To start, I was wondering whether you could just maybe explain a little bit about your background and how you came to write Enchanted Creatures.

My background is actually, it was initially in natural sciences.

I was, I specialized in zoology, so I was very much a, a science enthusiast to begin with.

And after my undergrad, I went on to look into history and philosophy of science.

So I did a master's and PhD in history and philosophy of science, and the projects that I found myself drawn towards in that were all about how we had crystallized strange and novel animals when we first encountered them in the early modern period.

I was ve- I was very drawn to the early modern period for, for some reason, so sort of Renaissance, Enlightenment.

And I looked into animals like the birds of paradise, the pangolin, the dodo, the walrus, and how naturalists had constructed them from pieces of travel logs, pieces of ancient scripture, pieces of body parts.

Mm.

I started by asking how she began this journey.

My background is actually, it was initially in natural sciences.

I was, I, um, specialized in zoology, so I was very much a, a science enthusiast to begin with.

And, um, after my undergrad, I went on to look into history and philosophy of science.

So I did a master's and PhD in history and philosophy of science, and the projects that I found myself drawn towards in that were all about how we had crystallized strange and novel animals when we first encountered them in the early modern period.

I was v- I was very drawn to the early modern period for, um, for some reason, so sort of Renaissance, Enlightenment.

And I looked into animals like the birds of paradise, the pangolin, the dodo, the walrus, and how naturalists had constructed them from pieces of travel logs, pieces of ancient scripture, pieces of body parts.

Mm.

You have a very interesting relationship, so can you kind of introduce yourself to us too?

So that kind of shift in perspective was, um, something I had to go through 'cause I, I'm a writer and a illustrator, and I...

My background is in zoology and history and philosophy of science.

So I, I overlap with Paco in some ways on that.

But I had to kind of, over the course of writing this book with Paco, I found my own views shifting and my, my eyes opening in terms of awareness of, of the capacities of plants and my own biases as well that had initially been there.

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You can think of it in, in terms of the effect that we, we have on plants, you can think of it as we're exploiting them as resources, or we're using them for their beauty, whatever.

You can also think about it as they have something that we want, and we have made their lives easier so they can invest more in it.