Transcript below.
We discuss the award winning book, Fathoms: the world in the whale by Rebecca Giggs. Our conversation covers seeing the history of humanity through the lens of the whale, activism movements, and the poetic in writing. Whales as an extractive industry and why the book is not prescriptive in what we might do.
We play overrated/underrated. Rebecca rates: cicadas, snails, worms and plankton. We end with the process of writing. Why mechanical keyboards might help, and writing in bursts.
Rebecca's essays and writing have been in The Atlantic, Granta, The New York Times Magazine. Her recent work has featured our relationship with animals in a time of both technological change and ecological crisis. www.rebeccagiggs.com and twitter @rebeccagiggs
Amazon link here. Indie Bookshop.org link here.
Podcast audio version here:
Fathoms
A bold and lyrical exploration of our fraught relationship with the sea's most magnificent inhabitant, the whale.
Whales loom large in the human imagination. From a history of animals being harpooned worldwide to today's ecotourism operators and the work of marine biologists, whales have, for centuries, attracted myth, symbolism, significance, and exploitation.
But whales, and the waters they inhabit, are changing. Even as the international community draws closer to a ban on factory whaling, whales surface with disturbing news from the deep. Once-rare whale strandings, pollution and toxins accrued in whale bodies, plastics consumed by whales, the stress of exposure to industrial sound, and diseases contracted from livestock are direct results of human activity.
Incisive, provocative, and timely, Fathoms uses the story of the whale to examine our own story and that of the health of the planet.
Transcript (There are typos, and grammar is not edited)
Ben:
Hey everyone. I'm Ben Yeoh. Today I'm having a conversation with the most amazing author Rebecca Giggs.
Rebecca has published her first book, Fathoms: the world in the whale. It's already Prize-winning.
Her essays and writing have been in the Atlantic, Granta, and the New York times magazine. She's just simply awesome. Her recent work has featured our relationship with animals in a time of both technological change and ecological crisis.
So Rebecca, truly welcome. And I think we're going to start off with a short, reading from your book, so please take it away.
Rebecca:
Thank you, Ben. It's wonderful to be with you. I'm just going to read a little bit. I should show the cover. This is our beautiful - little glarey, I think in the light British - Hard back, appropriately, it looks like it's covered in, clingfilm, which seems kind of hygienic for this moment in the middle of a pandemic.
I'm just going to read from the preface, for about three or four minutes, and this is a scene that has to do with the decomposition of a whale's body.
On WhaleFall
A dead whale slips below the depth where epipelagic foragers can feed from it. The whale’s mushy body decelerates as it drops, and, where pressure compounds, putrefying gases build up in its softening tissues. It drifts past fish that no longer look like anything we might call fish, but resemble instead bottled fireworks, reticulated rigging, and musical instruments turned inside out. The whale enters the abyssopelagic zone. No light has ever shone here, for so long as the world has had water. Entering permanent darkness, the whale passes beyond the range of diurnal time. Purblind hagfish slink; jawless, pale as the liberated internal organs of other animals. Jellyfish tie themselves into knots. The only sound is the scrunch of unseen brittle-stars, eating one another alive. Slowly. It is very cold. Hell’s gelid analogue on Earth. The hagfish rise to meet the carcass and tunnel in, lathering the passages they make with mucus. They absorb nutrients right through their skin. The whale body reaches a point where the buoyancy of its meat and organs is only tethered by the force of its falling bones. Methane is released in minuscule bubbles. The ballooning mass scatters skin and sodden flesh below it, upon which grows a carpet of white worms waving upwards, like grass on its grave. Then, sometimes, the entire whale skeleton will suddenly burst through the cloud of its carcass. For a time, the skeleton might stay hitched to its parachute of muscle; a macabre marionette, jinking at the spine in the slight currents. Later, it drops, falling quickly to the sea floor, into the plush cemetery of the worms. Gusts of billowing silt roll away. The mantle of the whale’s pulpier parts settles over it. Marine snow — anonymous matter, ground to grit in the sun-filtered layers of the sea — sprinkles down ceaselessly. The body is likely to settle far deeper than any living whale will ever descend to see it. Rattails, sea scuds, more polychaetes, and eelpouts appear. No one knows from where. Opportunist octopuses bunt between ribs. Sightless, whiskered troglodytes, like ginger tubers, burrow into the surrounding sediment, which is blackened with fat and whale oil. From the dark come red-streamer creatures that flutter all over. Colourless crabs; their delicate gluttony. Life pops. It is as though the whale were a piñata cracked open, flinging bright treasures. On the body gather coin-sized mussels, lucinid clams, limpets, and crepitating things that live off sulphate.
Over 200 different species can occupy the frame of one whale carcass. A pink, plumed tube shrinks back into the gothic column of its name, the Osedax — Latin for ‘bone devourer’. Mouthless and gutless, the Osedax is nonetheless insatiable: it eats through its feet, which extend, like trickling roots, into the marrow. Some of the organisms that materialise on the whale are called ‘fugitive species’. Some live nowhere else but in dead whales, and a few are so specialised they thrive only within the remains of a single cetacean species. Others are found, very occasionally, at hydrothermal vents or around briny cold seeps on the sea floor — spots where life on Earth is theorised to have first begun, with a plethora of millimetre-high animals inhabiting a thin band of gas-enriched water.
After the whale’s soft tissues and cartilage are consumed, these tiny organisms broadcast their larvae into the sea to drift in dormancy; infinitesimal, barely perceptible, and hopeful (if the larval can be said to be hopeful) of finding more dead cetaceans. A whale body is, to this glitter splash of biology, a godsend; and an occasion for gene exchange. To think such extremophiles indestructible — too ancient or too deep to be affected by the impoverishment of the sea above — is to disregard their interaction with the corpse whales, which function as engines of evolution, and stepping stones for their migration between stringent, oxygen-poor habitats. Without whales, many kinds of detritivores fail to colonise new habitat. When their vents and seeps deplete, their kind will decline. These creatures exist, they have evolved, because of the fall of whales. Whales as transient, decomposing ecosystems that amass, pulse, twitch, and dissolve.
Ben:
That was beautiful. And covers like in a microcosm so much about your book. and that also has led to my first thought is your writing is really beautiful and you have these really glorious, sentences. do you concentrate on the sentence and kind of edit as you go along? Do you think of the PTO of your writing particularly sort of in book form a supposed to sort of essays or journalism, or is that kind of a natural way? You kind of think about this type of writing.
Rebecca:
When I started the book, I had an idea that it would be very straight science communication. So it would literally just be a book about the ways in which the lives of whales today reflect the anthropogenic change in the oceans. And if you go to the science section of your bookstores, you'll tend to these kinds of books there. some about physics, some about mathematics, some about biology, but the purpose of science communication is really to provide a kind of lucid clear description of a complex set of scientific findings. And so the tendency is to use quite direct and conversational language. And so I struggled on with that idea for, I suppose, the first 10 months of this project. And then there was one day, really blindingly hot day in Sydney. there'd been a heatwave, my little apartment was stultifying really hot. And so I went to the local library, and I was sitting downstairs in the state library, in the air conditioning and a friend who is a poet, just by coincidence. And he sat on the table next to me and we kind of had a chat and then we got back to our respective work and I just thought to myself, you know what, just for today, you know, given the fortuity of this, I'm going to try to write the science in the way that Aiden Rolfe, my poet friends would write the science. And I wrote that passage, which was the decomposition of the whale. and I tried to really embody his voice on the page. And once I had that, I really understood actually that what I was writing was not just a science communication book, but though it's kind of science, literate and science curious, it's very invested in the question of how do we represent the natural world? What are the narratives that we mobilize, within our culture when we encounter the science and what are the kinds of lyricism and, you know, language traditions that come out of our attachment with nature. so yeah, so that sequence really became the engine that then pushed into the rest of the project because, you know, whereas I had seen the death of a whale as a tragedy, of course, in the deep sea, it's kind of like spring comes, you know, like all these organisms just leap at it.
Ben:
All of this resource.
Rebecca:
Yeah, exactly. It's a big energy input and it's a turning point. It's, it's suddenly this huge act of fecundity. And, and that kind of like swivel from the tragedy to, you know, the new beginning kind of became a motif for the rest of the book.
Ben:
That's amazing. So I, another thing I think about your book, which is quite unique, -it kind of hearkens to that - because it doesn't strike me as science communication. It's science curious, like you say, but I wouldn't put it next to kind of climate change for dummies or something like that in the bookstore.
There's a tradition of nature writing. You have people who go on for walks, people will consider mountains. There's a little bit of that, but a narrative, there's almost a memoir element to your work. So I could place it within that tradition.
On the other hand, there's also a few books which are like a lens of history when you look at the world through something. So you look at it through the lens of a building or the lens of a geography or the lens of an empire or the lens of an item like salts or the seas or trade. And we see the lens of humanity through, whaling, which was really fascinating.
Are you conscious of those traditions?
Or do you think I just have this and this is the form I thought that would best express that kind of story.
Rebecca:
When I started, I'd never written any narrative nonfiction before.
I’d written short fiction and a couple of review essays, quite long essays, but, this was my first foray into this world. With hindsight, I should have bitten off something slightly smaller than the whale and the world.
When I started out - when I was stuck - a friend of mine gave me a piece of advice that I really just needed to write short sections as long as it would fit under the palm of your hand. He suggested that I work with this model of decomposing the whale. … taking all of the elements of the whale from, its lungs and the way that it inhales airborne pollutants to its blubber and the absorption of heavy metals that takes place as a result of organic phosphate run off in the ocean to, the baleens that are in the whale's mouth, which are like a mustache that's inside the top lip of some whales, which they use to feed with.
And those baleens have been used historically in the 19th century like the thermo plastic of the time they were taken out and remolded into all kinds of different products. And so I started with this sort of active decomposition and making these very short pieces, all focused on a different body part of the whale.
I was going along looking for the evidence of human contact, you know there's some amazing stories of very ancient weaponry in the forms of arrowheads being embedded into the flesh of living whales because they were speared but not killed when they were young.
Those whales can go on to live 200 and then when they eventually die - in their study by scientists, we find these artifacts of human culture - museum worthy and very important for historical reasons - actually in the flesh of these animals.
Of course it's all the plastic in their stomach as well, but at any length I had this decomposition.
And then as I got along with the book, I started reading a lot more natural history, particularly in that Eurocentric tradition that you're talking about. think you can locate some motifs in fathoms that are consistent with that history.
But there were some things that I wanted to push back on as well. That nature writing tradition comes out of a period of time in which nature was set up to be a place of retreat from urban modernity. And it was supposed to be reassuringly refreshing.
Ben:
A playground in a some way.
Rebecca:
A playground… but also a source of moral instruction. You could go there and kind of have an encounter with godly. And it was white able-bodied men in this narrative. And so you get from this a lot of adventuring narratives. A traditions of nature at grand scale - vigorous, expeditioning.
There's one chapter in the book, which is about digital culture and about experiencing the whale from within a crowd, particularly within an online crowd, what does it mean to share photographs of whales online, whales and dolphins.
And I wanted that to be there because I wanted to write from collectives. I wanted to write from collective experiences of nature. And I wanted to acknowledge that it's not just about the nature that's in the deep sea or in American national parks or European Alpine ranges. It's also, what we do in our kitchens that matter. What we do in back gardens and how we drive and work. It’s all relevant to what nature is today. And so is the digital sphere.
Ben:
I think we're going to touch on that individual in system, but one thing I'm going to pick up, which is really fascinating, which is your idea of decomposition, because it's a very strong sort of theme through that. I think that's amazing because essentially it means that your structure and form follow your process and the process of the wild.
Form, structure and content reflect one another in a really satisfying way. Structural form married with the writing and the education and the science and everything.
I think that's one other thing about the lens of the whale - viewing the human part of the relationship. You make quite a strong line of argument for how well was essentially one of the first extractive industries.
The whole life cycle of the whale embodies so much of humanity within it, whether it's chemicals or our ancient items - how it absorbs all that. … with this idea of extractives - do you think we probably haven't learned enough about how we did use the whales ?
…that also ties into - the successes or not of some of the green movement.
Do you think we did use whale essentially as an extractive industry before we really understood what we were doing?
Rebecca:
I think he way to answer that question, is to take you a little bit on the research journey of this book, which was that I thought as I believe, many people do that whaling was an artifact of the 19th century.
My picture of whaling was the Victorian era. It's the same time as like people were applying leeches to their bodies for medicine, and using smelling salts. And that is where I had popped Whaling in my mind.
And though I had heard of course, about the 1980s save the whale campaigns because I was born in the mid 1980s. I sort of vaguely conscious of that green movement, but I understood whaling to have tailed off well before that, as it turns out, that's not the case, many people attribute and believe that whaling declined because of some invisible hand of the market that came in, with things like kerosine and petroleum and thermo-plastic, and essentially replace the product, the products that whales were being used for.
So in the 19th century to take step back, whales were exploited for their oil and for their baleens. We talked about their baleens - these bristly mouth substance that was used in everything from surgical stitching to hula hoops and police batons.
Do you have this expression in Britain “to whale on somebody” That's from the canes that used to be used in schools as corporate punishment for children.
They were made from this baleen substance - so we whale on somebody to hurt somebody is to cane them with - literally -a piece of whale. Then the oil really was part of the late industrial revolution. It was a lubricant in machinery. it was used in textile factories, but most importantly it was an amazing illuminant and went into lamps and candles. It wasn't just an industrial product. It changed the conditions of production because once you had a reliable, long burning illuminant factory hours could be extended shop floor hours could be extended. It had a huge influence on not just the speed of automation, but the way the economy worked at large, then we jumped forward to the 21st century.
You think here are all these other cheapest substances that are going to replace whaling. That didn't happen. What ended up happening was the products that the oil went into, changed.
They became a different market, they became luxury goods. They got affiliated with the space race, which is bizarre. They ended up in the tiny little shutters that are on satellite cameras.
The proponents of the whale oil business really went to great lengths to get them into soap, and into margarine as well. So it was really a cornerstone of new hygiene practices and the diet of the working class.
But ultimately, we needed cultural change to affect economic change in this area because fossil fuels meant that we could exploit whales to a far greater degree. We could see them with faster ships. We had refrigeration on those ships. We could obtain species of whales that were much larger, and hadn't been hunted in the 19th century because we had big mechanical boats. and so there was a kind of Whaling Olympics. There was a surge in the sixties, of whale hunting, by a lot of major Western nations. There’s this lesson. We did need a kind of collective cultural change to enforce that pivot away from whaling.
Ben:
I actually think that one of the things that they teach very initially in economics, and then you forget is that markets and products are actually very social things. [A social science] They are governed by us. And even when you have supposedly unregulated markets, there are actually laws, either social norms or legal rules for what govern them.
I was very struck by your research and writing into this about how essentially quotas fail ed initially because they said, Oh, we're going to do quotas. And then you had over-whaling. As people tried to, essentially, they ended up decimating the whale population to try and get in before the quotas hit. And then you had this huge access surplus that you either needed to go almost full ban, which is kind of where we went.
So these are kind of unintended consequences to your point. It really was only solved from some of the social and demand change which went alongside that.
One other theme your book charts - not only the history of humans and the ecological crisis and the technological change, - but the history of a kind of activism, where whales are kind of seen as a symbol of activist success, but actually in your research and your writing, it seems to be much more complicated than that. Whales also reflect models of activism. What did you find?
Rebecca:
I think that it's common to look back now and view those anti-whaling campaigns as effectively benevolent animal welfare campaigns. Whereas in actual fact, they fit more neatly into a model of dealing with globalized environmental problems. So this, you have to remember as an era in which the ozone layer is becoming very topical, Chernobyl is only just in the rearview mirror. So that idea of kind of cross border radioactivity, is a concern. The acid rain clouds in some parts of Europe has similarly multi nation multi-state problems and saving the high seas - having some kind of connection to the planetary dimensions of the wider ocean was hard until we had a global animal like the whale to empathize with.
And I think about this a lot in terms of that question of how do you tell global stories now, because for myself, you know, when I hear about the melting ice caps, or I hear about levels of CO2 and, the atmosphere worldwide. It activates for me sadness and grief, - the dimensions of it are kind of too big to wrap my head around.
I find it is hard to empathize with the changing biosphere on that vast level.
Whereas in the early part of this book, I describe a whale beaching, in Western Australia, in Perth, where I'm from. I went down to see this beached whale. There were all these people standing around, it a macabre carnival atmosphere, all these families with their children, and some people brought their pets down, but there was an attitude that was “at last… here is the body …we knew there was trouble.”
We knew things were changing in the ocean. We heard vaguely about acidification or plastic pollution, but we lacked the kind of sensory apparatus to apprehend it.
We can't taste the oceans acidity, and we rarely, unless we go to the big plastic guys actually encountered the dimensions of microplastic and plastic pollution as extremes. And so the arrival of a whale on the beachfront had this kind of mood of…here is the body… here is the event that kind of gives flesh to our environmental conscience.
The activism of the eighties around whales was very much about a globalized environmental citizenry. It was intended to be about protecting things that you would never encounter.
You could feel for the whale, even if you lived in a high rise building in an urban environment, it mattered to you that the planet wasn't denuded of its largest animals.
I think that question of having empathy and compassion for the unmet thing is really sharp in this point in time, because we are going to be called to care for things in the future that we don't have either a genetic connection to, it's not about our families. They're not part of our tribe. We're going to have to care for people who live very far away from us. We're going to have to care for environments like the polar environments that are on totally uninhabited.
I wanted to revisit that, that moment in the eighties where it was possible to, feel meaningfully engaged with the planetary.
Ben:
You talked about the system through the individual. You see it through the Whale - through individual's experience and that chapter about the digital. Do you see much conflict between that individual lens? And I guess a lot of individualism, which has gone through the last decade or two versus how we all going to have to cope with this systemic change and dealing with these other entities, whether that's environment or people, or far away distant, both time and geography and, and otherness that seems to be coming together in sort of sharp relief.
And I think your writing reflects that, and you have some very interesting chapters on that. Are we going to see this conflict continuing through this individual lens?
Rebecca:
That's a great question. And I don't know that I've got a definitive answer on that. I, you know, I think that now
Ben:
You should be running for president, maybe if you did.
Rebecca:
What I have is writing. I am no good with spreadsheets. My talents lie here in words.
So I'm prone to read this as salient but people's connection to narrative - it’s that connection that activates their environmental conscience.
When a whale washes up - at the beginning of the book - I talk about this particular whale that washes up off the coast of Spain.
In its stomach there is a stupendous medley of objects. It has bits of bedding … coat hangers. Most saliently - it has an entire greenhouse that has been collapsed and it contains within it ropes and tarpaulins.
It has comes out of greenhouse district, which is effectively the salad bowl of Europe, where all of your Tesco's tomatoes and salad leaves grow over the winter.
I read that news story. And I thought to myself, if I had put that in a novel people would not believe it.
You have the 1980s fantasy Paragon of green devotion - the whale - and it's consuming literally the metaphor of our climate crisis. The greenhouse. The green house is how we talk about global warming, and that encapsulation of history and plastic and all these kinds of issues.
It really sung out to me as being important because we have these stories in our culture already about what it means when a whale washes up with someone inside it.
Leviathan. Lots of different cultures have these narratives of someone being swallowed by a whale and then undergoing a kind of moral turnabout. It matters to us. It sets up this kind of beacon of awareness when things like that happen in the real world.
Ben:
David Finnegan has said play writing today is all art in a time of climate crisis? That actually all art is somehow related to that, because it's a reflection of where we are.
On reading your book, I reflected that it's been like that for decades, if not centuries. And I would also add that other part that you reflect on is the technological change. So that actually in some ways, all our writing, our reflection of humanity and our art has reflected ecological crisis, ecological change, technological change over decades.
Rebecca:
There are the mental models of the technological world - very kindred within ecological conscience, too. Like my students- I used to teach creative writing at a university and we would talk about nature writing and my students would come to me and say, gosh, I can't name the trees. Like, I don't know the names of this eucalyptus ….
I look out into the world and I think I, these things are completely nameless, but because they were so embedded in the technological realm, because they had an understanding of feedback loops and, you know, they had an understanding of networks and a cybernetic consciousness. Ecology can very easy to them in the sense that they understood systems. I think actually a lot of nature writing craves, a kind of specialized language of terminology, giving everything the right name. Whereas I am very hopeful about the next generation that though they may not have that. What they have is a much more technical systems based way of thinking.
Ben:
I think we are definitely making progress. There's some things which gets worse, but there are a lot of things which I'll say also do get better.
Over Rated / Underrated. Animal Edition.
Snails.
Rebecca
Underrated.
Ben
You have had a pet snail. Yeah. Quite a famous. Now tell me about snails. Why underrated?
Rebecca:
We acquired some snails. My partner David was scheduled to do a performance in London in the middle of the year and when it was canceled everything got wrapped up. We still had these props from the performance, which were these living snails.
We had to care for them over those first few months of the lockdown. And they're kind of magic, little animals. They're you know, they're incredibly vulnerable. They're soft on the underside, and yet they've got this shell they can retreat into. And they were a nice little metaphor, I think in the moment of lockdown and feeling both like hard on the outside and sensitive oversight.
Ben:
Gender fluidity… Great. Okay. Snails, definitely underrated.
Cicadas.
Rebecca:
Yes. We're going through a once every eight year event in Australia a boom of green cicada - in Australia at the moment in new South Wales, which means that if I have to video call somebody out in the blue mountains, you know how the frame moves with the sound, it just doesn't move off the person who's in South Wales
This is the background sound of cicadas.
I think the scientist I was talking to the other day, he said he measured 95 decibels, literally the sound of a jackhammer within 20 meters. That was the level of sound coming from this once every eight year boom in cicadas.
Ben:
Yeah. Very surprising sound like the sound of people haven't heard the sound of koala also. Very, very surprising.
Rebecca:
Yeah, Brits think a koala is cute. I can only think it's because you've never heard one and make a horrible noise that terrifying and if you're camping and you hear them fighting, it's like listening to gargoyles, you know, go at each other.
Ben:
Koala cuteness overrated once, once you truly get to know them. Worms. Overrated, underrated?
Rebecca:
Underrated. I mean, they do so much amazing work and I read somewhere the other day that they can have eight hearts, eight hearts in the one body. I don't know if that's true, but I read it in a poem. Yes. So full of heart.
Ben:
Yeah. I think completely underrated and actually also extremely useful for science as well as the fact that they do do so much for us.
Rebecca:
Have you read the Ted Hughes short story about, the worm, the origin of the worm? It's like a beautiful short story. He talks about God having made the elephant with clay. And then at the very end, he kind of rubs his hands together to get rid of the last little bits of clay that are on his hands. And he makes these tiny little filaments and he just molds one into a tiny elephant trunk and he drops it and forgets it. And so that's worms are the elephant trunks, like these tiny little elephant trunks, just trying to find more clay to make themselves whole, it's a lovely story.
Ben:
I don’t know it. I will go read it. We'll do a final one here. Plankton or maybe particularly phytoplankton.
Rebecca:
Not an animal, I believe.
Ben:
Yeah. You called me out on that. So not quite an animal, but we will stick with living being.
Rebecca:
Under rated as well. Maybe I just love the animal world too much.
Often overlooked in its ability to absorb CO2 out of the atmosphere. We think a lot about forests as being part of the climate system and trees off setting you know our carbon emissions which is why reforestation or preserving old growth forest is such a flashpoint issue.
But plankton in the ocean is responsible for an even larger proportion of absorption of CO2 to the point where I think one of the, an IMF report that I was reading a little while back said something like an uptick of plankton of 1% would be the equivalent of adding 2 billion mature trees into the system for tree to grow that's. That’s huge. We should all learn more about the little plankton.
Ben:
Thanks for playing overrated underwrite - the living being edition.
Turning back to your book.
You had this pivotal moment - the whale and the beaching - a genesis moment for thinking about the book.
Do you think you wrote with a purpose for the book or what people might get from the book ?
Or was it a book you felt compelled to write ? It wrote itself in a way and now it's taking on a kind of life of its own.
Rebecca:
I think there are two questions there. There's my attachment to the project.
And there's also a question about what kind of activism underlies the book.
What do I hope people will change their mind about or take from the book?
In answer to the latter, I deliberately hold back from prescribing a specific set of actions. If people feel activated by this book, they're energized by this book to go and care more for the oceans. There's nothing in there that says, well, you need to, these are the steps, you know, you need to do X, Y, and Z. Although there are suggestions in there and the reason I didn't set out to prescribe something, so kind of didactically is that I think each of us needs to start where we are. And each of us has a different set of privileges, a different set of resources, a different network, that we can leverage.
When I talk to students about the book that it's starts with taking a bit of an accounting of what you have in front of you, and also what you're good at - what is the one thing that you have that you're uniquely good at that you could bring to this cause, So maybe you are the spreadsheet queen.
Ben:
Numbers will save the world!
Rebecca:
An hour to give to an NGO, to do their books or to but it also means engaging people on the other side as well. You can't just talk to your community, you need to be ready to generously engage with people who think otherwise.
Then there's the question of what my experience was.
I started out feeling like questions of trans-hemispheric, ocean pollution and climate change and I felt humiliated by them. I felt like they made me disempowered. They made me full of grief.
I think my biggest takeaway - these problems are occurring on such a scale - means that we have a capacity to make change on that scale as well.
We can individually change our consumption patterns in small ways, and it can have an effect all the way out in the deep sea and that is stupefying as well.
If I picked up a product off a supermarket shelf, sometimes I would think, I wonder how much water has gone into creating this product, or I wonder how much pollution has been caused in manufacturing this product.
Now I also think much more downstream, I think much more about where the packaging is going to end up… I'm more conscious of that sort of like legacy the other direction into the future as well as the past. It was a journey.
Ben:
And that is one of the things we are both distant yet very interconnected. … genetics we have in common with a lot more people - I was puzzling it through on the physics the other day that it's very likely that we breathe oxygen atoms or drunk water molecules that you and I have both drunk or breathe. And that whales would have drunk -
Rebecca:
If you were anti whaling in the eighties, you were against whaling nations, whaling fleets, whaling governments, if you're anti harming whales, now it knits you into a system of worldliness. That's so much more vast. It's about the weather. It's about consumption. It's about many more organisms than the ones we care enough to love and call charismatic animals. It's also about plankton. That model of worldliness - it doesn't need to be humiliating.
Ben:
How do you go about your work day?
This is not me. Some CEOs - some writers - they rise at 4:00 AM or 5:00 AM and write for two or three hours, Chuck out 1000, 2000 words. And Hey look, 200 days later I have my next masterpiece.
Do you have thought on how your writing process works or how even how your day is now?
Rebecca:
This book took me six years to write. I had a full-time job for about four of those years, otherwise I was working part-time. But I also took two, six month breaks and I think I needed those breaks to really grow some emotional conscience around what I was making and why it mattered.It was a long project, but it also needed downtime, you know, cumulatively over a year before it was ready to go.
My day-to-day work when I'm just writing and I haven't got anything else on my dance card is two, one and a half hour bursts. So it is a three hour burst of writing and that that's no other distractions. That's just me and the word document.
Ben:
Do you switch off internet, doors closed?
Rebecca:
I have an old fashioned egg timer that, I use. There are different kinds of hacks along the way when I'm really stuck and on an idea, I'll sometimes change the tools that I'm using. So I'll use a mechanical keyboard.
Ben:
Look
Rebecca:
You have one
Ben:
Look. [I have both types].
Rebecca:
Changing the media - I think that mechanical noise makes me feel more productive. An old fashioned typewriter thing. I'll sometimes change the tools. I don't do a lot of handwriting which I know some of my peers do a lot.
Ben:
Do you keep a notebook with you?
Rebecca:
I don't journal as routinely as some friends and colleagues do, but, I keep a notebook. What else do I keep? But it's very small. I sort of have two, I have one that's sort of ideas for non-fiction and then I loosely have this one that's about, about fiction, although it's been a long time since I wrote fiction. yeah, so I keep two notebooks with me. I also take notes on my phone if I'm out, you know, just using the notes app.
Ben:
[I know a poet who writes poems on notes]
Rebecca:
If I'm into something that's longer like an article or potentially a book chapter, I have something that's just loosely called a research memo that sits on top of the chapter or the essay. Yeah. It's just a cover page for the document, but that it's a sort of living document and it will include questions like, you know, what do I need to know to write this? What does the reader need to know? So for example, if I'm writing about, you know, the industrial history of whaling, I'm going to need to know a lot more than actually ends up in the chapter and so I may need to notice that things about the chemical composition of blubber, like to quite find degreed find detailed level. but then the reader is just going to need to be reminded of exactly what blubber is. Most people know what blubber is, but they sort of, you just need to sort of let them remind them that this is it's this fatty kind of envelope around the animal. and so I have this sort of research memo that that's outlining what I need to know what the reader needs to know. And I keep coming back to that, as a kind of, not an outline exactly but a kind of mission statement for the, for the work at large. and it becomes a piece of scaffolding that eventually gets pulled down, but that's been very helpful as well.
Ben:
Great. That's really fascinating. Thanks for those insights. So your books available us now, the UK already, already Australia, obviously you can get it from Amazon and online and all of that. but a lot of is also supporting independent bookshops because that's where, you know, a lot of interesting stuff happens. Is there any, a couple of independent bookshops you'd recommend people might look out, they also take online and post orders as well, if you want to support them. So, you know, I'm not going to just Amazon and we will use it as well. So wherever you're going to get it, first of all, get the book. But if you know, minded to, you might want to support an independent bookshop.
Rebecca:
Yeah, well, I will recommend as a new, conglomerate kind of interface called bookshop.org, UK, which is literally now all the independents have come together to use the one digital platform to sell, and it means that whatever you're buying off that site, you're buying to support a local retailer. so that's the easiest kind of way to go if that's your, if you're not already familiar with the local bookstore, I mean in East London, we have, we have some fantastic bookstores, down in Broadway, near London fields and in brick lane. but of course they're all shut up shop at this point in time. So, you can still, I think call and they'll give you recommendations, in fact, and they, you know, people are biking around books to their local suburbs at this point, which is really lovely. and yeah, I mean, I think, I think those bookstores are really cornerstones of literary community, and where you can support them. They're doing a tough at this point. So, yeah it's well worth reaching out to your local, and putting in a phone call and having a chat with a human being.
Ben:
The book is available now. It is Prize-winning. I'm sure it was going to win a lot more awards. Thank you so much for joining me in conversation.
Rebecca's essays and writing have been in The Atlantic, Granta, The New York Times Magazine. Her recent work has featured our relationship with animals in a time of both technological change and ecological crisis. www.rebeccagiggs.com and twitter @rebeccagiggs
Amazon link here. Indie Bookshop.org link here.
Previous blog on her book here.
