I write historical fiction, but so many of my followers read or write NON-FICTION. So, I connected with space historian Amy Shira Teitel, author of the recently-released Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight, about historical research, the craft of writing non-fiction, and, of course, women in space!
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Stephanie Storey: I hear this question from a lot of my students: “how can I decide whether to write my historical story as non-fiction or historical fiction?” Why do you choose to tell your stories as non-fiction? What do you think the non-fiction form does well to serve your particular stories or writing process?
Amy Shira Teitel: I’ve always been extremely passionate about history, especially when it comes to trailblazers — people or ideas. The first time someone does something, the first time a technology is used in practice. Those stories have always captivated me more than any fictional account can. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good historical fiction narrative, but for me, someone daring and incredible who was also real turns them from a great character into an inspiring role model.
The other thing I really like about writing history is it doubles as educational content. I always learn something new when I write an article or a book, and I like the idea that someone reading my book could come out of it feeling like they learned something neat in addition to a good story. I always say that if a reader gets excited about one thing in a piece and does their own deep dive, if I spark someone’s curiosity like that it’s a win.
SS: As a historical fiction writer, I have a lot of artistic liberty to slide a historical event forwards or backwards by a day or month to serve the story or to cut out a whole person who gets in the way of the forward movement of the narrative. As a non-fiction writer, you don’t have that kind of liberty. Do you like that kind of imposed structure? Why or why not?
AST: I love the structure imposed by telling history because it forces you to really dig and find things that aren’t well known, which I suppose is a roundabout way of admitting I really love researching!
There’s something so amazingly satisfying about finding ways to connect your figures when you’re working within the confines of history. For example: in Fighting for Space, the moment we meet the Mercury astronauts at a press conference on April 9, 1959, is a significant moment in the narrative.
Mercury astronauts after their April 9 introductory press conference. Credit: NASA. From left: Gus Grissom, Al Shepard (standing), Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra (standing), Deke Slayton, John Glenn (standing), Gordo Cooper.
It’s the moment when the public starts turning away from aviation in favour of spaceflight. Which means I needed a way to connect my two leading ladies somehow.
Jerrie Cobb in flight. Credit: National Air & Space Museum
The first fell into my lap. Jerrie Cobb writes in her memoirs about a 2,000km close course record she flew at the the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale's First World Congress of Flight on April 13. It’s a beautiful contrast: John Glenn is an instant hero at a press conference days before Jerrie gets no accolades for securing a record. Digging deeper, it turns out Jackie was president of the FAI that year, and the FWCF was entirely her doing. Finding that let me add the third comparison point of Jackie facilitating Jerrie’s big day while also (according to her paperwork) not caring at all about a propellor-plane record.
I wouldn’t have known about Jackie’s involvement in that event had I not needed to find a way to keep her in the narrative at that point. Not only did I find an amazing crossover, I learned a lot more about that event and Jackie, and to me it makes the whole sequence a lot more powerful.
SS: When you write non-fiction, it’s still your responsibility to “bring the characters to life” for your readers. I understand how to do that as a fiction writer, but how do you accomplish such a feat in non-fiction, when you can’t make-up dialogue or get into the heads and hearts of the characters as easily?
AST: I think this really depends on who you’re writing about and how much documentation exists about them. With Fighting for Space, I was extremely lucky with how much primary source material I had access to — letters, memos, interview transcripts, and memoirs. NASA’s history is so well documented, especially from the Apollo-era, that on the space side of things I had a lot of work with.
Jackie Cochran, early 1940s. Credit: Eisenhower Presidential Library
Even luckier: Jackie was an epic pack-rat. She kept everything, and it’s all in the Eisenhower Presidential Library so I have hundreds of letters and memos from her. All of those sources let me let my figures speak for themselves.
It’s also possible to read into documents. For example: I found a typed letter from Randy Lovelace to Jackie Cochran, which was full of great insight but felt very stark. The handwritten post-script, however, adds emotion, especially because it’s a grammatical nightmare. Coming from a doctor, it tells me Randy felt extremely strongly about conveying his need for Jackie to know he valued their friendship. I learned as much from those two hand-written lines as I did from the whole letter.
I was also lucky to find tons of pictures to help paint scenes. Like when Jackie is doing her speed runs in the desert in 1953, I have pictures of Randy Lovelace, her husband Floyd, and a shirtless Chuck Yeager standing at sighting cameras. There’s no official written record of them being there, but those pictures tell me they were, what they were doing, and even what the weather was like at a certain time of day.
SS: You obviously have a passion for space flight. When did it start?
This image of Venus is a composite of data from NASA's Magellan spacecraft and Pioneer Venus Orbiter. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
AST: When I was seven doing a second grade project on Venus, I was obsessed. This planet, this whole other world, was about the same size as Earth but rousingly hot, uninhabitable, and rotates backwards… but I could see it in the night sky without binoculars! I was amazed and got so exited learning about all the other planets that were out there, and the mysteries they all contained.
That year I got a book at the book fair (remember those!?) called something like “1001 Facts About Space.” Every two pages was a spread on a planet or facet of space exploration. The page about the Moon had a drawing of two astronauts in front of the lunar module. That was the first time I heard about people going to the Moon and I was shocked. How had people gone to the Moon!? And why didn’t I know about it! I’m from Canada so it’s hardly surprising we didn’t learn about American achievements in grade school.
That book launched my obsession with the Apollo program and mid-century Americana and technology. It’s really the underpinning of my whole career!
SS: You have a serious background in spaceflight, so you’re not starting from scratch when you “begin” your research on a particular story. I think we all know how this kind of deep knowledge would help a historical writer, but does it ever hinder you? Ex: do you struggle to overcome biases in your own well-founded perspective?
I definitely came to this story with a bias, but in this case it wasn’t one I felt I needed to overcome. The story of the “Mercury 13” is so well known and so often wrong that my agenda as it were was to set the record straight.
That goal helped me erase biases as I went in a way though. Reading about Jerrie Cobb, it’s hard not to love her fight against the patriarchy. By her account, she’s the star in a feminist epic. But my bias leaning towards a fair and balanced telling that gave equal weight to NASA’s position let me fall out of love with Jerrie a little bit. The more I dug, the more it became clear that she was less a romantic hero and more pain in NASA’s tush. My bias for telling a true story definitely took over!
SS: When you decided to write a book about this particular story in Fighting for Space: Two Pilots and Their Historic Battle for Female Spaceflight, was it a story with which you were already familiar or was it a story about which you had a lot of questions that you wanted answered?
AST: I was familiar with a version of the story. The typical “Mercury 13” narrative goes something like this: thirteen female pilots take on NASA in a congressional subcommittee hearing in the fight have women in space. The hero is a pilot name Jerrie Cobb, often described as the first woman to take the astronaut tests or to do astronaut training. The villain, aside from the patriarchy personified by NASA, is Jackie Cochran, herself a decorated pilot who speaks out against women in space. It’s typically told as a feminist epic, positioning Jerrie as a feminist martyr ahead of her time.
But the story didn’t feel right to me because of what I know about NASA’s history. Jerrie testified at the subcommittee hearing in July of 1962, which is the same month NASA finally figured out how it was going to the Moon (landing with the Lunar Module while leaving the Command-Service Module) in orbit. I knew NASA had a lot going on leading up to the hearing with early Apollo decisions, so I could understand why, coupled with the era, the agency maybe was less interested in also taking on female astronauts at the time. So why did retellings of the story seem to ignore that context? Jackie was another sticking point. She’s typically portrayed like Maleficent to Jerrie’s Aurora: she swoops down from her castle to thwart her should-be sisters then flies home to hang out with her pet raven. There had to be more to Jackie than that.
So when I started writing Fighting for Space, I knew there were things in that typical story I wanted to dig into and answer correctly. Basically that gave me my jumping off point for my research and helped guide my writing process. I knew what contextual points I wanted to hit and made sure those were in there.
SS: Are there specific challenges that come with writing about historical women? Is it harder to find details about them because they were women (and perhaps not covered as often as men in the press or by other historians?)
AST: This depends on the women. Dealing with less notable figures, male or female, means there’s going to be less documentation to use as research. Lucky for me, I was dealing with two fairly well-known women with Fighting for Space so I had a lot of resources to help bring them to life.
I think the bigger challenge writing about women, and this might be because I’m dealing with women in male-dominant fields, is getting past a reader’s bias. People will come to a story about women with expectations, especially a story about Jerrie Cobb because the story of the “Mercury 13” is so widely-known. They’re fans of Jerrie and think women should have flown in the 1960s. Ot they expect a book about women to be venting about injustice. The biggest challenge writing about historical women, really, is convincing people that it’s really just a story about American history that *happens* to talk about women.
SS: How do you physically organize your research when preparing to write a book?
AST: I’m one of those people who needs hard copies of everything and who hand-writes notes, so my organization is messy and intense.
When I visit archives, I take pictures of everything — providing it’s allowed, of course — and then have all the images printed. From there I organize everything into categories that make sense for me (like “Jackie records”), then group things by sub-categories (like “1953 jet”) and put those documents in chronological order in folders. As I organize everything, I add post-its as tabs on documents I know I’ll want to go back to (“Jackie and Floyd jet correspondence”). From there, all the files go in boxes with the little annotated tabs sticking up.
With the system in place, it’s easy to pull the file I need as I write, so I’ll have the 1953 jet folder open on my desk as I write that section. I can go through the folder and add all the details from letters or memos as I let the section take shape. And because I know exactly where everything is in my system, it’s easy to go back later and fact-check or add more text from a letter as needed!
SS: What’s your fact-checking process like? Fact-checking is intense in historical fiction, but nothing like in non-fiction, I’m quite sure…
AST: For the most part, fact-checking history is great. Dealing with verified flight records, military history, and spaceflight means there are records of everything and so many accounts that it’s easy to check multiple sources and trust where they overlap. In the case of one-off mentions like a detail from a memoir, I tried to write it in a way that makes it clear this reaction or this feeling about something is attributed to the person in question, that I’m not assigning them any feeling or response.
With the personal side of things of my leading ladies, though, things got a little messy. Both Jackie and Jerrie wrote memoirs that became my primary source for their narratives. Memoirs are great, but flawed for a few reasons. First, memoirs are usually pretty self-serving, designed to raise the author’s profile before, say, running for office (Jackie’s first memoirs coincided with her bid for a seat in Congress). Memoirs are also someone’s remembrance of an event. But that doesn’t mean someone won’t misremember an event to make a better story or to make themselves sound better.
In her first memoir, The Stars at Noon, Jackie describes seeing pilot Cecil Allen crash taking off for the 1935 Bendix air race. She recounts the fiery wreckage, seeing his headless body, and her subsequent badass move of eating a bowl of meat chili to prove she wasn’t rattled. It’s a great story and she talks about how formative it was for her development as an aviatrix… except that it didn't happen. Cecil Allen did die that night, but he took off after Jackie and crashed in a potato field after takeoff. That story was easy to check since every newspaper account of the race mentioned Cecil’s death. A bigger challenge was Jackie’s early life. She writes that she was raised an orphan, but she wasn’t. Fact checking her true background was a task and a half, but I was able to piece together a reasonable account of her childhood from other biographies, memoirs of her relatives, and lots of newspaper and county archive digging.
The bigger challenge, then, becomes how to write it. A pet peeve of mine is when writers take readers out of the story with verbiage like “at least, that was the version Jackie would write in her memoirs. In reality…” So I focussed on why Jackie would lie about it. What purpose did the story of seeing Cecil Allen’s headless body serve for her in life? For Jackie, that story was her way of proving how tough she was, how readily she faced the inherent danger of fast flying in the 1930s. It was important for the way she saw and presented herself, which means it was important for me. And it wasn’t a story that changed the overall narrative; it was a little anecdote that brought her to life.
My editor and I decided to keep this harmless “Jackie versions” in the book with a clear acknowledgement of it in the author’s note. I made the choice to honour how she saw herself in this instance for the sake of the reader understanding her as a woman.
The Starry Night, Vincent Van Gogh, 1889. MoMA
SS: Not to brag, but I went to Space Camp when I was a kid and was the Payload Specialist during our simulated shuttle flight, in charge of operating the equipment that loaded our space walkers in and out of the shuttle, but if I could really go now, I’d want to be one of the Space Walkers! I imagine it would be like walking inside of Van Gogh’s Starry Night… If you could go into space, what would YOU do or where would YOU go?
AST: This one’s a toss up. Since this is purely hypothetical, Venus would be a top choice, which, obviously, would kill me instantly. But it’s the planet that got me excited about space and it would be amazing to see the surface of that world with better cameras than the Soviet Venera landers took there in the 1970s and 1980s. I’m all for Venusian exploration! Or, predictably, the Moon. I would love to retrace Moonwalkers steps, without disturbing their footprints, of course! Just to see the Earth from their vantage point, to see where they walked. Since so much of my life has been reading about Apollo, the draw to see those spots for myself is very strong!
Photo Credit: Jeaneen Lund
Amy Shira Teitel is a spaceflight historian, author, and public speaker who, much like her subjects, is one of the only academically trained young women in her field. She earned a Bachelor's degree with combined honours in History of Science and Technology and Classics (U. King's College and Dalhousie University) as well as a Master's degree in Science and Technology Studies before transitioning into popular science writing. She has written for more than two dozen websites including the BBC and Time Magazine online, she earned a Group Achievement Award from NASA as part of the New Horizons Mission to Pluto team, and appears frequently as a expert interviewee on a number of TV shows and documentaries, including The Apollo Chronicles and NASA's The Unexplained Files. She also maintains her blog, Vintage Space, as its companion YouTube channel of the same name that has more than 327,000 subscribers.