RINDWY: Writing Together

In which we reflect on what it was like to find our collective voice. (Spoilers: it was really hard! But also really awesome!)

As always, be sure to visit keepingit101.com for full show notes, homework, transcripts, & more.

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Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion is proud to be part of the Amplify Podcast Network.

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Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 0:17

This is keeping it 101, a killjoys, Introduction to religion podcast, which is part of the amplify podcast network, we are grateful to live teach and record on the current ancestral and unceded lands of the Abenaki and Wabanaki peoples, as well as the lands of one federally recognized native nation, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and seven North Carolina state recognized tribal entities. Increasingly, though, native folks are pushing us to forgo land acknowledgements altogether and focus on action items. So let's start with land back. And as always, you can find material ways to support indigenous communities on our website.

Megan Goodwin: 0:52

What's up? Nerds? Hi, hello. I'm Megan Goodwin, a scholar of American religions, race, gender and politics.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 0:59

Hi, hello. I'm Ilyse Morgenstein Furst, an historian of religion, Islam, race and racialization and South Asia.

Megan Goodwin: 1:07

Hi, hello.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 1:11

Well, hi, hello to you too.

Megan Goodwin: 1:15

What shall we fill this awkward opening time with jokes? Knock, knock, good lord, knock, knock.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 1:23

Who's there?

Megan Goodwin: 1:25

Interrupting ginger.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 1:26

Interrupting ginger Who?

Megan Goodwin: 1:29

it's me. Hi, hello. Welcome to our scholarly, very serious podcast.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 1:37

Please don't try to out dad joke me. I'm a mom.

Megan Goodwin: 1:43

I'm out of my element. I'm out I'm out of my element. I rescind my previous attempt

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 1:47

It was pretty good. Um, Igive it a solid 9.1

Megan Goodwin: 1:52

I will take that. I will take that very generous from the New Jersey Judge. Have we an episode to manage?

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 1:58

Yeah, yeah, we do. And this is our last in a series of shorter episodes answering broad listener questions about Religion is Not Done with You, our new book that's available everywhere you buy books now and how that book got made. Today, we're doing the one that I sort of love to talk about the most, actually, which is, how did we figure out how to write together?

Megan Goodwin: 2:25

Yeah, okay, so lots of trial and error and a couple of really hard conversations and yeah. And then it was book! Episode over!

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 2:34

dude,

Megan Goodwin: 2:36

fine. I will be more detailed. But honestly, trial and error and a lot of hard conversations and painstaking line reads. A lot of you actually asked how we wrote together. I think this is probably the question I get the most when I talk about having written this book, is like, Oh, what was that like? I was like, it was really hard, and also a delight, and I loved it. And it was so hard, it was so much harder than I thought it was gonna be. So, like, some of that is a broad like, how do you co author a book? And some of it was way more specific. Like, how do you balance, like, friendship with professional life? Or, like, when did you even make time to do this? Or who wrote what part, or, yeah,

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 3:23

yeah, or my favorite, which was from my chair. And friend and Season Four Buddhism guest expert, Thomas Borchert, he said, How did we navigate our tone off the air?

Megan Goodwin: 3:37

I deeply appreciate that Thomas Anselm Borchert thinks that we moderate our tones ever and that we're not just like this all of the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, well, let's, let's do the easy parts

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 3:50

Well, anyway, we, we do find this to be a really interesting question that folks ask us a lot. I think sometimes, like searching for Goss. We see you Goss monsters who are like, give us the dirty, dirty on the inner workings of your relationship. And like, all right, you could ship us all you want, but like, there is nothing that dirty. We just had some hard conversation, but we could say more than that. So Goodwin from your from your perspective, how do we do this? first, right? Like, the technical stuff, we used Google Docs because we can edit at the same time. So that worked out pretty well. So after we figured out that Google Docs was the way to go, even though I have to admit, I don't love a Google Doc, I do not love a Google Doc. I have learned all the commands in Microsoft Word because I write and use several languages, but fine, Google Docs was actually the right technical tool for us, I think after we decided the theme of each chapter, not not the order, necessarily, but the themes, we sort of decided who would be the main author of each chapter based on our expertise.

Megan Goodwin: 4:58

Yeah, well, and I think that might have been the hardest part of the writing process, was figuring out, like, how the book was gonna get organized, because the introduction, I think, came together really super easy. We were clear on like, how we wanted to frame this conversation, because it was basically how we pitched the book to Beacon, and then we had a pretty good sense, I think, of what we what the header, the headers should be. And then even after we had the headers, we still kind of had to dig through. How do we do this? Right? So, like we were supposed to be collaborating on the introduction, or, sorry, we were supposed to be collaborating on chapter one, and instead of collaborating. So, like, my personal writing style is Godzilla esque, in which I Trump through everything and just leave carnage in my wake. And, yeah. So instead of collaborating on chapter one, we both wrote different versions of chapter one in the same chapter, and then had to put it down and then have some of the aforementioned harder conversations about like, how this was gonna work. But once we had that conversation, once, I think we gave ourselves permission to let one of us kind of lead on the chapters where our expertise was most pertinent, things came together a lot more smoothly.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 6:30

Yeah, I don't know that I would call that the hardest part. I'm excited for my hardest part, but that's fascinating to listen to

Megan Goodwin: 6:38

We had so many, so many feelings about that part. Okay,

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 6:41

then we edited together. So once we had these beasts of chapters that needed real editing, we were just on a call like this, like we're on a video call and we're in the Google Doc and we're literally doing line edits. And sometimes we would read to each other, especially the stuff that we ourselves did not write so that we could hear it aloud, which I read to myself all the time. I constantly am talking to myself when I'm writing, because I talk better than I write, and so I like to hear how it sounds like Is this my actual voice, or is this like me cosplaying an old man or something? But we did that together.

Megan Goodwin: 7:18

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I, I do not read my stuff out loud, which I'm sure you can tell, given that you read everything that I write, and sometimes I have 15 ideas in one sentence. And if you try to say that, I'm not saying it's not a good practice or that I wouldn't benefit from it, I'm just saying I don't do it.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 7:35

I'm not saying I'm just saying I learned a long time ago that especially when I'm moving between languages, my English gets kind of funky, but also I can't I can't always hear what I wanted to say in my own voice. And actually, the thing I've learned from you is that my speaking voice and my teaching voice is often so much clearer than the voice I think I should be writing in as an academic. And so a way that I've tried to bridge that gap between like, fuddy duddy, take me seriously. I have real information that you need to know that's technical. And hey, hey kids, what's up like that? Like teacher voice, say it out loud, and to really feel like, oh, that does not sound like me. I don't talk like this.

Megan Goodwin: 8:23

This is how you talk.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 8:24

I talk to quote the great New Jersey adopterieno, best friend of mine, Michelle Visage.

Megan Goodwin: 8:31

this is how you talk. Yeah. So we, we did, editing together, tracking changes. But also, I like, I think the most productive pieces were the parts where we were sitting down together and doing that line by line, and then we did rewrites together so we would read it out loud and something wouldn't work, so we talked over the sticky bits or the word choice or flow in comments or calls, or the last part We wrote in the same room in a tiny little Airbnb in Edinburgh, which was delightful. It was delightful.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 9:11

Okay, so that's the technical stuff I'm going to talk about voice, because I found that to be the hardest thing we had to figure out. So I know that we I know we definitely had a hard conversation about structure and process, but I found that the hardest part was to move from podcast voice, because historically, I have written most of our episodes, and sometimes that's just an outline, but a lot of times, dear nerds, I literally write imp. It gets color coded purple, and I write what I say, and then I write mpg, and it's color coded red, and I write what Megan says. And we are close enough friends that I actually know which lines are more Megan than are Ilyse. And Megan goes through and has final say, and she often like, it's not like she's reading. It's not like a mean director who's like, you didn't write what I said. You're just the voice actor like that's not happening. But like, for the most part, I have gotten the hang over the last four years of writing, as you might say, this point, but to write together as one voice, where it isn't in Ilyse's literal voice. She is saying this point about British India. And in Megan's literal voice, she is saying this thing about America. It's like together the Goodwin and Morgenstein Fuerst voice,

Megan Goodwin: 10:31

the good mo fu?

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 10:32

yeah. I was like, I can't think of a nickname for this. The GMF voice should be combined and yet distinctive. I found that to be the hardest, because there are things that I wanted to say really methodically and really slowly. And when I write the podcast, I let myself talk like that, in a way that you don't like talking. You don't like writing that way. You don't like talking.

Megan Goodwin: 10:54

I don't talk like that. I don't talk like that,

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 10:56

so I found like that was the part that was so tricky. We had spent all this time learning to write as individuals. Then we spent all this time as podcasters, learning how to podcast together, where we both have our fingerprints on every word that gets said, but we keep them distinct on purpose, and then in writing, when you're just getting whatever font is, the font of the book, and it sounds and like the reader is reading in their own voice in their head, or the voice actor is say, it's one voice actor who's talking for the audio book. So I found that really hard so that it wasn't, it wasn't too much of you or too much of me, but was perfectly both of us together.

Megan Goodwin: 11:45

Yeah, yeah. I guess for me, that isn't necessarily separate from the structure, because I felt like we developed a collective voice once we gave ourselves permission to kind of first draft where somebody was taking the lead, because the spot that we got into in Chapter One was we were both trying to talk at the same time in radically different tones and about different stuff. So once we said, Okay, we're going to split it up where we're doing an imperialism chapter and we're going to do a race chapter. We're going to look at sexuality and law, and then we're going to look at airports. And we could say, okay, Ilyse will take the lead on imperialism duh, and also this airports chapter, and Megan takes the lead on the race in the US, and the sexuality and law stuff in the US. And then we can add in, but we don't have to necessarily both do the driving. In each chapter, somebody gets to drive in the content chapters, and then we can go back and kind of edit it for me. Let me basically like, just get off your nuts about this isn't this isn't, I don't write like this. And so having not being responsible for, like, the content parts of an imperialism chapter, because obviously, you know that material better, I could just kind of go through and go like, Okay, if it needs to say this, and I'm going to trust Ilyse that it needs to say this, then how do we smooth it out so that it feels a little more chatty, right? And what are the one or two things that I like maybe have to add here in a way that I would like, maybe have to add in a podcast episode that isn't in my area of expertise. And so that was kind of the that was kind of the magic moment for me, where I this is a thing that I'm working on with my therapist, but I gave up some control, and I backed off a little bit, and I trusted you, and I trusted our our professional and personal relationships, and the the drafts that came out of that felt like there was more, I guess, space for me to play around a little bit and not be so freaked out about what each chapter needed to include. So like, I was responsible largely for the the what is it? Three and four, and then you filled in. You were responsible for one in the conclusion, and then I filled in. And then, yeah, going over it, line by line, it kind of just evolved into this collective voice that isn't really either of us. It is, which is, I don't know it's honestly my favorite part of the book.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 14:29

Yeah, I, I It's curious to hear you phrase it that way, because I really felt like I couldn't figure out the tone until we were well into until we were well into it. So the structure piece of it wasn't my magic moment. The structure piece for it was helpful to facilitate you backing the fuck off on some of these. Honestly, yeah, like especially, honestly, it was especially chapter one. One, not the Yeah, chapter two was imperialism, but chapter one on the baseball chapter where it was like, you were just doing that thing of, like, I know four things that happened in three years, and I need them to be everywhere. There's 10 pages of early aughts Boston Red Sox. And I was like, none of this is relevant, right? And like, the order that you're doing this in is too fast, like, that chapter felt so fraught, like really honestly, if you remember, we wrote that chapter and then touch it again for nine months because we could not figure out how to write it together. And that for me, when that chapter could actually feel good, I was like, Okay, we figured this out. Figured out that we actually can't have a joke in every line that like this is not the podcast. We cannot put jokes on jokes on jokes. You get one drink per joke, which is a very famous Conan O'Brien when he ran the Simpsons. Like, you get one joke in a joke, right? And I love that. It's a line that I keep in my pocket of like, you can't put a hat on a hat. Like, one joke, one joke. Each joke is one joke,

Megan Goodwin: 15:59

whereas my brain is all Bartholomew cabins all the way down.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 16:02

And like, I'm not mad at that when we banned her, but I think when we were writing, it felt cluttered. It felt like, like an over graffitied wall where the effect is really interesting, but I don't know what I'm looking at, whereas, like, I feel like, when we pared it down, it's like, okay, there's like, a main there's a mural here, and there's lots of different art styles, maybe, but there is, like, one theme, and we know exactly what's going on.

Megan Goodwin: 16:26

Yeah,

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 16:29

I think part of the writing process. So all right, we got it together. I think we're both saying the same thing, but in different processes, different parts of the process. But I think, I think one of the other things that we really had to figure out was audience. How do you feel about that?

Megan Goodwin: 16:44

Yeah, it was. I mean, we talked about this a little bit on the like, how did you come to write a book episode? But understanding that book audiences might overlap with podcast audiences, but they're not exactly the same folks, and that there are folks that are more likely to pick up a book than they are to pick up a podcast. And also, there are a lot more teachers, for example, who are likely to assign a book than they are to assign a podcast, keeping all of that in mind while still trying to sound like us and still trying to write an accessible and engaging way that is not as frantic or mad cap as the podcast can get was, yeah, it was a lot to kind of navigate. But again, and interestingly, I'm realizing this as I'm talking this through, once we had the structure locked, I had a much better sense of how, how I wanted to talk to folks who are going to be interested in this material, but not necessarily tune into a podcast.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 17:41

Yeah, and I think for me, it because I code switch more than you do. Like, I have different personas that show up in different places

Megan Goodwin: 17:49

you read a social cue. So you have different ways of speaking in different situations, whereas I'm just you

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 17:55

unabashedly you at all times, and it is are delightful. Whereas, like, I have made a whole career and life out of this is this version of me, and this is the way that version speaks. It's the way my accent comes in and out, which most of the time, except when I am altered or tired or fuming angry, is a very controlled it's very controlled. And so I think for me, figuring out how to write this book with, with or without you actually would have been really hard, because this is between my, like, stodgiest Islamic Studies Journal of the Asiatic, like, Royal Asiatic society voice, because, like, not for nothing, like, that's my training, right? Like, it's a lot of old men who speak 15 languages who are grilling you at every opportunity, and so you learn how to speak in those spaces really differently. And so I'm not sure I would have figured out what this tone could have been, or what this style could have been without the experience of totally loose writing for the podcast, but also without you being there, like I always talk like this. This is who I am. This is how I talk. And so I think that gave me some freedom to both imagine an audience that would go to the public library to pick up this book, or go to a Barnes and Noble to pick up this book, which is different than making sure a book exists so that my colleagues can read it, and then I can, like, get through the next tenure hoop. Yeah? Like, I need to really work on that in order to get right with where you were. Like, I knew what was wrong, but I couldn't quite figure out what felt right. Well, would you do it again? Would you write a book with me again?

Megan Goodwin: 19:37

I would write a book with you again.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 19:39

Not, not for a while, though,

Megan Goodwin: 19:41

I, like, I in in the great vein of books is what we do. I have left the traditional Academy, and yet I'm still unwilling to let go of my next book project, and I've got one planned after that. So, like, I would like to do some research writing for a while, but I would absolutely write a book with you again. And I would, I would. Like to think that maybe it would go smoother this time, but who can say?

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 20:05

all things considered? I actually think it went real smooth, but I think it was a fascinating part of our friendship to have to say like, I love you as a scholar, I read every word you write. You read every word I write, and have for honestly, more than a decade at this point. So it's not like, I don't know your tone. It was just so interesting to have that tone be my tone. It was like, oh, oh. When I don't talk in writing, I'm like, all for it. But when it has my name on it, and I'm like, Ooh, I don't these pants don't fit, this is wrong. Like, this is itchy. I'm wearing an itchy sock. You know?

Megan Goodwin: 20:39

well, and it has that. For me, it was also a thing of, like, I don't know, this is how I would say this. I don't see the problem. Slash, I'm not just saying it for me, I'm saying it for us, which is, that's a thing that I'm always going to work on, always, because I just don't think in teams. but also, like, in a real way, you have to think about how this book gets received within the academy in a way that I have the luxury of, like, not giving a shit about honestly. Like, I said, what I said? What are you gonna do? Not hire me some more. Suck it. So, which I think is, in some ways really freeing and in some ways maybe counterproductive. So I'm glad that we reached a balance.

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 21:21

Me too. well on that note, Megan, what do we have left to say?

Megan Goodwin: 21:27

We have left to say that you can find us across social media, still on Twitter, reluctantly and Insta and Tiktok and Facebook. And if none of that crumbles your cookie, we have a newsletter you can join via our website, which is keeping it one, oh one.com, drop us a rating review in your podcaster of choice,

Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst: 21:42

and if you are one of the people that are hoping to get us to come to your local bookstore to do a book reading, or to your campus to give a talk, that would be amazing. Please, please, please, do reach out to us, or better yet, to Caitlin Meyer, our incredible marketing and publicity Maven, over at Beacon. All of that contact information is over on our website, so get to it with that peace out nerds and

Megan Goodwin: 22:05

do your homework. It's on the syllabus. You

Belle: 22:30

it's my favorite part, because you see we shake please wish Prince Charming, but she won't discover that it's him till chapter three.