Rabbit Holes, Benthic Burrows, and Other Detours, a guest post by Debbie Levy

For me, a nonfiction project starts with immersion: diving deep, or floating in shallows, letting words, audio, and images wash over me. There are, inevitably, rabbit holes—or, to maintain my marine metaphor, I should call them benthic burrows—where I’m doused in stuff that will never show up in my book.

I love that stuff! It may not appear on my pages in specific words and sentences, but it will be present, indelibly, like a watermark. And the thing I always want readers to know—because not only are readers also writers, they’re people navigating the familiar and the unknown—is that unused research isn’t wasted research.

But this isn’t only about research and writing. This is how you understand the world: by venturing beyond what is necessary.

This was true for me in creating my most recent book, A Dangerous Idea.

The book is about the famous “monkey” trial of 1925—the prosecution of John Scopes, a teacher in Tennessee, for the crime of teaching evolution. It’s a rollicking story, one I was first drawn to because it tickled my legal funny bone—I practiced law years ago. But I was hooked by the Jazz Age journalism, which tickled another funny bone; I also worked as a newspaper editor. In newsprint archives I found first drafts of history—as well as those watermarks I mentioned.

Such as columns for “girls,” a/k/a women, with advice like this for a woman with two children whose husband was cheating on her: “Make yourself and your home attractive . . . . and above all, don’t scold or nag, dear.” (Nashville Banner, 1925.) Reading these infantilizing columns enhanced my appreciation for Nellie Kenyon, one of two “girl” journalists covering the Scopes trial whose work is featured in my book.

Something else I encountered: a stupendous amount of quackery. “Bradfield’s Female Regulator should be taken by every woman or girl who has the slightest suspicion of any of the ailments which afflict women,” advised a typical ad. (Coffeyville (Kansas) Daily Journal, 1900.) Being awash in such hokum (plus so many cures for cancer!) reminded me that scientific literacy was in its infancy. This awareness kept me empathetic in writing about the anti-evolution crowd of the early twentieth century.

A last example from A Dangerous Idea, far more sobering: In its September 29, 1906, edition, The Appeal (St. Paul, Minnesota), one of many Black-owned newspapers of that era, took three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan to task as a “stupendous fraud” and bigot. Bryan is a major figure in my story. His white supremacy, entwined with his campaign against evolution, is central to my themes. This editorial was not a benthic burrow.

But right beneath it on the broadsheet was another article, titled “The Atlanta Massacre.” It starts with this: “The massacre of Afro-Americans at Atlanta Saturday night was the most horrible that has ever occurred in this country and rivals in atrocity the massacres of the Jews at Kishnieff, Bialystok and Siedlce.” I was moved by the comparison to those notorious European pogroms, moved to dig deeper into this horrific event in American history (sanitized for years as the “Atlanta Race Riots”). And I was confirmed in thinking it was fair to hammer Bryan’s racism and not engage in “man-of-his-time” whitewash.

One more note from the benthic zone, this time from The Year of Goodbyes, which spans my mother’s last year living in Nazi Germany as a girl. I was inspired to write that book after discovering Mom’s poesiealbum, a type of autograph album. It was full of lovely, typically formal, entries from her friends, and decorated with stickers, called oblaten. Along with her poesiealbum, my mother brought envelopes of oblaten to this country when she arrived in 1938 as a child refugee. One of the most striking depicts an overflowing flower basket.

While bobbing around in a research pool that was not at all necessary to writing The Year of Goodbyes, I came across a page composed by another girl, in the poesiealbum of that girl’s classmate. Those two girls—those friends—lived in the Netherlands. There on that page was the flower basket, just like my mother’s. There on the bottom of the page was the signature of its creator, the girl who chose that sticker: Anne Frank.

Anne Frank’s page didn’t have a place in my mother’s story. But it was galvanizing. Anne Frank and my mother and my mother’s friends expressed themselves in different languages but with identical depth of feeling—and identical stickers. Any concerns I had that modern readers might find the poesiealbum too formal to relate to dissipated. Friendship is friendship, loss is loss, no matter the decade or style of expression. I decided to open each chapter of The Year of Goodbyes with a reproduction of a page from Mom’s poesiealbum.

These stories are not just the rewards of a writer’s life. Mind-expanding byways await anyone who picks up a book. In A Dangerous Idea, readers will experience the vibrant Black press that covered the Scopes trial. Might some be moved to dive deeper? How about investigating Ida B. Wells through historical fiction? How lucky those readers are that 2024 brought us Veronica Chambers’ Ida, in Love and in Trouble.

Or, when my readers learn that in the first third of the twentieth century nearly 30 states adopted laws aimed at helping evolution along by cleansing society of the “unfit”—might they move on to J. Albert Mann’s The Degenerates, a historical novel about four supposedly “unfit” girls penned up in the Massachusetts Schools for the Feeble-Minded? Talk about mind-expanding.

After reading about Clarence Darrow in my book, might other teens choose to immerse themselves in Candace Fleming’s Murder Among Friends? Will still others decide to douse themselves in the original evolutionary scientist, Charles Darwin, and choose Deborah Heiligman’s Charles and Emma? Yes!

Benthic burrows, rabbit holes, whatever you call them: they are detours well worth the extra mileage. And mostly—they’re not even detours. They’re part of the journey.

Meet the author

Debbie Levy is the author of more than thirty books for young people, including the New York Times bestselling I Dissent: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Makes Her Mark; Becoming RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Journey to Justice; The Year of Goodbyes; and This Promise of Change: One Girl’s Story in the Fight for School Equality (with Jo Ann Allen Boyce). Debbie is the recipient of a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, a Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Honor, an Orbis Pictus Honor, a Sydney Taylor Book Award, and many other accolades. Before she started writing books, Debbie worked as a newspaper editor and a lawyer.

Instagram: @debbielevy books

Website: debbielevybooks.com

About A Dangerous Idea: The Scopes Trial, the Original Fight over Science in Schools

One hundred years ago, a small-town science teacher ignited a nationwide debate over what students should learn in school—and who should decide.

* “Compelling.” –School Library Journal, starred review

* “Timely.” –Booklist, starred review

* “Insightful.” –Horn Book, starred review

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

In 1925, when Tennessee lawmakers banned the teaching of evolution in public schools, teacher John Scopes challenged the law—and set off a gripping circus of a legal battle. Two masterminds faced off in a blistering courtroom debate over creationism and natural selection, each armed with the books they believed belonged in classrooms. Celebrity politician William Jennings Bryan relied on the Bible to make his case, while legal luminary Clarence Darrow defended Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. Their clash would go down in history as the Scopes Monkey Trial.

A century later, here is the riveting truth of what happened and why it matters. For a nation still arguing about the books and ideas that young people should encounter, award-winning author Debbie Levy delivers an important, insightful and expertly-researched account of our history that illuminates the challenges we face today.

ISBN-13: 9781547612215
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Publication date: 01/14/2025
Age Range: 10 – 14 Years

Filed under: Guest Post