Kate Rope’s new book, Strong as a Girl is not only well-written and thoroughly researched, it includes the voices of so many girls and young women. In this week’s episode, Jess talks with Kate about how she managed to secure interviews with these girls, get permission to use their voices, and manage the paperwork around all those releases.
Find Kate via her website: Kate Rope, @kateropewriter on Instagram, and her Substack Strong as a Human
Transcript Below!
Jess LaheyHey, it’s Jess Lahey. If you’ve been listening to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast for any length of time, you know that, yes, I am a writer, but my true love—my deepest love—is combining writing with speaking. I get to go into schools, into community organizations, into nonprofits, into businesses, and do everything from lunch and learns to community reads to just teaching about the topics that I’m an expert in, from the topics in The Gift of Failure, engagement, learning, learning in the brain, cognitive development, getting kids motivated, and yes, the topic of over-parenting and what that does to kids’ learning—two topics around The Addiction Inoculation, substance use prevention in kids, and what I’ve been doing lately that’s the most fun for me, frankly, is combining the two topics. It makes the topic of substance use prevention more approachable, less scary when we’re talking about it in the context of learning and motivation and self-efficacy and competence and, yes, cognitive development.
So if you have any interest in bringing me into your school, to your nonprofit, to your business, I would love to come—you can go to jessicalahey.com, look under the menu option “Speaking,” and go down to “Speaking Inquiry.” There’s also a lot of information on my website about what I do. There are videos there about how I do it. Please feel free to get in touch, and I hope I get to come to your community. If you put in the speaking inquiry that you are a Hashtag AmWriting listener, we can talk about a discount, so that can be one of the bonuses for being a loyal and long-term listener to the Hashtag AmWriting Podcast. Hope to hear from you.
Multiple Speakers
Is it recording? Now it’s recording. Yay! Go ahead. This is the part where I stare blankly at the microphone. Try to remember what I’m supposed to be doing. All right, let’s start over. Awkward pause. I’m going to rustle some papers. Okay. Now, one, two, three.
Jess Lahey
Hey, welcome to Hashtag AmWriting. This is the podcast about reading all the things—short things, long things, poetry, nonfiction, fiction, articles, queries, book proposals. This is the podcast about writing all the things, but more than anything else, this is the podcast about getting the writing done, getting the work of being a writer done. I’m Jess Lahey. I’m the author of The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation, and you can find my work at The Washington Post and The New York Times and The Atlantic and lots of other places.
And today I have a guest—a guest I’m very, very excited about. So today I’m going to be talking with Kate Rope about a topic that I have wanted to cover for a while and have not had exactly the right person to cover the topic with. Kate Rope is a writer. She is a journalist, and she’s had articles at a lot of the same places that I have, actually—like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and things like that. She wrote a wonderful book called Strong like a Mother [Strong as a Mother], and her new book, Strong like a Girl [Strong as a Girl], is coming out in October—October 14, to be precise. And thank you so much, Kate, for coming on the podcast.
Kate Rope
Oh, I’m so excited. It’s a dream come true. It’s—it’s literally like leveling up in my world.
Jess Lahey
Okay, so help me remember where we actually first met? It could have been through Jess Foundation people, because those people in common.
Kate Rope
No, no, it was before then. I think I just sought you out for—for being a source for a couple of articles.
Jess Lahey
Oh, okay.
Kate Rope
Just because of having read your The Gift of Failure.
Jess Lahey
Normally what I do—what I need, what our computers need now—is a function called “How do I know blah, blah, blah?” Because there are all these people that, like, we know them from online, or I know them because I’ve used them as a source somewhere for some article. So I got on my computer, and I looked in my little, you know, search terms, and I put your name in, and I was looking for, like, our earliest contact, and I couldn’t find it. But I think our computers need, like...
Kate Rope
I think it was a phone call.
Jess Lahey
How—oh, okay, well, there you go.
Kate Rope
I think that’s why there’s no record of it.
Jess Lahey
Well, either way, I’m so glad we’re talking now. I love, love, love your new book. I’ve been fortunate enough to read an early version of it. It’s really lovely. You ended up with a beautiful cover—I can’t wait for everybody to see it. I will be posting a picture of it in the show notes. But I wanted to talk to you—and you actually came up with this independently—but this is this topic I’ve wanted to talk about for a long time: about interviewing kids specifically. Like, logistically, there are a lot of hurdles to get through when you interview kids There can be, I know, depending on, like, the when, the where, the why, and the how. But I wanted to talk a little bit about interviewing—how we interview kids, how we interview people in general, how we get permission, how we approach people. So since you had sort of this idea to begin with, I would love for you to start and talk a little bit about your book—how on earth you got access to the people you talked to in your book, and how that process went for you.
Kate Rope
Sure. So it goes back to my first book. I will admit to having a bias—I do not like books that have case studies that open chapters, and so it’s like, “Sarah and her family could never get homework done,” and so it, you know, went for, you know, this is what they went through. And if you don’t relate to that particular story, you check out. So for my last—my last book, Strong as a Mother—I wanted to have the voices of all different kinds of moms and pregnant people, you know, sharing what their experience was, so that a reader could find some other person that had gone through what they had gone through. And so for that...
Jess Lahey
Can I hit pause? Can I hit pause for just one second? So my—and this is, I’m going to be talking to my Authority to Author person that I’ve been interviewing for a series that I’m doing on going from being an authority to being an author—and we talk a lot about this: like, what’s your framing narrative for the chapter? How do you create narrative? So I want to make sure at some point we talk about—so if you’re not a fan of sort of the case study approach, how do you go about thinking about creating a narrative to use to couch your data, so that it’s not just about data?
Kate Rope
Yeah, I do have stories in there. So I might have, you know, a couple of paragraphs with a particular story that illustrates, you know, whatever we’re talking about in the chapter, but it doesn’t ground the whole chapter in one experience. So…
Jess Lahey
I like that.
Kate Rope
Yeah, it’s trying to bring in different, different viewpoints. I tend to write very much, like, voice-forward. So I bring people in, and I talk about, you know, the research, but I don’t tend to be really clinical or academic. So I tend to kind of create the narrative. I bring the people’s stories in within the body of the text. But then what I did in Strong as a Mother was, at the end of each chapter, I had quotes from pregnant people and moms about whatever the topic was. So, let’s say it was a chapter on breastfeeding, or choosing how you’re going to feed your kid. I wanted the mom who said, “I never wanted to breastfeed. I went to the hospital; I put a sign on my door that said, ‘Do not bring a lactation consultant in here. I know what I’m doing. I’m doing formula.’”
I wanted the woman who was like, “Breastfeeding is all I ever wanted to do in my whole life, and it just didn’t work, and I had to stop. And it was heartbreaking, but I got through it.” I wanted the woman who was like, “This was the one thing that worked out for me, and I loved it, and I did it till my child was four.” Because then, at the end of the chapter, you’ve read this whole chapter on making choices about feeding your child that feel good to you and that work for you—and adjusting if life makes it not possible to live out that particular choice. And then I wanted them to see people who had done it, and who’d gotten through it. So that’s the way I did Strong as a Mother. And it was funny—I had so many in the end, and the only ding I got in Publishers Weekly was that they wanted more. But we had to cut so many, because otherwise the book would have been, like 600 pages long.
Jess Lahey
Which is interesting, because then I have to—I, you know, if I’m going to go with, as I did both in The Gift of Failure and The Addiction Inoculation, I chose one framing narrative. So I have to be really careful about, how can I make this framing narrative as general, as appealing to as many people as possible? Because it is going to be a very thin slice, no matter what you do. But how you generalize that for people who may be experiencing something different is—it’s a hard thing to do. So that’s a really interesting choice to have to make—to say, okay, I’m not going to focus it on this one story versus, I’m going to give lots of different ways to people. I like thinking about that.
Kate Rope
It’s sort of like if…
Jess Lahey
Because I get stuck in…
Kate Rope
You went to a moms’ group…
Jess LaheyThe way I do things…
Kate Rope
Yeah, it’s—you had went to—then why do you go to a moms’ group early on when you have your baby? So that you don’t feel like a weirdo and somebody else is going through the same thing. So I kind of wanted this to be, like, three pages of a moms’ group for, you know, perinatal depression and anxiety, breastfeeding, sex, co-parenting—whatever the topics were. I wanted them to feel like they had entered a room with peers who were open to all the different experiences, you know, one can have when going through, you know, trying to make or bring a child into your home. You know?
Jess Lahey
I like that. Thank you for opening my eyes to a different way. It’s just what you’re used to, I suppose, and how you want to go about entering into your storytelling.
Kate Rope
Yeah, and so for Strong as a Girl, that didn’t feel quite the right way to go. So what I wanted to do was—and I’m a journalist, so I don’t even have, like you have—you’re a teacher, you’re trained. I am trained as a journalist. So all of the, you know, there’s some stories and advice that come from me living out my experience—me mostly doing things that I’ve learned from experts—but most of the actual advice and tips and everything is coming from experts. So I know I’m going to interview experts—experts for the book—and then I wanted to interview girls themselves, because I wanted to hear from them. What do they want? You know, basically, you know—this book is written for caregivers and parents of kids who identify as girls, elementary-age kids who identify as girls, so big, five to twelve. And you know, you can talk with ten and up, I would say. But, you know, five, six, seven, eight was not necessarily where I was going to get my, you know, sort of most self-reflective comments on what helps them and what doesn’t.
Jess Lahey
Although you do get great—you do get great quotes from kids those age.
Kate Rope
Agreed, agreed, agreed. So I went with, you know, kind of, you know, middle, upper elementary, middle school, all the way up through college. And I gathered focus groups together—and we can talk about why I did focus groups—but the whole point, the whole—what I wanted in the book was girls and young women reflecting on their childhoods: what helps them, what were the things that people in their lives did that were really helpful to them, and what were the things that they wish they had done differently or didn’t have access to? So that it was literally like—the way I would start off the focus groups is, I’d be like, “Pretend you’re talking to an auditorium of caregivers, and you get to tell them exactly the best way to do this job, like the way that’s going to help you the most to just— I want to know those things.” So for that...
Jess Lahey
Okay, so let’s talk about the focus groups. Yeah, the focus groups—because I think A) brilliant, B) how on earth do you get—do you pull a focus group together? Like, it’s something that when most people hear focus groups, they think of, like, oh, you know, this is how you beta test a movie, like.
Kate Rope
Yeah... “Do you like this toilet paper?
Jess Lahey
You do a test for a movie and see what the focus group thinks. Right? Exactly. How on earth do you, as a journalist, pull together a focus group? Because that’s such an incredible, valuable— and how do you select who’s going to be in your focus group?
Kate Rope
Yeah, so I have to give—so I have several writing groups, and one of them is professors in the Education Department at Georgia State. So they all write papers and stuff, and we get together, and I write whatever I’m writing, and so—and they’re all in education, and they’re all in early education. And so they interview kids, and so they said to me right off the bat, “You have to do focus groups. You have to have groups.” Because adults, you know, typically one-on-one, you can get them to start talking. But with kids, they’re going to respond to each other, and they’re going to riff off each other and develop a rapport. But—but you can’t have too many. There were definitely some focus groups—I would say the sweet spot is maybe four to six. Six starts to get a little unwieldy, only because you can’t keep them for three hours, and they all have so much good stuff to say. And so I had focus groups that were anywhere from two people to—I think, I think I had a seven—and they were virtual, because the girls were from all over the country and young women, and I wanted them to represent different lived experiences of girls.
So, you know, girls are not a monolith. You know, there are some things unique to being a female in our society—challenges, strengths, all those things—and then there are things, you know, that are unique to being a girl of color or living with a physical disability. So I wanted to talk with groups of girls who could speak to just the experience of being a girl and what helped them, and then also whatever, you know, their specific identity or lived experience was—what were the additional inputs that were helpful to them, or additional obstacles that they have ideas about how to help girls overcome. So in that case, I wrote—I reached out to organizations. So I reached out to a bunch of different organizations that work with girls of color, and I just said, “This is what I’m doing.” And literally in the acknowledgments, I say to those organizations, like, “You didn’t have to return my email, but you did,” because I just blind-emailed a bunch of organizations and said, “Here’s what I’m doing. Do you have—?” And a lot of these organizations have, like, an advisory council, or a summer camp or they just, you know, work with the same girls again and again. They have ambassador programs. So, you know, they could—they reached out to their network and said, “Who wants to do this?”
And so that was one approach. Same thing with having a focus group of girls living with a physical disability—I reached out to the Disability EmpowHer Network, and they helped me connect with, in that case, I think they were mostly young women. I think they were all about college age, maybe some in high school.And then, let’s see—for neuro—I wanted a big group of girls with neurodivergence, and that I just did pretty much by word of mouth. I created Google Surveys, Google Forms saying, “I’m looking to talk with girls. This is how it’ll go,” and just sent it to everybody, all and sundry, and had caregivers respond and say, “Yes, you know, my child is interested.” Same with LGBTQIA+ kids. So I basically kind of—and—and that was interesting. It was hard for me to find organizations because they are so protective of their LGBTQ youth—which I completely respect—that they don’t really like to do that. So that group, I had to kind of grassroots it, like I did with the girls living with neurodivergence. And I was very clear—and this is an important—we don’t have to do this now if you have more questions—but I definitely want to talk about the ethics and the...
Jess Lahey
Oh, I want to definitely go into this.
Kate Rope
Yeah, yeah.
Jess Lahey
This is all really interesting.
Kate Rope
And the parameters—so, so, so my motto is, you know, in the last book was “No mothers will be harmed in the creating of this book.” In this one: “No girls will be harmed in the creating of this book.” So there—I, the only thing I want to publish is some—I want to publish something a girl is happy to see on the page. Because I’m not supporting the mental health and well-being of girls if I am sacrificing one person’s experience and well-being to make a point or whatever. So I made it very clear from the start that they were completely in control of what ended up—I recorded everything, then I chose my quotes, and then I ran them by them. They could change their mind at any time—like, basically, they had total control of what ended up in the book, including an alias or just their first name. You know, if they wanted to say, instead of saying they were from, you know, Encinitas, they wanted to say they were from Southern California. I’m also very careful, having come up as a research director and editor in magazines that I never want to have identifying information about minors. So I didn’t—I would never do a full name and a location. For instance, I would really never do a full name. It’s always just a first name or an alias, and then location in a general enough way. And that kind of depends too on what we’re talking about and how sensitive it is. So...
Jess Lahey
One of the fun things that I let the kids do often was pick their own alias if they wanted to. It was a fun way—it was sort of like, “Ooh, that’s exciting, oh my gosh.” And then it turned into, like, a whole project—like, “Oh my gosh, what’s my name going to be?” That was kind of fun too. But I love—I think for a lot of people, especially people who have never done this before, it sounds completely overwhelming to try to ethically get the voices of kids into a book. And it can be easier to, you know, just sort of avoid talking to them directly—which is the problem with a lot of books about kids. Or even when you go into education, and I’m like—every once in a while, I’m like, “Or we could just ask them.” And it seems like there’s a big block about actually talking to the kids themselves, because it is complicated. There are considerations that you have to hold dear to your heart if you really are working for the betterment of kids and not, as you said before—which I really like the way you articulated it—you know, you can’t harm one kid in order to get a story out to lots of others, no matter how helpful you think that story is going to be
Kate Rope
Yeah, yeah. And it sounds overwhelming, but first of all, those focus groups were the best part of doing this book. These girls had insight and humor and natural, reflexive inclusivity. And, I mean, they just made me feel better about the world every time I finished. And I mean what I mean—they, sometimes there was one that went for two hours, and that was cool. That was the group of girls who had different neurodivergences, and they got so into each other that, like, at a certain point, I just was sitting there while they were exchanging numbers and sharing what their interests were. And so, so yeah—I, it was so enjoyable, and it wasn’t that overwhelming. Because going through an organization, you’ve got someone helping you, you know, get this all together. You’ve got someone helping you distribute the waivers, because you have to have, you know, release forms signed. And, you know, I just kept a really good Google Sheet of, like, who has signed the waiver, what’s their approved name, what’s their approved quote.
So, so that—I think, honestly, that’s not the hardest part. I mean, I think the other—I do try to be really efficient in other ways with my interviewing. With experts, I always do a recorded—nowadays, mostly Zoom—used to be phone interview. Because I don’t know what they’re going to tell me, right? I know what I’m interested in, but I don’t know what they’re going to tell me. With caregivers—and I also have caregiver quotes throughout Strong as a Girl—I usually want to talk to them about a particular topic. You know, “How did you first handle your daughter’s dyslexia diagnosis? How do you talk about sex with your daughter? When did you start? When she’s having really big emotions, how do you guys work through it?” So for that, I just did Google Forms, because they have—they know the answer to that question. I know what I’m looking for. I’m looking for information about specific things to get a sense of different ways families handle things, and they can just respond in a Google Form, and it’s easier than trying to get a busy, you know, parent or caregiver on the phone.
Jess Lahey
Yeah.
Kate Rope
So that was how that—so, like—
Jess Lahey
That makes a lot of sense.
Kate Rope
That made it less overwhelming. I sort of have three tiers of interviews.
Jess Lahey
How do you go about organizing—once you have that information? I find then I have a transcript of the interview, or whatever form—I happen to like having the transcript of the interview—and I’ll underline things and flag things. How do you go about organizing? Do you organize by topic? Do you organize by age group? How—you know—what are the ways that you organize the interviews? It sounds like once you have enough of them, it can be really hard to know how you want to use what information and quotes.
Kate Rope
Yeah, I think, I think the hardest thing is—I think I knew pretty much how I wanted to use everything. The hardest part is, like, the copy editor caught that I said one girl lived in Philadelphia in one area of the book, and then I had her in Denver in the other area. And that’s because she was in a focus group with someone from Denver. And so I can’t say I have the answer to that, because I don’t think I did it really well—but I will do better next time. I basically just—I would, I would screen the transcript shortly after the interview or the focus group, because then it was fresh in my mind, and I could sort of remember, “Oh yeah, I want to...” and then I would just highlight, like, whatever the things were that I really liked. And then I just created one master document with all the focus group quotes, you know, and then...
Jess Lahey
Oh, nice!
Kate Rope
As I’m thinking about—yeah—and then as I’m thinking about the topics—okay, now I’m in the, you know, the chapter on puberty—I’m going to go through and pull out what quotes speak to that. And I use Scrivener. I’m a huge Scrivener fan. I use one percent of what Scrivener offers. I just use the table of contents on the left so I can just plop—so then I would just plop them in there. So that..
Jess Lahey
Yeah.
Kate Rope
That was my approach, yeah.
Jess Lahey
I think the reason I ask that question is—I think every single writer has had that moment of, “Oh, I know someone said this really cool thing. Who was that? Where did I file it? Where am I going to find it again? It was in a study, it was on a piece of paper, I know I saw it, it had a red mark on the corner.” You know, all these problems we have with our organization—we’re never going to have, I don’t think I’m ever going to have, the perfect system—but I seem to get a little better at it with each mistake I make.
Kate Rope
Yeah, yeah. I sent—I sent, I sent the wrong quote to one of the focus group participants—to her mom. She was the, you know, the conduit—and she said back, she was like, “Goldie—pretty sure she did not say that in the— they did not say that in the focus group.” And I was like, “Really?” And I went through, and sure enough, it was somebody else. And then I reached out to them—“Oh, yeah, I said that.” Because I’d already checked quotes with them. So that’s another reason for checking quotes.
Jess Lahey
Yeah. I also love the idea of making sure that your subject knows that they will have the right to say, “No, I’d rather—even though I know I said that.” You know, it’s—with a kid, you can’t just say, “Okay, this is an on-the-record, off-the-record sort of situation.” So before, for example, in The Addiction Inoculation, and specifically with kids like Georgia and Brian—the two kids I really featured heavily in the book—they had approval over every single thing that was going to be in the final book. And I think at one or two points, just because I felt really protective of them, I was like, “Are you sure this is how you want to say it? You realize, like, people will read this book.” I think there’s this detachment between, like, the things that come out of your mouth and the fact that it will be out there in public, and I sort of saw it partially as my job to fully make sure they understood the implications and the possible outcomes. And I know you don’t have to go that far, but for me, I felt very protective of the kids and wanted to make sure that ethically, everything was on nice, solid footing.
Kate Rope
Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, the journalism you and I do is not—we are not reporting on politicians who are trying to spin stuff afterward, you know? We’re—we’re telling stories of real people to help real people. So, you know, on the record, off the record, it’s not so—you know, it’s—it’s you have control. And also, obviously, you and I both, like, parent and write from a consent point of view. And so if I’m saying in my book, you know, that a person in a physical interaction can—has—the ability and right to call it off at any time, right?
Jess Lahey
Yep.
Kate Rope
Then the same goes for their participation in my book.
Jess Lahey
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So first of all, one of the things I really loved about this book was the multitude of stories—the multiple angles on the girl experience—and the fact that there wasn’t this one experience that is this monolithic girl experience. I think, especially coming at it from a perspective of someone who is the mom of a kid who maybe doesn’t fit neatly into the box of a, you know, a stereotypical—whatever that is—girl. There’s a lot of ways you can come at this story, and in order to not alienate kids who are not having the experience of, like, whatever it is you want to refer to as a stereotypical girl experience, you have to encompass all of those stories. And I have a lot of respect for the way that you managed to really bring those stories in. So thank you so, so much. As a reader, I really, really appreciated that as well. It just made the book more interesting too, because I have a lot of moments where I’m like, “Oh, that hadn’t occurred to me,” and “That’s not my experience, but cool, now I know what someone else’s experience is.” So the book did double duty for me.
Kate Rope
Well, thank you. That’s awesome. And yeah—and I think, ultimately, as I think about it, like, it’s really about listening, right? Most of what I’m talking about in the book is about listening and letting the person in front of you tell you who they are. You know, that they come into this world with the raw material they need to survive, and this world throws a lot at them. And so how do you just keep them true to that experience—help them develop that sense of themselves? And that goes for, you know, any kind of experience. That goes for learning, you know, that you’re an introvert, and it’s okay if you don’t want to speak up in class. And I have a quote in the book from you, who said—and I loved it—like everyone says, “Here, let’s teach you how to speak up in class,” and you’re like, “That’s, like, one of the most high-pressure places to speak up.” Like, umm...
Jess Lahey
And listen—that was a place that, well, that was a place that I had to come to. It was—that was a painful evolution for me as a teacher, especially because I am an extrovert, and I’m used to teaching to extroverts. And so for me to learn from Susan Cain the way I did, and learn from her book Quiet, and learn from her pushing back on something I wrote once and saying, “Mm-mmm, that’s not how everyone learns. That’s not how everyone shows that they’re understanding what you’re teaching them.” So that was a painful evolution for me, and I do not take credit for just knowing that stuff—definitely...
Kate Rope
Right? Well…
Jess Lahey
That was a hard one for me.
Kate Rope
The world runs on extroverts, right? So, if you—so, if you have an introverted girl, you know it’s a balancing act of completely respecting who she is—celebrating who she is—and then also finding out where you can equip her to operate in the world in a way that helps her, given the world’s expectations. Or understanding the world. You know, in the neurodivergence section, we talked a lot about—and for all these sections—you know, if I was doing a section on, you know, girls of color, or girls with physical disabilities, it was all experts who work in those communities, caregivers whose kids are in those communities, or girls themselves from those communities, because I can’t speak to those experiences. But the people I talked to in the neurodivergence section would talk about how a lot of times parents try to protect them—like, by not telling them about their neurodivergence, or by sort of framing it as a superpower, or not talking about the difficult things. And I think it was Amanda Morin—who’s this awesome neurodivergence and inclusive-schools expert—who said, you know, “We need to teach them about the world’s expectations, not so that they can conform to them, but so that they can understand when they don’t, and advocate for themselves.” So, you know, that’s what this whole thing is about—knowing who you are, understanding a little bit about the world, so that you can be who you are—whether that is, you know, the sex you were assigned at birth, or whether that is living in, you know, a larger body, or all the things. Like, any area where the world is going to try to tack on one more reason a girl isn’t good enough—how do you equip her with, like, real faith and love for who she is? So that was important.
Jess Lahey
Speaking—well, speaking of neurodivergence, did you have to change anything about the way you ran your focus group or the way you did your interviews, based on the fact that you were then interviewing people with neurodivergence?
Kate Rope
No, because they did that for me. They were amazing. I mean, I had one participant who was, I mean, just so eager to share everything. And early on said, “I interrupt. I interrupt all the time.” And then another participant said, “So do I. It’s really hard for me not to. I need to say the thing when I think the thing.” These girls were clearly in families where they had been supported with the right—
Jess Lahey
And empowered...
Kate Rope
Supported and empowered with, like, you know, the necessary school supports or whatever—but also just the understanding of themselves. And so they knew the language, and at one point, the girl who had started off the bat saying, “I interrupt,” and she wanted to show everything in her room, you know, and I just let her go. Like, I wasn’t about—I wanted to see her as who she was. I wasn’t trying to get anywhere specific with the focus group. I really let that go. But at a certain point, she said, “You know what, I can’t stop interrupting, so I’m just going to mute myself, and you’ll see me talking, because I’ll still be interrupting—but I won’t be interrupting.” And I mean, I was, like, blown away. I mean...
Jess Lahey
Wow!
Kate Rope
Just the—in all the groups—the self-awareness...
Jess Lahey
Yeah.
Kate Rope
The skills they had developed, you know—and sometimes I would talk to girls who—kids who, you know, had been hurt by their experiences growing up. And I could feel that, but they had processed it. You know, maybe if, from their family of origin, they weren’t getting everything they needed, but I got to them through a mentoring organization where they were starting to get that. And so they were able to articulate what those challenges were and what they wish they had had. So it’s not that they—it was all, you know, rainbows and—and, you know, puppies, but...
Jess Lahey
Well, it sounds like going to…
Kate Rope
But they all had incredible insight.
Jess Lahey
It sounds like going to the kids also through organizations that had given them that opportunity to learn about their empowerment and to give them the language also helped you, because then again, as I said, you didn’t have to—you didn’t have to work quite so hard to help elicit some of the conversations that you needed.
Kate Rope
Right.
Jess Lahey
It sounds like that was a really smart way to go.
Kate Rope
Yeah, these—these kids were in those organizations, in those conversations already. You know?
Jess Lahey
I’ve learned some of the hardest lessons about interviewing when I’m trying to transcribe my own notes. And Tim laughs every single time I do this, because then I hear myself talking too much, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, just shut up. Shut up. Let them talk. What the heck are you doing?” And that—I think that was one of the greatest lessons I had to learn through all of my journalism and through all of my writing these books—is sometimes you just got to shut up. And that’s why I think having these other kids available in the focus groups—brilliant—because they’ll egg each other along, they’ll get conversations going, and you can just shut up and step back a little bit. I love that.
Kate Rope
Yeah, and they’ll—they’ll, you know, in that particular focus group, the one girl who was interrupting a lot, another one was starting to have difficulty with it, and she was so respectful in how she said it. She said, “I feel differently than you do, and it’s hard for me to think when you’re talking so much.” And maybe it was after that that she said, “Okay, I’ll mute myself.” But they were expressing these things to each other in the most kind and direct and empowered ways. But I’m a huge talker, as you can already tell on this podcast, and I do talk too much. And so, I mean, literally every focus group opens with me, like, blathering on about what I’m doing, and then me eventually saying, “You know, I’m going to shut up and you guys talk.”
Jess Lahey
It was also big—it’s a big thing that happened in my teaching, as well, when I let them sort of lead class a little bit more, and I got to step back and just sort of watch them do their thing. I learned way more about them. They learned way more from each other. And it was—it worked all the way around. So, is there anything else you wanted to share with us about the interviewing process for this book? I mean, you have so much experience in interview space, and I love that you’re just talking and talking, because I’m actually learning a ton from you.
Kate Rope
Oh, thanks. That means a lot, because I’ve learned so much from you. I have your book right here. I’ve got my, like—my “best of.” So…it was difficult to—I got men. I did, I did get some dads, but it was difficult. And if I were doing this book again, or if I do a similar book, I’ll really—you know—it’s harder. There aren’t organizations. There aren’t super-active Facebook groups of dads, you know, but it’s growing. There’s a lot more attention paid. And so I will definitely start out earlier thinking about what are the harder people to reach, and I’m going to prioritize reaching out to them. So it’s not like, “Oh God, I got to turn this book in, and okay, I heard from five fathers, and that’s just going to have to be good enough,” you know?
Jess Lahey
That’s a really good point. I’ve actually done a lot of thinking about ways to access more fathers as well. And I was thinking, okay, maybe you could come at it from the influencer angle, or the—you know, that kind of thing. It is tougher, especially in the education space. And there are lots of conversations in education about how do we make it clearer to fathers that they are really and truly invited into education in a way that traditionally it’s just been the moms. And it has been—it’s been tougher, but I think it’s really valuable and really worth doing. So I’m so glad you brought that up.
Kate Rope
Yeah, and as we’re talking about it, I’m thinking focus groups could be really good for that. I mean, it’s hard—it’s hard to get adults available at the same time. It was hard to get kids available at the same time. But it’s—you know, I don’t want to throw men under the bus, but like—like kids, they might do better sparking each other’s ideas...
Jess Lahey
Yeah, absolutely.
Kate Rope
…than having to just make it up from whole cloth when you’re asking them. And, you know, I think people—they get nervous. They think this is like a permanent record, or, you know, it’s like those—you know, those old-timey photographs of people who are like, “This is the record of this moment of our lives.” And so, you know, I did the same thing with caregivers that I— I mean, mostly I did Google Forms with caregivers, but I did interview some on the phone or in person, and I said the same thing to them: “You’re in charge of what goes in this book.” You know?
Jess Lahey
Love it. I absolutely love it, and you’ve written a really powerful book. You’ve written a really wonderful and eloquent book. I’m really excited to be able to take it around and hold it up and say, if you want to read a book about, you know, girls and parenting girls and taking care of girls and raising girls, here’s a new book that I really, really recommend. So thank you so much for writing the book. It was a pleasure to read—it really was.
Kate Rope
Thank you. That means—you have no idea. I mean, just even coming on this podcast is, like I said, leveling up. It’s like, you know, I remember reading and meeting you guys for the first time at Mom 2.0 when my book was coming out, and I had no idea what I was doing. I still think I wouldn’t know what I was doing if I went to a thing like that again. But, like, I’m just not a networker. Worship is a strong word, but definitely looking up to you guys, you know? And listening to the podcast, you know, every episode—and then I’m like, “I’m going to be on it.”
Jess Lahey
Well, if people want to learn more about you, where could they go to do that?
Kate Rope
Yes, my website is katerope.com. I’m on Instagram.
Jess Lahey
A lovely website. I was there just earlier today. It’s a lovely website.
Kate Rope
I am very happy with Booyah Creative—Kayleen Mendenhall, who designed it—@kateropewriter on Instagram. And I have a Substack, Strong as a Human. You’ll find me any of those places.
Jess Lahey
Oh, I love that.
Kate Rope
And Strong as a...
Jess Lahey
We will put you—all of your stuff—yep, we’re going to put the cover in the show notes; we’ll put all the links in the show notes. And I’m just really grateful to you. Thank you so much for taking time to come on the show, and for everyone else, you know how it goes... Until next week, keep your butt in the chair and your head in the game.
Narrator
The Hashtag AmWriting Podcast is produced by Andrew Perrella. Our intro music, aptly titled Unemployed Monday, was written and played by Max Cohen. Andrew and Max were paid for their time and their creative output, because everyone deserves to be paid for their work.
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