Ask the Author: Marilyn Johnson
Answered Questions (8)
Marilyn Johnson
Thank you, Shelley! Charles C. Mann's 1491 was a pleasurable and engaging read about all sorts of recent discoveries in the Americas. I found James Deetz's In Small Things Forgotten: an Archaeology of Early American Life to be a short and haunting book about what the colonial people left behind; I also loved A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for what it taught me about colonial life. Shamans, Queens, and Figurines by Sarah Milledge Nelson is a good look back at a pioneering archaeologist's efforts to find women in Asia's past. I met some of the authors for the Heritage Matters series (in particular, Laurie Rush, a wonderful guide to the field), and perhaps this would be a good series for your university library. https://boydellandbrewer.com/series/h... I discovered Brian Fagan's Archaeologists: Explorers of the Human Past after I wrote Lives in Ruins, or I would have included its short profiles of past and present archaeologists in my bibliography.
Marilyn Johnson
Of course, Chris! You can contact me via my website at marilynjohnson.net. Thanks for reading Lives in Ruins!
Marilyn Johnson
I used to have terrible writer's block; then I started writing non-fiction. I think what I had was a self-consciousness block: I was trying to write poetry, fiction, and humor. As soon as I started writing non-fiction, I got out of my own way and was able to work when I needed to. For me, it helped to feel a responsibility to represent other people and tell their stories. I think I simply needed a subject outside myself.
Marilyn Johnson
Getting access to a part of my brain that isn't available to me any other way!
Marilyn Johnson
Join or form a writers' group. My writers' group had a huge influence on me, and I still rely on these people for regular feedback and support. They are my first and most influential audience, and they remind me that writing is simply an attempt by one person to communicate with another.
Marilyn Johnson
I don't know what my next project will be. My head is still with the archaeologists!
Marilyn Johnson
I start every writing day with a working journal. I write about personal things in it, but I also use it as a space to block out what I want to explore or attempt that day. It warms me up.
Marilyn Johnson
The obituaries always inspire me. I read a number of obituaries of archaeologists in 2010 and 2011 that made my heart beat faster -- what fascinating lives! Mary Leakey was crazy about her Dalmatians. Lewis Binford was married six, or was it seven, times. Donny George, an Iraqi archaeologist, had thrown himself between the looters of the Iraq National Museum and its treasures. I remember, around this time, asking a scientist which fields were in flux these days. Physics and astrophysics and medicine and biotechnology were booming, obviously, but also archaeology -- archaeology was being turned upside down on a regular basis. As the earth was being transformed by forces both natural and unnatural, pieces of the human past were turning up and changing what we knew about the human past. I was smitten.
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