Posts Tagged nonfiction

The Real Scoop on Middle-Grade Interviews

For my first post I’d like to write about something I get very excited about while doing research for one of my science books—interviews! Interviews get you out of your head during the research process and out into the action of doing science. They help bring the soul into your science writing.

Interviews are important for any topic though—they reveal the story behind the data. Uncovering that story is your job as the writer, so how do you do it? And what does it bring to your book? I have a few ideas (KLK) and I asked fellow MUF bloggers Jennifer A. Swanson (JAS) and Heather Murphy Capps (HMC) for their thoughts too. Here’s what we all had to say about doing interviews for nonfiction books.

What do you think interviews add to a nonfiction book?

  • KLK: I think interviews add a voice and perspective that you cannot get from traditional research. By doing interviews, you can uncover dramatic and unusual details that suck middle grade readers right in and allow experts to speak directly to them.
  • JAS:  Interviews add authenticity. Unfortunately, I don’t get to experience the thrill of discovering new science, the excitement of going into space or diving deep in the ocean, or even the construction of new technology in person. I get to read about them. Interviews add a spice of life and reality to liven up the subject. They also ensure that I am accurate in my explanations.
  • HMC: What I like about the interview is that it adds texture and also interesting perspective from a subject matter expert. You can throw all the facts you want into a book, but without the anecdotes and personal relationships a SME has with a subject, it can – and often does – fall flat.

How do you find people to interview? How do you contact them?

  • HMC: I usually reach out to the thought leaders on the subject I’m working with. As a reporter, those thought leaders were often local, and usually were excited to be given an opportunity to talk about something they love. Sometimes it wasn’t so easy – if the subject was controversial. Also, sometimes if I was reaching out to a person with large national visibility, the time it took to get an interview was challenging.
  • KLK: I often look on science publications. I can usually find the authors’ contact information on the paper or online. I also try contacting the PR department at a university to ask them if any professors might be willing to be interviewed. Be persistent and patient (but never pushy) when trying to schedule an interview. One time it took me six months to get an interview scheduled, but it was so worth the wait!
  • JAS: I spend a lot of time searching for contacts online. I tend to look at universities and colleges first. Since that is where a lot of the cutting-edge research starts. When I find someone that I want to interview, I simply send them an email asking if they’d be willing to speak with me. Many of them are happy to do so. Others take a little more persistence to get them to respond, and some just never respond. That’s fine. They are busy people and I respect that.

Do you like to do recorded phone interviews, take notes while speaking, or email your questions? If you record interviews, how do you do so? And what do you do if you have technical difficulties?

  • JAS: For me, it’s up to what is best for the scientist or engineer. Phone interviews take more time than answering emails. Some experts have the time for a phone interview. If you do that, be sure to record it. But ask their permission first—on the record. You wouldn’t want to be accused of recording them without their permission. Others I will just send questions within the email. I’ve been surprised before, though. A few times when I just needed the answer to one or two quick questions, the expert wanted to have a phone call and it ended up lasting an hour. I learn so much from those interactions. There are many different apps that you can download. Be sure to test the app before the actual interview. For example, once I found out that a recording app I had used successfully before DID NOT record if I had my headphones plugged in. OOPS! Yeah, I didn’t find out until after the interview. UGH. So I do take notes as I go along, too. Yes, I’ve had technical difficulties, I mean it’s technology. You just do the best you can. But if you test and prepare in advance, you should do fine.
  • KLK: I prefer recorded phone interviews, because they result in more natural speaking language and I get more quotable material. Sometimes written answers can be very formal and highly technical, especially when coming from someone used to academic writing. I use an app to record, and have had some issues. I think it’s best to have a backup recording device available, like a handheld tape recorder. Sometimes recorded interviews aren’t convenient for the person you are interviewing, though, especially if you are in different time zones or don’t speak the same native languages. So email interviews work best in those cases.
  • HMC: As a TV reporter, all of my interviews were recorded. However, as an author I find most people prefer the flexibility of emailed interview questions, which they then have time to edit and research before hitting “send.” When I do the rare phone interview, I do it old-school—scribbling notes on a legal pad.

What are some of the most interesting details you’ve discovered through interviews?

  • HMC: I have discovered fascinating details about the search for genetic cures (CRISPR-Cas9) to diseases that plague us, like malaria and cystic fibrosis.
  • KLK: When doing research for my book Extreme Longevity: Discovering Earth’s Oldest Organisms, I was fascinated by the different coincidences and accidents that led to different discoveries. Like Italian biologist Ferdinando Boero and his team, who forgot to feed some jellyfish they were raising to document their life cycle, After two days, they realized their mistake and saw the jellyfish had regenerated into new ones. That’s how they discovered the immortal jellyfish! Another was when Danish biologist Julius Nielsen was in a college seminar and heard that the largest Greenland shark was caught more than 100 years ago. But he knew this was incorrect, because he had recently been on a research vessel that had caught an even larger shark. Hearing this, Nielsen decided to investigate Greenland shark size and age, and discovered that they may live longer than 500 years! I love hearing the connections like these between the events that made a scientist curious about something to the results of their investigations.
  • JAS: That’s a tough one. There are SO many! Some of the most notable such as Dr. Kathryn Sullivan, the first US female astronaut to walk in space and also at the time of theinterview who was the head of NOAA, were so profound, that I could have listened to her for hours. I mean what she has personally done to further women in the field of science and technology is awesome. That was for my Astronaut-Aquanaut Dr. Sullivan is both. I also got to speak and actually meet Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of Jacques Cousteau, my childhood hero. That was awesome! Fabien was very easy to talk to and we had a lot of fun. I spoke with a few of the top climate change scientists in the world about carbon capture and reforestation. For my Super Gear book, my expert is a material scientist who now has his own medical device company that is changing the face of medicine!

 

And here are a few extra tips from the three of us:

  • Be polite. Be professional. Be aware of their time. Remember that you are asking these people to give up a portion of their very valuable time to speak with you. So you should be prompt, prepared, and keep to your topic.
  • Plan your interview as carefully as you can by planning your book so that you iron out any questions about direction, detail, level of difficulty, etc.
  • Remind interview subjects that you are writing for a middle-grade audience, which means the language used to describe the topic has to be accessible to the 8-14 age range.
  • Be sure to listen and let them speak. But also listen to ensure that you get what you need for your book.  If you need them to talk about a specific topic, then make sure it’s covered.
  • See if your interviewees have any photos they might be willing to share with you for the book. Photos from the field are hard to come by on stock photo sites. Also ask if they can recommend any papers or books for your further research.
  • People sometimes get a little nervous when what they say appears in a book. Offer to send interviewees what you write about them for their review.
  • Add a “special thanks” section to the book and be sure to recognize the contributions of the people you interviewed.
  • Send your interview subjects a thank you and copy of the book. That is not required, but definitely a nice gesture. It sometimes works in your favor. I sent a copy of my climate change book to an expert and he did a huge shout out on Twitter about it. Went to a lot of his colleagues who all said they’d buy the book. You never know… 🙂

 

Thanks so much to Jennifer A. Swanson and Heather Murphy Capps for contributing to this post! Here’s a bit more about each of them.

Science Rocks! And so do Jennifer Swanson’s books. She is the award-winning author of over 30 nonfiction books for children. She has presented at numerous SCBWI conferences, BEA, ALA, NSTA conferences, the Highlights Foundation, and also the World Science Festival. You can find Jennifer through her website www.JenniferSwansonBooks.com.

 

Heather Murphy Capps writes middle grade novels that weave together all her favorite things: science, magic, baseball, and poetry. She is an #ownvoices author committed to increasing diversity in publishing.

 

 

 

Now it’s your turn! What do you like about doing interviews? And what are your tips? Tell us in comments what you like to do!

STEM Tuesday — Deep Space and Beyond — In the Classroom

Let’s launch into nonfiction literacy with this month’s theme, Deep Space and Beyond!

Space is the star of the show this month. From asteroids to zero gravity, there are human interest and general STEM themes interwoven with this theme.  Have a blast as you explore the Solar System and beyond!

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Try a Trio.

Emphasize the human heart of science as you compare and contrast the stories in a trio of books: Team Moon (Catherine Thimmesh), Mission to Pluto (Mary Kay Carson), and Voyager’s Greatest Hits (Alexandra Siy).  Focus on the motivations, challenges, worries, and risks involved in reaching for big, ambitious goals that advance scientific and technological frontiers.  Students can consider which missions they find most interesting; which one they think they would most like to have been involved in; and where else they think humanity should explore. They might also write about what they see as the advantages and disadvantages of  human explorations compared to robotic ones.

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Elizabeth Rusch’s IMPACT! Asteroids and the Science of Saving the World focuses on professional scientists’ efforts to understand asteroids and their, er, impacts, both past and potential, on Earth. Then Rusch invites readers to get involved in citizen, or amateur, asteroid science. (After reading this book, who wouldn’t want to join the fun?) Page 64 offers resources to help engage your group, or just one motivated kid, in efforts to track asteroids, discover one, or even save the world from an asteroid! Rusch provides tips for meteorite collecting, but it might be easier to collect tiny micrometeorites. Their incredibly long adventures through space can end on rooftops and in downspout debris. They’re ready for pick-up by the well-informed, slightly lucky, prepared amateur with a magnet. Check out Popular Science’s DIY article for details. (Be sure to get all the appropriate permissions and scout only in safe areas when collecting!)

 

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Readers zipping through Dr. E’s Super Stellar Solar System  (Bethany Ehlmann with STEM Tuesday’s Jennifer Swanson) might appreciate the mind-boggling size of the solar system after they make and revise solar system models to various scales. Get started with a scale and relevant data for a football field-sized model, found on page 18. Before heading out to the gridiron, however, help students map out the model.

Begin by sketching the football field on cm-grid graph paper and locating the planets’ orbits on it. (Each cm represents one foot on the field and 5 million miles in real space.) At this scale, students will find the field is too small for all orbits; students will need to adjust the scale so all planets can fit. New map in hand, head outside. Students can position themselves at the scaled planetary distances from the Sun.

Reading on, as students find that the solar system extends farther than the planetary orbits, they can track distance data for all Solar System features mentioned in the book. At the scale students used before, where in the community beyond the field would these features have to be placed?

For more depth, consider the scale of the objects and other models.

  • Is the model of the Sun (an orange) the right size for this scale?
  • If not, what would be?
  • What are the strengths and limitations of various 3D and illustrated visual models of the solar system that students have encountered?

 

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Metaphors and imagery help scientists flesh out ideas for themselves. Piggy-backing new ideas onto ones we already grasp is also important in science communication, especially when it comes to fascinating but abstract, challenging concepts related to black holes.

Keep a class log of the metaphors, analogies, and other comparisons used by scientists and the authors—including Sara Latta, author of Black Holes: the Weird Science of the Most Mysterious Objects in the Universe and me, author of A Black Hole is NOT a Hole. You’ll find some, for example, on page 35 of Black Holes, where Latta quotes Neil deGrasse Tyson describing galactic (and black hole) cannibalism : “…the big galaxies get bigger; the little ones get eaten”. By contrast my book begins by challenging  such anthropomorphism (“monstermorphism”?); soon, starting on page 8, the text compares a black hole to a whirlpool.

  • What other examples can readers find of scientists or writers using metaphorical language to describe black holes and related ideas?
  • In what ways does each metaphor work as a model and in what ways does it break down? What metaphors do students come across in other science contexts?
  • Based on their own world experience, what metaphors can students develop for the science concepts they are learning?

 

Make It Your Mission. Just as it took 400,000 people—Team Moon–to launch humanity to the moon, it takes a big Team STEM Tuesday to launch kids into getting the most of their STEM and STEM reading experiences. We would love to hear from you.

  • What books on this month’s list do you want to bring to your young readers?
  • Which of this month’s suggestions intrigue you most?
  • What other ideas, thoughts, and questions around using space books with your young learners do you have?

 


portrait of author Carolyn Cinami DeCristofanoSTEM author Carolyn Cinami DeCristofano writes books for kids about space and other topics. Her lively author programs bring engaging science and writing experiences to readers.  As co-founder of Blue Heron STEM Education, she provides teacher professional development and creates curriculum resources for classrooms and other contexts.

Books to Help You Survive Summer Vacation- #Giveaway!!

Here we are about a month or so into summer vacation. How’s it going? Are you still excited to not have to drive your kids to school, pack their lunches, and drag them out of the bed in the morning so as not to be late? Good!  OR are the days starting to feel really loooonng and never-ending? Like you have nothing to do all day but be the cruise director for your kids? If you feel like the former– awesome! If you feel like the latter, don’t worry. You are not alone. When my three kids were young, summers sometimes seemed to stretch forever.

What’s a parent to do?  For one thing we got our kids BOOKS!  Books are awesome! They are fun for reading, but also for doing activities. We bought each kid a math workbook and had them do problems to keep their skills up. (It was also a great incentive for them to get some videogame or TV time) 🙂 If you’re looking for some FUN ways to do that, check out these Big Fat Notebooks by Workman Publishing.

 

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The BIG FAT NOTEBOOK™ series is built on a simple and irresistible conceit—borrowing the notes from the smartest kid in class. There are five books in all, and each is the only book you need for each main subject taught in middle school: Math, Science, American History, English Language Arts, and World History. Inside the reader will find every subject’s key concepts, easily digested and summarized: Critical ideas highlighted in neon colors. Definitions explained. Doodles that illuminate tricky concepts in marker. Mnemonics for memorable shortcuts. And quizzes to recap it all.

The best part is that they read as if they are written by a kid. Kids will LOVE them!

 

If Games, Puzzles, and Mazes are more your kid’s game, then check out this AWESOME new book by Mike Lowery, also by Workman Publishing.

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Pure interactive fun between two covers A book that begs to be doodled in with 96 wacky prompts, games, and crafts, and adorable creatures to boot, The Kid’s Awesome Activity Book is packed with activities that take delightful twists and turns, inviting kids to design, draw, and dream–and encouraging creativity on and off the page. Enter an ancient cave to decode a mummy’s message. Find your way through a beehive maze. Write a song for a cat rock band. Design a personalized spaceship–and so much more. Plus, plenty of goodies to return to again and again for hands-on play: paper dolls, finger puppets, bonus stickers, and a giant pullout poster designed to kindle curious minds and active imaginations.

A great boredom-buster for travel or rainy days, and a fun birthday or holiday gift. From the author and illustrator of the Doodle Adventures(R) series and based on the Kid’s Awesome Activity Calendar, the book showcases Lowery’s inimitable quirky style and humor that clicks with all ages–get the whole family in on the fun.

This is TONS of fun for kids and it will keep them occupied for hours. (which means you get to dive into a book yourself!)

Want to win them all? Enter below.

(And hang in there, school is only a month or two away…) 🙂

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