NYPL Researcher Spotlight: Seanan Forbes

This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library's collections for the development of their work.

Seanan Forbes (they/them) is currently crafting a queer young adult prequel to Romeo and Juliet. Forbes has worked extensively in many of the research divisions— including the Map Division—to better understand the Early Modern world where their characters act out their lives.

Constantly finding new connections between the materials they are utilizing from various divisions, Forbes's work truly embodies the following quote: “The essence of research is exploring unknown paths in order to make unexpected discoveries. It is in the nature of the Library to value and encourage the open-ended research of those winding paths” (Treasures of the New York Public Library, pp. x).

When did your interest in Shakespeare start?

Shakespeare’s been in my life for ages — ages, as in “the ages of a (hu)man”—at every stage of the play that is my life.

When I was eight years old, while the adults shared tedious grownup conversations,  a boy and I sat in a corner, where we read aloud—for ourselves alone—the ballroom scene from Romeo and Juliet, discovering its art, wit, and beauty as we read. A couple of years later, a neighbor—a British actor whose family had acted in the UK for centuries—decided to take me to see a Shakespearean performance: Romeo and Juliet. This was followed by a Q&A, during which said actor grilled me about how I perceived every element of stagecraft, each performance, and the play. Shakespeare was far less intimidating than the demand for deep analysis, but I later saw these questions as a lasting gift.

Shakespeare and trickster tales have taken me around the world, widening my mind to multicultural, multigenerational perspectives. As an actor, I was fortunate enough to study First Folio Shakespeare with John Basil, founder of the American Globe Theatre in New York City, and with physicist-turned-theatre-director Patrick Tucker in New York and London. Later, in Pula, Croatia, I worked with Japanese butoh dancer Katsura Kan and a cohort of Pan-Asian performers, bringing together butoh, puppetry, taiko drumming, and Shakespeare. Together, we taught and performed with a remarkable group of Croatian teenagers, some of whom went on to become professional performers. I’ve also gotten to workshop an all-female version of the Scottish play (They let my sex at birth outrank my gender identity to create the opportunity.), test my talents as Oberon, distill Shakespeare’s Queen Margaret into a fifteen-minute solo show, work with First Folio scripts in the formats that the original actors used, stand in the half-built Globe Theatre, binge the bard in Central Park and Stratford-upon-Avon, and learn—experientially, theoretically, and internationally—that Shakespeare can be fun.

For the story I am writing…. One day, I was in a kitchen, performing a serial task: washing bottles, stirring some simmering substance, doing the same thing over and over and over again. It was in this state—when the body is otherwise engaged and enough of the mind is otherwise disengaged to leave thoughts free for roaming—that it popped into my mind, like a fully grown Athena cramming herself back into Zeus’ head: Verona, two minor-characters-made into-major-players lovers, the whole of Shakespeare’s cast, a narrative arc, a subplot, and a setting and scaffolding that made it all make sense—a book.

What research tools could you not live without?

"Do books count? The 1610 Mercator atlas and 1596 Dante are anchors—for research, for me, and for a few people in the novel.

There are characters who would not exist were it not for curators and librarians. At this rate, the Library will be the book’s co-author. However, if we’re talking about physical objects and skirting the subject of people, then the answer is book snakes, of which I own a minor collection of various shapes and weights. Also book wedges, which the Library has in almost every room I’ve visited.

What’s the most unexpected item you encountered in your research?

The one that woke and humbled me was Gerardi Mercator’s 1610 Atlas Minor.

I was finding all sorts of resources related to the Renaissance and Early Modern Europe, for everything from sexuality to philosophy during that time frame. However,  I could not see the world: the one that the characters walked in or their wider worldview. As obstacles are measured, this one was Sisyphean. I had to get it up its hill and out of creativity’s way. I couldn’t do it alone, and the books I had weren’t helping. I needed better leverage.  

So, I wrote to the Maps Division and Ian Fowler, the Curator of Maps, History, and Government Information, recommended Gerardi Mercator’s 1610 Atlas Minor. The second I opened it, this atlas gave me ingress to my novel, and more than one new world to explore. It brought me into the world as the novel’s contemporaries saw it: this was literally the wide world they knew.

Much later came the beauty moment, when I perceived the book from three perspectives: as my researcher-writer self, as my protagonist, and as another player in the book who works in the book-making industry during the time frame when the Atlas Minor was made. 

There are other marvels, of equal and equally compelling stature, but this was the book that changed me, and the first one to reshape both the novel and some of the people in it.

What's the most interesting thing you've learned from a book recently?

Are you after an “Aha!” moment? There have been many.

My work is intersectional, international, intercultural, filled with acts of resistance, and almost entirely lodged in the worlds of adolescents. It has me poking my nerd-nose in different departments. Some researchers stay in one familiar section. Mine is a world of rabbit holes. It leads me all over the place. In itself, that brings marvelous and sometimes unexpected rewards.

Here are two interesting things that I learned in the Rare Book Division.

The languages spoken in Italy during the Early Modern period were not Italian as we know it. I understood that as a detached theory, but in the Rare Books reading room, theoretical knowledge came to immediate life. When I was reading the 1596 Commedia, I realized that a word I’d casually read had been different four hundred years ago from how it is today. To feel the modern studies, the novel-contemporary research, the way my mind worked, and that venerable volume come together and connect: that was transformative, another library-induced moment of silent “Yes!”

In the same room, a different day delivered a glorious book-geek instant. There were words printed in the margin of the 1596 Dante, toward the top of the page, next to a short straight line. I asked the Rare Books Librarian whether this was a  correction. “No,” he said. “That’s a shoulder note.” Then, he showed another librarian and me how the line leading from that text marked the passage that the note was explaining. After that moment, when I turned a page and saw a note in the margin—wherever it was on the page—I could find the text to which it referred. It was a new kind of map: one made of words and of book-making art.

Oh, and chain-lines. A librarian from the Map Division showed me those indentations—marks from where paper rested as it dried. That was followed by resources, links, and in-person guidance. Her teachings about printmaking changed the way I looked at books. Now, when I get nose-down and look at fine details in a book, I can appreciate where a woodblock was used on a page and where an engraving was used instead, and have a sense of why that choice was made. When the librarians in Rare Books build on that foundational knowledge, it feels as if this were as much a university as it is a library.

At one point, I was chasing the rabbit tail of tarot cards being used for education. The rabbit’s hole dropped me in Prints, which set a book before me. The book led to a 1492 edition of Dante, printed in Florence, which connected the tarot deck, which was important in one character’s life, to book-and art-obsessions that mattered to two others, and that turn of the tail led back to Rare Books and then to Maps. This happens often: what’s found or said in one department opens a new gateway to another.

Is there anything you'd like to tell someone looking to get started?

There are hiccoughs, as there always are, but this is one of the most disability-, gender-, and- accepting places I have worked on a creative project. Don’t let the marble fool you. This Library is anything but stodgy—and the lions (I promise.) don’t bite.

Imposter syndrome is a vile cognitive tunnel. Do not assume that your work isn’t good enough, isn’t a “right fit,” or isn’t worthy of being called research, or that NYPL is too prestigious for you to deserve space here. That counts for poets, visual artists, musicians, playwrights, dancers, and other creative people, as well as academic researchers. If you have work to do, and the Library’s resources would further your goals, then ask. You’ll have access to research librarians and the boundless knowledge that’s in this building (which is visibly and invisibly bigger than any of us knows) and its sibling sites, which include vast university libraries. It’s a feast. You deserve to dine.

Ask research librarians what might be pertinent in places you haven’t explored, and let them name the departments and libraries, and expand your range. If you’re working on a theatre project, then you might want to dive into the archives about vice and its regulation. There’s enough inspiration in those records to keep a rep company busy into the next century. If you’re conducting sociological research into the flow of people around a nation or the world, and you’re brow-deep in facts and numbers, connect with photography, and make those people real. If nothing else, it might refresh and inspire you, and spark ideas. That’s invaluable.

Be fearless about exploring possible connections between one realm of research and another. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Find the threads that no one else is touching, and follow where they lead. If it feeds your project, then it is purposeful. 

Questions thrive here. If you don’t know a resource, source, or expert, then write to the research divisions and ask whether you’re touching anybody’s field of interest, or whom they’d recommend you ask.

Keep learning to use the online system. There are layers within layers. Knowing when to use which menu (or menu options) can make all the difference. If your search feels futile, then the research librarians in Room 315 will draw on their seemingly bottomless wellsprings of patience and generosity, and show you multiple ways to hunt your questing beast. And if that beast is nowhere to be found, then they’ll help you find an equally wondrous, pertinent beast to track.

Describe your research routine.

I walk to and from the Library, going through Central Park or along the Hudson River walk. If I arrive before 9:00, then I go to SNFL (The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library) and write or read. I land on the Stephen A. Schwarzman steps at around 9:30, and spend half an hour going through notes, studying Italian or Latin, planning the day, caffeinating, and answering tourist’s questions.

After that, I visit research materials and period-appropriate books that I have requested in the various reading rooms. Each week, I’ve been viewing an atlas, a map, or a rare book. Thus far, a 1610 Mercator atlas and a 1596 volume of Dante’s Commedia from NYPL’s collection have added themselves to characters‘ shelves in the novel.

My smarter-than-I-am watch tells me I average thirty-six flights of stairs a day. The same flights of stairs, over and over, with questions and answers and books and more at every end.

The luxury of learning every possible thing about a culture full of teenagers is that the terrain is boundless. If it becomes glaringly apparent that I’m getting bogged down in violence and masculinity, then I can spend time studying popular culture or queer Renaissance studies—it’s all pertinent and everything is connected. Finding that freedom in your work means being able to give your brain breaks, stay on task, and spare yourself exhaustion.

Where is your favorite place to eat in the neighborhood?

The steps. There’s a cranny overlooking Beauty (the south-side fountain) where I like to perch. For some reason, Truth is usually more crowded. So I’m either between Truth and Fortitude the Lion or between Beauty and Patience the Lion, which is no bad place for an artist in any genre. I scarf down food and drink, and get back to the real meal—research—as fast as I can.

The baristas at Amy’s Bread in NYPL’s new gift shop at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building make a stellar double espresso. When you’re running out of fuel for focus, it’s a lifesaver.

Have we left anything out that you’d like to tell other researchers?

Recently, I started photographing “my” bookshelf: something I wish I’d done from the start. It would be rewarding to be able to look back and see the shifts, as books and themes move onto the shelf, off it, and sometimes back again, in new combinations. It would be like watching an intricate medieval tapestry slowly weave itself, with elements of the image revealing themselves part by part, one by one, a stationary story telling its own tale.