Author: Loree Burns

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The End

No, no, no … not the end of my book draft. (Are you crazy? I’m just getting rolling with that!)

No, today marked the end of my seven weeks fostering a hummingbird clearwing moth. I found its mysterious, pearly green egg on a viburnum bush in my backyard, brought it indoors, watched it hatch into a tiny caterpillar, and then grow into a giant caterpillar, and then transform into a pupa. (You can read more and see pictures here.) Today, right here in my office, the adult moth emerged … and I am in awe.


© Loree Griffin Burns

Isn’t it beautiful!?

The lovely flew off into the woods behind my house at about 3pm this afternoon, after posing sweetly on a potted sage for close to half an hour. My office feels strange tonight … a wee bit lonely, a wee bit magical.

 

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Writing Creative Nonfiction

WRITING CREATIVE NONFICTION
Edited by Carolyn Forché and Philip Gerard
Story Press, 2001

I got this book as a Christmas gift, but only recently began thumbing through it. I enjoy reading about other writer’s and how they work, especially when I am immersed in work myself. I particularly enjoy mention of those places where another writer struggles. For example, in her essay The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer, Robin Hemley says: One of the greatest difficulties for the writer of longer nonfiction is figuring out the structure of the book. For me, this has been one of my major hurdles, why I seem to stew about a book for a year or so before coming to an understanding of what I’m writing about and how to go about writing it.

Well, then, I am in good shape. Structure I’ve got. An opening chapter? Not so much. But I’ve settled on a nice structure, I think, and that’s something. At least to me … and Robin Hemley.

Here are some other gems from the early pages of WRITING CREATIVE NONFICTION:

… above all else write about something to which you feel some emotional or psychological tie.

Alan Cheuse in his essay Finding a Story, or Using the Whole Pig

I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in sand.

Terry Tempest Williams in his essay Why I Write

Every writer ought to have to read her narrative to an audience of three hundred people and learn, by the shuffling of their feet, where the storytelling flags.

Philip Furia, in his essay As Time Goes By: Creating Biography

 

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Rising


© Ellen Harasimowicz

My friend and book-making partner Ellen Harasimowicz, took this photo last Friday night in Rhode Island. We had ventured to the southern part of that state to join local FrogWatchers as they listened for and recorded frog calls. The warm glow in the photo perfectly matched my feelings about the trip–my last into the field for this particular book–and the setting sun was appropriate, too.

Alas, the sun rose again on Saturday … and I began the next phase of the process: wrestling my citizen science research into the shape of a book. In reality, I’ve been drafting for a couple weeks now; somehow it all feels more official today.

In other news, proper summertime weather has arrived in central Massachusetts. Hallelujah! Hope it is sunny and bright where you live, too.

 

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The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

THE EVOLUTION OF CALPURNIA TATE
By Jacqueline Kelly
Henry Holt, 2009

Category: Middle grade historical fiction

A few weeks ago, I participated in a discussion about the teen detective in contemporary fiction, and I asked aloud for books that featured female protagonists with a scientific bent. Someone recommended THE EVOLUTION OF CALPURNIA TATE, by Jacqueline Kelly, and I am so very glad they did.

Calpurnia Virginia Tate, known to neighbors and friends as Callie Vee, is a wonderful girl detective. Mentored by her grandfather, she awakens during the glorious summer of 1899 to the mysteries all around her: Why does this single species of grasshopper come in two distinct colors? Why don’t caterpillar have eyelids? What in heaven’s name are those somethings-with-hairs swimming in the river water she looked at through Grandfather’s microscope? Must all girls grow up and become wives and mothers?

Callie Vee is that rare heroine who transcends her time and her place; she inspires readers—at least this one!—to wonder, observe, strive and dream. I highly recommend you make her acquaintance.

(For a proper review, check out this one from Colleen Mondor.)

 

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What A Girl Wants: Books She Can Relate To

Colleen Mondor at Chasing Ray has inspired another interesting discussion about teen girls and reading. This time, Colleen asked us panelists to discuss how important it is (or isn’t) for writers to identify with their protagonists. Specifically, she asked:

 

Do you think writers and publishers address this identity issue strongly enough and in a balanced manner in current teen fiction?

Can authors write characters of different race/ethnicity or sexual preference from their own?

Beyond that, what special responsibility, if any, do authors of teen fiction have to represent as broad a swath of individuals as possible?

You can read the thoughtful responses of Colleen’s WAGW Panel here.

I tackled the question from a non-fiction point of view, of course, and only the issue of identifying with my subject as an author. I also linked over to a similar discussion that was started at the I.N.K. (Interesting Nonfiction for Kids) blog. If you feel strongly on these topics, do stop by and join in the discussions.

In the meanwhile, I’m rubbing my hands together in anticipation of reading three new titles in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Scientists in the Field series. Together these books share the work of five scientists, among them a female microbiologist/spelunker and an African American biologist:

 

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Compression, As Promised

Interesting that a post called compression is so overly long. I realized too late that compression is a topic for a BOOK CHAPTER, not a BLOG POST. But I did promise …

Last fall, while researching my citizen science book, I attended three monarch butterfly tagging events. Wonderful things happened at each event, things that I dutifully recorded in my notes so that I could use them when the time came to write the book.

Well, friends, the time has come to write the book.

And so I have been reliving my favorite butterfly tagging moments. One that is tugging particularly hard on my mind is the day I watched a dozen adults and kids hunt for monarchs with naturalist Kristin Steinmetz at Broad Meadow Brook Wildlife Sanctuary…

After a thorough introduction to monarch butterflies and the MonarchWatch tagging program, Kristin led the group of intrepid butterfly hunters to a large open meadow on the property. The milkweed and cow vetch and wild aster there was taller than every kid in the group—and probably a few of the adults. But overgrown wildflowers couldn’t stop these folks. They stood alongside that meadow, butterfly nets in hand, and scanned the weedtops for telltale shimmers of orange-and-black.

“There!” the smallest girl in the group yelled, pointing. And before I had even spotted the butterfly, her dad set out at a sprint with his net raised up over his head. He chased that butterfly on a haphazard flight through the heart of the meadow. When it finally settled on a flower; Dad snagged it with a single, graceful sweep of his net. There were whistles and cheers as he made his way back to the path.

The group watched in awe as Kristen reached into the net, grasped the butterfly by its wings, and slid it ever-so-gently out of the net. As she held the marvelous creature up for all to see, there was much oohing and ahhing. And then, too swiftly, heartbreak:

“I’m sorry,” Kristin said, “but we can’t tag it.”

There was a collective gasp. Then silence.

“This isn’t a monarch butterfly,” Kristin explained, gently. “It’s a viceroy.”

As Kristin tried to convince her charges that their mistake was common, and also a good lesson (mimicry among butterflies is widespread, and monarch watchers must learn to tell the difference between a monarch and a viceroy in order to be successful monarch citizen scientists), I was already scribbling into the margin of my notebook: “Open monarch chapter with this scene?”

In theory, I would still love to open the monarch chapter of my new book with this scene. It has a striking setting, interesting characters, dramatic arc, and important information embedded in its unfolding. Unfortunately, though, a chapter opening with this scene would, in the end, disappoint my readers … because this particular group of monarch hunters didn’t capture or tag a single monarch for the rest of the day!

Sigh.

How can I explore the tagging of monarch butterflies in a chapter that does not include a single successful monarch capture? It can’t be done. How can I include successful monarch captures into a chapter that includes the scene above? Well, that can be done, but only by resorting to compression …

Compression, in the writing world, is the act of combining several temporally distinct events into a single, seamless whole. If I were to simply include the mistaken identity scene above in a chapter that includes a dramatic rendering of another, more successful monarch tagging event, I will have compressed two events into one. If I were careful, the reader would never suspect the events happened on different days.

Hmmm. Convenient.

Legal? Well, yes, actually. Compression is a legitimate authorial tool for managing chronology and pacing in a work of nonfiction.

Honest? Um, well, no. Not really. And I can’t swallow the idea that duping readers in the name of their literary pleasure is okay. At least not when your readers are twelve.

There is a great essay on Compression in KEEP IT REAL, the book I recommended last week. It’s worth a read. It concludes, based on the experiences of one writer who chose to compress material in her work, that “compression may often be a sound choice artistically, [but] it is also rife with danger.”

I am not generally a girl who digs danger. Nope. Not me. But I do love a challenge. I know there is a way to share my tagging experiences in a chapter that is both intriguing AND accurate. I just have to find it …

 

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Moth Update

I’m behind on a few things … including the story of our hummingbird clearwing moth. (If you don’t know what I am talking about, catch yourself up here.) Here is what our caterpillar–raised from a myserious egg found on our backyard viburnum bush–looked like 17 days after it hatched (this photo was taken last Wednesday):


© Loree Griffin Burns

Here’s the same caterpillar three days later:


© Loree Griffin Burns

Pupation had begun! This was exciting, and it was very, very hard not to disturb the process by peeking at our cat every twenty seconds. I was good, though; I took this one photo, covered the browning beast back up with the paper towel that it had chosen to pupate beneath, and hid my camera. Then I sat on my hands for as long as possible.

Today, I could wait no more …

So, here is our setup. On the left of the tank you can see the viburnum leaves placed in the tank for the caterpillar’s culinary pleasure. On the right, a paper towel; I put this in the tank so I could add water without making too much mud; I didn’t realize the caterpillar would use it as a shelter to pupate under. The oval-shaped dirt blob on the folded down corner of the paper towel is our pupating moth:


© Benjamin Griffin Burns

Need a closer view? So did we. So I lifted up the paper towel and tried to pull away the dirt mound containing the pupa. The caterpillar had spun a cocoon of sorts around itself, a mix of reddish-brown silk and dirt that had gotten hard and semi-impenetrable. If we wanted to see the pupa itself, we were going to have to go through the dirt/cocoon mound. The kids told me that I was a nut for proceeding, but notice their heads were practically in the tank as they said so:


© Benjamin Griffin Burns

Our first glimpse was enticing:


© Benjamin Griffin Burns

And I can tell you for certain our tiny pupating charge is alive. How do I know? BECAUSE IT WRIGGLED! It wriggled like a … a … forty-something mother of three trying to fit into her thirty-something genes. Serious wriggling. Here’s one last view. I should’ve put a ruler in there for you, but I was holding a wriggling nub of life and wasn’t thinking straight:


© Benjamin Griffin Burns

I’ve now wrapped our pupa back into its cocoon and laid the paper towel in the dirt again. I will try not to touch the tank again until I see a hummingbird clearwing moth in it …

 

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Keep It Real

KEEP IT REAL:
Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction
Edited by Lee Gutkind and Hattie Fletcher
Norton, 2008

I am a very instinctual writer. The choices I make in my manuscripts are not based on academic training in the language arts, which I’ve never had, but rather a lifetime of immersion in well-told stories … and the resulting sense of what works and what doesn’t. With each book I create, however, I sink a little deeper into the technical side of the writing process. I find myself wondering how one choice worked and why this other choice didn’t. I analyze the creative nonfiction of writers I admire and try to reason out their choices. With my latest project, a book on citizen science, I’ve even found myself wondering about the legal implications of my authorial choices.

What is creative nonfiction? According to the authors of KEEP IT REAL:

The word “creative” refers simply to the use of literary craft in presenting nonfiction–that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events–in a compelling, vivid manner.

It is a form distinct from journalism, textbook writing, and other more straightforward reportage of facts. Its practitioners, according to the book “have a complicated obligation to their readers: to entertain like novelists but to educate like journalists.” There are dilemmas that arise when one is attempting to fulfill this obligation, and the collection of essays in KEEP IT REAL examines them. From acknowledgment of sources to compression to fact-checking to frame, readers get a concise overview of the artistic, ethical, and sometimes even legal implications of the choices creative nonfiction writers make.

I don’t know if KEEP IT REAL truly contains everything one needs to know in order to research and write creative nonfiction, but there is enough good stuff there for me to wholeheartedly recommend the book to others in the genre. It’s the sort of book I will turn to again and again as I puzzle through my writing projects. In fact, I plan to puzzle through the issue of compression with you here later in the week …

 

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What A Girl Wants: Girl Detectives

A new installment of Colleen Mondor’s What a Girl Wants discussion series went live today at Chasing Ray, and its all about the decline of the girl detective novel: does it hurt girls not to have the teen girl detective in the 21st century? what does it say about us that she is largely gone? You can–and should!–read the entire post here. I’ll paste my thoughts below; I hope they’ll entice you to wander over and join the discussion.

I adored Nancy as a kid. It wasn’t the mysteries so much as the undeniable fact that she was different. She wasn’t interested in the sorts of things that most teenaged girls were interested in: boys and how to attract them. No, Nancy was more interested in uncovering the truth, most especially when there were people trying to hide it. Looking back, Nancy’s appeal for me is all wrapped up in this idea that she was different, that she knew it, and that she didn’t worry about it. Because I was different, and I knew it … and I worried about it endlessly.

I guess what I am saying is that I don’t think today’s girls need a girl detective so much as they need a girl—any girl—who is strong and capable (e.g. different!) and who gets on with life anyway. And there are female protagonists who fit this bill; they just don’t happen to be detectives.

As a writer whose passion is science and nature, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least point out that one incarnation of the girl detective in our age is the female scientist. And although there are lots of nonfiction books available for teen girls about women who grew up to be scientists, I can’t think of many contemporary novels with scientifically-bent heroines: Meg Murry (A WRINKLE IN TIME), Dewey Kerrigan (THE GREEN GLASS SEA), Hermione Granger (HARRY POTTER series) … who else?