Episode 19: The Teacher As Writer with Phaedra Hise
How to reach Phaedra Hise:
Phaedra’s business: Streetlight Data
Twitter
Books written by Phaedra:
Pilot Error: The Anatomy of a Plane Crash
Entrepreneur America: Lessons from Inside Rob Ryan's High-Tech Start-Up Boot Camp
Transcripts:
(Transcription by kayla.r.fainer@gmail.com)
Melissa Milner 00:09
Hi, this is Melissa Milner. Welcome to The Teacher As... podcast. The goal of this weekly podcast is to help you explore your passions and learn from others in education and beyond to better your teaching. The Teacher As... will highlight uncommon parallels to teaching, as well as share practical ideas for the classroom.
In this episode, I talk with Phaedra Hise. Since she's a fantastic writer, I will quote directly from the About section of her LinkedIn profile. It reads, "Phaedra is an award winning writer, editor and author. She loves creating smart stories for high level readers with diverse interests. I came to know Phaedra through my husband who worked with her in loyalty marketing.
In this interview, Phaedra shares the purpose of any piece of writing and the skills involved in her work. After talking to Phaedra, I had a renewed sense of urgency to inspire all my students in the area of writing. Enjoy The Teacher As... Writer.
Welcome to The Teacher As..., Phaedra. What would you like people listening to know about you?
Phaedra Hise 01:11
I am very passionate about what I do no matter what it is. I just have a lot of energy and excitement for all the things that I do. I'm lucky that I get to do what I love. And I really enjoy it.
Melissa Milner 01:24
So tell us, what do you do?
Phaedra Hise 01:26
Yeah, so I'm super excited to have a job that's easy to describe to a five year old. That moment when the little kid says, so what's your job? And you have to try to explain it. And I can just say, I'm a writer. And that's a super easy answer. Of course, it is more complicated than that. I do writing. I do editing. And at the moment, I do that all in the context of content marketing for a high tech company that creates analytics for transportation, which I would not be able to explain to a five-year-old.
But because it's working with words all day long, it is still writing and editing, and I just absolutely love it. I'm sort of the grammar police at my company, which plays into my bossy tendencies. And I basically create all the copy that we have on our website, that we send out as emails for social media. So that includes case studies, white papers, blog posts, videos, webinars, and I'm sure I'm leaving a few things out. It's a lot.
Melissa Milner 02:31
That's pretty impressive. And you said you're enjoying it?
Phaedra Hise 02:35
I love it. I absolutely love it. I'm really happy. And I've done this with a couple of different companies. I'm really happy working with businesses, especially when they do something that's kind of complicated, complex, hard to understand. And I'm basically the translator who helps interpret that for a wider audience.
It's one thing that I did with LoyaltyOne, which is a big company in consumer analytics for retailers where they sort of track your purchasing history and use that information. And now I'm doing it with this company in transportation analytics. And it's just so much fun to find out where the meaning is in a very technical complicated topic and why that should be interesting to someone who may not even realize that it has importance in their life. So I love working with super smart people who are doing interesting things.
Melissa Milner 03:29
That is, I would say, one of the closest parallels I've heard in an interview so far.
Phaedra Hise 03:37
Oh, to teaching? Oh, yeah. Okay, great.
Melissa Milner 03:39
So you know, we have content that we have to teach, and we have to break it down. We have to decide what's the most essential. We have to figure out how to make it accessible to the students in front of us. And everything you just said, I was just nodding my head.
Phaedra Hise 03:59
Yeah, absolutely. And I think of it as an interpreter, but the fact is, it is teaching. And it's that classic combination of educating and entertaining at the same time, because you have to capture someone's attention. And my background is in journalism. So my first journalist job was at Inc. Magazine.
And then I spent a long time in business writing, where I was at The Wall Street Journal, I was at Fortune for a while. I wrote several business books. And the way that I think of it is, you're trained as a journalist to think of who your audience is. So who am I talking to? And why is it really important that they absorb what I want to tell them? And when you're in journalism, you're also trying to grab someone's attention from the newsstand.
Because in the world of magazines, where I learned how to do this, you're sitting next to a bajillion other magazines. And you have to really jump out at them and capture their attention and then hold them through the entire story. So yeah, now that you say that, I absolutely see the parallels I didn't see before. But I'm sure you do the same thing as a teacher.
Melissa Milner 05:05
Absolutely. So when you were in school, were you inspired by teachers to do this kind of writing? Or did you have a teacher say, wow, you have a talent here?
Phaedra Hise 05:17
Oh, good question. No, the actual story is, and I remember this moment so clearly, I was four or five years old. And my mother was reading a book. And I just loved when she would read to me, anyone would read to me actually.
And I asked her where the book came from. And she said, well, what do you mean? And I said, well, who made this? And she said, well, a write. And I was like, boom, done. That's absolutely where I want to spend my life.
Melissa Milner 05:45
Oh, wow.
Phaedra Hise 05:46
So I went through-- I would love to say that I had that one teacher who really inspired and encouraged me. But sadly, I went to schools in east Tennessee, where actually, my Physics teacher inspired me more than my English teacher. My Physics teacher was amazing, which probably kindled my interest in technical, scientific leaning topics. My English teachers were not super inspiring.
I studied literature in college. I didn't study Journalism. And that subject matter was really inspiring to me, because I got to study beautiful writing, lots of different kinds of writing, that I wouldn't have gotten to study if I had gone into Journalism. The physics teacher inspired me, actually, now that we're making these parallels, because he actually did the same thing that I do now. He made a very technical subject matter fascinating, because he told really good stories. He had a great sense of humor, and he would give us homework.
I remember, I went to school in east Tennessee. And he gave us some homework where we had to calculate the trajectory of a sail opossum. And a sail possum is basically roadkill that's been run over so many times and dried up and flat. You can treat it like a frisbee, and you just toss it. And he was like, okay, if a sail opossum is at this altitude, and it's got this speed and this acceleration, how far is it gonna go?
He gave us a bathroom scale homework. We had our bathroom scales, and we had to go to a certain elevator in a certain building downtown. And we had to mark how our weight changed, and then calculate the amount of G forces that that elevator was creating.
Melissa Milner 07:24
Cool!
Phaedra Hise 07:25
So it was really great storytelling that connected us, in a meaningful way, to a subject matter that can be very esoteric and hard to relate to for a high school kid. And he just pulled us all over with his ability to make that gripping for us.
Melissa Milner 07:43
That's amazing. So I happen to know that you worked with Matt Paxton, who has already been on The Teacher As... Can you tell us about that whole project?
Phaedra Hise 07:52
Oh, yeah. Matt is fabulous. Matt is one of my favorite human beings on the planet. We've been friends for a long time, golly, maybe 15 years. Matt and I found each other one day because we both live in Richmond, Virginia.
And I was doing a panel discussion where several journalists in the area were talking about, how do you get publicity for your company? How do you generate media interest in your company? So it was for small business owners in the area. And I was there representing the national media, there were local media people. And I, at the time, was with Fortune. And so I was saying, so here's what you need to do.
And I watched the video later, I was really mean. Because I was really jaded, and I was getting all these pitches all the time. And so I was basically saying, don't send me this boring PR pitch, don't email me. Send me a note or email me and invite me to lunch, because I love food. And I will tell you what restaurant I want to go to, and then you'll have me for an hour. And I was like, but I'm bored by so many of the pitches that I get. Don't even bother basically.
And Matt, God love him, was the only person who had the guts to come up and talk to me afterwards. He's like, hey, I have this company where I clean up hoarding stuff, and I'd love to chat with you. So I was like, yeah, that's fascinating. And we had set up an appointment. He was buying me coffee. We were gonna chat about his company.
The day before, I got a phone call that Fortune Small Business, which is who I was writing for, was closing their doors. So suddenly, I was out of a job. And I showed up at the coffee, and I said, so hey, my magazine shut down. But I'm also writing for The Wall Street Journal, so let me chat with you about that. I did end up writing that story for The Wall Street Journal.
But Matt said, what I really want to do is write a book. So I had already written three or four business books. So I had an agent, and I was like, yes, absolutely. When he started talking to me about what he does with hoarders, it was clear to me that what Matt did-- I'm gonna make another parallel, just because you're inspiring me with your good questions.
He wasn't just cleaning up. He was working with hoarders to overcome some psychological-- he had identified some psychological challenges. And so it was education for him. I spent a lot of time with him going to hoards and watching him work with people. He would educate them on, let's talk about where this maybe comes from. Let's just chat casually about your history. Oh, wow, your mother died. That must have been really upsetting. And so these are all of your mother's things, it must be really hard for you to let go of this. So he'd really coach them through the psychology of it.
And I was like, absolutely, this is a book. And so he and I worked on a book together that profiled a handful of some of the most interesting people he had worked with. And it was great. We went to auction with the book, which was super exciting. When you go to auction, it means several publishers want it and there's a bidding war. So I'm on the phone with the agent, and it was so really crazy.
So we got an advance, a big advance. But the catch was they wanted the book super fast. So we wrote that book in three months.
Melissa Milner 11:17
It is so well written. And again, like you said, the stories you guys chose, it was just perfect.
Phaedra Hise 11:25
Thank you. We chose a variety of people to represent different aspects of hoarding. And he was working at the same time. So we had this crazy-- I had a calendar blocked out where I was like, we will do a chapter a week, I think, is basically what we did. And we had a system where I would get up in the morning.
I was a single parent at the time. I had a child in school. So I would get up early and work a little bit, write a little bit. And then I'd get her off to school. And then I'd write like crazy. And she would get out of school at 3:30. At about 2:00, I would call him, wherever he was. And we'd spend half an hour to an hour chatting about the next day's material. And I would basically interview him about the next day's material. And then the next day, I'd get up and write that.
And then at the end of the week, I would send everything to him for review. And we just hit it hard day after day after day. And we met the deadline. I think the deadline was October 1st, and I sent it at like 5PM on October 1st.
Melissa Milner 12:22
So I'm hearing this, and I'm thinking, what skills and qualities did you have to be able to take this information from an interview and crank out-- I've read these chapters, the chapters really read so smoothly. And they're such an easy, pleasant read.
Phaedra Hise 12:42
Thank you.
Melissa Milner 12:43
It's just so well done. What skills and qualities were you able to utilize?
Phaedra Hise 12:48
Yeah, a couple of different ones. One is I had to build a really good working relationship with Matt. And that was a little challenging, because Matt will tell you himself, he is all over the place. He's ADD, he jumps all around. His brain is not linear. And of course, he has a million things going on. And so he's easily distracted and pulled in a lot of directions.
But we had a structure that we had to fit into basically. So I had to liaison between Matt and that structure and make sure we kind of stayed on track. So that was kind of a project management skill that I had to have. And then, of course, discipline, lots of discipline, which when you're a freelance writer, a deadline is your discipline.
And I know a lot of writers who love to write, and they will write just for the love of writing. I've never been that writer. I always wanted to do it flat out for a living. And so I only write when I have a deadline and a paycheck at the end of it.
Melissa Milner 13:48
Wow, that's so interesting.
Phaedra Hise 13:51
Because it's my job. It's what I wanted to do as a job job. So the discipline to meet those deadlines, and the deadlines were insane, and to do that productivity. And then the other thing is the empathy to connect. I told Matt to connect with the people who suffer from hoarding. I told Matt that I was the perfect person to write his book, because I went into it as sort of a minimalist neat freak.
And so I went into it completely horrified by this disorder and how it manifests itself in hoarding, especially after going on some of the hoards with him. And so I was basically his reader, who was intended to be maybe a family member or even a professional who comes across this in their work, who find someone living in a hoard with this disorder and has to find a way to deal with it.
Of course, my first instinct is, throw all this crap away. We're just gonna clean it all up. But you can't do that. And Matt taught me that you can't do that. And so I had to, again, going back to my metaphor of translating, I had to translate that for an audience that just like me, just wanted to throw all the crap away. So I had to be able to channel that empathy that Matt is so good with.
Melissa Milner 15:08
Yeah. So your work now, you mentioned again, just being able to break down something and make it relatable to your audience. What other skills and qualities do you need for the job you're doing now?
Phaedra Hise 15:19
So one of the skills that I need now that I didn't need as a freelance writer is I need the skill of fitting into a business community in business context. And sometimes that means using the latest buzzwords and conversation or at least understanding what they mean, being able to communicate with an executive level person at the company in a meaningful way. So talking about business strategy, and talking about how what I do relates to business strategy. And listening to an executive talk about business strategy, and then connecting to that with the work that I'm doing, finding a way to connect with that.
Because at the end of the day, what I do right now, actually what any writer does, I guess, is just about driving revenue, really. Because if you think about it, even with the book, when you write a book proposal, and the publisher buys that, it's a business proposition. You have convinced them that they will be able to pay you in advance, and then they're going to sell enough books that they will earn out that advance. They will earn back the money that they've paid you to write that book.
So you're trying to make money. You are really trying to sell that book and make sure that people buy it. I'm doing the same thing. I am trying to not sell something necessarily. Because what I'm trying to do is generate interest in what I've written, so much so that you'll give me your email address. That's content marketing, lead generation.
So I have to make what I create so compelling that you're like, I have to have that. Okay, here's my email address. I know you're going to send me a follow up email. That's annoying, but I'm going to do it anyway. Because what you're offering me is so great, I have to have it.
Melissa Milner 17:02
And is this wording or style and pictures? Like what do you think helps with that?
Phaedra Hise 17:10
It's less about the structure of the piece of content. And it's more about what we call the value proposition. So it's basically the same as writing a book. Where in the very beginning, you make a deal with the reader. And this is why that opening sentence, that opening paragraph, that opening chapter of anything you write has to be so good, so gripping, have a great hook in it.
Because the contract that you're entering into with the reader is, trust me, stick with me. If you stick with me all the way through this journey of what you're reading that I've given you, you'll be happy at the end of it. You'll walk away entertained, and you will have learned something. That is the basic premise of any piece of writing, whether it's a piece of journalism in a newspaper or a piece of marketing copy. So I have to make what this concept is so fascinating.
So for example, I'm writing for a transportation planner. And this transportation planner is really interested in closing certain streets in their city during the pandemic so that people can be on bicycles more, and the cars won't be there to scare them. It's more of a park atmosphere. We're going to close these streets temporarily to invite more cyclists and pedestrians.
So I have to write a piece that says, you want to do that, I get that. But you don't have the right analytics to understand which streets are the best ones to close. And we have a case study here that tells you that Minneapolis used our metrics, and they identified the best streets to close that attracted a lot of cyclists and pedestrians who enjoyed that street, but also did not disrupt the traffic flow through Minneapolis. Isn't that cool? Wouldn't you like to learn more? Give me your email address, and I'll tell you.
Melissa Milner 18:51
That's awesome. But you don't give everything. You give a little bit. That's like at the beginning of a lesson! I'm going to tell you a little bit, and then I'm going to send you off to discover it.
Phaedra Hise 19:04
Right. you're making a deal with your students in the same way. Like, okay, hey, here's what we're gonna learn about today. It's pretty cool. By the end of the day, you may know this other thing or by the end of my class, you're going to know this other thing or these three things. And it's going to be really awesome. Stick with me all the way through these 12 sessions we're going to do for this class, and you'll get the little payoff at the end.
Melissa Milner 19:25
What work are you zooming in on right now?
[ZOOMING IN SOUNDBITE]
Phaedra Hise 19:31
Right now, that's a great question. So we're doing a couple of things that are really fascinating to me. They're a little technical, but I will try to employ my skill of making them interesting for someone who's not a transportation specialist. They're interesting to me because they affect the environment.
The first one is we do an annual research report on the top 100 largest cities in the country and how they rank according to transportation emissions. And this is really important, because transportation emissions are the number one contributor to greenhouse gas in the world, in the United States. I think in the world. Definitely in the United States, I think in the world. And so if we can make a meaningful decrease in transportation emissions, we can really affect greenhouse gas build up.
So we rank these cities, and we rank them by several different factors, including how many people ride bikes to work versus driving to work? How many people take transit? And when people do drive in this city, how far do they drive? What's the average trip distance that they're making? Are they taking a pretty direct route to their destination? Or are they kind of meandering a little bit because the road layout's not that efficient?
So different factors like that, our database, which is an amazing database, has all that information. So we're running a big analysis where every year we rank those cities, and we basically give a little 'atta boy to the top cities and hope that they inspire the rest. And we do a very, very gentle, encouraging type of shaming for the bottom cities. It's a you can do it, you can get better. So that's super exciting and meaningful for me.
We also do a lot of research that we share on bicycle analytics, which is a subject near and dear to my heart, because I'm an avid cyclist. When we all work in offices again one day, I was before and I will again ride my bike to work. So I'm always excited when we're doing a bike safety report, or some sort of report that helps people enjoy cycling more.
Melissa Milner 21:33
I didn't even know this was a thing you could do.
Phaedra Hise 21:38
I didn't either!
Melissa Milner 21:40
It's so specific, right?
Phaedra Hise 21:42
Right. I was recruited for this job. I didn't even know it existed until I got the call from the recruiter. I was like, wait, they do what, again? It's fascinating.
Melissa Milner 21:53
In all the work you've done, what's your proudest moment?
Phaedra Hise 21:55
I've been lucky enough to have several proudest moments. Becoming an editor of a magazine was a huge moment for me, because I always wanted to work in magazines versus working in books or newspapers. I have to say, even eclipsing that, being on television was also exciting. A couple of times I've been on TV to be interviewed about different things I've written.
But before all that, my proudest moment was when my first book came out. And it's a classic proud moment for a writer. But this book in particular, and it was a book that was written when the internet was first getting big. And I was at Inc. Magazine at the time on staff.
And I'd written a book about growing your business online, how small businesses can compete with larger businesses in the digital world. Because you can't tell if you're big or small, just make a pretty website and you look big, which was a pretty radical concept at the time. And I wrote that book.
This is how I knew I could do the book with Matt Paxton. Because I wrote that book on maternity leave. And I wrote it in three months and just banged it out. And it came out, and I just was like-- I don't even remember if I cried. I probably did.
Because I knew I'd wanted to be a writer since I was five years old. And holding a book in your hand that you've written that a mainstream publisher believed in and brought out, it just blew me away that I had done that. I was just like, okay, I can die now. I've done it. I'm happy.
Melissa Milner 23:25
That's an amazing accomplishment. What was the name? What was the title of the book?
Phaedra Hise 23:29
Growing Your Business Online. It's out of print now, of course, because it's all obsolete. But at the time, it was really cutting edge.
Melissa Milner 23:38
All right, here's the hardest question. You ready? What is your favorite movie, and why?
Phaedra Hise 23:43
What is my favorite movie, and why? You know, that's such a hard question. Because at any given moment, there are five or six that I love. One that I really love is The Right Stuff, which is the film about the astronauts first going to the moon. And I love it for several different reasons.
One is, it's a great movie. It's just a great movie on its own. It's got a lot of drama. It's got a lot of tension. The acting is amazing. The writing is amazing.
Number two, it's based on a book, and it doesn't disappoint. That is so incredibly rare for me. Because I devour a book, and then when they make a movie, it's a different genre. Necessarily, they have to streamline, and it's never quite the same. But this one really does an amazing job.
And then finally, it's just the backstory for me is really meaningful. Because it was written by Tom Wolfe, and Tom Wolfe started life as a journalist. And this was a piece of nonfiction. Tom Wolfe has since obviously morphed into a novelist, and he's brilliant. And so he inspires me as a nonfiction writer. He's just so good at it.
And this was an amazing piece of reporting that he did, and it's aviation. And I have a pilot's license. I spent a long time flying. I used to have an airplane. My dad taught me to fly. And so anything airplane related, I'm gonna inherently enjoy.
Melissa Milner 25:00
Okay, I might be interviewing you again for The Teacher As... Pilot. Because there's obviously parallels there, as well.
Phaedra Hise 25:09
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Melissa Milner 25:11
Thank you so much, Phaedra, for joining me on this interview and talking to me about the amazing work you do. But also, I think it's pretty inspiring to hear our young writers that we work with, and where they might end up, and what they might end up doing, and we need to give them those skills.
Phaedra Hise 25:28
Yeah, definitely. I encourage more people to go into writing. If you love to ask questions and play with words, it's just a dream job.
Melissa Milner 25:37
If you enjoyed this episode, and have not done so already, please hit the subscribe button for The Teacher As... podcast so you can get future episodes. I would love for you to leave a review and a rating, as well, if you have time. For my blog, transcripts of this episode and links to any resources mentioned, visit my website at www.theteacheras.com. You can reach me on Twitter and Instagram @melissabmilner. And I hope you check out The Teacher As... Facebook page for episode updates.
I am sending a special thanks to Linda and Lester Fleishman, my mom and dad, for being so supportive. They are the voices you hear in the Zooming In soundbite. And my dad composed and performed the background music you are listening to right now. My intro music was "Upbeat Party" by Scott Holmes.
So what are you zooming in on? I would love to hear from you. My hope is that we all share what we are doing in the classroom in order to teach, remind, affirm and inspire each other. Thanks for listening. And that's a wrap!