Interview with Danilyn Rutherford
You don't get abstractions for free
Danilyn Rutherford is an anthropologist and author. She was a professor and chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz prior to becoming the President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Danilyn is the author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier (Princeton University Press, 2003), Laughing at Leviathan: Sovereignty and Audience in West Papua (University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Living in the Stone Age Reflections on the Origins of a Colonial Fantasy (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Danilyn’s latest book Beautiful Mystery: Living in a Wordless World (2025) weaves together anthropology of disability and memoir. It is more personal than a typical academic study, and more analytic than a memoir. As a mother and anthropologist, she explores the world her daughter Millie inhabits. Millie has never been able to express herself verbally, but she has a thriving social environment rooted in the people around her.
Karīna Vasiļevska-Das (KVD): You mentioned in your email that writing Beautiful Mystery was very different from writing your previous books and articles. Could you talk about that process?
Danilyn Rutherford (DR): Sure. My first aspiration in life was to write novels from the perspective of my cat. I was five, and my mom gave me a notebook and some pens and pencils. (She also gave me scissors for some reason!) I wanted to be a writer. Then I wanted to be all sorts of other things. I ended up becoming an anthropologist, but really by accident. I was a biology and history double major as an undergrad. I never took any anthropology. I wanted to live outside the U.S.—that was the number one objective. I lived in Indonesia for two years. After that, I applied to a bunch of different graduate programs and ended up in anthropology, kind of by accident. [...]
It took me a year to begin writing my dissertation. Part of that year I spent spinning my wheels over an essay I was trying to rewrite and had to just throw away. It wasn’t until the first sentence came to me that I was able to start my dissertation. I had all sorts of tricks at that point for writing, and one of them was writing everything by hand. Until recently, I had to draft every piece of writing that really mattered to me by hand. I had to tell myself: this doesn’t really matter. And that was why scribbling helped; it tricked me into believing this doesn’t really matter. Once I had something on paper, I could enter it into the computer and begin the process of revising it until I felt okay about what I was writing.
As a graduate student, you spend a lot of time “writing scared.” You’re not writing to say something; you’re writing not to say something. You feel like you’re surrounded by landmines. You react to this feeling in different ways. Often it’s by taking on the style of someone who is established, who is safely ensconced at the top of a tower where people can’t attack them. This longing for safety is understandable, but it can lead to a lot of really bad habits for graduate students. You think, if it seems too easy to understand, no one will respect me. I was in graduate school from 1989 to 1997, a high watermark for poor writing in our discipline. I feel like I had that “writing scared” thing going on. But I also had this idea that writing should be musical. It’s not just a matter of using the right words for what you want to say; the words need to have a rhythm and a music to them. Even as I was trying to sound smart, [the] rhythm and music of words were something that was important to me in my writing.
I wrote a dissertation that was 700 pages long. Every single rabbit hole I felt like going down is in that dissertation. I had to unwrite to write my first book. I wrote the second book with the scraps of the first book plus some new research. The third book was something that came up when I was researching the second book. Those three academic books are structured as sets of circles. Each chapter is a circle. My form of writing has always been essayistic: start someplace, go someplace, circle back. [...]. I wrote these books by bringing together a group of essays and finding the connective tissue that ran through them all.
This book [Beautiful Mystery] was different. It had to have a single arc. I started working on it in a writing practice class I took with Laura Davis when I first moved to Santa Cruz. There was a flyer in Millie’s backpack for a writing workshop for parents of disabled kids. I participated in that, then I joined one of Laura’s weekly writing practice classes. I started generating material, and I loved it. It was like the scribbling I used to do to get started—whatever’s in your head, just get it on the page. The rules of writing practice are that your pen or pencil shouldn’t leave the page, that you have to write in longhand, and that you have to be as vivid and concrete as you can be. A bunch of that material ended up in the book. I’d take my handwritten pages home, and I’d type them into my laptop, edit them, and save them. I had a whole bunch of little snippets of writing about Millie, about the past, about my family, etc. Then I got invited to give some talks that Millie started sneaking into, so I had some academic writing, too [...] Turning all of this into a book was a really heavy lift. I will say that.
KVD: What did you do in terms of that heavy lifting and developing the arc?
DR: Here’s a part of my character that I’m trying to come to terms with: I suffer from delusions of grandeur.
KVD: Oh, we all do.
DR: I think we all do. You become an anthropologist because you like to write, and then you’re like, I really like to write, maybe I should just be a writer. In your interview with Angela Garcia, she talks about meeting with the executive editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. She told him about the creative nonfiction book she wanted to write, and he said, “That’s not the book we want.” I had a conversation with Laurence Ralph that was very similar. We get all excited about writing for trade presses because we want to be writers. But we soon discover that they want to publish us because we’re anthropologists. We need to face up to this. We need to recognize the expertise that we have as anthropologists as something that’s valuable to the rest of the world. But we also need to find a way to write in a way that the rest of the world might want to read. That’s the challenge. It’s an exciting one.
After toying with finding an agent, I realized that my book wasn’t going to be a trade book. But I also realized that it didn’t need to be a trade book to be the book I wanted to write. I really care about the theoretical questions I address in it, because they’re so important for ethical and political reasons, as well as for intellectual reasons. I didn’t want to lose those parts of the book, but I didn’t want to lose the personal parts either. It was a matter of giving the book a unified voice. I reached out to Ken Wissoker at Duke for advice. He read an early draft and gave me a whole lot of comments; he did not pull any punches. On his advice, I put a lot of effort into tightening up the memoir parts so the book had a clear arc. Not everything that happens to you is interesting – I learned that quickly. There was a lot of baby killing involved – I had to cut passages from the memoir chapters that I really loved. And I had to completely rewrite the chapters that had been published in academic settings—to bring myself in, to bring Millie in. Any time I had a concept, I had to buy it with a story. The story could just be a phrase, but I had to add something that would bring the idea to life.
You don’t get abstractions for free. I think this is one of the problems with academic writing—we think that we can. Academic writing can be lovely—we’re really good at beautiful abstractions. But we don’t pay for them. We don’t bring them into the world. That was one of the main challenges for me with this book. I had to be a lot harder on myself. A reviewer told me I needed to be more in dialogue with disability studies. I didn’t just add some names to a string of references. I took time on the revisions, not just to meet the minimum requirements, but to get the book to the place where I wanted it to be.
Throughout all of this, I was taking a feedback class with the same teacher, Laura Davis. I workshopped the entire book in that class in 1600-word chunks, including the academic parts of it. I’d share a rewritten section of a chapter, and my classmates were like, yeah, this is so boring. Finally, I got to the point where the majority of them understood what I was saying and didn’t feel like throwing what I had written across the room. It was a much more involved process than the academic writing I’ve done, a really different process, but ultimately, I think it was really good for me as a writer.
Like I said, I suffered from delusions of grandeur. I wanted to publish the book with a trade press; I thought that way everyone would read it. But people who write trade books can’t count on having an audience. Unless you end up publishing a best seller, an academic press is a better bet. My book is not a best seller. But because I’m an anthropologist, and anthropologists buy Duke books, there are people out there who are reading it. You guys read it; that’s beautiful. We anthropologists read each other’s books, and that’s nice.
KVD: What have people said?
DR: The response has been really good. I’ve done a couple of events here in Santa Cruz, including one on campus, which was great. Friends on the faculty showed up, but also people from the community. Two women came up to me and told me that their writing group had read my book. They were memoir writers; I’d never met them before.
I did another event that was co-sponsored by the County Office of Education, and teachers, therapists, and some parents who are part of their community advisory council came. We had the coolest conversation about normativity and the way schooling is supposed to create neoliberal subjects and citizens, and how this vision shapes the whole IEP [Individualized Education Program] process. It was really fun. I was worried that people from the schools would be offended by what I wrote. But they told me, No, this really speaks to us [...]
My family has read the book—my brother cried at the dining room table. Friends have told me that they never really understood what I was going through, and now they do. I’ve been happy with the way people have reacted to it. And relieved. It’s a very personal book. I don’t expect to write a lot more books that reveal this much of myself. Or that reveal this much of my daughter. To be worth it, the book had to be effective in addressing the political and ethical issues her life raises. Otherwise, it would feel pretty icky having it out there.
RP: Do you have a set writing routine? In your book you describe looking at a photo of yourself writing on a yellow pad on your son’s back. You were writing everywhere. How has this changed?
DR: It’s changed a lot. I interviewed for my first tenure-track job when I was a visiting tutor at Goldsmiths College. I got the call from the University of Chicago when my son was a week old. That’s around the time that photograph was taken. I was like, Okay, I have a job. Now what? I was very, very motivated to write, because I was actually quite frightened. I need to sit down and write. What if I can’t write anything? I had that kind of anxiety. Making the process feel spontaneous was important. I had lots of little rituals—writing on yellow pads—the legal ones that are really long—with the right pens, in the right locations. Coffee houses where people were talking but not saying anything interesting. Cubbyholes in a library. I needed to change my environment. To get away from places associated with just work.
It’s different now. I don’t work in a university. I don’t have to publish as part of my job. That means that when I write, it’s just for me. I have a deadline every week on Thursday, which is when my feedback class meets. I write every weekend, and I always look forward to it. […] My partner is a fiction writer. We’re like, okay, let’s go on a vacation—we can find someplace pretty to sit and write.
Writing is different at different points in your career, and I think this has to be acknowledged. First books and articles often aren’t as effective or beautiful as they could be. That’s because we don’t help each other. Senior scholars don’t nurture junior scholars. We don’t give them the time they need to write really well. I think there also needs to be a recalibration within the discipline. There’s too much pressure on junior scholars to publish a whole bunch of stuff without thinking hard about how effective each of those pieces are, how original they are. We don’t give junior scholars the time, space, and support they need to go through the process I went through with this book. I think this [is] bad for the discipline.
Some fear is essential. It’s part of learning. It’s scary to learn; it’s scary to be unsettled. If we could work to remove some of the other sources of fear, people would be able to find their voice within the discipline in a way that’s less painful and perhaps more productive for everyone.
KVD: Just a clarifying question. When you talk about the discipline, you mean the discipline of anthropology?
DR: Yeah, the discipline of anthropology. I think about this in my role at Wenner-Gren. I care about the survival of anthropology. We need to support each other so we can become better writers. We need to develop alliances beyond our own narrow little pod.
RP: Can academics write what they like?
DR: I think they should be able to write what they like. You don’t become a scholar unless you like playing with ideas, unless you like exploring complicated things. But wouldn’t it be a beautiful world if you had time to express those ideas so vividly and coherently that when you read the final draft of that book or article, you said to yourself, yeah, this is beautiful. I can really feel the passions that brought me to these ideas. I can really feel proud of this piece of writing. I did more than just obey Reviewer Three. I did more than just jump through the hoops I needed to jump through to survive. I’ve actually been able to create something that I love.
I’ve been able to write what I like because I’m incredibly privileged. Less privileged academics should be able to, too. Is that the right answer? I don’t know.
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