Posts Tagged interview

STEM Tuesday– Taking a Look at Climate Change/Earth Science– Interview with Sneed Collard

By on February 26, 2019   /   Climate Change/Earth Science, Common Core & NGSS, Cross-Curricular, STEM Tuesday  

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

Today we’re interviewing Sneed Collard, author of HOPPING AHEAD OF CLIMATE CHANGE: Snowshoe Hares, Science, and Survival. The book follows scientists as they study snowshoe hares and other animals that change their coat colors each winter as they adapt to shorter winters brought on by climate change.

Mary Kay Carson: How did Hopping Ahead of Climate Change come about? 

Hopping Ahead of Climate Change: Snowshoe Hares, Science, and Survival was named a Junior Library Guild selection.

Sneed Collard: This book actually has an instructive background in patience and timing. I first got a contract for this book for Houghton Mifflin’s well-known “Scientists in the Field” series, and planned to travel to Bhutan to follow Scott Mills and other scientists as they studied animals that changed their coat colors every year. The year was 2008, the dawn of the Great Recession, and unfortunately I was unable to get the permissions I needed to travel and work in Bhutan so the entire project just fell apart. As it turned out, that was a good thing, because Professor Mills was just beginning his work on coat-color-changing animals and I really wouldn’t have had much to say about his work at the time.

Around 2014, however, I happened to run into Prof. Mills again and asked him what he’d been working on. He enthusiastically shared results of his recent research looking at the impacts of climate change on snowshoe hares, and I thought, “Oh, well now is the time to write this book.” By this time, I’d also started my own publishing company, Bucking Horse Books, and I thought, “Rather than go through the multi-year process of trying to get a contract for this book, I am just going to write and publish it myself.” It was one of the best moves that I’ve made.

MKC: Could you share a favorite research moment? 

Sneed: One of the really fun things about this project was the opportunity to go into the field in Montana with Prof. Mills and visit his research laboratories, then located at North Carolina State in Raleigh. During several trips, I had the opportunity to watch Prof. Mills track radio-collared snowshoe hares as well as take blood samples and tag them. On my last visit with him, we headed into the woods near Seeley Lake, Montana. Scott had set out cages the night before and we hit the jackpot, capturing a number of snowshoe hares. One of the last was a young hare, or leveret. Scott coaxed the leveret into a burlap sack while he took a blood sample and tagged it. Then, I stood a few yards away ready to take a photo as he released the hare back into the wild.

“He’s going to go fast,” Scott warned. When he opened the sack, though, the hare didn’t run away. Instead, it just sat in Dr. Mills’ lap for about twenty seconds. Then, it hopped toward me and posed for another twenty seconds while I fired photo after photo.

“Wow,” Scott said. “They never do that. I think it was doing that just for you.” One of those photos, by the way, ended up on the title page and page 54 of the book.

Sneed B. Collard III has written more than eighty award-winning nonfiction and fiction books for young people including Woodpeckers—Drilling Holes & Bagging Bugs; One Iguana, Two Iguanas: A Story of Accident, Natural Selection, and Evolution, and his newest picture book Birds of Every Color. In 2006, Sneed was awarded the prestigious Washington Post-Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award for his body of work. Learn more about Sneed at his website www.sneedbcollardiii.com.

MKC: What are you working on now? 

Sneed: So a passion I have shared with my sixteen-year-old son, Braden, for the past five years is birds. (Follow their birding blog at www.fathersonbirding.com.) I am constantly thinking about bird diversity and biology, and the survival issues faced by many birds. This has resulted in a number of recent books including Fire Birds—Valuing Natural Wildfires and Burned Forests, Woodpeckers—Drilling Holes and Bagging Bugs, and my newest picture book title, Birds of Every Color, which features photos by both Braden and myself. To study birds, scientists and ordinary citizens spend a huge amount of time counting birds and it was suggested to me that this might make a good topic for a book. Braden and I started our research by participating in recent Christmas Bird Counts in our area, but I also plan to participate in a variety of other bird-counting programs held in various places and at various times of the year. It’s one of those books where I probably won’t know exactly where it’s heading until I’ve completed my research, but I think it will turn into an engaging series of stories about birds and bird studies.

MKC: Do you have a STEM background?

Sneed: Science has been a part of my life since my earliest memories. Both of my parents were biologists, and I vividly remember going out catching crickets with my mom or digging through tidepools with my dad while they were still students at U.C. Santa Barbara. I must have gotten the gene because I didn’t hesitate to declare a marine biology major at U.C. Berkeley before going on for a master’s in scientific instrumentation at U.C.S.B. I realized, though, that there were probably enough scientists to save the world. The bigger problem was the immense gulf between what scientists know and what the general public—including politicians—understand. I think it was this gap that helped push me into a writing career.

Win a FREE copy of Hopping Ahead of Climate Change!

Enter the giveaway by leaving a comment below. The randomly-chosen winner will be contacted via email and asked to provide a mailing address (within the U.S. only) to receive the book.

Good luck!

Your host is Mary Kay Carson, author of Alexander Graham Bell for Kids, Mission to Pluto, Weird Animals, and other nonfiction books for kids. @marykaycarson

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Interview and Giveaway with Author Erica S. Perl, A Sydney Taylor Honor Award Winner!

By on February 13, 2019   /   Articles, Author Interviews, Giveaways  

The Mixed-Up Files is  thrilled to be a part of the Sydney Taylor Book Blog Tour:

Named in memory of Sydney Taylor, author of the classic All-of-a-Kind Family series, the STB award recognizes books for children and teens that exemplify high literary standards while authentically portraying the Jewish experience.

 

Huge congratulations to author Erica S. Perl for her Sydney Taylor Honor Award

in the Older Readers category for her book,

 

All Three Stooges  (Knopf BFYR) 

About the book: SYDNEY TAYLOR BOOK AWARD HONOREE FOR OLDER READERS!
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR CHILDREN’S LITERATURE!

An unforgettable coming-of-age story about comedy, loss, and friendship for fans of Jennifer L. Holm and Gary D. Schmidt.

Spoiler alert: This book is not about the Three Stooges. It’s about Noah and Dash, two seventh graders who are best friends and comedy junkies. That is, they were best friends, until Dash’s father died suddenly and Dash shut Noah out. Which Noah deserved, according to Noa, the girl who, annoyingly, shares both his name and his bar mitzvah day.

Now Noah’s confusion, frustration, and determination to get through to Dash are threatening to destroy more than just their friendship. But what choice does he have? As Noah sees it, sometimes you need to risk losing everything, even your sense of humor, to prove that gone doesn’t have to mean “gone for good.”

Equal parts funny, honest, and deeply affecting, All Three Stooges is a book that will stay with readers long after the laughter subsides.

 

Reviews:

“Perl has created a moving coming-of-age journey steeped in Jewish traditions and comedic history, elegantly balancing humor with an honest look at the impact of suicide. Noah’s genuine voice and tricky situation will have readers pulling for him.”–Publishers Weekly

“This novel is excellent on multiple fronts. A satisfying story that will appeal to all middle grade readers.”–SLJ

“Watching Noah repeatedly sliding on a banana peel (even, once, literally) gives readers plenty of occasions to wince, to chortle, and ultimately, to applaud.”–Booklist

“A welcome portrayal of a very difficult situation’s impact on someone not ready to deal with it—and there are plenty of funny moments to make it all easier to take.”–Horn Book

 

We are delighted to welcome to Erica  to the Mixed-Up Files blog:

Erica, Your book looks delightful. Can you tell us how you came up with this idea? Does it relate to anything growing up, etc?

 All Three Stooges is about two comedy-obsessed seventh grade boys, Noah and Dash. I started writing this book when my younger child was preparing to become a bat mitzvah. When she was little, her best friend’s father died by suicide. So, I knew very early on that Dash’s dad would take his own life and that his death would affect Noah as well as Dash. This allowed me to tell the story through Noah’s perspective and show him making a series of misguided choices in a desperate attempt to reconnect with Dash. Noah, whose comfort zone is being a funny guy, has to learn empathy and how to be a mensch through a painful trial-and-error process.

 

Tell us a little about the story and how your characters evolved. They seem so funny and real.  

I researched the book by hanging out at my temple’s mid-week religious school, taking notes and trying to be a fly on the wall. I also drove the Hebrew school carpool a lot. And I volunteered at a grief camp for kids, and interviewed several teens who had lost loved ones to suicide. It was important to capture their pain, but also to capture the levity that is a defining quality of most kids this age – even those who are grieving.

 

Your book deals with some pretty heavy topics, but does so with a bit of comedy. Do you feel its important to balance the emotions of the book? 

Absolutely. In writing All Three Stooges, I needed to make sure it never felt like I was trivializing loss or pain. But at the same time, I deeply believe in the power of laughter to connect people and to heal. At grief camp, our tradition is to start off by giving the kids cans of seltzer and letting them shake them up, then explode them on themselves and others. That release – of fizzy water as well as laughter – gives them permission to also let out the darker bottled up emotions. That was precisely the balance I wanted to strike in this book (and why I made seltzer Dash’s dad’s favorite beverage).

 

I have to ask, are you a Three Stooges fan? 

 Not exactly. BUT I do have favorite Stooges clips. And I discovered after the book came out that I had a relative named Paul “Mousie” Gardner who was one of many original Stooges in their vaudeville days (before the Three Stooges went on to stardom in Hollywood).

 

What does it mean to you to win the Sydney Taylor Honor Award? 

It means the world to me. When I was little, All of a Kind Family was one of the first books I read about a Jewish family (the other was The Carp in the Bathtub). As a writer and a reader, I care deeply about the importance of accurately showing the Jewish experience to the world, so to see a Sydney Taylor silver medal on All Three Stooges makes my heart soar.

 

The Sydney Taylor Book Award is sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries 

More information about the award  and a list of all of the winners can be found here: The Sydney Taylor Book Site

Learn about all of the Sydney Taylor Book Award winners by reading about them on the other Blog Tour sites listed here

 

But wait, there’s more, Erica has graciously offered to do a giveaway of her book. Please post your  comments about the book or congratulations to Erica below to be entered for a chance to win a free autographed copy of  All Three Stooges 

                                                                                                                                                     

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STEM Tuesday– Awesome Animal Antics– Interview with Author Patricia Newman

By on January 29, 2019   /   Animals, Common Core & NGSS, Cross-Curricular, STEM Tuesday  

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

Today we’re interviewing Patricia Newman, author of Eavesdropping on Elephants: How Listening Helps Conservation. This fascinating book is a 2019 Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students: K-12 (National Science Teachers Association and the Children’s Book Council) and won a Eureka! Gold Award from the California Reading Association.

Mary Kay Carson: Why did you write Eavesdropping on Elephants?

Patricia Newman: Back in the 1980s I visited Kenya and saw elephants in the wild for the first time. I watched the way they moved, observed their family groups, and experienced how fiercely the matriarch protects her herd when she charged our safari van. One day we took a hike outside the national park and came across a massive elephant skull. Any child who has seen The Lion King understands the circle of life, but it wasn’t at all clear to us how this elephant had died. Natural causes or poaching? The tusks were gone. Did a park official or a poacher take them? The idea that a poacher carried away the tusks under cover of darkness gave me shivers.

I must have passed my interest in elephants on to my daughter Elise, because she worked for Cornell’s Elephant Listening Project as an undergrad. She had daily contact with Katy Payne, Peter Wrege, and Liz Rowland. She explained their research to me and described how she sat in front of the computer cataloguing forest sounds. And she told stories of snatching the headphones off her ears when an elephant trumpeted a very loud alarm call. I knew then I wanted to write about them. Elise handled the introductions, and the rest…well, you know.

School Library Journal says about Eavesdropping on Elephants, “…this book does an excellent job of transporting readers and providing a clear, multifaceted picture of African forest elephants…The more you listen to wildlife, the more your mind opens up to new ideas about why the world is a place worth saving.”

MKC: How did you research this book? Did it involve travel? 

Patricia: I did not spend time with forest elephants. The scientists were not at their research station in the Central African Republic when I wrote this book, but I did sit in the Elephant Listening Project’s lab and listen to forest sounds. I had headphones on my ears and for hours I watched video and listened to sound files.

You might think listening to sounds is a poor substitute for actually being in the field, but it wasn’t. The sounds were transformative and immersive! I felt elephant rumbles and roars deep in my chest. I heard water sloshing as elephants walked through it. I literally swatted away a mosquito buzzing in my ear. I could imagine the forest mud sucking at my feet. And I learned how to identify the sounds of frogs, buffalo, parrots, gorillas, and chimps.

By allowing my ears to take over, I learned to appreciate the forest in a whole new way. And I wanted my readers to have the same experience. Eavesdropping on Elephants tells the story of field scientists helping an endangered species, but it’s so much more. Through the power of video and audio QR codes, the book allows readers to walk in the scientists’ shoes inside the forest. I always ask kids to tell me what they see in the videos or hear in the audio. Their responses would make Katy and Peter proud.

Patricia Newman’s books show kids how their actions can ripple around the world. Newman hopes to empower kids to think about the adults they’d like to become. Find out more about the author and her award-winning books at www.patriciamnewman.com.

MKC: To whom did you imagine yourself writing to while writing the book?

Patricia: Throughout, I imagined my daughter at age ten. What would she want to know? Elephant facts, for sure. But she was also interested in the “how” and “why” of the world. This book was a challenge because the narrative unfolded over the course of many years. How would I squeeze in Katy Payne’s early work with infrasound, sprinkle in some Elephant Listening Project history, and still keep the ten-year-old Elise engaged? I decided to use the passage of time to my advantage.

Science is not performed in a vacuum, nor is a long-term investigation quick. I thought the story of how Katy’s work on infrasound at the Oregon zoo morphed into ELP was a great example of real science in action. Questions and observations often lead scientists down unexpected paths and to unexpected conclusions.

Also, scientists sometimes age out of their work. When Katy retired from ELP, Peter carried on her vision but added his own flair. I thought the staff change was a great example of the inclusiveness of science—how different individuals can contribute to and build on the same project.

MKC: For readers who loved Eavesdropping on Elephants, what other middle-grade books would you suggest?

Patricia: A tough question because I don’t know of any other books about forest elephants for children (or for adults for that matter). They are just coming into their own as a species and few people know about them. Young readers interested in elephant research might consider The Elephant Scientist by Caitlin O’Connell and Donna M. Jackson, which features Caitlin’s work with savanna elephants. Also, consider Bravelands #3: Blood and Bone by Erin Hunter, the author of the Warriors series. The third installment of Bravelands is told by the African elephant—but it’s a savanna elephant, not a forest elephant.

Win a FREE copy of Eavesdropping on Elephants!

Enter the giveaway by leaving a comment below. The randomly-chosen winner will be contacted via email and asked to provide a mailing address (within the U.S. only) to receive the book.

Good luck!

Your host this week is fellow elephant fan Mary Kay Carson, author of Mission to Pluto and other nonfiction books for kids. @marykaycarson

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