Heather Radke is a freelance nonfiction author and contributing editor and reporter at Radiolab. Her book Butts: A Backstory, about the cultural history of the buttocks, was published in 2022 and was praised by Time, Esquire, and Publishers Weekly, among others. On Wednesday, she gave this year’s Jesse Floyd Mack Lecture in the Humanities, titled “Small Potatoes,” on the importance of covering seemingly small or ubiquitous topics in nonfiction.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk a little bit about your idea of writing about “Small Potatoes,” the topic of your recent Radiolab episode and Wednesday’s lecture?
It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I worked at the Hull House Museum, which was a house museum, so the domestic was really an important part of what we were doing. We would put spoons on display or Jane Adams’ journal, where she wrote down all the food she ate in a day. These really mundane parts of life are really important when you’re putting together a historic house museum.
Even before that, I always was interested in the domestic and the everyday, but I have long felt like that interest is in tension with traditional ideas around journalism, which are deeply invested in traditional narrative arcs and high-stakes storytelling — and for reasons that are really good. But because journalism thrives in that area, I’ve often felt like there’s a lot that goes unseen and undocumented. So I’m always pushing this idea of like, what if we looked at the parts of our lives, which are most of our lives. Most of every day you’re doing things like making a sandwich and trying to decide what you’re going to do for coffee or figuring out how you get your laundry done — in-between tasks like that. These are the things that actually make up what life is. And the fact that that’s not represented in various forms of art and media, I just think that’s interesting and worth discussing out loud. It’s like this provocation to ask whose lives we aren’t seeing and why we choose not to see those parts of life.
How did you decide nonfiction writing was what you wanted to do?
I always loved reading and writing, but I also think early on I intuitively understood that I’m a pretty social person, and sometimes fiction writing is an incredibly lonely thing because you’re just alone. One of the good things about creative nonfiction or journalism are the parts of it where you’re talking, where you’re interacting with the world. I don’t know if I ever consciously decided that this was the kind of writing I was going to do, but I think it suits that part of my personality very well.
After I graduated from college, I went to the University of Michigan. I kind of wandered around a good bit. One of the things I did was I went to this place called the Salt Institute of Documentary Studies in Maine, and that was a semester-long program in radio documentary. Then I got an internship at Radiolab, and it all seemed like things were moving, but then 2008 happened and the entire economy crashed and there were no jobs. So I moved to Chicago with my girlfriend and she had a job. I just started looking for any kind of job I could get. I had been a history major, so I started to look at museum work.
Eventually I got this job, which was truly transformative, at the Jane Adams Hull House Museum in Chicago, where we just did a variety of really innovative and weird stuff. I think it was in that role that I was able to feel creatively free and sort of formally unbridled. I worked there for four years or something, and then I turned 30 and I realized if I was ever going to be a writer or do the journalism thing, I was going to have to do it. So that’s when I applied for an M.F.A., and I got into Columbia.
How do you decide what to write about?
There’s some question of what people are going to let you write. Like what’s marketable? I think you can’t deny that that’s part of the story, but I also think it’s like any kind of art where you have to let yourself love what you love and be interested in what you’re interested in. The thing about this kind of work is it’s incredibly risky and heartbreaking. You pitch these stories and people say no all the time to something you really care about, and that can be hard.
I do think you end up seeing stories everywhere; you see them in the things you do all over the place. And one of the fun things about doing this kind of work is it’s like a snake eating its tail. You’re getting more and more excited about the world because you have chosen a life where that’s the whole job.
How would you describe the current media landscape, and what challenges and opportunities does this landscape provide for people who want to write or be on the radio?
I think with media, the challenge is always about money, and that’s more and more true. Just in the past two years, there’s been a huge amount of layoffs in radio. NPR had layoffs less than a month ago. WNYC had laid off something like eight percent of their staff. Also, I think one of the heartbreaks of narrative nonfiction is there was this time in the ’80s and ’90s where you could be this kind of blockbuster Jay McInerney-style magazine writer and make $4 or $5 a word, which is just unheard of now. So I think the structural economic realities are clearly the challenge.
I also think to some extent access is a challenge, although that’s changing. I think there are more and more ways to learn about it compared to even from when I was young, because I think people are trying to break down barriers to access. But it’s still a network of people who are friends and went to fancy schools and that kind of thing. But I think the opportunities are just like what they always are, which is each person has a way of seeing the world particularly and bringing that particular lens and specific sense of humor, and where you grew up and who your parents are, and just all these parts of how we become particular humans instead of general humans. I feel like the opportunity is you get to be curious about what you’re curious about and then make other people excited about that.
