A conversation on weaving the personal and the scientific together in memoir with two brilliant writers, Karmela Padavic-Callaghan and Joseph Osmundson, who have both put out genre-bending books this year. Padavic-Callaghan, a physicist, is the author of Entangled States: A Life According to Quantum Physics and Osmundson, a microbiologist, is the author of Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood. Both poetically bring together science and story in a way that illuminates the world in new ways for the reader.

This conversation was moderated by Raechel Anne Jolie, author of Rust Belt Femme and the Radical Love Letters newsletter.

Osmundson: I've been thinking a lot about some of the rhetoric that queerness is inherently biological, right? And I'm like, well, I'm bi and queer, so there is a lot of choice in my sexuality. But one of the things I'm writing about a lot in the book are the limits of the utopic thinking of queerness. Like, I don't have a womb. No amount of imagination would allow me to have a baby in that way, and there are cis women for whom that's true as well. And no amount of rethinking biology and no amount of community ended the story that I had with my best friend with me having a child. No one did anything wrong, necessarily. We all just bumped up against the limits of our desire and possibility, and I really think those stories are essential because one of the things about the sort of “it gets better” of queerness is that sometimes it fucking doesn't, and that is very isolating when all of the stories are narrativized around keeping people alive so that it gets better. Like we want people to be alive, but we also have to impact the material conditions that make things worse and have been making things worse. So it's like to me, it's like very Dan Savage. Like I'm sure his life is great. He's rich and white and cis. Like he's kind of an asshole. Like asshole men operate well in this world, but not all of us do, and so I just I felt very isolated. I was so lonely in this experience that I had with my friends, and that's one of the things that I was like, I have to write this as a book because every book of of a queer person wanting a kid ended with a fucking kid.

Padavic-Callaghan: I think grief and failure is something that I've been thinking about a lot in the past year. There's this sort of classic idea from Jack Halberstam about queer failure as something sort of unavoidable, right? You have the utopia and then you fail and then you have to keep living, and that's I think for a lot of us a constant experience: We find ourselves through failure, to a large extent. Like that scene at the pole dancing class. I think that was maybe the last straw, honestly, that got me to be like, Okay, I gotta stop running away from my gender stuff. Like, We’re just gonna have to be trans. Like there's there's no way around this because it was, in so many ways, so incredibly beautiful to see my mom dance and to be in that room where all the women clearly felt this divine feminine in such an embodied way. It's hard to explain Croatian culture, but I think you have to imagine going to a pole dancing class in a rural midwestern town where everyone goes to church and people don't talk about social construction of gender and everyone married their high school sweetheart and it's not the kind of culture where there's a lot of places where women can be fully unbounded and this was one of these rooms where everyone clearly felt so free, and the freedom was deriving from this very feminine place. And I was sort of like, I just don't have that.

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan is a science journalist and non-fiction writer from Croatia, based in Queens, NY. They are currently a news reporter at New Scientist and their past writing has been featured in Wired, Scientific American, Slate, MIT Technology Review, Quanta Magazine, Symmetry Magazine and Physics World. Their debut book, the physics memoir Entangled States: A Life According to Quantum Physics, was published in May by Beacon Press. Karmela holds a PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics and atomic, molecular and optical physics from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and they were previously an assistant professor at Bard High School Early College in New York City, where they taught high school and college courses in physics and mathematics. When they are not writing, Karmela is running, in a boxing class, or making a vegan cake.

Joseph Osmundson is a professor of microbiology at New York University and the author of the National Book Critics Circle and Lambda Literary Award finalist Virology. His work has been published in leading biological journals including Cell and PNAS and in the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives and works in New York City. 

Raechel Ann Jolie is a writer, teacher, punk-enculturated queer femme anarchist, ex-academic, and forest witch living in Northeast Ohio. Her writing focuses primarily on sex, gender, class, media, and social movements. Her memoir Rust Belt Femme (Belt, 2020) was the winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction, an NPR Favorite Book of 2020, and a runner-up for the Heartland Bookseller’s Award. Her essays, criticism, and reporting have appeared in Playboy, The Baffler, Bitch Magazine, In These Times, Teen Vogue, Belt Magazine, among others.