Show notes
Kate Rope’s new book, Strong as a Girl is not only well-written and thoroughly researched, it includes the voices of so many girls and young women. In this week’s episode, Jess talks with Kate about how she managed to secure interviews with these girls, get permission to use their voices, and manage the paperwork around all those releases. Find Kate via her website: Kate Rope, @kateropewriter on Instagram, and her Substack Strong as a HumanTranscript Below!Jess LaheyHey, it’s Jess Lahey. If you’ve been listening to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast for any length of time, you know that, yes, I am a writer, but my true love—my deepest love—is combining writing with speaking. I get to go into schools, into community organizations, into nonprofits, into businesses, and do everything from lunch and learns to community reads to just teaching about the topics that I’m an expert in, from the topics in The Gift of Failure, engagement, learning, learning in the brain, cognitive development, getting kids motivated, and yes, the topic of over-parenting and what that does to kids’ learning—two topics around The Addiction Inoculation, substance use prevention in kids, and what I’ve been doing lately that’s the most fun for me, frankly, is combining the two topics. It makes the topic of substance use prevention more approachable, less scary when we’re talking about it in the context of learning and motivation and self-efficacy and competence and, yes, cognitive development.So if you have any interest in bringing me into your school, to your nonprofit, to your business, I would love to come—you can go to jessicalahey.com, look under the menu option “Speaking,” and go down to “Speaking Inquiry.” There’s also a lot of information on my website about what I do. There are videos there about how I do it. Please feel free to get in touch, and I hope I get to come to your community. If you put in the speaking inquiry that you are a Hashtag AmWriting listener, we can talk about a discount, so that can be one of the bonuses for being a loyal and long-term listener to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast. Hope to hear from you.Multiple SpeakersIs it recording? Now it’s recording. Yay! Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. Try to remember what I’m supposed to be doing. All right, let’s start over. Awkward pause. I’m going to rustle some papers. Okay. Now, one, two, three.Jess LaheyHey, welcome to Hashtag AmWriting. This is the podcast about reading all the things—short things, long things, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, articles, queries, book proposals. This is the podcast about writing all the things, but more than anything else, this is the podcast about getting the writing done, getting the work of being a writer done. I’m Jess Lahey. I’m the author of The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation, and you can find my work at The Washington Post and The New York Times and The Atlantic and lots of other places.And today I have a guest—a guest I’m very, very excited about. So today I’m going to be talking with Kate Rope about a topic that I have wanted to cover for a while and have not had exactly the right person to cover the topic with. Kate Rope is a writer. She is a journalist, and she’s had articles at a lot of the same places that I have, actually—like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and things like that. She wrote a wonderful book called Strong like a Mother [Strong as a Mother], and her new book, Strong like a Girl [Strong as a Girl], is coming out in October—October 14, to be precise. And thank you so much, Kate, for coming on the podcast.Kate RopeOh, I’m so excited. It’s a dream come true. It’s—it’s literally like leveling up in my world.Jess LaheyOkay, so help me remember where we actually first met? It could have been through Jess Foundation people, because those people in common.Kate RopeNo, no, it was before then. I think I just sought you out for—for being a source for a couple of articles.Jess LaheyOh, okay.Kate RopeJust because of having read your The Gift of Failure.Jess LaheyNormally what I do—what I need, what our computers need now—is a function called “How do I know blah, blah, blah?” Because there are all these people that, like, we know them from online, or I know them because I’ve used them as a source somewhere for some article. So I got on my computer, and I looked in my little, you know, search terms, and I put your name in, and I was looking for, like, our earliest contact, and I couldn’t find it. But I think our computers need, like...Kate RopeI think it was a phone call.Jess LaheyHow—oh, okay, well, there you go.Kate RopeI think that’s why there’s no record of it.Jess LaheyWell, either way, I’m so glad we’re talking now. I love, love, love your new book. I’ve been fortunate enough to read an early version of it. It’s really lovely. You ended up with a beautiful cover—I can’t wait for everybody to see it. I will be posting a picture of it in the show notes. But I wanted to talk to you—and you actually came up with this independently—but this is this topic I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time: about interviewing kids specifically. Like, logistically, there are a lot of hurdles to get through when you interview kids There can be, I know, depending on, like, the when, the where, the why, and the how. But I wanted to talk a little bit about interviewing—how we interview kids, how we interview people in general, how we get permission, how we approach people. So since you had sort of this idea to begin with, I would love for you to start and talk a little bit about your book—how on earth you got access to the people you talked to in your book, and how that process went for you.Kate RopeSure. So it goes back to my first book. I will admit to having a bias—I do not like books that have case studies that open chapters, and so it’s like, “Sarah and her family could never get homework done,” and so it, you know, went for, you know, this is what they went through. And if you don’t relate to that particular story, you check out. So for my last—my last book, Strong as a Mother—I wanted to have the voices of all different kinds of moms and pregnant people, you know, sharing what their experience was, so that a reader could find some other person that had gone through what they had gone through. And so for that...Jess LaheyCan I hit pause? Can I hit pause for just one second? So my—and this is, I’m going to be talking to my Authority to Author person that I’ve been interviewing for a series that I’m doing on going from being an authority to being an author—and we talk a lot about this: like, what’s your framing narrative for the chapter? How do you create narrative? So I want to make sure at some point we talk about—so if you’re not a fan of sort of the case study approach, how do you go about thinking about creating a narrative to use to couch your data, so that it’s not just about data?Kate RopeYeah, I do have stories in there. So I might have, you know, a couple of paragraphs with a particular story that illustrates, you know, whatever we’re talking about in the chapter, but it doesn’t ground the whole chapter in one experience. So…Jess LaheyI like that.Kate RopeYeah, it’s trying to bring in different, different viewpoints. I tend to write very much, like, voice-forward. So I bring people in, and I talk about, you know, the research, but I don’t tend to be really clinical or academic. So I tend to kind of create the narrative. I bring the people’s stories in within the body of the text. But then what I did in Strong as a Mother was, at the end of each chapter, I had quotes from pregnant people and moms about whatever the topic was. So, let’s say it was a chapter on breastfeeding, or choosing how you’re going to feed your kid. I wanted the mom who said, “I never wanted to breastfeed. I went to the hospital; I put a sign on my door that said, ‘Do not bring a lactation consultant in here. I know what I’m doing. I’m doing formula.’”I wanted the woman who was like, “Breastfeeding is all I ever wanted to do in my whole life, and it just didn’t work, and I had to stop. And it was heartbreaking, but I got through it.” I wanted the woman who was like, “This was the one thing that worked out for me, and I loved it, and I did it till my child was four.” Because then, at the end of the chapter, you’ve read this whole chapter on making choices about feeding your child that feel good to you and that work for you—and adjusting if life makes it not possible to live out that particular choice. And then I wanted them to see people who had done it, and who’d gotten through it. So that’s the way I did Strong as a Mother. And it was funny—I had so many in the end, and the only ding I got in Publishers Weekly was that they wanted more. But we had to cut so many, because otherwise the book would have been, like 600 pages long.Jess LaheyWhich is interesting, because then I have to—I, you know, if I’m going to go with, as I did both in The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation, I chose one framing narrative. So I have to be really careful about, how can I make this framing narrative as general, as appealing to as many people as possible? Because it is going to be a very thin slice, no matter what you do. But how you generalize that for people who may be experiencing something different is—it’s a hard thing to do. So that’s a really interesting choice to have to make—to say, okay, I’m not going to focus it on this one story versus, I’m going to give lots of different ways to people. I like thinking about that.Kate RopeIt’s sort of like if…Jess LaheyBecause I get stuck in…Kate RopeYou went to a moms’ group…Jess LaheyThe way I do things…Kate RopeYeah, it’s—you had went to—then why do you go to a moms’ group early on when you have your baby? So that you don’t feel like a weirdo and somebody else is going through the same thing. So I kind of wanted this to be, like, three pages of a moms’ group for, you know, perinatal depression and anxiety, breastfeeding, sex, co-parenting—whatever the topics were. I wanted them to feel like they had entered a room with peers who were open to all the different experiences, you know, one can have when going through, you know, trying to make or bring a child into your home. You know?Jess LaheyI like that. Thank you for opening my eyes to a different way. It’s just what you’re used to, I suppose, and how you want to go about entering into your storytelling.Kate RopeYeah, and so for Strong as a Girl, that didn’t feel quite the right way to go. So what I wanted to do was—and I’m a journalist, so I don’t even have, like you have—you’re a teacher, you’re trained. I am trained as a journalist. So all of the, you know, there’s some stories and advice that come from me living out my experience—me mostly doing things that I’ve learned from experts—but most of the actual advice and tips and everything is coming from experts. So I know I’m going to interview experts—experts for the book—and then I wanted to interview girls themselves, because I wanted to hear from them. What do they want? You know, basically, you know—this book is written for caregivers and parents of kids who identify as girls, elementary-age kids who identify as girls, so big, five to twelve. And you know, you can talk with ten and up, I would say. But, you know, five, six, seven, eight was not necessarily where I was going to get my, you know, sort of most self-reflective comments on what helps them and what doesn’t.Jess LaheyAlthough you do get great—you do get great quotes from kids those age.Kate RopeAgreed, agreed, agreed. So I went with, you know, kind of, you know, middle, upper elementary, middle school, all the way up through college. And I gathered focus groups together—and we can talk about why I did focus groups—but the whole point, the whole—what I wanted in the book was girls and young women reflecting on their childhoods: what helps them, what were the things that people in their lives did that were really helpful to them, and what were the things that they wish they had done differently or didn’t have access to? So that it was literally like—the way I would start off the focus groups is, I’d be like, “Pretend you’re talking to an auditorium of caregivers, and you get to tell them exactly the best way to do this job, like the way that’s going to help you the most to just— I want to know those things.” So for that...Jess LaheyOkay, so let’s talk about the focus groups. Yeah, the focus groups—because I think A) brilliant, B) how on earth do you get—do you pull a focus group together? Like, it’s something that when most people hear focus groups, they think of, like, oh, you know, this is how you beta test a movie, like.Kate RopeYeah... “Do you like this toilet paper?Jess LaheyYou do a test for a movie and see what the focus group thinks. Right? Exactly. How on earth do you, as a journalist, pull together a focus group? Because that’s such an incredible, valuable— and how do you select who’s going to be in your focus group?Kate RopeYeah, so I have to give—so I have several writing groups, and one of them is professors in the Education Department at Georgia State. So they all write papers and stuff, and we get together, and I write whatever I’m writing, and so—and they’re all in education, and they’re all in early education. And so they interview kids, and so they said to me right off the bat, “You have to do focus groups. You have to have groups.” Because adults, you know, typically one-on-one, you can get them to start talking. But with kids, they’re going to respond to each other, and they’re going to riff off each other and develop a rapport. But—but you can’t have too many. There were definitely some focus groups—I would say the sweet spot is maybe four to six. Six starts to get a little unwieldy, only because you can’t keep them for three hours, and they all have so much good stuff to say. And so I had focus groups that were anywhere from two people to—I think, I think I had a seven—and they were virtual, because the girls were from all over the country and young women, and I wanted them to represent different lived experiences of girls.So, you know, girls are not a monolith. You know, there are some things unique to being a female in our society—challenges, strengths, all those things—and then there are things, you know, that are unique to being a girl of color or living with a physical disability. So I wanted to talk with groups of girls who could speak to just the experience of being a girl and what helped them, and then also whatever, you know, their specific identity or lived experience was—what were the additional inputs that were helpful to them, or additional obstacles that they have ideas about how to help girls overcome. So in that case, I wrote—I reached out to organizations. So I reached out to a bunch of different organizations that work with girls of color, and I just said, “This is what I’m doing.” And literally in the acknowledgments, I say to those organizations, like, “You didn’t have to return my email, but you did,” because I just blind-emailed a bunch of organizations and said, “Here’s what I’m doing. Do you have—?” And a lot of these organizations have, like, an advisory council, or a summer camp or they just, you know, work with the same girls again and again. They have ambassador programs. So, you know, they could—they reached out to their network and said, “Who wants to do this?”And so that was one approach. Same thing with having a focus group of girls living with a physical disability—I reached out to the Disability EmpowHer Network, and they helped me connect with, in that case, I think they were mostly young women. I think they were all about college age, maybe some in high school.And then, let’s see—for neuro—I wanted a big group of girls with neurodivergence, and that I just did pretty much by word of mouth. I created Google Surveys, Google Forms s…
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