Where's the conflict?

Devon Fredericksen on trusting the story—and Modern Love!

I’ve never been to Norway, but when I read the following passage by Devon Fredericksen, I could feel the cold archipelago air on my skin.

“Across the heather moors, vegetation crouches low to the ground. Map lichen, typically found in the mountains, paints sea-level moraines with dabs of lime green. Isolated and exposed to the northern elements, Vega seems a harsh, inhospitable seascape—except that here, nestled amid bushels of kelp, lies a treasure long coveted by Norwegian coastal communities: unfathomably soft eiderdown.”

Devon is an environmental journalist and author of How to Camp in the Woods who writes beautifully about humans’ relationships with the natural world. In this piece for bioGraphic, The Eider Keepers, her own experience across Vega is treaded lightly as she focuses on this unique community of people who have developed, over generations, a hard-won and mutualistic relationship with eider ducks. In return for protecting the wild birds from predators, the eider keepers collect the fluffy (and valuable) down feathers they leave behind. Devon brings these character’s deep commitment to their work to life. And while doing so, she makes her own work—that of finding sources in an unfamiliar place and reporting from the harsh, frigid islands—seem easy.

This is the kind of story that whisks you away, not for a tropical vacation but something maybe more soothing: A nuanced exploration of place and people that nudges at the hope we could all use more of these days. I just loved it. And I wanted to know more about how it all came together: the pitch, the travel, the remote reporting.

Devon shares a line in her answers to my questions about loving the work. I keep thinking about it this week as I’ve been slogging through a too-long to-do list, unanswered emails, and percolating pitch ideas. Devon and the eider keepers remind us why we willingly subject ourselves to arduous passions, even as they keep getting harder. So, thank you for that Devon. Now let’s get to it so you can enjoy this conversation, too!

Devon Fredericksen, reporting from the Vega Archipelago

B: Do you remember how you first learned about eiders and their caretakers? What made you want to write about them?

D: While planning a solo road trip up the coast of Norway in 2022, I was thumbing through a Lonely Planet guidebook and noticed a sidebar about the “bird keepers” of Vega. How cool, I thought—that the women who live in this remote archipelago have been passing down this tradition matrilineally for hundreds of years, caretaking wild ducks in mutualist exchange. I wanted to find out more, so I planned my road trip route accordingly.

How did you begin to pursue this story? Did you lose yourself in research or pitch it early on? How did you know you had a story and not just a topic and were ready to pitch it to editors?

I rented an Airbnb in Brønnøysund, Norway, the town where I would need to catch a ferry if I wanted to venture to Vega to do pre-reporting. The problem was I had no idea where to start. I had zero contacts. The sources I’d reached out to hadn’t emailed me back. I also don’t speak Norwegian. Then, serendipity stepped in my path.

My Airbnb host asked (in English) if I’d like to have dinner with him and his 12-year-old son. I accepted, and over a family-style dinner, learned that my Airbnb host was the ex-husband of one of the bird keepers of Vega. He put me in contact with her, and I ventured to Vega the next day to do some pre-rereporting.

When I got home, I interviewed my main source again over Zoom (from 1 am-2 am PST, due to the time difference and my source’s availability), then I began pitching. The response I encountered was: Where’s the conflict? Editors were skeptical that a story about a harmonious relationship between humans and wild ducks had enough of a hook. But I was confident that the harmony was the hook. The story offered a counternarrative to the worn-out tale that humans are separate from nature. Because I was having trouble placing the story, I asked my friend Krista Langlois if she would look at my pitch and offer feedback. Krista is an editor at bioGraphic and she saw my vision for the piece, said the pitch seemed ready, and asked if she could run it by the editorial team. Before long, bioGraphic had assigned the story and asked me for a travel budget. (I was so excited I jumped up and down, then cried happy tears).

Traveling for research can be a tricky thing these days, especially with fewer big assignments and stagnant rates. How did travel to the Vega Archipelago work for this assignment?

Fortunately, bioGraphic has travel money. Unfortunately, Norway is expensive. I put together the slimmest budget I could envision (with me living on instant soup packets and oatmeal), but bioGraphic couldn’t cover the whole trip. The fuel alone, just to reach the outer islands of the archipelago, was $800 USD, not to mention the European flight tickets, rental car, ferry tickets, lodging, and gas money. I applied for a reporting grant, but didn’t get it, so ended up paying about $1,500 out of pocket.

This piece is so rich in detail and texture. How do you make sure, when you're traveling for a piece, that you gather enough information to capture people and places on the page when you're back at your desk?

I take lots of photos. I’m a visual person. I’ll take photos of every plant I see, every room I’m in, every person I’m interviewing. During the reporting trip, I was note-taking as much as I could throughout each day, but it was so cold (even wearing gloves) that my fingers would go numb, and I could barely scrawl anything. At the end of each day, after warming back up, I jotted notes of every detail I could remember, tapping into all five senses.

Was the story you wrote the story you planned to write? What surprised you?

When I first heard about the bird keepers of Vega, I was struck by the feminist angle. Here again, I thought, was an example of women acting as caretakers of the earth. That angle seemed both empowering and a little depressing. Why does caretaking always fall to women? It wasn’t until I met Albert Stensholm and watched him coo lovingly into the houses of nesting mother ducks that I reframed my preconceptions. I learned that these days, half of the bird keepers are men. Watching Albert do such gentle work, I realized that maybe the story was even more feminist than I’d thought.

What about the process of reporting/writing/publishing this piece have you carried into other work? Any big lessons learned?

Believe in the story. I had serious doubts I would be able to land this assignment. I had taken an 8-year hiatus from journalism and my clips were old. There was no possible way, I thought, that an outlet would assign an international story to a rusty reporter. Still, I believed in the story and knew I wouldn’t give up on trying to bring it into the world. To my shock and delight, the piece was my first assignment after returning to journalism.

The biggest lesson, though, was what happened once I was in Norway. As I mentioned, I was very, very cold, my stiff fingers barely able to take notes or snap photos. The reporting was also so constant that I often didn’t have time to eat proper meals—stuffing half-frozen RX bars into my mouth. Because I was there near the summer solstice, the sun barely set, which meant I didn’t get much sleep. In other words, I was in a near-constant state of cold, hunger, and exhaustion. Still, I loved it. I enjoyed myself so much. I kept looking around at the surrounding beauty and telling myself: no matter what, hold onto this feeling. It was a good lesson that the story is the most important thing. The bylines don’t matter. Awards and accolades don’t matter. Money matters a little bit, insofar as we all need it to get by. But the thing that matters most is telling a story as well as you’re able and enjoying the process as much as you possibly can. It’s the only thing we, as storytellers, can control.

Tell us more about this hiatus. What made your leave journalism and what inspired you to return to this work?

I left journalism in 2012 when my partner and I moved to Portland, Oregon from a small town in California where I'd been a newspaper reporter. I had hoped to do freelance journalism, but I quickly realized that I needed to find a "real" job because our living expenses increased dramatically living in a city. I worked at Girl Friday Productions, a women-owned book editorial company, for eight years as a book development editor. As much as I loved making books with wonderful coworkers (and having vacation time and health insurance), a restlessness continued to tug at me.

I desperately wanted to give journalism another shot, but because my partner and I had a mortgage and I was earning more between us, it wasn't financially feasible. Then the pandemic hit, and my partner lost his job within the first few weeks. He's a sound engineer and he quickly turned around and converted our backyard sauna into a sound design studio. He began making enough money that we could squeak by on his income while I made the transition back to journalism. So I joined the "Great Resignation" in 2021 and left my job. I feel like I'm still transitioning into journalism, as most of my freelance earnings come from book editorial work, yet I'm so happy to have more flexibility in my schedule to devote to researching and reporting. My financial anxiety is higher now, but when I'm working on a story I'm excited about, I'm reminded just how much I love telling stories and how important this is for my overall wellbeing.

In the process of writing for bioGraphic, is there anything you learned that might be helpful to others who have a story to pitch them?

I’m so glad media outlets like bioGraphic exist. The good people at bioGraphic believe in science and solid reporting. The fact checking is rigorous because they want to get the science right. Krista Langlois and Sarah Gilman edited my piece, and I am so grateful for the deep thinking and care they brought to the project. Sadly, Hakai magazine shuttered last year. The good news is it merged with bioGraphic, which means the publication is now even more flush with amazing editors who want to publish solid journalism told beautifully.

When pitching bioGraphic, bring a sense of wonderment to the story. What makes [x species] totally cool? What wild actions are humans taking to help conserve / study / live in tandem with [x species]? What amazes you?

OK, I must also ask about your gorgeous Modern Love essay. Did you write this article specifically for Modern Love, or was that a submission choice after the fact?

I wrote the essay because I needed to write that essay. After thumbing through a journal I’d kept during my honeymoon, I realized the grief from that period was still unprocessed and so I began writing about why my husband and I had decided to get married despite all the factors that were stacked against us. I guess I needed to explain it to myself. As it happens, the completed essay fell within the prescribed word count for Modern Love submissions. I thought it couldn’t hurt to submit! Admittedly, though, I had submitted an essay to Modern Love a couple of years prior, which was rejected, so I had zero hope this one would be accepted. The lesson is: keep submitting.

How has it felt to have such a vulnerable, personal piece out in the world? You've obviously put yourself out there in writing personal essays before—does it get easier?

Putting this essay into the world felt harder. In the past, I’ve gotten the sense that most of the people who read my personal essays are people who already know me or my work, so I don’t expect to receive vicious messages about my sinful, depraved lifestyle—meaning my queerness and my non-monogamous marriage. But by publishing my personal life in the New York Times, I was inviting thousands (millions?) of strangers to read about my sinful, depraved lifestyle. And people on the internet can be cruel and scary. I have friends who have received death threats for pieces they’ve written, and I was bracing myself for the same treatment. I made my Instagram private and scrubbed the internet for identifying information before the piece published.

Have you heard from many readers? What's that been like?

To my enormous relief, the response has been one hundred percent positive so far. No death threats, no mean emails. I wasn’t expecting anyone to relate to my story, but I’ve received many thoughtful messages from readers who saw themselves in my words, and I’ve been very moved by the shared vulnerability.

As someone who writes both deeply reported stories that presumably come from pitches or assignments and also more lyrical, personal essays that you probably write without an assignment, how do you find the balance between those two types of work? (Asking this from my own anxiety over where the next assignment will come from, so I sometimes struggle to make time for the more creative pieces and feel a lot of pressure to focus on pitching!)

I cram all my “work-work” into Monday–Thursday, and I leave my Fridays open for writing. This requires some serious boundary setting that I’ve honed over several years of sticking to this schedule, but it totally works for me. Most of my paid work comes from book editorial projects, ghostwriting assignments, and book coaching, so I schedule all my meetings and deadlines for Mon–Thurs. Then, because I end my week with my favorite day—my writing day!—I have to hold myself accountable and get all my other work done before then. I so look forward to my Fridays, when I get to luxuriate in an entire day devoted to thinking deeply about whatever project I’m working on, whether it’s a personal essay or a reported piece. I also start every workday with 30 minutes of writing—a poem, an essay, a Substack post, an article—whatever feels exciting. I want my morning writing to feel like play and not like work, so I hop around between various projects through the week this way. I read something somewhere that writing in the mornings allows you to tap into your creative mind before your ego has had a chance to wake up. I love this idea, and I find it to be true for me.

What are you most excited about in your writing life right now? I think a lot of us feel really overwhelmed by the state of the world and the state of journalism —even more so than usual—so I'd love to know what's making you feel good in your creative work!

For the past ten months, I’ve been working on a book proposal about the eider ducks of Vega. An agent reached out to me after my bioGraphic article published, and we’ve been collaborating since. She’s a mom with two small children and she said my article buoyed her spirits about the state of the world. I love that a piece of writing can have this effect, and my hope is that a publisher might be interested in a book-length version that reimagines our role, as humans, within our greater communities. By “communities” I mean ecosystems—all the beings that live in an interconnected web with us. What could the world look like if we thought of ourselves as part of the natural world rather than separate from it? What might be possible?

As a more casual project, I started a Substack where I explore pleasure in its various forms—from sex to food to friendship—and I’ve gotten so much pleasure from the process! Regularly writing about pleasure means that I’m often looking at the world through pleasure-colored glasses, seeing more clearly the importance of play, the usefulness of wonder, and the comfort of community.

To learn more about Devon and her work, find her on Bluesky and Instagram.

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Stay inspired,

Britany