In Nana Visitor’s new book, Open a Channel — The Women of Star Trek, she weaves together tales from women of every incarnation of Star Trek into a rich tapestry of trials and triumphs. By centering both the characters and the unique women behind the roles, Visitor explores both the history of women characters in Star Trek, and even more deeply the experiences of the women who brought them to life throughout decades of Hollywood and how each era shaped the women who worked and lived through them.
 
We were lucky enough to get a chance to sit down with Visitor — who of course portrayed Kira Nerys on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — to talk about the extraordinary experiences she had creating this work and what she learned along the way.
 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TREKCORE: Let’s start from the beginning. Where did the idea come from, and how did you decide to take on such a big challenge? It’s a really big scope, almost 60 years of Star Trek.

NANA VISITOR: I have to tell you, I spent most of the time overwhelmed going, “I don’t know where to start or keep going,” you know, it was so much. Ben Robinson thought that having a book on the women of Star Trek was a really strong and timely idea, and he came to me and said, “Would you write it? It doesn’t make sense for a man to write this.”

And it was originally going to be a page each of all the women, the actors, what they represented, who they were, maybe some kind of representation of them artistically on the other page. And as I started to think about it, and it was mostly, I guess, subconscious, this desire to go, “Wait a minute, what about — ” To his credit, he let me go. It wasn’t the book that it started out to be.

It was supposed to be really what you think of a coffee table book being, but as I started to think about our lives, the decades we were in, what we dealt with as we were projecting this hopeful future, it seemed I couldn’t see another way to put it down. I thought that was really, really important to say.

TREKCORE: You brought more of a depth to it, right? Because they’re not just  characters on a page, there’s deeper issues at play here.

VISITOR: And that’s why Ben was brilliant to go, “I’m not writing this. I need a woman to do this.” And he trusted me with it.

TREKCORE: You’re doing work as a historian too, a deeper history. One of my favorite interviews in the book is the section with the Original Series guest stars. You’re chronicling not just Star Trek history, but what it was like in Hollywood in general during that time, and you could see the progression of where we were to where we are. What what was it like being a historian in that way?

VISITOR: I talk about being caught in amber, you know, so much of my thinking was what the culture was at the time that I entered society. I was deeply affected by it and made accommodations for it so that I didn’t even know certain things that were affecting me and my thoughts and the way I lived my life. So I became aware of that in the people that I interviewed.

I started off thinking, “Everyone’s gonna protect the franchise.” And I certainly wasn’t looking for anyone to blame. I just wanted to know how it was. Because men are affected by the cultural norms and boxes that they’re put in too. But I realized it wasn’t that at all. Some women I saw go, “Wait a minute. Yeah. What? What did I used to think?” And the phrase, “That’s just the way it was,” which is sort of a hopeless phrase, you know?

What I came away with is we must talk. [laughs] We need to open a channel and have these conversations so that we help lift ourselves out of these ruts of constant pattern thought given to us by somebody else.

TREKCORE: You tell a lot of great anecdotes about your own experiences in this book — like when you were little and your mother would pull your hair putting your hair in rollers, saying “You have to suffer to be beautiful.”

That one really struck me because it reminded me so strongly of my own mother who would do the exact same thing. I had to have the rollers in and she would say, “It’s the cost of beauty.” Those were just the things that we grew up with; our moms were both perpetrators and victims of these things.

VISITOR: Because they’re passing down the way it works. And that made sense. You know, President Kennedy gave such a confusing speech for women saying, “Now we need you in the workforce, we welcome you in the workforce, once, basically, you do all your stuff at home.” What? And that was a big lesson of the time. It’s like the Enjoli woman, you know? “I can bring home the bacon, cook it up in a pan, and never let you—

TREKCORE and VISITOR: — “forget you’re a man.”

VISITOR: Yeah. [laughs]. So it’s all about him.

TREKCORE: Oh, yeah. I had that memorized too, as a young girl.

VISITOR: I used to strut around to that song, not even understanding I’m being programmed. And our mothers too, and that generation, I mean, they got it from all sides. As we do right now, in 10 years’ time, I’ll understand what culture is working on me at the moment. Right now, I’m sure I can’t see it.

But the media, the TV, that was so important at the time had these messages of how you’re supposed to look, how you’re supposed to behave, what will get you a man. The all-important thing. There was a lot to consider and a lot to juggle.

TREKCORE: One thing I was struck by how kind you were to everyone in the retelling of these stories. You seem to respect how complicated people are; there isn’t always a hero and a villain in a lot of these tales. How does that perspective inform what you think we should take from these kinds of stories?

VISITOR: Understanding that we don’t know where someone comes from and what they’ve been through, and what deals they’ve made with themselves to move forward, that’s important. So leading with compassion always seems to be a start at the basis of: “you are human”. They are human, so let’s go from there.

I have to say, I was so impressed with Brannon Braga because he did a really long interview with me — he had no idea how I was gonna write this book or how I was going to bring that narrative in, if I was looking for enemies to blame, and he was so forthcoming and so thoughtful. There is an activist who says, “Don’t call people out, call people in.” And I think that that’s one of the best things that I can do, is to explain how I got the way I was.

What you rob of a woman when you make her aware of sexuality when it’s not what we’re talking about at the moment. When it’s a workplace, how that hijacks her brain. I don’t think men know that.

TREKCORE: Right. It’s just not their lived experience — they might not think in those terms, and that’s part of it. And talking about Braga in particular, there was one thing in the book that really took me aback.

Talking about how when Enterprise came on the air how the thought was, “Oh, we did the woman thing with Voyager. We’re done with that.” [laughs] Like, “We solved sexism, we’re done. Good job, everyone. Now we can do what we wanna do”..

VISITOR: Isn’t that a lesson? That made me realize you must not ever think the work is done. We slide so fast. We have to keep things at the forefront.

TREKCORE: How do you think we help them along — people in power in particular — go from just paying lip service to it to truly changing things?

VISITOR: Well, then I’ll go to Mike McMahan, who said, “If you love a system, keep questioning it. Don’t just go, ‘That’s just the way it is.'” Things will change when women are all through the hierarchy of power, not just at certain levels — and leaders, both men and women who give voice to the people that they’re working with. Cooperation.

I mean, patriarchy doesn’t seem to work so well, but neither does matriarchy. It’s not about that. It’s about leaders who understand that it’s a system. When something is true for the smallest thing, it’s true for the biggest thing, and our bodies rely on all the systems of our bodies being healthy and working together.

A well-oiled machine and that means everything is being cared for and listened to and worked with. So I think to me, that seems to be an answer. And it’s not about taking power away, it’s about hearing voices and hearing what needs to be done.

TREKCORE: Reading the sections about the women in the newer shows was like a healing balm after reading some of the experiences of the other generations of women — and if we could talk about the word “fuckable” for a little bit, which, you know, it’s a haunting word.

Reading that Melissa Navia hadn’t heard that word till she heard it on television, and that Jess Bush said no one would ever say that to her. This was so wonderful to hear.

VISITOR: I was thrilled to hear that.

TREKCORE: How did that feel talking to these women?

VISITOR: It felt thrilling. It was, of course, later in the whole process. And so when I asked this question — and I asked the question to most women because of my personal experience and they were like, “Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, well.” And then finally, to get to these young women who were looking at me like I had three eyes, it was a sigh of relief.

TREKCORE: I really enjoyed reading about was your early life and your early career before Star Trek — how you had to stereotype yourself and put yourself into these boxes. What did it feel like to focus, to reflect on that part of your life through this lens, your experiences as a girl, and a young woman?

VISITOR: I recommend it to everybody. To look back, and really think about it, and write about it, and think about yourself in terms of a larger system. It was upsetting, and I went through very hard times looking at myself hard. I mean, I had to do some reading to catch up on feminism, on what young women were thinking, on what the realities of bias were. And that was shocking.

If you wanna get shocked, read The End of Bias: A Beginning by Jessica Nordell. It opened my eyes and it made me aware of unconscious bias where I would go, “No, what? I don’t think that way at all.” And then you look deeper and there’s some cleaning up to do. I found that with myself, and it was hard to look so honestly at myself. It was upsetting, but certainly, it caused a big shift in me.

TREKCORE: Did you read these books specifically as research for this book?

VISITOR: Yes, but I didn’t know that I would be doing that. I didn’t sit there and go, “Okay, so I’m gonna research, I’m gonna do this.” I would do an interview, and my interviews were horrible to start with. [laughs] I wouldn’t stop talking. I was leading. I didn’t know how to do it. I learned that by watching them — and I learned when I would interview a woman and get stuck and go, “I don’t know what her experience is. I don’t understand this.”

Like with the guest stars, so like this behavior, they’re just shutting me down. They don’t want to answer. And then I did a look at the history of the time, and I went, “Ah, no, they’re not shutting me down.” This is the way they learned to be women. And this is the way the culture of the time taught them they needed to be. And then I’d talk to somebody else and go, “Oh my God, I don’t know enough about this.”

I’d stop and read and just educate myself with endless books, endless looking at history. There was, it was probably a week that I just went down a rabbit hole of 1960s and ’70s old commercials. I could have just done a section on that. It’s really shocking. And magazines. And then I went down a rabbit hole of popular music and what the messages were.

This is something, you know, we’re shopping and we’re listening to this music. The words are forming patterns in our heads without our awareness. If we’re aware, if we go, “Oh, wow that’s an interesting thing to be singing about,” it lifts us out of that rut. But if we’re not aware, that’s why we need to talk.

TREKCORE: “Open a Channel.”

VISITOR: Exactly.

TREKCORE: How did you come up with that title? When did you realize that was what this book was about?

VISITOR: I had this moment with astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti who is just a remarkable human. I was in Germany at ISA, and I had the opportunity to talk to her while she was on the space station — she really got a lot of encouragement from Star Trek to become an astronaut, an engineer, and everything else that she does. And while I was talking to her, I watched her bounce her way to the camera to talk to me. I was an actor on a set of a space station and this child watched that, got inspiration, now she’s in space and I’m talking to her and saying, “Hi, Samantha. It’s so good to see you again.” My brain did back flips. It was so huge and overwhelming.

And then I came home, and I went to lunch with Brian Fuller. And I was telling him about my experience, and I was telling him about my struggles with the book and I told him: “They said, “Open a channel.” That was my line. This was for real.” He said, “That’s the title of your book.”

Had the honor to interview astronaut Samantha Christoforetti today for A Woman’s Trek- what an extraordinary human @AstroSamantha pic.twitter.com/r9haJySCDa

— Nana Visitor (@NanaVisitor) February 12, 2022

TREKCORE: I want to ask you about the power of saying things out loud.

VISITOR: That’s huge.

TREKCORE: Yes — and this book is full of people retelling traumatic events, from little “t” trauma to the brave retelling your own personal trauma with a capital “T.” How do you view the importance of recounting these things that we usually try to avoid talking about directly?

VISITOR: I recently did a TEDx talk at Space Force. And I had young women and men come up to me and be in tears and say, “Thank you.” You know, France is going through this moment and it’s kind of wonderful. There’s this famous trial going on about rape and they are saying the shame is on the wrong person. It’s not ours, it’s theirs.

And to realize that we have shame about it, but it’s human. This is human experience. My mother would always say something, great: “If it happened, you can talk about it.” I’ve noticed is how it takes shame away from somebody else and keeping it in this dark place.

The moment you start talking about it, it absolutely sheds light — and once that shame is gone, we have all kinds of energy and mind possibilities to project in other ways, not in keeping us hidden.

TREKCORE: This book does a lot of that, for people who might not be aware that these things are so common, and the experience of so many people around them. I want men to read this book as much as women.

VISITOR: You know the men that have read it have responded in a really interesting, positive way. Dominic Keating read it and was like, “It makes me thoughtful about what we did on Enterprise. It makes me think about how I’ve been.”

In relationships, one-on-one, the therapist will teach you to say, not, “You did this. You did that,” but, “When this happened, I felt this,” because then you can be heard — instead of the other person shutting down and will freeze, won’t hear it because it’s too scary. But if they can understand your feelings, maybe they can hear you. It’s not an easy process. It’s not an easy process to do but that’s a direction that we can start to take.

TREKCORE: Open the channel?

VISITOR: Open the channel.

Our interview with Nana Visitor continues here.

Open a Channel: The Women of Star Trek is in stores now.