Grounded in her experiences as a climate scientist, an environmental policy advisor to U.S. Senator Al Franken and Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, and a mother, the innovative essays in Anna Farro Henderson’s Core Samples range from observations, confessions, and meditations on lab and fieldwork to a packing list for a trip to the State Capitol and a lactation diary. Readers are invited on voyages as far afield as the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico, the Juneau Icefield in Alaska, and a meteor crater in Ghana—and as close to home as a town hall meeting in America’s corn belt.
Catherine Imbriglio: Your book’s title Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood signals a commitment to integration rather than compartmentalization of the many roles/selves that go into making up an individual. You use the terms “core samples” and “experiments,” words which readers might understand as coming from science, and encourage readers to see how they might apply to politics and motherhood. Could you first tell us what core samples/ experiments meant in your field work and then give us some examples of what these meant for you in writing about politics and motherhood?
Anna Faro Henderson: I spent the first decade of my career as a research geologist. While most science experiments take place in a laboratory, geological experiments took place thousands, millions, or billions of years ago. As a researcher, I puzzled out those natural experiments. For instance, did the development of grasslands lead to ice sheets spreading across North America? During past warm periods did the seasonal patterns of rain and drought change? I mainly worked with core samples from lakes, but I also studied cores from tree rings, bone, and ice. With mass spectrometers and microscopes, I “read” these core samples.
For example, mud collects at the bottom of lakes preserving plant pollen, silicious algae, and other fossils. Since a plant or algae species can only survive in a certain range of conditions, its presence, or absence, is a clue to the past. These clues, and others, gave snapshots that I strung into zoetrope-like time series.
When I left academics to work in the U.S. Senate, I had no political or policy background. I was also six months pregnant with my second child (and had barely figured out what it meant to be a mom). Thinking of my actions as experiments let me try—and fail. And then try again. I have an oak leaf taped to my wall that I wrote on with Sharpie, “Each day another draft.” Okay, so there is no final performance, but the mindset of drafting and experimenting allows me to move forward in uncertainty. I don’t know how I would get words on the page if I didn’t give myself that space.
One of the first agents I spoke with told me that while science is a literary topic and elections are a literary topic, the actual work of policy and politics is not, and could never be, literary. So, another experiment was rendering my experience in the Senate, bureaucracy, and Governor’s office as literary.
CI: Though the title doesn’t mention writer as one of your key roles, it’s clear to me that your creative gifts counteract compartmentalization on both personal and professional levels. In particular, throughout your book, you employ personal narrative and poetic language to underscore the importance of narrative and poetry in science, government, and everyday life. In one of your essays you write: “We read mud like a diary, transcribing it with equations, time series, and maps. All this is a story.” Could you talk about how seeing science as a story has helped you in your capacity as policy maker? As a mother? As a writer?
AFH: Seeing science as a story means seeing science as messy – people trying, screwing up, falling in love, holding grudges, and, sometimes, having brilliant ideas. You might not get much from an explanation of how I propagated error through an equation. But if I told you about it in the context of a power struggle with my boss, an impulsive decision to have a baby, and sneaking around under a pen name, it might be relatable.
In political work, I spent most of my time with people who disagreed with me. Nothing could happen without bipartisan support (a divided Congress and a divided state legislature). We fall in love with well-written villains when we see from their perspective. To work with political adversaries, I needed to make them relatable villains or, even, friends. The point was not to convince or convert them to my ideas. It was to find overlap, what did we both want? I might want funding to monitor chemicals in rivers to enforce regulations, and they might want that same data to grant industrial permits. In the Senate, I met staff from the other political party for coffee or frozen yogurt. We chatted about our lives as much as legislation. In the Minnesota State Capitol, I met with legislators in their offices. I would ask about the art on their walls and the objects on their desks. I learned about serving on submarines, family history, and ice skating on rivers. Seeing a political adversary as someone who obsessively collects agates, I glimpsed their story, which is to say their humanity. That humanity provided threads for connection, and those connections led to millions of dollars of investment in environmental programs and policies.
In politics, I also used my writing craft in very practical ways. The first speech I drafted in the Senate was on climate change, and I had total writer’s block. The Senator was famous from Saturday Night Live and bestseller books. I was a postpartum scientist leaking milk through my imposter office clothing. I froze. How I unfroze and wrote words that would be spoken on the Senate floor, was by falling backwards into my writer instincts (like a trust exercise on a picnic table). In fiction, I had taken on voices that had nothing to do with my lived experience. I could do it in nonfiction as a speech writer.
CI: In your essay, “How to Pee Standing Up: Rules for a Woman in Climate Science,” one of the rules you list is “There are Limits to What We Can Know.” Could you talk about coming to terms with limits you discovered both personally and professionally? How dealing with limits might have changed you? Might even have changed your perceptions of limits?
AFH: On the first research expedition I led, my field assistant and I went to a hundred remote lakes between New Mexico and the Canadian border in Montana, and then across to the Pacific Ocean in Oregon. We drove over eight thousand miles in eight weeks camping out almost every night. Each morning, we drove up a dirt mountain road until it was impassible. Then we hiked. When we reached our destination, I swam to the middle of the lake, dove down, and filled a collection bottle. More advanced graduate students had told me that my plan was too ambitious. One of my advisors had told me to end each day while I still had energy. None of what they said made sense to me. I knew nothing about limits. Growing up as one of seven kids with chaotic parents, doing whatever it took to make things work was second nature. I spent a lot of my twenties crashing and burning. It would take a few years before I even recognized when I bulldozed through my limits.
My initial concept for motherhood was to proceed as before, just with a kid on my back. Pregnant, and then breastfeeding, I slammed into brick walls. I would be paralyzed for days or weeks by back pain. I went through all sorts of mundane forms of hell: heartburn, acid reflux, insomnia, anemia, and so on. These limits I could not override. I was forced into my body, but figuring out how to deal with my limits would take much longer.
What ultimately forced me to deal with my limits was frustration (grief) over not having time to develop writing projects. I “stole” time to write, mostly at the expense of sleep. I was waiting for a permission slip. To write, I had to make a choice, and choosing meant admitting time was limited. I could not do it all. (To be honest, I face this decision again and again.)
CI: I read the section titled “Water Czar” as the emotional and thematic climax of Core Samples. One of your book’s running themes involves anxiety and self-doubt about “walking away,” but this section sets up a space for “walking toward,” something that has been latent all along, but here is reinforced by several key realizations. For example, you title one of the subsections “Giving Up Control of the Narrative.” What does this mean, given the book’s emphasis on the importance of narrative?
AFH: Giving up control of the narrative in politics meant creating space for dissent and a broader (and more interesting) definition of who gets to be an expert. Serving as the water advisor to the Governor of Minnesota, I put a lot of people on stage. The goal was to set the Governor at the top of a pyramid that appeared to have a wide base of support. No surprises. Our office drew from the same pool of environmental experts that I heard on the radio. They were mostly urban, white, and male. After four months in my position, planning rural town halls on new and unpopular regulations on farmers, I decided to change course. Audiences needed to identify with the speakers. For the town halls, I invited farmers critical of the government who were also deeply invested in government water protection programs. I invited tribal chairmen/chairwomen to speak about water policies who were at odds with our Administration on other issues. People are contradictions, and they remember past injustices. Allowing for this drew large crowds from across communities and the political spectrum. When protestors showed up (pro-mining, anti-pipelines, anti-medical waste, etc), we gave them the microphone. Before each event, I crossed my fingers and waited to see what would happen. The reality was that no moment could be lassoed into submission. Narratives take a collective.
The intimate writing in Core Samples felt like giving up control. Following where essays led was like falling off a cliff. The book, itself, coming out terrified me. I had broken a taboo by writing about scientists (mostly me) making stupid choices. I had shared the inner workings of political offices. Before the launch, I recorded a podcast about getting your voice heard in politics with two former colleagues. After reading an advanced copy, one texted us, “I can’t believe you wrote about sex” (on a glacier). I had been thinking the same thing. How could I have written such unprofessional things about professional work? The other texted back, “I love that you did that, I felt so seen.” I didn’t know what would happen when I fell off the cliff, but hearing from readers can make for a safe landing.
CI: During the course of your career, you have made many presentations to different kinds of audiences. You have just recently finished a book tour. I’m curious about the responses/questions that literary audiences had for you.
AFH: My favorite part of the tour was inviting folks to participate in a community bookmaking project. I started doing interactive art in 2014 at street fairs—the ultimate in experimenting. How to invite a stranger to make something and be creative on the spot? For the tour, I designed bookplates and spray-painted an old ledger book. The invitation was to write a seven-word memoir about your relationship to nature on a bookplate, and put it in the ledger book. Sometimes people wanted to read these aloud. I love that my events can give space to other voices, as well as to connect people through space and time.
I am used to working behind the scenes; my role for so long was to write talking points not deliver them. I am still uncertain about being the person on stage. At an event by Lake Superior, a couple asked me if they should have children given climate change. In Montana, a mother who lost her son in a school shooting wanted to know what else to do after years of getting nowhere advocating for gun policies. The week after the election, I kicked off an event at a small rural library (a politically mixed crowd) with, “I can’t think of a better time to talk about science, politics, and caretaking.” That went well. In February, I tried framing an event with a climate group using an exercise on cultivating hope. That tanked.
I have done events at bookstores, libraries, research institutions, classrooms, corporate R&D, and a spice shop. In larger settings, people ask about science, community, and politics. But, in one-on-one conversations, signing books, and in smaller settings, people want to talk about bad bosses—the frustration (humiliation) of bad bosses doesn’t seem to fade. Some people share stories about breastfeeding and pumping milk. I met a professional acquaintance for a work meeting last fall, and she showed up with a copy of Cores Samples to have signed and ten pounds of rocks. “Since you are a geologist, I wanted to share my rock collection,” she told me. I do love rocks.
CI: Much of your story-telling is lyrical and impressionistic. What informed your decisions about what to leave in and what to leave out in your essays? What informed your choice of structural strategies? Lists, diaries, fragmentation, etc.
AFH: I wrote Core Samples not from my wise expert voice, but from my corporeal, sometimes raw, and, often, out-of-equilibrium voice. The voice of the present moment. On a sticky note above my computer, I wrote, “Stay in scene.” I didn’t want my science voice to get carried away with comprehensive exposition or for my policy voice to get lost in an Op-Ed. I didn’t want the book to be explanation or argument. From the beginning, I knew this wasn’t a memoir, which meant I didn’t need to complete personal storylines. The essays are narrative, but the narrative is in service to exploring questions.
The use of the present tense didn’t provide much space for reflection. I played with structure and form to gain distance and to layer in context. I used a packing list to structure an essay about internal fighting in the Governor’s office when we faced “blackmail”/threats from the leadership of the other political party. The list helps with worldbuilding. Readers see the tension between parenting and working in politics through details about a Lego figure in my suit pocket and packing myself lunch, dinner, and a million snacks.
In another essay, I write about making the choice with my PhD advisor to stay out on a lake when there is lightning. I end the section with “I would prove myself in this way too. No limits.” That swagger woke me in the night—I needed a PSA [Public Service Announcement] about lightning strikes above treeline. Instead of doing this directly, I titled each section as a rule for being a woman in climate science. This section is titled, “Safety First.”
CI: What are you doing now since leaving state government? Do you see your current work as a continuation of your previous work? Are you working on another writing project?
AFH: All my writing projects intersect with science, climate change, and what it means to inhabit a body. The essay urge is strong, and I keep writing small pieces. But I also have three fiction projects going, which means I am struggling to admit how long a book takes, and the limits of my time. I also like to keep a writing practice that is not goal-oriented—to demand nothing beyond play. For this, I write poetry that collects in a binder by my desk. I don’t know if it’s just my sense of humor, but a lot of the poems right now are funny (especially the sad ones).
I do paid work tied to environmental policy: a little adjunct teaching, staffing a grant-making program, coalition building, and consulting. Despite how hard I tried not to merge my professional and creative worlds, Core Samples forced it. What a relief.
Anna Farro Henderson is a PhD climate scientist who worked as an advisor in the U.S. Senate and to Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton. Her book, “Core Samples: A Climate Scientist’s Experiments in Politics and Motherhood,” came out with University of Minnesota Press in October 2024. Her publications have appeared in Orion, Lit Hub, The Kenyon Review, Brevity, New Ohio Review, River Teeth, and The Rumpus, among others (she previously published as E.A. Farro). She has been a recipient of Minnesota State Art Board grants, an Everwood Farmstead residency, and the Terrain.org’s 2023 fiction contest, among others. She teaches at The Loft Literary Center.
An excerpt from Core Samples:
Not Funny
Reckoning with Complicated Truths
I am in a cabinet meeting on sexual harassment policies in Minnesota when the news breaks—any humor in that irony is lost to the gut punch. It’s November 2017, and #MeToo is on every front page. Power is reversing course and flowing in a different direction—at least for the moment. At least for a few women. The news about my former boss, Senator Franken, arrives in a text from someone sitting across the table. It is a text of a tweet of a photo, an image from his previous life as a comedian. I can’t make sense of what I see: hands hover over the chest of a sleeping woman. A slice of a joke that has time traveled and is now everywhere on social media.
I look around for an indication of whether others have seen the news. The colleague who texted opens her eyes wide like a wrecking ball is coming at the conference table. I know from working in politics not to act on impulse when emotions run high. I need to know where the photo taken. Who else was there? Why?
I’ve had many bosses, all of whom I learned from, many I liked, but this boss set me on a path with an actual career trajectory. And he hired me six months pregnant. He wanted to change the world and believed I could too. My other bosses saw their staffs as resources to extract, tools to make use of, or entertainment for the ride. My professional growth came from pushing against them. With this boss I was part of a team.
I nursed my baby in the senator’s bedroom during a Christmas party. I worked on speeches for him, and he read them word for word on the Senate floor. I crammed into the internal subway of the U.S. Capitol with him. Sat behind him during hearings, passing notes back and forth. Joked with him on the couches in his office. My kids like him—he made my older son laugh hysterically the time he knelt on the sidewalk and whispered in his ear. Does this mean I know him?
In elementary school, I imagined that my teachers lived in the school building. Believing in bosses and teachers is part of the joy of throwing myself into work. My spouse and kids also believe—that is why they accommodate my all-nighters and missed family dinners. My work is mission driven, and relationships go beyond a paycheck.
More accusations of groping or forced kisses unfold. I don’t not believe the women. A far murkier and scarier idea unsettles me. What if everyone is telling the truth, their truth? I wade through an overwhelm of information in my daily life, and social media offers shortcuts to informed opinions. But how do I judge multiple stories of the same events that don’t fit together?
I talk and email with other women who worked for the senator. No dark secrets emerge. But everyone is sad. I consider how the accusations rewrite my empowering career story.
When I see my college writing professor, she doesn’t talk about poetry. It has been more than a decade, and she is delighted to hear that I still write. But what she wants to talk about is the senator. He made the world safer for women, she says. Even though she doesn’t live in his state, losing his service to our country feels personal to her.
It was in this professor’s class that my writing developed beyond diary entries and stranded lines of poetry. With her, I learned to shape my notes into art. Her voice still plays in my head. She embraced writing in fragments, letting a single spark or scene come onto a page. She encouraged a process of discovery. Amalgamations of these fragments could capture the larger truths of our experiences. But in her class, she didn’t teach us about humor.
Making people laugh can change everything—getting it wrong can change everything too.
Calculations of numbers are absolute, with clear rules, but jokes depend on context. Whatever was the truth in the moment, the delivery, timing, and absurdity have been recalculated. A joke is not a joke is not a joke. A joke is a calculation of the present moment that might not work at another time. You had to be there. Jokes fall flat in the retelling. Or worse.
I catalog the subjects of jokes. All bodily functions. Our impending and inevitable deaths. Stating facts, like the unlikelihood of our dreams coming true. The potential of others to harm us. Our potential to harm others. The paradox of systems we rely on hurting us—our families, our schools, our medical care, the police, the government. The existence of brutality, racism, hate, and cruelty. Possible but unlikely risks—the reminder that we can’t forget about kidnappers or death by drowning in a foot of water. Jokes delight in our fear, pain, flaws, failure, shame, and differences. What we cannot bear to say—or listen to—in plain language.
For the subject of the joke, it’s only funny if they are in on it, safe, a collaborator.
Misconduct has gradients from inappropriate to criminal. Layered on this is the level of distress of the person violated. I do not see a limit to the ripple effects a person might feel when something happens to them. No equation can match a level of misconduct to a level of distress.
I am hopeful that a formal investigation will provide a larger framework through which to understand all this. I want it to delve into the everyday confusion of casual touch: a hand to the shoulder, a hug with too much squeeze, an arm around the waist. Small touches can be platonic, wildly erotic, or invasive. I think an investigation can do what I cannot: hold facts at a distance.
When the senator’s close colleagues call for him to resign, the resolution is immediate. But it resolves nothing. The media move on, with miles of fresh headlines to scroll. I am left wanting more than an understanding that everyone has their own truth and their own boundaries and their own sense of humor. That is a reckoning our country is not ready to make.
I watch from within my office as the governor picks my former boss’s replacement. I didn’t want him to resign. When it is announced that our lieutenant governor will become senator, I call my former coworkers in D.C. to tell them how great she is, all the while gutted to lose our office’s guiding star. She will no longer lead from the office across the hall from me. Feeling powerless, I do what is in my control.
I send out an email to all of Senator Franken’s former staff, a network that goes far beyond those I have met. It is an offer to join together one last time. My idea riffs off recent public art I’ve done. I put a book together. Each person gets a page. I ask everyone to send a photo and a handwritten note. The scrawl, scratch, and loops of a pen on the page hold wisps of spirit. As in, I want as much humanity as possible, to make this personal.
The week he officially leaves office, the senator calls me. He says thank you. The book is really something—it’s beautiful. It made him cry.
We don’t hang up right away, and I don’t know what to talk about. I ask about his immediate plans. What does his day look like today? That is the mom in me speaking.
The once a staffer, always a staffer is also present but digging fingernails into my leg so I don’t cry. That staffer would like a script. Given the scarcity of time when he was senator, I’d been trained to keep dialogue concise—interactions revolved around specific recommendations, like questions to ask in a confirmation hearing.
“What do you suggest?” he asks.
“To read,” I say. My mom compulsively read mystery novels when my Grandma Fanny died.
“Do you have a book you’d suggest?” he asks.
I am sitting on my desk in the State Capitol. I look around for ideas. All I see are policy papers and an open desk drawer full of high heels. I think of a book my husband and I read aloud to each other in our twenties. I’d enjoyed it so much, I had wanted to stay up all night to find out how it ended. The Golden Compass, I say. It’s the first book in a trilogy with magic, animals, and snowy landscapes.
It doesn’t resonate with him. He is a comedian who reads history and biographies. Nonfiction. Overly serious, just as I suspected.
I want to tell him that sometimes the language for our experiences doesn’t exist. Sometimes we need entire invented worlds to understand or even see the very real but invisible in our lives—in ourselves. But I don’t push it. I suggest All the Light We Cannot See, a work of historical fiction.
At the end of the call, he says, “We had so much fun in the office, didn’t we?” I feel the same discomfort I felt when I worked for him and people outside the office said, “He must be so funny all the time.”
I loved every minute of staffing him and participating in the team he built. I sobbed face down on the carpet when I left. But I would never call working in his office fun. I don’t tell him this. It has already been made clear that we can perceive shared experiences very differently.
I lie. “Yes, yes it was so fun,” I say.
What I really mean is, we gave it all we had.