mean this answer to sound flippant, but it's I think learning sort of routines for self-care are really important. So I know that I get energized and that sort of whatever chemistry is happening in my brain gets righted through regular exercise. So even when I'm out,
00:53:23
Speaker
reporting on these stories I always bring my running shoes and you know I have very visceral memories of waking up at 6 a.m. and running in the Louisiana bayou waking up at 6 a.m. and running in Pensacola and I genuinely mean that I don't I think it was actually key to keeping myself buoyant through the writing process
00:53:50
Speaker
Yeah, I don't think that's flipping at all. That's kind of what I was hoping you would get at, too, is that there are these self-care things that are every bit as important as getting out there and doing the work. But you do have to do some whatever it is to check in with yourself, whether that's meditation or exercise, which a long run can be both meditative and physically exhilarating and exhausting. So yeah, these are important things, I think,
00:54:17
Speaker
a lot of artists and writers don't necessarily check that box. It's real important to be able to get the work done. Yeah, I don't know. There's always this idea of the writer as a hard-drinking person who stays up till the wee hours drinking whiskey. I think if I did that, I would have crumbled in week two.
00:54:41
Speaker
Like the heck over the next day would just be so debilitating and depressing that I would probably have like thrown in the dowel. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's like if you if you lead a more routine based life, you can be crazy in the artwork, but you can't have a crazy life and then be crazy in the artwork. You'll just be too exhausted. Totally, totally.
00:55:08
Speaker
I tell this to my students, and there's often a little flicker of a dream lost. They're like, oh, but I wanted to be that bohemian avant-garde poet moving around the cafes in Paris. I'm like, yeah, it's actually a lot of sitting very still in your office.
00:55:31
Speaker
At least that's what it is for me. And for most of my friends who are working writers, yeah, those routines are just key. How do you have a conversation about climate change or sea level rise with someone who might not be buying into it completely? So one thing that I found again and again and again, because
00:55:58
Speaker
I wanted to make sure, well, let me take a step back. I wanted to make sure that I got voices from across the political and economic spectrum in this book, thinking about all of those testimonies that are littered throughout the book. And I realized that, of course, rising tides don't know the difference between a Democrat and a Republican. And so when I would work in right-leaning communities,
00:56:28
Speaker
I think the first step for me was to sort of check my discourse at the door, especially if you have like a right-leaning community that's far from Washington, that's far from the center of political power. Climate change as a term sounds like a very violent term. It takes their physical lived experience and turns it into a political discussion. And I think that they,
00:56:58
Speaker
often feel sort of very resistant to that discourse. It's discourse that's often sort of exclusionary of the real difficulty of their lived experience. So I would start the conversation by sort of saying, tell me about how
00:57:15
Speaker
the environment has been changing. Are you flooding worse? What's the flooding like? And so to sort of try to not use the terms as dictated by the political left to talk about these things, but to let them speak to me of their own experience.
00:57:38
Speaker
And then what was really fascinating was also to have, as you start to enter into these conversations with people, and I think as soon as they feel like you're not trying to sort of dictate the shape of the conversation, I would often not necessarily talk about climate change in the abstract, but I'd say, Hey, did you know if I'm talking to folks in Louisiana that are thinking about retreating,
00:58:07
Speaker
Did you know that there's a community in Staten Island that is already in the middle of the managed retreat process? And this is what they're doing, and this is the flooding they're facing. And to act as a conduit for personal stories from other locations in the country, I think that helping residents find common ground amongst other people all over the United States
00:58:36
Speaker
was really important. And I would say that many folks might be resistant to the terms climate change, but they're not necessarily resistant to the fact that they know they're flooding worse and worse year after year. They know the environment is changing when they hear that other people like themselves are in very similar circumstances.
00:59:01
Speaker
I think they start to become a little bit less resistant to the idea that this is a story that's playing out on a global level and that there are responsible ways of responding to it.
00:59:16
Speaker
Did you find at all in your reporting and your research of people willing to make certain lifestyle changes that would contribute positively to less carbon emissions, et cetera, or are people still kind of reluctant to make those life changes that negatively affect the environment?
00:59:43
Speaker
Well, let me say one thing first. I think 10 or 15 years ago, there was a belief. I remember at my college, they had little signs by the light switches that said something like, turn off a light, save a fish. And we were in the Pacific Northwest, and that translated to, if you use less electricity, we're going to have less.
01:00:09
Speaker
hydrological dams for energy production. And so I think, you know, 10, 15 years ago, there was this belief that individual lifestyle changes and choices could fundamentally change
01:00:27
Speaker
and have a positive impact on climate change. And I'm not entirely sure that we're in that moment any longer. I think that they're really key for sending messages to the utilities, for instance, that we might use less electricity or the choice to purchase an electric vehicle, that there's going to be more electric vehicle development as a result of consumer interest in electric vehicles. But I also think fundamentally,
01:00:58
Speaker
we're not going to be able to get out of this predicament by consuming differently. And that there has to also be a movement towards carbon tax, towards actually keeping these fossil fuels in the ground. And I think we are seeing those stories play out as well. So I think I personally am a little bit skeptical of the
01:01:25
Speaker
changes an individual consumer choice as a way of sort of fundamentally advert, you know, moving away from some of the worst possible futures that climate change could precipitate. That being said, do individuals across this country make those choices all the time? Absolutely. And I do think that that's positive.
01:01:49
Speaker
There's research that shows that we're more likely to make healthy environmental decisions when people around us are doing the same thing, that it's sort of like a, I don't know, like what happens at the schoolyard, you just want to fit in. I think it really depends on the dynamics of the community.
01:02:15
Speaker
But for instance, I mean, are people willing to give up their homes to let wetlands come back and then act as a buffer for inland communities and the storms to come? Absolutely. And I think that there is hope in that.
01:02:30
Speaker
Yeah, predicated that nothing else got built on that land too. That was the real catch of that. That was super surprising to me. Absolutely. That a lot of communities said, we'll do it. We'll sell our homes to the state, but only if it doesn't get redeveloped. And there is talk of changing that law.
01:02:52
Speaker
So that you could redevelop land that is slated and is bought out through the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program. There's actually been tremendous pushback.
01:03:03
Speaker
from flood survivors around the country on that proposed change to your disaster recovery policy. Oh man, that's disheartening. The memory of Sandy, which is only six years old, would be so short that that program, they already start thinking of ways that they can redevelop that land. That sounds maddening.
01:03:28
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's actually in particular in the context of Harvey and under the Trump administration, there's so much low lying land in Houston that's been developed within the floodplain. And there's also
01:03:46
Speaker
thousands of what are called severe repetitive loss properties, which means that they've flooded upwards of 10 times. And the federal government, which runs the National Flood Insurance Program, has paid claims for those homes upwards of 10 times. And there's this huge discussion, so what do you do? Law right now requires that you rebuild in place.
01:04:11
Speaker
And there's been a big movement to start to purchase and demolish some of these incredibly flood prone homes in Houston, in Southern Florida. And I think that's a really important idea. There's also been pushback from developers who say, well, we could develop to new flood standards in the floodplain.
01:04:36
Speaker
And that's fine, they could, but then who's going to pay for when that street is underwater in the future? And who's going to pay to repair all the utilities that those homes depend upon? So it is disheartening, but I think that's a particular product, I imagine, of this administration.
01:04:56
Speaker
And lastly, before I let you get out of here, Elizabeth, after doing this book and then subsequently the tour that you're going on with it, where does your optimism lie? My optimism, I get it from two places. One, I think, speaks
01:05:26
Speaker
to the way in which if your life is regularly, fundamentally being impacted by climate change, you don't have a choice any longer to look away. And I think we've spent a lot of the past decade being sort of scared of this phenomenon, but not wanting to engage in it in any real or immediate sense and having
01:05:53
Speaker
the privilege to do so. But last September, one in 10 Americans, US citizens, was living in a county with a disaster declaration. And that was largely because of how devastating the hurricane season was. Experts say that this hurricane season is likely to be equally devastating.
01:06:16
Speaker
And so I think that as more and more of us are made vulnerable by climate change, we have no choice but to deal with it and rise to the occasion that it presents. I think there are across the country and across the world
01:06:36
Speaker
incredible movements driven by indigenous groups to keep fossil fuels in the ground. And I think that you'll also, we are certainly starting to see coalitions of flood victims forming. There's a very cool new advocacy group called Flood Forum USA. That's a nationwide advocacy group that connects
01:06:59
Speaker
flood victims with hydrologists and planners to help them advocate at a local level for equitable disaster recovery and infrastructure to help them weather the future storms that are getting worse year after year. So I think that climate change has the opportunity, presents a chance for us to come together and advocate for
01:07:29
Speaker
more equitable development practices and disaster recovery practices. That's a source of optimism. And also in this very strange way, you know, when your life, I think that many of us live fundamentally divorced from the environment. We spend a lot of our lives sort of looking at computer screens that are 16 inches in front of our faces. And as climate change starts to warp and shift,
01:07:59
Speaker
the weave of our day-to-day lives, I think that it's also demanding that we pay more attention, period, to the environment and just how fundamentally we human beings are dependent upon and interwoven into the health of this planet. And I think that's sort of a source of optimism, too, that it's reawakening a kind of environmental awareness amongst people who might not
01:08:28
Speaker
have otherwise had it. So that's a source of hope as well. Fantastic. Well, Elizabeth, thank you so much for carving out this time to talk about your lovely book. And also just best of luck with it and best of luck with the tour. You're going to be all over the country. So it's pretty exciting. Thank you, Brendan. And yes, absolutely. Just a shout out to the Rising Book Tour. We're doing, I don't know, 24 cities.
01:08:55
Speaker
up and down the East and West coast. So, um, where can people, um, find out about those tour dates? If you go to my website, Elizabeth rush.net, um, and click on the events tab, you'll find them awesome. Awesome. Well, always a pleasure. I can't wait to speak to you again about, about your wonderful work, Elizabeth. But in the meantime, best of luck with the tour and I will be in touch.
01:09:22
Speaker
Thanks very much, Brendan. Thanks for having me. You got it. Take care. Take care. Thanks to Elizabeth. And thanks to our promotional sponsor, hippocampus magazine. If you made it this far, I suspect you like the show and want to help out.
01:09:42
Speaker
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Speaker
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01:10:20
Speaker
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01:11:43
Speaker
you