In 2019, author Zara Chowdhary sat down with Kristen Iversen, author of Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, to discuss her research and writing process. More recently, Ms. Iversen has edited the anthology, Doom with a View: Historical and Cultural Contexts of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, and her memoir has been adapted into a soon-to-be-released documentary film.
Kristen Iversen’s work includes the books Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats (now a forthcoming documentary), Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, and Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, The American Scholar, and other publications. Originally from Colorado, Iversen has taught at universities around the country and is professor of creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, where she is also Literary Nonfiction editor of The Cincinnati Review. She holds a PhD from the University of Denver, and is currently a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bergen.
Zara Chowdhary is a multi-hyphenate writer, producer, and educator from Chennai, India. She now lives in Madison, WI. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University and an MA in Writing for Performance from the University of Leeds. She has taught courses in Hindi and South Asian cultures, protest poetry, and creative nonfiction.
Zara spent her first decade as an adult working in film, advertising and media production including for studios like Eros Entertainment, Red Chillies, and Vinod Chopra Productions. Her work has aired on Channel [V], National Geographic India, and on American television for Turner Classic Movies. Her prose has appeared in anthologies like New Moons edited by Kazim Ali, as well as online for speculative and environmental journals like Flyway Journal, Cotton Xenomorph.
PODCAST INTERVIEW
Zara Chowdhary (Intro): You’re listening to my interview with Kristen Iversen author of Full Body Burden: Living in the Shadows of Rocky Flats. This interview was supported by Flyway, a literary journal of creative writing environment, and the M.F.A. Creative Writing & Environment program at Iowa State University. Full Body Burden is the memoir of a troubled family living against the backdrop of the US government on a plutonium processing facility—one that refuses to tell its people how much their soil and air and water are poisoned. Booklist, in its starred review of the book, says that Iverson seems to have been destined to write this shocking and infuriating story.
News stories come and go but it takes a book of this exceptional caliber to focus our attention and martial our collective commitment to preventing future nuclear horrors. Here is my conversation with her in December 2019.
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Zara Chowdhary: I don’t think I fully processed it so don’t mind my more incredulous questions. I’m just like OK how could they do this?! I’m still in that part of when you’ve just read something that’s quite stunning and shocking, and you’re still reacting to it on some level. But I think it’s when I came to the portion where you come back home to Rocky Flats and start working there, and then you see the ABC Nightline program about it, to me as a writer, it felt like: was that the moment when she when there was this sort of spark in your head or realization that this had been your whole life but that there was a story here that you hadn’t necessarily considered as deeply?
Kristen Iversen: I think that was a moment, and you don’t get very many moments in life like that. I remember it really vividly. I was a single parent with two little kids, and I put my boys to bed, and I made myself a cup of tea or something, and I sat down in front of the TV and saw this and my heart just sank through the floor, you know, and I thought: How can I live in this community? How can I live here and grow up here and be working, and how can I not know this? How could they not tell us this? Then of course, what else haven’t they told us? —which is a question that is ongoing and very relevant, as I mentioned earlier, even today. It was a turning point, and I knew at that moment that I would quit my job and I knew at that moment that I would write a book. It’s just, I couldn’t believe it, I felt so betrayed, you know?
Zara Chowdhary: I think what struck me about that moment was that it was so long after you done the M.F.A., you lived in Germany, traveled away from this place, and it’s like this the seed of this idea was always within you, but it took coming back to it and kind of — in my own experience— hat it took becoming a mother for me to start caring about some of these things, like, when any kind of violence, environmental or social or cultural or physical, is inflicted on your body, we tend to take it lighter than when it comes to our children. I feel like, for me today, looking at the way the world is and being a mom, seeing my son, I don’t want India or his identity to be torn in the way that mine was. That that sort of pushed me to write. Did you as a mother feel some sense of that I need to tell this story, but just document this history as well?
Kristen Iversen: I think being a mother definitely influenced that, and I was worried—I was worried about my little boys. I was worried about my family and the people that I grew up with and all of it. In my high school graduating class for example, I learned later that there is an incredible level of cancer and death, and a lot of people have died young from cancer and things like that. So, it was a sense of, as I said, betrayal and a sense of responsibility, and also, I had to face a couple of things myself as a writer—my own sense of denial—which I had been raised with and I had accepted to a certain extent. My parents always said, “You know surely the government will tell us if something is wrong.” And they told us, they lied to us. Dow Chemical, as I mentioned in the book, my mother thought they were making Scrubbing Bubbles — they weren’t making Scrubbing Bubbles. But no one in the neighborhood could talk about the work that they did at Rocky Flats. They would get fired. So, there was a lot of rumor and myth, and then this idea that—that you know, surely the government and these corporations who ran the plant will tell us if something was wrong. I sort of bought into that for a long time or I didn’t wanna look at it. I kind of had this sort of gallows humor, I guess you would say—my sisters and I would joke you know the reason why we all have such glowing personalities because of Rocky Flats. It was kind of like we felt like if there was something there, we couldn’t do anything about it—it couldn’t be that bad, or they would tell us. So, I had to confront my own sense of denial and I had to confront my own sense of fear. I was really in the beginning, in 10 years of research after that moment that we just talked about, 10 years of research went into this book before I even started seriously writing. I wanted to be very careful that I had my facts straight, and then I had to sense my I had to face my own sense of fear of writing about something that was so terrifying, and also the one thing that I had been told never to write about, and that if I did write about it. So, you know, I really thought about that. Am I putting myself at risk? Am I putting my children at risk by writing about this thing?
Zara Chowdhary: Those are very real risks for writers. I think people don’t necessarily see when they hold the finish book in their hands, how much of personal risk and courage it takes tells these stories. But I want to go back to what she said about denial, and you talk a lot in the book about the silence of the family as well and that’s sort of the story of Rocky Flats as well, but it’s very much on a micro-level the story of a family. What did it take for you to sort of say I’m going to talk about this in a book and put it out in the world? ‘Cause that’s hard as well. There’s their sense of loyalty, their sense of whatever it was, this was my family. To kind of grapple with that and get past that how did you find yourself dealing with those?
Kirsten Iversen: That’s a really great question. Well, I think I started out honestly thinking that I wanted to write a memoir about growing up, you know, in the mountains with dogs and horses, and I wanted to kind of document my sense of childhood the kind of childhood that I felt my own kids would never have ’cause we had the kind of childhood, where my mother would just , you know, push us out the door in the morning and say come back at supper time. And we would, my sister and I, would go out on our horses, and very few people have that kind of childhood anymore and I saw that as a great sense of loss and that was the beautiful part of my childhood. So, I started with that and then to more honestly face what had happened in my family and the alcoholism, and what happened with my mother and my father and all of that.
At the same time, I was thinking about Rocky Flats and there was a moment this was another aha moment where I realized that I couldn’t tell one story without the other. That it was both stories were so much a part of my growing up and were about silencing—secrecy and secrecy—and the cost of secrecy and silencing. So that’s kind of how the how the stories came together and was writing about the about the two things that I had been told never to talk about and never to write about. I wasn’t sure what you know, I wasn’t sure what was gonna happen.
First of all, I didn’t think anyone would ever publish this book, truly, but I felt like I had to write it before I could write anything else. So, I just wrote it the way I felt it needed to do it and then when I ended up getting not just an agent, but a really great agent, and the book was not just sold in New York and London but auctioned—it was so publishers were so interested in it that it went to auction and it was all sort of a big surprise, a big shock! It was an amazing thing that happened! Then I had to really you know think about “Oh my gosh”, this is really going to be a book and it, it’s you know it’s going to be kind of a big deal maybe, and how is this going to affect my family and how is this going to affect my life?
I’ll just tell you a brief story with my father—it’s so relevant because my family is from Iowa, his family from Iowa—I had been estranged from him and my sisters, my brother too, for quite some time, and then when I wrote the book and it was accepted for publication I contacted him and I said “You know I’m writing a book” and he’s like OK. Then when it was close to publication, I sent him a galley copy and I don’t think he read it. It wasn’t until it was actually in the bookstores and reviewed in The New York Times, and I called him and I said “Have you read it?” and then he did read it. I didn’t know what would happen, I thought with every little thread of connection that we had would probably — maybe he would never speak to me again, but I felt that this story was so important—that that was a risk I felt that I had to take. So, he read the book and I called him. I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I remember this vividly. I called him and I said “So have you read it?” He said yes, and I said “What do you think?” And there was this long pause, and he said “I can’t talk to you,” and he said “Come see me.” And so, I went back to Colorado and I went to visit him and we talked. It was probably the first fairly honest conversation we’d ever had. Not that everything was revealed and forgiven, but it was a really powerful moment. And I think the book was difficult for him, but I think he really tried his best to understand what I was doing with it, and after that point we all grew closer to him. He passed away three years ago now, I think, and my sisters and I, we were all at his bedside when he passed. I can still hardly talk about it. It was really powerful. But so, you never know, and all that risk, and all that fear, and all that denial really turned into a moment of transformation in my family and it also I think helped turn the tide of what’s happening in Rocky Flats, in a broader environmental and political sense.
Zara Chowdhary: See the other person that I was really struck by in this book was Mark. I want to briefly sort of talk about him because, again, when I was around the same age, I had a friend and there was — it wasn’t a romantic relationship — but he was just this incredible human being who in college just seemed to see that I was more troubled than a lot of the kids in our class. He reached out—and he was a proper young activist in that sense, you know, and he would do these cycle rallies to go stop a chemical plant from starting up somewhere—so, Mark reminded me a lot of [him] instantly. Then when we were 19 in our second year of school on one of those cycle rallies, he drowned while swimming in a little lake off the road. I think it was it was one of those things that you just again silently absorb that sort of death at that age, you continue on, and then a lot of your life becomes about just sort of moving past some of these more traumatic things. But one of the reasons I came back to Graduate School after a divorce and as a single mom and like all of those things, is because somewhere [his] voice always kind of is in my head, him telling me that you’re too young to have a plan, you need to figure how you can change the world, and how can you do this! It was this idealism and this amazing energy of that time that sort of has gotten sort of encapsulated in some way in his memory. So that scene where you have the dream about Mark in your story—it just it felt to me like he’s been that that moral courage for you through the years.
Kirsten Iversen: I think that’s absolutely true. He really believed in me as a writer at a time when I didn’t believe in myself as a writer, and I couldn’t even see the path of how to become a writer. He saw what was happening. I mean he was young, but in some ways he seemed much older. And you know what’s funny about that is—I mean it’s been years, decades—I still hear his voice in my dreams. It’s amazing. He’s still there, like paying attention: “What are you doing?”, you know that guidance. It took me—that was another thing it was really difficult to write about, and for years I walked around—it was not that much time you know in the scheme of things. I look back at my age now, and I think that was such a short intense period of time, but it was, oh my gosh, years and years and years before I could even talk about it. It just felt like I was walking around with a knife inside of me, and I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk about it ’cause it would just be too painful, it was such an intense experience. I’ve lost other people in my life, and that death really is something that I still carry around with me today.
Zara Chowdhary: An aunt of mine, I remember telling me this when I was very young, she said “Daughters are like the moral compass in the family.” This book for me felt like it was not just you trying to find that moral compass, but it’s you questioning our ethical compass as a country or unity, of what are the things we allow and what do we allow our government to hide from us in the name of protection or production or progress? I find that so intriguing as an idea because for me, I’m still new to the US and I find a lot of these debates, whether it’s about climate change or do we need guns in our schools, like some of these are no brainers, and yet the discussion about it gets embroiled in the sense of family and legacy and tradition. Rocky Flats seems to have that you know, we’re all a family, and that just sort of goes away when we allow for that, sort of these more emotional ideas, to get attached to very ethical questions.
Kristen Iversen: There were so many interesting situations at Rocky Flats. In the union, it was quite strong there, I think it’s the Steel Workers Union. There were people who were in the union and adamant about being in the union because it was the union that was the only thing that was concerned about worker safety. If it wasn’t for that union, things would have been much worse than they already were, so many people got sick, so many workers got sick, so many workers died. The union, I mean they were aware of this, and they were working for safety. Then there were a lot of people who were anti-union and they felt that you know you had to be independent and again that the company would tell you if they were doing anything bad.
I just remember at Christmas, or maybe it was Thanksgiving, the company would give you a turkey for Thanksgiving and it was “Oh what a good company! We work for a great company and we’re family and look they’re really looking after us!” I just remember getting this turkey, and first of all, there was a turkey farm right down the street not far from my house and those turkeys were contaminated. The Department of Energy was conducting—I interviewed this family several times, went to school with their sons, and the DOE would show up unannounced and take tests. They would take some turkeys, kill some turkeys, and they would never tell the family what it was about. They intimidated the families that “Don’t dare say anything”, so I always knew there was something funny going on with the turkeys. I remember getting this turkey and thinking, “So you’re giving me this Turkey but you’re putting my life at risk, my health at risk, my community at risk, my children at risk? And are not telling us the truth, you’re lying to us.” And people would go home with the turkeys and just be happy. and it’s that kind of thing that you’re talking and I just wanna say “wake up”! There was a lot of anti-activist sentiment, and there still is, that if you say anything negative about Rocky Flats that you are saying, you know, you’re not a patriot.
Zara Chowdhary: Exactly, because it’s tied into this whole idea of well, this is protecting all of you, the activists included. I remember one of the people, Deb or the security guard, saying that, but you know, ”my job is to even protect them, it’s the plants job.”
There’s also a point where, I don’t remember who says this, but somebody gives the analogy of this is like having a tiger living next door. It made me think like, if there was a tiger living next door, I would not be able to sleep at night. And yet there’s something about the abstraction of radiation and cancer that doesn’t feel urgent. I feel like this book is doing that work of trying to show you there’s a tiger living next door.
Kristen Iversen: There’s a tiger living next door and he’s in a paper cage, he’s going to get out. The whole thing with plutonium—you can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t taste it. So, I think people tend not to take it seriously, but it’s more complicated than that. This is what’s coming out more recently—I’ll talk a little bit about this tonight in my talk—this kind of collusion that’s happening or has happened, not just at Rocky Flats, but at other sites as well—but at Rocky Flats is particularly corrosive and horrible—agreements between developers, local governments, and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to deny independent testing that shows, beyond a shadow of doubt, the presence of plutonium and other things too–carbon to chloride and there’s lot of stuff out there, but this sort of collusion to keep this information hidden away and again, deny, deny, deny, and say everything is safe, don’t worry about it, everything is safe, we got it covered.
So, some of the slides I’m going to show this evening there is a lot of new information coming out based on independent test testing that not only confirms the presence of the plutonium in the soil in areas where they’re building houses, but it also shows very real health effects of what’s happening in the local populations. In terms of young breast cancer—by that I mean women under the age of 35, under the age of 30, getting breast cancer—leukemia, brain cancer, all sorts of things. And even today, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment will say, well look at these cancer studies we did over here, which also have to be contextualized in terms of the data that they’re looking at and how they’re presenting it. They’ll say it’s safe, it’s safe, don’t worry.
When my book first came out, I was receiving hundreds of emails per week from people who were sick, and their animals were sick: horses, dogs, in particular—dogs getting cancer in their paws, in the paws their feet, you know, in contact with the soil. And that hasn’t stopped. People are still getting sick, and yet anyone with the government, or you know, corporations that have operated Rocky Flats and now even US Fish and Wildlife Service say that’s all anecdotal evidence, that doesn’t matter. The activists, these activists are just a small group of people, they’re kind of crazy, we’ll ignore them, all that kind of stuff.
Zara Chowdhary: When you talked about the dogs, I remembered all the stories in the books, the rabbits being radioactive, and the deer, the cows, which is just shocking. But also when you try and imagine a place like Colorado, I mean it’s got this pristine paradise sort of imagery right? And your book also has that. You have children who are riding horses out, and there’s a lake that everyone goes swimming in, and so—growing up in that sort of environment, but knowing that this is in the air and the water and the grass and the soil, I think that’s part of the dissonance comes in the US as well, that everything still looks so in control and so perfect and so beautiful, that we—we’re not willing to question unless it becomes that dire. If you saw the trees all dying out and it was this more dystopian looking environment, I bet there’d be a lot more people questioning it.
Kristen Iversen: That’s exactly right. Recently, the Colorado Department of Public Health Environment and the Ocean Wildlife Service put something on their website about how the Rocky Flats site was pristine. So many people protested about that, that I think they took that word down. It is not pristine by any means. But you, if you just look at it, it’s beautiful, and even the way we look at the land is kind of changed because in the 1950s when the first—the Department of Energy or Atomic Energy, AEC at that point in time, built the plant on that site, they took it over from the family that owned the land. They bought it, but they had the right to buy it at very low price because they were you know going to use it for federal purposes. And then they built this plant. At that time, you can see in the literature, and the memos, and all of that “this is wasteland. Nobody is going to care about this land,” and it was interesting, and I think I talked about this a little bit in the book.
At Los Alamos, for example, if you worked at Los Alamos, there was a secret city. It was completely enclosed and controlled and at Rocky Flats they had to locate that plant close enough to a major city where they could get workers. When I was working in Rocky Flats, there were more than 5000 people working there. It was huge, 881 buildings. So, it was supposed to be in a remote area away from any city, because they knew, they knew how dangerous it was. It was dangerous because of the contamination. You cannot make nuclear weapons without contaminating people or the environment. Then it was also dangerous because we were at the top of the hit list during the Cold War. We were like number one ’cause we were the heart of nuclear weapons production in the United States. But you know, growing up next to Rocky Flats, they didn’t tell us any of that. We didn’t know any of that. And it’s just so ironic that they located it there—terrible location, then when they clean up—and it’s not really clean up, it’s like a cover up—but then the DOE very deliberately started to change the language: it’s beautiful land, it’s pristine land, and look at all the wildlife! It used to be that you could go on the Internet and pull up a lot of photographs of Rocky Flats, of what they did. Now, if you go to a Google search or something, you’ll get pictures of deer and butterflies, and it’s fine, everything is beautiful—this shut down place, nobody talks about that. It’s a very intentional and deceptive PR campaign.
Zara Chowdhary: I think also in telling some of these stories it takes a very deep investigative journalistic approach. Then to be able to tell it, and you did not graduate in journalism, you graduated in creative writing—
Kristen Iversen: I took a couple of journalism classes long enough—I had no idea when I first started out how complex it was going to become, and so much, so much work in terms of interviewing, trying to track down documentation. And yet I knew that I couldn’t just tell like a personal perspective, “this is what happened,” I wanted to tell the story as fully as possible, from as many different perspectives as possible, and I interviewed a lot of people. And when I interviewed workers who were, you know, adamantly pro-Rocky Flats and still are, and we’re not happy that I was writing the book—I mean I really try to understand their perspective and why they felt that way.
I think it’s the same kind of story that’s going on in places all over the country—people would say to me “Rocky Flats paid my mortgage and put my kids through college.” A lot of people who worked out there did not have a high school education, or they hired directly out of the high schools. People say would they have had the opportunity, the benefits, yes, maybe I got contaminated along the way, but I did it in service to my country and in service to my family.
I can understand your point of view, but it’s also—if you’re going to put your life on the line for your country, you can join the military, and you’re knowingly taking that risk. Rocky Flats put our entire community: all the workers unknowingly, the residents unknowingly, and indeed the entire state, and we had no idea. We were that we were at the front line of Cold War—we didn’t volunteer for it! When I first started learning about it, it was just so unbelievable to me, and so sad. I mean I do love that landscape so much. I just love it there and it just breaks my heart that we poisoned it. It’s heart breaking, and it’s not fixable—there’s no going back. Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years which means it’s dangerous for 500,000, which is beyond even, like we’re not talking my kids or grandkids or great grandkids, that’s almost beyond human comprehension, how deeply we have poisoned land. It should have been declared a National Sacrifice Zone and it should be closed. But there’s a lot of that’s—it’s open for the public right now for hiking and biking. I was talking to someone the other day who bikes out there and he had the same attitude that I had when I was 17: it’s beautiful land, I’m gonna go out there and they would tell me if it was really bad, and I can’t see anything, I don’t feel anything, so why shouldn’t I go out there?
I want to say one more thing about investigative journalism. I think—I could talk about plutonium, and americium, and you know all these things and put you to sleep in about 5 minutes. . .but I think I just want to emphasize that, if I can put a face, if I can put a story—I think this is true with a couple of other books I’m working on now—if I can put a human face on the story, then it becomes meaningful to people.
Zara Chowdhary: Yeah, because it’s not just the story of your family and you, as the girl that grew up in that world, but it’s these characters and these heroes who come in and leave.
You would imagine that a classical way of telling of this would just follow one person, but you kind of keep going out, following somebody else’s story to the end, but you come back: the story is Rocky Flats. So, you just keep coming back to it, so it’s this very interesting braiding that is going on throughout, and there’s choices to be made, right? I’m sure there’s stories you might have to edit at some point: “I’m like I just can’t, I don’t have the space. I want to tell this, but I can’t”—
Kristen Iversen: There’s so many other stories that could be told too, many stories I had to leave out. That’s why it’s kind of exciting to have an option if it does become a television series, because then they can follow these other stories. So, the workers, the women who first worked on the on the hotline, some of the early activists, some of the Catholic nuns that I interviewed, they were so amazing!
Zara Chowdhary: They’re so vivid, because it’s not the picture you have in your head of activists. You paint this whole other picture of housewives and nuns and hippies and Buddhist monks and Ginsberg—
Kristen Iversen: I have a new book coming out in the spring on Rocky Flats. It’s an anthology that I edited with the former editor at the Smithsonian. So, some of the people whom I mentioned in the book have written articles and essays, lots of other people too, so it’s kind of a look at Rocky Flats from the perspective of all different kinds of people: lawyers, scientists. It’s really great. And the essay that I wrote is entitled “The Accidental Activist”. I didn’t start out to be an activist. I didn’t write that book with any sort of agenda. I just wanted to tell the story. And I guess in a way the book really is the narrative arc of my own kind of waking up and becoming an activist.
Zara Chowdhary: That’s something I always doubted in the beginning when I started the MFA, whether I was the right person to tell the story — there’s so many better writers!
Kristen Iversen: And everybody has that question and that’s the story you have to tell. That’s happened to me more than once. I see it in my students, too, when they come into the program, where they’re at the M.F.A. level or at the PhD level—they have something inside, and you have to write it. I just remember thinking back when I was kind of wondering whether I had the guts to actually do this. Then I thought, you know, I can’t end up 95 years old in a nursing home wondering: what if?
Zara Chowdhary: I have this environmental history class this semester where we’re reading a lot of these question books of, you know, about rivers and water scarcity and polar caps melting and the big things that sort of are talked about the news and that kids learn about. Then you read a story like this, and I found myself questioning well: how do you make someone care about this other than the community that lives there? I want to ask you that question of: what is it that somebody that isn’t from Colorado, didn’t live, or doesn’t have an investment in the Rocky Flats—what is the take away for them?
Kristen Iversen: That’s a really interesting question. I’m teaching a class right now, creative writing and the environment, so we’re maybe reading some of the books that you’re reading. So many things are kind of overwhelming, I think, even looking at radioactivity and what’s happening with now, particularly under the Trump administration, with nuclear weapons and the storage of nuclear waste and nuclear power and all that is overwhelming. It’s really—easy to sit in your living room and just think “Oh my God, what can I do as an individual person?” And I see that whenever I give talks. I can just see people become sort of overwhelmed seeing the enormity of it and I think that the one thing that I can do as a writer is tell individual stories: a particular person, what happened to them, even a particular animal. Sometimes it’s easier for people to understand the story if I talk about animals. So I want to kind of bring it down to the very personal kind of microscale—this is this is what is happening on this on this level, and this is why you need to care. And, I think coming at it from that point makes it a little bit easier to understand the bigger problem and also a little easier to understand what to do—what can be done.
I’ll tell you, this is a little bit off topic, but one of the most powerful things that I’ve become involved in, and one organization that I often speak with, is called Hibakusha Stories. It’s an organization in New York, and Hibakusha are the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These people are in their 80s and they have really incredible stories of survival, horrible stories, horrifying stories, and one of the people who’s also involved in that organization is Clifton Truman Daniel—a grandson of President Truman, who made the decision to drop the bomb. So, we do these presentations where I will get up and talk about how the bomb was developed in Colorado and then links to New Mexico, New York, you know, all of the facilities around the United States including Iowa State. Then Clifton Truman Daniel will stand up and talk about his grandfather’s decision to drop the bomb and the political things that that led up to that decision and the consequences of that decision. Then some of the survivors will get up and tell their story. They’re powerful stories. There’s this one woman who was in middle school, and girls were putting sandbags on the playground because they were anticipating something. She actually saw the plane coming, saw the bomb drop, and she raised her hand, and she lost her fingers and her face and was obviously deeply injured. By luck, her mother found her, and she was I think the only child in that school who survived and one of the few people who survived in that area. Her mother and father who were out of town away, so they weren’t as badly injured, they nursed her. There weren’t any medical supplies, they put cooking oil on her skin. You know it’s just an amazing story. Then she eventually became one of the Hiroshima Maidens. There were a number of young women they were brought over to the United States by an organization in California and they paid for plastic surgery…Ever since that time she’s devoted her life to talking about what happened. So that’s how we do these presentations and it’s incredibly powerful. That’s what we’re talking about. We’re not just talking about plutonium and dogs with cancer in their paws. We’re talking about that. That’s what we’re doing—building bombs to do that, and that’s what we’re still doing
Zara Chowdhary: We carry these scars from that one moment, that one fire, that one leak throughout, and that’s essentially that “full body burden” is not just about how much plutonium or how little is going to affect you. It’s about how far in life you’re going to carry that burden, that moment, that decision that you didn’t make, that someone else made for you. It’s a violence that is very, sort of, quiet but deadly.
Kristen Iversen: Exactly, and it’s a very personal violence. I think it’s easy for people to think about the dropping of the atomic bombs as something that happened a long time ago, it affected people who live a long ways away from you—no, this is each one of us. We all have plutonium in our bodies right now because of the testing in the 1950s. It’s a very, very personal thing. It feels big. It feels overwhelming, but the only way that we can really think about it and change anything is from that very personal level.
Zara Chowdhary: And that’s why when you said that story of Ginsberg sitting on those tracks and writing his poem, and you have it at the end of your book, what I took away, if that’s all you can do — you do that. If all you can do is sit down on a train track and stop a train and write a poem — you do that.
Kristen Iversen: And that poem has had enormous impact. That poem educated a lot of people!
Zara Chowdhary: What a pleasure, thank you so much!
