Shelli R. Johannes, SHE PERSISTED: Florence Nightingale

[1:18]Zibby Owens: Hi. I'm Zubby Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books. This thirty minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, three hundred sixty five days a year for about thirty minutes. I am also the publisher for Zippy Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction and memoir. Our books are already out now. You can check it out on zippybooks.com. And we have a magazine called Zippy Mag where we have lots of wonderful essays and lifestyle features. That's at zippymag.com. We have classes at zippyclasses.com. And I recently opened a bookstore in LA called Zibby's Bookshop at 1113 Montana Avenue at 11th Street in Santa Monica. I hope that you are able to enjoy some of our other offerings, but this here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in 2018.

[2:10]Shelli R. Johannes: And no matter what I do, this is basically my favorite thing. Enjoy.

[2:19]Zibby Owens: Shelly R. Johannes is the coauthor of nine books in the C. C. Loves Science series. She also wrote the Theo Thesaurus series, Shine Like a Unicorn, and Penny. Her newest chapter book is Florence Nightingale, part of Chelsea Clinton's She Persisted series. She's also the critically acclaimed author of five teen novels, including the nature of grace series, rewired, and on the bright side. Shelley lives in Atlanta with her own pack of animals, a British husband, two kids, one bird, one fish, and two crazy goldendoodles who hate vegetables. Welcome, Shelley. Thanks for coming back on moms don't have time to read books.

[2:52]Shelli R. Johannes: This time to discuss Chelsea Clinton's Florence Nightingale. Discuss. Yes. It's good to be back. Thank you for having me again. Of course. So explain, how is Chelsea Clinton involved? How are you involved? And how is Florence Nightingale involved? Yes. So Chelsea Clinton series is all about women being empowered and and how they got to where they were as far as heroes from a perspective of persistence. And that could be current people or people from the past. So that is her whole theme of that series. And they wanted to do Florence Nightingale to celebrate the nurses and kind of doctors after COVID and everything that they had done on the front lines. So I actually had worked with Jill Santopolo, who is the major editor over the series. And, just with some of my STEM books, I think they thought I would be a good fit for Florence Nightingale. So I was excited to dive into it because I didn't know much about her. She was a hero. I'm pretty sure I dressed up as her for either a school fair or a Halloween. I just totally remember dressing up in my mom's bathroom. So I don't know. I'll have to ask her about it. It was probably like you were the lady of the lamp probably. Yeah. Yeah. That was her big, like, call to fame was the lady of lamp. And so Florence Nightingale is really credited for basically starting nursing altogether, right? Happened before her? Paint the picture of life before Florence Nightingale, how she burst on the scene, and how she transformed the industry. Yeah. Well, she is kind of known for starting the modern nursing world. There are two other figures that I think are really important just to mention, which is Mary Seikle, who was a black British Jamaican woman who met Florence Nightingale, but also was part of the Crimean War and started a British hotel for soldiers. And then Clara Barton, of course, who was over in The United States about the same time kind of overlapping was key to the civil war. So Florence Nightingale before her, I think there weren't a lot of women in nursing. It was a lot of men and it was really seen like everyone looked down on nurses. They were considered lower class. They were considered not serious about their job. So I don't think it was a very high profession that people were pushed into. And Florence Nightingale came from a very wealthy family and- But wait, did they call it, they still called it nursing, even though, Do we know this? I think it was still called nursing, but it wasn't great to be a nurse. So it wasn't a very well established field. It was mostly doctors and they were all male. So there wasn't a lot of caretaking of the patients at the level that I think nurses were coming in and taking care of them. Got it. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Good. Yeah. She was born in Florence, Italy and her parents loved Italy. So that's why they named her Florence. And she just never saw herself as a society girl. So even from the very beginning, her father saw that she was really smart. So he really educated her and her sister, her name's pop, and took them in this little bookcase behind you know, in his office and would teach them math. And they spoke many languages kind of against the mother's wishes. The mother really wanted them to be very high society and marry. And look, Florence Nightingale had no intention of marrying and never did marry, even though she had gotten many, many proposals. So she was very smart, loved math, loved science, loved languages, loved to write. She was a writer. And, when she was 16, she got this calling that she was supposed to be a nurse and help people, a calling that her parents were not very supportive of. So hence she persisted and really pushed forward in an industry where women were not respected. And how did she do that? I guess I have to read. Well, I'll have to read the book to find out. Yes. She loved taking care of animals. She would go to the local hospital and help during some of the outbreaks. And she kind of under the pretense of traveling around Europe as a high society woman would stop by churches and talk to nuns who are taking care of people. She would stop by hospitals and she would stop by and kind of learn all of these different ways that people were taking care of people who were sick. Eventually against their will, she enrolled in a nursing school in Germany and went to Germany out of the high society, turned down all of her marriage proposals. She's 20 at this time. Right? So going against not only being in a wealthy family and their expectations, but also expectations of just during those that Victorian era. So yeah. Did you read the Mitford sisters? It's not the same timeline. But No. I didn't. You should read it's by Marie Benedict, and it's about these four society girls, these daughters of a society family essentially. One of whom is a writer, and she sort of chronicles how her older sister, who was like the queen bee, this, like, blonde, beautiful, you know, whatever, she ends up getting a divorce in the beginning like, right at the beginning of the book. And it ends up I won't give it's about how she persisted, but also went against all of the norms of her family and actually ended up being involved with World War II and Hitler and all this other stuff and how her little sister was. I don't know. I feel like Florence and the Mitfords would have an interesting cross generational conversation. Marie Benedict writes a lot of great historical books about strong women. So are you doing like how did you decide what to include in the book? It's a chapter book series. So like how did you know how like I never know how to talk to the right age child. Like I'm always writing, Oh, this is too old. This is too young. Like how do you nail that? I know you have so much experience with the Toll children's world. So like how to get the writing to the right age? What is the right age? And then how do you pick what to include when you have so much information about someone's life? Yeah. And I really wanted So this is my first chapter book. I've done a lot of picture books and early readers. So I was nervous, but accepted the challenge. Was persisting and excited to be a part of this series. Read obviously there are many, many other Chelsea Clinton chapter books on current and past historical women. So read that, but I really wanted to get into who was Florence, like the girl, who was Florence, the woman, like if this is for nine to 12 year olds, like who was she at that age and what inspired her? Because I think sometimes when we're that age, we don't realize the things that we love and how they can play into our futures. And sometimes we maybe discard them or think they're not very important, but she loved math. She would collect seashells and she would organize them by shape and by size and by type, and she would catalog, you know, catalog them. And so she was very meticulous about numbers and how things were categorized. So that was just something that she loved. And she later on ended up also developing the Rose diagram, which is a statistical diagram. So after she went and trained in nursing and she knew a lot of high society people. So there was a man who was the war of secretary. When the Crimean war started, they wanted to send over nurses because the death rate was so high in this war that they couldn't figure out what was going on. So she volunteered, he chose her, which was unheard of at the time in being a woman, all men, over on the battlefield. And she got to pick 38 nurses to travel with. It was like a thirteen day travel, like seasick, cockroaches, rats, goes over there and realizes that most of the people are dying because of sickness or disease. It's not because of their battle wounds. It's because they're getting dysentery and cholera and getting very sick. I guess the conditions were so bad. People were laying in their own feces. There was blood, there was no one cleaning there. There wasn't great amount of food. The water wasn't clean. So she just went in there with not any of the support of the male doctors and just decided I need to clean this place up. And so all of her math and science and language all came in that she loved when she was little came into play. She could speak to anyone. She used her math and statistics to figure out how many people were dying. They didn't even know how many people were dying, who was dying, what the statistic was. So she actually took this statistic of like forty five percent of a death rate and lowered it to two percent by the time she had left in about six months, just from doing sanitation, everything we use today in modern nursing, washing hands, keeping linens clean, separating the sick from the healthy. And so a lot of those things that she, that we use during COVID to keep ourselves safe, she really kind of implemented. And it all came from when she was a kid and the things that she helped animals and helped sick people in town. So I love that this series shows you the person behind the legend or the hero and how they grew up to be that way and what they had to go against to get there. Wow. Very cool. I feel like we need role models like that now more than ever. Feel like trudging uphill against so many things in our society. Yeah. And she really brought holistic patient care. It wasn't just a doctor coming in saying, Oh, hey, take this pill or here, I'll sew you up. As you know, if you were her at Halloween, she would dress up at night and she would walk this four mile hospital and she would talk to these soldiers. She would take care of them. She would write letters for them. She implemented a call bell, which is similar to the call bell system we have today, but they had little hand bells that they could ring and she and her nurses would go and take care of them. And she really felt like if you took care of the person, as opposed to the problem, that they had a better chance of survival. And she was right. Wow. Mean, not all doctors sort of ascribe to that even now. I feel like people, they bring in their whole teams and they talk about you, like your disease or whatever, they don't not that this has happened, but I don't know, even like with having a baby or whatever, you know, it's like, okay, she had a C section. I'm like, hello, right? Yeah, I'm here. I'm a person. Yeah. And the nurses, I mean, thank goodness for them, right? They're the ones that come in and really they're the ones that take care of the dirty stuff, right? They're changing bedpans, they're changing your medicine, they're making sure that you're comfortable, they're bringing you food and they're really the caretakers of the hospitals. Without them, they were essential in COVID. And I love that we're celebrating nurses because I just don't think they get enough credit for the care and the love and the sacrifice and responsibility that they have to their patients. Every time I've been in a hospital,

[14:06]Zibby Owens: I'm like, as soon as I get out of here, I'm gonna send all these like flowers and cakes and thank you gifts to these nurses. Oh my gosh. They're so amazing. And then I like go back to my life and I always forget. Is that the most embarrassing thing to admit? No, it's not because life gets busy, but this is a time where we can celebrate them during Women's History Month in March and really say thank you for everything that they did, as you know, taking care of those patients.

[14:31]Shelli R. Johannes: And a lot of them were alone being there for them, that's the heart of a nurse. Yes. So true. Yeah. Who are the other people being featured in the series and are you writing all of those as well? No. I am not writing all those. I would love to. But I mean, it really is all women. So it's not even just women in science or nursing. Harriet Tubman, Sally Ride, Malala. I mean, really covers the gamut. It covers from dance to science, to math, to space travel, Jane Goodall. And it really just covers the gamut of these are strong women who have fought to stand up for something that they believed in, whether that was taking care of someone or being an activist or making a change in the world. So Florence Nightingale is mine and they have a whole slew of just lovely writers that are in charge of the different books as they come out. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince. 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I mean, what's fun about her is, you know, she loved animals and she had like 60 cats in her life and she would take care of these animals in the same way that she would really take care of humans. And she even rescued an owl when she was in, Athens in Greece and named the owl Athena and ended up bringing that owl back. And it was her pet owl that she would carry like in her pocket with her. So she was very loving to really all satiate beings and you know, really just pushed against the status quo. I mean, she could have gotten married, had her money and lived a life of sewing and parties and entertaining, which is what her mother and her sister did. But instead she like, she wanted to make a difference. And even after she left the war, she came back, she was bedridden. She was very sick. She got Crimean fever or Crimean fever, and she was bedridden for the rest of her life, but still from her bed, you know, helped transform the healthcare system in Great Britain. Knew Queen Victoria and would work with her to make sure that soldiers were taken care of and that people were taken care of. And wrote, she was a writer. She wrote 13,000 letters in her life, to family members, to friends, just telling about those experiences. And they have all of those letters. And she wrote two novels. I mean, two like books on nursing and hospitals, as well as a, what I think is funny, a little obscure fact is she wrote a fiction novel called Cassandra, which was really about a girl who was going up against the societal norms of the time and dealing with the oppression of men and society. So I love that she was a writer and a mathematician and not just a nurse, like she was a whole person. Wow. Yeah. That's so cool. So she had quite the life and ended up, I think, dying when she was 90. 90? Oh my 90. Bedridden. Mean, all of this, wrote all these letters, did all of this change to the system from her bed. Wow. That's a lot of time from age 20 to 90. And she was in bed the whole time. That's not By how the time she got back, it was probably about forty years at the end of her life by the time she got back in one and was starting to do these bigger changes. Okay. Wow. But still forty years. Mean, was in bed for like what, four months with my twins when I was pregnant and that was like really long. And she's accomplishing things. She's writing, she's making a difference. She's you know, not giving up. Like she's pushing her cause.

[20:11]Zibby Owens: Yes.

[20:12]Shelli R. Johannes: Yeah. So now that this book is done, what are your next projects in the queue? We still have some more books coming out with Love Science. So the Love Science series, mostly I can read. So that's we just had one release in January, which was Wind and Water, and we had never have another one releasing next January. And all of the books are going into paperback. So any of the picture books that didn't go into paperback are getting ready to go into paperback. So I'm really excited about that, especially now with the printing and just, you know, everything going on in the industry. I think kids need to be able to have accessible and affordable books and the paperbacks, you know, give them that also a chapter book series that hasn't quite been announced, that will tackle like sustainable farms, a girl that lives on a sustainable farm. So that will be coming out like 2024 or 2025. Wow. More little lines in the water. You know how that is. Yeah, I know that. That's awesome. You know those lines in the water. One comes out, you put another one in. The life of the writer. Writer. Yeah. Wow. So yeah. And I love in the book, they also, the series includes like, what are some things that kids can do, you know, at the end? Like what can you do to push this forward? And at the launch party that's happening at little shop, they're having the kids, you know, not only dress up as historical characters, but write letters that we're gonna end up taking to the hospitals, to nurses, like just thanking them. So nice. Also having like a soap making party, you know, so they can make soap just to keep things clean. And so there's a lot of little things in the back to say, Hey, here's how you can honor Florence Nightingale and just this whole plight of nursing and really making a space for yourself. But fun activities that that they can really do at their level. Love that. Yeah. This is a good, like, birthday party gift, birthday party idea. You know, you could do the soap making and I don't know, nice way to give back. And write letters and let them know how much we appreciate them. I mean, we wouldn't have made it these last two years without our nurses. And you know, right, like a year ago, I think that was in the news, but I think we've forgotten that a little bit. So we're just trying to shine a light to say, Hey, we've come this far. Like we're getting back to normal because these people took care of us and our loved ones at times when we couldn't and didn't know how. And I love that kids will walk away from this with like knowing Florence the person as opposed to the lady of the lamp. Have you had a good nursing experience, a good experience with a nurse? Yeah. Mean, I think my grandmother passed away of MS and she was in the hospital for a very long time and the nurses kept her laughing and the nurses kept her moving. And I had two C sections. I wouldn't have made it without my nurses. Just bring light to sometimes a dark time when you're dealing with a lot of other things. You know how it feels when you just feel horrible. Like you, you kind of lose that light, I think a little bit when you don't feel good. And I think nurses are the ones that keep that light going. So I love lady of the land because I think that's what nurses do. They bring in that light, They bring in the humor, they bring in the care, they bring in the love when other people can't be there and the understanding at a time where I think doctors can't and our family may not know what we need. True. Yeah. The real warriors. Yeah. I know you've had a lot of experience with that. Like, we've all had experience and appreciate. Yes, absolutely. In case listeners haven't heard your prior episode, can you give a little summary of how you got to this point in your career? Yeah. I mean, I think I started out with writing picture books that were science focused and really it was about kind of at a time when my daughter was younger, she was starting to move away from science and she loved science and had said that science was just for boys. And so I kind of got this idea about a series, which was really a fancy Nancy, like taking the, you know, it's fun to be, you know, pretty and pink and fancy, but you can also be smart. And so it was really a fancy Nancy for science. And that's really kind of what, what kicked off my writing career. In addition to some of the other series, have Thesaurus and Unicorn. And I never thought I would be a picture book writer. Always thought I would be like a dark You writer and maybe someday I'll get back to that. But I definitely feel like I have a progression. Like now I'm moving into chapter books and I hope I get a chance to do another She Persisted series because I loved learning and researching and finding out more about that. Did you see Kyle just told me my husband just told me this, that Danny and the Dinosaur is now gonna be a live action movie produced by Harper Collins Productions is making a live action movie out of it. Oh, wow. I know. I didn't know Harper Collins was making movies. I also didn't think I didn't imagine that book being a full feature.

[25:20]Zibby Owens: Mhmm.

[25:21]Shelli R. Johannes: Know? Like he gets done so they're running through the town. Yeah, they run through the they run around and then they

[25:26]Zibby Owens: have a nice day.

[25:27]Shelli R. Johannes: Right. Like what's going to happen? Ice cream. It's

[25:32]Zibby Owens: going be a sequel.

[25:35]Shelli R. Johannes: Yeah. It'll be a short film. Yes. I also wanted to give a quick call out to the illustrators, Alexandra, I think it's Boyger and Jillian Flynn are the illustrators for that entire series. And they do a lot of hard work. They do the internal illustrations as well as the cover. And there are many, many more books coming out this year and I hope it continues.

[25:58]Zibby Owens: I hope so too. That's really awesome. Well, I'm so glad to have chatted with you about it. Congratulations.

[26:04]Shelli R. Johannes: Thank you so much. And

[26:06]Zibby Owens: yeah, always look forward to hearing what you're up to. Yep, me too.

[26:10]Shelli R. Johannes: Good luck with your bookstore and congratulations on all your books coming out. I love seeing them.

[26:17]Shelli R. Johannes: the what if, I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it's on my pile. Oh, good. Love doing your book club and I love book ambassadors. I love being a part of everything that's been going on for the last couple of years from when I started book club. So it's been really nice to kind of just watch from the sideline to see that journey and to feel like, Oh, this happens. Like we can do this.

[26:39]Zibby Owens: Thanks. Thank you. Yeah.

[26:41]Shelli R. Johannes: Well, it's all because of everybody who's been involved. There has to be some demand for it. Yeah. So I hope it's the things you're not part of it. Yeah. I'm excited. Thank you. Okay. Alright. Thanks a lot. See Thanks

[26:55]Zibby Owens: for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also, sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.