Interview by Kelly Weinersmith
“Yes, I am completely convinced that the allure of parasitology is closely related to our ability to envision ourselves infected. No one can prove what happens to a person’s mind as a result of imagined parasitic worms, although it’s easy to predict what happens when that same mind is infected with certain ideas.”
- John Janovy Jr, Life Lessons from a Parasite
Dr. John Janovy Jr is a former ASP President, co-author of the textbook from which many of us first learned about parasites (Foundations of Parasitology - available for free download here), an incredible parasitologist, and a prolific author of both fiction and non-fiction. John’s new book, Life Lessons from a Parasite: What Tapeworms, Flukes, Lice, and Roundworms Can Teach Us About Humanity’s Most Difficult Problems comes out Aug 20, 2024. John applies the lessons he has learned through decades spent studying the natural world to problems like immigration, the differences between kinds and individuals, problem-solving, what happens when people get “infected” with parasitic ideas, and much more.
Life Lessons with Parasites is both fun and insightful. It includes some delightful lines that made me chuckle out loud, such as this one: “The first rule of fine dining is to never invite a parasitologist to dinner.” (I once accidentally ruined a lobster dinner for a friend by talking about parasites. Perhaps this book should be required reading for any new friends I make…)
I had the opportunity to interview John Life Lessons from a Parasite, and his career as an author:
Q: What motivated you to write Life Lessons from a Parasite? Was there a particular event that motivated you to write this book, or has the idea been percolating for awhile?
This book probably started with a lunch conversation maybe four years ago, with a couple of retired biologist colleagues, about our careers. That’s when I started reflecting on what I’d learned from parasites, in addition to what I’d learned about them. But from watching students develop as scientists over the past fifty years, it has always been obvious that they were acquiring a repertoire of transferrable skills and ideas that they would not have had if they’d never started doing research on parasites. It’s also seemed like parasites were far more effective as teachers than were free-living forms, because parasite lives can be so complex. So, I just decided to make that experience the focus of my next big non-fiction project.
Q: When you and I see a parasite, we see something complex and beautiful. This is, of course, not how much of the general population see parasites. But rather than writing something easy like Life Lessons from Cuddly Panda Bears or Life Lessons from Snuggly Puppies, you took on parasites. What was your strategy for making parasites more relatable and likable for a general audience in Life Lessons with Parasites?
I tried to personalize the parasitology experience in an educational way, using examples of people who were focused on a problem, or a kind of puzzle, that intrigued them to the point of making them devote time, resources, and a significant part of their lives to the solution. I assumed readers would be hooked by the mystery and someone’s attempt to solve it, so would get past the fact that I was writing about parasites. The first few chapters are really about humans studying nature and what happens when those humans decide to study nature, even though, or maybe especially because, that part of nature is uncooperative and resistant to discovery. In other words, I tried to tell stories of humans who were fascinated by these mysterious organisms. This book is really about curiosity as a driving force in human behavior and parasites are the vehicle.
Q: Which of the books that you’ve written was hardest to write, and why?
My chapters of Foundations of Parasitology were by far the most difficult writing assignment of my whole career. Each of those five editions that I contributed to involved two years of almost full-time work, and a student research/editorial assistant (usually recruited from my BIOS 101 classes). I screened maybe 20,000 abstracts for each edition, read maybe 5,000 papers, and extracted information from about a thousand of those papers, information that would end up sometimes as a single sentence. The textbook user was the driving force in these revisions, a very different audience than reads other kinds of literature. It was always a focus on what some 19- or 20-year old college student needed to learn, rather than what I personally wanted to write or what some airport shopper wanted to read. But the end products were always very satisfying!
Q: I tried my hand at fiction once, and failed miserably. Writing fiction is a very different skill than writing non-fiction! How does the process of writing fiction and non-fiction differ for you?
I’m not really sure it differs all that much for me, although I’m obviously not a best-selling fiction writer! In my fiction pieces, I start with the ending, then start tracing what has to happen to bring this thing to closure. I’m not a good story-teller and have always been far more interested in animals than in people, so that’s a problem with my fiction. All the fiction I’ve written has more to do with events and ideas than with interpersonal relationships, and the characters are caught up in situations and dragged along rather than battling one another or pursuing romance. The only one of my fiction pieces that has what you might call a narrative arc is Tuskers, a project that my agent tried very hard to sell, going through 22 rejections, before turning it back to me to do whatever I wanted with it. Our ESPN daughter demanded that it be self-published, so I did it. It’s about the OU vs. Nebraska football game in 2090 and the Nebraska mascot is a resurrected live woolly mammoth.
Q: Tell us about your writing process.
I try to do something creative every day and have been doing that since I was a kid. After Keith County Journal was published, I started taking a creativity hour, adjourning to a local coffee shop, or the student union, and writing. Sit down with some dark roast coffee, and a couple of pieces of dark chocolate, and assume the writer mindset, almost like an actor stepping into a new role, and just shutting out the rest of the world. I usually try to think of a finished product, e.g., a chapter, which is the rough equivalent of a college prof’s lecture. I also re-read and edit constantly, focusing mainly on paragraph structure and the sequence of ideas, statements, etc. I’ve also had some superb editors on my published books, including Jenna Jankowski on Life Lessons. Good editors always make your books better than the one you wrote originally.
Q: Who are your favorite authors and why?
From the 60s through the 80s, I read all of John Barth’s fiction (except Letters; simply could not wade through it); his stories seemed to be a reflection of the academic politics at my university. I’ve read most of Somerset Maugham’s short stories, and quite a bit of Graham Greene. It seemed like those authors were able to find meaningful analysis of common, every-day, situations compared to science fiction, for example. I’ve read quite a bit of Doris Lessing, including her science fiction pieces. I’ve read most of John McPhee, including his books on the geology of North America; he’s probably my favorite because of his ability to write about anything in a coherent and compelling way. Instead of favorite authors, I have a list of books that have been very influential, shaping my thinking about the world and the human condition. The next books I add to that list will be two by Abrahm Lustgarten: Run to Failure and On The Move. Google his name and read about those books and you’ll figure out why. They are simply stunning (non-fiction).
Q: If you could chat with any author (living or dead), who would it be and what would you ask them?
Hmmmm; that’s a good question! It would probably be John Steinbeck, and I’d ask him about his time spent with Ed Ricketts, and also the Dust Bowl days, the latter because of my Oklahoma upbringing; I’d probably have to actually read Grapes of Wrath before talking with him!
Q: Do you have any tips for aspiring book-writers in our community?
Do it every day and do it now. Get ready for a lot of rejection and check your sensitivities at the door. Never worry about trying to write something that your friends and colleagues would believe is inappropriate or out of character. One time years ago I typed out the first five pages of a John Grisham novel, double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman, one-inch margins, on scratch paper. Those pages are what an agent and/or target editor reads to make a decision on acceptance or to ask for a full manuscript. That little act took a lot of the mystery out of book writing; a best-selling author’s work looked quite different in manuscript than in print, and those typed pages didn’t seem so much more compelling than the stuff I was generating at the time.
Q: Did you go through periods of “writer’s block”? If so, do you have any tips for how to overcome it?
I don’t remember ever having writer’s block, mainly, I supposed, because I’ve never had to make a living as a writer (although being a biology prof assigned to large introductory classes is the rough equivalent of writing forty-five hour-long television shows every semester.) And I always have more than one project at a time, so that if I get frustrated or bored with one, I can work on another one.
Q: What are you writing next?
I always have several projects going at the same time. My agent has a manuscript that I’m not quite ready to talk about, and she’s waiting until we get a sense of how well Life Lessons does before finalizing the proposal and submitting to her list of about fifty publishers. I’m also working on a couple of pieces of fiction, one is the sixth book in the Gideon Marshall Mystery Series; all of these Gideon Marshall books are centered on what happens when a mega-billionaire oil baron decides he wants an earthquake/volcano making machine based on fracking technology. The other is about a modern-day carpenter recruited to build an ark, a sort of Third Millennium version of the Noah’s Ark story. Both of those pieces are pretty far along, maybe 80% first draft stage. During the COVID shutdown, I retrieved and scanned maybe 2000 pages of stuff I’d generated since the 70s, and put those through a character reader. That set of pieces is now on my computer as The Pandemic Papers; lots of strange stuff. I’m also doing my own version of the Cedar Point Biological Station first half-century history; that’s fairly far along.
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You can order John’s new book here: Life Lessons from a Parasite: What Tapeworms, Flukes, Lice, and Roundworms Can Teach Us About Humanity’s Most Difficult Problems
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