They say if you are able to combine your passion with your gifts and your values, you have found your purpose. My next guest falls directly into that category. A gifted wildlife photographer, her photos have received many national and international awards and appeared in prestigious media outlets such as National Geographic and the BBC, which featured her photos of the Mola Mola sunfish. But she is best known for her remarkable underwater photos of whales from places as exotic as Tonga and as familiar as the Monterey Bay. Tonight you'll hear about her amazing journey, leading safaris in Africa, photo shoots in Antarctica, her contributions to science, a close encounter with a baby whale, and the controversial image of cats and dogs that put her in the national spotlight. I'm Becca Reeve and we'll be right back with Jodi Frediani. Welcome Jodi Frediani. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Oh well you're we're so happy that you have taken the time to share your thoughts with us today and to share all about your work, traveling the world, shooting all kinds of animals and and then focusing on whales. Just wonderful and speaking of of your whale photos, I would really like to start this interview by showing the audience what kind of work that you do and then we'll get back to how you how you got to do it. The first photo I'd like to show is of whales making bubbles. Can you talk about how you got this amazing photo? Sure and I find it interesting that you have decided to start with that photo because right now I'm working with a colleague on several papers on bubble use by humpback whales. So it's a very dear subject to me and I swim with humpback whales on the Silver Bank which is off the Dominican Republic and have been doing that for 20 years now and the males use bubbles in in competitive groups where they're competing to escort a female and usually what we see at the surface is a whale uh what's called the primary escort will come to the top come to the surface and blow this great big bubble blast so this is a great big bubble trail but sometimes they're blowing bubbles beneath the surface and if we're in a boat we don't necessarily see that. So I have been able to get in the water and sometimes the whale swims by but in this case we knew that this whale was swimming past us and we couldn't get in the water at that moment in time it wasn't appropriate so I just took my camera on the housing and I we're in a small boat I just leaned over the side stuck my camera in there and started shooting and so it is a little bit like a trail cam where you set it up where you expect the animal to be and and it takes photos every time it moves in this case I knew the animals was passing by I had no idea what it was doing what direction it was going in but I stuck my camera in the right way um and and just clicked the shutter and and got that image. So amazing where you when you got home or can you look at it there could you look at the boat and see if you got it? I can't wait that long I mean that's one of the blessings one of the blessings with digital photography is you don't have to wait until you get home and you send the film in and it comes back and you find out all the mistakes you made you have to get to find that out right away and you get the the satisfaction of knowing when you've actually captured something um and that and that is pretty unique scientists don't really know exactly all the things that whales are doing when they we are blowing those bubbles no I mean it's in fact um there are papers that have been done on um as I mentioned the competitive behavior where these whales grow blow great big bubbles at the surface and it's thought to be a way of screening the female from the other males who are in the group and showing how powerful they are and then there is kind of a bit of work that's been done on humpback whales using bubbles um in what's called cooperative bubble net feeding up in Alaska where they blow these these carousels of bubbles and capture the herring inside of them but the rest of it there's there's not really anything out there so I'm working with a colleague and we are preparing beginning to work on several papers to deal with that just exciting that is exciting and I I think that it is really um it's really wonderful how you've been able to keep your love of art and of animals and of conservation all all going at one time and we'll get back to the science work that you do with photography and uh but first I'm I would very like I would like to know how you managed to combine all this was it it seems like you're doing all the things you love and you've created more than a career you've created a life and how did would you was this your plan or did this evolve um so it's it's a long story and my life has evolved um through I've worn many hats let's put it this way I've had uh done many different things on my lifetime but when I was in high school at that moment where you're deciding what to do and what to study um when you go off to college I wanted to study biology um and I wanted to study art and I considered going to the Sorbonne and I considered going to Scripps University to study marine biology and um I I went a slightly different path but I was very interested at that time in studying um art and science and particularly I fascinated with animals and animal behavior I mean we always had I didn't have any brothers and sisters so my siblings were the dogs the cats the parakeets the lizards you know all the rest of the animals that we had my parents both love loved animals so we had a lot of pets and went to the zoo and um I I then detoured I went away and I and I studied photography in high school but I didn't really stick with it until um until I was an adult and took some classes at Cabrio College and found that I really loved the photography love photography and initially used it to photo for for advertising purposes because my um my husband at the time and I raised dairy goats and we sold them nationally and internationally and so I would photograph the goats and you know this is the perfect goat in its elbow and it wasn't until I basically retired from my various and sundry work um things that I began to really get into my photography and um combine come back around and combine the science and the art and my passion for animals now one of the one of the projects that you did I believe you did in graduate school did did hinge on your passion for animals it was about the other homeless homeless cats and dogs can you talk a little bit about you accepted that assignment and I think that must have been hard to do talk about that assignment it was definitely hard um at that point in time um and I should say that when I uh I said my life has gone through many many different directions I started out as a biology major and I went off to um the university and um and then then took a break got married has kids at goats did other things and then when I got divorced I went back to school and I studied art and photography and that project that you reference I was um doing a graduate program at UC Santa Cruz and my professor said my advisor said this request came in to do this project at the SPCA and if you don't want to do it I will do it but I think it's your project and it was to track two animals two dogs through the the whole process the intake process um you know what happened to the animals the adoption of one and the euthanasia of another and um I said okay because not only was it about animals and I had been involved it's one of my hats um training training animals training dogs and cats for many years and training people to deal with their animals behavioral issues and so we've done a lot of work uh at animal shelters but I had also always been fascinated about what I call um real real life processes that are hidden so um if I traveled in Europe and we went to a meat market and here we buy meat it's in a plastic it's plastic wrapped you know and and it's cuts we don't see the head we don't see the feet but in Europe it's all there I mean the carcasses are hanging the heads are in the in the cases the chickens feet are there and I was always fascinated by that and I was also an organic farmer and we raised livestock here and we had a custom butcher come out and he would butcher hogs and I would photograph that so it it made yes but this made perfect sense to me to do this SPA SPCA project and yet I remember one day and it was a small small group of students in this program um one of the other other students said to me you're not taking enough images you're not shooting enough and I said at that time I think I lived in Santa Cruz for maybe 20 years and I said I'm getting lost going to the SPCA that's how difficult it is for me it's having that impact on me and one day um one of the shelter workers had said to me you choose which animal we're going to euthanize today exactly and I said I'm afraid that's not in my job description I'll photograph you you make that choice so it was it was quite challenging um and it was a satisfying project the director of the SPCA at the time wanted to she wanted to end euthanasia basically and shelters would always put out cute photos of kittens and puppies in their fundraising appeals and she wanted something else that showed what the shelter workers had to deal with and um and it it became a project entitled Our Other Homeless um it was exhibited at the it's at the art center I thought I don't remember what it's called anymore in Santa Cruz was featured in the um the Sentinel and the San Jose Mercury and at least one of my images ended up on a billboard in Los Angeles that caused quite a to-do um and then was covered on KGO in San Francisco like and people said get a life how dare you you know expose us to this and what was that photo um I believe it was it was the barrel room at the shelter where um it's even difficult to talk about it animals you know dogs and cats would be euthanized because there were too many of them there were no homes for them and after a certain length of time um they they would go through that process and then they would be put in barrels in a walk-in freezer a walk-in cooler you know refrigerator and once a week the tallow company would have a truck come and all these barrels would get dumped into the back of this truck and they would go to San Jose and they would get processed into tallow and whatever else there might be deer roadkill deer and others in there as well and I was given access so I photographed in the barrel room I climbed a ladder when the truck was there photographed down into the truck and I believe the photo and it was a was a non-profit that had had um purchased the billboard space and ran this image again because at that time it was a real big push to end this overpopulation of pets and this crazy thing that we do of absolutely loving and adoring these animals and yet allowing them to breed or breeding them and and then having them killed on mass you know thousands a year so that is um I'm sort of a minor theme I notice in your work is some of it is very beautiful and others are very painful you have really beautiful photos of animals in Africa and you also have photos of elephants having their having prosthetic legs attached which is great that they can get legs but it makes you feel badly that they lost their legs or their feet have been injured what is that it's like two it's like two sides of you it's like you have a journalistic side and then and a beauty side how are you how does it feel to merge those two well I say schizophrenic um to me it it's really both sides are really important and one of the things that I've I've learned along the way is um people get overwhelmed by the difficult and particularly when it comes to pets I mean it's amazing how much human suffering we have become enured to and can can look at but when it comes to animals or pets people have a very very difficult time with that and and I think that's as it should be unfortunately it should be the same with humans and so you can't just um you can't just sort of bludgeon people you know and say this has got to change because they it's like emotionally we just block out and I think to really get people to care about all animals in the planet is they need to see the beauty at the same time and the story of the prosthesis is actually a very positive story um or a positive outcome of a very difficult story and that's a case of landmines in you know Thailand and Laos um where people are trying to hurt people and then the elephants are the collateral damage because they're out there and they um you know in some cases this it's the calf of a mother who is working you know hauling logs and the calf is out grazing and stops on a landmine and and loses loses its limb so yeah so what I I love about your photos is they tell a story each one I love the photo in Africa of the mom line and the baby lion he's just resting her head I'm just exhausted I'm using you yeah I I'm afraid that was one of those photos that um we had gone out on a in in Zambia on a night safari which is a common thing to do because you get to see different things at night and we came across this pride of lions just several lionesses and other cubs and they were sound asleep and the next thing is you know there's bright light is on them and it probably turned the engines off I don't remember and the cubs are going oh look mom oh look and that mother's going no this is time for sleeping but yes it does tell the story I'm afraid it tells the story of the people waking the lions yes the story of an hired lion what is um can you sense now that we're on the lions we're back to Africa so what um what took you to Africa you had you had studied photography and then Africa how did that happen that's that's a good question so when I was a child um you know all American children are given teddy bears right that's the ubiquitous you know little cuddly animal um I did not have a teddy bear I had um actually you can see her on the couch and then in the back really in the right shoulder yes there's a you can see a whale on a pillow and then in this side of that is a little red something I see I was I was given a knit elephant and her name is Ellie and I used to sleep with her and she's here today with me and I developed very young this wonderful love of Africa I also had a children's book that had a propaganda story in it and that that story was about a little boy wouldn't let his mother wash behind his ears and so he went to bed with dirty ears in the middle of the night the calico dog and foot of his bed gets up flaps his ears and the little boy wakes up and says where are you going and says I'm flying around the world and the little boy says please please can I come with you it's like okay he climbs in the back of the calico dog and they fly off to Africa and there they are and he looks down and he sees a mother elephant with her baby in the river and she's washing the baby and he says let's go down and he says please can I play with your baby and she says oh no your ears are too dirty the same thing happens when he sees a hippo no no your ears are too dirty so in the morning he he lets his mother wash behind his ears but those those images of these wild animals when I was quite young and I went and then I had the opportunity to teach the animal training work I was doing in in southern Africa different countries and was invited over to teach at safari safari lodges and things and then I began to have the opportunity to take people over on small safaris and photographed while I was doing all of that so how do you get how how do you get the job of animal safari leader where is the what did you know what were your credentials for that yes so I would call the credentials following your dreams you know and following your heart and I had desperately wanted to go to Botswana and met a woman whose sister lived there and had a difficult horse and at that point I was I was training horses and working with problems and I said I'll come and I came and it was Christmas time which of course in Botswana is not the best time to go because it can be incredibly hot and the women had to go off to Johannesburg to have Christmas with her father I couldn't stay at her house I was staying at a really dusty campgrounds and I gave a demo of this horsework that I was doing and I said is there anybody here who'd be willing to put me up and a woman said yes you can stay with us and she helped me take care of help help work with that woman's and then not long after that she and her husband moved to Namibia and he was a pilot a bush pilot who worked for wilderness safaris and she worked in the office part time and they they said look um can we get you back over here this is like later on to teach a safari uh teach um classes on this with work was called t-touch or telling to touch and we can't people can't afford to pay very much they'd pay like twenty dollars for a class and that's great but it didn't pay my airfare to get there and she said but we'll put you on a on a fly in safari in between so you teach this weekend then you go fly five days to safari camps and then you teach again and I said I'm in and um and then they gave me tour operator rates so I was able to bring people back they would organize the safaris in different camps um and away we away we went wow what a wonderful thing to have unfold for you yes I was really fortunate what man how long did you so you have been to many countries in Africa how long did you stay well I mean I went then I came back and went and I came back I mean it was it was um you know usually relatively you know one two weeks maybe three weeks or something like that I did some earth watch projects over there um and I I I did a fairly extended tour you know maybe a month I'm not sure through Zimbabwe and southern Africa south Africa um teaching teaching these workshops went back to Swaziland and taught some clinics there taught in Namibia so I um yeah I I I learned some skills and people over there wanted somebody to go teach and at that time there was nobody else and I said hey I'm I'm your person so so you brought your camera with you apparently yeah did you start taking wildlife was that your first wildlife photography that's a good question um I mean I had been using my camera by then that was back in the 90s and in the 80s as when I had started to go take some courses at Cabrio College because I'd gone to Yosemite with my my husband and kids and took some what I was impressed with photos and thought gee maybe if I learned something I can do even better and um and began to study and and uh really really understood you know that was in the film days and and how to take an image out of the camera and actually turn it into something of beauty and something that told the story um but I I'm not sure um I think Africa was probably the beginning of my my wildlife um my wildlife photos fabulous well that was a great place to start did you have one really beautiful photo that I hope we can show it's a plane and there are zebras and elephants on the plane and possibly other animals and in the distance it's kind of blue and then the distance is like a twister like a really skinny I think it's an award-winning photo was do you remember how did you have to be there at that perfect moment um that was that's um in Atosha National Park in Namibia and the location in the park is called the Atosha Pan which is a a large I guess an ancient lake but it's um white clay very dusty and you know I mentioned that I had the opportunity to take people on safari but that wasn't enough so I would sometimes I would go and visit my friends and rent a vehicle and take somebody with me who could be my navigator and because we're driving on the other side of the road and I would go to um you know I might go to Atosha I might go to a few camps on my own just just drive and um I don't remember exactly which trip that was but you know I took workshops I also took some workshops in Santa Fe on um you know photography and I remember seeing some beautiful work there and realizing that it's a combination of having the equipment having the preparation which may be learning about your subject learning how to use your equipment having the opportunity to go to the location and then having the universe come and cooperate with you and that's what happened for that particular image did you have to wait a long time to get that moment did you sit there for a long while waiting for the perfect thing I have no that's a long time ago I have I um spoke with another photographer once and he said that something like what you've just said and so he always had a camera with him he had one in his car always under the front seat and he had one in his pocket you know a small one and he got amazing pictures because something happened just then he was there is does that happen for you that way um or do you stalk the animals I both I mean I wouldn't use stalk as a search yes but it let's put it this way I um I haven't been doing it lately but then I the last couple of years I um I had injured my shoulder and so that impacted my ability to take photos it impacted my ability to do everything and then I had surgery um but prior to that I always had my camera on the car with me and um sometimes something was happening you know it's like I might be on west cliff drive or going home and all of a sudden there's something happening out there or there's um I would hear that there was a dead whale in the kelp and I would go over and there was a couple there and they were had red jackets said tow boat on the back and I started to talk to them and they were going to tow they had been asked to tow this carcass offshore and that has led to a number of other incident situations with the same couple um tow they towed a gray whale this um this year and um and so that you know if I didn't have my camera with me I wouldn't have I wouldn't have started that whole conversation but it it's really helps to also know the know the behavior of the species that you want to photograph and know the season so if you want to photograph sandhill cranes they're going to be in the central valley in the fall you know so if you go there in June you're not going to find them so it it's a combination things so you have sort of a plan but you're always prepared like thomas jefferson the more unprepared the luckier I get you're you're you're almost always prepared there are certainly times I have not been prepared have you missed us missed something because of that have you missed the one that got away um I can think of two situations and I'm not sure I would have gotten decent photos but one um it was very clear I was going to town in the evening to an event at the museum of art and history was uh and it was like an oceans um exhibition it was the opening and I remember as I got into my vehicle I thought I don't need my my camera with me it's nighttime never do that so I went I went to the the opening I enjoyed myself and I came home and I'm driving up a private road in the dark snow lights anywhere and I look in my headlights and there are two juvenile mountain lines and I'm going camera no camera and so I just stopped I turned my engine off I left my headlights on and they looked at me and went oh no what do we do what do we do and one ran across the road that way and the other said I don't know mom and and turned around and went back and so I just sat there and I thought well that's not going to last forever because they've now gone separate ways and as I waited I could see um the eye shine of the cat that it's gone back where it come from and then below it I could see another set of eyes and I went oh that's interesting and then I went my phone and at that time because we don't have cell coverage out here my phone wasn't even on so I turned it on and when the screen came on it lit up my face and at that moment they could tell what I was and where I was the juvenile ran across and then mom got up and just kind of looked at me like okay and trundled across the road and I got a photograph with my camera with my phone it looks like a raccoon so that that image is up here oh I would like to get you a chance to redeem yourself with the picture that you got at the um at the Anio Nuevo of the baby elephant seal can you talk about that it's just the the baby that was being born uh-huh that you know I guess somebody somebody made a comment recently on some of the images I posted on Facebook and and you know said what a great job I had done and I don't remember what the images were and I said and lucky and sometimes you know you just get incredibly lucky and again there's a bit of good fortune it's just maybe a little different than luck um I have a a cousin who is a docent at Anio Nuevo and they have a I guess it's a fundraiser for the friends of Anio Nuevo or something like that every January and she has invited me to come and you get to go out and instead of going from place to place with the docent you get to stay at one of the viewing stations and um I done that a few times and I got to stay at this viewing station and she had to leave feel so bad for her and the next thing I realized people are looking over here and there's this this female elephant seal who's giving birth right in front of us facing in the correct direction so we can actually see the birth of her her baby so yeah it was it was pretty special it was very special it isn't that doesn't happen I mean they obviously they have babies that's a regular deal but usually not where people see it well yes and no I mean if you've been anybody who's been to Anio Nuevo um during the elephant seal season the beaches are just plastered with these great big bodies and you know moms are popping all over the place and but you know there might be 300 yards or 500 yards that way or there might be in a crush of um you know crush of seals and um it's I don't know how often it happens that the mother is placed in front of the viewing station with nothing else obstructing the view so that is amazing I went there for a shoot once and they are there are so many of them and they're all sandy and at first as we walked toward them I was thinking well where are they they're kind of blended they're so big you think they're a dune it's the best out there that that's why they have that's why they have kinds with you so you know I had two rangers with me and they had to weigh an elephant seal and I was there for that and that was crazy I mean they are not amenable so um let's talk about marine life now since we're on the elephant seal trail I I read that you had been shooting whales in in Tonga and got to swim with or maybe I don't know if you got to but it happened that you were swimming with a uh competitive group of whales and it was sort of dangerous can you describe I've seen that in movies but can you describe what that means and what the what's happening and how you got so close okay so I have been swimming as I said earlier um with the humpback whales in the Dominican Republic um waters of the Dominican Republic for about 20 years and it's it's um a similar but different program than in Tonga it's very well regulated and it's open ocean so um there's a there's a bank you know which is fairly shallow water 30 to 100 feet deep out in the open ocean which means there's no islands nearby um so the water is rougher um than in near shore waters and um the visibility sometimes it's not that great so we're not allowed to get in the water with competitive groups in the Dominican in Dominican waters in Tonga you are allowed to do that and there you're swimming it's an archipelago of these beautiful green islands and so it's it's interior waters and it's calmer and usually but not always the visibility is quite good and this competitive group is basically um as far as we understand there's a female in it and then there's like two or more males and in Tonga there are very often seven ten whales males and they're all competing for the opportunity to escort this female and since nobody has ever seen humpback whales mate we don't know how that how that interfaces with this whole process but we're allowed to get in the water with the competitive groups and I'd always wanted to know what was going on underwater because when you see them there's a lot of surface activity and sometimes one male you know lashes out at another or rides him lots of blowing and lots of posturing and then they'll go beneath the surface and it's quiet and you have no idea what's going on so I specifically went to Tonga to get that opportunity and what they do because we also are really large and they move really fast is and there's no way that even the best swimmer can keep up with fast swimming whales is we find a competitive group the captain decides that this is an appropriate it's good and then we're dropped in the water sort of in front of them when they're beneath the surface so they're not at the surface at that point where it could be quite dangerous they're beneath the surface and they're interacting with one another and you have just a few moments to see and photograph what's going on and boom then they're gone so yeah it's it's pretty exciting but it's also um you know some of my photos have some bubbles in them that are not from the whales that are from the faster swimmers who are ahead of me but it's it's pretty exciting I find once you put your eye in a viewfinder you now have tunnel vision you're not seeing what's around you anymore can you how do you and in the water it's dark there's all kinds of things going on there and all sorts of images like action around you how do you stay safe in a situation where you're kind of focused on getting a picture called having good situational awareness um it's so in a situation like that with the competitive group and when we always have a guide in the water so that's and even in the silver bank we always have a guide in the water and it's their job to to to keep us safe you know to to to know that and I've done this so long that I I understand a lot of the behavior myself but um there there's a process of you know moving the camera up and looking over the top and then looking back in again and if you see something that's coming towards you you know then figuring out what to do and whales humpback whales um are are not aggressive generally I mean they don't go out of their way to hurt people and they generally don't go out of the way to touch us I mean I just saw a video yesterday of a I forget where it was taken maybe in Australia of a very curious humpback whale that was spy hopping where it brings its head out of the water and it inadvertently bumped the the boat and cracked the wind the window on it there's happened to be safety glass but that's very rare for them to actually touch touch the boats they come up and they they've got a very good spatial sense in fact except in the competitive groups or the mothers and calves they don't usually touch each other they're they're they're in close they may be in close proximity but they're not like dolphins who may wrap their flippers together and you know really really engage in physical contact so um to me in terms of quote unquote danger with humpback whales is the calves because the calves are still learning they're learning how to use their bodies and they're learning um and they're a little clumsy and um and they can be a little naughty so I've been bumped in the in the legs by a calf that came through and just kind of swished its flute and I remember one time when that happened and I asked our guide what I had done wrong and he said you didn't get out of the way okay um which which is a case you know initially we're told don't move because the whales know where you are but with these calves sometimes they know exactly where you are they they don't usually try and bump you but they try and just kind of you know might switch their flukes as a way of going in and in I did have one really interesting encounter with a calf and this was actually a number of years ago where um our guide was up ahead closer to the the mother and the calf and the rest of us were in a line um maybe 15 feet behind him maybe I don't know I lose track I can't tell the distance but far enough back and the next thing without I didn't see how it happened but this calf is coming from behind and underneath me and it is I'm looking through my camera and I see this face and this eye staring straight at me and this peck fin is just missing my head and then I just keep shooting and there's the ventral pleats is the belly and then the calf taps my camera with this flute and I'm going okay that was interesting and then I thought well yeah that was interesting but I'm going to go move to the other end of the line I don't know what I thought that would do but I didn't fool the calf I get down there I'm now at the opposite end of the line this calf comes through does the same thing really quickly and picks my camera up out of the water with its flute and then sets it back down again so it was like it had it had tested this this odd thing and they they seem to be interested because the camera's got a big dome port it's like a um a glass or plexiglass like a mirror so they can even see their reflection in it I don't know what it's like to them whether they it's a giant eye or whether they just go what is that strange appendage and the first time it's like tested it and the second time it went oh yeah I know how heavy it is we can just do this so that's a rare experience but it was um it was pretty funny oh so a playful whale that kind of dangerous and fun now I think this is interesting that you've told that the whale seemed to know you tracked you back oh there there she is she's got something I like um what whales that whale knows you but you know other whales can you talk about working to help to identify the whales with the allied whale project yes so when I first started um well before I actually swam out of the the solar bank I had um gone to um gone to Maui and done an earth watch project with a researcher their name Adam Pack and this is back in the film days and they were taking fluke ID photos and then putting them in you know a binder um look the pages in it and every time you got a new fluke photo you would go through this binder and look to see if you could find a match because that's a very non-invasive way of gathering information on who these whales are what they do where they are at different times and I was really intrigued with that I just I mean not there's something about knowing an animal personally that's very different than it just being a generic whale so um when I got out to the silver bank and now thankfully we had digital digital cameras um I wanted to know you know if anybody was gathering fluke ID photos and it turned out there wasn't really much going on and a woman came over one day and introduced herself she actually introduced herself to the person who was in um leading the trips that I was going on and asked him if he was interested in sharing fluke photos and he said I'll go talk to Jodi so she connected me with the folks that allied whale and at that point I started doing it seriously taking my fluke photos gathering from the crew on my boat gathering from you know kept them on another boat um anybody who was willing to give me their photos and sending them to to allied whale who would put them in their catalog and in the meantime I had made a a journey to the east coast because these whales are part of the north atlantic population and some of them feed um the stalagm bank out the coast of massachusetts um province town and gloucester massachusetts some of them feed off a main some of them feed in isla and norway and I I went and I met people in province town and gloucester and bar harbor main and made the connections with them and then I would send them some of my fluke photos because some of them know the whales in their head that visit because these whales have it's called site fidelity they come back to the same feeding area each season and um and it became very exciting and we started to learn things that might not have been known otherwise for instance we know that humpback whales and most of this is from the the feeding grounds calf every two to three years but what we don't know is how many calves are born down on the breeding calving grounds on the tropical waters and the calves don't make it alive up to the so if we see a female with a calf on the calving grounds and then we see where the calf the next year and we share that information it turns out the first calf didn't make it all the way it died somewhere along the way the second calf got there now they know that this whale had calves two years in a row calves two years in a row but that information would have would have gone unnoticed before staying so have you have you found other things have you been able to document other things with your camera that were previously unknown to scientists yes but if I may before I get to that question sure um I I've taken you know uh because I think it's it's very connected to Santa Cruz is that um a a friend and colleague Ted Cheeseman has developed a um software that is able to identify do do a really good job of matching flukes and so he's developed a citizen science project called happy whale and um when I'm in Monterey Bay when I'm in Antarctica when I'm in Norway anywhere in the world I will submit my fluk photos to happy whale and then you know we get instant feedback this is whale so-and-so and then you can go on the website and you can see where else this whale has been cited and how many times it's been it's been cited um and so that's that that's very rewarding and I I'm sure that Ted is coming up with all kinds of interesting information some of it has to do with matches where you don't expect the whale to go to a different calving ground than the rest of the whales in that population as far as my own um sort of discoveries and and this is maybe minor in terms of the the fluke information but I believe it was about two maybe three years ago 2018 I guess uh in Monterey in Monterey Bay we um had two humpback whales that did something that had never been observed before the day before killer whales had taken a gray whale calf and um boats had gotten there they didn't see the kill but they were there while the feeding was going on and I went I wasn't there I went out the next day and we went to the same location to see if the whales were still feeding because it can take and lo and behold there were a couple of killer whales and um and then they and and then they left oh and the carcass was there and then the killer whales took off and our captain um took off to follow them and the captain on our other boat said radioed her and said you know there are two humpbacks here with this carcass so Nancy Black who's our captain turned around and went back and for the next 12 minutes we watched these two humpback whales in investigating this carcass they would spy hop they would come up backwards they would reach out with their peck fins they would kind of move their flukes towards it um they appeared to be touching it with their sides touching it with their heads when it was quite it was quite amazing and um I ended up doing a scientific paper with um with Nancy Black as a co-author and Fred Sharp who has um did all the seminal work on the bubble net feeding whales up in Alaska and in the process of doing that we discovered that one of the two whales had been there the day before when the killer whales are feeding so watch that going on and oftentimes what the humpbacks will do is they'll they'll interfere you know they'll they'll get aggressive towards the killer whales as if they don't want them to do that so then came back the next day and brought a friend and they um they checked out this carcass and then we were able to to learn that both of these whales have been seen in breeding grounds in Mexico but they're probably male they've never been seen with calves they've been seen like you know 60 90 times a piece so you know we've got we've got a whole picture of who these whales are who are actually investigating that carcass interesting I think elephants do that too with their when an elephant dies they they hang around and check it out they do and the biggest difference here is that one we don't often see humpbacks with a dead calf of their own but this was of the different species and that was the part that has never been seen before in the wild interesting so you mentioned Antarctica that cannot be an easy place to shoot I saw your picture to a penguin that looks really difficult what is it like to shoot in such a hostile I mean it's underwater that's kind of hostile but that's really extreme how do you doesn't your camp what do you have to do to keep your camera from freezing unfortunately Antarctica is not that cold anymore I'm too bad actually the first thing is you don't go in the in the middle of winter okay that's when researchers are down there but and when I have been there it's been their fall and the weather's a little bit warmer but you dress very warmly you charge your batteries and you know you keep your spare batteries inside your clothes so that they're warm and you know you've got good gloves hard to photograph with with the right kind of gloves on so you may get cold fingers and you know as with all of these I said not all but a lot of the things that I do I'm I'm not just going on my own in part because they're expensive to get to Antarctica anymore and it's really nice to have somebody else to the preparation and you're out there on a very large ship that's nice and warm and cozy inside and then you get Zodiacs you dress properly for it and you go out and you stay out for you know several hours at a time you get a chance to make landings you know walk around see what's going on and you know some the weather I've been several times sometimes it's foggy sometimes it's snowing sometimes it's windy sometimes it's sunny and warm so you just kind of get used to dealing with the elements well you went more than once so it must not be that bad I never thought I would go more than once but it's like the whales it's a little bit addictive is there anywhere you have haven't been that you would like to go to take photographs this year I was supposed to go to Svalbard in Norway it's a separate island last I was it just last year I was able to go to Franz Joseph land which is as far north as I've ever been that's a Russian archipelago and that was I was really fascinating I'm really glad I went but there wasn't quite as much wildlife there were a lot of birds we didn't see we saw whales as we were coming back going through the barren sea and we did see polar bears but I would like to go to Svalbard and there are bears polar bears there and arctic foxes and even the wildflowers arctic wildflowers are just incredibly beautiful and you know at this point it's difficult to get photographs that haven't been taken before and I've just been really really drawn to parts of the world that are not as as heavily visited and unfortunately COVID interrupted that trip and we'll see if we can go next year is there a picture you haven't taken that you want to take yes do I know what it is no you know I mean I am seeing a lot of photographs these days that other photographers are taking that are quite extraordinary and it's it's like the bar keeps being raised there's a lot of drone images that are are are extraordinary winning in competitions there are some that take probably more patience than I have you know birds doing extraordinary things so it's one of the things I like about whales because they're they're there and they're large easy to easy to follow them and and there are only so many things they do but it's it's also why being able to work on research projects with them is a great you know it's a great compliment because I can I can make my photographs actually work to help the species they can they can help teach people and get people engaged and and enthusiastic about protecting them so what is the what is the message you hope you share in your photos in your photos what do you hope people learn from you I hope that my love of of this planet and my other species who inhabit this planet with us comes through in my images you know the animals I want to say they can't speak for themselves or if they do we can't understand them and I hope that with my images and I try and I try and educate people so it's not just oh here's a whale breaching but it's like oh this is this is Angel Wing and this is her calf halo and they came over to visit our boat today and you know uh halo breached a number of times and we see that same behavior in the silver bank where um we call out taking the calf for a walk in the afternoon you know and being able to share that information and that this calf is is probably you know on the on the cabin grounds that hasn't migrated yet so it has to be fit to make this very long thousand miles thousands of miles swim but it still needs to be fit and it's it's just a baby so um you know I I hope to I hope to give people a window into the lives of these animals so that they will they will care as well and without you know we don't care about them we can't do much to protect them which we definitely need to do. Thank you Jodi Frediani for sharing your photos with us and your thoughts and all your work to conserve our beautiful planet. Thank you so much for having been my pleasure. You're so welcome. If you viewers would like to see more of Jodi's wonderful photos visit jodi frediani.com. Thanks for watching joining me now. Good night.


Online, Near Wife, a Novel by J. R. Thorpe, who will be in conversation with Philippa Kelly, dramaturg in residence at California Shakespeare Theater. I'm Laura Shepherd, Director of Events at the Mechanics Institute, and we're very proud to co-sponsor this event with Cal Shakes and with the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning. If you're new to the Mechanics Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature our beautiful General Interest Library, an international chess club, and ongoing author and literary programs, and for you film buffs, our cinemalits film series on Friday night. Please visit our website at milibrary.org and also visit us in person at 57 Post Street in San Francisco. Our doors are open. So we're very pleased to welcome our two esteemed guests for this program and this new novel. Near Wife is inspired, of course, by Shakespeare's King Lear and this breathtaking debut novel tells the story of the most famous woman ever written out of literary history. Near Wife is a breathtaking novel of loss, renewal, and how history leads into the present. It's gorgeously written, very poetic, and we're very pleased to welcome J.R. Thorpe from Ireland. She is a writer, lyricist, and librettist. She won the London Short Story Award in 2011 and was shortlisted for the BBC Opening Lines Prize and has also worked published in the Cambridge Literary Review, the Manchester Review, Antithesis, Wave Composition, and in other publications. She wrote the libretto for the highly-acclaimed modern opera, Dear Marie Stopes, which you can also see some trailers on YouTube and has worked commissioned by the Arts Council, The Welcome Trust, and St. Paul's Cathedral. She's also a Claritin scholar at Oxford where she completed her PhD and she's also an Aussie and now living in Cork, Ireland. Our host and moderator today is Philippa Kelly. As I mentioned, is the resident dramaturg at California Shakespeare Theatre. She has published 11 books and 98 articles on her latest being Diversity, Inclusion, and Representation in Contemporary Dramaturgies, Case Studies from the Field. She is proud to lead a year-round community theater group entitled the Berkeley Theater Explorations. And the purpose is to make dramaturgy foundational to community theater appreciation. In other words, to make theater going an active practice rather than a passive form of consumption. Also, I wanna mention that Philippa posts the in-depth conversations on Shakespeare's plays and you can see a link either on their website or if you'd like to be in touch with her directly to find out about the next series of lectures which will be in July, please see her email in the chat. Also, Cal Shakespeare will be presenting an adaptation of King Lear in the fall. So watch their website and please make your reservations and get to the theater. So I also wanna mention, if you'd like to buy a book, please purchase at alexandabook.com or at an independent bookstore near you. And also we will engage you, our audience, in a chat and conversation after our program. So please welcome J.R. Thorpe and Philippa Kelly. Thank you so much for having me. It's so wonderful to, obviously I can't see all the faces of the participants, but it's very lovely to be able to speak to you from so far away. And actually it's lovely, we often do these as a webinar but actually right now we can see a lot of faces around the top of the screen, including the beautiful face of this genius J.R. Thorpe who at the age of 33 has done so much, accomplished so much and has published this internationally, reviewed and hugely praised book, Lear Wife. So it's really lovely that you've made the time to speak with us, J.R. And I'll just ask, in County Cork, what time is it now? Right now it is 10 past eight in the evening and because we are far enough north, it is still bright sunlight outside. Yeah, oh lovely. So we're at midday. So just to begin on a couple of points that are really intriguing. First of all, what was your, what drew you to King Lear as your kind of ur text, everybody, the ur text, the sort of original text? Well, I actually, like I'm sure many other people did, I studied King Lear in high school and we did a very particular focus on it which was to look at how many different ways it could be interpreted. So we looked at it as a family drama, we looked at it as a political drama we looked at it as a particular artistic statement about the ways in which memories work and we watched many different productions of it, some of which I'm sure a lot of people have seen, the Ian Holm version and the, I was 16 and the impact of it never really left me. I just thought it was at its heart, a really, really interesting family drama. And I read A Thousand Acres, A Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize winning interpretation of it which takes that aspect, relocates it to rural America to brutal and beautiful effect. And I also, when I was 19, I saw Ian McKellen as King Lear at the Royal Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon. So it was one of those places that I kept coming back to. I kept thinking about it and eventually I had this idea of trying to find where the mother might be in this. And when I initially had the idea, I thought, well, someone else has come up with this. Clearly this is an idea that has been done before. I'd like to find who has. And oddly enough, it hadn't really. And then, well, the book happened. So when you sat down, JR, when you say the book happened, I mean, many people listening today will think, but I've been trying to make a book happen for 50 years. How does it happen? It happened. For you. For me it happened over five years because I was working full-time. I did my masters and then I did my PhD. And then I thought I'd really like to get this idea onto paper. But I was working full-time as a journalist. So it took five years of working in the evenings, on a weekend, and without an agent, without any outside support in that sense, just deciding that it was a good idea and that I wanted to keep going. And see what happened. And really the book is just the result of me being incredibly stubborn. I think is the best way to put it. This will happen. It doesn't matter if it's good or not. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, there's a tiny bit of noise from here, but that's just disappearing now. So just to say, I'm really, this interview is not about me, but I just have to say that when I initially was introduced to Leah, it was also in Australia. I was 14. And that play formed the foundation of my life so that three books and countless articles later, I'm still obsessing about Leah. And one of the things that I was really moved by by a philosopher called Karen Armstrong, was she was talking about her relationship to Catholicism and to life. And she said, what we human beings need to learn to do is to dethrone ourselves from the center of the universe. And I just love that quote in relationship to King Leah. But what you've done even further is to put the queen back in the center, if not on the throne. So JR's queen has been twice married. Leah is her second husband. And I'll ask you to say a little bit more about the foundations of your Leah queen. So the queen herself came from the shape of her life as it were, came from a variety of different sources. Cause I decided quite early on that if this woman were missing, there had to be a reason. And she has mentioned twice in the play, very, very small offhand references, which indicate that Leah believes her to be dead. And that's almost an unbelievable erasure. I went back to the original story that Shakespeare took his Leah from, which is the chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth. There's no wife in there either. It's almost as if Shakespeare and the chronicle had decided that a mother and a wife wasn't necessary, that the figures were moving around in their own dramas so succinctly that there was no, that figure wasn't required. But I looked at Leah and the three daughters as people who had been continuing a pattern clearly for a very long time. If we look at the first scene of King Leah, the very famous one where the daughters are told to tell how much they love Leah and they will get something in return. And Kjordelia, of course, refuses to play. That is a game that clearly they have been playing for a very long time. Everyone knows what they are meant to do. And for the very first time, Kjordelia says that she's not going to do it, but it got me thinking, who taught them this game? Where did this game come from? And why has it been going on for so long? And so I came up with the idea that maybe the queen was a contributing factor in this bizarre competitive family dynamic and made her into this figure who taught Leah a lot of the things that he knew that competed violently with her daughters for love and attention. And also I looked to a lot of medieval queens. Eleanor of Aquitaine was also married multiple times. She managed to have sons, which Leah managed never to do, and was locked up in an abbey for being a political thord in her second husband's side. So there were a lot of contributing ideas, some of which came from the play, some of which came from historical research. And they all kind of merged together into the figure of Leah-wife. That's wonderful. And I'll just say to everybody, one of the things about Shakespeare's lack of older women was that as most of you would know, the women were not allowed to perform on the stage. So young boys would have to perform older parts. And so you get most mothers in Shakespeare, Hermione in Winter's Tale, Taísa in Pericles, they're either buried, lost at sea, buried for 16 years, or have been dead way before the play. And so that's just been the way that the mother in Leah has been institutionally internalized. But to have her actually be buried within the convent is such a beautiful idea. And the fact that Leah, who has thought that he, I mean, at one part in Shakespeare's play, he says, they taught me I was everything. They told me that I had white hairs ere the gray hairs were there. So to have J.R. uplift her knowledge and to place that in counterpoint to this king who realizes how little he has known, what a beautiful idea this is. Thank you. I'm glad that it's, I think it enters into an interesting tradition of women's voices in classics that have been cut out or have not been seen as necessary, but who can add something really entertaining? Yes. And so J.R., when you were thinking about the women in the play, did you ever consider as Jane Smiley did? And by the way, Jane Smiley gave this book a beautiful review, but did you ever consider giving the voice to the daughters before you landed on the mother? No, I actually, I was always set on the mother as the central point because she sees herself so much as Leah does as the center of the universe. She sees herself as the fixed point around which everything else revolves, around which Leah revolves, Kent revolves, the kingdom revolves, her children, and as it turns out in the book, the convent. She believes that she should be the center of power, the crux around which all gravity rotates. And that makes her a very fundamentally interesting and sometimes quite unlikable person. And we know Gondal and Reagan, don't we? We know Gondal and Reagan and we know Cordelia. They have very famous lines. They have abilities to speak for themselves. They've always, they're, and often they're quite clear in many ways that one of my favorite bits in King Leah is when Leah says, I gave you all. And one of the daughters says, and in good time you gave it. Yes. And that encapsulates their whole dynamic, the whole history of the family. Yeah. So they have their chance to talk. Yeah. The mother never did. Yeah. And so this was my pulling her out of that dark space. Yes. And I love that thought. It reminds me of your line that something like, when my daughters were born, I reached for their bodies and said yes. And she's never allowed that yes during Leah's lifetime. She's only allowed it after everybody's dead. Yeah. In many ways I wanted to make a book about grief and about what grief would feel like for someone whose world has been completely shattered, who's completely ended. This is a woman who has lost everything. She was taken away from her children. She doesn't understand why she's in the convent. And that's a secret I will not spoil if you haven't read the, if you haven't read the novel. And she's just told by messenger that her husband and her three daughters are dead. And what does that do to a woman, particularly a woman who used to be incredibly powerful? Yeah. And that's also a really big influence on the story I was trying to tell. Yes. And it's interesting just thinking, I think you're probably a bit of a Shakespeare scholar because even when I was looking through passages in the book just before, you know, re-reading them before today, I was thinking about there's a line where you say like a woman picking reeds in a river. And then that took me to Hamlet. And so I wanted to ask, did you feel also the resonances of other plays coming into your story? And for instance, other Shakespeare mothers like Hermione buried for 16 years, like Taiza who is believed to be dead in a wreck at sea. Did you feel them coming in or were you really, was that just sort of almost by accident? I think he was, I did an enormous amount of reading partly because I wanted to see what echoes of mother and wife there might be in other plays that Shakespeare had taken on that I could pull in for little hooks for linguistic echoes. Because that's something I really enjoyed with Lea White was putting in little aspects of the play linguistically that you might recognize, but that I've changed to reflect who Lea White is as a person or her role. So nothing shows up a lot in Lea White. And it's a big theme in King Lea. And here it's very much about her grief and what to do when there is nothing at the centre of your life when formerly there were, you know, there was a family. And that's kind of where I looked to other plays was to go, okay, what here can inform what I'm doing without, you know, becoming a pastiche or becoming a parody or anything like that. Yes. And I love the way she refers to herself as the womb of the kingdom.  And so just thinking also she, like the wives of Henry VIII, like, you know, so many very upper shelf women of that time, one of the things that was most important that also they had no control over was to produce a male heir.  Well, it's interesting because in many ways I wanted to make her quite a conservative figure, you know. She rails a lot against the idea that she herself cannot carry power, that she shouldn't be the one in charge. But when it comes to things like sons and passing things on to sons, I made it quite clear that that is something that she desperately wanted in part because she is very much in love with Leah and that's what Leah wants. And, you know, this, this, the idea of tradition in that sense imprisoned her in many ways. She's like many women that you'll meet who perpetuate things that actively harm them because it's the way things have always been and they know no other way of doing things. And I'm sure that if she had had a son she would have tried to find a way to manipulate them and, you know, rule things anyway. But it was getting a very careful balance between here is a woman who rebels against her circumstance but not so much that it's going to seem unreal, that it's going to seem as if I'm putting a modern person in a situation that they would try to escape from.  Yes, and I also love your, what you just said before about queens in history before Shakespeare and actually during his time where if they didn't have sons how could they get power? And very often, as with his, you know, famous crone queen Margaret, they got their power through marrying their sons off at a ridiculously young age or if they had only daughters marry, you know, at least betrothing them as young as seven or eight. And so for this woman, she's never had any power over her daughters for the last 15 years. Yeah, and it's a perspective that I wanted to make sure was very clear that there's only so much power that you can have in that scenario. Even if you are the most powerful woman in the country, which she was, there are limits. There are places where that you cannot go, where your ability not to bear a son will mean that you fail. And through Gonaral and Reagan and Cordelia, I'm kind of imagining their lives before the events of the play. I kind of looked at various different ways that that could play out. Why Gonaral was married to the person she was married to, why Reagan was married to the person that she was married to and why they don't have dowries. Because that's also the thing about clear when in that very first scene, he's dividing up his kingdom for the first time. Like he's giving away power for the first time in his life. Before that, his children have had basically nothing because they're girls and they've been married to powerful men. This is the first time he goes, okay, well now maybe I'll give you something. And Leah's given to the sons-in-law because dukes were conferred by royal in earls were born, but the daughters have had to basically just been, they've been sort of ladies-in-waiting. I can't help thinking about whether Shakespeare was influenced in some way in his play by the fact that when Catherine of Aragon's daughter, Mary was born, she was the princess royal. At the age of 17, when Henry VIII had dumped Catherine and taken on Anne Boleyn, Mary was forced at 17 years old to be the lady-in-waiting to this infant.  It is. And it's interesting to see how things change between Geoffrey of Monmouth's Leah and what Shakespeare does with it because the original story is quite different. There are three daughters. It does end with them rejecting him, but Cordelia is much more powerful in the original chronicle. Cordelia is a player. She's getting in there. She comes back to it. She tries to save Leah. It becomes, it's a much more present relationship. She isn't just taken off to France. Yeah. And so Shakespeare clearly saw in this figure this woman who says, no, I don't want to play anymore and is immediately sold off to France. A really interesting thing to put on stage at that time. Yeah. And how it might resound with people in that audience. Yes. Really interesting. Yes.  We're not going to, you know, take up the whole time. So have your questions ready. Can I just, as an Australian, ask you what took you, well, firstly to study at Oxford and then to live in Cork in Ireland? Well, I went from, I went on exchange from Australia to, to the UK when I was 19. That was when I saw Rian McKellen. I went to the university of East Anglia, which has a really famous, really wonderful creative writing program. And I fell in love with the country. As a lot of expert Australians do, you move to England and suddenly it's like all of these story books have come to life. And so when it came time to do my masters, I applied to Oxford, to their creative writing program, which is amazing. And I moved there. And then I did what sometimes happens, which is I met the love of my life and I stayed. And I got married and I did my, I did my PhD and they then in 2018 got a job in Cork. And so we moved to Cork and have been there ever, have been here ever since throughout the pandemic, throughout everything. And this is why, if you're wondering why my accent doesn't sound fully Australian, this is wrong. I haven't lived in Australia since 2009. I do sound much more Australian when I get angry or when I'm very tired. And so my only memory of Cork is, it was so beautiful, but diving into the water and having a headache for half an hour afterwards because it's so cold. It has been an adjustment as an Australian. It has been an adjustment, but it is, it's also, it's more like Australia than the UK is, I have to say Ireland, because people swear more here and people are very, very friendly, which are two things that I miss a lot about Australia. It is, it's also very beautiful here. And there's a very strong arts and literature, literature scene here. So I've been lucky enough to get a grant from the Irish Arts Council to write my second novel. And I've only lived here since 2018, but they very much adopted me as, no, you're an Irish writer now.  So you clearly must be Irish. Okay. All right. And probably we Australians are, most of us descended from the Irish because, you know, a couple of centuries ago, they sent out all of their poverty stricken people that they designated criminals. So my mother's heritage on both sides is actually as convicts. Oh, amazing. My lot, my lot were just poor and left in the early 1800s to find a better life in Australia, which I guess has worked out. Yeah. But now I'm back, which is very confusing for the whole timeline, but. And so just thinking about the arts scene, another question I want to ask you is that I noticed that you're, and I really feel this in your book.  And so your words feel very lyrical. And I was wondering how much your, your, your parallel career as a librettist has informed your writing. A great deal. I'd have to say a lot of the professional training I've done, which is what a master's and a PhD in creative writing is, you know, it's, it's like long apprenticeships to learn how to do this stuff professionally. A lot of it was in poetry and in poetic form and in the manipulation of language, which is why the book is so, I've made it so full of imagery and, and so language based because that's what I really enjoy doing. But it was very important to me when this book is read aloud, it sounds good. Every sentence has to have the right rhythm. Everything has to move in the right way. And fortunately the amazing Juliet Stevenson, the actress did the audiobook of this, which if anyone is into, into audio books, I highly recommend. She's a Shakespearean actress. And she gives the rhythm of it such life and interest and brings out so much of, of what I've put on the page. It's just gorgeous. And I know that, I know that sometimes that's, it can be dense to read, but it's, it's, it's a book that I designed that you read a little bit and then you go away and then you come back and you're a little bit more and you go away because that's the sort of book I really love to read. And it's interesting JR because I have my own hard copy, but I, when I realized how lyrical it is, I then bought an audible copy. So I love to listen and Juliet Stevenson, she's so amazing. I love to listen to her read. So I'd highly recommend to everybody go to Amazon and buy it or use one of your credits or whatever to get it, get on audible. Let's see. I just saw something in the chat. Okay. Let me just have a quick look. So Maxine asks, because Leah's wife is only in her 50s, Leah can no longer be seen as senile since he was younger than her. That's a great question. Through this prism, we now see him as downright cruel to abandon his wife after the birth of Cordelia. And so Maxine says, why did you make these choices? But another thing I would say is that in Leah itself, in Shakespeare's Leah, we're never sure about how far Leah is mentally gone or not gone. And in fact, the two older daughters center that question at the very end of scene one, where one of them says to the other, you notice how full of changes his age is. And the other says he had ever been thus. So Shakespeare really wanted us to not know whether we could blame any of his conduct on senility. For instance, he is the most misogynist character in the whole of Shakespeare. Women only really take a presence for him beyond the first scene in terms of being the sites of venereal disease. So just thinking about that, could you talk about the age of Leah and the fact that he's not four score years and upward? And how that impacts your storytelling? Well, I made originally, Leah White was going to be older. Originally, when the book first went to the agent, she was older than she currently was, and so the timeline was more extended. But we contracted it after some discussion because A, I liked the idea of her being a bit more vigorous, younger, more capable of taking charge and running around doing some of the completely ludicrous things that she does in the convent. But also because I very much like a reading of the play where what really destabilizes Leah is not age, it's what he perceives as betrayal. He is a leader that we've seen in so many ways appears to have positioned himself on uniform obedience, on everyone doing exactly what he says, except for the fool. The fool is the only person who's allowed to poke in anyway. And it is that. And it's particularly his daughters, his beautiful daughters who have said that they love him dearly and above all else, above their husbands for years and years and years. When that is taken away from him, that is what I like to view the play as destabilizing him. That is what sends him out raving on the heath, yelling about ungrateful daughters and serpents' teeth for children. Because there's such psychological power in what Shakespeare has set up that it can work as long as the daughters are adult at any age. When you have a figure like Leah with these daughters and that relationship as it goes in the play, he doesn't need to be for school years and 10. He just needs to be old enough to feel as if he has built all this up and is watching it crumble around him. I love that thought. And it's interesting, you know, just thinking about that. I'm doing an in-depth course that will be... that will certainly begin with Leah for Cal Shakespeare's Middle of July. And thinking about some amazing things that have been built lately on the back of Kim Leah. Firstly, Leah's wife. I'm going to be asking you to come back for an interview. And then succession. That is the Leah story. The father starring Sir Anthony Hopkins. I don't know whether anybody on this Zoom has seen the father. But again, it's so beautiful the way that movie takes the idea of abandonment and places it, in that case, side by side with senility. And has the daughter going off to France. There are just so many beautiful things at the moment. Interestingly, Brian Cox, the star of succession, performed Leah in, I think, 1992. And he performed Leah in a wheelchair. And he said the reason he chose the wheelchair was he was starting to, you know, going to the airport. He was noticing how so many people would come in, wheeled on wheelchairs, go to the front of the queue, and then they'd get out of the wheelchair and they'd be their sprightly selves again. So he started to realize how age or the appearance of age didn't have to be only a vulnerability, but could be pivoted to make it a strength. That's also something. And that's also something that Leah does when he's open with his daughters. He uses that as a manipulation technique. He's emphasizing how old he is and how weak he is. And realistically, that is just something that he is using in the moment to try and control the women around him. And that doesn't have to be the truth of what's happening. In fact, it's almost more interesting if it isn't. Yes. And so just before we go to questions, could I ask you, JR, could you give us a teaser for your next novel? The next novel is very different. It is set in the near future. And it's in the 2030s. And it's about the refugee crisis in Europe, but it's about the helpers, not the refugees themselves, but the translators, the couriers, the charity workers, and that sort of thing, which I think is a very universal sort of story that hasn't been heard a lot. Although recently one of the, I believe the National Book Award finalists, the wrong end of the telescope is fabulous if anyone is interested in that sort of, in those sorts of stories. So that's the next project, something very different. And then the third novel is back to historical fiction again. So I'm ping-ponging. And the historical fiction for the third, do we have a teaser for that yet? That's going to be in 1600s Nuremberg. I like variety. What can I say? Well, and then the very last thing before we go to questions. When you think of, say, the voice that you have for the Queen, I feel it's a very lyrical voice. Will you be shifting to another voice altogether? Or, I mean, it's so hard to tell at this point, I imagine. I like first person writing a great deal because you can do so much with the interior of someone's head, you know, what they're thinking and how that corresponds to the outside world. And so much of Leo wife is based on something happening to her and in her environment that then triggers a memory in her head. And so she is existing on these dual planes and it's really interesting to do that from first person. And she has a very distinctive, very bossy, very single-minded perspective. And for my second novel, I've gone with someone a bit more ambiguous, someone a bit quieter, a bit less sure of themselves. And that's been a really interesting challenge because I've inhabited this very certain idea about, you know, Leo wife and the world for such a long time that moving to a more kind of quiet perspective has been very different. And I'll let you know if it works. Because your queen has no place for self-doubt and no time for self-doubt. Or doubting anyone else. Yeah, yeah. So let's move to questions. Oh, Philippa, I'd like to jump in and I thought that before we go to questions, I'd like to have Jennifer read a passage from... Oh, yes. You know, I just want to say that, you know, and also my question is, JR, the way that you have constructed the style and the voice of the queen is so unique, so uniquely poetic. I just wanted you to comment on that, how you got to this voice. And then also to read us a passage before we jump into our Q&A. Absolutely fine. Well, first I'll talk about the voice and then I'll read. The voice was quite tricky because I wanted it to have that Shakespearean tone, but not be so dense and, I suppose, panickity and historical that it shut people out. And we've had so many good interpretations of historical fiction recently with Black Hillary Mantel and people like that who can still use the register but can still make it direct and beautiful enough that people can communicate with it in their own time and in their own language. But I used people like Patrick White and Michael Ondarci, who use very, very lyrical and poetic language and Anne Michaels, a Canadian writer who wrote fugitive pieces to kind of figure out the balance between imagery and personality. Because I didn't want her just to be a vehicle for saying pretty things. I wanted her to have a very distinct point of view. Even if sometimes that point of view is not very attractive, you still want to be there with her. I actually got quite a lot of, when the book came out in November, I got quite a lot of questions about, well, how does it feel writing such an unlikeable voice? And frankly, it's very freeing because so often as women, you are told to be very likable and Leah Wife does not care. She does not care if people like her. She's never met anyone that she would care if liked her. Leah's is really the only opinion she's ever cared about. And that was very fun to inhabit. Just someone who just does not care. And that's probably the main through line. But I'll read you a bit now from quite early on, which is Leah Wife's initial, her memories of what Gonaral and Reagan were like as children and young women. So, Gonaral, small, heavy-skulled, ferrine, fitful in her movements, knotting and unknotting across the stone floors and red, red to the nape of her neck. Though she tried citrus, barmed her freckles in creams and old milk and wept. Her plaits were the glossed orange of her father's youth before it fell into grizzling and gray. He loved this, the undeniable nature of paternal fate. I looked at her and saw orchards, the fullness of fruit. Tried to be graceful, but had too much dog in her, too much fretting, startled her and she'd tense motionless, an animal caught in the open at dusk. I told her, relax your spine, don't think so much, but you cannot train it out of them. That hunted sense. Reagan, white as paint, with coarse black hair. My own, so I taught her taming, the lines of it on her back, night wetting to smooth its wilderness. Every morning she rose and unbound her hair, wash of dark over her shoulder, and I would think God helped the man who sees this. Heron girl, full in the breasts, long and smooth with edgeless eyes. Small featured, like my mother, pass a hand over her face and the lips, the cheeks would barely rise under your fingers. Perhaps Cordelia was like this when she grew. That whiteness, that pale clay, when I slapped Reagan once on the neck, some small disobedience, she had arranged my pale cones in her own plaques, the marked rose and would not fade, high scarlet, like a bite. She wore low bodices to display it, flagrant, turning to the light at dinners. I ignored her, gave her pounded hazel for the burn. Later, goneral told me, whispering, always in my memory she is whispering, smothered, a giggle in the dark, that she had rubbed and pinched it every night to keep it virulent. Twisting her wound, bending to the glass to check it swell. So industrious in her spite. Beautiful. Thank you. I know I'm supposed to say that, but I mean it. And frankly, I think quite disturbing as well. But yes, that is a sample from, that's page 45 or so, quite early on in the novel. She's just starting to sort of think back on her girls and on what they were like as children and what her relationship with Lea was like. So yes, what questions does everyone have? Pam is going to read out the questions. And then also I wanted to show everyone, this is the US copy and book cover. It's been printed both separately in England and in Britain. And so we've got two various book covers here. Very beautiful. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to read a question from Tom Lederer. The more the two of you spoke, the more I thought of a recent US president and the co-role of egocentrism rather than senility played in his and Lear's life and the responses of his various wives. Did you think of that person at all? Weirdly enough, no. But when I was writing it, I was working for a US website as a journalist and it was during Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. And I remember very clearly bringing out the character of Lea wife as this woman was being constantly criticized for not being powerful enough, for speaking too angrily, for not speaking angrily enough, for not performing power in exactly the right ways at exactly the right time, while the other person on the stage obviously did whatever he wanted. And the brutality of that response, of the media's response to a woman having the temerity, whether she deserved it or not, the temerity to want to be president. And that was very informative because that hasn't gone away. The idea of a woman nakedly wanting power, and Lea wife does, she nakedly wants and works for power in the Abbey and in her life, is still so alien and confronting to so many people. That informed it really, really strongly, actually. How afraid people still are of that as a thing. It's interesting, J.R., because that was a question I had lined up to ask you exactly that. Just, I mean, how is it that we have so, we are sort of scaffolded by so many assumptions about who deserves the stage, what it takes for people to believe in you, how you can be a complete, full of mendacity and have people believe that you're speaking the truth. And as you know, as you say, Hillary Clinton has now kind of disappeared and is now reemerging, writing, I believe, some kind of crime novels. So he seems to have given up on the idea that power can be believed in. And so now she's going to, for her, now she's going to be in the world of make believe. Yeah. And I saw the follow up to that, which is in the chat that Lea wife is not something to aspire to, which is interesting because she's not, she's profoundly unlikeable in many, many ways. We understand her. I've made it so that it's very clear why she is the way she is. She has had an incredible pressure from the world around her that has shaped her into kind of a monstrous mother, a difficult wife, all of this other stuff. But I also believe it's very important in fiction and elsewhere for there to be space for women to be profoundly unlikeable, particularly ones who want power and want to command the stage because we give that permission to male characters so easily. We give them that space. We're willing to go along with it, even if they are terrible, which they often are, because terrible people can still be entertaining and you can still empathize with them. There are still stories to be told. In fact, sometimes terrible people have the best stories. The entirety of Lear is built around the terrible person making a terrible story. But that permission is not often given still to female characters. It was very important for me to give Lear wife that sort of density, that layering of many motives, some of them not particularly friendly. Joseph Heisler has an interesting question that kind of harkens back to the voice you used. He asks, how do you decide what voice to write when referencing a famous play? Did you find yourself taking on Shakespeare's voice at any time or were you ever tempted to echo his voice? Even trying to echo Shakespeare is terrifying. The idea is just, and in many ways, doing this as a first novel is an active, blind ego that I probably wouldn't try five novels in. You have to kind of be at your first novel stage to be like, of course, this is fine. I'll treat it quite a bit of Shakespeare. It's fine. But I had to be quite careful to make it, as I said, not seem like a pastiche of Shakespeare, you know, not make it feel like I was writing another play. Because the other thing is that plays, as Philip will note, plays are incredibly different storytelling vehicles to novels. The way that language is presented and language is used to build character is really, really different. And so a lot of what Shakespeare does technically is not kind of applicable to what I could be doing. And I did have an interesting conversation with my publisher early on who was like, were you ever tempted to do, you know, thou dost and, you know, stay in the register really clearly. And I was like, no, because I'm fairly sure people would think it was funny. They would read it and go absolutely not and shut the book and move away. And you can get away with it if you're Shakespeare, because you're Shakespeare. But with something like this, I had to be really careful, basically, is the answer to that question. Well, I have a question that I don't see any further ones in the chat, but just while we're giving someone else a chance to type in one, I was going to ask to you if the tricky thing often about writing about women in past centuries is dealing is writing within the context of, as you know, you've done it very well, writing in the context of how women were guarded and how women were treated in those in that time. And there might be a temptation for a sort of escapism. Well, I'll make this. Yes. I'll make this woman more powerful than she likely would have been or I'll make her more likeable. I'll make her more palatable to a 21st century audience. Did you ever get any pushback on that when you were editing it? I had some concern that Abbey's were not as freeing as or not freeing, but you know, that they weren't what I kind of made them out to be. But actually, Abbas's were, if anything, more powerful in the specific period that I was that I was talking about. I did a lot of research and because of the nature of Oxford, I found someone who specializes in medieval abbeys. And she basically informed me that Abbas's were huge landowners. They were incredibly powerful figures in the community. It was one of the really guaranteed ways for women to obtain quite serious political power in Europe in the medieval period. And if anything, I sort of underplay that because I'm not sure people would have believed it in its own way. And I've also underplayed how much freedom there was in Abbey's for very wealthy women. Because if you read accounts of the times, they were allowed to have sweets. They had pet monkeys. They could wear silk under their robes. They could have, you know, ornate jewels all over themselves. And I've put in the class divide very clearly between the nuns because it's a feature of the novel. But there were some excesses that were just accepted at the time that modern readers would be like, wait, what? What? They've got a Pomeranian. What? Yeah. So that was sort of the tension is making it believable for modern readers. Um, there's another question from Maxine. I wonder if you've read Hamnet, which has a totally different approach to Agnes, the Anne Hathaway character. I have it came out as Leo wife was in editing and has been this amazing, beautiful success, which I'm so glad about because that is a beautiful book. And a really interesting take on, yeah, what it was like to be a woman in that particular and very clearly in Shakespeare's time itself, whereas I've set Leo wife in earlier centuries. And I have nothing but good things to say about that book. I am also, I really, really liked the cover. The cover came out and we were having cover conversations. I was like, could we make it look like this? And they were like, no, people will get confused. But no, it's a very, very interesting book that does a lot of, I think really intriguing stuff with echoing Hamlet and Hamlet and the ideas of what Shakespeare took from his life. And actually we interviewed Maggie O'Farrell here at the Mechanics Institute when the book first came out. Yeah, so it's so lovely to have you sort of, you know, thinking about that novel as well. It was beautiful. It was a lot of stuff, a lot of kind of retellings and like silence of the girls and things like that came out just before Leo wife came out. It was lovely. It felt like we were sort of riding a wave of interest in women's voices that haven't been heard, you know. It's sort of, even though we, it wasn't possible to kind of read each other's work as it was happening, it's just sort of a coincidence. It's really lovely and I hope it keeps happening. I hope these books keep being made. The only thing that Grendel's mother from Beowulf is right for a retelling. If anyone wants, that's free, have at it. Pam, how are we off for time? I'm just looking, it's 101 so it means that it's 901 in County Cork. Oh, let's see. There's a question from Rabbi Avi Winnaker. Can we just run to that quickly, Pam? Sorry, let me scroll back and find that question. Yeah. Do you want me to read it out? Yes, go ahead if you would. Yeah, so Rabbi Avi Winnaker says, slightly off, but is there a relationship between Cordelia and Desdemona, Lea and Othello? If you don't have a take on that, that comes to mind, J.I., which I'm sure you do, I can jump in on that one. You go first. I have some thoughts, but I think your take on this is going to be really interesting. Well, I think power and the loss of it and the fact that the loss of power in terms of one's identity. You know, I always think of, I'll just say, because Avi is a Rabbi, I'll say, just referring this to the Christian idea of original sin, the idea of the rupture that is at the heart of Christian faith, I think is such a gorgeous metaphor for the rupture at the center of everybody. So the idea that we have internal integrity is, I think, is a sort of a myth. And so the idea that we have a rupture imposed by somebody else, by these original sinners, I think is a lovely way of just actually seeing that and the search to heal that rupture at every point. I think that is such a beautiful premise for the study of any character, anywhere, particularly Lea. He doesn't discover his rupture until he's almost dead. And Othello is at the height of his power. He says, you know, the flinty and steel couch of war has been my thrice driven bed of down. And so when he gets off that bed of down and goes into the bedroom in the house, that's when everything falls apart. The rupture, all Iago has to do is poke his finger in there. And the rupture is just, you know, just blows out. So I think when you think of these characters, the female characters are in a sense, their mercury, their sense of OK, but they can blame it on the females rather than blame it on the rupture. That might sound a little bit complicated. In here it's clear. Well, that's that was basically my take on it as well, which is that you can see the parallels of their expectations of power in their world and the command that they have over themselves in their domestic life are upended in some way. Someone negates it.  And that's what causes the destabilization to start things to start unraveling and to go horribly wrong in both in both senses. But yes, ultimately caused by what's rooted in both the male characters that faults that they have set in motion years before. And that's sort of the interesting parallel there. I know poor thing. Hey, by the way, everybody, I'll just put in the cal shakes address again in case anybody wants to do in depth. And I'm hoping that I'm going to bludgeon JR to join me in one of those one of those sessions. Oh, yes, absolutely. And that Cal shakes. And Pam, and, and, and Laura, did you want to, or Maxine, did you want to close off with anything or just thank both of you for a fantastic conversation. And this is just, it's, it's wonderful to have the voices of women, known and unknown given agency. And we should continue that for the future and all of our both in literature and in our society and in politics as we go forward. I want to thank these two incredible Aussies. These two are you type ladies of literature. We have author J R Thorpe and dramaturg, Philippa Kelly from California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda, joining us today and I am so pleased to have this very voluminous audience today. So I want to encourage you to come back to our programs to buy the book, Lear Wife to sign up for Phillipa's in depth conversations, which are magnificent. And join us in the theater live at Cal shakes this fall and this summer I think you're doing Romeo and Juliet this summer. So, these are incredible contemporaries, temporary versions of Shakespeare, and we look forward to seeing you at Mechanics Institute in the theater, and also in the library. So, thank you all. And thank you, JR and all best. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me I've had a wonderful time. What are we?