Photo by Aran Shetterly
Margot Shettlerly, the author of New York Times best-selling novel “Hidden Figures,” which inspired an Oscar-nominated film by the same name, will be a featured speaker at this year’s James River Writers Conference (Oct. 14 and 15, jamesriverwriters.org), and she’s a nonfiction finalist for the Library of Virginia’s 20th annual Literary Awards, to be announced Oct. 14. She recently spoke with us about the meaning behind the pages, being raised by a scientist and a professor, and her next book.
Image courtesy HarperCollins
Richmond magazine: Who is Margot Shetterly outside of the award-winning author whose name we all recognize? What drives you as a person? What's fun for you?
Margot Shetterly: Well, I’ve done so many other things in my life before this, that despite all of the amazing changes that have happened in the last year, I’m still kind of the same person, with kind of the same rhythms. For me, writing this book was a way to explore a lot of things I was interested in anyway — science, identity, the way we deal with work. This was a way to step back and look at the bigger picture, in a way.
RM: What was your upbringing in Hampton like? How did your father's career as a research scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center and your mother's as a university English professor influence your own career trajectory? It seems that you merged your parents’ interests into your own, in a way, by writing about science.
Shetterly: I did, although it was far from direct. Your first role models are your parents. In my parents, I had a black man who was a scientist; the very first scientist I knew was a black man, so that was science to me, he represented the field. And then, this large group of people he worked with at NASA were also black people, and women. So I had this idea that I could have been a NASA [employee] or a scientist, because they looked like me. At the same time, I was fortunate to have a mother who loved words. When I was in elementary school, she spent hours drilling me for the spelling bee [laughs]. She loved language and words. And she was teaching at Hampton; if James Baldwin was speaking there, we went. If Maya Angelou was speaking there, we went. So I got to see this rich expanse of black writers and intellectuals. And it gave me, as a young black kid, confidence to do whatever I wanted to do. When I was older, I decided to work in finance and moved to New York. Then I moved into technology, then media. So in a sense, 'Hidden Figures' brought me home.
RM: I understand that you and your husband, Aran, published a magazine, 'Inside Mexico,' while living and working in Mexico. Tell me about that experience. How long ago was that? Do you anticipate working on more projects together in the future?
Shetterly: We are both people who’ve done a lot of different things. He worked in book publishing; I worked in internet publishing. We met in New York, when he was working on his first book ["The Americano: Fight With Castro for Cuba’s Freedom,” 2007]. We moved to Mexico, drove down in our car and started this business. The first thing we learned was all the things we didn’t know, of course. Print publishing, in every form, in every part of the world, has gone through a lot of changes, and our publication was not immune. Also, the language barrier was still a challenge. And it was in the middle of a global economic meltdown. Then out of that business, we founded another, a marketing and tourism consulting business. During that time was when I began work on 'Hidden Figures.' There is nothing that I write that Aran doesn’t read, and there’s nothing he writes that I don’t read. He’s my first reader. It’s amazing to have a partnership like that, where you can rip up the pages, discuss the issues, and come out with something better. Now, he’s working on his next book, so it’s great that I can play the role of being the first reader, the editor.
RM: 'Hidden Figures' is about groundbreaking black women scientists whose work fueled America's journey into space. There are two big issues that your book addresses through these women's stories: racial discrimination and sexism in the workplace. The events in your book happened over 70 years ago, but the issues are current and contentious, as evidenced through a Google employee's recent firing after writing a manifesto decrying diversity, alleging that women were not biologically fit to work in engineering and technology fields. Why do you think we're still wrestling with these issues as a society? How can we, as individuals, begin to overcome them?
Shetterly: Change takes a long time to happen. It’s easy for us to look at how much farther that we still want to go, but we have to remember that we’ve come a very long way in the last six, seven decades since Catherine Johnson was in her heyday. People hold on to incorrect ideas for a long time. I think what we have to do is, each individual advocate for the best ideas, no matter where they come from. We can’t dismiss good ideas because of preconceived notions of what a scientist or engineer looks like. One of the reasons people responded so strongly to 'Hidden Figures' was that it was empirical proof of these women’s work, and the important contributions women have made in science and engineering. One thing I want to get back to is another project born of 'Hidden Figures,' tallying the numbers of women working in science and engineering fields. I dare you to refute women’s role [in STEM fields] looking at the numbers, the hard empirical evidence. We’ve come a long way, but we still have a lot of work to do.
RM: Your book and the movie it inspired have supported a push for girls to study STEM subjects in school, and for educators, organizations and employers to find ways to usher more women into these fields. Did you expect your writing to have that influence?
Shetterly: I knew that there would be interest, because it’s such a top-of-mind topic — anything that has to do with women in STEM, inclusion, we’re all thinking and talking about those things. The kind of jobs our country needs to remain globally competitive are tech jobs. But I have to say that I’ve been completely taken aback and blown away by the breadth of the interest in the story. It’s been incredible; I don’t know that I have adequate words to describe this phenomenon happening around me, and how grateful I am for being a part of it, how proud I am of the women who did it, and how inspired I am by meeting the people and girls and boys who tell me how much they loved the book. Another important point is, I see boys at my book signings, who tell me that are very inspired by the women in the book, so it’s changing perceptions of young people about who a scientist is, and what they look like.
RM: What's next for you, are you writing another book?
Shetterly: I’m taking a little time off; knitting as much as I can. My dad’s engineering gene expresses itself in me through knitting. I do have a new book on the horizon, I’m just getting started. What happened was, when I worked on 'Hidden Figures,' I kept turning up other stories. I would find something in the Norfolk Journal and Guide, I would be reading other old black newspapers, and I would see all these things happening at the time. I started to get really curious about the people behind these stories. One thing I really got super curious about was Carl Murphy, who published the Afro-American (Richmond has an edition, this was the Baltimore edition). He was kind of a behind-the-scenes guy, though well-known in his area. I wondered, 'Why has someone not written a book about him?' and filed it away. And then, Baltimore itself was fascinating; it was an epicenter of black life and had a vibrant African-American community. William Adams started as a numbers runner, who migrated there from North Carolina, who ended up becoming an extremely successful venture capitalist and investor. So, this will be about pre- 'The Wire' Baltimore, business owners, finance and their interpretation of the American dream.
Margot Shetterly, author of "Hidden Figures," will speak at this year’s James River Writers Conference on Saturday, Oct. 14. jamesriverwriters.org
