Posts Tagged Author Interview

STEM Tuesday– Natural Disasters– Author Interview

By on May 27, 2025   /   Natural Disasters, STEM Tuesday  

Welcome to STEM Tuesday: Author Interview, a repeating feature for the last Tuesday of every month. Go Science-Tech-Engineering-Math!

Today we’re interviewing Jessica Stremer, author of Fire Escape: How Animals and Plants Survive Wildfires a middle grade nonfiction book that examines how animals and plants detect and respond to wildfires as well as the role humans play during these widespread natural disasters.

Fire Escape has been named:

  • A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
  • An NSTA-CBC Outstanding Science Trade Book
  • An ALA Sustainability Round Table Top 10 Selection
  • Named to the Missouri Dogwood Reading List

And now, let’s find out what sparked the idea for this book for a better earth!

Emily Starr: I would love to know more about the evolution of this book’s outline. How did you move from the questions about wildfires you described in the acknowledgements to a book that includes such a wide variety of information. I never considered how a zoo responds to a wildfire!  

Jessica Stremer: You’ll often hear nonfiction picture book writers joke about not getting lost down the research rabbit hole. The great thing about writing long-form nonfiction is that you have the freedom chase different rabbits. Fire Escape started as a picture book, but the more I researched, the more I realized I couldn’t contain the story to forty pages. When I first begin researching, I use different search phrases to see what different responses I get. Often those responses will lead me down another rabbit hole of searches. When I felt I had chased enough rabbits, I organized everything into potential chapters. Of course, there’s always more questions that come up and more research to be done. 

Emily Starr: You include a lot of specialized wildfire response information! What was your process for contacting experts and conducting interviews?  

Jessica Stremer: I made a list of different people whose names I found while researching, then I put on a brave face and emailed them. In my emails I mention a little bit about myself, the project I’m working on, and ask if they’d be willing to chat to help me learn a little bit more and clarify or fill in holes in my research. I also mention that I will credit the interview in the book and send them a copy when its published. 

Emily Starr: Wildfires can be a scary topic for some students–especially those living in fire-prone zones. What was your thought process when considering how to present the information in a way that was realistic yet not too frightening? 

Jessica Stremer: Kids can handle more than we give them credit for. We need to have honest conversations with them by meeting them where they’re at. That’s what I tried to do in Fire Escape. I think a lot of it comes down to voice, word choice, and sentence structure. I shared facts about wildlife and wildfires, and tried to be careful to not go too into detail or include information that I didn’t think kids would find interesting or engaging. Chapter two contains a trigger warning as there are a few graphic photos of injured wildlife.  

Emily Starr: Climate change is such a complicated topic, yet you make it understandable for children. What were your considerations when deciding how much and what type of climate change information to include?

Pine pitch cones release their seeds only after fire exposure. Dmccabe, CC BY-SA 4.0

Jessica Stremer: There are a lot of books about climate change out there, so while I did think it was important to mention, I didn’t want to spend too much time on that topic. Climate change does play a part in the frequency and severity of wildfires, but it’s not the only reason we experience fires. I include mention of climate change in the chapter on megafires, but the real takeaway I’m hoping for is that people see that not all fires are bad. In fact, one of the reasons we’re experiencing so many destructive fires is because we’ve worked hard to prevent fires from happening. Much of the landscape needs fire, and I hope kids see that after reading this book. 

Emily Starr: Throughout the book, you illustrate how we are all part of an interconnected ecosystem. I especially appreciated the inclusion of ways humans help animals after wildfires and how animals help humans prevent wildfires. Were there any animals that didn’t make it into the book? 

Jessica Stremer: Most of the wildlife in Fire Escape can be found in North America. I didn’t have room for it in this book, but there are plenty of animals in different continents that also experience wildfire.  

Emily Starr: The layout of the book makes the information accessible–small blocks of text interspersed with photographs, illustrations and fire fact sidebars. What was your involvement in the layout and/or choosing the photographs? 

Jessica Stremer: I used the Fire Facts as a way to include additional information that I couldn’t fit into the narrative. I put them in places where the break felt natural, for example when transitioning from one idea or topic to the next. For the photographs, I tried to include two to three per chapter, knowing there would also be artwork incorporated throughout. Some were easier to find than others! I presented a handful of photo options for each chapter to my editor, and she told me which ones she preferred. The layout was all her! 

Emily Starr: What do you hope readers understand about wildfires by reading your book? 

Jessica Stremer: While I never want to downplay the human loss experienced from wildfires, I hope that readers see another side to wildfires that’s different than the doom and gloom portrayed on the news. I hope they understand why wildfire is an important natural event and learn about some of the benefits fire brings to the landscape. I also hope it encourages them to spend time outdoors and exploring the world around them. 

Emily Starr: Do you have upcoming projects you can share with our readers? 

Jessica Stremer: I have three picture books publishing this year! They are PLIGHT OF THE PELICAN: HOW SCIENCE SAVED A SPECIES, WONDERFULLY WILD: REWILDING A SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY, and TRAPPED IN THE TAR PIT: HOW SCIENTISTS UNEARTHED A CITY’S PREHISTORIC PAST. I love nature and science and hope readers consider picking up some of my other books. 

Jessica Stremer is an award-winning children’s author who combines her love of science and writing to create books that inspire kids to explore and think critically about the world around them. Her titles include GREAT CARRIER REEF (a NY Public Library Best Book of the Year and JLG Gold Standard selection), LIGHTS OUT: A Movement to Help Migrating Birds, FIRE ESCAPE: How Animals and Plants Survive Wildfires (a JLG Gold Standard selection), PLIGHT OF THE PELICAN: How Science Saved a Species, TRAPPED IN THE TAR PIT, and WONDERFULLY WILD. Jessica obtained a B.S. in Biology, with an emphasis in Ecology, from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. She was a recipient of the 2023 Stephen Fraser Encouragement Award, a 2023 finalist for the Russel Freedman award, and received honorable mention for the 2021 Ann Whitford Paul award. When not writing you can find Jessica cheering from the sideline of her kids’ soccer games, spending time outdoors, and planning her next family adventure.

 

As a former fourth grade teacher and founder of StarrMatica, a STEM publishing company, Emily Starr has developed award-winning K-5 science curriculum and professional learning materials for 20 years. She is a member of the Iowa State Science Leadership Team, a peer reviewer for the National Science Teaching Association’s journal Science and Children, and a frequent presenter at state and national education conferences. Her debut middle grade nonfiction book will be released in 2025 from the Iowa Ag Literacy Foundation.

 

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WNDMG Author Interview with Meg Eden Kuyatt

By on May 19, 2025   /   Author Interviews, Diversity  

WNDMG Author Interview with Meg Eden Kuyatt

When I fell in love with the prose in Meg Eden Kuyatt’s first novel, Good Different, then learned she was writing a ghost story of sorts, I. COULD. NOT. WAIT!
I had the esteemed pleasure of sitting down to interview Meg. Here’s the inside scoop on both the author and her book…

KATE: Our Mixed-Up-Files readers would love the inside scoop on your latest novel-in-verse, The Girl in the Walls. Can you tell us a bit about where the idea for this story came from?

MEG: I tend to start my stories in a feeling. This one started when I saw something very upsetting happen to someone I cared about. I tried to write about it directly, but when that didn’t work and felt a little too real, I knew I needed to try another angle (like Emily Dickinson, to tell it slant). I started asking what if questions, like: what if V could time travel? What if she met a ghost? The ghost helped bring this magic wonderland world of the walls, giving me distance. It also gave me an outlet for me to process all my feelings, giving an option for what I could be like if I held onto them forever and didn’t try to work through them. That warning made me really want to work through my feelings all the more and find healing on the other end.

KATE: I love that you write books which make me cry (I’m looking at you too, Good Different). And by this, I don’t mean you write emotional books, I mean you write books with big emotions. How easy is it for you to tap into a young character’s emotions while creating universal connections to your readers?

MEG: Thank you so much, Kate! That’s the part I feel like is my strength. As an autistic person, I feel things so big, and so channeling those feelings into my characters is easy. I just write what I’m feeling now, and what I felt at that age (often they’re very similar things, just maybe wearing different outfits). When I ask things like: what am I struggling with now? What did I struggle with then?, I try to be as specific as possible, and ironically, the more specific we are, the more universal we get because we’re tapping into the human experience.

KATE: In discussing some of those emotions just a bit further, I think many readers will be able to relate to Valeria, a girl who has been hurt by the actions and comments of others. Afterall, who hasn’t wished someone else a taste of their own medicine? How did you decide this would be her driving force?

MEG: I write what I’m feeling and struggling with in the moment. I knew I needed to write this book when, like V, I was hurt and angry at someone else. I knew I needed to try to see them with more empathy. But to get there, I knew I needed to be honest with where I was in my feelings and let that fuel the story.

KATE: You have two characters giving Valeria art guidance – one who says to draw art as you see it. Another who says to draw art as you feel it. When you write, which advice registers closest for you?

MEG: I think there’s truth to both, for V and for my writing. We need to be informed by what we feel, but also what is true. Sometimes these intersect, but sometimes feelings are unreliable narrators, so we need to open our eyes to get perspective and ask, what is true?

KATE: There’s a great parallel in your novel between ghosting someone and being a ghost oneself. Talk to us about how you wove in the concept of being seen.

MEG: I think as the story progresses, V realizes she’s been holding in feelings, but so has the house—to embody how the family has been holding in hurt from generational trauma and ableism. When we’re ghosted, it hurts, and if we don’t acknowledge those feelings, if we don’t move forward, we can become ghosts in a sense, trapped in a cul de sac of looping feelings. We can also give that as an inheritance to the next generation. And if we don’t acknowledge those feelings, they build and fester and get worse. They wound, and can create really malignant patterns for the generations to come. In a few ways, this becomes a literal threat V has to deal with, because as things escalate, they can become real obstacles. I wanted V to break those generational patterns and pave forward another option.

KATE: We often hear about family curses. How important was it for you to make this story generational?

MEG: That was the main thing I wanted to explore here: generations. What do we inherit from our families? The people who dig at us the most, is it in part because we see ourselves in them? What legacy do we want to leave forward? How can we take the good and oppose the evil in the legacies we inherit?

KATE: It’s often fun to read about the baddies of a book, and your baddie is certainly up there on that list! How fun was it for you to write this antagonist?

MEG: Not fun! 😉 But very healing. Sometimes you have to write very real things, that aren’t necessarily fun, because they hit a little too close to home. But it’s really important. It was fun, in a sense, exploring the complexities of the antagonist: the yes, but what if…?

KATE: You and Valeria share many things in common, I’m sure, one in particular is being neurodivergent. Can you tell MUF readers about neurodivergence and how this connection to Valeria helped you in your story development?

MEG: I’m neurodivergent and I don’t know what it’s like to not be ND. I used to try to write neurotypical leads to satisfy a previous agent, but I learned I’m a bad actor, and don’t know what it’s like to be neurotypical! So I write what I know, and my best writing is what I know. For V, I particularly wanted to channel my insecurities as a neurodivergent person in a neurotypical world, how I have so much joy in who I was created to be until something happens and someone makes me doubt myself.

Especially because in Good Different, Selah grows to love her autism, I wanted to show the other end, because it’s not always that simple. Usually there’s a mix of joy and internalized ableism. I don’t want people to stop at Selah’s story and think we’ve “fixed ableism.” It’s still there, all the more obvious by RFK Jr’s recent disturbing comments. There is joy, but there’s also a lot of hurt, and for kids struggling with that, I wanted them to see themselves in V’s story, and see it doesn’t have to end there.

KATE: Can you describe your writing process and, can you give us an example of something you cut, changed, or reworked from draft to publication?

MEG: Goodness, so much changed. The basic bones of the emotional arc have always been there, but there were pranks that had to get cut, lots of conversations between the ghost and V, a lot of internal poems..I was really challenged by my editor to focus, to escalate, and keep things active, since I can get so lost in my head sometimes.

KATE: Thank you for taking the time to share the inside scoop on The Girl in the Walls. Is there something beyond Valeria’s world you can hint at? Perhaps a new project in the works?

MEG: I’m so excited to have a Good Different companion novel in the works currently called PERFECT ENOUGH, and a YA with two autistic leads (that I’ve been working on for over ten years now, so it’s such a joy to know it’s coming out into the world)! Being undiagnosed for most of my life, I’m really enjoying exploring what it means to be autistic and how to be a healthy autistic person in a neurotypical, often ableist world. So we’ll see where that leads me as I play with future ideas!

KATE: Where can readers best find you if they want to reach out?

MEG: megedenbooks.com! I love hearing from readers!

 

Lightning Round

 

And….no MUF interview is complete without a lightning round, so…

Favorite place to write? – patio, or Chick-fil-a

Dark chocolate or milk chocolate? – dark chocolate all the way

Superpower? – flying! or timetravel.

Rollerblades or bike? – bike!

Dream job when you were a kid? – being an artist or a manga-ka

House pet? – cat

Favorite piece of advice for writers? – persist!

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STEM Tuesday– Naturalists– Author Interview: Danna Staaf

By on April 22, 2025   /   Author Interviews, Earth Day, STEM Tuesday  

Welcome to STEM Tuesday: Author Interview, a repeating feature for the last Tuesday of every month. Go Science-Tech-Engineering-Math!

Today we’re featuring Danna Staaf, a marine biologist and author of several science books. Her book The Lady and the Octopus: How Jeanne Villepreux-Power Invented Aquariums and Revolutionized Marine Biology garnered these reviews:

  • Notable Award Children’s Book Committee at Bank Street College Best Children’s Book of the Year, 2023
  • Booklist Top 10 History for Youth, 2023
  • Booklist Top 10 Science and Technology Books for Youth, 2023
  • Cooperative Children’s Book Center (CCBC) Choices, 2023
  • Booklist Top 10 Biographies & Memoirs for Youth, 2023
  • School Library Journal Best Book of 2022

 

Andi Diehn: I love your sidebar in the first few pages about historic accuracy and doing our best with what we know until we can add to that knowledge. Why include this?

Danna Staaf: Honesty really is the best policy, especially when talking to children. Both the historical and the scientific record are intrinsically incomplete—there are open questions, missing data points, ambiguous findings. I felt it was very important to acknowledge that uncertainty up front, and not to pretend that I had all the answers. At the same time, I spent years researching this book, and I did have a lot of information, which gave me the ability to make guesses in good faith about missing pieces. This is how we build a trusting relationship with readers, by saying, “I don’t know everything. I’ll tell you what I do know, and how I know it. When I have to make guesses, I’ll tell you why those guesses are reasonable. And I’ll admit that they might turn out to be wrong later.”

I think about all the dinosaur books I read when I was a little kid, and the old misinterpretations of what dinosaurs looked like and how they lived. Most of those authors were doing the best they could with the available research—and they inspired the next generation of scientists to go out and do more research, to show which guesses were right and which were wrong. That’s the iterative nature of knowledge. It’s beautiful.

AD: I like how you made it clear that Jeanne was able to study and practice science because of her privileged position as a married woman with no children – why is this important for readers to be aware of?

DS: It’s a really interesting topic! When I first began to read about Jeanne, I thought her story would be strongly impacted by sexism, both during and after her life. And she absolutely did have to contend with sexism. A man who wasn’t even a scientist tried to take credit for her work, and although she managed to join several scientific societies as their first female member, the Royal Society (the UK’s national science academy) refused to admit women until 1945! Sexism likely also played a role in how quickly her work was forgotten after her death. However, as I read more of her writing and her peers’ writing about her, I became very impressed by how successfully she advocated for herself. Now I think that the reason we know as much about her as we do, and indeed the reason I had enough material to write this book, was her own determination to publish her research and get credit for it.

But Jeanne’s ability to research and advocate effectively was greatly enhanced by her privilege. In addition to being married and childless, she was white and wealthy. Before her marriage, she struggled to support herself and couldn’t devote time to natural history, but afterward, she had the resources and the leisure to pursue her curiosity. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had that freedom? How many more wonderful discoveries and inventions could be made? I hope it helps readers think about who has been left out of history, and why, and what we can do to create a more just society.

AD: I love your phrase on page 43 about studying “marine life instead of marine death” – why does this distinction matter?

DS: I actually think about it even more now than I did while I was writing this book! When Jeanne started working in natural history, especially in the field we now call marine biology, most people were very focused on studying dead specimens. They killed and dissected animals; they preserved skeletons and furs and shells. Even setting aside the ethics of doing science like that, they missed so much by not looking at living animals. Especially in the ocean, an animal can look completely different when it’s alive in its natural habitat—think of a jellyfish swimming gracefully through the water, which dissolves into goo if you kill it and try to preserve it. And behavior! The only way to really see how animals move, hunt, court, mate, and so forth is to observe it.

Science has come a long way from the days of pickling and dissecting everything in order to study it, in large part thanks to people like Jeanne and inventions like her aquariums. And yet there are still some stubborn remnants of this attitude. To describe a new species, it’s generally accepted that a dead specimen needs to be put in a museum somewhere. Now, I don’t want to discount the importance of museum collections in any way—those historical specimens are absolutely vital to our understanding of life, and even to the conservation and protection of living organisms, because scientists use the knowledge from those specimens to figure out things like which species are left in a coral reef or a rain forest, and how many are new to science. But now that we have high-resolution video capabilities, 3D scans, CT scans, and so forth, maybe we can shift toward identifying species without needing to kill individuals so often.

AD: She’s a scientist but also an inventor – how does scientific inquiry and invention go hand in hand?

DS: Scientists are always inventing gadgets to help them figure out the answers to their questions, from high-tech to low-tech and everything in between. When I was in graduate school studying squid, I wanted to know how temperature affected the development of squid eggs, so I worked with a really skilled technician to design a little incubator that could keep dishes of seawater at a range of different temperatures. It had a bunch of carefully machined metal pieces, all very precise. Then I took it on a research boat in Mexico in very hot weather, and I had to improvise a combination of bubble wrap and a desk fan to keep the whole assembly from overheating! Then, I also learned how to write computer programs to analyze the data I gathered. I’d say those are both forms of invention. Sometimes scientists’ inventions are very specific to a particular need, like my incubator, and sometimes they find more general applications, like Jeanne’s aquariums. You never know!

AD: What was your favorite thing you learned from your research?

DS: How can I pick just one?? I learned that that the tides in the Mediterranean Sea are more impacted by the local geography than by the moon, so when it’s high tide on one side of the Strait of Messina, it’s low tide on the other side, just a few kilometers away. I learned that an engineer named Charles Condert developed a type of scuba gear a hundred years ahead of Cousteau’s Aqua-Lung, and made many successful dives before dying in a tragic underwater accident–the first known scuba fatality. I learned that Benjamin Franklin carried around a little container of oil in his walking stick, so he could impress people by pouring it on rough water and calming the waves. But, if I have to pick, I think my favorite research gem was learning about Anna Thynne. She’d studied geology for years, and fell in love with corals because she saw them as living rocks. I love her account of collecting corals, which I didn’t have room to include in the book: “With a needle and thread I fixed the Madrepores [corals] on a large sponge, that there might be no damage from collision, and then placed them in a glass jar filled to the brim with water, and tied down with a bladder….During the journey [home from the seashore], I had the great pleasure of seeing them expand their tentacula most happily; and they arrived both at Clifton and London in a most flourishing state.”

AD: What did you like best about writing a biography? Was there anything frustrating about the project?

DS: I have to confess that history was my least favorite subject in school. I struggled to memorize the names and dates of monarchs and battles, while I had no trouble memorizing octopus species. So the historical research for this book was the biggest challenge for me. I had to read the timeline of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars over and over again to make sure I was getting everything right.

That said, it might also be the thing I liked best. I found that world events became much more interesting to me when I could link them with Jeanne’s life. Writing a biography actually kindled my interest in history, and helped me see how seemingly abstract monarch names and battle dates affected real people’s lives, even impacting the course of science. Now I can remember that Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in 1815, because it led directly to Jeanne sewing a royal wedding gown in 1816, which led in turn to her meeting her future husband, and the beginning of her career in marine biology!

 

Danna Staaf is a science communicator and marine biologist who earned a PhD from Stanford University with her studies of baby squid. Her writing has appeared in Smithsonian, Nautilus, Atlas Obscura, and Science, and she is the author of Monarchs of the Sea: The Extraordinary 500-Million-Year History of Cephalopods (named one of Science Friday’s best science books of the year), The Lady and the Octopus: How Jeanne Villepreux-Power Invented Aquariums and Revolutionized Marine Biology (a best book of the year of the School Library Journal and the Children’s Book Committee), and Nursery Earth: The Wondrous Lives of Baby Animals and the Extraordinary Ways They Shape Our World (hailed as “a gobsmacking delight!”). Her newest book is The Lives of Octopuses and their Relatives: A Natural History of Cephalopods. Staaf lives in San Jose, California, with her husband, children, cat, and innumerable plush octopuses.

 

Andi Diehn

Andi Diehn works as an editor for Nomad Press and has written many STEM books for kids!

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