Jaime Green is a freelance writer, editor, and writing teacher who writes about books, culture, and science. She is the author of The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos, and she is the series editor for The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Previously, Green was associate editor of Future Tense, a collaboration of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University, the writer behind The New York Times romance book review column, and the creator, host, and producer of the podcast The Catapult. She has taught at Columbia University, Eugene Lang at The New School, Catapult, and the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, and she is currently a lecturer at Smith College.

EB: When I started this series, I was thinking about “non-humans” as animals, but I’ve realized that term also includes plants, fungi, or, as in the case of your new book The Possibility of Life, aliens. When did you first start writing about “non-humans”?

JG: I’ve been interested in aliens forever.It goes so far back I don’t even remember when it started—but I first started writing about the possibility of life on other planets and the possibility of life beyond earth in that research seminar we had to take in grad school at Columbia.

EB: I remember that research seminar well. Is that where The Possibility of Life began to take shape?

JG: There was no a-ha moment, like this is what I’ll write about. It just felt obvious. I already had my tattoo of the Pulsar Map from the Voyager Golden Record—this was something that I loved and cared about and knew about. It was one of those things that had always been with me that I then decided to write about.

I knew I wanted to write a book about alien life in the research seminar, but I did that thing where you visit the spot on the shelf in the bookstore where your future book would exist, and I went to Housing Works and saw all the other books about the possibility of alien life and thought, okay, this book already exists by people with way more expertise than me—all these astronomers with PhDs. I couldn’t justify why I should write about it.

EB: I know that feeling.

JG: But then a few years later, a friend was doing some editing for Medium and she was commissioning ideas for essay series for their culture vertical. I was suggested: What about an essay series about aliens from a cultural lens? And she said, yes, and thank God, because this book would not exist otherwise.

So, I sketched out my ideas for the essays—putting aliens from literature and pop culture alongside scientists and researchers—and the essays were supposed to be 1,500 to 2,000 words, and I just kept writing and writing. I was like, Oh, this is something I have a lot to say about. This is a very fruitful way to do it. And this is a different approach, to looking at the topic.

It still went through a couple iterations after that, but then I was at a writers group session that Carl Zimmer came to as a guest, and he was talking about how he structured his book, and that’s when it hit me like a lightning bolt. I rushed out—it was at someone’s apartment—and I ran into the entryway where my bag was stashed and grabbed my notebook and wrote down what the structure of my book would be. I still have all my old notebooks on my shelf, and I’m sure I could find the notebook where I wrote that down, and I bet the table of contents would be extremely similar to what ended up being in the book. Because that when the idea crystallized as a structure—that was when I knew that I could do it, because I knew what each chapter would be.

EB: That makes a lot of sense. Sometimes I feel like the whole problem of writing is figuring out the structure of something and as soon as you get that right, everything else falls into place.

Once you had the structure figured out—did you know then that you would be a character in the book? Because I love how you act as a guide throughout The Possibility of Life, especially for the parts with more complex scientific concepts. It feels like you’re holding my hand as you explain things to me, which I appreciate.

JG: When I wrote the sample chapter for the proposal, which was an early version of chapter three, the animals chapter, I was surprised how science-heavy it ended up being. I had been imagining the book to be more sci-fi than science, but I think it ended up 60/40 science to sci-fi. So, I knew to make sense of all the science real estate I had to be there. I don’t think I ever doubted that I would be there as a presence, though I’m not there as an embodied character—it’s not like other science journalism where you see the reporter in the lab, looking at a bug. This was largely because I did so much research during the pandemic.

EB: And no one wants to read descriptions of you sitting on Zoom calls.

JG: Right, but also I kept telling myself “I am an essayist” so I didn’t feel imposter syndrome about me writing science journalism. I’m not an expert, I’m a curious person alongside the reader. I could be like, let me take you on this journey.

EB: I loved your drawings throughout too—that added to the journey feeling.

JG: The drawings were not something I knew would be in it from the beginning. I actually don’t even really remember how it started? I did the first one on a Post-It note, and I thought, That looks cute. I know I’m not an artist, but I think having my bad drawings in it makes it feel more personal. Like we’re sitting together and I grab a napkin to draw something so you can understand it better.

EB: Did writing The Possibility of Life change your relationship to “non-humans” in any way?

JG: I feel really done with aliens. I got it out of my system. [laughter]

I talked to one astrophysicist who maintains a habitable planet catalog, and I asked him something about what he thinks about in terms of aliens that might be out there, and he said, “I don’t care.” And I was like, “What are you talking about? This is what you do for a living.” And he said, “The more I learned about life on Earth, the less I care about what’s out there, because life on Earth is so interesting.” And in that moment I thought, Okay, sure, cool. But two months later I realized I had come to the same conclusion. I went into this book, knowing a decent bit about astronomy and exoplanets and SETI [the search for extraterrestrial life] and the search for aliens, and much less about the biology stuff that I write about. But I had to read and write about the origin of life and evolutionary biology, because in order to imagine life on another world, we have to really understand life on Earth. And all that was so interesting and fascinating to me, partially because it was new information to me but also because there is so much wonder and mystery in life on Earth. And there’s so much weird life on Earth! This is good. I don’t get into odds and probabilities in the book, because I don’t feel super compelled by the probability of there being a lot of other life on other planets, especially not complex life. So, what we have on Earth might just have to be enough, because this might be all we have.

EB: I felt that way after reading Ed Yong’s An Immense World. Dolphins are aliens that live among us!

JG: Yes! I really started to appreciate how alien animals on Earth are. I write about dolphins and bats in the book because they are so intelligent but live in a different environment from humans. So the way their brains have evolved is different, both in terms of communication and sensory perception, and also their kind of intelligence. But it’s not just dolphins and bats! I moved to the suburbs during early on in my time writing the book, and I’m looking at my backyard right now while talking to you, and it’s just a normal suburban backyard with some 30- or 40-foot trees, nothing wild, just normal backyard stuff. And I see so many birds all the time! There are grackles and finches and they’re amazing, they’re insane, they’re so different—how they communicate and experience the world. Watching them makes me think, why do we need aliens? We have this.

But the reason we feel like we need aliens is we want someone else to talk to. Even though we’re pretty closely related to dolphins, they have evolved for such a different environment that we can’t talk to them. But if we met an alien that had evolved to live on land and to breathe air, they might be more similar to us than a dolphin is cognitively.

EB: Kind of going off the differences in cognition, what do you think are some of the challenges of writing about subjects you can’t interview directly? What are some of the rewards?

JG: The closest example is talking to dolphin researchers instead of dolphins. Some of the researchers I spoke with are very adamant about not anthropomorphizing, and their research is about how dolphins communicate with each other and not with us.

I also wrote about fictional aliens, and I interviewed Ted Chiang who wrote the short story that Arrival is based on. I asked him if the aliens he wrote have any interiority to him, like if he knows their thoughts and their motivations. He said, no, absolutely not. They needed to be alien to him in order for them to be alien to the reader. The whole idea is that we’re trying to imagine the unimaginable.

EB: So, in some ways, I feel like writing nonfiction about “non-humans” is always a little bit fictional, because we can’t really know for sure what is going on. In general, what do you think are the biggest challenges and rewards are of writing nonfiction, not just nonfiction about animals?

JG: I can’t compare it to other genres because my brain doesn’t write fiction. But what I love about nonfiction is how all the puzzle pieces are already out in the world. You have to go find them and figure out how they fit together and figure out what the picture is and how to spackle the gaps between the pieces. I find that so rewarding and satisfying.

And I love getting to follow my curiosity. I learned that in grad school—Richard Locke was the one who pointed out to me that my strongest writing was when I follow my curiosity. So whenever I get stuck with a chapter or whatever, I will give myself the free-write prompt: What am I curious about? And I’ll sit and write about that to reconnect with that. That’s always at the core of what I’m writing. Which I think is part of why I’m done with aliens now, because I’m not curious about them anymore because I just wrote a whole book about them.

But even the hard stuff, the problem solving, is so rewarding. Someone described writing a book as a collaboration between Yesterday You and Today You and Tomorrow You and many years’ worth of ourselves, sitting down, and doing the work each day, to collaborate on this big thing that you by yourself can’t do.

EB: I will say when writing my book sometimes I found myself cursing 2015 E.B. for not taking more clear notes on a source or organizing my research folders better. Sometimes I felt like I was fighting with past versions of myself.

JG: Part of the challenge of writing the book was finding research methods that allowed me to be in conversation with my past and future selves. I’ll at least now always remember to annotate a PDF with when I read it and whether I read it or skimmed it. Because you can’t just look at it and be like—nothing is highlighted in chapter two, does that mean I skipped it and didn’t read it, or I read it and nothing in it was relevant?

EB: So, after all this reading and writing about aliens, why do you think it is important that humans read and write about non-humans?

JG: It’s how we expand our empathy. Whenever we try to imagine aliens, we are trying to stretch our empathy. It’s like stretching your leg—pushing past your range of motion to extend the range of motion. By thinking about aliens, we are expanding the scope of our empathy, basically asking ourselves: How weird of a creature can you care about?

EB: Who are some other writers that you admire who write nonfiction about non-humans? Any kind of non-humans—animals, plants, aliens, etc.

JG: My number one lately is Merlin Sheldrake, author of Entangled Life, which is a book about fungi. It’s so good. I read it because my U.K. publishers were using it as a comp title to my book, and I was confused how it was relevant—but I learned all of these facts about how fungi interact with the world, how they work, how research on them works. But he also shows what an interconnected part of the world they are—plants on land depend on mycorrhizal networks between their roots. That was required for plants to move out of the oceans and onto land! If we didn’t have fungi, we wouldn’t have plants on land—but it’s all invisible, and that just blew my mind. Every time I look at a tree now, I think about how it only exists because of mycorrhizal networks. That sort of transformative knowledge—that is not only cool to learn, but changes how I feel about the world—is so powerful to me.

I also haven’t read it yet but Jonathan Losos has a new book coming out about the evolution of cats that I’m really excited about. His book Improbable Destinies was a big source in my chapter on evolution—it’s super good. So, I’m sure The Cat’s Meow is going to be fantastic. Also, at one point I read something in his book and thought, what the fuck, I have to talk to this guy, and I emailed him and I was on the phone with him two days later. That was just so generous—I will always have a special place in my heart for him for humoring me.

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

JG: Is it bad my first thought was my four-year-old human child? [laughing] I’m constantly trying to understand what is going on in his brain and how he’s experiencing the world and figuring out how to connect and communicate. He’s extremely verbal, but he’s also a little freak.

I also have Hercules, my dog, who is napping right down here. He just looked up. Hello. Yes, you. Yes, you stinky man.

Plus, there are all the birds in my backyard, the two groundhogs who live under our deck, the grackles that nest in this evergreen tree. It’s baby grackle season and they all look like scruffy little teenagers. They’re so funny-looking. And there is a red-tailed hawk that lives in the park across the street from me, who I often see above my trees. I really love my backyard birds.