Author: Loree Burns

Posted on

West Boylston Arts Festival


(Posted with permission!)

This mural was created by the children of our local elementary school. Isn’t it gorgeous?* It was designed to commemorate the 200th anniversary of West Boylston, and whenever I am up at the school, my kids like to finger the tiles they placed and recall the creative, messy, and totally fun days they spent creating it.

The mural project was funded by the West Boylston Arts Foundation, a local group of parents, teachers and residents who feel strongly about keeping art, music and drama in our schools. They feel so strongly, in fact, that they have begun to plan a massive celebration of the arts right here in West Boylston. The Arts Festival will take place on September 20, 2008 … and artists everywhere are invited to participate.

If you are interested in sharing your books or art with our community, check out the Arts Festival call for artists below. (I’d be happy to mail you an electronic version, just ask.) I am planning to participate, along with an impressive list of local writers and storytellers.

It would be very cool to have some of my local writer friends in the mix!

*Check out the website of mural artist Cindy Fisher to learn how you can make one, too.

 

Posted on

Invasion of the Road Weenies

INVASION OF THE ROAD WEENIES
By David Lubar
Starscape, 2005

Category: Middle Grade Fiction (Short Stories)

Rain cancelled the season opener yesterday, so the kids and I hit the library … and came home with David Lubar’s INVASION OF THE ROAD WEENIES. The title alone put a smile on the face of my Avid-But-Picky reader. The cover art produced an actual giggle. The fact that I had not read the book won him over entirely.

And I woke this morning to this:

Excited Picky Reader: “Mom! Mom! Wake up! Quick! You have to read this!”

Tired Mom: “Can it wait? Can I have tea first?”

Excited Picky Reader: “NO! You have to read it now.” There followed some confusing talk about copy machines and butt cracks, none of which made a lick of sense to me. By the time I opened my eyes all three kids were in my bed and begging.

Tired Mom, with a big, dramatic sigh: “Okay …”

There has never, ever been a funnier morning in this house. Someone once said that the perfect short story takes moments to read and a lifetime to forget; David Lubar’s “Copies” was just that sort of story. None of us will ever look at a photocopier with a straight face again.

 

Posted on

Cambridge Science Festival

The Cambridge Science Festival kicked off last weekend, and the days ahead are chockablock with incredible activities for the entire family. Check out the official Festival website for more details … and make special note of the “Science Writers for Kids!” event happening this Saturday at the Central Square Branch of the Cambridge Public Library. (The Central Square Branch is located at 45 Pearl Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.)

Details are available at the link above, but here is a list of New England authors participating:

Loree Burns and TRACKING TRASH editor Erica Zappy
Leslie Bulion
Susan Goodman
Melissa Stewart
Kay Kudlinski
John Himmelman
Lita Judge
Jeannine Atkins

Porter Square Books will be handling book sales at the library, and authors will be available to sign books. Stop by if you are in the area!

 

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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 …

 

Posted on

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!

 

Posted on

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!

 

Posted on

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?