If you’d like to hear Tove Danovich and E.B. Bartels in conversation in person, come to Porter Square Books in Cambridge, MA tomorrow (Friday 4/7/23) at 7pm! To register and learn more information about the event, click here.

Tove Danovich is the author of Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them. Her work appears in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Ringer, Eater, NPR, Vox, Grid, and many others. Her articles have been selected for The Year’s Best Sports Writing and Best Food Writing and have been notable selections in Best American Food Writing and Best American Travel Writing. She has been interviewed about her work by 99% Invisible, Marketplace, KERA Think, Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio, and others. She lives in Portland, Oregon and works as a freelance journalist.

EB: This might be a chicken-and-egg-type question, but did you get chickens because you wanted to write a book about chickens, or did you want to write a book about chickens because you got chickens? This is a silly way of me asking the origin story of Under the Henfluence.

TD: The chickens definitely came first. Though, because I’m a journalist, I love reading about everything that I do. So, I went and checked out every book about chickens from the library, and as I was doing all this reading, I kept looking for a book that would explain chickens to me. There were 12,000 how to books about raising chickens, but not really anything that was meant to be a proper readable book about who chickens are and who we are with chickens. So then I thought, oh, no, I guess I’ll just write it.

EB: Love it.

TD: A couple times I did end up doing things for the sake of the book. For example, I got my rescue hens because I knew I wanted to do a chapter about that. So those I sought out for that experience. But the rest of my flock is just there because they wound up there.

EB: What was the exact moment when you realized, “Oh no, guess I’ll just write it”?

TD: It was within a year—probably closer to six months—of getting the chickens that I began to feel that there was something there. But then when Betty died, I had this big emotional moment I hadn’t been expecting. That really changed my relationship with them so much, and it changed the way I thought about them.

EB: How long did you spend writing this book?

TD: I got the chickens in 2018, wrote the proposal in 2019, and sold the book in 2020, and it was just published this March.

EB: How many chickens have you had over the course of that time period? How did your flock help you with or distract you from writing?

TD: I have eight chickens currently. I’ve had sixteen total. And they’re helpful, because they’re so much fun to hang out with! That part never felt like work.

Of course, I was working on this book while also doing other articles and things like that. So whenever I had moments where I really was in the book-writing zone, if it was a nice day, I would take my computer out to the patio while the chickens were out, and that reminded me of how nice they are and why I wanted to do this project in in the first place. Mentally they’re so calming. I think for me as an anxious person, having chickens has been really great. Just going out into the yard and watching them—maybe I’m gardening, maybe I’m hanging out in a chair— is very meditative and calming. It’s a nice excuse to get outside and away from the computer.

EB: That’s such a great visual image—you writing a book about chickens while surrounded by chickens. I loved the structure of the book and how the types of relationships people have with chickens shaped the story. How did you come up with that? Did the chickens tell you what to write?

TD: Figuring out the structure of the book, I’ve come to realize, is such a huge thing in writing a book. It makes such a big difference in figuring out what story you’re really trying to tell.

EB: I totally agree—I feel like I didn’t really know what I was writing about until I got the structure figured out.

TD: I knew from the beginning that this book was going to be a love letter to chickens. And I had this mission of wanting to take the reader on this journey and have them fall in love with chickens in the way that I got to do by having them in my own backyard. But I had to figure out the best way to simulate that, and that meant that the chapters are very much not in the order that they happened in real life.

I start with some of the nicer fun things about my excitement around getting chickens, and then that first loss that really changed things so much for me. But then I wanted to move into the broader world of “chickendom”—how chickens are an animal we just don’t think about very much, and how we have both changed each other’s lives as a species. I really wanted to explore the question, “Who are chickens?”

I’ve been reporting on animal agriculture for a long time, and I’ve read a lot of books about the many terrible things that happen in factory farming. A lot of those books can be really great, and they can change a lot of people’s behavior. But I found that doesn’t always last very long, and many people don’t even pick up these books because they don’t want to read about animal welfare or animal agriculture. So I wanted to give people the chance to love chickens in my book, and wait until the end to raise the question of whether we’re doing what we should be doing by them.

EB: I totally fell in love with chickens thanks to you sharing your stories about your own flock. I always love nonfiction that is a blend of personal stories and reporting, but I think it worked especially well for Under the Henfluence. How and when did you decided to do the blended personal and research approach?

TD: I always knew the book was going to be a blend of both personal and research. I didn’t want it to just be a book about, “I have some chickens and isn’t that great?” And I also love reporting and digging into old documents. That blended type of writing feels very natural to me, but it is a harder sell in the journalism world. You can get away with it in books.

EB: Backtracking a bit, how did you start writing nonfiction in general? And, because this series is specifically about writing nonfiction about non-humans, what specifically drew you to writing about animals?

TD: I took an introduction to journalism class at Eugene Lang, which is part of The New School in New York City. We were assigned to interview someone, and bedbugs were a really huge issue at that time, sweeping Manhattan. So I decided to write about bedbugs. I called the bedbug guy at the Museum of Natural History, who is the person that the New York Times goes to when they need a quote, and he answered all of my questions for just this little student assignment that never saw the light of day, and it was so much fun. I didn’t know you could do that. That you could have a question and find a person who spent their life studying these questions, and that person will just answer all these things that you’ve always been wondering about. That they’d take hard-earned time out of their day just to satisfy your curiosity. So that was really what made me fall in love with journalism and got me hooked.

EB: I also love that part of writing nonfiction. I am just really nosey and love that people will answer my questions about their lives and their work. So, bedbugs were your gateway animal?

TD: [laughing] Yes, but I also started doing food writing, and there are a lot of animals in food, and I just seemed to gravitate towards them. I’ve just been kind of scooting that direction ever since.

EB: So, I have to ask—writing nonfiction isn’t always easy. Generally, what do you think the biggest challenges and rewards are of writing nonfiction?

TD: The business of writing nonfiction is terrible! It’s so hard to make a living doing it. I try to be up front that I am depressed, I have anxiety, but I also have a husband with a steady job, and if it weren’t for that, I don’t know if I would still be doing this as much as I am able to. It’s really sad that that makes such a difference in this world.

But getting all your questions answered is rewarding! And getting to work with a great editor is just a joy. I think the world of nonfiction is wonderful because there’s so much to learn. I mean, there is a lot of overlap with writing fiction—we’re all just telling stories. It’s just I have to search through the real world to see what facts are there to collect into my Word document, and when you’re writing fiction, you’re building all those facts in your head first, but in the end it’s the same. Your story has to have an arc, it has to be interesting, it has to have world-building. So yeah, I just I think it’s cool to be able to look at the world around you and find the stories.

EB: What about when it comes to writing about animals in particular? What are the challenges and rewards? Also, did you have any misconceptions about chickens (or other non-humans) when you went into writing Under the Henfluence? Did your writing and research change your relationship to animals in any way?

TD: People just don’t think about chickens—I had thought about them in the abstract, and I’ve had on-and-off vegetarian stints for a while. For many years, even prior to this book, I stopped eating chicken, because I realized the welfare for chickens is just abysmal. You cannot go out to a restaurant and get chicken that I would feel good about eating—even at the height of the farm-to-table movement, ethical chicken in restaurants was still incredibly difficult to come by, while grass-fed beef is everywhere. So I knew how badly they were treated, but I didn’t appreciate chickens going into the book. In some ways that made it easier to write it and to bring all the things I was learning to the page because there were just so many things to discover that delighted me. So, I was like, let me share these with you, and maybe you, too, will be delighted to learn all these things that chickens can do.

EB: Delight is like the perfect word to describe your approach to this book. I felt that delight! I felt delighted reading it! So, besides learning delightful things, why do you think it is important that humans read and write about non-humans?

TD: Humans are so human-centric in so many ways. But then we also love our dogs and cats and other pets—just recently I was reading about how our love for animals is perhaps a product of the fact that humans need to nurture other things. We need to baby something, and humans love to find creatures that need us.

I don’t think it’s an accident that a lot of my deep chicken feelings came out from feeling loss, and also having sick pets that I had to bring inside and really focus on and care for. Then when you lose them, it’s that much more difficult.

I think animals are so much a part of our stories, because they’re just around us all the time. It’s hard to imagine not loving stories about animals. And I think, on a smaller level, which you talk about in your book, they’re a gateway to so many of these bigger lessons—like my first experience with death or being a lonely kid and the dog is my first real friend. So many of us have experiences like that, where we become very close to animals, and it can maybe feel safer sometimes to explore these stories through animals than with other people. In a way, we can really see ourselves in animals because it’s like us as children.

EB: I totally get that. I mean, I feel like everyone has animal stories. Whenever I talked about what I was writing about in Good Grief, people wanted to tell me their dead pet stories.

TD: I talk about chickens all the time, and everyone has some story about chickens!

EB: It’s so true! Your book got me thinking about how my great-grandmother kept chickens in Somerville, Massachusetts. Or how the people who owned our house before us had a chicken coop in the yard that apparently had a very tragic fire situation.

TD: Oof, yeah, that happens a lot.

EB: Okay, butbesides Jan Brett, who you talk about in your book—I did not know she was a chicken person!—who are some other animal writers you love?

TD: Definitely Sy Montgomery.I really love Jennifer Ackerman, who writes about birds. I’ve just been doing a lot of bird reading—there are so many amazing bird books. I also love Mozart’s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, and I just read Slow Birding by Joan E. Strassmann. Oh, I also love Alexandra Horowitz’s dog books! And Wild Souls by Emma Marris. I recently read Fox and I by Catherine Raven and it might be my new favorite.

EB: Finally, who are the non-humans in your life right now?

TD: I have two dogs, Mesa and Bandit, who are sleeping behind me right now in my office, and outside we have eight chickens. We have two new ones who are super cute—Blanche and Rose. They don’t appear in the book, but everyone else is listed in the acknowledgments section. [Editor’s note: you can follow the chickens on Instagram @thebestlittlehenhouse.] I also recently got a fish tank which has cherry shrimp and a couple small fish that I promptly forgot the species of as soon as I left the store. But they’re delightful and live in my office where I can take breaks and stare at them.