Doreen Cunningham is the author of Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales. She follows the migratory patterns of the bowhead whales but what did this adventure teach her about motherhood and the non-human?

Hi, I'm Dhruti Shah, and this is my podcast Have You Thought About. Thank you for joining us for Season Two. Now I'm a writer and I love to find out about what passions people are pursuing, and also what makes them tick. The podcast is for those who are at a reckoning and tired of being told you can just have this one focus only one thing that makes you you.

In each edition, I'm chatting with someone who breaks these lines and who's managed to fit things together in their life or profession that you might not think of as an obvious match. You're about to hear me chatting with Doreen Cunningham, author of Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales, and amazing nature memoir with a special focus on whales.

Journeys in the company of Whales came about. And also, as part of that, what is it about whales that you find so mesmerising?

Well, I think they're spectacular beings. And I grew up in Wales and then in the Channel Islands, I was an island child. So the sea was everywhere. There were things about my childhood that were difficult. And one of the things that my dad did; my mother suffered from depression basically; was take us to the sea a lot. He'd grown up mainly in Jersey - also whales in

My mum's Irish Catholic, she gave me a Children's Bible, very early included Old Testament, and there was the story of Jonah inside the whale, having a bit of a rough time. So bit of identification that there and how the whale sort of almost saved him from himself. So they were there. And they were, to be honest, much more spellbinding than any unicorn could ever be; these giant fantastical

With this particular book. It's a memoir, and you took a lot of risks, and you outlined them within the story to go on this journey. Is that also something that's been quite a significant part of how you think how you act? What happened?

Well, yes, I'm quite impulsive. And I am very stubborn. That's something that was told to me when I was very little. I like to call it persistent when applying for jobs. But there we go. What had happened was, I had become a single mum and I had basically fallen out of my life, I ended up in a hostel for single parents in Jersey with not really any way of seeing how I could get

When I worked for the BBC, I had travelled the world as a journalist, I had spoken to lots of people, I felt like I had agency. And although it was in this big structure, I had experienced a lot of benefits. But all that disappeared, because I wasn't well paid enough to pay for child care. The job kind of became unattainable. My experience meant nothing. And I had to find a new way of being in

And I was there for about a year I think becoming more and more depressed and frustrated and less able to imagine what kind of future I was going to be able to give my son. And also in a fairly conservative society, I really felt I was lacking in Jersey - it was held up to me every day there's a lot of wealth in Jersey, and I hadn't managed to provide him a home, managed to give him another

I was trying to work one night, he was asleep on the mattress beside me and I was there hunched over my laptop and I just had quite a bad day. And I decided to give myself a break. So I went and started to read about whales. And there's this one incredible David Attenborough clip that I still love to watch where he's there chatting on his little boat, and then a giant blue whale emerges out

This was one of the amazing experiences I had while working for the BBC. So I was reading about bowhead, and then just happened on an article about grey whales, which I didn't actually know anything about despite being a whale nerd because they're a little bit less charismatic than some whales outwardly. You know, they're not as big as blue whales. They're not as citing for tourists as humpbacks,

,They're just great and medium sized, a bit knobbly bit ugly. But what I discovered was that they do this incredible migration every year the mothers and carves by themselves from the birthing lagoons of Baja California in Mexico, all the way to the Arctic, to Arctic Alaska, where I had previously been.

And that's where they like to feed on the benthic bottom dwelling amphipods little crustaceans, that's their preferred food source. And when I read about this, I just felt absolutely called. Firstly, there was a reason to take Max my two year old because I read the in the birthing lagoons, the whales come up to the boats and bump them; the mums and babies together. And I was like, great, I can

And then yes, when I'd realised that they do this epic journey all the way back to the Arctic. That's really what called me. And from then on, it was involuntary. And as a producer, having produced and travelled around a lot, you know, organising a trip meant nothing to me, that was kind of second nature, I could do it without thinking about it, which was very good, really, because if I thought

But the thing is, Doreen, you didn't just think about it, you took that action? I mean, as you said, not everybody would do that. What is it that is inherently within you that thinks this is so important for my son, for the readers as well? Because that's the other thing, you then wrote about some quite vulnerable moments. Why? As a storyteller as Doreen, has it been so important for

That's a really interesting question. And I had never thought I would make it into a book, I hadn't actually realised it was particularly unusual thing to do until I started to write the book and had some conversations with editors, particularly this wonderful US editor I had - Valerie. I was lucky enough to have two editors, one in the UK and one in the US. And Valerie was

But I had been motivated to write the book from basically from seeing scientists crying on TV. So I worked in climate myself, before I got into journalism. I got into journalism, with very lofty hopes of being able to help start a conversation about science inform people about science, so that we can make informed decisions as communities going ahead. But obviously, that didn't happen in the

So I thought, well, if I look at my life in a certain way, it's all about climate, growing up on an island, that very intimate relationship with the natural world. My dad was a biologist and relationships where animals were forefront in my, in my childhood, they were my best friends. And I went from there, into learning about science. So I could weave in science. But then as you say, I

And when I say climate, I don't mean CO2 levels, because climate is in everything. Yes, the CO2 celebrity graphs do make an appearance once but the main issue is climate justice and colonialism and how colonial violence has shaped where we're heading now by separating people from their relationship with the land. And the impact it has on women and children and the most vulnerable indigenous

And picking up on that there is a lot of focus on language and indigenous terms and making sure that you're using, I guess, the appropriate terms. Why is that so important for you to have included that..

People who don't have enough to live on, and how really the only place I can look to - and this is a lesson that I drew, both from observing the whales during my journey and learning from them, but also from the experiences that were so generously given to me by my Inupiaq family, the Kaleak in Utqiaġvik in the Arctic years earlier, I just learned that community is everything. The Irish Times,

..it's not the only way. But to be honest, when I started writing the book, I thought, I don't know if I have the right to write about this culture that isn't mine. So I sought permission, I spoke to the family and I spoke to people in the community all the way along, and I got a lot of help. And I also very much stuck to my own story. I didn't delve into the story of

And another thing I felt was really important. Well, a couple of things, actually. One was that I was the most exposed all the way through, it wasn't fair to write anything about other people unless, you know, I was the one bearing all and kind of the most at risk really from book being published. And the other was that if there was Indigenous stories or knowledge that was in the book, I needed

So Julia will tell a story or Van who helped lead the whaling crew I was in is there talking about his views. And I'll never take something and just put it on the page abstractly. It belongs to someone. And as long as they're okay with me having them there on the page, then I think that that's good enough. And yes, I really wanted to focus on the language that I had been taught. So for

So I wanted to use words, which as you said, showed that ours isn't the only way of relating to the nonhuman world and with the bowhead whale, bowhead refers to the shape of the jaw bone. It's a whaling term - Balaena mysticetus - which is the scientific term which also appears in the book that implies a hierarchy of life based on the name classification of life. And agviq is the Inupiaq word

That relationship that you have with non human beings. Why is it so important for us to give due respect to the other creatures that we share this world with?

There's the obvious environmental argument, about biodiversity life and that we depend on them that if the ecosystems are heading for collapse, so are we. We are animal, we're not separate with part of that world. But there's a sort of wider one for me, which is that we all grew up together. We evolved together each into our little niches and we don't know what they know. So

You know, they have their own cultures, they have their own relationship to each other. And I suspect that whales live more in community. And when I was doing the grey whale journey, the strength that they gave me, first of all, in the birthing lagoons, where we first met and patted them, that was a place of slaughter, in the 1800s, those whales have recovered from extinction near extinction.

What I observed was that the mother whale was kind of checking out the boat and then the baby came up. And so there was a lot there about play about enjoying the moment about overcoming trauma. But grey whales have bigger behaviours, which are really interesting and which we can learn a lot from. I don't see the nonhuman just as victims in this whole story. I see them as our possible saviours,

ut there is one whale that I learned about who has been observed in the waters of Northern Puget Sound by an incredible biologist called John Calambokidis. And she has been nicknamed Earhart by researchers after Amelia Earhart. And what he and his team at Cascadia Research have observed Earhart doing is leading other whales to a new food source.

This is part of the way up migration route, they're feeding on ghost shrimp near the shore. And it's very risky for them to feed on the ghost shrimp, they have to go into the intertidal zone. So if they misjudged direction or timing, they could get stranded. They could be hit by boats, because they're close to shore. In fact, Earhart has been hit by a boat, she has scars, and there are higher

So if you look at all the stories that are held in the book in Soundings, there's the story of the oil industry, and of the birth of climate doubt or denial in the oil industry boardrooms when I was a child in Channel Islands, and that kind of grows throughout the book, when I'm a journalist, I'm meeting it with the deniers on air not really understanding what's going on, and propelled to the

Wow. You said earlier, you've come from a science background. You're an engineering graduate. You've been talking about climate change for such a long time. You're using the stories of the whales to help a lot of people understand as well. Something a little bit more relatable. But one thing I really want to find out more about is how do you cope with what can sometimes be the

Wow. I don't know if I can answer that. Dhruti

I need to think, I guess I just keep trying. I mean, when I was in the, in the newsroom, you know, questioning the fact that deniers were on air wondering why trying to talk to editors about it trying to get climb on air more. I kept asking questions. And that's what took me all the way to northern Alaska. There's no easy answer to that. But there are communities who are

That's fine.

It is a place where you can build community and where you can see that there are so many people around the world, working in different ways, in science, in community building in politics, to get different stories heard and to change our overall story. Seeing that helps me. And I also just try really hard to build community wherever I am.

I'm not a mother, who knows what's going to happen. But having read the book, it made such an impression on me. And when I recommend it to people, I don't just recommend it to mothers, I recommend it to a much wider audience. Understanding that you have gone on a journey, we the memoir, does talk a lot about motherhood. And it does talk about not just your motherhood, but also the

I very much hope so. And I'm really happy to hear that. Because it's not just about motherhood. One of the difficult things about the book is that it's travel. It's memoir. It's science or popular science and a bit of nature writing. But I never wrote it to be one of those things. And in a lot of the memoir, I'm not a mother, you know, the main love story takes place when I'm

in a way my hopes and fears and everything extended my own lifetime, I was no longer the star of my own stor

Somebody else was. And it enabled me to reach out kind of as a human mammal to these other communities and see how they were coping with it because I was not coping with it. Well, I didn't have a good relationship with my own mum, a part of the book is about overcoming trauma in the maitre lineal line in my Irish family, which is also a colonised culture. And I had to learn I had to find a way of

Journeys in the company of Whales. Do you have an interdisciplinary life because I would love to hear from you and maybe we can chat on this podcast that goes with my newsletter, which is called Have You Thought About and can be found via www.dhrutishah.com. Please join me next time for a fun conversation with another guest who