On Book Talks and Suitcases
file under: PROCESS NOTES
this one is from: AMBIKA & LIZ
From Ambika:
Before I joined Liminal, I worked as an evolutionary biologist studying animal behavior. A decade of studying all kinds of questions about the behavior of lizards (and, briefly, birds and spiders and caterpillars) led me to something of an existential crisis. I found myself asking, over and over again: how often are “truths” about animal behavior actually just projections of our very human social norms and political perspectives onto the lives of animals? Cutting to the chase, this turn towards questioning some of the foundations of my scholarly field eventually led me to co-author a forthcoming book called Feminism in the Wild: How Human Biases Shape Our Understanding of Animal Behavior.
My co-author Melina Packer and I have sent in the final manuscript to our publishers, and we cannot wait for this string of words that’s lived inside our computers for months to finally take on a more corporeal form. I’ve been dreaming about release day, and about the time when I will get to talk about the book to people, to try and entice you into buying it or borrowing it from your public library and reading it and recommending it to their friends. Which is to say, I’ve been thinking a lot about how this manuscript needs to become more than a book—it needs to become a message.
The most common vehicle for delivering a book’s message is the book talk. A book talk is a strange and special beast, perhaps closer to a movie trailer than any other piece of media. Crucially, it isn’t really anything like the academic talks I’ve previously given. To get myself used to the format, I turned my most recent (and likely last) academic talk into my very first book talk. I was lucky enough to get some advice on book talks from acclaimed science journalist and fellow Liminal member Ed Yong, before launching into making a book talk myself. Here is some of what I learned from the process:
There’s more than one way to make a book talk: In my experience as an audience member, the most common format for a book talk is that an author reads a bit from their book and then discusses the book as a whole with an interlocutor (often another author), after which the author answers questions from audience members, who may or may not have read the book already. But it’s also quite feasible for a book talk to be more of a solo venture, without an interlocutor. And not all authors read from their book during a book talk! When talking about An Immense World, for example, Ed doesn’t read from the book but instead tells more abbreviated versions of some of its main stories.
In my book talk, I chose to read brief excerpts from the book when I wanted to dive in deeply—my logic was that I had spent months figuring out how best to make my argument, and I didn’t want to have to figure it all out again, so if I had the time to read, then I would. But I also wanted the talk to have a more overarching narrative, so I interspersed the in-depth excerpts with speedier sections in which I breezed through the broad strokes of an argument in just a slide or two. The more broadly applicable guiding principle here is, I think, to pay attention to the rhythm of knowledge acquisition: as a speaker, I want to be thinking about the intellectual and cognitive demands I’m placing on my audience, striking that balance between heady and relaxed that feels more like a crisp, bracing breeze than either stagnation or a gale force wind.
A book talk is not the whole book: Unlike a scientific academic talk, where it’s feasible to tell the complete story of a paper in a single fifteen minute talk, you cannot fit a whole book into a talk (if you can, I’d argue the book should never have been a book at all, but instead should have remained an essay). This is a good thing—after all, you want your audience to feel motivated to read the book! And like the most effective movie trailers, a book talk will leave the audience a little bit on the edge of their seats, hungry for more. And yet, perhaps contradictorily…
A good book talk stands alone: I have to accept that not everyone who comes to my book talks will buy the book, but I want everyone to get something from the experience regardless. A book talk is about twenty times as long as a movie trailer, and the audience’s reward needs to be commensurate with their time investment. If an audience member feels like the talk was a waste of their time unless they also read the book, then I’ve missed an opportunity to engage a person in front of me, and lost a chance to convey my message.
Ultimately, I have to remind myself that though I care quite a bit about selling this book (and in that vein, you can preorder it here or here!), I care more about spreading its message, and my book talks need to reflect this belief. I’m looking forward to sharing this message with you in the upcoming months!
From Liz:
Meanwhile, I’m just back from a long stretch of travel and am thinking about what it takes to answer “How was it??”.
Exactly one month ago, I headed off for our annual week-long Storymakers Retreat, a program that transforms “scientists into storytellers, and academic research into a vision that changes the world.” This program was the first thing I pitched when I started Liminal. In a beautiful turn of events, Storymakers then shaped what Liminal would become: Ambika and Neil were among our inaugural fellows, and Ed is our writing instructor. Our time together on Catalina island changed our lives, and then it did it again last year, and now for the third time: three cohorts, thirty two fellows, more stories than I can tell. Some of the seeds Storymakers has planted are still germinating. Others are just about to bloom - Ambika’s book Feminism in the Wild is one of the first!
At the end of each retreat, we celebrate with a wrap party back in Los Angeles. We change our clothes, and I welcome back the version of myself who feels best in a cocktail dress, but it’s not so easy to slip back into who we were before. I was racing to get dressed, feeling just shattered, and shocked by the mess spilling out of my usually-tidy suitcase. It inspired my final words to this amazing group of humans:
“Tonight we write the final chapter in the story of this cohort’s creative retreat. You may be feeling overwhelmed by concrete, by traffic, by smog, but honestly, perhaps overwhelmed by the enormity of the tasks in front of you. You may be wondering how you pack all of this back into your suitcases and your lives...
You will walk out of this party tonight and you will walk back into horrible departmental politics, into grim political news, into the all-consuming demands of parenthood and caretaking work we do. You will also be walking into pitch meetings, into rooms of power, where you are going to need to perform at levels we haven’t seen you reach yet. You are going to have to be spectacular. Although I may not know the exact form that will take for each of you, and perhaps you don’t know yet how you will do it, but I believe we are going there.“
After Storymakers, I kept traveling, including going halfway across the world to watch some hippo research in Kenya. Coming back has been hard, and I needed to repeat this little speech to myself again today. Maybe you needed to hear it too, or maybe your humans need to hear it from you: step by step, figuring it out together, let’s do this.