THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION OF how to become a science writer contains within it the key to becoming a writer of grace and intelligence, or so I learned recently while interviewing writer Nancy Campbell. Nancy is the author of a new book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose, just out by MIT Press, and while speaking to her I found myself learning some essentials tips about how to form oneself as a writer. Listen in and read along. This conversation has been slightly edited for this format.
My guest today is Nancy Campbell, professor and department head of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She’s a historian of science technology and medicine who focuses on legal and illegal drugs, drug science, policy, and treatment harm reduction, and gender and addiction. Her new book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose, was just published by MIT Press. I have long wanted to talk with someone about how to become a science writer and Nancy seems to be the perfect person for this discussion. Hi Nancy, how are you?
Nancy: I’m doing just fine, although here we are in the middle of a pandemic.
Marion: Yes we are, and we may be in the middle of this pandemic for a lot longer than we thought so I guess we’re going to get used to it. So before your current book, you publish two books on gender and you have a remarkable list of articles under your name, so let’s set this up for people a bit. Let’s say someone’s in college. She likes science and writing and is trying to imagine a career in one or both of those fields. What would you say are some of the fundamental requirements for how to become a science writer these days?
Nancy: So you have to have an intense curiosity about science, how it works, the people who do it, but also about science as a form of storytelling. Scientists tell stories, and I’m particularly interested in stories that have to do with drugs and addiction. And so my curiosity was really intertwined between the subject matter and the science itself.
Marion: That’s beautiful. And I agree with you that scientists are storytellers. And I think we think that there’s this strange kind of wall between people who look down through microscopes and then other people who tell their stories and not at all, because every time I’ve ever talked to a physicist or a cosmologist or someone in any field of science, it’s the narrative that they relate that gets me fascinated right from the start. So staying on that storytelling idea, we give all manners of bad advice to young writers. I’ve heard editors tell people to, “Specialize early and stick to your brand.” And yet I’ve interviewed so many people whose successful writing lives wander widely from topic to topic. So do science writers need to specialize early and in one scientific discipline, like be a physics writer or cosmology writer, or will good old curiosity get you through several disciplines and let you write around in the sciences?
Nancy: I was never a disciplined writer, I have always ranged around, in part because what I’m really interested in is how people make knowledge, how they produce science and they produce knowledge claims about addiction. And so I feel very committed to interdisciplinary knowledge projects, and I really think that the best way to become a science writer is to learn to think and to learn to write how you think. So I’m always really thinking about how people think and how people translate their thoughts onto the page, so I’m always writing to figure out what I have to say about that.
Marion: I love that. I don’t know how I feel about anything until I write it down. Obviously, when we talk about things we use such clipped thought. We say things like, “Oh, I went to this great restaurant last night. It was so great, it was really great. You should go.” Right? We rarely expand upon the location or the country of food, or we’re just not very good at it until we care to be. And writing of course requires caring to be communicative, it’s a wonderful difference. And I think you’re such a good defender of good old liberal education, aren’t you? The idea of learning to think, learning to write, learning how you think, that’s a wonderful thing. So I think a lot of the questions I have too, about how to, have to include of course, how difficult. And so I see some fairly robust gender parity these days on The New York Times science writing bench, but I still see far more male names in science writing these days than female names. Any thoughts about that?
Nancy: Yeah, I think we have to think about gender almost all the time as both the structure of constraint, but also as a way in which certain paths are carved out for people based on gender, race, ethnicity, social class. I think that it is still the case that it’s very difficult to succeed in science, even in this day and age, when we have diversity programs and where we are really thinking about attracting many voices into science, many kinds of thinkers, because I think our sciences are by now so complex that we really need multiple perspectives on science. And so it seems to me like gender is one of those standpoints from which we know the world. And so knowing whatever it is, whatever the object of knowledge is from different perspectives is essential to science.
Marion: It absolutely is isn’t it? Because of course we experience things differently, we think differently. And the need for diversity is everywhere, it was well put and so deeply appreciated. So these days, if a young person of any disenfranchised group came to you in your office and said, “I want to do what you do.” And you know better than anyone how much writing that includes, what would be your first piece of advice for them in terms of setting out? You said, you want to learn how you think and learn how to write, but after that are you thinking about asking them about their science heart? I mean, what are we talking about when we talk to young writers about becoming science writers?
Nancy: Right, so I’m actually thinking a lot about poetics these days, and that is obviously the poetry of prose. One of the very saddest things that I think we have is an impoverished kind of science writing now, scientists are forced into almost cookie cutter ways of translating their work into words. And so science writers have to have imagination, they have to have a finely honed sense of poetry and of the multiplicity of the world. And I don’t really think that you can become a writer without that. I think writers really must cultivate their sense of poetics. And by that, I mean, both the ethical and the aesthetic sense of poetics, it’s very important. I was trained to be a poet in college and also a journalist, and so that obviously helped when I decided to study the history of consciousness and become essentially a science writer who was very centered on addiction because I had a very vast range of experiences.
And I really thought about words and things, I thought about words as something to play with. I thought about words in the way that I thought when I was writing poetry. And I think, believe it or not, that that attunement to metaphor and attunement to the way things go together is really important for nonfiction i.e. for science writing, just as it is if you were writing fiction or poetry,
Marion: Well, it shows in your work. And I was fascinated by your language in your newest book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose, you refer to drug overdose as an “unnatural disaster.” It’s a small phrase, but it percolates up in a way that makes us pay attention. And of course, we know that this is a disaster of epic proportions but as a writer, that was a huge responsibility when you realized it’s an unnatural disaster wasn’t it? And taking on something as human and large and tragic as this. So in terms of writing about it, let’s talk about first of all, is it a burden when you realize that you have got an unnatural disaster on your hands, your language, so appreciates the size of the problem. So did you feel burdened when you realized that you had an unnatural disaster on your hands in terms of your subject?
Nancy: I wouldn’t say burdened, but I would say responsible. I felt like I had fallen into an abyss where there wasn’t really a history of overdose. There wasn’t really a history that could explain in a feeling sort of way what it is, what this confrontation with death is. And what this confrontation with the desire to use opioids in such a compelling way as do the people in my book. But I was also really interested in the liveliness of the social movement that grew up around this on natural disaster. And so I was thinking a lot about what it took for the people of Naloxone, in order for Naloxone to now be able to be delivered curbside or bought in a pharmacy in the United States. A lot of people had to get together and they had to coordinate, and they had a very, at times angry, at times grieving, at times a real sense of loss of kin and of people to whom they were very close. And so I wanted to really capture that.
And I did feel responsible for capturing their energy and their desire and their real attempts to make the world a better place for people, yes, who use drugs. But I try very hard to kind of throw open the world to them, and I felt really responsible for doing that because I knew that many of the people who I was in a sense writing with and writing for, we’re not going to be a people of the word and people who would write in the ways that I would.
And so I wanted to be responsible to that movement and to their liveliness and their energy. And so I wanted the language to not exactly sparkle, but I wanted it to be hard. I wanted it to glint through the armor of people who do not want to see the world this way. I wanted to get to people, I really do want to get to readers. And so as a writer I am constantly thinking about the effect that I am going to have on my readers and how do I gain that effect in a way that harnesses that kind of response to the kinds of goals that I, as a writer, have for thinking about human rights and social justice.
Marion: It’s fascinating, and we should explain that Naloxone is a drug that made resuscitation reversal possible. So you’re science writing is done from the front lines. And it requires an exquisite combination of prescience and sensitivity, I think. You literally are seeing things coming. Now, arguably all good books, like all good movies, see things coming from several years out, right? And they sit down and you write this book with this sort of sense of like a dog who can sense earthquakes coming, that you see things coming.
In this case, you chart the remaking of overdose into an experience recognized as common, predictable, patterned, and above all preventable. As you say, in your book, and as I just clarified, Naloxone made resuscitation after an overdose possible. And in turn, as you just referenced, became a tool for shifting law policy, clinical medicine and science toward harm reduction. People can literally have it at home or in their purses. So that’s an amazing thing that you saw coming, so just jump back for a minute to the spot where you recognized what was on its way and how you decided to take this topic on. When did you spot that and jump on this topic?
Nancy: Well, I have to credit a harm reduction activist, Maya Doe-Simkins, who actually read another article that I’d done, that was much more a history of buprenorphine or Suboxone. And she had this idea that I should write another article, but about Naloxone. And so she brought me this idea and she told me what she and her cronies really were up to, and this was about seven or eight years ago. And I thought, “Oh my.” I’m not sure that I did know what this would become. However, I did know enough at the time to start interviewing people and start talking to people. I started in other words, following molecule, that’s how I think of what I do, certainly in the buprenorphine piece and in the Naloxone book, which began as a much smaller project, I really thought that this was a little article, maybe even a blog post. I did not know that it was a book, the book crept up on me.
And part of it was that when you get an idea about something that you think is going to become more and more significant… I’ll tell you a story about, one day I was repairing a wall in the creek in Pennsylvania, where my family has a small cottage that floods all the time. And I was repairing these wall rock walls, and that summer I heard some inner tubers who were floating down the creek behind me, and I didn’t know them, but I overheard a snatch of conversation in which they mentioned Naloxone, because one of them had just started a new job with the harm reduction organization. And that was the moment when I thought, “Oh, I’m not writing something little.” I’m actually writing something that I need to join with this larger stream, because this molecule is becoming very important to people. This molecule is giving people a sense of optimism and hope that they might save someone, but also that the world might be reconfigured so that more people would be able to have the experience of saving and being saved.
And so it was at that point that I thought this isn’t a little story, this story is growing into a book. And it’s a book that I am very well prepared to write about because back when I wrote my dissertation in 1990s, I was already thinking a lot about the opioids in particular and about the culture that grow up in the United States around the opioids, about the 19th century opioid epidemic, about many things that turned out to be really useful to know if you’re going to grow into the author of this book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose.
Marion: So along with listening, while you’re repairing a wall, which I just love, and I think these are the most valuable contributions we make to one another, writer to writer is to remind people that it happens while you’re pruning your cherry tree. It happens while you’re carving your Turkey. It happens while you’re fixing your rock wall. In other words, it, the writing process is happening all the time and there’s metaphor and there’s encouragement and there’s discouragement everywhere in the world. And so you get this idea that you really have the confidence that you’ve got on you what you need to go forward with this, but you still got to do a great deal of good old fashioned beat reporting, as I think of it because I come from a newspaper tradition. And you report from Britain, rural New Mexico, all around Massachusetts and the Northeast, I think it’s somewhere upwards of 60 or so interviews. You talk to advocates, drug users, former users, friends, families, scientists.
And I have personal things that I do when I’m reporting to keep myself thinking, so I’m thinking about this rock wall now, but now I’m actually in the interview with somebody and I keep my notebook, I use a notebook, I keep the notebook vertical when I’m taking down quotes, when I’m literally just listening. But I turn it sideways like a landscape painting when taking in the environment or the mood or of the place, when I’m trying to get the context I turn it sideways and I write, I still write, I don’t sketch, I’m still writing. But it says to my brain when I’m transcribing my notes, “This is context and you need to remember the smell of the place and the place.” So do you have any quirky, little strange things you do when you’re doing interviews or that you could pass along to people, along with the rock wall building, which is my new favorite thing that you just listen to what’s going on around you?
Nancy: Strangely Marion, I do that exact thing. I still write longhand when I’m in the sort of ideation stage, and so when I am doing direct quotes or something like that, I write the way everyone writes. Although I do have to say, my hand writing is extraordinary and people have commented on it, that it brings a bit of beauty into the world, it’s font like. So I have lots of connectors, one thing I do a lot of is connect up my thoughts… So I have to differentiate between what other people say and what I think. And so that’s what I do when I turn things sideways or when I write with, I put a little tilde kind of in front of it, so that I know that this is my thought, somebody else didn’t say this or imply this, this was my thought because it’s often difficult for me… Because I’m writing, I’m very critical of the way in which facts are brought to life. In other words, I know that those are always constructs, they’re always like rock walls.
And so I am very interested in the role of the historian or the writer in creating what seems like an edifice of facts. And also scientists who are expert knowledge producers are also excellent at obscuring the ways in which they are constructing, the ways in which they are putting things together because they too are building walls and seeing what fits in that wall and what doesn’t and what will make the wall more stable or less stable over time, right? So there are all those kinds of thoughts that go into the construction or creation of anything. And so my notebooks are full of those kinds of building blocks, right? The stones that you’re putting into the wall.
And so when I actually go to the computer and start actually going to the keyboard and start writing, I often have these notebooks accessible because I often want to take myself back to that place and try to re-envision that moment when I realized how something goes together. I had a lot of trouble when I was interviewing neuroscientists, which I don’t do so much of in OD, but which I have done in other books and articles. And I had a lot of trouble sorting out in my own notes and in my own mind what they were saying and how they were trying to convey the abstract knowledge that they produce in more concrete terms. So they were using a lot of metaphors, they were telling a lot of stories and I was always at pains to kind of sort that out.
So I think writing is that kind of process of constructing, it is constructing a wall or a garden or anything, woodworking, I used to do some woodworking. And the ways that you get to know your materials, you learn how things will go together and how things really don’t. I do a lot of editing of my own work and that of others and you have to really, I think, get to know the grain and get to know what’s against the grain, and what’s against the grain in a good way. And what’s against the grain in a way that is just not going to be coherent.
Marion: I love that, and you made me think of so many things. You made me remember so many moments where I had an idea while someone was speaking and the way I noted that as I was taking down their words, the way I noted my own thoughts so I didn’t attribute them incorrectly to someone else, but also so that I could give myself a little credit for thinking while on the job and producing the piece in my head, that’s so generous. So the questions you ask in all of your books seem to me to include how ideas about drugs and drug addiction changed over time. And what do we know about drug addiction, how do we know it, and why do we have the drug policies that we do? And if I’m tracking this right book to book, your questions have deepened, it seems to me they’ve gotten deeper. Not that your initial books were shallow at all, but it’s just this digging because in your most recent book, you’re really talking about the very politics of overdose.
And as you said, it’s not something we used to like to talk about, it’s something that happened over there. But now we know that that’s just not true, if the opiate addiction has taught us anything it’s that it’s happening everywhere. So how would you describe the longevity of your interest? I mean, how have you kept this discipline? Is it literally curiosity that deepens? If it’s knowledge, let us go deeper. How do we keep this long trajectory of thought going and how do we keep feeding it?
Nancy: I think that’s a really interesting question because my own attraction, fascination really with drugs began as a fairly young child. When I was looking up in my… My grandfather was a small town doctor in Pennsylvania and he had a drug room and I loved the top shelf, which is where all the old stuff was kept. And I still have little areas of glittering drug bottles in my house to remind me of that. And what’s interesting was I was always asking these questions as a kid about, “If drugs are so bad, why are so many people using them? And what’s the difference between good drugs and bad drugs, good people and bad people? And how does all that line up?” And so I’ve long asked these questions.
I remember in fifth grade announcing to a group of, my father also became a doctor, a group of interns with him, announcing that my goal in life was to write a book that was a history of the pill. And they thought I meant the birth control pill-
Marion: Of course they did.
Nancy: … but I didn’t even know what a birth control pill was, I meant the pill, I meant pharmacy, I meant that I had this kind of fascination. So I have a long used, not only drugs, but also alterations of consciousness and the ways in which people do science on consciousness as a way of thinking about thinking. It’s a way of coming to terms with, well, here we are human beings, we have brains, we have experiences, how do we make sense of the intertwinement between brain and experience and body? And so I’m always trying to make sense of those things.
Now, addiction becomes something that I become very curious about, so curious that I was actually in a master’s English program, was curious about drug policy and decided that I could not do the work that I wanted to do on drugs and drug policy if in an English department. I needed to add in things other than language and culture and representation, I also wanted to think about science and medicine and the professional approaches to drugs.
And so I became quite fascinated with pharmacology as a science and that stuck with me for a long time. Along the way I made many discoveries about, I would say… One of my books is called, Discovering Addiction, and the point of that book is that we rediscover addiction every time our science changes, we get new tools, we get new patterns to think with. We get new ways of thinking about people with addictions. We have lots of policy changes. And so OD was a way to bring all of that together. And I’ve often wondered if OD is — being my fifth book about drugs — if it’s my last?
But recently I’ve become interested again, actually in some of the topics we’ve discussed today, in terms of how do historians write, what Hayden White calls, “the practical past.” So I’m really interested in what a practical past might give to the people that I’m writing about, so the harm reduction activists and drug policy reformers, and people who are interested in the same kinds of questions I’m interested in, but who might have different stances. I became really interested in what partisan research meant, what did it mean that I have opinions about how drug policy should change? And I didn’t really want to write an ideological book, a book exhorting others and persuading others to think like me, because I think the most important thing about drug policy or really any kind of social change is that we have lots of people who are thinking in different ways so that we can get to a better amalgamation, a different form of consciousness, a different multiple sets of perspectives on something like drugs.
Marion: So my pop culture writers who are listening and will never forgive me if I don’t ask you this question, which is, so what about writing for popular culture? What about writing a piece on gender and addiction for Oprah or Bustle or one of the big online sites? Have you gone into the pop culture writing world, or are you strictly an academic writer and how do you see that divide?
Nancy: Well, I have a couple interesting answers to that, and one of them is that I’ve written about Oprah. So one of my articles is called, Why Can’t They Stop? And it’s about an Oprah show on which one of my neuroscientists, Anna Rose Childress in Philadelphia, was asked to come along with one of her human subjects, and be on the show. And I write about the show and the way in which it constructs addiction, so I’m super interested in the way that popular culture translates ideas about addiction into movies, a lot of OD is about movies and popular culture constructs, and so I’m interested in that.
As to writing for popular culture, I do could contribute once in a while to a blog called Points, which is the Alcohol & Drug History Society Blog. Points is an old fashioned word for a needle or a syringe. And we try to make our work, in a sense, play to an educated but popular audience that wants to be more informed about the history of drugs and drug policy. And so I do like that kind of writing, and I do think that it’s more and more in my horizon but it’s more like poetry for me than prose because I have to forget my footnotes and that can just induce hyperventilation in a historian.
Marion: You said it, I didn’t. That is kind of rather the stereotypical wall we have between academic publishers and mass market publishers is that, I know when I’ve written, I’ve written a bunch of nonfiction books but they’re not heavily annotated, I always name at the end what I’ve read and where I’ve gotten my facts and all of that very well documented, but it doesn’t have footnotes. And if we could all just name one thing that divides the pop culture press from the academic press, it would definitely be the footnote. So we’d love to see you on this side of the wall more because the poetics of the way you think and the way you write is something that I think lends itself very beautifully to the mass market writing. So as we wrap this up, of course, I need to know what you’re doing next.
Nancy: Well, that’s a really interesting thought, I’m not exactly sure. I’m writing a chapter on intoxication. And I’m interested in that book chapter in how scientists have thought about intoxication and intoxicated states and how they have replicated them in the laboratory. Overdose is really hard to study because it doesn’t happen in the laboratory, it’s a life threatening situation. Overdose does happen sometimes in anesthesiology, of course. And so I’m interested in those kinds of states and how get written about. I’m interested in the way in which people narrate drug experiences. And so I am thinking about writing about popular culture that puts narratives of that kind out for public consumption. And so I guess I will leave it at that because the COVID-19 situation has also made me think about my responsibility as a historian of medicine, too… I think a lot about breathing, and so I am also thinking about doing some more, shall we say think pieces, about those kinds of processes and bringing people into, I suppose, my thinking about science as storytelling, my thinking about science as having a poetics and perhaps even poetry.
Marion: That’s a wonderful answer. Thank you so much, Nancy, it was a joy to talk to you.
Nancy: Oh, thank you.
Marion: The author is Nancy Campbell, she’s the author of the recent book, OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose, published by MIT Press. Get her books, wherever books are sold. I’m Marion and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany New York, reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont, our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com and take a class with me. And thanks for listening, and don’t forget to subscribe to Qwerty and listen to it wherever you go.
