Amanda Niehaus has a PhD in Physiological Ecology. She is the author of numerous award-winning short stories, essays, and an acclaimed novel, The Breeding Season (Allen & Unwin, 2019). As part of her author profile (bestill our science-loving hearts) she writes: “Does science belong in literary fiction? As a scientist, I never thought so. But fiction connects with readers, enabling them to empathise with imagined lives. So what better way to communicate?” She was studying a unique marsupial species where the male invests so much into their reproduction that they only survive one breeding season. The metaphor was just too rich. That’s when she started writing The Breeding Season. What began as an award-winning short story eventually evolved into a novel—which was completely outside Amanda’s comfort zone. But as both she and Jess agree, you just have to trick yourself by writing it piece by piece. Check out the full episode as we discuss this, and many other traits of scientists-turned-writers, as well as the organization she founded with author, Jessica White, called Science Write Now, a publishing platform and community-based forum for creative writing about science. Honorable Mentions: Author, Lidia Yuknavitch Author, Alice Sebold Author, Krissy Kneen

Published Date: February 3, 2023

Transcription

Phuc Luu:

This is a special episode of Effing Shakespeare, recorded in collaboration with the 2021 AWP Conference and Book Fair. We're thankful to be the official podcast for AWP for a second year, and have invited a gallery of guests that you don't want to miss out on. As always, please subscribe, rate, and review so we can continue to bring you interviews of amazing writers sharing about their amazing work. Enjoy.

Jessica Cole:

I'm Jessica Cole.

Phuc Luu:

I'm Phuc Luu.

Kate Williams:

I'm Kate Martin Williams.

Jessica Cole:

And this is Effing Shakespeare. By writers-

Kate Williams:

For writers.

Jessica Cole:

Amanda Niehaus has a PhD in Physiological Ecology. She is the author of numerous award-winning short stories, essays, and the acclaimed novel The Breeding Season, out from Allen and Unwin in 2019. I think you wrote on your website... Somewhere, but I think your website, this great question. "Does science belong in literary fiction? As a scientist, I never thought so. But as fiction connects with readers, enabling them to empathize with imagined lives, what better way to communicate?" Welcome, Amanda.

Amanda Niehaus:

Thank you.

Kate Williams:

What a great quote. I love that.

Jessica Cole:

I love that quote. I want to put it somewhere in my house. I had a crush on science, I say, so I have no degree. Degrees are in English and creative writing, but I have a crush on science, so I'm so excited to get into it with you. I want to ask the question that I've been thinking about since I've finished reading your story, which is called Breeding Season, that won first place in the Victoria University Short Story Contest in 2017. And then your novel, The Breeding Season, was published just two years later. Could you give us the bold strokes of how that process, expanding a short story into a novel, finding the publisher that you did, what that was like?

Amanda Niehaus:

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So my experience has, I mean, I think everybody's experience is different for as much as we try to read the formula online, like how to do it. So I was still working as a scientist when I started writing fiction in 2000... I think I took my first fiction class in 2014. And up until that point, I knew I wanted to do more writing, but I guess because I was a scientist and I wanted to think about communicating science, people kept pushing me towards the journalistic forms of science communication, and it just wasn't my thing. And then I finally plucked up the courage to take a fiction course, and that was it. I loved it so much, just the way that you can be anything and be anywhere and explore without bounds. It's terrifying, but also thrilling. Right?

Jessica Cole:

Yes.

Amanda Niehaus:

And so I was starting to sort of practice fiction, and I had this idea about expanding some of the scientific research I was working on at the time into some sort of other form of communication than the academic papers that were probably going to come out of it.

And so I was doing work on some species of marsupials, one of them mouse-sized, and one of them more large squirrel, small-cat sized.

Jessica Cole:

Is that the quoll?

Amanda Niehaus:

That's the northern quoll. Yeah. And the mouse-sized ones are the antechinuses. And these creatures are really interesting because they invest so much into their reproduction that they don't survive more than one breeding season. So at least for the northern quolls, the males do this. They're interesting because the females actually live for two or three years and breed multiple times, so they hold something in reserve. And that fascinated me, and I wanted to find a way to write about that reproductive biology, ideally in a story or in fiction. And it was only, I was working on different things. I think I had a draft of a story that was written from the perspective of a quoll, or an interview with a quoll.

Yeah, it didn't work. Saying that though, there are a lot of really great Australian novels of the last couple of years that have taken on the voice of animals, and it's worked really brilliantly, but for me it didn't.

Kate Williams:

[inaudible 00:04:58] Look them up too.

Amanda Niehaus:

Yeah, absolutely. And so writing classes, and it was in a class with Lydia Yuknovic actually, that I managed to draft out the bones of what was the story Breeding Season. And as soon as I wrote that character, I knew she was the one. And I don't know... I was coming from a science background, I was absolutely terrified of the idea of writing more than 2000, 3000, 4,000 words at a time. The story Breeding Season was by far the longest thing I'd ever written at that time, and that was 4,000 words. And I was just so proud of myself. And then I felt like I wanted to keep going with her story, but gosh, how do you psych yourself up to write something that's like 60, 70, 80,000 words? It was very much out of my comfort zone, but I managed to trick myself into doing it piece by piece, I guess. So it's a very long answer to your question.

Jessica Cole:

[inaudible 00:06:14] I think tricking yourselves is the only way to take on any big project.

Amanda Niehaus:

Absolutely.

Jessica Cole:

But certainly out of our comfort zone. That's so cool. And I mean, I feel like the short story is so perfect. Honestly, it really moved me, and I felt like it was completely, absolutely complete, almost like a pearl. But reading then that your novel expands it, I was like, yes, I absolutely want to know what happens to the character and the marriage, and yes, I want to see Danny on the page and more quolls. I'm so glad you did.

Amanda Niehaus:

Yeah, thank you.

Jessica Cole:

Did you know about Alan and Unwin, the press, before you started? [inaudible 00:07:02].

Amanda Niehaus:

Yeah, they're amazing. They are an amazing press, you know you found the right people when inevitably, every book that they publish, you're like, "Wow, I love that. I would've published that if I was a publisher." So I really felt when they made an offer on the book that these were my people and I was just so elated.

Jessica Cole:

That's so cool. It seems like the perfect fit, and I'm so glad to know about you and that press, because I didn't know about that press either. Did you have any support besides tricking yourself, besides your own trickery, as you were expanding your story into the novel?

Amanda Niehaus:

I guess I had, yeah, so I had two mentorships as I was writing the novel. One of them was with the AWP in one of the early writer to writer mentorship programs. It was in spring of 2016, and I guess I had written the short story. And I was trying to figure out how to work it into something bigger. And I was chosen for mentorship by the writer Alice Sebold, which I remember getting the call from AWP, like, "Guess what? We've matched you. And it's Alice Sebold." And I literally burst into tears because I felt so affirmed. Right. What a dream, right?

Jessica Cole:

[inaudible 00:08:40] honestly, you did a really good job.

Amanda Niehaus:

So that was really phenomenal. She really just kind of in those early stages, she kind of kept feeding me nuggets of inspiration. That sounds really awful, but it was [inaudible 00:09:01] she would send me books.

Jessica Cole:

It's perfect. It's like a perfect analogy for a scientist to make. Yes.

Amanda Niehaus:

Yeah. So she would send me articles and books and we would talk about sort of philosophies, and that was really amazing. And then when I finally had a draft finished of the novel, she read it. And then we got a blurb on the cover, which was phenomenal.

Jessica Cole:

I didn't know how you got that. I was going to ask how that [inaudible 00:09:25]

Amanda Niehaus:

Yeah.

Jessica Cole:

She was your mentor.

Amanda Niehaus:

She was my AWP mentor. Yeah. And then I also was fortunate at the other end of things to have a mentorship with the writer Krissy Kneen, who's an Australian author. You have to look up her work. She's one of my absolute favorites.

Kate Williams:

Oh, wonderful.

Amanda Niehaus:

Very, very sort of body-based and lush and interesting writing. She's always, what I love about Krissy is that she's always changing forms to suit the story. And so her mentorship was with the Australian Society of Authors. And that was when I was finished a draft of the novel and was sort of working through the edits. So it was phenomenal to have those two mentors.

Jessica Cole:

That's incredible. That's incredible.

Kate Williams:

I'm really interested in hearing, I heard about, or I read about the Australia Council for the Arts resilience grant that you received to develop the new creative writing and science cooperative I suppose, can you talk about Science Write Now? W R I T E?

Amanda Niehaus:

Yes. Yes. Yeah. So that was really exciting. It's something that my friend and colleague Jessica White and I had been talking about for a couple of years, but I guess COVID, I mean it affected us all, it has affected us all, continues to affect us all in many ways. But for us, it was kind of like, well, let's do this now. It sort of pushed us to finally pluck up the courage to ask for money for this thing that we felt... Almost like, I feel like sometimes applying for a grant is like submitting your novel to publishers. You're like, "I have this great idea that I feel so passionately about. Please love it. Please want to help us." And so we finally did that. So Science Write Now is a writing publishing platform and community based around creative writing about science. We felt that this was something that was kind of lacking in the world as far as we could see, and we just really wanted to start supporting the different ways of communicating science.

Because as you read at the beginning, this is my passion. I just really love supporting and exploring all of these different ways that we can talk about science that might connect with people outside of the New Scientist magazine or Discover magazines. So Jess and I applied for and won funding to kickstart our website. And we've published three editions. We've published quite established authors as well as brand new authors. And we have poetry, craft essays, essays, excerpts.

So one of the things that we're excited about is we translated for the first time from Japanese, not we, I don't know Japanese. But we connected with a woman who happens to be both a Japanese translator and a mathematician. And she translated part of a conversation between the famous Japanese novelist, Igawa, and a mathematician, for the first time into English for us. We have all sorts of things on the website. So we're really proud of it, and we're hoping to keep building it more and bigger all the time.

Kate Williams:

So have you firmly planted yourself in the literary world now, or are you still working as a scientist also?

Amanda Niehaus:

See, I think so, yeah. I'm not a huge risk taker, so I like to feel... I finally feel like I have my weight balanced enough on the writing side that I can shift entirely into that space now. And actually, I'm about to start a second PhD, so next time we talk you have to call me Dr. Dr. But I'm about to start a second.

Phuc Luu:

I'll sing Dr. Dr. so be careful.

Amanda Niehaus:

Okay. I'm going to call you up on that later. Yeah. So I'm about to start a PhD in creative writing, so...

Kate Williams:

Exciting.

Amanda Niehaus:

Yeah.

Jessica Cole:

Where?

Amanda Niehaus:

At the University of Queensland, so I only do my PhDs at the University of Queensland.

Jessica Cole:

Only place to become a Dr. Dr.

Amanda Niehaus:

Yeah. Only place. It's on the practice of writing and the experience of reading science and fiction. So I'm so excited about it.

Jessica Cole:

Oh my gosh, I want to read your dissertation, I want to read everything. I find the whole idea of telling stories through science, not science fiction, but this scientists doing their work in the world, so incredibly evocative. It feels like so much information can be relayed with so kind of little... I don't know what it is. There's some sort of reticence working against it in some way, because, and I don't know why that feels like a different metaphoric construct than speaking about relationships and work using other metaphoric tropes. I don't know what it is, but it feels extra special.

But I have a hard time describing that. I had a hard time in my PhD, which was also science and writing. Do you find it's easier to write the story or the essay rather than explaining it to people? Or at this point, maybe because you have an actual scientific PhD, do you find it easier to make those connections more real for people speaking in narrative, in one-on-one narratives?

Amanda Niehaus:

No, it's really interesting because I guess I can talk about the biological principles or the scientific principles in the way that I was sort of describing the way that those marsupials, the northern quoll, sort of breed. But I think that there's so much more, and it doesn't really... I mean, the thing that fiction does is it really allows you to see, I think, how these ideas fit into your everyday life in meaningful ways. And I could sit here and tell you those things, but fiction allows you to experience them for yourself. And I think that that's so much more powerful. There's less of power differential, I think, than if I'm like, well, I have a PhD in biology and I'm going to tell you about these animals. It's like, here, come and see. Come and sit with me and let's like experience this together.

Jessica Cole:

Yeah, I love it.

Kate Williams:

And I think I always felt more comfortable hearing or receiving information from scientists who could tell stories. Who were good at that sort of human connection that comes from storytelling. So I feel like it works on both sides, right? Is that...

Amanda Niehaus:

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.

Jessica Cole:

Can you read some to us, we'd love to hear some of [inaudible 00:17:24].

Amanda Niehaus:

Yes, I do. So I have a little section from the beginning. Here's the breed... Oh, it's backwards, [inaudible 00:17:34] Oh, it's not.

Jessica Cole:

[inaudible 00:17:35] Gorgeous cover.

Kate Williams:

[inaudible 00:17:37] The cover.

Amanda Niehaus:

Isn't it beautiful? That was another moment I cried, when they sent me the cover. 'Cause I was terrified, I'd been hearing all those horror stories about getting your cover and...

Jessica Cole:

It's gorgeous.

Amanda Niehaus:

And they sent this and I opened it and I was just, they nailed it. It was so perfect. And so I'm going to read just a short bit from the, there's a prologue. So before we actually move into the main story.

"Elise picks her way through the bush where the scrub rises up at the end of the trap line, towards a small peninsula made of high rock. After setting the last of the small mammal traps, she will take her daughter from the carrier on her back and set her on her lap and gaze from the cliff brink over the ocean, the blue-green Gulf placid and deadly. She will tell her child a story, as she does each afternoon around this time, about the seabirds that wheel over crystalline water, or the quolls that scamper through the forest at dusk. Or Dan. The world is not as quiet as it used to be.

There is no real quiet anymore, but a constant chatter of words, not words, the flow of sentences with no true meaning, but which convey in the process, everything there is to say. The kick of feet against her back as she walks. Fingers tangled in her hair. To have the weight behind is strange, Elise thinks, how mass shifts around the body internal to external, and how the body adjusts to these things, remembers what was there before. How impermanent the human form. Its scars growing fainter with time, like the new pink stretch marks on her abdomen, already paling. Or the chafe on her hip where the carrier rubbed in those first days before the skin grew over, smooth and shiny."

Jessica Cole:

Is it crazy that I want to cry to know that Elise has a daughter? After reading the story.

Kate Williams:

That's beautiful.

Jessica Cole:

Wow. Yeah.

Amanda Niehaus:

Thank you.

Jessica Cole:

There's so much there. Do you feel that using science is a way to hide a little bit in a way that's helpful as an author? Whereas being a researcher, it's very much, especially grant writing and things like, this is my idea, here I am. Here's all of my research as just sort of forced ownership in a way that fiction... I mean, you've talked about the freedom of it, but I feel like there's almost... When I read the line about the quolls about, such a gorgeous line sort of shuffling from dark to dark, I was like, that sort of feels like writing to me. Doesn't have to be finished or perfect yet. I can just scuttle around in the dark for a while.

Amanda Niehaus:

Yeah. Oh, that's so true, actually. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I guess it's interesting because the scientific concept always seems to come first, and then it takes me a long time to find the story that fits it. So I guess I use this metaphor a lot, and I think I even used it in my AWP panel about writing science and fiction as like baking spinach into brownies, which I used to do to my daughter when she was little. I had all of those cookbooks that are like, "How to feed your child vegetables without them knowing."

Kate Williams:

Oh, that's so good.

Amanda Niehaus:

Right. So I always start with the patch of spinach outside, and then I'm like, "What recipe is really going to make this invisible?" But actually, I mean, okay, I don't want to continue with the spinach metaphor too much, but I don't want the science necessarily to be invisible. I just want it to be palatable. I want it to be so well integrated that the reader's like, "Oh, that's kind of cool." Or, "Oh, I didn't know that before, or I might want to sort of read more about that." But yeah, it's interesting because at the moment I'm working on my second novel and the science in this... So The Breeding Season, every bit of science in The Breeding Season is work that I've done myself at some stage in my life. The novel I'm working on now is all based in physics and epigenetics, neither of which I've worked on in my life. So I'm totally throwing myself out of-

Kate Williams:

So you're saying you're going to get a third PhD in physics. [inaudible 00:22:34].

Amanda Niehaus:

No, but isn't that the fun thing about writing, is that you get to sort of put on all these different hats all the time? Yeah, for sure.

Jessica Cole:

The novel I worked on for my dissertation is noted by theoretical physicist, and I don't think that I have ever taken one physics class even in high school. I think I somehow settled out of it, but..

Amanda Niehaus:

Yeah.

Jessica Cole:

It's a really fun way to sort of armchair travel, and armchair study. And just follow our inclinations wherever, and our characters tell us a lot too, what they want to be.

Amanda Niehaus:

Totally.

Jessica Cole:

I didn't start out saying, I'm going to write about a theoretical physicist, but he showed up. He's like, "This is what I am." [inaudible 00:23:25].

Amanda Niehaus:

Good luck.

Jessica Cole:

Yeah. Yeah. Off to the library for you. Bet you wish you had at least taken high school physics. Yeah.

Amanda Niehaus:

I took physics at uni and yeah, no.

Jessica Cole:

No, it probably [inaudible 00:23:46], it's not, I mean, hopefully it'll help you. I don't know if it will.

Amanda Niehaus:

No, no.

Jessica Cole:

It changes so much, and it changes so quickly that-

Kate Williams:

It does.

Jessica Cole:

To go back constantly and revise, and I mean, it's set in a certain time period. The things that I either found out then that I found out now are wrong, even... Anyway, whatever. It's too boring.

Amanda Niehaus:

No, no.

Jessica Cole:

It's a self obsoleting kind of science, as probably all science is, which is-

Amanda Niehaus:

Absolutely.

Jessica Cole:

[inaudible 00:24:17] Married so well with fiction, which also feels like as much as we want it to last, is fleeting and of the moment and all of that. Yeah.

Amanda Niehaus:

I know. It's so hard, as a debut novelist to watch... Your book, you start see your book places, and then your book disappears from those places. It's really confronting.

Jessica Cole:

And then you're like, "Let's write another one." Which will then [inaudible 00:24:49].

Amanda Niehaus:

That's right. Throw it into the void.

Kate Williams:

Yeah. You didn't know The Breeding Season was going to be a metaphor for yet another part of...

Amanda Niehaus:

Exactly.

Jessica Cole:

Wow. Thanks.

Kate Williams:

It is a delight to know you, Amanda, thank you so much for coming on this show.

Jessica Cole:

Yes.

Amanda Niehaus:

Oh, thank you. This has been really, really lovely to speak to you guys.

Kate Williams:

We'll be waiting anxiously for the next book. And hope to stay in touch.

Amanda Niehaus:

Yeah, yeah, sure. Absolutely. Thank you very much.

Phuc Luu:

You're welcome. The great, Amanda Niehaus. Last but not least, Dr. Dr.

Jessica Cole:

Dr. Dr. Soon to be Dr. Dr.

Phuc Luu:

This has been a live recording of the Effing Shakespeare podcast by Blooms Day Literary at the 2021 AWP Conference and Book Fair.

Effing Shakespeare is a production of Blooms City Literary, in association with Houston Creative Space, hosted by Kate Martin Williams and Jessica Cole, and produced by me Phuc Luu. Our trusty and hardworking intern is Sanviti Sedan. Please subscribe, rate and review wherever podcasts are found.