Would you go down the Colorado river in a couple of homemade rowboats with a guide that had never been down the river? That is exactly what two women botanists from the University of Michigan did in 1938 to become the first women known to have travel 600 miles/965 kilometers down the Colorado river through the Grand Canyon. Want to know more? Stay tuned…. Brave the Wild River podcast is now available on the Behind the Scenery Podcast series.

Wallis: Hi this is Wallis, and today we are featuring an interview with Melissa Sevigny, award winning author in her spare time and science reporter for KNAU in Flagstaff. In this episode Melissa will tell us about her career path and how she went from wanting to be a geologist to working as a science reporter and writing an award winning book.

Wallis: Ok, well we are here today with Melissa Sevigny, author, science reporter and let’s get started. Hey Melissa, Melissa: So great to be here.

Wallis: So great to have you here. A lot of interview questions are the kinds of things that you might expect. A sort of letting our listeners get to know you so let’s do a few of those questions. I see from your bio that you started out with a degree in Environmental Science and Policy but now you are an award-winning writer and journalist. Was writing something you always wanted to do?

Melissa: You know, not really, actually which is funny um I have always written things ever since I was a little girl but I always wanted to be a geologist. That, that was my dream. Um and so I stuck with that all the way up until I enrolled in the university of Arizona and I enrolled in an Environmental Science degree which I figured would be geology with some trees added on top you know but somewhere along the way I just I can’t even describe it I got pulled away by writing I just kept taking more and more writing classes and taking jobs that helped me learn how to communicate science to the public and it kind of just stole me away it was not intentional. I never imagined I would be a writer but somehow here I am.

Wallis: But there you are. So I have a follow-on question to that is tell us a little bit how you went from environmental science to the MFA program at Iowa State University and from there to being a science reporter for KNAU?

Melissa: You know it’s not a very exciting story. When I was applying for grad schools I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I had ended up with a double major in environmental science and creative writing and I was sort of stuck between those 2 loves and so I applied for a bunch of programs some in sciences and some in writing and some in science writing and I really didn’t know what I was doing and uh the program that had full funding was this environmental creative writing program at Iowa State University and so that is where I ended up. Um I think it is good to share that story with young people who feel like maybe they need to know what their path is gonna be like. I had no idea what I was doing. I went and got that creative writing degree, I graduated, I was unemployed. I didn’t know what to do with that degree. it was such a weird mix of skills I had kind of cultivated and then this job came up for a science reporter for the NPR station in Flagstaff and I wanted to come back home to Arizona, this is where I grew up so I applied a little bit on a whim. I didn’t know if I was qualified or if I could get the job um but I did and I’ve been there 10 years and it has really taught me a lot about uh talking about science to the public.

Wallis: That’s very interesting and so like many people you didn’t have a direct career path but you just kind of followed your heart.

Melissa: Exactly yeah.

Wallis: Well what makes communicating science exciting and challenging right now? So as both an author and a science reporter for KNAU what differences do you see in the various mediums of science communication? And what methods do you think are most effective?

Melissa: That is such an interesting question because there are so many more methods now than even when I was little you know um there is social media and there’s video and there are podcasts like this one. There is just so many wonderful ways to reach out to people and I think the most effective way is the way that works for the audience you want to reach. I mean I think they all, they all can work for different people um and so I am glad there is people out there doing all of those kinds of things. You know the kind of person who would pick up a book like you know what I have written um isn’t the same kind of person who is going to listen to a podcast or listen to a video on YouTube so it it is an exciting time. There is a lot of different ways to communicate science and for me maybe the most exciting thing is just that science is exciting and my goal is to make it as accessible as possible. I want people to feel like they can do science, they can be scientists. It doesn’t matter what your background is or your age is. You don’t have to be this image of uh a wild haired genius locked away in an ivory tower someplace. That is not what a scientist is. You know, really it boils down to if you are curious and observing the world around you and all of us do that naturally as kids you know and it is something we sort of grow out of and so my goal with communication is to show people how exciting it is to tap into that curiosity.

Wallis: Great! Let’s move on. Now your book Brave the Wild River was published last year and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it this spring. This wonderful book, in case you don’t know, was the 2024 Southwest book of the year top pick, a 2024 Reading the West Award for memoir/biography, and the 2023 National outdoor book award for history/biography. Now as a woman scientist I am always interested in the women scientists who came before me. So, the questions I would like to ask you are how did you learn about or get interested in Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter? And sort of a follow on to that would be what spurred your interest in the women and why did you think this was an important or timely story you thought needed to be told?

Melissa: I really just stumbled across their story. I was looking for something else I don’t remember what it was and I was fishing around online at the special collections department at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and this um this hyperlink popped up and it said women botanists. And I was curious so I clicked on it and there was just one name in the file and the name was Lois Jotter and I read the description and I learned that she had gone down the Colorado river through Grand Canyon in 1938 with her mentor Elzada Clover and they were both botanists from Michigan and they made the first formal plant collection of over 600 miles of the Colorado river and I was so surprised that I had never heard of them before. You know I grew up in Arizona, I thought I knew a lot about Colorado river history and yet I had never encountered their names. And so I just started started poking around um Lois was a packrat she kept all kinds of material, her diaries, her letters from this trip and that was all at Northern Arizona University and so I started going over there on my lunch breaks and just kind of like looking around in the story and I got so drawn into it and eventually I started to write and pretty soon I realized that I had I had a book. I was writing a book um it took me a while to come to that realization but I was just really drawn to their story exactly for the reason you said. You know it’s amazing to hear about the women scientists that have come before us. There are so many of them out there but often their stories kind of get lost. They sort of fall through the cracks and so I wanted to to bring this story kind of back to the forefront so that when people are coming to places like the Grand Canyon or they are interested in doing science. You know I think I think it makes us feel a little less alone when we see people like ourselves throughout history who were doing that work.

Wallis: Oh I agree I uh used this book as a basis for several programs and at my last program I had a woman who was a graduate student in botany and she was with her family and her mother said do you know about these women and she said I had never heard of them. And that was really shocking to me, so I am glad that you found the link and are bringing them forward.

Melissa: Thank you.

Wallis: Now do you feel there are any special challenges in telling a story that is not well know like this story and we like to call them deferred stories rather than researching and retelling a more dominant narrative? Do you think it is a little harder?

Melissa: Yeah that is such a great question I um I hadn’t heard that phrase before, deferred story and I really like that. They are kind of stories that just haven’t quite been told yet for whatever the reason. Um there are challenges with it but I am drawn to that type of story because because I think, I don’t know I just I get really fascinated by stories that that haven’t really been told before at least not in the kind of extensive format, in a book format. Um and so that really draws me in I just I I want to be able to to kind of chart new ground when I am writing, and chart a new path and so that attracted me to this story. Some of the the challenge is just: is the archival material there? When you are doing stories out of history you have gotta have those primary sources, so you have got to have archives and I was really lucky that Lois Jotter and Elzada Clover both kept their diaries. They kept extensive notes and they both had the foresight to donate those to universities before they passed away. And if it wasn’t for that I probably wouldn’t have been able to write the book because I wouldn’t have had their point of view. Um and so you know I think it is a challenge to, you know, some of these stories like we know they are out there like we might know a name or an idea but we just don’t have the material or it just didn’t survive. And so that is a real challenge in pulling those kind of memories out um and it speaks to the importance of historians and archivists who do this work and make sure those things don’t get lost. Wallis: Oh it certainly does and I found that bits and pieces of their journals that I’ve read have been fascinating and it kind of spurs me to want to journal more just in general.

Melissa: I shudder to think of what someone would make of my diary if they tried to read it.

Wallis: True. Now I understand you did a river trip while researching this book. So do you have a favorite spot in the Grand Canyon that you maybe discovered on that trip?

Melissa: Oh gosh (laughing) I’m not sure I can pick a favorite spot it was my first river trip, my first white water trip of any kind. I had never done that before, but I felt like I needed to to understand how to tell this story and so everything was new and everything was extraordinary and every corner you turned unveils these fantastic new views. I I don’t know if I have a favorite spot but I do have a favorite moment in time. I was hiking in one of the the side canyons the tributary channels um canyons and I I stopped dead because I smelled something. I ran into this like ribbon of smell that was coming off of some plant and I don’t know what plant it was I never found it but it stopped me in my tracks because it was this extraordinary fragrance and it made me think like this is what like bees or hummingbirds animals that are drawn to flowers must feel when they are out in the world and that was a moment that stands out in my mind. I felt like when I was down there, I was using all of my senses in a very different way like in a way I don’t normally pay attention to what I am smelling that way um but yeah it kind of, it wakes you up in a way that is very hard to describe.

Wallis: So you became a botanist while you were on this trip then a little bit.

Melissa: I did my best yeah and I was lucky that I was on a trip with botanists we were weeding Ravenna grass out of the Grand Canyon which is a non-native species so there were botanist with me and I peppered them questions so I learned a lot from them.

Wallis: Sure. I’ll bet you didn’t have to do all the cooking though!

Melissa: I I did almost none of the cooking and I feel a little bad. I told the story that is in the book about how Elzada and Lois had to do all the cooking on their expedition pretty early in the trip and I think they were afraid to ask me to cook after that. Um the lower half of the trip was just me and a group of men and I didn’t do any cooking at all.

Wallis: That’s great that’s great. So, your book has become a primary source of information for myself and our other rangers looking to tell more stories about women in the Grand Canyon. Well, where or how did you learn more about these stories. I guess you sort of touched on that but if you could elaborate just a little bit more about your sources.

Melissa: Yeah for Elzada and Lois um there are archives at the University of Michigan and at Northern Arizona University that the two women kept but there were a lot of gaps particularly in Elzada’s story. She was a very private person and so she was less open about keeping all of her materials and so I had to track down more things about her in kind of more creative ways. I had to find archives of people that she wrote to and go look at those archives to see if they kept copies of her letters and uh a really important source was tracking down um former students of both of these women because it was still, I got to know them through their letters and their diaries but I still, I still needed to know what they were like as people and as teachers and as mentors and so I was able to track down um former students to both of them and that really helped me understand who they were as as people and I am so grateful to those sources for for sharing their memories with me.

Wallis: And I think that your understanding of them as people really comes out in the book, so it is interesting the sources that you have found.

Melissa: That’s good, yeah.

Wallis: Well are there other stories about women that you are interested in learning about or that you think need telling her in the Grand Canyon?

Melissa: Oh there are so many and I had to stop myself from getting distracted and working on other projects while I was working on this book. I am now working on a short piece about an ornithologist named Florence Merriam Bailey. Um her her husband and her brother were both more famous than her and so people don’t always know her story. But she spent several months at the bottom of the Grand Canyon cataloguing the birds and she wrote a very beautiful book called Birds of the Grand Canyon which is just so elegantly written um and so I think that her story needs to be told more but there are so many others. I kept encountering them as I was working you know um John Wesley Powell had a sister named Ellen and she catalogued the plants north of the Grand Canyon right here on the Kaibab Plateau where we are sitting now and a lot of people don’t know about her. And there are many others and I think um I think we are going to see more to these stories being told as we go forward.

Wallis: Ok, that’s great. So are you going to expand that little project into a book or do you have another book project going?

Melissa: Well I don’t know yet I am kind of in a hiatus um I I wrote the book on the weekends. This is my side job I guess you could call it um and so I need a little rest and I am looking around for new ideas but I do have some ideas about stories like this, stories that have kind of fallen through the cracks. I really like doing the archival work um and so I’ve got some some ideas but I haven’t quite firmed them up yet and decided what my next project is.

Wallis: Ok. Well after reading your book and doing additional research for my programs I really started to feel a sort of kinship with both of them, as if we would have been friends in another time and place and I would be interested to know your personal perspective on both Elzada and Lois.

Melissa: They were both very different and I identified with them in different ways at different times. You know Elzada was the older of the two she was 41 um in her era she would have been considered a spinster. You know she was unmarried, as far as I could tell she had no interest in getting married. Um, that wasn’t what she wanted to do. She was obsessed with plants um her students described her as just going off into the woods and they would be trailing behind her and falling in the holes and getting into poison ivy and she just was like focused on getting the plants and nobody wanted to disappoint her. Um and and so she was just a very like larger than life, rea;;y passionate person when it came to botany. Lois was the younger of the two she was 24. Um, she was much more open in her diary about things that she wanted to complain about for example, so it was really easy to get to know her because she was very very open in her diary and letters. Um and uh and she was on a different career path than Elzada. She was doing more laboratory based work and less field work um but I think they had I think they had a bond that was interesting to me. They were friends, they were teacher and student and they didn’t always get along and sometimes they got into little spats while they were on the river um but I think they were so human and so complicated and I definitely couldn’t pick a favorite um at different times and different ways I felt a lot of kinship with both of them.

Wallis: So, in what ways do you feel similar to or different from each of them? Or can you explain that?

Melissa: I think yeah I think um for most part Lois is very likeable she was very charismatic um most of the people with a few notable exceptions would would kind of instantly feel a friendship with Lois.

Wallis: She had a smile and in some of those photos didn’t she?

Melissa interjects: Yes, yeah she had a very bright smile she was just she was described as a sort of like a magnetic person, a magnetic personality. I think I am not like that I think I am more like Elzada in that it is maybe a little bit harder to get to know a little bit more reserved um you know she wasn’t as easy for me to get to know through her letters and diaries so I probably identify more with her on that part of her personality but it depends on the day I suppose.

Wallis: I suppose it does. Did did your opinion of them or ideas of them change at all as you researched the book and how did that work out?

Melissa: It did yeah I found one of the strongest examples was that very early in the research I found uh um a source that said Elzada was a motherly person and that kind of caught me up. I was like, it didn’t it didn’t seem quite right but I it was early in the project and so I wasn’t sure, yet she certainly took a lot of care of the people around her on the trip. But motherly sounded like maybe something somebody was putting her in that box so somebody was thinking 40 year old woman in the 1930s she must be motherly and so I had to do some digging and it was really when I found um one of her students to talk to and they described to me how she would be on expeditions and how obsessed she was with plants and she didn’t sound motherly at all so that was something that I had to kind of uncover about her personality as I as I did the research.

Wallis: Ok. Do they remind you of anyone from modern times?

Melissa: Oh what a great question! Um I don’t know although. I’ve I’ve had a chance to meet a lot of students in the past year when I have been going on these book talks and I just came back from the University of Michigan Biological Station

Wallis: Interesting!

Melissa: where both these women worked and there were so many students there you know. I kind of got to spend some time with them and go out you know go out on the boat with them and you know pull up weeds out of the lake and look at them and their their passion and their curiosity about the world around them and the questions they asked. Uh it was so inspirational and uplifting um and I I felt I felt like they were kind of channeling the spirit of these of these two woman like they were the legacy of these two women left behind. Wallis: It’s interesting because I was going to use that exact same word, channeling the spirit of those two women.

Melissa: Right

Wallis: Great. Well I see, and to me this is very interesting, I see that you worked with NASA’s Phoenix-Mars Scout Mission back in 2008. Can you tell us a little bit about the mission and what you did because that sounds fascinating?

Melissa: Sure yeah. It was actually my first ever science communication job was on the Phoenix-Mars Scout mission. Um and it was a lander that landed on Mars in 2008. A lot of people don’t pay attention to the landers because the rovers get all the attention. They get to drive around but it was a really cool mission. We landed on the pole on the polar regions and drilled down and we were the first mission to what we call ground truth the the fact that there is water ice there. We had observed that from satellites but nobody had actually touched it before and we were the first mission to do that. And I actually started on that mission as a as a volunteer working on the robotic arm camera team. So that was a camera that was attached to the arm that was doing the digging to take pictures of the water ice. And at one point when the when the mission was about to land and um they were opening up jobs for people to work during the ground operations there was an opportunity for me to either take a job on that team or take a job on the education and public outreach team. And looking back I know that was a real crossroads in my life even though I was just, I think, 19 years old or something like that um you know it was a decision and I I don’t know, you know, sometimes I still wonder if I had taken the other path and stayed kind of in the engineering and the hard sciences what my life would have been. But I decided to go on the education and public outreach team and I have to say I loved it it was the best job I’ve ever had Wallis: That’s great. Thank you. Kind of to wrap up. Story telling is what we do as interpretation rangers. We select a topic that we hope will be of interest to our visitors, something that pertains to the park, and then we work on telling a good story. In ‘Brave the Wild River’ you weave together many stories and you make these two women and Norm Nevills and all the characters involved in the trip really come to life. Do you have any suggestions for us on how to tell a good story?

Melissa + Wallis: How to tell a good story?

Melissa: I mean I have been trying to figure that out my whole entire career and I I imagine I am going to keep working on it. Um at least at this moment in time how I feel is that a good story kind of boils down to people who want something and there are obstacles in their way you know what I mean? Like at the heart of this story is two women who had this desire to go and make their mark on the world of Botany and they were willing to go risk their lives to do it. I mean a river trip in 1938 was no small feat you know they they really dove into something where they didn’t know what they were getting into and they didn’t have the kind of equipment and maps and information that we have today but they were so passionate about about this idea that they could make a difference in the field of Botany that they were going to go no matter what. And so it is a story about about that kind of inner drive that inner desire and I think a lot of stories are about that when you kind of peel back the layers and see the heart of the story. Do you have a character who wants something and what are they prepared to do to get what they want? Um I imagine there is other ways to think about story telling but that is just kind of the way I am thinking about it right now.

Wallis: Well thank you that’s helpful for us. And finally do you think there are, we touched on this a little bit, but do you think there are other Grand Canyon stories that really need to be told? And what might they be?

Melissa: I think there are so many, and I am glad we are doing this on the North Rim you know I have been walking around looking at those views and just thinking about how vast and incredibly iconic this landscape is. I mean there are no words to describe the Canyon and I think it is full of stories many of which have not yet been told. I mean everyone who comes and encounters this canyon has a new story to tell and throughout history there are stories that need to be told. I think one thing I am really glad the park service is doing now is telling more stories about the Indigenous peoples who live in this region and making space for them to tell their own stories and talk about their presence in the park. Um I think that is a really important step forward I think there are definitely more stories about women to tell throughout history who have encountered this place and been changed by it and and again I do think every visitor who comes here comes away with their own story.

Wallis: Thanks. I I like the way you said that the Canyon changes people because I really feel that since I have been here too.

Melissa: It does. It does and it is hard to put into words but you do come away from it feeling different about the world and about yourself and about life and what it means to be alive on this beautiful planet. It’s it’s an incredibly important place for for experiencing that kind of change.

Wallis: Oh I think so I couldn’t agree more and I think that I think that Elzada and Lois probably felt exactly that way when they came out of the Canyon.

Melissa: I think they did and I think they were changed for the rest of their lives by what they had experienced.

Wallis: Absolutely. Well, thank you very much. We have been talking to Melissa Sevigny author of ‘Brave the Wild River’ and science reporter for KNAU. Thanks again.

Melissa: Thanks Wallis

Wallis: We would like to thank Melissa for taking the time to talk to us today and we look forward to her next writing project. And before we leave, I’d like to gratefully acknowledge the Native peoples on whose ancestral homelands we gather, as well as the diverse and vibrant Native communities who make their home here today.