Author: Loree Burns

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Grayson

grayson

GRAYSON
By Lynne Cox
Harcourt, 2006

Category: Young Adult or Adult Nonfiction

I arrived home on Friday and have spent the time since reconnecting with my family, washing a few thousand loads of laundry, and lying in the hammock with GRAYSON. It’s good to be home!

Grayson is a baby gray whale that author Lynne Cox, a champion open ocean swimmer, encountered during an early morning training session when she was seventeen. The book opens dramatically, with Cox realizing, ever-so-slowly, that something is in the water with her:

“It wasn’t a rogue wave or a current. It felt like something else.

It was moving closer. The water was shaking harder and buckling below me.

All at once I felt very small and very alone in the deep dark sea.”

Can you say BEELINE FOR THE BEACH? But Cox is a much braver woman than I:

“… the sea’s surface erupted nearby. There was a rushing and plunking sound.

Like raindrops hitting the water. But nothing was falling from the sky. This was wrong.

Very wrong.”

This goes on for pages, for what must have been hours for Cox, and her main reaction is this:

“Stay calm. You need to focus. You need to figure out what this is.”

I am in awe. Somehow (how?), Cox stayed calm, focused, and figured out her companion was a baby whale that had lost its mother. What follows is a lesson in communication-beyond-words, quite possibly the most magnificent interaction between human and whale that has ever been recorded.

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A Final Word from the Field

Ellen Harasimowicz has taken hundreds of amazing images for THE HIVE DETECTIVES this week … but you have to wait until Spring 2010 to see them. Sorry!

To make it up to you, though, I offer you this fairly cool image. I took it with my camera, but its composition is heavily influenced by Ellen. She has taught me a lot this week. (And you thought I was only learning about bees!)

Here is another shot I took today in one of the Pennsylvania State University apiaries, where Ellen and I shadowed Maryann Frazier and Keith Marshall as they monitored hives and collected samples.

I got to help out a bit by manning the smoker. Notice I am gloveless:

Notice I stand much further away from the hive than Maryann does:

I am getting braver, but am not exactly a natural with the bees yet!

Tomorrow we head back home. And the writing begins …

 

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A Day of Rest

What do writers and photographers do with a day off from field work? Well, this writer and this photographer recommend a funny flick (MISSING SARA MARSHALL) and a stroll through the nearest bookstore. They also recommend filling the well of creativity with a few incredible books (THE GOOD, GOOD PIG, by Sy Montgomery, GRAYSON, by Lynne Cox or A CAMERA, TWO KIDS AND A CAMEL, by Annie Griffiths Belt).

Time off can be almost as fun as bee research!

 

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More From the Field

Yesterday was another incredible day in the field. I spent the afternoon in a bee yard with several commercial beekeepers:

one super cool honey bee scientist:

one amazing photographer:

and hundreds of thousands of honey bees. They were hard for me to catch on film, so you will have settle for these shots of me checking out a frame of bees and sneaking some honey straight from the hive.

Tomorrow we are off to Pennsylvania State University to interview and photograph more hive detectives. Stay tuned!

 

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A Writer in the Field

Hello from Pennsylvania.

I will be here all week, along with photographer Ellen Harasimowicz, researching and collecting images for THE HIVE DETECTIVES. We set out on Sunday morning and have had an amazing couple days … of near-torrential rain.

For the record, bees do not like the rain. It wets their wings and makes it hard to fly. And so they mostly stay inside the hive.

Also, for the record, bees do not like to have their hives disturbed when they are hunkering down during a rainstorm. It makes them angry.

And so we spent most of yesterday indoors. Luckily there is a lot of interesting stuff going on inside the Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, even on a rainy day. Here is a shot of Ellen at work. The bee scientist is Nathan Rice, who was kind enough to walk us through a day in his lab life. Nathan even stung himself—twice—so that Ellen could photograph the sting process. And then, because I am the sort of gal who is willing to sacrifice for her art, Nathan held a bee to MY arm so that I could live the sting process. Seriously. I let myself be stung by a bee. And we have a picture. And it is pretty cool.

Today we are shooting in another bee lab and, if the weather holds, in a commercial bee yard. This is the day we will break out the bee suits.

Have I ever mentioned here how much I love my job?

 

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The Willoughbys, or Never Judge a Book by its Color

THE WILLOUGHBYS
By Lois Lowry
Houghton Mifflin, 2008

Category: Middle grade fiction

A month ago I offered to let my son read my new copy of THE WILLOUGHBYS, but he turned up his nose. I asked why and he told me, “I don’t usually like books with black and white-colored covers.”

I would have left it at that, but a few days later he happened to creep into my office in the wee hours. I was procrastinating from the morning’s work by reading a Boston Globe article about Lois Lowry. Suddenly I had a great idea for an experiment (aka more procrastination?). There was a link from the article, which was online, to an audio clip of Lois reading from THE WILLOUGHBYS …

Me: Hey, wanna hear something?

Unsuspecting son: What is it?

Me: An author reading from a book you might like.

Unsuspecting son: Sure.

I busied myself with actual work (!) until he was done listening.

Me: Well?

Unsuspecting son: Do we have the book?

Me, nonchalantly pulling my copy of THE WILLOUGHBYS off the shelf: Yep. Here it is. I hope you don’t mind a black and white cover.

Unsuspecting son, no longer unsuspecting: You tricked me!

Me: Hey, what would you like for breakfast?

The trickery, er, the experiment was a resounding success, though: he loved the book. I asked him to write a review for my blog, and this is what he turned in:

A couple of days ago I came downstairs early to see my Mom, and she tricked me into listening to a book clip. It was good and I liked one of the characters, Commander Melanoff, so I started the book. It was THE WILLOUGHBYS, by Lois Lowry. I started reading it and couldn’t stop! When I finally looked up it was time to get ready for school. I read when I was eating and on the bus. I finished after three days of reading. I was fascinated by the story. You should read THE WILLOUGHBYS.

All’s well that ends well, yes?

 

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Maine Student Book Award

I recently learned that TRACKING TRASH has been included on the 2008-2009 Maine Student Book Award List. Students in Maine will be encouraged to read books from this list during the upcoming school year and next spring each student who has read at least three titles from the list will be eligible to vote for their favorites. How fun is that?

There are some amazing books on this list and I am thrilled to see TRACKING TRASH there beside them. Today, thanks to Cynthia Lord, I was literally able to see TRACKING TRASH there beside them. Cindy’s novel, RULES, won this year’s Maine Student Book Award (Hooray Cindy!) and Cindy’s blog post about her award acceptance included a picture of the 2008-2009 MSBA book display.

Thank you Cindy!

Thank you MSBA committee!

Happy Reading students of Maine!

 

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What To Do About Alice?

WHAT TO DO ABOUT ALICE?
Written by Barbara Kerley
Illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham
Scholastic, 2008

Category: Picture book biography

I love this book. Love it. Love it. Love it.

Barbara Kerley trimmed her rollicking biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth with excellent word choices and perfectly used, perfectly accurate dialogue. Edwin Fotheringham added illustrations that convey the energy and spunk of Theodore Roosevelt’s first daughter. And the premise—that girls can be feisty AND adored—is one that will speak to tomboys everywhere. If you love biography, write biography for young people, or are in search of a girlish gift that is not pink or plastic, I strongly recommend this book.

Need further enticement? Here is the subtitle: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy!

Still more? “Alice Lee Roosevelt was hungry to go places, meet people, do things. Father called it ‘running riot.’ Alice called it ‘eating up the world.'”

How can you resist?

 

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New England Inspiration

In 2003, I attended the annual spring conference of the New England chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. Within days of returning home I came across the newspaper article that would become, in time, the subject of my first published book for children. Was there a connection between the two events? Positively. There is something about being in the company of other creative people that sparks the imagination. Whenever I attend this conference I come home inspired … and good things follow.

This year I enjoyed keynote addresses from Laurie Halse Anderson and Keven Hawkes, and soaked up wisdom from these talented New Englanders:

Mitali Perkins on Pajama Promotion;

Lou Waryncia, Editorial Director for Cobblestone magazine group on Writing for Themed Magazines;

Yolanda LeRoy, Editorial Director at Charlesbridge Publishing and Tanya Lee Stone on Noteworthy Nonfiction;

Toni Buzzeo on Self Promotion.

As if all this professional wisdom wasn’t enough, I also shared good times with writer friends (check out the first picture in this Jo Knowles post for proof. Nice shot, Jo!). This year more than any other, I left Nashua feeling part of a community of writers … and that is a very good feeling.

All this positive energy has been put to good use here at home. I am making final preparations for a HIVE DETECTIVES research trip, and soon I’ll be cavorting, once again, with honey bees and honey bee scientists. Good thing I now own one of these:


Me in my bee suit!

 

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Inside an Albatross

A link to this YouTube video was sent to me by Cynthia Vanderlip, who works at the Kure Atoll Seabird Sanctuary in Hawaii. Cynthia has shared many of her photographs with me, including an image of a plastic-strewn beach on Kure that was published in TRACKING TRASH.

Now Cynthia and her colleagues are preparing video footage to show the rest of the world what they are finding on Kure atoll. This video is not for the squeamish; it shows an albatross necropsy … and the stomach contents are sickening. In addition to 5 squid beaks, 4 pumice rocks and several fish eggs–all of which are normal things to find in an albatross stomach– scientists find 5 plastic caps, 1 strip of canvas, 1 wire brush, 4 feet of monofilament line, 1 pen cap, 1 oyster industry spacer and 2 handfuls of unidentifiable plastic pieces.