Transcript: Book Club: Trace

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

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Sam Evans-Brown: FYI - there’s a swear in this episode. It’s in context and it happens after the break. K, here’s the show.

Sam Evans-Brown: This is Outside/In. I’m Sam Evans-Brown -

Justine Paradis: And I’m Justine Paradis.

Sam Evans-Brown: And together, we are welcoming you all to the very first Outside/In Book Club!

Justine Paradis: Our first pick, and the subject of today’s conversation is Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, by Lauret Savoy.

Justine Paradis: Trace was published in 2015. It’s Lauret’s first solo work of non-fiction, and it’s a memoir that takes her from where she was born in southern California, across the country to Puritan New England, from Lake Superior to the US Mexico Border, and finally to Washington D.C., where she grew up.[1]

Sam Evans-Brown: In the book, Lauret uses the search for her family story as a lens to better understand American history… and the reverse: using the American landscape as a lens to better understand her own past.

Justine Paradis: In this episode, we’ll be sharing excerpts of our conversation with Lauret Savoy, and excerpts of her book, and then talking it out together. You know, like a podcast book club discussion!

Sam Evans-Brown: Yay!

Justine Paradis: And going forward, we would love to hear your thoughts and questions about either this book or the next pick for the book club.

Sam Evans-Brown:  --- which we will announce at the end of the episode ---

Justine Paradis: Yupp. So if you want to join the conversation - we are also starting a hashtag - which is #ReadingOutsideIn. And we invite you to use the hashtag on Twitter or Instagram - just share a picture of yourself reading the book -

Sam Evans-Brown:  perhaps outside, if that’s where you find yourself.

Justine Paradis: It also doesn’t have to be the book club pick - if you’re reading outside, I’d say it counts. Again that hashtag is #ReadingOutsideIn. And you can tag us AT outsideinradio.

Sam Evans-Brown: We just want to normalize reading outside in the summer. Because it needs normalizing.

Justine Paradis: I know!

Sam Evans-Brown: As if this is something that’s not normalized already.

Justine Paradis: We’re making a stand for people reading in parks.   

Sam Evans-Brown: So, without further ado, here’s our conversation with Lauret Savoy.

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Sam Evans-Brown: I want to start with a specific example from the book that really hit home for me, and it sets the tone for discussion. It takes place at a spot called Crow’s Nest Pass.

Justine Paradis: Crow’s Nest Pass is a mountain pass and highway through the Canadian Rockies. And it’s also a geological wonder that marks the boundary of an ancient continental divide.

Sam Evans-Brown: Lauret was there to study environmental changes in ancient oceans, changes that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago.

Lauret Savoy: And these changes occurred when a tropical sea covered most of the continent. And if you can imagine the seas in the Caribbean, the waters surrounding the Bahamas, the beautiful turquoise waters, imagine that on a continental scale.

Justine Paradis: I mean, honestly, that sounds pretty amazing.

Sam Evans-Brown: Well, yeah, until those waters became so starved of oxygen that organisms could no longer survive -- which happened at such a large scale that this was actually a great extinction event. Lauret said the telltale sign of that loss of oxygen are these layers of black shale, like at Crow’s Nest Pass.

Lauret Savoy: And while looking at that interval of black shale with our hammers, we just pulled out these slices of black shale and chipped in to them. And we found on the surfaces these fossils that we'd never seen before.

They kind of looked like little fish fossils or little drawings of fish that a child would make.

And when we brought them back to show to experts, the people who were the fish people said, no, no, no, they're not fish. And they said they’re probably plants.

And then we showed them to the plant people and they said, no, no, no, they're probably fish. And it finally came down to there being a new type of organism. And so a new genus and species was named on, based on them.

 But without a sense of where they fell and whether they were plants or animals, and so they're Incertae sedis.

Sam Evans-Brown: Incertae sedis: it’s Latin for “of uncertain placement.” Lauret discovered a fossil that was not-fish, not-plant, not-animal. It was a fossil she could not place. And Lauret also wrote that she herself has lived as Incertae sedis - “of uncertain placement”.

Justine Paradis: I love this very specific perspective of being both geologist and writer, to the point that you would identify with a fossil. You know?

Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah… [laughs].

Justine Paradis: So, Lauret’s academic background is geology. But she told us that these days, she identifies first as a writer. And one reason we thought she’d be a great first pick for our Book Club, is that her writing lives at that place at the intersection between earth science and human culture.

Lauret Savoy: I define geology, or geo logo -- that's from the Greek for “understanding Earth” -- I define it much more broadly than scientists do. And for me, my writing in Trace is a form of doing geology: that is, understanding Earth and our place on it.

Lauret Savoy: The science of geology, yes, it offers an elemental foundation of place. Yet it is also an offering of, at least in my view, of metaphor, for considering the deposition and erosion of human memory and the fragmentation and displacement of human experience. And for me, race and racism have been key to it all.

Justine Paradis: But as far as why Lauret specifically relates to that fossil of uncertain origins...  Lauret is a person of complex heritage - she has ancestral roots in Africa, the British Isles, Europe, and Indigenous America. 

Sam Evans-Brown: So her origins were even mysterious to herself. But not only does she identify with the fossil, but also the book itself is kind of a drawn-out metaphor, comparing fossil hunting to history hunting.

Justine Paradis: Specifically, the way that the fossil record and the historical record are both full of huge gaps. Here’s Lauret reading an excerpt of Trace.

[mux rise: Blue Dot Sessions, “Quarry Clouds”]

“The journeys that once-living organisms embark on toward the fossil record, few rarely complete. Happy accidents brought these remains within my reach. Of their escaping decay on a quiet sea floor too inhospitable for hungry scavengers and most bacteria. Of thrust faults upheaving bedrock once deeply buried. Of erosion cutting into ranges such that a highway could be built along a path of least resistance—yet not dissecting so far as to destroy the outcrop. Of my hammer splitting the right shale layers.

 

Annals of the past in these mountains lie incomplete and fragmented. Millions of years may be lost in the gaps between black shale laminae so thin as to be pages of a book of night.” - Trace, p185.

[mux fade: Blue Dot Sessions, “Quarry Clouds”]

Justine Paradis: Oh man, what a phrase. A book of night!

Sam Evans-Brown: Right?!

Sam Evans-Brown: Like the gaps in the fossil record, there are also blank spots in Lauret’s family history. And in fact, it sounds like it was easier for Lauret to look at the landscape and identify the geologic story - which is kind of inscrutable to many of us -- than it was to find the answers about some of her own family history. 

Justine Paradis: Yeah. It’s just so interesting that something that happened 350 million years ago might actually be closer to her than something that happened three hundred years, or even 20 years, you know?

Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah, it’s wild.

[music: Chris Zabriskie - Cylinder Fire]

Justine Paradis: One example of a major silence in her family history, she talks about a lot of them in the book, but there’s one that occurred in the relationship between her and her father. Lauret writes that growing up, her father was a rather silent, embittered person. And their relationship was somewhat strained by the time she was a teenager. She told us that he never really shared much about his earlier life with her.

Sam Evans-Brown: But eventually, as a young adult, Lauret made a pretty big discovery about her father… one that was kind of a revelation.

Lauret Savoy: I was in college at that point. It was the end of my first year, I went to Princeton University But at the end of my first year, I was in the library, Firestone Library, and instead of studying for finals, I was procrastinating and looking to see if there might be books in the library by people I know.

 And so I looked in the card catalog and this was when the card catalog was nearing its end.  And so I was flipping through S's trying to see, well, could there be another Savoy here?

[mux: Chris Zabriskie: “What True Self- Feels Bogus, Let’s Watch Jason X”, Reappear]

And I saw the card for Savoy, comma, Willard Wilson. Alien Land. And Willard Wilson Savoy was my father. and so I found the book in the basement stacks of the library and I pulled it out and it was a novel written by my father more than a decade and a half before my birth. And it was a book he never told me about.

Justine Paradis: Willard Wilson, her father, died less than two years before Lauret found his book in the library, a time when, again, she said their relationship was pretty strained.

Sam Evans-Brown: So, when Lauret found the book, she read it. It’s about a multiracial boy - a boy who could pass as white -- and his struggle to navigate how to live in the world. She told us she’s learned it’s at  least semi-autobiographical.  

Lauret Savoy: Should he, could he escape racism and his own demons by redefining himself as white?

 And so I won't I won't say what, what choice he makes, because that is a large part of the story, but finding a book written by my father… just... I can't describe the feeling.

Could we stop for a moment so that I could find pull out the book, because I've got it right here.

Sam Evans-Brown: Oh, absolutely. Yup.

Lauret Savoy: Okay, let me pull it out.

[sounds of opening the book]

The dedication in the book said this: “to the child, which my wife and I may someday have, and to the children of each American, in the fervent hope that at least one shall be brought to see more clearly the enduring need for simple humanity.”

It goes on. But when I read those words, I broke down in tears. I sat on the floor in the basement of the library for I, I can't remember how long, holding the book, hugging the book, crying, because I thought here was a chance, possibly, for a conversation with my father, a conversation I never had with him.

And so I stole the book.

Lauret Savoy: I stole it.

[mux: Chris Zabriskie: “What True Self- Feels Bogus, Let’s Watch Jason X”, Reappear]

I had to and I, I apologize, but I, I had to take it. As an 18 year old, at that point, I had just turned 18, I was struggling to understand who I was and to see that he is as a youth, had asked the same questions, just felt as if I had found the connection with a parent with whom I thought I never had a connection.

[mux fade]

Justine Paradis:  I feel like when she’s describing this moment in the library, you can really hear in her voice just how meaningful and formative a moment this was for her. 

Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah. And to find that out in that way, as such a shock. I feel like this experience became a big motivator for Lauret to search for the unsaid... within and beyond her family.

Justine Paradis: So, there’s another book that figures really heavily in Trace… and that book is Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.

Sam Evans-Brown: Right. A Sand County Almanac is famous in environmental circles. It came out in the same year as Lauret’s father’s book. 1949. And it includes an essay about the concept of a land ethic - which essentially, he says we should enlarge the definition of what we consider community to include soil, and water, and plants... Collectively, the land.

 

Justine Paradis: Which sounds basically like an indigenous idea, right?

 

Sam Evans-Brown: Mmmhmmm. But in the context of the US environmental movement this was an expansive idea -- but for Lauret, it sounds like it was a pretty frustrating read.

Justine Paradis: Because even though it was focused on American history and land, it only referenced slavery in a pretty strange way. It talks about the conflict of considering land as property -- and says that that’s as outdated an idea as considering human beings to be property. But Leopold doesn’t refer to slavery in America when he does this.

Lauret Savoy: And I asked why was it that in a book so concerned about America's past, why was it that the only reference to slavery in that book, to human beings as property, was about ancient Greece?

So while I enjoyed the parts of the book that considered the land, the seasons and place, I so feared that any reference that Aldo Leopold made to “we” and “us” excluded me...

Sam Evans-Brown: But for Lauret, these two books DO belong on the same shelf.

Lauret Savoy: For years, I struggled to reconcile these two ideas: Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, and Alien Land. I had to understand the distance between them and whether or not that distance could be narrowed...

And so it was only slowly that I came to see that I would remain complicit in my own diminishment unless I stepped out of the separate trap: me from you, us from them, brown skin from depigmented skin, relations among people from relations with land.

I know that Aldo Leopold and my father never met in their lifetimes but my fervent hope is that Alien Land and “land ethic” can meet and answer to each other in ours. They need to. They need to.

[mux: Chris Zabriskie: “What True Self- Feels Bogus, Let’s Watch Jason X”, Reappear]

 Sam Evans-Brown: So, for Lauret, a practice of geology - you know, “understanding the earth” - necessarily has to include race.

Justine Paradis: For her, A Sand County Almanac and Alien Land are essentially I think twin pillars of her entire approach in Trace. Like, human history becomes metaphorically, or even literally, another layer in the sort of geologic strata, you know?

Sam Evans-Brown: And there are these twin silences, right? There’s so much that’s unsaid between her and her father and, you know, also what’s not included in environmental history.

 

Justine Paradis: Yeah. I feel like this is what set her on a path. She seeks out what is erased or unsaid. And that’s what Trace is. It’s a journey. And something I love is that the title Trace intentionally functions as both a noun and verb.

Lauret Savoy: If you think of The Odyssey and what Odysseus said in The Odyssey, he said that I belong in the place of my departure and I belong in the place that is my destination.

Justine Paradis: I see this as saying that the act of the journey, the act of tracing and seeking is just as important as the trace itself.

Lauret Savoy: And in all, I hope that Trace could counter what are some of our oldest and most damaging public silences by revealing often unrecognized ties such as the siting of the nation's capital and the economic motives of slavery.

Sam Evans-Brown: Coming up on Outside/In -- how Lauret sought answers about these public silences - and what they said about her own family. We talk about what’s said -- and not said -- in the story of how the U.S. capital was placed at Washington, D.C. Plus, I learn a new word… a word that helps me understand how history is erased and remembered in the American landscape.

Lauret Savoy: None of these ties is coincidental. Too few of them appear in public history, yet they all touch us.

[mux post: Chris Zabriskie: “What True Self- Feels Bogus, Let’s Watch Jason X”, Reappear]

Sam Evans-Brown:  That’s after a break.

 

 

/// BREAK \\\\\

 

Sam Evans-Brown: Reminder - there’s a swear in this episode. It’s coming up. Alright, back to the show.

 Sam Evans-Brown: This is Outside/In. I’m Sam Evans-Brown, with our producer Justine Paradis --

Justine Paradis: And it is the first Outside/In Book Club! We’re talking about the book Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape.

Sam Evans-Brown: And I actually learned a new word and a new concept from this book. Here I am speaking with author Lauret Savoy.

 Sam Evans-Brown: ... I'm hoping that I'm going to pronounce it correctly. Is it palimpsest?

 Lauret Savoy: You could pronounce it different ways, Palimpsest or Palimpsest? I've heard it both ways.

Sam Evans-Brown: So what is a palimpsest?

Lauret Savoy:  I think that the key thing to think about it’s that it's a surface, like an old parchment, on which the original text has been erased or partially erased and then overwritten by something else, something that's come later. Yet still traces of what was there are still apparent to the attentive eye.

Sam Evans-Brown:  And this is a real thing, right? This is like paper used to be scarce. And so sometimes people would just write over something that had already been written on.

Lauret Savoy: Yep. Reuse. Recycle. Exactly.

Justine Paradis: I love thinking about what could be considered palimpsests -- like our bodies for instance! We start out written by the genes provided by our primate parents, and then life writes all over us - like with scars, with the way we use our  bodies, like what muscles we exercise, how often we stand or sit or climb or crawl, how often we laugh... and then eventually, the way we’re shaped and wrinkled in ways that make us palimpsests, I think. We become readable to degree. Or a city is a palimpsest - like the way that the way like, a warehouse in New York City gets renovated into luxury condos, but you still see the past in the details of the building - it’s only partially erased.

Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah and well you know, perhaps another obvious example of this, or maybe it’s not obvious until you start to think about it, is our maps --  and how we name our places.

Here’s Lauret reading from the book.

[mux]

“‘All the greatness of any land, at any time, lies folded in its names,’ wrote Walt Whitman in his American Primer. ‘Names are the turning point of who shall be master.’

 

If history can be read in the names on the land, then the text at the surface is partial and pieced. A reader might do well to look beyond ‘official’ maps for traces of other languages, other visions. He or she might do well to acknowledge, and mourn, the loss of innumerable names born out of textured homelands that no longer reside in living memory. (p87)

[mux]

Lauret Savoy: what's important to think about is that names wear meanings that many people don't realize.

And you can name anything New Hampshire, Brooklyn, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Badlands. All of that is really an important and, for too many, unrecognized part of American history, because being very far from innocent, naming and mapping were for Europeans and their descendants who who have lived here, essential to the project of claiming this land.

Justine Paradis: Lauret’s point I think is that, you know, names are not passive, even the ones that seem like they are.  Like even the names that might seem more quote-unquote authentic or indigenous -- look twice.

Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah, the story that for me was the most mind-blowing was the origin of the name “Wyoming.”

Justine Paradis: Yeah.

Sam Evans-Brown: It’s a Lenape word for a valley not in what’s called Wyoming today, but in Pennsylvania. And it means, in Lenape, at the Big Flats or Great Meadows. During the Revolutionary War, about 300 or so settlers were killed there by British forces and their Indigenous allies. Later, in the 1800s, someone wrote a poem to commemorate that battle. So Wyoming became this apocryphal idea, and lots of towns all across the US were named for it - and eventually - after the Civil War, Congress was debating what the name of this territory should be.

Lauret Savoy: There were so many Names that were argued. Tribal names from the area were considered. Cheyenne received the most attention until one senator thought it sounded too close to the word for female dog, chienne.

And then people were thinking or he was thinking that if you think of a female Dog, you might think of bitch. And so they didn't want that name. And so in the end, the name that won the day was Wyoming because of its sound and its poetic association, But not because it had Anything to do with the place.

Justine Paradis: it’s like, the name “Wyoming” didn’t have anything to do with the actual territory of Wyoming - it had to do with the story that white settlers wanted to tell about this new country.

Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah it kind of actually reminds me of how subdivisions are often named things like “Oak Hill” or “Beaver Meadow”... and it’s named for what was there before the land was cleared and paved. So you name lands for what they were. Or the story you want to evoke about that place.

Justine Paradis: Or like what you had to destroy to make that place.

Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah.

Sam Evans-Brown: the names sort of tell you more about the namers of the place more than anything else.

Lauret Savoy: It's Partly the Indigenous names that had so many in the 19th century believe that the United States were stepping away from Europe, that they had something all their own.

But the irony is, it was something that was, was taken from, appropriated, and then modified to be made their own.

 //// [mux beat]

Justine Paradis: Can we turn to another example from the book?

Sam Evans-Brown: Totally!

Justine Paradis: I think we should look at the story that Lauret lays out about the decision and placement of the capital city of the United States - Washington, D.C. Because this is a moment that I think speaks volumes. It’s a place and a moment where so much coincides: the shape of the land itself, the history of slavery in the US, and Lauret’s family history - they’re all here.

So: first of all, the shape of the land itself: how did D.C. get placed where it is? And this is a lot easier to see if you’re looking at a map. But if you look at the Appalachian mountain range, which runs up the East Coast. There are all these cities right on that edge - it’s like they’re all marching in step or something. And the reason this is, is that ships travelling up rivers, which are the access points inland -- when they reach this contour line - what they see into are waterfalls and rapids. This is called the “fall line.” 

 

Sam Evans-Brown:  Right, so from the perspective of the settlers coming in on ships, it’s a stopping point. You drop anchor because you have to.

 

Justine Paradis: Yeah, and again, it’s striking when you look at it on a topo map - like, you have this string, almost like a necklace, of major cities up and down the east coast along the fall line. And they are still there - major cities like Baltimore Maryland. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even capital cities, like Richmond, Virginia.

 

Sam Evans-Brown: and Washington, D.C.

Lauret Savoy: I opened the chapter, the last chapter in Trace, placing in Washington, D.C. after the inauguration, and this is the inauguration of President Barack Obama. I opened it by standing on the Bank of the Potomac River. And it's where I go on every visit to D.C. And this is the place my father's people called home.

I knew that the Potomac River, which flows by the city, carried what some call the freight of history on its back.  And I knew that I was part of the river's load. But how was I part?

Sam Evans-Brown: Part of this inquiry started from a place of curiosity. When she wrote the book, she knew at least five generations of her ancestors had lived in Washington D.C. But she also knew that when she was 12 years old, her Aunt Rhoda had told her that her family had never been enslaved. So what was their story? How were they tied to this place?

Lauret Savoy: Her telling me that, of course, began the wondering, the questioning.

I knew that the nation's capital had been In a contested place since its deliberate siting in 1790.

And I knew that the city condoned both chattel servitude and the trade of captive Africans within its borders for more than half a century. I knew that slave pens and markets stood within sight of the Capitol building itself.

And I knew the vestiges of slavery’s landscape and architecture still remain in plain sight, including structures like the Capitol and the White House, whivch were built largely by enslaved labours.

 Justine Paradis: Again! Cities are palimpsests! Like, the people who built places are in a way the thing that is overwritten. The sweat and labor of enslaved people who quarried the stone and literally constructed the symbols of the federal government.

Sam Evans-Brown: In fact, the U.S. capital had been moved a couple times, eventually making it to D.C. from New York and Philadelphia, a city known for its abolitionist movement.  So, while part of this history is related to the topography and landscape - rivers and and waterfalls soils - but so much is tied to the country’s relationship to slavery.

 

Lauret Savoy: In the colonial period, in the 1600s and 1700s, the basic meanings of whiteness and blackness were being invented in Virginia and Maryland.

 

Justine Paradis:  But if Lauret’s family had lived her for five generations, and slavery was such a part of the city’s history... what of her family’s past? Where were they? So… as she was searching through family records, Lauret did learn how she was part of that history. She eventually found an inventory for an estate owned by a white naval officer…

 

Sam Evans-Brown: and one item in that inventory was actually a name. A relative - her great-great-grandmother, “Eliza Savoy,” and next to the name, $300.”[2]

 

[music]

 

Justine Paradis: I think something that comes up for me here, which maybe brings us back again to this theme of how looking for fossils and looking for history have such commonalities. Like, you have these massive geologic events, you can kind of know the story of a specific individual or species in the aggregate because you know the bigger story - but as you try to get closer and closer to specificity and to the individual, the real story - it slips away. And it also makes me wonder who gets to be an individual, to have their specific stories known and told - but in the case of her great-great-grandmother…  It took Lauret years of sifting through family records and the silence of her father and the answers she got from family members… to finally get at this one trace, to use her word, of a person, of one answer.

 

Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah. It’s like there’s so much… so much chance involved in who gets to have a historical record. It’s like, were you born into a situation in which you had the time to write a memoir? And did people care about it? And it almost feels the same with the geologic record, right? Like, are you the fly that  just happened to be trapped in amber?

 

Justine Paradis: But it’s not just chance, right? It’s like… I feel like if… if you’re a land-owning white man, in, sort of, European history, of being caught in amber, so to speak. But like the geologic event, the human geological event that was slavery which was, like, an obliterating event, of memory and history and records for so many people. You reach a certain point and then beyond that it’s, like, oblivion. You know?

 

Sam Evans-Brown: Yeah.

 

[music swell - Chris Zabriskie: What True Self Feels Bogus, Let’s Watch Jason X]

 

Justine Paradis: Since encountering that trace of her great-great-grandmother - Lauret told us that she’s learned a lot more.

 

Sam Evans-Brown: Right - and actually that’s her next project.

 

Lauret Savoy: So, I've learned since then that ancestral roots extend  very deeply into Chesapeake Earth. I've learned that forebears were tied to the colonial projects of Virginia and Maryland.

And I learned that ancestors belonged to a growing population of free people of color, up to two centuries before the Civil War.

 I didn't know this when I was writing about Trace, but I am writing about it now. I'm writing about how these earlier lives directly encountered the origins of race and racism in this land and the vast terrain between freedom and enslavement.

[mux rise]

“Trace. Active search. Path taken. Track or vestige of what once was. These narrative journeys have crossed textured lands seeking both life marks and home. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to “Indian Territory,” from Point Sublime to burial grounds, from a South Carolina plantation to the U.S.-Mexico border and U.S. capital. Their confluence articulates--that is, helps me both join together and give clearer expression to--the unvoiced past in my life. Re-membering is an alternative to extinction.

 

Home indeed lies among the ruins and shards that surround us all.” (p186)

 

[mux beat]

Sam Evans-Brown: Lauret Savoy, thank you so much.

 Lauret Savoy: Thank you, Sam. It was a pleasure to be with you.

Sam Evans-Brown: That was Lauret Savoy, author of Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape.

This was our very first Outside/In Book Club, which we’re aiming to do every couple months. The next pick is…. Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz. It’s about the “rise and fall of four ancient cities” (Çatalhöyük, Angkor, Pompeii and Cahokia) and what these cities tell us about environmental change and how we think about civilization.

Reminder that we’re starting a hashtag- #ReadingOutsideIn - take a picture of yourself or your book reading  - perhaps outside, if that’s where you find yourself. And don’t forget to tag us - we’re AT outsideinradio on twitter and instagram.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on either of these books - Trace or Four Lost Cities.

If you’ve got a question for Annalee Newitz, send em our way!

We may incorporate them into our interview. We may also share your thoughts in our biweekly newsletter. And you can get yourself signed up for THAT at our website - OUTSIDE IN RADIO.ORG.

And don’t forget - we’re a production of a public radio station -- while you’re doing all this, please consider donating to support the show. OutsideInRadio.org

This episode was produced by Justine Paradis with me, Sam Evans Brown, and support from Taylor Quimby and Felix Poon. Erika Janik is our executive producer.

Music from Blue Dot Sessions and Chris Zabriskie.

Theme by Breakmaster Cylinder.

OI is a member-supported podcast, and a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.

 


[1] Trace, p11 - moved there when she was 7.

[2] Trace, p170.