Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion Podcast · Profs. Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin

RINDWY: Writing Together

·23 min·1 clip

Instead of collaborating on chapter one, Goodwin and Morgenstein-First each wrote a different version of it in the same chapter.

1. Keeping It 101: A Killjoy's Introduction to Religion devotes this final short episode in a series on the book "Religion Is Not Done With You" to how its two authors learned to write together. 2. Hosts Megan Goodwin, a scholar of American religions, race, gender, and politics, and Elise Morgenstein-First, a historian of religion, Islam, race, and South Asia, co-wrote the book for Beacon. 3. Their core answer is "trial and error and a lot of hard conversations and painstaking line reads," and they call the process "really hard and also a delight." 4. Technically, they used Google Docs for simultaneous editing, then edited on video calls, line by line, reading passages aloud, and wrote the last section in a tiny Airbnb in Edinburgh. 5. Their structural breakthrough came after both wrote different versions of chapter one; Goodwin calls her style "Godzilla-esque," and they agreed to let whoever had the relevant expertise lead each chapter. 6. Morgenstein-First took the lead on imperialism and the airports chapter, while Goodwin led the race and sexuality-and-law chapters in the U.S., with the other adding to and smoothing each draft. 7. The baseball chapter sat untouched for nine months, and Morgenstein-First says it improved only once they cut the "10 pages of early Boston Red Sox" and the joke in every line, following the rule "you can't put a hat on a hat." 8. Morgenstein-First says the hardest part was moving from the podcast, where she scripts both hosts' lines in purple and red, to a single blended voice they jokingly call "the GMF voice." 9. Morgenstein-First says her training in Royal Asiatic Society-style academic prose, shaped by scholars who "speak 15 languages," made it hard to imagine readers who would pick the book up at a public library or Barnes and Noble. 10. Listeners curious about co-authorship, academic writing voice, or how this book was made will get the most from it.

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