Welcome back to Creator Spotlight! This week we’re featuring Anne Theriault, history buff, feminist and writer. Anne is based in Kingston, Ontario. In addition to her Patreon, articles and essays found in many forums, you can also find her on Twitter.
From Anne’s Twitter profile
Anne, how did you become a writer?
I've always written for as long as I can remember. I started keeping a journal when I was 10 or 11 and I was always writing short stories and stuff.
The work I do now really started when my son was a baby and I was a stay-at-home mom. I started a blog and it just kind of happened to be the heyday of blogging. One thing that I wrote got picked up by a bunch of news outlets and I was able to parlay that into actually writing for news outlets. A lot of it has just been happenstance that the right person saw the right thing at the right time and it went viral or whatever. I've been very fortunate.
A photo of Anne’s work area
Do you have a preferred set of tools for writing? Are you all keyboards or do you still like pen and paper? Or do you have a preference?
My journal is still pen and paper. I generally prefer using a laptop because it is easier to organize thoughts in a document; I'm a Google Docs nerd. I find it so easy to do bullet points and then expand that into thoughts. When you're writing on pen and paper, everything kind of has to be linear, but I do sometimes still use notebooks - they can be really useful for brainstorming.
What led to the creation of the Queens of Infamy series?
It started as an in-joke. I was tweeting out these jokey history threads: people from history having these imagined conversations. This was when the Longreads platform was really expanding. I had worked a bit with one of the editors (Ben Huberman) and one day he sent me a DM on Twitter and he was like, hey, would you be interested in expanding this into a long form series?
I replied “I don't think that's gonna work, but you know I'll try anything once.”
He’s the one who came up with Queens of Infamy title. He's wonderful to work with and he was a big driving force behind that series. So without him, nothing would have happened.
Queen Isabella of France
And speaking of the same... the Isabella of France installment is hilarious! I was really struck by the choice of language (re: swears) in the article. Was it a conscious choice to try to draw in the attention of the reader? Or is that just your style?
It was a conscious choice to use, yeah, colorful language, very modern sounding. Not your grandma's history, I guess, although grandmas swear; my grandma swears a lot.
Did you feel that modernizing both the language and and the phrases and the figures of speech would help something that some people find dry, like history, and make it more interesting and more accessible?
Yeah, you know, I can't tell you the number of people who have said to me “I hate history. I found it so boring at school.” And that's so weird to me, for me, history is one of the most interesting, vital, and wonderful fields of study.
I kind of think of myself as a history translator. It’s like I'm not adding anything new, I am using entirely secondary resources, you know, and it's not any new research, but I'm hopefully writing it in a way that might speak to a person who maybe won't sit down and read a whole history book - they can be pretty dry, to be honest. I've had to learn to kind of read between the lines and find the fun where the fun is and so I hope other people do that after reading my work.
Are you familiar with Lucy Worsley and the work she does with British history?
Yeah, she's great. Yeah there are so many great historians out there working right now and the BBC has some amazing programming. There's definitely a lot of fun history happening right now.
I find that part of her approach is she tries to make history seem almost just that tiny bit... not salacious… but she looks for the intrigue or the eyebrow raise and capitalizes on that.
I think that's the thing. It's not hard to find the salacious or the eyebrow raise. People have been people since forever in a day and they've always been, you know, doing kind of the same behaviors.
Yeah, people are people no matter what century.
Moving on: you've written openly and frankly about mental illness and your own situation. How are you doing these days? It seemed like you might have been struggling a bit earlier this year. Have you adapted to the transition from Toronto to Kingston (your current homebase)? Much smaller population, etc.
You know what? I'm OK. I think I am (knock wood) in a better place than I have been for most of the pandemic. I'm a summer person anyway, so when the weather is nice, I'm always like that much happier.
It was a very rough kind of two years, and I did move in the middle of it, so that's been a tricky kind of thing. I do talk about it on social media sometimes, though usually I almost have like an emotional hangover after I do that. I always feel embarrassed and like, oh, why did I overshare about that?
It’s embarrassing, 'cause it's usually late at night when I can't sleep. That's the worst time for me - the wee hours of the morning. It feels like a relief to get it out at that point, but then the next morning, it's more of hangover aspect of “Oh God, what did I do?”
So I'm trying not to do it anymore. I gave up Twitter for Lent and I haven't been using it much since then because it was a really nice break.
What's your outlook on Twitter these days? Elon Musk's “will I or won't I” game now seems to have landed on “I won't”, does that affect your approach to the platform in any way?
Yeah, I think there are certainly pockets of Twitter that I enjoy. Typically I enjoy using it and interacting with people. I do find that looking at my timeline can be really stressful because panic and meanness are just like dialed up so much, that it can be hard to process.
It does feel like there are a lot of people who are just spoiling for a fight and Twitter’s where they go to indulge that urge and then there are people using Twitter for larger agendas and it’s hard to avoid that no matter how many people you follow.
Yeah, for sure. I think, especially after two years of pandemic, people are so stressed out and can easily get into such bad moods and want to relieve that stress by arguing with someone or intensify their ire by getting into arguments.
I also think that Twitter incentivizes meanness. I think the kind of stuff that thrives in in attention economy is, like, quote tweeting someone to dunk on them. So I think that also very frustrating.
Right, bad news and drama sell. People get bored with good news.
From Anne’s Twitter account
If I take this just a step further, it looks like Elon Musk's trying to get out of the Twitter deal while Twitter's burning through cash hand over fist at the moment. If Twitter did disappear, how would that impact you? Would you find somewhere else to go and be more present there?
I don't know. I'm not really an Instagram girl, especially since it's been changing to focus more on videos rather than pictures and I'm too old for TikTok. I don't know that there really is anywhere that I can go. I do think Twitter is already bleeding users and I think the majority of users who are on there are of a certain age bracket. I don't think there's a lot of young people (i.e. Gen Z) on there anymore.
How are you feeling about the state of the world following the end of Roe v. Wade in the US? Any concerns of anything similar happening in Canada?
Yeah, it's very concerning to see the Supreme Court overturn a precedent. I do, worry about Canadians becoming complacent or you know, talking about how so great our system is. Meanwhile, there are still places like PEI that you can't get an abortion there. You have to travel to a different province. We may not have legal restrictions, but we certainly have restrictions to access that I think not everybody realizes. I think people in Atlantic Canada probably have a firmer grasp on that reality than Ontarians do, as an example. Then again, I've known people in Ontario even who had to travel, not other provinces but to other cities 'cause the wait times in their cities were too long.
So yeah, I think we're in a better position than the US, but I think our system is more fragile than than some people might want to believe.
I believe you’re Catholic. Do you consider yourself to be a pro-choice person?
I consider myself to be both Catholic and pro-choice. There's stuff that I don't agree with the church on but I think that the church needs progressive people, 'cause if it loses all of its progressive people, then who’s pushing it to be better?
How do you feel about the federal Conservative Party, any concerns about Pierre Polievre in particular and his chances for becoming leader?
I think what concerns me is that on some issues he is speaking in a way other politicians aren't, things that people are worried about in a way that Trudeau and Singh aren't, particularly on housing. Pierre has been very engaging on the housing crisis in a way that other federal politicians haven't been so that does worry me because I feel his brand of populist politics is so dangerous.
But I think he has a good communications team and I think he is a smart man and that worries me. I just hate to see this kind of like “Trump Lite” style of politics coming to Canada. We've been deep in it in Ontario for the past four plus years with Doug Ford and that's been a complete garbage fire as far as I'm concerned. And he just got re-elected, so yeah.
What are you reading these days for fiction and/or non-fiction?
For fiction, I’m on a real Iris Murdoch binge, she was a mid century British writer, so I've been reading all of her books this summer.
That’s been great because they all kind of circle around similar themes, so you kind of know what you're getting. But then each book is its own weird little surprise.
For non-fiction I'm reading this book called The Barbizon. That's about the Barbizon hotel in New York, which was an all women residence, basically in the 20th century. If you were coming to New York in the 30s to the 60s and you were a single girl and you wanted to live somewhere respectable while you had a career or went to school then your best option was these all women residences. They were kind of a step above a rooming house but they didn't allow men in. It’s really interesting.
Pretend you wake up one day and the Internet has been destroyed. What's the first thing that you do?
I’d try to treat it like a normal day: get up, have breakfast, read my book. I guess I don't have a job anymore, so that just sucks. And I guess we'll have to figure out who's leading the kind of grassroots back to print media revolution that we will need.
In a post Internet era I guess I'll have to make some phone calls Not that I ever call anybody on the phone, but there you go. Although without the Internet planes would be crashing.
From Anne’s Twitter account
Thanks so much to Anne Theriault for this great interview! You can read her work in several places, including the Queens of Infamy series on Longreads.
I’d greatly appreciate it if you shared this interview using the social media of your choice!
Terrific interview, Mark. Your provocative questions and Anne’s eloquence made for an informative read.
Great interview. I learned a lot. I wasn't familiar with Anne before this but this made me check her out, and her stuff is excellent.