Sherine Hamdy: Roxanne, it was such a delight to read this book! I’m not sure what I was expecting – well, I’ll admit that I was expecting a more breezy murder mystery – but you did so much more! It was a real page-turner, I couldn’t put it down and was very intrigued and wanted to know what would happen next, but I definitely didn’t expect to encounter so much anthropological theory. And I don’t know how you did that without bogging down the pace!

I’d never seen Marx’s commodity fetishism explained so clearly – and I loved the discussion of Walter Benjamin’s misgivings about reproduced images, and all the interrelations between the camera and the gun. You tackle the history of visual anthropology and photography, the ethics of war photojournalism, paleontology, the use of dioramas – all the while keeping up the suspense – it was really so much fun for me.

So, I guess my first question is: who was your audience for this? Why so much anthropological theory? I mean, again, I loved it – but would non-anthropologists love it too? Who were you trying to reach? Aside from a good murder mystery, were you also thinking of it as a pedagogical tool?

Roxanne Varzi, with her student’s projects. Photograph by Luis Fonseca.

Roxanne Varzi: That’s a great question! My goals were to advocate for students with ADHD and dyslexia and teach some anthropology while breaking methodological boundaries in anthropology. I hope the book will serve as a good introduction to anthropology for undergraduates, will attract students to the major, even as early as senior year in high school, and help retain the students that come. I also wrote it for all those people who think anthropology is cool, but don’t know a lot about it and who happened to like a murder mystery. And I wrote it for people who like or need to learn through stories. I was appalled at the level of fake news and science denial, and everything that was going on politically during the pandemic and thought anthropology could be a great tool for everyone to use. Just this quarter my students said the most valuable thing they learned was how to read images.

I spent over a decade homeschooling a student with dyslexia who learns differently and I’ve learned so much about the importance of storytelling as a form of pedagogy and so I started experimenting. I really liked the idea of field notes as a way to bring in curriculum. I had already experimented with this in Last Scene Underground.  

The murder mystery first came to me when the character of Pete appeared in my head on my way home from Bozeman. I literally wrote the idea down on a napkin with traces of peanuts during my flight back. And then we landed in California, and I didn’t have any time to write until the [pandemic] lockdown, which is when I wrote the majority of the book. 

Sherine: Flight from Bozeman, Montana? Well, you anticipated my next question! Did you go to Bozeman to do the research for this book? Because it is all detailed so vividly as the setting of Alex’s graduate anthropological research and, well, someone else’s murder.

Roxanne: No, I didn’t. I was there on a family trip at winter break, and my son is huge into paleontology and so we spent a lot of time at the museum of the Rockies.

I also have a close family member who lives in Bozeman so we had a local guide who took us to all the cool hikes and places that I probably wouldn’t have gone to otherwise.

I’ve been out there twice –  both in the snow and without the snow, so I’ve had an opportunity to experience Yellowstone in two seasons. I’m very saddened about the extensive firings of National Park staff which is going to put the parks at risk for all sorts of things – fire, vandalism, less support to keep them open for visitors. Our National Parks are one of the best things our country has to offer. They are an amazing system, and they are the perfect blend of research, entertainment, education, and nature and it’s horrible to purposely undermine their ability to keep with that mission.

We must have spent a lot of time in the Maiasaura exhibit because that was very vivid in my imagination when I started writing the book.

I did make up the commercial places in Bozeman based on places that I had been, but the Honey Hive came right out of my imagination, and all of the names of those places like the Feed Barn, I also made up.

Sherine: Wow, again that’s really impressive. 

I had never heard of Frances Glessner Lee – who I learned, was the first female police captain in the U.S. and known as the mother of forensic science. Her Nutshell Murders is a blend of domestic dollhouse craft and forensic science and form the basis of detective training. They are an important anchor throughout the book. Was her work the initial spark for this book project? How did you come to learn of her and her nutshells?

Red Bedroom, by Frances Glessner Lee, the Smithsonian

Roxanne: I taught in the UCDC program [University of California’s program in Washington, D.C.] and I went to see her nutshells at the Renwick Gallery and I was absolutely mesmerized. I think I went back to the show a couple of times. I read up on her and just became completely fascinated. 

I don’t know if it’s an anthropological thing or a writerly thing but I tend to squirrel away experiences and nuggets for later and that was a big one that I knew I wanted to do something with, but I wasn’t sure what. 

I wrote my very first academic article for Public Culture back when I was a graduate student and it was about this little miniature world in Iran that was full of all of the iconic places to visit and I became very interested in theories of the gigantic and the miniature and was deep into reading Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press, 1992). 

I think I’ve always been a little fascinated by dioramas; I had a dollhouse when I was younger, but I had it more out of architectural interest. I’m also very into theater so it served as a stage as well. And now I am using dioramas as pedagogical tools, but I didn’t come to that until after I wrote the murder mystery. So my protagonist in a way led me to using dioramas in the classroom. Just this week in a reaction paragraph a student said she felt like Alex as she explored ethnography through a diorama project in class. 

Parsonage Parlor, by Frances Glessner Lee. Collection of the Harvard Medical School

Sherine: It sounds like you are a jeweler: you stow away all these gems, and wait to be inspired to put them all together into something really artful and beautiful. 

Roxanne: I love that, thank you! Another big theme in the book is that what some people call learning disabilities like dyslexia and ADHD can be superpowers in other settings. The protagonist has dyslexia and ADHD, and while she struggles with some things related to her coursework and dissertation, in other areas her different ways of learning prove to be a really helpful way to look at the world (and solve mysterious murders!) 

Sherine: Why was writing about dyslexia so important to you and this book?

Roxanne: My son was diagnosed with dyslexia when he was in kindergarten and it was very clear even back then that the public school system could not cater to students with dyslexia who are also gifted or what we call twice exceptional – kids who are gifted in some areas with learning disabilities in others. I believe that anyone with dyslexia or ADHD who has made it into college has been using all of their strength-based dyslexia skills to get there, and that they are most likely incredibly gifted, but it gets muted by the incredible struggles that come with dyslexia when it is not properly supported.

I initially wrote the book thinking about high school students and college students who struggle with dyslexia like my son but then after I was diagnosed, I understood my struggles keeping up with a lot of reading in graduate school. I especially had a hard time entering into works that were dry and that didn’t paint a picture – which is very necessary for dyslexic readers. 

At the same time, I would say that the other side of the coin with the inability to engage in dry theoretical texts lent me an ability or a strength at making theory relevant and real because it’s the only way I can see it. I need to apply theory immediately to something out in the world in order to understand it, and as a result, I am a better translator of theory perhaps – going back to your first question about why there was so much anthropological theory in there.

Sherine: You then bring Frances Glessner Lee’s nutshells together with anthropology, when our protagonist Alex, who struggles with dyslexia, proposes a multimodal approach to ethnography: instead of text alone, she will complement her dissertation by building dioramas of her interlocutors’ life stories of migration into Bozeman, Montana. Is this an actual method in multi-modal anthropology that you saw somewhere? Or did you – and your protagonist Alex – just entirely invent a new genre for doing anthropology?

Roxanne: Alex and I may have invented a new genre! It’s funny to have written it fictionally before I ever tried it myself. And then the next thing I knew, I was suddenly teaching it in the classroom. This is where fiction can create new realities… Which, rabbit hole alert … is why I love teaching about Neorealism. More about that in the book!

The diorama is an amazing tool, because as we learned in the murder mystery, it’s a great way to interview people about their space and their lives and material culture tells us a lot about a person. For example, some of my students decided to do a catalog of found objects in their junk drawers, which led to asking them all sorts of questions about where they got things and why they had them and it ended up being very philosophical. It also shows the research in a way that is more accessible, which is what the museum is all about… so it can be both a research tool and an output medium.

Sherine: I love all the interdisciplinarity and multimodality that you bring together – it’s so funny to me when people get hung up on their specific disciplines and don’t want to cross-contaminate – as if knowledge is actually bounded by these arbitrarily-made disciplines! Your book is full of so much knowledge and different pathways or fields a person could pick up, depending on their proclivities and interests, which is so generous of you as a writer/scholar, and also so generative for the reader. 

In your preface, you mention that Jack Horner is the only real person whose name you use. Well, I guess the only person who is still living. You also talk about Frances Lee Glasser, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, Susan Sontag and others who were also real people! 

Can you tell us a bit about how you came to know of Jack Horner and his work, and how he made it into these pages?

Jack Horner, Museum of the Rockies

Roxanne: I had started the book with Jack Horner as a character. Everyone else was in there as referents in discussions of academic theory, but he actually plays a role as one of the characters and he really belongs in the book, though I didn’t know why at the time. 

I just thought of him as the paleontologist who discovered the Maiasaura at the center of the exhibit at the Museum of the Rockies.  I didn’t really pay much attention to who he was beyond that. And then one day, my son came home from a mentoring program for dyslexia at Chapman University, and he was excitedly looking for his fossils to show the new faculty mentor who was a paleontologist. 

And I sort of absently asked him who it was, and he said Jack Horner. I’m not kidding. I had no idea Jack has dyslexia. I had no idea that Steven Spielberg, who is also dyslexic, had made Jurassic Park based on Jack’s work and that Jack was the model for Dr. Grant, the paleontologist character in Jurassic Park. 

And so of course I insisted on driving Rumi to Chapman the following week so I could talk to Jack and he was lovely. I told him he was a character in my murder mystery and he gave me his permission. Just last month, he was in the audience at a book talk I gave at Chapman, so it was really amazing to come full circle.

I wanted him to see what I had written about him  before going to press and as Jack still doesn’t enjoy reading text, I met him at a cafe and read those parts of the book aloud to him, which was even more gratifying, because I got to see his reaction on the spot. 

I really love reading out loud, although most people with dyslexia do not. Which is why I also really enjoyed narrating the audiobook myself.

Sherine: Is it true you’ve created a whole series? Can we expect a sequel soon?

Roxanne: Yes, there will be sequels! Book 2 takes place in Oslo, Norway, and focuses on the theories of sound and attention and will be coming out this year. Book 3 takes place in Joshua Tree [National Park, Southern California] and focuses on the anthropology of performance.

I had broadly conceived of doing a series with each book focusing on a different area of my own expertise: visual anthropology, sound, performance and so on. When you sign off serial rights anything can happen, especially if you’re not given full editorial control. For example I envisioned it as a National Parks murder mystery series, but then I ended up in Norway. I prefer to have the freedom not to define it before it’s finished! 

Another reason to be the publisher is that I can change things in the moment. I think a book can change and transform in the same way that its author does in her lifetime. If I want to edit or change anything I can do that immediately and re-distribute.  

You cannot do that once you’re bound to a publishing contract with a traditional press. But they, on the other hand, will have the right to change your words and language as they see fit in future editions and I’ve never liked the idea of giving away that kind of control. 

Sherine: Congratulations on the start of a new series, Roxanne – the book is so smart and so much fun, and I hope it gets many, many readers and listeners!

If you want to read more about Roxanne Varzi’s publishing decisions, read here.