Eating Dessert First

The whole idea of traveling is to learn about new places and new people.  You can buy tours where the itinerary is planned by someone else.  But for me, the best trips are the ones where I start the process that will create a trip to research a new project.  Make no mistake; it takes time and attention to plan such a trip.  This winter I made two trips to research my next book How Could We Foil a Flood? I’m particularly interested in the engineering aspect of flood control because more than forty percent of loss of life and property from natural disasters comes from flooding, and because we’ve been engineering to prevent flooding for at least 1000 years.  Most other natural disasters have had little to no engineering applied to controlling the phenomenon—we’re struggling hard enough learning how to predict them.

So the first question I ask, after reading extensively on the subject, is, who knows about this?  It is always useful to start looking for contact information through tourism or government sources.  So I made contact with the Mississippi Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) who connected me to the ACE in New Orleans, where they’re putting the finishing touches on an enormous post-Katrina resiliency post-flooding  project.  (It is no longer politically correct to call it “flood control.”) 

Lexi poses next to the new West Closure Pumping Station
--the most powerful pump in the world.
It can fill an olympic-sized swimming pool in 5 seconds.

Next, I contact the tourism people and tell them where I plan to visit and ask if I can get media rates on accommodations, freebies, etc.  Since New Orleans, a tourism mecca,  was on the itinerary, I was booked into a great hotel in the French Quarter at an affordable price.  My nineteen-year-old granddaughter, Lexi, had approached me last fall, “Please, please, please Gran, I’ve never been anywhere or seen anything.  Take me with you.”  How could I resist that gift?  My response,  “Okay, but you’ll have to work.  I need you to listen to all the interviews, take photos and videos, and keep track of all my contacts.”  And so the deal was struck.  It took a good three months to make the arrangements.

Here I am in front of some major sluices that keep the North Sea from flooding
the lowlands.  It was cold and windy with wind turbines everywhere.

The second trip I made was to the place where they know more about keeping the sea at bay than any other nation—the Netherlands.  Here, a peculiar serendipity  (not unusual for these amazing trips) played a role.  Over Thanksgiving my son had new guests—his wife’s mother’s first cousin from Scotland and her Dutch husband, Wim—were visiting from Canada. I told Wim I was planning to visit his country, so he offered the help of his brother Giovanni and his wife, Mechtild, who lived in the Hague.  Giovanni was a recently retired diplomat with time on his hands.  They stepped up and offered me a place to stay and would drive me to all my venues. In effect, they would do the job Lexi had done.  (I had been planning to take Lexi along, but she’s in her first year of college/nursing school with a heavy schedule and prioritized well.  She couldn’t take the time to come.  I’m proud of her for that.) 

I always thank the people I interview with a signed book and
an acknowledgment when the new book is published

The arrangements and schedule of what I’d see and who I’d interview was done by Arjan Braamskamp of the Dutch Consulate in NYC.  It was an amazing, exhausting and rigorous schedule.  I was wished “bon voyage” in person by Rob de Vos, the Consul General who happens to be a friend of Giovanni (talk about a small world!)

My one day to relax was two weeks before the tulips so I settled for
tiptoeing through the crocuses in the Hague.

These trips are like eating dessert first. Now comes the hard part of sifting through all the material and crafting it into something new, which will ignite the desire to learn from my readers.

Report from London: 3

I’m into my third month on a home exchange in London and time has raced by with breathtaking speed, even during the rainiest April in 100 years. I brought a lot of work-in-progress with me, but there is too much to do here! And in the midst of new places and culture blitzes creeps the question – is there a book here?

Searching For That Next Book

I drove north to Yorkshire for a school visit at the Driffield Infant School (ages 4-7, preK-2) and met adorable children, who acted out Katje the Windmill Cat in Yorkshire accents. On the drive home, listening to BBC Radio (great stuff!) I heard a documentary about an Elizabethan composer who could possibly feature in a sequel to my Shakespeare novel…. Long shot, that.

David Hockney’s stupendous show of landscapes at the Royal Academy – what about a biography? Thankfully he’s still alive and kicking and reinventing himself every few years.  His mother lived to be 101, and so he’s a mere stripling at 75, and we’ve got time for a few more Hockney incarnations. A biography would be out of date before it was published.

Dickens is 200 this year.  I heard a wonderful lecture by his great great granddaughter and biographer, Lucinda Hawksley.  Too late for me to cash in on the bicentenary.

I’ve spent lots of time and money attending Chelsea football matches, leaving no time to research the history of women’s football. BTW, Chelsea are the Champions of Europe!

Then a holiday from my vacation. I just returned from eleven days in Turkey.  Days filled with shopping, visiting ancient mosques, one blissful evening lolling about at a hamam (traditional Turkish bath,) as well as eating three delicious vegetarian meals a day. But no story ideas until we visited the ancient ruins at Ephesus where I remembered a story I wrote many years ago…. Time for its resurrection?

Then there was a television documentary (love that BBC!), with related material seen a few days later at a nearby palace, and a library search for relevant books.  A day-trip to Oxford and lunch with a colleague who suggested a visit to the Royal Archives. And I may just have a story. An upstairs/downstairs sort of story with conflict, pathos, and humor. I’m onto it.

Meanwhile my works-in-progress are languishing over in the corner, buried in a pile of books, so I won’t hear them crying for attention.  Many writers would agree, I think, that new projects are ever-so-much more fun than old ones. This condition is called Research Rapture.

Talking About the Weather

During that rainiest-April-in-a-hundred-years, it didn’t just rain all day.  Each day began in brilliant sunshine with glorious white clouds, which grew grayer and gathered thickly as the hours passed, then emptied onto the city streets, followed by clearing skies until the sun shone brilliantly again. Then the clouds gathered again…. repeating the cycle two or three times every day!

And I thought, isn’t that just like the weather of our writing lives – from sunshine, to gloom, to downpour and back again, sometimes on a daily basis. At  the moment, the sun is shining!

PS: Here's a wall seen on a major shopping promenade in Istanbul.

Have Laptop, Will Travel

One of the best things about being a writer is our portability which can incite mobility. Long ago when I was an MFA student at Vermont College, I met a visual arts MFA student who complained about the mighty costs and problems of shipping artworks to the twice-annual residencies. We writers only had to pack our floppy disks.

Nonfiction writers aren’t quite as portable as our fiction-writing cousins. Speaking for myself, my desk is littered with loose papers, file folders bulging with notes and photocopies, books piled high on said papers and stuffed into overflowing bookcases.

But the lure of mobility forced me to rethink my portability a couple of weeks ago when I flew to England to attend the twentieth anniversary retreat of the Kindling Words workshop in the Lake District. Fourteen of us spent a week at a four-star hotel, eating four-course meals each night, walking along the lake, into the woods, and up the hills (but not enough, I fear, to work off those four-course meals.) And, yes, attending workshops and writing.

Though I wasn’t the only nonfiction writer there, many were tapping away on fantasy novels. As they retreated to their imaginary worlds by the fireside in the lounge, I time-travelled back to eighteenth century Revolutionary America, to meet my biography subjects. As others were drawn by guided meditations into the subconscious minds of their protagonists, I tried to do the same, but was interrupted by an annoying voice whispering, “Document your sources.”

Seven writers, headlights shining, about to descend into the subconscious of their protagonists, or was it the Honister Slate Mine?

When the luxurious week was over, I took off for East Yorkshire to visit old friends, including writer Marvin Close, who live by the sea. One of the world’s biggest offshore wind farms will soon arise off the Yorkshire coast, but not soon enough to be pictured in my next book, The Wind at Work, a history of wind energy. So here, instead, is a picture of the beach with dog Libby chasing a seagull.

One evening Marvin arranged an interview at the local radio station, BBC Humberside. The topic of the interview: how a children’s writer from southern California came to be an obsessed fan of English football in general and Chelsea Football Club in particular. I tried to mix it up with writerly talk, but not having many people to discuss football [soccer] with at home, I was happy to talk about the sturm und drang of the current Chelsea season.

Now I’m in London for three months, thanks to my latest travel adventure: home exchanging. Sitting in a top-floor flat in Notting Hill Gate with sun streaming in on all sides -- I brought it with me from LA -- I’ve got several manuscripts in progress, just a few file folders of research, a couple of books, and a brand new card from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Library system. All the comforts of home!

I’m still immersed in the American Revolution, which has a whole different significance from where I sit now. And I’m on the lookout for something to research on the ground here. English football perhaps?

More anon on the joys of portability and mobility.