Anna Henderson Was Finally Able to Drop the Shark
Writing= Making and Solving Problems, Try This at Home, Let's Help a Writer for Free!
Hi Friends,
I’m back at my desk in Vancouver, trying to swim in the ocean whenever it’s warm enough. New classes, new students, new rhythms. I love September’s newness even when it’s tough to transition.
Writing = Making and Solving Problems
Over time, I’ve come to realize that problems aren’t an impediment to writing. Problems are the substance of writing: we set problems for ourselves and we work them out. In this feature, I ask writers to dig into a specific writing problem and how they resolved it.
Anna Farro Henderson’s Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood comes out October 22nd with the University of Minnesota Press and is available for pre-order now.
I’ve known Anna since we lived down the hall from one another during our first year of university. Over the years, we’ve kept in touch through a shared love of handwritten letters and a mix of phone calls and visits. We bonded over the struggles of having a kid while doing a Ph.D. (hers in Geology, mine in Comparative Literature) and rapid work-related relocations (Minnesota, Pennsylvania, DC, and back to Minnesota for her; California, Vermont, Canada for me). These days, we talk on the phone most Mondays for writing accountability and support. This means that I’ve been able to follow along through much of this book’s life cycle, and I’m extra delighted to share this conversation with Anna right as her book is about to be available to everyone.
What are three key things to know about this book?
It is a literary essay collection about being a climate scientist, becoming a mother, and then going to work as an environmental policy advisor to Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton. If you are curious about Minnesota politics… my book goes to the heart of Midwestern polite ferociousness.
I bring readers into the research and discovery process of science and behind the scenes in the work of politics. I wrote the book with my old field notebooks from collecting scientific samples, letters I received while living on a glacier, meeting notes from when I advised elected officials, photos, news stories, and a diary kept while pumping milk in the U.S. Senate.
The book is an experiment in making art about topics outside what might be considered artful: the gritty mundane of science research and the messy implementation of environmental regulations (vs. the drama of a groundbreaking discovery, an election, or the fight to pass a bill). I had found poetry in the complicated, hands-on, muddy work, but could I share it with others?
What’s a problem—small or large—that you encountered while making this book?
When I first put the manuscript together, I had not written about my childhood. A friend told me that if readers didn’t know “who I was” and “where I came from,” they wouldn’t care about the rest. I didn’t want to write about my chaotic big family, but without writing about that time in my life, how could I explain becoming a scientist?
I struggled to even write a first draft of an essay about my roots. Writing by hand, I was able to force myself to draft vignettes with lovely sentences and dramatic images. I used an intense story about my mom’s encounter with a shark to tie the whole thing together. This draft was enough to reach out to literary agents, but in the editing process with the press, they pushed for focus. This was the only real writer’s block I experienced. I had to figure out how to write something I didn’t want to write that allowed the rest of the book to flow. The editing process also pushed me to refine and focus other essays. While writing had been a process of discovery, editing was a process of clarity. Sometimes that clarity felt like laying my cards on the table—it could be raw and vulnerable.
What did you do? How did you move forward?
If this had been fiction I could have created moments that led to my epiphany that I wanted to study science. Instead, I had to work with what had happened. I had not been scholarly or gone straight to college. My path to science was more a kaleidoscope of life experiences and emotional needs.
To move forward, I wrote myself rules for the essay. And then I changed the rules as the focus of the essay coalesced. My first rules were to write about 1) my connection to water, 2) how I used disassociating as a power tool, and 3) navigating life as a young person with the philosophy that life was a search for beauty. I kept the shark since it was sort of about water. But this still didn’t add up.
Frustrated, I began drawing representations of essays, including the one about childhood. With simple illustrations, I had to get to the point. This helped me answer the question: what is this about? I could not deflect that question with action scenes. I had to answer from my heart. For the first essay, I wrote an equation.
Science = need for wonder & beauty + provides framework for life + learned hypervigilance & observation.
From that equation, I was finally able to drop the shark, along with other scenes that were interesting but were not contributing to this essay, and write the essay that would introduce readers to how I really became a scientist.
The image is a diagram of my first essay in the book. I really struggled with what content to include and what to exclude. I was trying to answer the question of how I became a scientist to an editor who was expecting a traditional story of growing up doing sciencey things, but that was not my experience. — Anna Farro Henderson
Anna Farro Henderson is a PhD climate scientist who worked as an advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton. Her first book, Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press in October 2024. Her publications have appeared in River Teeth, The Kenyon Review, and The Normal School, among others (she previously published as E.A. Farro). She has been a recipient of Minnesota State Art Board grants, an Everwood Farmstead residency, and Terrain.org’s 2023 fiction contest, among others. She teaches at the Loft Literary Center.
Pre-order a signed copy from Magers and Quinn, an independent Minnesota bookstore or from Amazon.
Anna's got lots of upcoming events that you can find on her website. And if you are in Minnesota, you can see her in conversation with Minnesota Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman at the Open Book on October 23rd. You can find her on Facebook at Anna Henderson. You can find her on the web at eafarro.com. You can find her on Instagram at anna_farro_henderson. You can find her on Linkedin at Anna Farro Henderson. And you can (and should!) sign up for her Substack newsletter Science Love Notes
Try This at Home
Writing by hand allowed Anna to make progress on an essay she felt stuck on. In our long writing friendship, I’ve seen her use handwritten freewriting, rough notes, complex diagrams, and exploratory maps to move her project forward. When you’re stuck in a document, try turning to pen and paper for a change.
Anna talks about the anecdote of the shark and all of the other writing she initially did that didn’t ultimately end up in the introductory essay. I often think of this writing as scaffolding: the writing we need to make (but ultimately discard) to get to the writing we can keep. Try making peace with your scaffolding, seeing it as expected and necessary.
“To move forward, I wrote myself rules for the essay,” Anna writes. “And then I changed the rules as the focus of the essay coalesced.” Ask yourself: what does my project need right now: making rules? or breaking rules?
Let’s Help a Writer for Free
A great free way to help a writer is to connect them to people an opportunities in your broader network. This might look like emailing to put someone in touch with your friend who hosts a reading series or entering their name as a suggested guest for a podcast you listen to (
often asks for guest suggestions for , for example).I knew
would be interested in how Anna’s book talks about mothering amidst the work of science, politics, and creativity, so I wrote to introduce Nancy and Anna. You can read their conversation for Nancy’s “Good Creatures” interview series here:
What podcast, Substack, reading series, literary festival, class visit, or library event might you recommend a writer for (either within your personal network or your local community)? You might even reply to this message and pitch a writer for a future Writing = Making and Solving Problems conversation.
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Warm best,
Bronwen
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I'm really enjoying these interviews with writers about problem-solving. Core Samples sounds like a very interesting book. I can't wait until it comes out!
Oh, this book sounds wonderful, and exactly what I need to read. My university library has a copy on order and I am now first in the 'holds' queue for it.