I’ve decided to treat my book release the same way I treat my birthday. It is just too important an event to be contained in a single day! Why not celebrate for a week? Or more? I’m going to spend the next couple weeks telling you some of the stories behind the story, and introducing some of the people who helped me to bring TRACKING TRASH into the world.
So, here we go…
Today’s star is Terry Turner. Terry was the Children’s Librarian at the Gale Free Library in the spring of 2003, when I was just starting to focus my writing energies on books for children. And she was the person who first put a Scientists in the Field book in my hands.
At that time, I had three children under the age of five. I had put my career as a research scientist on hold in order to care for them full-time, and I was writing as a means of staying sane. One day I read an AP article in the local paper called “Duckies floating to eastern beaches”. It relayed the story of a shipment of plastic bathtub toys that had accidentally spilled into the Pacific Ocean. The twenty-nine thousand ducks, frogs, beavers and turtles had been floating for eleven years and scientists were predicting they would soon start washing up on New England beaches.
Okay, call me crazy, but I found this astounding. Go ahead and look at a world map. The path from the middle of the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic coast of New England is not a simple one. The article claimed there was a guy—a professional oceanographer—who had been tracking the tub toys for the decade since they had fallen into the ocean. This man predicted the toys had traveled through the Bering Sea, across the Arctic Ocean and down into the Atlantic. He was using the information he had gathered by following the toys to study ocean currents. Excuse me, but could there be a more interesting way to get kids thinking about oceanography? I was convinced I had found the perfect topic for my first book project …
… until Terry straightened me out. When I told her I was going to write a picture book about the tub toy spill, she looked stricken. “Um, hold on,” she said, and then she dashed into the stacks. She came back with a copy of Eve Bunting’s DUCKY. Turns out Ms. Bunting had the same fabulous idea I did … but she had her brainstorm ten years earlier, when the spill first happened. My book had already been written!
I read DUCKY, of course, and it is a fine book. But it is very different from the story I wanted to tell. It is a picture book for young children, and it doesn’t delve into the parts of the story that most intrigued me: How did oceanographers find out about the spill? Do grown men really chase these toys around the world in the name of science? How do they find them? And what do they learn about the ocean when they do? I told Terry that I thought there might be room in the world for another children’s book on the topic. This time when she dashed off into the stacks (librarians just LOVE to do that, don’t they?) she came back with Ellen Jackson’s LOOKING FOR LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE, a “Scientists in the Field” book.
“Maybe you could do something like this,” she said as she handed me the book.
Reading that book was a revelation. It was, indeed, the perfect format for telling my version of the ducky story. And it opened me up to the idea that I could write about the things that most excited me—science and scientists—for an audience I cared deeply about—children.
So, thank you, Terry Turner, for being the sort of librarian who can dash into the stacks and always come back with the right book. And thank you for setting me on the road that has led me here, to Publication Week.