How PR pros can stand out in 2020
2020 will be a challenging year for communicators.
The news holes will be taken up with all the usual headlines of a new decade: presidential campaigns, the Olympics, and a few other minor stories like impeachment and the usual corporate crisis. And those are just the things we already know about.
The question for professional communicators isn’t how to break through all that clutter. You probably can’t—and probably don’t want to, since your most likely breakthrough scenario would be a major crisis.
The real question is, how do get your point across to senior leaders in such a crazy year?
Here are few survival tips for 2020:
Everyone from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to your archrival in the industry is going to be pushing false narratives and creating copycat media outlets that look like the real thing. The answer is to focus your attention only on those media outlets and platforms that matter to your stakeholders. That doesn’t mean ignoring social media or podcasts; it means doing your homework and making sure you have a thorough understanding of what’s important to your customers, employees, shareholders, volunteers, donors or constituents.
The outlets and platforms matter less than the people who are influencing the opinions, beliefs, actions and behaviors of your stakeholders. So vet your sources carefully, make sure they matter to your stakeholders, and then follow the postings of those influencers with the diligence of Sherlock Homes—and ignore everything else.
Do not get distracted by the daily vagaries of the news cycle nor by whoever walks into your office with a clever idea. Build a set of metrics and/or a dashboard that starts with your organization’s strategic priorities. Then map out the path that shows how your team contributes to those priorities. A good dashboard should reflect how all the elements of your communications program are contributing to each of the priorities.
In other words, stop worrying about how many clicks that last social media campaign generated, or how many people shared that last news story. Focus your time and attention on how all your activities helped realize your organization’s goals.
Forget about tooting your horn or creating a brag book of the great stuff you did. Who has time for that when there are a million other things to do? When you do get the 30 seconds in an elevator with your boss’s boss, tell him/her what you need in order to hit a home run. Use your measurement data to discover what isn’t working or isn’t succeeding as well as other efforts. Then recommend moving resources from those less successful efforts to what you know will make you a star.
Years ago, when I was probably way over my head in a new job as director of corporate communications at the largest independent software company on the planet, someone gave me a book called “A Whack on the Side of the Head.”
I quickly consumed it, and some people thought I was a genius and some perceived me as a professional provocateur. But however you viewed my ideas, they certainly weren’t what anyone was expecting.
These are uncertain times, and the foundations that many communications programs were built on are disappearing as fast as the Greenland ice sheet. Pretty much every idea that someone thought of last year won’t work this year.
So read the book, and when you do have a chance to make recommendations or suggest changes, think big change. If you can’t think of a new idea, go ask your customers or someone you don’t hear from every day. Better yet, do a quick Google Poll to survey your stakeholders and get their ideas. Whatever you do, don’t sound like yesterday’s solutions.
For me it’s giving the dog a belly rub. There’s nothing like being rewarded with the puppy equivalent of a purr to get you out of whatever headspace you’re stuck in. Whether it’s a walk on the beach, a hike in the woods, a 10-minute soak in your hot tub, or giving your puppy a belly rub—there has to be time in your day when you step away from your desk, turn the media off and get a new perspective on whatever problem you’re trying to solve.
So take that time to clear your head before you start trying to communicate up.
Katie Delahaye Paine is the CEO of Paine Publishing LLC and publisher of The Measurement Advisor. Find her on Twitter @queenofmetrics.
‘I Heard Patrick’s Voice in My Head’: Michael Chabon on Making ‘Picard’ and Being a Fanboy
When a character grows popular enough to endure for decades, at the hands of more than one writer, the difference between sequels and fan fiction can get awfully blurry. Few writers understand that messy feeling better than Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fanboy at the helm of Star Trek: Picard. In the new CBS All Access series premiering January 23rd, Sir Patrick Stewart reprises his Star Trek: The Next Generation role as Jean-Luc Picard, now a Starfleet retiree running the family vineyard in France.
A literary wunderkind for early novels The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys, Chabon took his writing career to another level with 2000’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a dense, beautiful story of two Jewish cousins who create a beloved superhero, the Escapist, near the dawn of World War II. This wasn’t a highbrow author slumming it, but Chabon bringing a lifelong love of superheroics and science fiction into a world he had already conquered. He was rewarded with the Pulitzer for fiction, and followed Kavalier & Clay with similarly genre-bending books like The Final Solution (an elderly Sherlock Holmes solves a mystery in the Forties) and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (a murder mystery set in an alternate history where a Jewish state was established in Alaska rather than the Middle East). He also dabbled in screenwriting, contributing to the scripts for Spider-Man 2 and John Carter, struggling all the while to wrestle Kavalier & Clay into movie form before the project was abandoned 15 years ago.
More recently, Chabon and his novelist wife Ayelet Waldman have taken their talents to the small screen. They were among the co-creators of Netflix’s acclaimed sexual assault miniseries Unbelievable. A lifelong Trekkie, Chabon also wrote a couple of episodes of Short Treks, the CBS All Access spinoff of Star Trek: Discovery — one (“Calypso”) about the Discovery adrift centuries in the future, the other (“Q&A”) an attempt to reconcile the evolution of Spock across the various pilot episodes for the original series. Now, he’s showrunner of perhaps the most anticipated entry in the TV franchise since The Next Generation, in which Picard gets caught up in a mystery involving his late comrade, Commander Data. (Brent Spiner is one of several Trek alums to appear in the series, which co-stars Isa Briones, Alison Pill, and Harry Treadaway, among others.)
Chabon spoke with Rolling Stone about his history with Star Trek, dabbling in fanfic, facing literary snobbery, and his bittersweet step back from Picard Season Two so he can bring Kavalier & Clay to Showtime as a series.
Do you remember the first Star Trek episode you saw?Yeah, I do. I didn’t watch the whole episode, though, and I didn’t know what it was at the time. I have this clear memory of sneaking out of my bed when I must have been four years old, maybe I pretended I needed a glass of water or something like that. My dad was watching something with a guy with pointy ears and really scary-looking eyebrows and a lady with pointy ears. Everything was made out of rocks, and they were fighting. Someone got slashed, and there was blood. I was just like, “Wow, I don’t want to see this! This is a really scary thing my dad’s watching.” Then I forgot about it.
Then six years later, when I was 10, I became a big Star Trek fan. I was watching Channel 5 in Washington D.C. on Saturday at 6:00, and this thing comes on. It’s “Amok Time.” And I remembered it from [that time] when I was little. That was the first episode I ever saw, but I hadn’t realized that was Star Trek until that moment. It’s interesting, because in the history of Star Trek fandom, I’d say “Amok Time” has to be maybe the single most important episode, just in going back to Vulcan. And it was really the first time in more than a just glancing way that the show had tried to pop open one of the characters. And of course the character they popped open was Spock. It must have given birth to 1,000 fanzines.
Oh, I’ve read so many fanfics about pon farr, the Vulcan mating cycle.Right, exactly. It’s sex, and it’s Vulcan, and it’s Spock losing control of his emotions, doing that thing that everybody always wanted to see. You get to see it, what he is like when he’s emotional, and in particular that moment of joy that he has when he realizes Kirk’s not dead.

Leonard Nimoy in ‘Star Trek.’ Photo by Paramount Television/Kobal/Shutterstock
So you’re 24 when Next Generation comes on. Were you watching that?Yes, from the first episode. I’ll be totally honest, I was not impressed when I first started to watch it. Of all my friends I’ve ever had, only one is also a real Star Trek fan. He lived in Pittsburgh, where I had gone to school, and I was living out west. We would call after each episode, and neither of us was impressed. I think it’s fairly well-accepted the show wasn’t very good when it started. It really took them a while to figure out how to make it work. I had read David Gerrold’s book [The World of Star Trek], so I understood intellectually the idea that the captain shouldn’t be the one going on the away missions and endangering his life, so then they had sort of responded with this [second-in-command character] Number One. But I really had a hard time accepting that.
Then at some point I suddenly realized, “Wow, that was a good episode.” Then the next one was like, “That was a good one too,” and it started to really draw me in. I met Ayelet, my wife, in ’92, when the show was coming to an end of its run, and one of the things we did together was sit down every week and watch TNG. She got into it at that point, too. It became an important show to me over time, very important. But it took a while.
Picard was very different from Kirk by design. How did you respond to him back then?I think Picard and Patrick were the things I clung to in those first couple of years. The character of Data was interesting, and Brent Spiner’s such an amazing performer. I would just watch for them. I was enough of a nerd to be aware of Patrick in Dune as Gurney Halleck, and I kind of had my eye on him, and I thought it was really interesting they had brought in someone like that to be in Star Trek. Picard was one of the places I settled the quickest in trying to accept the show.
As many great actors as this franchise featured before and after, Stewart could go to these places — “There! Are! FOUR! Lights!” — that are just astonishing.I had dinner with [Next Generation showrunner] Rick Berman a few weeks ago. I said something like, “Oh, it was so remarkable that they cast such a great actor, and someone who was so well-known on the England stage.” He said, “You have to remember, when we started that show, we actually cast two really well-known, talented actors: LeVar Burton and Wil Wheaton, who had been in Stand By Me.” That was the casting coup of The Next Generation in the beginning. It was viewed as: They got LeVar Burton and Wil Wheaton, who was this hot, young actor. Patrick Stewart was so unknown at that time, he wasn’t viewed as a coup in the sense that he was, say, when they cast him to play Professor X.
Back in the day, did you ever find yourself writing fanfic?I was just thinking about this last night! I would draw my own Starfleet starship designs, and I made up alien cat crew members, different alien species that put them in the Starfleet uniforms. I never tried writing any Star Trek fan fiction, but when I was starting out, I wrote Sherlock Holmes fan fiction, Robert E. Howard fan fiction, Larry Niven fan fiction, John Carter/Edgar Rice Burroughs fan fiction… And I was thinking, “Why didn’t I ever write Star Trek fan fiction?” I think the reason is, what I was responding to in all those other cases was a voice on the page. Those are all writers with recognizable, strong, identifiable styles that I would try to imitate, but there was no such thing about Star Trek. Like, the James Blish book adaptations of episodes — I read them all, but they were written in this very flat, neutral tone. There was nothing literary on the page that really sparked me. It was about watching the show. I didn’t have the means to make my own fan episodes.

Rebecca Romijn and Ethan Peck as Number One and Spock in “Q&A,” from ‘Short Treks.’ Photo by Michael Gibson/CBS
What I often hear from writers working on famous movie or TV or comic book characters is, “Basically, I am getting to do official fan fiction.”Exactly. That’s very much how I feel. In the case of the short film, “Q&A,” I wrote what felt to me like pure fan fiction in the sense that one of the things fan fiction often tries to do is explain unexplained things. Like, why does Dr. Watson one time say he was shot in the shoulder in Afghanistan, and in another story he says he was shot in the leg in Afghanistan? So people have written these elaborate things trying to account for that discrepancy. In “Q&A,” the thing I started from was in “The Menagerie” [a two-part Star Trek clip show that repackaged the original pilot, “The Cage”], Spock is nothing like Spock as we came to know him. He’s warm, and when he sees that singing flower, he grins this amazing grin, right? He talks differently. His makeup is different. He’s very different, but especially the emotionality, the warmth of his personality. It’s very much more like Leonard Nimoy coming through, it feels like.
Obviously there’s an outside-the-show explanation for that, but in the show, nobody looks at Spock and is like, “Hey, you sure did act differently back then.” It’s just ignored. When I saw the episode for the first time as a kid, maybe I didn’t know the explanation yet, but I just was like, “That’s so weird. What happened to him?” So this little short I tried to, in that fan fiction kind of way, start to answer the question of, “Why did Spock become more locked down over time than when we first saw him?”
How did you land in this particular writing group to begin with, in order to do “Calypso” and eventually Picard?I was working with [Discovery producer] Akiva Goldsman. He had put together a room of writers to try to create a shared universe around a bunch of forgotten Hasbro action figures from the Seventies and Eighties. That was a very fun experience. There were a lot of cool writers in that room. The next time he did that, it was with a different project. During the course of that room, they had already started work on these Star Trek short films, and he took me aside. He knew I was a big Trek fan, and he said, “Would you have an interest of doing a short?” I said yes immediately.
I wrote a script for what became “Calypso,” and I loved every second of writing it. They were happy with how it came out. When I came aboard, they were talking about two possible series — one would be a Picard series, and the other one I don’t want to say, just because I’m not supposed to. We were actually sort of leaning more toward that other one initially, just because getting Patrick to come back seemed too unlikely. Then when we roped him in, I rolled right into doing that as an executive producer, and then just before filming started I took over as showrunner.
How was that? This isn’t the first thing you’ve done in TV, but it’s still a big step.In terms of production, “Calypso” was the first thing I ever did in TV. I’ve done film work, but I’ve never done TV. I’ve written a lot of TV scripts, had a lot of pilots that never got made, but I had no actual production experience. I was very invested by that point, and I had been part of the team shaping and creating the series, and I felt like I would be able to do it, and I’m not quite sure why. I’m really not sure why [producer] Alex Kurtzman and everybody else was willing to take a chance on me, but I loved it. I loved every minute of it. It was so much fun.
I might not have felt quite that way if it weren’t Star Trek. Anytime I sat down to start working on a script, I got this deep feeling of pleasure, like I can’t believe I got to just to write the word “phasers” and “transporter,” and the jargon, and Starfleet and Federation, and planet names, and getting into the lore — the Borg, and all the other elements and the Romulans. We really tried with this season to do, to some degree at least, for the Romulans what TNG did for the Klingons. To take a really familiar, well-known, antagonist alien species, and open them up a little bit beyond the mustache twirling and the swarthy, glowering looking across space through the view screens. Like, what’s going on with Romulans? What’s their culture like? To be able to do that, to be empowered, suddenly, out of the blue, to create canon about Romulans… Wow, incredible.

J.K. Simmons in ‘Spider-Man 2.’ Photo By Columbia/courtesy Everett Collection
This isn’t the first time you’ve written something involving a character you’ve grown up reading. How does this feel, to write these words and have Patrick and Brent saying them?Hair stood up on the back of my neck the first few times I got to watch Patrick speaking dialogue I had written for him and Brent. Oh my god, and Riker and Troi, too. I had that experience. The only other thing that was at all close to it but was different was when I worked on Spider-Man 2, and some of the dialogue that I wrote for J. Jonah Jameson survived into the film. But for me, that was a 2D-drawn character. As great as [J.K. Simmons] is, it wasn’t the actor playing the part I had been picturing in my head. Whereas for this, it was mainlined right into Patrick. I heard his voice in my head. I saw his face in front of me.
Not only that, but I also knew I had him as a resource. There were many times over the course of the season where Patrick would take me aside with a line or a couple of lines together, and he would say, “I understand what the purpose of these lines is, but this just doesn’t sound like Picard to me,” or, “I don’t think Picard would say it that way,” or, “I don’t think he would say it at all.” You can’t argue with that, and I never did. He was always right. Such a clear sense of the character.
And beyond that, anything you’re going to hand Patrick Stewart, he can play. It’s not like you have to write around limitations.It’s incredible, the things he does over the course of the season. Because it’s not just him playing the Picard that you know when you think of Picard. He’s playing Picard who’s decades older, has been through a lot, has aged physically, is looking at his life in the way that someone who’s middle-aged wouldn’t. In canon in our story, Picard is I believe 92. So he’s older than Patrick is, but someone who’s been alive that long, looking at his life, is going to be behaving very differently than someone who’s however old Patrick was when he started doing TNG. Patrick had all of that. He presents the character of Picard very much as the same guy. And yet, he’s changed, inevitably. He’s older, he’s wiser, he’s sadder, he has more regrets and more to regret. All of that just emerged on day one of shooting.
Star Trek: Generations does weird things with Kirk and Picard’s retirement fantasies. I never bought that Kirk would want to be on a horse farm instead of the Enterprise, nor that Picard would dream of this idealized family gathering. When you started thinking about what Picard had done in retirement, where did you first go on the way to where he landed?We had the clue from the series finale of TNG about the vineyard, and there was a lot that was appealing in that. I don’t know how the other writers felt about it, but to me somehow there were echoes of Sherlock Holmes in that, one of my other favorite characters. I wrote fan fiction on that. You know, retiring to Sussex to be a beekeeper and how that always had a sense of, “How could Holmes have possibly been content to do that?” This man that we’re told, when we first meet him, if he’s ever idle, he immediately turns to the cocaine, and he can’t stand being idle for a moment, and yet he’s going to tend to bees? Then you see he did come out of retirement, according to Doyle, and did this thing during World War I.
Thinking about Patrick and Picard in that way, I thought, let’s say he did go back to the chateau. Would he be happy there? How would that work for him? Would he just settle down and start dating a local widow and have a quiet, pastoral life, or would that sit not well for him? Would he chafe at it? It just felt like an interesting enough question just right off the bat that it felt like, let’s start there and see what happens.
You’ve written a lot about the stigma the literary fiction world had against genre fiction when you were coming up, and you helped change that by incorporating genre into many of your books. Did you ever find just in the circles you were moving in, people were surprised or even dismissive that you knew so much about comic books and Captain Kirk?Oh, very much so. I would either be gently teased about it, or people just would be like, “I’m going to go talk to somebody else.” When I was writing The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, people would ask me what the book’s about, like at a dinner party, and I would describe it to them. It was a conversation-killer. I’d say, “Two guys go into the comic book business in New York in the Forties?” And that would just be it. Nobody would have anything to say. I would feel like, “Oh, shoot, I hope I’m not alone at the end of this party.”
When I started — I got an MFA in fiction at UC Irvine, I went into that program coming out of college — I was writing work that was, to me, both literary and genre. I wanted to write science fiction that was unabashedly literary and literature that was unabashedly science fiction. I had some models for doing that. Writers I admired, like Italo Calvino and J. G. Ballard, who I felt each had found his own way of doing that. But models were few and far between, and when I came into the program and started submitting my work to the workshop, people just shut down. They would literally say things like, “I don’t like science fiction, so I can’t help you with this. I don’t read science fiction, so I can’t help you with this. I don’t understand science fiction, so I can’t help you with this.” And I’m thinking, “This is just a story about characters, with writing. There’s nothing you need to know about science fiction to help me with your feedback on this. I’m trying to do all the same things you’re all trying to do in your mainstream fiction. I’m just also interested in how it would be if it was happening on another planet” or whatever it was. I didn’t get anywhere with that at all. So I gave up, because it wasn’t the only kind of reading I liked to do, and it wasn’t the only kind of writing. I had done mainstream stuff, too, and I thought, “I’m not going to waste my time here trying to convince these people. I’ll just put that aside for now, and I’ll start writing more naturalistic, mainstream stuff, and take advantage that I’m here, and they’re here.” So I ended up writing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. But yeah, it took me a long time to find my way back.
What gave you the courage ultimately to write Kavalier & Clay then, after these two big literary successes?I think it was early support and encouragement first from my wife, and then from my agent at the time. I just described it in brief: “It’s going to be set in New York and start in the late Thirties and go through the Fifties.” They said, “Oh, that sounds cool.” I think my enthusiasm for it and my interest in it made them feel like, “If he’s that excited about it, it’s probably a good thing.” In a sense, I sort of backed into it. It’s not a comic-book novel. It is a primarily naturalistic, mainstream piece of historical fiction. I mean, that’s a genre in itself, but you know, there’s that little splash of magic realism in it.
Even then, I wasn’t really taking the dive, which I really only took when I started to write The Final Solution, a piece of Holmes fan fiction. What gave me the courage to do that was winning the Pulitzer. Once I felt like, “OK, I took a chance on Kavalier & Clay, it seemed to have paid off, so I’m just not going to worry about that anymore. I’m going to write what I want to read.”
Among the things I love about Kavalier & Clay is that Joe’s life runs very much in parallel to the Escapist’s. He has all these crazy, superhero-style adventures. You got to have your cake and eat it, too, in this otherwise realistic historical fiction.Right. Although that tendency is there, I think, from the beginning. If you look at The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, there’s a lot of exploits. Maybe not to the same degree that there is in Kavalier & Clay, but there’s a larger-than-life quality. There’s gangsters, and the character of Cleveland dies in this way that’s meant to evoke King Kong. And in Wonder Boys, there’s a kind of madcap, slightly heightened sense of one thing after another in that character’s life. In a way, Joe Kavalier was the heir to that, but I guess [I did it] to evoke that period and make it as intense as I imagined being alive that time would have felt, with a kind of heightened reality.
All the things that you were once mocked for in your circles, that’s the mainstream now.Absolutely. In pop-cultural terms, we’re living in the world that fandom created. That modern, mass fandom. Which, to me, starts with Star Trek. Like, I mean, yeah, there were fandoms before. There was science-fiction fandom. There was obviously Sherlock Holmes fandom. But in that fan fiction-driven, fanzines, to me that rolled into the first Star Trek conventions. That’s to me the origin point for the world that we live in now.
What kind of fan were you? Did you go to cons? Did you subscribe to Starlog?Well, I didn’t subscribe to it, but I got it every month. My dad was a Star Trek fan, and he had watched it all in the first run and had never really watched the reruns since then. But once I got into that, he started to come back to it a little bit.
What is interesting for me in hindsight — I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, which was a planned community that was designed and built in the 1960s by this guy named James Rouse, between Baltimore and Washington. Rouse’s vision in creating this place was very closely aligned with Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future. It was inclusive, tolerant. James Rouse was a real estate developer. He had been disgusted by Baltimore’s redlining practices and blockbusting practices. He determined, “If I can’t sell houses to black people here, I’m going to build a whole town where I can sell houses to whoever I want.”
There were interfaith centers where all the different denominations shared one building, like Jews and Catholics. It was racially integrated, religiously ecumenical. The school system tried all of these very 1970s progressive teaching ideas and so on. So that’s where I was living. I was growing up in what was overtly presented as the city of the future. And then I’m watching Star Trek which is just coinciding so completely with that. And my babysitter, Alison Felix, who loved Star Trek, was black, and one of our neighbors. All of the strands kind of got woven together for me in that origin moment watching Star Trek with Alison, and I remember how important the character Uhura was to her. It felt so real. It felt so possible. It felt so true. Like, this is where we’re going, and we’ll get there.
Given the state of the world right now, do you still feel like we can get there?You know, I have four kids. I chose to have four kids. I think I’d be deeply irresponsible if not almost sinister if I didn’t believe it. Yeah, I really do. I would say Star Trek insisted on the darkness in human beings and their capacity for evil. It would keep cropping up in places. Whether it was in the culture on a planet they might be visiting that had been settled by humanoid creatures, or whether it was within their own group. In the episode “The Naked Time,” or all the many times when Spock was triggered by some kind of mind control or spores of a plant to sort of enact the deep buried rage, or in “Amok Time,” for that matter, all that stuff that had been buried. So it’s not like Star Trek ever said, “People are really and truly and basically good, and if we just get our shit together, that’ll just come out.” No, it took work. It took struggle. It took constant effort in a way you might say if you look at the model of Vulcans — it takes constant repression, self-repression, and that’s what being a Vulcan’s all about. Just because you feel it doesn’t mean you have to act on it. Just because you think it doesn’t mean you have to say it. There’s a kind of benign regression that is necessary for human beings to exist together. We’ve always known that.
It seems dark now, but on the other hand it seemed dark when I was a kid, too. I’m not saying it was better then, or worse then, or worse now, or whatever, but I remember in the first years of the Reagan presidency, I went to bed every single night and was 17, 18 years old thinking, “I wonder if I’ll wake up in the morning. I wonder if this is going to be the night that the exchange takes place,” you know? It was one minute to midnight for a lot of that time. It was a dark time. When I was a little kid, Vietnam was happening, and the riots, and turmoil in the streets, a lot of what you see reflected in the original series. It felt like a lot of reasonable people then felt like the wheels were falling off the cart completely, and we were heading into all those post-nuclear dystopias that you saw on the movie screens in the early Seventies, whether it’s Planet of the Apes or The Omega Man or Soylent Green. That felt very possible then. It’s always a bad time to be alive, and it’s always a wonderful time to be alive.
The last novel you published was 2016’s Moonglow. You’ve been doing a bunch of TV projects, this one included. What’s the status of your novel writing?I have a book underway. Writing Picard definitely got in the way of it, to a degree. It’s something I’m really interested in, and it actually addresses questions of genre and literature and fandom. The way generations of fans who then become creators themselves have a responsibility to reinterpret whatever it is that they want taken on as their own. I’m enjoying working on it. It’s given me a chance to do some things I’ve always wanted to do.
What took the Kavalier & Clay film so long to get out of development hell, and how did it finally happen?That was caused by there having been a feature-film version planned that went rather far in development at Paramount, a fair amount of money was spent on it. It collapsed in 2005. One thing that happened that made it seem more doable was the re-merger of CBS and Viacom. Ayelet and I have a really strong and continuing relationship with CBS, and Kavalier & Clay was now within the greater extended family.
What are your hopes for the property as a TV show, versus the movie that never got made?It took me five years to write what became the final draft of Kavalier & Clay the film, after having already spent five years writing the novel. A fair amount of the reason it took so long is it went through so many drafts, and that was because I was struggling from the very first draft to the last to not only condense the novel into a two- to two-and-a-half-hour jar, but to do something different, which was to tell the same story as a movie. It was a combination of abandoning things and jettisoning things, and also sometimes simultaneously finding cinematic ways of telling the same narrative that is told in the book. It was so hard. I think the script that emerged was a good script, and it could have made a good movie, but it’s such an arbitrary marker that has nothing to do with the story that’s being told. You might argue that some stories should only be told as films, and others that might have previously existed as novels worked equally well as films, and sometimes get better. Alfred Hitchcock was famous for saying he much preferred adapting a bad book to a good book. What you want it to feel like is that this had to be a movie; a movie is the way to tell this story. That’s not always the case. But when you move to this new world of serialized eight-, 10-, 12-episode seasons, suddenly that arbitrary thing gets taken away that forces you to shoehorn or jettison things and give up large portions of a book. I think it’s still absolutely imperative to be reinvented to work as a TV show. You can’t just transcribe the novel on film and have all the dialogue, for many, many reasons, but one of the big reasons is that a lot of what happens in the novel is so internal to the characters. So you still have to make that translation, but at least you’re taking away that weird, arbitrary chopping block regarding how much story you can include.
You have to step down as Picard showrunner to do this. How does it feel to have one dream project get in the way of another?It would be great if I could do both. I don’t want to leave Picard. I’m not leaving — I’m sticking around. It’s been renewed, so we’ve already started planning for the second season. I’m every bit as involved in that process, and I’m going to stay on as an executive producer, and I’m going to write episodes. But at some point, the focus of my time and attention and love is going to slide over to Kavalier & Clay. But exactly how and where and when, it’s not clear. This is a transitional period for me. But I’m definitely reluctant and sorry to ultimately be leaving this behind. It’s still incredibly exciting. Talking about Season Two is already fun all over again. It won’t be easy for me. Star Trek’s not going anywhere, and hopefully, I’m not going anywhere either.
Star Trek: Picard debuts January 23rd on CBS All Access.
On cultural appropriation: A Latina novelist calls herself out amid the "American Dirt" controversy
Recently, my latest book, a contemporary novel about a pregnant Latinx anthropologist who has to battle her way through an apocalyptic New Mexico, was labeled "appropriative" — as in, culturally — in an online review. Another way of saying this is I, the author, was accused of writing a culturally appropriative novel. This made me ask myself: What or who is my novel appropriating? What are the ways in which it could it be appropriative? In what ways have I been appropriative as an author? Do the answers to these questions, or even the act of asking the questions in the first place, mean authors should write about only that which we've directly experienced in our lives, rather than whatever we can imagine and empathize with? Or does it all add up to something more complicated?
I am a Latina writer, a Mexican-American woman who grew up in the desert, on the Mexicali border. My dad is white. My mom's family has traced our lineage to the Pueblo in New Mexico. My great-great grandmother crossed the Sonoran Desert and married a Puebloan man and had my great-grandmother before they worked as migrant farmworkers across the Southwest and up and down California, picking pecans and citrus. My great-grandfather Natividad Efren Casas crossed from Durango to Juarez up to El Paso, and they all ended up in downtown Los Angeles, where my great grandma sewed in the garment district and my great grandparents owned a little corner restaurant that sold deli sandwiches and piloncillo and where my Grandpa Rafael accidentally burned down the shed with his friend Tommy when they were nine years old with a box of newspapers and matches. 2615 E. 1st Street, Los Angeles, my grandpa says. My bisabuelas are Veronica Martinez Lopez and MarΓa Bracamonte Casas.
I am also a daughter of the revolution, says my Grandma Marge, my father's mother, who came here from Canada when she was a teenager, whose life has been tumultuous and wild and beautiful, and who has supported my writing from the beginning. In my heart, I affectionately call her my white grandma. Because I grew up Mexican-American, identifying with my mom and brother, whose father is Mexican, spending most of my time with my mom's family and my Mexican-American cousins, aunts, uncles, comadres and compadres. My mother told me again and again that I was a daughter of Mexican and indigenous queens: she grew up with the stories from her abuela, my bisabuela, who recounted them in turn to me.
When I was nine years old, the same age as Grandpa Rafael when he burned down the shed, the whole family visited New Mexico, packed into my uncles' two huge vans, to find our family's roots. We visited Las Cruces and the chapel in Old Mesilla to locate our antepasados' graves and were caught in a lightning storm in White Sands, where my Grandma Linda, the strong matriarch of our familia, rolled down the hills with us. A decade ago, my mom, my own babies, my partner, and I moved to New Mexico, following our roots and hearts back to this land that my familia crossed to bring us safety and prosperity, and where my bisabuela's ancestors had been all along, connected to the Ancient Ancestors of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico when it was still The Place, the land, Mother, the center of the world.
When I came to New Mexico, I was searching for a way to keep breathing. For hope. For life. I've suffered from sometimes debilitating depression and mental illness since I was a young teenager, and I came home to find my antepasados, my ancestors, to guide me through.
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Someone had told me there's a place in New Mexico where people disappear. I'm a voracious reader and scholar, and interested in the interstices of science, religion, myth, belief, art, and hope, so I began researching my family's roots as well as the nuclear history of New Mexico, looking for the origins of that story. I learned that the history of the indigenous peoples here is enmeshed with the atomic history, but I could not find examples of the disappearance place explored in literature.
Calling on stories I learned from anthropological scholarship and memoirs dating back as far as 100 years, from scholars and people both indigenous and white, I wrote a place for us — a place my heart and my mother's heart and the hearts of all our mothers before us had belonged. That became my novel, "Trinity Sight."
Into my fictional narrative I incorporated the stories of Puebloan people who were not a part of my own lived experience growing up on the Mexicali border. I called on Zuni stories, of a culture and people I immediately loved when I read them ten years ago, beginning with "Water Jar Boy," and from my visits to Zuni. I wove the stories of the people of this land, along with my own lived experiences — as well as my hopes and dreams and fears and loves and failings, as a 26-year-old mama living in poverty, working as an adjunct without health insurance, a Chicana whose mama has reminded her since she was a little girl that she is a Mexican queen — to write "Trinity Sight."
I went onto Goodreads the other day and saw that a reader has given it two stars. In their review the reader writes that my book is appropriative.
This week, Jeanine Cummins, an author who as recently as four years ago described herself as a white woman with no desire to write about race, has received much harsher criticism than a lukewarm Goodreads review for her new novel "American Dirt," about a Mexican mama trying to cross the border. The reviews are out, and several are damning. Not only have critics pointed out the ways in which the wider publishing industry passes elevates a writer like Cummins over Latinx folks already writing these stories, the reviews make clear that Latinx folks are also doing it much better, both on a cultural competence level and in the crafting of characters Cummins claims are meant to "humanize" migrant peoples.
The degree to which "American Dirt" has been elevated by the industry matters. Cummins' book has been showered with astounding levels of pre-publication money and attention — a seven-figure advance, a launch party featuring (of all things) barbed-wire floral centerpieces, four separate pieces in the New York Times, rapturous blurbs from prominent authors, and now, a berth in Oprah's Book Club.
Cummins achieved this on the assumed strength of a book being marketed as the story that will humanize the border. A woman who apparently identified as white until she became known for writing a book about nonwhite people said she hoped "American Dirt" would help give migrants, thought of as a "faceless brown mass," some humanity. As Latino Rebels notes, Cummins wrote, "I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it." As if Latinx writers haven't been writing our hearts out — speaking, singing, chanting our hearts out — here in our Ancestral lands for millennia?
Someone asked me, what about the fact that Cummins' grandmother is Puerto Rican? Is it still cultural appropriation?
Well, now you see, I am no expert. Depending on your belief about whether Latinx and indigenous peoples are ancestrally connected and share claim to the stories, I may have appropriated, and I've been called out for it. Whether Cummins' Puerto Rican heritage gives her the right to Mexican stories isn't really the point.
And I'm not saying white people can't write about Mexico or Mexicans.
And I hope you're not saying I had no right to write "Trinity Sight."
But Latinx and indigenous peoples are still not getting paid and credited and lauded at consistently high levels for our work telling our stories. And that makes no sense when we are the experts on our lives.
(For perspective: I received $12,000 dollars for "Trinity Sight." Not enough to pay off my credit cards after all the years living in poverty, but more money than I'd ever received for my writing before, aside from my National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, which allowed me the time to write my novel in the first place, as well as two books of poems.)
Whatever any of us are writing — whatever voice we're writing in, whatever story we're telling — we should be asking ourselves: Who benefits? Who is already telling these stories without the benefit of the privileges and platforms we can access? Who is being paid — and paid well — for telling these stories? Who is being ignored and why?
These systemic differences in access and privilege matter in the publishing industry, where according to Forbes, Latinx representation accounts for 6% of the industry, yet Latinx folks make up 17% (or about 55 million) of the U.S. population. In that same survey, no editors self-identified as Native/indigenous. A Publisher's Weekly 2015 annual survey confirmed the paucity of Latinx and indigenous representation in the industry: , and while PW claims the 2018 survey shows an overall increase of diversity, shifting from 86% to 84% white, the new survey includes no Native representation at all, and Latinx decreased to 3%.
Beyond the publishing industry, systemic differences in access and privilege represent life or death matters. Native women are more likely to go missing than any other demographic of women in the United States; there were 5,712 missing Native women in 2016 alone, and the statistics haven't improved in the past four years. Native people have a 39% poverty rate; for Latinx peoples it's 23%.
This topic is so fraught and multifaceted, and I appreciate that the literary community is engaged in this discussion, a microcosm for the larger social/political inequalities that Latinx and indigenous peoples face. We need to continue exploring its depths, no matter what. We should consider what those depths mean for us as individuals, and as part of larger communities, and we should do the hard work of examining our own work and intentions and results. This means calling ourselves out when needed. And I am.
My deepest hope is that I have not caused damage, that I have not overstepped in drawing on the sacred that uplifted me, which I wove into the plot of my novel in order to uplift other Latinx and indigenous peoples. I tried very hard to share only those stories that have already been in the archaeological record and also to contextualize them since many were originally interpreted and written through a white lens. My goal, first and foremost, has been to encourage and strengthen Latinas and indigenous girls and women. I am committed to this uplifting in word and in deed: Whatever funds I earn that allow me to subsist beyond paycheck to paycheck, I also contribute to the empowerment of Latinx and indigenous girls and women. If my work does not serve this goal, then I do need to be called out.
I truly believe that my experience, as a woman of color who grew up with the knowledge of my ancestral roots and the prejudices against me for being Latina, have given me the insight to tell the story of "Trinity Sight" with the nuance, empathy, and grace that it deserves. It was never written for the white gaze. I wrote to my hermanas and hijas, always. I found and created a place for us where we would be safe.
But writing about experiences outside of our own is not only about empathy or imagination, though these are important. The stakes are higher. Yes, we should write the stories and worlds and experiences we're called to write, that burn within us. But who is the writing serving? What are our intentions? Why are we called to write a particular story?
My intention was always about serving my community, my family, people of color, Latinx and indigenous people — reminding us how our ancestral connection to the land and its spiritual possibilities give us strength and courage. I never aimed to speak for another culture. If indigenous readers feel I have, then I invite conversations and I will listen.
Cummins has responded to the criticism of her book, that she has no right to tell this story, by saying that while according to the "court of public opinion" she is "the white lady," she sees herself as Latinx. This response, paired with her own declaration just a few years ago that "in every practical way, my family is mostly white" and her admission that she'll "never know the impotent rage of being profiled, or encounter institutionalized hurdles to success because of my skin or hair or name" shows a lack of self-awareness and a conflation of lived experience versus ancestral heritage. It must take extreme bravado and entitlement to switch so seamlessly between identities and cultures. The world has seen me as a Latina since I was a little girl, and treated me accordingly, though I still do have light-skin privilege compared to my darker hermanxs. If Cummins can decide that she has the right to tell the stories of the people who have been living and writing them longer than she's publicly called herself Latinx, then it doesn't sound like she's able to look beyond herself, her privilege, or her own stake in the story she's appropriated, even as she claims to be serving as a "bridge." Perhaps she is familiar with Gloria AnzaldΓΊa and CherrΓe L. Moraga's indispensable anthology of feminist writing, which makes clear that the bridge has always been upon the backs of women of color, who have survived by splitting ourselves, making bridges of ourselves. That Cummins believes she can enter this world (of oppression, racism, fear, violence) when she chooses (and by that logic, leave whenever she chooses), then, no, I don't think she understands why her critics are saying she doesn't have a right to this story.
I do believe writers shouldn't feel limited to writing only through experiences that we can personally claim 100% "ours," or write only characters and voices and personas that we "own." Identity is not all. But for many of us, particularly writers of color, disabled writers, and LGBTQ+ writers, identity is how we've been labeled and understood and interpreted – how we've been ignored, slighted, ridiculed, swept aside. How I've been mistaken for a member of the cleaning staff and spoken down to again and again by white folks with all the best intentions. I've lived as a woman of color my whole life and write from that perspective.
At the same time, publishers are supposedly invested in the #ownvoices campaign, in an effort to work toward increasing diversity. My publisher has told me it's a major marketing point that a writer is telling their own story in their own voice. This is supposed to give people of color a boost in platform, yes?
And yet here is a typical way a big publishing house — the kind that could bestow seven-figure advances and get books in Oprah's hands — will find to say no to a writer like me, even as I'm praised as a "star on the rise":
"I really enjoyed the themes that Jenn plays with in this collection and found her imagery truly stunning. Jenn is clearly so talented and definitely a star on the rise. However, while [REDACTED] is always on the lookout for fresh new voices, we struggled to find a truly commercial way to position Jenn as her platform isn't quite as robust as we so wanted it to be in order to break her out in a big way."
Too often we are out here telling our "own" stories, and yet we — POC and disabled people and queer/trans folks perhaps especially — are being passed over in favor of others who are writing those stories for us, who are taking the mic instead of passing it.
There is pressure to stay in our own lanes. At the same time there is the pressure that comes from being told our own stories are not enough.
It is important to me to tell my protagonist's story — that of a Latina at the heart of an epic adventure. I'd never read or seen any badass Latina/indigenous protagonists slaying demons and taking names; I wrote this book so that women and girls like me, like my daughter, could see ourselves reflected in stories that stretched in different directions than what white, mainstream America thinks we should star in. My protagonist is a mother but she is also a professor, an anthropologist, and a force to be reckoned with. She becomes a monster slayer and saves the lives of those around her. I've lived in fear that someone would accuse me of not being indigenous enough to tell my antepasados' stories alongside her story, though I've felt commissioned to do so, called to do so, by my spirit and my familia, all my life. And now it's happened.
So I ask myself again. What were my intentions?
To find hope in the ancestral stories and to champion the healing and renewing possibilities that Latinx and indigenous wisdom offer us.
To add my voice to the conversation of strong writers of color, Latinx and indigenous folks already doing the work. Here's a list of powerful indigenous books to start with from the Chicago Review of Books. I'd like to call special attention to two of them, recent post-apocalyptic and indigenous futurist stories working in a similar vein to mine: "Trial of Lightning" by Rebecca Roanhorse and "Future Home of a Living God" by Louise Erdrich (both of which I read only after finishing my novel, since I was writing concomitant to Erdrich and Roanhorse, who published these beautiful books the year before mine came out). I'll carry these books alongside my own, sisters in the fight for survival, recognition, and healing.
What were my intentions? Not to speak for. Not to give humanity to. To uplift. To recognize the gifts and talent and light and spark that already exist. And to keep lighting that for generations to come, mis hijas y mis nietas, until the time all Latinas and indigenous women are seen for the queens and badasses we've always known we are.
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