In Process with: Jaime Green

"I mostly feel excited and curious about what's ahead - it's the start of a big project that feels, fingers crossed, viable, all possibility and potential"

Today’s In Process With…spotlights our first nonfiction-only writer, the writer Jaime Green, author of The Possibility of Life, a book that asks the biggest of questions in our big universe: Are we alone? The Possibility of Life was an NPR Science Friday Book Club Pick, a Wired Book to Read for Spring, and a TODAY Show Summer Pick. Jaime is the series editor for The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and a lecturer at Smith College and at the Johns Hopkins Science Writing Master's Program. Yes, she did write that New York Times article you probably read about space junk, but lest you think Jaime is all science all the time, she was the the romance book review column for The New York Times for two years, and the host of a podcast spotlighting new writing called The Catapult.

Jaime is someone I think of as a books person, deeply invested in reading and writing. We met on the internet, pre publishing our own books, as two people who wanted to know what others were reading and writing, and how. She is a pleasure to follow on social media for many reasons, but for me it’s so much that she is a fellow devotee of process and transparency. Her posts and stories are often sharing her own, whether that’s her work space for the hour or questions that are on her mind or the realities of being a writer, and how that overlaps with the realities of being a parent (see too this essay) and teacher. As a former podcast host, Jaime shines behind a microphone, and I’ve loved her appearances on Slate’s Working podcast, like this one on what pub day is really like and this one on finding anchor jobs that I have sent to approximately a hundred of my friends who are trying to form a stable creative life.

Follow Jaime right here on Substack—her newsletter is TBD (maybe never), or on Instagram or the other social app here or learn how to become a smarter writer by signing up for one of her classes (I’ve had my eye on the Scrivener one for some time myself).

-Danielle

What have you been working on this week?