Willow Defebaugh

Did you know you look just like the portrait of Mary Shelley?

I said no, but I thought in my soul, I wish I did.

I mean, I can't imagine why, where you would have gotten that from.

But you had just spent seven years in Mary Shelley's world, writing your new book, Traversal.

What drew you to Mary Shelley?

Not to mention also the legacy of Frankenstein has been twisted and warped and turned into its own creature.

You know, when in reality, the original story holds so much wisdom for our world today, not just about ambition and power, but also about what happens when we treat people as, I'll say monsters and how treating someone as monstrous turns them monstrous.

And I mean, look at our world today.

Hurt people hurt people.

So as you mentioned, Traversal interweaves the narratives of a number of revolutionary scientific and literary minds.

But it also really reads to me like a love letter to chemistry, chance, connection.

Would you say that these are the central forces of your life, all life?

I mean, we're talking about this happening with the Cold War as the backdrop, right?

And so who's to say what role she played in preventing that from becoming

I'm reminded of what you were sharing last night about the transit of Venus, right?

Which was in a lot of ways the first truly global scientific experiment.

And you were sharing how that's kind of a welcome reminder for this moment we're living in where it feels like science is really under attack.

The search for truth prevails and this moment is not new, right?

And I just want to underline what you were sharing that from that, we were able to conceive of the scale of the universe.

Do you feel personally in this time when, you know, there's such a backlash against science, particularly in this country in which we're having this conversation, do you feel like an urgency to safeguard the scientific history and catalog it the way that you've done with traversal?