Bathsheba Demuth reads from Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, billed as the first comprehensive history of Beringia, the Arctic lands and waters that stretch from Russia to Canada. In this episode, we discuss a passage about walruses and the challenges of writing about nontraditional history subjects. Bathsheba talks to Jon and Cory about:
Turning an academic dissertation paper into a trade history book
Researching the history of commercial whaling in the 1840s
Taking inspiration from poets
The luxury of writing as a graduate student
Creative nonfiction writing exercises
Writing while running
Bathsheba’s passage, from Floating Coast:
Walruses are coastline embodied. They cannot eat without the sea, feeding a hundred or more feet underwater, where they root beds of clams and benthic worms from the mud. But they must breed and birth in the air. So the herds slide and wallow between, riding the edge of the sea ice south in autumn, then north through the Bering Strait in summer, sometimes leaving the ice to flop onto patches of sandy earth. Like whales, they concentrate rich seas in their bodies—over a ton for females, more than two tons for males. Walruses are not as fat as bowheads; the mussels they eat take their cut of the sunlight. But beneath inches of furrowed skin, a third of a walrus’s body weight is blubber. They do labor no person can, transforming submarine muck into useful tissue and hauling it to shore, drawing a line of energy from the sea onto the solid world.
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör
The Passage. Innehållet i podden är skapat av The Passage och inte av,
eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.
