I’m giving away five softcover copies of Citizen Scientists over at Goodreads. If you’re a member and you’d like a chance at one of them, click the link below and sign up. But do it soon, because entries close on March 17.
Good luck!
Snow? On Launch Day?!
Hello friends,
Ellen and I will be launching Citizen Scientists at the Harvard Public Library today at 1:30pm, as planned. The impending snowstorm, however, has forced us to postpone tonight’s launch event at the Beaman Memorial Library in West Boyslton. That event will now take place next Thursday, March 8 at 6pm.
Signing events in central Massachusetts over the next week are summarized below:
Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 1:30pm
Harvard Public Library
4 Pond Road
Harvard, MA
Saturday, March 3, 2012, 10am-12noon
Tatnuck Bookseller
Route 9 & Lyman Street
Westborough, MA
Thursday, March 8, 2012, 6pm-8pm
Beaman Memorial Public Library
8 Newton Street
West Boylston, MA
Enjoy the snow!
Leap Day/Launch Week
Ellen Harasimowicz and I will be celebrating the release of Citizen Scientists with three public book signing events this week, two of which fall on Leap Day. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop in and say “Ribbit!” You might inspire me to do my American toad impersonation …
Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 1:30pm
Harvard Public Library
4 Pond Road
Harvard, MA
Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 6pm-8pm
Beaman Memorial Public Library
8 Newton Street
West Boylston, MA
Saturday, March 3, 2012, 10am-12noon
Tatnuck Bookseller
Route 9 & Lyman Street
Westborough, MA
All three events will feature a short presentation, a reading, and a booksigning. Hope to see you there!
2012 Great Backyard Bird Count
This year’s Burns family Great Backyard Bird Count event was not the usual well-planned affair. Scheduling conflicts kept me from holding the after school birding program I’ve run for the past four years, so there was not the usual gaggle of children to invite. And I’ve only hung a single feeder since our move, making it unlikely that many of our usual feathered visitors would show up either. I decided a small count, just me and my kids, was the best approach for this year.
But then a reporter from our local daily newspaper called and said she’d like to do an article on backyard birdwatching and my new book. She wanted to schedule an interview for Saturday afternoon, smack-dot in the middle of Great Backyard Bird Count weekend. When I mentioned this, she asked if she could bring along a photographer and collect images of me and the kids counting.
Uh. Okay.
But that seemed sort of crazy. So many of our former bird counters are local kids, friends and neighbors we’ve known forever. The sort of people I could call last minute and say, “Please, please, please come over to my house on Saturday and help us count birds. There will be a reporter. And a photographer. And you guys are much cuter than I am!”
In the end, eight of us counted birds, talked to the reporter, and tried hard to pretend the man with the camera trained on us wasn’t there. It was a fun afternoon that will surely lead to a nice article. As a bonus, we recorded eight species of birds:
Sharp-shinned hawk (a life bird for almost everyone in the group)
Black-capped chicadee
Dark-eyed junco
Downy woodpecker
White-breasted nuthatch
Tufted titmouse
Northern cardinal
Eastern blue bird
And as a bonus-bonus, five more species, recorded over the remainder of the weekend:
American robin (28 of them!)
Blue jay
Red-tailed hawk
Mourning dove
American crow
I’ll append a link to the article as soon as it runs. In the meanwhile, tell me: did you count birds this weekend? What did you see?
Edited 5/17/2012 to add: Here’s the T&G article!
On Tooting One’s Horn
In my spare time these past months, I’ve been organizing my rag-tag collection of business cards and teacher contact lists and compiling them—along with the email addresses of my friends and family and acquaintances—into a massive (for me) Email Marketing Database. It was an angst-ridden process.
Why the angst?
Well, for starters, I am not good at tooting my own horn. The very idea that I was compiling this database with the end goal of sending every person on it a few words about myself was daunting. Excrutiating, even. That said, I’ve learned over the five years since my first book was published that marketing myself and my work is not something that is going to happen effectively without my help. My publishers are wonderful, and they do a lot for me, but their resources are limited and they have many authors and many books to promote. If I don’t supplement their promotion with a little legwork of my own, fewer readers are going to see my books. And toot-challenged or not, I do want readers to find my books.
So I kept at the database.
There were other demons. I kept asking myself: Will Tom want to be in my Email Marketing Database? (Tom being a high school friend.) Will Jane think I’m being pushy? (Jane being a writer friend I know personally but not well.) Will Harry wonder why I’ve included him? (Harry being the neighbor I sort of know, but not well.) Doubts like these haunted me the entire time I was creating the database, learning how to export email addresses from my contact books, composing that first promotional newsletter, and right up until the moment I told my marketing program (Mad Mimi, if you’re wondering) to send that first e-Blast.
But send it I did.
And the most amazing thing happened: my colleagues and business contacts and teacher friends and neighbors and family members and random acquaintances and Toms and Janes and Harrys began responding. Kindly. And while there are a few folks who’ve asked to be taken off that marketing list (2 out of 940!), yesterday was filled with lovely email messages of support and congratulations from all over the world. In the words of an editor friend with whom I shared my database/marketing angst: “Let it go!”
And so I’m letting it go…
My third book, Citizen Scientists, was published yesterday. If you didn’t get an email from me, or hear about the release on Facebook or Twitter, feel free to drop me a line (lgb (at) loreeburns (dot) com) and I’ll add you to my new Email Marketing Database. If you did hear about it, please feel free to spread the love far and wide. And if you’ve already spread that love, thank you from the bottom of my angst-less heart!
PS: The lovely valentine graphic above was a gift from my son on Release Day. How cool is he?
Leap Day Book Launches!
“What is citizen science, anyway?” So begins this journey into the surprising world of science for everyone, everywhere. Part job description, part nature study, and part beginner field guide, Citizen Scientists invites readers of all ages to think of themselves as scientists, encouraging them to begin by tagging butterflies, counting birds, identifying frogs, and hunting ladybugs…
It’s here! It’s finally here! My newest book for young readers, Citizen Scientists: Be a Part of Scientific Discovery from Your Own Backyard will be published on February 14, 2012. Photographer Ellen Harasimowicz and I will be launching the book in two public events, one at her local library and one at mine. In keeping with the books outdoorsy nature, and in celebration of the amphibians that star in chapter three (“Frogging in Spring”), we’re holding these events on Leap Day, February 29, 2012.
We’ll share the people and places that helped us create the book in a short, all-ages presentation. A book sale and signing will follow. Here are the details:
Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 1:30pm
Harvard Public Library
4 Pond Road
Harvard, MA
Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 6pm
Beaman Memorial Public Library
8 Newton Street
West Boylston, MA
Please feel free to help us spread the word by sharing a link to this post. And if your free, we hope you’ll come and help us celebrate!
Wednesday Wild: Snow
On Saturday, we central New Englanders saw the first true snowfall of the winter. Where I live, we got about five inches, just enough to strap on snowshoes and head out into the wild. My family and I explored the woods near our new house, tracked a neighbor dog, brushed flakes from hearty mushrooms, and stumbled into an area that had, moments before our arrival, been a resting place for four deer. I took photos of the woods and the tracks and the mushrooms and the deer beds, of course, but none of them pleased me as much as the image above. Is there anything as exciting as the rush into untrodden, new-fallen, long-awaited snow?
Happy Wednesday, friends!
The Way of Natural History
THE WAY OF NATURAL HISTORY
edited by Thomas Lowe Fleischner
Trinity University Press, 2011
Category: Essay Collection for Adults
I have spent the past month drinking deeply from this collection of essays, jotting notes in margins, mulling ideas, appreciating voices and places new to me. I’m feeling tipsy. There is so much to admire in these pages, and to love. Like this lesson from John Anderson’s essay Sauntering toward Bethlehem:
“More and more I have come to believe that the context of any action may be at least as important as the action itself, and that this also applies to our learning and teaching. An analysis of bear dung that gives a precise distribution of foodstuffs consumed or fits the bear into some clearly defined trophic level doubtless has an elegance and beauty of its own, but it is neither the bear nor the berries that the bear ate, nor the crushed grass stems springing back from the bear’s pugmarks, nor the taste of the morning air before anyone else in camp is awake, nor your feeling of breathless excitement that direct contact with the truly other can bring.”
And this, from Laura Sewall’s Perceiving a World of Relations:
“What sort of sensibility might emerge with one’s attention commonly cast out over a river? Could it be that a fluid, flexible form of consciousness–a certain sensibility–is born of attention to River? Could an internal ease arise after contemplating Lake’s still depth? As children, might we learn the nature of transformation by watching tadpoles become frogs in the fecund months of spring? Might we then be predisposed toward a belief in our own potential to transform?”
THE WAY OF NATURAL HISTORY captured me as much by content as by style. Perhaps it would capture you, too?
Sneak Peek!
I’m thrilled to be part of the Worcester Writers Collaborative Author Explosion on January 29 at Tatnuck Bookseller in Westboro, Massachusetts, where more than a dozen local authors will be reading and signing copies of their books in a single afternoon. We are a diverse group of writers, creating books for children as well as adults, works of fiction and of nonfiction, books published traditionally and books published on our own. If you live in central Massachusetts and would like to learn more about the variety of writers living and working near you, do stop in and say hello. We’d love to meet you. Here are the event details:
Saturday, January 29, 2012, 1-4pm
Tatnuck Bookseller
18 Lyman Street
Westborough, MA
I’ll be on hand to talk about and sign copies of The Hive Detectives and Tracking Trash. Since Citizen Scientists releases just two short weeks later, however, I’ve decided to dedicate my reading time to a Sneak Peek! I’m scheduled to read at 1:30pm, but plan to hang around, enjoy the festivities, and mingle with attendees and with my fellow authors all afternoon. I hope to see you there!
Wednesday Wild: Painted Turtle
Yes, I realize it’s Thursday. But putting up a Wednesday Wild post on a Thursday seems about right for me these days. I’m behind in everything, you know? But now that the holidays are past and my family and I are settled into our new place, I’m expecting my days to find their old rhythm. One week soon I will post something wild on a Wednesday. (Or maybe even a Tuesday!) In any event, we’re beginning to explore our new environment, and I’m looking forward to sharing what we find. Which brings me to this painted turtle.
On my birthday, my sons made an unusual request. Meet us at the pond, they said. Bring cookies. Who am I to question such intrigue? I packed up some Oreos and went to the pond. They showed up with two school friends, and all four boys greeted me with Happy Birthday wishes. (Which I thought was adorable. These guys are thirteen, for crying out loud.)
Then they ate the cookies. (As I said: thirteen.)
Then, Come on. We’ve got a surprise for you.
I followed them along the trail beside the pond. Two of them slipped out onto the ice.
(A safety interlude: This pond is so shallow that to break through the ice would drop one into water only ankle-deep. Otherwise I would have not allowed–or joined in–such shenanigans. NEVER WALK ON POND ICE UNLESS YOU ARE SURE IT IS SAFE!)
Okay. On top of the pond, boys sneaker-skated about, peered through the ice, muttered. Eventually they dropped to their knees.
There!
A painted turtle. Under the ice. Just hanging out.
The boys waved me over. I stepped onto the ice. Loud cracks shot wildly about. The boys asked me to step back while they evacuated. They assured me the issue was their weight, not mine. (Love these guys.) And then, with the strain on the ice lessened, I slid out there alone. And I can tell you for certain that a turtle in winter is a mighty fine gift.