How to Write a Book that Debunks Cherished Ideas?
Bringing comedy, collaboration and science to why we shouldn't live on Mars--yet
“At some point, our editor was like, you are still trying to write the book you pitched and you don’t believe in that anymore.” —Kelly and Zach Weinersmith
Preview: Episode 107 Talking with the Weinersmiths about A City on Mars
“Have we really thought this through?” That’s part of the subtitle of Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s new book, A City on Mars, and in this episode of Emerging Form, we get an inside view of how the many ways the collaborative couple “thought this through” as they researched, wrote, and shared their findings. What do you do when you’ve written a book proposal but then change your mind mid research about where you stand? How do you gather all that research? How do you organize it? How do you allocate responsibility with a writing partner? How do you keep up interest for the public in a science-heavy conversation? How do you take critique from your spouse? And how do you tell people their dreams of space travel are really a bad idea, at least for now? As in their books, in this light-hearted, process-oriented episode the couple uses comedy to help the medicine go down.
Dr. Kelly Weinersmith received her PhD in Ecology at the University of California Davis, and is an adjunct faculty member in the BioSciences Department at Rice University. Kelly studies parasites that manipulate the behavior of their hosts, and her research has been featured in The Atlantic, National Geographic, BBC World, Science, and Nature. When she isn’t studying Nature’s creepiest wonders, Kelly is writing books with her husband, Zach Weinersmith (creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Comics). Their first book, Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, was a New York Times Bestseller.
Zach Weinersmith is the cartoonist behind the popular geek webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. He co-wrote the New York Times bestseller Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything and illustrated the New York Times-bestselling Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. His work has been featured by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Forbes, Science Friday, Foreign Policy, PBS, Boingboing, the Freakonomics Blog, the RadioLab blog, Entertainment Weekly, Mother Jones, CNN, Discovery Magazine, Nautilus and more. He lives in Virginia with his wife/coauthor and his children/coauthors.
What We’re Reading and Listening to:
Rosemerry:
After last week’s session on self-compassion and our recent interview with John Roedel that included his letters from God, I found that Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat, Pray, Love fame) has a blog sharing her daily practice of writing letters to herself from love. They’re funny and honest, and gentle to the self.
I’m halfway through a book for teens, What I Leave Behind, by Alison McGhee, and I love it. Written in rather poetic prose, it’s written in 100 chapters of 100 words each. It’s spacious and personal, meeting heavy topics of loss, suicide and sexual assault with connection, generosity, and ways we might choose to meet the world after our own trauma and the trauma of others. Though it’s for teens, it’s for adults, too.
Christie:
I loved this essay whose title says it all, “My Mother Got on a Bike. It Changed Her Life.” Caroline Paul explains how her mom’s life changed for the better when she took up cycling at age 62 and continued the activity into her 70s. “she and her fellow seniors resembled any weekend warrior. But unlike so many people I knew, she and her friends didn’t seem to want to be younger. My mother became more fit, more social and more emotionally expressive than I’d ever seen her.“ But that wasn’t all she was also “embracing attributes like exhilaration, exploration, awe, a little bit of recklessness.”
I picked up T.C. Boyle’s latest short story collection, “I Walk Between the Raindrops” at Paonia Books and it’s just as weird and wonderful as I expected. I love the story loosely based on the true story of Madame Calment, a french woman once declared the world’s oldest living person.
Monday Night: A Portrait
You are not a passive observer in the cosmos. The entire universe is expressing itself through you at this very minute.
—Deepak Chopra
Even as she made the cauliflower soup,
she was a deep space explorer.
No one else in the room seemed to notice
she was floating. No one noticed
how gravity had no hold on her.
No, they only saw she was chopping onions,
noticed how the act made her cry. How was it
did they not hear her laughter, astonished
as she was by her own weightlessness,
by the way she could move in any direction?
Perhaps the novelty explains why
she forgot to turn off the stove,
untethered as she was to anything.
It’s a miracle she sat at the dinner table at all,
what, with the awareness that she was surrounded
by planets, spiral galaxies, black holes, moons. Yes,
miracle, she thought as she tasted the soup,
and noticed deep space not just around,
but inside her: supernovae, constellations,
interstellar dust,
the glorious, immeasurable dark.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, from All the Honey (Samara Press, 2023)
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This week, we talk with the Weinersmiths about how to budget time for a book, running a household when both parents are on the same deadline and why sometimes you just need to jump on a tractor. Oh yeah, and there’s the thing about the burning house … If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can go now to our website, EmergingForm.substack.com, or by clicking the button below. Thank you!
Two Questions:
(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)
How do you use humor in your creative practice?
What cherished creative ideas or dreams have you had debunked or dashed? What then?
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Emerging Form is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
LIz Gilbert's blog is so accessible and I 'bumped' into Alison McGhee's book in the library today! Nice coincidence!
joanne