Karen Pinchin is the author of Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas. Pinchin is an investigative journalist and trained cook whose work runs in Canadian Geographic, Scientific American, and Hakai Magazine. She graduated from Columbia Journalism School’s MA-Science in 2019, and has since been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Sloan Foundation. She lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with her husband and son.
EB: How did you first begin writing about animals? Was it when you went to school for science journalism?
KP: Writing about non-humans is what brought me to graduate school, but it started a couple years before my son was born. I had worked for a newswire service—I worked in hard news for the first ten years or so of my career—but the profession was collapsing, and I saw two paths forward. One was to become a general assignment reporter, and the other was to develop a beat. So, I took a leap and quit my job and went to culinary school, and began writing about animals through a food systems perspective: How do we treat these creatures in restaurants? How do we consume them? What is the difference between an artisanal butcher and a factory farm?
When I moved to Atlantic Canada—my husband is from here—I moved from writing about general food systems to fisheries specifically. I got to be a stranger in a strange land. There’s a lot of preconceived notions of what it’s like in the Maritimes, these tourist visions of lobster rolls and amazing seafood on every corner, but I couldn’t find any of it in grocery stores. So I dug into a longform investigation asking where that seafood is being landed. Where is it going? And how do those systems work? That’s what got me out on boats—watching scuba divers pick live sea urchins off the ocean bottom, or seeing a full-grown American eel before it was shipped off to China and turned into unagi. The creatures themselves hijacked my interests.
I went to grad school for science writing because I wanted to press pause on the day-to-day hustle of journalism, and wanted to take a class taught by the incredible writer and professor Sam Freedman. He made us all pitch book ideas, and at first I pitched an investigation on the American Eel, but he said no! So I was scrambling to find an idea that would meet his benchmark, and that’s when I heard about the story of Amelia the bluefin tuna. I got this spider sense, this feeling of intuition, that this was what I had to write about.
EB: Oh, that’s the best feeling. When you just know.
KP: I began to think about how maybe the bluefin was the way to tell all these stories at once—about capitalism, the commodification of animals, how much we don’t know about the ocean—to really get at this complex knot and pull out the individual threads. Anyway, that was six years ago. I had no idea how obsessed I’d become with bluefin tuna.
EB: [laughing] I actually wanted to ask if writing Kings of Their Own Ocean changed your relationship to fish specifically or animals in general in any way. I guess it did if you’re obsessed with bluefin tuna now?
KP: Hugely! It hugely changed how I think about the value of non-human life. Learning about the evolutionary history of the bluefin and how this fish is 55 to 65 million years old. It was spawning in the Mediterranean before the Mediterranean was even the Mediterranean. The bluefin represents the geological evolution of the earth in its body, and that body is perfectly engineered to live in the ocean. That echo across time leaves me in true awe… It’s truly awesome. And just the first time I saw a tuna that had just been caught—do you remember Lisa Frank?
EB: Yes, I loved Lisa Frank.
KP: Just seeing this fish in real life, its skin was shimmering with all these colors like a Lisa Frank drawing. There is this otherworldly rainbow to a tuna that when you see it in person… I was almost speechless the first time I saw one.
EB: Amazing.
KP: All these different worlds exist and we expect them to be what we need from them, but if you get past that and start thinking about what it would take to understand the tuna on its own terms—this has been the push behind the work I’ve been trying to do. It’s something I learned from a lot of my Indigenous sources. I’ve been lucky to spend time with them, learning about their relationship to the natural world, and the idea of respect and reciprocity. We are not separate from these creatures, they are us. You can try to cut yourself off from the reality of seeing a fish killed and sold at market, or you can stare right at it.
EB: Wow. I just got chills. That connects to what I wanted to ask about next, which is how, on the surface your book is about tuna, but it’s really about the people and their relationship with the tuna as well. How is it different for you writing about humans versus non-humans? Is there an overlap in your approach? Is your empathy cross-species?
KP: What a great question. So, my agent sold the rights to the book pretty quickly in Canada and the U.K., but struggled to sell the book to editors in the U.S. They didn’t understand the approach—they kept asking me who the book was for. And I realized that, in part, not everyone grew up fishing like I did with my dad, but even if you like fishing it doesn’t mean you are interested in the ocean. I even had editors say to me, “I don’t like eating fish, so why would I want to read this book?” There is such a disconnect between people and the natural world.
But Al Anderson was an incredible gift to me. I realized by understanding this one fisherman, by trying to bring the reader closer to the inner life of a human, trying to understand his motivations and why he’s obsessed with Atlantic bluefin tuna and their incredible biology and evolutionary history and how they spawn and everything, that maybe that can be a reader’s way in.
To be a fisherman you have to be able to think like the fish. You have to be able to drop under the ocean in your mind. You have to imagine yourself as both the hook and the fish. You have to be part of nature, but we are all nature, just different iterations.
EB: I love that visual of a fisherman dropping his mind under the ocean—I feel like you did that in your writing in this book, like you let your reader swim along the tuna. How did you pull that off? What are some of the biggest challenges—and rewards—of writing about a non-human like a tuna?
KP: Once of the first things I looked up was how much tuna can see. I wanted to understand their visual world, because as a creative nonfiction writer, I rely so much on what I see. I know that science is human and humans are fallible, so you can never know exactly what it is like to be a tuna, but I wanted to understand as much as I could. I also read about the decibels that tuna can hear. There is a lot of evidence that the sound of motorboats stress tuna out, and that will cause them to change their behaviors. I must say though that I am a notorious over-researcher—I am the kind of writer who writes 10,000 words and cuts 6,000 of them. It’s just my process. I need to know everything in order to write confidently about a topic. But it’s also my favorite part of this job, is getting to dedicate a few years of your life to becoming an expert. What a practical joy that is.
At a certain point, though, you have to throw yourself off the cliff and hope it’s enough. You can do your best, but perfection is the enemy of good. You have to accept that there will be some uncertainty. I can try my best to describe the life of a tuna, with good intentions, working my hardest, and I have to hope that’s enough and that it starts a conversation about animal existence and how it relates to human existence.
EB: I love how the reader gets glimpses of your own personal story throughout Kings of Their Own Ocean. When and why did you decide to do that?
KP: That was actually a late addition to the book. It came about because one of the pieces of feedback I kept getting was from people who didn’t understand fishing—they felt like there was something they weren’t being told. They were missing the context. So one day I sat down and wrote what eventually became the prologue—I tried to get at why I had become obsessed with these fish, and how I had lost my dad right when I discovered this man on the other side of the country who felt like he was speaking through time, who had something for me to learn. I realized my own obsession was part of the story, and it was a profound experience to give myself permission to exist in my own work. I was trained in traditional journalism, which is always after some sort of abstract objectivity. I had been taught to strip out what makes us human as reporters in our reported work. But I think what drew me to writing about the natural world is the idea that maybe we can do more integrated work, which I think is more hopeful and more constructive.
It was so uncomfortable! It was horrifying to write down! I felt so vulnerable. But ultimately including my own story made me more accountable to the final product.
EB: Who are some other writers that you admire who write nonfiction about non-humans?
KP: Sabrina Imbler! They were in conversation with me for my book launch in New York, and they are just so phenomenal. I also love Lizzie Stark on eggs, Liz Gilbert on lichen, Paige Williams on dinosaur bones, Gloria Dickie on bears, and Helen Macdonald on birds.
EB: Finally, who are the non-humans in your life right now?
KP: We have a one-year-old Golden Retriever named Tailer, who is currently looking up at me and asking for a walk. We also have a two-year-old foster cat named Pilot who lets me hold her like a baby, and seven orange-tailed guppies. And there is a rat who lives under our deck!