Barbara J. King

How did you become a writer?

For my first two decades in academia, I wrote journal articles and books based on my research with monkeys and apes. I did then as I do now: read widely and voraciously, particularly science intended for a wide audience and literary fiction. Gradually, I experienced an awakening of sorts about my own work, and craved to write in a more engaging, less-jargon-ridden style. One day I submitted “cold” a book-review essay to Jessa Crispin’s wonderful Bookslut, and started writing for Jessa regularly, then soon for the Times Literary Supplement too, about the books I loved (or once in a while, didn’t love). It all snowballed from there. Lining up my books on a shelf, I can arrange them now from more to less technical, from an evident distance from animals’ lives to an explicit thrilling to animals’ ways of being, thinking, and feeling: that pleases me. When I joined the small team at National Public Radio’s 13.7 Cosmos & Culture blog six years ago, I learned something also about how to write a snappy 900 words a week, 50 weeks a year, and make those words count. Then, in a marvelous series of ever-more-exciting moments in 2015, I took the plunge and left academia altogether. Now I’m a full-time freelance writer. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Jane Goodall’s refusal to buy into the academic insistence that animals must be reduced to statistics, and her insistence on describing individual chimpanzees’ behavior with both love and scientific rigor, made a great impression on me early on. Writers who illuminate the natural world like Goodall, Bernd Heinrich, Brandon Keim, Sy Montgomery, and Carl Safina educate and delight me. I’m extraordinarily drawn also to reading memoirs in the grief genre, and what I suppose could be called the dying genre, maybe because I’ve spent many hours researching and writing about grief and mourning in nonhuman animals. These memoirs— Beyond the High Blue Air by Lu Spinney, The Iceberg by Marian Coutts, The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala, A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates, The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke, The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs—are devastating at times but even more, they burn with resilience, with love and life. In science fiction, fierce books like Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Mars Trilogy coax me to try, just try, to think big. 

When and where do you write?

On the walls of my study are photographs of wild bison, and on the study’s bed there usually can be found a cat or two, and it is there that I write. Even when I had a campus office, I’ve always written best at home. Energizing conversations with my husband, bouts of exercise, and chocolate breaks fuel the process. I read every day, but I try to take weekends off from writing (during which, of course, the writing carries on in my brain anyway). 

What are you working on now?

I’m just venturing again into the wild unkempt territory where I corral first thoughts towards a new book about animals. At the same time, it’s great fun to write “spin off” essays about the lives of pigs, chickens, cows, octopuses and other farmed animals: my Personalities on the Plate has only been out since the spring, so I’m still riding that wave. Writing both short- and long-form at more or less the same time is the optimal mix for me, plus those weekly adrenaline shots of 900 words. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Not really. I’ve suffered from producing some quite bad writing that I couldn’t figure out for a while how to fix! But I always just write, then clean up by revising as many times as I need to (and often beyond that, thanks to the superb editors with whom I work). It’s like being out for a walk in nature, where I’m sometimes not completely sure I’m on the right path: I always just keep moving. 

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Read aloud works-in-progress, or parts of them. I do this in full for my shorter pieces, with an audience of my husband or a cat, and never fail to amaze at how my ears hear when my eyes don’t see. I can’t always do this for long pieces or book chapters, but even in that case, I’ll select the thorniest bits to read aloud. 

What’s your advice to new writers?

Connect on Twitter! Twitter has a bad rap as the black hole where civility goes to die, but that’s not been my experience. I connect with writers, scientists, artists, and animal people: overlapping categories to be sure. My goal (@bjkingape) is to be a generous presence there, sharing others’ work, and at the same time, not caving in to the view that to share one’s own work is “self-promotion.” What a term! It codes for “excessively self-focused,” and it took me some work to break its spell. We write to be read, after all. Done well, Twitter offers a community in balance, sharing what each of us loves most. 

Barbara J. King is emerita professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and a full-time freelance science writer. Her latest book is Personalities on the Plate: The Lives & Minds of Animals We Eat (2017). Her book How Animals Grieve (2013) has been translated into Japanese, Portuguese, French (winning a book prize), and Hebrew. She writes regularly for National Public Radio's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog and for the Times Literary Supplement, and has been published in Scientific American, Aeon Magazine, The Atlantic, Undark Magazine, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Barbara is active on Twitter @bjkingape, and her website is www.barbarajking.com.

Jill Eisenstadt

How did you become a writer?

I believe that I was born with a brain wired for words. My very earliest memories revolve around things said, the impact words had on me to confuse, deceive, put pictures in my head, produce strong emotions. Gradually, I became aware of the way my words affected others and how I could modulate their reactions by choosing carefully when to speak or changing my tone. From there, becoming a writer was just a matter of learning to read and write.

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

Below are the first (among many) that come to mind.

Books: Harriet the Spy (Louise Fitzhugh), James and the Giant Peach (Roald Dahl), From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basel E. Frankweller (E.L. Konigsburg), The Princess Bride (William Goldman), The Member of the Wedding (Carson McCullers), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), Black Tickets (Jayne Anne Phillips), To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf). Writers (along with the above and so many others): Sam Shepard, Denis Johnson, Grace Paley, Wendy Wasserstein, Don DeLillo, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Alice Munro, Anton Chekov, D.H Lawrence. Teachers: my high school English teacher, Ms. Rossi, my college teachers, Joe McGinniss and Nick Calabro, my grad school professors, Stephen Koch and Robert Towers.When and where do you write?

When and where do you write?

I write daily but too often too little. When I force myself to sit down and really focus, I’m at a white desk in the corner of my clean bedroom. Otherwise, I might be anywhere, in or out of my house.

What are you working on now?

Something new.

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?

Always. For me, this takes the form of re-writer’s block. That is, I get stuck rewriting obsessively instead of moving forward.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Best advice given to me directly (and which I still struggle to follow): “You can’t polish a mess.” Stephen Koch. Best advice I’ve read: “Write what you don’t know about what you know.” Weirdly, this seems to be attributed to both Eudora Welty and Grace Paley.

What’s your advice to new writers?

The above, plus: Get some exercise to help you sit still.

Jill Eisenstadt is the author of the novels, From Rockaway, Kiss Out (Knopf), and Swell (Little, Brown). Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Vogue, Bomb, Elle, Town and Country, Lit Hub and The Boston Review, among other places. Jill has been a teacher at The New School’s Eugene Lang College and an editor at BKLYN Magazine. She co-wrote and produced the feature film, The Limbo Room along with her sister, the director Debra Eisenstadt. Jill is a recipient of a Columbia M.F.A writing fellowship, a National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts Teacher Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts Grant in Fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jennifer Latson

How did you become a writer?

I started my journalism career at The (Centralia) Chronicle, a small newspaper in the foothills of the Washington Cascades, where my title was “rural reporter,” meaning that I covered the goings-on in towns with fewer than 1,000 residents. Most of my stories were about logging accidents, mill accidents, meth lab explosions, and, even more harrowing, small-town politics. I covered events like the Toledo (Washington) Cheese Days festival and was later banned from the Morton Loggers Jubilee for writing about an 80-year-old retired logger who wasn’t allowed to compete in the spar pole climbing contest. He had proven to me, in a demonstration that I feared would become another logging accident, that he was still a force to be reckoned with on the spar pole. This was the best job I’ve ever had. 

Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).

One of my all-time favorite books is Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. I read it when I was just starting out in journalism, and it became the model for the kind of immersive literary journalism I wanted to do. Rebecca Skloot and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s books have also been immense sources of inspiration.

My freshman year in college, I was extraordinarily lucky to have Susan Rieger, the author of The Heirs and The Divorce Papers, as a writing teacher. She wasn’t a novelist then, but she was an incredible teacher whose advice and encouragement have fueled my writing career from the beginning. It’s funny; she read all these essays I wrote when I was 18, but I didn’t get to read any of her work until a few years ago, when she published her first book. And then I realized that our writing styles are nothing alike — I admire her writing enormously, but our voices are very different. I’m not sure why that surprised me, but I guess I had always assumed that she had taught me to write like her. Instead, she had helped me cultivate my own unique voice. I’m so grateful to her for that.

When and where do you write? 

My favorite place to write is at a coffee shop. I spent eight years in newsrooms, and I find that the background noise is good for focus. I like having other people around — as long as they’re doing their own thing and ignoring me. The biggest drawback is that I never know what to do with my laptop when I go to the restroom. Do I take it with me? Ask someone to watch it? Cover it with napkins and hope nobody notices it? Usually I just hurry and hope for the best.

What are you working on now? 

I’m trying to come up with an idea for my next book. If you have any, let me know. My first book, The Boy Who Loved Too Much, is narrative nonfiction about a rare genetic disorder called Williams syndrome, which is sometimes called the opposite of autism: It makes people extremely outgoing and overwhelmingly affectionate. That project took seven years from conception to publication, and the immersive reporting, while incredibly rewarding and worthwhile, was intense. I can’t imagine spending that much time with people who aren’t so intrinsically kind and lovable — which is pretty much all of the rest of us. So I’d like to pick something that won’t take quite as long. 

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? 

Often, but never for very long. The antidote is to have daily deadlines that your livelihood depends on. Luckily, I had those as a newspaper reporter; I’ve tried to impose them on myself now that I don’t have editors yelling at me. I set daily word goals and just imagine the irate editor.

What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Write directly.

What’s your advice to new writers?

Be interesting.

Jennifer Latson is the author of The Boy Who Loved Too Much, the poignant story of a boy’s coming-of-age complicated by Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder that makes people biologically incapable of distrust. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly wrote, “[Latson] skillfully interweaves the science — what we do and don’t know about genetic disorders such as Williams — with a powerful story line.”