Lisa Gardner On Cold Cases & Public Land Disappearances

March 14, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.

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Mindy: We are here with Lisa Gardner, whose book One Step Too Far is a stand-alone, but it's using a character that you’ve used before, your character of Frankie Elkin who is a recovering alcoholic, she travels light and is obsessed with locating missing people whose cases have been forgotten. Which I think is just particularly interesting in the world that we're moving in today where so many people do have an interest in true crime, and they might not necessarily have a background in it or not be officially cops, or in the justice system. But they're interested in being a part of it.

Lisa: Exactly, Mindy. Thank you very much. It's somewhat the basis for Frankie Elkin, that there is this very real world trend of everyday people getting involved in cold cases, and part of that has to do with forensics. If there was the magical hair fiber or the smoking gun that was gonna solve the case, it would have happened. If the police had the right interview, lead suspects, it would have happened. So when you start getting into these cold cases and missing persons often, well, you don't need an investigative background, you don't need to be a forensic scientist or a detective or a hacker, you get down to, as Frankie likes to put it, the right person asking the right questions at the right time. And yes, there's two books with Franiey Elkin. They're pretty distinct because both just encapsulate these totally different scenarios of the very real world situations in the US where there are a lot of people missing and no one's looking for them.

Mindy: It's so scary. I am particularly interested in, drawn in by Frankie’s second book here, the one coming out, One Step Too Far, because it focuses on something I personally am very interested in, is people disappearing in state parks, national parks, wilderness areas. This happens a lot more than people realize.

Lisa: Yes, I live in the mountains of New Hampshire, so I happen to be an avid hiker, and it's actually a part of the writing process. Every time I get stuck, I hit a hiking trail. So about two years ago when I started reading about... Again, there's like 1600 people missing on national public lands, they call it. It's everything from the toddler that wandered away from the fire during the camping trip to - in the case of One Step Too Far, you have a young man doing his bachelor party who disappears in the woods. But all of this is handled by volunteers, when someone goes missing, there is a lot of attention in the short term. Thousands of people will come in to volunteer, and you'll get pilots and you'll get drones, and you'll get dog teams and anything you could ever ask. But they ultimately have to return to their normal life, so three to six weeks later... That's it. If that was your four-year-old wandering from the campfire, that was your son, who disappeared on his Bachelor weekend. That's just it. And that was kind of staggering to me that we could have this huge gap of who is looking for these people, who is bringing closure to those families. In my book One Step Too Far, that's what Frankie Elkin is all about. She doesn't know how to solve her own problems, so she really likes to get involved in some of the problems of others.

Mindy: Wonderful and it's going to appeal to so many mystery readers in general, but also maybe people that haven't necessarily dipped their toe into reading fiction. They're more into the true crime arena, but they themselves are really going to relate to Frankie and what she's doing, I think.

Lisa: What I love about Frankie Elkins is, she's very real-world-based, she doesn't have any special skills, she's not kick ass, she's not bad ass, she's not a computer hacker. There's nothing special really there, I mean, that's something she's very aware of, she's leading an anti-life. She's a recovering alcoholic, she has more regrets than belongings. She stays in one place, tries to have one job, keeps to herself with one set of relationships. She drinks. She gets that society is telling her - these are the things she should want, and that's the lifestyle she should aspire to, but Frankie's pretty blunt, real world, the things she's supposed to want... Makes her drink. If she travels, if she moves, she does this very kind of different and bizarre sort of mission, she goes from town to town, she looks for the missing that other people have forgotten. She listens, she learns. She connects the dots. It keeps her sober. No one gets it. But it works for her.

Mindy: I love it, I love it, particularly because often as a reader, but also as just a consumer in general, I have become, as I got older, very disillusioned with the Uber men and the Uber women. They can do anything, they can get shot five times and still have sex. They're fine. And I'm just like, No, they're not. They're bleeding out. But yes, I get so frustrated watching people that aren't real people, people that are functioning just at a higher level, either physically or mentally than the rest of us. Because I can't relate, like you're saying, I can't put myself in their shoes because they're not human in many ways. So I find it so refreshing that Frankie really is someone living on the outer edges of life, and she's not leading that traditional life and she's not buying into some of what other people would claim is happiness.

Lisa: Yeah, and she's not super powered, she's really a lot of fun to write. In my writing career, my previous best novelist, I had the FBI Serial Profiler. I've had the urban Boston detective, I've even had this fabulous vigilante Flora Dane who, her own survival is knowing how to kill you in more ways than Sunday. Frankie is none of those things. She's an excellent proxy for us, and she's a challenge because of that very reason.

So in her case, she's following missing persons boards online, she's reading articles in the newspaper, and that's what brings her to Wyoming and in One Step Too Far this young man went missing several years ago, his mother is dying of cancer. Her dying wish is to be buried next to her son, so here's the father, the husband kind of - Alright, this is it, and we're gonna have this final push into the wilderness and we're gonna find him. And he's angry and he's determined. And then you have the friends who were last with Timothy O’Day when he disappeared and they’re guilt-stricken and remorseful and hang dog. And then you got the experts and the search and rescue person, the Bigfoot hunter –which turns out, they know a lot more than you think. And Frankie who stumbles upon an article in the paper and was like - So I solve missing person's cases, I can do seven weeks in the wilderness of Wyoming. Within two hours she is really sorry she ever thought. Frankie does not like hiking and camping, and it kind of occurs to her halfway up the mountain that she's not enjoying all of that. What the hell? There's no neighbors to ask questions. Why was I ever thinking I could do this? But of course, this things evolve, but I love that when I go to write the books, when I go to think about it, it's like, Okay, you and me... We're sitting at home right now. What would we do? We have only the resources available to us as everyday, average people. What would you do? Francis, ingeniousness is to Listen, Learn and have empathy.

Mindy: And I think you hit on something that I want to talk about a little bit more, 'cause it's such a rich area. Emotion, all of the different conflicting emotions that revolve around a missing person's case, you mentioned the people that Timothy O’Day was with when he disappeared, they have guilt. You've got the mother who's like, I just need to know what happened, and I have a small window in which to get my answers. And the dad who is angry, and you've got professionals that probably have an amount of frustration and volunteers who are putting themselves out on the line, there's so many different relationships and avenues to develop emotions within your story.

Lisa: I kind of classified One Step Too Far when I was writing it as my official Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None goes on a hike. And it was fun for me because Frankie, we quickly establish, she's not a hiker, she's used to inner city urban environments where minorities, the disenfranchised have been left alone and no one's looking for them. This is her first true, really wilderness remote experience. So she starts to kind of reflect upon, okay, I know I’m in the woods. I have established now I hate hiking and I don't actually like the woods. What do I bring to the table? How do I help this group? Then starting to understand that anything is a human experience, and this party of eight, this group of eight, which she starts to observe, but they're not a group. You’ve got two leaders over here, you got three hikers over there, the groomsmen, and then you got like her and the other two professionals over here. We're gonna have to make this work, and that's kind of Frankie's super power. She's a loner, but she's a people person. Again, she's not there to just kick ass and take names, she's trying to put the pieces together, so she talks, she listens, she learns, and as things continue to go very, very sideways and bad things start to happen, she is the first to really clue in, if we're ever gonna make out of this alive - we're gonna have to become a true group.

Mindy: This group that's not a group is not getting out of the woods any time too, and I love that you tackle that, but also that you yourself are an avid hiker. I am as well. I've always been an outdoors person. One of my recent books is actually a survival story about a girl lost in the smoky mountains by herself. And when I was writing it, first of all, I was cursing myself because it's literally one person alone for 98% of the book. God, every time I sat down to write, I was like - You idiot. But I have been in situations where I wouldn't say I was lost, but I was not prepared. And in the dark and not having overnight gear or lights and in a national forest, which aren't really very well maintained. I've been in situations with weather and storms where I was like, Oh, this could actually be really bad. I was in Maui this past December, when the kona storm went through and there were landslides. When you're in nature, it's like nature doesn't care about your gender, your income, what you look like, who you are, whether you're important, whether you're not. It's going to kill you regardless - especially if you are not either bonding with someone else and helping each other get through or extremely capable.

Lisa: What I love about Frankie in the course of One Step Too Far, she's in this environment that's not her. She's a fish out of water. She's trying to learn, Frankie’s superpower is listening. And I think she struck a chord with readers and reviewers because I think at some fundamental level, all of us recognize we all wanna be heard, but no one knows how to listen. But at a point, it becomes this on-going thing. As you get to a pretty severe survival situation, what you're talking about - food is gone, weather is bad, someone's injured, someone else's injured. What the hell are we gonna do? What is survival? Is it being tough enough? Is it being the biggest badass present? 'cause there are some in the group that will tell you, Yeah, I'm gonna make it through this, 'cause I'm the biggest tough ass in the world. But Frankie’s kinda argument to this is - it's adaptability. I don't know any of this, and I'm not even particularly tough. I have no idea what I'm doing, but I can continue to adapt, adapt, adapt, and think of, Okay, solution A. Solution B. Okay, now I'm on solution X, Y, Z.

I love that, 'cause I think there's a parable in that for all of us. I think a lot of us have spent the past two years of what the hell does it take to get through it? Is it being mentally tougher? Is it being more resilient? Is it being this, is it being that? And I think Frankie, speaking for her, as a character, she's like - I'm not any of those things. I just keep listening, learning, adapting, and somehow I have faith, this is gonna get me through these woods.

Mindy: We live in a world where everyone is looking for … I don't even know if it's 15 minutes of fame anymore, I think it's more like 15 seconds. And you have to be screaming to get the attention and you have to be constantly fighting to keep any number of eyes on you, and it is almost impossible. The actual listening - very few people do. I had an interesting guest on my blog a couple of weeks ago, an author who wrote a guest post, and it was titled Introversion Is My Superpower. I thought it was wonderful because she was talking about how she is not an outgoing person, she's not dancing on tiktok, she's not doing all of the things that you're supposed to do to gain attention, and she's like, I listen and I observe. And that's why I'm a good writer. And that is my goal, is to be a good writer. Not To Be A Good TikToker.

Lisa: The other thing, there's a little bit of backlash, and I think we're getting aware of it, but maybe can't get off the treadmill. It's not for Frankie. She doesn't do social media, but she’s connected. Because if you wanna check boards for missing people and follow some of these cases, you need to. But essentially her issue with life is somewhat the social media day and age where we are surrounded by images that tell us - this is how your life should look, this is what should make you happy. And I think one of the reasons readers and reviewers and fall in love with her is - She's already like, yeah, I tried the norms, I tried to do what everyone tells me I should do, I tried to do that the Instagram post, the Facebook, all it did was make me drink.

If I do this, if I go from town to town, if I just keep moving, if I solve other people's problems, which I know is a cop-out, on some level I get, I should probably solve my own, but at the moment, solving other people's problems that’s what I am capable of. I think she recognizes that, she actually really doesn't know yet how to solve her own problems. Her doing this is giving her purpose, it's giving her momentum, it is keeping her sober, but it's a harder life. She is the outsider in this group, the wedding party, the father, everyone else has some kind of connection to something. She's connected to nothing, and it makes her both powerful and haunted and compelling.

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Mindy: You mentioned something earlier that I want to touch back on because it was something that I wanted to bring up with you, so I'm thrilled that you actually opened the door. You talked about a Bigfoot hunter. Like I said, I have for various reasons, mostly 'cause I am a hiker, and so I am aware of the amount of missing people in public lands is a very real thing people don't necessarily know a lot about. And when you wander into those mysteries and the wilderness mysteries and things like that, one of the very first things you're gonna bump into is Bigfoot theories. One of the main cornerstones for missing people in public lands and in wilderness areas is a show and a series of books called Missing 411. I'm sure you're probably somewhat familiar, but it does focus on assuming maybe that Big Foot or aliens are responsible for all of these experiences. So I always thought it was mildly amusing, but I actually bought a Missing 411 book that was about my area, and I live in Ohio, and I am near a designated wilderness area, not necessarily a park or any halibut, it's a wilderness area.

And there was a case in the 30s of a little boy that disappeared like five miles for me, and I got so freaked out. I had to give the book away, I was like, I can't have this in my house. And so I think it's really interesting because I was a little bit like, amused about all these theories, and I'm not saying that I think Bigfoot is responsible. But what I'm saying is that once I started reading these cases, it was amazing to me, minus the end solution that it's Bigfoot, how much information and how capable many of these researchers are.

Lisa: And that's really the word. So I'm an avid hiker, and I'd read this article about all these people that go missing, no one's looking for... And I'm like, there's a story there. And then we start delving into it deeper, one of kind of crazy real life things, stuff you didn't know–there's not even a national database of all the people that have gone missing on our public lands. Which is staging itself. And in fact the best source of data comes from the North American Bigfoot Association. That's kind of crazy. They are actively engaged in mapping disappearances because anomalies have an interest to them, where a lot of people go missing, maybe that's a sign of activity. But the other thing too, in missing persons cases - And this, again, this is the real world - they’re hikers. Outdoors people, people were into looking for BigFoot... Yes, they're out, they know their mountains and when people go missing, they are often some of the first to step forward and to volunteer their time to be guides. And there's several prominent cases in the Olympic Peninsula where they're still searching, and it is the Big Foot society that's frankly, they're the ones who are still looking for these people. No one else is, but they are, and they play this kind of very legitimate role. I could not help but bring it to the table, so in One Step Too Far, in addition to the Father, the grieving groomsmen and the search dog - we’ve got to talk about Daisy, because we both love dogs. But you’ve also got Bob, the Big Foot Hunter, it's like, I didn't even know I needed a bigfoot hunter as a character, but in trying to research this book, I'm like, Oh, yeah, and the team must include a Bigfoot hunter.

Mindy: It's true, and it's something that when I ran across it as well, because like you, I sniffed it out and I was like, Man, there's stories here. And I ended up digging around a little bit, but like I said, there was one just way too close to my house and I got way too scared and I was like... 'cause I run at night and I run in the morning, And I was just like, I can't, I can't do this. But yeah, it is interesting to me, and again, you have those people that are on the fringes of society, but they're out there doing that work. So you mentioned Daisy, of course, I wanna go back to that. I'm a dog person, I've got my Dalmatian, Gus. He's actually sitting on my feet right now, I mean, I don't know about you, but I will forever be scarred by all Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows. So as the author, when you go into writing a dog what are your thoughts and feelings on that?

Lisa: I'm a huge animal fan in general, particularly dogs, and I've had cats for most of my life and horses, and I do think they make anything better. Anything you experience, a pet makes it better. And I am fascinated by working canines, the ways that dogs can sense, do, feel, things that are far beyond our experience. I had the opportunity 10 years ago or so, to visit the body farm, and it just happened that there was a search and rescue team, canine team there. They were looking for human remains to work on their cadaver recovery, because you're not really allowed to bury body parts in your backyard, it turns out. And just talking to them and the training and the cases - what dogs can find, what dogs can do. Having these forensic scientists, they are saying, Oh, forget all the science in my lab. Your best chance of finding human remains is a dog's nose. And I just love that concept. So of course, if you're doing a search and rescue team in the mountains such as One Step Too Far, you have to have a dog. And one of the things I love about One Step Too Far, is Daisy really is the star. The group actually acknowledges this upfront. They have this rugged mountain guide, who's a local legend. And he is not just from the mountains, he is of the mountains. and even he is like - if we are successful in this mission, it will because of Daisy the dog, it will not be us. As humans, we're not actually very good at hide and seek at all.

Mindy: I run with my dog. My doggy comes with me everywhere, and we run together. If I have the ability, I take him with me on hikes and I always just... You really said it, everything is better with your animals with you.

Lisa: And Daisy is based on a real story. When I was working with this cadaver dog team, they talked about, they had all the pure breeds, the German Shepherd. Purely coincidentally, they were somewhere in South America and Puerto Rico working a mudslide. And they adopted his stray dog, it was just clearly starving, brought her home to be a pet. She became by far their best dog. Just the drive to work, the desire to please... It was actually kind of funny to them 'cause they were trying to keep her separate, like you are a pet. This is our work, and she just wouldn't stay put. She kept intruding into the work exercises and training until they finally started to realize that's really what she wanted to do.

Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find you online and where they can get the book One Step Too Far?

Lisa: One Step Too Far will be available any place books are sold, you could find me on Lisa Gardner dot com, on social media, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LisaGardnerBKS for books.

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Mindy: Writer Writer Pants on Fire is produced by Mindy McGinnis. Music by Jack Korbel. Don't forget to check out the blog for additional interviews, writing advice and publication tips at Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com. If the blog or podcast have been helpful to you or if you just enjoy listening, please consider donating. Visit Writer Writer Pants on Fire dot com and click “support the blog and podcast” in the sidebar.

Discover A New Age of Exploration & Storytelling With Hidden Compass

March 7, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

Ad: Welcome to the Haunting, Unearthly and Paranormal Stories podcast. Each week will be a different event, whether paranormal or some other strange and unexplained happening–maybe even a haunting located near you. These events and stories have been given to us by the people who experienced them in their own lives. These stories will take you to the depths of fear and back again. You will learn of places haunted by specters and other shadows, ghost investigations, the demonic happenings and possible possessions, dream homes taken over by paranormal events. Within these stories, you will question yourself and locations you have been to – times you caught movement out of the corner of your eye… or thought you did. You may question locations you currently visit and begin to wonder if those noises you hear are truly the building settling or someone from a past life, walking down the hallway towards you. These weekly journeys will lead us down deserted roads, into the deep and dark forests, and through the doors of buildings we should not enter. Pull up a chair as we take a step into the unknown on the Haunting, Unearthly and Paranormal Stories podcast. Find us at hupspodcast.com Contact us at hupspodcast@yahoo.com. Believe the stories you choose to believe – or believe in none. It is your choice.

Mindy: We're here with Sabine K. Bergmann and Sivani Babu, who are the founders of Hidden Compass, which is a women-founded media company. So why don't we just start with you guys telling us about Hidden Compass, what it is and what you do.

Sivani: We're excited to be here, we're excited to talk about Hidden Compass. Hidden Compass is a women women-founded media company, we're ending the era of junk food journalism by empowering audiences to unite with human causes and possibilities behind award-winning stories.

Sabine: What that means in practice is that we have an online quarterly magazine of exploration. We have launched a podcast, we have launched an online speaker series, and we have what we call the Alliance, which is like a modern society of exploration essentially. And all of these elements are showcasing as Sivani said Award-winning stories, but also celebrating the partnership between us as a publisher, our contributors and our audience and inviting our audience to get to know the people behind the stories, to be able to support them directly and to be able to participate in what we do as a company.

Mindy: I love it. I struggle as an author... Junk media is the way to put it. I have been kind of railing internally and not always internally, if I'm being honest. I'm an author, I write traditionally, I'm very fortunate to be able to make a living this way. But I have a lot of frustration with the elements of marketing that have no substance yet appears to actually be what works and sells books. I've become very frustrated at the fact that I apparently have to make a TikTok video in order to really function in the publishing world today. And I'm 42 and I don't really feel like dancing or putting on make-up or participating in some of these arenas that we're being told matter. So I kind of like your ideas about creating a new platform, a new method of exploration, but also just kind of a refutation of that idea of the attention span, shortening of the world.

Sabine: It's funny that you say that this is what works and what sells books. It's one strategy that can work to a certain extent, what Sivani and I talk about all the time is that everyone is trying the same strategy, to a large extent, we are ignoring people like - I think all three of us - who love deeper, challenging, nerdy, intellectual stories that don't treat us like people who have five-second attention spans. Behind the founding and the running of Hidden Compass are these two dual frustrations on my part. One is, as a writer, I wanted places to publish stories that weren't shoe-horned into a simplified version of reality, but then on the other side as a reader, I was like, That's not the kind of stuff I wanna read every day. It's not good for me. It kind of wigs me out. And I think a lot of people feel the same way.

Sivani: Right, that's exactly why we founded Hidden Compass was as writers, as readers, we felt like we were being pulled in a direction that frankly we didn't wanna go in and that we didn't think was healthy, and that we didn't think was necessary, and we believed that there should be a place for those longer, difficult, nuanced stories that we wanted to read as much as we wanted to write. We figured if we built it, we couldn't be the only people who wanted that. If we build it, perhaps they will come.

Mindy: I have fallen victim myself to the scroll and going through reels and just looking for that next thing in getting that little rush of adrenaline when you know a cat misses it's jump, a human falls down on the ice in front of their house, and I'm just like, Why am I doing this? I will hate myself for spending time going through looking for that next thing that's gonna make me laugh or whatever it is, and I have found it affecting my brain. There's no doubt about that. The way that I process information. I do have a harder time sitting down and reading, I do have a harder time saying, I'm going to watch an entire movie. You may or may not be familiar with a book called The Shallows?

Sivani: I don't know that one.

Mindy: I think that you would greatly enjoy this. It came out a while ago, I think they have updated it. It was by Nicholas Carr, it's called The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. A very compelling book about your brain actually being rewired. About the endless scroll, about skimming, about how you aren't processing large chunks of text any longer, and I don't tag it entirely on the internet, obviously, there are plenty of wonderful places where you can do long form reading and interact on a more meaningful level on the internet. However, again, this was originally published in 2010, so the title kind of reflects that. But there is a real impact on your brain and in your processing your language and your language and comprehension processing when you are simply pushing for that next little adrenaline boost What I do is read, that's what I do, I sit down and I read and then I write, and the longer I participate in little 100 calorie snack packs for my brain, my brain is eroding. There's no doubt in my mind.

Sivani: And what's been so interesting to me throughout this whole process of founding Hidden Compass and clarifying what our mission is and how we talk about it, are the parallels between media, the internet, and junk food and food. And so we drew heavily on the farm-to table movement when we started thinking about what Hidden Compass is. Because there is this parallel with junk food. It's out there, we all know it's out there, if you have it every once in a while, it's probably not gonna kill you. But if it's all you're consuming it's not gonna end well. And it's the same thing with this type of media that is bite-size, that is designed to give you that dopamine hit, designed to keep you coming back for more without really forcing you to engage with it in a meaningful way.

Sabine: But the exciting thing too is, in looking at that parallel between food and media, I looked at the past of what happened in the food industry. For centuries, food was just by nature, seasonal, handmade, local organic. And then there was this era of the commercialization of food and processed food just started booming. Then there was this shift of people really caring about the quality of what they put in their bodies, willing to do the research, willing to invest more resources into thoughtful choices. And I think we're in the same place with media, I think there is this moment that's happening right now where people are starting to think about what they put in their minds, the way that we thought about what we were putting in our bodies. And that gives me such excitement and hope because when Sivani and I entered this industry, everyone told us it was dying. And I think it's at an inflection point, I think we're at this moment that is so exciting, and this could be the moment when there is a shift towards different kind of media, and it might look totally different in 20, 30 years, or maybe even two years.

Sivani: And it requires a lot of creative thinking to figure out how to make it work when on the monetary side, it's evolved, click-bait drives content. And the reason it does that is because the way that internet advertising works and the way that publications make money isn't on the quality of the content, it's on how much of it they can get people to consume. And so in order to make that shift, it requires publications, media companies, businesses to think creatively about how they can afford to run their company and do the things that they want to do and pay writers what they deserve to be paid, and photographers and artists, and do it in a way that allows them to produce the kind of content that they can actually be proud of, and that is nourishing and healthy and mind-expanding. And that's been such a big part of our mission at Hidden Compass, is to figure out how to make this work in an industry where the Internet and the way that internet advertising has developed is what's driving content. How do we take a step back and rethink that and figure out how we can successfully run a business without falling into that trap?

Mindy: I could not agree more. I love the parallel to food, I tell people often, I was a teenager in the 90s, and I live in the Midwest. We drank pop. That's what you drank. When I think about it, now it makes me feel so gross. That's what you drank, that's what you had with meals, that's what you drank when you were thirsty, if you were an athlete, we could drink Gatorade, but most of the time you were drinking pop. I think about that now, and it makes me feel sick. I don't drink it, I drink water. I remember when bottled water became something you could buy, everyone made fun of people that drank bottled water, at least where I'm from. Why would you pay for water? It was so bizarre that people would drink bottled water. But change happens, right? And I would love to see it continue to happen, especially in the world of media. I wanna go back to what you said about entering this world of media and publishing and long form writing, and having people iterate to you that this was a dying industry. Can you expand on that a little bit?

Sivani: Sabine and I both grew up in the era of National Geographic, we both had the giant stacks in our respective childhood homes of National Geographic and Time and Life, and all of these magazines where long form media was the norm. A lot of our mentors and the people we looked up to in this industry had also sort of come of age in that time, and when we got into this business and they became mentors and friends, so many of them were lamenting the loss of what they call this golden age of media, particularly related to travel journalism and about how it was never going to be that way, and travel journalism was dying, 'cause it was all about listicles and that type of short piece content that does what we've been talking about, it's engineered to do. We hit a point, Sabine and I, where we have this question of, Well, do we continue in this industry that everyone says is dying? Do we accept that this industry is in fact dying? And if not, what do we do about it? And for us, we looked at it and we didn't have that nostalgia for a time in our careers that looked very different 'cause we were new to the industry, and so we could look at it and see what might be an opportunity where folks that we absolutely adore, were focusing on what they'd lost. And we had this moment kind of a forced opportunity really, we couldn't look backwards because to a certain extent, they were right, that this print model has been disastrous. It's been really painful actually to see friends and colleagues who were editors at larger publications, storied publications get let go because the editorial teams are being cut down. It's been horrible to see how fact-checking departments have been cut. We talk about optimism and hope, and that's definitely a huge part of the story, but there are parts of the story too of just sadness. But it does mean that decision to take the print business model and try and superimpose it on the internet, and then when that fails to start selling user information and targeting advertising and kind of scrambling to make money in other ways. I mean, National Geographic sells furniture and wine now. Most of their money is made through TV programs, they've cut many of the publications and so obviously that isn't working. But at the same time, we think we're in the age of the internet, which means that we're in an era where readers have greater access than they ever have in the history of publishing. The internet could be leveraged to access this participatory nature of travel journalism that has never been tapped into before, and so I feel both sadness for everything that's happening, but also this drive to move towards a vision of what this could be.

Sabine: For us, this always felt more like an industry in transition than an industry that was dying, that there were these opportunities, if you could come in and look at it with a different perspective, and it's hard for big publications to do that. National Geographic is a big ship. It is very hard to turn a big ship. So these publications that have been struggling and have made choices that have affected, frankly the editorial quality of what they're putting out. One of the big issues with National Geographic and internal conflict has been with the television network being what brings in a lot of money and the quality of what's being aired on that television network and whether it meets the standards of the National Geographic Society, and whether it meets the standards of the magazine. And so there are these internal conflicts that bigger publications and bigger media companies are having. And that was where Hidden Compass was at a little bit of an advantage actually, and it's more than a little bit of an advantage in that we're small. We're small and we can afford to do things differently and try things out and experiment, and our hope is that when other companies see that it can be successful to do it a different way, they find their own ways to do it differently. We don't think that we are setting the only example of how this can be done, but we hope that with some publications, we're just showing people that it can be done and it can be done differently, and we don't have to drive content the way we have been. It doesn't have to be a quantity over quality game, that it can be quality over quantity, that there is a market for that, that people actually want that, and that it ultimately can be successful.

Mindy: I love so much everything that you're saying, especially when you're talking about, as an example, National Geographic, and when you're talking about their TV channel and questions of whether or not some of the content that is being pushed out is up to the standards, I think that... And I'm not speaking specifically of National Geographic, but in general, man. Standards have lowered. I struggle as a consumer, not just a writer, I struggle as a consumer to find things that interest me. I struggle to find things that are well done, well made, well put together, well delivered, the narrative has to be what I need it to be, and that is where my writer side comes in. So much of everything that I interact with ends up disappointing me, and I do think that that is why. The depth is not there, the quality that I used to be able to access and yes, you're right, when you have more invested in printing out a magazine and it has glossy photos and color pages, it's expensive for you to produce it, you're not putting all the content in there. You are making sure that what you're selling is worth what you're asking people to pay for it. When you have unlimited links that you can just throw up... Yeah, you're right. Quantity is the name of the game, and quality isn't even a word I feel like we use anymore.

Sabine: When we tell people that we only publish 20 stories a year, their jaws drop. That was a thoughtful decision on our part. 40 to 50% of the stories we publish every year win awards for the best travel journalism. And that's because we only publish great stories. We have in-depth conversations in our editorial meetings about - what is this contributing to the global conversation? And it's this focus on quality and award winning stories, but also raising the bar for our audiences and saying, We're not gonna dumb this down for you, we're gonna challenge you with the content, and we're also gonna challenge you to meet the writers and photographers and artists behind the by lines. In 2020, we became the first media company in the world to publish profile pages and fundraising campaigns for every storyteller that we publish. And this is on top of the rates that we pay them. So we thought what would happen if we invited readers to support good storytelling? It has been so amazing to see people rise to that occasion, and to prove wrong, this idea that readers don't care, that people want free content, that people don't want to pay attention. And the growth in readership, we now have tens of thousands of readers. The growth in financial support for storytellers is proving that wrong, that people don't care - they do.

Sivani: They do care. They wanna know who is behind the content that they're consuming, the stories that they're reading. And this goes back to that food model that we've drawn so much inspiration from, and I talked a bit and Sabine talked a bit about farm to table, and that was that shift where people wanted to know, they wanted to re-engage with their food in a modern way. We were never going back to being subsistence farmers, but people wanted to know where their food is coming from, and they wanted to know who's preparing it and how it's being made. And we took those concepts and we applied them to what we do in journalism and exploration and storytelling, and started introducing people to the folks behind the content that they were consuming behind the stories. It's been an interesting challenge. Definitely our readership has risen to that challenge. Part of what has been fun and also challenging at times has been asking writers to step out of the shadows and to step out from behind the by line, because Sabine and I dealt with this too, as journalists. We're used to - We write a story, our name is out there, it's on it, but that's kind of the extent of our interaction with the folks who read it. We don't usually get the opportunity as writers and journalists to actually put ourselves out there and share more of ourselves in the context of a single publication. And so that opportunity on the other side of it, from the journalist side of it has also been really interesting, and it's been really fun to see the journalists also step up to that challenge and engage with their audiences and talk about the work that they do more broadly, rather than just about the story, but what they're passionate about and what drives them to tell a story. And that's what people are responding to, they're responding to that connection with those journalists.

Sabine: You know who are thinking of, Siv, is Edmée van Rijn who is this incredible photo journalist, she does conflict photojournalism in the Middle East, and she is an incredible journalist and reporter and is not used to talking about herself or writing about herself. And us being Hidden Compass, we said we're gonna have a profile page for you, you're gonna be on video, we're gonna have photos of you and your bio and everything, and we want this story to have a really strong element of your story and your narrative, and she said that was really challenging for her. And it's one of - I hate to say this 'cause all of the stories we publish are my favorites, but it's one of my favorites that we published recently. And it is this woven narrative of her work as a conflict photojournalism in the Middle East and her experiences dog sledding in Norway.

Sivani: And it seemed like these two disparate experiences that should not work woven together in a story, but they do so beautifully because they're both very much a part of her.

Sabine: And I love that this story does what a lot of stories that we publish to, which is to humanize journalists and I think that that is something that is so necessary right now, I think we talk about media, we talk about journalism. But how many people can name a journalist who aren't in this industry? And so to be able to give the general public that opportunity to see the human beings behind stories, and these are stories of exploration. I think it's harder in news to do the same sort of thing 'cause it's polarized in a lot of ways that exploration, journalism isn't. This is an important step for people to be able to put faces and names and voices on to the people who are creating the stories that we read every day.

Mindy: I think it's interesting, the crossover to fiction authors, authorship in general. I can tell you every author that I know, they can write 400, 500, 000 words a year. You ask them to write a 30-word bio about themselves, and they're like, uhhhh.... It is the hardest part of what we do. I love too, the idea of taking this person that is behind the story and making them a full 3D human being. I think one of the things that I resent, and I do use the word resent, is that as an author, I have to market myself. I'm not just selling my books anymore, I have to market who I am and literally market my face and making these videos and all of these things like that. But the way that you're doing it is different. You're not asking your journalists to do a dance on TikTok with their cat. There's depth there. And if someone were to ask me, and people do, don't get me wrong, but if someone were to do an in-depth interview with me about my work, yeah, I'm all over this. I'm not going to be doing the towel drop on Instagram, like for a lot of reasons.

Sivani: And it's so funny that you say this because this has been a challenge for me and Sabine. When we started Hidden Compass, it was a side project. We had our freelance careers, we were both full-time freelance journalists, we were traveling the world, and we thought Hidden Compass would be this little side journal publication that we would put out every quarter, and it would just be this little thing that lived on the side, and that quickly turned out not to be the case. And a big part of what changed when we realized that it was going to do well, was we also realized that we had become the faces of the brand, and that people had to connect with us as individuals. And that was hard for us because neither of us were wired that way. That has been part of this journey, but I also think it is what has allowed us to bring that same thing to our journalists in a way that is comfortable and doesn't feel demeaning because we feel the same things that they feel. It didn't come naturally to us to put ourselves out there as individuals rather than as people behind Hidden Compass and Hidden Compass being out there. That didn't come naturally to us, and we recognize that it doesn't come naturally to a lot of wonderful folks that we work with, and at the same time, we realize that a lot of the wonderful folks that we work with are spectacular individuals who have amazing stories to share, who have had experiences that we can all learn from. And so we're in this position where we know what they're feeling, but we also know what they're capable of, and we get to help them bring that to the world in a slightly different way. And that's incredibly rewarding for me certainly, and I think for both of us.

Sabine: Yes, I would say for both of us. And there are two main elements at play here really, we talk about humanizing journalists, and I don't know if the two of you have noticed, but humanity isn't perfect. It's not about them being perfect, it's about them being a person, and at Hidden Compass, we very much... We're kind of tongue and cheek in the personality of our brand, and we're very much like trying to take back certain words. So we call our journalists and our storytellers heroes, and we do that purposefully, we do that to say, hero isn't somebody who's perfect, hero is someone who's standing up for something they care about. And that's the second element here, is that we tell our contributors, yes, it's about celebrating you, but also you have a story to tell, literally, you published a story with us that is important, and because it's at Hidden Compass it means we had the whole editorial discussion about what it's contributing to the global conversation, which means that it matters. And to invite these storytellers to step up and say, deforestation in Sumatra is something that is important, and this is why I did a photo essay about it, or disappearing languages and language diversity is important, which is why I wrote a story about it.

Sivani: We're all about celebrating the nerds, we believe that everyone is a nerd about something. So when people hear nerd, they often think of very specific things, but we have had stories where the thing that the author is nerding out about it is the history of textile dye. Everyone's a nerd about something, and so these fascinations and these curiosities that have stories behind them that can teach us about all sorts of other things in the world, have been a big part of the types of stories that we publish, it's the stories that contribute to these global conversations, it's the stories that send people down rabbit holes of research. That was one of the great things that we discovered about our readers when we were able to talk to long-time readers as well as perspective readers, is that folks would read a story and then they would go down their own rabbit holes of research because they were so fascinated by what they read. And that was a huge compliment, and it just reminded us, this is why we do what we do, and there are people out there who do wanna be inspired by something that they don't even know exists yet.

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Mindy: So I'm from Ohio, and I don't live near any large or Earthworks, but we have here in Ohio, there's a system of earthworks that were discovered when white people showed up, and it's essentially at this point in time, they've been dubbed the Hopewell and Adena culture, and those are the names of the white people that discovered them. Essentially, there was a prehistoric people here that moved around huge, massive amounts, hundreds of thousands of tons of dirt to make mounds and not just burial mounds. They made the serpent mound is probably the most famous one, here in Ohio. That's what I am a nerd about. I am a nerd about our Earthworks in Ohio, and we literally know nothing about them. Basically, when Europeans showed up, they were talking to the Native Americans, especially where I'm from, it would have been the Cherokee, and they were like, So what's up with all these earthworks and the Native Americans were literally like, dude, we have no idea. They were like, they've always been here. We don't know. Other people did it. It's funky and they're just super, super old, and we literally know nothing, next to nothing about these people and what these were used for. And when I tell people about the Adena and the Hopewell and the earth works, people are like, What the hell are you talking about? And I'm like - It's this whole thing, it's like Egypt, but it's in Ohio.

Sabine: Oh, that's amazing. It just is so incredible to me how much we don't know. I love that you bring up this idea of discovery and exploration, it's a thing we talk about a lot, and I think that there's this pervasive feeling that we've discovered most everything there is to discover and that the age of exploration is over. This is another thing that Sivani and I fight back against... We're like, journalism is not dying, and the age of exploration is not over. And it's because of things like this Mindy, these earthworks, and also you brought up that there are these European explorers and these white explorers who come in and that really represents the old age of exploration. We're at a moment now where we are celebrating different kinds of voices, the Age of Exploration, now it's not just about being the first Westerner to set foot on top of a certain mountain, it's about frontiers that are ethical, communicating across cultures across generations that are intellectual frontiers as well. And these questions, not just what's out there, but what is our role here on this planet, if not in the universe, and these are huge exciting questions where we can hear from different kinds of voices now in a way that we just didn't before.

Sivani: Right. Exploration used to be about conquering, and it used to be about being the first generally Westerner, generally white male Westerner, up a mountain or to plant a flag in a place where there were already plenty of people who had been there forever. Now, we're at this moment, like Sabine said, where it's not about conquering, it's about understanding, and it's about reckoning with the past of exploration and the fact that exploration used to be about exploitation. It used to be about quote / unquote discovering a place where millions of people already lived and then figuring out what you could take from it. And now it's about understanding and trying to learn from the people who are already there, rather than coming in and trying to tell people how they should be living or how they should be protecting their environment or telling them what the thing is that they've been living with forever. It's about understanding and listening, and it's taken on these forms that aren't just physical, it's not about being the first to some place, it can also be just about going deeper rather than broader. And about actually understanding the ecological consequences and the ethical consequences, the historical consequences, and there are all these types of exploration. And so when we talk about being an exploration-driven media company and magazine, people often take that as physical exploration, it's science. And it is those things, but it's also all of these other things that are fascinating and inspiring, and like Sabine being said, this is why we don't feel like the age of exploration is over, it's just different now.

Mindy: Agreed, entirely. I am very interested in the history of literally where I live. People ask if you could live at any time or any place in history, where would you be... And I always say in my own backyard 1000 years ago, I think that would be amazing. Because it's a completely different place. I love what you're saying about exploration because... Yeah, I live in Ohio, I lived very much in the middle of nowhere, and there are so many things that I can learn in a, let's say two mile radius. There's a piece of property down the road where there's a stream, and it was used by, I believe the Cherokee for their tanning, they tanned their hides on that bank. And I'm always saying to myself, I need to go down there and look around and look for arrowheads and look for tools and do these things, and I haven't done it yet. There are so many things that are just literally, literally in my own backyard. My house was built by a Civil War soldier, and I have come across so many things in the yard, just like digging or gardening or cutting up a dead tree and the roots come up and it's like, Oh, here's a horse shoe and here's an old plow, and it's just like... it's amazing to me when you're speaking of depth, and it's like, you know, we're not talking about sailing of into the sunset, it's literally can be two feet under your feet in your backyard.

Sivani: It's so interesting that you mentioned the in your backyard aspect of it, because that is another part of exploration that you have to go far afield to these quote / unquote exotic places. We published a story that I really enjoyed because it was about the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara in LA. And so I can literally see a Channel Island from my window, I'm based in Santa Barbara. And these islands are incredibly bio-diverse, they were never connected to the mainland, and so animals have developed and evolved there somewhat independently. It's often referred to as the Galapagos of the US. We published a story by a gentleman named Alex Krowiak, he's a naturalist who had spent time guiding on these islands and photographing was a beautiful photo feature, he's a wonderful photographer as well. But what had been missing in all of these stories about conservation successes on these islands has been the human history that had largely been overlooked, these are islands that are located right off the coast of some of the most populated parts of the country, and people who live within eyesight of them largely don't know the history of them. And they're right here, and they are fascinating, these islands where the oldest dated skeleton in the Americas was found there. I grew up in this area, and I'm familiar with the islands, I learned a ton in editing that story, but also I know so many people who have no idea that that is just right off the shore. So it's great when we can kind of reframe what exploration could be and show that it really is valuable, but it's also accessible to everyone because it doesn't require you to spend a ton of money and travel around the globe, it really could be your actual backyard.

Sabine: This is the power of story tellers too, Mindy you sharing all of these incredible historical aspects of where you live in Ohio, and Alex, who's writing about the Channel Islands. The storytellers are so often the thread that connects us to our own backyards, back to previous eras, to each other. I mean, I am such a believer in the power of storytelling, and my background is actually in environmental science. I had this moment when I was in college, I was working with indigenous subsistence farmers in the rural Andes. This is 2008, and I was putting together a scientific report that never got published actually, because the country fell into a state of civil unrest. The wonderful outcome of that is that I ended up being stranded in these remote rolling hills at 14000 feet of elevation with a couple of colleagues and Spanish Quechua translator. And I'm with people who don't use the western calendar, who live by oral traditions that have been passed down for hundreds of generations, roughly 400 generations, which goes back to the advent of Andean agriculture thousands of years ago. And I had this moment of, Oh my gosh, the power of these oral traditions, the power of these stories that convey what we as a people, as a species are learning, have learned, have yet to learn. Stories are how we have that global conversation, but also intergenerational conversations. They are our keys to interpreting the universe, to conveying knowledge and expression, to connecting with our peers and ancestors. I have goosebumps as I'm saying this right now, 'cause I cannot believe that I get to spend my life working with storytellers. I can't imagine anything else I would rather do.

Mindy: I love being one, and I love thinking narratively, which is just how my brain functions and always has. So I live in a, like I said, a really old house I think it was built in 1857, and everybody was like, You are crazy to buy this house and to want to live in a house that is this old and I'm like, No, I'm classy. I like this... This is amazing, like my house has history, if you go down in the basement, the beams are actually... They were cut by hand, there's hatchet marks and Everything about that matters. And it all goes back to the 15-second attention-grabbing and everything that has, I feel, very little substance. I feel that way sometimes about architecture, I can have that reaction to architecture, I need my house to matter. I researched the house when I bought it, and I know the name of the soldier that built it, and I actually found his grave and I went to his grave and I was like, Hey man, thanks for building my house. I love my house. I'm gonna take care of it for you. That matters to me because it is all story and we are all people populating the stories no matter how old they are or where they happen.

Sivani: Well, and storytelling to it's about connection, it's about that history, but for me, I also always look at it as storytelling is also about advocacy. So Sabine's background is Environmental Science, mine is varied, but I was a Federal Public Defender. Every career I have ever had - so I've been a lawyer, I've been a teacher. I have always come back to story, and everything is about story, and it's how we actually make changes in the world, the important changes and the detrimental ones too. It's all about story. And so when I look at what we do, and when I look at what I used to do as a lawyer, it was always about telling the story as a form of advocacy. And this is something that I have carried over in my life that's connected to Hidden Compass, I teach these storytelling for social justice workshops to aspiring public interest attorneys and things like that. But it's also something that gets carried over in the stories that we publish, we maintain journalistic integrity, we fact-check every story thoroughly, but there are stories that are illuminating conservation efforts or the need for conservation or helping us think about things in new ways. There was a beautiful story that actually was separate from all of the conservation type things that we publish, that was written by a woman Cherene Sherrard, who is a Black professor, chair of English and literature at Santa Clara University, and she wrote about her experience surfing for the first time in Hawaii, and tied it in with her experience as a Black woman dealing with and managing risk in just day-to-day life. And so here was the opportunity to make people think about things in a new way, in a way that might affect how they think about certain social issues that are currently at the forefront. And it's so important to me that we get to use story to not just make those connections with people, 'cause that is incredibly important, but also to show people the world in which we live and the world in which we want to live.

Sabine: I'm gonna jump in and showcase Hidden Compass fact checking in action. Cherene Sherrard is the chair of the English department at Pomona College, she teaches African-American and Caribbean literature. We got it right!

Mindy: Well, that matters. So last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find Hidden Compass and some of your other efforts that are tied into Hidden Compass and some of the stories that you're most excited about recently.

Sivani: Sure, we're at Hidden Compass dot net. So pretty easy to find us on the internet. On our website, you'll find information about the Alliance, which we mentioned pretty briefly earlier in this conversation, but the Alliance is our modern society of exploration, and we launched it at the end of last year, it is an opportunity for people who wanna take the next step and connect with a community of folks who not only wanna support exploration, but who wanna have a say in what modern day exploration looks like, and who also wanna join us in standing up for the values that we believe in which is that journalism, Science, History and hope are worth protecting. And so the Alliance gives folks access to our story tellers. We'll be funding larger expeditions and our Alliance members will get to help us choose the ones that we fund, they will get to interact with folks who are on those expeditions and to learn what goes into a big endeavor like that. It's our effort to build the community around exploration.

Sabine: Definitely go and check that out. And then in terms of stories that we would point you to, it's so hard to choose, but our latest issue - every issue we publish has a theme, and our latest issue, the theme was layered exposures. You should jump into that one, there are fundraising campaigns that are active for all five of the storytellers. You can contribute to support each of them directly. There is a story by a writer and filmmaker named Paul Fischer about these Palestinian tens who are obsessed with the promise of the movies, but grew up in a place where all of the cinemas were shut down and they have this impossible dream that they fight through. And it's about the history and the violence of that era, and also the hope and the amazing things that can come out of that place. There's an incredible photo feature by documentary maker Eric Dusenbery in Musella, Georgia, where he's inspired by these depression era portraits, by this iconic photographer, Dorothea Lange. And he takes a large format camera, very old school, and he sets off to capture modern agrarian life, and that's in our time travel department, so it's inspired by depression era photography and then bringing modern photography in, but with older technology. There's the story about the architecture in Vietnam, I mean, just go and read the entire issue at this point. I'm gonna tell you all of it and poke around and see what you love, because we have things for all kinds of nerds.

Sivani: And we hope you discover something that you didn't know existed, but that fascinates you.

Deanna Raybourn On Mistaken Perceptions of the Victorian Age

February 28, 2022 Mindy McGinnis

Mindy: We're here with Deanna Raybourn author of The Impossible Imposter, which is continuing in her Veronica Speedwell series. It's available now. It is set in the 1880s, and it is about our hero, Veronica, who is very much a free spirit and a lot of what she does goes against how we imagine a traditional woman living her life in the 1880s. And I think a lot of readers would probably feel like it was truly a work of fiction. However, Veronica is based on a real person; she's based on Margaret Fontain. So if you'd like to tell us a little bit about how you discovered Margaret and decided to write about her in the form of Veronica.

Deanna: I graduated a long, long time ago with a degree in English and history, I double majored and it was a university with a really small history department. So we didn't do anything aside from basically Western European history. And it was very dude centric. It was very war centric. And so I kind of left that program feeling like I wanted to know a lot more. And I started doing a deep dive into Victorian female explorers. And for whatever reason, that was just this kind of tiny little niche in history that I thought was just really, really fascinating. And one of the Victorian explorers that I was just thoroughly enthralled by was Margaret Fountain. She was a lepidopterist. She was a butterfly hunter, and she ended up earning a living at a time when genteel women weren't doing a whole lot of earning a living, right?

I mean, it was considered to be socially beyond the pale if you had to make money, but this was an occupation that didn't get you terribly dirty. You weren't in a factory, you weren't in a coal mine, you weren't doing anything like that. And it wasn't considered to be degrading in the way that shop work might have been considered to be lowly. You could still go out and hunt butterflies and pretend to be a bit of a lady. One of the reasons that we know this is because of the fact that when you sold your butterflies to collectors, you would charge in guineas as opposed to pounds. Guineas are always the currency of luxury items. You know, you would pay your dressmakers bill in guineas, you'd pay for your expensive wines and your jewelry and guineas, but you'd pay for your firewood most likely in pounds and shillings.

And so Margaret used to make a pretty good living doing this. She could earn in a month's time well over what a ladies maid would make in an entire year. And she was very much her own mistress. She was kind of boss of her own life. She traveled the world, she butterflied on six continents and she had relationships with men. And I mean that in every sense of the word all around the world, she had extra marital relationships. She had interracial relationships, the sorts of liaisons that you don't think your average Victorian woman is going to be indulging in, but Margaret did. The great thing about Margaret is like a lot of Victorians, she left diaries and journals of her travels and what she got up to. And she's really frank about these amorous exploits as well as her butterflying. And the way she wrote was fantastic because she wove them in.

So one minute you're reading about her chasing this lovely little butterfly through the Qatar jungle. And the next minute her guide has his hands down her dress. It just was so bonkers that I loved it. It was really so unexpected that I thought, you know, if I ever write another Victorian character, cause I already had a Victorian series - the Lady Julia Gray books that were being published. I thought if I create another Victorian series character, I want her to be inspired by Margaret. So Veronica Speedwell is a lepidopterist with a very independent and Intrepid spirit, very much lives life by her own lights. And in that respect, she's similar to Margaret. That's probably where the similarities end though.

Mindy: You know, it's fascinating. I also have an English degree and I minored in history. I also have a philosophy degree. So I'm a really, really useful person at Trivial Pursuit. Everything else. I mean, practical applications, things like that. I mean, I can argue people down to the ground and have a great time doing it. But, my resume and job searches are usually a little awkward. What's amazing to me is that you do run into these women in history that aren't fitting what we think of as the mold. And it does kind of make you reconsider the mold. I think very often we have a lot of preconceived notions and, and maybe that is another arm of patriarchy at work telling us the way that women were supposed to be behaving. And sometimes I have to wonder if it is more prescriptive than it is descriptive.

Deanna: Absolutely. You know, the image we have of the Victorian period is very, very much influenced by what was considered to be aspirational. What was considered to be the goal, which is this angel of the domestic hearth. That's what women are. Women are put up on this pedestal; they're gentle and sweet and demure. And that was what men wanted them to be. That's the goal is to have a woman like that. So yeah, the stories about women who aren't like that tend not to be at the forefront. We have this picture that Victorians were all super straight laced and nobody got up to sex, that they were putting skirts on the chair legs and never saying the word out loud, because it was rude. If you look at the actual records, more than 50% of the brides in England in the lower classes were pregnant on their wedding day. Okay, well, somebody was getting up to something, You know, I mean somebody wasn't, shrouding their chair legs.

And if you look at the upper classes, you see a very similar situation, you know. Amongst the aristocracy, once you get lower than Victoria and Albert, you're looking at people who had country house parties, which were not that different from key swap parties in the seventies. There's nothing new under the sun. But there is this image that this era was completely buttoned up and everybody was pure. And there were things that were just completely never, ever spoken about and much less ever done. And the truth is no, they were being done, not openly done. And a lot of this goes back to Prince Albert himself because his mother was kind of kicked out of the family when he was about five years old because she had an extra marital affair and this had a huge, huge impact on him.

He was a very moral, very upright sort of man. And so when he married Victoria, who came from this incredibly wild and wooly Hanoverian family that got up to all kinds of shenanigans, he had this much more straightforward, upright, moral posture. And that was how they were going to kind of direct their family. And that was going to be the aspiration for the nation. And they failed wildly where their oldest son was concerned. But you know, it really did create this picture.

This is where you see this huge, huge rise in consumer culture. The very beginnings of our celebrity culture that we have now, where, you know, pictures of the Royal family are, are in the newspapers. And you know, so these pictures are being circulated with an idea of - look at this beautiful, pink cheeked, freshly scrubbed family, having a picnic in the Scottish Highlands and everybody's behaving themselves. And everybody takes that as the model for how they're supposed to be living their lives, that this is the picture that you aspire to. And the reality was, usually quite, quite different.

Mindy: Yes, you're right. We do think about Victorians when we think about a lot of these staples of behavior, but I do a lot of genealogy and my family has been here, like where I live in Ohio for a very, very long time. And what you're saying about women being pregnant when they got married, I was teasing my mother because she's from a very, very long line of German people. And we live in a very, very heavily German community. Actually. It's still very German. I told her, I was like, you know, what's really interesting about people 200 years ago around here is that their gestation period was actually shorter. And mom was like, oh really? And like yeah, it appears to be about six months.

Deanna: So crazy, all those premature babies,

Mindy: Like I dunno how we got all the big strapping Germans out of it because everybody was born three months early, Mom. And my mom would just be like, Oh, Mindy! And I'm like, dude, everybody was going out to the haymow, Mom. Everybody.

Deanna: It's so much more common than we think it is.

Mindy: Yes it is. It's especially interesting to me, like as a woman, see that behavior swept underneath the rug and, and of course not celebrated, I would come across instances where, especially if they were like out on the edges of the frontier, if you were like, it's time to get married, they would be living together. And you just kind of wait for a minister to come to your area and then you get married. Because you don't have time to wait for the blessing of God. You know, people have always been people and we've always had genitals.

Deanna: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I come from a genealogy heavy family too. And my parents were just doing some digging and literally last week discovered that, you know, a great grandmother so many times over, we knew that she had married this particular gentleman. Well, they went digging into the census records and found out that she had two illegitimate children when she married him and that her mother had been the housekeeper to this gentleman. And so all of a sudden you can start to put the pieces together and say, oh, well, those were probably his kids. Nothing is as straightforward as you think it is.

And basically the Victorian age is when advertising really started to take off. And that's when you see the idea that you could construct this picture of perfection and sell people products based on how close it could get you to that picture. What are we gonna hold up as our ideal? What are our standards going to be? That's very much where this came from.

And you know, I think there's a certain element too, because you have a lot of people moving into the middle class for the first time during this time period. I think there is a kind of an ideal of, we need to be super clean. We need to kind of wash the dirt literally off of the shopkeeping and the factory work and the, the more practical hands on type of work. And so that's why you see so many ads for things like soap. That's why you see the idea of clean bodies being clean morality. And this really uptight overlap between scrubbing everything to death. Of course, germ theories are coming out during this century too, right? So you have people suddenly realizing, oh, I really do need to wash things, if I wanna be healthy. It's this really interesting kind of cocktail of what advertisers are pushing and, and where the morality is going.

And there's a return to church because people are getting scared by Darwin and his ideas. And they're thinking, oh, well, we better go back to Jesus, double down on religion. And this really interesting time period where there are new ideas and old ideas, and they all keep coming into conflict and the pendulum keeps swinging. It's such a fascinating time period to dig into because the further we get into our century, the more you realize when you look back, there really is nothing new under the sun.

People have always wrestled with the same questions. How do we use technology? How do we open our borders to immigrants and integrate them? How do you make your way in the world? How do you take care of people who are less advantaged than you are? What rights should women have? Everybody's rights and everybody's responsibilities and how society functions, are questions we never solve. We just keep asking them over and over again. I think human beings are kind of hardwired to like the idea of story. And so we like to fit things into a narrative. We like tidy endings and we like lessons to be learned from our stories. And if you've got an English degree, you do this stuff in your sleep, man. That, and Jesus imagery.

Mindy: I'll find you Jesus. And I can probably locate 20 to 30 penises as well.

Deanna: Oh my God. You know, that's day one on your English degree, find the phallus.

Mindy: Well coming back to Veronica then and how she's moving through the world, whether it’s necessarily how the reader expects and her behavior may not necessarily be what the reader expects. How do you go about combining these two things? What the reader probably expects and how things may have actually been? Plus of course, Veronica moving through the world, how she's interacting with some of the expectations versus the reality?

Deanna: My rule of thumb, when deciding whether or not to put something into a book, it doesn't even have to be particularly plausible. It just has to be possible. If it was historically possible, then I'll include it. I don't mind at all the idea that Veronica could push people to broaden their thinking a little bit about what Victorian women may have been like. I love that idea, in fact, because I think there's so many women whose stories have gone unclaimed and untold and unshared, and we need those women. We need to know that there were women who were engaged in astronomy and women who were engaged in philosophy and women who were engaged in all sorts of different occupations. Because I think that those are the women that we look to and say, oh, okay, well, you know, she threw herself under a horse race and got trampled to death in order to secure the vote for women. Maybe I can make a donation to the League of Women Voters. You get a sense of perspective that I think it's essential to remember the people who have paved the way for us.

And a lot of times there were women in the background who were doing these things and paving the way and making sacrifices. And we don't know their stories. And I feel like that does such a grave disservice to them. So I love the idea that Veronica might encourage people to go and find out a little bit more about what our fore mothers were getting up to. I kind of figured out early on that reader expectations about a particular period or particular historical facts were something that I couldn't spend too much time worrying about. My first series character Lady Julia Gray is the daughter of an Earl. And so there's a very specific way that she's supposed to be addressed.

She's married to a Duke and the notes that I would get from people saying, well, you did this wrong. And then I would have to respond with citations from Jane Austen, from Burke’s Peerage explaining why no, it's actually correct. And that's when I realized people, a lot of times will magpie their knowledge, taking, you know, little pieces here and there. And a lot of times it may be from something like a Jane Austen adaptation, or it may be from a book that was written in order for you to have fun. It wasn't necessarily written to teach you something. You know, it's not a nonfiction book about English aristocracy. Maybe it's a Regency romance that is fantastic, but got the titles just a little bit wrong. So I realized that a lot of times people were taking those things as gospel. And so I thought, okay, all I'm gonna be able to do is write it as correctly as I can.

And if people think that it's anachronistic or that it's wrong, I know it's not. Those are things, sometimes if readers ask me, I'm happy to explain. I used to explain this stuff a lot. When I kept a blog regularly, I would do blog posts about it. This is a question I get a lot - here you go. It's always this little dance that you do with readers, trying to make sure that above all you're entertaining them. If they wanted to be educated or informed about something, they would go get a nonfiction book. They want entertainment. They want to be in a different world for a little period of time. So I try to do as much of that as I possibly can because of the fact that I have a history degree, I'm not gonna go and just violate what I know is historically factual, just because that would grate on my own particular senses. If I need it to be particularly bright out at night, when I'm writing a certain scene, I'll check the moon phase and see what it was doing.

Or, you know, when I was writing the book before, An Impossible Imposter is called An Unexpected Peril. It's set in January of 1888 and I needed a snowstorm. I needed a reason for one of my characters to be out of London for a little while. Well, I went ferreting through the weather archives and found out there was this massive snowstorm in the south of England on this particular date. And all the trains were shut down. Like the whole second half of my book was taken care of. Then I know when she can conceivably get back. And so I worked with it. Now, whether or not any reader is ever going to go check that I don't have a slight idea. I assume they won't, but you never know. It was fun for me. And I do push the boundary sometimes, but I try to keep it as, as true as I possibly can. You must know this as well as I do, anything you study in history, you find out is probably not what you thought it was going to be when you went into it.

Mindy: Oh, absolutely. And I, as a writer, myself and a historian, I struggle so much with these exact things. My book that came out in 2015 is set in what is ostensibly, a real town here in Ohio, but I never name it. And I was working with all of the material and the data because it's set in an insane asylum that is fairly famous regionally. And so I used that as the basis, but I also never said it is this asylum and it is this town. There's a mystery involved as well. There's a killer on the loose. And so I was striving so hard. You wrote about Jack the Ripper as well. So you know that they did have criminal profiling back then. It wasn't fantastic, but they had the beginnings of it. Because my book is set in 1890, I had to give them the ability to actually catch this killer, but not give them things that they wouldn't have.

And I had to have insane asylum. And the question of - like you were saying about lighting, if my character walks into the room in this building of this socioeconomic level, what is this room lit with? Is it fire? Is it gas? Is it electric? You know, all of these things and I will go and I will find the answer to that before I even write the person walking into the room.

I ended up get going so deeply into having this great fidelity to facts that at one point, because of the nature of my serial killer, they had to be in a certain profession. And I was like rolling. And I'm checking the census data for this town. There were only two men practicing that particular profession in this town at that time. And I'm like, oh my God, this is horrible. It's a 50/50 - which guy is the killer? I just made this so easy. And I wander downstairs and the man that I was living with at the time just takes one look at me and he's like, oh my God, what's wrong?

And I'm like, I just wrote this entire book predicated upon this profession, and I just found out that this town was so small that there were only two men in that profession and everything just fell apart. And I have to rewrite the whole book and restructure my killer and he just looked at me and he went, this is fiction. Right? And I'm like, yeah. So just make the town bigger. And I was like…. oh.

Deanna: Yeah, you can get very much in your own head about this stuff. You really, really can. A couple of decades ago I read a fantastic book written by Persia Woolley. It was part of the, um, writer's digest series and it was How to Write a Historical Novel. And she gave a fantastic piece of advice, which is of all the research you do for your book - 70% of it should just be for you. No more than 30% should go into the book. It was so smart. It's such a great rule of thumb because one of the things that readers tend to really skip over are these really dense long paragraphs of narrative where you're going into just the most minute detail. Readers don't need that. For me, it's always about trying to figure out, okay, what do I put in that a reader's gonna go, huh? That's cool. Didn't know it. But keep on reading.

As you mentioned, I have one book that does deal kind of tangentially with Jack the Ripper, which is A Murderous Relation. When you're writing a series and it's set in London, you know, your timeline is coming up to the autumn of 1888, you start twitching because you're gonna have to deal with this somehow. Because it was the story, everyone, all of London, this is the story. It dominated everything. Life kind of was taken over for everybody. I absolutely did not want to write a Jack the Ripper book. I was adamant about that, but I knew I had to kind of set the scene and make sure that people knew this is what's going on at the time, and this is influencing how people behave.

And one of the cool little facts that I was able to throw in, again with nothing new under the sun, is that there were tent cities of unhoused people in Trafalgar Square. I'm writing this right when Occupy Wall Street is happening, people are putting up their tents outside. Now they're protestors. They're not unhoused people, but the idea of sleeping rough in the middle of a city and this being something that was newsworthy is not new at all. That's something that readers would be, be able to look at and say - oh yeah, I totally get that. There are news stories that just seem to repeat themselves.

Mindy: Last thing, why don't you let readers know where they can find the book, The Impossible Imposter and where they can find you online?

Deanna: The Impossible Imposter is at your favorite book seller in multiple formats. You can get it hardcover, digital or Audible, whatever makes you happy. You can get signed copies from The Poisoned Pen, signed book plates from Murder, By the Book or Fountain, which are all three great independent bookstores I love. And you can find me at deannaraybourn.com. And most days on Twitter!

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