Scientist • Writer • Teacher
On Saturday my daughter and I hauled a giant pile of old sneakers to Wellesley Booksmith, where green-thinking booksellers were collecting them in honor of America Recycles Day. Author Nancy F. Castaldo was on hand to share even more ideas for preserving our planet and its resources, and she signed copies of her Kids Can! Book, KEEPING OUR EARTH GREEN.
Well done, Wellesley Booksmith! It was lovely to meet you, Nancy!
© Holly Lombardo
Posted with permission
“Walk This Way” is a watercolor painting by my friend Holly Lombardo, and it will soon be hanging on my office wall. Holly and I met decades ago when we were both training to be scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Now she is a scientist, a teacher, and a talented painter. I attended a gallery showing of her work on Friday, and I fell in love with this crab. Can you blame me?
You can see more of Holly’s art at her painting blog or her photography blog.
You are amazing, Holly. I am so very proud to own one of your paintings!
My kids and I spent yesterday at the Museum of Science in Boston. Sadly, the library was closed. The library wing is where the honey bee observation hive lives, and this meant that we couldn’t check out the honey bees. (Was that joy I saw on the faces of my children? Could they be sick to death of my honey bee mania?)
But, the butterfly garden was open:
© Loree Griffin Burns
© Loree Griffin Burns
I spent a long time setting up the shot below and waiting for a butterfly to flutter by. No luck. But isn’t the Boston skyline an interesting backdrop for a South American butterfly?
© Loree Griffin Burns
Later, in the gift shop, I came across a T-shirt emblazoned with the title of this post:
PEACE, LOVE, AND BUTTERFLIES
I didn’t buy one, because I have too much stuff as it is. But I am sitting here now thinking about peace and love and butterflies … and I have decided that these are good thoughts with which to begin a busy day.
No worries, I’m not grumpy today. The title of this post refers to Grumpy, with a capital G. He was my grandfather.
Grumpy’s real name was Richard William Dorman, and he once told me that he had planned to be “Grampy” or “Gramps”. But when I was two and experimenting with the whole word thing, I had trouble with short vowels. “Grampy” came out “Grumpy” and that, as they say, was that. Eventually there were eight of us grandkids, and we all knew our grandfather as Grumpy. When we were older, one of us bought him a “Grumpy” hat at a Disney store, and he wore it with pride for the rest of his life.
Grumpy, in Germany after WWII
On this Veterans Day, a day for honoring the men and women who have served this country, I’d like to honor him. Grumpy was a good soldier, and the most perfect grandfather that ever was. I miss him very much.
MANFISH,A Story of Jacques Cousteau
By Jennifer Berne
Illustrated by Éric Puybaret
Chronicle Books, 2008
Category: Picture book biography
Now that the bee book is off my desk for a while, I have turned my attention to a little book that I have been working on for years. It’s a biography, in picture book format, of a great naturalist: Jean Henri Fabre. This book has been through many revisions, has been read by many-an editor, has even seen the bright promise of an acquisitions meeting.
Alas, it is still a manuscript. And a “quiet” manuscript at that. (How quiet can it be if it keeps me awake, slips into my daydreams, won’t let go?) No matter. As a reward for completing the bee book, I am giving myself a week to play, once more, with this quiet book that I adore.
For inspiration, I am letting myself linger over some new picture book biographies. MANFISH was nominated for a 2008 Cybils Award in the Nonfiction Picture Books category. With it, Berne and Puybaret tell the story of Jacques Cousteau in fine style. Puybaret’s long lines and palette choices remind me of Barbara Cooney, and Berne’s text manages to convey Cousteau’s wonder for the world beneath the ocean, his genius for sharing that world with others, and his passion for protecting it.
MANFISH is a quiet book, but the quiet resonates. It is the quiet of the deep sea, the quiet of a watery place without cell phones and traffic jams and road rage, the stirring quiet of a man who “dreamed that someday it would be you, exploring worlds never seen, never imagined.”
It’s official. I like quiet books.
Actually, what I mean to say is, “Later, pollinator manuscript!”
That’s right, today is the day I drive to Boston and hand the first draft* of my new book over to an editor. Not just any editor, mind you, but a talented editor who I trust completely.
Here’s a look at my baby all dressed up and ready for the trip**:
Isn’t she cute? She is fifty-five pages long and contains 12,009 glorious words. I call her THE HIVE DETECTIVES; here is a sneak peek at the bee scientists she is named for:
I’m rather smitten with this new baby of mine!
* It feels ridiculous to call this a first draft. In reality, what I’m handing in is the 1,311,292nd draft. But as this is the first draft my editor will see, and because ‘first draft’ sounds so much better than ‘1,311,292nd draft’, I’m going with it.
** Please note than my desk is never this clean. If you are at all familiar with the term ‘nesting’ in relation to the arrival of human babies, however, you will understand why it looks so pristine today. I’ve been tidying up all morning!
*** Please excuse the poor quality of my photographs. New moms often lose their ability to perform the most basic of functions. At least for a few days.
BUTTERFLY
Written by Ben Morgan
Photographs By Thomas Marent
DK Publishing, 2008
Category: Nonfiction for any age
What can I say about this book? If you are the least bit interested in butterflies you will be mesmerized. If you appreciate photography, you will be inspired. If you admire gorgeous books in which concept, content, layout, and design merge perfectly, you will be impressed.
The images are astonishingly beautiful, but I lingered longest over those taken at the Mexican wintering roosts of the monarch butterflies. If all goes according to plan, I will have the chance to visit those roosts this winter. I also spent a good bit of time grinning at the image of pine processionary caterpillars marching head-to-rear through leaf litter. To those poor friends who have seen my fork-and-knife pine processionary presentation: the real thing is so much more beautiful!
Treat yourself to a peek at this book if you can …
PETE PUFFIN’S WILD RIDE
By Libby Hatton
Alaska Geographic, 2008
Category: Picture book, fiction
Author/Illustrator Libby Hatton recently sent me “a note of appreciation” … and I am sending her one right back with this blog post.
Libby’s latest picture book, like TRACKING TRASH, was inspired by the 1992 spill of 28,800 plastic bathtub toys into the Pacific Ocean. After an unfortunate fall from an Alaskan cruise ship, the titular Pete Puffin—a wooden toy—narrates the story of his epic adventures afloat on Alaskan currents. Lift-and-read postcards from Pete’s owner, a boy named Eddy, complete the tale while adding an interactive element that younger readers will surely appreciate.
Libby’s book joins a rather long list of children’s books inspired by the 1992 cargo spill that released 28,800 plastic ducks, beavers, frogs, and turtles into the Pacific Ocean:
DUCKY, by Eve Bunting
10 LITTLE RUBBER DUCKS, by Eric Carle
DEXTER’S JOURNEY, by Chris d’Lacey
TRACKING TRASH, by me
This ever-growing list excites me to no end, and not just because I am on it. No, the list excites me because I talk with students in schools all the time about telling stories, and one of the messages I try to impart is this one:
WRITE THE STORY THAT EXCITES YOU, EVEN IF IT HAS BEEN TOLD BEFORE. JUST TELL IT YOUR WAY!
Each of the writers in the list above has taken the story of an amazing accident and turned it into a way of sharing their passions. Eve Bunting explores emotion (she tells the spill story through the eyes of a single lost duck), Eric Carle used the story to explore a concept through art (the concept: ordinal numbers), Chris d’Lacey created a story to entice beginning readers, I delved into the science, and Libby Hatton uses the story to share her passion for Alaska and its environs. Each of us told the same story, but by drawing on our unique passions and interests.
Thank you for your book, Libby. And welcome to the ducky-spill book club!
Happy Halloween!
This week I have been working with my foremost Work-In-Progress, the bee book. For the last month I have been diligently polishing and perfecting the text, so this week was all about the images.
THE HIVE DETECTIVES will be illustrated with sixty or more photographs, and one of my many jobs is to choose which images best suit the text I have written or convey principles that complement what I have written. I thought I’d share a bit of the process here on the ol’ blog …
First, some context. Here is a sneak peak at the reader’s introduction to the Varroa mite, a nasty little creature that plagues honey bees:
Let’s start with Varroa mites. These are tiny insects—about the size of this letter “o”—that survive by attaching themselves to the outside of a bee and feeding on its blood. (Technically, bees don’t have blood. They have hemolymph, which is blood mixed together with other bodily fluids. Either way, an insect that drinks this stuff is pretty gross.) Mites spend the early part of their life cycle hidden inside a honeycomb cell, usually underneath a growing larva. When the larva is fed by adult bees, the hidden mite is fed, too. Later, when the cell is capped and the larva begins to pupate, female mites lay eggs. The eggs hatch and dozens of newborn mites attach themselves to the developing bee. In many cases the bee will die. If the bee does survive, it will emerge from its capped cell unhealthy, misshapen, and covered in a new generation of Varroa mites. These young mites hop from one bee to the next until they find a new larval cell to hide in and begin the cycle again.
And to give you an idea of what the little buggers look like:
Photo by Scott Bauer, Courtesy USDA/ARS
Now, I plan to use the image above in the book, but I also want to give the reader a visual of a mite actually on a bee. Here are my two best choices:
Photo by Scott Bauer, Courtesy USDA/ARS
This image is incredibly crisp and the mite on the bee stands out well. Aesthetically speaking, it is my favorite. But the location of the mite is unfortunate. All honey bees are darkish and less-hairy in this part of their bodies. (Scroll through the images here and you will see what I mean. The honey bee is third row down on the left.) I am worried that readers will think the mite in this image is actually a normal part of the bee’s anatomy.
Photo by Lila de Guzman, Courtesy USDA/ARS
This second choice is less crisp because the photographer was attempting to capture a group of bees. (Let me assure you that it is very hard to focus a camera on a cluster of busy honey bees and produce a crisp, sharp and focused image!) However, these bees are horribly infested with Varroa mites, and the mites should be easily recognizable to my readers. It is a creepy image, too, and sometimes creepy is good.
Which would you choose?
