Mindy: Welcome to Writer Writer Pants on Fire, where authors talk about things that never happened to people who don't exist. We also cover craft, the agent hunt, query trenches, publishing, industry, marketing and more. I'm your host, Mindy McGinnis. You can check out my books and social media at mindymcginnis dot com and make sure to visit the Writer Writer Pants on Fire blog for additional interviews, query critiques and more as well as full transcriptions of each podcast episode. at WriterWriterPants on Fire.com. And don’t forget to check out the Writer, Writer, Pants on Fire Facebook page. Give me feedback, suggest topics you’d like to hear discussed, and let me know if there is someone you’d love to see a a guest.
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Ad: Welcome to the Haunting, Unearthly and Paranormal Stories podcast. Each week will be a different event, whether paranormal or some other strange and unexplained happening–maybe even a haunting located near you. These events and stories have been given to us by the people who experienced them in their own lives. These stories will take you to the depths of fear and back again. You will learn of places haunted by specters and other shadows, ghost investigations, the demonic happenings and possible possessions, dream homes taken over by paranormal events. Within these stories, you will question yourself and locations you have been to – times you caught movement out of the corner of your eye… or thought you did. You may question locations you currently visit and begin to wonder if those noises you hear are truly the building settling or someone from a past life, walking down the hallway towards you. These weekly journeys will lead us down deserted roads, into the deep and dark forests, and through the doors of buildings we should not enter. Pull up a chair as we take a step into the unknown on the Haunting, Unearthly and Paranormal Stories podcast. Find us at hupspodcast.com Contact us at hupspodcast@yahoo.com. Believe the stories you choose to believe – or believe in none. It is your choice.
Mindy: We're here with Sabine K. Bergmann and Sivani Babu, who are the founders of Hidden Compass, which is a women-founded media company. So why don't we just start with you guys telling us about Hidden Compass, what it is and what you do.
Sivani: We're excited to be here, we're excited to talk about Hidden Compass. Hidden Compass is a women women-founded media company, we're ending the era of junk food journalism by empowering audiences to unite with human causes and possibilities behind award-winning stories.
Sabine: What that means in practice is that we have an online quarterly magazine of exploration. We have launched a podcast, we have launched an online speaker series, and we have what we call the Alliance, which is like a modern society of exploration essentially. And all of these elements are showcasing as Sivani said Award-winning stories, but also celebrating the partnership between us as a publisher, our contributors and our audience and inviting our audience to get to know the people behind the stories, to be able to support them directly and to be able to participate in what we do as a company.
Mindy: I love it. I struggle as an author... Junk media is the way to put it. I have been kind of railing internally and not always internally, if I'm being honest. I'm an author, I write traditionally, I'm very fortunate to be able to make a living this way. But I have a lot of frustration with the elements of marketing that have no substance yet appears to actually be what works and sells books. I've become very frustrated at the fact that I apparently have to make a TikTok video in order to really function in the publishing world today. And I'm 42 and I don't really feel like dancing or putting on make-up or participating in some of these arenas that we're being told matter. So I kind of like your ideas about creating a new platform, a new method of exploration, but also just kind of a refutation of that idea of the attention span, shortening of the world.
Sabine: It's funny that you say that this is what works and what sells books. It's one strategy that can work to a certain extent, what Sivani and I talk about all the time is that everyone is trying the same strategy, to a large extent, we are ignoring people like - I think all three of us - who love deeper, challenging, nerdy, intellectual stories that don't treat us like people who have five-second attention spans. Behind the founding and the running of Hidden Compass are these two dual frustrations on my part. One is, as a writer, I wanted places to publish stories that weren't shoe-horned into a simplified version of reality, but then on the other side as a reader, I was like, That's not the kind of stuff I wanna read every day. It's not good for me. It kind of wigs me out. And I think a lot of people feel the same way.
Sivani: Right, that's exactly why we founded Hidden Compass was as writers, as readers, we felt like we were being pulled in a direction that frankly we didn't wanna go in and that we didn't think was healthy, and that we didn't think was necessary, and we believed that there should be a place for those longer, difficult, nuanced stories that we wanted to read as much as we wanted to write. We figured if we built it, we couldn't be the only people who wanted that. If we build it, perhaps they will come.
Mindy: I have fallen victim myself to the scroll and going through reels and just looking for that next thing in getting that little rush of adrenaline when you know a cat misses it's jump, a human falls down on the ice in front of their house, and I'm just like, Why am I doing this? I will hate myself for spending time going through looking for that next thing that's gonna make me laugh or whatever it is, and I have found it affecting my brain. There's no doubt about that. The way that I process information. I do have a harder time sitting down and reading, I do have a harder time saying, I'm going to watch an entire movie. You may or may not be familiar with a book called The Shallows?
Sivani: I don't know that one.
Mindy: I think that you would greatly enjoy this. It came out a while ago, I think they have updated it. It was by Nicholas Carr, it's called The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. A very compelling book about your brain actually being rewired. About the endless scroll, about skimming, about how you aren't processing large chunks of text any longer, and I don't tag it entirely on the internet, obviously, there are plenty of wonderful places where you can do long form reading and interact on a more meaningful level on the internet. However, again, this was originally published in 2010, so the title kind of reflects that. But there is a real impact on your brain and in your processing your language and your language and comprehension processing when you are simply pushing for that next little adrenaline boost What I do is read, that's what I do, I sit down and I read and then I write, and the longer I participate in little 100 calorie snack packs for my brain, my brain is eroding. There's no doubt in my mind.
Sivani: And what's been so interesting to me throughout this whole process of founding Hidden Compass and clarifying what our mission is and how we talk about it, are the parallels between media, the internet, and junk food and food. And so we drew heavily on the farm-to table movement when we started thinking about what Hidden Compass is. Because there is this parallel with junk food. It's out there, we all know it's out there, if you have it every once in a while, it's probably not gonna kill you. But if it's all you're consuming it's not gonna end well. And it's the same thing with this type of media that is bite-size, that is designed to give you that dopamine hit, designed to keep you coming back for more without really forcing you to engage with it in a meaningful way.
Sabine: But the exciting thing too is, in looking at that parallel between food and media, I looked at the past of what happened in the food industry. For centuries, food was just by nature, seasonal, handmade, local organic. And then there was this era of the commercialization of food and processed food just started booming. Then there was this shift of people really caring about the quality of what they put in their bodies, willing to do the research, willing to invest more resources into thoughtful choices. And I think we're in the same place with media, I think there is this moment that's happening right now where people are starting to think about what they put in their minds, the way that we thought about what we were putting in our bodies. And that gives me such excitement and hope because when Sivani and I entered this industry, everyone told us it was dying. And I think it's at an inflection point, I think we're at this moment that is so exciting, and this could be the moment when there is a shift towards different kind of media, and it might look totally different in 20, 30 years, or maybe even two years.
Sivani: And it requires a lot of creative thinking to figure out how to make it work when on the monetary side, it's evolved, click-bait drives content. And the reason it does that is because the way that internet advertising works and the way that publications make money isn't on the quality of the content, it's on how much of it they can get people to consume. And so in order to make that shift, it requires publications, media companies, businesses to think creatively about how they can afford to run their company and do the things that they want to do and pay writers what they deserve to be paid, and photographers and artists, and do it in a way that allows them to produce the kind of content that they can actually be proud of, and that is nourishing and healthy and mind-expanding. And that's been such a big part of our mission at Hidden Compass, is to figure out how to make this work in an industry where the Internet and the way that internet advertising has developed is what's driving content. How do we take a step back and rethink that and figure out how we can successfully run a business without falling into that trap?
Mindy: I could not agree more. I love the parallel to food, I tell people often, I was a teenager in the 90s, and I live in the Midwest. We drank pop. That's what you drank. When I think about it, now it makes me feel so gross. That's what you drank, that's what you had with meals, that's what you drank when you were thirsty, if you were an athlete, we could drink Gatorade, but most of the time you were drinking pop. I think about that now, and it makes me feel sick. I don't drink it, I drink water. I remember when bottled water became something you could buy, everyone made fun of people that drank bottled water, at least where I'm from. Why would you pay for water? It was so bizarre that people would drink bottled water. But change happens, right? And I would love to see it continue to happen, especially in the world of media. I wanna go back to what you said about entering this world of media and publishing and long form writing, and having people iterate to you that this was a dying industry. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Sivani: Sabine and I both grew up in the era of National Geographic, we both had the giant stacks in our respective childhood homes of National Geographic and Time and Life, and all of these magazines where long form media was the norm. A lot of our mentors and the people we looked up to in this industry had also sort of come of age in that time, and when we got into this business and they became mentors and friends, so many of them were lamenting the loss of what they call this golden age of media, particularly related to travel journalism and about how it was never going to be that way, and travel journalism was dying, 'cause it was all about listicles and that type of short piece content that does what we've been talking about, it's engineered to do. We hit a point, Sabine and I, where we have this question of, Well, do we continue in this industry that everyone says is dying? Do we accept that this industry is in fact dying? And if not, what do we do about it? And for us, we looked at it and we didn't have that nostalgia for a time in our careers that looked very different 'cause we were new to the industry, and so we could look at it and see what might be an opportunity where folks that we absolutely adore, were focusing on what they'd lost. And we had this moment kind of a forced opportunity really, we couldn't look backwards because to a certain extent, they were right, that this print model has been disastrous. It's been really painful actually to see friends and colleagues who were editors at larger publications, storied publications get let go because the editorial teams are being cut down. It's been horrible to see how fact-checking departments have been cut. We talk about optimism and hope, and that's definitely a huge part of the story, but there are parts of the story too of just sadness. But it does mean that decision to take the print business model and try and superimpose it on the internet, and then when that fails to start selling user information and targeting advertising and kind of scrambling to make money in other ways. I mean, National Geographic sells furniture and wine now. Most of their money is made through TV programs, they've cut many of the publications and so obviously that isn't working. But at the same time, we think we're in the age of the internet, which means that we're in an era where readers have greater access than they ever have in the history of publishing. The internet could be leveraged to access this participatory nature of travel journalism that has never been tapped into before, and so I feel both sadness for everything that's happening, but also this drive to move towards a vision of what this could be.
Sabine: For us, this always felt more like an industry in transition than an industry that was dying, that there were these opportunities, if you could come in and look at it with a different perspective, and it's hard for big publications to do that. National Geographic is a big ship. It is very hard to turn a big ship. So these publications that have been struggling and have made choices that have affected, frankly the editorial quality of what they're putting out. One of the big issues with National Geographic and internal conflict has been with the television network being what brings in a lot of money and the quality of what's being aired on that television network and whether it meets the standards of the National Geographic Society, and whether it meets the standards of the magazine. And so there are these internal conflicts that bigger publications and bigger media companies are having. And that was where Hidden Compass was at a little bit of an advantage actually, and it's more than a little bit of an advantage in that we're small. We're small and we can afford to do things differently and try things out and experiment, and our hope is that when other companies see that it can be successful to do it a different way, they find their own ways to do it differently. We don't think that we are setting the only example of how this can be done, but we hope that with some publications, we're just showing people that it can be done and it can be done differently, and we don't have to drive content the way we have been. It doesn't have to be a quantity over quality game, that it can be quality over quantity, that there is a market for that, that people actually want that, and that it ultimately can be successful.
Mindy: I love so much everything that you're saying, especially when you're talking about, as an example, National Geographic, and when you're talking about their TV channel and questions of whether or not some of the content that is being pushed out is up to the standards, I think that... And I'm not speaking specifically of National Geographic, but in general, man. Standards have lowered. I struggle as a consumer, not just a writer, I struggle as a consumer to find things that interest me. I struggle to find things that are well done, well made, well put together, well delivered, the narrative has to be what I need it to be, and that is where my writer side comes in. So much of everything that I interact with ends up disappointing me, and I do think that that is why. The depth is not there, the quality that I used to be able to access and yes, you're right, when you have more invested in printing out a magazine and it has glossy photos and color pages, it's expensive for you to produce it, you're not putting all the content in there. You are making sure that what you're selling is worth what you're asking people to pay for it. When you have unlimited links that you can just throw up... Yeah, you're right. Quantity is the name of the game, and quality isn't even a word I feel like we use anymore.
Sabine: When we tell people that we only publish 20 stories a year, their jaws drop. That was a thoughtful decision on our part. 40 to 50% of the stories we publish every year win awards for the best travel journalism. And that's because we only publish great stories. We have in-depth conversations in our editorial meetings about - what is this contributing to the global conversation? And it's this focus on quality and award winning stories, but also raising the bar for our audiences and saying, We're not gonna dumb this down for you, we're gonna challenge you with the content, and we're also gonna challenge you to meet the writers and photographers and artists behind the by lines. In 2020, we became the first media company in the world to publish profile pages and fundraising campaigns for every storyteller that we publish. And this is on top of the rates that we pay them. So we thought what would happen if we invited readers to support good storytelling? It has been so amazing to see people rise to that occasion, and to prove wrong, this idea that readers don't care, that people want free content, that people don't want to pay attention. And the growth in readership, we now have tens of thousands of readers. The growth in financial support for storytellers is proving that wrong, that people don't care - they do.
Sivani: They do care. They wanna know who is behind the content that they're consuming, the stories that they're reading. And this goes back to that food model that we've drawn so much inspiration from, and I talked a bit and Sabine talked a bit about farm to table, and that was that shift where people wanted to know, they wanted to re-engage with their food in a modern way. We were never going back to being subsistence farmers, but people wanted to know where their food is coming from, and they wanted to know who's preparing it and how it's being made. And we took those concepts and we applied them to what we do in journalism and exploration and storytelling, and started introducing people to the folks behind the content that they were consuming behind the stories. It's been an interesting challenge. Definitely our readership has risen to that challenge. Part of what has been fun and also challenging at times has been asking writers to step out of the shadows and to step out from behind the by line, because Sabine and I dealt with this too, as journalists. We're used to - We write a story, our name is out there, it's on it, but that's kind of the extent of our interaction with the folks who read it. We don't usually get the opportunity as writers and journalists to actually put ourselves out there and share more of ourselves in the context of a single publication. And so that opportunity on the other side of it, from the journalist side of it has also been really interesting, and it's been really fun to see the journalists also step up to that challenge and engage with their audiences and talk about the work that they do more broadly, rather than just about the story, but what they're passionate about and what drives them to tell a story. And that's what people are responding to, they're responding to that connection with those journalists.
Sabine: You know who are thinking of, Siv, is Edmée van Rijn who is this incredible photo journalist, she does conflict photojournalism in the Middle East, and she is an incredible journalist and reporter and is not used to talking about herself or writing about herself. And us being Hidden Compass, we said we're gonna have a profile page for you, you're gonna be on video, we're gonna have photos of you and your bio and everything, and we want this story to have a really strong element of your story and your narrative, and she said that was really challenging for her. And it's one of - I hate to say this 'cause all of the stories we publish are my favorites, but it's one of my favorites that we published recently. And it is this woven narrative of her work as a conflict photojournalism in the Middle East and her experiences dog sledding in Norway.
Sivani: And it seemed like these two disparate experiences that should not work woven together in a story, but they do so beautifully because they're both very much a part of her.
Sabine: And I love that this story does what a lot of stories that we publish to, which is to humanize journalists and I think that that is something that is so necessary right now, I think we talk about media, we talk about journalism. But how many people can name a journalist who aren't in this industry? And so to be able to give the general public that opportunity to see the human beings behind stories, and these are stories of exploration. I think it's harder in news to do the same sort of thing 'cause it's polarized in a lot of ways that exploration, journalism isn't. This is an important step for people to be able to put faces and names and voices on to the people who are creating the stories that we read every day.
Mindy: I think it's interesting, the crossover to fiction authors, authorship in general. I can tell you every author that I know, they can write 400, 500, 000 words a year. You ask them to write a 30-word bio about themselves, and they're like, uhhhh.... It is the hardest part of what we do. I love too, the idea of taking this person that is behind the story and making them a full 3D human being. I think one of the things that I resent, and I do use the word resent, is that as an author, I have to market myself. I'm not just selling my books anymore, I have to market who I am and literally market my face and making these videos and all of these things like that. But the way that you're doing it is different. You're not asking your journalists to do a dance on TikTok with their cat. There's depth there. And if someone were to ask me, and people do, don't get me wrong, but if someone were to do an in-depth interview with me about my work, yeah, I'm all over this. I'm not going to be doing the towel drop on Instagram, like for a lot of reasons.
Sivani: And it's so funny that you say this because this has been a challenge for me and Sabine. When we started Hidden Compass, it was a side project. We had our freelance careers, we were both full-time freelance journalists, we were traveling the world, and we thought Hidden Compass would be this little side journal publication that we would put out every quarter, and it would just be this little thing that lived on the side, and that quickly turned out not to be the case. And a big part of what changed when we realized that it was going to do well, was we also realized that we had become the faces of the brand, and that people had to connect with us as individuals. And that was hard for us because neither of us were wired that way. That has been part of this journey, but I also think it is what has allowed us to bring that same thing to our journalists in a way that is comfortable and doesn't feel demeaning because we feel the same things that they feel. It didn't come naturally to us to put ourselves out there as individuals rather than as people behind Hidden Compass and Hidden Compass being out there. That didn't come naturally to us, and we recognize that it doesn't come naturally to a lot of wonderful folks that we work with, and at the same time, we realize that a lot of the wonderful folks that we work with are spectacular individuals who have amazing stories to share, who have had experiences that we can all learn from. And so we're in this position where we know what they're feeling, but we also know what they're capable of, and we get to help them bring that to the world in a slightly different way. And that's incredibly rewarding for me certainly, and I think for both of us.
Sabine: Yes, I would say for both of us. And there are two main elements at play here really, we talk about humanizing journalists, and I don't know if the two of you have noticed, but humanity isn't perfect. It's not about them being perfect, it's about them being a person, and at Hidden Compass, we very much... We're kind of tongue and cheek in the personality of our brand, and we're very much like trying to take back certain words. So we call our journalists and our storytellers heroes, and we do that purposefully, we do that to say, hero isn't somebody who's perfect, hero is someone who's standing up for something they care about. And that's the second element here, is that we tell our contributors, yes, it's about celebrating you, but also you have a story to tell, literally, you published a story with us that is important, and because it's at Hidden Compass it means we had the whole editorial discussion about what it's contributing to the global conversation, which means that it matters. And to invite these storytellers to step up and say, deforestation in Sumatra is something that is important, and this is why I did a photo essay about it, or disappearing languages and language diversity is important, which is why I wrote a story about it.
Sivani: We're all about celebrating the nerds, we believe that everyone is a nerd about something. So when people hear nerd, they often think of very specific things, but we have had stories where the thing that the author is nerding out about it is the history of textile dye. Everyone's a nerd about something, and so these fascinations and these curiosities that have stories behind them that can teach us about all sorts of other things in the world, have been a big part of the types of stories that we publish, it's the stories that contribute to these global conversations, it's the stories that send people down rabbit holes of research. That was one of the great things that we discovered about our readers when we were able to talk to long-time readers as well as perspective readers, is that folks would read a story and then they would go down their own rabbit holes of research because they were so fascinated by what they read. And that was a huge compliment, and it just reminded us, this is why we do what we do, and there are people out there who do wanna be inspired by something that they don't even know exists yet.
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Mindy: So I'm from Ohio, and I don't live near any large or Earthworks, but we have here in Ohio, there's a system of earthworks that were discovered when white people showed up, and it's essentially at this point in time, they've been dubbed the Hopewell and Adena culture, and those are the names of the white people that discovered them. Essentially, there was a prehistoric people here that moved around huge, massive amounts, hundreds of thousands of tons of dirt to make mounds and not just burial mounds. They made the serpent mound is probably the most famous one, here in Ohio. That's what I am a nerd about. I am a nerd about our Earthworks in Ohio, and we literally know nothing about them. Basically, when Europeans showed up, they were talking to the Native Americans, especially where I'm from, it would have been the Cherokee, and they were like, So what's up with all these earthworks and the Native Americans were literally like, dude, we have no idea. They were like, they've always been here. We don't know. Other people did it. It's funky and they're just super, super old, and we literally know nothing, next to nothing about these people and what these were used for. And when I tell people about the Adena and the Hopewell and the earth works, people are like, What the hell are you talking about? And I'm like - It's this whole thing, it's like Egypt, but it's in Ohio.
Sabine: Oh, that's amazing. It just is so incredible to me how much we don't know. I love that you bring up this idea of discovery and exploration, it's a thing we talk about a lot, and I think that there's this pervasive feeling that we've discovered most everything there is to discover and that the age of exploration is over. This is another thing that Sivani and I fight back against... We're like, journalism is not dying, and the age of exploration is not over. And it's because of things like this Mindy, these earthworks, and also you brought up that there are these European explorers and these white explorers who come in and that really represents the old age of exploration. We're at a moment now where we are celebrating different kinds of voices, the Age of Exploration, now it's not just about being the first Westerner to set foot on top of a certain mountain, it's about frontiers that are ethical, communicating across cultures across generations that are intellectual frontiers as well. And these questions, not just what's out there, but what is our role here on this planet, if not in the universe, and these are huge exciting questions where we can hear from different kinds of voices now in a way that we just didn't before.
Sivani: Right. Exploration used to be about conquering, and it used to be about being the first generally Westerner, generally white male Westerner, up a mountain or to plant a flag in a place where there were already plenty of people who had been there forever. Now, we're at this moment, like Sabine said, where it's not about conquering, it's about understanding, and it's about reckoning with the past of exploration and the fact that exploration used to be about exploitation. It used to be about quote / unquote discovering a place where millions of people already lived and then figuring out what you could take from it. And now it's about understanding and trying to learn from the people who are already there, rather than coming in and trying to tell people how they should be living or how they should be protecting their environment or telling them what the thing is that they've been living with forever. It's about understanding and listening, and it's taken on these forms that aren't just physical, it's not about being the first to some place, it can also be just about going deeper rather than broader. And about actually understanding the ecological consequences and the ethical consequences, the historical consequences, and there are all these types of exploration. And so when we talk about being an exploration-driven media company and magazine, people often take that as physical exploration, it's science. And it is those things, but it's also all of these other things that are fascinating and inspiring, and like Sabine being said, this is why we don't feel like the age of exploration is over, it's just different now.
Mindy: Agreed, entirely. I am very interested in the history of literally where I live. People ask if you could live at any time or any place in history, where would you be... And I always say in my own backyard 1000 years ago, I think that would be amazing. Because it's a completely different place. I love what you're saying about exploration because... Yeah, I live in Ohio, I lived very much in the middle of nowhere, and there are so many things that I can learn in a, let's say two mile radius. There's a piece of property down the road where there's a stream, and it was used by, I believe the Cherokee for their tanning, they tanned their hides on that bank. And I'm always saying to myself, I need to go down there and look around and look for arrowheads and look for tools and do these things, and I haven't done it yet. There are so many things that are just literally, literally in my own backyard. My house was built by a Civil War soldier, and I have come across so many things in the yard, just like digging or gardening or cutting up a dead tree and the roots come up and it's like, Oh, here's a horse shoe and here's an old plow, and it's just like... it's amazing to me when you're speaking of depth, and it's like, you know, we're not talking about sailing of into the sunset, it's literally can be two feet under your feet in your backyard.
Sivani: It's so interesting that you mentioned the in your backyard aspect of it, because that is another part of exploration that you have to go far afield to these quote / unquote exotic places. We published a story that I really enjoyed because it was about the Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara in LA. And so I can literally see a Channel Island from my window, I'm based in Santa Barbara. And these islands are incredibly bio-diverse, they were never connected to the mainland, and so animals have developed and evolved there somewhat independently. It's often referred to as the Galapagos of the US. We published a story by a gentleman named Alex Krowiak, he's a naturalist who had spent time guiding on these islands and photographing was a beautiful photo feature, he's a wonderful photographer as well. But what had been missing in all of these stories about conservation successes on these islands has been the human history that had largely been overlooked, these are islands that are located right off the coast of some of the most populated parts of the country, and people who live within eyesight of them largely don't know the history of them. And they're right here, and they are fascinating, these islands where the oldest dated skeleton in the Americas was found there. I grew up in this area, and I'm familiar with the islands, I learned a ton in editing that story, but also I know so many people who have no idea that that is just right off the shore. So it's great when we can kind of reframe what exploration could be and show that it really is valuable, but it's also accessible to everyone because it doesn't require you to spend a ton of money and travel around the globe, it really could be your actual backyard.
Sabine: This is the power of story tellers too, Mindy you sharing all of these incredible historical aspects of where you live in Ohio, and Alex, who's writing about the Channel Islands. The storytellers are so often the thread that connects us to our own backyards, back to previous eras, to each other. I mean, I am such a believer in the power of storytelling, and my background is actually in environmental science. I had this moment when I was in college, I was working with indigenous subsistence farmers in the rural Andes. This is 2008, and I was putting together a scientific report that never got published actually, because the country fell into a state of civil unrest. The wonderful outcome of that is that I ended up being stranded in these remote rolling hills at 14000 feet of elevation with a couple of colleagues and Spanish Quechua translator. And I'm with people who don't use the western calendar, who live by oral traditions that have been passed down for hundreds of generations, roughly 400 generations, which goes back to the advent of Andean agriculture thousands of years ago. And I had this moment of, Oh my gosh, the power of these oral traditions, the power of these stories that convey what we as a people, as a species are learning, have learned, have yet to learn. Stories are how we have that global conversation, but also intergenerational conversations. They are our keys to interpreting the universe, to conveying knowledge and expression, to connecting with our peers and ancestors. I have goosebumps as I'm saying this right now, 'cause I cannot believe that I get to spend my life working with storytellers. I can't imagine anything else I would rather do.
Mindy: I love being one, and I love thinking narratively, which is just how my brain functions and always has. So I live in a, like I said, a really old house I think it was built in 1857, and everybody was like, You are crazy to buy this house and to want to live in a house that is this old and I'm like, No, I'm classy. I like this... This is amazing, like my house has history, if you go down in the basement, the beams are actually... They were cut by hand, there's hatchet marks and Everything about that matters. And it all goes back to the 15-second attention-grabbing and everything that has, I feel, very little substance. I feel that way sometimes about architecture, I can have that reaction to architecture, I need my house to matter. I researched the house when I bought it, and I know the name of the soldier that built it, and I actually found his grave and I went to his grave and I was like, Hey man, thanks for building my house. I love my house. I'm gonna take care of it for you. That matters to me because it is all story and we are all people populating the stories no matter how old they are or where they happen.
Sivani: Well, and storytelling to it's about connection, it's about that history, but for me, I also always look at it as storytelling is also about advocacy. So Sabine's background is Environmental Science, mine is varied, but I was a Federal Public Defender. Every career I have ever had - so I've been a lawyer, I've been a teacher. I have always come back to story, and everything is about story, and it's how we actually make changes in the world, the important changes and the detrimental ones too. It's all about story. And so when I look at what we do, and when I look at what I used to do as a lawyer, it was always about telling the story as a form of advocacy. And this is something that I have carried over in my life that's connected to Hidden Compass, I teach these storytelling for social justice workshops to aspiring public interest attorneys and things like that. But it's also something that gets carried over in the stories that we publish, we maintain journalistic integrity, we fact-check every story thoroughly, but there are stories that are illuminating conservation efforts or the need for conservation or helping us think about things in new ways. There was a beautiful story that actually was separate from all of the conservation type things that we publish, that was written by a woman Cherene Sherrard, who is a Black professor, chair of English and literature at Santa Clara University, and she wrote about her experience surfing for the first time in Hawaii, and tied it in with her experience as a Black woman dealing with and managing risk in just day-to-day life. And so here was the opportunity to make people think about things in a new way, in a way that might affect how they think about certain social issues that are currently at the forefront. And it's so important to me that we get to use story to not just make those connections with people, 'cause that is incredibly important, but also to show people the world in which we live and the world in which we want to live.
Sabine: I'm gonna jump in and showcase Hidden Compass fact checking in action. Cherene Sherrard is the chair of the English department at Pomona College, she teaches African-American and Caribbean literature. We got it right!
Mindy: Well, that matters. So last thing, why don't you let listeners know where they can find Hidden Compass and some of your other efforts that are tied into Hidden Compass and some of the stories that you're most excited about recently.
Sivani: Sure, we're at Hidden Compass dot net. So pretty easy to find us on the internet. On our website, you'll find information about the Alliance, which we mentioned pretty briefly earlier in this conversation, but the Alliance is our modern society of exploration, and we launched it at the end of last year, it is an opportunity for people who wanna take the next step and connect with a community of folks who not only wanna support exploration, but who wanna have a say in what modern day exploration looks like, and who also wanna join us in standing up for the values that we believe in which is that journalism, Science, History and hope are worth protecting. And so the Alliance gives folks access to our story tellers. We'll be funding larger expeditions and our Alliance members will get to help us choose the ones that we fund, they will get to interact with folks who are on those expeditions and to learn what goes into a big endeavor like that. It's our effort to build the community around exploration.
Sabine: Definitely go and check that out. And then in terms of stories that we would point you to, it's so hard to choose, but our latest issue - every issue we publish has a theme, and our latest issue, the theme was layered exposures. You should jump into that one, there are fundraising campaigns that are active for all five of the storytellers. You can contribute to support each of them directly. There is a story by a writer and filmmaker named Paul Fischer about these Palestinian tens who are obsessed with the promise of the movies, but grew up in a place where all of the cinemas were shut down and they have this impossible dream that they fight through. And it's about the history and the violence of that era, and also the hope and the amazing things that can come out of that place. There's an incredible photo feature by documentary maker Eric Dusenbery in Musella, Georgia, where he's inspired by these depression era portraits, by this iconic photographer, Dorothea Lange. And he takes a large format camera, very old school, and he sets off to capture modern agrarian life, and that's in our time travel department, so it's inspired by depression era photography and then bringing modern photography in, but with older technology. There's the story about the architecture in Vietnam, I mean, just go and read the entire issue at this point. I'm gonna tell you all of it and poke around and see what you love, because we have things for all kinds of nerds.
Sivani: And we hope you discover something that you didn't know existed, but that fascinates you.
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